Upcoming SJSU Computer Science Department Master's Defenses

The list of students is ordered by the date of defense.

Student Name: Sai Pranav Sripathi
Defense Title: "Enhancing JPEG-Domain Malware Classification with LSH-Guided Knowledge Distillation in Vision Transformers"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Ananta Singh
Defense Title: "Sleeper Agent Behavior in Small Code LLMs"
Advisor: Dr. Amith Kamath Belman
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Prasanna Sai Rohit Durbha
Defense Title: "SYNTHETIC MALWARE EMBEDDING GENERATION USING BYTE ENTROPY IMAGE REPRESENTATIONS AND GENERATIVE ADVERSARIAL NETWORKS"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Ethan Kusnadi
Defense Title: "Aggressive Driving Detection form IMU Data: Evaluating Classical and Deep Learning Under Robust Settings"
Advisor: Dr. Sayma Akther
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM 
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Chi Huu Phan
Defense Title: "Distribution-Aware Hash Representations for Diffusion Data Augmentation in Malware Image Classification"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM 
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Ashwabh Bhatnagar
Defense Title: "Exploring Architectural Enhancements for YOLO Object Detection: Dual-Stream Attention, Size-Adaptive Assignment, and OOD Awareness"
Advisor: Dr. Amith Kamath Belman
Date: May 11, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Shantanu Shivraj Khanapure
Defense Title: "TerraAI: A Spatially Grounded Agentic AI System for Urban Intelligence and Real Estate Reasoning"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Chandrakanth Reddy Challa
Defense Title: "Secure and Resilient Federated Learning for Malware Classification"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Lok Man Chu
Defense Title: "Stepwise Sudoku Reasoning Training using Transformers"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Akanksha Sharan Basappa Raghapur
Defense Title: "Exploring Steganographic Capacity of Machine Learning Models Via Bit-Level Parameter Perturbations"
Advisor: Dr. Mark Stamp
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 322

Student Name: Sai Sanjay Yerunkar
Defense Title: "Emotional Patterns in Conversational Social Media Using Graph-Based Context"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Titas Sarkar
Defense Title: "Dish-to-Grocery Structured Prediction with Index-Constrained Large Language Models"
Advisor: Dr. Thomas Austin
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Mansi Rahul Patel
Defense Title: "Stacked Ensemble Learning for Graph-Based Fraud Detection"
Advisor: Dr. Katerina Potika
Date: May 12, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Michael Nguyen
Defense Title: "Modeling Sealed Deck Construction in Collectible Card Games Using Learning-to-Rank Approach"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 322

Student Name: Kranthi Kusal Latchupathula
Defense Title: "Temporal Evaluation Framework for Pedagogical Scope Compliance in RAG Tutoring Systems"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Suneel Chandra Vanamu
Defense Title: "ADMIC Hardening Malware Image Classifiers Against Adversarial Evasion Attacks"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Vaibhav Reddy Panyala
Defense Title: "Benford’s Law for Malware Detection: Class-Aware Feature Selection with Cascade Hybrid Classification"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Vivek Raman
Defense Title: "Spartan Write: An Academic Document Editor Supercharged by Agentic Artificial Intelligence"
Advisor: Dr. Amith Kamath Belman
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM 
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Shreyas Bhoyar
Defense Title: "When Agents Disagree: A Multi-Agent Debate Approach to Clinical Reasoning"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Niyati Aggarwal
Defense Title: "Predicting Unstable Handovers in Dense Cellular Networks"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 13, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Shreyas Satish Deore
Defense Title: "Quantitative Evaluation and Generation of FDA-Compliant Pharmaceutical Labels"
Advisor: Dr. Mark Stamp
Date: May 13 2026
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 6M
Location: ISB 130

Student Name: Purva Govind Tugaonkar
Defense Title: "Adaptive Real-Time Fraud Detection Using Online Learning and Explicit Concept-Drift Detection"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 14, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Jonathan Macoco
Defense Title: "Evaluating Opcode based NLP and Graph Representations for Synthetic Malware"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troria
Date: May 14, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Jakob Gregory Kauffmann
Defense Title: "Audio Deepfake Detection with Grouped Layer Adversarial Domain Adaptation"
Advisor: Dr. Faranak Abri
Date: May 14, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 424

Student Name: Sahil Atul Mhatre
Defense Title: "HyperKGRec: A Hypergraph Enhanced Recommendation System With Knowledge Graph Embeddings"
Advisor: Dr. Katerina Potika
Date: May 14, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Giovanni Canales
Defense Title: "BiLSTM-Based FoG Detection in Parkinson’s Disease: Evaluating Temporal, Frequency, and Biographical Features"
Advisor: Dr. Sayma Akther
Date: May 14, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Gargi Ajit Kulkarni
Defense Title: "ASE Soft Failure Simulation and Detection in Optical Networks Using LSTM"
Advisor: Dr. Katerina Potika
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Charita Challa
Defense Title: "WindCast-STARNet: A SpatioTemporal Advection-Routed Network for Solar Forecasting"
Advisor: Dr. Katerina Potika
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Aditya Joshi
Defense Title: "Vision-Augmented Proactive Bandwidth Allocation via Deep Reinforcement Learning"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Siddhi Sarjerao Patil
Defense Title: "RelCheck: Training-Free Detection and Correction of Relational Hallucinations in Multimodal Large Language Model Outputs"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Siva Girish Ramesh
Defense Title: "Reinforcement Learning-Based Scheduling of Dependent AI Workflows on the Edge-Cloud Continuum"
Advisor: Dr. Genya Ishigaki
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Axel Castellanos-Morales
Defense Title: "Custom OS with embedded SNN Activity Suggester"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 424

Student Name: Gitika Rath
Defense Title: "Bilingual Video Captioning: Extending Vision-Language Models for English and Hindi"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Harshini Kanamathareddy
Defense Title: "Emotion-Based Music Recommendation System"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 210

Student Name: Mahima Chowdary Mannava
Defense Title: "TASK-AWARE GAME-THEORETIC SCHEDULING FOR MORPHENCE-MTD FRAMEWORK IN TIME-SERIES FORECASTING"
Advisor: Dr. Saptarshi Sengupta
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Aldridge Fonseca
Defense Title: "LOOM-RAG: Layered Ontology-Orchestrated Multi-Signal Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Reducing Hallucinations in LLMs"
Advisor: Dr. Ching-Seh Wu
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Victor Zhen
Defense Title: "Evaluating Noise-Based Defenses Against Adversarial Attacks in Object Detection"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 15, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Sindhu Satish
Defense Title: "On the Accuracy-Cost Frontier of Reasoning Models"
Advisor: Dr. Maryam Khazaei
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Rachel Tsai
Defense Title: "Performing Data Analysis and Machine Learning Techniques on Health Data"
Advisor: Dr. Maryam Khazaei
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Benjamin Fong
Defense Title: "Predicting Traffic Collision Injury Severity in San Jose"
Advisor: Dr. Maryam Khazaei
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Mandar Sunil Gondane
Defense Title: "SAFE-R2R: A Safety-Aware and Budget-Optimized Retrieval Controller for RAG Systems"
Advisor: Dr. Robert Chun
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Amirali Marashifar
Defense Title: "KOLMOGOROV-ARNOLD NETWORKS ARE VULNERABLE TO INFERENCE-TIME ATTACKS FOR REGRESSION PROBLEMS."
Advisor: Dr. Saptarshi Sengupta
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 229

Student Name: Faiz Sameer Ahmed
Defense Title: “Efficient Pipeline Parallelism for Reinforcement Learning”
Advisor: Dr. Genya Ishigaki
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 229

Student Name: Paul Chon
Defense Title: “Towards Mechanistic Interpretability of mAntimicrobial Resistance Proteins Using Sparse Autoencoders and Cross-Layer Transcoders”
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopolus
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Rudraksh Pushkar Naik
Defense Title: “FinKGR : Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning on Financial Knowledge Graphs via Rule Mining and Transformers”
Advisor: Dr. Katerina Potika
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 422

Student Name: Sohan Vallapureddy
Defense Title: "GenderStego: A Novel Framework for Gait-Based Gender Recognition and Video Steganography"
Advisor: Dr. Nada Attar
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Narayana Murthy Raju Dantuluri
Defense Title: "Explainable and Adversarially Robust IoT Malware Detection Using Lightweight Neural Networks"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Aniket Ramesh Mali
Defense Title: “Mitigating API Hallucination in LLM-Generated Code via Structured Grounding, Selective Augmentation, and Validator-Guided Repair”
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Rikhila Reddy Annem
Defense Title: “MIXED BAYESIAN STACKELBERG SCHEDULER FOR MORPHENCE - A MOVING TARGET DEFENSE FOR VISION TRANSFORMERS”
Advisor: Dr. Saptarshi Sengupta
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Ananya Penuballi
Defense Title: "Multi-Scale Alcohol Consumption Behavior Detection from Wearable Motion Sensors"
Advisor: Dr. Sayma Akther
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Sushmitha Chikkanayakanahalli Gopala
Defense Title: "LLM-Powered Investment Advisor Assistant"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 20, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Shilpa Ramakrishna
Defense Title: "Query Implied Generative Engine Optimization"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 20, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 225