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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Analytical Approach To Multi-Objective Joint Inference Control For Fixed Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Julian L. Casey Jan 2020

Analytical Approach To Multi-Objective Joint Inference Control For Fixed Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Julian L. Casey

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Fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been found highly useful in various environments, including military and law enforcement. With the increased use of fixed-wing UAVs, there becomes an increased need to optimize the resources available. One approach to resource management is to create multi-objective flights. This thesis presents the design, analysis, and experimental implementation of multi-objective resource management for the resource of Range, distance available to the UAV, from the viewpoint of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR). First, a Simulation Environment is created capable of tracking multiple fixed-wing UAVs and to allow for the UAVs’ being controlled by an externally …


Processing And Properties Of Multifunctional Two Dimensional Nanocomposites Based On Graphene Nano-Flakes, Mohammed K. Mohammed Jan 2020

Processing And Properties Of Multifunctional Two Dimensional Nanocomposites Based On Graphene Nano-Flakes, Mohammed K. Mohammed

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The unique properties of graphene have directed researchers to study and characterize this new material. Graphene production and graphene based materials have been widely explored and developed in the past decade. Most research has aimed at developing scalable, environmentally friendly, and cheap procedures to produce defect-free graphene that can be used in various applications such as mechanical properties enhancement and multifunctional material. The challenge is processing such material on a scale suitable for engineering applications such as advanced photonics and advanced electronics. In this study, we investigate a new processing technique based on Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) Technique. We managed to produce …


Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (Qsm) Reconstruction From Mri Phase Data, Sara Gharabaghi Jan 2020

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (Qsm) Reconstruction From Mri Phase Data, Sara Gharabaghi

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Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a powerful technique that reveals changes in the underlying tissue susceptibility distribution. It can be used to measure the concentrations of iron and calcium in the brain both of which are linked with numerous neurodegenerative diseases. However, reconstructing the QSM image from the MRI phase data is an ill-posed inverse problem. Different methods have been proposed to overcome this difficulty. Still, the reconstructed QSM images suffer from streaking artifacts and underestimate the measured susceptibility of deep gray matter, veins, and other high susceptibility regions. This thesis proposes a structurally constrained Susceptibility Weighted Imaging and Mapping …


Stabilization Of Β-Cristobalite In The Sio2-Alpo4-Bpo4 System, Kathryn Doyle Jan 2020

Stabilization Of Β-Cristobalite In The Sio2-Alpo4-Bpo4 System, Kathryn Doyle

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Fused silica (silica glass) is transparent in the optical and near-infrared and has a low dielectric constant, making it suitable as a window material for radio frequency radiation. However, at high temperatures (>1100C), fused silica will easily creep and lose dimensional stability. Crystallized silica is much more creep resistant than fused silica. Silica crystallizes to many different structures including quartz, tridymite, and α- and β cristobalite. The only cubic polymorph, which is suitable for both optical and radio frequency transmission in polycrystalline form, is β -cristobalite. Unfortunately, this polymorph transforms to α-cristobalite at ~300C, and the volume change during …


Hierarchical Structure, Properties And Bone Mechanics At Macro, Micro, And Nano Levels, Farah Mohammed Ridha Abdulateef Hamandi Jan 2020

Hierarchical Structure, Properties And Bone Mechanics At Macro, Micro, And Nano Levels, Farah Mohammed Ridha Abdulateef Hamandi

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This research focuses on the hierarchical structure of bone and associated mechanical properties at different scales to assess damage accumulation leading to premature failure, with or without instrumentation. In this work, an attempt was made to develop a framework of macro, micro, and nano damage accumulation models and implementing them to derive mechanical behavior of the bone. At macrolevel, retrospective evaluation of 313 subjects was conducted, and the damage of bone tissue was investigated with respect to subject demography including age, gender, race, body mass index (BMI), height and weight, and their role in initiating fracture. Experimental data utilized 28 …


Developing Equivalent Solid Model For Lattice Cell Structure Using Numerical Approaches, Tahseen Abdulridha Ali Al-Wattar Jan 2020

Developing Equivalent Solid Model For Lattice Cell Structure Using Numerical Approaches, Tahseen Abdulridha Ali Al-Wattar

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Lattice cell structures (LCS) are the engineered porous structures that are composed of periodic unit cells in three dimensions. Such structures have many scientific and engineering applications, such as in vessel gas technology, thermal systems, mechanical and aerospace structures, etc. for which lightweight, high strength, and energy absorption capabilities are essential properties. To have an optimized design, finite element analysis (FEA) based computational approach can be used for detailed analysis of such structures, sometime in full scale. However, developing a large-scale model for a lattice-based structure is computationally expensive. If an equivalent solid FE model can be developed using the …


Online Clustering With Bayesian Nonparametrics, Matthew D. Scherreik Jan 2020

Online Clustering With Bayesian Nonparametrics, Matthew D. Scherreik

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Clustering algorithms, such as Gaussian mixture models and K-means, often require the number of clusters to be specified a priori. Bayesian nonparametric (BNP) methods avoid this problem by specifying a prior distribution over the cluster assignments that allows the number of clusters to be inferred from the data. This can be especially useful for online clustering tasks, where data arrives in a continuous stream and the number of clusters may dynamically change over time. Classical BNP priors often overestimate the number of clusters, however, leading researchers to develop new priors with more control over this tendency. To date, BNP algorithms …


Development Of Real-Time Systems For Supporting Collaborations In Distributed Human And Machine Teams, Aishwarya Bositty Jan 2020

Development Of Real-Time Systems For Supporting Collaborations In Distributed Human And Machine Teams, Aishwarya Bositty

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Real-time distributed systems constitute computing nodes that are connected by a network and coordinate with one another to accomplish a cooperative task, combining the responsiveness, fault-tolerance and geographic independence to support time-constrained collaborative applications, including distributed Human-Machine Teaming. In this thesis research the viability of real-time distributed collaborative technologies is demonstrated through the design, development and validation of prototype systems that support two human-machine teaming scenarios namely, ACE-IMS (Affirmation Cue based Interruption Management Systems) and ReadMI (Real-time Assessment of Dialogue in Motivational Interview). ACE-IMS demonstrates how a combination of AI capabilities and the cloud and mobile computing infrastructure can be …


Mitigating Atmospheric Phase Errors In Sal Data, Randy S. Depoy Jr. Jan 2020

Mitigating Atmospheric Phase Errors In Sal Data, Randy S. Depoy Jr.

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Synthetic aperture ladar (SAL) is an emerging remote sensing technology capable of providing high-resolution, interpretable, and timely imagery. SAL and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) are similar in that they provide high-resolution imagery suitable for a wide-variety of applications beyond the diffraction limit of the real aperture. Several advantages of SAL are; realistic imagery resulting from diffuse scattering of optically-rough objects, fine directionality of laser beam making the technology inherently low probability-of-detect, and shorter synthetic aperture collection times, all of which result from operating at optical as opposed to RF wavelengths. With the dramatic decrease in wavelength, SAL systems become more …


Understanding Visual Representation Of Imputed Data For Aiding Human Decision-Making, Ryan M. Thompson Jan 2020

Understanding Visual Representation Of Imputed Data For Aiding Human Decision-Making, Ryan M. Thompson

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The effectiveness of representing higher dimensional data on a two-dimensional visualization was required to be studied in the development of a novel data imputation method, Continuous Imputation With Association Rules (CIWAR). When the CIWAR method is used to impute missing data, the method generates additional metadata that increases each imputed data point's dimensionality. Potential use cases for CIWAR include situations where imputed data would be analyzed by individuals with little or no data analytic experience or situations where imputed data would be used to aid high-stress time-critical human decision processes. A study was conducted to assess the effect of the …


Turbine Passage Vortex Response To Upstream Periodic Disturbances, Mitchell Lee Scott Jan 2020

Turbine Passage Vortex Response To Upstream Periodic Disturbances, Mitchell Lee Scott

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Flow through the turbine section of gas turbine engines is inherently unsteady due to a variety of factors, such as the relative motion of rotors and stators. In low pressure turbines, periodic wake passing has been shown to impact boundary layer separation, blade surface pressure distribution, and loss generation. The effect of periodic disturbances on the endwall flow is less understood. Endwall flow in a low-pressure turbine occurs in the boundary layer region of the flow through the blade passage where the blade attaches to the hub in the turbine. The response of an endwall vortical structure, the passage vortex, …


Ultraviolet-B Radiation Induces Release Of Bioactive Microvesicle Particles In Keratinocytes Via Platelet-Activating Factor And Acid Sphingomyelinase, Langni Liu Jan 2020

Ultraviolet-B Radiation Induces Release Of Bioactive Microvesicle Particles In Keratinocytes Via Platelet-Activating Factor And Acid Sphingomyelinase, Langni Liu

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Ultraviolet-B (UV-B) radiation is one of the most common environmental factors and is known to induce the production of bioactive agents that cause several diseases including skin cancer. UVB exposure stimulates the production of a phospholipid activator, platelet-activating factor (PAF), and its analogs in keratinocytes that activate the PAF receptor (PAF-R) resulting in acute inflammatory and delayed systematic immunosuppressive effects. However, as UVB only penetrates into the skin epidermal layer, the detailed mechanisms of how UVB exerts systematic effects remains unclear. Previously we found that UVB induces keratinocytes to release large numbers of microvesicle particles (MVPs). These small membrane-bound particles …


Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman Jan 2020

Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman

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In the last decade, the advent of social media and microblogging services have inevitably changed our world. These services produce vast amounts of streaming data, and one of the most important ways of analyzing and discovering interesting trends in the streaming data is through clustering. In clustering streaming data, it is desirable to perform a single pass over incoming data, such that we do not need to process old data again, and the clustering model should evolve over time not to lose any important feature statistics of the data. In this research, we have developed a new clustering system that …


Small-Signal Analysis Of Non-Isolated Ćuk Dc-Dc Converter, Lokesh Kathi Jan 2020

Small-Signal Analysis Of Non-Isolated Ćuk Dc-Dc Converter, Lokesh Kathi

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In the future, renewable energy sources will be the primary energy sources due to non-renewable energy resources depletion. Having a sustainable energy source as an input voltage source for the electrical system is essential. Its applications can be widely used in hybrid solar-wind energy systems, electric vehicles, etc. This converter is invented and named after by Slobodan Cuk. An analysis describing a detailed steady-state operation of the non-isolated Cuk converter operating in continuous-conduction mode (CCM) is provided. The expected steady-state current and voltage waveforms across different components of the converter are analytically derived. Design equations for the converter are provided. …


Global Identification Of Human Modifier Genes Of Alpha-Synuclein Toxicity, Ishita Haider Jan 2020

Global Identification Of Human Modifier Genes Of Alpha-Synuclein Toxicity, Ishita Haider

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Alpha-synuclein is a small lipid binding protein abundantly expressed in the brain. Lewy body or Lewy-like pathology, primarily composed of misfolded alpha-synuclein, is a pathological feature shared by several neurodegenerative disorders, including Parkinson's disease (PD). Both missense mutations and increased copy numbers of the SNCA gene, encoding the alpha-synuclein protein, have been genetically linked to autosome dominant PD. Other genetic variations affecting the expression of the SNCA gene have been associated with sporadic PD. Although the physiological function of alpha-synuclein is not well understood, its localization to plasma and vesicular membranes at the presynaptic terminals suggests a role in neurotransmission. …


Kv2.1 Channel Clustering In The Sod1-G93a Mouse Model Of Als, Joshua Christopher Harris Jan 2020

Kv2.1 Channel Clustering In The Sod1-G93a Mouse Model Of Als, Joshua Christopher Harris

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Kv2.1 channels mediate slow-activating K+ rectifier current within the membrane of spinal motoneurons (MNs), and they are known to co-localize with other synapses and ion channels. Although Kv2.1 channels are suggested to regulate MN excitability, little research has gone into investigating its potential contribution to MN-altered excitability in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Using the male SOD1-G93A mouse model of ALS, we examined Kv2.1 cluster area and density in lumbar MNs at four key stages of disease progression. In our experiments, MNs were separated by type via SK3 immunoreactivity in order to isolate and compare the responses of disease-resistant (slow; SK3+) …


Regulation Of Δnp63Α By Tip60 Promotes Cellular Proliferation, Andrew Jared Stacy Jan 2020

Regulation Of Δnp63Α By Tip60 Promotes Cellular Proliferation, Andrew Jared Stacy

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ΔNp63α is a p53 transcription factor family member that promotes cellular proliferation and survival. In squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), ΔNp63α overexpression is associated with poor prognosis and survival, implicating it as a proto-oncogene. Despite its importance in SCC, the mechanisms regulating ΔNp63α expression are poorly understood. We have identified the acetyltransferase TIP60 as a novel upstream regulator of ΔNp63α levels. We discovered that TIP60 regulates ΔNp63α via two mechanisms. First, TIP60 upregulates ΔNp63α mRNA levels. Moreover, pharmacological inhibition of TIP60 activity reduces ΔNp63α transcript levels, indicating that TIP60-cataltyic activity is vital to amplified transcription of ΔNp63α. Second, we have demonstrated …


Host-Parasite Interactions: Comparative Analyses Of Population Genomics, Disease-Associated Genomic Regions, And Host Use, Sara Rose Seibert Jan 2020

Host-Parasite Interactions: Comparative Analyses Of Population Genomics, Disease-Associated Genomic Regions, And Host Use, Sara Rose Seibert

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Birds are major vectors and reservoir hosts of pathogens across our globe. Pathogens can be spread through the dispersal and seasonal movements of migratory and resident wild birds. Although biogeographic barriers have the potential to restrict completely or in part gene flow in wild birds, variation in ecological drivers of dispersal likely influences the effectiveness of these barriers amongst different species. This dissertation seeks to enhance our knowledge of Southern Hemisphere waterfowl species’ dispersal, population genomics, and disease ecology using population genomic techniques (double-digest restriction-site associated DNA sequencing (ddRADseq)) and multi-variate statistics. First, we investigated the roles of dispersal behavior …


Scalable, Pluggable, And Fault Tolerant Multi-Modal Situational Awareness Data Stream Management Systems, Michael Partin Jan 2020

Scalable, Pluggable, And Fault Tolerant Multi-Modal Situational Awareness Data Stream Management Systems, Michael Partin

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Features and attributes that describe an event (disasters, social movements, etc.) are heterogeneous in nature. For virtually all events that impact humans, technology enables us to capture a large amount and variety of data from many sources, including humans (i.e., social media) and sensors/internet of things (IoTs). The corresponding modalities of data include text, imagery, voice and video, along with structured data such as gazetteers (i.e., location-based data) and government and statistical data. However, even though there is often an abundance of information produced, this information is fragmented across the various modalities and sources. The DisasterRecord system aims to provide …


Towards Interpretable And Reliable Deep Neural Networks For Visual Intelligence, Ning Xie Jan 2020

Towards Interpretable And Reliable Deep Neural Networks For Visual Intelligence, Ning Xie

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Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are powerful tools blossomed in a variety of successful real-life applications. While the performance of DNNs is outstanding, their opaque nature raises a growing concern in the community, causing suspicions on the reliability and trustworthiness of decisions made by DNNs. In order to release such concerns and towards building reliable deep learning systems, research efforts are actively made in diverse aspects such as model interpretation, model fairness and bias, adversarial attacks and defenses, and so on. In this dissertation, we focus on the research topic of DNN interpretations for visual intelligence, aiming to unfold the black-box …


Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja Jan 2019

Analyzing Public View Towards Vaccination Using Twitter, Mahajan Rutuja

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Educating people about vaccination tends to target vaccine acceptance and reduction of hesitancy. Social media provides a promising platform for studying public perception regarding vaccination. In this study, we harvested tweets over a year related to vaccines from February 2018 to January 2019. We present a two-stage classifier to: (1) classify the tweets as relevant or non-relevant and (2) categorize them in terms of pro-vaccination, anti-vaccination, or neutral outlook. We found that the classifier was able to distinguish clearly between anti-vaccination and pro-vaccination tweets, but also misclassified many of these as neutral. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we found that two …


Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter Jan 2019

Detecting Malicious Behavior In Openwrt With Qemu Tracing, Jeremy Porter

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In recent years embedded devices have become more ubiquitous than ever before and are expected to continue this trend. Embedded devices typically have a singular or more focused purpose, a smaller footprint, and often interact with the physical world. Some examples include routers, wearable heart rate monitors, and thermometers. These devices are excellent at providing real time data or completing a specific task quickly, but they lack many features that make security issues more obvious. Generally, Embedded devices are not easily secured. Malware or rootkits in the firmware of an embedded system are difficult to detect because embedded devices do …


Assessing The Role Of Polyphenols As A Vascular Protectant Against Drug Induced Vascular Injury, Anson Jacob Oommen Jan 2019

Assessing The Role Of Polyphenols As A Vascular Protectant Against Drug Induced Vascular Injury, Anson Jacob Oommen

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Vascular injury is identified during pre-clinical toxicity testing within certain pharmacological classes of drug candidates and induces degenerative and hyperplastic changes in endothelial (ECs) and vascular smooth muscle (VSMCs) cells. This drug-induced vascular injury has been show as a side-effect caused by various classes of drugs, including, antibacterial (e.g., azithromycin), anti-malarial (e.g., quinoline), anti-viral (e.g., anti-hepatitis C virus interferons) and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (e.g., ibuprofen), and affects normal cardiovascular function and can further lead to various cardiovascular conditions like arrhythmia, cardiac arrest, high blood pressure, and even heart attack. The search for agents capable of reducing vascular injury side-effects by …


A Low-Area, Energy-Efficient 64-Bit Reconfigurable Carry Select Modified Tree-Based Adder For Media Signal Processing, Priscilla Sharon Allwin Jan 2019

A Low-Area, Energy-Efficient 64-Bit Reconfigurable Carry Select Modified Tree-Based Adder For Media Signal Processing, Priscilla Sharon Allwin

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Multimedia systems play an essential part in our daily lives and have drastically improved the quality of life over time. Multimedia devices like cellphones, radios, televisions, and computers require low-area and low-power reconfigurable adders to process greedy computation algorithms for the real-time audio/video signal and image processing such as discrete cosine transform, inverse discrete cosine transform, and fast Fourier transform, etc. In this thesis, a novel 64-bit reconfigurable adder is proposed and implemented to reduce the area and power consumption. This adder can be run-time reconfigured to different reconfigurable word lengths, i.e., one 64- bit, two 32-bits, four 16-bits or …


Strategic Decision Facilitation: An Exploration Of Alternative Anchoring And Scale Distortion Optimization In Multi-Attribute Group Decision Making, Joseph Patrick Kristbaum Jan 2019

Strategic Decision Facilitation: An Exploration Of Alternative Anchoring And Scale Distortion Optimization In Multi-Attribute Group Decision Making, Joseph Patrick Kristbaum

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Choosing between alternatives, regardless of the decision context in an organizational group setting is a difficult task. The integrity of the decision is under constant scrutiny and rarely are we ever able to characterize the magnitude of that with which we are consciously or subconsciously concerned: personal bias. This leads to long, drawn out timelines and loosely trusted decisions. This dissertation research focuses on using a traditionally, negatively viewed anchoring bias strategically in a series of experiments with a hypothesis that it can be used to positively reduce personal biases such as preference bias and judgement rooted in ambiguous or …


Knowledge-Enabled Entity Extraction, Hussein S. Al-Olimat Jan 2019

Knowledge-Enabled Entity Extraction, Hussein S. Al-Olimat

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Information Extraction (IE) techniques are developed to extract entities, relationships, and other detailed information from unstructured text. The majority of the methods in the literature focus on designing supervised machine learning techniques, which are not very practical due to the high cost of obtaining annotations and the difficulty in creating high quality (in terms of reliability and coverage) gold standard. Therefore, semi-supervised and distantly-supervised techniques are getting more traction lately to overcome some of the challenges, such as bootstrapping the learning quickly. This dissertation focuses on information extraction, and in particular entities, i.e., Named Entity Recognition (NER), from multiple domains, …


Characterization Of In-Vivo Damage In Implantable Cardiac Devices And The Lead Residual Properties, Anmar Mahdi Salih Jan 2019

Characterization Of In-Vivo Damage In Implantable Cardiac Devices And The Lead Residual Properties, Anmar Mahdi Salih

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Approximately, 92.1 million patients in the US suffer from cardiovascular diseases with an estimated healthcare cost of over $300 billion; out of which at least one million patients have Cardiac Implantable Electronics Devices (CIED). CIED represented by pacemakers, Implantable Cardioversion Defibrillator (ICD), and Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) are exposed to in-vivo damage. These damages are complex and composed on multiple levels and present challenges while assessing their combined extent. Since 2004, more than one hundred recalls were reported for cardiac devices. ICD devices had the majority with 40.8% recalls, pacemaker recall percentage was 14.5%, CRT recall percentage was12.7%, leads recalls …


Cmos Receiver Design For 802.11ac Standard Using Offline Calibrated Active Inductor Based Band Pass Filter In 90 Nm Technology, Shuo Li Jan 2019

Cmos Receiver Design For 802.11ac Standard Using Offline Calibrated Active Inductor Based Band Pass Filter In 90 Nm Technology, Shuo Li

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Wireless local area network is widely used in industry and people daily life. More and more mobile devices rely on this technology to perform data communication with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency band. As the development of CMOS technology is able to keep shrinking chip size and increasing circuit integration density, traditional on-chip passive inductor inefficient area consumption issue is becoming critical to receiver front end system design. In this dissertation, an active inductor-based band pass filter is studied and implemented with 90 nm technology. This active inductor design provides very small area consumption and larger quality factor compared …


Biomarker-Performance Associations During Nutritional And Exercise Intervention In Air Force Personnel, Jennifer Jurcsisn Jan 2019

Biomarker-Performance Associations During Nutritional And Exercise Intervention In Air Force Personnel, Jennifer Jurcsisn

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This study evaluated the combined effects of an exercise intervention and nutritional supplement on biomarkers of stress and resilience, and the relationships of those markers with physical and cognitive performance. 130 healthy Active-Duty Air Force (AF) personnel were recruited to participate in a double-blind, placebo controlled 12-week exercise and nutritional intervention. Serum was collected at basal and high stress conditions pre- and post-intervention to track the following biomarkers: cortisol, dehydroepiandrosterone-sulfate (DHEA-S), norepinephrine (NE), neuropeptide Y (NPY), and serotonin. The exercise intervention significantly attenuated the cortisol response and peak stress cortisol levels. The nutritional intervention decreased peak stress NE. The selected …


Automated Vehicle Electronic Control Unit (Ecu) Sensor Location Using Feature-Vector Based Comparisons, Gregory S. Buthker Jan 2019

Automated Vehicle Electronic Control Unit (Ecu) Sensor Location Using Feature-Vector Based Comparisons, Gregory S. Buthker

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In the growing world of cybersecurity, being able to map and analyze how software and hardware interact is key to understanding and protecting critical embedded systems like the Engine Control Unit (ECU). The aim of our research is to use our understanding of the ECU's control flow attained through manual analysis to automatically map and identify sensor functions found within the ECU. We seek to do this by generating unique sets of feature vectors for every function within the binary file of a car ECU, and then using those feature sets to locate functions within each binary similar to their …