Showcase highlights student research

More than 30 students presented projects and research during the East Carolina University College of Engineering and Technology Research Showcase on Monday.

Students from the departments of construction management, computer science, engineering and technology systemsinformed attendees about the challenges and successes of projects that ranged from health care, cybersecurity and the environment to artificial intelligence and even responsible pet care.

While the students gained experience in presenting research, the showcase also served as inspiration.

“It motivates other students to get involved,” said Dr. Tijjani (TJ) Mohammed, chair of the Department of Technology Systems.

Matthew Yelverton, a senior engineering major from Wilson, explains his project to Dr. Stephanie George, interim dean of the College of Engineering and Technology.

Sustainable Soil

Matthew Yelverton, a senior engineering major from Wilson, is working on a project to control soil erosion.

“We’re finding a way to use any crop waste from the agricultural industry like straw or corn husks or fibers and to implement that into soil in order to prevent topsoil erosion,” he said. “North Carolina is a big agricultural area, and some of the main agricultural practices break up the topsoil and make it vulnerable to being carried away by (water) runoff. That will leave sediments in water bodies and wastewater treatment areas and sewer lines, which increases the chance of flooding and increases the cost of water treatment.”

Dr. Suranga Gunerathne, assistant professor in the Department of Engineering, is supporting the project, which has received funds through ECU’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Awards program.

“Finding a way to get waste from the agricultural industry into the topsoil to prevent topsoil runoff, it will make soil erosion control more sustainable,” Yelverton said. “We want to have an easy way to apply these things into the soil.”

AI Video Detection

Stephanie Rivera-Moro, a master’s student in data science from Jacksonville, is exploring AI-generated video detection.

Stephanie Rivera-Moro explains her project.

“As AI videos are increasing in realism, they’re a little more difficult to distinguish if it’s real or not, which opens up a lot of potential for AI video misuse, scamming and misinformation as well as the potential of taking someone’s identity without their consent,” Rivera-Moro said. “There is a lot of potential misuse of AI-generated videos.”

She said models used to detect AI-generated videos can be cumbersome, requiring large-scale data storage, and can sometimes misdiagnose a video with data it hasn’t seen before. She called the research challenging yet fulfilling.

“I’m very interested and very passionate about this section of research,” Rivera-Moro said. “Being able to do a thesis and do this project on something that I’m very passionate about, I’ve just learned so much. I’ve been able to use what I learned in classes, and it’s been so much information, but it’s been a great experience to learn so much.”

Through the research, she knows one thing everyone should consider.

“Be careful, be cautious and be leery of the content that you’re consuming online and think about the ethics of the AI that you may be consuming,” she said.

Anand Jha, left, discusses his project with senior teaching instructor Travis Powell.

Smart Cities

Plenty of maps show Greenville’s roadways. However, a team of six information and cybersecurity technology students are mapping more than just roads. They are looking to map the best locations to deploy sensors that can be used for everything from traffic control to soil quality. It’s a technique that could be used in cities everyone.

Anand Jha, a senior from Baku, Azerbaijan, explained that LoRaWan (Long Range Wide Area Network) technology is often used at various locations to provide data. However, signal strength and signal-to-noise ratios can inhibit the quality of the data, or if the data can be collected at all.

The team deployed sensors on ECU Transit buses and vehicles to enable mapping of areas across Greenville.

“Once the data is collected, we use the data to create a heat map of Greenville and the surrounding areas for a future case scenario of having devices such as sensors being deployed in the city, trying to make it a smart city,” Jha said.

He said the possibilities are endless, for example, monitoring traffic to allow buses to safely exit a school parking lot at dismissal.

“This could be used on any case scenario, such as related to water management, electricity, making the road smarter or enabling the devices that currently exist in the infrastructure by connecting them into a single server where the data that’s been collected can be used to either improve, for example, traffic congestion or especially monitoring the soil,” he said.

The project is supported through ECU’s Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Awards program as well as the Center for IoT (Internet of Things) Engineering and Innovation.

Pet Friendly

Guiding parents and their children in responsible pet ownership is the goal of a project by Kailee Grubbs, a double major in computer science and mathematics.

Kailee Grubbs, a double major in computer science and mathematics, explains her project to develop an app to help children learn responsible pet care.

“A lot of families want to get pets for their kids because it builds responsibility owning a pet, and it also helps reduce things like social anxiety, research has shown,” said Grubbs, a Brinkley-Lane Scholar in the Honors College. “But a lot of families have never had pets before or they don’t do the research necessary to take care of a small animal, and that leads to poor quality of life for small animals or with animals getting surrendered to a shelter, so I wanted to provide a system to be able to give kids and parents the confidence to be able to own a pet if that’s something within their means.”

The Greenville senior is developing an app to support both parents and children in caring for a pet. The system would allow children to earn points for completing tasks — such as feeding the animal or cleaning up after it — that can be redeemed for rewards of the parents’ choosing.

Grubbs said working on the project taught her time management skills and allowed her to use technology she learned in her mobile computing class.

“Time management was a big thing. That was definitely something I struggled with, being able to schedule time each week to work on it, which I did not always achieve, and also being able to realistically plan because this took way longer than I thought it was going to take,” she said.

Grubbs considers the project a work in perpetual progress.

“Something like this is never finished to me,” she said. “I’m such a perfectionist. I’m just going to keep working on it.”

Jay Muanja, a information and cybersecurity technology senior from Greenville, presents his research work on analysis of phishing cybersecurity attacks.

Going Phishing

Jay Muanja can point to one overwhelming factor in computer hacking.

“Humans are the weakest links in cybersecurity,” he said.

The senior information and cybersecurity technology major from Greenville presented a hands-on cyber AI lab that simulates real email phishing scenarios and uses a local large language model for detection. The model analyzes factors such as language patterns, urgency cues and behavioral signals in emails to infer attacker intent, enabling more accurate detection beyond keyword-based methods.

“Building the networking part of it and writing the Python code that we used was very fun. I learned how to code at ECU,” Muanja said. “And it was fun watching the model’s response before fine-tuning it and then after fine-tuning.”

He said phishing emails are responsible for more than 90% of cybersecurity attacks because the scams prey on a user’s interests.

“If it’s something you like, you’re going to click on it,” he said.

Muanja said he enjoyed the CET Research Showcase and received some good feedback.

“It was a great experience, and presenting to CET gave me more ideas to improve on what I currently have,” he said.