Engineering Commons^™

Second Order-Response Surface Model For The Automated Parameter Tuning Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Several automated parameter tuning procedures/configurators have been proposed in order to find the best parameter setting for a target algorithm. These configurators can generally be classified into model-free and model-based approaches. We introduce a recent approach which is based on the hybridization of both approaches. It combines the Design of Experiments (DOE) and Response Surface Methodology (RSM) with prevailing model-free techniques. DOE is mainly used for determining the importance of parameters. A First Order-RSM is initially employed to define the promising region for the important parameters. A Second Order-RSM is then built to approximate the center point as well as …

Design And Implementation Of An Instruction Set Architecture And An Instruction Execution Unit For The Rez9 Coprocessor System, Daniel Spencer Anderson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

While the use of RNS has provided groundbreaking theory and progress in this field, the applications still lack viable testing platforms to test and verify the theory. This Thesis outlines the processing of developing an instruction set architecture (ISA) and an instruction execution unit (IEU) to help make the first residue based general processor a viable testing platform to address the mentioned problems.

Consider a 32-bit ripple adder. The delay on this device will be 32N where N is the delay for each adder to complete its operation. The delay of this process is due to the need to propagate …

Simulation, And Overload And Stability Analysis Of Continuous Time Sigma Delta Modulator, Kyung Kang

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The ever increasing demand for faster and more powerful digital applications requires high speed, high resolution ADCs. Currently, sigma delta modulators ADCs are extensively used in broadband telecommunication systems because they are an effective solution for high data-rate wireless communication systems that require low power consumption, high speed, high resolution, and large signal bandwidths.

Because mixed-signal integrated circuits such as Continuous Time sigma delta modulators contain both analog and digital circuits, mixed signal circuits are not as simple to model and simulate as all discrete or all analog systems. In this dissertation, the delta transform is used to simulate CT …

Designing A Biomimetic Testing Platform For Actuators In A Series-Elastic Co-Contraction System, Ryan Tyler Schroeder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Actuators determine the performance of robotic systems at the most intimate of levels. As a result, much work has been done to assess the performance of different actuator systems. However, biomimetics has not previously been utilized as a pretext for tuning a series elastic actuator system with the purpose of designing an empirical testing platform. Thus, an artificial muscle tendon system has been developed in order to assess the performance of two distinct actuator types: (1) direct current electromagnetic motors and (2) ultrasonic rotary piezoelectric motors. Because the design of the system takes advantage of biomimetic operating principles such as …

Fresh Bytes - Connected Hydroponics For Small-Scale Growing, Jack Bowen

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Many users are now transitioning to small-scale hydroponics and aquaponics at home. There can be a barrier to entry with these systems as there is a delicate balance of chemicals, pH, etc. that must be maintained. There are sensors for these various components but they are either aimed at commercial production or are un-automated. Fresh Bytes is a microcomputer with sensors to detect all of these unseen components in a hydroponic system. A prototype of this microcomputer is produced along with CAD plans for more professional versions of it. The sensors are verified and future development is contemplated.

A Pareto-Frontier Analysis Of Performance Trends For Small Regional Coverage Leo Constellation Systems, Christopher Alan Hinds

Master's Theses

As satellites become smaller, cheaper, and quicker to manufacture, constellation systems will be an increasingly attractive means of meeting mission objectives. Optimizing satellite constellation geometries is therefore a topic of considerable interest. As constellation systems become more achievable, providing coverage to specific regions of the Earth will become more common place. Small countries or companies that are currently unable to afford large and expensive constellation systems will now, or in the near future, be able to afford their own constellation systems to meet their individual requirements for small coverage regions.

The focus of this thesis was to optimize constellation geometries …

Is The Smartphone Smart In Kathmandu?, Seth Bird

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This is the extensive study of the smartphone in the developing country of Nepal, specifically the Kathmandu valley. Throughout my research I conducted various interviews with businesses, Tibetan refugees, and Nepali millennials (18yrs-33yrs) with the goal of identifying how the smartphone is used and understood. I chose the Kathmandu valley as my main area of research because the usage of smartphones in rural Nepal is extremely limited, and the valley represents the economic hub where progressive thinking flourishes. As a main objective I sought to understand how, if at all, the smartphone is used differently between Nepal and America. All …

Study Of Parallel Programming Models On Computer Clusters With Accelerators, Chenggang Lai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In order to reach exascale computing capability, accelerators have become a crucial part in developing supercomputers. This work examines the potential of two latest acceleration technologies, Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) Architecture and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). This thesis applies three benchmarks under 3 different configurations, MPI+CPU, MPI+GPU, and MPI+MIC. The benchmarks include intensely communicating application, loosely communicating application, and embarrassingly parallel application. This thesis also carries out a detailed study on the scalability and performance of MIC processors under two programming models, i.e., offload model and native model, on the Beacon computer cluster.

According to different benchmarks, the results …

Exploring User-Provided Connectivity, Mohammad H. Afrasiabi, Roch Guerin

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Network services often exhibit positive and negative externalities that affect users' adoption decisions. One such service is "user-provided connectivity" or UPC. The service offers an alternative to traditional infrastructure-based communication services by allowing users to share their "home base" connectivity with other users, thereby increasing their access to connectivity. More users mean more connectivity alternatives, i.e., a positive externality, but also greater odds of having to share one's own connectivity, i.e., a negative externality. The tug of war between positive and negative externalities together with the fact that they often depend not just on how many but also which users …

Neural Network Dynamic Progamming Constrained Control Of Distributed Parameter Systems Governed By Parabolic Partial Differential Equations With Application To Diffusion-Reaction Processes, Behzad Talaei, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a novel neural network (NN) adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) control scheme for distributed parameter systems (DPS) governed by parabolic partial differential equations (PDE) is introduced in the presence of control constraints and unknown system dynamics. First, Galerkin method is utilized to develop a relevant reduced order system which captures the dominant dynamics of the DPS. Subsequently, a novel control scheme is proposed over finite horizon by using NN ADP. To relax the requirement of system dynamics, a novel NN identifier is developed. More-over, a second NN is proposed to estimate online the time-varying non-quadratic value function from …

Mechatronics In Electrical Efficiency And Environmental Impact, Sherif Hyseni

UBT International Conference

This paper focuses on the mechatronic technology development, and its influent on electrical efficiency with a direct result in cost and environment. Considering the well-known European Union standard “20-20-20” and the possibility and responsibility of Kosovo in this field, the role of energy efficiency has great impact for future directions. This paper refers to a new technology solution for heating that is available on the local market, called “DAIKIN” by analyzing the functionality of this device and its promise to save up to 40% of the heating costs. Implementation of “DAIKIN” technology in state institutions in Prishtina, and also the …

A New Transfer Impedance Based System Equivalent Model For Voltage Stability Analysis, Yang Wang, Caisheng Wang, Feng Lin, Wenyuan Li, Le Yi Wang, Junhui Zhao

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper presents a new transfer impedance based system equivalent model (TISEM) for voltage stability analysis. The TISEM can be used not only to identify the weakest nodes (buses) and system voltage stability, but also to calculate the amount of real and reactive power transferred from the generator nodes to the vulnerable node causing voltage instability. As a result, a full-scale view of voltage stability of the whole system can be presented in front of system operators. This useful information can help operators take proper actions to avoid voltage collapse. The feasibility and effectiveness of the TISEM are further validated …

Cubic Spline Interpolation By Solving A Recurrence Equation Instead Of A Tridiagonal Matrix, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

The cubic spline interpolation method is proba- bly the most widely-used polynomial interpolation method for functions of one variable. However, the cubic spline method requires solving a tridiagonal matrix-vector equation with an O(n) computational time complexity where n is the number of data measurements. Even an O(n) time complexity may be too much in some time-ciritical applications, such as continuously estimating and updating the flight paths of moving objects. This paper shows that under certain boundary conditions the tridiagonal matrix solving step of the cubic spline method could be entirely eliminated and instead the coefficients of the unknown cubic polynomials …

Designing A Bayer Filter With Smooth Hue Transition Interpolation Using The Xilinx System Generator, Zhiqiang Li, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

This paper describes the design of a Bayer filter with smooth hue transition using the System Generator for DSP. We describe and compare experimentally two different designs, one based on a MATLAB implementation and the other based on a modification of the Bayer filter using bilinear interpolation.

A Game-Theoretic Analysis Of The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Although nuclear non-proliferation is an almost universal human desire, in practice, the negotiated treaties appear unable to prevent the steady growth of the number of states that have nuclear weapons. We propose a computational model for understanding the complex issues behind nuclear arms negotiations, the motivations of various states to enter a nuclear weapons program and the ways to diffuse crisis situations.

Estimating The Flight Path Of Moving Objects Based On Acceleration Data, Peter Revesz

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Inertial navigation is the problem of estimating the flight path of a moving object based on only acceleration measurements. This paper describes and compares two approaches for inertial navigation. Both approaches estimate the flight path of the moving object using cubic spline interpolation, but they find the coefficients of the cubic spline pieces by different methods. The first approach uses a tridiagonal matrix, while the second approach uses recurrence equations. They also require different boundary conditions. While both approaches work in O(n) time where n is the number of given acceleration measurements, the recurrence equation-based method can be easier updated …

Traccs: Trajectory-Aware Coordinated Urban Crowd-Sourcing, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Aldy Gunawan, Archan Misra, Koustuv Dasgupta, Deepthi Chander

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the problem of large-scale mobile crowd-tasking, where a large pool of citizen crowd-workers are used to perform a variety of location-specific urban logistics tasks. Current approaches to such mobile crowd-tasking are very decentralized: a crowd-tasking platform usually provides each worker a set of available tasks close to the worker's current location; each worker then independently chooses which tasks she wants to accept and perform. In contrast, we propose TRACCS, a more coordinated task assignment approach, where the crowd-tasking platform assigns a sequence of tasks to each worker, taking into account their expected location trajectory over a wider time …

Click-Through-Based Subspace Learning For Image Search, Yingwei Pan, Ting Yao, Xinmei Tian, Houqiang Li, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the fundamental problems in image search is to rank image documents according to a given textual query. We address two limitations of the existing image search engines in this paper. First, there is no straightforward way of comparing textual keywords with visual image content. Image search engines therefore highly depend on the surrounding texts, which are often noisy or too few to accurately describe the image content. Second, ranking functions are trained on query-image pairs labeled by human labelers, making the annotation intellectually expensive and thus cannot be scaled up. We demonstrate that the above two fundamental challenges …

Cama: Efficient Modeling Of The Capture Effect For Low Power Wireless Networks, Behnam Dezfouli, Marjan Radi, Kamin Whitehouse, Shukor Abd Razak, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network simulation is an essential tool for the design and evaluation of wireless network protocols, and realistic channel modeling is essential for meaningful analysis. Recently, several network protocols have demonstrated substantial network performance improvements by exploiting the capture effect, but existing models of the capture effect are still not adequate for protocol simulation and analysis. Physical-level models that calculate the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for every incoming bit are too slow to be used for large-scale or long-term networking experiments, and link-level models such as those currently used by the NS2 simulator do not accurately predict protocol performance. In this article, …

Localization Of Near-Field Radio Controlled Unintended Emitting Sources In The Presence Of Multipath Fading, Nurbanu Guzey, Hao Xu, Sarangapani Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Localization of near-field unintended emitting radio controlled (RC) devices under a multipath environment is considered in this paper using a uniform linear array (ULA). Since received signals are dependent on both angle of arrival (AoA) and distance from the RC devices to the ULA in the near-field scenario, traditional localization schemes based on received signal strength indicator, time difference in arrival, which only estimate either AoA or distance, are unsuitable. Therefore, a novel smooth 2-D multiple signal classification (MUSIC) near-field localization scheme is developed to locate RC devices under a multipath environment with a possible location error of 0.5 m. …

Vireo @ Trecvid 2014: Instance Search And Semantic Indexing, Wei Zhang, Hao Zhang, Ting Yao, Yijie Lu, Jingjing Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper summarizes the following two tasks participated by VIREO group: instance search and semantic indexing. We will present our approaches and analyze the results obtained in TRECVID 2014 benchmark evaluation

Organizing Video Search Results To Adapted Semantic Hierarchies For Topic-Based Browsing, Jiajun Wang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qiang Wang, Kuiyuan Yang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Organizing video search results into semantically structured hierarchies can greatly improve the efficiency of browsing complex query topics. Traditional hierarchical clustering techniques are inadequate since they lack the ability to generate semantically interpretable structures. In this paper, we introduce an approach to organize video search results to an adapted semantic hierarchy. As many hot search topics such as celebrities and famous cities have Wikipedia pages where hierarchical topic structures are available, we start from the Wikipedia hierarchies and adjust the structures according to the characteristics of the returned videos from a search engine. Ordinary clustering based on textual information of …

Distributed Owl El Reasoning: The Story So Far, Raghava Mutharaju, Pascal Hitzler, Prabhaker Mateti

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Automated generation of axioms from streaming data, such as traffic and text, can result in very large ontologies that single machine reasoners cannot handle. Reasoning with large ontologies requires distributed solutions. Scalable reasoning techniques for RDFS, OWL Horst and OWL 2 RL now exist. For OWL 2 EL, several distributed reasoning approaches have been tried, but are all perceived to be inefficient. We analyze this perception. We analyze completion rule based distributed approaches, using different characteristics, such as dependency among the rules, implementation optimizations, how axioms and rules are distributed. We also present a distributed queue approach for the classification …

A Cross Layer Routing Scheme For Passive Rfid Tag-To-Tag Communication, Haifeng Niu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A routing protocol for Passive RFID tag-to-tag networks is not reported in contrast with routing protocols for battery powered mobile wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. In this paper, we provide a cross-layer approach for passive RFID tag-to-tag communication. In the data link layer, we designed the medium access control (MAC) protocol which is suitable for passive tag-to-tag communication. In the network layer, we developed the optimal link cost multipath routing (OLCMR) protocol by using modulation depth as the link cost. Simulation results verify that proposed routing protocol consumes less energy when it is compared to optimum link state routing …

Strategies For Sensor Data Aggregation In Support Of Emergency Response, X. Wang, A. Walden, M. Weigle, S. Olariu

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the Military Communications Conference (MILCOM), Baltimore, Maryland, October 7, 2014. Also available on Slideshare.

Indoor Acoustic Mapping And Geolocation, Thomas Shyy

Open Access Theses

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is widely used in navigations of flights, vehicles and travelers nowadays. However, the signals are not always available and there are some cases where the receptions of the GPS signal can be lost because of the presence of urban canyons, buildings, tunnels and forests. Another down side for the GPS is that indoor positioning can be really difficult because of the greater signal interference from the indoor.

On the other hand, the concept of echolocation has also been used for positioning purposes. Echolocation offers a promising approach to improve the quality of life of people …

Pushing The Boundaries Of Tractable Ontology Reasoning, David Carral, Cristina Feier, Bernardo Cuenca Grau, Pascal Hitzler, Ian Horrocks

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We identify a class of Horn ontologies for which standard reasoning tasks such as instance checking and classification are tractable. The class is general enough to include the OWL 2 EL, QL, and RL profiles. Verifying whether a Horn ontology belongs to the class can be done in polynomial time. We show empirically that the class includes many real-world ontologies that are not included in any OWL 2 profile, and thus that polynomial time reasoning is possible for these ontologies.

Wi-Fi Real Time Location Systems, Benjamin A. Doll

Open Access Theses

This thesis objective was to determine the viability of utilizing an untrained Wi-Fi real time location system as a GPS alternative for indoor environments. Background research showed that GPS is rarely able to penetrate buildings to provide reliable location data. The benefit of having location information in a facility and how they might be used for disaster or emergency relief personnel and their resources motivated this research. A building was selected with a well-deployed Wi-Fi infrastructure and its untrained location feature was used to determine the distance between the specified test points and the system identified location. It was found …

Rapid Indirect Trajectory Optimization On Highly Parallel Computing Architectures, Thomas Antony

Open Access Theses

Trajectory optimization is a field which can benefit greatly from the advantages offered by parallel computing. The current state-of-the-art in trajectory optimization focuses on the use of direct optimization methods, such as the pseudo-spectral method. These methods are favored due to their ease of implementation and large convergence regions while indirect methods have largely been ignored in the literature in the past decade except for specific applications in astrodynamics. It has been shown that the shortcomings conventionally associated with indirect methods can be overcome by the use of a continuation method in which complex trajectory solutions are obtained by solving …

Impact Of License Selection On Open Source Software Quality, Benjamin J. Cotton

Open Access Theses

Open source software plays an important part in the modern world, powering businesses large and small. However, little work has been done to evaluate the quality of open source software. Two different license paradigms exist within the open source world, and this study examines the difference in software quality between them. In this thesis, the author uses technical debt as a measure of software quality. Eighty open source projects (40 from each paradigm) were downloaded from the popular open source hosting website SourceForge. Using complexity, code duplication, comments, and unit test coverage as inputs to the SonarQube technical debt model, …