Engineering Commons^™

Autonomous Pipeline Monitoring And Maintenance System: A Rfid-Based Approach, Jong-Hoon Kim, Gokarna Sharma, Noureddine Boudriga, S.S. Iyengar, Nagarajan Prabakar

School of Computing and Information Sciences

Pipeline networks are one of the key infrastructures of our modern life. Proactive monitoring and frequent inspection of pipeline networks are very important for sustaining their safe and efficient functionalities. Existing monitoring and maintenance approaches are costly and inefficient because pipelines can be installed in large scale and in an inaccessible and hazardous environment. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID)-based Autonomous Maintenance system for Pipelines, called RAMP, which combines robotic, sensing, and RFID technologies for efficient and accurate inspection, corrective reparation, and precise geo-location information. RAMP can provide not only economical and scalable remedy …

From Boolean Equalities To Constraints, Sergio Antoy, Michael Hanus

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although functional as well as logic languages use equality to discriminate between logically different cases, the operational meaning of equality is different in such languages. Functional languages reduce equational expressions to their Boolean values, True or False, logic languages use unification to check the validity only and fail otherwise. Consequently, the language Curry, which amalgamates functional and logic programming features, offers two kinds of equational expressions so that the programmer has to distinguish between these uses. We show that this distinction can be avoided by providing an analysis and transformation method that automatically selects the appropriate operation. Without this distinction …

All Your Sessions Are Belong To Us: Investigating Authenticator Leakage Through Backup Channels On Android, Guangdong Bai, Jun Sun, Jianliang Wu, Quanqi Ye, Li Li, Jin Song Dong, Shanqing Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Security of authentication protocols heavily relies on the confidentiality of credentials (or authenticators) like passwords and session IDs. However, unlike browser-based web applications for which highly evolved browsers manage the authenticators, Android apps have to construct their own management. We find that most apps simply locate their authenticators into the persistent storage and entrust underlying Android OS for mediation. Consequently, these authenticators can be leaked through compromised backup channels. In this work, we conduct the first systematic investigation on this previously overlooked attack vector. We find that nearly all backup apps on Google Play inadvertently expose backup data to any …

Gpu Accelerated On-The-Fly Reachability Checking, Zhimin Wu, Yang Liu, Jun Sun, Jianqi Shi, Shengchao Qin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model checking suffers from the infamous state space explosion problem. In this paper, we propose an approach, named GPURC, to utilize the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to speed up the reachability verification. The key idea is to achieve a dynamic load balancing so that the many cores in GPUs are fully utilized during the state space exploration.To this end, we firstly construct a compact data encoding of the input transition systems to reduce the memory cost and fit the calculation in GPUs. To support a large number of concurrent components, we propose a multi-integer encoding with conflict-release accessing approach. We …

On Problematic Robotic Thresholds, Adam K. Taylor

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

Large configuration spaces present difficulties for developers validating large soft- ware systems and for users selecting the proper configuration to achieve the desired runtime behavior. Robot systems face the same challenges as they may have hundreds of configurable parameters. Our work focuses on co-robotic systems, those in which robots and humans work closely together to augment each other’s capabilities. We aim to leverage the user’s knowledge about a system to help determine configuration errors. To accomplish this, users mark runtime failures while observing the system in operation. A marked error indicates the robot “did something when it should not have” …

Plasmonic Field Confinement For Separate Absorption-Multiplication In Ingaas Nanopillar Avalanche Photodiodes, Alan C. Farrell, Pradeep Senanayake, Chung-Hong Hung, George El-Howayek, Abhejit Rajagopal, Marc Currie, Majeed M. Hayat, Diana L. Huffaker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Avalanche photodiodes (APDs) are essential components in quantum key distribution systems and active imaging systems requiring both ultrafast response time to measure photon time of flight and high gain to detect low photon flux. The internal gain of an APD can improve system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Excess noise is typically kept low through the selection of material with intrinsically low excess noise, using separate-absorption-multiplication (SAM) heterostructures, or taking advantage of the dead-space effect using thin multiplication regions. In this work we demonstrate the first measurement of excess noise and gain-bandwidth product in III–V nanopillars exhibiting substantially lower excess noise factors …

On Reliability Of Smart Grid Neighborhood Area Networks, Shengjie Xu, Yi Qian, Rose Qingyang Hu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

With the integration of the advanced computing and communication technologies, smart grid system is dedicated to enhance the efficiency and the reliability of future power systems greatly through renewable energy resources, as well as distributed communication intelligence and demand response. Along with advanced features of smart grid, the reliability of smart grid communication system emerges to be a critical issue, since millions of smart devices are interconnected through communication networks throughout critical power facilities, which has an immediate and direct impact on the reliability of the entire power infrastructure. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of reliability issues …

A Network Topology Control And Identity Authentication Protocol With Support For Movable Sensor Nodes, Ying Zhang, Wei Chen, Jixing Liang, Bingxin Zheng, Shengming Jiang

Computer Science Faculty Research

It is expected that in the near future wireless sensor network (WSNs) will be more widely used in the mobile environment, in applications such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for marine monitoring and mobile robots for environmental investigation. The sensor nodes’ mobility can easily cause changes to the structure of a network topology, and lead to the decline in the amount of transmitted data, excessive energy consumption, and lack of security. To solve these problems, a kind of efficient Topology Control algorithm for node Mobility (TCM) is proposed. In the topology construction stage, an efficient clustering algorithm is adopted, which …

Learning Query And Image Similarities With Ranking Canonical Correlation Analysis, Ting Yao, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

One of the fundamental problems in image search is to learn the ranking functions, i.e., similarity between the query and image. The research on this topic has evolved through two paradigms: feature-based vector model and image ranker learning. The former relies on the image surrounding texts, while the latter learns a ranker based on human labeled query-image pairs. Each of the paradigms has its own limitation. The vector model is sensitive to the quality of text descriptions, and the learning paradigm is difficult to be scaled up as human labeling is always too expensive to obtain. We demonstrate in this …

Adaptive Scaling Of Cluster Boundaries For Large-Scale Social Media Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the …

Faster Maximium Priority Matchings In Bipartite Graphs, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

A maximum priority matching is a matching in an undirected graph that maximizes a priority score defined with respect to given vertex priorities. An earlier paper showed how to find maximum priority matchings in unweighted graphs. This paper describes an algorithm for bipartite graphs that is faster when the number of distinct priority classes is limited. For graphs with k distinct priority classes it runs in O(kmn1/2) time, where n is the number of vertices in the graph and m is the number of edges.

The Bounded Edge Coloring Problem And Offline Crossbar Scheduling, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper introduces a variant of the classical edge coloring problem in graphs that can be applied to an offline scheduling problem for crossbar switches. We show that the problem is NP-complete, develop three lower bounds bounds on the optimal solution value and evaluate the performance of several approximation algorithms, both analytically and experimentally. We show how to approximate an optimal solution with a worst-case performance ratio of 3/2 and our experimental results demonstrate that the best algorithms produce results that very closely track a lower bound.

Adaptive Duty Cycling In Sensor Networks With Energy Harvesting Using Continuous-Time Markov Chain And Fluid Models, Ronald Wai Hong Chan, Pengfei Zhang, Ido Nevat, Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Hwee Xian Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The dynamic and unpredictable nature of energy harvesting sources available for wireless sensor networks, and the time variation in network statistics like packet transmission rates and link qualities, necessitate the use of adaptive duty cycling techniques. Such adaptive control allows sensor nodes to achieve long-run energy neutrality, where energy supply and demand are balanced in a dynamic environment such that the nodes function continuously. In this paper, we develop a new framework enabling an adaptive duty cycling scheme for sensor networks that takes into account the node battery level, ambient energy that can be harvested, and application-level QoS requirements. We …

Bep: Bit Error Pattern Measurement And Analysis In Ieee 802.11, Jiayue Li, Zimu Zhou, Chen Zhang, Liang Yin, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The IEEE 802.11 is a set of Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications which concern the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) service. However, most IEEE 802.11 WLAN services are easily affected by external elements, such as the homogeneous interference caused by the high-density deployment of IEEE 802.11 devices, the attenuation effect caused by complicated indoor obstacles, and the heterogeneous interference caused by other devices which operate out of unlicensed 2.4GHz ISM bands. In this paper, we first present a method to capture IEEE 802.11n Bit Error Patterns (BEP) under the network effect such as the homogeneous interference …

Transforming C Openmp Programs For Verification In Civl, Michael Rogers

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

There are numerous way to express parallelism which can make it challenging for developers to verify these programs. Many tools only target a single dialect but the Concurrency Intermediate Verification Language (CIVL) targets MPI, Pthreads, and CUDA. CIVL provides a general concurrency model that can represent pro- grams in a variety of concurrency dialects. CIVL includes a front-end that support all of the dialects mentioned above. The back-end is a verifier that uses model checking and symbolic execution to check standard properties.

In this thesis, we have designed and implemented a transformer that will take C OpenMP programs and transform …

Bandwidth Estimation For Virtual Networks, Ertong Zhang

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

Cloud computing is transforming a large part of IT industry, as evidenced by the increasing popularity of public cloud computingservices, such as Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Windows Azure, and Rackspace Public Cloud. Manycloud computing applications are bandwidth-intensive, and thus the network bandwidth information of clouds is important for theirusers to manage and troubleshoot the application performance.

The current bandwidth estimation methods originally developed for the traditional Internet, however, face great challenges in clouds dueto virtualization that is the main enabling technique of cloud computing. First, virtual machine scheduling, which is an importantcomponent of computer virtualization for processor …

Using Software-Defined Networking To Improve Campus, Transport And Future Internet Architectures, Adrian Lara

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

Software-defined Networking (SDN) promises to redefine the future of networking. Indeed, SDN-based networks have unique capabilities such as centralized control, flow abstraction, dynamic updating of forwarding rules and software-based traffic analysis. SDN-based networks decouple the data plane from the control plane, migrating the latter to a software controller. By adding a software layer between network devices and applications, features such as network virtualization and automated management are simpler to achieve.

In this dissertation, we show how SDN-based deployments simplify network management at multiple scales such as campus and transport networks, as well as future Internet architectures. First, we propose OpenSec, …

Computational Capacity And Energy Consumption Of Complex Resistive Switch Networks, Jens Bürger, Alireza Goudarzi, Darko Stefanovic, Christof Teuscher

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Resistive switches are a class of emerging nanoelectronics devices that exhibit a wide variety of switching characteristics closely resembling behaviors of biological synapses. Assembled into random networks, such resistive switches produce emerging behaviors far more complex than that of individual devices. This was previously demonstrated in simulations that exploit information processing within these random networks to solve tasks that require nonlinear computation as well as memory. Physical assemblies of such networks manifest complex spatial structures and basic processing capabilities often related to biologically-inspired computing. We model and simulate random resistive switch networks and analyze their computational capacities. We provide a …

Maximum Priority Matchings, Jonathan Turner

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Let G=(V,E) be an undirected graph with n vertices and m edges, in which each vertex u is assigned an integer priority in [1,n], with 1 being the ``highest'' priority. Let M be a matching of G. We define the priority score of M to be an n-ary integer in which the i-th most-significant digit is the number of vertices with priority i that are incident to an edge in M. We describe a variation of the augmenting path method (Edmonds' algorithm) that finds a matching with maximum priority score in O(mn) time.

Spatial Domain Management And Massive Mimo Coordination In 5g Sdn, Songlin Sun, Bo Rong, Rose Qingyang Hu, Yi Qian

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

In 5G mobile communication systems, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) play crucial roles to achieve expected coverage and capacity across venues. This paper correspondingly addresses software-defined network (SDN) as the central controller of radio resource management in massive MIMO HetNets. In particular, we identify the huge spatial domain information management and complicated MIMO coordination as the grand challenges in 5G systems. Our work accordingly distinguishes itself by considering more network MIMO aspects, including flexibility and complexity of spatial coordination. In our proposed scheme, SDN controller first collects the user channel state information in an effective way, and …

Experimental Analysis Of Artificial Dragonfly Wings Using Black Graphite And Fiberglass For Use In Biomimetic Micro Air Vehicles (Bmavs), P. N. Sivasankaran, Thomas Ward, R. Viyapuri, M. R. Johan

Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This article examines the suitability of two different materials which are black graphite carbon fiber and red pre-impregnated fiberglass from which to fabricate artificial dragonfly wing frames. These wings could be of use in Biomimetic Micro Aerial Vehicles (BMAV). BMAV are a new class of unmanned micro-sized air vehicles that mimic flying biological organisms. Insects, such as dragonflies, possess corrugated and complex vein structures that are difficult to mimic. Simplified dragonfly wing frames were fabricated from these materials and then a nano-composite film was adhered to them, which mimics the membrane of an actual dragonfly. Experimental analysis of these results …

Shopminer: Mining Customer Shopping Behavior In Physical Clothing Stores With Passive Rfids, Longfei Shangguan, Zimu Zhou, Xiaolong Zheng, Lei Yang, Yunhao Liu, Jinsong Han

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Shopping behavior data are of great importance to understand the effectiveness of marketing and merchandising efforts. Online clothing stores are capable capturing customer shopping behavior by analyzing the click stream and customer shopping carts. Retailers with physical clothing stores, however, still lack effective methods to identify comprehensive shopping behaviors. In this paper, we show that backscatter signals of passive RFID tags can be exploited to detect and record how customers browse stores, which items of clothes they pay attention to, and which items of clothes they usually match with. The intuition is that the phase readings of tags attached on …

Forecasting Design Day Demand Using Extremal Quantile Regression, David Joseph Kaftan, Jarrett L. Smalley, George F. Corliss, Ronald H. Brown, Richard James Povinelli

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Extreme events occur rarely, making them difficult to predict. Extreme cold events strain natural gas systems to their limits. Natural gas distribution companies need to be prepared to satisfy demand on any given day that is at or warmer than an extreme cold threshold. The hypothetical day with temperature at this threshold is called the Design Day. To guarantee Design Day demand is satisfied, distribution companies need to determine the demand that is unlikely to be exceeded on the Design Day.

We approach determining this demand as an extremal quantile regression problem. We review current methods for extremal quantile regression. …

An Exploration Of The Effects Of Enhanced Compiler Error Messages For Computer Programming Novices, Brett A. Becker

Theses

Computer programming is an essential skill that all computing students must master and is increasingly important in many diverse disciplines. It is also difficult to learn. One of the many challenges novice programmers face from the start are notoriously cryptic compiler error messages. These report details on errors made by students and are essential as the primary source of information used to rectify those errors. However these difficult to understand messages are often a barrier to progress and a source of discouragement. A high number of student errors, and in particular a high frequency of repeated errors – when a …

Deep Multimodal Learning For Affective Analysis And Retrieval, Lei Pang, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media has been a convenient platform for voicing opinions through posting messages, ranging from tweeting a short text to uploading a media file, or any combination of messages. Understanding the perceived emotions inherently underlying these user-generated contents (UGC) could bring light to emerging applications such as advertising and media analytics. Existing research efforts on affective computation are mostly dedicated to single media, either text captions or visual content. Few attempts for combined analysis of multiple media are made, despite that emotion can be viewed as an expression of multimodal experience. In this paper, we explore the learning of highly …

Energy-Efficient Computational Chemistry: Comparison Of X86 And Arm Systems, Kristopher Keipert, Gaurav Mitra, Vaibhav Sunriyal, Sarom S. Leang, Masha Sosonkina, Alistair P. Rendell, Mark S. Gordon

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The computational efficiency and energy-to-solution of several applications using the GAMESS quantum chemistry suite of codes is evaluated for 32-bit and 64-bit ARM-based computers, and compared to an x86 machine. The x86 system completes all benchmark computations more quickly than either ARM system and is the best choice to minimize time to solution. The ARM64 and ARM32 computational performances are similar to each other for Hartree-Fock and density functional theory energy calculations. However, for memory-intensive second-order perturbation theory energy and gradient computations the lower ARM32 read/write memory bandwidth results in computation times as much as 86% longer than on the …

Direct Or Indirect Match? Selecting Right Concepts For Zero-Example Case, Yi-Jie Lu, Maaike De Boer, Hao Zhang, Klamer Schutte, Wessel Kraaij, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Vireo-Tno @ Trecvid 2015: Multimedia Event Detection, Hao Zhang, Yi-Jie Lu, Maaike De Boer, Frank Ter Haar, Zhaofan Qiu, Klamer Schutte, Wessel Kraaij, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an overview and comparative analysis of our systems designed for the TRECVID 2015 [1] multimedia event detection (MED) task. We submitted 17 runs, of which 5 each for the zeroexample, 10-example and 100-example subtasks for the Pre-Specified (PS) event detection and 2 runs for the 10-example subtask for the Ad-Hoc (AH) event detection. We did not participate in the Interactive Run. This year we focus on three different parts of the MED task: 1) extending the size of our concept bank and combining it with improved dense trajectories; 2) exploring strategies for semantic query generation (SQG); and …

Lesinn: Detecting Anomalies By Identifying Least Similar Nearest Neighbours, Guansong Pang, Kai Ming Ting, David Albrecht

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce the concept of Least Similar Nearest Neighbours (LeSiNN) and use LeSiNN to detect anomalies directly. Although there is an existing method which is a special case of LeSiNN, this paper is the first to clearly articulate the underlying concept, as far as we know. LeSiNN is the first ensemble method which works well with models trained using samples of one instance. LeSiNN has linear time complexity with respect to data size and the number of dimensions, and it is one of the few anomaly detectors which can apply directly to both numeric and categorical data sets. Our extensive …

Skin Effect Suppression In Infrared-Laser Irradiated Planar Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube/ Cu Conductors, Kamran Keramatnejad, Yang Gao, Yunshen Zhou, Hossein Rabiee Glogir, Mengmeng Wang, Yongfeng Lu

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

Skin effect suppression in planar multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT)/Copper (Cu) conductors was realized at the 0-10 MHz frequency range through infrared laser irradiation of MWCNTs, which were coated on the surface of the Cu substrate via the electrophoretic deposition (EPD) method. The effect of laser irradiation and its power density on electrical and structural properties of the MWCNT/Cu conductors was investigated using a wavelength-tunable CO2 laser and then comparing the performance of the samples prepared at different conditions with that of pristine Cu. The irradiation at λ=9.219 μm proved to be effective in selective delivery of energy towards depths close …