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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Femtosecond Laser Written Volumetric Diffractive Optical Elements And Their Applications, Jiyeon Choi Jan 2009

Femtosecond Laser Written Volumetric Diffractive Optical Elements And Their Applications, Jiyeon Choi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the first demonstration of femtosecond laser written waveguides in 1996, femtosecond laser direct writing (FLDW) has been providing a versatile means to fabricate embedded 3-D microstructures in transparent materials. The key mechanisms are nonlinear absorption processes that occur when a laser beam is tightly focused into a material and the intensity of the focused beam reaches the range creating enough free electrons to induce structural modification. One of the most useful features that can be exploited in fabricating photonic structures is the refractive index change which results from the localized energy deposition. The laser processing system for FLDW can …


Visual Inspection Of Railroad Tracks, Pavel Babenko Jan 2009

Visual Inspection Of Railroad Tracks, Pavel Babenko

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we have developed computer vision methods for measurement of rail gauge, and reliable identification and localization of structural defects in railroad tracks. The rail gauge is the distance between the innermost sides of the two parallel steel rails. We have developed two methods for evaluation of rail gauge. These methods were designed for different hardware setups: the first method works with two pairs of unaligned video cameras while the second method works with depth maps generated by paired laser range scanners. We have also developed a method for detection of rail defects such as damaged or missed …


Detecting Malicious Software By Dynamicexecution, Jianyong Dai Jan 2009

Detecting Malicious Software By Dynamicexecution, Jianyong Dai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Traditional way to detect malicious software is based on signature matching. However, signature matching only detects known malicious software. In order to detect unknown malicious software, it is necessary to analyze the software for its impact on the system when the software is executed. In one approach, the software code can be statically analyzed for any malicious patterns. Another approach is to execute the program and determine the nature of the program dynamically. Since the execution of malicious code may have negative impact on the system, the code must be executed in a controlled environment. For that purpose, we have …


Alliances In Graphs: Parameterized Algorithms And On Partitioning Series-Parallel Graphs, Rosa Enciso Jan 2009

Alliances In Graphs: Parameterized Algorithms And On Partitioning Series-Parallel Graphs, Rosa Enciso

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Alliances are used to denote agreements between members of a group with similar interests. Alliances can occur between nations, biological sequences, business cartels, and other entities. The notion of alliances in graphs was first introduced by Kristiansen, Hedetniemi, and Hedetniemi in . A defensive alliance in a graph G = (V, E) is a non empty set S ⊆ V where, for all x ∈ S, |N[x] ∩ S| ≥ |N[x] − S|. Consequently, every vertex that is a member of a defensive alliance has at least as many vertices defending it as there are vertices attacking it. Alliances can …


Design And Analysis Of Effective Routing And Channel Scheduling For Wavelength Division Multiplexing Optical Networks, Xingbo Gao Jan 2009

Design And Analysis Of Effective Routing And Channel Scheduling For Wavelength Division Multiplexing Optical Networks, Xingbo Gao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Optical networking, employing wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), is seen as the technology of the future for the Internet. This dissertation investigates several important problems affecting optical circuit switching (OCS) and optical burst switching (OBS) networks. Novel algorithms and new approaches to improve the performance of these networks through effective routing and channel scheduling are presented. Extensive simulations and analytical modeling have both been used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in achieving lower blocking probability, better fairness as well as faster switching. The simulation tests were performed over a variety of optical network topologies including the ring and …


Concept Learning By Example Decomposition, Sameer Joshi Jan 2009

Concept Learning By Example Decomposition, Sameer Joshi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For efficient understanding and prediction in natural systems, even in artificially closed ones, we usually need to consider a number of factors that may combine in simple or complex ways. Additionally, many modern scientific disciplines face increasingly large datasets from which to extract knowledge (for example, genomics). Thus to learn all but the most trivial regularities in the natural world, we rely on different ways of simplifying the learning problem. One simplifying technique that is highly pervasive in nature is to break down a large learning problem into smaller ones; to learn the smaller, more manageable problems; and then to …


Connectionless Approach: A Localized Scheme To Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Yao Ho Jan 2009

Connectionless Approach: A Localized Scheme To Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, Yao Ho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

According to a Gartner Group (www.gartner.com) report in September 2008, the worldwide telecommunications market is on pace to reach $2 trillion in 2008. Gartner predicts that by 2012, the ratio of mobile to fixed connections will exceed 4-to-1. The North American mobile data market grew to 141.1 million connections in 2007, with a compound annual growth rate of 41.7 percent. It is believed that a large portion will be ad hoc and multi-hop connections, which will open many opportunities for Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) applications and Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) applications. A MANET is a self-organizing multi-hop wireless network …


Modeling Scenes And Human Activities In Videos, Arslan Basharat Jan 2009

Modeling Scenes And Human Activities In Videos, Arslan Basharat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address the problem of understanding human activities in videos by developing a two-pronged approach: coarse level modeling of scene activities and fine level modeling of individual activities. At the coarse level, where the resolution of the video is low, we rely on person tracks. At the fine level, richer features are available to identify different parts of the human body, therefore we rely on the body joint tracks. There are three main goals of this dissertation: (1) identify unusual activities at the coarse level, (2) recognize different activities at the fine level, and (3) predict the …


Learning Techniques For Information Retrieval And Mining In High-Dimensional Databases, Hao Cheng Jan 2009

Learning Techniques For Information Retrieval And Mining In High-Dimensional Databases, Hao Cheng

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main focus of my research is to design effective learning techniques for information retrieval and mining in high-dimensional databases. There are two main aspects in the retrieval and mining research: accuracy and efficiency. The accuracy problem is how to return results which can better match the ground truth, and the efficiency problem is how to evaluate users' requests and execute learning algorithms as fast as possible. However, these problems are non-trivial because of the complexity of the high-level semantic concepts, the heterogeneous natures of the feature space, the high dimensionality of data representations and the size of the databases. …


Efficient Techniques For Relevance Feedback Processing In Content-Based Image Retrieval, Danzhou Liu Jan 2009

Efficient Techniques For Relevance Feedback Processing In Content-Based Image Retrieval, Danzhou Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems, there are two general types of search: target search and category search. Unlike queries in traditional database systems, users in most cases cannot specify an ideal query to retrieve the desired results for either target search or category search in multimedia database systems, and have to rely on iterative feedback to refine their query. Efficient evaluation of such iterative queries can be a challenge, especially when the multimedia database contains a large number of entries, and the search needs many iterations, and when the underlying distance measure is computationally expensive. The overall processing costs, …


Geometric Invariance In The Analysis Of Human Motion In Video Data, Yuping Shen Jan 2009

Geometric Invariance In The Analysis Of Human Motion In Video Data, Yuping Shen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human motion analysis is one of the major problems in computer vision research. It deals with the study of the motion of human body in video data from different aspects, ranging from the tracking of body parts and reconstruction of 3D human body configuration, to higher level of interpretation of human action and activities in image sequences. When human motion is observed through video camera, it is perspectively distorted and may appear totally different from different viewpoints. Therefore it is highly challenging to establish correct relationships between human motions across video sequences with different camera settings. In this work, we …


Scheduling And Resource Management For Complex Systems: From Large-Scale Distributed Systems To Very Large Sensor Networks, Chen Yu Jan 2009

Scheduling And Resource Management For Complex Systems: From Large-Scale Distributed Systems To Very Large Sensor Networks, Chen Yu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we focus on multiple levels of optimized resource management techniques. We first consider a classic resource management problem, namely the scheduling of data-intensive applications. We define the Divisible Load Scheduling (DLS) problem, outline the system model based on the assumption that data staging and all communication with the sites can be done in parallel, and introduce a set of optimal divisible load scheduling algorithms and the related fault-tolerant coordination algorithm. The DLS algorithms introduced in this dissertation exploit parallel communication, consider realistic scenarios regarding the time when heterogeneous computing systems are available, and generate optimal schedules. Performance …


Learning Semantic Features For Visual Recognition, Jingen Liu Jan 2009

Learning Semantic Features For Visual Recognition, Jingen Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visual recognition (e.g., object, scene and action recognition) is an active area of research in computer vision due to its increasing number of real-world applications such as video (image) indexing and search, intelligent surveillance, human-machine interaction, robot navigation, etc. Effective modeling of the objects, scenes and actions is critical for visual recognition. Recently, bag of visual words (BoVW) representation, in which the image patches or video cuboids are quantized into visual words (i.e., mid-level features) based on their appearance similarity using clustering, has been widely and successfully explored. The advantages of this representation are: no explicit detection of objects or …


Water And The Mountains: Maya Water Mangement At Caracol, Belize, James Crandall Jan 2009

Water And The Mountains: Maya Water Mangement At Caracol, Belize, James Crandall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Water management techniques in the Southern Maya Lowlands are both regionally diverse and site specific. This thesis examines the water management strategies of the Classic Period Maya at the site of Caracol, Belize. While it is likely that elites at Caracol controlled the redistribution of resources, i.e. craft and agricultural products, it is probable that the production of agricultural resources and the maintenance of water resource acquisition took place on a more local level. In order to test this hypothesis, a sample of five reservoirs were examined through original research -- and situated in conjunction with past settlement studies -- …


The Forensic Analysis Of Triacetone Triperoxide (Tatp) Precursors And Synthetic By-Products, Kimberly Painter Jan 2009

The Forensic Analysis Of Triacetone Triperoxide (Tatp) Precursors And Synthetic By-Products, Kimberly Painter

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) is a primary high explosive that can be synthesized using commercially available starting materials and has grown in use among terrorists over the past several years. Additives present in the precursors were investigated to see if they carry through the TATP synthesis and can be detected in the final product potentially aiding in the identification of the source. Additives identified in the acetones were also identified in pre-blast and in some post-blast samples. However, these additives are present in trace quantities relative to the TATP, which coupled with the volatility and short lifetimes of some of the …


Room Temperature Synthesis And Systematic Characterization Of Ultra-Small Ceria Nanoparticles, Chetak Patel Jan 2009

Room Temperature Synthesis And Systematic Characterization Of Ultra-Small Ceria Nanoparticles, Chetak Patel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cerium oxide (ceria, CeOâ‚‚) is a rare earth oxide that has attracted wide-spread research interest because of its unique properties such as high mechanical strength, oxygen ion conductivity, oxygen storage capacity and autocatalytic property. In recent years, researchers have discovered that ceria nanoparticles (NPs) are capable of protecting cells from free radical induced damage. Interestingly, it was found that nanometer size (~ 5 nm) ceria can scavenge free radicals quite efficiently, thus acting as an anti-oxidant. This phenomenon has been explained based on the autocatalytic property of ceria NPs. Several methods have been developed for the synthesis of ceria NPs …


A Preliminary Study Of A Non-Invasive Glucose Sensor Based On A Mercury Sensor, Erin Wood Jan 2009

A Preliminary Study Of A Non-Invasive Glucose Sensor Based On A Mercury Sensor, Erin Wood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Diabetes mellitus is a potentially lethal disease that affects 7.6 percent of American people. In the US, it is recognized as the 6th leading cause of death. Failure to control blood glucose levels (BGL) in patients with either type of diabetes can lead to other serious complications as well, such as loss of limb, blindness and other health problems. Controlling and monitoring the BGL in post-op and intensive care patients in the hospital is also vital to their health. Currently the most reliable method of monitoring BGL is through an invasive procedure which monitors the amount of glucose in blood …


Vectorpad: A Tool For Visualizing Vector Operations, Jared Bott Jan 2009

Vectorpad: A Tool For Visualizing Vector Operations, Jared Bott

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Visualization of three-dimensional vector operations can be very helpful in understanding vector mathematics. However, creating these visualizations using traditional WIMP interfaces can be a troublesome exercise. In this thesis, we present VectorPad, a pen-based application for three-dimensional vector mathematics visualization. VectorPad allows users to define vectors and perform mathematical operations upon them through the recognition of handwritten mathematics. The VectorPad user interface consists of a sketching area, where the user can write vector definitions and other mathematics, and a 3D graph for visualization. After recognition, vectors are visualized dynamically on the graph, which can be manipulated by the user. A …


New Computational Approaches For Multiple Rna Alignment And Rna Search, Daniel Deblasio Jan 2009

New Computational Approaches For Multiple Rna Alignment And Rna Search, Daniel Deblasio

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis we explore the the theory and history behind RNA alignment. Normal sequence alignments as studied by computer scientists can be completed in O(n2) time in the naive case. The process involves taking two input sequences and finding the list of edits that can transform one sequence into the other. This process is applied to biology in many forms, such as the creation of multiple alignments and the search of genomic sequences. When you take into account the RNA sequence structure the problem becomes even harder. Multiple RNA structure alignment is particularly challenging because covarying mutations make sequence …


Design, Synthesis, And Characterization Of Novel Hydrophilic Fluorene-Based Derivatives For Bioimaging Applications, Dao Nguyen Jan 2009

Design, Synthesis, And Characterization Of Novel Hydrophilic Fluorene-Based Derivatives For Bioimaging Applications, Dao Nguyen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work, hydrophilic fluorene-based derivatives that contain ethylene oxide substituents, have been synthesized and characterized for potential use as new fluorophores for bioimaging applications and for fluorescence sensing of heavy metals. Symmetrical and unsymmetrical fluorene derivatives based on structural types of acceptor-pi-acceptor, acceptor-pi-donor, and donor-pi-donor were characterized by TGA, UV-vis absorption, fluorescence emission, lifetime, anisotropy, and two-photon absorption (2PA) cross section. They were found to possess high thermal stability, high photostability, high fluorescence quantum yields, and generally large two-photon absorption cross sections, making them quite suitable for new probes in single-photon absorption and two-photon absorption fluorescence microscopy imaging. Novel …


Imaging And Spectroscopy Of Conducting Polymer-Fullerene Composite Materials, Daeri Tenery Jan 2009

Imaging And Spectroscopy Of Conducting Polymer-Fullerene Composite Materials, Daeri Tenery

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since the development and optical study of conjugated (conducting) polymers it has become apparent that chain conformation and aggregation at the molecular scale result in complex heterogeneous nanostructured bulk materials for which a detailed insight into morphological, spectroscopic as well as optoelectronic properties and mechanisms is overwhelmingly difficult to obtain. Nanoparticles composed of the conjugated polymer poly (MEH-PPV) and nanocomposite nanoparticles consisting of MEH-PPV doped with 1-(3-methoxycarbonylpropyl)-1-phenyl-C61 (PCBM) were prepared as model systems to study these materials at the length scale of one to a few domains. The MEH-PPV and PCBM doped nanoparticles were analyzed by single imaging/particle spectroscopy (SPS) …


Application Of Alkylsilane Self-Assembled Monolayers For Cell Patterning And Development Of Biolocial Microelectromechanical Systems, Kerry Wilson Jan 2009

Application Of Alkylsilane Self-Assembled Monolayers For Cell Patterning And Development Of Biolocial Microelectromechanical Systems, Kerry Wilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in microfabrication and surface chemistry techniques have provided a new paradigm for the creation of in vitro systems for studying problems in biology and medicine in ways that were previously not practical. The ability to create devices with micro- to nano-scale dimensions provides the opportunity to non-invasively interrogate and monitor biological cells and tissue in large arrays and in a high-throughput manner. These systems hold the potential to, in time, revolutionize the way problems in biology and medicine are studied in the form of point-of-care devices, lab-on-chip devices, and biological microelectromechanical systems (BioMEMS). With new in vitro models, it …


Synthesis Of Novel Fluorene-Based Two-Photon Absorbing Molecules And Their Applications In Optical Data Storage, Microfabricatio, Ciceron Yanez Jan 2009

Synthesis Of Novel Fluorene-Based Two-Photon Absorbing Molecules And Their Applications In Optical Data Storage, Microfabricatio, Ciceron Yanez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Two-photon absorption (2PA) has been used for a number of scientific and technological applications, exploiting the fact that the 2PA probability is directly proportional to the square of the incident light intensity (while one-photon absorption bears a linear relation to the incident light intensity). This intrinsic property of 2PA leads to 3D spatial localization, important in fields such as optical data storage, fluorescence microscopy, and 3D microfabrication. The spatial confinement that 2PA enables has been used to induce photochemical and photophysical events in increasingly smaller volumes and allowed nonlinear, 2PA-based, technologies to reach sub-diffraction limit resolutions. The primary focus of …


Efficient Cone Beam Reconstruction For The Distorted Circle And Line Trajectory, Souleymane Konate Jan 2009

Efficient Cone Beam Reconstruction For The Distorted Circle And Line Trajectory, Souleymane Konate

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We propose an exact filtered backprojection algorithm for inversion of the cone beam data in the case when the trajectory is composed of a distorted circle and a line segment. The length of the scan is determined by the region of interest , and it is independent of the size of the object. With few geometric restrictions on the curve, we show that we have an exact reconstruction. Numerical experiments demonstrate good image quality.


Optimal Dual Frames For Erasures And Discrete Gabor Frames, Jerry Lopez Jan 2009

Optimal Dual Frames For Erasures And Discrete Gabor Frames, Jerry Lopez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since their discovery in the early 1950's, frames have emerged as an important tool in areas such as signal processing, image processing, data compression and sampling theory, just to name a few. Our purpose of this dissertation is to investigate dual frames and the ability to find dual frames which are optimal when coping with the problem of erasures in data transmission. In addition, we study a special class of frames which exhibit algebraic structure, discrete Gabor frames. Much work has been done in the study of discrete Gabor frames in Rn, but very little is known about the l2(Z) …


The Sheffer B-Type 1 Orthogonal Polynomial Sequences, Daniel Galiffa Jan 2009

The Sheffer B-Type 1 Orthogonal Polynomial Sequences, Daniel Galiffa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1939, I.M. Sheffer proved that every polynomial sequence belongs to one and only one type. Sheffer extensively developed properties of the B-Type 0 polynomial sequences and determined which sets are also orthogonal. He subsequently generalized his classification method to the case of arbitrary B-Type k by constructing the generalized generating function A(t)exp[xH1(t) + · · · + xk+1Hk(t)] = ∑∞n=0 Pn(x)tn, with Hi(t) = hi,iti + hi,i+1t i+1 + · · · , h1,1 ≠ 0. Although extensive research has been done on characterizing polynomial sequences, no analysis has yet been completed on sets of type one or higher …


Almost Regular Graphs And Edge Face Colorings Of Plane Graphs, Lisa Macon Jan 2009

Almost Regular Graphs And Edge Face Colorings Of Plane Graphs, Lisa Macon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Regular graphs are graphs in which all vertices have the same degree. Many properties of these graphs are known. Such graphs play an important role in modeling network configurations where equipment limitations impose a restriction on the maximum number of links emanating from a node. These limitations do not enforce strict regularity, and it becomes interesting to investigate nonregular graphs that are in some sense close to regular. This dissertation explores a particular class of almost regular graphs in detail and defines generalizations on this class. A linear-time algorithm for the creation of arbitrarily large graphs of the discussed class …


Weighted Lp-Stability For Localized Infinite Matrices, Qiling Shi Jan 2009

Weighted Lp-Stability For Localized Infinite Matrices, Qiling Shi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation originates from a classical result that the lp-stability of the convolution operator associated with a summable sequence are equivalent to each other for different p . This dissertation is motivated by the recent result by C. E. Shin and Q. Sun (Journal ofFunctional Analysis, 256(2009), 2417-2439), where the lp-stability of infinite matrices in the Gohberg-Baskakov-Sjostrand class are proved to be equivalent to each other for different p. In the dissertation, for an infinite matrix having certain off-diagonal decay, its weighted lp-stability for different p are proved to be equivalent to each other and hence a result by Shin …


Analytical And Numerical Solutions Of Differentialequations Arising In Fluid Flow And Heat Transfer Problems, Erik Sweet Jan 2009

Analytical And Numerical Solutions Of Differentialequations Arising In Fluid Flow And Heat Transfer Problems, Erik Sweet

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The solutions of nonlinear ordinary or partial differential equations are important in the study of fluid flow and heat transfer. In this thesis we apply the Homotopy Analysis Method (HAM) and obtain solutions for several fluid flow and heat transfer problems. In chapter 1, a brief introduction to the history of homotopies and embeddings, along with some examples, are given. The application of homotopies and an introduction to the solutions procedure of differential equations (used in the thesis) are provided. In the chapters that follow, we apply HAM to a variety of problems to highlight its use and versatility in …


Development Of Theoretical And Computational Methods For Three-Body Processes, Juan Blandon Zapata Jan 2009

Development Of Theoretical And Computational Methods For Three-Body Processes, Juan Blandon Zapata

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses the development and application of theoretical and computational methods to study three-body processes. The main focus is on the calculation of three-body resonances and bound states. This broadly includes the study of Efimov states and resonances, three-body shape resonances, three-body Feshbach resonances, three-body pre-dissociated states in systems with a conical intersection, and the calculation of three-body recombination rate coefficients. The method was applied to a number of systems. A chapter of the thesis is dedicated to the related study of deriving correlation diagrams for three-body states before and after a three-body collision. More specifically, the thesis discusses …