Engineering Commons^™

A Gpu-Based Framework For Parallel Spatial Indexing And Query Processing, Zhila Nouri Lewis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Support for efficient spatial data storage and retrieval have become a vital component in almost all spatial database systems. Previous work has shown the importance of using spatial indexing and parallel computing to speed up such tasks. While GPUs have become a mainstream platform for high-throughput data processing in recent years, exploiting the massively parallel processing power of GPUs is non-trivial. Current approaches that parallelize one query at a time have low work efficiency and cannot make good use of GPU resources. On the other hand, many spatial database applications are busy systems in which a large number of queries …

Distributed Spatiotemporal Control And Dynamic Information Fusion For Multiagent Systems, Dzung Minh Duc Tran

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first objective of this dissertation is to develop novel distributed control architectures allowing spatiotemporal control of multiagent systems as applied to formation control. In addition, its second objective is to introduce distributed estimation frameworks for dynamic information fusion for addressing the heterogeneity in sensor networks.

Changing the spatial and temporal properties of agent teams in a distributed manner and in real-time is an open problem in the control system literature as multiagent systems are often required to complete tasks with ever-increasing complexity in adverse conditions and dynamic environments. Motivated by this standpoint, this dissertation aims to address challenges related …

Authentication And Sql-Injection Prevention Techniques In Web Applications, Cagri Cetin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the top two “most critical web-application security risks” by combining two high-level contributions.

The first high-level contribution introduces and evaluates collaborative authentication, or coauthentication, a single-factor technique in which multiple registered devices work together to authenticate a user. Coauthentication provides security benefits similar to those of multi-factor techniques, such as mitigating theft of any one authentication secret, without some of the inconveniences of multi-factor techniques, such as having to enter passwords or biometrics. Coauthentication provides additional security benefits, including: preventing phishing, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks; basing authentications on high-entropy secrets that can be generated and updated automatically; …

Force Feedback And Intelligent Workspace Selection For Legged Locomotion Over Uneven Terrain, John Rippetoe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Legged robots present an incredible opportunity for humanity to conduct dangerous operations such as search and rescue, disaster recovery, and planetary exploration without ever placing themselves in harms way. The ability of a leg to more freely dictate its shape, orientation, and length gives it tremendous mobility and adaptability demanded of a system intended for operation outside of a controlled environment. However, one only need look at the average cat, dog, or friendly neighborhood squirrel to understand the immense gap that exists between what is possible of legged systems and their current set of capabilities.

Areas of study relevant to …

Robotic Motion Generation By Using Spatial-Temporal Patterns From Human Demonstrations, Yongqiang Huang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Robots excel in manufacturing facilities because the tasks are repetitive and do not change. However, when the tasks change, which happens in almost all tasks that humans perform daily, such as cutting, pouring, and grasping, etc., robots perform much worse. We aim at teaching robots to perform tasks that are subject to change using demonstrations collected from humans, a problem referred to as learning from demonstration (LfD).

LfD consists of two parts: the data of human demonstrations, and the algorithm that extracts knowledge from the data to perform the same motions. Similarly, this thesis is divided into two parts. The …

A Flexible, Natural Deduction, Automated Reasoner For Quick Deployment Of Non-Classical Logic, Trisha Mukhopadhyay

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Automated Theorem Provers (ATP) are software programs which carry out inferences over logico-mathematical systems, often with the goal of finding proofs to some given theorem. ATP systems are enormously powerful computer programs, capable of solving immensely difficult problems. Currently, many automated theorem provers exist like E, vampire, SPASS, ACL2, Coq etc. However, all the available theorem provers have some common problems: (1) Current ATP systems tend not to try to find proofs entirely on their own. They need help from human experts to supply lemmas, guide the proof, etc. (2) There is not a single proof system available which provides …