Computer Engineering Commons^™

Knowledge Annotations In Scientific Workflows: An Implementation In Kepler, Aida Gandara, George Chin Jr., Paulo Pinheiro Da Silva, Signe White, Chandrika Sivaramakrishnan, Terence Critchlow

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Scientific research products are the result of long-term collaborations between teams. Scientific workflows are capable of helping scientists in many ways including collecting information about how research was conducted (e.g., scientific workflow tools often collect and manage information about datasets used and data transformations). However, knowledge about why data was collected is rarely documented in scientific workflows. In this paper we describe a prototype system built to support the collection of scientific expertise that influences scientific analysis. Through evaluating a scientific research effort underway at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we identified features that would most benefit PNNL scientists in …

Quantifying Performance In Fading Channels Using The Sampling Property Of A Delta Function, Won Mee Jang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

We apply the sampling property of a delta function to obtain the probability of error in fading channels. Our approach reduces the integration to a sampling. The sampling point is obtained in terms of fading parameters and the average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to provide the closed form solution of the performance.

Modified Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Algorithm For Reducing Systems Of Linear Inequalities With Unconstrained Parameters, Mario Bencomo, Luis Gutierrez, Martine Ceberio

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The need for eliminating redundancies in systems of linear inequalities arises in many applications. In linear programming (LP), one seeks a solution that optimizes a given linear objective function subject to a set of linear constraints, sometimes posed as linear inequalities. Linear inequalities also arise in the context of tensor decomposition. Due to the lack of uniqueness in higher-order tensor decomposition, non-negativity constraints are imposed on the decomposition factors, yielding systems of linear inequalities. Eliminating redundancies in such systems can reduce the number of computations, and hence improve computation times in applications.

Towards Faster Estimation Of Statistics And Odes Under Interval, P-Box, And Fuzzy Uncertainty: From Interval Computations To Rough Set-Related Computations, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Interval computations estimate the uncertainty of the result of data processing in situations in which we only know the upper bounds $\Delta$ on the measurement errors. In interval computations, at each intermediate stage of the computation, we have intervals of possible values of the corresponding quantities. As a result, we often have bounds with excess width. One way to remedy this problem is to extend interval technique to rough-set computations, where on each stage, in addition to intervals of possible values of the quantities, we also keep rough sets representing possible values of pairs (triples, etc.).

How To Combine Probabilistic And Possibilistic (Expert) Knowledge: Uniqueness Of Reconstruction In Yager's (Product) Approach, Nitaya Buntao, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Often, about the same real-life system, we have both measurement-related probabilistic information expressed by a probability measure P(S) and expert-related possibilistic information expressed by a possibility measure M(S). To get the most adequate idea about the system, we must combine these two pieces of information. For this combination, R. Yager -- borrowing an idea from fuzzy logic -- proposed to use the simple product t-norm, i.e., to consider a set function f(S) = P(S) * M(S). A natural question is: can we uniquely reconstruct the two parts of knowledge from this function f(S)? In this paper, we prove that while …

Estimating Risk Of Extreme And Catastrophic Events Under Interval Uncertainty, Nitaya Buntao, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many application areas, we encounter heavy-taildistributions -- for example, such distributions are ubiquitousin financial applications. These distributions are oftendescribed by Pareto law. There exist techniques for estimatingthe parameters of such the corresponding Pareto distributionsbased on the sample x₁, ..., x_n. In practice, we oftenonly know the values x_i with interval uncertainty. In thispaper, we show how to estimate the parameters of the Paretodistribution under such uncertainty and how to describe deviationand dependence for general heavy-tailed distributions.

Reactive Routing In Hidra Networks, Scott Michael Marshall

Computer Engineering

In recent years, the Internet has grown so large that the future scalability of the Internet has become a major concern. The two primary scalability concerns are the size of the forwarding table and the ability for BGP to converge while distributing hundreds of thousands of routes.

HIDRA is a new Internet routing architecture that is backwards-compatible with existing routing technologies and protocols that focuses on feasibility-of-implementation. HIDRA remedies the first Internet scalability concern by proposing a means to reduce the number of entries in the default-free zone (DFZ) forwarding table.

This project extends HIDRA by designing a complete reactive …

Rough Consensus And Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles Into Internet Policy Debates, Christopher S. Yoo

Federal Communications Law Journal

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010.

The End-To-End Argument And Application Design: The Role Of Trust, David D. Clark, Marjory S. Blumenthal

Federal Communications Law Journal

Symposium: Rough Consensus and Running Code: Integrating Engineering Principles into Internet Policy Debates, held at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Technology Innovation and Competition on May 6-7, 2010.

Policy debates about the evolution of the Internet show varying degrees of understanding about the underlying technology. A fundamental principle of the design of the Internet, from the early 1980s, is the so-called "end-to-end argument" articulated in a seminal technical paper. Intended to provide guidance for what kind of capability is built into a network as opposed to the devices that use the network, the end-to-end argument has been invoked in …

Universal Engineering Programmer – An In-House Development Tool For Developing And Testing Implantable Medical Devices In St. Jude Medical, Khoa Tat Do

Master's Theses

During development and testing of the functionality of the pacemaker and defibrillator device, engineers in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division use an in-house development tool called Universal Engineering Programmer (UEP) to ensure the device functions as expected, before it can be used to test on an animal or a human during the implantation process.  In addition, some applications of UEP are incorporated into the official releases of the device product.  UEP has been developed and used by engineers across departments in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division (CRMD).  This thesis covers the flexible and reusable …

Ambulatory Healthcare Utilization In The United States: A System Dynamics Approach, Rafael Diaz, Joshua G. Behr, Mandar Tulpule

VMASC Publications

Ambulatory health care needs within the United States are served by a wide range of hospitals, clinics, and private practices. The Emergency Department (ED) functions as an important point of supply for ambulatory healthcare services. Growth in our aging populations as well as changes stemming from broader healthcare reform are expected to continue trend in congestion and increasing demand for ED services. While congestion is, in part, a manifestation of unmatched demand, the state of the alignment between the demand for, and supply of, emergency department services affects quality of care and profitability. The central focus of this research is …

2011 (Spring) Ensi Informer, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2011.

The State Of Software Engineering Maturity And Licensure, Travis Lawrence Dean

Master's Theses

IEEE-CS is pursuing licensing for software engineers, but ACM believes that software engineering is too immature, and regulating the profession would be premature. In 1996, Norman Gibbs and Gary Ford from Carnegie Mellon University performed a qualitative survey of the maturity of the software engineering profession. I apply this model to the present state of the art in software engineering and analyze the results for 2010. I analyze the maturity of software engineering to determine that the profession is not yet ready for licensure. This is not because the infrastructure of software engineering is too immature, but because we have …

A Cooperative Diversity-Based Robust Mac Protocol In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Sangman Moh, Chansu Yu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

In interference-rich and noisy environment, wireless communication is often hampered by unreliable communication links. Recently, there has been active research on cooperative communication that improves the communication reliability by having a collection of radio terminals transmit signals in a cooperative way. This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) algorithm, called Cooperative Diversity MAC (CD-MAC), which exploits the cooperative communication capability of the physical (PHY) layer to improve robustness in wireless ad hoc networks. In CD-MAC, each terminal proactively selects a partner for cooperation and lets it transmit simultaneously so that this mitigates interference from nearby terminals, and thus, improves …

Generalized Construction Of Scalable Concurrent Data Structures Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Paul E. Mckenney, Philip W. Howard, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present relativistic programming, a concurrent programming model based on shared addressing, which supports efficient, scalable operation on either uniform shared-memory or distributed shared- memory systems. Relativistic programming provides a strong causal ordering property, allowing a series of read operations to appear as an atomic transaction that occurs entirely between two ordered write operations. This preserves the simple immutable-memory programming model available via mutual exclusion or transactional memory. Furthermore, relativistic programming provides joint-access parallelism, allowing readers to run concurrently with a writer on the same data. We demonstrate a generalized construction technique for concurrent data structures based on relativistic programming, …

Scalable Correct Memory Ordering Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett, Philip William Howard, Paul E. Mckenney, Jonathan Walpole

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

We propose and document a new concurrent programming model, relativistic programming. This model allows readers to run concurrently with writers, without blocking or using expensive synchronization. Relativistic programming builds on existing synchronization primitives that allow writers to wait for current readers to finish with minimal reader overhead. Our methodology models data structures as graphs, and reader algorithms as traversals of these graphs; from this foundation we show how writers can implement arbitrarily strong ordering guarantees for the visibility of their writes, up to and including total ordering.

Identifying Horizontal Gene Transfer Using Anomalies In Protein Structures And Sequences, Venkat Ram B. Santosh

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Genetics has traditionally focused on vertical gene transfer, which is the passing of the genetic material of an organism to its offspring. However, recent studies in genetics increased the awareness that horizontal gene transfer, which is the passing of the genetic material of an organism to another organism that is not its offspring, is also a significant phenomenon. Horizontal gene transfer is thought to play a major role in the natural evolution of bacteria, such as, when several different types of bacteria all suddenly develop the same drug resistance genes. Artificial horizontal gene transfer occurs in genetic engineering.

This thesis …

Sensitivity Of High-Speed Lightwave System Receivers Using Inalas Avalanche Photodiodes, Daniel S.G. Ong, Majeed M. Hayat, John P.R. David, Jo Shien Ng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Calculations based on a rigorous analytical model are carried out to compare the sensitivity of optical receivers that use InP and In_0.52Al_0.48As avalanche photodiodes (APDs). The model includes the effects of intersymbol interference, tunneling current, avalanche noise and its correlation with the stochastic avalanche duration, dead space, and transimpedance amplifier noise. For a 10-Gb/s system with a bit-error rate of 10^-12, the optimum receiver sensitivity predicted for In_0.52Al_0.48As and InP APDs is -28.6 and -28.1 dBm, respectively, corresponding to a reduction of 11% in optical signal power for receivers using …

On Reducing Communication Energy Using Cross-Sensor Coding Technique, Kien Nguyen, Thinh Nguyen, Sen-Ching Cheung

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the uneven communication energy problem in data gathering sensor networks where the nodes closer to the sink tend to consume more energy than those of the farther nodes. Consequently, the lifetime of a network is significantly shortened. We propose a cross-sensor coding technique using On-Off keying which exploits (a) the tradeoff between delay and energy consumption and (b) the network topology in order to alleviate the problem of unequal energy consumption. We formulate our coding problem as an integer linear programming problem and show how to construct a number of codes based on different criteria. We show …

From Processing Interval-Valued Fuzzy Data To General Type-2: Towards Fast Algorithms, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)