Computer Engineering Commons^™

An Efficient Multiple-Place Foraging Algorithm For Scalable Robot Swarms, Qi Lu

Computer Science ETDs

Searching and collecting multiple resources from large unmapped environments is an important challenge. It is particularly difficult given limited time, a large search area and incomplete data about the environment. This search task is an abstraction of many real-world applications such as search and rescue, hazardous material clean-up, and space exploration. The collective foraging behavior of robot swarms is an effective approach for this task. In our work, individual robots have limited sensing and communication range (like ants), but they are organized and work together to complete foraging tasks collectively. An efficient foraging algorithm coordinates robots to search and collect …

Design Of A Canine Inspired Quadruped Robot As A Platform For Synthetic Neural Network Control, Cody Warren Scharzenberger

Dissertations and Theses

Legged locomotion is a feat ubiquitous throughout the animal kingdom, but modern robots still fall far short of similar achievements. This paper presents the design of a canine-inspired quadruped robot named DoggyDeux as a platform for synthetic neural network (SNN) research that may be one avenue for robots to attain animal-like agility and adaptability. DoggyDeux features a fully 3D printed frame, 24 braided pneumatic actuators (BPAs) that drive four 3-DOF limbs in antagonistic extensor-flexor pairs, and an electrical system that allows it to respond to commands from a SNN comprised of central pattern generators (CPGs). Compared to the previous version …

Mathematics And Programming Exercises For Educational Robot Navigation, Ronald I. Greenberg

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This paper points students towards ideas they can use towards developing a convenient library for robot navigation, with examples based on Botball primitives, and points educators towards mathematics and programming exercises they can suggest to students, especially advanced high school students.

A Systematic Review Of Studies On Educational Robotics, Saira Anwar, Nicholas Alexander Bascou, Muhsin Menekse, Asefeh Kardgar

Journal of Pre-College Engineering Education Research (J-PEER)

There has been a steady increase in the number of studies investigating educational robotics and its impact on academic and social skills of young learners. Educational robots are used both in and out of school environments to enhance K–12 students’ interest, engagement, and academic achievement in various fields of STEM education. Some prior studies show evidence for the general benefits of educational robotics as being effective in providing impactful learning experiences. However, there appears to be a need to determine the specific benefits which have been achieved through robotics implementation in K–12 formal and informal learning settings. In this study, …

Large Scale Electronic Health Record Data And Echocardiography Video Analysis For Mortality Risk Prediction, Alvaro Emilio Ulloa Cerna

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Electronic health records contain the clinical history of patients. The enormous potential for discovery in such a rich dataset is hampered by their complexity. We hypothesize that machine learning models trained on EHR data can predict future clinical events significantly better than current models. We analyze an EHR database of 594,862 Echocardiography studies from 272,280 unique patients with both unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques.

In the unsupervised approach, we first develop a simulation framework to evaluate a family of different clustering pipelines. We apply the optimized approach to 41,645 patients with heart failure without providing any survival information to …

Do Grant Funding And Pro-Environmental Spillovers Influence Household Hazardous Waste Collection?, Kustini Lim-Wavde, Robert J Kauffman, Tin Seong Kam, Gregory S. Dawsond

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Agency and state grant funding should be disseminated in ways so it will result in better management of household hazardous waste (HHW) and environmental sustainability. Since location seems to matter in HHW collection activities, it is important to consider pro-environmental spatial spillovers that occur, based on agency actions and waste collection behavior taking place in other locations. These may influence HHW-related practices in close-by regions. Using a county-level spatio-temporal dataset that consists of economic, demographic, and HHW data in California from 2004 to 2015, we evaluate the impact of HHW grants on HHW collection activities while considering pro-environmental spillovers. We …

Features Of Designing The Architecture Of Intelligent Transport Systems, Jaffar Daeibal, Vyacheslav Lapshin, Dmitry Elkin, Sergey A. Kucherov

Karbala International Journal of Modern Science

In the global experience, intelligent transport systems (ITS) are recognized as a general transport ideology for integrating the achievements of telematics in all types of transport activities to solve economic and social problems: reducing accidents, improving the efficiency of public transport and cargo transportation, ensuring overall transport security, and improving environmental performance. Considering the design features of the intelligent transport system (ITS), there is a need to develop requirements for the functional and physical architecture as the main part of the ITS development. The creation of functional and physical architecture touches upon issues such as: the scheme of interaction between …

Gpu-Based Graph Traversal On Compressed Graphs, Mo Sha, Yuchen Li, Kian-Lee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph processing on GPUs received much attention in theindustry and the academia recently, as the hardware accelerator offers attractive potential for performance boost. However, the high-bandwidth device memory on GPUs has limited capacity that constrains the size of the graph to be loadedon chip. In this paper, we introduce GPU-based graph traversal on compressed graphs, so as to enable the processingof graphs having a larger size than the device memory. Designed towards GPU’s SIMT architecture, we propose twonovel parallel scheduling strategies Two-Phase Traversal andTask-Stealing to handle thread divergence and workload imbalance issues when decoding the compressed graph. Wefurther optimize our …

Evaluation Of Field Of View Width In Stereo-Vision-Based Visual Homing, Damian Lyons, Benjamin Barriage, Luca Del Signore

Faculty Publications

Visual homing is a local navigation technique used to direct a robot to a previously seen location by comparing the image of the original location with the current visual image. Prior work has shown that exploiting depth cues such as image scale or stereo-depth in homing leads to improved homing performance. While it is not unusual to use a panoramic field of view (FOV) camera in visual homing, it is unusual to have a panoramic FOV stereo-camera. So, while the availability of stereo-depth information may improve performance, the concomitant-restricted FOV may be a detriment to performance, unless specialized stereo hardware …

Personalized Product Evaluation Based On Gra-Topsis And Kansei Engineering, Huafeng Quan, Shaobo Li, Hongjing Wei, Jianjun Hu

Faculty Publications

With the improvement of human living standards, users’ requirements have changed from function to emotion. Helping users pick out the most suitable product based on their subjective requirements is of great importance for enterprises. This paper proposes a Kansei engineering-based grey relational analysis and techniques for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (KE-GAR-TOPSIS) method to make a subjective user personalized ranking of alternative products. The KE-GRA-TOPSIS method integrates five methods, including Kansei Engineering (KE), analytic hierarchy process (AHP), entropy, game theory, and grey relational analysis-TOPSIS (GRA-TOPSIS). First, an evaluation system is established by KE and AHP. Second, we define …

A Half- Yearly E-Newsletter Of The Department Of Computer Science And Engineering, Manipal Institute Of Technology - Jul 2019, Ashalatha Nayak

Faculty work

No abstract provided.

Towards Lakosian Multilingual Software Design Principles, Damian Lyons, Saba Zahra, Thomas Marshall

Faculty Publications

Large software systems often comprise programs written in different programming languages. In the case when cross-language interoperability is accomplished with a Foreign Function Interface (FFI), for example pybind11, Boost.Python, Emscripten, PyV8, or JNI, among many others, common software engineering tools, such as call-graph analysis, are obstructed by the opacity of the FFI. This complicates debugging and fosters potential inefficiency and security problems. One contributing issue is that there is little rigorous software design advice for multilingual software. In this paper, we present our progress towards a more rigorous design approach to multilingual software. The approach is based on the existing …

Chatbots: Conversation Killers Or Makers?, Jing Jiang

MITB Thought Leadership Series

Whether you’re aware of it or not, the chances are you’ve been chatting to robots of late. While these bots are faceless and unseen, don’t be fooled into thinking they aren’t there. In fact, chatbots, have been around since the 1960s at least, but with the progress in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and voice recognition, they’ve received both a functionality and a popularity boost. From the cosmetic to the life-changing, nowadays, chatbots can do anything from helping a person lose weight to assisting refugees applying for asylum.

Da-Drls: Drift Adaptive Deep Reinforcement Learning Based Scheduling For Iot Resource Management, Abishi Chowdhury, Shital A. Raut, Husnu S. Narman

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

In order to fulfill the tremendous resource demand by diverse IoT applications, the large-scale resource-constrained IoT ecosystem requires a robust resource management technique. An optimum resource provisioning in IoT ecosystem deals with an efficient request-resource mapping which is difficult to achieve due to the heterogeneity and dynamicity of IoT resources and IoT requests. In this paper, we investigate the scheduling and resource allocation problem for dynamic user requests with varying resource requirements. Specifically, we formulate the complete problem as an optimization problem and try to generate an optimal policy with the objectives to minimize the overall energy consumption and to …

Improving 3d Printed Prosthetics With Sensors And Motors, Rachel Zarin

Honors Projects

A 3D printed hand and arm prosthetic was created from the idea of adding bionic elements while keeping the cost low. It was designed based on existing models, desired functions, and materials available. A tilt sensor keeps the hand level, two motors move the wrist in two different directions, a limit switch signals the fingers to open and close, and another motor helps open and close the fingers. All sensors and motors were built on a circuit board, programmed using an Arduino, and powered by a battery. Other supporting materials include metal brackets, screws, guitar strings, elastic bands, small clamps, …

Selection Of Marine Security Policyusing Fuzzy-Ahp Topsis Hybrid Approach, Hozairi Hozairi, Buhari Buhari, Heru Lumaksono, Marcus Tukan

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

The research was focused on the integration of Fuzzy set theory with Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to choose the optimum maritime security policy to achieve Indonesia recognition as the world's maritime axis. The method used is AHP with fuzzy based enhancement. Here, the weight of each criterion is calculated to overcome the criticism of the scale of unbalanced rating, uncertainty, and inaccuracy in the pairwise of comparison process. The best recommendation for Indonesian maritime policies is multi task single agency which is greatly infuenced by several factors such as …

User Privacy Leakage In Location-Based Mobile Ad Services, Qicheng Lin

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The online advertising ecosystem leverages its massive data collection capability to learn the properties of users for targeted ad deliveries. Many Android app developers include ad libraries in their apps as a way of monetization. These ad libraries contain advertisements from the sell-side platforms, which collect an extensive set of sensitive information to provide more relevant advertisements for their customers. Existing efforts have investigated the increasingly pervasive private data collection of mobile ad networks over time. However, there lacks a measurement study to evaluate the scale of privacy leakage of ad networks across different geographical areas. In this work, we …

Exact Analytical Formula For The Excess Noise Factor For Mixed Carrier Injection Avalanche Photodiodes, Md. Mottaleb Hossain, John P.R. David, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The well-known analytical formula for the excess noise factor associated with avalanche photodiodes (APDs), developed by R. J. McIntyre in 1966, assumes the injection of either an electron or a hole at the edge of the APD's avalanche region. This formula is based on the statistics of the probabilities of carriers gaining and losing energy subject to high electric fields. However, this analytical formula, is not applicable in cases when photons are absorbed inside the avalanche region (even though the physics of the high field transport remains the same), and its use may severely underestimate or overestimate the actual excess …

Developing 5gl Concepts From User Interactions, David Stuckless Meyer

Masters Theses

In the fulfilling of the contracts generated in Test Driven Development, a developer could be said to act as a constraint solver, similar to those used by a 5th Generation Language(5GL). This thesis presents the hypothesis that 5GL linguistic mechanics, such as facts, rules and goals, will be emergent in the communications of developer pairs performing Test Driven Development, validating that 5GL syntax is congruent with the ways that practitioners communicate. Along the way, nomenclatures and linguistic patterns may be observed that could inform the design of future 5GL languages.

Intelligent Software Tools For Recruiting, Swatee B. Kulkarni, Xiangdong Che

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

In this paper, we outline how recruiting and talent acquisition gained importance within HRM field, then give a brief introduction to the newest tools used by the professionals for recruiting and lastly, describe the Artificial Intelligence-based tools that have started playing an increasingly important role. We also provide further research suggestions for using artificial intelligence-based tools to make recruiting more efficient and cost-effective.