Computer Engineering Commons^™

Power-Over-Tether Unmanned Aerial System Leveraged For Trajectory Influenced Atmospheric Sensing, Daniel Rico

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in agriculture has risen in the past decade and is helping to modernize agriculture. UASs collect and elucidate data previously difficult to obtain and are used to help increase agricultural efficiency and production. Typical commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UASs are limited by small payloads and short flight times. Such limits inhibit their ability to provide abundant data at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this thesis, we describe the design and construction of the tethered aircraft unmanned system (TAUS), which is a novel power-over-tether UAS configured for long-term, high throughput atmospheric monitoring with an array of …

A Real-World, Hybrid Event Sequence Generation Framework For Android Apps, Jun Sun

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Generating meaningful inputs for Android apps is still a challenging issue that needs more research. Past research efforts have shown that random test generation is still an effective means to exercise User-Interface (UI) events to achieve high code coverage. At the same time, heuristic search approaches can effectively reach specified code targets. Our investigation shows that these approaches alone are insufficient to generate inputs that can exercise specific code locations in complex Android applications.

This thesis introduces a hybrid approach that combines two different input generation techniques--heuristic search based on genetic algorithm and random instigation of UI events, to reach …

Using Contextual Bandits To Improve Traffic Performance In Edge Network, Aziza Al Zadjali

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Edge computing network is a great candidate to reduce latency and enhance performance of the Internet. The flexibility afforded by Edge computing to handle data creates exciting range of possibilities. However, Edge servers have some limitations since Edge computing process and analyze partial sets of information. It is challenging to allocate computing and network resources rationally to satisfy the requirement of mobile devices under uncertain wireless network, and meet the constraints of datacenter servers too. To combat these issues, this dissertation proposes smart multi armed bandit algorithms that decide the appropriate connection setup for multiple network access technologies on the …

Aerial Flight Paths For Communication, Alisha Bevins

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This body of work presents an iterative process of refinement to understand naive perception of communication using the motion of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This includes what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area sought to communicate without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to present more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work goes through multiple iterations of state elicitation and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be …

Modernization Of Scienttific Mathematics Formula In Technology, Iwasan D. Kejawa Ed.D, Prof. Iwasan D. Kejawa Ed.D

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

Abstract
Is it true that we solve problem using techniques in form of formula? Mathematical formulas can be derived through thinking of a problem or situation. Research has shown that we can create formulas by applying theoretical, technical, and applied knowledge. The knowledge derives from brainstorming and actual experience can be represented by formulas. It is intended that this research article is geared by an audience of average knowledge level of solving mathematics and scientific intricacies. This work details an introductory level of simple, at times complex problems in a mathematical epidermis and computability and solvability in a Computer Science. …

Using An Integrative Machine Learning Approach To Study Microrna Regulation Networks In Pancreatic Cancer Progression, Roland Madadjim

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

With advances in genomic discovery tools, recent biomedical research has produced a massive amount of genomic data on post-transcriptional regulations related to various transcript factors, microRNAs, lncRNAs, epigenetic modifications, and genetic variations. In this direction, the field of gene regulation network inference is created and aims to understand the interactome regulations between these molecules (e.g., gene-gene, miRNA-gene) that take place to build models able to capture behavioral changes in biological systems. A question of interest arises in integrating such molecules to build a network while treating each specie in its uniqueness. Given the dynamic changes of interactome in chaotic systems …

Teachability And Interpretability In Reinforcement Learning, Jeevan Rajagopal

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There have been many recent advancements in the field of reinforcement learning, starting from the Deep Q Network playing various Atari 2600 games all the way to Google Deempind's Alphastar playing competitively in the game StarCraft. However, as the field challenges more complex environments, the current methods of training models and understanding their decision making become less effective. Currently, the problem is partially dealt with by simply adding more resources, but the need for a better solution remains.

This thesis proposes a reinforcement learning framework where a teacher or entity with domain knowledge of the task to complete can assist …

“The Revolution Will Not Be Supervised": An Investigation Of The Efficacy And Reasoning Process Of Self-Supervised Representations, Atharva Tendle

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Transfer learning technique enables training Deep Learning (DL) models in a data-efficient way for solving computer vision tasks. It involves pretraining a DL model to learn representations from a large and general-purpose source dataset, then fine-tuning the model using the task-specific target dataset. The dominant supervised learning (SL) approach for pretraining representations suffers from some limitations that include expensive labeling and poor generalizability. Recent advancements in the self-supervised learning (SSL) approach made it possible to learn effective representations from unlabeled data. The performance of the fine-tuned DL models based on pretrained SSL representations is on par with the state-of-the-art pretrained …

Exploring The Efficiency Of Self-Organizing Software Teams With Game Theory, Clay Stevens, Jared Soundy, Hau Chan

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Over the last two decades, software development has moved away from centralized, plan-based management toward agile methodologies such as Scrum. Agile methodologies are founded on a shared set of core principles, including self-organizing software development teams. Such teams are promoted as a way to increase both developer productivity and team morale, which is echoed by academic research. However, recent works on agile neglect to consider strategic behavior among developers, particularly during task assignment–one of the primary functions of a self-organizing team. This paper argues that self-organizing software teams could be readily modeled using game theory, providing insight into how agile …

Plasmonic Waveguides To Enhance Quantum Electrodynamic Phenomena At The Nanoscale, Ying Li, Christos Argyropoulos

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The emerging field of plasmonics can lead to enhanced light-matter interactions at extremely nanoscale regions. Plasmonic (metallic) devices promise to efficiently control both classical and quantum properties of light. Plasmonic waveguides are usually used to excite confined electromagnetic modes at the nanoscale that can strongly interact with matter. The analysis of these nanowaveguides exhibits similarities with their low frequency microwave counterparts. In this article, we review ways to study plasmonic nanostructures coupled to quantum optical emitters from a classical electromagnetic perspective. These quantum emitters are mainly used to generate single-photon quantum light that can be employed as a quantum bit …

Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Effort Allocation Of Contributors To Public Projects, Jared Soundy, Chenhao Wang, Clay Stevens, Hau Chan

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Public projects can succeed or fail for many reasons such as the feasibility of the original goal and coordination among contributors. One major reason for failure is that insufficient work leaves the project partially completed. For certain types of projects anything short of full completion is a failure (e.g., feature request on software projects in GitHub). Therefore, project success relies heavily on individuals allocating sufficient effort. When there are multiple public projects, each contributor needs to make decisions to best allocate his/her limited effort (e.g., time) to projects while considering the effort allocation decisions of other strategic contributors and his/her …

Predictive Maintenance Of Bearing Machinery Using Simulation- A Bibliometric Study, Karan Gulati Mr., Keshav Basandrai Mr., Shubham Tiwari Mr., Pooja Kamat Prof., Satish Kumar Dr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Modelling is a way of constructing a virtual representation of software and hardware that involves a real-world device. We will discover the behaviour of the system if the software elements of this model are guided by mathematical relationships. For testing conditions that may be difficult to replicate with hardware prototypes alone, modelling and simulation are particularly useful, especially in the early phase of the design process when hardware might not be available. Model-based approach in MATLAB-Simulink can be useful for predictive maintenance of machines as it can reduce unplanned downtimes and maintenance costs when industrial equipment breaks. Through this bibliometric …

A Novel Spatiotemporal Prediction Method Of Cumulative Covid-19 Cases, Junzhe Cai

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Prediction methods are important for many applications. In particular, an accurate prediction for the total number of cases for pandemics such as the Covid-19 pandemic could help medical preparedness by providing in time a sufficient supply of testing kits, hospital beds and medical personnel. This thesis experimentally compares the accuracy of ten prediction methods for the cumulative number of Covid-19 pandemic cases. These ten methods include two types of neural networks and extrapolation methods based on best fit linear, best fit quadratic, best fit cubic and Lagrange interpolation, as well as an extrapolation method from Revesz. We also consider the …

Suffix Tree, Minwise Hashing And Streaming Algorithms For Big Data Analysis In Bioinformatics, Sairam Behera

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this dissertation, we worked on several algorithmic problems in bioinformatics using mainly three approaches: (a) a streaming model, (b) sux-tree based indexing, and (c) minwise-hashing (minhash) and locality-sensitive hashing (LSH). The streaming models are useful for large data problems where a good approximation needs to be achieved with limited space usage. We developed an approximation algorithm (Kmer-Estimate) using the streaming approach to obtain a better estimation of the frequency of k-mer counts. A k-mer, a subsequence of length k, plays an important role in many bioinformatics analyses such as genome distance estimation. We also developed new methods that use …

Representational Learning Approach For Predicting Developer Expertise Using Eye Movements, Sumeet Maan

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The thesis analyzes an existing eye-tracking dataset collected while software developers were solving bug fixing tasks in an open-source system. The analysis is performed using a representational learning approach namely, Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP). The novel aspect of the analysis is the introduction of a new feature engineering method based on the eye-tracking data. This is then used to predict developer expertise on the data. The dataset used in this thesis is inherently more complex because it is collected in a very dynamic environment i.e., the Eclipse IDE using an eye-tracking plugin, iTrace. Previous work in this area only worked on …

Formal Concept Analysis Applications In Bioinformatics, Sarah Roscoe

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Bioinformatics is an important field that seeks to solve biological problems with the help of computation. One specific field in bioinformatics is that of genomics, the study of genes and their functions. Genomics can provide valuable analysis as to the interaction between how genes interact with their environment. One such way to measure the interaction is through gene expression data, which determines whether (and how much) a certain gene activates in a situation. Analyzing this data can be critical for predicting diseases or other biological reactions. One method used for analysis is Formal Concept Analysis (FCA), a computing technique based …

Investigating Factors Predicting Effective Learning In A Cs Professional Development Program For K-12 Teachers, Patrick Morrow

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The demand for K-12 Computer Science (CS) education is growing and there is not an adequate number of educators to match the demand. Comprehensive research was carried out to investigate and understand the influence of a summer two-week professional development (PD) program on teachers’ CS content and pedagogical knowledge, their confidence in such knowledge, their interest in and perceived value of CS, and the factors influencing such impacts. Two courses designed to train K-12 teachers to teach CS, focusing on both concepts and pedagogy skills were taught over two separate summers to two separate cohorts of teachers. Statistical and SWOT …

Routing Optimization In Heterogeneous Wireless Networks For Space And Mission-Driven Internet Of Things (Iot) Environments, Sara El Alaoui

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

As technological advances have made it possible to build cheap devices with more processing power and storage, and that are capable of continuously generating large amounts of data, the network has to undergo significant changes as well. The rising number of vendors and variety in platforms and wireless communication technologies have introduced heterogeneity to networks compromising the efficiency of existing routing algorithms. Furthermore, most of the existing solutions assume and require connection to the backbone network and involve changes to the infrastructures, which are not always possible -- a 2018 report by the Federal Communications Commission shows that over 31% …

Formal Language Constraints In Deep Reinforcement Learning For Self-Driving Vehicles, Tyler Bienhoff

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In recent years, self-driving vehicles have become a holy grail technology that, once fully developed, could radically change the daily behaviors of people and enhance safety. The complexities of controlling a car in a constantly changing environment are too immense to directly program how the vehicle should behave in each specific scenario. Thus, a common technique when developing autonomous vehicles is to use reinforcement learning, where vehicles can be trained in simulated and real-world environments to make proper decisions in a wide variety of scenarios. Reinforcement learning models, however, have uncertainties in how the vehicle acts, especially in a previously …

A Novel Path Loss Forecast Model To Support Digital Twins For High Frequency Communications Networks, James Marvin Taylor Jr

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The need for long-distance High Frequency (HF) communications in the 3-30 MHz frequency range seemed to diminish at the end of the 20th century with the advent of space-based communications and the spread of fiber optic-connected digital networks. Renewed interest in HF has emerged as an enabler for operations in austere locations and for its ability to serve as a redundant link when space-based and terrestrial communication channels fail. Communications system designers can create a “digital twin” system to explore the operational advantages and constraints of the new capability. Existing wireless channel models can adequately simulate communication channel conditions with …

Power-Over-Tether Uas Leveraged For Nearly-Indefinite Meteorological Data Acquisition, Daniel Rico, Carrick Detweiler, Francisco Muñoz-Arriola

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in agriculture has risen in the past decade. These systems are key to modernizing agriculture. UASs collect and elucidate data previously difficult to obtain and used to help increase agricultural efficiency and production. Typical commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UASs are limited by small payloads and short flight times. Such limits inhibit their ability to provide abundant data at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this paper, we describe the design and construction of the tethered aircraft unmanned system (TAUS), which is a novel power-over-tether UAS leveraging the physical presence of the tether to launch multiple sensors along …

Reducing Run-Time Adaptation Space Via Analysis Of Possible Utility Bounds, Clay Stevens, Hamid Bagheri

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

Self-adaptive systems often employ dynamic programming or similar techniques to select optimal adaptations at run-time. These techniques suffer from the “curse of dimensionality", increasing the cost of run-time adaptation decisions. We propose a novel approach that improves upon the state-of-the-art proactive self-adaptation techniques to reduce the number of possible adaptations that need be considered for each run-time adaptation decision. The approach, realized in a tool called Thallium, employs a combination of automated formal modeling techniques to (i) analyze a structural model of the system showing which configurations are reachable from other configurations and (ii) compute the utility that can be …

Understanding Eye Gaze Patterns In Code Comprehension, Jonathan Saddler

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Program comprehension is a sub-field of software engineering that seeks to understand how developers understand programs. Comprehension acts as a starting point for many software engineering tasks such as bug fixing, refactoring, and feature creation. The dissertation presents a series of empirical studies to understand how developers comprehend software in realistic settings. The unique aspect of this work is the use of eye tracking equipment to gather fine-grained detailed information of what developers look at in software artifacts while they perform realistic tasks in an environment familiar to them, namely a context including both the Integrated Development Environment (Eclipse or …

Emotional Awareness During Bug Fixes – A Pilot Study, Jada O. Loro, Abigail L. Schneff, Sarah J. Oran, Bonita Sharif

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This study examines the effects of a programmer's emotional awareness on progress while fixing bugs. The goal of the study is to capitalize on emotional awareness to ultimately increase progress made during software development. This process could result in improved software maintenance.

An Eye Tracking Replication Study Of A Randomized Controlled Trial On The Effects Of Embedded Computer Language Switching, Cole Peterson

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The use of multiple programming languages (polyglot programming) during software development is common practice in modern software development. However, not much is known about how the use of these different languages affects developer productivity. The study presented in this thesis replicates a randomized controlled trial that investigates the use of multiple languages in the context of database programming tasks. Participants in our study were given coding tasks written in Java and one of three SQL-like embedded languages: plain SQL in strings, Java methods only, a hybrid embedded language that was more similar to Java. In addition to recording the online …

A Memory Usage Comparison Between Jitana And Soot, Yuanjiu Hu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

There are several factors that make analyzing Android apps to address dependability and security concerns challenging. These factors include (i) resource efficiency as analysts need to be able to analyze large code-bases to look for issues that can exist in the application code and underlying platform code; (ii) scalability as today’s cybercriminals deploy attacks that may involve many participating apps; and (iii) in many cases, security analysts often rely on dynamic or hybrid analysis techniques to detect and identify the sources of issues.

The underlying principle governing the design of existing program analysis engines is the main cause that prevents …

An Algorithm For Building Language Superfamilies Using Swadesh Lists, Bill Mutabazi

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The main contributions of this thesis are the following: i. Developing an algorithm to generate language families and superfamilies given for each input language a Swadesh list represented using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA) notation. ii. The algorithm is novel in using the Levenshtein distance metric on the IPA representation and in the way it measures overall distance between pairs of Swadesh lists. iii. Building a Swadesh list for the author's native Kinyarwanda language because a Swadesh list could not be found even after an extensive search for it.

Adviser: Peter Revesz

Advanced Techniques To Detect Complex Android Malware, Zhiqiang Li

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Android is currently the most popular operating system for mobile devices in the world. However, its openness is the main reason for the majority of malware to be targeting Android devices. Various approaches have been developed to detect malware.

Unfortunately, new breeds of malware utilize sophisticated techniques to defeat malware detectors. For example, to defeat signature-based detectors, malware authors change the malware’s signatures to avoid detection. As such, a more effective approach to detect malware is by leveraging malware’s behavioral characteristics. However, if a behavior-based detector is based on static analysis, its reported results may contain a large number of …

Open Dynamic Interaction Network: A Cell-Phone Based Platform For Responsive Ema, Gisela Font Sayeras

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The study of social networks is central to advancing our understanding of a wide range of phenomena in human societies. Social networks co-evolve concurrently alongside the individuals within them. Selection processes cause network structure to change in response to emerging similarities/differences between individuals. At the same time, diffusion processes occur as individuals influence one another when they interact across network links. Indeed, each network link is a logical abstraction that aggregates many short-lived pairwise interactions of interest that are being studied. Traditionally, network co-evolution is studied by periodically taking static snapshots of social networks using surveys. Unfortunately, participation incentives …

An Anns Based Failure Detection Method For Onos Sdon Controller, Shideh Yavary Mehr

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Network reachability is an important factor of an optical telecommunication network. In a wavelength-division-muliplexing (WDM) optical network, any failure can cause a large amount of loss and disruptions in network. Failures can occur in network elements, link, and component inside a node or etc. Since major network disruptions can caused network performance degradations, it is necessary that operators have solutions to prevent such those failures. This work examines a prediction model in optical networks and propose a protection plan using a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm called Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) using Mininet emulator. ANN is one of the best method …