Computer Engineering Commons^™

Basil Leaf Automation, Andrew Soong, Chris Nelson, John Goldsberry, Kalle Suzuki, Nikolas Abenoja, Sherene Victor, Simon Liu

Interdisciplinary Design Senior Theses

Recent population and wage increases have forced farmers to grow more food without a proportionate increase in work force. Automation is a key factor in reducing cost and increasing efficiency. In this paper, we explore our automation solution that utilizes position manipulation and vision processing to identify, pick up, and drop a leaf into a can. Two stepper motors and a linear actuator drove the three-dimensional actuation. Leaf and can recognition were accomplished through edge detection and machine learning algorithms. Testing proved subsystem-level functionality and proof of concept of a delicate autonomous pick-and-place robot.

2020 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2020.

Ionic Conductivity And Electrochemical Properties Of Alginate–Nn4no3-Based Biopolymer Electrolytes For Edlc Application, Norfatihah Binti Mazuki, Nur Muhitul Jalilah Rasali, Bouchta Sahraoui, Ahmad Salihin Samsudin

Makara Journal of Technology

In this work, alginate doped with various contents of ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) as a solid biopolymer electrolyte (SBE) was prepared via casting by using distilled water as a solvent. Impedance studies on alginate–NH4NO3 SBE films were conducted via impedance spectroscopy. The lowest bulk resistance (Rb) showed that the maximum ionic conductivity of the sample containing 25 wt.% NH4NO3 at ambient temperature (303 K) was 5.56 × 10−5 S cm−1. The temperature dependence of ionic conductivity was evaluated, and results confirmed that electrolytes followed an Arrhenius behavior. The highest conducting sample was fabricated into an electrical double-layer capacitor and characterized in …

Current Status Of Hydrothermal Treatment For Energy And Material Recovery Toward A Sustainable Post-Consumer Material Cycle, Baskoro Lokahita, Muhammad Aziz, Fumitake Takahashi

Makara Journal of Technology

The demand for energy-efficient and environmentally friendly municipal solid waste (MSW) processing has increased in developing countries. The thermochemical process offers a fast and reliable solution to reutilize or reduce the volume of MSW. Hydrothermal treatment is a novel MSW treatment technology that is compatible with high-moisture-content feedstock. It involves the thermal degradation of MSW in pressurized water or steam, which promotes the disintegration of cellulosic and polymer materials. Recent advances have shown effective MSW conversion into homogenous solid hydrochar with higher energy density. Alkali and chlorine content, which causes issues in combustors, was successfully removed due to the washing …

Differentially Private Online Task Assignment In Spatial Crowdsourcing: A Tree-Based Approach, Qian Tao, Yongxin Tong, Zimu Zhou, Yexuan Shi, Lei Chen, Ke Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With spatial crowdsourcing applications such as Uber and Waze deeply penetrated into everyday life, there is a growing concern to protect user privacy in spatial crowdsourcing. Particularly, locations of workers and tasks should be properly processed via certain privacy mechanism before reporting to the untrusted spatial crowdsourcing server for task assignment. Privacy mechanisms typically permute the location information, which tends to make task assignment ineffective. Prior studies only provide guarantees on privacy protection without assuring the effectiveness of task assignment. In this paper, we investigate privacy protection for online task assignment with the objective of minimizing the total distance, an …

How To And How Much? Teaching Ethics In An Interaction Design Course, Bimlesh Wadhwa, Eng Lieh Ouh, Benjamin Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

How much is sufficient and how should one teach ethics in an Interaction Design curriculum in undergraduate computing program has been a point of dilemma for many HCI educators. We conducted a preliminary study using a mixed method to gather perception on ethics in our interaction design courses at two of the leading Singapore Universities. We answer three research questions specific to an undergraduate HCI course: Is there a need for ethics? Is there sufficient ethics coverage? and how to teach ethics? We surveyed 140 students and interviewed six teachers in two Singapore Universities. Our findings suggest that 92% of …

A Machine Learning Based Approach To Accelerate Catalyst Discovery, Asif Jamil Chowdhury

Theses and Dissertations

Computational catalysis, in contrast to experimental catalysis, uses approximations such as density functional theory (DFT) to compute properties of reaction intermediates. But DFT calculations for a large number of surface species on variety of active site models are resource intensive. In this work, we are building a machine learning based predictive framework for adsorption energies of intermediate species, which can reduce the computational overhead significantly. Our work includes the study and development of appropriate machine learning models and effective fingerprints or descriptors to predict energies accurately for different scenarios. Furthermore, Bayesian inverse problem, that integrates experimental catalysis with its computational …

Longitudinal Brain Tumor Tracking, Tumor Grading, And Patient Survival Prediction Using Mri, Linmin Pei

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This work aims to develop novel methods for brain tumor classification, longitudinal brain tumor tracking, and patient survival prediction. Consequently, this dissertation proposes three tasks. First, we develop a framework for brain tumor segmentation prediction in longitudinal multimodal magnetic resonance imaging (mMRI) scans, comprising two methods: feature fusion and joint label fusion (JLF). The first method fuses stochastic multi-resolution texture features with tumor cell density features, in order to obtain tumor segmentation predictions in follow-up scans from a baseline pre-operative timepoint. The second method utilizes JLF to combine segmentation labels obtained from (i) the stochastic texture feature-based and Random Forest …

Drones Detection Using Smart Sensors, Aishah Moafa

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Drones are modern and sophisticated technology that have been used in numerous fields. Nowadays, many countries use them in exploration, reconnaissance operations, and espionage in military operations. Drones also have many uses that are not limited to only daily life. For example, drones are used for home delivery, safety monitoring, and others. However, the use of drones is a double-edged sword. Drones can be used for positive purposes to improve the quality of human lives, but they can also be used for criminal purposes and other detrimental purposes. In fact, many countries have been attacked by terrorists using smart drones. …

Supporting Self-Regulation Of Children With Adhd Using Wearables: Tensions And Design Challenges, Franceli L. Cibrian, Kimberley D. Lakes, Arya Tavakoulnia, Kayla Guzman, Sabrina Schuck, Gillian R. Hayes

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

The design of wearable applications supporting children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (ADHD) requires a deep understanding not only of what is possible from a clinical standpoint but also how the children might understand and orient towards wearable technologies, such as a smartwatch. Through a series of participatory design workshops with children with ADHD and their caregivers, we identified tensions and challenges in designing wearable applications supporting the self-regulation of children with ADHD. In this paper, we describe the specific challenges of smartwatches for this population, the balance between self-regulation and co-regulation, and tensions when receiving notifications on a smartwatch …

An Overlay Architecture For Pattern Matching, Rasha Elham Karakchi

Theses and Dissertations

Deterministic and Non-deterministic Finite Automata (DFA and NFA) comprise the fundamental unit of work for many emerging big data applications, motivating recent efforts to develop Domain-Specific Architectures (DSAs) to exploit fine-grain parallelism available in automata workloads.

This dissertation presents NAPOLY (Non-Deterministic Automata Processor Over- LaY), an overlay architecture and associated software that attempt to maximally exploit on-chip memory parallelism for NFA evaluation. In order to avoid an upper bound in NFA size that commonly affects prior efforts, NAPOLY is optimized for runtime reconfiguration, allowing for full reconfiguration in 10s of microseconds. NAPOLY is also parameterizable, allowing for offline generation of …

Attribute-Based Cloud Data Integrity Auditing For Secure Outsourced Storage, Yong Yu, Yannan Li, Bo Yang, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Jian Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Outsourced storage such as cloud storage can significantly reduce the burden of data management of data owners. Despite of a long list of merits of cloud storage, it triggers many security risks at the same time. Data integrity, one of the most burning challenges in secure cloud storage, is a fundamental and pivotal element in outsourcing services. Outsourced data auditing protocols enable a verifier to efficiently check the integrity of the outsourced files without downloading the entire file from the cloud, which can dramatically reduce the communication overhead between the cloud server and the verifier. Existing protocols are mostly based …

Two Can Play That Game: An Adversarial Evaluation Of A Cyber-Alert Inspection System, Ankit Shah, Arunesh Sinha, Rajesh Ganesan, Sushil Jajodia, Hasan Cam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-security is an important societal concern. Cyber-attacks have increased in numbers as well as in the extent of damage caused in every attack. Large organizations operate a Cyber Security Operation Center (CSOC), which forms the first line of cyber-defense. The inspection of cyber-alerts is a critical part of CSOC operations (defender or blue team). Recent work proposed a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach for the defender’s decision-making to prevent the cyber-alert queue length from growing large and overwhelming the defender. In this article, we perform a red team (adversarial) evaluation of this approach. With the recent attacks on learning-based decision-making …

Parsimonious Sociology Theory Construction: From A Computational Framework To Semantic-Based Parsimony Analysis, Mingzhe Du

Theses and Dissertations

In the social sciences, theories are used to explain and predict observed phenomena in the natural world. Theory construction is the research process of building testable scientific theories to explain and predict observed phenomena in the natural world. Conceptual new ideas and meanings of theories are conveyed through carefully chosen definitions and terms.

The principle of parsimony, an important criterion for evaluating the quality of theories (e.g., as exemplified by Occam’s Razor), mandates that we minimize the number of definitions (terms) used in a given theory.

Conventional methods for theory construction and parsimony analysis are based on heuristic approaches. However, …

Functional Object-Oriented Network: A Knowledge Representation For Service Robotics, David Andrés Paulius Ramos

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we discuss our work behind the development of the functional object-oriented network (abbreviated as FOON), a graphical knowledge representation for robotic manipulation and understanding of its own actions and (potentially) the intentions of humans in the household. Based on the theory of affordance, this representation captures manipulations and their effects on actions through the coupling of object and motion nodes as fundamental learning units known as functional units. The activities currently represented in FOON are cooking related, but this representation can be extended to other activities that involve manipulation of objects which result in observable changes of …

Design Of Delro Autonomous Delivery Robot And Ai Based Localization, Tolga Karakurt

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous robots are employed in numerous areas. In this thesis, it is proposed to design and build a self-controlled wheeled vehicle to deliver food.

As there are many applications of an autonomous agent for indoor and outdoor environments, this study is conducted on indoor settings whereas all the requirements and design processes are achieved for both operational boundaries.

The fundamental approach is to design and implement a Wheeled Mobile Robot (WMR), and to test skid-steering performance on proposed trajectories using a System Engineering approach. From this point of view, system requirements in mechanical, electrical, and software are evaluated, and overall …

Novel Bit-Sliced In-Memory Computing Based Vlsi Architecture For Fast Sobel Edge Detection In Iot Edge Devices, Rajeev Joshi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

For today’s Internet-of-Things (IoT) edge devices, there is an acute need for fast and power-efficient hardware for an image processing task. Traditional hardware solutions with sequential and/or pipelined architectures incur high latency and power. This motivates us to propose a novel in-memory computing architecture for rapid image processing. We propose a bit-sliced in-memory computing architecture for CMOS VLSI implementation for fast Sobel edge detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose in-memory computing based VLSI architecture foredge detection. The novelty of the proposed work is that one image can be processed in constant time …

Analyzing And Learning The Language For Different Types Of Harassment, Mohammadreza Rezvan, Saeedeh Shekarpour, Faisal Alshargi, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth

Publications

THIS ARTICLE USES WORDS OR LANGUAGE THAT IS CONSIDERED PROFANE, VULGAR, OR OFFENSIVE BY SOME READERS. The presence of a significant amount of harassment in user-generated content and its negative impact calls for robust automatic detection approaches. This requires the identification of different types of harassment. Earlier work has classified harassing language in terms of hurtfulness, abusiveness, sentiment, and profanity. However, to identify and understand harassment more accurately, it is essential to determine the contextual type that captures the interrelated conditions in which harassing language occurs. In this paper we introduce the notion of contextual type in harassment by distinguishing …

Multi-Channel Security Through Data Fragmentation, Micah J. Hayden

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a novel security system developed for a multi-channel communication architecture, which achieves security by distributing the message and its associated message authentication code across the available channels at the bit level, to support systems that require protection from confidentiality and integrity attacks without relying solely on traditional encryption. One contribution of the work is to establish some helpful terminology, present a basic theory for multi-channel communications, describe the services provided by an optimal system, and then implement a proof of concept system to demonstrate the concept's validity. This proof of concept, focused on the splitting and recombination …

Sliver: Simulation-Based Logic Bomb Identification/Verification For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Jake M. Magness

Theses and Dissertations

This research introduces SLIVer, a Simulation-based Logic Bomb Identification/Verification methodology, for finding logic bombs hidden within Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autopilot code without having access to the device source code. Effectiveness is demonstrated by executing a series of test missions within a high-fidelity software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulator. In the event that a logic bomb is not detected, this methodology defines safe operating areas for UAVs to ensure to a high degree of confidence the UAV operates normally on the defined flight plan. SLIVer uses preplanned flight paths as the baseline input space, greatly reducing the input space that must be searched …