Engineering Commons^™

Using Software-Based Decision Procedures To Control Instruction-Level Execution, William B. Kimball

AFIT Patents

An apparatus, method and program product are provided for securing a computer system. A digital signature of an application is checked, which is loaded into a memory of the computer system configured to contain memory pages. In response to finding a valid digital signature, memory pages containing instructions of the application are set as executable and memory pages other than those containing instructions of the application are set as non-executable. Instructions in executable memory pages are executed. Instructions in non-executable memory pages are prevented from being executed. A page fault is generated in response to an attempt to execute an …

Data Management In Cloud Environments: Nosql And Newsql Data Stores, Katarina Grolinger, Wilson A. Higashino, Abhinav Tiwari, Miriam Am Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

: Advances in Web technology and the proliferation of mobile devices and sensors connected to the Internet have resulted in immense processing and storage requirements. Cloud computing has emerged as a paradigm that promises to meet these requirements. This work focuses on the storage aspect of cloud computing, specifically on data management in cloud environments. Traditional relational databases were designed in a different hardware and software era and are facing challenges in meeting the performance and scale requirements of Big Data. NoSQL and NewSQL data stores present themselves as alternatives that can handle huge volume of data. Because of the …

Reduced Row Echelon Form And Non-Linear Approximation For Subspace Segmentation And High-Dimensional Data Clustering, Akram Aldroubi, Ali Sekmen

Computer Science Faculty Research

Given a set of data W={w1,…,wN}∈RD drawn from a union of subspaces, we focus on determining a nonlinear model of the form U=⋃i∈ISi, where {Si⊂RD}i∈I is a set of subspaces, that is nearest to W. The model is then used to classify W into clusters. Our approach is based on the binary reduced row echelon form of data matrix, combined with an iterative scheme based on a non-linear approximation method. We prove that, in absence of noise, our approach can find the number of subspaces, their dimensions, and an orthonormal basis for each subspace Si. We provide a comprehensive analysis …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2013, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

Drainage Structure Datasets And Effects On Lidar-Derived Surface Flow Modeling, Ruopu Li, Zhenghong Tang, Xu Li, Jessie Winter

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

With extraordinary resolution and accuracy, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-derived digital elevation models (DEMs) have been increasingly used for watershed analyses and modeling by hydrologists, planners and engineers. Such high-accuracy DEMs have demonstrated their effectiveness in delineating watershed and drainage patterns at fine scales in low-relief terrains. However, these high-resolution datasets are usually only available as topographic DEMs rather than hydrologic DEMs, presenting greater land roughness that can affect natural flow accumulation. Specifically, locations of drainage structures such as road culverts and bridges were simulated as barriers to the passage of drainage. This paper proposed a geospatial method for producing …

Situational Awareness/Triage Tool For Use In A Chemical, Biological, Radiological Nuclear Explosive (Cbrne) Environment, John N. Scarlett, Heather L. Gallup, David A. Smith

AFIT Patents

A method of managing patient care and emergency response following a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear Explosive (CBRNE) attack and maintaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The method including identifying each patient with a unique patient identifier, the identifier based upon the geospatial location of the patient, the geospatial location including at least the latitude and longitude of the patient when first treated, the unique patient identifier being part of patient data. Providing a collection point of patient data to form a patient data database where in the patient location data may be used to …

Broadcasting With Prediction And Selective Forwarding In Vehicular Networks, Jainjun Yang, Zongming Fei

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Broadcasting in vehicular networks has attracted great interest in research community and industry. Broadcasting on disseminating information to individual vehicle beyond the transmission range is based on inter-vehicle communication systems. It is crucial to broadcast messages to other vehicles as fast as possible because the messages in vehicle communication systems are often emergency messages such as accident warning or alarm. In many current approaches, the message initiator or sender selects the node among its neighbors that is farthest away from it in the broadcasting direction and then assigns the node to rebroadcast the message once the node gets out of …

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …

Improving Patient Length-Of-Stay In Emergency Department Through Dynamic Queue Management, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Francis Chun Yue Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Addressing issue of crowding in an Emergency Department (ED) typically takes the form of process engineering or single-faceted queue management strategies such as demand restriction, queue prioritization or staffing the ED. This work provides an integrated framework to manage queue dynamically from both demand and supply perspectives. More precisely, we introduce intelligent dynamic patient prioritization strategies to manage the demand concurrently with dynamic resource adjustment policies to manage supply. Our framework allows decision-makers to select both the demand-side and supply-side strategies to suit the needs of their ED. We verify through a simulation that such a framework improves the patients' …

A Simple Integration Of Social Relationship And Text Data For Identifying Potential Customers In Microblogging, Guansong Pang, Shengyi Jiang, Dongyi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying potential customers among a huge number of users in microblogging is a fundamental problem for microblog marketing. One challenge in potential customer detection in microblogging is how to generate an accurate characteristic description for users, i.e., user profile generation. Intuitively, the preference of a user’s friends (i.e., the person followed by the user in microblogging) is of great importance to capture the characteristic of the user. Also, a user’s self-defined tags are often concise and accurate carriers for the user’s interests. In this paper, for identifying potential customers in microblogging, we propose a method to generate user profiles via …

Decision Trees To Model The Impact Of Disruption And Recovery In Supply Chain Networks, Loganathan Ponnanbalam, L. Wenbin, Xiuju Fu, Xiaofeng Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, Rick S. M. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Increase in the frequency of disruptions in the recent times and their impact have increased the attention in supply chain disruption management research. The objective of this paper is to understand as to how a disruption might affect the supply chain network - depending upon the network structure, the node that is disrupted, the disruption in production capacity of the disrupted node and the period of the disruption - via decision trees. To this end, we first developed a 5-tier agent-based supply chain model and then simulated it for various what-if disruptive scenarios for 3 different network structures (80 trials …

Adaptive Computer‐Generated Forces For Simulator‐Based Training, Expert Systems With Applications, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Loo-Nin Teow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Simulator-based training is in constant pursuit of increasing level of realism. The transition from doctrine-driven computer-generated forces (CGF) to adaptive CGF represents one such effort. The use of doctrine-driven CGF is fraught with challenges such as modeling of complex expert knowledge and adapting to the trainees’ progress in real time. Therefore, this paper reports on how the use of adaptive CGF can overcome these challenges. Using a self-organizing neural network to implement the adaptive CGF, air combat maneuvering strategies are learned incrementally and generalized in real time. The state space and action space are extracted from the same hierarchical doctrine …

Efficient Routing For Wireless Mesh Networks Using A Backup Path, Amir Esmailpour, Nidal Nasser, Jehad Al Dallal

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has a proven record in providing viable solutions for some of the fundamental issues in wireless networks such as capacity and range limitations. WMN infrastructure includes clusters of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) connected through a fixed backbone of mesh routers. The mesh network can be constrained severely due to various reasons, which could result in performance degradation such as a drop in throughput or long delays. Solutions to this problem often focus on multipath or multichannel extensions to the existing ad- hoc routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel solution by introducing an alternative …

Clustering And Classification Of Multi-Domain Proteins, Neethu Shah

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

Rapid development of next-generation sequencing technology has led to an unprecedented growth in protein sequence data repositories over the last decade. Majority of these proteins lack structural and functional characterization. This necessitates design and development of fast, efficient, and sensitive computational tools and algorithms that can classify these proteins into functionally coherent groups.

Domains are fundamental units of protein structure and function. Multi-domain proteins are extremely complex as opposed to proteins that have single or no domains. They exhibit network-like complex evolutionary events such as domain shuffling, domain loss, and domain gain. These events therefore, cannot be represented in the …

Near-Infrared Surface-Enhanced Fluorescence Using Silver Nanoparticles In Solution, Michael D. Furtaw

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Fluorescence spectroscopy is a widely used detection technology in many research and clinical assays. Further improvement to assay sensitivity may enable earlier diagnosis of disease, novel biomarker discovery, and ultimately, improved outcomes of clinical care along with reduction in costs. Near-infrared, surface-enhanced fluorescence (NIR-SEF) is a promising approach to improve assay sensitivity via simultaneous increase in signal with a reduction in background. This dissertation describes research conducted with the overall goal to determine the extent to which fluorescence in solution may be enhanced by altering specific variables involved in the formation of plasmonactive nanostructures of dye-labeled protein and silver nanoparticles …

Improving Global Impact: How The Integration Of Remotely Reporting Sensors In Water Projects May Demonstrate And Enhance Positive Change, Evan A. Thomas

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article argues that improved feedback on the actual impact of development programs may ensure the success of poverty reduction interventions such as water filters, water pumps, latrines, and cookstoves.

An Agent-Based Simulation Approach To Experience Management In Theme Parks, Shih-Fen Cheng, Larry Junjie Lin, Jiali Du, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we illustrate how massive agent-based simulation can be used to investigate an exciting new application domain of experience management in theme parks, which covers topics like congestion control, incentive design, and revenue management. Since all visitors are heterogeneous and self-interested, we argue that a high-quality agent-based simulation is necessary for studying various problems related to experience management. As in most agent-base simulations, a sound understanding of micro-level behaviors is essential to construct high-quality models. To achieve this, we designed and conducted a first-of-its-kind real-world experiment that helps us understand how typical visitors behave in a theme-park environment. …

An Integrated Multidisciplinary Nanoscience Concentration Certificate Program For Stem Education, Karen S. Martirosyan, Mikhail M. Bouniaev, Malik Rakhmanov, Ahmed Touhami, Nazmul Islam, Davood Askari, Tarek Trad, Dmitri Litvinov, Sergey E. Lyshevski

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Integration of nanoscience and nanotechnology curricula into the College of Science, Mathematics, and Technology (CSMT) at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) is reported. The rationale for the established multidisciplinary Nanoscience Concentration Certificate Program (NCCP) is to: (i) develop nanotechnology-relevant courses within a comprehensive Science, Engineering and Technology curriculum, and, to offer students an opportunity to graduate with a certificate in nanoscience and nanotechnology; (ii) to contribute to students' success in achieving student outcomes across all college's majors, and, improve the breath, depth and quality of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates' education; (iii) through NCCP, recruit certificate- …

La Yeguada Volcanic Vomplex In The Republic Of Panama: An Assessment Of The Geologic Hazards Using 40ar/39ar Geochronology, Karinne L. Knutsen, William I. Rose, Brian Jicha

Department of Geological and Mining Engineering and Sciences Publications

La Yeguada volcanic complex is one of three Quaternary volcanic centers in Panama. To assess potential geologic hazards, new samples were analyzed using argon analysis (⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar), and obtained the following: the most recent eruption occurred approximately 32,000 years ago at the Media Luna cinder cone; the youngest dated eruption from the main dome complex occurred 357 ± 19 ka, producing the Castillo dome unit; Cerro Picacho, a separate dacite dome 1.5 km east of the main complex is 4.47 ± 0.23 Ma; and the El Satro Pyroclastic Flow unit surrounds the northern portion of the volcanic …

A Generalized Adaptive Mathematical Morphological Filter For Lidar Data, Zheng Cui

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology has become the primary method to derive high-resolution Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), which are essential for studying Earth’s surface processes, such as flooding and landslides. The critical step in generating a DTM is to separate ground and non-ground measurements in a voluminous point LIDAR dataset, using a filter, because the DTM is created by interpolating ground points. As one of widely used filtering methods, the progressive morphological (PM) filter has the advantages of classifying the LIDAR data at the point level, a linear computational complexity, and preserving the geometric shapes of terrain features. …

Network Construction And Graph Theoretical Analysis Of Functional Language Networks In Pediatric Epilepsy, Anas Salah Eddin

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation introduces a new approach for assessing the effects of pediatric epilepsy on the language connectome. Two novel data-driven network construction approaches are presented. These methods rely on connecting different brain regions using either extent or intensity of language related activations as identified by independent component analysis of fMRI data. An auditory description decision task (ADDT) paradigm was used to activate the language network for 29 patients and 30 controls recruited from three major pediatric hospitals. Empirical evaluations illustrated that pediatric epilepsy can cause, or is associated with, a network efficiency reduction. Patients showed a propensity to inefficiently employ …

Development Of Effective Approaches To The Large-Scale Aerodynamic Testing Of Low-Rise Building, Tuan-Chun Fu

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Low-rise buildings are often subjected to high wind loads during hurricanes that lead to severe damage and cause water intrusion. It is therefore important to estimate accurate wind pressures for design purposes to reduce losses. Wind loads on low-rise buildings can differ significantly depending upon the laboratory in which they were measured. The differences are due in large part to inadequate simulations of the low-frequency content of atmospheric velocity fluctuations in the laboratory and to the small scale of the models used for the measurements. A new partial turbulence simulation methodology was developed for simulating the effect of low-frequency flow …

Getting It Right The First Time: Robot Mission Guarantees In The Presence Of Uncertainty, Damian Lyons, Ron Arkin, Paramesh Nirmal, Shu Jiang, Tsung-Ming Liu, Julia Deeb

Faculty Publications

Abstract—Certain robot missions need to perform predictably in a physical environment that may only be poorly characterized in advance. We have previously developed an approach to establishing performance guarantees for behavior-based controllers in a process-algebra framework. We extend that work here to include random variables, and we show how our prior results can be used to generate a Dynamic Bayesian Network for the coupled system of program and environment model. Verification is reduced to a filtering problem for this network. Finally, we present validation results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the verification of a multiple waypoint robot mission using this …

The Cost Of Green Infrastructure: Worth The Investment?, Martha Sheils

Green Infrastructure

Is GI worth the investment?

• LID techniques often lead to cost savings when we look at WHOLE PROJECT COSTS

• Natural Infrastructure investments for flood control, drinking water protection and wildlife habitat can yield SIGNIFICANT AVOIDED COSTS and additional co-benefits to communitites

Approximate Techniques In Solving Optimal Camera Placement Problems, Jian Zhao, Ruriko Yoshida, Sen-Ching Samson Cheung, David Haws

Statistics Faculty Publications

While the theoretical foundation of the optimal camera placement problem has been studied for decades, its practical implementation has recently attracted significant research interest due to the increasing popularity of visual sensor networks. The most flexible formulation of finding the optimal camera placement is based on a binary integer programming (BIP) problem. Despite the flexibility, most of the resulting BIP problems are NP-hard and any such formulations of reasonable size are not amenable to exact solutions. There exists a myriad of approximate algorithms for BIP problems, but their applications, efficiency, and scalability in solving camera placement are poorly understood. Thus, …

Assessing The Performance Of A Northern Gulf Of Mexico Tidal Model Using Satellite Imagery, Stephen C. Medeiros, Scott C. Hagen, Naira Chaouch, Jesse Feyen, Marouane Temimi, John F. Weishampel, Yuji Funakoshi, Reza Khanbilvardi

Publications and Research

Tidal harmonic analysis simulations along with simulations spanning four specific historical time periods in 2003 and 2004 were conducted to test the performance of a northern Gulf of Mexico tidal model. A recently developed method for detecting inundated areas based on integrated remotely sensed data (i.e., Radarsat-1, aerial imagery, LiDAR, Landsat 7 ETM+) was applied to assess the performance of the tidal model. The analysis demonstrates the applicability of the method and its agreement with traditional performance assessment techniques such as harmonic resynthesis and water level time series analysis. Based on the flooded/non-flooded coastal areas estimated by the integrated remotely …

Optimization Approaches For Solving Chance Constrained Stochastic Orienteering Problems, Pradeep Varakantham, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Orienteering problems (OPs) are typically used to model routing and trip planning problems. OP is a variant of the well known traveling salesman problem where the goal is to compute the highest reward path that includes a subset of nodes and has an overall travel time less than the specified deadline. Stochastic orienteering problems (SOPs) extend OPs to account for uncertain travel times and are significantly harder to solve than deterministic OPs. In this paper, we contribute a scalable mixed integer LP formulation for solving risk aware SOPs, which is a principled approximation of the underlying stochastic optimization problem. Empirically, …

Core-Leaf Onion-Like Carbon/Mno2 Hybrid Nano-Urchins For Rechargeable Lithium-Ion Batteries, Ye Wang, Zhao Jun Han, Siu Fung Yu, Ran Ran Song, Huai He Song, Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov, Hui Ying Yang

Australian Institute for Innovative Materials - Papers

A hybrid nano-urchin structure consisting of spherical onion-like carbon and MnO2 nanosheets is synthesized by a facile and environmentally-friendly hydrothermal method. Lithium-ion batteries incorporating the hybrid nano-urchin anode exhibit reversible lithium storage with superior specific capacity, enhanced rate capability, stable cycling performance, and nearly 100% Coulombic efficiency. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of designing hybrid nano-architectures with uniform and isotropic structure, high loading of electrochemically-active materials, and good conductivity for the dramatic improvement of lithium storage.

Nitroxide-Functionalized Graphene Oxide From Graphite Oxide, Yazmin I. Avila-Vega, Cesar C. Leyva-Porras, Marcela Mireles, Manuel Quevedo-Lopez, Javier Macossay-Torres, Jose Bonilla-Cruz

Chemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

A facile method for preparing functionalized graphene oxide single layers with nitroxide groups is reported herein. Highly oxidized graphite oxide (GO=90.6%) was obtained, slightly modifying an improved Hummer’s method. Oxoammonium salts (OS) were investigated to introduce nitroxide groups to GO, resulting in a one-step functionalization and exfoliation. The mechanisms of functionalization/exfoliation are proposed, where the oxidation of aromatic alcohols to ketone groups, and the formation of alkoxyamine species are suggested. Two kinds of functionalized graphene oxide layers (GOFT1 and GOFT2) were obtained by controlling the amount of OS added. GOFT1 and GOFT2 exhibited a high interlayer spacing (d0001 = 1.12nm), …

Nineteenth Century North American And Pacific Tidal Data: Lost Or Just Forgotten?, Stefan A. Talke, David A. Jay

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Tide data are the oldest and longest oceanographic records and comprise one of the few tools for understanding, quantifying, and separating century-scale human and climate impacts on the coastal zone. Our archival research indicates that continuous measurements of tides began in 1844 in the western Atlantic, 1853 in the Eastern Pacific, and 1858 in the Western Pacific. At least 50 multiyear tide series existed by the year 1900. With few exceptions, however, these 19th and early 20th century measurements have not been analyzed in more than a century and have been forgotten and neglected by the scientific community. This article …