Engineering Commons^™

Luminescence Of Defects In The Structural Transformation Of Layered Tin Dichalcogenides, Peter Sutter, H.P. Komsa, A. V. Krasheninnikov, Y Huang, Eli A. Sutter

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Layered tin sulfide semiconductors are both of fundamental interest and attractive for energy conversion applications. Sn sulfides crystallize in several stable bulk phases with different Sn:S ratios (SnS2, Sn2, S3, and SnS), which can transform into phases with a lower sulfur concentration by introduction of sulfur vacancies (VS). How this complex behavior affects the optoelectronic properties remains largely unknown but is of key importance for understanding light-matter interactions in this family of layered materials. Here, we use the capability to induce VS and drive a transformation between few-layer SnS2 and SnS by electron beam irradiation, combined with in-situ cathodoluminescence spectroscopy …

Tiled Time Delay Estimation In Mobile Cloud Computing Environments, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

We present a tiled delay estimation technique in the context of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) environments. We examine its accuracy in the presence of multiple sources for (1) sub-sample delays and also (2) in the presence of phase-wrap around. Phase wrap-around is prevalent in MCC because the separation of acoustic sources may be large. We show that tiling a histogram of instantaneous phase estimates can improve delay estimates when phase-wrap around is sig- nificantly present and also when multiple sources are present. We report that error in the delay estimator is generally less than 5% of a sample, when the …

Load Balancing With Energy Storage Systems Based On Co-Simulation Of Multiple Smart Buildings And Distribution Networks, Shaun Duerr, Cristinel Ababei, Dan M. Ionel

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this paper, we present a co-simulation framework that combines two main simulation tools, one that provides detailed multiple building energy simulation ability with Energy-Plus being the core engine, and the other one that is a distribution level simulator, Matpower. Such a framework can be used to develop and study district level optimization techniques that exploit the interaction between a smart electric grid and buildings as well as the interaction between buildings themselves to achieve energy and cost savings and better energy management beyond what one can achieve through techniques applied at the building level only. We propose a heuristic …

Soft Foam Robot With Caterpillar-Inspired Gait Regimes For Terrestrial Locomotion, Cassandra M. Donatelli, Zachary T. Serlin, Piers Echols-Jones, Anthony E. Scibelli, Alexandra Cohen, Jeanne-Marie Musca, Shane Rozen-Levy, David Buckingham, Robert White, Barry A. Trimmer

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Caterpillars are the soft bodied larvae of lepidopteran insects. They have evolved to occupy an extremely diverse range of natural environments and to locomote in complex three-dimensional structures without articulated joint or hydrostatic control. These animals make excellent bio-inspiration for the field of soft robotics because of their diversity and adaptability. In this paper, we present SquMA Bot, a caterpillar-inspired soft robot. The robot's body is primarily composed of a soft viscoelastic foam, and it is actuated using a motor-tendon system. SquMA Bot is able to mimic the inching gait of a caterpillar and can use its flexible body to …

Parallel Cosine Nearest Neighbor Graph Construction, David Anastasiu, George Karypis

Faculty Publications

The nearest neighbor graph is an important structure in many data mining methods for clustering, advertising, recommender systems, and outlier detection. Constructing the graph requires computing up to n2 similarities for a set of n objects. This high complexity has led researchers to seek approximate methods, which find many but not all of the nearest neighbors. In contrast, we leverage shared memory parallelism and recent advances in similarity joins to solve the problem exactly. Our method considers all pairs of potential neighbors but quickly filters pairs that could not be a part of the nearest neighbor graph, based on similarity …

Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis On Review Data, Wei Xue

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With proliferation of user-generated reviews, new opportunities and challenges arise. The advance of Web technologies allows people to access a large amount of reviews of products and services online. Knowing what others like and dislike becomes increasingly important for their decision making in online shopping. The retailers also care more than ever about online reviews, because a vast pool of reviews enables them to monitor reputations and collect feedbacks efficiently. However, people often find difficult times in identifying and summarizing fine-grained sentiments buried in the opinion-rich resources. The traditional sentiment analysis, which focuses on the overall sentiments, fails to uncover …

Vkse-Mo: Verifiable Keyword Search Over Encrypted Data In Multi-Owner Settings, Yinbin Miao, Jianfeng Ma, Ximeng Liu, Junwei Zhang, Zhiquan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Searchable encryption (SE) techniques allow cloud clients to easily store data and search encrypted data in a privacy-preserving manner, where most of SE schemes treat the cloud server as honest-but-curious. However, in practice, the cloud server is a semi-honest-but-curious third-party, which only executes a fraction of search operations and returns a fraction of false search results to save its computational and bandwidth resources. Thus, it is important to provide a results verification method to guarantee the correctness of the search results. Existing SE schemes allow multiple data owners to upload different records to the cloud server, but these schemes have …

Meeting Real-Time Constraint Of Spectrum Management In Tv Black-Space Access, Zhongyuan Zhao

CSE Technical Reports

The TV set feedback feature standardized in the next generation TV system, ATSC 3.0, would enable opportunistic access of active TV channels in future Cognitive Radio Networks. This new dynamic spectrum access approach is named as black-space access, as it is complementary of current TV white space, which stands for inactive TV channels. TV black-space access can significantly increase the available spectrum of Cognitive Radio Networks in populated urban markets, where spectrum shortage is most severe while TV whitespace is very limited. However, to enable TV black-space access, secondary user has to evacuate a TV channel in a timely manner …

An Unmanned Aerial System For Prescribed Fires, Evan M. Beachly

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Prescribed fires can lessen wildfire severity and control invasive species, but some terrains may be difficult, dangerous, or costly to burn with existing tools. This thesis presents the design of an unmanned aerial system that can ignite prescribed fires from the air, with less cost and risk than with aerial ignition from a manned aircraft. The prototype was evaluated in-lab and successfully used to ignite interior areas of two prescribed fires. Additionally, we introduce an approach that integrates a lightweight fire simulation to autonomously plan safe flight trajectories and suggest effective fire lines. Both components are unique in that they …

Graphmp: An Efficient Semi-External-Memory Big Graph Processing System On A Single Machine, Peng Sun, Yonggang Wen, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta, Xiaokui Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies showed that single-machine graph processing systems can be as highly competitive as clusterbased approaches on large-scale problems. While several outof-core graph processing systems and computation models have been proposed, the high disk I/O overhead could significantly reduce performance in many practical cases. In this paper, we propose GraphMP to tackle big graph analytics on a single machine. GraphMP achieves low disk I/O overhead with three techniques. First, we design a vertex-centric sliding window (VSW) computation model to avoid reading and writing vertices on disk. Second, we propose a selective scheduling method to skip loading and processing unnecessary edge …

Video Frame Interpolation Via Adaptive Separable Convolution, Simon Niklaus, Long Mai, Feng Liu

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Standard video frame interpolation methods first estimate optical flow between input frames and then synthesize an intermediate frame guided by motion. Recent approaches merge these two steps into a single convolution process by convolving input frames with spatially adaptive kernels that account for motion and re-sampling simultaneously. These methods require large kernels to handle large motion, which limits the number of pixels whose kernels can be estimated at once due to the large memory demand. To address this problem, this paper formulates frame interpolation as local separable convolution over input frames using pairs of 1D kernels. Compared to regular 2D …

Anti-Icing Properties Of Femtosecond Laser Surface Processed Material, Ryan James Bell

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, the use of femtosecond laser surface processing (FLSP) to enhance the anti-icing properties of a commonly used aircraft alloy, Al 7075-O Clad is described. By changing the surface morphology through FLSP and the surface chemistry through siloxane vapor deposition, the wettability of Al 7075-O Clad was altered.

Condensation and the subsequent freezing of condensates on FLSP Al 7075-O Clad was studied. Both structure height and surface wettability were shown to play a role in the delay of freezing. Freezing occurred on the FLSP superhydrophilic surface faster than on the unprocessed Al 7075-O Clad surface, however, freezing was …

Condensation And Subsequent Freezing Delays As A Result Of Using A Femtosecond Laser Functionalized Surface, Chongji Huang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Femtosecond laser surface processing (FLSP) enhances the anti-icing properties of a commonly used aircraft alloy, Al 7075-O Clad. The wettability of Al 7075-O Clad was altered by changing the surface morphology through FLSP and the surface chemistry through siloxane vapor deposition. Tall mound and short mound FLSP functionalized surfaces were created through two sets of laser parameters. Atmospheric condensation and subsequent freezing of condensates on FLSP Al 7075-O Clad was studied. Results indicate that both structure height and surface wettability play a role in the delay of freezing. Freezing occurred on the FLSP superhydrophilic surface faster than on a unprocessed …

Analytical Modeling Of A Communication Channel Based On Subthreshold Stimulation Of Neurobiological Networks, Alireza Khodaei

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The emergence of wearable and implantable machines manufactured artificially or synthesized biologically opens up a new horizon for patient-centered health services such as medical treatment, health monitoring, and rehabilitation with minimized costs and maximized popularity when provided remotely via the Internet. In particular, a swarm of machines at the scale of a single cell down to the nanoscale can be deployed in the body by the non-invasive or minimally invasive operation (e.g., swallowing and injection respectively) to perform various tasks. However, an individual machine is only able to perform basic tasks so it needs to exchange data with the others …

Design And Implementation Of A Stand-Alone Tool For Metabolic Simulations, Milad Ghiasi Rad

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this thesis, we present the design and implementation of a stand-alone tool for metabolic simulations. This system is able to integrate custom-built SBML models along with external user’s input information and produces the estimation of any reactants participating in the chain of the reactions in the provided model, e.g., ATP, Glucose, Insulin, for the given duration using numerical analysis and simulations. This tool offers the food intake arguments in the calculations to consider the personalized metabolic characteristics in the simulations. The tool has also been generalized to take into consideration of temporal genomic information and be flexible for simulation …

Commentary: Wanted - A New Generation Of Accountants, Poh Sun Seow, Gary Pan, Clarence Goh

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Facing a new wave of automation, young accountants must redefine their role and their value-add to their company, say three Singapore Management University observers.

An Unsung Success Story: A Forty-Year Retrospective On U.S. Communications Policy, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Looking backwards on the occasion of Telecommunications Policy’s fortieth anniversary reveals just how far U.S. communications policy has come. All of the major challenges of 1976, such as promoting competition in customer premises equipment, long distance, and television networking, have largely been overcome. Moreover, new issues that emerged later, such as competition in local telephone service and multichannel video program distribution, have also largely been solved. More often than not, the solution has been the result of structural changes that enhanced facilities-based competition rather than agency-imposed behavioral requirements. Moreover, close inspection reveals that in most cases, prodding by the courts …

Classification Of Daily Activities For The Elderly Using Wearable Sensors, Jian Liu, Jeehoon Sohn, Sukwon Kim

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

Monitoring of activities of daily living (ADL) using wearable sensors can provide an objective indication of the activity levels or restrictions experienced by patients or elderly. The current study presented a two-sensor ADL classification method designed and tested specifically with elderly subjects. Ten healthy elderly were involved in a laboratory testing with 6 types of daily activities. Two inertial measurement units were attached to the thigh and the trunk of each subject. The results indicated an overall rate of misdetection being 2.8%. The findings of the current study can be used as the first step towards a more comprehensive activity …

Document Clustering, David Anastasiu, Andrea Tagarelli

Faculty Publications

In a world flooded with information, document clustering is an important tool that can help categorize and extract insight from text collections. It works by grouping similar documents, while simultaneously discriminating between groups. In this article, we provide a brief overview of the principal techniques used to cluster documents, and introduce a series of novel deep-learning based methods recently designed for the document clustering task. In our overview, we point the reader to salient works that can provide a deeper understanding of the topics discussed.

When Will Mems Switches Be Ready For Commercial Products?, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Bikemate: Bike Riding Behavior Monitoring With Smartphones, Weixi Gu, Zimu Zhou, Yuxun Zhou, Han Zou, Yunxin Liu, Costas J. Spanos, Lin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detecting dangerous riding behaviors is of great importance to improve bicycling safety. Existing bike safety precautionary measures rely on dedicated infrastructures that incur high installation costs. In this work, we propose BikeMate, a ubiquitous bicycling behavior monitoring system with smartphones. BikeMate invokes smartphone sensors to infer dangerous riding behaviors including lane weaving, standing pedalling and wrong-way riding. For easy adoption, BikeMate leverages transfer learning to reduce the overhead of training models for different users, and applies crowdsourcing to infer legal riding directions without prior knowledge. Experiments with 12 participants show that BikeMate achieves an overall accuracy of 86.8% for lane …

Reconstructing Yeasts Phylogenies And Ancestors From Whole Genome Data, Bing Feng, Yu Lin, Lingxi Zhou, Yan Guo, Robert Friedman, Roufan Xia, Chao Liu, Jijun Tang

Faculty Publications

Phylogenetic studies aim to discover evolutionary relationships and histories. These studies are based on similarities of morphological characters and molecular sequences. Currently, widely accepted phylogenetic approaches are based on multiple sequence alignments, which analyze shared gene datasets and concatenate/coalesce these results to a final phylogeny with maximum support. However, these approaches still have limitations, and often have conflicting results with each other. Reconstructing ancestral genomes helps us understand mechanisms and corresponding consequences of evolution. Most existing genome level phylogeny and ancestor reconstruction methods can only process simplified real genome datasets or simulated datasets with identical genome content, unique genome markers, …

Reconstructing Yeasts Phylogenies And Ancestors From Whole Genome Data, Bing Feng, Yu Ling, Lingxi Zhou, Roufan Xia, Fei Hu, Chao Liu

Faculty Publications

Phylogenetic studies aim to discover evolutionary relationships and histories. These studies are based on similarities of morphological characters and molecular sequences. Currently, widely accepted phylogenetic approaches are based on multiple sequence alignments, which analyze shared gene datasets and concatenate/coalesce these results to a final phylogeny with maximum support. However, these approaches still have limitations, and often have conflicting results with each other. Reconstructing ancestral genomes helps us understand mechanisms and corresponding consequences of evolution. Most existing genome level phylogeny and ancestor reconstruction methods can only process simplified real genome datasets or simulated datasets with identical genome content, unique genome markers, …

Transferable Multiparty Computation, Michael R. Clark, Kenneth M. Hopkinson

AFIT Patents

A method and apparatus are provided for secure multiparty computation. A set of first parties is selected from a plurality of first parties for computation. Inputs for computation associated with each party in the set of first parties are divided into shares to be sent to other parties in the set of first parties. The computation on the shares is performed by the set of first parties using multiparty computation functions. In response to a trigger event, shares of the set of first parties are transferred to a set of second parties selected from a plurality of second parties. The …

Cybersecurity Curriculum Development Initiatives, Seth Hamman, Kenneth M. Hopkinson

Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Presentations

No abstract provided.

Intent Detection Through Text Mining And Analysis, Samantha Akulick, El Sayed Mahmoud

Publications and Scholarship

The article is about the work investigated using n-grams, parts-Of-Speech and Support Vector machines for detecting the customer intents in the user generated contents. The work demonstrated a system of categorization of customer intents that is concise and useful for business purposes. We examined possible sources of text posts to be analyzed using three text mining algorithms. We presented the three algorithms and the results of testing them in detecting different six intents. This work established that intent detection can be performed on text posts with approximately 61% accuracy.

Efficient Identification Of Tanimoto Nearest Neighbors; All Pairs Similarity Search Using The Extended Jaccard Coefficient, David Anastasiu, George Karypis

Faculty Publications

Tanimoto, or extended Jaccard, is an important similarity measure which has seen prominent use in fields such as data mining and chemoinformatics. Many of the existing state-of-the-art methods for market basket analysis, plagiarism and anomaly detection, compound database search, and ligand-based virtual screening rely heavily on identifying Tanimoto nearest neighbors. Given the rapidly increasing size of data that must be analyzed, new algorithms are needed that can speed up nearest neighbor search, while at the same time providing reliable results. While many search algorithms address the complexity of the task by retrieving only some of the nearest neighbors, we propose …

Clutter Suppression Via Hankel Rank Reduction For Dfrft-Based Vibrometry Applied To Sar, Francisco Pérez, Balu Santhanam, Ranlf Dunkel, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Hankel rank reduction (HRR) is a method that, by prearranging the data in a Hankel matrix and performing rank reduction via singular value decomposition, suppresses the noise of a time-history vector comprised of the superposition of a finite number of sinusoids. In this letter, the HRR method is studied for performing clutter suppression in synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based vibrometry. Specifically, three different applications of the HRR method are presented. First, resembling the SAR slow-time signal model, the HRR method is utilized for separating a chirp signal immersed in a sinusoidal clutter. Second, using simulated airborne SAR data with 10 dB …

An Analysis Of Rumor And Counter-Rumor Messages In Social Media, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Alton Y. K. Chua, Hanyu Shi, Wenju Wei, Haiyan Wang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media platforms are one of the fastest ways to disseminate information but they have also been used as a means to spread rumors. If left unchecked, rumors have serious consequences. Counter-rumors, messages used to refute rumors, are an important means of rumor curtailment. The objective of this paper is to examine the types of rumor and counter-rumor messages generated in Twitter in response to the falsely reported death of a politician, Lee Kuan Yew, who was Singapore’s first Prime Minister. Our content analysis of 4321Twitter tweets about Lee’s death revealed six categories of rumor messages, four categories ofcounter-rumor messages …

Sourcevote: Fusing Multi-Valued Data Via Inter-Source Agreements, Xiu Susie Fang, Quan Z. Sheng, Xianzhi Wang, Mahmoud Barhamgi, Lina Yao, Anne H.H. Ngu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data fusion is a fundamental research problem of identifying true values of data items of interest from conflicting multi-sourced data. Although considerable research efforts have been conducted on this topic, existing approaches generally assume every data item has exactly one true value, which fails to reflect the real world where data items with multiple true values widely exist. In this paper, we propose a novel approach,SourceVote, to estimate value veracity for multi-valued data items. SourceVote models the endorsement relations among sources by quantifying their two-sided inter-source agreements. In particular, two graphs are constructed to model inter-source relations. Then two aspects …