Upcoming SJSU Computer Science Department Master's Defenses
The list of students is ordered by the date of defense.
Student Name: Jerry Lewis Liu
Defense Title: "Reason, Review, Repeat: Hybrid Chain of Thought to Mitigate Hallucinations
in Large Language Models"
Advisor: Dr. Teng Moh
Date: April 24, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 422
Student Name: Pranay Shanigarapu
Defense Title: "Explainable Malware Detection: Integrating Hierarchical Machine Learning
with Large Language Model Reasoning on the EMBER Dataset"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: April 29, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 225
Student Name: Andy Kuei
Defense Title: "Classifying and Generating Externally Visible Characteristics from
Human DNA using Transformer Architectures and Neural Networks"
Advisor: Dr. Teng Moh
Date: April 30, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: DH 318
Student Name: Aditya Prashant Dawadikar
Defense Title: "Selective Fine Tuning for Large Language Models"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 4, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 422
Student Name: Amey Bhide
Defense Title: "Agentic AI for Cerebral Tumor Personalized Clinical Decision Support"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 4, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: MH 422
Student Name: Huy Gia Ong
Defense Title: "Network Intrusion Detection Using Benford’s Law and Statistical Distance
Functions"
Advisor: Dr. Fabio Di Troia
Date: May 5, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: DH 318
Student Name: Harshitha Vipparthy
Defense Title: "Evaluating Log-Based Anomaly Detection under Distribution Shift using
CAShift"
Advisor: Dr. Navrati Saxena
Date: May 6, 2026
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location: MH 322
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: 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 224