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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

A Parallel Direct Method For Finite Element Electromagnetic Computations Based On Domain Decomposition, Javad Moshfegh Nov 2019

A Parallel Direct Method For Finite Element Electromagnetic Computations Based On Domain Decomposition, Javad Moshfegh

Doctoral Dissertations

High performance parallel computing and direct (factorization-based) solution methods have been the two main trends in electromagnetic computations in recent years. When time-harmonic (frequency-domain) Maxwell's equation are directly discretized with the Finite Element Method (FEM) or other Partial Differential Equation (PDE) methods, the resulting linear system of equations is sparse and indefinite, thus harder to efficiently factorize serially or in parallel than alternative methods e.g. integral equation solutions, that result in dense linear systems. State-of-the-art sparse matrix direct solvers such as MUMPS and PARDISO don't scale favorably, have low parallel efficiency and high memory footprint. This work introduces a new …


Service Competition And Data-Centric Protocols For Internet Access, Thiago Teixeira Oct 2019

Service Competition And Data-Centric Protocols For Internet Access, Thiago Teixeira

Doctoral Dissertations

The Internet evolved in many aspects, from the application to the physical layers. However, the evolution of the Internet access technologies, most visible in dense urban scenarios, is not easily noticeable in sparsely populated and rural areas. In the United States, for example, the FCC identified that 50% of the census blocks have access to up to two broadband providers; however, these providers do not necessarily compete. Additionally, due to the methodology of the study, there is evidence that the number of actual customers without broadband access is higher since the FCC considers the entire block to have broadband if …


Time-Difference Circuits: Methodology, Design, And Digital Realization, Shuo Li Oct 2019

Time-Difference Circuits: Methodology, Design, And Digital Realization, Shuo Li

Doctoral Dissertations

This thesis presents innovations for a special class of circuits called Time Difference (TD) circuits. We introduce a signal processing methodology with TD signals that alters the target signal from a magnitude perspective to time interval between two time events and systematically organizes the primary TD functions abstracted from existing TD circuits and systems. The TD circuits draw attention from a broad range of application fields. In addition, highly evolved complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology suffers from various problems related to voltage and current amplitude signal processing methods. Compared to traditional analog and digital circuits, TD circuits bring several compelling features: …


Stealthy Parametric Hardware Trojans In Vlsi Circuits, Samaneh Ghandali Oct 2019

Stealthy Parametric Hardware Trojans In Vlsi Circuits, Samaneh Ghandali

Doctoral Dissertations

Over the last decade, hardware Trojans have gained increasing attention in academia, industry and by government agencies. In order to design reliable countermeasures, it is crucial to understand how hardware Trojans can be built in practice. This is an area that has received relatively scant treatment in the literature. In this thesis, we examine how particularly stealthy parametric Trojans can be introduced to VLSI circuits. Parametric Trojans do not require any additional logic and are purely based on subtle manipulations on the sub-transistor level to modify the parameters of few transistors which makes them very hard to detect. We introduce …


Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh Oct 2019

Function And Dissipation In Finite State Automata - From Computing To Intelligence And Back, Natesh Ganesh

Doctoral Dissertations

Society has benefited from the technological revolution and the tremendous growth in computing powered by Moore's law. However, we are fast approaching the ultimate physical limits in terms of both device sizes and the associated energy dissipation. It is important to characterize these limits in a physically grounded and implementation-agnostic manner, in order to capture the fundamental energy dissipation costs associated with performing computing operations with classical information in nano-scale quantum systems. It is also necessary to identify and understand the effect of quantum in-distinguishability, noise, and device variability on these dissipation limits. Identifying these parameters is crucial to designing …


Sparsity In Machine Learning: An Information Selecting Perspective, Siwei Feng Jul 2019

Sparsity In Machine Learning: An Information Selecting Perspective, Siwei Feng

Doctoral Dissertations

Today we are living in a world awash with data. Large volumes of data are acquired, analyzed and applied to tasks through machine learning algorithms in nearly every area of science, business, and industry. For example, medical scientists analyze the gene expression data from a single specimen to learn the underlying causes of disease (e.g. cancer) and choose the best treatment; retailers can know more about customers' shopping habits from retail data to adjust their business strategies to better appeal to customers; suppliers can enhance supply chain success through supply chain systems built on knowledge sharing. However, it is also …


Improving And Understanding Data Quality In Large-Scale Data Systems, Xiaolan Wang Mar 2019

Improving And Understanding Data Quality In Large-Scale Data Systems, Xiaolan Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Systems and applications rely heavily on data, which makes data quality a critical factor for their function. In turn, low quality data can be incredibly costly and disruptive, leading to loss of revenue, incorrect conclusions, and misguided policy decisions. Improving data quality is far more than purging datasets of errors; it is more important to improve the processes that produce the data, to collect good data sources that are used for generating the data, and to truly understand the quality of the data. Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to improve and understand data quality from the above aspects. …


Modeling Temporal Structures In Time-Varying Networks, Kun Tu Mar 2019

Modeling Temporal Structures In Time-Varying Networks, Kun Tu

Doctoral Dissertations

A dynamic network is a network whose structure changes because of the emergence and disappearance of node or edges. It can be used to study complex systems where individuals in a system are represented as nodes and their relations/interactions are represented as edges. Studying dynamic network structures helps to better understand changes in relationships. Considerable work has been conducted on learning network structure. However, due to the complexity of dynamic networks, there is considerable room for improvement to obtain better analysis results. This thesis studies different aspects of characteristic and dynamics of a network, focusing on their application in link …


Sequence Design Via Semidefinite Programming Relaxation And Randomized Projection, Dian Mo Mar 2019

Sequence Design Via Semidefinite Programming Relaxation And Randomized Projection, Dian Mo

Doctoral Dissertations

Wideband is a booming technology in the field of wireless communications. The receivers in wideband communication systems are expected to cover a very wide spectrum and adaptively extract the parts of interest. The literature has focused on mixing the input spectrum to baseband using a pseudorandom sequence modulation and recovering the received signals from linearly independent measurements by parallel branches to mitigate the pressures from required extreme high sampling frequency. However, a pseudorandom sequence provides no rejection for the strong interferers received together with weak signals from distant sources. The interferers cause significant distortion due to the nonlinearity of the …


Fundamental Limits Of Covert Communication In Packet Channels, Ramin Soltani Mar 2019

Fundamental Limits Of Covert Communication In Packet Channels, Ramin Soltani

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on covert communication in channels where the communication takes place by the transmission of packets. Consider a channel where authorized transmitter Jack sends packets to authorized receiver Steve according to a Poisson process with rate $\lambda$ packets per second for a time period $T$. Jack's transmitted packet visit Alice, Willie, Bob and Steve, respectively. Suppose that covert transmitter Alice wishes to communicate information to covert receiver Bob without being detected by a watchful adversary Willie. We consider three sets of assumptions for this channel. For each set of assumptions, we present a technique for establishing covert communication …