Controls and Control Theory Commons^™

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

Detection Systems For Airbag Deployment, Ryan S. Kee

Honors Program Projects

The airbag enablement system in today’s automobiles is not ideal and may allow airbags to deploy when they should not. Weight sensors detect pressure when someone sits in a passenger seat, enabling the airbag to deploy if an accident occurs. This system is flawed. For example, if a heavy box is placed in a passenger seat, the airbag will be unnecessarily enabled. The goal of this research project was to determine if different sensors—not weight sensors or cameras—could be used to identify the occupant of an automobile seat.

Using a microchip programmed in C language, a circuit was designed with …

Neuromodulation Based Control Of Autonomous Robots On A Cloud Computing Platform, Cameron Muhammad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the advancement of neurobiologically plausible models and computer networking has resulted in new ways of implementing control systems on robotic platforms. The work presents a control approach based on vertebrate neuromodulation and its implementation on autonomous robots in the open-source, open-access environment of robot operating system (ROS). A spiking neural network (SNN) is used to model the neuromodulatory function for generating context based behavioral responses of the robots to sensory input signals. The neural network incorporates three types of neurons- cholinergic and noradrenergic (ACh/NE) neurons for attention focusing and action selection, dopaminergic (DA) neurons for rewards- and …