Engineering Commons^™

Procure-To-Pay Software In The Digital Age: An Exploration And Analysis Of Efficiency Gains And Cybersecurity Risks In Modern Procurement Systems, Drew Lane

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

Procure-to-Pay (P2P) softwares are an integral part of the payment and procurement processing functions at large-scale governmental institutions. These softwares house all of the financial functions related to procurement, accounts payable, and often human resources, helping to facilitate and automate the process from initiation of a payment or purchase, to the actual disbursal of funds. Often, these softwares contain budgeting and financial reporting tools as part of the offering. As such an integral part of the financial process, these softwares obviously come at an immense cost from a set of reputable vendors. In the case of government, these vendors mainly …

T-Count Optimization Of Quantum Carry Look-Ahead Adder, Vladislav Ivanovich Khalus

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

With the emergence of quantum physics and computer science in the 20^th century, a new era was born which can solve very difficult problems in a much faster rate or problems that classical computing just can't solve. In the 21^st century, quantum computing needs to be used to solve tough problems in engineering, business, medical, and other fields that required results not today but yesterday. To make this dream come true, engineers in the semiconductor industry need to make the quantum circuits a reality.

To realize quantum circuits and make them scalable, they need to be fault tolerant, …

A Compiler Target Model For Line Associative Registers, Paul S. Eberhart

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

LARs (Line Associative Registers) are very wide tagged registers, used for both register-wide SWAR (SIMD Within a Register )operations and scalar operations on arbitrary fields. LARs include a large data field, type tags, source addresses, and a dirty bit, which allow them to not only replace both caches and registers in the conventional memory hierarchy, but improve on both their functions. This thesis details a LAR-based architecture, and describes the design of a compiler which can generate code for a LAR-based design. In particular, type conversion, alignment, and register allocation are discussed in detail.

A Diverse Band-Aware Dynamic Spectrum Access Architecture For Connectivity In Rural Communities, Vijay K. Shah

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ubiquitous connectivity plays an important role in improving the quality of life in terms of economic development, health and well being, social justice and equity, as well as in providing new educational opportunities. However, rural communities which account for 46% of the world's population lacks access to proper connectivity to avail such societal benefits, creating a huge "digital divide" between the urban and rural areas. A primary reason is that the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) providers have less incentives to invest in rural areas due to lack of promising revenue returns. Existing research and industrial attempts in providing connectivity …

Novel Applications Of Machine Learning In Bioinformatics, Yi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Technological advances in next-generation sequencing and biomedical imaging have led to a rapid increase in biomedical data dimension and acquisition rate, which is challenging the conventional data analysis strategies. Modern machine learning techniques promise to leverage large data sets for finding hidden patterns within them, and for making accurate predictions. This dissertation aims to design novel machine learning-based models to transform biomedical big data into valuable biological insights. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on three bioinformatics domains: splice junction classification, gene regulatory network reconstruction, and lesion detection in mammograms.

A critical step in defining gene structures and mRNA …

Metadata-Based Image Collecting And Databasing For Sharing And Analysis, Xi Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Data collecting and preparing is generally considered a crucial process in data science projects. Especially for image data, adding semantic attributes when preparing image data provides much more insights for data scientists. In this project, we aim to implement a general-purpose central image data repository that allows image researchers to collect data with semantic properties as well as data query. One of our researchers has come up with the specific challenge of collecting images with weight data of infants in least developed countries with limited internet access. The rationale is to predict infant weights based on image data by applying …

Automated Network Security With Exceptions Using Sdn, Sergio A. Rivera Polanco

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Campus networks have recently experienced a proliferation of devices ranging from personal use devices (e.g. smartphones, laptops, tablets), to special-purpose network equipment (e.g. firewalls, network address translation boxes, network caches, load balancers, virtual private network servers, and authentication servers), as well as special-purpose systems (badge readers, IP phones, cameras, location trackers, etc.). To establish directives and regulations regarding the ways in which these heterogeneous systems are allowed to interact with each other and the network infrastructure, organizations typically appoint policy writing committees (PWCs) to create acceptable use policy (AUP) documents describing the rules and behavioral guidelines that all campus network …

Depth Enhancement And Surface Reconstruction With Rgb/D Sequence, Xinxin Zuo

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Surface reconstruction and 3D modeling is a challenging task, which has been explored for decades by the computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning communities. It is fundamental to many applications such as robot navigation, animation and scene understanding, industrial control and medical diagnosis. In this dissertation, I take advantage of the consumer depth sensors for surface reconstruction. Considering its limited performance on capturing detailed surface geometry, a depth enhancement approach is proposed in the first place to recovery small and rich geometric details with captured depth and color sequence. In addition to enhancing its spatial resolution, I present a …

Curricular Optimization: Solving For The Optimal Student Success Pathway, William G. Thompson-Arjona

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Considering the significant investment of higher education made by students and their families, graduating in a timely manner is of the utmost importance. Delay attributed to drop out or the retaking of a course adds cost and negatively affects a student’s academic progression. Considering this, it becomes paramount for institutions to focus on student success in relation to term scheduling.

Often overlooked, complexity of a course schedule may be one of the most important factors in whether or not a student successfully completes his or her degree. More often than not students entering an institution as a first time full …

Retail Data Analytics Using Graph Database, Rashmi Priya

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Big data is an area focused on storing, processing and visualizing huge amount of data. Today data is growing faster than ever before. We need to find the right tools and applications and build an environment that can help us to obtain valuable insights from the data. Retail is one of the domains that collects huge amount of transaction data everyday. Retailers need to understand their customer’s purchasing pattern and behavior in order to take better business decisions.

Market basket analysis is a field in data mining, that is focused on discovering patterns in retail’s transaction data. Our goal is …

Interactive Clinical Event Pattern Mining And Visualization Using Insurance Claims Data, Zhenhui Piao

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

With exponential growth on a daily basis, there is potentially valuable information hidden in complex electronic medical records (EMR) systems. In this thesis, several efficient data mining algorithms were explored to discover hidden knowledge in insurance claims data. The first aim was to cluster three levels of information overload(IO) groups among chronic rheumatic disease (CRD) patient groups based on their clinical events extracted from insurance claims data. The second aim was to discover hidden patterns using three renowned pattern mining algorithms: Apriori, frequent pattern growth(FP-Growth), and sequential pattern discovery using equivalence classes(SPADE). The SPADE algorithm was found to be the …

Intelligent Uav Scouting For Field Condition Monitoring, Hasan Seyyedhasani

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Precision agriculture requires detailed and timely information about field condition. In less than the short flight time a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) can provide, an entire field can be scanned at the highest allowed altitude. The resulting NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) imagery can then be used to classify each point in the field using a FIS (Fuzzy Inference System). This identifies areas that are expected to be similar, but only closer inspection can quantify and diagnose crop properties. In the remaining flight time, the goal is to scout a set of representative points maximizing the quality of actionable information …

3d Human Face Reconstruction And 2d Appearance Synthesis, Yajie Zhao

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

3D human face reconstruction has been an extensive research for decades due to its wide applications, such as animation, recognition and 3D-driven appearance synthesis. Although commodity depth sensors are widely available in recent years, image based face reconstruction are significantly valuable as images are much easier to access and store.

In this dissertation, we first propose three image-based face reconstruction approaches according to different assumption of inputs.

In the first approach, face geometry is extracted from multiple key frames of a video sequence with different head poses. The camera should be calibrated under this assumption.

As the first approach is …

Design Of A Machine Vision Camera For Spatial Augmented Reality, Matt Phillip Ruffner

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Structured Light Imaging (SLI) is a means of digital reconstruction, or Three-Dimensional (3D) scanning, and has uses that span many disciplines. A projector, camera and Personal Computer (PC) are required to perform such 3D scans. Slight variances in synchronization between these three devices can cause malfunctions in the process due to the limitations of PC graphics processors as real-time systems. Previous work used a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to both drive the projector and trigger the camera, eliminating these timing issues, but still needing an external camera. This thesis proposes the incorporation of the camera with the FPGA SLI …

Modeling Faceted Browsing With Category Theory For Reuse And Interoperability, Daniel R. Harris

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Faceted browsing (also called faceted search or faceted navigation) is an exploratory search model where facets assist in the interactive navigation of search results. Facets are attributes that have been assigned to describe resources being explored; a faceted taxonomy is a collection of facets provided by the interface and is often organized as sets, hierarchies, or graphs. Faceted browsing has become ubiquitous with modern digital libraries and online search engines, yet the process is still difficult to abstractly model in a manner that supports the development of interoperable and reusable interfaces. We propose category theory as a theoretical foundation for …

Iot Development For Healthy Independent Living, Shalom Greene

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The rise of internet connected devices has enabled the home with a vast amount of enhancements to make life more convenient. These internet connected devices can be used to form a community of devices known as the internet of things (IoT). There is great value in IoT devices to promote healthy independent living for older adults.

Fall-related injuries has been one of the leading causes of death in older adults. For example, every year more than a third of people over 65 in the U.S. experience a fall, of which up to 30 percent result in moderate to severe injury. …

Contributions To Edge Computing, Vernon K. Bumgardner

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Efforts related to Internet of Things (IoT), Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Machine to Machine (M2M) technologies, Industrial Internet, and Smart Cities aim to improve society through the coordination of distributed devices and analysis of resulting data. By the year 2020 there will be an estimated 50 billion network connected devices globally and 43 trillion gigabytes of electronic data. Current practices of moving data directly from end-devices to remote and potentially distant cloud computing services will not be sufficient to manage future device and data growth.

Edge Computing is the migration of computational functionality to sources of data generation. The importance of …

Novel Resource Efficient Circuit Designs For Rebooting Computing, Sai Subramanya Varun Thogarcheti

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

CMOS based computing is reaching its limits. To take computation beyond Moores law (the number of transistors and hence processing power on a chip doubles every 18 months to 3 years) requires research explorations in (i) new materials, devices, and processes, (ii) new architectures and algorithms, (iii) new paradigm of logic bit representation. The focus is on fundamental new ways to compute under the umbrella of rebooting computing such as spintronics, quantum computing, adiabatic and reversible computing. Therefore, this thesis highlights explicitly Quantum computing and Adiabatic logic, two new computing paradigms that come under the umbrella of rebooting computing. Quantum …

Using Natural Language Processing And Machine Learning Techniques To Characterize Configuration Bug Reports: A Study, Wei Wen

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In this study, a tool is developed that achieves two purposes: (1) given bug reports, it identifies configuration bug reports from non-configuration bug reports; (2) once a bug report is identified to be a configuration bug report, the tool finds out what specific configuration option the bug report is associated.

This study starts with a review of related works that used machine learning tools to solve software bug and bug report related issues. It then discusses the natural language processing and machine learning techniques. Afterwards, the development process of the proposed tool is described in detail, including the motivation, the …

3d Body Tracking Using Deep Learning, Qingguo Xu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

This thesis introduces a 3D body tracking system based on neutral networks and 3D geometry, which can robustly estimate body poses and accurate body joints. This system takes RGB-D data as input. Body poses and joints are firstly extracted from color image using deep learning approach. The estimated joints and skeletons are further translated to 3D space by using camera calibration information. This system is running at the rate of 3 4 frames per second. It can be used to any RGB-D sensors, such as Kinect, Intel RealSense [14] or any customized system with color depth calibrated. Comparing to the …

Autonomous Quadrotor Collision Avoidance And Destination Seeking In A Gps-Denied Environment, Thomas C. Kirven

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical Engineering

This thesis presents a real-time autonomous guidance and control method for a quadrotor in a GPS-denied environment. The quadrotor autonomously seeks a destination while it avoids obstacles whose shape and position are initially unknown. We implement the obstacle avoidance and destination seeking methods using off-the-shelf sensors, including a vision-sensing camera. The vision-sensing camera detects the positions of points on the surface of obstacles. We use this obstacle position data and a potential-field method to generate velocity commands. We present a backstepping controller that uses the velocity commands to generate the quadrotor's control inputs. In indoor experiments, we demonstrate that the …

Hierarchical Implementation Of Aggregate Functions, Pablo Quevedo

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Most systems in HPC make use of hierarchical designs that allow multiple levels of parallelism to be exploited by programmers. The use of multiple multi-core/multi-processor computers to form a computer cluster supports both fine-grain and large-grain parallel computation. Aggregate function communications provide an easy to use and efficient set of mechanisms for communicating and coordinating between processing elements, but the model originally targeted only fine grain parallel hardware. This work shows that a hierarchical implementation of aggregate functions is a viable alternative to MPI (the standard Message Passing Interface library) for programming clusters that provide both fine grain and large …

Per-Pixel Calibration For Rgb-Depth Natural 3d Reconstruction On Gpu, Sen Li

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ever since the Kinect brought low-cost depth cameras into consumer market, great interest has been invigorated into Red-Green-Blue-Depth (RGBD) sensors. Without calibration, a RGBD camera’s horizontal and vertical field of view (FoV) could help generate 3D reconstruction in camera space naturally on graphics processing unit (GPU), which however is badly deformed by the lens distortions and imperfect depth resolution (depth distortion). The camera’s calibration based on a pinhole-camera model and a high-order distortion removal model requires a lot of calculations in the fragment shader. In order to get rid of both the lens distortion and the depth distortion …

Understanding Home Networks With Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Passive Measurement, Xuzi Zhou

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Homes are involved in a significant fraction of Internet traffic. However, meaningful and comprehensive information on the structure and use of home networks is still hard to obtain. The two main challenges in collecting such information are the lack of measurement infrastructure in the home network environment and individuals’ concerns about information privacy.

To tackle these challenges, the dissertation introduces Home Network Flow Logger (HNFL) to bring lightweight privacy-preserving passive measurement to home networks. The core of HNFL is a Linux kernel module that runs on resource-constrained commodity home routers to collect network traffic data from raw packets. Unlike prior …

Multilevel Ant Colony Optimization To Solve Constrained Forest Transportation Planning Problems, Pengpeng Lin

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

In this dissertation, we focus on solving forest transportation planning related problems, including constraints that consider negative environmental impacts and multi-objective optimizations that provide forest managers and road planers alternatives for making informed decisions. Along this line of study, several multilevel techniques and mataheuristic algorithms have been developed and investigated. The forest transportation planning problem is a fixed-charge problem and known to be NP-hard. The general idea of utilizing multilevel approach is to solve the original problem of which the computational cost maybe prohibitive by using a set of increasingly smaller problems of which the computational cost is cheaper.

The …

A Network Path Advising Service, Xiongqi Wu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

A common feature of emerging future Internet architectures is the ability for applications to select the path, or paths, their packets take between a source and destination. Unlike the current Internet architecture where routing protocols find a single (best) path between a source and destination, future Internet routing protocols will present applications with a set of paths and allow them to select the most appropriate path. Although this enables applications to be actively involved in the selection of the paths their packets travel, the huge number of potential paths and the need to know the current network conditions of each …

Misfit: Mining Software Fault Information And Types, Billy R. Kidwell

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

As software becomes more important to society, the number, age, and complexity of systems grow. Software organizations require continuous process improvement to maintain the reliability, security, and quality of these software systems. Software organizations can utilize data from manual fault classification to meet their process improvement needs, but organizations lack the expertise or resources to implement them correctly.

This dissertation addresses the need for the automation of software fault classification. Validation results show that automated fault classification, as implemented in the MiSFIT tool, can group faults of similar nature. The resulting classifications result in good agreement for common software faults …

Stargrazer One: A New Architecture For Distributed Maximum Power Point Tracking Of Solar Photovoltaic Sources, Edgard Munoz-Coreas

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

The yield from a solar photovoltaic (PV) source is dependent on factors such as light and temperature. A control system called a maximum power point tracker (MPPT) ensures that the yield from a solar PV source is maximized in spite of these factors. This thesis presents a novel implementation of a perturb and observe (PO) MPPT.

The implementation uses a switched capacitor step down converter and a custom digital circuit implementation of the PO algorithm. Working in tandem, the switched capacitor step down converter and the custom digital circuit implementation were able to successfully track the maximum power point of …

Application Of Random Indexing To Multi Label Classification Problems: A Case Study With Mesh Term Assignment And Diagnosis Code Extraction, Yuan Lu

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Many manual biomedical annotation tasks can be categorized as instances of the typical multi-label classification problem where several categories or labels from a fixed set need to assigned to an input instance. MeSH term assignment to biomedical articles and diagnosis code extraction from medical records are two such tasks. To address this problem automatically, in this thesis, we present a way to utilize latent associations between labels based on output label sets. We used random indexing as a method to determine latent associations and use the associations as a novel feature in a learning-to-rank algorithm that reranks candidate labels selected …

Design Of A Scalable Path Service For The Internet, Mehmet O. Ascigil

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Despite the world-changing success of the Internet, shortcomings in its routing and forwarding system have become increasingly apparent. One symptom is an escalating tension between users and providers over the control of routing and forwarding of packets: providers understandably want to control use of their infrastructure, and users understandably want paths with sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) to improve the performance of their applications. As a result, users resort to various “hacks” such as sending traffic through intermediate end-systems, and the providers fight back with mechanisms to inspect and block such traffic.

To enable users and providers to jointly control routing and …