Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Reliability-Based Routing Protocol For Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks, James Bernsen

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs), an emerging technology, would allow vehicles to form a self-organized network without the aid of a permanent infrastructure. As a prerequisite to communication in VANETs, an efficient route between communicating nodes in the network must be established, and the routing protocol must adapt to the rapidly changing topology of vehicles in motion. This is one of the goals of VANET routing protocols. In this thesis, we present an efficient routing protocol for VANETs, called the Reliable Inter-VEhicular Routing (RIVER) protocol. RIVER utilizes an undirected graph that represents the surrounding street layout where the vertices of …

Cluster-Based Term Weighting And Document Ranking Models, Keerthiram Murugesan

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

A term weighting scheme measures the importance of a term in a collection. A document ranking model uses these term weights to find the rank or score of a document in a collection. We present a series of cluster-based term weighting and document ranking models based on the TF-IDF and Okapi BM25 models. These term weighting and document ranking models update the inter-cluster and intra-cluster frequency components based on the generated clusters. These inter-cluster and intra-cluster frequency components are used for weighting the importance of a term in addition to the term and document frequency components. In this thesis, we …

A Trusted Storage System For The Cloud, Sushama Karumanchi

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Data stored in third party storage systems like the cloud might not be secure since confidentiality and integrity of data are not guaranteed. Though cloud computing provides cost-effective storage services, it is a third party service and so, a client cannot trust the cloud service provider to store its data securely within the cloud. Hence, many organizations and users may not be willing to use the cloud services to store their data in the cloud until certain security guarantees are made. In this thesis, a solution to the problem of securely storing the client’s data by maintaining the confidentiality and …

3d Reconstruction Using Multi-View Imaging System, Conglin Huang

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This thesis presents a new system that reconstructs the 3D representation of dental casts. To maintain the integrity of the 3D representation, a standard model is built to cover the blind spots that the camera cannot reach. The standard model is obtained by scanning a real human mouth model with a laser scanner. Then the model is simplified by an algorithm which is based on iterative contraction of vertex pairs. The simplified standard model uses a local parametrization method to obtain the curvature information. The system uses a digital camera and a square tube mirror in front of the camera …

Data Assimilation And Visualization For Ensemble Wildland Fire Models, Soham Chakraborty

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

This thesis describes an observation function for a dynamic data driven application system designed to produce short range forecasts of the behavior of a wildland fire. The thesis presents an overview of the atmosphere-fire model, which models the complex interactions between the fire and the surrounding weather and the data assimilation module which is responsible for assimilating sensor information into the model. Observation plays an important role in data assimilation as it is used to estimate the model variables at the sensor locations. Also described is the implementation of a portable and user friendly visualization tool which displays the locations …

Bidirectional Lao* Algorithm (A Faster Approach To Solve Goal-Directed Mdps), Venkata Deepti Kiran Bhuma

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Uncertainty is a feature of many AI applications. While there are polynomial-time algorithms for planning in stochastic systems, planning is still slow, in part because most algorithms plan for all eventualities. Algorithms such as LAO* are able to find good or optimal policies more quickly when the starting state of the system is known.

In this thesis we present an extension to LAO*, called BLAO*. BLAO* is an extension of the LAO* algorithm to a bidirectional search. We show that BLAO* finds optimal or ^_E-optimal solutions for goal-directed MDPs without necessarily evaluating the entire state space. BLAO* …