Engineering Commons^™

Approaches For Eye-Tracking While Reading, Xiaohao Sun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we developed an algorithm to detect the correct line being read by participants. The comparisons of the reading line classification algorithms are demonstrated using eye-tracking data collected from a realistic reading experiment in front of a low-cost desktop-mounted eye-tracker. With the development of eye-tracking techniques, research begins to aim at trying to understand information from the eyes. However, state of the art in eye-tracking applications is affected by a large amount of measurement noise. Even the expensive eye-trackers still suffer significant noise. In addition, the inherent characteristics of gaze movement increase the difficulty of obtaining valuable information …

Reaction Wheels Fault Isolation Onboard 3-Axis Controlled Satellite Using Enhanced Random Forest With Multidomain Features, Mofiyinoluwa Oluwatobi Folami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing number of satellite launches throughout the years, it is only natural that an interest in the safety and monitoring of these systems would increase as well. However, as a system becomes more complex it becomes difficult to generate a high-fidelity model that accurately describes all the system components. With such constraints using data-driven approaches becomes a more feasible option. One of the most commonly used actuators in spacecraft is known as the reaction wheel. If these reaction wheels are not maintained or monitored, it could result in mission failure and unwarranted costs. That is why fault detection …

Hrotate: Hybrid Relational Rotation Embedding For Knowledge Graph, Akshay Mukundbhai Shah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Knowledge Graph (KG) represents the real world's information in the form of triplets (head, relation, and tail). However, most KGs are generated manually or semi-automatically, which resulted in an enormous number of missing information in a KG. The goal of a Knowledge-Graph Completion task is to predict missing links in a given Knowledge Graph. Various approaches exist to predict a missing link in a KG. However, the most prominent approaches are based on tensor factorization and Knowledge-Graph embeddings, such as RotatE and SimplE. The RotatE model depicts each relation as a rotation from the source entity (Head) to the target …

Meta-Heuristic Approach For Course Scheduling Problem, Amanta Sunny

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays, much research is being carried out to find efficient algorithms for optimal automated university course timetable problems (UCTP). UCTP allocates the university's events like lectures, exams to the various resources, including instructors, students, lecture time and classrooms. Class scheduling is one of the biggest challenging problems of educational institutions. In this thesis, the aim is to improve the state-of-art for a class scheduling problem considering some hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints must be satisfied. Soft constraints need not be satisfied, but there is a penalty for each soft constraint violation. We also have a timing penalty for scheduling …

Multilateration Index., Chip Lynch

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We present an alternative method for pre-processing and storing point data, particularly for Geospatial points, by storing multilateration distances to fixed points rather than coordinates such as Latitude and Longitude. We explore the use of this data to improve query performance for some distance related queries such as nearest neighbor and query-within-radius (i.e. “find all points in a set P within distance d of query point q”). Further, we discuss the problem of “Network Adequacy” common to medical and communications businesses, to analyze questions such as “are at least 90% of patients living within 50 miles of a covered emergency …

High-Density Parking For Autonomous Vehicles., Parag J. Siddique

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In a common parking lot, much of the space is devoted to lanes. Lanes must not be blocked for one simple reason: a blocked car might need to leave before the car that blocks it. However, the advent of autonomous vehicles gives us an opportunity to overcome this constraint, and to achieve a higher storage capacity of cars. Taking advantage of self-parking and intelligent communication systems of autonomous vehicles, we propose puzzle-based parking, a high-density design for a parking lot. We introduce a novel method of vehicle parking, which leads to maximum parking density. We then propose a heuristic method …

Signal Fingerprinting And Machine Learning Framework For Uav Detection And Identification., Olusiji Oloruntobi Medaiyese

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advancement in technology has led to creative and innovative inventions. One such invention includes unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). UAVs (also known as drones) are now an intrinsic part of our society because their application is becoming ubiquitous in every industry ranging from transportation and logistics to environmental monitoring among others. With the numerous benign applications of UAVs, their emergence has added a new dimension to privacy and security issues. There are little or no strict regulations on the people that can purchase or own a UAV. For this reason, nefarious actors can take advantage of these aircraft to intrude into …

Work Order And Subassembly Identification And Tracking System, Israa El-Sabbagh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The research encompassed in this thesis includes the development of a work order and subassembly identification and tracking software system created in-house and tested at SPM Automation (Canada) Inc. The research is motivated by the significant losses the company is enduring and the recurring problems occurring at the facility (i.e., excess inventory, late ordering, reordering, misplaced components, etc.). These problems are critical in the progress and profits of the company.

An extensive literature review was completed, and the research gaps were presented. The optimal work order and subassembly process was created using Process Mapping Methodology, Cause-and-Effect Diagrams, and 5Why Analysis. …

Image Analysis Of Charged Bimodal Colloidal Systems In Microgravity., Adam J. Cecil

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Colloids are suspensions of two or more phases and have been topics of research for advanced, tunable materials for decades. Stabilization of colloids is typically attributed to thermodynamic mechanisms; however, recent studies have identified transport or entropic mechanisms that can potentially stabilize a thermodynamically unstable colloidal system. In this study, suspensions of silsesquioxane microparticles and zirconia nanoparticles were dispersed in a nitric acid solution and allowed to aggregate for 8-12 days in microgravity aboard the International Space Station. The suspensions were subsequently imaged periodically at 2.5x magnification. Due to the inadequacy of existing image analysis programs, the python package “Colloidspy” …

Improved Secure And Low Computation Authentication Protocol For Wireless Body Area Network With Ecc And 2d Hash Chain, Soohyeon Choi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since technologies have been developing rapidly, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has emerged as a promising technique for healthcare systems. People can monitor patients’ body condition and collect data remotely and continuously by using WBAN with small and compact wearable sensors. These sensors can be located in, on, and around the patient’s body and measure the patient’s health condition. Afterwards sensor nodes send the data via short-range wireless communication techniques to an intermediate node. The WBANs deal with critical health data, therefore, secure communication within the WBAN is important. There are important criteria in designing a security protocol for a …

Cascaded Deep Learning Network For Postearthquake Bridge Serviceability Assessment, Youjeong Jang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Damages assessment of bridges is important to derive immediate response after severe events to decide serviceability. Especially, past earthquakes have proven the vulnerability of bridges with insufficient detailing. Due to lack of a national and unified post-earthquake inspection procedure for bridges, conventional damage assessments are performed by sending professional personnel to the onsite, detecting visually and measuring the damage state. To get accurate and fast damage result of bridge condition is important to save not only lives but also costs.
There have been studies using image processing techniques to assess damage of bridge column without sending individual to onsite. Convolutional …

Lightweight Encryption Based Security Package For Wireless Body Area Network, Sangwon Shin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the demand of individual health monitoring rose, Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) are becoming highly distinctive within health applications. Nowadays, WBAN is much easier to access then what it used to be. However, due to WBAN’s limitation, properly sophisticated security protocols do not exist. As WBAN devices deal with sensitive data and could be used as a threat to the owner of the data or their family, securing individual devices is highly important. Despite the importance in securing data, existing WBAN security methods are focused on providing light weight security methods. This led to most security methods for WBAN …

Human Activity Recognition Based On Wearable Flex Sensor And Pulse Sensor, Xiaozhu Jin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In order to fulfill the needs of everyday monitoring for healthcare and emergency advice, many HAR systems have been designed [1]. Based on the healthcare purpose, these systems can be implanted into an astronaut’s spacesuit to provide necessary life movement monitoring and healthcare suggestions. Most of these systems use acceleration data-based data record as human activity representation [2,3]. But this data attribute approach has a limitation that makes it impossible to be used as an activity monitoring system for astronavigation. Because an accelerometer senses acceleration by distinguishing acceleration data based on the earth’s gravity offset [4], the accelerometer cannot read …

Deep Learning Methods For Fingerprint-Based Indoor And Outdoor Positioning, Fahad Alhomayani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Outdoor positioning systems based on the Global Navigation Satellite System have several shortcomings that have deemed their use for indoor positioning impractical. Location fingerprinting, which utilizes machine learning, has emerged as a viable method and solution for indoor positioning due to its simple concept and accurate performance. In the past, shallow learning algorithms were traditionally used in location fingerprinting. Recently, the research community started utilizing deep learning methods for fingerprinting after witnessing the great success and superiority these methods have over traditional/shallow machine learning algorithms. The contribution of this dissertation is fourfold:

First, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based method for …

Wind Turbine Parameter Calibration Using Deep Learning Approaches, Rebecca Mccubbin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The inertia and damping coefficients are critical to understanding the workings of a wind turbine, especially when it is in a transient state. However, many manufacturers do not provide this information about their turbines, requiring people to estimate these values themselves. This research seeks to design a multilayer perceptron (MLP) that can accurately predict the inertia and damping coefficients using the power data from a turbine during a transient state. To do this, a model of a wind turbine was built in Matlab, and a simulation of a three-phase fault was used to collect realistic fault data to input into …