Other Computer Engineering Commons^™

Blockchain Design For A Secure Pharmaceutical Supply Chain, Zhe Xu

Masters Theses

In the realm of pharmaceuticals, particularly during the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic, the supply chain for drugs has faced significant strains. The increased demand for vaccines and therapeutics has revealed critical weaknesses in the current drug supply chain management systems. If not addressed, these challenges could lead to severe societal impacts, including the rise of counterfeit medications and diminishing trust in government authorities.

The study identified that more than the current strategies, such as the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) in the U.S., which focuses on unique authentication and traceability codes for prescription drugs, is needed to …

Analyzing The System Features, Usability, And Performance Of A Containerized Application On Cloud Computing Systems, Anoop Abraham

Masters Theses

This study analyzed the system features, usability, and performance of three serverless cloud computing platforms: Google Cloud’s Cloud Run, Amazon Web Service’s App Runner, and Microsoft Azure’s Container Apps. The analysis was conducted on a containerized mobile application designed to track real-time bus locations for San Antonio public buses on specific routes and provide estimated arrival times for selected bus stops. The study evaluated various system-related features, including service configuration, pricing, and memory & CPU capacity, along with performance metrics such as container latency, Distance Matrix API response time, and CPU utilization for each service. Easy-to-use usability was also evaluated …

Design And Fabrication Of A Trapped Ion Quantum Computing Testbed, Christopher A. Caron

Masters Theses

Here we present the design, assembly and successful ion trapping of a room-temperature ion trap system with a custom designed and fabricated surface electrode ion trap, which allows for rapid prototyping of novel trap designs such that new chips can be installed and reach UHV in under 2 days. The system has demonstrated success at trapping and maintaining both single ions and cold crystals of ions. We achieve this by fabricating our own custom surface Paul traps in the UMass Amherst cleanroom facilities, which are then argon ion milled, diced, mounted and wire bonded to an interposer which is placed …

Sel4 On Risc-V - Developing High Assurance Platforms With Modular Open-Source Architectures, Michael A. Doran Jr

Masters Theses

Virtualization is now becoming an industry standard for modern embedded systems. Modern embedded systems can now support multiple applications on a single hardware platform while meeting power and cost requirements. Virtualization on an embedded system is achieved through the design of the hardware-software interface. Instruction set architecture, ISA, defines the hardware-software interface for an embedded system. At the hardware level the ISA, provides extensions to support virtualization.

In addition to an ISA that supports hypervisor extensions it is equally important to provide a hypervisor completely capable of exploiting the benefits of virtualization for securing modern embedded systems. Currently there does …

Analysis Of Hardware Accelerated Deep Learning And The Effects Of Degradation On Performance, Samuel C. Leach

Masters Theses

As convolutional neural networks become more prevalent in research and real world applications, the need for them to be faster and more robust will be a constant battle. This thesis investigates the effect of degradation being introduced to an image prior to object recognition with a convolutional neural network. As well as experimenting with methods to reduce the degradation and improve performance. Gaussian smoothing and additive Gaussian noise are both analyzed degradation models within this thesis and are reduced with Gaussian and Butterworth masks using unsharp masking and smoothing, respectively. The results show that each degradation is disruptive to the …

A Secure Architecture For Defense Against Return Address Corruption, Grayson J. Bruner

Masters Theses

The advent of the Internet of Things has brought about a staggering level of inter-connectivity between common devices used every day. Unfortunately, security is not a high priority for developers designing these IoT devices. Often times the trade-off of security comes at too high of a cost in other areas, such as performance or power consumption. This is especially prevalent in resource-constrained devices, which make up a large number of IoT devices. However, a lack of security could lead to a cascade of security breaches rippling through connected devices. One of the most common attacks used by hackers is return …

Ticknet: A Lightweight Deep Classifier For Tick Recognition, Li Wang

Masters Theses

The world is increasingly controlled by machine learning and deep learning. Deep neural networks are becoming powerful, encroaching on many tasks in computer vision system areas previously seen as the unique domain of humans, such as image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation. The success of a deep learning model at a specific application is determined by a sequence of choices, like what kind of deep neural network will be used, what data to be fed into the deep model, and what manners will be adopted to train a deep model.

The goal of this work is to …

Navigation Instruction Validation Tool And Indoor Wayfinding Training System For People With Disabilities, Linlin Ding

Masters Theses

According to World Health Survey, there are 785 million (15.6%) people in the world that live with a disability. It is a well-known fact that lack of access to public transportation is a barrier for people with disabilities in seeking work or accessing health care. In this research, we seek to increase access to public transportation by introducing a virtual pre-travel training system that enables people with disabilities to get familiar with a public transportation venue prior to arriving at the venue. Using this system, users establish a mental map of the target environment prior to their arrival to the …

Efficient Scaling Of A Web Proxy Cluster, Hao Zhang

Masters Theses

With the continuing growth in network traffic and increasing diversity in web content, web caching, together with various network functions (NFs), has been introduced to enhance security, optimize network performance, and save expenses. In a large enterprise network with more than tens of thousands of users, a single proxy server is not enough to handle a large number of requests and turns to group processing. When multiple web cache proxies are working as a cluster, they talk with each other and share cached objects by using internet cache protocol (ICP). This leads to poor scalability.

This thesis describes the development …

Query On Knowledge Graphs With Hierarchical Relationships, Kaihua Liu

Masters Theses

The dramatic popularity of graph database has resulted in a growing interest in graph queries. Two major topics are included in graph queries. One is based on structural relationship to find meaningful results, such as subgraph pattern match and shortest-path query. The other one focuses on semantic-based query to find question answering from knowledge bases. However, most of these queries take knowledge graphs as flat forms and use only normal relationship to mine these graphs, which may lead to mistakes in the query results. In this thesis, we find hierarchical relationship in the knowledge on their semantic relations and make …

Virtualization Of Closed-Loop Sensor Networks, Priyanka Dattatri Kedalagudde

Masters Theses

The existing closed-loop sensor networks are based on architectures that are designed and implemented for one specific application and require dedicated sensing and computational resources. This prevents the sharing of these networks. In this work, we propose an architecture of virtualization to allow sharing of closed-loop sensor networks. We also propose a scheduling approach that will manage requests from competing applications and evaluate their impact on system utilization against utilization achieved by more traditional, dedicated sensor networks. These algorithms are evaluated through trace-driven simulations, where the trace data is taken from CASA’s closed-loop weather radar sensor network. Results from this …

Explorations Into Machine Learning Techniques For Precipitation Nowcasting, Aditya Nagarajan

Masters Theses

Recent advances in cloud-based big-data technologies now makes data driven solutions feasible for increasing numbers of scientific computing applications. One such data driven solution approach is machine learning where patterns in large data sets are brought to the surface by finding complex mathematical relationships within the data. Nowcasting or short-term prediction of rainfall in a given region is an important problem in meteorology. In this thesis we explore the nowcasting problem through a data driven approach by formulating it as a machine learning problem.

State-of-the-art nowcasting systems today are based on numerical models which describe the physical processes leading to …

Scheduling For Timely Passenger Delivery In A Large Scale Ride Sharing System, Yang Zhang

Masters Theses

Taxi ride sharing is one of the most promising solutions to urban transportation issues, such as traffic congestion, gas insufficiency, air pollution, limited parking space and unaffordable parking charge, taxi shortage in peak hours, etc. Despite the enormous demands of such service and its exciting social benefits, there is still a shortage of successful automated operations of ride sharing systems around the world. Two of the bottlenecks are: (1) on-time delivery is not guaranteed; (2) matching and scheduling drivers and passengers is a NP-hard problem, and optimization based models do not support real time scheduling on large scale systems.

This …

Architecture For Real-Time, Low-Swap Embedded Vision Using Fpgas, Steven Andrew Clukey

Masters Theses

In this thesis we designed, prototyped, and constructed a printed circuit board for real-time, low size, weight, and power (SWaP) HDMI video processing and developed a general purpose library of image processing functions for FPGAs.

The printed circuit board is a baseboard for a Xilinx Zynq based system-on-module (SoM). The board provides power, HDMI input, and HDMI output to the SoM and enables low-SWaP, high-resolution, real-time video processing.

The image processing library for FPGAs is designed for high performance and high reusability. These objectives are achieved by utilizing the Chisel hardware construction language to create parameterized modules that construct low-level …

Extending Capability And Implementing A Web Interface For The Xalt Software Monitoring Tool, Kapil Agrawal

Masters Theses

As high performance computing centers evolve in terms of hardware, software, and user-base, the act of monitoring and managing such systems requires specialized tools. The tool discussed in this thesis is XALT, which is a collaborative effort between the National Institute for Computational Sciences and Texas Advanced Computing Center. XALT is designed to track link-time and job level information for applications that are compiled and executed on any Linux cluster, workstation, or high-end supercomputer. The key objectives of this work are to extend the existing functionality of XALT and implement a real-time web portal to easily visualize the tracked data. …

Spotlight: An Information Service For The Cloud, Xue Ouyang

Masters Theses

Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud platforms are incredibly complex: they rent hundreds of different types of servers across multiple geographical regions under a wide range of contract types that offer varying tradeoffs between risk and cost. Unfortunately, the internal dynamics of cloud platforms are opaque in several dimensions. For example, while the risk of servers not being available when requested is critical in optimizing these risk-cost tradeoffs, it is not typically made visible to users. Thus, inspired by prior work on Internet bandwidth probing, we propose actively probing cloud platforms to explicitly learn such information, where each "probe'' is a request for a …

Standardizing Functional Safety Assessments For Off-The-Shelf Instrumentation And Controls, Andrew Michael Nack

Masters Theses

It is typical for digital instrumentation and controls, used to manage significant risk, to undergo substantial amounts of scrutiny. The equipment must be proven to have the necessary level of design integrity. The details of the scrutiny vary based on the particular industry, but the ultimate goal is to provide sufficient evidence that the equipment will operate successfully when performing their required functions.

To be able to stand up to the scrutiny and more importantly, successfully perform the required safety functions, the equipment must be designed to defend against random hardware failures and also to prevent systematic faults. These design …

Indoor And Outdoor Real Time Information Collection In Disaster Scenario, Dongyi Yang

Masters Theses

A disaster usually severely harms human health and property. After a disaster, great amount of information of a disaster area is needed urgently. The information not only indicates the severity of the disaster, but also is crucial for an efficient search and rescue process. In order to quickly and accurately collect real time information in a disaster scenario, a mobile platform is developed for an outdoor scenario and a localization and navigation system for responders is introduced for an indoor scenario.

The mobile platform has been integrated to the DIORAMA system. It is built with a 6-wheel robot chassis along …

Function Verification Of Combinational Arithmetic Circuits, Duo Liu

Masters Theses

Hardware design verification is the most challenging part in overall hardware design process. It is because design size and complexity are growing very fast while the requirement for performance is ever higher. Conventional simulation-based verification method cannot keep up with the rapid increase in the design size, since it is impossible to exhaustively test all input vectors of a complex design. An important part of hardware verification is combinational arithmetic circuit verification. It draws a lot of attention because flattening the design into bit-level, known as the bit-blasting problem, hinders the efficiency of many current formal techniques. The goal of …

Statistical Analysis Of Disturbances In Power Transmission Systems, Liu Liu

Masters Theses

Disturbance analysis is essential to the study of the power transmission systems. Traditionally, disturbances are described as megawatt (MW) events, but the access to data is inefficient due to the slow installation and authorization process of the monitoring device. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to disturbance analysis conducted at the distribution level by exploiting the frequency recordings from Frequency Disturbance Recorders (FDRs) of the Frequency Monitoring Network (FNET/GridEye), based on the relationship between frequency change and the power loss of disturbances - linearly associated by the Frequency Response. We first analyze the real disturbance records of North …

Improved Forensic Medical Device Security Through Eating Detection, Nathan Lee Henry

Masters Theses

Patients are increasingly reliant on implantable medical device systems today. For patients with diabetes, an implantable insulin pump system or artificial pancreas can greatly improve quality of life. As with any device, these devices can and do suffer from software and hardware issues, often reported as a safety event. For a forensic investigator, a safety event is indistinguishable from a potential security event. In this thesis, we show a new sensor system that can be transparently integrated into existing and future electronic diabetes therapy systems while providing additional forensic data to help distinguish between safety and security events. We demonstrate …

Automated Generation Of Simulink Models For Enumeration Hybrid Automata, David Aaron Heise

Masters Theses

An enumeration hybrid automaton has been shown in principle to be ready for automated transformation into a Simulink implementation. This paper describes a strategy for and a demonstration of automated construction. This is accomplished by designing a data model which represents EHA data and providing a mapping from EHA data points to Simulink blocks.

A Framework For Federated Two-Factor Authentication Enabling Cost-Effective Secure Access To Distributed Cyberinfrastructure, Matthew Allan Ezell

Masters Theses

As cyber attacks become increasingly sophisticated, the security measures used to mitigate the risks must also increase in sophistication. One time password (OTP) systems provide strong authentication because security credentials are not reusable, thus thwarting credential replay attacks. The credential changes regularly, making brute-force attacks significantly more difficult. In high performance computing, end users may require access to resources housed at several different service provider locations. The ability to share a strong token between multiple computing resources reduces cost and complexity.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) provides access to digital resources, including supercomputers, …

Automated Visual Monitoring Of Machining Equipment, Timothy Wayne Ragland

Masters Theses

Metalworking equipment is designed to modify a sheet, rod, or block of metal material in order to shape it for a specific application. This equipment can operate on the metal by bending it, drilling through it, or by cutting it. For small-scale operations, many tools require a significant amount of manual input. Unless the operator has extensive training and experience, the manual input may not be precise enough for fine details that may be needed in some applications. For example, with a bending brake, obtaining an accurate angle for the bend may be quite difficult. For a particular application, an …

Dynamic Application Level Security Sensors, Christopher Thomas Rathgeb

Masters Theses

The battle for cyber supremacy is a cat and mouse game: evolving threats from internal and external sources make it difficult to protect critical systems. With the diverse and high risk nature of these threats, there is a need for robust techniques that can quickly adapt and address this evolution. Existing tools such as Splunk, Snort, and Bro help IT administrators defend their networks by actively parsing through network traffic or system log data. These tools have been thoroughly developed and have proven to be a formidable defense against many cyberattacks. However, they are vulnerable to zero-day attacks, slow attacks, …

Gpu Implementation Of A Novel Approach To Cramer’S Algorithm For Solving Large Scale Linear Systems, Rosanne Lane West

Masters Theses

Scientific computing often requires solving systems of linear equations. Most software pack- ages for solving large-scale linear systems use Gaussian elimination methods such as LU- decomposition. An alternative method, recently introduced by K. Habgood and I. Arel, involves an application of Cramer’s Rule and Chio’s condensation to achieve a better per- forming system for solving linear systems on parallel computing platforms. This thesis describes an implementation of this algorithm on an nVidia graphics processor card us- ing the CUDA language. Increased performance, relative to the serial implementation, is demonstrated, paving the way for future parallel realizations of the scheme.