Senior Theses
Senior theses take a full academic year to complete. Students interested in working with me on a senior thesis should, ideally, contact me in their junior year. Your thesis topic, which we will decide on together, should align with my research interests rather than being a random project that you think is cool -- we are much more likely to be successful if we have common interests. Students who want to work with me should have a good math background. If you are mainly interested in a software development project, other professors in the department would be more appropriate thesis advisors.
Here is a list of senior theses I have supervised in the past.
| Title | Year | Department | Advisor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alignment: Humanistic Machine Ethics and Moral Confidence | 2025 | Philosophy & Computer Science | Murray (Philosophy) and O'Connell (Computer Science) |
| The Bridge Between Theory and Applications: Examining Bias in Nonlinear Classification | 2025 | Computer Science | O'Connell |
| An Exploration of Dimensionality Reduction Techniques as Applied to Mutated HIV-Vif-A3F Molecular Dynamics Simulations | 2025 | Computer Science | Ball (Chemistry) and O'Connell (Computer Science) |
| The Role of Neural Style Transfer Learning in the Creation and Dissemination of NFTs | 2023 | Computer Science | O'Connell |
| Epidemiological Modeling with Agent Based Systems | 2011 | Computer Science | O'Connell |
| Reinforcement Learning to Solve the Rubik's Cube® | 2009 | Computer Science | O'Connell |
| Reinforcement Learning for Dots and Boxes | 2004 | Computer Science | O'Connell |
| Information and Deception in AI Poker | 2003 | Computer Science | O'Connell |