Engineering Commons^™

Integrated Freestanding Single-Crystal Silicon Nanowires: Conductivity And Surface Treatment, Chung-Hoon Lee, Clark Ritz, Minghuang Huang, Michael Ziwisky, Robert Blise, Max Lagally

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Integrated freestanding single-crystal silicon nanowires with typical dimension of 100 nm × 100 nm × 5 µm are fabricated by conventional 1:1 optical lithography and wet chemical silicon etching. The fabrication procedure can lead to wafer-scale integration of silicon nanowires in arrays. The measured electrical transport characteristics of the silicon nanowires covered with/without SiO₂ support a model of Fermi level pinning near the conduction band. The I–V curves of the nanowires reveal a current carrier polarity reversal depending on Si–SiO₂ and Si–H bonds on the nanowire surfaces

Testing Embedded System Applications, Tingting Yu

Department of Computer Science and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, controlling a wide variety of popular and safety-critical devices. Testing is the most commonly used method for validating software systems, and effective testing techniques could be helpful for improving the dependability of these systems. However, there are challenges involved in developing such techniques. Embedded systems consist of layers of software – application layers utilize services provided by underlying system service and hardware support layers. A typical embedded application consists of multiple user tasks. Interactions between application layers and lower layers, and interactions between the various user tasks that are initiated by the application layer, …

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Lte Physical Layer, Fahimeh Rezaei

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) introduced Long Term Evolution (LTE) as the 3rd generation of mobile communication standards. LTE Release 8 describes a mobile communication standard which supports up to 300 Mbps of data transmission in downlink using the OFDM scheme as well as up to 75 Mbps throughput for uplink using the SC-FDMA modulation. In this thesis, an in-depth study of LTE performance based on Release 8 is conducted for uplink and downlink under different scenarios. The main objective of this study is to investigate a comprehensive analysis of physical layer throughput of LTE Release8 based on standard …

Cross-Layer Optimized Wireless Multimedia Networking, Dalei Wu

Computer and Electronics Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Multimedia communications, especially real-time video communications, is expected to be the major application of the next-generation wireless networks. However, bringing delay-sensitive and loss-tolerant multimedia services based on the current wireless Internet is a very challenging task. In this dissertation, we address cross-layer optimized wireless multimedia networking from both theoretical and practical perspectives. In the first part of the dissertation, we propose cross-layer optimization frameworks for real-time video communications over wireless networks, where the expected received video quality is adopted as the objective function. With the user-centric objective function, we first study content-aware video communications in single-hop wireless networks by exploring …

Security@Web: Teaching Security With Alignment In Trust On The Web (Final Report), Li-Chiou Chen, Mary Long

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

The Gel Documentation System: A Cornerstone To The Implementation Of The Introduction To Biotechnology And Introduction To Bioinformatics Cross-Disciplinary Course Series (Final Report), Marcy Kelly, Gregory Lampard, Constance Knapp

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

Our original goal was to offer Pace undergraduate students opportunities to be introduced to both Biotechnology and Computer Science as it relates to Bioinformatics. We proposed a two course series, offered to both computer science and biology students that will increase both biological and computer science literacy of our students. The two courses are Introduction to Biotechnology (BIO 372) and Introduction to Bioinformatics.

Increasing High School Stem Participation Through Robotics Training And Tournaments (Final Report), Richard Kline

Cornerstone 2 Reports : Community Outreach and Empowerment Through Service Learning and Volunteerism

The overall goal of this project was to engage high school students in an exciting way to increase their interest in science and technology. We planned to accomplish this by making Pace University an official Affiliate Partner of the FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) robotics competition, a fast-growing program with more than 1,100 participating teams in 2009-2010. In FTC, high-school age participants design, build, and program their own robots to enter into regional and national competitions. Building on the Seidenberg School’s past success as a partner to FIRST with its FIRST LEGO League program, we intended to organize, host, and run …

Use Of Mobile Phone Computing For Development Of Student 21st Century Skills, Susan M. Merritt, R. Lara Lee

Cornerstone 2 Reports : Community Outreach and Empowerment Through Service Learning and Volunteerism

Mobile phone computing enables immediate capture and transfer of data, images, notes and experiences from the field to a repository where retrieval, analysis, edits, aggregation, and further development are possible. Immediate findings and later results can be shared on the Web with local and global communities, and development of integrated service learning projects in concert with underserved communities is possible using this mode of information gathering and sharing.

Mobile phone computing incorporates moments when participants build tomorrow's skills while addressing today's learning goals. Use of digital tools and supporting resources bring real world problems into focus. Mobile phone computing enables …

Computing The Range Of Variance-To-Mean Ratio Under Interval And Fuzzy Uncertainty, Sio-Long Lo, Gang Xiang

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems such as radar imaging, it is useful to compute the variance-to-mean ratio. The need is important because for the sum of k identical independent signal components, both the variance and the mean are multiplied by k, so this ratio is independent on k and thus, provides useful information about the components. In practice, we only know the samples values with uncertainty. It is therefore necessary to compute the variance-to-mean ratio under this uncertainty. In this paper, we present efficient algorithms for computing this ratio under interval and fuzzy uncertainty.

Mamdani Approach To Fuzzy Control, Logical Approach, What Else?, Samuel Bravo, Jaime Nava

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In fuzzy control, two approaches are mainly used: Mamdani's approach, in which we represent the knowledge base as a disjunction of statements Ai(x) & Bi(u) corresponding to individual rules, and logical approach, in which the knowledge base is represented as a conjunction of the rules themselves Ai(x) --> Bi(u). Both approaches are known not to be perfect, so a natural question arises: what other approaches are possible? In this paper, we describe all possible approaches; alternative approaches use an "exclusive or" operation and correspond, e.g., to the fuzzy transform idea.

Least Sensitive (Most Robust) Fuzzy "Exclusive Or" Operations, Jesus E. Hernandez, Jaime Nava

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In natural language, "or" sometimes means "inclusive or" and sometimes means "exclusive or". To adequately describe commonsense and expert knowledge, it is therefore important to have not only t-conorms describing fuzzy "inclusive or" operations, but also fuzzy "exclusive or" operations f(a,b). Since the degrees of certainty are only approximately defined, it is reasonable to require that the corresponding operation be the least sensitive to small changes in the inputs. In this paper, we show that the least sensitive fuzzy "exclusive or" operation has the form f(a,b)=min(max(a,b),max(1-a,1-b)).

Estimating Mean Under Interval Uncertainty And Variance Constraint, Ali Jalal-Kamali, Luc Longpre, Misha Kosheleva

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Towards Chemical Applications Of Dempster-Shafer-Type Approach: Case Of Variant Ligands, Jaime Nava

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Reducing Over-Conservative Expert Failure Rate Estimates In The Presence Of Limited Data: A New Probabilistic/Fuzzy Approach, Carlos M. Ferregut, F. Joshua Campos, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Unique highly reliable components are typical for aerospace industry. For such components, due to their high reliability and uniqueness, we do not have enough empirical data to make statistically reliable estimates about their failure rate. To overcome this limitation, the empirical data is usually supplemented with expert estimates for the failure rate. The problem is that experts tend to be -- especially in aerospace industry -- over-cautious, over-conservative; their estimates for the failure rate are usually much higher than the actual observed failure rate. In this paper, we provide a new fuzzy-related statistically justified approach for reducing this over-estimation.

From Single To Double Use Expressions, With Applications To Parametric Interval Linear Systems: On Computational Complexity Of Fuzzy And Interval Computations, Joseph A Lorkowski

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical problems, we need to estimate the range of a given expression f(x1, ..., xn) when each input xi belongs to a known interval [xi] -- or when each input xi is described by a known fuzzy set. It is known that this problem is easy to solve when we have a Single Use Expression, i.e., an expression in which each variable xi occurs only once. In this paper, we show that for similarly defined Double Use Expressions, the corresponding range estimation problem is NP-hard. Similar problems are analyzed for the problem of solving linear systems under interval …

How To Tell When A Product Of Two Partially Ordered Spaces Has A Certain Property: General Results With Application To Fuzzy Logic, Francisco Zapata, Olga Kosheleva, Karen Villaverde

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fundamental Physical Equations Can Be Derived By Applying Fuzzy Methodology To Informal Physical Ideas, Eric Gutierrez, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy methodology transforms expert ideas -- formulated in terms of words from natural language -- into precise rules and formulas. In this paper, we show that by applying this methodology to intuitive physical ideas, we can get fundamental physical equations. This fact provides an additional justification for the fuzzy methodology.

Towards Optimal Placement Of Bio-Weapon Detectors, Chris Kiekintveld, Octavio Lerma

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Biological weapons are difficult and expensive to detect. Within a limited budget, we can afford a limited number of bio-weapon detector stations. It is therefore important to find the optimal locations for such stations. A natural idea is to place more detectors in the areas with more population -- and fewer in desert areas, with fewer people. However, such a commonsense analysis does not tell us how many detectors to place where. To decide on the exact placement of bio-weapon detectors, we formulate the placement problem in precise terms, and come up with an (almost) explicit solution to the resulting …

Fusing Continuous And Discrete Data, On The Example Of Merging Seismic And Gravity Models In Geophysics, Omar Ochoa, Aaron Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

From Program Synthesis To Optimal Program Synthesis, Joaquin Reyna

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Adding Constraints -- A (Seemingly Counterintuitive But) Useful Heuristic In Solving Difficult Problems, Olga Kosheleva, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Intuitively, the more constraints we impose on a problem, the more difficult it is to solve it. However, in practice, difficult-to-solve problems sometimes get solved when we impose additional constraints and thus, make the problems seemingly more complex. In this methodological paper, we explain this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon, and we show that, dues to this explanation, additional constraints can serve as a useful heuristic in solving difficult problems.

How To Bargain: An Interval Approach, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Songsak Sriboonchitta

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Why Curvature In L-Curve: Combining Soft Constraints, Uram Anibal Sosa Aguirre, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In solving inverse problems, one of the successful methods of determining the appropriate value of the regularization parameter is the L-curve method of combining the corresponding soft constraints, when we plot the curve describing the dependence of the logarithm $x$ of the mean square difference on the logarithm $y$ of the mean square non-smoothness, and select a point on this curve at which the curvature is the largest. This method is empirically successful, but from the theoretical viewpoint, it is not clear why we should use curvature and not some other criterion. In this paper, we show that reasonable scale-invariance …

Universal Approximation With Uninorm-Based Fuzzy Neural Networks, Andre Lemos, Vladik Kreinovich, Walmir Caminhas, Fernando Gomide

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy neural networks are hybrid models capable to approximate functions with high precision and to generate transparent models, enabling the extraction of valuable information from the resulting topology. In this paper we will show that the recently proposed fuzzy neural network based on weighted uninorms aggregations uniformly approximates any real functions on any compact set. We will describe the network topology and inference mechanism and show that the universal approximation property of this network is valid for a given choice of operators.

Testing Shock Absorbers: Towards A Faster Parallelizable Algorithm, Christian Servin

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Cars are equipped with shock absorbers, which are designed to smooth out the shocks on the road. In practice, there is a need to test them. To test the shock absorbers, we need to estimate the values of the shock absorber's parameters. If we did not have any measurement errors, then two measurements would be sufficient to determine the parameters. However, in reality, there are measurement errors. Usually, in engineering practice, it is assumed that the errors are normally distributed with 0 mean, so we can use least squares method to test it. In practice, we often only know the …

Towards Optimal Sensor Placement In Multi-Zone Measurements, Octavio Lerma, Craig Tweedie, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In multi-zone areas, where the boundaries change with time, it is desirable to place sensors in such a way that the boundary is covered at all times. In this paper, we describe the optimal sensor placement with this property. In this optimal placement, sensors are placed along a see-saw trajectory going between the current location of the boundary and its farthest future location.

Midwave Infrared Quantum Dot Avalanche Photodiode, David A. Ramirez, Jiayi Shao, Majeed M. Hayat, Sanjay Krishna

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We report the first demonstration of a GaAs based avalanche photodiode (APD) operating in the midwave infrared region . In the device, called the quantum dot avalanche photodiode, an intersubband quantum dots-in-a-well detector is coupled with an APD through a tunnel barrier. Using this approach, we have increased the photocurrent and reached a conversion efficiency of 12%, which is one of the highest reported conversion efficiencies for any quantum dot detector.

Topical Summarization Of Web Videos By Visual-Text Time-Dependent Alignment, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Search engines are used to return a long list of hundreds or even thousands of videos in response to a query topic. Efficient navigation of videos becomes difficult and users often need to painstakingly explore the search list for a gist of the search result. This paper addresses the challenge of topical summarization by providing a timeline-based visualization of videos through matching of heterogeneous sources. To overcome the so called sparse-text problem of web videos, auxiliary information from Google context is exploited. Google Trends is used to predict the milestone events of a topic. Meanwhile, the typical scenes of web …

Attitudes Of Health Professionals To Electronic Data Sharing Within An Integrated Care Electronic Health Record (Icehr), Charyl O'Malley, Damon Berry, Mary Sharp

Conference Papers

It is estimated that 98,000 people die in hospitals yearly in the USA as a result of medical errors (Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2009). Electronic Health Records (EHR) can offer improved patient safety. EHRs are being implemented by many countries, however, not all health professionals have welcomed them (MORI Social Research Institute, 2006). As outlined in the National Health Information Strategy (NHIS) document, Ireland has plans to introduce an EHR. Attitudes of health professionals are a significant factor for the successful implementation and adoption of a new clinical information system. This study aimed to gauge the attitude of …

A Quiet Success Story In The Laboratory: Survey Of 30 Implementations Of The Astm 1394 Standard For Analyser Interfaces, Brian Markey, Damon Berry

Conference Papers

In 1991 the American Society of Testing and Materials (ASTM) introduced the first version of a standard called ASTM E1394-91 for communication between centralised clinical analysers and host systems. For nearly 20 years this low key standard has been used as the basis for analyser host communications. A minor revision of the standard (ASTM1394-97) was published in 1998. This work gives a brief summary of the development of lab messages that led to the introduction and continued use of the standard. The authors also present a review and preliminary analysis of 30 implementations of ASTM E1394. The authors investigated 30 …