Engineering Commons^™

Improved Signal Integrity In Ieee 1149.1 Boundary Scan Designs, Efren De Jesus Rangel Taboada

Theses and Dissertations

This work is an analysis of solutions to problems derived from inherent timing and signal integrity issues in the use and application of the IEEE 1149.1 Standard at the board level in conjunction with its test system. Setup or hold times violations may occur in a boundary scan chain using IEEE 1149.1 compliant devices. A practical study of the TDI-TDO scan data path has been conducted to show where problems may arise in relationship to a particular board topology and test system. This work points to differences between passing and failing scan path tests for problem characterization. Serial data flow …

Computational Approaches To The Design And Analysis Of Stability Of Polypeptide Multilayer Thin Films, Bin Zheng

Doctoral Dissertations

The focus of this research is the development of computational approaches to understanding the physical basis of layer-by-layer assembly (LBL), a key methodology of nanomanufacturing. The results provided detailed information on structure which cannot be obtained directly by experiments.

The model systems chosen for study are polypeptide chains. Reasons for this are that polypeptides are no less polyelectrolytes than the more usual polyions, and one can control the primary structure of a polypeptide on a residue-by-residue basis using modern synthetic methods. Moreover, as peptides constitute one of the four major classes of biological macromolecules, research in this direction is expected …

Teabag: A Debugger For Curry, Stephen Lee Johnson

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis describes TeaBag, which is a debugger for functional logic computations. TeaBag is an accessory of a virtual machine currently under development. A distinctive feature of this machine is its operational completeness of computations, which places novel demands on a debugger. This thesis describes the features of TeaBag, in particular the handling of non-determinism, the ability to control nondeterministic steps, to remove context information, to toggle eager evaluation, and to set breakpoints on both functions and terms. This thesis also describes TeaBag's architecture and its interaction with the associated virtual machine. Finally, some debugging sessions of defective programs are …

Qos Provisioning For Multi-Class Traffic In Wireless Networks, Mona El-Kadi Rizvi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Physical constraints, bandwidth constraints and host mobility all contribute to the difficulty of providing Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in wireless networks. There is a growing demand for wireless networks to support all the services that are available on wired networks. These diverse services, such as email, instant messaging, web browsing, video conferencing, telephony and paging all place different demands on the network, making QoS provisioning for wireless networks that carry multiple classes of traffic a complex problem. We have developed a set of admission control and resource reservation schemes for QoS provisioning in multi-class wireless networks.

We present three …

Variations On Particle Swarm Optimization And Their Experimental Evaluation On Maximum Satisfiability, Susan A Abdelshahid

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Models, Composability, And Validity, Eric Werner Weisel

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Composability is the capability to select and assemble simulation components in various combinations into simulation systems to satisfy specific user requirements. The defining characteristic of composability is the ability to combine and recombine components into different simulation systems for different purposes. The ability to compose simulation systems from repositories of reusable components has been a highly sought after goal among modeling and simulation developers. The expected benefits of robust, general composability include reduced simulation development cost and time, increased validity and reliability of simulation results, and increased involvement of simulation users in the process. Consequently, composability is an active research …

Parallel Decomposition Procedures For Large-Scale Linear Programming Problems, Yusong Hu

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In practice, many large-scale linear programming problems are too large to be solved effectively due to the computer's speed and/or memory limitation, even though today's computers have many more capabilities than before. Algorithms are exploited to solve such large linear programming problems, either in the sequential or parallel computation environment. This study focuses on two parallel algorithms for solving large-scale linear programming problems efficiently.

The first parallel decomposition algorithm discussed in this study is from the theory problems in a special block-angular structure. The theory or the decomposition principle is first examined. Since the subproblems of a linear programming problem …

Agent Based Simulation Seas Evaluation Of Dodaf Architecture, Gregory V. Destefano

Theses and Dissertations

With Department of Defense (DoD) weapon systems being deeply rooted in the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) structure, it is necessary for combat models to capture C4ISR effects in order to properly assess military worth. Unlike many DoD legacy combat models, the agent based model System Effectiveness and Analysis Simulation (SEAS) is identified as having C4ISR analysis capabilities. In lieu of requirements for all new DoD C4ISR weapon systems to be placed within a DoD Architectural Framework (DoDAF), investigation of means to export data from the Framework to the combat model SEAS began. Through operational, system, …

Swarm Based Implementation Of A Virtual Distributed Database System In A Sensor Network, Wen C. Lee

Theses and Dissertations

The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in recent military operations has had success in carrying out surveillance and combat missions in sensitive areas. An area of intense research on UAVs has been on controlling a group of small-sized UAVs to carry out reconnaissance missions normally undertaken by large UAVs such as Predator or Global Hawk. A control strategy for coordinating the UAV movements of such a group of UAVs adopts the bio-inspired swarm model to produce autonomous group behavior. This research proposes establishing a distributed database system on a group of swarming UAVs, providing for data storage during a …

Partitioning A Graph In Alliances And Its Application To Data Clustering, Khurram Hassan-Shafique

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Any reasonably large group of individuals, families, states, and parties exhibits the phenomenon of subgroup formations within the group such that the members of each group have a strong connection or bonding between each other. The reasons of the formation of these subgroups that we call alliances differ in different situations, such as, kinship and friendship (in the case of individuals), common economic interests (for both individuals and states), common political interests, and geographical proximity. This structure of alliances is not only prevalent in social networks, but it is also an important characteristic of similarity networks of natural and unnatural …

Bidirectional Lao* Algorithm (A Faster Approach To Solve Goal-Directed Mdps), Venkata Deepti Kiran Bhuma

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Uncertainty is a feature of many AI applications. While there are polynomial-time algorithms for planning in stochastic systems, planning is still slow, in part because most algorithms plan for all eventualities. Algorithms such as LAO* are able to find good or optimal policies more quickly when the starting state of the system is known.

In this thesis we present an extension to LAO*, called BLAO*. BLAO* is an extension of the LAO* algorithm to a bidirectional search. We show that BLAO* finds optimal or ^_E-optimal solutions for goal-directed MDPs without necessarily evaluating the entire state space. BLAO* …

Creating A Video Device Application, Kevin Septor

Honors Theses

A video device, such as a webcam, has the capability to be used in many ways, including recording video and behaving like a security camera. A TV tuner card can also record video, and in addition be used for watching television. However, the video hardware and device driver the operating system uses to access it are only capable of delivering raw frames of video. A user space application is necessary for exploiting the capabilities of such a device beyond reading sequential frames of video. This research explores the desiderata in a powerful video device application, and introduces a program that …

Toward Building A Social Robot With An Emotion-Based Internal Control, Andreas Marpaung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we aim at modeling some aspects of the functional role of emotions on an autonomous embodied agent. We begin by describing our robotic prototype, Cherry--a robot with the task of being a tour guide and an office assistant for the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Cherry did not have a formal emotion representation of internal states, but did have the ability to express emotions through her multimodal interface. The thesis presents the results of a survey we performed via our social informatics approach where we found that: (1) the idea of having emotions …

A Book Management System Elibrary, Shanpeng Song

Theses Digitization Project

"eLibrary" is a book management software application that runs on Microsoft Windows platforms. The software incorporates a Windows Explorer like interface and XML/XSL to display book details. The purpose of this project is to build a full-featured, commerical-quality software package to help people manage their books (either printed or electronic). The goal is for eLibrary to be a complete solution for people who wish to build their own personal electronic library catalog.

Depth From Defocused Motion, Zarina Myles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Motion in depth and/or zooming causes defocus blur. This work presents a solution to the problem of using defocus blur and optical flow information to compute depth at points that defocus when they move. We first formulate a novel algorithm which recovers defocus blur and affine parameters simultaneously. Next we formulate a novel relationship (the blur-depth relationship) between defocus blur, relative object depth and three parameters based on camera motion and intrinsic camera parameters. We can handle the situation where a single image has points which have defocused, got sharper or are focally unperturbed. Moreover, our formulation is valid regardless …

Automatic Annotation Of Database Images For Query-By-Concept, Nualsawat Hiransakolwong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As digital images become ubiquitous in many applications, the need for efficient and effective retrieval techniques is more demanding than ever. Query by Example (QBE) and Query by Concept (QBC) are among the most popular query models. The former model accepts example images as queries and searches for similar ones based on low-level features such as colors and textures. The latter model allows queries to be expressed in the form of high-level semantics or concept words, such as "boat" or "car," and finds images that match the specified concepts. Recent research has focused on the connections between these two models …

Infrastructure For Performance Tuning Mpi Applications, Kathryn Marie Mohror

Dissertations and Theses

Clusters of workstations are becoming increasingly popular as a low-budget alternative for supercomputing power. In these systems,message-passing is often used to allow the separate nodes to act as a single computing machine. Programmers of such systems face a daunting challenge in understanding the performance bottlenecks of their applications. This is largely due to the vast amount of performance data that is collected, and the time and expertise necessary to use traditional parallel performance tools to analyze that data.

The goal of this project is to increase the level of performance tool support for message-passing application programmers on clusters of workstations. …

Optimizing Combat Capabilities By Modeling Combat As A Complex Adaptive System, Steven Mains

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Procuring combat systems in the Department of Defense is a balancing act where many variables, only some under control of the department, shift simultaneously. Technology changes non-linearly, providing new opportunities and new challenges to the existing and potential force. Money available changes year over year to fit into the overall US Government budget. Numbers of employees change through political demands rather than by cost-effectiveness considerations. The intent is to provide the best mix of equipment to field the best force against an expected enemy while maintaining adequate capability against the unexpected. Confounding this desire is the inability of current simulations …

Sinbad Automation Of Scientific Process: From Hidden Factor Analysis To Theory Synthesis, Olcay Kursun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modern science is turning to progressively more complex and data-rich subjects, which challenges the existing methods of data analysis and interpretation. Consequently, there is a pressing need for development of ever more powerful methods of extracting order from complex data and for automation of all steps of the scientific process. Virtual Scientist is a set of computational procedures that automate the method of inductive inference to derive a theory from observational data dominated by nonlinear regularities. The procedures utilize SINBAD – a novel computational method of nonlinear factor analysis that is based on the principle of maximization of mutual information …

Object Tracking And Activity Recognition In Video Acquired Using Mobile Cameras, Alper Yilmaz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to increasing demand on deployable surveillance systems in recent years, object tracking and activity recognition are receiving considerable attention in the research community. This thesis contributes to both the tracking and the activity recognition components of a surveillance system. In particular, for the tracking component, we propose two different approaches for tracking objects in video acquired by mobile cameras, each of which uses a different object shape representation. The first approach tracks the centroids of the objects in Forward Looking Infrared Imagery (FLIR) and is suitable for tracking objects that appear small in airborne video. The second approach tracks …

Fast Algorithms For Fragment Based Completion In Images Of Natural Scenes, Siddharth Rajkumar Borikar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Textures are used widely in computer graphics to represent fine visual details and produce realistic looking images. Often it is necessary to remove some foreground object from the scene. Removal of the portion creates one or more holes in the texture image. These holes need to be filled to complete the image. Various methods like clone brush strokes and compositing processes are used to carry out this completion. User skill is required in such methods. Texture synthesis can also be used to complete regions where the texture is stationary or structured. Reconstructing methods can be used to fill in large-scale …

High Performance Data Mining Techniques For Intrusion Detection, Muazzam Ahmed Siddiqui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of computers transformed the way in which information and data was stored. With this new paradigm of data access, comes the threat of this information being exposed to unauthorized and unintended users. Many systems have been developed which scrutinize the data for a deviation from the normal behavior of a user or system, or search for a known signature within the data. These systems are termed as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). These systems employ different techniques varying from statistical methods to machine learning algorithms. Intrusion detection systems use audit data generated by operating systems, application softwares or …

Interactivity And User-Heterogeneity In On Demand Broadcast Video, Mounir Tantaoui El Araki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video-On-Demand (VOD) has appeared as an important technology for many multimedia applications such as news on demand, digital libraries, home entertainment, and distance learning. In its simplest form, delivery of a video stream requires a dedicated channel for each video session. This scheme is very expensive and non-scalable. To preserve server bandwidth, many users can share a channel using multicast. Two types of multicast have been considered. In a non-periodic multicast setting, users make video requests to the server; and it serves them according to some scheduling policy. In a periodic broadcast environment, the server does not wait for service …

Dynamic Shared State Maintenance In Distributed Virtual Environments, Felix George Hamza-Lup

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in computer networks and rendering systems facilitate the creation of distributed collaborative environments in which the distribution of information at remote locations allows efficient communication. Particularly challenging are distributed interactive Virtual Environments (VE) that allow knowledge sharing through 3D information. In a distributed interactive VE the dynamic shared state represents the changing information that multiple machines must maintain about the shared virtual components. One of the challenges in such environments is maintaining a consistent view of the dynamic shared state in the presence of inevitable network latency and jitter. A consistent view of the shared scene will significantly increase …

Adaptive Intelligent User Interfaces With Emotion Recognition, Fatma Nasoz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is on creating Adaptive Intelligent User Interfaces to facilitate enhanced natural communication during the Human-Computer Interaction by recognizing users' affective states (i.e., emotions experienced by the users) and responding to those emotions by adapting to the current situation via an affective user model created for each user. Controlled experiments were designed and conducted in a laboratory environment and in a Virtual Reality environment to collect physiological data signals from participants experiencing specific emotions. Algorithms (k-Nearest Neighbor [KNN], Discriminant Function Analysis [DFA], Marquardt-Backpropagation [MBP], and Resilient Backpropagation [RBP]) were implemented to analyze the collected data signals …

The Proteomics Approach To Evolutionary Computation: An Analysis Of Pr, Ivan Garibay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the complexity of our society and computational resources increases, so does the complexity of the problems that we approach using evolutionary search techniques. There are recent approaches to deal with the problem of scaling evolutionary methods to cope with highly complex difficult problems. Many of these approaches are biologically inspired and share an underlying principle: a problem representation based on basic representational building blocks that interact and self-organize into complex functions or designs. The observation from the central dogma of molecular biology that proteins are the basic building blocks of life and the recent advances in proteomics on analysis …

Image Based View Synthesis, Jiangjian Xiao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation deals with the image-based approach to synthesize a virtual scene using sparse images or a video sequence without the use of 3D models. In our scenario, a real dynamic or static scene is captured by a set of un-calibrated images from different viewpoints. After automatically recovering the geometric transformations between these images, a series of photo-realistic virtual views can be rendered and a virtual environment covered by these several static cameras can be synthesized. This image-based approach has applications in object recognition, object transfer, video synthesis and video compression. In this dissertation, I have contributed to several sub-problems …

Developing Software For Wound Measurement, Savo Kordic

Theses : Honours

Chronic wounds such as leg ulcers, pressure ulcers and diabetic ulcers affect many thousands of people in Australia. In addition to the costs of these wounds in terms of human suffering, loss of income and resources, there are costs related to the treatment of ulcers. Thus, there is a genuine need to develop an accurate and a fully objective application for wound measurement. The aim of this project was to create software for the measurement of wounds. In achieving this goal, several issues were addressed: an accurate measurement method capable of detecting small changes in an open wound surface area, …

Lookahead Scheduling In A Real-Time Context: Models, Algorithms, And Analysis, Benjamin J. Coleman

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Our research considers job scheduling, a special type of resource assignment problem. For example, at a cross-docking facility trucks must be assigned to doors where they will be unloaded. The cargo on each truck has various destinations within the facility, and the unloading time for a truck is dependent on the distance from the assigned door to these destinations. The goal is to assign the trucks to doors while minimizing the amount of time to unload all trucks.;We study scheduling algorithms for problems like the cross-docking example that are different from traditional algorithms in two ways. First, we utilize real-time, …

Pperfgrid: A Grid Services-Based Tool For The Exchange Of Heterogeneous Parallel Performance Data, John Jared Hoffman

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis details the approach taken in developing PPerfGrid. Section 2 discusses other research related to this project. Section 3 provides general background on the technologies utilized in PPerfGrid, focusing on the components that make up the Grid services architecture. Section 4 provides a description of the architecture of PPerfGrid. Section 5 details the implementation of PPerfGrid. Section 6 presents tests designed to measure the overhead and scalability of the PPerfGrid application. Section 7 suggests future work, and Section 8 concludes the thesis.