Engineering Commons^™

Ict For Poverty Alleviation In Pacific Island Nations: Study Of Icts4d In Fiji, Deogratias Harorimana, Opeti Rokotuinivono, Emali Sewale, Fane Salaiwai, Marica Naulu, Evangelin Roy

Dr Deogratias Harorimana

ICT for Poverty Alleviation in Pacific Island Nations: Study of ICTs4D in Fiji There has been a vague and little knowledge on the role or potential of Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) in relation to addressing poverty in Fiji. This may be probably due to the newness of the technology in the South Pacific Region as a whole but also probably due to the fact that only 9.7% of the current Fiji 931,000 populations are internet users (ITC Figures 2011). This paper reports on finding how ICTs is contributing towards poverty alleviation in Fiji. On the basis of reviewed best …

Comments On "A Practical (T, N) Threshold Proxy Signature Scheme Based On The Rsa Cryptosystem", Guilin Wang, Feng Bao, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Dr Guilin Wang

In a (t, n) threshold proxy signature scheme based on RSA, any t or more proxy signers can cooperatively generate a proxy signature while t-1 or fewer of them can't do it. The threshold proxy signature scheme uses the RSA cryptosystem to generate the private and the public key of the signers. In this article, we discuss the implementation and comparison of some threshold proxy signature schemes that are based on the RSA cryptosystem. Comparison is done on the basis of time complexity, space complexity and communication overhead. We compare the performance of four schemes: Hwang et al., Wen et …

Proxy Signature Scheme With Multiple Original Signers For Wireless E-Commerce Applications, Guilin Wang, Feng Bao, Jianying Zhou, Robert H. Deng

Dr Guilin Wang

In a proxy signature scheme, a user delegates his/her signing capability to another user in such a way that the latter can sign messages on behalf of the former. We propose an efficient and secure proxy signature scheme with multiple original signers. Our scheme is suitable for wireless electronic commerce applications, since the overheads of computation and communication are low. As an example, we present an electronic air ticket booking scheme for wireless customers.

Diseñando Colisiones De Satélites En La Guerra Cibernética Encubierta, Jan Kallberg

Jan Kallberg

La guerra concentrada en la red depende de la red de información global para capacidades de combate conjuntas.3 La capa fundamental crea la capacidad de combate global como la columna vertebral espacial de la red de información donde los haberes espaciales son el elemento decisivo. EE.UU. depende de las capacidades espaciales para su éxito y la seguridad nacional de EE.UU. se basa hoy en día en un número limitado de satélites muy utilizados. Estos satélites son cruciales para la disuasión estratégica, la vigilancia, la recopilación de inteligencia y las comunicaciones militares. Si la disuasión estratégica falla, los satélites forman parte …

Privacy Issues And Solutions In Social Network Sites, Xi Chen, Katina Michael

Associate Professor Katina Michael

The boom of the internet and the explosion of new technologies have brought with them new challenges and thus new connotations of privacy. Clearly, when people deal with e-government and e-business, they do not only need the right to be let alone, but also to be let in secret. Not only do they need freedom of movement, but also to be assured of the secrecy of their information. Solove [6] has critiqued traditional definitions of privacy and argued that they do not address privacy issues created by new online technologies. Austin [7] also asserts: “[w]e do need to sharpen and …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2012, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Senior Design Experience

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. Working in teams, the senior design project encourages students to use everything learned in the engineering and computer design programs to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

Beyond the classroom ...

Because of the requirement to work in teams, students also build good communication skills, presentation skills and even business writing skills. They also have to …

Exploring Computational Chemistry On Emerging Architectures, David Dewayne Jenkins

Doctoral Dissertations

Emerging architectures, such as next generation microprocessors, graphics processing units, and Intel MIC cards, are being used with increased popularity in high performance computing. Each of these architectures has advantages over previous generations of architectures including performance, programmability, and power efficiency. With the ever-increasing performance of these architectures, scientific computing applications are able to attack larger, more complicated problems. However, since applications perform differently on each of the architectures, it is difficult to determine the best tool for the job. This dissertation makes the following contributions to computer engineering and computational science. First, this work implements the computational chemistry variational …

Parallel For Loops On Heterogeneous Resources, Frederick Edward Weber

Doctoral Dissertations

In recent years, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have piqued the interest of researchers in scientific computing. Their immense floating point throughput and massive parallelism make them ideal for not just graphical applications, but many general algorithms as well. Load balancing applications and taking advantage of all computational resources in a machine is a difficult challenge, especially when the resources are heterogeneous. This dissertation presents the clUtil library, which vastly simplifies developing OpenCL applications for heterogeneous systems. The core focus of this dissertation lies in clUtil's ParallelFor construct and our novel PINA scheduler which can efficiently load balance work onto multiple …

Dynamic Task Execution On Shared And Distributed Memory Architectures, Asim Yarkhan

Doctoral Dissertations

Multicore architectures with high core counts have come to dominate the world of high performance computing, from shared memory machines to the largest distributed memory clusters. The multicore route to increased performance has a simpler design and better power efficiency than the traditional approach of increasing processor frequencies. But, standard programming techniques are not well adapted to this change in computer architecture design.

In this work, we study the use of dynamic runtime environments executing data driven applications as a solution to programming multicore architectures. The goals of our runtime environments are productivity, scalability and performance. We demonstrate productivity by …

Validation Of Weak Form Thermal Analysis Algorithms Supporting Thermal Signature Generation, Elton Lewis Freeman

Masters Theses

Extremization of a weak form for the continuum energy conservation principle differential equation naturally implements fluid convection and radiation as flux Robin boundary conditions associated with unsteady heat transfer. Combining a spatial semi-discretization via finite element trial space basis functions with time-accurate integration generates a totally node-based algebraic statement for computing. Closure for gray body radiation is a newly derived node-based radiosity formulation generating piecewise discontinuous solutions, while that for natural-forced-mixed convection heat transfer is extracted from the literature. Algorithm performance, mathematically predicted by asymptotic convergence theory, is subsequently validated with data obtained in 24 hour diurnal field experiments for …

Knowledge-Driven Autonomous Commodity Trading Advisor, Yee Pin Lim, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The myth that financial trading is an art has been mostly destroyed in the recent decade due to the proliferation of algorithmic trading. In equity markets, algorithmic trading has already bypass human traders in terms of traded volume. This trend seems to be irreversible, and other asset classes are also quickly becoming dominated by the machine traders. However, for asset that requires deeper understanding of physicality, like the trading of commodities, human traders still have significant edge over machines. The primary advantage of human traders in such market is the qualitative expert knowledge that requires traders to consider not just …

Lagrangian Relaxation For Large-Scale Multi-Agent Planning, Geoff Gordon, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent planning is a well-studied problem with various applications including disaster rescue, urban transportation and logistics, both for autonomous agents and for decision support to humans. Due to computational constraints, existing research typically focuses on one of two scenarios: unstructured domains with many agents where we are content with heuristic solutions, or domains with small numbers of agents or special structure where we can provide provably near-optimal solutions. By contrast, in this paper, we focus on providing provably near-optimal solutions for domains with large numbers of agents, by exploiting a common domain-general property: if individual agents each have limited influence …

A Mechanism For Organizing Last-Mile Service Using Non-Dedicated Fleet, Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and rising income levels have fueled the growth of car ownership in almost all newly formed megacities. Such growth has congested the limited road space and significantly affected the quality of life in these megacities. Convincing residents to give up their cars and use public transport is the most effective way in reducing congestion; however, even with sufficient public transport capacity, the lack of last-mile (from the transport hub to the destination) travel services is the major deterrent for the adoption of public transport. Due to the dynamic nature of such travel demands, fixed-size fleets will …

Hardware-Software Co-Design, Acceleration And Prototyping Of Control Algorithms On Reconfigurable Platforms, Desta Kumsa Edosa

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Differential equations play a significant role in many disciplines of science and engineering. Solving and implementing Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and partial Differential Equations (PDEs) effectively are very essential as most complex dynamic systems are modeled based on these equations. High Performance Computing (HPC) methodologies are required to compute and implement complex and data intensive applications modeled by differential equations at higher speed. There are, however, some challenges and limitations in implementing dynamic system, modeled by non-linear ordinary differential equations, on digital hardware. Modeling an integrator involves data approximation which results in accuracy error if data values are not considered …

Post Processing Of Optically Recognized Text Using First Order Hidden Markov Model, Spandana Malreddy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we report on our design and implementation of a post processing system for Optically Recognized text. The system is based on first order Hidden Markov Model (HMM). The Maximum Likelihood algorithm is used to train the system with over 150 thousand characters. The system is also tested on a file containing 5688 characters. The percentage of errors detected and corrected is 11.76% with a recall of 10.16% and precision of 100%

Lagrangian Relaxation For Large-Scale Multi-Agent Planning, Geoffrey J. Gordon, Pradeep Varakantham, William Yeoh, Hoong Chuin Lau, Ajay S. Aravamudhan, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multi-agent planning is a well-studied problem with various applications including disaster rescue, urban transportation and logistics, both for autonomous agents and for decision support to humans. Due to computational constraints, existing research typically focuses on one of two scenarios: unstructured domains with many agents where we are content with heuristic solutions, or domains with small numbers of agents or special structure where we can provide provably near-optimal solutions. By contrast, in this paper, we focus on providing provably near-optimal solutions for domains with large numbers of agents, by exploiting a common domain-general property: if individual agents each have limited influence …

The Return Of Dr. Strangelove: How Austerity Makes Us Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb…And Cyber War, Jan Kallberg, Adam Lowther

Jan Kallberg

With sequestration looming—generating significant cuts to defense spending—the United States may find itself increasingly relying on nuclear and cyber deterrence as an affordable way to guarantee national sovereignty and prevent major conflict. While earlier defense planning and acquisitions were based on economic conditions that no longer exist, Congress’ options to balance the budget by cutting defense spending are politically palatable because far fewer American are “defense voters” than “social welfare voters,” according to a number of recent public opinion surveys.

Scaling Bayesian Network Parameter Learning With Expectation Maximization Using Mapreduce, Erik B. Reed, Ole J. Mengshoel

Ole J Mengshoel

Mapreduce For Bayesian Network Parameter Learning Using The Em Algorithm, Aniruddha Basak, Irina Brinster, Ole J. Mengshoel

Ole J Mengshoel

Communications And Energy-Harvesting In Nanosensor Networks, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Presentations

PDF of a powerpoint presentation from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Workshop on Biological Computations and Communications in Boston, Massachusetts, November 9, 2012. Also available on Slideshare.

Action Disambiguation Analysis Using Normalized Google-Like Distance Correlogram, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classifying realistic human actions in video remains challenging for existing intro-variability and inter-ambiguity in action classes. Recently, Spatial-Temporal Interest Point (STIP) based local features have shown great promise in complex action analysis. However, these methods have the limitation that they typically focus on Bag-of-Words (BoW) algorithm, which can hardly discriminate actions’ ambiguity due to ignoring of spatial-temporal occurrence relations of visual words. In this paper, we propose a new model to capture this contextual relationship in terms of pairwise features’ co-occurrence. Normalized Google-Like Distance (NGLD) is proposed to numerically measuring this co-occurrence, due to its effectiveness in semantic correlation analysis. …

Material Balance Adjustement In Raw Material Processing, Migena Hoxha, Piro Zoga, Aida Bode

UBT International Conference

Circuit of one processing plant was studied in order to adjust the mass balance. The granulometric composition of the streams that belong to grinding and classifying processes was analysed, while the chemical content was determined only at the streams related to separation process. Three connection matrixes are considered in this paper, one corresponding to the size fraction equations, the second corresponding to the chemical content measurements and the third, the solid flow rate balance. The technique used consisted of filtering all the data by a weighted least-squares procedure. Then running the output data in a custom designed feature of the …

Mechatronics And Mechatronics Management, Peter Kopacek

UBT International Conference

Mechatronics bringing together a number of technologies mechanical engineering, control engineering, electrical engineering, electronic engineering,computer technology. Mechatronics as an umbrella integrates areas of technology like measurement systems and sensors, actuation systems and drives, systems behavior, control, and microprocessor systems. Education in Mechatronics is highly interdisplinary. Graduates with a BSc or MSc degree in Mechatronics get usually higher or medium management positions in Industry requiring some knowledge in management. Therefore an education program ―Mechatronics Management‖ was developed by an international consortium and implemented at UBT in Prishtina

Dynamic Modeling And Analysis Of Propulsion Effect Of 3 Dof Robot, Ahmet Shala, Xhevahir Bajrami

UBT International Conference

Dynamical Modeling of robots is commonly first important step of Modeling, Analysis and Control of robotic systems. This paper is focused on using Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) convention for kinematics and Newton-Euler Formulations for dynamic modeling of 3 DoF - Degree of Freedom of 3D robot. The process of deriving of dynamical model is done using Software Maple. Simulations are done using Matlab/Simulink for analysis of propulsion effect under Earth gravity when First Link rotates with 1000 rpm, second Link can move free in vertical direction and Third Link can rotates free around their rotations axle. Simulations results shows very good propulsion …

The Effectiveness Of The Use Of Solar Panels In Hotels Of Durres Area, Asllan Hajderi, Shkelqim Gjevori

UBT International Conference

In the present study is analyzing the case of the application of solar energy with vacuum tube collectors for heating water for sanitary needs in hotels of Durres areas. In recent years there has been a special interest by the leading authorities to the EU countries and the U.S., for the use of renewable energies in general and solar energy in particular. This is mainly related with the reduction of environmental pollution from gas CO2, which directly influences the greenhouse effect and global warming. Unlike other forms of renewable energy, like wind turbines, photovoltaic panels and biomass usages, the use …

Water Resources Systems Planning And Management, Piro Zoga, Aida Bode, Ramiz Balla, Nevton Kodhelaj, Spartak Kucaj

UBT International Conference

The most fundamental human needs of water are for drinking, cooking and personal hygiene. In order to fulfill these needs, the quality of the water used should cause no risk to human health. The quality of the water in nature also affects the condition of ecosystems all living organisms depend on. At the same time, humans use water bodies as convenient sinks for the disposal of domestic, industrial and agricultural wastewaters. This, of course, degrades the quality of those water bodies. Water resources management involves the monitoring and management of water quality as much as the monitoring and management of …

Computer Aided Analysis Of Kinematics And Kinetostatics Of Six-Bar Linkage Mechanism Through The Contour Method, Qelaj Mehmet, Likaj Ramë

UBT International Conference

In this paper is presented a six-bar linkage mechanism of the pump for oil extrusion. In this mechanism are introduced even higher kinematic pairs. Dimensions and other incoming links will be adopted as necessary. For the six-bar linkage mechanism will be carried out the kinematic analysis and for all linkages will be presented the displacement, velocity and acceleration. The analysis will be performed by MathCad software, while kinetostatic analysis will be carried out using Contour Method, comparing results of two different software‘s MathCAD and Working Model. The simulation parameters will be computed for all points of the contours of mechanism.

Nanotechnology And His Effects In Medicine, Hatixhe Bilibashi

UBT International Conference

Nanotechnology is a great revolution in the field of information technology that has effects on almost every aspect of the human society nowadays. It is one of the technologies with huge potentials in many directions. Nanotechnology can be defined as the manipulation, precision-placement, modeling and manufacture of material at the nanometer scale (One meter consists of 1 billion nanometers) ( 10〗^(-9) of a meter). ).Therefore nanotechnology can help save the lives of many people. Main fields in medicine where nanotechnology can be found are the control and prevention of cancer, diagnostication of the drug dependance, diagnostication of the diabet es, …

Advancement Of The Plastering Machine, Bujar Ademi, Peter Kopacek

UBT International Conference

Automation of water flow at plastering machines is a solution which serves the process of plastering, to adhere international standards.Automation of water flow by taking signals from the condition of the material depending on humidity. So its output is used to influence the increase or decrease of the amount of water flow in the valve.Water flow automation is a system which consists of several components in which the already, develop different processes. To realese the feedback we need a sensor which is built by piezoelemnt in which we have the phenomenon of the frequency. With which we have to create …

Urban Waste Water Discharges And Their Treatment: Case Study Waste Water Treatment Plant Of Kavaja (Wwtpk), Aida Bode, Nevton Kodhelaj, Piro Zoga, Doriana Xhulaj

UBT International Conference

WWTPK is the first plant built sewage purification in the Republic of Albania (RA). This plant it is placed in the Kavaja region, district of Tirana. For this is an important area sewage treatment and waste water treatment according to the standards of the Ministry of Environment, Forestry and Water Management (MoE) in Republic of Albania and not directly discharged untreated in nature. In order to determine productivity of the IPUZ and to predict the future of the operation, the results of the analysis of BOD, COD, SS are produced. According to chemical analyzes carried out in the period from …