Engineering Commons^™

Online State Of Charge And Electrical Impedance Estimation For Multicell Lithium-Ion Batteries, Taesic Kim, Wei Qiao, Liyan Qu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

This paper proposes a hybrid battery model-based high-fidelity state of charge (SOC) and electrical impedance estimation method for multicell lithium-ion batteries. The hybrid battery model consists of an enhanced Coulomb counting algorithm for SOC estimation and an electrical circuit battery model. A particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based online parameter identification algorithm is designed to estimate the electrical parameters of the cells sequentially. An SOC compensator is designed to correct the errors of the enhanced Coulomb counting SOC estimations for the cells sequentially. This leads to an accurate, robust online SOC estimation for individual cells of a battery pack. The proposed method …

An Ultra-Low Power Communication Protocol For A Self-Powered Wireless Sensor Based Animal Monitoring System, Tao Ma

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

To prevent and control the outbreak of contagious animal disease, many countries have developed animal identification and tracking systems. However, the current animal identification and tracking system, which is based on passive RFID technology, has many limitations such as the short communication range and incapability of automatically monitoring the animal. To overcome these limitations, our Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory (TEL) in Department of Computer and Electronics Engineering (CEEN), University of Nebraska-Lincoln took the mission of developing a more advanced monitoring system for animal identification and tracking. This dissertation work as a part of this mission was focusing on developing an …

A Smartphone Design Approach To User Communication Interface For Administering Storage System Network, Weider Yu, Xiao Su, Jason Hansen

Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the feasibility and potential of using a mobile smartphone as a user administration control for storage system network. It includes the design and implementation of a mobile smartphone software system that can be used to perform system administration activities on the storage system without the need of using a laptop or desktop system. In the paper the design of some effective metaphors to present the storage system on the limited display area of a mobile smartphone device and the set of system features chosen for implementation are presented. Current storage system administration is limited to using storage …

Spatiotemporal Capacity Management For The Last Level Caches Of Chip Multiprocessors, Dongyuan Zhan

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

Judicious management of on-chip last-level caches (LLC) is critical to alleviating the memory wall of chip multiprocessors (CMP). Although there already exist many LLC management proposals, belonging to either the spatial or temporal dimension, they fail to capture and utilize the inherent interplays between the two dimensions in capacity management. Therefore, this dissertation is targeted at exploring and exploiting the spatiotemporal interactions in LLC capacity management to improve CMPs' performance. Based on this general idea, we address four specific research problems in the dissertation.

For the private LLC organization, prior-art proposals can improve the efficacy of inter-core cooperative caching at …

Predicting Stock Market Using Online Communities Raw Web Traffic Streams, Pierpaolo Dondio

Articles

This paper investigates the predictive power of online communities traffic in regard to stock prices. Using the largest dataset to date, spanning 8 years and almost the complete set of SP500 stocks, we analyze the predictive power of raw unstructured traffic by filtering stock daily returns with traffic features. Our results partially challenge the assumption that raw traffic simply trails stock prices, as expected from a noisy signal without the sentiment direction. Raw traffic is shown to predict prices with statistical significance but with small economic impact. Anyway, this impact rises to moderate under the following conditions: 3 to 7 …

Thin 3d Multiplication Regions In Plasmonically Enhanced Nanopillar Avalanche Detectors, Pradeep Senanayake, Chung-Hong Hung, Alan C. Farrell, David A. Ramirez, Joshua Shapiro, Chi-Kang Li, Yuh-Renn Wu, Majeed M. Hayat, Diana L. Huffaker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

We demonstrate a nanopillar (NP) device structure for implementing plasmonically enhanced avalanche photodetector arrays with thin avalanche volumes (∼ 310 nm × 150 nm × 150 nm). A localized 3D electric field due to a core–shell PN junction in a NP acts as a multiplication region, while efficient light absorption takes place via surface plasmon polariton Bloch wave (SPP-BW) modes due to a self-aligned metal nanohole lattice. Avalanche gains of ∼216 at 730 nm at −12 V are obtained. We show through capacitance–voltage characterization, temperature-dependent breakdown measurements, and detailed device modeling that the avalanche region is on the order of …

Pc-Based Automated Control System For Jordan Northern Grain Silo, Salem Al-Agtash

Computer Science and Engineering

This paper presents a PC-based automated control system operation of the Northern Grain Silo of Jordan. The system connects to a PLC (programmable logic controller) device, and combines operator interface, PLC programming and monitoring functions into one platform. The PLC portion handles direct operations control, while the PC portion handles interfacing and data intensive functions. A simulation package is developed. The package generates a graphical user interface for real-time graphic animations of the Grain Silo operation. We discuss anticipated benefits of such a system and phases of implementation.

Modeling Of Yeast Pheromone Pathway Using Petri Nets, Abhishek Majumdar

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

Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is one of the most widely studied single celled organisms. Mating of yeast cells occur between cells of opposite mating types a and alpha. Pheromone secretion by a cell alerts the corresponding opposite type cell about its presence and eventually facilitates the process of mating between them. The details of how pheromones affect cells can be studied from the pheromone response pathway in a yeast cell. A response pathway typically depicts the chain of interactions that happens between the different proteins in the cells in response to the pheromone. In this thesis we model the …

A Unifying Approach To Behavioral Coverage, Elena Sherman

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

Developing methods for validating that a program works as intended is one of the key research areas in software engineering. Ideally a program P must exhibit its expected be- havior, or property, φ on all of its inputs, i.e., P |= φ. The software engineering community has developed various program analysis approaches to assess whether P |= φ. In general, these approaches can be partitioned into dynamic and static program analysis. The former execute P on a particular input and checks that the execution conforms to φ. The latter in- terprets the code of P and check that on all …

Learning Visual Features For The Avatar Captcha Recognition Challenge, Mohammed Korayem, Abdallah A. Mohamed, David Crandall, Roman Yampolskiy

Faculty Scholarship

Captchas are frequently used on the modern world wide web to differentiate human users from automated bots by giving tests that are easy for humans to answer but difficult or impossible for algorithms. As artificial intelligence algorithms have improved, new types of Captchas have had to be developed. Recent work has proposed a new system called Avatar Captcha, in which a user is asked to distinguish between facial images of real humans and those of avatars generated by computer graphics. This novel system has been proposed on the assumption that this Captcha is very difficult for computers to break. In …

De-Embedding In High Speed Design, Don Degroot, David Dunham

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Mobile First Web And Content Strategy, Stefanie Havelka, David Stevens

Publications and Research

The paradigm shift from the traditional desktop to the mobile web experience is fast approaching, and providing relevant date, location and time-sensitive content to users via mobile devices becomes an essential piece of the overall web strategy. This presentation demonstrates the concepts, techniques and technologies used to develop both the overall mobile content strategy and user experience, as well as the aggregation and delivery of content to both the desktop and mobile form factors from a single content source.

Collaborative Research: North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium, Michael Eckardt

University of Maine Office of Research Administration: Grant Reports

EPS-0918284, University of Vermont & State Agricultural College, J. L. Van Houten, linked to EPS-0918033 (University of New Hampshire), EPS-0918078 (University of Delaware), EPS-0918018 (University of Maine), EPS-0918061 (University of Rhode Island)
Collaborative Research: North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

The North East Cyberinfrastructure Consortium (NECC) unites Maine (ME), New Hampshire (NH), Vermont (VT), Rhode Island (RI), and Delaware (DE) to support cyber-enabled research that requires analyses of large datasets. The project is organized around sharing resources, expertise and facilities in order to make cyber-enabled collaborative …

Action Disambiguation Analysis Using Normalized Google-Like Distance Correlogram, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying realistic human actions in video remains challenging for existing intro-variability and inter-ambiguity in action classes. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Interest Point (STIP) based local features have shown great promise in complex action analysis. However, these methods have the limitation that they typically focus on Bag-of-Words (BoW) algorithm, which can hardly discriminate actions’ ambiguity due to ignoring of spatial-temporal occurrence relations of visual words. In this paper, we propose a new model to capture this contextual relationship in terms of pairwise features’ co-occurrence. Normalized Google-Like Distance (NGLD) is proposed to numerically measuring this co-occurrence, due to its effectiveness in semantic correlation analysis. …

System-On-A-Chip (Soc) Based Hardware Acceleration In Register Transfer Level (Rtl) Design, Xinwei Niu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Today, modern System-on-a-Chip (SoC) systems have grown rapidly due to the increased processing power, while maintaining the size of the hardware circuit. The number of transistors on a chip continues to increase, but current SoC designs may not be able to exploit the potential performance, especially with energy consumption and chip area becoming two major concerns. Traditional SoC designs usually separate software and hardware. Thus, the process of improving the system performance is a complicated task for both software and hardware designers. The aim of this research is to develop hardware acceleration workflow for software applications. Thus, system performance can …

Temporal Data Mining Of Uncertain Water Reservoir Data, Abhinaya Mohan, Peter Revesz

CSE Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the challenges of data mining uncertain water reservoir data based on past human operations in order to learn from them reservoir policies that can be automated for the future operation of the water reservoirs. Records of human operations of water reservoirs often contain uncertain data. For example, the recorded amounts of water released and retained in the water reservoirs are typically uncertain, i.e., they are bounded by some minimum and maximum values. Moreover, the time of release is also uncertain, i.e., typically only monthly or weekly amounts are recorded. To increase the effectiveness of data mining of …

Stress Monitoring Of Post-Processed Mems Silicon Microbridge Structures Using Raman Spectroscopy, Lavern A. Starman, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Inherent residual stresses during material deposition can have profound effects on the functionality and reliability of fabricated Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) devices. Residual stress often causes device failure due to curling, buckling, or fracture. Typically, the material properties of thin films used in surface micromachining are not well controlled during deposition. The residual stress; for example, tends to vary significantly for different deposition methods. Currently, few nondestructive techniques are available to measure residual stress in MEMS devices prior to the final release etch. In this research, micro-Raman spectroscopy is used to measure the residual stresses in polysilicon MEMS microbridge devices. This …

Cognitive Architectures And Autonomy: Commentary And Response, Włodzisław Duch, Ah-Hwee Tan, Stan Franklin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper provides a very useful and promising analysis and comparison of current architectures of autonomous intelligent systems acting in real time and specific contexts, with all their constraints. The chosen issue of Cognitive Architectures and Autonomy is really a challenge for AI current projects and future research. I appreciate and endorse not only that challenge but many specific choices and claims; in particular: (i) that “autonomy” is a key concept for general intelligent systems; (ii) that “a core issue in cognitive architecture is the integration of cognitive processes ....”; (iii) the analysis of features and capabilities missing in current …

Fashionask: Pushing Community Answers To Your Fingertips, Wei Zhang, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We demonstrate a multimedia-based question-answering system, named FashionAsk, by allowing users to ask questions referring to pictures snapped by mobile devices. Specifically, instead of asking verbose questions to depict visual instances, direct pictures are provided as part of questions. To answer these multi-modal questions, FashionAsk performs a large-scale instance search to infer the names of instances, and then matches with similar questions from communitycontributed QA websites as answers. The demonstration is conducted on a million-scale dataset of Web images and QA pairs in the domain of fashion products. Asking a multimedia question through FashionAsk can take as short as five …

Predicting Domain Adaptivity: Redo Or Recycle?, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shiai Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Over the years, the academic researchers have contributed various visual concept classifiers. Nevertheless, given a new dataset, most researchers still prefer to develop large number of classifiers from scratch despite expensive labeling efforts and limited computing resources. A valid question is why not multimedia community “embrace the green” and recycle off-the-shelf classifiers for new dataset. The difficulty originates from the domain gap that there are many different factors that govern the development of a classifier and eventually drive its performance to emphasize certain aspects of dataset. Reapplying a classifier to an unseen dataset may end up GIGO (garbage in, garbage …

Community As A Connector: Associating Faces With Celebrity Names In Web Videos, Zhineng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Juan Cao, Wei Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating celebrity faces appearing in videos with their names is of increasingly importance with the popularity of both celebrity videos and related queries. However, the problem is not yet seriously studied in Web video domain. This paper proposes a Community connected Celebrity Name-Face Association approach (CCNFA), where the community is regarded as an intermediate connector to facilitate the association. Specifically, with the names and faces extracted from Web videos, C-CNFA decomposes the association task into a three-step framework: community discovering, community matching and celebrity face tagging. To achieve the goal of efficient name-face association under this umbrella, algorithms such as …

Combining Emotion And Facial Nonamanual Signals In Synthesized American Sign Language, Jerry Schnepp, Rosalee Wolfe, John Mcdonald, Jorge Toro

Visual Communications and Technology Education Faculty Publications

Conference proceedings from the the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility-2012. ASSETS '12. Boulder, CO, USA, October 22 - 24, 2012. New York, NY, USA: ACM. 249-250.

Fabrication Process Comparison And Dynamics Evaluation Of Electrothermal Actuators For A Prototype Mems Safe And Arming Devices, Scott A. Ostrow Ii, Robert A. Lake, J. P. Lombardi Iii, Ronald A. Coutu Jr., Lavern A. Starman

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Electrothermal actuators fabricated using the Polysilicon Multi-User MEMS Process (PolyMUMPs) and the Sandia Ultra-Planar, Multi-Level MEMS Technology 5 (SUMMiT V) have been investigated for use in integrated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) safe and arming devices. The fabricated electrothermal actuators have been dynamically tested to determine and compare the responses of devices from both processes. Furthermore, the integration of these devices into a safe and arming device were tested and investigated for each process. Initial results indicate that the SUMMiT devices provide the most optimum results based on consistency of operation and reliability.

Sar-Based Vibration Estimation Using The Discrete Fractional Fourier Transform, Qi Wang, Matthew Pepin, Ryan J. Beach, Ralf Dunkel, Tom Atwood, Balu Santhanam, Walter Gerstle, Armin W. Doerry, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A vibration estimation method for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is presented based on a novel application of the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFRFT). Small vibrations of ground targets introduce phase modulation in the SAR returned signals. With standard preprocessing of the returned signals, followed by the application of the DFRFT, the time-varying accelerations, frequencies, and displacements associated with vibrating objects can be extracted by successively estimating the quasi-instantaneous chirp rate in the phase-modulated signal in each subaperture. The performance of the proposed method is investigated quantitatively, and the measurable vibration frequencies and displacements are determined. Simulation results show that the …

Evolving Expert Agent Parameters For Capture The Flag Agent In Xpilot, Gary Parker, Sarah Penrose

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Xpilot is an open source, 2d space combat game. Xpilot-AI allows a programmer to write scripts that control an agent playing a game of Xpilot. It provides a reasonable environment for testing learning systems for autonomous agents, both video game agents and robots. In previous work, a wide range of techniques have been used to develop controllers that are focused on the combat skills for an Xpilot agent. In this research, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to evolve the parameters for an expert agent solving the more challenging problem of capture the flag.

Evolving Predator Control Programs For An Actual Hexapod Robot Predator, Gary Parker, Basar Gulcu

Computer Science Faculty Publications

In the development of autonomous robots, control program learning systems are important since they allow the robots to adapt to changes in their surroundings. Evolutionary Computation (EC) is a method that is used widely in learning systems. In previous research, we used a Cyclic Genetic Algorithm (CGA), a form of EC, to evolve a simulated predator robot to test the effectiveness of a learning system in the predator/prey problem. The learned control program performed search, chase, and capture behavior using 64 sensor states relative to the nearest obstacle and the target, a simulated prey robot. In this paper, we present …

Automation Techniques For Intelligent Environments - Prediction Of Building Activity Patterns Using A Cyclic Genetic Algorithm, Gary Parker, David T. Alpert

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This work involves learning the use schedule of an academic building in order to intelligently control various aspects of the environment. Motion sensors are used to monitor and record the activity of each of the rooms in the building. After a basic preprocessing of the data, a Cyclic Genetic Algorithm (CGA) is used to pick out the patterns of use of the rooms. The CGA is seen as ideal for such a problem because of its ability to find repetitive cyclic patterns in the data. Our results show that a CGA has the ability to pick out such patterns and …

Designing Autonomous Robot Missions With Performance Guarantees, Damian M. Lyons, Ronald Arkin, Prem Nirmal, Shu Jiang

Faculty Publications

This paper describes the need and methods required to construct an integrated software verification and mission specification system for use in robotic missions intended for counter-weapons of mass destruction (c-WMD) operations, as part of a 3-year effort for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The overall system architecture is described. The principal tool for verification is a process algebra, PARS, based on port automata theory. PARS is introduced, emphasizing its ability to represent probabilistic programs and uncertain and dynamic environments, followed by the analysis of mission properties for an example robotic mission.

Cs 1010: Introduction To Computers And Office Productivity Software, Terri Bauer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Focus on learning MS Office software applications including intermediate word processing, spreadsheets, database and presentation graphics using a case study approach where critical thinking and problem solving skills are required. Computer concepts are integrated throughout the course to provide an understanding of the basics of computing, the latest technological advances and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Cs 1150-01: Introduction To Computer Science, Karen Meyer

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

The Introduction to Computer Science course will expose students to the scientific method as implemented in computer science. The course will show students how the scientific method as implemented in computer science can be used as a problem-solving tool. The course requires students to apply and extend the concepts in a laboratory setting. The concepts will include the study of and methodology of algorithm discovery, design, application, and fundamentals of networks. Lecture and Lab