Engineering Commons^™

Semantically Grounded Learning From Unstructured Demonstrations, Scott D. Niekum

Open Access Dissertations

Robots exhibit flexible behavior largely in proportion to their degree of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge is often meticulously hand-coded for a narrow class of tasks, limiting the scope of possible robot competencies. Thus, the primary limiting factor of robot capabilities is often not the physical attributes of the robot, but the limited time and skill of expert programmers. One way to deal with the vast number of situations and environments that robots face outside the laboratory is to provide users with simple methods for programming robots that do not require the skill of an expert.

For this …

Reconfigurable Technologies For Next Generation Internet And Cluster Computing, Deepak C. Unnikrishnan

Open Access Dissertations

Modern web applications are marked by distinct networking and computing characteristics. As applications evolve, they continue to operate over a large monolithic framework of networking and computing equipment built from general-purpose microprocessors and Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that offers few architectural choices. This dissertation presents techniques to diversify the next-generation Internet infrastructure by integrating Field-programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a class of reconfigurable integrated circuits, with general-purpose microprocessor-based techniques. Specifically, our solutions are demonstrated in the context of two applications - network virtualization and distributed cluster computing.

Network virtualization enables the physical network infrastructure to be shared among several …

Hybrid Radio Frequency And Video Framework For Identity-Aware Augmented Perception In Disaster Management And Assistive Technologies, Xunyi Yu

Open Access Dissertations

In this dissertation, we introduce a hybrid radio frequency and video framework that enables identity aware-augmented perception. Identity-aware augmented perception enhances users' perception of the surrounding by collecting and analyzing information pertaining to each identifiable or tractable target nearby aggregated from various sensors, and presents it visually or audibly augmenting users' own sensory perceptions. We target two application areas of disaster management and assistive technologies. Incident commanders and first responders can use the technology to perceive information specific to a victim, e.g. triage level, critical conditions, visually superimposed on third person or first person video. The blind and visually impaired …

Online Management Of Resilient And Power Efficient Multicore Processors, Rance Rodrigues

Open Access Dissertations

The semiconductor industry has been driven by Moore's law for almost half a century. Miniaturization of device size has allowed more transistors to be packed into a smaller area while the improved transistor performance has resulted in a significant increase in frequency. Increased density of devices and rising frequency led, unfortunately, to a power density problem which became an obstacle to further integration. The processor industry responded to this problem by lowering processor frequency and integrating multiple processor cores on a die, choosing to focus on Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) for performance instead of traditional Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP).

While …