Engineering Commons^™

A Neural Network Approach To Border Gateway Protocol Peer Failure Detection And Prediction, Cory B. White

Master's Theses

The size and speed of computer networks continue to expand at a rapid pace, as do the corresponding errors, failures, and faults inherent within such extensive networks. This thesis introduces a novel approach to interface Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) computer networks with neural networks to learn the precursor connectivity patterns that emerge prior to a node failure. Details of the design and construction of a framework that utilizes neural networks to learn and monitor BGP connection states as a means of detecting and predicting BGP peer node failure are presented. Moreover, this framework is used to monitor a BGP network …

Sensor Integration For Low-Cost Crash Avoidance, Stephane M. Roussel

Master's Theses

This report is a summary of the development of sensor integration for low-cost crash avoidance for over-land commercial trucks. The goal of the project was to build and test a system composed of low-cost commercially available sensors arranged on a truck trailer to monitor the environment around the truck. The system combines the data from each sensor to increase the reliability of the sensor using a probabilistic data fusion approach. A combination of ultrasonic and magnetoresistive sensors was used in this study. In addition, Radar and digital imaging were investigated as reference signals and possible candidates for additional sensor integration. …

Internet-Scale Reactive Routing And Mobility, Daniel B. Nelson

Master's Theses

Since its commercialization, the Internet has grown exponentially. A large variety of devices can communicate creating advanced services for a diverse ecosystem of applications. However, as the number of Internet hosts has grown, the size of routing tables required to correctly route data between them has also increased exponentially. This growth rate necessitates increasingly frequent upgrades to routing device hardware, providing them with additional memory for fast-access storage of route information. These upgrades are both physically and fiscally untenable, and a new Internet routing solution is necessary for future growth.

This research focuses around an incrementally deployable, reactive routing system …

Jdiet: Footprint Reduction For Memory-Constrained Systems, Michael John Huffman

Master's Theses

Main memory remains a scarce computing resource. Even though main memory is becoming more abundant, software applications are inexorably engineered to consume as much memory as is available. For example, expert systems, scientific computing, data mining, and embedded systems commonly suffer from the lack of main memory availability.

This thesis introduces JDiet, an innovative memory management system for Java applications. The goal of JDiet is to provide the developer with a highly configurable framework to reduce the memory footprint of a memory-constrained system, enabling it to operate on much larger working sets. Inspired by buffer management techniques common in modern …

A System For Natural Language Unmarked Clausal Transformations In Text-To-Text Applications, Daniel Miller

Master's Theses

A system is proposed which separates clauses from complex sentences into simpler stand-alone sentences. This is useful as an initial step on raw text, where the resulting processed text may be fed into text-to-text applications such as Automatic Summarization, Question Answering, and Machine Translation, where complex sentences are difficult to process. Grammatical natural language transformations provide a possible method to simplify complex sentences to enhance the results of text-to-text applications. Using shallow parsing, this system improves the performance of existing systems to identify and separate marked and unmarked embedded clauses in complex sentence structure resulting in syntactically simplified source for …

General Direction Routing Protocol, Sean Michael Lydon

Master's Theses

The General Direction Routing Protocol (GDRP) is a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

multi-path routing protocol which abstracts localization information (commonly GPS

coordinates) into relative direction information in order to perform routing decisions. By

generating relative direction information GDRP is able to operate with fewer precision

requirements than other protocols. This abstraction also allows the integration of other emerging

hardware-based localization techniques, for example, Beamforming Sensor Arrays.

GDRP does not specifically address the next hop a packet should take, but instead specifies a

direction it should travel. This direction abstraction allows for multiple paths to be taken through

the network thus …

Store And Forward Routing For Sparse Pico-Satellite Sensor Networks With Data-Mules, Trevor Joseph Koritza

Master's Theses

Satellites are playing an increasingly important role in collecting scientific information, providing communication services, and revolutionizing navigation. Until recently satellites were large and very expensive, creating a high barrier to entry that only large corporations and government agencies could overcome. In the past few years the CubeSat project at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly) has worked to refine the design and launching of small, lightweight, and less expensive satellites called pico-satellites, opening space up to a wider audience. Now that Cal Poly has the launch logistics and hardware under control, a new problem has arisen. These …

Affine Region Tracking And Augmentation Using Mser And Adaptive Sift Model Generation, Matthew James Marano

Master's Theses

Relatively complex Augmented Reality (AR) algorithms are becoming widely available due to advancements in affordable mobile computer hardware. To take advantage of this a new method is developed for tracking 2D regions without a prior knowledge of an environment and without developing a computationally expensive world model. In the method of this paper, affinely invariant planar regions in a scene are found using the Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) detector. A region is selected by the user to define a search space, and then the Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is used to detect affine invariant keypoints in the region. …

A Graphical Approach To Testing Real-Time Embedded Devices, Steven M. Day

Master's Theses

Software Testing is both a vital and expensive part of the software development lifecycle. Improving the testing process has the potential for large returns. Current testing methodologies used to test real-time embedded devices are examined and the weaknesses in them are exposed. This leads to the introduction of a new graphical testing methodology based on flowcharts. The new approach is both a visual test creation program and an automated execution engine that together frame a new way of testing. The new methodology incorporates flow-based diagrams, visual layouts, and simple execution rules to improve upon traditional testing approaches. The new methodology …

Extraction Of Causal-Association Networks From Unstructured Text Data, Brett N. Bojduj

Master's Theses

Causality is an expression of the interactions between variables in a system. Humans often explicitly express causal relations through natural language, so extracting these relations can provide insight into how a system functions. This thesis presents a system that uses a grammar parser to extract causes and effects from unstructured text through a simple, pre-defined grammar pattern. By filtering out non-causal sentences before the extraction process begins, the presented methodology is able to achieve a precision of 85.91% and a recall of 73.99%. The polarity of the extracted relations is then classified using a Fisher classifier. The result is a …

Bottom-Up Ontology Creation With A Direct Instance Input Interface, Charles C.H. Wei

Master's Theses

In general an ontology is created by following a top-down, or so called genus-species approach, where the species are differentiated from the genus and from each other by means of differentiae [8]. The superconcept is the genus, every subconcept is a species, and the differentiae correspond to roles. To complete it a user organizes data into a proper structure, accompanied with the instances in that domain in order to complete the construction of an ontology. It is a concept learning procedure in a school, for example. Students first learn the general knowledge and apply it to their exercise and homework …