Engineering Commons^™

Scheduling Based Optimization In Software Defined Radio And Wireless Networks, Nathan Daniel Price

Doctoral Dissertations

"The objective of this work is to enable dynamic sharing of software-defined radio (SDR) transceivers through the concepts of hardware virtualization and real-time resource management. SDR is a way to build a digital radio that consists of a software back-end for digital signal processing (DSP) and an analog front-end transceiver for waveform generation and reception. This work proposes the use of a virtualization layer to decouple back-end SDR software from front-end transceivers. With this arrangement, front-ends are said to be virtualized, and it becomes possible to share a limited number of front-ends among many SDR back-ends through different multiplexing techniques. …

Instrumentation, Modeling, And Sound Metamodeling Foundations For Complex Hybrid Systems, Natasha Amelia Jarus

Doctoral Dissertations

Many of our critical infrastructures, from power grids to water distribution networks, are complex hybrid systems that use software to control their non-trivial physical dynamics. These systems must be able to capably serve their purpose, while also being reliable, dependable, safe, secure, and efficient. Representation and analysis of these features requires the creation of several distinct models. These models may encode design goals or be derived from collected instrumentation data, reflecting both how a system ought to operate and how it does operate. It is essential to ensure that all of these models consistently and accurately describe the same system. …

Deep Learning For Digitized Histology Image Analysis, Sudhir Sornapudi

Doctoral Dissertations

“Cervical cancer is the fourth most frequent cancer that affects women worldwide. Assessment of cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN) through histopathology remains as the standard for absolute determination of cancer. The examination of tissue samples under a microscope requires considerable time and effort from expert pathologists. There is a need to design an automated tool to assist pathologists for digitized histology slide analysis. Pre-cervical cancer is generally determined by examining the CIN which is the growth of atypical cells from the basement membrane (bottom) to the top of the epithelium. It has four grades, including: Normal, CIN1, CIN2, and CIN3. In …

Novel Approaches For Reliable And Efficient Circuit Design, Prashanthi Metku

Doctoral Dissertations

"In this research work, a suite of approaches are presented to improve reliability of 3D heterogeneous processors (3DHP) and to reduce the area overhead of asynchronous designs. This work is primarily divided into two parts. In the first part, we present an approach for improving reliability in 3DHP. Typically, in 3DHP, thermal hotspots introduce spatial and temporal variability that results in wide bit error variation in DRAM dies. To address this issue multi- path BCH decoder is introduced. Based on the thermal gradient data generated by on-chip temperature sensors, the proposed methodology specializes in adaptively estimating the number of errors …

Trajectory Control Of A Wheeled Robot Using Interaction Forces For Intuitive Overground Human-Robot Interaction, George Leno Holmes Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

"Effective and intuitive physical human robot interaction (pHRI) requires an understanding of how humans communicate movement intentions with one another. It has been suggested that humans can guide another human by hand through complex tasks using force information only. However, no clear and applicable paradigm has been set forth to understand these relationships. While the human partner can readily understand and adhere to this expectation, it would be difficult for anyone to explain their intuitive motions with strict rules, algorithms, or steps. Uncovering such a procedural framework for the control of robotic systems to execute expected performance simply from force …

Volumetric Error Compensation For Industrial Robots And Machine Tools, Le Ma

Doctoral Dissertations

“A more efficient and increasingly popular volumetric error compensation method for machine tools is to compute compensation tables in axis space with tool tip volumetric measurements. However, machine tools have high-order geometric errors and some workspace is not reachable by measurement devices, the compensation method suffers a curve-fitting challenge, overfitting measurements in measured space and losing accuracy around and out of the measured space. Paper I presents a novel method that aims to uniformly interpolate and extrapolate the compensation tables throughout the entire workspace. By using a uniform constraint to bound the tool tip error slopes, an optimal model with …

Neuroengineering Of Clustering Algorithms, Leonardo Enzo Brito Da Silva

Doctoral Dissertations

"Cluster analysis can be broadly divided into multivariate data visualization, clustering algorithms, and cluster validation. This dissertation contributes neural network-based techniques to perform all three unsupervised learning tasks. Particularly, the first paper provides a comprehensive review on adaptive resonance theory (ART) models for engineering applications and provides context for the four subsequent papers. These papers are devoted to enhancements of ART-based clustering algorithms from (a) a practical perspective by exploiting the visual assessment of cluster tendency (VAT) sorting algorithm as a preprocessor for ART offline training, thus mitigating ordering effects; and (b) an engineering perspective by designing a family of …

Adaptive Dynamic Programming With Eligibility Traces And Complexity Reduction Of High-Dimensional Systems, Seaar Jawad Kadhim Al-Dabooni

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation investigates the application of a variety of computational intelligence techniques, particularly clustering and adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) designs especially heuristic dynamic programming (HDP) and dual heuristic programming (DHP). Moreover, a one-step temporal-difference (TD(0)) and n-step TD (TD(λ)) with their gradients are utilized as learning algorithms to train and online-adapt the families of ADP. The dissertation is organized into seven papers. The first paper demonstrates the robustness of model order reduction (MOR) for simulating complex dynamical systems. Agglomerative hierarchical clustering based on performance evaluation is introduced for MOR. This method computes the reduced order denominator of the transfer …

Deep Learning And Localized Features Fusion For Medical Image Classification, Haidar A. Almubarak

Doctoral Dissertations

"Local image features play an important role in many classification tasks as translation and rotation do not severely deteriorate the classification process. They have been commonly used for medical image analysis. In medical applications, it is important to get accurate diagnosis/aid results in the fastest time possible.

This dissertation tries to tackle these problems, first by developing a localized feature-based classification system for medical images and using these features and to give a classification for the entire image, and second, by improving the computational complexity of feature analysis to make it viable as a diagnostic aid system in practical clinical …

Machine Learning Techniques Implementation In Power Optimization, Data Processing, And Bio-Medical Applications, Khalid Khairullah Mezied Al-Jabery

Doctoral Dissertations

"The rapid progress and development in machine-learning algorithms becomes a key factor in determining the future of humanity. These algorithms and techniques were utilized to solve a wide spectrum of problems extended from data mining and knowledge discovery to unsupervised learning and optimization. This dissertation consists of two study areas. The first area investigates the use of reinforcement learning and adaptive critic design algorithms in the field of power grid control. The second area in this dissertation, consisting of three papers, focuses on developing and applying clustering algorithms on biomedical data. The first paper presents a novel modelling approach for …

Design And Theoretical Analysis Of Advanced Power Based Positioning In Rf System, Lei Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"Accurate locating and tracking of people and resources has become a fundamental requirement for many applications. The global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) is widely used. But its accuracy suffers from signal obstruction by buildings, multipath fading, and disruption due to jamming and spoof. Hence, it is required to supplement GPS with inertial sensors and indoor localization schemes that make use of WiFi APs or beacon nodes. In the GPS-challenging or fault scenario, radio-frequency (RF) infrastructure based localization schemes can be a fallback solution for robust navigation. For the indoor/outdoor transition scenario, we propose hypothesis test based fusion method to integrate …

Quantitative Dependability And Interdependency Models For Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems, Koosha Marashi

Doctoral Dissertations

"Cyber-physical systems link cyber infrastructure with physical processes through an integrated network of physical components, sensors, actuators, and computers that are interconnected by communication links. Modern critical infrastructures such as smart grids, intelligent water distribution networks, and intelligent transportation systems are prominent examples of cyber-physical systems. Developed countries are entirely reliant on these critical infrastructures, hence the need for rigorous assessment of the trustworthiness of these systems. The objective of this research is quantitative modeling of dependability attributes -- including reliability and survivability -- of cyber-physical systems, with domain-specific case studies on smart grids and intelligent water distribution networks. To …

Survivability Modeling For Cyber-Physical Systems Subject To Data Corruption, Mark James Woodard

Doctoral Dissertations

"Cyber-physical critical infrastructures are created when traditional physical infrastructure is supplemented with advanced monitoring, control, computing, and communication capability. More intelligent decision support and improved efficacy, dependability, and security are expected. Quantitative models and evaluation methods are required for determining the extent to which a cyber-physical infrastructure improves on its physical predecessors. It is essential that these models reflect both cyber and physical aspects of operation and failure. In this dissertation, we propose quantitative models for dependability attributes, in particular, survivability, of cyber-physical systems. Any malfunction or security breach, whether cyber or physical, that causes the system operation to depart …

Novel Approaches To Clustering, Biclustering Algorithms Based On Adaptive Resonance Theory And Intelligent Control, Sejun Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

"The problem of clustering is one of the most widely studied area in data mining and machine learning. Adaptive resonance theory (ART), an unsupervised learning clustering algorithm, is a clustering method that can learn arbitrary input patterns in a stable, fast and self-organizing way. This dissertation focuses on unsupervised learning methods, mostly based on variations of ART.

Hierarchical ART clustering is studied by generating a tree of ART units with GPU based parallelization to provide fast and finesse clustering. Experiment results show that the our method achieves significant training speed increase in generating deep ART trees compared with that from …

Clustering: Methodology, Hybrid Systems, Visualization, Validation And Implementation, Dao Minh Lam

Doctoral Dissertations

"Unsupervised learning is one of the most important steps of machine learning applications. Besides its ability to obtain the insight of the data distribution, unsupervised learning is used as a preprocessing step for other machine learning algorithm. This dissertation investigates the application of unsupervised learning into various types of data for many machine learning tasks such as clustering, regression and classification. The dissertation is organized into three papers. In the first paper, unsupervised learning is applied to mixed categorical and numerical feature data type to transform the data objects from the mixed type feature domain into a new sparser numerical …

On The Deployment Of On-Chip Noise Sensors, Tao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"The relentless technology scaling has led to significantly reduced noise margin and complicated functionalities. As such, design time techniques per se are less likely to ensure power integrity, resulting in runtime voltage emergencies. To alleviate the issue, recently several works have shed light on the possibilities of dynamic noise management systems. Most of these works rely on on-chip noise sensors to accurately capture voltage emergencies. However, they all assume that the placement of the sensors is given. It remains an open problem in the literature how to optimally place a given number of noise sensors for best voltage emergency detection. …

Cormem Digital Reasoning Architecture Using Cmos Technology, Indira Priyadarshini Dugganapally

Doctoral Dissertations

”This dissertation describes the application of a multi-level, memory-based approach for building digital circuits. To reflect the alternative approach, the basic science is termed digital reasoning and the specific CorMem technology is based on recent patents. CMOS transistors are used in a non-traditional way for multi-level operations and memory manipulation. The combination of multi-level architectures and matrix algebra principles can create flexible, modular systems using standard fabrication methods and can avoid many of the limitations of other multi-valued logic approaches.

Quaternary, memory-based systems are developed to implement logic-gate-type functions, digital adder circuits, a complete arithmetic and logic unit (ALU), quaternary-to-binary …

Computing And The Electrical Transport Properties Of Coupled Quantum Networks, Casey Andrew Cain

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation a number of investigations were conducted on ballistic quantum networks in the mesoscopic range. In this regime, the wave nature of electron transport under the influence of transverse magnetic fields leads to interesting applications for digital logic and computing circuits. The work specifically looks at characterizing a few main areas that would be of interest to experimentalists who are working in nanostructure devices, and is organized as a series of papers. The first paper analyzes scaling relations and normal mode charge distributions for such circuits in both isolated and open (terminals attached) form. The second paper compares …

Reliability And Security In Low Power Circuits And Systems, Hui Geng

Doctoral Dissertations

"With the massive deployment of mobile devices in sensitive areas such as healthcare and defense, hardware reliability and security have become hot research topics in recent years. These topics, although different in definition, are usually correlated. This dissertation offers an in-depth treatment on enhancing the reliability and security of low power circuits and systems. The first part of the dissertation deals with the reliability of sub-threshold designs, which use supply voltage lower than the threshold voltage (V_th) of transistors to reduce power. The exponential relationship between delay and V_th significantly jeopardizes their reliability due to process variation …

Advanced Neural Networks And Their Applications In Smart Grids, Bipul Luitel

Doctoral Dissertations

"Today, neural networks (NN) are used in several system identification and nonlinear control system applications. However, their implementation on large systems has been limited either because of their degraded performance or the amount of time and computation required for implementing them being impractical for real applications. The primary emphasis of this research is on the development of advanced NN - simultaneous recurrent neural networks (SRN) and cellular neural networks (CNN); and methods for learning the complexity of large systems.

US electricity infrastructure is one of the largest and the most critical infrastructure consisting of thousands of generators connected by transmission …

Real-Time Localization Using Received Signal Strength, Mohammed Rana Basheer

Doctoral Dissertations

"Locating and tracking assets in an indoor environment is a fundamental requirement for several applications which include for instance network enabled manufacturing. However, translating time of flight-based GPS technique for indoor solutions has proven very costly and inaccurate primarily due to the need for high resolution clocks and the non-availability of reliable line of sight condition between the transmitter and receiver. In this dissertation, localization and tracking of wireless devices using radio signal strength (RSS) measurements in an indoor environment is undertaken. This dissertation is presented in the form of five papers.

The first two papers deal with localization and …

Null Convention Logic Applications Of Asynchronous Design In Nanotechnology And Cryptographic Security, Jun Wu

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation presents two Null Convention Logic (NCL) applications of asynchronous logic circuit design in nanotechnology and cryptographic security. The first application is the Asynchronous Nanowire Reconfigurable Crossbar Architecture (ANRCA); the second one is an asynchronous S-Box design for cryptographic system against Side-Channel Attacks (SCA). The following are the contributions of the first application: 1) Proposed a diode- and resistor-based ANRCA (DR-ANRCA). Three configurable logic block (CLB) structures were designed to efficiently reconfigure a given DR-PGMB as one of the 27 arbitrary NCL threshold gates. A hierarchical architecture was also proposed to implement the higher level logic that requires a …

Agent-Based Analysis And Mitigation Of Failure For Cyber-Physical Systems, Jing Lin

Doctoral Dissertations

"Techniques exist for assessment, modeling, and simulation of physical and cyber infrastructures, respectively; but such isolated analysis is incapable of fully capturing the interdependencies that occur when they intertwine to create a cyber-physical system (CPS). The first contribution of this doctoral research includes qualitative representation of the operation of a CPS in a single multi-agent model. Dependable operation of a CPS is contingent upon correct interpretation of data describing the state of the system. To this end, we propose agent-based semantic interpretation services that extract useful information from raw sensor data. We utilize the summary schemas model to reconcile differences …

Spiking Neural Networks And Their Applications, Cameron Eric Johnson

Doctoral Dissertations

"Artificial neural networks (ANNs) have been developed as adaptable, robust function approximators for at least the last quarter-century. They have progressed through two generations, and the third is now under development. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) seek to improve on previous generations in two ways: by using a more biologically-inspired neuron, they are shown to be capable of more complex calculations; incorporating polychronous properties of highly-recurrent networks with delays of different lengths on each synapse to achieve large numbers of possible patterns with relatively few neurons and synapses.

Abstracted spiking neurons have been used as a third-generation activation function in a …

A Case Study In Quantitative Analysis Of Cyber-Physical Systems: Reliability Of The Smart Grid, Ayman Z. Faza

Doctoral Dissertations

"A cyber-physical system is the integration of a physical infrastructure with a cyber infrastructure, which provides control over its physical counterpart. The goal is to improve certain aspects of the physical infrastructure, such as its reliability. The Smart Grid, in which intelligent cyber control is added to improve the operation of the traditional power grid, is a prime example of a cyber-physical system. Quantitative models are needed in order to better understand the benefits and risks of adding intelligence to physical systems. To this end, we have developed an integrated cyber-physical reliability model, with a focus on the Smart Grid …

Adaptive Resource Allocation For Cognitive Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Behdis Eslamnour

Doctoral Dissertations

"Widespread use of resource constrained wireless ad hoc networks requires careful management of the network resources in order to maximize the utilization. In cognitive wireless networks, resources such as spectrum, energy, communication links/paths, time, space, modulation scheme, have to be managed to maintain quality of service (QoS). Therefore in the first paper, a distributed dynamic channel allocation scheme is proposed for multi-channel wireless ad hoc networks with single-radio nodes. The proposed learning scheme adapts the probabilities of selecting each channel as a function of the error in the performance index at each step.

Due to frequent changes in topology and …

Quality Of Service Provisioning Through Resource Allocation And Data Aggregation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Carl Larsen

Doctoral Dissertations

"In this dissertation, improvement of quality of service (QoS) provisioning in wireless sensor networks (WSN) is examined using four different methods. The first two focus on allocation of limited resources in the face of changing network and channel conditions, and thus improving performance in terms of throughput and delay. The second two methods focus on using data aggregation to minimize the size and number of packet transmissions reducing the energy consumption and improving network lifetime.

Therefore, in the first paper a novel adaptive and distributed fair scheduling (ADFS) protocol for WSN is presented that allocates the channel bandwidth in proportion …

Meta-Learning Computational Intelligence Architectures, Ryan J. Meuth

Doctoral Dissertations

"In computational intelligence, the term 'memetic algorithm' has come to be associated with the algorithmic pairing of a global search method with a local search method. In a sociological context, a 'meme' has been loosely defined as a unit of cultural information, the social analog of genes for individuals. Both of these definitions are inadequate, as 'memetic algorithm' is too specific, and ultimately a misnomer, as much as a 'meme' is defined too generally to be of scientific use. In this dissertation the notion of memes and meta-learning is extended from a computational viewpoint and the purpose, definitions, design guidelines …

Energy-Aware And Secure Routing With Trust Levels For Wireless Ad Hoc And Sensor Networks, Eyad Taqieddin

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation focuses on the development of routing algorithms for secure and trusted routing in wireless ad hoc and sensor network. The first paper presents the Trust Level Routing (TLR) protocol, an extension of the optimized energy-delay routing (OEDR) protocol, focusing on the integrity, reliability and survivability of the wireless network...The second paper analyzes both OLSR and TLR in terms of survivability and reliability to emphasize the improved performance of the network in terms of lifetime and proper delivery of data...The third paper proposes a statistical reputation model that uses the watchdog mechanism to observe the cooperation of the neighboring …