Engineering Commons^™

Assembly Of Ordered Carbon Shells On Semconducting Nanomaterals, Eli Anguelova Sutter, Peter Werner Sutter

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

In some embodiments of the invention, encapsulated semiconducting nanomaterials are described. In certain embodiments the nanostructures described are semiconducting nanomaterials encapsulated with ordered carbon shells. In some aspects a method for producing encapsulated semiconducting nanomaterials is disclosed. In some embodiments applications of encapsulated semiconducting nanomaterials are described.

Developing A Baccalaureate Digital Forensics Major, John H. Riley

Annual ADFSL Conference on Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As colleges and universities consider instituting a bachelor’s degree in digital forensics or computer forensics, there are numerous questions to be addressed. While some of these normally occur in the development of any new major, there are aspects of digital forensics which do not often (if ever) occur in other majors. We discuss the issues that should be resolved in the development of a baccalaureate degree program in digital forensics.

Keywords: Digital forensics major. Computer forensics major.

Detection And Filtering Of Landmark Occlusions Using Terrain Spatiograms, Damian M. Lyons

Faculty Publications

A team of robots cooperating to quickly produce a map needs to share landmark information between members so that the local maps can be accurately merged. However, the appearance of landmarks as seen by members of the team can change dramatically due to the phenomenon of occlusion.

We have previously presented an approach to landmark representation using Terrain Spatiograms – an extension to image spatiograms in which the spatial information relates to the scene rather than the image. Because this representation preserves depth structure, it is possible to identify and filter potential occlusions.

We present an approach to identifying and …

A Visual Imagination Approach To Cognitive Robotics, Damian M. Lyons, Sirhan Chaudhry, D. Paul Benjamin

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

How To Relate Fuzzy And Owa Estimates, Tanja Magoc, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we have several estimates x1, ..., xn of the same quantity x, i.e., estimates for which x1 ~ x, x2 ~ x, ..., and xn ~ x. It is desirable to combine (fuse) these estimates into a single estimate for x. From the fuzzy viewpoint, a natural way to combine these estimates is: (1) to describe, for each x and for each i, the degree mu(xi - x) to which x is close to xi, (2) to use a t-norm ("and"-operation) to combine these degrees into a degree to which x is consistent with all n …

Efficient Algorithms For Heavy-Tail Analysis Under Interval Uncertainty, Vladik Kreinovich, Monchaya Chiangpradit, Wararit Panichkitkosolkul

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Most applications of statistics to science and engineering are based on the assumption that the corresponding random variables are normally distributed, i.e., distributed according to Gaussian law in which the probability density function d(x) exponentially decreases with x: d(x) ~ exp(-k * x^2). Normal distributions indeed frequently occur in practice. However, there are also many practical situations, including situations from mathematical finance, in which we encounter heavy-tailed distributions, i.e., distributions in which d(x) decreases as d(x) ~ x^(-a). To properly take this uncertainty into account when making decisions, it is necessary to estimate the parameters of such distributions based on …

Metrization Theorem For Space-Times: From Urysohn's Problem Towards Physically Useful Constructive Mathematics, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the early 1920s, Pavel Urysohn proved his famous lemma (sometimes referred to as "first non-trivial result of point set topology"). Among other applications, this lemma was instrumental in proving that under reasonable conditions, every topological space can be metrized.

A few years before that, in 1919, a complex mathematical theory was experimentally proven to be extremely useful in the description of real world phenomena: namely, during a solar eclipse, General Relativity theory -- that uses pseudo-Riemann spaces to describe space-time -- has been (spectacularly) experimentally confirmed. Motivated by this success, Urysohn started working on an extension of his lemma …

Acceleration Of Spiking Neural Networks On Single-Gpu And Multi-Gpu Systems, Venkittaraman Vivek Pallipuram Krishnamani

All Theses

There has been a strong interest in modeling a mammalian brain in order to study the architectural and functional principles of the brain and offer tools to neuroscientists and medical researchers for related studies. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are compute models that try to simulate the structure and/or the functional behavior of neurons and process information using the connectionist approach to computation. Hence, the ANNs are the viable options for such studies.
Of many classes of ANNs, Spiking Neuron Network models (SNNs) have been employed to simulate mammalian brain, capturing its functionality and inference capabilities. In this class of neuron …

Extending Maximum Entropy Techniques To Entropy Constraints, Gang Xiang, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practical situations, we have only partial information about the probabilities. In some cases, we have {\em crisp} (interval) bounds on the probabilities and/or on the related statistical characteristics. In other situations, we have {\em fuzzy} bounds, i.e., different interval bounds with different degrees of certainty.

In a situation with uncertainty, we do not know the exact value of the desired characteristic. In such situations, it is desirable to find its worst possible value, its best possible value, and its "typical" value -- corresponding to the "most probable" probability distribution. Usually, as such a "typical" distribution, we select the …

A Web And Mobile System For Environmental Decision Support, James Carswell, Keith Gardiner, Michela Bertolotto, Andrea Rizzine

Books/Book chapters

Current field data collection methods for many of today’s scientific and other observer/monitor type applications are still entrenched in the “clipboard age”, requiring manual data transcription to a database management system at some (often much) later date, and only allows for visualisation and analysis of recently captured field data “back in the lab”. This chapter is targeted at progressing today’s pen & paper methodology into the spatially enabled mobile computing age of realtime multi-media data input, integration, visualisation, and analysis simultaneously both in the field and the lab. The system described is customized to the specific needs of the Canadian …

Healthcare Professional Roles: The Ontology Model For E-Learning, Lorraine Carmody, Elizabeth Sherry, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

The paper aims to present the MEDeLEARN project, an ontology-driven virtual learning environment for Medical Information System training. The current training environment for healthcare professionals in the use of essential medical information systems in a large urban training hospital is based on conventional instructor-led training sessions. Problems arise due to the demanding nature of the hospital working environment, causing training to be cancelled or curtailed. This mode of training delivery is deemed to be inefficient and ineffective, with the danger of serious errors occurring as a consequence.

The project investigates whether a virtual learning environment can address the competency gap …

Acceleration Of Biomolecular Simulations Using Fpga-Based Reconfigurable Computing, Ananth Nallamuthu

All Theses

A paradigm shift is occurring in the way compute-intensive scientific applications are developed. Thanks to advancements in commercially viable hybrid architectures for High-Performance Computing (HPC), the focus has shifted from improving performance by merely scaling algorithms on von Neumann computing nodes to fully exploiting additional computational capabilities provided by accelerators such as FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) and GPGPUs (General Purpose Graphical Processing Units).
Computational chemists use Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations like LAMMPS (Large Scale Atomic Molecular Massively Parallel Systems) and NAMD (NAnoscale Molecular Dynamics) to simulate biomolecular behaviour such as protein folding and small molecule docking to proteins. MD …

The Great Teakon: A 3d Video Game, Chad Cable

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The Great Teakon is an experimental 3D video game that uses gameplay as a narrative device. Players take charge of Charles Teakon, a rising film star, during the silent film era in the early 1900ʼs. But when Charles breaks his leg on set, heʼs forced into retirement and obscurity. After a 30 year hiatus, he decides to return to the film world and complete his unfinished movie. ! As the protagonist ages, so will the players - not only is this reflected in the physicality of the characters, landscape, and architecture, but the actual mechanics for interacting with the virtual …

Timing Side-Channel Attacks On Ssh, Harikrishnan Bhanu

All Theses

In most secure communication standards today, additional latency is kept to a minimum to preserve the Quality-of-Service. As a result, it is possible to mount side-channel attacks using timing analysis. In this thesis we discuss the viability of these attacks, and demonstrate them by inferring Hidden Markov Models of protocols. These Hidden Markov Models can be used to both detect protocol use and infer information about protocol state. We create experiments that use Markov models to generate traffic and show that we can accurately reconstruct models under many circumstances. We analyze what occurs when timing delays have enough jitter that …

Traffic Analysis Of Anonymity Systems, Ryan Craven

All Theses

This research applies statistical methods in pattern recognition to test the privacy capabilities of a very popular anonymity tool used on the Internet known as Tor.
Using a recently developed algorithm known as Causal State Splitting and Reconstruction (CSSR), we can create hidden Markov models of network processes proxied through Tor. In contrast to other techniques, our CSSR extensions create a minimum entropy model without any prior knowledge of the underlying state structure. The inter-packet time delays of the network process, preserved by Tor, can be symbolized into ranges and used to construct the models.
After the construction of training …

An Exploration Of Formal Methods And Tools Applied To A Small Satellite Software System, Russell J. Grover

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Formal system modeling has been a topic of interest in the research community for many years. Modeling a system helps engineers understand it better and enables them to check different aspects of it to ensure that there is no undesired or unexpected behavior and that it does what it was designed to do. This thesis takes two existing tools that were created to aid in the designing of spacecraft systems and creates a layer to connect them together and allow them to be used jointly. The first tool is a library of formal descriptions used to specify spacecraft behavior in …

Bio-Inspired Distributed Constrained Optimization Technique And Its Application In Dynamic Thermal Management, Saranya Chandrasekaran

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The stomatal network in plants is a well-characterized biological system that hypothetically solves the constrained optimization problem of maximizing CO₂ uptake from the air while constraining evaporative water loss during the process of photosynthesis. There are numerous such constrained optimization problems present in the real world as well as in computer science. This thesis work attempts to solve one such constrained optimization problem in a distributed manner by taking a cue from the dynamics of stomatal networks. The problem considered here is Dynamic Thermal Management (DTM) in a multi-processing element system in computing. There have been several approaches in …

Exploring Managed Nand Media Endurance, Mark G. Jurenka

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Flash memory can be found in media players, cameras, cell phones and portable storage. These consumer items have universally compatible storage devices. However, what is their longevity and what is the long-term data retention reliability? This thesis will explore and attempt to answer these questions. Predicting accurate endurance ratings and long-term storage reliability is problematic; a storage card in a cell phone will simply wear differently if used for personal computer backup. Advertised longevity ratings can also be ambiguous, specified in a number of years of ‘typical’ and ‘average’ use.

This thesis begins by exploring the operation of flash technology …

Design Of Adaptive Collective Foraging In Swarm Robotic Systems, Hanyi Dai

Dissertations

Inspired by the collective behavior observed in biological colonies, swarm robotics is a new approach to design a distributed control algorithm in order to coordinate a group of simple robots performing a complex group task. With only limited computation and communication ability of individual robots, one of the challenges in designing such multi-robotic systems is to understand the effect of individual robots behavior on the group performance. This thesis dedicates the research to designing a set of local interaction and adaptation rule for individual robots so that optimized collective foraging performance can be achieved at group level.

The research starts …

Hidra: Hierarchical Inter-Domain Routing Architecture, Bryan Clevenger

Master's Theses

As the Internet continues to expand, the global default-free zone (DFZ) forwarding table has begun to grow faster than hardware can economically keep pace with. Various policies are in place to mitigate this growth rate, but current projections indicate policy alone is inadequate. As such, a number of technical solutions have been proposed. This work builds on many of these proposed solutions, and furthers the debate surrounding the resolution to this problem. It discusses several design decisions necessary to any proposed solution, and based on these tradeoffs it proposes a Hierarchical Inter-Domain Routing Architecture - HIDRA, a comprehensive architecture with …

Application Of Temporal Difference Learning To The Game Of Snake., Christopher Lockhart

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The game of Snake has been selected to provide a unique application of the TD( ) algorithm as proposed by Sutton. A reinforcement learning technique for producing computer controlled players is documented. Using value function approximation with multilayer artificial neural networks and the actor-critic architecture, computer players capable of playing the game of Snake can be created. The adaptation to the standard neural network backpropagation procedure will be documented. Not only does the proposed technique provide reasonable player performance, its application is unique; this approach to Snake has never been documented. By performing sets of trials, the performance of the …

Open Innovation In Platform Competition, Mei Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We examine the competition between a proprietary platform and an open platform,where each platform holds a two-sided market consisted of app developers and users.The open platform cultivates an innovative environment by inviting public efforts todevelop the platform itself and permitting distribution of apps outside of its own appmarket; the proprietary platform restricts apps sales solely within its app market. Weuse a game theoretic model to capture this competitive phenomenon and analyze theimpact of growth of the open source community on the platform competition. We foundthat growth of the open community mitigates the platform rivalry, and balances the developernetwork sizes on …

Fpga Based Timing Module And Optical Communication Card Design For Spallation Neutron Source, Biswa Singh

All Theses

The Timing Module and Optical Communication Card (OCC) are used for acquisition of neutron event data by the instrument systems at the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) neutron scattering facility. The instrument systems produce a very large flux of neutrons of varying energies over a short time period through the spallation process. The Timing Module and OCC require high-bandwidth communication to ensure high-speed data movement to the memory in the data collection system without loss of neutron data. The existing implementations use a standard PCI-X bus interface to transfer the data between the cards and the host computer. The data processing …

Naked Object File System (Nofs): A Framework To Expose An Object-Oriented Domain Model As A File System, Joseph P. Kaylor, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

We present Naked Objects File System (NOFS), a novel framework that allows a developer to expose a domain model as a file system by leveraging the Naked Objects design principle. NOFS allows a developer to construct a file system without having to understand or implement all details related to normal file systems development. In this paper we explore file systems frameworks and object-oriented frameworks in a historical context and present an example domain model using the framework. This paper is based on a fully-functional implementation that is distributed as free/open source software, including virtual machine images to demonstrate and study …

Coping With The Curse Of Dimensionality By Combining Linear Programming And Reinforcement Learning, Scott H. Burton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Reinforcement learning techniques offer a very powerful method of finding solutions in unpredictable problem environments where human supervision is not possible. However, in many real world situations, the state space needed to represent the solutions becomes so large that using these methods becomes infeasible. Often the vast majority of these states are not valuable in finding the optimal solution. This work introduces a novel method of using linear programming to identify and represent the small area of the state space that is most likely to lead to a near-optimal solution, significantly reducing the memory requirements and time needed to arrive …

Cooperative Remote Sensing And Actuation Using Networked Unmanned Vehicles, Haiyang Chao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation focuses on how to design and employ networked unmanned vehicles for remote sensing and distributed control purposes in the current information-rich world. The target scenarios are environmental or agricultural applications such as river/reservoir surveillance, wind profiling measurement, and monitoring/control of chemical leaks, etc. AggieAir, a small and low-cost unmanned aircraft system, is designed based on the remote sensing requirements from environmental monitoring missions. The state estimation problem and the advanced lateral flight controller design problem are further attacked focusing on the small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform. Then the UAV-based remote sensing problem is focused with further flight …

Constraint Programming Techniques For Generating Efficient Hardware Architectures For Field Programmable Gate Arrays, Atul Kumar Shah

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This thesis presents an approach for modeling and generating efficient hardware architectures using constraint programming techniques, targeting field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The focus of this thesis is the derivation of optimal or near-optimal schedules for streaming applications from data flow graphs (DFGs). The resulting schedules are then used to facilitate the architecture generation process. Most streaming applications, like digital singal processing (DSP) algorithms, are repetitive in nature: the same computation is performed on different data items. This repetitive nature of streaming applications can be used to expose additional parallelism available across different iterations, by creating multiple instances of the …

Decentralized Coordination Of Multiple Autonomous Vehicles, Yongcan Cao

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation focuses on the study of decentralized coordination algorithms of multiple autonomous vehicles. Here, the term decentralized coordination is used to refer to the behavior that a group of vehicles reaches the desired group behavior via local interaction. Research is conducted towards designing and analyzing distributed coordination algorithms to achieve desired group behavior in the presence of none, one, and multiple group reference states.

Decentralized coordination in the absence of any group reference state is a very active research topic in the systems and controls society. We first focus on studying decentralized coordination problems for both single-integrator kinematics and …

Accelerated Frame Data Relocation On Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Array, Ramachandra Kallam

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Emerging reconfiguration techniques that include partial dynamic reconfiguration and partial bitstream relocation have been addressed in the past in order to expose the flexibility of field programmable gate array at runtime. Partial bitstream relocation is a technique used to target a partial bitstream of a partial reconfigurable region (PRR) onto other identical reconfigurable regions inside an FPGA, while partial dynamic reconfiguration is used to target a single reconfigurable region. Prior works in this domain aim to minimize "relocation time" with the help of on-chip or on-line processing. In this thesis, a novel PRR-PRR relocation algorithm is proposed and implemented both …

A Finite Domain Constraint Approach For Placement And Routing Of Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures, Rohit Saraswat

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Scheduling, placement, and routing are important steps in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design. Researchers have developed numerous techniques to solve placement and routing problems. As the complexity of Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) increased over the past decades, so did the demand for improved place and route techniques. The primary objective of these place and route approaches has typically been wirelength minimization due to its impact on signal delay and design performance. With the advent of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), the same place and route techniques were applied to FPGA-based design. However, traditional place and route techniques may …