Computer Engineering Commons^™

Assessment Of Audio Interfaces For Use In Smartphone Based Spatial Learning Systems For The Blind, Shreyans Jain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent advancements in the field of indoor positioning and mobile computing promise development of smart phone based indoor navigation systems. Currently, the preliminary implementations of such systems only use visual interfaces—meaning that they are inaccessible to blind and low vision users. According to the World Health Organization, about 39 million people in the world are blind. This necessitates the need for development and evaluation of non-visual interfaces for indoor navigation systems that support safe and efficient spatial learning and navigation behavior. This thesis research has empirically evaluated several different approaches through which spatial information about the environment can be conveyed …

Novelty-Assisted Interactive Evolution Of Control Behaviors, Brian G. Woolley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The field of evolutionary computation is inspired by the achievements of natural evolution, in which there is no final objective. Yet the pursuit of objectives is ubiquitous in simulated evolution because evolutionary algorithms that can consistently achieve established benchmarks are lauded as successful, thus reinforcing this paradigm. A significant problem is that such objective approaches assume that intermediate stepping stones will increasingly resemble the final objective when in fact they often do not. The consequence is that while solutions may exist, searching for such objectives may not discover them. This problem with objectives is demonstrated through an experiment in this …

Performance Study Of Ofdm Over Fading Channels For Wireless Communications, Ahmed Alshammari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a very efficient multicarrier technique. OFDM is used more and more in recent wideband digital communications. It has numerous advantages such as the ability to handle severe channel conditions, efficient spectral usage, reduced inter symbol interference (ISI), and high data rate. Therefore, it has been utilized in many wired and wireless communication systems like DSL, wireless networks and 4G mobile communications.

Studying the performance of OFDM over different channels is the main focus of this research. Channels' environments simulated in Matlab are additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and fading channels. Each channel affects the …

Virtual Worlds And Conservational Channel Evolution And Pollutant Transport Systems (Concepts), Chenchutta Denaye Jackson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many models exist that predict channel morphology. Channel morphology is defined as the change in geometric parameters of a river. Channel morphology is affected by many factors. Some of these factors are caused either by man or by nature. To combat the adverse effects that man and nature may cause to a water system, scientists and engineers develop stream rehabilitation plans. Stream rehabilitation as defined by Shields et al., states that "restoration is the return from a degraded ecosystem back to a close approximation of its remaining natural potential" [Shields et al., 2003]. Engineers construct plans that will restore streams …

Using Eye Tracking And Attention Maps In Computer Science Education, Austin Pernell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Eye tracking has been used for many different areas of study where a user's eye movements are considered the most important information available. Before eye tracking was possible, the only way that information could be obtained was to ask the user where they looked and what caught their attention. Now, with the rise of eye tracking cameras, this data can be captured, stored, and processed in a meaningful way. These cameras aren't perfectly accurate however and there is still some interpretation that must be applied to more accurately represent the true gaze path of the user. This paper establishes some …

Implementation Of Multiple-Instance Learning In Drug Activity Prediction, Gang Fu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the context of drug discovery and development, much effort has been exerted to determine which conformers of a given molecule are responsible for the observed biological activity. In this work we aimed to predict bioactive conformers using a variant of supervised learning, named multiple-instance learning. A single molecule, treated as a bag of conformers, is biologically active if and only if at least one of its conformers, treated as an instance, is responsible for the observed bioactivity; and a molecule is inactive if none of its conformers is responsible for the observed bioactivity. The implementation requires instance-based embedding, and …

Specification And Runtime Checking Of Timing Constraints In Safety Critical Java, Ghaith Haddad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Java platform is becoming a vital tool for developing real-time and safety-critical systems. Design patterns and the availability of Java libraries, both provide solutions to many known problems. Furthermore, the object-oriented nature of Java simplifies modular development of real-time systems. However, limitations of Java as a programming language for real-time systems are a notable obstacle to producing safe real-time systems. These limitations are found in the unpredictable execution model of the language, due to Java’s garbage collector, and the lack of support for non-functional specification and verification tools. In this dissertation I introduce SafeJML, a specification language for support …