Computer Engineering Commons^™

Automatic Performance Level Assessment In Minimally Invasive Surgery Using Coordinated Sensors And Composite Metrics, Sami Taha Abu Snaineh

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Skills assessment in Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) has been a challenge for training centers for a long time. The emerging maturity of camera-based systems has the potential to transform problems into solutions in many different areas, including MIS. The current evaluation techniques for assessing the performance of surgeons and trainees are direct observation, global assessments, and checklists. These techniques are mostly subjective and can, therefore, involve a margin of bias.

The current automated approaches are all implemented using mechanical or electromagnetic sensors, which suffer limitations and influence the surgeon’s motion. Thus, evaluating the skills of the MIS surgeons and ...

A Comprehensive Hdl Model Of A Line Associative Register Based Architecture, Matthew A. Sparks

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Modern processor architectures suffer from an ever increasing gap between processor and memory performance. The current memory-register model attempts to hide this gap by a system of cache memory. Line Associative Registers(LARs) are proposed as a new system to avoid the memory gap by pre-fetching and associative updating of both instructions and data. This thesis presents a fully LAR-based architecture, targeting a previously developed instruction set architecture. This architecture features an execution pipeline supporting SWAR operations, and a memory system supporting the associative behavior of LARs and lazy writeback to memory.

Power-Efficient And Low-Latency Memory Access For Cmp Systems With Heterogeneous Scratchpad On-Chip Memory, Zhi Chen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The gradually widening speed disparity of between CPU and memory has become an overwhelming bottleneck for the development of Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) systems. In addition, increasing penalties caused by frequent on-chip memory accesses have raised critical challenges in delivering high memory access performance with tight power and latency budgets. To overcome the daunting memory wall and energy wall issues, this thesis focuses on proposing a new heterogeneous scratchpad memory architecture which is configured from SRAM, MRAM, and Z-RAM. Based on this architecture, we propose two algorithms, a dynamic programming and a genetic algorithm, to perform data allocation to different memory ...

Exploiting Temporal And Spatial Correlation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Daniel Parker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

Collecting data continuously from Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) with limited power and bandwidth is a challenging problem. Such networks have potential utility in a wide range of disciplines such as medical, industrial, environmental, and military applications. For long-term monitoring and surveillance applications, the objective is often times to cover as large an area as possible while still acquiring high-resolution information about the sensed environment. The main challenges involve energy-efficiency and scalability of the techniques used to acquire the substantial amount of data from the sensor network. Addressing these challenges, we propose a method that effectively exploits both spatial and temporal ...

Optimization Of Eigenvalue Calculations Within Quantum-Dot Cellular Automata Stray Charge Simulations, Taylor Baldwin

Celebration of Undergraduate Scholarship

Simulations for quantum computing typically involve the computation of a large number of eigenvalues of large matrices. This effort focuses on optimization of these calculations using algorithms tailored to the specific characteristics of typical matrices found in these simulations. Currently, computations which heretofore required over 30 hours of simulation time have been reduced to less than 3 hours.

Robust Monocular Visual Odometry For A Ground Vehicle In Undulating Terrain, Ji Zhang, Sanjiv Singh, George Kantor

Robotics Institute

Here we present a robust method for monocular visual odometry capable of accurate position estimation even when operating in undulating terrain. Our algorithm uses a steering model to separately recover rotation and translation. Robot 3DOF orientation is recovered by minimizing image projection error, while, robot translation is recovered by solving an NP-hard optimization problem through an approximation. The decoupled estimation ensures a low computational cost. The proposed method handles undulating terrain by approximating ground patches as locally flat but not necessarily level, and recovers the inclination angle of the local ground in motion estimation. Also, it can automatically detect when ...

Automated Crop Yield Estimation For Apple Orchards, Qi Wang, Stephen Nuske, Marcel Bergerman, Sanjiv Singh

Robotics Institute

Crop yield estimation is an important task in apple orchard management. The current manual sampling-based yield estimation is time-consuming, labor-intensive and inaccurate. To deal with this challenge, we developed a computer vision-based system for automated, rapid and accurate yield estimation. The system uses a two-camera stereo rig for image acquisition. It works at nighttime with controlled artificial lighting to reduce the variance of natural illumination. An autonomous orchard vehicle is used as the support platform for automated data collection. The system scans both sides of each tree row in orchards. A computer vision algorithm detects and registers apples from acquired ...

Fpga-Based Implementation Of Dual-Frequency Pattern Scheme For 3-D Shape Measurement, Brent Bondehagen

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Structured Light Illumination (SLI) is the process where spatially varied patterns are projected onto a 3-D surface and based on the distortion by the surface topology, phase information can be calculated and a 3D model constructed. Phase Measuring Profilometry (PMP) is a particular type of SLI that requires three or more patterns temporarily multiplexed. High speed PMP attempts to scan moving objects whose motion is small so as to have little impact on the 3-D model. Given that practically all machine vision cameras and high speed cameras employ a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) interface directly to the image sensors ...

Ironclad C++: A Library-Augmented Type-Safe Subset Of C++, Christian Delozier, Richard A. Eisenberg, Santosh Nagarakatte, Peter-Michael Osera, Milo Martin, Stephan A. Zdancewic

Technical Reports (CIS)

C++ remains a widely used programming language, despite retaining many unsafe features from C. These unsafe features often lead to violations of type and memory safety, which manifest as buffer overflows, use-after-free ulnerabilities, or abstraction violations. Malicious attackers are able to exploit such violations to compromise application and system security. This paper introduces Ironclad C++, an approach to bring the benefits of type and memory safety to C++. Ironclad C++ is, in essence, a library-augmented type-safe subset of C++. All Ironclad C++ programs are valid C++ programs, and thus Ironclad C++ programs can be compiled using standard, off-the-shelf C++ compilers ...

Dependence On Cyberscribes - Issues In E-Security, Thomas R. Mclean, Alexander B. Mclean

Journal of Business & Technology Law

No abstract provided.

Closed-Loop Verification Of Medical Devices With Model Abstraction And Refinement, Zhihao Jiang, Miroslav Pajic, Salar Moarref, Rajeev Alur, Rahul Mangharam

Real-Time and Embedded Systems Lab (mLAB)

The design and implementation of software for medical devices is challenging due to their closed-loop interaction with the patient, which is a stochastic physical environment. The safety-critical nature and the lack of existing industry standards for verification, make this an ideal domain for exploring applications of formal modeling and closed-loop analysis. The biggest challenge is to balance the complexity and fidelity of the environment model, while preserving the safety and efficacy properties. In this effort, we use a dual chamber implantable pacemaker as a case study for modeling and verification of control algorithms for medical devices in UPPAAL. We begin ...

Electronic Medical Record Ipad Application, Mischa Symmone Buckler, Dwayne Wiliam Flaherty, John Thomas Cotham, Mark Bellott

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Network Intrusion Detection And Mitigation Against Denial Of Service Attack, Dong Lin

Technical Reports (CIS)

The growing use of Internet service in the past few years have facilitated an increase in the denial of service (DoS) attacks. Despite the best preventative measures, DoS attacks have been successfully carried out against high-prole organizations and enterprises, including those that took down Chase, BOA, PNC and other major US banks in September 2009, which reveal the vulnerability of even well equipped networks. These widespread attacks have resulted in significant loss of service, money, and reputation for organizations, calling for a practical and ecient solution to DoS attack detection and mitigation.

DoS attack detection and mitigation strengthens the robustness ...

Automatic Detection Of Abnormal Behavior In Computing Systems, James Frank Roberts

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

I present RAACD, a software suite that detects misbehaving computers in large computing systems and presents information about those machines to the system administrator. I build this system using preexisting anomaly detection techniques. I evaluate my methods using simple synthesized data, real data containing coerced abnormal behavior, and real data containing naturally occurring abnormal behavior. I find that the system adequately detects abnormal behavior and significantly reduces the amount of uninteresting computer health data presented to a system administrator.

Reconstructing 3d Human Pose From 2d Image Landmarks, Varun Ramakrishna, Takeo Kanade, Yaser Sheikh

Robotics Institute

Reconstructing an arbitrary configuration of 3D points from their projection in an image is an ill-posed problem. When the points hold semantic meaning, such as anatomical landmarks on a body, human observers can often infer a plausible 3D configuration, drawing on extensive visual memory. We present an activity-independent method to recover the 3D configuration of a human figure from 2D locations of anatomical landmarks in a single image, leveraging a large motion capture corpus as a proxy for visual memory. Our method solves for anthropometrically regular body pose and explicitly estimates the camera via a matching pursuit algorithm operating on ...

Applying Agile Methodology In Mobile Software Engineering: Android Application Development And Its Challenges, Shakira Banu Kaleel, Ssowjanya Harishankar

Computer Science Technical Reports

Highly volatile requirements of mobile applications require adaptive software development methods. Several attempts to address challenges in mobile software engineering have found agile methodology to be appropriate for mobile application development. This project report provides a detailed analysis on various challenges involved in mobile software development which are addressed using Agile-SCRUM methodologies. An efficient mobile software development concept derived from Agile-Scrum methodology is designed in this project. A light-weight Android application for secure and incremental backup has been developed using the proposed methodology. An in-depth illustration of the practical experience in developing the application has been discussed. Unlike other prominent ...

Vsfs: A Versatile Searchable File System For Hpc Analytics, Lei Xu, Ziling Huang, Hong Jiang, Lei Tian, David Swanson

CSE Technical reports

Big-data/HPC analytics applications have urgent needs for file-search services to drastically reduce the scale of the input data to accelerate analytics. Unfortunately, the existing solutions either are poorly scalable for large-scale systems, or lack well-integrated interface to allow applications to easily use them. We propose a distributed searchable file system, VSFS, which provide a novel and flexible POSIX-compatible searchable file system namespace that can be seamlessly integrate with any legacy code without modification. Additionally, to provide real-time indexing and searching performance, VSFS uses DRAM-based distributed consistent hashing ring to manages all file-index. The results of our evaluation show that ...

Infrastructure-Free Shipdeck Tracking For Autonomous Landing, Sankalp Arora, Sezal Jain, Sebastian Scherer, Stephen Nuske, Lyle J. Chamberlain, Sanjiv Singh

Robotics Institute

Shipdeck landing is one of the most challenging tasks for a rotorcraft. Current autonomous rotorcraft use shipdeck mounted transponders to measure the relative pose of the vehicle to the landing pad. This tracking system is not only expensive but renders an unequipped ship unlandable. We address the challenge of tracking shipdeck without additional infrastructure on the deck. We present two methods based on video and lidar that are able to track the shipdeck starting at a considerable distance from the ship. This redundant sensor design enables us to have two independent tracking systems. We show the results of the tracking ...

Realtime Alternate Routes Planning: The Rrt*-Ar Algorithm, Sanjiban Choudhury, Sebastian Scherer, Sanjiv Singh

Robotics Institute

Motion planning in the most general sense is an optimization problem with a single elusive best solution. However attempting to find a single answer isn’t often the most desired approach. On the one hand, the reason is theoretical - planners often get trapped in local minimas because the cost function has many valleys or dynamics are too complex to fully exploit. On the other hand, there are many practical deterrents - unmapped obstacles might require the system to switch quickly to another plan, unmodelled dynamics can make a computed plan infeasible, or the system may have a human-in-loop who has a ...

Ieee 1588 And Accurate Time Stamping Techniques, Chinmayi Avasarala

IPFW Student Research and Creative Endeavor Symposium

When the clocks in our lives get out of sync, bad things happen. We arrive late for meetings, miss the train, or record all but the last few minutes of our favorite television show. Wouldn't it be helpful if clocks were always set to the correct time?

Actually, if they were networked together and using the IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol, they could all be set to same time, typically within 100 nanoseconds of each other.

The IEEE 1588 protocol enables rapid convergence (typically less than a minute, depending on the network topology) to sub-microsecond time synchronization between heterogeneous ...