Engineering Commons^™

Hardware-Software Integration For Particle Light Scatter Imaging, Christophe Pierre Godefroy

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The main purpose of this research is the implementation of a software interface. This interface shall allow the interpretation of particle size in a medium with respect to its diffraction patterns. The literature shows extensive work on the theory of light scattering but the experiments are cumbersome to implement. Some initial work has required the levitation of particle to isolate the difficulties associated with a flow environment. The purpose of this work; however, will focus on the software requirements to synchronize, collect and analyze light scattering patterns.

Although there are many other ways of sizing particles, it may be useful …

Multi-Resolution Techniques In The Rules-Based Intelligent Control Systems: A Universal Approximation Result, Yeung Yam, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Intelligent control is a very successful method of transforming expert knowledge of control rules (formulated in terms of natural language, like "small") into a precise control strategy. It has led to many spectacular applications, ranging from appliances to automatic subway control to super-precise temperature control on a Space Shuttle mission.

It is known that fuzzy control is a universal approximator, i.e., that it can approximate every possible control strategy within an arbitrary accuracy. One of the main problems of fuzzy control is that the number of rules which are necessary to represent a given control strategy with a given accuracy, …

Fuzzy/Probability ~ Fractal/Smooth, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Berlin Wu

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many applications of probability theory are based on the assumption that, as the number of cases increase, the relative frequency of cases with a certain property tends to a number - probability that this property is true. L. Zadeh has shown that in many real-life situations, the frequency oscillates and does not converge at all. It is very difficult to describe such situations by using methods from traditional probability theory. Fuzzy logic is not based on any convergence assumptions and therefore, provides a natural description of such situations. However, a natural next question arises: how can we describe this oscillating …

Decision Making Under Interval Probabilities, Ronald R. Yager, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

If we know the probabilities p(1),...,p(n) of different situations s1,...,sn, then we can choose a decision Ai for which the expected benefit C(i)=p(1)*c(i,1)+...+p(n)*c(i,n) takes the largest possible value, where c(i,j) denotes the benefit of decision Ai in situation sj. In many real life situations, however, we do not know the exact values of the probabilities p(j); we only know the intervals [p-(j),p+(j)] of possible values of these probabilities. In order to make decisions under such interval probabilities, we would like to generalize the notion of expected benefits to interval probabilities. In this paper, we show that natural requirements lead to …

Multi-Resolution Methods In Non-Destructive Testing Of Aerospace Structures And In Medicine, Roberto Osegueda, Yohans Mendoza, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A fault in an aerospace structure can lead to catastrophic consequences; therefore, it is extremely important to test these structures regularly. Thorough testing of a huge aerospace structures results in a large amount of data, and processing this data takes a lot of time. To decrease the processing time, we use a "multi-resolution" technique, in which we first separate the data into data corresponding to different vibration modes, and then combine these data together. There are many possible ways to transform each mode's data into the probability of a fault, and many possible way of combining these mode-based probabilities; different …

Chu Spaces - A New Approach To Diagnostic Information Fusion, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Berlin Wu

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This paper is rather theoretical. Its aim is to describe a general algebraic framework, known as Chu spaces, in which different type of information can be transformed into the same form, so that fusion procedures can be investigated in a single general framework.

Online Auctions, Michael N. Huhns, José M. Vidal

Faculty Publications

Auctions on the Internet can involve not only consumers, but also businesses. They can form dynamically and enable the exchange of goods much as stock exchanges manage the buying and selling of securities. But because auctions have a wide scope and a short lifetime, the opportunistic behavior needed for successful interaction requires agents to both participate in and manage auctions. The article focuses on the use of software agents in such Internet based auctions

An Investigation Into The Causes And Effects Of Legacy Status In A System With A View To Assessing Both Systems Currently In Use And Those Being Considered For Introduction, Patricia O'Byrne

Other resources

This dissertation analyses the area of legacy systems and determines the effects that are exhibited in legacy systems, presenting them in a legacy effect determination framework, so that management can ascertain whether the system they have is a legacy system. An analysis of legacy causal criteria is carried out, resulting in a table of legacy causes. A new definition of legacy systems is put forward, by defining legacy status as a status held by a legacy system. “A system exhibits legacy status if it is deficient in terms of its suitability to the business, its platform suitability or application software …

We Live In The Best Of Possible Worlds: A Proof, Guoqing Liu, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that equations of motions and equations which describe the dynamics of physical fields can be deduced from the condition the action S (determined by the corresponding Lagrange function) is optimal. In other words, there is an optimality criterion on the set of all trajectories, and the actual trajectory is optimal with respect to this criterion.

The next reasonable question is: where does this optimality criterion on the set of all trajectories (i.e., the corresponding Lagrange function) come from? It is reasonable to assume that (similarly) on the set of all Lagrange functions, there is an optimality …

1999 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 1999.

Arithmetic Of Complex Sets: Nickel's Classical Paper Revisited From A Geometric Viewpoint, Vladik Kreinovich, Juergen Wolff Von Gudenberg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Due to measurement uncertainty, after measuring a value of a physical quantity (or quantities), we do not get its exact value, we only get a set of possible values of this quantity (quantities). In case of 1-D quantities, we get an interval of possible values. It is known that the family of all real intervals is closed under point-wise arithmetic operations (+,-,*) (i.e., this family forms an arithmetic). This closeness is efficiently used to estimate the set of possible values for y=f(x1,...,xn) from the known sets of possible values for xi.

In some practical problems, physical quantities are complex-valued; it …

Towards Faster, Smoother, And More Compact Fuzzy Approximation, With An Application To Non-Destructive Evaluation Of Space Shuttle's Structural Integrity, Yeung Yam, Roberto Osegueda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is known that fuzzy systems are universal approximators, i.e., any input-output system can be approximated, within any given accuracy, by a system described by fuzzy rules. Fuzzy rules work well in many practical applications. However, in some applications, the existing fuzzy rule approximation techniques are not sufficient:

First, in many practical problems (e.g., in many control applications), derivatives of the approximated function are very important, and so, we want not only the approximating function to be close to the approximated one, but we also want their derivatives to be close; however, standard fuzzy approximation techniques do not guarantee the …

Locating The Whole Pattern Is Better Than Locating Its Pieces: A Geometric Explanation Of An Empirical Phenomenon, Scott A. Starks, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, we must find a pattern in an image. For situations in which the desired pattern consists of several simple components, the traditional approach is first to look for such components, and then to see whether the relative locations of these components are consistent with the pattern. Recent experiments have shown that a much more efficient pattern recognition can be achieved if we look for the whole pattern (without decomposing it first). In this paper, we give a simple geometric explanation of this empirical fact.

System Reliability: A Case When Fuzzy Logic Enhances Probability Theory's Ability To Deal With Real-World Problems, Timothy J. Ross, Carlos M. Ferregut, Roberto Osegueda, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his recent paper "Probability theory needs an infusion of fuzzy logic to enhance its ability to deal with real-world problems", L. Zadeh explains that probability theory needs an infusion of fuzzy logic to enhance its ability to deal with real-world problems. In this talk, we give an example of a real-world problem for which such an infusion is indeed successful: the problem of system reliability.

From Fuzzy Models To Fuzzy Control, Chitta Baral, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Yeung Yam

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Traditional (non-fuzzy) control methodology deals with situations when we know exactly how the system behaves and how it will react to different controls, and we want to choose an appropriate control strategy. This methodology enables us to transform the description of the plant's (system's) behavior into an appropriate control strategy. In many practical situations, we do not have the exact knowledge of the system's behavior, but we have expert-supplied fuzzy rules which describe this behavior. In such situations, it is desirable to transform these description rules into rules describing control. There exist several reasonable heuristics for such transformation; however, the …

Towards Intelligent Virtual Environment For Training Medical Doctors In Surgical Pain Relief, Richard Alo, Kenneth Alo, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Chronic pain is a serious health problem affecting millions of people worldwide. Spinal cord stimulation is one of the most effective methods of easing the chronic pain. For most patients, a careful selection of weak electric currents drastically decreases the pain level. Engineering progress leads to more and more flexible devices that offer a wide variety of millions of possible simulation regimes. It is not possible to test all of them on each patient, we need an intelligent method of choosing an appropriate simulation regime. In this paper, we describe the need for an intelligent virtual environment for training medical …

A New Look At Fuzzy Theory Via Chu Spaces, Hung T. Nguyen, Berlin Wu, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We propose to use Chu categories as a general framework for uncertainty analysis, with a special attention to fuzzy theory. We emphasize the fact that by viewing fuzzy concepts as Chu spaces, we can discover new aggregation operators, and model interactions and relationship between fuzzy data; these possibilities are due, in essence, to the category structure of Chu spaces, and especially to their morphisms. This paper is a tutorial introduction to the subject.

An Optimality Criterion For Arithmetic Of Complex Sets, Vladik Kreinovich, Juergen Wolff Von Gudenberg

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Uncertainty of measuring complex-valued physical quantities can be described by complex sets. These sets can have complicated shapes, so we would like to find a good approximating family of sets. Which approximating family is the best? We reduce the corresponding optimization problem to a geometric one: namely, we prove that, under some reasonable conditions, an optimal family must be shift-, rotation- and scale-invariant. We then use this geometric reduction to conclude that the best approximating low-dimensional families consist of sets with linear or circular boundaries. This result is consistent with the fact that such sets have indeed been successful in …

On Average Bit Complexity Of Interval Arithmetic, Chadi Hamzo, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we know only the intervals which contain the actual (unknown) values of physical quantities. If we know the intervals [x] for a quantity x and [y] for another quantity y, then, for every arithmetic operation *, the set of possible values of x*y also forms an interval; the operations leading from [x] and [y] to this new interval are called interval arithmetic operations. For addition and subtraction, corresponding interval operations consist of two corresponding operations with real numbers, so there is no hope of making them faster. The best known algorithms for interval multiplication consists of …

Chu Spaces: Towards New Foundations For Fuzzy Logic And Fuzzy Control, With Applications To Information Flow On The World Wide Web, Hung T. Nguyen, Vladik Kreinovich, Guoqing Liu

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We show that Chu spaces, a new formalism used to describe parallelism and information flow, provide uniform explanations for different choices of fuzzy methodology, such as choices of fuzzy logical operations, of membership functions, of defuzzification, etc.

Constructive Induction Machines For Data Mining, Marek Perkowski, Stanislaw Grygiel, Qihong Chen, Dave Mattson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

"Learning Hardware" approach involves creating a computational network based on feedback from the environment (for instance, positive and negative examples from the trainer), and realizing this network in an array of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Computational networks can be built based on incremental supervised learning (Neural Net training) or global construction (Decision Tree design). Here we advocate the approach to Learning Hardware based on Constructive Induction methods of Machine Learning (ML) using multivalued functions. This is contrasted with the Evolvable Hardware (EHW) approach in which learning/evolution is based on the genetic algorithm only.

Using Xml To Network Distributed Analytical Instruments: Back To The Future?, Benjamin Jung, Damon Berry, Jane Grimson

Conference Papers

There has been a paradigm shift in medical informatics standards in recent years from the message-oriented approach to a more distributed systems approach. However, despite all the early promise of distributed applications, they haven't been widely adopted in the health domain for various reasons. As a result, despite an increasing need for a standardised distributed solution for analytical laboratory instruments, many implementers of instrument interfaces are still using proprietary serial interfaces which do not support distribution. The emergence of the eXtended Markup Language (XML) specification in 1998 revived the fortunes of the messaged oriented methodology. This paper presents a partial …

Complete Maps Of The Aspect Sensitivity Of Vhf Atmospheric Radar Echoes, R. M. Worthington, R. D. Palmer, S. Fukao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Using the MU radar at Shigaraki, Japan (34.85°N, 136.10°E), we measure the power distribution pattern of VHF radar echoes from the mid-troposphere. The large number of radar beam-pointing directions (320) allows the mapping of echo power from 0° to 40° from zenith, and also the dependence on azimuth, which has not been achieved before at VHF wavelengths. The results show how vertical shear of the horizontal wind is associated with a definite skewing of the VHF echo power distribution, for beam angles as far as 30° or more from zenith, so that aspect sensitivity cannot be assumed negligible at any …

Graduate Catalog The School Of Computer And Info Sciences 1999-2000, Nova Southeastern University

College of Engineering and Computing Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Reduction Of Quantum Noise In Transmittance Estimation Using Photonecorrelated Beams, Majeed M. Hayat, Adel Joobeur, Bahaa E.A. Saleh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The accuracy of optical measurements at low light levels is limited by the quantum noise of the source and by the random nature of the interaction with the measured object. The source noise may be reduced by use of nonclassical photon-number squeezed light. This paper considers the use of two photon-correlated beams (generated, for example, by spontaneous parametric downconversion) to measure the optical transmittance of an object. The photons of each beam obey a random Poisson process, but are synchronized in time. One beam is used to probe the object while the other is used as a reference providing information …

School Of Computer And Information Sciences--Master Of Science Degree Programs 1999, Nova Southeastern University

College of Engineering and Computing Course Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Fuzzy Systems Are Universal Approximators For A Smooth Function And Its Derivatives, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Yeung Yam

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the reasons why fuzzy methodology is successful is that fuzzy systems are universal approximators, i.e., that we can approximate an arbitrary continuous function within any given accuracy by a fuzzy system. In some practical applications (e.g., in control), it is desirable to approximate not only the original function, but also its derivatives (so that, e.g., a fuzzy control approximating a smooth control will also be smooth). In our paper, we show that for any given accuracy, we can approximate an arbitrary smooth function by a fuzzy systems so that not only the function is approximated within this accuracy, …

Why Clustering In Function Approximation? Theoretical Explanation, Vladik Kreinovich, Yeung Yam

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Function approximation is a very important practical problem: in many practical applications, we know the exact form of the functional dependence y=f(x1,...,xn) between physical quantities, but this exact dependence is complicated, so we need a lot of computer space to store it, and a lot of time to process it, i.e., to predict y from the given xi. It is therefore necessary to find a simpler approximate expression g(x1,...,xn) for this same dependence. This problem has been analyzed in numerical mathematics for several centuries, and it is, therefore, one of the most thoroughly analyzed problems of applied mathematics. There are …

Beyond [0,1] To Intervals And Further: Do We Need All New Fuzzy Values?, Yeung Yam, Masao Mukaidono, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical applications of fuzzy methodology, it is desirable to go beyond the interval [0,1] and to consider more general fuzzy values: e.g., intervals, or real numbers outside the interval [0,1]. When we increase the set of possible fuzzy values, we thus increase the number of bits necessary to store each degree, and therefore, increase the computation time which is needed to process these degrees. Since in many applications, it is crucial to get the result on time, it is therefore desirable to make the smallest possible increase. In this paper, we describe such smallest possible increases.

Time-Bounded Kolmogorov Complexity May Help In Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (Seti), Martin Schmidt

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main strategies in Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is trying to overhear communications between advanced civilizations. However, there is a (seeming) problem with this approach: advanced civilizations, most probably, save communication expenses by maximally compressing their messages, and the notion of a maximally compressed message is naturally formalized as a message x for which Kolmogorov complexity C(x) is close to its length l(x), i.e., as a "random" message. In other words, a maximally compressed message is indistinguishable from the truly random noise, and thus, trying to detect such a message does not seem to be a …