Digital Commons Network^™

How Can We Build A Moral Robot?, Kristen E. Clark

Capstones

Artificial intelligence is already starting to drive our cars and make choices that affect the world economy. One day soon, we’ll have robots that can take care of our sick and elderly, and even rescue us in rescue us in emergencies. But as robots start to make decisions that matter—it’s raising questions that go far beyond engineering. We’re stating to think about ethics.

Bertram Malle and Matthias Scheutz are part of a team funded by the department of defense. It's their job to answer a question that seems straight out of a sci-fi novel: How can we build a moral …

Demonstration Of Inexact Computing Implemented In The Jpeg Compression Algorithm Using Probabilistic Boolean Logic Applied To Cmos Components, Christopher I. Allen

Theses and Dissertations

Probabilistic computing offers potential improvements in energy, performance, and area compared with traditional digital design. This dissertation quantifies energy and energy-delay tradeoffs in digital adders, multipliers, and the JPEG image compression algorithm. This research shows that energy demand can be cut in half with noisesusceptible16-bit Kogge-Stone adders that deviate from the correct value by an average of 3 in 14 nanometer CMOS FinFET technology, while the energy-delay product (EDP) is reduced by 38 . This is achieved by reducing the power supply voltage which drives the noisy transistors. If a 19 average error is allowed, the adders are 13 times …

Formal Modeling And Verification Of Delay-Insensitive Circuits, Hoon Park

Dissertations and Theses

Einstein's relativity theory tells us that the notion of simultaneity can only be approximated for events distributed over space. As a result, the use of asynchronous techniques is unavoidable in systems larger than a certain physical size. Traditional design techniques that use global clocks face this barrier of scale already within the space of a modern microprocessor chip. The most common response by the chip industry for overcoming this barrier is to use Globally Asynchronous Locally Synchronous (GALS) design techniques. The circuits investigated in this thesis can be viewed as examples of GALS design. To make such designs trustworthy it …

Security Protocol Suite For Preventing Cloud-Based Denial-Of-Service Attacks, Marwan M. Darwish

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cloud systems, also known as cloud services, are among the primary solutions of the information technology domain. Cloud services are accessed through an identity authentication process. These authentication processes have become increasingly vulnerable to adversaries who may perform denial-of-service (DoS) attacks to make cloud services inaccessible. Several strong authentication protocols have been employed to protect conventional network systems. Nevertheless, they can cause a DoS threat when implemented in the cloud-computing system. This is because the comprehensive verification process may exhaust the cloud resources and shut down cloud’s services. This thesis proposes a novel cloud-based secure authentication (CSA) protocol suite that …

Nd − Pdpa: N Dimensional Probability Density Profile Analysis, Arjang Fahim

Theses and Dissertations

Proteins are often referred as working molecule of a cell, performing many structural, functional and regulatory processes. Revealing the function of proteins still remains a challenging problem. Advancement in genomics sequence projects produces large protein sequence repository, but due to technical difficulty and cost related to structure determination, the number of identified protein structure is far behind. Novel structures identification are particularly important for a number of reasons: they generate models of similar proteins for comparison; identify evolutionary relationships; further contribute to our understanding of protein function and mechanism; and allow for the fold of other family members to be …

Adapting Architectural Models For Visualization Using Virtual Reality Headsets, Bernardo Martinez

Honors Theses

Business contracts represent a main source of income for Architects. Acquiring these contracts requires the latest and most immersive technology that improves their sales against competitors. Virtual reality provides an in-depth experience that allows clients to have a reasonable assurance that the building meets their physical expectations. Videos and photos are detached and mundane; while they provide some visual representation they will not allow the user to compare his physical characteristics (height, length, width) with a 3D model. In this paper, I describe a procedure for automatically importing 3D models from Revit into Unreal4. I also describe the workflow required …

Using Gpu To Accelerate Linear Computations In Power System Applications, Xue Li

Doctoral Dissertations

With the development of advanced power system controls, the industrial and research community is becoming more interested in simulating larger interconnected power grids. It is always critical to incorporate advanced computing technologies to accelerate these power system computations. Power flow, one of the most fundamental computations in power system analysis, converts the solution of non-linear systems to that of a set of linear systems via the Newton method or one of its variants. An efficient solution to these linear equations is the key to improving the performance of power flow computation, and hence to accelerating other power system applications based …

Hyperspectral Data Acquisition And Its Application For Face Recognition, Woon Cho

Doctoral Dissertations

Current face recognition systems are rife with serious challenges in uncontrolled conditions: e.g., unrestrained lighting, pose variations, accessories, etc. Hyperspectral imaging (HI) is typically employed to counter many of those challenges, by incorporating the spectral information within different bands. Although numerous methods based on hyperspectral imaging have been developed for face recognition with promising results, three fundamental challenges remain: 1) low signal to noise ratios and low intensity values in the bands of the hyperspectral image specifically near blue bands; 2) high dimensionality of hyperspectral data; and 3) inter-band misalignment (IBM) correlated with subject motion during data acquisition.

This dissertation …

Neuron Clustering For Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting In Supervised And Reinforcement Learning, Benjamin Frederick Goodrich

Doctoral Dissertations

Neural networks have had many great successes in recent years, particularly with the advent of deep learning and many novel training techniques. One issue that has affected neural networks and prevented them from performing well in more realistic online environments is that of catastrophic forgetting. Catastrophic forgetting affects supervised learning systems when input samples are temporally correlated or are non-stationary. However, most real-world problems are non-stationary in nature, resulting in prolonged periods of time separating inputs drawn from different regions of the input space.

Reinforcement learning represents a worst-case scenario when it comes to precipitating catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. …

Arithmetic Logic Unit Architectures With Dynamically Defined Precision, Getao Liang

Doctoral Dissertations

Modern central processing units (CPUs) employ arithmetic logic units (ALUs) that support statically defined precisions, often adhering to industry standards. Although CPU manufacturers highly optimize their ALUs, industry standard precisions embody accuracy and performance compromises for general purpose deployment. Hence, optimizing ALU precision holds great potential for improving speed and energy efficiency. Previous research on multiple precision ALUs focused on predefined, static precisions. Little previous work addressed ALU architectures with customized, dynamically defined precision. This dissertation presents approaches for developing dynamic precision ALU architectures for both fixed-point and floating-point to enable better performance, energy efficiency, and numeric accuracy. These new …

Hands-Free Computer Interaction Using A Sip/Puff Sensor As A Mouse, Daniel Williams

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Free2play, Corey Lee Wilson

Computer Engineering

Free2Play is a website based upon the wildly popular PC video game League of Legends created by Riot Gaming. The website contains helpful information for new and old players of the game, such as articles containing the latest League of Legends new, a rune calculator, and recommended item builds for characters. The website uses HTML5, jquery, node.js, MySQL, and PHP to pull data from Riot’s web API and Champion.gg’s website.

Microcontroller Application For Linear And Rotational Motion Sensing, Zachary Mintzer

Computer Engineering

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Digital Effects Processing Using Ios, Jonah W. Clinard

Computer Engineering

In today’s society, we are seeing incredible improvements in terms of creating smaller technological devices that behave more and more like the personal computers of yesterday. Mobile “Smart” devices, in particular, are becoming incredibly powerful not just in terms of processing power, but in the fact that they are able to provide assistance to users in their everyday lives. Application developers are now able utilize the power and size of these devices, to create and realize ideas that would have been previously viewed as impossible. This project applies the fields of digital signal processing, music, and mobile application development, to …

Generalized Techniques For Using System Execution Traces To Support Software Performance Analysis, Thelge Manjula Peiris

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation proposes generalized techniques to support software performance analysis using system execution traces in the absence of software development artifacts such as source code. The proposed techniques do not require modifications to the source code, or to the software binaries, for the purpose of software analysis (non-intrusive). The proposed techniques are also not tightly coupled to the architecture specific details of the system being analyzed. This dissertation extends the current techniques of using system execution traces to evaluate software performance properties, such as response times, service times. The dissertation also proposes a novel technique to auto-construct a dataflow model …

Dividing And Conquering Meshes Within The Nist Fire Dynamics Simulator (Fds) On Multicore Computing Systems, Donald Charles Collins

Masters Theses

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) provides a computational fluid dynamics model of a fire, which can be visualized by using NIST Smokeview (SMV). Users must create a configuration file (*.fds) that describes the environment and other characteristics of the fire scene so that the FDS software can produce the output file (*.smv) needed for visualization.The processing can be computationally intensive, often taking between several minutes and several hours to complete. In many cases, a user will create a file that is not optimized for a multicore computing system. By dividing meshes within the …

An Integrated Framework For Cardiac Sounds Diagnosis, Zichun Tong

Masters Theses

The Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal contains valuable information about the cardiac condition and is a useful tool in recognizing dysfunction and heart failure. By analyzing the PCG, early detection and diagnosis of heart diseases can be accomplished since many pathological conditions of the cardiovascular system cause murmurs or abnormal heart sounds. This thesis presents an algorithm to classify normal and abnormal heart sound signals using PCG. The proposed analysis is based on a framework composed of several statistical signal analysis techniques such as wavelet based de-noising, energy-based segmentation, Hilbert-Huang transform based feature extraction, and Support Vector Machine based classification. The MATLAB …

A Platform For Fast Detection Of Let-7 Micro Rna Using Polyaniline Fluorescence And Image Analysis Techniques, Partha P. Sengupta

Master's Theses

The project describes a new strategy for transducing hybridization events through modulating intrinsic properties of the electroconductive polymer polyaniline (PANI). When DNA based probes electrostatically interact with PANI, its fluorescence properties are increased, a phenomenon that can be enhanced by UV irradiation. Hybridization of target nucleic acids results in dissociation of probes causing PANI fluorescence to return to basal levels. By monitoring restoration of base PANI fluorescence as little as 10^-11 M (10 pM) of target oligonucleotides could be detected within 15 minutes of hybridization. Detection of complementary oligos was specific, with introduction of a single mismatch failing to …

Detecting Occlusions Of Automobile Parts Being Inspected By A Camera System During Manufacturing Assembly, Jayadevan Puthumanappilly

All Theses

This thesis considers the problem of detecting occlusions in automobile parts on a moving assembly line in an automotive manufacturing plant. This work builds on the existing ``Visual Inspector'' (VI) system developed as a joint research project between Clemson University and the BMW Spartanburg manufacturing plant. The goal is to develop a method that can successfully detect occlusions in real-time. VI is a detector and classifier system that uses video cameras to determine the correct installation of a part in the assembly line. In the current version of VI, an occluded part is flagged simply as `not OK' - as …

Implementation Of A Neuromorphic Development Platform With Danna, Jason Yen-Shen Chan

Masters Theses

Neuromorphic computing is the use of artificial neural networks to solve complex problems. The specialized computing field has been growing in interest during the past few years. Specialized hardware that function as neural networks can be utilized to solve specific problems unsuited for traditional computing architectures such as pattern classification and image recognition. However, these hardware platforms have neural network structures that are static, being limited to only perform a specific application, and cannot be used for other tasks. In this paper, the feasibility of a development platform utilizing a dynamic artificial neural network for researchers is discussed.

Exclusive-Or Preprocessing And Dictionary Coding Of Continuous-Tone Images., Takiyah K. Cooper

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of lossless image compression studies the various ways to represent image data in the most compact and efficient manner possible that also allows the image to be reproduced without any loss. One of the most efficient strategies used in lossless compression is to introduce entropy reduction through decorrelation. This study focuses on using the exclusive-or logic operator in a decorrelation filter as the preprocessing phase of lossless image compression of continuous-tone images. The exclusive-or logic operator is simply and reversibly applied to continuous-tone images for the purpose of extracting differences between neighboring pixels. Implementation of the exclusive-or operator …

The Information Of Spam, Sawyer C. Anderson

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper explores the value of information contained in spam tweets as it pertains to prediction accuracy. As a case study, tweets discussing Bitcoin were collected and used to predict the rise and fall of Bitcoin value. Precision of prediction both with and without spam tweets, as identified by a naive Bayesian spam filter, were measured. Results showed a minor increase in accuracy when spam tweets were included, indicating that spam messages likely contain information valuable for prediction of market fluctuations.

Signage Recognition Based Wayfinding System For The Visually Impaired, Abdullah Khalid Ahmed

Masters Theses

Persons of visual impairment make up a growing segment of modern society. To cater to the special needs of these individuals, society ought to consider the design of special constructs to enable them to fulfill their daily necessities. This research proposes a new method for text extraction from indoor signage that will help persons of visual impairment maneuver in unfamiliar indoor environments, thus enhancing their independence and quality of life.

In this thesis, images are acquired through a video camera mounted on glasses of the walking person. Frames are then extracted and used in an integrated framework that applies Maximally …

Computer Aided Brain Tumor Edge Extraction Using Morphological Operations, Warqaa Shaher Alazawee

Masters Theses

Detecting the precise boundary of the area containing a recognized brain tumor is a complex problem and must be addressed since it applies to many medical modalities and tumor types. The objective of this thesis is to provide an efficient algorithm for detecting edges of brain tumors to help neurosurgeons identify the border of the critical area and distinguish the precise margin of the tumor from the rest of the brain tissue during the surgery. This thesis work exploits MRI brain tumor images as a tool to aid surgeons. MRI image segmentation is an essential step as a preliminary process …

Design Of A New Digital Relay For Transmission Line Fault Detection, Classification And Localization Based On A New Composite Relay And Artificial Neural Network Approach, Ahmed Sabri Altaie

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on new approach to detect, classify, and localize the fault in transmission line. Firstly, fault detection was carried out using the New Composite Relay (CR) which, has different characteristics and the ability to detect any type of fault including series faults. Secondly, fault classification was conducted using the Feed Forward Artificial Neural Network (FFANN). In addition, the fault classification led to the investigation of the best use of the FFANN. The data used come from MATLAB/SIMULINK three phase series compensated network. The results obtained using FFANN, were compared with the type of the fault that have been …

Control Of Cation Ordering In Zinc Tin Nitride And In-Situ Monitoring Of Growth, Brian Christopher Durant

Masters Theses

Semiconducting materials with a band gap around 1.5 eV are very much sought after due to their close match to the solar spectrum. However, some compounds that have shown promise for highly efficient solar cells contain rare, expensive, and sometimes toxic elements, such as indium and gallium. As such, a search for earth abundant materials has become more prominent recently. One such earth abundant semiconducting material that has garnered interest is ZnSnN₂. It has been shown through previous studies that there is the possibility of continuously tuning the band gap between 1.0 and 2.0 eV by controlling the …

Design Of Digital Down Converter Chain For Software Defined Radio Systems On Fpga, Nagarjun Marappa

Masters Theses

Modern communication systems have increasingly attempted to trade off the digital signal processing for analog circuitry. In performing this tradeoff, advanced algorithms have been implemented in both custom programmable hardware and in software; such systems are commonly called Software Defined Radios (SDR). Advanced software defined radios consist of highly configurable hardware and computers used as digital signal processing (DSP) platforms that provide the technology for realizing current and future generations of digital wireless communication infrastructure. Many sophisticated signal processing tasks are performed in SDR, including compression algorithms, channel estimation, equalization, forward error correction and protocol management. This research has focused …

A High Performance Architecture For An Exact Match Short-Read Aligner Using Burrows-Wheeler Aligner On Fpgas, Dana Abdul Qader

Masters Theses

Due to modern DNA sequencing technologies vast amount of short DNA sequences known as short-reads is generated. Biologists need to be able to align the short-reads to a reference genome to be able to make scientific use of the data. Fast and accurate short-read aligner programs are needed to keep up with the pace at which this data is generated. Field Programmable Gate Arrays have been widely used to accelerate many data-intensive bioinformatics applications.

Burrows-Wheeler Transform has been used in the theory of string matching which has led to the development of many short-read alignment programs. This thesis presents a …

Morphology Based Framework For Improved Driver's Visibility In Inclement Weather Conditions, Saleem Farhood Hussein

Masters Theses

The U.S. Department of Transportation reports that on average there are 5,870,000 vehicle accidents each year. Twenty-three percent (23%) of these accidents are attributed to weather conditions with an annual average of more than 6,000 people are killed and 480,000 people are injured. Weather-related accidents occur mainly because of the low visibility on the roads under inclement conditions such as snow, rain and fog. While these conditions can be predictable and individuals try to avoid driving in inclement weather, there are circumstances that require driving in such conditions such as emergency responders or when the severity of the storm has …

A Lidar Based Semi-Autonomous Collision Avoidance System And The Development Of A Hardware-In-The-Loop Simulator To Aid In Algorithm Development And Human Studies, Thomas F. Stevens

Master's Theses

In this paper, the architecture and implementation of an embedded controller for a steering based semi-autonomous collision avoidance system on a 1/10^th scale model is presented. In addition, the development of a 2D hardware-in-the-loop simulator with vehicle dynamics based on the bicycle model is described. The semi-autonomous collision avoidance software is fully contained onboard a single-board computer running embedded GNU/Linux. To eliminate any wired tethers that limit the system’s abilities, the driver operates the vehicle at a user-control-station through a wireless Bluetooth interface. The user-control-station is outfitted with a game-controller that provides standard steering wheel and pedal controls along …