Computer Engineering Commons^™

Reasoning Across Language And Vision In Machines And Humans, Andrei Barbu

Open Access Dissertations

Humans not only outperform AI and computer-vision systems, but use an unknown computational mechanism to perform tasks for which no suitable approaches exist. I present work investigating both novel tasks and how humans approach them in the context of computer vision and linguistics. I demonstrate a system which, like children, acquires high-level linguistic knowledge about the world. Robots learn to play physically-instantiated board games and use that knowledge to engage in physical play. To further integrate language and vision I develop an approach which produces rich sentential descriptions of events depicted in videos. I then show how to simultaneously detect …

Predictive Duty Cycling Of Radios And Cameras Using Augmented Sensing In Wireless Camera Networks, Joonhwa Shin

Open Access Dissertations

Energy efficiency dominates practically every aspect of the design of wireless camera networks (WCNs), and duty cycling of radios and cameras is an important tool for achieving high energy efficiencies. However, duty cycling in WCNs is made complex by the camera nodes having to anticipate the arrival of the objects in their field-of-view. What adds to this complexity is the fact that radio duty cycling and camera duty cycling are tightly coupled notions in WCNs.

Abstract In this dissertation, we present a predictive framework to provide camera nodes with an ability to anticipate the arrival of an object in the …

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 …