Computer Engineering Commons^™

Simultaneous Localization And Mapping Analysis, Jacob Miller, Kurtis Clark, Jeremy Evert

Student Research

Objectives

• Simulate virtual robot for test and analysis
• Analyze SLAM solutions using ROS
• Assemble a functional Turtlebot
• Emphasize projects related to current research trajectories for NASA, and general robotics applications

Robot Simulation Analysis, Kurtis Clark, Jacob Miller, Jeremy Evert

Student Research

Objectives

• Build a tutorial targeted to Middle School and High School Students to get ROS running on a Virtual Machine
• Make ROS and it's simulations approachable to middle school and high school students.

Innovation In Pedagogy And Technology Symposium, 2019: Selected Conference Proceedings, University Of Nebraska Online, University Of Nebraska Information Technology Services

Zea E-Books Collection

Advancing Technology in Education at the University of Nebraska, May 7, 2019

Welcome Address • Susan Fritz, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Provost, University of Nebraska 6

Opening Remarks • Mary Niemiec, Associate Vice President for Digital Education, Director of University of Nebraska Online 6

Keynote Presentation: Shaping the Next Generation of Higher Education • Bryan Alexander, Ph.D. 6

Featured Extended Presentation: Redesigning Courses & Determining Effectiveness Through Research • Tanya Joosten, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), Erin Blankenship, Ph.D. (UNL), Ella Burnham (UNL), Nate Eidem, Ph.D. (UNK), Marnie Imhoff (UNMC), Linsey Donner (UNMC), Ellie Miller (UNMC) 7

5 Ways to …

Integrating The 1st Person View And The 3rd Person View Using A Connected Vr-Mr System For Pilot Training, Chang-Geun Oh Ph.D., Myunghoon Oh Ph.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

Many virtual reality (VR)-based flight simulation programs provide pilots the enhanced reality from the 1^st person-view to make themselves immersed in the cockpit. Using the VR simulations, pilots can take flight training in many challenging situations that are hard to create in real environments due to its natural entropy and safety concerns such as severe crosswind or engine fire. Mixed reality (MR) technology provides three-dimensional graphics so that users can effectively see all 360 degree-vertical and horizontal aspects of an object while they freely move around to see the graphics maintaining the consciousness of real space. Flight instructors may …

Validation Framework For Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, Mustafa Akbas Ph.D.

National Training Aircraft Symposium (NTAS)

Autonomous aerial vehicles (AAV) have the potential to have market disruptions for various industries such as ground delivery and aerial transportation. Hence, the USAF has called for increased level of autonomy and rapid progress is being made in artificial intelligence (AI) engines, complex and non-deterministic system components, which are at the core of the autonomous aerial platforms. Traditional testing and validation methods fall short of satisfying the requirement of testing such complex systems. Therefore, to achieve highly or fully autonomous capabilities, a major leap forward in the validation is required. Otherwise, the full capabilities of autonomy will not be realized. …

W-Gun: Whale Optimization For Energy And Delay-Centric Green Underwater Networks, Rajkumar Singh Rathore, Houbing Song, Suman Sangwan, Sukriti Mazumdar, Omprakash Kaiwartya, Kabita Adhikari, Rupak Kharel

Publications

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) have witnessed significant R&D attention in both academia and industry due to their growing application domains, such as border security, freight via sea or river, natural petroleum production and the fishing industry. Considering the deep underwater-oriented access constraints, energy-centric communication for the lifetime maximization of tiny sensor nodes in UWSNs is one of the key research themes in this domain. Existing literature on green UWSNs are majorly adapted from the existing techniques in traditional wireless sensor network relying on geolocation and the quality of service-centric underwater relay node selection, without paying much attention to the dynamic …

A New Ectotherm 3d Tracking And Behavior Analytics System Using A Depth-Based Approach With Color Validation, With Preliminary Data On Kihansi Spray Toad (Nectophrynoides Asperginis) Activity, Philip Bal, Damian Lyons, Avishai Shuter

Faculty Publications

The Kihansi spray toad (Nectophrynoides asperginis), classified as Extinct in the Wild by the IUCN, is being bred at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Bronx Zoo as part of an effort to successfully reintroduce the species into the wild. Thousands of toads live at the Bronx Zoo presenting an opportunity to learn more about their behaviors for the first time, at scale. It is impractical to perform manual observations for long periods of time. This paper reports on the development of a RGB-D tracking and analytics approach that allows researchers to accurately and efficiently gather information about the toads’ behavior. …

Deep Generative Models For Semantic Text Hashing, Suthee Chaidaroon

Engineering Ph.D. Theses

As the amount of textual data has been rapidly increasing over the past decade, efficient similarity search methods have become a crucial component of large-scale information retrieval systems. A popular strategy is to represent original data samples by compact binary codes through hashing. A spectrum of machine learning methods have been utilized, but they often lack expressiveness and flexibility in modeling to learn effective representations. The recent advances of deep learning in a wide range of applications has demonstrated its capability to learn robust and powerful feature representations for complex data. Especially, deep generative models naturally combine the expressiveness of …

A Blockchain Approach To Social Responsibility, Augusto Bedin, Wander Queiroz, Miriam A M Capretz, London Hydro

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

As blockchain technology matures, more sophisticated solutions arise regarding complex problems. Blockchain continues to spread towards various niches such as government, IoT, energy, and environmental industries. One often overlooked opportunity for blockchain is the social responsibility sector. Presented in this paper is a permissioned blockchain model that enables enterprises to come together and cooperate to optimize their environmental and societal impacts. This is made possible through a private or permissioned blockchain. Permissioned blockchains are blockchain networks where all the participants are known and trust relationships among them can be fostered more smoothly. An example of what a permissioned blockchain would …

Deal: Differentially Private Auction For Blockchain Based Microgrids Energy Trading, Muneeb Ul Hassan, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Jinjun Chen

Publications

Modern smart homes are being equipped with certain renewable energy resources that can produce their own electric energy. From time to time, these smart homes or microgrids are also capable of supplying energy to other houses, buildings, or energy grid in the time of available self-produced renewable energy. Therefore, researches have been carried out to develop optimal trading strategies, and many recent technologies are also being used in combination with microgrids. One such technology is blockchain, which works over decentralized distributed ledger. In this paper, we develop a blockchain based approach for microgrid energy auction. To make this auction more …

Differential Privacy Techniques For Cyber Physical Systems: A Survey, Muneeb Ul Hassan, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Jinjun Chen

Publications

Modern cyber physical systems (CPSs) has widely being used in our daily lives because of development of information and communication technologies (ICT).With the provision of CPSs, the security and privacy threats associated to these systems are also increasing. Passive attacks are being used by intruders to get access to private information of CPSs. In order to make CPSs data more secure, certain privacy preservation strategies such as encryption, and k-anonymity have been presented in the past. However, with the advances in CPSs architecture, these techniques also need certain modifications. Meanwhile, differential privacy emerged as an efficient technique to protect CPSs …

Interoperable Ads-B Confidentiality, Brandon C. Burfeind

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption …

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation From Npc Attributes, Megan E. Washburn

Master's Theses

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time.

Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood …

Room Management Web Application And Movement And Temperature Sensors, Visalbotr Chan, Huy Anh Duong

Computer Engineering

There are three main parts of this system: micro-controller, database, and website. Micro-controller detects motion of people walking in and out and It also measures room temperature and humidity in a confined space then updates collected data to the database. Our system’s database contains 6 main columns: room number, room capacity, number of students, temperature in Celsius, humidity in percent and date created. Finally, this database is queried by the website to display the information on the webpage. Users could also navigate on our site to check the most and least occupy rooms, and they can also search for a …

Does The Age Of An It Executive Impact Adoption Levels Of Cloud Computing Services?, Marcus L. Smith

Faculty Publications

This author researched previously the personal decision factors considered by information technology (IT) executives when making the cloud computing services adoptionchoice. The conclusions in that work (Smith, Jr., 2016) supported four hypotheses, namely, (a) advancement, recognition and satisfaction from accomplishments, (b) top management support, (c) diminishment of personal image, and (d) a pattern of technology readiness have a positive influence on business intentions to adopt cloud computing services. Interestingly, a fifth hypothesis, diminishment of personal image, was found to have a negative influence on business intentions. The relationship between age of the survey respondents and adoption levels was highlighted in …

Web Application For Movie Performance Prediction, Devalkumar Patel

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

This is an amazing and unique idea for the web application. The purpose of this application is to address those movie lover people who is always in a hurry to visit the theatre to watch upcoming movies irrespective of which star cast is in it. This system is a mixture of desktop applications, python libraries, and simple math arithmetic. The application can be used by anyone which is ultimately helping them to decide, either they should watch the movie or not. The user just submits the name of the movie. This application is developed in Visual Studio 2019 for functioning …

Decentralized, Noncooperative Multirobot Path Planning With Sample-Basedplanners, William Le

Master's Theses

In this thesis, the viability of decentralized, noncooperative multi-robot path planning algorithms is tested. Three algorithms based on the Batch Informed Trees (BIT*) algorithm are presented. The first of these algorithms combines Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA) with BIT*. The second of these algorithms uses BIT* to create a path which the robots then follow using an artificial potential field (APF) method. The final algorithm is a version of BIT* that supports replanning. While none of these algorithms take advantage of sharing information between the robots, the algorithms are able to guide the robots to their desired goals, with the …

Semantic Segmentation Of Aerial Imagery Using U-Nets, Terence J. Yi

Theses and Dissertations

In situations where global positioning systems are unavailable, alternative methods of localization must be implemented. A potential step to achieving this is semantic segmentation, or the ability for a model to output class labels by pixel. This research aims to utilize datasets of varying spatial resolutions and locations to train a fully convolutional neural network architecture called the U-Net to perform segmentations of aerial images. Variations of the U-Net architecture are implemented and compared to other existing models in order to determine the best in detecting buildings and roads. A final dataset will also be created combining two datasets to …

Using Knowledge Bases For Question Answering, Yunshi Lan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

A knowledge base (KB) is a well-structured database, which contains many of entities and their relations. With the fast development of large-scale knowledge bases such as Freebase, DBpedia and YAGO, knowledge bases have become an important resource, which can serve many applications, such as dialogue system, textual entailment, question answering and so on. These applications play significant roles in real-world industry.

In this dissertation, we try to explore the entailment information and more general entity-relation information from the KBs. Recognizing textual entailment (RTE) is a task to infer the entailment relations between sentences. We need to decide whether a hypothesis …

Feature Agglomeration Networks For Single Stage Face Detection, Jialiang Zhang, Xiongwei Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jianke Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent years have witnessed promising results of exploring deep convolutional neural network for face detection. Despite making remarkable progress, face detection in the wild remains challenging especially when detecting faces at vastly different scales and characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel simple yet effective framework of “Feature Agglomeration Networks” (FANet) to build a new single-stage face detector, which not only achieves state-of-the-art performance but also runs efficiently. As inspired by Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) (Lin et al., 2017), the key idea of our framework is to exploit inherent multi-scale features of a single convolutional neural network by aggregating …