Engineering Commons^™

A Complete Automation Of Unit Testing For Java Programs, Yoonsik Cheon, Myoung Yee Kim, Ashaveena Perumandla

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Program testing is expensive and labor-intensive, often consuming more than half of the total development costs, and yet it is frequently not done well and the results are not always satisfactory. However, testing is the primary method to ensure that programs comply with requirements. We describe our on-going project that attempts to completely automate unit testing of object-oriented programs. Our project investigates the use of an evolutionary approach, called genetic algorithms, for the test data generation and the use of program specifications, written in JML, for the test result determination. A proof-of-concept tool has been implemented and shows that a …

On Inverse Halftoning: Computational Complexity And Interval Computations, Sergio D. Cabrera, K. Iyer, Gang Xiang, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

We analyze the problem of inverse half-toning. This problem is a particular case of a class of difficult-to-solve problems: inverse problems for reconstructing piece-wise smooth images. We show that this general problem is NP-hard. We also propose a new idea for solving problems of this type, including the inverse halftoning problem.

Exact Bounds For Interval And Fuzzy Functions Under Monotonicity Constraints, With Potential Applications To Biostratigraphy, Emil Platon, Kavitha Tupelly, Vladik Kreinovich, Scott A. Starks, Karen Villaverde

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

The age of fossil species in samples recovered from a well that penetrates an undisturbed sequence of sedimentary rocks increases with depth. The results of biostratigraphic analysis of such a sequence consist of several age-depth values -- both known with interval (or fuzzy) uncertainty -- and we would like to find, for each possible depth, the interval of the possible values of the corresponding age. A similar problem of bounding an intervally (fuzzily) defined function under monotonicity constraint occurs in many other application areas. In this paper, we provide an efficient algorithm for solving this problem.

To Properly Reflect Physicists' Reasoning About Randomness, We Also Need A Maxitive (Possibility) Measure, Andrei M. Finkelstein, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Scott A. Starks, Hung T. Nguyen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

According to the traditional probability theory, events with a positive but very small probability can occur (although very rarely). For example, from the purely mathematical viewpoint, it is possible that the thermal motion of all the molecules in a coffee cup goes in the same direction, so this cup will start lifting up.

In contrast, physicists believe that events with extremely small probability cannot occur. In this paper, we show that to get a consistent formalization of this belief, we need, in addition to the original probability measure, to also consider a maxitive (possibility) measure.

Towards A Minimal Metrics Suite For Agent Based Systems, Maha Ahmed Nabil Abdel Kader

Archived Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Automatic Classification And Speaker Identification Of African Elephant (Loxodonta Africana) Vocalizations, Patrick J. Clemins, Michael T. Johnson, Kirsten Leong, Anne Savage

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A hidden Markov model (HMM) system is presented for automatically classifying African elephant vocalizations. The development of the system is motivated by successful models from human speech analysis and recognition. Classification features include frequency-shifted Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and log energy, spectrally motivated features which are commonly used in human speech processing. Experiments, including vocalization type classification and speaker identification, are performed on vocalizations collected from captive elephants in a naturalistic environment. The system classified vocalizations with accuracies of 94.3% and 82.5% for type classification and speaker identification classification experiments, respectively. Classification accuracy, statistical significance tests on the model parameters, …

The Value Of Mobile Applications: A Utility Company Study, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Keng Siau, Hong Sheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The value proposition of mobile applications i.e. the net value of the benefits and costs associated with the adoption and adaptation of mobile applications is discussed. A means-ends network that depicts the fundamental relationships among the objectives such as efficiency, effectiveness, customer satisfaction, security, cost, and employee acceptance, was developed. The network is useful to researchers as it highlights the issues, concerns, and values of mobile applications. The network help the managers and practitioners to achieve their companies' objectives of implementing mobile and wireless applications.

Qos Constrained Cellular Ad Hoc Augmented Networks, Chi-Tung Chen

Dissertations

In this dissertation, based on different design criteria, three novel quality of service (QoS) constrained cellular ad hoc augmented network (CAHAN) architectures are proposed for next generation wireless networks. The CAHAN architectures have a hybrid architecture, in which each MT of CDMA cellular networks has ad hoc communication capability. The CAHAN architectures are an evolutionary approach to conventional cellular networks. The proposed architectures have good system scalability and high system reliability.

The first proposed architecture is the QoS constrained minimum-power cellular ad hoc augmented network architecture (QCMP CAHAN). The QCMP CAHAN can find the optimal minimum-power routes under the QoS …

A Co-Processor Design To Support Mpi Primitives In Configurable Multiprocessor Designs, Rohan Bafna

Theses

The Message-Passing Interface (MIPI) is a widely used standard for inter-processor communication in parallel computers. This standard is normally implemented in software, thus resulting in large communication latencies. A hardware implementation can reduce communication latencies significantly, thereby increasing the bandwidth. However, this approach cannot be applied in practice to the very large set of functions in MPI.

Reconfigurable computing has reached levels where entire parallel systems can be built inside one or more FPGAs (Field-Programmable Gate Arrays). In this scheme, specialized components must be built for inter-processor communication and the resulting code is difficult to port to other reconfigurable platforms. …

Scalable Wide Area Ad-Hoc Networking, Nithin Bose

Theses

The scalability problem of routing algorithms in Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANET) has conventionally been addressed by introducing hierarchical architectures, clusters, and neighborhood zones. In all of these approaches, some nodes are assigned different routing related roles than others. Examples include cluster heads, virtual backbones and border nodes. The selection of these nodes on a fixed or dynamic basis adds complexity to the routing algorithm, in addition to placing significant demands on mobility and power consumption of these nodes. Furthermore, the scalability achieved with hierarchical architectures or partitions is limited.

This thesis demonstrates that location awareness can greatly aid in MANET …

An Autonomous Router-Based Solution To Detect And Defend Low Rate Ddos Attacks, Karunakar Anantharam

Theses

Internet security was not a concern when the Internet was invented, but we cannot deny this fact anymore. Since all forms of businesses and communications are aligned to the Internet in one form or the other, the security of these assets (both infrastructure and content) is of prime importance. Some of the well known consequences of an attack include gaining access to a network, intellectual property thefts, and denial of service.

This thesis focuses on countering flood-type attacks that result in denial of service to end users. A new classification of this denial of service attacks, known as the low …

Smartacking: Improving Tcp Performance From The Receiving End, Daniel K. Blandford, Sally A. Goldman, Sergey Gorinsky, Yan Zhou, Daniel R. Dooly

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

We present smartacking, a technique that improves performance of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) via adaptive generation of acknowledgments (ACKs) at the receiver. When the bottleneck link is underutilized, the receiver transmits an ACK for each delivered data segment and thereby allows the connection to acquire the available capacity promptly. When the bottleneck link is at its capacity, the smartacking receiver sends ACKs with a lower frequency reducing the control traffic overhead and slowing down the congestion window growth to utilize the network capacity more effectively. To promote quick deployment of the technique, our primary implementation of smartacking modifies only the …

Design Concepts And Process Analysis For Transmuter Fuel Manufacturing: Quarterly Progress Report #1, Jamil M. Renno, Georg F. Mauer

Fuels Campaign (TRP)

A Hot Cell robotic assembly: Pick and place dynamic simulation, including feedback control with Matlab, was developed for dispersion fuel manufacture.

The deployment of remote manufacturing of transmuter fuel is a necessity for the transmutation applications. In the reporting period, a virtual hot cell for the manufacturing of dispersion fuel was designed using MSC.visualNastran^©, ProEngineer^© and MATLAB^©. Atypical events were successfully simulated. Relevant physical quantities arising during such events were monitored as well.

Robust Control Techniques For State Tracking In The Presence Of Variable Time Delays, Jarrett Goodell, Marc Compere, Miguel Simon, Wilford Smith, Ronnie Wright, Mark Brudnak

Publications

In this paper, a distributed driver-in-the-Ioop and hardware-in-the-Ioop simulator is described with a driver on a motion simulator at the U.S. Army TARDEC Ground Vehicle Simulation Laboratory (GVSL). Realistic power system response is achieved by linking the driver in the GVSL with a full-sized hybrid electric power system located 2,450 miles away at the TARDEC Power and Energy Systems Integration Laboratory (P&E SIL), which is developed and maintained by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). The goal is to close the loop between the GVSL and P&E SIL over the Internet to provide a realistic driving experience in addition to realistic …

Analyst-Focused Arabic Information Retrieval, Robert N. Oddy, Ann R. Diekema, Jean Hannouche, Elizabeth Liddy, Grant Ingersoll

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

An English-Arabic Cross-Language Information Retrieval Environment was created in which the analyst can query an Arabic database in English and retrieve a set of relevant Arabic documents. The retrieved Arabic documents are automatically translated into English to facilitate readability by the English-only analyst. Proper names of people, places, and organizations are extracted from the retrieved documents and transliterated from Arabic into English. They are presented to the analyst and serve to provide a brief summarization of the retrieved document search query in English. Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR), itself a desideratum in the ARDA workshop, is a special case of Information …

C2iedm For The Gig: A Tutorial, Andreas Tolk, Charles Turnitsa, Curtis Blais

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

A Universal Sensor Model, Valery Mazin, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Non-Verbal Communication With Autistic Children Using Digital Libraries, Gondy A. Leroy, John Huang '05, Serena Chuang '05, Marjorie H. Charlop

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has become one of the most prevalent mental disorders over the last few years and its prevalence is still growing. The disorder is characterized by a wide variety of symptoms such as lack of social behavior, extreme withdrawal, and problems communicating. Because of the diversity in symptoms and the wide variety in severity for those, each autistic child has different needs and requires individualized therapy. This leads to long waiting lists for therapy.

Websat: Web-Based Systems Administration Tool, Juyong Jeong

Theses Digitization Project

Discusses the development of WebSAT (Web-based systems administration tool), a computer network tool that allows systems administrators to create and delete accounts, disable and enable existing accounts, manage disk space conveniently, monitor the status of all network printers, and monitor network security. The WebSAT application was implemented using PHP, a server-side embedded scripting language, with a MySQL database.

A Beacon-Less Location Discovery Scheme For Wireless Sensor Networks, Lei Feng, Wenliang Du, Peng Ning

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - All Scholarship

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), sensor location plays a critical role in many applications. Having a GPS receiver on every sensor node is costly. In the past, a number of location discovery schemes have been proposed. Most of these schemes share a common feature: they use some special nodes, called beacon nodes, which are assumed to know their own locations (e.g., through GPS receivers or manual configuration). Other sensors discover their locations based on the information provided by these beacon nodes. In this paper, we show that efficient location discovery can be achieved in sensor networks without using beacons. We …

Delay-Constrained Transmission Of Fine Scalable Coded Content Over P2p Networks, Xiao Su, Yi Shang, Tao Wang, Yuqing Mai

Faculty Publications

Images or videos are generally coded before transmission, and they can be either non-scalable coded or scalable coded, which can be further classified into fine-scalable coded and coarse-scalable coded. In this paper, we focus on delivery of fine-scalable coded content. The objective of our work is to design algorithms to optimize the quality of fine-scalable coded images or videos on peer-to-peer networks when a requesting peer is delay-sensitive and has to display content within a certain delay bound. Fine-scalable coding has two properties: (1) it embeds lower bit-rate bitstreams into higher bit-rate bitstreams; and (2) its coding quality increases with …

Online Multimedia Communication System, Yin-Wei Yang

Theses Digitization Project

Online Multimedia Communication System is a project aimed at providing people the ability to store and share their multimedia files. The users and administrator can modify and view the files and database information from a normal web browser. Furthermore, this site offers a secure environment to keep all the users' information private.

An Electro-Oculogram Based System For Communication And Control Using Target Position Variation, Ronan Fitzmaurice, Ted Burke, Annraoi De Paor

Conference Papers

In this paper we describe a novel mode of human computer interaction based on gaze tracking using the electro-oculogram (EOG). Despite the relative simplicity of recording this signal, it is often discounted as a reliable method of gaze tracking because of problems arising from changing sensitivity and DC drift. We describe an original technique, Target Position Variation (TPV), which addresses this issue by presenting moving icons which, when followed with the eye, create a corresponding pattern in the EOG signal which can be used to infer the correct gaze position and to compensate for variations in sensitivity.

Digital Control Of Half-Bridge Dc-Dc Converters With Current Doubler Rectification, Liangbin Yao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

DC-DC power converters play an important role in powering telecom and computing systems. Complex systems, including power electronics systems, are increasingly using digital controllers because of the major advancements in digital controllers and DSP as well as there ability to perform sophisticated and enhanced control schemes. In this thesis, the digital controller is investigated for DC-DC converters in high current low voltage applications. For an optimal design of a regulated DC-DC converter, it is necessary to derive a valid model. The current doubler rectified half bridge (CDRHB) DC-DC converter is suitable for high current low voltage applications. In this thesis, …

Design Of Mobile Phone Applications For Point-Of-Care Test Result Validation., John Mcgrory, Owen Lynch, Eugene Coyle

Conference Papers

Patients with many different conditions are required to take the management of their condition into their own hands and perform Point of Care Testing (POCT) at home. However, this raises quality control issues that would not arise in a clinical setting, since the sample acquisition and testing procedures are not overseen by professional hospital staff. Another major issue, the main focus of this research, is that results from such tests are not clinically validated to ensure that they are plausible for that patient at the time of testing. In hospital, tests taken by clinicians are validated by hi-tech computerised validation …

Trioson: A Graphical User Interface For Pattern Sonification, Charlie Cullen, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

The TrioSon software allows users to map musical patterns to input data variables via a graphical user interface (GUI). The application is a Java routine designed to take input files of standard Comma Separated Values (CSV) format and output Standard Midi Files (SMF) using the internal Java Sound API. TrioSon renders output Sonifications from input data files for up to 3 user-defined parameters, allocated as bass, chord and melody instruments for the purposes of arrangement. In this manner each parameter concerned is distinguished by its individual instrumental timbre, with the option of rendering any combination of 1 to 3 parameters …

Preconditioning Of Primary Human Endothelial Cells With Inflammatory Mediators Alters The “Set Point” Of The Cell, Youichiro Wada, Hasan H. Otu, Shengqian Wu, Md. Ruhul Abid, Hitomi Okada, Towia Libermann, Tatsuhiko Kodama, Shu-Ching Shih, Takashi Minami, William C. Aird

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Endothelial cells are highly sensitive to changes in the extracellular milieu. Sepsis results in activation of inflammatory and coagulation pathways. We hypothesized that sepsis-associated mediators may alter the response capacity (so-called “set point”) of endothelial cells. Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) were preincubated in the presence or absence of tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, lipopolysaccharide (LPS), hypoxia, hyperthermia, and/or high glucose; treated with or without thrombin for 4 h; and then processed for RNase protection assays of selected activation markers. Priming with TNF-α and LPS significantly inhibited thrombin-mediated induction of vascular cell adhesion molecule-1, intercellular adhesion molecule-1, tissue factor, and …

Performance Of Convolutional Interleavers With Different Spacing Parameters In Turbo Codes, Sina Vafi, Tadeusz Wysocki

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

This paper considers application of a convolutional interleaver and the issue of infuence of the space parameter in the turbo code performance. Similarly to previously considered convolutional interleavers, the new interleavers are designed as block interleavers and their performance in different code structures is compared with the interleaver having higher periods and space value of 1. In each comparison, the number of inserted stuff bits at the end of each data block is considered to be of similar order. Finally, suitable modification to the new interleavers is proposed improving performance for the codes with lower number of stuff bits.

Technical Chair’S Message, A. Beghdadi, Tadeusz Wysocki

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

We have organized an exciting technical program which includes tutorials, plenary sessions, and technical presentations. All technical submissions to the conference were based on full-length papers. Each paper has been assessed by at least two reviewers. This year marks the first time that a double-blind peer review process has been used in an ISSPA conference. Overall, the process was a great success with both authors and reviewers conforming to the double-blind review guidelines. We received 395 paper submissions, most of which were of very high quality. However, due to space limitations, only 228 articles were accepted for presentation at the …

Observations Of The Small-Scale Variability Of Precipitation Using An Imaging Radar, Robert D. Palmer, Boon Leng Cheong, Michael Hoffman, Stephen J. Frasier, F.J. Lopez-Dekker

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

For many years, spatial and temporal inhomogeneities in precipitation fields have been studied using scanning radars, cloud radars, and disdrometers, for example. Each measurement technique has its own advantages and disadvantages. Conventional profiling radars point vertically and collect data while the atmosphere advects across the field of view. Invoking Taylor’s frozen turbulence hypothesis, it is possible to construct time-history data, which are used to study the structure and dynamics of the atmosphere. In the present work, coherent radar imaging is used to estimate the true three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere within the field of view of the radar. The 915-MHz …