Engineering Commons^™

Metric Learning Via Linear Embeddings For Human Motion Recognition, Byoungdoo Kong

Masters Theses

We consider the application of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) and dimensionality reduction to the problem of human motion recognition (HMR). The structure of human motion has unique characteristics such as its dynamic and high-dimensional nature. Recent research on human motion recognition uses deep neural networks with multiple layers. Most importantly, large datasets will need to be collected to use such networks to analyze human motion. This process is both time-consuming and expensive since a large motion capture database must be collected and labeled. Despite significant progress having been made in human motion recognition, state-of-the-art algorithms still misclassify actions because of characteristics …

Perception System: Object And Landmark Detection For Visually Impaired Users, Chenguang Zhang

Masters Theses

This paper introduces a system which enables visually impaired users to detect objects and landmarks within the line of sight. The system works in two modes: landmark mode, which detects predefined landmarks, and object mode, which detects objects for everyday use. Users can get audio announcement for the name of the detected object or landmark as well as its estimated distances. Landmark detection helps visually impaired users explore an unfamiliar environment and build a mental map.

The proposed system utilizes a deep learning system for detection, which is deployed on the mobile phone and optimized to run in real-time. Unlike …

Thermal Transport Modeling Of Semiconductor Materials From First Principles, Aliya Qureshi

Masters Theses

Over the past few years, the size of semiconductor devices has been shrinking whereas the density of transistors has exponentially increased. Thus, thermal management has become a serious concern as device performance and reliability is greatly affected by heat. An understanding of thermal transport properties at device level along with predictive modelling can lead us to design of new systems and materials tailored according to the thermal conductivity. In our work we first review different models used to calculate thermal conductivity and examine their accuracy using the experimentally measured thermal conductivity for Si. Our results suggest that empirically calculated rates …

Numerical Simulation Of Thermoelectric Transport In Bulk And Nanostructured Sisn Alloys, Venkatakrishna Dusetty

Masters Theses

The current high demand for sustainable and renewable energy sources to solve world energy crisis has enormously increased interest in looking at alternative sources of energy. All the machines used in manufacturing process, electricity generation, residential applications, transportation etc., rejects energy in the form of heat into environment. Thermoelectric materials can convert thermal-to-electrical and electrical-to-thermal energy and can be utilized in waste-heat harvesting, more efficient cooling to reduce energy usage and CO₂ emissions. Significant research efforts have been devoted over the past decade to thermoelectric materials, with particular emphasis being placed on combining materials selection with nanostructuring. The overarching …

Compound Effects Of Clock And Voltage Based Power Side-Channel Countermeasures, Jacqueline Lagasse

Masters Theses

The power side-channel attack, which allows an attacker to derive secret information from power traces, continues to be a major vulnerability in many critical systems. Numerous countermeasures have been proposed since its discovery as a serious vulnerability, including both hardware and software implementations. Each countermeasure has its own drawback, with some of the highly effective countermeasures incurring large overhead in area and power. In addition, many countermeasures are quite invasive to the design process, requiring modification of the design and therefore additional validation and testing to ensure its accuracy. Less invasive countermeasures that do not require directly modifying the system …

Accelerating Rsa Public Key Cryptography Via Hardware Acceleration, Pavithra Ramesh

Masters Theses

A large number and a variety of sensors and actuators, also known as edge devices of the Internet of Things, belonging to various industries - health care monitoring, home automation, industrial automation, have become prevalent in today's world. These edge devices need to communicate data collected to the central system occasionally and often in burst mode which is then used for monitoring and control purposes. To ensure secure connections, Asymmetric or Public Key Cryptography (PKC) schemes are used in combination with Symmetric Cryptography schemes. RSA (Rivest - Shamir- Adleman) is one of the most prevalent public key cryptosystems, and has …

Crosstalk Based Side Channel Attacks In Fpgas, Chethan Ramesh

Masters Theses

As FPGA use becomes more diverse, the shared use of these devices becomes a security concern. Multi-tenant FPGAs that contain circuits from multiple independent sources or users will soon be prevalent in cloud and embedded computing environments. The recent discovery of a new attack vector using neighboring long wires in Xilinx SRAM FPGAs presents the possibility of covert information leakage from an unsuspecting user's circuit. The work makes two contributions that extend this finding. First, we rigorously evaluate several Intel SRAM FPGAs and confirm that long wire information leakage is also prevalent in these devices. Second, we present the first …

Compressive Parameter Estimation Via Approximate Message Passing, Shermin Hamzehei

Masters Theses

The literature on compressive parameter estimation has been mostly focused on the use of sparsity dictionaries that encode a discretized sampling of the parameter space; these dictionaries, however, suffer from coherence issues that must be controlled for successful estimation. To bypass such issues with discretization, we propose the use of statistical parameter estimation methods within the Approximate Message Passing (AMP) algorithm for signal recovery. Our method leverages the recently proposed use of custom denoisers in place of the usual thresholding steps (which act as denoisers for sparse signals) in AMP. We introduce the design of analog denoisers that are based …