Digital Commons Network^™

The Soulless Machine, Nathan Lomas

Theses

Since their creation, we have grown increasingly reliant on machines to aid us in our understanding and perceptions of the world - the camera is no exception. As an extension of the human eye, it allows us the opportunity to examine our environments from new perspectives, offering up views that we may not be able to witness on our own. Though in truth, the structure of the machine is ingrained in everything we know: from the natural world to our social patterns, actions are prescribed, parts move with united purpose, yet there is a certain comfort in the surrender of …

An Approach To Detecting Crowd Anomalies For Entrance And Checkpoint Security, Holly Zelnio

Theses

This thesis develops an approach for detecting behavioral anomalies using tracks of pedestrians, including specified threat tracks. The application area is installation security with focus on monitoring the entrances of these installations. The approach specifically allows operator interaction to specify threats and to interactively adjust the system parameters depending on the context of the situation. This research has discovered physically meaningful features that are developed and organized in a manner so that features can be systematically added or deleted depending on the situation and operator preference. The features can be used with standard classifiers such as the one class support …

Electric Vehicle Charging And Routing Management Via Multi-Infrastructure Data Fusion, Christopher Decker

Theses

The introduction of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has placed a strain on the aged and already overworked electrical grid. With each EV requiring the same amount of power as 3 to 140 single family homes, depending on how fast the charge occurs, measures need to be taken in order to protect the electrical grid from serious damage. The electric grid renovations proposed by the U.S. department of energy, commonly referred to as the smart grid, could help accommodate an even greater EV penetration. The introduction of the smart grid and other cutting-edge technologies create the potential for applications which provide new …

Mobile To Cloud Co-Processing Of Asl Finger Spelling To Text Conversion, Philip Hays

Theses

Computer recognition of American Sign Language (ASL) is a computationally intensive task. Although it has generally been performed using powerful lab workstations, this research investigates transcription of static ASL signs using an application on a consumer-level mobile device. The application provides real-time sign to text translation by processing a live video stream to detect the ASL alphabet as well as custom signs to perform tasks on the device. In this work several avenues for classification and processing were ex-plored to evaluate performance for mobile ASL transcription. The cho-sen classification algorithm uses locality preserving projections (LPP) with trained support vector machines …

Two And Three Dimensional Segmentation Of Multimodal Imagery, Sreenath Rao Vantaram

Theses

The role of segmentation in the realms of image understanding/analysis, computer vision, pattern recognition, remote sensing and medical imaging in recent years has been significantly augmented due to accelerated scientific advances made in the acquisition of image data. This low-level analysis protocol is critical to numerous applications, with the primary goal of expediting and improving the effectiveness of subsequent high-level operations by providing a condensed and pertinent representation of image information. In this research, we propose a novel unsupervised segmentation framework for facilitating meaningful segregation of 2-D/3-D image data across multiple modalities (color, remote-sensing and biomedical imaging) into non-overlapping partitions …

Cross-Enterprise Access Control Security For Electronic Health Records: Technical, Practical And Legislation Impact, Mark Rodzinka

Theses

In this thesis we investigate the relationship of security, privacy, legislation, computational power in relation to Cross-Enterprise User Assertions (XUA), which allows us to develop the recommendations for the appropriate, architecture, functionality, cryptographic algorithms, and key lengths. The evolution of health records from paper to electronic media promises to be an important part of improving the quality of health care. The diversity of organizations, systems, geography,laws and regulations create a significant challenge for ensuring the privacy of Electronic Health Records (EHRs), while maintaining availability. XUA is a technology that attempts to address the problem of sharing EHRs across enterprise boundaries. …

Investigation Of Bolometric And Resistive Properties Of Nickel Oxide, Shaurya Kumar

Theses

This work investigates the properties of nickel oxide for use in microbolometric and resistive memory applications. For the uncooled infrared radiation detector industry, the current standard sensor materials are either very expensive, but very sensitive (vanadium oxide), or the other extreme of low cost, and low quality (amorphous silicon). Thus, a need arises for a medium-grade, medium-cost microbolometer sensitive material. The physical scaling limits of conventional charge-based non-volatile memory has progressed the semiconductor industry into searching for a new type of non-volatile memory device. Resistive random access memory (ReRAM) shows promise to fill this void, and nickel oxide presents itself …

Analysis And Application Of A Free Energy Model For Lens Protein Mixtures, Michael Bell

Theses

Cataract, the leading cause of blindness worldwide, has motivated a variety of investigations into the behavior of concentrated mixtures of eye lens proteins. While there has been success in modeling single protein solutions, a convenient model for mixtures is needed. We apply an analytically solvable sticky-hard sphere model to aqueous mixtures of alpha and gamma crystallin, two of the predominant proteins found in the mammalian eye lens. Developed by Baxter and Barboy, this model incorporates some of the fundamental characteristics of realistic mixtures, namely, variation in size and intermolecular attraction strength among each component. We show that light scattering intensities …

A Model Order Reduction Method For Lightly Damped State Space Systems, Matthew Cappello

Theses

This paper introduces a model order reduction method that takes advantage of the near orthogonality of lightly damped modes in a system and the modal separation of diagonalized models to reduce the model order of flexible systems in both continuous and discrete time. The reduction method is computationally fast and cheap, not requiring any singular value decompositions or large matrix operations. Numeric solutions to the infinite time Lyapunov equations are presented, and used to solve for the observability and controllability grammians of diagonalized models. Four different modal importance calculations are produced from the diagonalized model's grammians and are compared to …

Gpu Implementation Of Block Transforms, Boyan Zhang

Theses

Traditionally, intensive floating-point computational ability of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has been mainly limited for rendering and visualization application by architecture and programming model. However, with increasing programmability and architecture progress, GPUs inherent massively parallel computational ability have become an essential part of today's mainstream general purpose (non-graphical) high performance computing system. It has been widely reported that adapted GPU-based algorithms outperform significantly their CPU counterpart.

The focus of the thesis is to utilize NVIDIA CUDA GPUs to implement orthogonal transforms such as signal dependent Karhunen-Loeve Transform and signal independent Discrete Cosine Transform. GPU architecture and programming model are examined. …

Utilization Of A Tropospheric-Stratospheric Lidar System To Study Mountain Induced Gravity Waves Over Jenny Jump State Forest, Anthony Teti

Theses

Gravity waves are a dominant driver of the middle and lower atmospheric circulation. Yet such waves have been difficult to study due to their inherent small spatial and temporal scales and synoptic occurrence, and thus require advanced experimental systems. In this thesis first results are presented from a newly constructed tropospheric-stratospheric lidar operating at the New Jersey Institute of Technology-United Astronomy Clubs of New Jersey site in Jenny Jump State Forest in northwest New Jersey. The system utilizes a 4-W 532-nm Nd:YAG laser transmitter and a 4-inch telescope receiver to collect backscattered photons from the lower atmosphere in order to …

Tracking Of Various Targets In The Infrared And Issues Encountered, Kyle Ausfeld

Theses

The use of a computer to track objects has been a subject of interest for a few decades. The applications these algorithms may be applied to span a large number of fields; anything from homeland security to the study of animal behavior. In particular, visible tracking has been around the longest and has the largest library of algorithms available. Algorithms such as Mean Shift have become a standard for testing algorithms against. However, algorithms such as Mean Shift may work well for visible video data, infrared video data presents some issues beyond many visible algorithms. Infrared video gives certain advantages …

Lasing Behavior Of An Active Nim-Pim Dc With Different Coupling Coefficients, Abdulaziz Atwiri

Theses

Metamaterials is a class of materials that do not exist naturally. This kind of material has interesting properties that differ from subclass to another and are researched for its numerous potential usages. One of these subclasses is negative index materials (NIMs). This subclass has special properties that make its refractive index negative. Trying to take advantage of this property in photonic structures has led to many new and interesting photonic structures that can be used in industry. One application that makes use of NIMs properties is the NIM-PIM DC. NIM-PIM DC, which is a photonic structure that is made of …

Using Gis Databases To Simulate Night Light Imagery, Joshua Zollweg

Theses

The Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) model and other image simulators provide the ability to utilize detailed, artificial scenes to generate spectrally and spatially realistic simulated imagery. Simulated imagery is useful in a myriad of ways, such as sensor modeling, algorithm performance assessment, and others. Actually making synthetic scenes, however, is often a time consuming process, requiring the manual placement of the many objects required to define the scene. This is particularly true for scenes of large spatial extent. Proposed is a technique to generate large-area night scenes for DIRSIG. This is accomplished by using freely available …

A Signal Processing Approach For Preprocessing And 3d Analysis Of Airborne Small-Footprint Full Waveform Lidar Data, Jiaying Wu

Theses

The extraction of structural object metrics from a next generation remote sensing modality, namely waveform light detection and ranging (LiDAR), has garnered increasing interest from the remote sensing research community. However, a number of challenges need to be addressed before structural or 3D vegetation modeling can be accomplished. These include proper processing of complex, often off-nadir waveform signals, extraction of relevant waveform parameters that relate to vegetation structure, and from a quantitative modeling perspective, 3D rendering of a vegetation object from LiDAR waveforms. Three corresponding, broad research objectives therefore were addressed in this dissertation. Firstly, the raw incoming LiDAR waveform …

Power Analysis Attacks On The Sha-3 Candidate Grøstl, Garrett Smith

Theses

Side-channel attacks refer to a particular form of cryptanalysis in which sensitive data is revealed through information extracted from the physical implementation of a cryptosystem. An unprotected device may leak details related to operations performed on secret information through unintended inputs and outputs known as side-channels. Examples of side-channel information include power consumption, operation timing, or any other intelligence-bearing signal. Unlike traditional cryptanalytic methods, such as linear and differential cryptanalysis, side-channel attacks may be used to break cryptographic systems with no known weaknesses in the algorithm's mathematical structure. Many of these attacks may also be performed using relatively cheap and …

Design And Analysis Of A Uhf Transmission Line Coupler For Telemetry And Power Harvesting In A Passive Sensor System, Jean-Jacques Delisle

Theses

The intra-coaxial transmission line coupler TXC is a four port device designed to harvest power from a host coaxial transmission line and to provide telemetry for remote sensing applications via the same host transmission line. Seven different TXC structures were designed and fabricated to study the effects of varying specific geometric features on the electrical characteristics of the TXC. Each TXC structure was tested using a RF vector network analyzer and analyzed using a commercially available finite-element numerical simulator. Two main observations resulted from the study: 1) the resonant frequency depends mainly on the value of the tuning capacitor and …

Electromechanical Actuator Bearing Fault Detection Using Empirically Extracted Features, Rahulram Sridhar

Theses

Model parameter estimation when coupled with Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Bayesian classification techniques form a potentially effective fault detection scheme for Electromechanical Actuators (EMAs). This work uses parameter estimation algorithms based on linear system identification methods, derives a novel feature extraction algorithm based on PCA and analyzes its performance through simulations and experiments. A Bayesian classifier is used to create well defined EMA health classes from the extracted features. Research contributions on fault detection in EMAs are significant because EMA faults and their detection are not yet well understood. Potential future applications - such as in primary flight control …

High Pressure Coolant Effect On Pvd Coated Inserts During End Milling Of Ti-6al-4v, Arvind Sridharan

Theses

Titanium alloys are being employed extensively in engineering and aerospace applications for their high strength to weight ratio, mechanical strength and ability to withstand high temperatures. Out of the different alloys of titanium available, the most commonly used alloy is Ti-6Al-4V. It is also called `Grade-5 titanium alloy' or `á+â titanium alloy'. High speed machining of titanium alloys generates high temperatures in the cutting zone, promoting accelerated tool wear and reducing the efficiency in metal cutting. Consequently, the ability of the coolant to remove heat from the cutting zone plays an increasingly important role in the economics of the process …

White-Light Optical Vortex Coronagraph, Prachyathit Kanburapa

Theses

An optical vortex is characterized by a dark core of destructive interference in a light beam. One of the methods commonly employed to create an optical vortex is by using a computer-generated hologram. A vortex hologram pattern is computed from the interference pattern between a reference plane wave and a vortex wave, resulting in a forked grating pattern. In astronomy, an optical vortex coronagraph is one of the most promising high contrast imaging techniques for the direct imaging of extra-solar planets. Direct imaging of extra-solar planets is a challenging task since the brightness of the parent star is extremely high …

A Method For Designing Efficient Routes For Home Healthcare Agencies Considering Uncertain Future Demand, Nisha Nataraj

Theses

Faced with increasing demand for home health care that is rising faster than the supply of resources needed to deliver it and drastic budget cuts, many home care agencies are struggling to remain operational. There is a need for efficient routing that doesn’t compromise on the quality of care achieved when a patient is visited by the same nurse over the entire period of care, also known as care-giver continuity or continuity of care. Because care periods often last more than 60 days, care-giver continuity causes scheduling decisions to have a long-term impact by potentially restricting the agency from making …

An Evaluation Of Multispectral Earth-Observing Multi-Aperture Telescope Designs For Target Detection And Characterization, Jason Smith

Theses

Earth-observing satellites have fundamental size and weight design limits since they must be launched into space. These limits serve to constrain the spatial resolutions that such imaging systems can achieve with traditional telescope design strategies. Segmented and sparse-aperture imaging system designs may offer solutions to this problem. Segmented and sparse-aperture designs can be viewed as competing technologies; both approaches offer solutions for achieving finer resolution imaging from space. Segmented-aperture systems offer greater fill factor, and therefore greater signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), for a given encircled diameter than their sparse aperture counterparts, though their larger segments often suffer from greater optical aberration …

Analysis Of Translating Hydrofoil Power Generation Systems (Hydrokites), Kelsey Mcconnaghy

Theses

The hydrokite is a novel hydro-power system that is based on emerging kite wind-energy systems which are currently being designed for use at high altitudes. The hydrokite system is comprised of a hydrofoil and a support system, and is designed to capture kinetic energy from the flow of a river while reducing negative impacts on the river ecology by minimally interfering with the rivers natural flow (i.e. no dams or river diversions are needed). This work presents some initial results which demonstrate the power performance capabilities of the hydrokite. Two different steady-state models for this system were studied to determine …

A Regression-Based Training Algorithm For Multilayer Neural Networks, Christopher W. Sherry

Theses

Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are powerful tools for machine learning with applications in many areas including speech recognition, image classification, medical diagnosis, and spam filtering. It has been shown that ANNs can approximate any function to any degree of accuracy given enough neurons and training time. However, there is no guarantee on the number of neurons required or the time it will take to train them. These are the main disadvantages of using ANNs. This thesis develops an algorithm which uses regression-based techniques to decrease the number of training epochs. A modification of the Delta Rule, combined with techniques established …

Modeling A Solar-Heated Anaerobic Digester For The Developing World Using System Dynamics, Johanna Bentley

Theses

Much of the developing world lacks access to a dependable source of energy. Agricultural societies such as Mozambique and Papua New Guinea could sustain a reliable energy source through the microbacterial decomposition of animal and crop waste. Anaerobic digestion produces methane, which can be used directly for heating, cooking, and lighting. Adding a solar component to the digester provides a catalyst for bacteria activity, accelerating digestion and increasing biogas production. Using methane decreases the amount of energy expended by collecting and preparing firewood, eliminates hazardous health effects linked to inhalation of particles, and provides energy close to where it is …

A Computational Study Of The Effects Of Adherent Leukocytes On Secondary Recruitment, Dhananjay Subramaniam

Theses

Leukocyte rolling is known to be mediated by the selectin family of adhesion molecules and their corresponding ligands and is characterized by the formation and breakage of receptor-ligand bonds. Selectin mediated rolling is associated with the initial stages of the leukocyte adhesion cascade (LAC) in which the cell passes through several stages including chemo-attraction, rolling adhesion, tight adhesion and transmigration before moving out of the circulatory system towards the site of injury. This thesis studies the initial stages of the leukocyte adhesion cascade through a direct numerical simulation based on boundary element techniques. Besides, cell deformation during rolling is believed …

A Charge Pump Architecture With High Power-Efficiency And Low Output Ripple Noise In 0.5 Μm Cmos Process Technology, Primit Modi

Theses

The demand of portable consumer electronic devices is skyrocketing day-by-day. Such modern integrated microsystems have several functional blocks which require different voltages to operate adequately. DC-DC converter circuits are used to generate different voltage domains for different functional blocks on large integrated microsystems from a single voltage battery-operated power supply. Charge pump is an inductorless DC-DC converter which generates higher positive voltage or lower voltage or negative voltage from the applied reference voltage. A charge pump circuit uses switches for charge transfer action and capacitors for charge storage. The thesis presents a high power-efficiency charge pump architecture with low output …

Classification Of Phase Transition Behavior In A Model Of Evolutionary Dynamics, Dawn Michelle King

Theses

Amongst the scientific community, there is consensus that evolution has occurred; however, there is much disagreement about how evolution happens. In particular, how do we explain biodiversity and the speciation process? Computational models aid in this study, for they allow us to observe a speciation process within time scales we would not otherwise be able to observe in our lifetime. Previous work has shown phase transition behavior in an assortative mating model as the control parameter of maximum mutation size (µ) is varied. This behavior has been shown to exist on landscapes with variable fitness (Dees and Bahar, 2010), and …

Primary English Language Teachers' Perceptions On Professional Development Programs In Public Private Partnership Schools In Al - Ain, United Arab Emirates, Jamila Khamis Aihassani

Theses

This study intended to examine primary English language teachers ' perception toward professional development program in Public Private Partner hip (PPP) school . It aimed at identifying to what extent the e teacher thought these program helped them improve as ESL teacher. The data was obtained through conducting focused-group interviews and a survey. The study took place i n 1- in Educational zone during 2010-2011. The interview sample included 18 female and male teachers and the survey sample included 30 out of 60 out of 17 PPP primary schools in A l in. The study found that one-shot workshop PD …

Cycle Three English Language Teachers’ Perceptions Of Their Ict Use In Teaching English Language In The Uae., Ali Hussein Mohammed

Theses

This study tried to examine the perceptions of Cycle Three language teachers’ (ELTs) of their Informative and Communicative Technology (ICT) use. It places a specific focus on awareness of the use of technology in Abu Dhabi Education Council schools in the UAE. The study was conducted on randomly selected 73 Cycle Three English language teachers; male and female, native and nonnative of different years of experience in teaching English language. A questionnaire and observations were adapted from the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS) and Performance Indicators. Results were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SSPS), and …