Engineering Commons^™

Character Spotting And Autonomous Tagging: Offline Handwriting Recognition For Bangla, Korean And Other Alphabetic Scripts, Nishatul Majid, Elisa H. Barney Smith

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper demonstrates a framework for offline handwriting recognition using character spotting and autonomous tagging which works for any alphabetic script. Character spotting builds on the idea of object detection to find character elements in unsegmented word images. An autonomous tagging approach is introduced which automates the production of a character image training set by estimating character locations in a word based on typical character size. Although scripts can vary vividly from each other, our proposed approach provides a simple and powerful workflow for unconstrained offline recognition that should work for any alphabetic script with few adjustments. Here we demonstrate …

Dual-Band Circularly Polarized Shared Aperture Antenna For Cubesat Communication System, Syed Salman Kabir

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

For space exploration, a special class of small satellite known as CubeSat, has become popular in academia and industry in recent years. Due to its low cost and short development time, researchers prefer CubeSat over large-scale satellites wherever possible. In academia, CubeSat has major applications in the field of space atmosphere, space-to-ground communication, weather forecasting, etc. Like other spacecrafts, CubeSat uses multiple antennas in different frequency bands to establish a communication link with ground stations. Recent CubeSat missions are generating a large amount of data which cannot be downlinked using conventional antennas. The demand for a compact antenna system that …

Nonlinear Observers For Burning Zone Temperatures And Torque Estimation Of The Rotary Cement Kiln., Bhagyashri Aditya Bhagwat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to consistent expansion in the infrastructure and housing sectors worldwide have given a new way for the rapid growth of global cement market. Increased global demand for the cement production makes the attractive research topic which can lead to the quality and overall efficiency of the product. Measurement of the temperature in the burning zone is vital to maintain product quality and kiln efficiency in the cement industry. Often the BZT is un-measurable due to internal kiln conditions, dusty environment, extreme heat, harshness for example and this leads to kiln not being driven as efficient as possible. Multi-physics tools …

Design, Evaluation, And Control Of Nexus: A Multiscale Additive Manufacturing Platform With Integrated 3d Printing And Robotic Assembly., Danming Wei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) technology is an emerging approach to creating three-dimensional (3D) objects and has seen numerous applications in medical implants, transportation, aerospace, energy, consumer products, etc. Compared with manufacturing by forming and machining, additive manufacturing techniques provide more rapid, economical, efficient, reliable, and complex manufacturing processes. However, additive manufacturing also has limitations on print strength and dimensional tolerance, while traditional additive manufacturing hardware platforms for 3D printing have limited flexibility. In particular, part geometry and materials are limited to most 3D printing hardware. In addition, for multiscale and complex products, samples must be printed, fabricated, and transferred among different …

Smartphone Detector, Ryan Coldiron

Electrical Engineering

There is a wide variety of times when it is unacceptable to be using a smartphone, and this device could help to minimize when people are using their devices. People have become more and more reliant on their various pieces of technology such as their smartphones, and are often using them when they should be paying attention in class, attending an important meeting, watching a movie, or should just be present to their other surroundings. A device that could detect the use of smartphones at these inopportune times would be something that would benefit a wide variety of people.

The …

Battery Energy Storage System, Carlos Gonzalez, Philip Tafoya, Mariely Caraballo, William Hoang

Electrical Engineering

The Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) project consists of bringing an existing photovoltaic battery energy storage system into service within Cal Poly’s Energy Conversion Lab. Information regarding the BESS is limited to the existing manuals as the original equipment manufacturer has ceased supporting the product in the United States. Results from previous projects on the BESS speculated that a DC input may be required to enable the system’s to be fully operational. The goal of the project is to provide a DC input into BESS and test the system’s functionality. Initially, a Photovoltaic Thevenin Equivalent was expected to be utilized …

Diy Cell Incubator, Hayden James Jeanor

Electrical Engineering

The purpose of creating a cell Incubator is for the development of cell and tissue production in laboratory settings. Large scale research projects and the medical community grow cells for various reasons, including experiments and creating tissue for patients. However, they cannot simply depend on growing cells in a petri dish that sit on a rack at room temperature. To grow heathy cells in the fastest way possible, they use cell incubators. Cell incubators create an atmosphere within the incubation bay that is designed to promote cell growth. The three main components that need to be constantly regulated, using a …

Projecting Electric Vehicle Charging Demand In North Dakota And Minnesota, University Of North Dakota. Energy And Environmental Research Center

EERC Brochures and Fact Sheets

Fact sheet projecting the demand for electric vehicle (EV) charging and the future of EVs and EV charging stations in North Dakota and Minnesota.

A Retrospective On 2022 Cyber Incidents In The Wind Energy Sector And Building Future Cyber Resilience, Megan Egan

Cyber Operations and Resilience Program Graduate Projects

Between February and June 2022, multiple wind energy sector companies were hit by cyber-attacks impacting their ability to monitor and control wind turbines. With projected growth in the United States of 110.66 GW from 2020 to 2030, wind energy will increasingly be a critical source of electricity for the United States and an increasingly valuable target for cyberattacks. This paper shows the importance of redundant remote communications, secure third-party providers, and improving response and recovery processes that would ensure this growth period fulfills its potential as a unique opportunity to build in cyber resilience from the outset of new installations …

Identifying And Minimizing Underspecification In Breast Cancer Subtyping, Jonathan Cheuk-Kiu Tang

Master's Theses

In the realm of biomedical technology, both accuracy and consistency are crucial to the development and deployment of these tools. While accuracy is easy to measure, consistency metrics are not so simple to measure, especially in the scope of biomedicine where prediction consistency can be difficult to achieve. Typically, biomedical datasets contain a significantly larger amount of features compared to the amount of samples, which goes against ordinary data mining practices. As a result, predictive models may fail to find valid pathways for prediction during training on such datasets. This concept is known as underspecification.

Underspecification has been more accepted …

Optical Control System For Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation, Martyn Lemon

All Theses

Propagation of laser light is distorted in the presence of atmospheric turbulence. This poses an issue for sensing, free-space optical communications, and transmission of power. With an ever-increasing demand for high-speed data communications, particularly between satellites, unmanned vehicles, and other systems that benefit from a point-to-point link, this issue is critical for the field. A variety of methods have been proposed to circumvent this issue. Some major categories include the manipulation of the light’s structure, an adaptive scheme at the optical receiver, scanning mirror systems, or a transmission of simultaneous signals with a goal to improve robustness.

There is an …

A Stacking-Based Misbehavior Detection System In Vehicular Communication Networks, Troy Green

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Over the past few decades communication systems for vehicles have continued to advance. Communications between these vehicles can be classified into safety related and non safety related messages. An example of a safety related message would be one vehicle warning others of an icy road it encountered, where a non safety related communication would be a passenger streaming a movie. In either case it's important to secure the communications so that the system continues to behave as expected. In this thesis we propose a Misbehavior Detection System (MDS), which is a system that monitors messages sent between vehicles, and detects …

The Rise Of Terrorism In Africa And What It Means For U.S. Policymakers, Bridget Mary Hughes

Master's Theses

This thesis utilizes three case studies to measure the rise of terrorism in Africa. This qualitative data leads the reader to one ultimate question: what does the rise in terrorism in Africa mean for the United States (U.S.) and U.S. policymakers, National Security academia, students in National Security, if anything at all? The answer is: if civilian and military compounds are being targeted by these violent extremists, as these three case studies demonstrate, it is my recommendation that U.S. policymakers cease sending troops to the African theater and, instead, allocate funding to the citizens and nonprofits of the countries whom …

Domain Aware Deep Learning For Wireless Physical Layer, Shuvam Chakraborty

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Wireless receiver design for OFDM systems is well investigated with classical signal processing tools, which lack the capacity to extract intrinsic channel effects in received signal and lead to high decoding error in receiver. Current deep learning techniques have shown improvement in such cases. But these models are mostly being developed as black box without any anchor to the theory of wireless signal propagation, which leads to surface level information gain and lacks generalizability. We propose deep learning models where the hyperparameters and learning objectives are derived from domain knowledge of wireless signal propagation. These models not only increase the …

Oam-Based Wavelets In A High Speed Optical Probing System For Measuring The Angular Decomposition Of The Environment, Justin Free

All Theses

This thesis presents the theoretical development of orbital angular momentum (OAM) based wavelets for the analysis of localized OAM information in space. An optical probing system for generating and detecting these wavelets is demonstrated; individual wavelets can scan the environment in 10µs or less. The probing system was applied to a three-dimensional atmospheric turbulence distribution to obtain a continuous wavelet transform of the angular information of the turbulent propagation path about a fixed radius. An entire continuous wavelet transform was measured in 3.8ms; the measurements are much faster than the turbulence and give insight into the short time scale of …

Gate-Controlled Quantum Dots In Two-Dimensional Tungsten Diselenide And One-Dimensional Tellurium Nanowires, Shiva Davari Dolatabadi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This work focuses on the investigation of gate-defined quantum dots in two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenide tungsten diselenide (WSe2) as a means to unravel mesoscopic physical phenomena such as valley-contrasting physics in WSe2 flakes and its potential application as qubit, as well as realizing gate-controlled quantum dots based on elementaltellurium nanostructures which may unlock the topological nature of the host material carriers such as Weyl states in tellurium nanowires.The fabrication and characterization of gate-defined hole quantum dots in monolayer and bilayer WSe2 are reported. The gate electrodes in the device design are located above and below the WSe2 nanoflakes to accumulate …

Design And Comparison Of Asynchronous Fft Implementations, Julie Bigot

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is a widely used digital signal processing technology in a large variety of applications. For battery-powered embedded systems incorporating FFT, its physical implementation is constrained by strict power consumption, especially during idle periods. Compared to the prevailing clocked synchronous counterpart, quasi-delay insensitive asynchronous circuits offer a series of advantages including flexible timing requirement and lower leakage power, making them ideal choices for these systems. In this thesis work, various FFT configurations were implemented in the low-power Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL) paradigm. Analysis illustrates the area and power consumption trends along the changing of the number …

Data-Driven Deep Learning-Based Analysis On Thz Imaging, Haoyan Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Breast cancer affects about 12.5% of women population in the United States. Surgical operations are often needed post diagnosis. Breast conserving surgery can help remove malignant tumors while maximizing the remaining healthy tissues. Due to lacking effective real-time tumor analysis tools and a unified operation standard, re-excision rate could be higher than 30% among breast conserving surgery patients. This results in significant physical, physiological, and financial burdens to those patients. This work designs deep learning-based segmentation algorithms that detect tissue type in excised tissues using pulsed THz technology. This work evaluates the algorithms for tissue type classification task among freshly …

Fiber-Based Time-Correlated Single Photon Counting As A Method For Investigating Metabolism During Tetanic Contraction Of Skeletal Muscle, Kathryn Miller Priest

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is a cofactor that serves to shuttle electrons during metabolic processes such as glycolysis, the tricarboxylic acid cycle, and oxidative phosphorylation (OXPHOS) [1-5]. The reduced form of NAD, NADH, is autofluorescent, making it a measurable characteristic in the investigation of metabolic changes. The fluorescence lifetime of NADH is dependent on the state of protein binding, specifically free or bound NADH, allowing for detection of metabolic shifts between glycolysis (free NADH) and OXPHOS (bound NADH) [6-16]. Fiber-coupled time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) equipped with an implantable needle probe can be used to measure NADH lifetime in vivo …

Hybrid Multilevel Converters With Internal Cascaded/Paralleled Structures For Mv Electric Aircraft Applications, Fei Diao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Using on-board medium voltage (MV) dc distribution system has been a megatrend for next-generation electric aircraft systems due to its ability to enable a significant system mass reduction. In addition, it makes electric propulsion more feasible using MV power electronic converters. To develop high-performance high-density MV power converters, the emerging silicon carbide (SiC) devices are more attractive than their silicon (Si) counterparts, since the fast switch frequency brought by the SiC can effectively reduce the volume and weight of the filter components and thus increase the converter power density. From the converter topology perspective, with the MV dc distribution, the …

Autonomous Teaming Of Multileader System - Robust Cluster Formation Approach, Maryam N. Naleini

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

The cluster consensus problem of Multileader MAS Is considered and the clustering problem of interconnected multileader systems is formulated as a disturbance attenuation problem. For the first time, it's proved that the multileader MAS can reach cluster consensus without limiting the communication between the clusters. The combination of Small Gain Theorem and H8 optimization has been designed in the graphical differential game platform to prove the stability for the system. At the end, an online off-policy reinforcement learning algorithm is developed to find the solution to the H8 optimal problem of multileader MAS with completely unknown systems.

Machine Learning For Target Detection Using Uwb Radar Sensor Networks, Dheeral Naresh Bhole

Electrical Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Machine learning (ML) has recently been used to solve critical problems. This dissertation focuses on developing systems using Ultra-Wideband (UWB) wireless sensor networks and machine learning to solve critical tasks such as target detection in various challenging scenarios. These tasks have been researched for several years and efforts have been made to achieve universal solutions. In the first part of this dissertation, we have proposed a system to detect metallic targets in foliage environment. Mission critical systems need to be ready for the harsh working environment such as dense foliage, water bodies, rain, heavy winds and other natural challenges. Extreme …

A Control Integrated Circuit For A Hysteretic Flyback Power Converter, Armani Alvarez

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This Thesis reports the design, simulation, and layout of a switching power supply controller chip for a fly-back switching power supply. The controller chip was designed using ON’s Semiconductor C5 process. The resulting switching power supply using the controller chip consists of using various off-chip components such as a power MOSFET, transformer, and capacitors. The main components used in the integrated circuit include a bandgap reference voltage circuit which outputs a reference voltage of 1.25V, a ring oscillator having a nominal frequency of 5MHz, a high-gain comparator, and a buffer that can drive a 5pF capacitor. Under normal simulation conditions …

An Integrated Electronic-Skin Patch For Real-Time And Continuous Monitoring Of A Panel Of Biomarkers Combined With Drug Delivery, Tanzila Noushin

Electrical Engineering Theses

Inflammatory biomarkers present in the human body play a vital role in medical field by guiding the clinician in decision-making for many diseases. The levels of these inflammatory biomarkers are associated with the severity and progress of several diseases. Researchers have found that increasing severity of many diseases such as cardiovascular disease, after surgery infection, and adverse clinical outcomes due to infectious diseases, results in the elevation of the level of inflammatory biomarkers in human sweat. Furthermore, the inflammatory cytokines indicate the pathophysiology and prognosis of critically ill SARS‑CoV‑2 patients. In this thesis work, different sensors have been developed for …

Low Power Multi-Channel Interface For Charge Based Tactile Sensors, Samuel Hansen

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Analog front end electronics are designed in 65 nm CMOS technology to process charge pulses arriving from a tactile sensor array. This is accomplished through the use of charge sensitive amplifiers and discrete time filters with tunable clock signals located in each of the analog front ends. Sensors were emulated using Gaussian pulses during simulation. The digital side of the system uses SAR (successive approximation register) ADCs for sampling of the processed sensor signals.

Adviser: Sina Balkır

A Low-Power, Low-Area 10-Bit Sar Adc With Length-Based Capacitive Dac, Zhili Pan

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A 2.5 V single-ended 10-bit successive-approximation-register analog-to-digital converter (SAR ADC) based on the TSMC 65 nm CMOS process is designed with the goal of achieving low power consumption (33.63 pJ/sample) and small area (2874 µm^2 ). It utilizes a novel length-based capacitive digital-to-analog converter (CDAC) layout to achieve low total capacitance for power efficiency, and a custom static asynchronous logic to free the dependence on a high-frequency external clock source. Two test chips have been designed and the problems found through testing the first chip are analyzed. Multiple improved versions of the ADC with minor variations are implemented on the …

Denoising And Deconvolving Sperm Whale Data In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico Using Fourier And Wavelet Techniques, Kendal Mccain Leftwich

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The use of underwater acoustics can be an important component in obtaining information from the oceans of the world. It is desirable (but difficult) to compile an acoustic catalog of sounds emitted by various underwater objects to complement optical catalogs. For example, the current visual catalog for whale tail flukes of large marine mammals (whales) can identify even individual whales from their individual fluke characteristics. However, since sperm whales, Physeter microcephalus, do not fluke up when they dive, they cannot be identified in this manner. A corresponding acoustic catalog for sperm whale clicks could be compiled to identify individual …

Soc Reconfigurable Architecture For Software-Trained Neural Networks On Fpga, Michael Wasef

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Neural networks are extensively used in software and hardware applications. In hardware applications, it is necessary to implement a small, accelerated, and configurable hardware architecture to be easily embedded in hardware devices to implement and execute the required neural network with superior performance. Such configurable hardware architecture allows the user to implement neural networks with different structures and easily modify or change them as needed.

In this dissertation, three architectures, each containing three layers, have been designed using a system-on-chip approach and implemented on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), to realize and accelerate the performance of three types of …

A Voice And Facial Recognition System To Protect Students From Being Forgotten Inside School Buses In The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Ibrahim Alferaih

Theses and Dissertations

In this research, we discuss the situation of students in the three to eight year old age group. Every day in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during school days, more than 1,000,000 students are transported throughout the country by more than 15,000 school buses. Everything is dependent on the human element. During school transportation around the world, many children are forgotten inside the school bus and with many of them eventually going missing or even dying. The bus driver is usually busy and tired due to the focus on the road, which may make him lose focus on those on …

Deep Learning Approach To Speech Recognition: A Signal Extractor & Producer For Artificial General Intelligence, Ahmad Zuhair S. Hasanain

Theses and Dissertations

The efficient use of a communication bandwidth starts with the data source. The features of the speech signals can be extracted and reconstructed to lower the Internet traffic of the acoustic artificial agents and to increase the quality of the automatic speech recognition systems. The Speech Quefrency Transform (SQT) is hereby introduced in the work to enrich the communication space between the artificial agents and mankind. We describe the motivation, methodology, and deep learning approach in detail as we apply the SQT technology to several applications: sharp pitch track extraction, real-time speech communications, and emotion recognition. The results were excellent. …