Computer Engineering Commons^™

Autonomous Uavs For Near Earth Environmental Sensing, David J. Anthony

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing an increasing role in large scale environmental monitoring. Small UAVs are increasingly used to monitor agricultural fields, infrastructure projects, and disaster areas. The combination of their sensors, ease of use, and portability make them an ideal tool for collecting information on demand about geographic regions. These small UAVs do have several significant limitations. The UAVs have very limited autonomy and fly pre-determined flight paths far above the underlying terrain, limiting the spatial resolution of the collected data. Current battery technology severely limits their flight times, which in turn limits the temporal resolution of the …

Testing The Independence Hypothesis Of Accepted Mutations For Pairs Of Adjacent Amino Acids In Protein Sequences, Jyotsna Ramanan

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Evolutionary studies usually assume that the genetic mutations are independent of each other. However, that does not imply that the observed mutations are independent of each other because it is possible that when a nucleotide is mutated, then it may be biologically beneficial if an adjacent nucleotide mutates too.

With a number of decoded genes currently available in various genome libraries and online databases, it is now possible to have a large-scale computer-based study to test whether the independence assumption holds for pairs of adjacent amino acids. Hence the independence question also arises for pairs of adjacent amino acids within …

Power Management In Heterogeneous Mapreduce Cluster, Rojee Sunuwar

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The growing expenses of power in data centers as compared to the operation costs has been a concern for the past several decades. It has been predicted that without an intervention, the energy cost will soon outgrow the infrastructure and operation cost. Therefore, it is of great importance to make data center clusters more energy efficient which is critical for avoiding system overheating and failures. In addition, energy inefficiency causes not only the loss of capital but also environmental pollution. Various Power Management(PM) strategies have been developed over the years to make system more energy efficient and to counteract the …

The Effect Of Frequency Resolution On Intelligibility Sentence And Its Relevance To Cochlear Implant Design, Seth H. Roy

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The purpose of this study is to understand how electrical stimulation (as opposed to acoustical stimulation) of the auditory nerve is used in cochlear implants. Speech is a complex signal that changes rapidly in time and frequency domains. Since phonemes (the smallest unit of speech that distinguishes words) depend on nuanced differences in frequency patterns, it would be expected that a signal with drastically reduced frequency information would be of limited value for conveying speech. Such a frequency-poor signal is the object to be investigated in the present work. It is also the basis of the way speech is represented …

Finding Dna Motifs: A Probabilistic Suffix Tree Approach, Abhishek Majumdar

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

We address the problem of de novo motif identification. That is, given a set of DNA sequences we try to identify motifs in the dataset without having any prior knowledge about existence of any motifs in the dataset. We propose a method based on Probabilistic Suffix Trees (PSTs) to identify fixed-length motifs from a given set of DNA sequences. Our experiments reveal that our approach successfully discovers true motifs. We compared our method with the popular MEME algorithm, and observed that it detects a larger number of correct and statistically significant motifs than MEME. Our method is highly efficient as …

Towards Building A Review Recommendation System That Trains Novices By Leveraging The Actions Of Experts, Shilpa Khanal

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Online reviews increase consumer visits, increase the time spent on the website, and create a sense of community among the frequent shoppers. Because of the importance of online reviews, online retailers such as Amazon.com and eOpinions provide detailed guidelines for writing reviews. However, though these guidelines provide instructions on how to write reviews, reviewers are not provided instructions for writing product-specific reviews. As a result, poorly-written reviews are abound and a customer may need to scroll through a large number of reviews, which could be up to 6000 pixels down from the top of the page, in order to find …

A Reduced Labeled Samples (Rls) Framework For Classification Of Imbalanced Concept-Drifting Streaming Data., Elaheh Arabmakki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Stream processing frameworks are designed to process the streaming data that arrives in time. An example of such data is stream of emails that a user receives every day. Most of the real world data streams are also imbalanced as is in the stream of emails, which contains few spam emails compared to a lot of legitimate emails. The classification of the imbalanced data stream is challenging due to the several reasons: First of all, data streams are huge and they can not be stored in the memory for one time processing. Second, if the data is imbalanced, the accuracy …

Psychophysiological Analysis Of A Pedagogical Agent And Robotic Peer For Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorders., Mohammad Nasser Saadatzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by ongoing problems in social interaction and communication, and engagement in repetitive behaviors. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 1 in 68 children in the United States has ASD. Mounting evidence shows that many of these individuals display an interest in social interaction with computers and robots and, in general, feel comfortable spending time in such environments. It is known that the subtlety and unpredictability of people’s social behavior are intimidating and confusing for many individuals with ASD. Computerized learning environments and robots, however, prepare a predictable, …

Just In Time Assembly (Jita) - A Run Time Interpretation Approach For Achieving Productivity Of Creating Custom Accelerators In Fpgas, Sen Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reconfigurable computing community has yet to be successful in allowing programmers to access FPGAs through traditional software development flows. Existing barriers that prevent programmers from using FPGAs include: 1) knowledge of hardware programming models, 2) the need to work within the vendor specific CAD tools and hardware synthesis. This thesis presents a series of published papers that explore different aspects of a new approach being developed to remove the barriers and enable programmers to compile accelerators on next generation reconfigurable manycore architectures. The approach is entitled Just In Time Assembly (JITA) of hardware accelerators. The approach has been defined …

Unsupervised Feature Selection For Outlier Detection By Modelling Hierarchical Value-Feature Couplings, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen, Huan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper feature selection for unsupervised outlier detection can improve detection performance but is very challenging due to complex feature interactions, the mixture of relevant features with noisy/redundant features in imbalanced data, and the unavailability of class labels. Little work has been done on this challenge. This paper proposes a novel Coupled Unsupervised Feature Selection framework (CUFS for short) to filter out noisy or redundant features for subsequent outlier detection in categorical data. CUFS quantifies the outlierness (or relevance) of features by learning and integrating both the feature value couplings and feature couplings. Such value-to-feature couplings capture intrinsic data characteristics and …

Evaluation Of User Perceived Qoe In Mobile Systems Using Social Media Analytics, Ahmed Yaseen Mjhool

Theses and Dissertations

In mobile system environments, the quality perceived by users is inconstant and reliant on many factors such as cellular network, data connection, cost, coverage area, etc. Even though Quality of Service (QoS) management is enabled in most modern telecommunication systems, it does not guarantee the actual user’s perceived Quality of Experience (QoE) level. Many cellular networks rely on engineering test research, such as drive testing or smart mobile applications, to collect the required parameters in order to provide better service quality to users. However, this approach does not always yield customer satisfaction. Hence, user opinions should be considered. These opinions …

Investigation Of Polymer–Plasticizer Blends As Sh-Saw Sensor Coatings For Detection Of Benzene In Water With High Sensitivity And Long-Term Stability, Pintu Adhikari, Laura Jeanne Alderson, Florian Bender, Antonio J. Ricco, Fabien Josse

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We report the first-ever direct detection of benzene in water at concentrations below 100 ppb (parts per billion) using acoustic wave (specifically, shear-horizontal surface acoustic wave, SH-SAW) sensors with plasticized polymer coatings. Two polymers and two plasticizers were studied as materials for sensor coatings. For each polymer–plasticizer combination, the influence of the mixing ratio of the blend on the sensitivity to benzene was measured and compared to commercially available polymers that were used for BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene) detection in previous work. After optimizing the coating parameters, the highest sensitivity and lowest detection limit for benzene were found …

Sensor Placement With Time-To-Detection Guarantees, Saif Eddin Jabari, Laura Wynter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a novel and effective method for determining the placement of sensors so as to be able to satisfy probabilistic constraints on the time-to-detection of an incident. Indeed, with the wealth of real-time traffic data available today, an important new goal of intelligent traffic management systems is incident detection with time-to-detection guarantees, in particular on expressways with large distances between sensors. This goal drives investment decisions in new sensor deployment, hence making the topic a pressing need for traffic management. The method we provide makes use of a probabilistic formulation of traffic behavior and incident localization to determine the …

Harmonic Scale Transformations, John H. Chalmers

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

My artwork derives from a project to delineate the transformations certain types of harmonic musical scales undergo as the sizes of their generating intervals vary over the space of the octave.

Overview Of Lte Spectrum Sharing Technologies, Yun Ye, Dalei Wu, Zhihui Shu, Yi Qian

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Long-Term Evolution (LTE) communication systems feature advanced frequency reuse and interference coordination techniques providing faster and more secured mobile services. However, the network capacity in licensed spectrum is still behind market demands. Dynamic spectrum access or spectrum sharing in other frequently vacant or unlicensed frequency bands is considered an effective means to boost system throughput. Different from operations in licensed spectrum with exclusive access, LTE deployment needs to take into account the distinct regulations on channel access to each shared frequency band, in order to avoid interference to incumbent users, and to maintain fair play with peer operators in heterogeneous …

On The Origin Of Synthetic Life: Attribution Of Output To A Particular Algorithm, Roman V. Yampolskiy

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

With unprecedented advances in genetic engineering we are starting to see progressively more original examples of synthetic life. As such organisms become more common it is desirable to gain an ability to distinguish between natural and artificial life forms. In this paper, we address this challenge as a generalized version of Darwin's original problem, which he so brilliantly described in On the Origin of Species. After formalizing the problem of determining the samples' origin, we demonstrate that the problem is in fact unsolvable. In the general case, if computational resources of considered originator algorithms have not been limited and priors …

Mesh Addition Based On The Depth Image (Mabdi), Lucas E. Chavez

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

Many robotic applications utilize a detailed map of the world and the algorithm used to produce such a map must take into consideration real-world constraints such as computational and memory costs. Traditional mesh-based environmental mapping algorithms receive data from the sensor, create a mesh surface from the data, and then append the surface to a growing global mesh. These algorithms do not provide a computationally efficient mechanism for reducing redundancies in the global mesh. MABDI is able to leverage the knowledge contained in the global mesh to find the difference between what we expect our sensor to see and what …

Towards Learning And Verifying Invariants Of Cyber-Physical Systems By Code Mutation, Yuqi Chen, Christopher M. Poskitt, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS), which integrate algorithmic control with physical processes, often consist of physically distributed components communicating over a network. A malfunctioning or compromised component in such a CPS can lead to costly consequences, especially in the context of public infrastructure. In this short paper, we argue for the importance of constructing invariants (or models) of the physical behaviour exhibited by CPS, motivated by their applications to the control, monitoring, and attestation of components. To achieve this despite the inherent complexity of CPS, we propose a new technique for learning invariants that combines machine learning with ideas from mutation testing. …

Towards Concolic Testing For Hybrid Systems, Pingfan Kong, Yi Li, Xiaohong Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hybrid systems exhibit both continuous and discrete behavior. Analyzing hybrid systems is known to be hard. Inspired by the idea of concolic testing (of programs), we investigate whether we can combine random sampling and symbolic execution in order to effectively verify hybrid systems. We identify a sufficient condition under which such a combination is more effective than random sampling. Furthermore, we analyze different strategies of combining random sampling and symbolic execution and propose an algorithm which allows us to dynamically switch between them so as to reduce the overall cost. Our method has been implemented as a web-based checker named …

Rapid Deployment Indoor Localization Without Prior Human Participation, Han Xu, Zimu Zhou, Longfei Shangguan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we propose RAD, a RApid Deployment localization framework without human sampling. The basic idea of RAD is to automatically generate a fingerprint database through space partition, of which each cell is fingerprinted by its maximum influence APs. Based on this robust location indicator, fine-grained localization can be achieved by a discretized particle filter utilizing sensor data fusion. We devise techniques for CIVD-based field division, graph-based particle filter, EM-based individual character learning, and build a prototype that runs on commodity devices. Extensive experiments show that RAD provides a comparable performance to the state-of-the-art RSSbased methods while relieving it …