Computer Engineering Commons^™

Table Of Contents

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

No abstract provided.

Do We Need M&S Science?, Jose J. Padilla, Saikou Y. Diallo, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

No abstract provided.

Utilizing A Computational Model For The Design Of A Passive Dynamic Walker, Craig Alan Honeycutt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent interest in using passive dynamic walkers (PDWs) for gait rehabilitation studies has presented a need for a robust, easily built mechanism. Unfortunately, these passive robots are hypersensitive to many variables outside of the usual design considerations that are studied when constructing them. By accentuating previous failures instead of suppressing them, this thesis presents a number of problematic situations commonly experienced when testing and tuning a PDW.

Further, through a complete design of a 4-legged PDW with knees, simple design axioms brought about by myself and others are put into a practical context and applied directly to design. This thesis …

Asymmetric Passive Dynamic Walker Used To Examine Gait Rehabilitation Methods, John Sushko

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Testing gait rehabilitation devices on humans can be a difficult task, due to the effects of the neurological controls of the human body. This thesis advances the use of a passive dynamic walker (PDW) tuned to have asymmetric gait patterns similar to those with physical impairments to test rehabilitation devices. A passive dynamic walker is a multipendulum system that has a stable gait pattern when walking down a slope without any energy inputs except the forces due to gravity. A PDW model is better suited for testing rehabilitation devices because it has been shown to resemble human gait and separates …

Using Smartphones For Indoor Navigation, Benjamin Thomas Loulier

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

This directed projet is about the use of smartphones for indoor navigation.

Nowadays, indoor navigation is a real challenge, we are all familiar with the multiple applications of GPS based navigation but all these applications cannot be transfered in an indoor environment as we cannot receive a GPS signal inside.

The document is composed of three different parts related to indoor navigation using smartphones. The first part presents an inertial positioning system for pedestrians walking in an indoor environment, this system is implemented on an iPhone 4. In the second part we introduce a positioning system using RFID tags scattered …

Optimal Port Placement And Automated Robotic Positioning For Instrumented Laparoscopic Biosensors, Brady King

Wayne State University Dissertations

OPTIMAL SURGICAL PORT PLACEMENT AND AUTOMATED ROBOTIC POSITIONING FOR RAMAN AND OTHER BIOSENSORS

by

BRADY KING

January 2011

Advisors: Dr. Abhilash Pandya, Dr. Darin Ellis, Dr. Le Yi Wang, and Dr. Greg Auner

Major: Computer Engineering

Degree: Doctor of Philosophy

Medical biosensors can provide new information during minimally invasive and robotic surgical procedures. However, these biosensors have significant physical limitations that make it difficult to find optimal port locations and place them in vivo. This dissertation explores the application of robotics and virtual/augmented reality to biosensors to enable their optimal use in vivo.

In the first study, human …

Autonomic Management Of Virtualized Resources In Cloud Computing, Jia Rao

Wayne State University Dissertations

The last five years have witnessed a rapid growth of cloud computing in business, governmental and educational IT deployment. The success of cloud services depends critically on the effective management of virtualized resources. A key requirement of cloud management is the ability to dynamically match resource allocations to actual demands, To this end, we aim to design and implement a cloud resource management mechanism that manages underlying complexity, automates resource provisioning and controls client-perceived quality of service (QoS) while still achieving resource efficiency.

The design of an automatic resource management centers on two questions: when to adjust resource allocations and …

Efficient Channel Allocation And Medium Access Organization Algorithms For Vehicular Networking, Zaydoun Yahya Rawashdeh

Wayne State University Dissertations

Due to the limited bandwidth available for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), organizing the wireless channel access to efficiently use the bandwidth is one of the main challenges in VANET. In this dissertation, we focus on channel allocation and media access organization for Vehicle-to-Roadside Units (V2R) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications. An efficient channel allocation algorithm for Roadside Unit (RSU) access is proposed. The goal of the algorithm is to increase system throughput by admitting more tasks (vehicles) and at the same time reduce the risk of the admitted tasks. The algorithm admits the new requests only when their requirements can be …

Design Of Multi Agent Based Crowd Injury Model, Emin Kugu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A major concern of many government agencies is to predict and control the behavior of crowds in different situations. Many times such gatherings are legal, legitimate, and peaceful. But there are times when they can turn violent, run out of control, result in material damages and even casualties. It then becomes the duty of governments to bring them under control using a variety of techniques, including non-lethal and lethal weapons, if necessary.

In order to aid decision makers on the course of action in crowd control, there are modeling and simulation tools that can provide guidelines by giving programmed rules …

Measuring Uncertainty Of Protein Secondary Structure, Alan Eugene Herner

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops and demonstrates a method to measure the uncertainty of secondary structure of protein sequences using Shannon's information theory. This method is applied to a newly developed large dataset of chameleon sequences and to several protein hinges culled from the Hinge Atlas. The uncertainty of the central residue in each tripeptide is computed for each amino acid in a sequence using Cuff and Barton's CB513 as the reference set. It is shown that while secondary structure uncertainty is relatively high in chameleon regions [avg = 1.27 bits] it is relatively low in the regions 1-7 residues nearest a …

A User Centered Design And Prototype Of A Mobile Reading Device For The Visually Impaired, Robert B. Keefer

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

While mobile reading devices have been on the market and investigated by researchers in recent years, there is still work required to make these devices highly accessible to the visually impaired. A usability test with one such device revealed gaps in the current state of the art devices. These gaps focus mostly on the user interaction and his or her ability to quickly consume written reading material. In this dissertation a voice user interface (VUI) is presented that improves the ability of a blind user of a mobile reading device to interact with written material. The image processing techniques required …

A Triangulation-Based Approach To Nonrigid Image Registration, Timothy R. Linden

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A triangulation-based approach to nonrigid image registration is presented. This method builds upon control point projective registration methods. Control points for this method are located using the Harris point detector. An analysis is presented for this detector to show its properties. Projective registration is used as the basis for this non-rigid registration method. Details of the projective registration method used are presented. Nonrigid registration is used to spatially align images of a 3-D scene taken from different views. Projective registration approximates the scene geometry as a plane. This nonrigid approach subdivides the images into small corresponding triangles, to improve the …

Weapon Engagement Zone Maximum Launch Range Approximation Using A Multilayer Perceptron, Brian Michael Birkmire

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the use of an artificial neural network (ANN), in particular a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), to perform function approximation on truth data representing a weapon engagement zone's (WEZ) maximum launch range. The WEZ of an air-to-air missile represents the boundaries and zones of effectiveness for a one-vs-one air-to-air combat engagement [13]. The intent is for the network to fuse table lookup and interpolation functionality into a physically compact and computationally efficient package, while improving approximation accuracy over conventional methods. Data was collected from simulated firings of a notional air-to-air missile model and used to train a two layer …

Design And Development Of A Fall Detection Device With Infrared Receiving Capabilities, Ammari Ramzi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Fall related injuries are the leading cause of death and hospitalization among the elderly. Falls among older people become a major problem facing hospitals and nursing homes. In this study we put an effort to design a wireless device capable of detecting falls with the hope that this study will provide a path towards better healthcare monitoring and better independent living for the elderly.

In this project I showed how the fall detection device can be interfaced with different systems to achieve functionality without adding extra cost. For seniors who prefer to stay at their homes and live independently, the …

Large Scale Distributed Semantic N-Gram Language Model, Yuandong Jiang

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Language model is a crucial component in statistical machine translation system. The basic language model is N-gram which predicts the next word based on previous N-1 words. It has been used in the state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems over years. However, the N-gram model ignores the rich syntactic and semantic structure in natural languages. We propose a composite semantic N-gram language model which combines probabilistic latent semantic analysis model with N-gram as a generative model. We have implemented the proposed composite language model in a super-computer with thousand processors that is trained by 1.3 billion tokens corpus. Comparing with simple …

3-D Model Characterization And Identification From Intrinsic Landmarks, John L. Camp

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

A method to automatically characterize and identify 3-D range scans based on intrinsic landmarks is presented. Intrinsic landmarks represent locally unique, intrinsic properties of a scanned surface, regardless of scale or rotation. The number, location, and characteristics of landmarks are used to characterize the scanned models. This method contains a selection process to identify stable, intrinsic landmarks for range scans as well as the identification of those scans. The selection process requires no user interaction or surface assumptions. It uses the principal curvatures at the range points to select the landmarks. First, a large number of landmarks are generated by …

A Domain Specific Language Based Approach For Developing Complex Cloud Computing Applications, Ashwin Kumar Manjunatha

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Computing has changed. Lately, a slew of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources has become available at the disposal of the common man. The latter commonly called Cloud Computing (or just Cloud) is democratizing computing by making large computing power accessible to people and corporations around the world easily and economically.

However, taking full advantage of this computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by many factors, the primary one being the complexity in developing applications for the variety of available platforms.

This thesis …

Reprogrammed Transcriptome In Rhesus-Bovine Interspecies Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer Embryos, Kai Wang, Hasan H. Otu, Ying Chen, Young Lee, Keith Latham, Jose B. Cibelli

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: Global activation of the embryonic genome (EGA), one of the most critical steps in early mammalian embryo development, is recognized as the time when interspecies somatic cell nuclear transfer (iSCNT) embryos fail to thrive.

Methodology/Principal Findings: In this study, we analyzed the EGA-related transcriptome of rhesus-bovine iSCNT 8- to 16- cell embryos and dissected the reprogramming process in terms of embryonic gene activation, somatic gene silencing, and maternal RNA degradation. Compared with fibroblast donor cells, two thousand and seven genes were activated in iSCNT embryos, one quarter of them reaching expression levels comparable to those found in in vitro …

A Novel Channel Probing/Scanning Scheme For Secure Fast Handoff In Ieee 802.11-Based Wireless Networks, Ye Yan, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

With the proliferation of wireless networks for practical deployments in recent years, secure fast handoff has become significantly important to provide secured access while reduce the latency caused by handoff procedure. Channel probing/scanning delay has been a major contribution to the overall latency of handoff in IEEE 802.11 based wireless networks. In this paper, we present a novel secure fast handoff scheme that adopts network-assisted radio statement (NACS) to eliminate lengthy probing/scanning delay by taking advantage of the knowledge of network topology of neighboring nodes in the network. We apply an opportunistic mechanism to retrieve the channel condition from neighboring …

Priority Preemption For Real-Time Application Qos Guarantees In Cooperative Vehicular Networks, Ting Zhou, Hamid Sharif, Michael Hempel, Puttipong Mahasukhon, Tao Ma, Pradhumna Shrestha

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Inter-vehicle and roadside-to-vehicle communications can contribute to a safer and more efficient driving experience by providing time-sensitive and location-aware information. However, its performance suffers from vehicle mobility, intermittent user connectivity, and wireless channel unreliability. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer optimization approach based on our Adaptive Distributed Cooperative Medium Access Control (ADC-MAC) protocol to guarantee the quality-of-service (QoS) of real-time applications. Markov chain based theoretical analysis show that our proposed priority preemption approach can improve the quality of a real-time application by guaranteeing its bandwidth and reducing its transmission latency.