Engineering Commons^™

A Modeling Framework For Urban Growth Prediction Using Remote Sensing And Video Prediction Technologies: A Time-Dependent Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture, Ahmed Hassan Jaad

Civil and Environmental Engineering Theses and Dissertations

Studying the growth pattern of cities/urban areas has received considerable attention during the past few decades. The goal is to identify directions and locations of potential growth, assess infrastructure and public service requirements, and ensure the integration of the new developments with the existing city structure. This dissertation presents a novel model for urban growth prediction using a novel machine learning model. The model treats successive historical satellite images of the urban area under consideration as a video for which future frames are predicted. A time-dependent convolutional encoder-decoder architecture is adopted. The model considers as an input a satellite image …

Big-Data Talent Analytics In The Public Sector: A Promotion And Firing Model Of Employees At Federal Agencies, Rabih Neouchi

Operations Research and Engineering Management Theses and Dissertations

Talent analytics is a relatively new area of focus to researchers working in analytics and data science. Talent Analytics has the potential to help companies make many informed critical decisions around talent acquisition, promotion and retention. This work investigates data science to predict “shiny star” employees in the U.S. public sector, defined as top-notch performers over the years of a given time span. Its scope falls within talent analytics, also called people analytics, a relatively new research area.

We clean a data set made available by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and present two models to predict the …

Near-Optimal Control Of Switched Systems With Continuous-Time Dynamics Using Approximate Dynamic Programming, Tohid Sardarmehni

Mechanical Engineering Research Theses and Dissertations

Optimal control is a control method which provides inputs that minimize a performance index subject to state or input constraints [58]. The existing solutions for finding the exact optimal control solution such as Pontryagin’s minimum principle and dynamic programming suffer from curse of dimensionality in high order dynamical systems. One remedy for this problem is finding near optimal solution instead of the exact optimal solution to avoid curse of dimensionality [31]. A method for finding the approximate optimal solution is through Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) methods which are discussed in the subsequent chapters.

In this dissertation, optimal switching in switched …