Computer Engineering Commons^™

The Construction And Characterization Of A Magneto-Optical Trap For Rubidium-87 And Electromagnetically-Induced Transparency In Rubidium-87 In A Vapor Cell, Yu Liu

Honors College Theses

Recent years have observed fast developments in neutral atomic vapor based quantum information storage technology. The technique utilizes light fields in the optical wavelength region as signal carrier and retriever and neutral atomic systems (e.g. single atoms, ensembles of atoms, atom-like defects in solids) as storage media. Photons are robust carriers of information due to their high velocity (c = 2.998 x 10⁸ m/s) and ease of transportation (they propagate rectilinearly with low loss). Their high mobility, however, makes it a challenging task to spatially localize and therefore store them. Atoms (or atom-like systems), on the other hand, can …

Biobotic Solutions, Michael Joseph Iseman

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

BioBotic Solutions is a business plan that was created and used to compete in national business competitions. The business takes an in-depth look into the pathology industry, which has an impact on nearly 75% of all patient diagnosis, and proposes a change- to automate a process currently done manually, and introduce to proprietary products, a robotic arm and a new container. The solution addresses a $500M annual opportunity, and will reduce both errors and costs for mid/large size laboratories.

Using A Uav To Effectively Prolong Wireless Sensor Network Lifetime With Wireless Power Transfer, Jinfu Leng

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Wireless sensor networks are widely used for everything from border security to monitoring waterway pollution. Supplying energy for long term deployment is a main challenge in the applications of wireless sensor networks, as batteries are the primary energy source. Current wireless sensor networks deployed for long periods either require additional infrastructure, such as solar panels, or periodic maintenance. Our research lab has proposed a novel solution that uses a micro unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to wirelessly charge the sensor nodes and prolong the sensor network lifetime. Recent studies have shown that significant power can be transferred wirelessly over medium distances. …

Dnn: A Distributed Namenode Filesystem For Hadoop, Ziling Huang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) is the distributed storage infrastructure for the Hadoop big-data analytics ecosystem. A single node, called the NameNode of HDFS stores the metadata of the entire file system and coordinates the file content placement and retrieval actions of the data storage subsystems, called DataNodes. However the single NameNode architecture has long been viewed as the Achilles' heel of the Hadoop Distributed file system, as it not only represents a single point of failure, but also limits the scalability of the storage tier in the system stack. Since Hadoop is now being deployed at increasing scale, …

A Study Of Time-Based Features And Regularity Of Manipulation To Improve The Detection Of Eating Activity Periods During Free Living, Jose Reyes

All Theses

This thesis considers the problem of detecting when people eat by tracking their wrist motion. The goal of this work is to automatically detect the start and stop times of these eating activities. It builds upon previous work done by our research group, which developed an algorithm for automatically detecting peaks in activities associated with food preparation and clean-up. This peak detector is then used for segmenting data. These segments are then classified as eating or non-eating activities using a naive Bayes classifier based on probabilities obtained from computing different features in each segment. The original work introduced 4 features, …

Privacy Preserving Statistics, Oluwakemi Hambolu

All Theses

Over the past few years, there have been an increase in the development and improvement of circumvention tools like Tor and Psiphon. These tools provide an environment for citizens of oppressive regimes to access websites freely without fear of identification, these tools aid democracy activists and journalists in West Africa in using the Internet securely. A similar circumvention tool was developed by us. This tool circumvents DNS and IP address blocking/filtering, by leveraging technologies developed by criminal botnet enterprises. To improve and maintain the circumvention tool we developed, it is important to quantify the number and country of origin of …

Electric Power Synchrophasor Network Cyber Security Vulnerabilities, Christopher Beasley

All Theses

Smart grid technologies such as synchrophasor devices (Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs)), make real-time monitoring, control, and analysis of the electric power grid possible. PMUs measure voltage and current phasors across the electrical power grid, add a GPS time stamps to measurements, and sends reports to the Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) in the control centers. Reports are used to make decisions about the condition and state of the power grid. Since this approach relies on Internet Protocol (IP) network infrastructure, possible cybersecurity vulnerabilities have to be addressed to ensure that it is stable, secure, and reliable. In literature, attacks that are …

Radiation-Hardened Delay-Insensitive Asynchronous Circuits For Multi-Bit Seu Mitigation And Data-Retaining Sel Protection, John Davis Brady

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Radiation can have highly damaging effects on circuitry, especially for space applications, if designed without radiation-hardening mechanisms. Delay-insensitive asynchronous circuits inherently have promising potentials in mitigating the effects of radiation due to their delay insensitivity. This thesis proposes the use of two delay-insensitive asynchronous logic architectures to mitigate the effects of up to two single-event upsets (SEU) and a single-event latch-up (SEL). The multi-bit SEU mitigation with SEL protection architecture improves the original design by providing more integrity against data corruption and lock-ups caused by multi-bit SEUs, and it is expanded to simultaneously provide protection against SEL. The multi-bit SEU …

Designing Customizable Network-On-Chip With Support For Embedded Private Memory For Multi-Processor System-On-Chips, Azad Fakhari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The computer industry's transition to multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) architectures is increasing the need for new scalable high-bandwidth on-chip communication

backbones. Network-on-Chip (NoC) interconnects are gaining interest for serving as the on-chip communication infrastructure. The most important issues to be considered in designing a NoC are topology, routing algorithm, flow control, and buffering and also the trade-offs between performance, power, and area.

This research proposes a custom-designed NoC specifically for MPSoCs on FPGAs. The proposed design allows the communication infrastructure to seamlessly scale as the numbers of processors within the chip increases. The design adds a new level of …

Co-Emulation Of Scan-Chain Based Designs Utilizing Sce-Mi Infrastructure, Bill Jason Pidlaoan Tomas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Simulation times of complex System-on-Chips (SoC) have grown exponentially as designs reach the multi-million ASIC gate range. Verification teams have adopted emulation as a prominent methodology, incorporating high-level testbenches and FPGA/ASIC hardware for system-level testing (SLT). In addition to SLT, emulation enables software teams to incorporate software applications with cycle-accurate hardware early on in the design cycle. The Standard for Co-Emulation Modeling Interface (SCE-MI) developed by the Accelera Initiative, is a widely used communication protocol for emulation which has been accepted by major electronic design automation (EDA) companies.

Scan-chain is a design-for-test (DFT) methodology used for testing digital circuits. To …

Wsnfs: A Distributed Data Sharing System For In-Network Processing, Joshua C. Kiepert

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have emerged as versatile platforms for a wide range of scientific data acquisition applications. Wireless sensor network systems are used in many applications including: surveillance, environmental monitoring, target tracking, wildlife tracking, personal health monitoring, machinery monitoring, and many others. Current research efforts in WSN system designs are moving toward approaches that enable direct in-network processing of acquired sensor data to avoid the high energy costs associated with the bulk transmission of data to outside systems for processing. Implementation of collaborative in-network processing algorithms is a non-trivial issue for WSN system development. Design complexity for in-network processing …

Tapjacking Threats And Mitigation Techniques For Android Applications, Vanessa Cooper

Dissertations, Theses and Capstone Projects (Full IR Collection)

With the increased dependency on web applications through mobile devices, malicious attack techniques have now shifted from traditional web applications running on desktop or laptop (allowing mouse click- based interactions) to mobile applications running on mobile devices (allowing touch-based interactions). Clickjacking is a type of malicious attack originating in web applications, where victims are lured to click on seemingly benign objects in web pages. However, when clicked, unintended actions are performed without the user’s knowledge. In particular, it is shown that users are lured to touch an object of an application triggering unintended actions not actually intended by victims. This …

Implementation Of Prediction Algorithms To Reduce Latency In Control Of Switching Converters, Brent Bell

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Using pulse-width modulation (PWM) to control switching converters such as a dual active bridge introduces latency into a system [1]. Latency in a switching converter decreases the effective bandwidth that the converter can be switched at and for the case of a closed loop control system decreases the effective closed loop system stability. This delay can be attributed to sampling of the control signal and calculation time for the PWM. If a prediction scheme is implemented in this calculation, the next switching time could be predicted to remove any latency. There are effectively two steps in order to achieve this …

Reducing Ambiguities In Customer Requirements Through Historical Rule-Based Knowledge In A Small Organization, Silvia Brum Preston

Dissertations

During the elicitation process the requirements for a software application are obtained from the customer. Customers often do not know how to clearly express the requirements of the application to be built, causing requirements to be ambiguous. Many studies have been found to cover different characteristics of the requirements elicitation process including methods for reducing ambiguities in requirements. The methods and findings of these studies were found to be too general when it comes to the specific domain of the requirements and knowledge about the requirements. In addition, some studies did not take into consideration the level of expertise of …

A Novel, Tag-Based File-System, Aaron Laursen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

For decades, computer use has largely focused on managing and manipulating files-- creating and consuming media, browsing the web, software development, and even, with such systems as UNIX and Plan$9$, direct device access can largely be reduced to locating, creating, reading, and writing files. To facilitate these operations, developers have created a vast assortment of file-systems, each presenting a unique framework underlying nearly everything people do with a computer.

For various reasons, these file-systems have historically represented only incremental improvements and alterations from their predecessors, leaving the basic design and interaction models relatively unchanged. Because of this, most common file-systems …

On The Database Lookup Problem Of Approximate Matching, Frank Breitinger, Harald Baier, Douglas White

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Investigating seized devices within digital forensics gets more and more difficult due to the increasing amount of data. Hence, a common procedure uses automated file identification which reduces the amount of data an investigator has to look at by hand. Besides identifying exact duplicates, which is mostly solved using cryptographic hash functions, it is also helpful to detect similar data by applying approximate matching.

Let x denote the number of digests in a database, then the lookup for a single similarity digest has the complexity of O(x). In other words, the digest has to be compared against …

Text Stylometry For Chat Bot Identification And Intelligence Estimation., Nawaf Ali

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Authorship identification is a technique used to identify the author of an unclaimed document, by attempting to find traits that will match those of the original author. Authorship identification has a great potential for applications in forensics. It can also be used in identifying chat bots, a form of intelligent software created to mimic the human conversations, by their unique style. The online criminal community is utilizing chat bots as a new way to steal private information and commit fraud and identity theft. The need for identifying chat bots by their style is becoming essential to overcome the danger of …

Evaluation Of The Importance Of Time-Frequency Contributions To Speech Intelligibility In Noise, Chengzhu Yu, Kamil K. Wójcicki, Philipos C. Loizou, John H. L. Hansen, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Recent studies on binary masking techniques make the assumption that each time-frequency (T-F) unit contributes an equal amount to the overall intelligibility of speech. The present study demonstrated that the importance of each T-F unit to speech intelligibility varies in accordance with speech content. Specifically, T-F units are categorized into two classes, speech-present T-F units and speech-absent T-F units. Results indicate that the importance of each speech-present T-F unit to speech intelligibility is highly related to the loudness of its target component, while the importance of each speech-absent T-F unit varies according to the loudness of its masker component. Two …

A Novel On-Chip Three-Dimensional Micromachined Calorimeter With Fully Enclosed And Suspended Thin-Film Chamber For Thermal Characterization Of Liquid Samples, Benyamin Davaji, Hye Jeong Bak, Woo-Jin Chang, Chung-Hoon Lee

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A microfabricated calorimeter (μ-calorimeter) with an enclosed reaction chamber is presented. The 3D micromachined reaction chamber is capable of analyzing liquid samples with volume of 200 nl. The thin film low-stress silicon nitride membrane is used to reduce thermal mass of the calorimeter and increase the sensitivity of system. The μ-calorimeter has been designed to perform DC and AC calorimetry, thermal wave analysis, and differential scanning calorimetry. The μ-calorimeter fabricated with an integrated heater and a temperature sensor on opposite sides of the reaction chamber allows to perform thermal diffusivity and specific heat measurements on liquid samples with same device. …

Re-Engineering Of A Black Box For The Purpose Of Upgrade And Maintenance, Nathanael R. Weidler

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

There existed an aging electrical system that needed to be upgraded. An upgrade was necessary for this system because the cost to maintain the aging technology was becoming too great. There were, however, no available schematics or technical papers describing this system. In order to upgrade the system, it first needed to be reverse engineered. The system to be upgraded was a device that would pass data back and forth from a personal computer to a proprietary storage device. The device to be upgraded communicated with the personal computer over a standard Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) interface and with …