Computer Engineering Commons^™

Development Of An Autonomous Robotic Mushroom Harvester, Nikita Alexeevich Kuchinskiy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The process of development of a new robot is one of the modern technological arts. This process involves multiple complex steps and recursive approach. In this project, a solution for automatic harvesting of mushrooms is developed. In order to design an effective solution, it is necessary to explore and take into consideration the limitations of grasping very soft and fragile objects (particularly mushrooms). We will elaborate several strategies of picking and analyze each strategy to formulate the design requirements, develop a solution, and finally, evaluate the efficiency of the proposed solution in actual farm conditions for real mushrooms. The mushroom …

A Maturity Model For Mobile Learning, Muasaad Alrasheedi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Higher education is becoming increasingly interested in adopting innovative and modern technologies as a mode of imparting education. Mobile technologies are considered to be the next frontier of educational platforms as they have the capability to provide high-quality learning experiences and to satisfy the increasing demand for mobility and flexibility. In view of the ubiquitous nature of mobile technology and the immense opportunities it offers, there are favorable indications that the technology could be introduced as the next generation of learning platforms. The present research aims to develop a comprehensive framework based on the well-known Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and …

A Software Framework For Task Based Performance Evaluation, Justin J. Mackenzie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

It is difficult to objectively measure performance of complex tasks such as a surgical operation and surgical simulators require the ability to evaluate performance whether to predict surgical outcome, determine competence, provide learning feedback, etc. With no standard software framework for collecting, analyzing and evaluating performance data for complex tasks in simulations, it is investigated whether a solution can be implemented that allows for custom data collection schemes, all while being general enough to be used across many simulation platforms and can be used in a simple simulator.It is also investigated whether the implemented framework can perform its functionality while …

Use Of Microsoft Kinect In A Dual Camera Setup For Action Recognition Applications, Omar Ghassan Kayal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Conventional human action recognition methods use a single light camera to extract all the necessary information needed to perform the recognition. However, the use of a single light camera poses limitations which can not be addressed without a hardware change. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to the multi camera setup. Our approach utilizes the skeletal pose estimation capabilities of the Microsoft Kinect camera, and uses this estimated pose on the image of the non-depth camera. The approach aims at improving performance of image analysis of multiple camera, which would not be as easy in a typical multiple …

State Controlled Object Oriented Programming, Jamil Ahmed

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we examine an extension to the idea of object oriented programming to make programs easier for people and compilers to understand. Often objects behave differently depending on the history of past operations as well as their input that is their behavior depends on state. We may think of the fields of an object as encoding two kinds of information: data that makes up the useful information in the object and state that controls its behavior. Object oriented languages do not distinguish these two. We propose that by specifying these two, programs become clearer for people to write …

A Vector-Based Approach To Virtual Machine Arrangement, Nicholas Cerilli

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Cloud based data centres benefit from minimizing operating costs and service level agreement violations. Vector-based data centre management policies have been shown to assist with these goals. Vector-based data centre management policies arrange virtual machines in a data centre to minimize the number of hosts being used which translates to greater power efficiency and reduced costs for the data centre overall. I propose an improved vector-based virtual machine arrangement algorithm with two novel additions, namely a technique that changes what it means for a host to be balanced and a concept that excludes undesirable target hosts, thereby improving the arrangement …

Brain Tumor Segmentation With Minimal User Assistance, Liqun Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we propose a brain tumor segmentation system that requires only 4 clicks from users to specify a tight bounding box that completely contains the tumor.

We convert the segmentation problem to an energy minimization problem. We utilize the basic energy function that combines intensity appearance and boundary smoothness. Global and local appearance models are experimented and compared in our work.

The basic energy function does not assume any shape prior and thus leads to unrealistic shapes. We take the advantage of the fact that most of the tumors are approximately convex in shape and incorporate the star …

Collaborative Policy-Based Autonomic Management In Iaas Clouds, Omid Mola

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the increasing number of "machines" (either virtual or physical) in a computing environment, it is becoming harder to monitor and manage these resources. Relying on human administrators, even with tools, is expensive and the growing complexity makes management even harder. The alternative is to look for automated approaches that can monitor and manage computing resources in real time with no human intervention. One of the approaches to this problem is policy-based autonomic management. However, in large systems having one single autonomic manager to manage everything is almost impossible. Therefore, multiple autonomic managers will be needed and these will need …

Reliability Models Applied To Smartphone Applications, Sonia Meskini

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Smartphones have become the most used electronic devices. They carry out most of the functionalities of desktops, offering various useful applications that suit the user’s needs. Therefore, instead of the operator, the user has been the main controller of the device and its applications, therefore its reliability has become an emergent requirement. As a first step, based on collected smartphone applications failure data, we investigated and evaluated the efficacy of Software Reliability Growth Models (SRGMs) when applied to these smartphone data in order to check whether they achieve the same accuracy as in the desktop/laptop area. None of the selected …