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Articles 1 - 24 of 24
Full-Text Articles in Engineering
A Machine Learning Approach To Assess The Separation Of Seismocardiographic Signals By Respiration, Brian Solar
A Machine Learning Approach To Assess The Separation Of Seismocardiographic Signals By Respiration, Brian Solar
Honors Undergraduate Theses
The clinical usage of Seismocardiography (SCG) is increasing as it is being shown to be an effective non-invasive measurement for heart monitoring. SCG measures the vibrational activity at the chest surface and applications include non-invasive assessment of myocardial contractility and systolic time intervals. Respiratory activity can also affect the SCG signal by changing the hemodynamic characteristics of cardiac activity and displacing the position of the heart. Other clinically significant information, such as systolic time intervals, can thus manifest themselves differently in an SCG signal during inspiration and expiration. Grouping SCG signals into their respective respiratory cycle can mitigate this issue. …
Towards Improving Human-Robot Interaction For Social Robots, Saad Khan
Towards Improving Human-Robot Interaction For Social Robots, Saad Khan
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Autonomous robots interacting with humans in a social setting must consider the social-cultural environment when pursuing their objectives. Thus the social robot must perceive and understand the social cultural environment in order to be able to explain and predict the actions of its human interaction partners. This dissertation contributes to the emerging field of human-robot interaction for social robots in the following ways: 1. We used the social calculus technique based on culture sanctioned social metrics (CSSMs) to quantify, analyze and predict the behavior of the robot, human soldiers and the public perception in the Market Patrol peacekeeping scenario. 2. …
Analytical Study Of Computer Vision-Based Pavement Crack Quantification Using Machine Learning Techniques, Soroush Mokhtari
Analytical Study Of Computer Vision-Based Pavement Crack Quantification Using Machine Learning Techniques, Soroush Mokhtari
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Image-based techniques are a promising non-destructive approach for road pavement condition evaluation. The main objective of this study is to extract, quantify and evaluate important surface defects, such as cracks, using an automated computer vision-based system to provide a better understanding of the pavement deterioration process. To achieve this objective, an automated crack-recognition software was developed, employing a series of image processing algorithms of crack extraction, crack grouping, and crack detection. Bottom-hat morphological technique was used to remove the random background of pavement images and extract cracks, selectively based on their shapes, sizes, and intensities using a relatively small number …
Data-Driven Simulation Modeling Of Construction And Infrastructure Operations Using Process Knowledge Discovery, Reza Akhavian
Data-Driven Simulation Modeling Of Construction And Infrastructure Operations Using Process Knowledge Discovery, Reza Akhavian
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) domain, simulation modeling is mainly used to facilitate decision-making by enabling the assessment of different operational plans and resource arrangements, that are otherwise difficult (if not impossible), expensive, or time consuming to be evaluated in real world settings. The accuracy of such models directly affects their reliability to serve as a basis for important decisions such as project completion time estimation and resource allocation. Compared to other industries, this is particularly important in construction and infrastructure projects due to the high resource costs and the societal impacts of these projects. Discrete event simulation …
Modeling User Transportation Patterns Using Mobile Devices, Erfan Davami
Modeling User Transportation Patterns Using Mobile Devices, Erfan Davami
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Participatory sensing frameworks use humans and their computing devices as a large mobile sensing network. Dramatic accessibility and affordability have turned mobile devices (smartphone and tablet computers) into the most popular computational machines in the world, exceeding laptops. By the end of 2013, more than 1.5 billion people on earth will have a smartphone. Increased coverage and higher speeds of cellular networks have given these devices the power to constantly stream large amounts of data. Most mobile devices are equipped with advanced sensors such as GPS, cameras, and microphones. This expansion of smartphone numbers and power has created a sensing …
Complementary Layered Learning, Sean Mondesire
Complementary Layered Learning, Sean Mondesire
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Layered learning is a machine learning paradigm used to develop autonomous robotic-based agents by decomposing a complex task into simpler subtasks and learns each sequentially. Although the paradigm continues to have success in multiple domains, performance can be unexpectedly unsatisfactory. Using Boolean-logic problems and autonomous agent navigation, we show poor performance is due to the learner forgetting how to perform earlier learned subtasks too quickly (favoring plasticity) or having difficulty learning new things (favoring stability). We demonstrate that this imbalance can hinder learning so that task performance is no better than that of a suboptimal learning technique, monolithic learning, which …
An Unsupervised Consensus Control Chart Pattern Recognition Framework, Siavash Haghtalab
An Unsupervised Consensus Control Chart Pattern Recognition Framework, Siavash Haghtalab
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Early identification and detection of abnormal time series patterns is vital for a number of manufacturing. Slide shifts and alterations of time series patterns might be indicative of some anomaly in the production process, such as machinery malfunction. Usually due to the continuous flow of data monitoring of manufacturing processes requires automated Control Chart Pattern Recognition(CCPR) algorithms. The majority of CCPR literature consists of supervised classification algorithms. Less studies consider unsupervised versions of the problem. Despite the profound advantage of unsupervised methodology for less manual data labeling their use is limited due to the fact that their performance is not …
Sketchart: A Pen-Based Tool For Chart Generation And Interaction., Andres Vargas Gonzalez
Sketchart: A Pen-Based Tool For Chart Generation And Interaction., Andres Vargas Gonzalez
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
It has been shown that representing data with the right visualization increases the understanding of qualitative and quantitative information encoded in documents. However, current tools for generating such visualizations involve the use of traditional WIMP techniques, which perhaps makes free interaction and direct manipulation of the content harder. In this thesis, we present a pen-based prototype for data visualization using 10 different types of bar based charts. The prototype lets users sketch a chart and interact with the information once the drawing is identified. The prototype's user interface consists of an area to sketch and touch based elements that will …
On Kernel-Base Multi-Task Learning, Cong Li
On Kernel-Base Multi-Task Learning, Cong Li
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has been an active research area in machine learning for two decades. By training multiple relevant tasks simultaneously with information shared across tasks, it is possible to improve the generalization performance of each task, compared to training each individual task independently. During the past decade, most MTL research has been based on the Regularization-Loss framework due to its flexibility in specifying various types of information sharing strategies, the opportunity it offers to yield a kernel-based methods and its capability in promoting sparse feature representations. However, certain limitations exist in both theoretical and practical aspects of Regularization-Loss-based MTL. …
Remote Sensing With Computational Intelligence Modelling For Monitoring The Ecosystem State And Hydraulic Pattern In A Constructed Wetland, Golam Mohiuddin
Remote Sensing With Computational Intelligence Modelling For Monitoring The Ecosystem State And Hydraulic Pattern In A Constructed Wetland, Golam Mohiuddin
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Monitoring the heterogeneous aquatic environment such as the Stormwater Treatment Areas (STAs) located at the northeast of the Everglades is extremely important in understanding the land processes of the constructed wetland in its capacity to remove nutrient. Direct monitoring and measurements of ecosystem evolution and changing velocities at every single part of the STA are not always feasible. Integrated remote sensing, monitoring, and modeling technique can be a state-of-the-art tool to estimate the spatial and temporal distributions of flow velocity regimes and ecological functioning in such dynamic aquatic environments. In this presentation, comparison between four computational intelligence models including Extreme …
Human-Robot Interaction For Multi-Robot Systems, Bennie Lewis
Human-Robot Interaction For Multi-Robot Systems, Bennie Lewis
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Designing an effective human-robot interaction paradigm is particularly important for complex tasks such as multi-robot manipulation that require the human and robot to work together in a tightly coupled fashion. Although increasing the number of robots can expand the area that the robots can cover within a bounded period of time, a poor human-robot interface will ultimately compromise the performance of the team of robots. However, introducing a human operator to the team of robots, does not automatically improve performance due to the difficulty of teleoperating mobile robots with manipulators. The human operator’s concentration is divided not only among multiple …
Integrated Data Fusion And Mining (Idfm) Technique For Monitoring Water Quality In Large And Small Lakes, Benjamin Vannah
Integrated Data Fusion And Mining (Idfm) Technique For Monitoring Water Quality In Large And Small Lakes, Benjamin Vannah
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Monitoring water quality on a near-real-time basis to address water resources management and public health concerns in coupled natural systems and the built environment is by no means an easy task. Furthermore, this emerging societal challenge will continue to grow, due to the ever-increasing anthropogenic impacts upon surface waters. For example, urban growth and agricultural operations have led to an influx of nutrients into surface waters stimulating harmful algal bloom formation, and stormwater runoff from urban areas contributes to the accumulation of total organic carbon (TOC) in surface waters. TOC in surface waters is a known precursor of disinfection byproducts …
Life Long Learning In Sparse Learning Environments, John Reeder
Life Long Learning In Sparse Learning Environments, John Reeder
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Life long learning is a machine learning technique that deals with learning sequential tasks over time. It seeks to transfer knowledge from previous learning tasks to new learning tasks in order to increase generalization performance and learning speed. Real-time learning environments in which many agents are participating may provide learning opportunities but they are spread out in time and space outside of the geographical scope of a single learning agent. This research seeks to provide an algorithm and framework for life long learning among a network of agents in a sparse real-time learning environment. This work will utilize the robust …
Human Action Localization And Recognition In Unconstrained Videos, Hakan Boyraz
Human Action Localization And Recognition In Unconstrained Videos, Hakan Boyraz
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
As imaging systems become ubiquitous, the ability to recognize human actions is becoming increasingly important. Just as in the object detection and recognition literature, action recognition can be roughly divided into classification tasks, where the goal is to classify a video according to the action depicted in the video, and detection tasks, where the goal is to detect and localize a human performing a particular action. A growing literature is demonstrating the benefits of localizing discriminative sub-regions of images and videos when performing recognition tasks. In this thesis, we address the action detection and recognition problems. Action detection in video …
A Study Of Localization And Latency Reduction For Action Recognition, Syed Zain Masood
A Study Of Localization And Latency Reduction For Action Recognition, Syed Zain Masood
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The success of recognizing periodic actions in single-person-simple-background datasets, such as Weizmann and KTH, has created a need for more complex datasets to push the performance of action recognition systems. In this work, we create a new synthetic action dataset and use it to highlight weaknesses in current recognition systems. Experiments show that introducing background complexity to action video sequences causes a significant degradation in recognition performance. Moreover, this degradation cannot be fixed by fine-tuning system parameters or by selecting better feature points. Instead, we show that the problem lies in the spatio-temporal cuboid volume extracted from the interest point …
Effective Task Transfer Through Indirect Encoding, Phillip Verbancsics
Effective Task Transfer Through Indirect Encoding, Phillip Verbancsics
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
An important goal for machine learning is to transfer knowledge between tasks. For example, learning to play RoboCup Keepaway should contribute to learning the full game of RoboCup soccer. Often approaches to task transfer focus on transforming the original representation to fit the new task. Such representational transformations are necessary because the target task often requires new state information that was not included in the original representation. In RoboCup Keepaway, changing from the 3 vs. 2 variant of the task to 4 vs. 3 adds state information for each of the new players. In contrast, this dissertation explores the idea …
Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-Agent Adversarial Games, Kennard R. Laviers
Exploiting Opponent Modeling For Learning In Multi-Agent Adversarial Games, Kennard R. Laviers
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
An issue with learning effective policies in multi-agent adversarial games is that the size of the search space can be prohibitively large when the actions of both teammates and opponents are considered simultaneously. Opponent modeling, predicting an opponent’s actions in advance of execution, is one approach for selecting actions in adversarial settings, but it is often performed in an ad hoc way. In this dissertation, we introduce several methods for using opponent modeling, in the form of predictions about the players’ physical movements, to learn team policies. To explore the problem of decision-making in multi-agent adversarial scenarios, we use our …
Optimal Detour Planning Around Blocked Construction Zones, Mutasem Jardaneh
Optimal Detour Planning Around Blocked Construction Zones, Mutasem Jardaneh
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Construction zones are traffic way areas where construction, maintenance or utility work is identified by warning signs, signals and indicators, including those on transport devices that mark the beginning and end of construction zones. Construction zones are among the most dangerous work areas, with workers facing workplace safety challenges that often lead to catastrophic injuries or fatalities. In addition, daily commuters are also impacted by construction zone detours that affect their safety and daily commute time. These problems represent major challenges to construction planners as they are required to plan vehicle routes around construction zones in such a way that …
A Contextual Approach To Learning Collaborative Behavior Via Observation, Cynthia L. Johnson
A Contextual Approach To Learning Collaborative Behavior Via Observation, Cynthia L. Johnson
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This dissertation describes a novel technique to creating a simulated team of agents through observation. Simulated human teamwork can be used for a number of purposes, such as expert examples, automated teammates for training purposes and realistic opponents in games and training simulation. Current teamwork simulations require the team member behaviors be programmed into the simulation, often requiring a great deal of time and effort. None are able to observe a team at work and replicate the teamwork behaviors. Machine learning techniques for learning by observation and learning by demonstration have proven successful at observing behavior of humans or other …
Concept Learning By Example Decomposition, Sameer Joshi
Concept Learning By Example Decomposition, Sameer Joshi
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
For efficient understanding and prediction in natural systems, even in artificially closed ones, we usually need to consider a number of factors that may combine in simple or complex ways. Additionally, many modern scientific disciplines face increasingly large datasets from which to extract knowledge (for example, genomics). Thus to learn all but the most trivial regularities in the natural world, we rely on different ways of simplifying the learning problem. One simplifying technique that is highly pervasive in nature is to break down a large learning problem into smaller ones; to learn the smaller, more manageable problems; and then to …
Using Student Mood And Task Performance To Train Classifier Algorithms To Select Effective Coaching Strategies Within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Its), Robert Sottilare
Using Student Mood And Task Performance To Train Classifier Algorithms To Select Effective Coaching Strategies Within Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Its), Robert Sottilare
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The ultimate goal of this research was to improve student performance by adjusting an Intelligent Tutoring System's (ITS) coaching strategy based on the student's mood. As a step toward this goal, this study evaluated the relationships between each student's mood variables (pleasure, arousal, dominance and mood intensity), the coaching strategy selected by the ITS and the student's performance. Outcomes included methods to increase the perception of the intelligent tutor to allow it to adapt coaching strategies (methods of instruction) to the student's affective needs to mitigate barriers to performance (e.g. negative affect) during the one-to-one tutoring process. The study evaluated …
Analyses Of Crash Occurence And Injury Severities On Multi Lane Highways Using Machine Learning Algorithms, Abhishek Das
Analyses Of Crash Occurence And Injury Severities On Multi Lane Highways Using Machine Learning Algorithms, Abhishek Das
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Reduction of crash occurrence on the various roadway locations (mid-block segments; signalized intersections; un-signalized intersections) and the mitigation of injury severity in the event of a crash are the major concerns of transportation safety engineers. Multi lane arterial roadways (excluding freeways and expressways) account for forty-three percent of fatal crashes in the state of Florida. Significant contributing causes fall under the broad categories of aggressive driver behavior; adverse weather and environmental conditions; and roadway geometric and traffic factors. The objective of this research was the implementation of innovative, state-of-the-art analytical methods to identify the contributing factors for crashes and injury …
An Analysis Of Misclassification Rates For Decision Trees, Mingyu Zhong
An Analysis Of Misclassification Rates For Decision Trees, Mingyu Zhong
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The decision tree is a well-known methodology for classification and regression. In this dissertation, we focus on the minimization of the misclassification rate for decision tree classifiers. We derive the necessary equations that provide the optimal tree prediction, the estimated risk of the tree's prediction, and the reliability of the tree's risk estimation. We carry out an extensive analysis of the application of Lidstone's law of succession for the estimation of the class probabilities. In contrast to existing research, we not only compute the expected values of the risks but also calculate the corresponding reliability of the risk (measured by …
Towards A Self-Calibrating Video Camera Network For Content Analysis And Forensics, Imran Junejo
Towards A Self-Calibrating Video Camera Network For Content Analysis And Forensics, Imran Junejo
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Due to growing security concerns, video surveillance and monitoring has received an immense attention from both federal agencies and private firms. The main concern is that a single camera, even if allowed to rotate or translate, is not sufficient to cover a large area for video surveillance. A more general solution with wide range of applications is to allow the deployed cameras to have a non-overlapping field of view (FoV) and to, if possible, allow these cameras to move freely in 3D space. This thesis addresses the issue of how cameras in such a network can be calibrated and how …