Engineering Commons^™

Cs 240: Computer Programming I, Sarah Gothard

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of programming and programming languages are introduced.
Emphasis is on structured programming and stepwise refinement.

Cs 205-08: Introduction To Computers And Office Productivity Software, Kim Gros

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Focus on learning MS Office software applications including word processing (intermediate), spreadsheets, database and presentation graphics using a case study approach where critical thinking and problem solving skills are required. Computer concepts are integrated throughout the course to provide an understanding of the basics of computing, the latest technological advances and how they are used in industry. Ethics and issues encountered in business are discussed to challenge students on societal impact of technology.

Ceg 402/602-01: Introduction To Computer Communication, Jianing Ma

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course provides an introduction to basic concepts of communication
networks, different types of networks, protocols over different layers, and network
applications through lectures, labs, homework, and reading on relevant materials. You will
•Understand networking principles, protocols, and technologies.
•Understand some design and performance issues involved in providing a
network service.
•Acquire background for supporting e-commerce, e-government, and e-education.
•Gain hands-on experience with programming techniques for network
protocols.
•Obtain background for original research in computer networks.

Ceg 433/633-01: Operating Systems, Thomas Wischgoll

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

By the end of this quarter, you should be able to apply the learned concepts to the following:
•Develop, test and debug programs in Unix.
•Improve the performance of programs by tuning virtual memory usage, and file io.
•Design and construct device drivers for Unix.
•Design and build newer file systems for any OS.

During the course we will discuss topics from the following areas:
•Operating system structures
•Operating system interfaces
•Process management and scheduling
•Interprocess communication
•File systems
•Memory management

Cs 415: Social Implications Of Computing, Leo Finkelstein

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 415 is a communication skills course using as its subject matter current salient issues associated with the social implications of computing. In addition to the course text, you will need to use certain reading materials in the library and elsewhere, and you will be responsible for using concepts and theories provided in class lectures and discussions.

Cs 466/666: Introduction To Formal Languages, Guozhu Dong

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 466/666 is an introduction to formal language and automata theory. In this course we will examine methods for defining syntax of languages and recognizing patterns: the syntax of languages can be defined using grammars and patterns accepted by finite state machines. Along with presenting the fundamentals of these two topics, the course will develop and investigate the relationships between language definition and pattern recognition. The text will be the third edition of Languages and Machines: An Introduction to the Theory of Computer Science, by Thomas Sudkamp.

A Nonlinear Constituent Based Viscoelastic Model For Articular Cartilage And Analysis Of Tissue Remodeling Due To Altered Glycosaminoglycan-Collagen Interactions, Gregory C. Thomas, Anna Asanbaeva, Pasquale Vena, Robert L. Sah, Stephen M. Klisch

Mechanical Engineering

A constituent based nonlinear viscoelastic (VE) model was modified from a previous study (Vena, et al., 2006, “A Constituent-Based Model for the Nonlinear Viscoelastic Behavior of Ligaments,” J. Biomech. Eng., 128, pp. 449–457) to incorporate a glycosaminoglycan (GAG)-collagen (COL) stress balance using compressible elastic stress constitutive equations specific to articular cartilage (AC). For uniaxial loading of a mixture of quasilinear VE constituents, time constant and relaxation ratio equations are derived to highlight how a mixture of constituents with distinct quasilinear VE properties is one mechanism that produces a nonlinear VE tissue. Uniaxial tension experiments were performed with newborn bovine AC …

Investigation And Mitigation Of Driver Confusion At Modern Roundabouts, Aemal Khattak, Gregory Mcknight, Karen Schurr, Ram R. Bishu

Nebraska Department of Transportation: Research Reports

Construction of modern roundabouts in place of traditional four-legged intersections is becoming common in the United States. Roundabout negotiation can be confusing for drivers who are not familiar with their use. This research was carried out to identify roundabout elements that play a role in incorrect roundabout negotiation, ascertain driver characteristics prominent in incorrect roundabout negotiation, assess the relative potential for incorrect negotiation amongst different groups of drivers, and suggest measures for improving drivers’ abilities to negotiate roundabouts. Potential for incorrect roundabout negotiation was measured by asking questions in a survey questionnaire related to rules of roundabout negotiation and the …

Thermal Testing Of Innovative Building Insulations, Eoghan Frawley

Masters

The main objective of this research was to design and develop a Hot Box to test the thermal properties of Eco-quilt multi-foil insulation. This work began by gaining an understanding into how multi-foil works, how it is installed and examining different variations of this insulation. It was clear at an early stage that there were two conflicting opinions on the thermal performance of multi-foils. One set of tests claimed that the insulation had a thermal resistance of approximately 5 m2oC/W. These tests were carried out in real weather conditions, where temperatures were fluctuating, although one laboratory test achieved similar results. …

Highway Work Zone Risk Factors And Their Impact On Crash Severity, Yingfeng Li, Yong Bai

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Numerous factors may contribute to high-severity crashes in highway work zones. Identifying these factors and then alleviating their impact is a challenging task that traffic engineers and researchers have to confront. In this study, the work zone risk factors that could increase the probability of causing fatalities when severe crashes occur were examined using a comprehensive approach. The researchers first identified the significant risk factors based on a screening process that incorporates both statistical analyses and empirical research findings. They then systematically investigated these factors using logistic regression and frequency analysis techniques. The severe crashes including the fatal crashes between …

A Biomechanical Comparison Of Locked Plate Fixation With Percutaneous Insertion Capability Versus The Angled Blade Plate In A Subtrochanteric Fracture Gap Model, Brett D. Crist, Afshin Khalafi, Scott J. Hazelwood, Mark A. Lee

Biomedical Engineering

Objectives: The angled blade plate has been the historical standard in fixed-angle extramedullary subtrochanteric femur fracture fixation, but it requires an extensile lateral approach to the femur. Little formal evaluation exists for specifically designed percutaneous extramedullary implants. The purpose of this study was to compare 3 locked plating constructs, all with percutaneous insertion capability, with the standard 95-degree angled blade plate to determine whether specifically designed fixed-angle extramedullary implants for subtrochanteric femur fractures were biomechanically comparable to the angled blade plate.

Methods: Forty composite adult femurs were divided into 4 equal groups. The constructs evaluated included a 95-degree angled blade …

Statistical Hypothesis Testing For Postreconstructed And Postregistered Medical Images, Eugene Demidenko

Dartmouth Scholarship

Postreconstructed and postregistered medical images are typically treated as the raw data, implicitly assuming that those operations are error free. We question this assumption and explore how the precision of reconstruction and affine registration can be assessed by the image covariance matrix and confidence interval, called the confidence eigenimage, using a statistical model-based approach. Various hypotheses may be tested after image reconstruction and registration using classical statistical hypothesis testing vehicles: Is there a statistically significant difference between images? Does the intensity at a specific location or area of interest belong to the “normal” range? Is there a tumor? Does the …

Energy-Efficient Multi-Key Security Scheme For Wireless Sensor Network, Sandeep Kolli, Maciej Jan Zawodniok

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes multi-key encryption scheme and engine architecture (MKE) that increases security and optimizes energy efficiency of sensor networks, while minimizing modifications to existing implementations. The scheme improves security of AES against correlation power analysis (CPA) attack by employing MKE engine, breaking the correlation between power consumption and the used key. Other schemes utilize complex hardware designs, for example by using the inhomogeneous s-boxes that reduce energy efficiency of the engine. In contrast, the proposed hardware engine uses a randomly sequence of few keys to encode subsequent blocks of a messages. Additionally, the scheme improves security of AES against …

Modulation Of Mitochondrial Bioenergetics In The Isolated Guinea Pig Beating Heart By Potassium And Lidocaine Cardioplegia: Implications For Cardioprotection, Mohammed Aldakkak, David F. Stowe, Edward J. Lesnefsky, James S. Heisner, Qun Chen, Amadou K.S. Camara

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Mitochondria are damaged by cardiac ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury but can contribute to cardioprotection. We tested if hyperkalemic cardioplegia (CP) and lidocaine (LID) differently modulate mitochondrial (m) bioenergetics and protect hearts against I/R injury. Guinea pig hearts (n = 71) were perfused with Krebs Ringer's solution before perfusion for 1 minute just before ischemia with either CP (16 mM K+) or LID (1 mM) or Krebs Ringer's (control, 4 mM K+). The 1-minute perfusion period assured treatment during ischemia but not on reperfusion. Cardiac function, NADH, FAD, m[Ca2+], and superoxide (reactive oxygen species) were assessed at baseline, during the 1-minute perfusion, …

Image Registration Using Conformal Log Polar Mapping, Bala Krishna Vadapally

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Image Registration is the process of aligning, or overlaying two images of the same scene that were taken at different times and/or from different viewing angles and/or by sensors with different modalities or resolutions. The variations in the imaging environment induce the difference between the images of the same scene. In our situation, we have two images of the same scene taken with two sensors, one in the visible and the other in the infrared (IR) domain. The cameras are placed adjacent to each other on a stable platform, and the images are captured almost simultaneously. This means that the …

Fault-Tolerance And Recovery In Wireless Sensor Networks, Kevin M. Somervill

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The topic of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has gained considerable attention in the research community due to the variety of applications and interesting challenges in developing and deploying such networks. The typical WSN is significantly energy constrained and often deployed in harsh or even hostile environments, resulting in sensor nodes that are prone to failure. Failing nodes alter the topology of the network resulting in segmented routing paths and lost messages, ultimately reducing network efficiency. These issues spur the desire to develop energy-efficient, Fault-Tolerant (FT) algorithms that enable the network to persist in spite of the failed nodes. This work …

Unplanned Maintenance Scheduling A Lean Application Using Group Technology And Adaptive Conflict Resolution, Manish Shashibhushan Mittal

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Historically, production of ships is based on Group Technology (GT) with product oriented work breakdown structure. Recent GT applications have been effectively adapted to ship maintenance operations. In this thesis we have developed a GT based classification and coding system for the three basic requirements for maintenance operations: personnel, resources and space.

Traditionally unplanned maintenance activities are executed as and when the resources are available. This thesis presents a method for planning and scheduling these jobs with many of the traditional Lean manufacturing principles first adapted appropriately and then applied to Lean Maintenance. This method begins with identifying the priority …

Dynamic Interaction Of Elevated Guideway With Uncontrolled Maglev Vehicles, Sumanth Reddy Velma

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A flexible guideway on an elevated foundation is a key to affordable maglev urban transit. The flexible guideway can undergo significant dynamic motion, either when a vehicle solely relies on an open-loop control system or when a vehicle equipped with feedback control system experiences failure, due to fluctuating magnetic forces between the vehicle and the guideway. In an attempt to understand the effect of the uncontrolled vehicle on the structural response of the guideway, its dynamic interaction with maglev vehicles is investigated under various operating conditions. To this end, two vehicle models using Electrodynamic suspension (EDS) and Electromagnetic suspension (EMS) …

Monte Carlo Model Of Light Propagation In Tissues And The Effects Of Phase Changes On The Light Intensity, Rakesh Choula

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Lasers, due to their unique properties, have a wide range of applications in the medical field. For accurate laser treatments that focus on bio-tissues, prior knowledge of the amount of laser power, spot size and its irradiation time are necessary. In order to predict the effects of lasers on tissues and their bio-effects, a first necessary step is the creation of a model that can predict the temperature distributions within the tissue following laser excitation. This involves modeling light propagation through the tissue with inclusion of internal scattering, and assessment of the energy deposited by the incoming photons. The next …

A Robust Method To Detect Concealed Weapons, Anand Gone

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Concealed weapons detection is a large problem that is faced by the Police Department nowadays. There are many disasters caused by poor detection of the weapons. Since public safety is at risk there is a need to design an efficient detector that can detect the weapons hidden under the clothing. This thesis presents a novel method for detecting concealed weapons under clothing using image processing techniques. In this thesis IR imagery is used to capture an image which works on the principle of law of black body radiation. Image thresholding is performed on the captured data using Sauvola's adaptive thresholding …

Defining And Implementing Commutativity Conditions For Parallel Execution, Milind Kulkarni, Dimitrios Prountzos, Donald Nguyen, Keshav Pingali

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

Irregular applications, which manipulate complex, pointer-based data structures, are a promising target for parallelization. Recent studies have shown that these programs exhibit a kind of parallelism called amorphous data-parallelism. Prior approaches to parallelizing these applications, such as thread-level speculation and transactional memory, often obscure parallelism because they do not distinguish between the concrete representation of a data structure and its semantic state; they conflate metadata and data.

Exploiting the semantic commutativity of methods in complex data structures is a promising approach to exposing more parallelism. Prior work has shown that abstract locks can be used to capture a subset of …

An Error Threshold Criterion For Singular Value Decomposition Modes Extracted From Piv Data, Brenden P. Epps

Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellowship Reports

Singular value decomposition (SVD) is often used as a tool to analyze particle image velocimetry (PIV) data. However, experimental error tends to corrupt higher SVD modes, in which the root mean square velocity value is smaller than the experimental error. Therefore, we suggest that the threshold criterion, sk [ ffiffiffiffiffiffiffi DT p ; can be used as a rough limit of the validity of SVD modes extracted from experimental data (where sk is the singular value of mode k, D and T are the number of data sites and time steps, respectively, and is the root mean square PIV error). …

Semantics-Preserving Bag-Of-Words Models For Efficient Image Annotation, Lei Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Nenghai Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Bag-of-Words (BoW) model is a promising image representation for annotation. One critical limitation of existing BoW models is the semantic loss during the codebook generation process, in which BoW simply clusters visual words in Euclidian space. However, distance between two visual words in Euclidean space does not necessarily reflect the semantic distance between the two concepts, due to the semantic gap between low-level features and high-level semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for learning a codebook such that semantically related features will be mapped to the same visual word. In particular, we consider the distance between …

A Service Choice Model For Optimizing Taxi Service Delivery, Shih-Fen Cheng, Xin Qu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi service has undergone radical revamp in recent years. In particular, significant investments in communication system and GPS devices have improved quality of taxi services through better dispatches. In this paper, we propose to leverage on such infrastructure and build a service choice model that helps individual drivers in deciding whether to serve a specific taxi stand or not. We demonstrate the value of our model by applying it to a real-world scenario. We also highlight interesting new potential approaches that could significantly improve the quality of taxi services.

Course Portfolio - Discrete Event Simulation, Paul Savory

Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

This course portfolio, written by Dr. Paul Savory, provides an overview of his Discrete Event Simulation course at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It offers an overview of the course goals, a summary of the classroom activities for achieving them, and a detailed assessment of student learning. He highlights his introduction of the simul8 programming environment to his students. In addition to exploring his students’ learning, Dr. Savory also explores different approaches for documenting his teaching by including multimedia clips (video and audio), uses graphs, uses color, and incorporates images. The resulting portfolio is one that can be reviewed, shared, and …

Nanoscale Domain Patterns In Ultrathin Polymer Ferroelectric Films, Pankaj Sharma, Timothy J. Reece, Daniel W. Wu, Vladimir M. Fridkin, Stephen Ducharme, Alexei Gruverman

Stephen Ducharme Publications

High-resolution studies of domain configurations in Langmuir–Blodgett films of ferroelectric polymer poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene), P(VDF-TrFE), have been carried out by means of piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM). Changes in film thickness and morphology cause significant variations in polarization patterns. In continuous films and nanomesas with relatively low thickness/grain aspect ratio (<1/10), the relationship between the average domain size and thickness follows the Kittel law. Nanomesas with high aspect ratio (>1/5) exhibit significant deviations from this law, suggesting additional surface-energy-related mechanisms affecting the domain patterns. Polarization reversal within a single crystallite has been demonstrated and local switching parameters (coercive voltage and remnant piezoresponse) have been measured by monitoring the local hysteresis loops. Reliable control of polarization at the sub-grain level demonstrates …

A New Look At Richardson Number Mixing Schemes For Equatorial Ocean Modeling, Edward D. Zaron, James N. Moum

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

A reexamination of turbulence dissipation measurements from the equatorial Pacific shows that the turbulence diffusivities are not a simple function of the gradient Richardson number. A widely used mixing scheme, the K-profile parameterization, overpredicts the turbulent vertical heat flux by roughly a factor of 4 in the stably stratified region between the surface mixed layer and the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC). Additionally, the heat flux divergence is of the incorrect sign in the upper 80 m. An alternative class of parameterizations is examined that expresses the mixing coefficients in terms of the large-scale kinetic energy, shear, and Richardson number. These representations …

Electrolytic Recovery Of Silver From Gold Smelting Wastewater, Michael Vincent Ofrecio Laurio

Undergraduate Theses

The recovery of silver from gold smelting wastewater by electrodeposition was investigated as an alternative to (the more expensive, and more polluting) traditional copper-based recovery method. The effects of operating current and time on silver recovery were investigated from electrodeposition time-course plots. Secondary effects were also observed from temperature, and pH profiles. High silver removal rates and silver removal efficiencies were observed at increased operating currents. Electrodeposition at 9A operating current showed 98.67% silver recovery after 30 minutes. Increase in temperature and decrease in pH were observed during the operation. Charge dose for silver electrodeposition (a scale-up operating factor) was …

Evaluation Of A Fisher And Paykel Motor As Alternator For A 200 Watt Pico-Hydro Power Supply System., Athena Perejan Lavega

Undergraduate Theses

Energy is an important commodity in our current generation. There are currently many available sources of it, but considering the current decline of the environment's condition one must consider the environmental impact of the energy sources. With this mind set, renewable energy systems are a popular field of study, of which hydro power supply systems are the oldest and one of the most used technology. At present hydro power supply systems are being scaled down to smaller levels to make it more available to more people. Though the endeavor be far from actually attaining perfectly clean energy, it is should …

Technical Research Needs For Sustainable Buildings: Results From A Multidisciplinary Nsf Workshop, Leidy Klotz, Vivien Loftness, Gregor Henze, David J. Sailor, David Riley

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article describes research needs for sustainable buildings as defined in a July 2009 National Science Foundation-sponsored workshop. This workshop brought together building researchers with researchers in the areas of distributed renewable energy and multifunctional materials to engage their expertise and identify overlapping research needs and opportunities. An overview of sustainable building design provided the broad context for discussion. This overview was followed by focused presentations in building control systems, advanced building envelopes, and systems and process integration. In addition, presentations on distributed renewable energy and multi-functional materials supported the participants in outlining and generating research needs that connect the …