Engineering Commons^™

Improved Speech Intelligibility With A Chimaera Hearing Aid Algorithm, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

It is recognised that current hearing aid fitting algorithms can corrupt fine timing cues in speech. This paper presents a fitting algorithm that aims to improve speech intelligibility, while preserving the temporal fine structure. The algorithm combines the signal envelope amplification from a standard hearing aid fitting algorithm with the fine timing information available to unaided listeners. The proposed “chimaera aid” is evaluated with computer simulated listener tests to measure its speech intelligibility for 3 sample hearing losses. In addition, the experiment demonstrates the potential application of auditory nerve models in the development of new hearing aid algorithm designs using …

Visqol: The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener, Andrew Hines, Jan Skoglund, Anil Kokaram, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

A model of human speech quality perception has been developed to provide an objective measure for predicting subjective quality assessments. The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener (ViSQOL) model is a signal based full reference metric that uses a spectro-temporal measure of similarity between a reference and a test speech signal. This paper describes the algorithm and compares the results with PESQ for common problems in VoIP: clock drift, associated time warping and jitter. The results indicate that ViSQOL is less prone to underestimation of speech quality in both scenarios than the ITU standard.

Development Of Student Centred Knowledge Management System Based In A Higher Education Institution, Chong Liu

Dissertations

With the emergence of a knowledge society and of information technology, knowledge has become a key resource to develop a sustained economy. It is a vital word in the Knowledge Management area (Awad & Ghaziri, 2004). Knowledge Management has also become vital to help knowledge organizations seek a competitive advantage. It also encourages members of organization to share knowledge and improve the organization‘s efficiency, performance, and competitiveness (Shin, 2004). Therefore, an increasing number of organizations have realized the necessity of knowledge management. Especially, the Higher Education Institute (HEI) as the extraordinary ―business‖ will be suitable for implementing knowledge management approaches …

E-Learning And Knowledge Management: The Development Of An E-Learning System For Organisational Training, Alan Muhire

Dissertations

Information technology has major role in most successful companies and organisations around the world, most companies are using IT to reduce operation cost, while improving customer service by providing service twenty four hours, seven days a week and improving communication that helps keep pace with competitors. In most companies and organisation training is a process carried out on a regular basis; the quality of training offered to employee will be reflected on how knowledgeable the staff will become resulting in the organisation becoming more successful. As organisations and companies are currently interested in improving knowledge management, employees are equally working …

An Investigation Into Obstacles Effecting The Use Of Support Technology For Accommodation Facilitation In Third Level Education, Conor Brennan

Dissertations

The profile of students attending third level education in Ireland has changed over the past number of years. More non-traditional students have entered mainstream education. These non-traditional students may be mature students, students whose first language is not English and students with disabilities. In the 2010-2011 academic session 6,932 students with disabilities were enrolled in third level education. This represent 3.9%(AHEAD 2011) of all students enrolled in third level education, which constitutes a 10% increase on 2009-2010. This increase is putting pressure on an already strained system. Efforts have been made to educate and inform lecturers and teaching staff on …

Robotic Manufacturing Cell: An Analysis Of Variables Affecting Performance, Elvis Alicic

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Analyzing the performance of manufacturing cells is a well established concept. The justification for conducting thorough analyses of manufacturing cells comes from the known advantages it can provide, including performance improvement and production planning improvement, both current and future. This study focuses on assessing the variables affecting performance of a robotic manufacturing cell through the measure of throughput. Initially, simulation modeling is utilized to model an existing robotic cell and compare the output to actual production output from the same cell. Additionally, general regression modeling is employed to analyze the following variables and their effect on throughput: machine downtime, off-plan …

Strategies For The Intelligent Selection Of Components, Valerie Maxville

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

It is becoming common to build applications as component-intensive systems - a mixture of fresh code and existing components. For application developers the selection of components to incorporate is key to overall system quality - so they want the `best'. For each selection task, the application developer will de ne requirements for the ideal component and use them to select the most suitable one. While many software selection processes exist there is a lack of repeatable, usable, exible, automated processes with tool support. This investigation has focussed on nding and implementing strategies to enhance the selection of software components. The …

An Improved Medium Access Control Protocol For Real-Time Applications In Wlans And Its Firmware Development, Sushil Dutt

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), commonly known as Wi-Fi, has emerged as a popular internet access technology and researchers are continuously working on improvement of the quality of service (QoS) in WLAN by proposing new and efficient schemes. Voice and video over Internet Protocol (VVoIP) applications are becoming very popular in Wi-Fi enabled portable/handheld devices because of recent technological advancements and lower service costs. Different from normal voice and video streaming, these applications demand symmetric throughput for the upstream and downstream. Existing Wi-Fi standards are optimised for generic internet applications and fail to provide symmetric throughput due …

Measurement And Modeling Of Passive Surface Mount Devices On Fr4 Substrates, Rahulkumar Sadanand Koche

Dissertations and Theses

Passive components like resistors, capacitors and inductors are used in every electronic system. These are the very basic components which affect the system performance at higher frequencies and it is necessary to understand and model the behavior of these components in a very accurate manner. This work focuses on utilizing Printed Circuit Board (PCB) test boards, or fixtures, made of FR4 for characterizing Surface Mount Device (SMD) components. Agilent's Advanced Design System (ADS) microwave circuit simulation software was used for designing the microstrip transmission lines as well as for generating the layout for manufacturing of the PCB. SMD resistors, capacitors …

Advanced Neural Networks And Their Applications In Smart Grids, Bipul Luitel

Doctoral Dissertations

"Today, neural networks (NN) are used in several system identification and nonlinear control system applications. However, their implementation on large systems has been limited either because of their degraded performance or the amount of time and computation required for implementing them being impractical for real applications. The primary emphasis of this research is on the development of advanced NN - simultaneous recurrent neural networks (SRN) and cellular neural networks (CNN); and methods for learning the complexity of large systems.

US electricity infrastructure is one of the largest and the most critical infrastructure consisting of thousands of generators connected by transmission …

Speech Intelligibility Prediction Using A Neurogram Similarity Index Measure, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Articles

Performance Intensity functions can be used to provide additional information over measurement of speech reception threshold and maximum phoneme recognition by plotting a test subject's recognition probability over a range of sound intensities. A computational model of the auditory periphery was used to replace the human subject and develop a methodology that simulates a real listener test. The newly developed NSIM is used to evaluate the model outputs in response to Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) word lists and produce phoneme discrimination scores.

Computational Modeling For Transportation Network Security, Sherif A. Tolba

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Data Exploration Interface For Digital Forensics, Varun Dontula

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The fast capacity growth of cheap storage devices presents an ever-growing problem of scale for digital forensic investigations. One aspect of scale problem in the forensic process is the need for new approaches to visually presenting and analyzing large amounts of data. Current generation of tools universally employ three basic GUI components—trees, tables, and viewers—to present all relevant information. This approach is not scalable as increasing the size of the input data leads to a proportional increase in the amount of data presented to the analyst.

We present an alternative approach, which leverages data visualization techniques to provide a more …

Reducing Data Loss And Saving Money By Acquiring Data Loss Prevention Software, Patarika Tipwong

Technical Reports

Choosing and implementing the right security software tools can protect a company’s assets. In particular, data breaches might not happen if a company is aware of its information flow and has the proper tool to protect it. This thesis paper will explain why and how acquiring data loss prevention (DLP) software will help a company to reduce data loss, mitigate the loss impact and save money. Facts and examples are provided to support and illustrate the statement above.

Detection Of Diffuse Sea Floor Venting Using Structured Light Imaging, Gabrielle Inglis, Clara Smart, Christopher Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Efficiently identifying and localizing diffuse sea floor venting at hydrothermal and cold seep sites is often difficult. Actively venting fluids are usually identified by a temperature induced optical shimmering seen during direct visual inspections or in video data collected by vehicles working close to the sea floor. Relying on such direct methods complicates establishing spatial relations between areas within a survey covering a broad area. Our recent work with a structured light laser system has shown that venting can also be detected in the image data in an automated fashion. A structured light laser system consists of a camera and …

Remote Analysis Of Grain Size Characteristic In Submarine Pyroclastic Deposits From Kolumbo Volcano, Greece, Clara Smart, D. P. Whitesell, Christopher N. Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Grain size characteristics of pyroclastic deposits provide valuable information about source eruption energetics and depositional processes. Maximum size and sorting are often used to discriminate between fallout and sediment gravity flow processes during explosive eruptions. In the submarine environment the collection of such data in thick pyroclastic sequences is extremely challenging and potentially time consuming. A method has been developed to extract grain size information from stereo images collected by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). In the summer of 2010 the ROV Hercules collected a suite of stereo images from a thick pumice sequence in the caldera walls of Kolumbo …

A Study Of Correlations Between The Definition And Application Of The Gene Ontology, Yuji Mo

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

When using the Gene Ontology (GO), nucleotide and amino acid sequences are annotated by terms in a structured and controlled vocabulary organized into relational graphs. The usage of the vocabulary (GO terms) in the annotation of these sequences may diverge from the relations defined in the ontology. We measure the consistency of the use of GO terms by comparing GO's defined structure to the terms' application. To do this, we first use synthetic data with different characteristics to understand how these characteristics influence the correlation values determined by various similarity measures. Using these results as a baseline, we found that …

State-Based Techniques For Designing, Verifying And Debugging Message Passing Systems, Rajaa Khaled Alqudah

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Dissertations

Message passing systems support the applications of concurrent events, where independent or semi-independent events occur simultaneously in a nondeterministic fashion. The nature of independence, random interactions and concurrency made the code development of such applications complicated and error-prone. Conventional code development environments or IDEs, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, provide little programming support in this regard. Furthermore, ensuring the correctness of a message passing system is a challenge. Typically, it is important to guarantee that a system meets its desired specifications along its construction process. Model checking is one of the techniques used in software verification which has proven to …

Efficient Approximation For Security Games With Interval Uncertainty, Chris Kiekintveld, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

There are an increasing number of applications of security games. One of the key challenges for this field going forward is to address the problem of model uncertainty and the robustness of the game-theoretic solutions. Most existing methods for dealing with payoff uncertainty are Bayesian methods which are NP-hard and have difficulty scaling to very large problems. In this work we consider an alternative approach based on interval uncertainty. For a variant of security games with interval uncertainty we introduce a polynomial-time approximation algorithm that can compute very accurate solutions within a given error bound.

Assessment Of Functional Impairment In Human Locomotion: A Fuzzy-Motivated Approach, Murad Alaqtash, Thompson Sarkodie-Gyan, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many neurological disorders result in disordered motion. The effects of a disorder can be decrease by an appropriate rehabilitation. To make rehabilitation efficient, we need to monitor the patient and check how well he or she improves. In our previous papers, we proposed a fuzzy-based semi-heuristic method of gauging how well a patient improved. Surprisingly, this semi-heuristic method turned out to be more efficient that we expected. In this paper, we provide a justification for this efficiency.

In the future, it is desirable to combine this fuzzy-assessment approach with results by Alavarez-Alvarez, Trivino, and Cordon who use fuzzy techniques …

Constraint Optimization: From Efficient Computation Of What Can Be Achieved To Efficient Computation Of A Way To Achieve The Corresponding Optimum, Ali Jalal-Kamali, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practically useful cases, we know how to efficiently compute the exact range of a function over given intervals (and, possibly, under additional constraints). In other words, we know how to efficiently compute the minimum and maximum of a given function f(x₁, ..., x_n) on any box. From the practical viewpoint, it is important not only to find the value of the corresponding maximum or minimum, but also to know for what values of the parameters x_i this optimum is attained. We prove a general result: that if we can efficiently compute the optimum, …

Why Bernstein Polynomials Are Better: Fuzzy-Inspired Justification, Jaime Nava, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that an arbitrary continuous function on a bounded set -- e.g., on an interval [a,b] -- can be, with any given accuracy, approximated by a polynomial. Usually, polynomials are described as linear combinations of monomials. It turns out that in many computational problems, it is more efficient to represent a polynomial as Bernstein polynomials -- e.g., for functions of one variable, a linear combination of terms (x-a)^k * (b-x)^n-k. In this paper, we provide a simple fuzzy-based explanation of why Bernstein polynomials are often more efficient, and we show how this informal explanation …

Semi-Heuristic Poverty Measures Used By Economists: Justification Motivated By Fuzzy Techniques, Karen Villaverde, Nagwa Albehery, Tonghui Wang, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To properly gauge the extent of poverty in a country or in a region, economists use semi-heuristic poverty measures such as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) metric. These measures are used because it was empirically shown that they capture the commonsense meaning of the extent of poverty better than previously proposed measures. However, the fact that these measures are better then a few earlier proposed ones does not necessarily mean that these measures are the best possible; so, it is desirable to look for optimal poverty measures. In this paper, we first use fuzzy techniques to provide a commonsense interpretation of FGT …

In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Fuzzy, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Powersearch: Augmenting Mobile Phone Search Through Personalization, Xiangyu Liu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cell phone has become a fundamental element of people's life. People use it to call each other, browse websites, send text messages, etc. Among all the functionalities, the most important and frequently used is the search functionality. Based on ComScore, in July 2008, Google was estimated to host 235 millions searches per day. However, unlike the search on desktop, the search on cell phone has one critical constrain: battery. Cell phone performing a normal Google search, the battery drains very fast. The reason is that when sending a query to and fetching the results from Google, cell phone keeps communicating …

Stability And Classification Performance Of Feature Selection Techniques, Huanjing Wang, Taghi Khoshgoftaar, Qianhui Liang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Feature selection techniques can be evaluated based on either model performance or the stability (robustness) of the technique. The ideal situation is to choose a feature selec- tion technique that is robust to change, while also ensuring that models built with the selected features perform well. One domain where feature selection is especially important is software defect prediction, where large numbers of met- rics collected from previous software projects are used to help engineers focus their efforts on the most faulty mod- ules. This study presents a comprehensive empirical ex- amination of seven filter-based feature ranking techniques (rankers) applied to …

Mapping Device With Wireless Communication, Xiangyu Liu

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Wireless communication is one of the most powerful communication methods that people use nowadays. The key advantage of wireless communications is that it can cover large distances without having to run any cables from one end to the other. Based on this advantage, wireless communication has many important applications, such as remote controls, cell phones, and global positioning system (GPS). This senior design project is developed to use wireless communication technology to map the geographic characteristics of an unknown place. It contains two wireless communication modules with Atmega1281 microprocessor, two robots with the 8051 microcontroller, six pairs of infrared transmitters …

Fast Super-Resolution With Affine Motion Using An Adaptive Wiener Filter And Its Application To Airborne Imaging, Russell C. Hardie, Kenneth J. Barnard, Raúl Ordóñez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Fast nonuniform interpolation based super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been limited to applications with translational interframe motion. This is in part because such methods are based on an underlying assumption that the warping and blurring components in the observation model commute. For translational motion this is the case, but it is not true in general. This presents a problem for applications such as airborne imaging where translation may be insufficient. Here we present a new Fourier domain analysis to show that, for many image systems, an affine warping model with limited zoom and shear approximately commutes with the point spread function …

A General Attack Method For Steganography Removal Using Pseudo-Cfa Re-Interpolation, Pradhumna Shrestha, Michael Hempel, Tao Ma, Dongming Peng, Hamid Sharif

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Watermarking and steganography are two of the most researched topics in multimedia forensics. However, easy availability of tools and technology has made their misuse a serious concern. To counteract this development some effective tools are necessary to remove malicious steganography. In this work, we introduce a novel watermark attack method which can destroy hidden information embedded in images based on the principle of re-interpolation of Color Filter Array (CFA) artifacts. In digital cameras and scanners, CFA filters are used to acquire low-resolution physical color channel information and produce a high-quality image by subsequent interpolation. We propose to emulate a similar …

A Quantitative Performance Analysis Of 2.5 Ghz And 3.65 Ghz Mobile Wimax, Pradhumna L. Shrestha

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

Mobile WiMAX has emerged as a prime contender for the de-facto ITU’s 4G standard. It provides high data rate with large coverage and vehicular mobility support. It has been, and is being, widely deployed in diverse applications like video streaming, broadcasting and data service. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) issues licenses to operate Mobile WiMAX services in several spectrums, among which 2.5 GHz and 3.65 GHz are the most common. Because the 2.5 GHz spectrum suffers the least propagation losses, it has been widely applied commercially. For this reason, academic and industrial researchers have given it particular attention. However, in …