Upcoming SJSU Computer Science Department Master's Defenses

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

Student Name: Owen Mastropietro
Defense Title: "NeuroLoop: Closed-Loop Deep Brain Stimulation for Controlling Neural Synchronization"
Advisor: Dr. Genya Ishigaki
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 10:00 AM - 11:00 AM
Location: MH 210

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: Shubhankar Sameer Munshi
Defense Title: "Multimodal Emotion Detection System"
Advisor: Dr. Amith Kamath Belman
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
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: Skanda Gonur Nagaraj
Defense Title: “Legal Document Analysis - Clause Classification and Summarization”
Advisor: Dr. Ching-Seh Wu
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 210

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: Oskar Aria Attar
Defense Title: “SURVIVAL RISK STRATIFICATION IN ONCOLOGY USING INTEGRATED TEMPORAL EVENT SEQUENCES OVER SYNTHETIC HEALTHCARE DATA”
Advisor: Dr. Saptarshi Sengupta
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Sushant Rakesh Lokhande
Defense Title: “A Comparison of Image-Based Techniques for Malware Classification”
Advisor: Dr. Mark Stamp
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Siddharth Sondhi
Defense Title: “Investigating UI-Based and AI-Based Interactions in VR Environments for Human Anatomy Education”
Advisor: Dr. Vuthea Chheang
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MH 226

Student Name: Chung-Hsuan Wu
Defense Title: “Benchmark Study of LLMs on Drum Style Classification”
Advisor: Dr. Ching-Seh Wu
Date: May 18, 2026
Time: 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location: MLK 724

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: Patricia Saito
Defense Title: "Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Corals"
Advisor: Dr. Philip Heller
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
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. William Andreopoulos 
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: Guneet Kaur Bhogal
Defense Title: "Detection and Characterization of Cancer using cfDNA fragmentomics analysis"
Advisor: Dr. Wendy Lee
Date: May 19, 2026
Time: 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Sushmitha Chikkanayakanahalli Gopala
Defense Title: "LLM-Powered Investment Advisor Assistant"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 20, 2026
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Location: MH 225

Student Name: Shilpa Ramakrishna
Defense Title: "Query Implied Generative Engine Optimization"
Advisor: Dr. William Andreopoulos
Date: May 20, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 225