Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Augmented Lagrangian Approach To Design Of Structured Optimal State Feedback Gains, Fu Lin, Makan Fardad, Mihailo R. Jovanovic

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

We consider the design of optimal state feedback gains subject to structural constraints on the distributed controllers. These constraints are in the form of sparsity requirements for the feedback matrix, implying that each controller has access to information from only a limited number of subsystems. The minimizer of this constrained optimal control problem is sought using the augmented Lagrangian method. Notably, this approach does not require a stabilizing structured gain to initialize the optimization algorithm. Motivated by the structure of the necessary conditions for optimality of the augmented Lagrangian, we develop an alternating descent method to determine the structured optimal …

Minimax Games For Cooperative Spectrum Sensing In A Centralized Cognitive Radio Network In The Presence Of Interferers, Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla, Hao Chen, Pramod Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

In this paper, we consider the problem of interference attacks for cooperative spectrum sensing in a centralized cognitive radio network comprising N cognitive radios (CRs) and one fusion center (FC) in the presence of a fixed interferer. The design metric chosen is the error probability. We prove the existence of a saddle-point in the minimax game between the interferer and the CR network. An optimal solution is found that maximizes the objective with respect to the interferer’s parameters and minimizes the same with respect to the CR network’s parameters. We show that the probability of error is a quasi-convex function …

Attacks On Webview In The Android System, Tongbo Luo, Hao Hao, Wenliang Du, Heng Yin

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

WebView is an essential component in both Android and iOS platforms, enabling smartphone and tablet apps to embed a simple but powerful browser inside them. To achieve a better interaction between apps and their embedded\browsers", WebView provides a number of APIs, allowing code in apps to invoke and be invoked by the JavaScript code within the web pages, intercept their events, and modify those events. Using these features, apps can become customized \browsers" for their intended web applications. Currently, in the Android market, 86 percent of the top 20 most downloaded apps in 10 diverse categories use WebView. The design …

Freeing Space For Nasa: Incorporating A Lossless Compression Algorithm Into Nasa's Fiber Optic Strain Sensing System, Kaitlyn Fiechtner, Allen Parker

STAR Program Research Presentations

NASA’s Fiber Optic Strain Sensing (FOSS) system can gather and store up to 1,536,000 bytes (1.46 megabytes) per second. Since the FOSS system typically acquires hours—or even days—of data, the system can gather hundreds of gigabytes of data for a given test event. To store such large quantities of data more effectively, NASA is modifying a Lempel-Ziv-Oberhumer (LZO) lossless data compression program to compress data as it is being acquired in real time. After proving that the algorithm is capable of compressing the data from the FOSS system, the LZO program will be modified and incorporated into the FOSS system. …

Decision-Making With Heterogeneous Sensors - A Copula Based Approach, Satish Giridhar Iyengar

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Dissertations

Statistical decision making has wide ranging applications, from communications and signal processing to econometrics and finance. In contrast to the classical one source-one receiver paradigm, several applications have been identified in the recent past that require acquiring data from multiple sources or sensors. Information from the multiple sensors are transmitted to a remotely located receiver known as the fusion center which makes a global decision. Past work has largely focused on fusion of information from homogeneous sensors. This dissertation extends the formulation to the case when the local sensors may possess disparate sensing modalities. Both the theoretical and practical aspects …

Cognitive Security Framework For Heterogeneous Sensor Network Using Swarm Intelligence, Rajani Muraleedharan

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Dissertations

Rapid development of sensor technology has led to applications ranging from academic to military in a short time span. These tiny sensors are deployed in environments where security for data or hardware cannot be guaranteed. Due to resource constraints, traditional security schemes cannot be directly applied. Unfortunately, due to minimal or no communication security schemes, the data, link and the sensor node can be easily tampered by intruder attacks. This dissertation presents a security framework applied to a sensor network that can be managed by a cohesive sensor manager. A simple framework that can support security based on situation assessment …

Solar Power System Modeling And Performance Analysis, Jiaqi Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

At present the main source of our power and energy needs are from fossil fuel; almost all transportation tools and nearly 70% of electrical power are produced by fossil fuel. But unfortunately these materials are limited in our planet, with obvious drawback such as pollution. So looking for new kinds of energy supply is an urgent matter. Solar-powered photovoltaic system provides a clean energy solution to this problem. It is developing fast all over the world in terms of both research work and actual applications. It is estimated that the power supplied by solar energy can provide 10 percent of …

Simulation, Application, And Resilience Of An Organic Neuromorphic Architecture, Made With Organic Bistable Devices And Organic Field Effect Transistors, Robert A. Nawrocki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents work done simulating a type of organic neuromorphic architecture, modeled after Artificial Neural Network, and termed Synthetic Neural Network, or SNN. The first major contribution of this thesis is development of a single-transistor-single-organic-bistable-device-per-input circuit that approximates behavior of an artificial neuron. The efficacy of this design is validated by comparing the behavior of a single synthetic neuron to that of an artificial neuron as well as two examples involving a network of synthetic neurons. The analysis utilizes electrical characteristics of polymer electronic elements, namely Organic Bistable Device and Organic Field Effect Transistor, created in the laboratory at …

Reference Set Metrics For Multi-Objective Algorithms, Chilukuri K. Mohan, Kishan Mehrotra

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Several metrics and indicators have been suggested in the past to evaluate multi-objective evolutionary and non-evolutionary algo- rithms. However, these metrics are known to have many problems that make their application sometimes unsound, and sometimes infeasible. This paper proposes a new approach, in which metrics are parameter- ized with respect to a reference set, on which depend the properties of any metric.

Spatial Whitening Framework For Distributed Estimation, Swarnendu Kar, Pramod K. Varshney

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

Designing resource allocation strategies for power constrained sensor network in the presence of correlated data often gives rise to intractable problem formulations. In such situations, applying well-known strategies derived from conditionalindependence assumption may turn out to be fairly suboptimal. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing an adjacency-based spatial whitening scheme, where each sensor exchanges its observation with their neighbors prior to encoding their own private information and transmitting it to the fusion center. We comment on the computational limitations for obtaining the optimal whitening transformation, and propose an iterative optimization scheme to achieve the same for large …

Building A Visual Front-End For Audio-Visual Automatic Speech Recognition In Vehicle Environments, Robert Hursig, Jane Zhang

Electrical Engineering

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) holds the promise of providing a natural, efficient, and safer means for communication between humans and computers and can profoundly change the way we live. Since its invention in the 1950s, ASR has witnessed considerable research activities and in recent years is finding its way into practical applications as evidenced by more and more consumer devices such as PDAs and mobile phones adding ASR features. While mainstream ASR has focused almost exclusively on the acoustic signal, the performance of these systems degrades considerably in the real-world in the presence of noise. One way to overcome this …

Pipe Flow – A Tutorial For Electrical Engineers, William Ahlgren

Electrical Engineering

Energy is transported over long distances primarily by electric power transmission lines and by pipelines carrying gas or liquid fuel. Electric power engineers need to compare these two energy transmission methods, but often lack knowledge of fluid mechanics pre‐requisite to understanding pipeline transmission. This article provides a focused tutorial to provide the necessary background in the fluid mechanics of pipe flow.

Compressed Sensing Based Cyclic Feature Spectrum Sensing For Cognitive Radios, Yohannes Z. Tafesse

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open

Spectrum sensing is currently one of the most challenging design problems in cognitive radio. A robust spectrum sensing technique is important in allowing implementation of a practical dynamic spectrum access in noisy and interference uncertain environments. In addition, it is desired to minimize the sensing time, while meeting the stringent cognitive radio application requirements. To cope with this challenge, cyclic spectrum sensing techniques have been proposed. However, such techniques require very high sampling rates in the wideband regime and thus are costly in hardware implementation and power consumption. In this thesis the concept of compressed sensing is applied to circumvent …

The Chirps Prototyping System, Gary Spivey

Faculty Publications - Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Oregon State University has been a pioneer in developing a “Platform for Learning” using their TekBots platform as a fundamental part of their electrical and computer engineering curriculum. At George Fox University, we fundamentally affirm this concept of a “Platform for Learning,” but we additionally desire a “Platform for Prototyping.” By “Platform for Prototyping,” we mean a platform that will enable our engineering students to create significant engineering projects as part of a myriad of service-learning projects, student research, course projects, and the senior capstone experience. To be effective across our curriculum, this system must not only be usable by …

Hybrid Sensing And Adaptive Control For Direct Brain Actuation Of Artificial Limbs, Christopher Aasted

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Developing a non-invasive direct brain control of artificial limbs is both challenging and desirable. Such a sensory and control system, if successful, will have a profound impact on the disabled. In this dissertation, we present the design and development of a non-invasive, hybrid sensory system, which uses near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG) to measure brain activity with simultaneous electromyography (EMG) to provide feedback data in a healthy limb. Through the combination of these sensory techniques, we have successfully trained a control system capable of mapping brain activity onto muscle actuation. The design of a control algorithm capable of automatic …

2010/11 Research, Development, And Activities, College Of Engineering And Applied Sciences

Electrical and Computer Engineering Newsletter

• Center for Advanced Smart Sensors and Structures (CASSS)
• Vehicular Ad Hoc Network Augmenting GPS Systems
• In-Flight Discreet Wireless Communication System
• Dual-Use Ground Vehicle Condition-Based Maintenance
• Neurobiology Engineering Laboratory
• CEAS Students Win Stryker Challenge!
• Earth Today iPhone Application for JPL’s Earth Sciences Directorate

Multilayered Planar Periodic Subwavelength Microstructures For Generating And Detecting Circularly Polarized Thermal Infrared Radiation, Samuel Lanning Wadsworth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Generation and detection of circularly-polarized (CP) radiation in the 8- to 12-μm band of the infrared (IR) spectrum is crucial for polarization sensing and imaging scenarios. There is very little naturally occurring CP radiation in the long-wave IR band, so that useful functionalities may be obtained by exploiting preferential radiation and transmission characteristics of engineered metamaterials. Conventional CP devices in the IR utilize birefringent crystals, which are typically bulky and expensive to manufacture. The operation of these devices is generally optimized at a single wavelength. Imaging in the long-wave IR is most often broadband, so that achromatic CP-device behavior is …

Furthering The Growth Of Cloud Computing By Providing Privacy As A Service, David S. Allison, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

The evolution of Cloud Computing as a viable business solution for providing hardware and software has created many security concerns. Among these security concerns, privacy is often overlooked. If Cloud Computing is to continue its growth, this privacy concern will need to be addressed. In this work we discuss the current growth of Cloud Computing and the impact the public sector and privacy can have in furthering this growth. To begin to provide privacy protection for Cloud Computing, we introduce privacy constraints that outline privacy preferences. We propose the expansion of Cloud Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to include these privacy …

An Empirical Study Of Open Source Software Usability: The Industrial Perspective, Arif Raza, Luiz Fernando Capretz, Faheem Ahmed

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the use of open source projects by common novice users; Open Source Software (OSS) is thus no longer a reserved arena for software developers and computer gurus. Although user-centered designs are gaining popularity in OSS, usability is still not considered as one of the prime objectives in many design scenarios. In this paper, we analyze industry users’ perception of usability factors, including understandability, learnability, operability and attractiveness, on OSS usability. The research model of this empirical study establishes the relationship between the key usability factors and OSS usability from industrial perspective. In …

Investigation Of Singlemode-Multimode-Singlemode And Singlemode-Tapered Multitmode-Singlemode Fibre Structures And Their Application For Refractive Index Sensing, Pengfei Wang, Gilberto Brambilla, Ming Ding, Yuliya Semenova, Qiang Wu, Gerald Farrell

Articles

All-fiber in-line single-mode–multimode–single-mode (SMS) and single-mode–tapered-multimode–single-mode (STMS) fiber structures are investigated. A wide-angle beam propagation method in cylindrical coordinates is developed and employed for numerical simulations of the light propagation performance of such fiber devices. The effect of strong mode interference on the performance of the devices is studied and verified numerically; results indicate that the proposed STMS structure can be exploited for measuring a broad refractive index range with reasonable high resolution, compared with the conventional SMS structure.