Engineering Commons^™

A Self-Configuring 3-D Body Scanner, David James Holtkamp

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A flexible, self-configuring body scanner is described that is capable of capturing and merging range data from multiple views into a single coordinate system without the use of registration. The scanner uses two disconnected frames with embedded lights to merge the coordinate systems of multiple cameras. The frame also serves in finding the laser plane as the lasers are swept over the surface from multiple locations. Both hardware and software details are presented as well as techniques for automating most aspects of the scanner. A new implicit surface implementation is also described for processing and triangulating the resulting point clouds …

Improving Remote Homology Detection Using A Sequence Property Approach, Gina Marie Cooper

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Understanding the structure and function of proteins is a key part of understanding biological systems. Although proteins are complex biological macromolecules, they are made up of only 20 basic building blocks known as amino acids. The makeup of a protein can be described as a sequence of amino acids. One of the most important tools in modern bioinformatics is the ability to search for biological sequences (such as protein sequences) that are similar to a given query sequence. There are many tools for doing this (Altschul et al., 1990, Hobohm and Sander, 1995, Thomson et al., 1994, Karplus and Barrett, …

Design And Performance Analysis Of A Secure Proces-Sor Scan-Sp With Crypto-Biometric Capabilities, Raghudeep Kannavara

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Secure computing is gaining importance in recent times as computing capability is increasingly becoming distributed and information is everywhere. Prevention of piracy and digital rights management has become very important. Information security is mandatory rather than an additional feature. Numerous software techniques have been proposed to provide certain level of copyright and intellectual property protection. Techniques like obfuscation attempt to transform the code into a form that is harder to reverse engineer. Tamper-proofing causes a program to malfunction when it detects that it has been modified. Software watermarking embeds copyright notice in the software code to allow the owners of …

A Study Of Hardware Efficient Recombination Variants In A Mini Population Genetic Algorithm, Shiva Satya Ramesh Varma Bhupathiraju Venkata

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Evolvable Hardware is an emerging sub-field of evolutionary computation in which evolutionary algorithms are employed to create designs for hardware devices. Recent work has combined continuous time recurrent neural networks with the Mini Population (Minipop) Evolutionary Algorithm to create self-configuring device controllers. Standard Minipop eschews recombination operators due to the belief that they increase the size of an algorithm's on chip implementation without adding significant search power for finding neural network controllers. The focus of this thesis is to challenge that thinking by testing a number of hardware efficient recombination operators against two benchmark problems. We consider variants that recombine …

Semantic And Role-Based Access Control For Data Grid Systems, Vineela Muppavarapu

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A Grid is an integration infrastructure for sharing and coordinated use of diverseresources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. Distributed data resources can be diverse in their formats, schema, quality, access mechanisms, ownership, access policies, and capabilities. In recent years, several organizations have started utilizing Grid technologies to deploy data-intensive and/or computation-intensive applications. As more and more organizations are sharing data resources and participating in Data Grids, the complexity and heterogeneity of the systems is increasing constantly, but their management techniques are …

A Cryptanalysis Methodology For The Reverse Engineering Of Encrypted Information In Images, Allan Anthony Rwabutaza

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Security is an important issue related to the storage and communication of data and information. In data and information security, cryptography and steganography are two of the most common security techniques. On one hand, there is cryptography, which is the secret communication between two parties by message scrambling on the sender's side and message unscrambling on the receiver's side so that only the intended receiver gets the secret message. On the other hand, there is steganography, which is the hiding of information in a medium in such a way that no one other than the sender or the intended receiver …

Extracting, Representing And Mining Semantic Metadata From Text: Facilitating Knowledge Discovery In Biomedicine, Cartic Ramakrishnan

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The information access paradigm offered by most contemporary text information systems is a search-and-sift paradigm where users have to manually glean and aggregate relevant information from the large number of documents that are typically returned in response to keyword queries. Expecting the users to glean and aggregate information has lead to several inadequacies in these information systems. Owing to the size of many text databases, search-and-sift is a very tedious often requiring repeated keyword searches refining or generalizing queries terms. A more serious limitation arises from the lack of automated mechanisms to aggregate content across different documents to discover new …

Two Dimensional Localization Of Passive Uhf Rfid Tags, Bhavik Contractor

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The advent of GPS has redefined the need of a positioning system in today*#8217;s ubiquitous computing world. While GPS works satisfactorily and is quite a norm in an outdoor environment, it fails to work indoors due to the inherent complexity of an indoor environment. There is an ever increasing need to develop an indoor positioning system and a lot of research has been done to solve the problem of indoor localization. These solutions differ on the basis of cost, dependency on environment, line of sight requirements and so on.

Passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags pose an interesting solution to …

Algorithmic Techniques Employed In The Isolation Of Codon Usage Biases In Prokaryotic Genomes, Douglas W. Raiford Iii

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While genomic sequencing projects are an abundant source of information for biological studies ranging from the molecular to the ecological in scale, much of the information present may yet be hidden from casual analysis. One such information domain, trends in codon usage, can provide a wealth of information about an organism's genes and their expression. Degeneracy in the genetic code allows more than one triplet codon to code for the same amino acid, and usage of these codons is often biased such that one or more of these synonymous codons is preferred. Isolation of translational efficiency bias can have important …

Energy Efficient Image Video Sensor Networks, Paul Anthony Bender

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Image Video Sensor Networks are emerging applications for sensor network technologies. The relatively large size of the data collected by image video sensors presents new challenges for the sensor network in terms of energy consumption and channel capacity. We address each of these issues through the use of a high density network deployment utilizing some nodes as dedicated relay nodes.

A high density network allows network nodes to reduce their transmission power. This reduction in transmission power allows each node to conserve power and simultaneously increases the potential for spatially concurrent transmissions within the network, resulting in improved network throughputs. …

Transformation Of Object-Oriented Associations And Embedded References To Them, Sneha Swamy

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AFIT Wide Spectrum Object Modeling Environment (AWSOME) automatically generates executable code by applying transforms to the formal specifications developed from the domain knowledge. AWSOME uses the specification language called as AFIT Wide Spectrum Language (AWL). All the transforms developed for AWSOME depend on and manipulate Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) created by parsing the formal specifications of a model. The main idea is to speed the process of creating error free code, to aid reusability of code and also to make the maintenance changes to be consistent and correct. The AWSOME metamodel contains the structural (object) model, the functional (operations) model …

Evolutionary Methodology For Optimization Of Image Transforms Subject To Quantization Noise, Michael Ray Peterson

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Lossy image compression algorithms sacrifice perfect imagereconstruction in favor of decreased storage requirements. Modelossy compression schemes, such as JPEG2000, rely upon the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to achieve high levels of compression while minimizing the loss of information for image reconstruction. Some compression applications require higher levels of compression than those achieved through application of the DWT and entropy coding. In such lossy systems, quantization provides high compression rates at the cost of increased distortion. Unfortunately, as the amount of quantization increases, the performance of the DWT for accurate image reconstruction deteriorates. Previous research demonstrates that a genetic algorithm can …

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Steven Perry

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Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. This dissertation proposes a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between named entities. …

Computational Methods For The Objective Review Of Forensic Dna Testing Results, Jason R. Gilder

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Since the advent of criminal investigations, investigators have sought a "gold standard" for the evaluation of forensic evidence. Currently, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) technology is the most reliable method of identification. Short Tandem Repeat (STR) DNA genotyping has the potential for impressive match statistics, but the methodology not infallible. The condition of an evidentiary sample and potential issues with the handling and testing of a sample can lead to significant issues with the interpretation of DNA testing results. Forensic DNA interpretation standards are determined by laboratory validation studies that often involve small sample sizes. This dissertation presents novel methodologies to address …

On Optimal Survivability Design In Wdm Optical Networks Under Scheduled Traffic Models, Tianjian Li

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Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are widely viewed as the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone with the potential to fulfill the ever-growing demands for bandwidth. WDM divides the enormous bandwidth of an optical fiber into many non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which may operate at the rate of 10 Gigabit per second or higher. A failure in a network such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous loss of data. Therefore, survivability is a very important issue in WDM optical networks. The objective of this dissertation is to address the survivability provisioning problem in WDM …

An Evolutionary Programming Algorithm For Automatic Chromatogram Alignment, Bonnie Jo Schwartz

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Scientists use liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) instruments to measure metabolic responses to external stimuli. The data from these instruments can be distorted due to changes in the testing environment. Automating the removal of distortions is crucial in processing the data. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an algorithm that will automate the process.

The data produced by the LC/MS instrument were treated as images and image registration techniques were applied. A polynomial transformation function was assumed. An evolutionary programming algorithm was used to determine the coefficients of the polynomial. The data was manipulated to determine the best registration …

Xml Integrated Environment For Service-Oriented Data Management, Marwan Younes Maarouf

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The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical …

Implementation For A Coherent Keyword-Based Xml Query Language, Venkatakalyan Potturi

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Due to the increasing pervasiveness of data sets using the XML data format, numerous query languages have been proposed that exploit the structure inherent in XML. Many such query languages, supported by specialized XML search engines, are complex and not suitable for naive users. A simple keyword based query language is described which not only exploits the structure of XML documents to extract relevant fragments, but can also fall back on retrieval through plain text search. This thesis focuses on developing a prototype implementation for a Coherent Keyword Based XML Query Language. It analyzes the typical challenges posed by the …

Role-Based Access Control For The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access And Integration (Ogsa-Dai), Anil L. Pereira

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Grid has emerged recently as an integration infrastructure for the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. In this dissertation, role-based access control (RBAC) systems for heterogeneous data resources in Data Grid systems are proposed. The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a widely used framework for the integration of heterogeneous data resources in Grid systems.

However, in the OGSA-DAI system, access control causes substantial administration overhead for resource providers in …

Data Mining And Analysis On Multiple Time Series Object Data, Chunyu Jiang

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Huge amount of data is available in our society and the need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge is urgent. Data mining is an important field addressing that need and significant progress has been achieved in the last decade. In several important application areas, data arises in the format of Multiple Time Series Object (MTSO) data, where each data object is an array of time series over a large set of features and each has an associated class or state. Very little research has been conducted towards this kind of data. Examples include computational toxicology, where each …

High Performance Text Document Clustering, Yanjun Li

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Data mining, also known as knowledge discovery in database (KDD), is the process to discover interesting unknown knowledge from a large amount of data. Text mining is to apply data mining techniques to extract interesting and nontrivial information and knowledge from unstructured text. Text clustering is one of important techniques of text mining, which is the unsupervised classification of similar documents into different groups.

This research focuses on improving the performance of text clustering. We investigated the text clustering algorithms in four aspects: document representation, documents closeness measurement, high dimension reduction and parallelization. We propose a group of high performance …

An Analysis Of Neutral Drift's Effect On The Evolution Of A Ctrnn Locomotion Controller With Noisy Fitness Evaluation, Gregory Robert Kramer

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This dissertation focuses on the evolution of Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as controllers for control systems. Existing research suggests that the process of neutral drift can greatly benefit evolution for problems whose fitness landscapes contain large-scale neutral networks. CTRNNs are known to be highly degenerate, providing a possible source of large-scale landscape neutrality, and existing research suggests that neutral drift benefits the evolution of simple CTRNNs. However, there has been no in-depth examination of the effects of neutral drift on complex CTRNN controllers, especially in the presence of noisy fitness evaluation. To address this problem, this dissertation presents …

Summaritive Digest For Large Document Repositories With Application To E-Rulemaking, Lijun Chen

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Large document repositories need to be organized and summarized to make them more accessible and understandable. Such needs exist in many applications, including web search, e-rulemaking (electronic rulemaking) and document archiving. Even though much has been done in the areas of document clustering and summarization, there are still many new challenges and issues that need to be addressed as the repositories become larger, more prevalent and dynamic. In this dissertation, we investigate more informative ways to organize and summarize large document repositories, especially e-rulemaking feedback repositories (ERFRs), so that the large repositories can be managed and digested more efficiently and …

Comparative Microarray Data Mining, Shihong Mao

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As a revolutionary technology, microarrays have great potential to provide genome-wide patterns of gene expression, to make accurate medical diagnosis, and to explore genetic causes underlying diseases. It is commonly believed that suitable analysis of microarray datasets can lead to achieve the above goals. While much has been done in microarray data mining, few previous studies, if any, focused on multiple datasets at the comparative level. This dissertation aims to fill this gap by developing tools and methods for set-based comparative microarray data mining. Specifically, we mine highly differentiative gene groups (HDGGs) from given datasets/classes, evaluate the concordance of datasets …

A Hybrid Approach To Retrieving Web Documents And Semantic Web Data, Trivikram Immaneni

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The Semantic Web has been evolving into a property-linked web of RDF data, conceptually divorced from (but physically housed in) the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents. Data Retrieval techniques are typically used to retrieve data from the Semantic Web while Information Retrieval techniques are used to retrieve documents from the Hypertext Web. Conceptually unifying the two webs enables the exploitation of their interconnections resulting in benefits to both data and document retrieval. Towards this end, we present the Unified Web model that integrates the two webs and formalizes the structure and the semantics of their interconnections. We present a …

Bibliography Tools In The Context Of Www And Latex, Munushree Thummala

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Preparation of academic papers involves not only the creative processes but also the more mechanical tasks such as adjusting the form and style to suit the demands of the publishing journal or conference. Among several packages that help in these rather tedious mechanical tasks, the TEX + LATEX + BibTEX combination is extremely popular. This thesis is about tools that help in the necessary task of citing related work accurately. It focuses on three aspects of this larger bibliography frame work: (i) a survey of existing bibliography formats and tools, (ii) a database view of BibTEX files and functionality that …

An Analog Evolvable Hardware Device For Active Control, Saranyan A. Vigraham

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The field of Evolvable Hardware (EH) has recently gained a lot of interest due to the novel methodology it offers for designing electrical circuits and machines. EH techniques involve configuring a reconfigurable hardware platform with the aid of learning engines such as evolutionary algorithms. The EH devices normally act as closed loop controllers with the capability of learning necessary control laws adaptively. Current EH practices have several shortcomings, which have restricted their use as reliable controllers. This dissertation will present an improved EH device based on behavioral reconfigurability that addresses the current open challenges in the field of analog Evolvable …

A Formal Language Approach For Detecting Texture Paths And Patterns In Images, Prithviraj S. Patil

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This Master thesis considers the use of formal languages representation for image processing, especially texture patterns and determining texture paths in them. The texture paths are detected and extracted by using image processing techniques, such as image segmentation to isolate regions of interest, and then the extraction of repeating textures. The detection of the texture blocks is obtained by recursively using 27 X 27, 9 X 9, and 3 X 3 windows. Predefined repeating texture patterns are also searched for in each of the sets. For each set of texture blocks with similar or same characteristics, curve fitting techniques are …

A Field Programmable Gate Array Architecture For Two-Dimensional Partial Reconfiguration, Fei Wang

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Reconfigurable machines can accelerate many applications by adapting to their needs through hardware reconfiguration. Partial reconfiguration allows the reconfiguration of a portion of a chip while the rest of the chip is busy working on tasks. Operating system models have been proposed for partially reconfigurable machines to handle the scheduling and placement of tasks. They are called OS4RC in this dissertation. The main goal of this research is to address some problems that come from the gap between OS4RC and existing chip architectures and the gap between OS4RC models and practical applications. Some existing OS4RC models are based on an …

Simulation And Analysis Of Rfid Localization Algorithms, Zubin Shah

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Radio frequency identification (RFID) based localization systems provide a unique approach to localize mobile entities equipped with RFID readers or tagged with RFID tags. UHF RFID systems using passive tags are a good choice considering their cost, reading range, and reliability. With global acceptance and deployment of UHF RFID systems using passive tags for tracking and identification, virtually everything around us can be tagged with small and low-cost passive RFID tags. This thesis describes a Monte Carlo Localization based algorithm to localize a mobile RFID reader within a tagged environment. A software tool is developed to validate this localization process, …