Engineering Commons^™

Understanding Vehicular Traffic Behavior From Video: A Survey Of Unsupervised Approaches, Brendan Tran Morris, Mohan Manubhai Trivedi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

Recent emerging trends for automatic behavior analysis and understanding from infrastructure video are reviewed. Research has shifted from high-resolution estimation of vehicle state and instead, pushed machine learning approaches to extract meaningful patterns in aggregates in an unsupervised fashion. These patterns represent priors on observable motion, which can be utilized to describe a scene, answer behavior questions such as where is a vehicle going, how many vehicles are performing the same action, and to detect an abnormal event. The review focuses on two main methods for scene description, trajectory clustering and topic modeling. Example applications that utilize the behavioral modeling …

Image Search By Graph-Based Label Propagation With Image Representation From Dnn, Yingwei Pan, Yao Ting, Kuiyuan Yang, Houqiang Li, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jingdong Wang, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our objective is to estimate the relevance of an image to a query for image search purposes. We address two limitations of the existing image search engines in this paper. First, there is no straightforward way of bridging the gap between semantic textual queries as well as users’ search intents and image visual content. Image search engines therefore primarily rely on static and textual features. Visual features are mainly used to identify potentially useful recurrent patterns or relevant training examples for complementing search by image reranking. Second, image rankers are trained on query-image pairs labeled by human experts, making the …

An Experimental Study For Inter-User Interference Mitigation In Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Bin Cao, Yu Ge, Chee Wee Kim, Gang Feng, Hwee-Pink Tan, Yun Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-user interference degrades the reliability of data delivery in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in dense deployments when multiple users wearing WBSNs are in close proximity to one another. The impact of such interference in realistic WBSN systems is significant but is not well explored. To this end, we investigate and analyze the impact of inter-user interference on packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput. We conduct extensive experiments based on the TelosB WBSN platform, considering unslotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision avoidance (CA) and slotted CSMA/CA modes in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, respectively. In order to mitigate interuser interference, …

An Ergonomic Evaluation Of Aircraft Pilot Seats, Yolanda Nicole Andrade

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Seat comfort has become increasingly important in today's society as we spend more time at consoles, instrument panels, or just online. However, seat comfort is hard to define and difficult to measure. Several measures both objective and subjective were used to evaluate seat comfort in commercially available average pilot seats. Three pilot seats, which had the same material and similar adjustments but different physical attributes, and a universal classroom seat, with different material and no adjustments, were compared by 20 volunteers using subjective and objective measures in a Latin square controlled repeated measures design. A Friedman's test was used to …

Mapping Automotive Like Controls To A General Aviation Aircraft, Christopher G. Carvalho

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to develop fly-by-wire control laws enabling a general aviation aircraft to be flown with automotive controls, i.e. a steering wheel and gas/brake pedals. There was a six speed shifter used to change the flight mode of the aircraft. This essentially allows the pilot to have control over different aspects of the flight profile such as climb/descend or cruise. A highway in the sky was used to aid in the navigation since it is not intuitive to people without flight experience how to navigate from the sky or when to climb and descend.

Many believe …

Investigation Of Grid Adaptation To Reduce Computational Efforts For A 2-D Hydrogen-Fueled Dual-Mode Scramjet, Kam Keong Foo

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

A two-dimensional dual-mode scramjet flowpath is developed and evaluated using the ANSYS Fluent density-based flow solver with various computational grids. Results are obtained for fuel-off, fuel-on non-reacting, and fuel-on reacting cases at different equivalence ratios. A one-step global chemical kinetics hydrogen-air model is used in conjunction with the eddy-dissipation model. Coarse, medium and fine computational grids are used to evaluate grid sensitivity and to investigate a lack of grid independence. Different grid adaptation strategies are performed on the coarse grid in an attempt to emulate the solutions obtained from the finer grids. The goal of this study is to investigate …

Attitude Dynamics Of Debris Resulting From Upper Stage Fragmentation In Low Earth Orbit, Killian Marie

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This thesis addresses the analysis of the attitude dynamics of pieces of space debris that could result from the fragmentation of a spent upper stage in low Earth orbit (LEO).

Up to now only whole objects of axisymmetric shape have been studied with the purpose of estimating their tumbling rates in LEO. Three shapes have been considered to be representative for the purpose of the study: a thin plate, a monocoque shell, an half conical shell and a spherical shell, and it has been assumed that they are fabricated from aluminum alloy. The motion of conducting body in a magnetic …

Observability And Confidence Of Stability And Control Derivatives Determined In Real Time, Alfonso Noriega

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Stability and control derivatives of an aircraft were estimated from real flight test data in real time. A higher language block diagram library was developed for this purpose. Parameter identification techniques and requirements were used to detect and rate maneuvers present in the data. These ratings were used to blend newly calculated derivatives with previously known values by means of a Kalman filter. The Kalman filter output was used to identify the health of control surfaces actuators. Statistical and measured data were used to predict the probability that an actuator failure has occurred at any given time during the flight. …

Preliminary Design Of Blade And Disc Fixing For Aerospace Application Using Multi-Disciplinary Approach, Abdulhalim Twahir

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The preliminary design phase of a turbine rotor has an important impact on the architecture of a new engine definition, as it sets the technical envelope of the product to be designed. Additionally, preliminary design cycle times are increasingly critical in capturing business opportunities in an ever competitive environment. Improving the accuracy of the preliminary design (pre-detailed design) is also necessary as not only does it significantly reduce the overall development of an engine, but also because any mistakes made at this stage can be extremely hard to rectify.

Previously, typical pre-detail fixing design cycle time was greater due to …

Identification Of Causal Paths And Prediction Of Runway Incursion Risk Using Bayesian Belief Networks, Benjamin Jeffry Goodheart

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

In the U.S. and worldwide, runway incursions are widely acknowledged as a critical concern for aviation safety. However, despite widespread attempts to reduce the frequency of runway incursions, the rate at which these events occur in the U.S. has steadily risen over the past several years. Attempts to analyze runway incursion causation have been made, but these methods are often limited to investigations of discrete events and do not address the dynamic interactions that lead to breaches of runway safety. While the generally static nature of runway incursion research is understandable given that data are often sparsely available, the unmitigated …

Footwear Antennas For Body Area Telemetry, Domenico Gaetano, Patrick Mcevoy, Max Ammann, Jacinta Browne, Louise Keating, Frances Horgan

Articles

Antennas designed to link footwear sensors within body centric networks are introduced with two small UWB antennas, one directional and another quasi-omnidirectional. The radiating characteristics are evaluated for three positions on a sample sports shoe using a detailed simulation model and measurements with a homogenous foot phantom. Antenna performance is assessed for resilience to close proximity loading by the footwear materials and the phantom foot.

Probabilistic Modeling Of Erroneous Human Response To In-Vehicle Route Guidance Systems: A Domain Decomposition-Based Algorithm, Abdullah Al Farooq

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Drivers are generally assumed to follow the shortest route to their destinations prescribed by in-vehicle route navigation systems without mistake. However, it is not uncommon that drivers make mistakes when there are complex intersections along the route to miss turns. Such mistakes would result in following a longer route than the optimal one. In this thesis, research has been conducted to analyze the effects of the number of intersections in the shortest routes of different O-D (origin-destination) pairs. While different formulations can be employed to describe such "driving with error" model, a Domain Decomposition (DD) partitioning algorithm has been developed …

Clustering Algorithms For Maximizing The Lifetime Of Wireless Sensor Networks With Energy-Harvesting Sensors, Pengfei Zhang, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by recent developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we present several efficient clustering algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs, i.e., the duration till a certain percentage of the nodes die. Specifically, an optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the lifetime of a single-cluster network, followed by an extension to handle multi-cluster networks. Then we study the joint problem of prolonging network lifetime by introducing energy-harvesting (EH) nodes. An algorithm is proposed for maximizing the network lifetime where EH nodes serve as dedicated relay nodes for cluster heads (CHs). Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results show that the proposed …

Annotation For Free: Video Tagging By Mining User Search Behavior, Yao Ting, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of tagging is mostly considered from the perspectives of machine learning and data-driven philosophy. A fundamental issue that underlies the success of these approaches is the visual similarity, ranging from the nearest neighbor search to manifold learning, to identify similar instances of an example for tag completion. The need to searching for millions of visual examples in high-dimensional feature space, however, makes the task computationally expensive. Moreover, the results can suffer from robustness problem, when the underlying data, such as online videos, are rich of semantics and the similarity is difficult to be learnt from low-level features. This …

Error Recovered Hierarchical Classification, Shiai Zhu, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical classification (HC) is a popular and efficient way for detecting the semantic concepts from the images. However, the conventional HC, which always selects the branch with the highest classification response to go on, has the risk of propagating serious errors from higher levels of the hierarchy to the lower levels. We argue that the highestresponse-first strategy is too arbitrary, because the candidate nodes are considered individually which ignores the semantic relationship among them. In this paper, we propose a novel method for HC, which is able to utilize the semantic relationship among candidate nodes and their children to recover …

Optimization Of Demon® Sidestream Treatment And Potential For Anammox Mainstream Bioaugmentation, Andrea Lauren Nifong

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Anaerobically digested sludge dewatering liquors (e.g. centrate) can represent 15-25% of the total kjeldahl nitrogen (TKN) load on a typical municipal waste water treatment plant (WWTP). Sidestream nitrogen removal has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for improving nitrogen removal performance and reliability with a savings in aeration energy, chemicals (supplemental alkalinity and carbon), and sludge production.

Deammonification, partial nitritation by ammonia oxidizing bacteria (AOB) combined with anaerobic ammonium oxidation (AMX or anammox), provides near complete nitrogen removal with a 65% reduction in energy and 100% reduction in supplemental carbon and alkalinity requirements as compared to traditional nitrification-denitrification. The …

Characterization And Limitations Of Diffusion Tensor Imaging Metrics In The Cervical Spinal Cord In Neurologically Intact Subjects, Aditya Vedantam, Michael B. Jirjis, Brian D. Schmit, Marjorie C. Wang, John L. Ulmer, Shekar N. Kurpad

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose

To characterize diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) metrics across all levels of the cervical spinal cord (CSC) and to study the impact of age and signal quality on these metrics.

Materials and Methods

DTI metrics were calculated for gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) funiculi throughout the CSC (C1–T1) in 25 healthy subjects (22-85 years old). Signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and mean DTI metrics were measured for the upper (C1-3), middle (C4-6) and lower (C7-T1) cervical segments. Age-related changes in DTI metrics were analyzed for the individual segment groups.

Results

Fractional anisotropy (FA), mean diffusivity (MD) and transverse apparent diffusion …

Micro-Scale Dielectric Spectroscopy Of Biological Cells, Arindam Ghosh

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In recent years microfluidics has become one of the most commonly used tools to investigate cellular biology and to provide a platform for novel biomedical devices. Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) was formulated as a non-invasive and label-fi.ee method to investigate the dielectric and the structural properties of materials. Since the early 20th century, EIS and Dielectric Spectroscopy have been applied to measure the dielectric properties of biological cells and tissues. Information about the cell membrane, cytoplasm and the nucleus can be extracted by dielectric spectroscopy. This thesis focuses on the applicability of the analytical models, in particular the Maxwell-Wagner Interfacial …

Design And Implementation Of Software For Technological Forecasting And Modeling Technological Obsolescence, Gershom Kwaku Obeng

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In a world that is highly infused with technology, it is important that an organization knows how many resources such as manpower, equipment, and funding are needed at what time so that the organization does not suffer unnecessary risks. It is also important to know when to replace equipment. After examining different methods of forecasting, it was determined that manipulation of growth curves was the best way to determine the likelihood of device failure at a specific time. An approach in engineering economics was used to estimate the cost due to the failure of various devices or groups of devices. …

Effect Of Tilt Sensor Versus Heel Loading On Neuroprosthesis Stimulation Reliability And Timing For Individuals Post-Stroke During Level And Non- Level Treadmill Walking, M. Barbara Silver-Thorn

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Study background: Non-level walking may adversely affect stimulation of neuroprostheses as initial programming is performed during level walking. The objectives of this study were to assess stimulation reliability of tilt and heel sensor-based neuroprosthesis stimulation during level and non-level walking, examine stimulation initiation and termination timing during level and non-level walking, and determine whether heel or tilt sensor-based stimulation control is more robust for non-level ambulation. Methods: Eight post-stroke individuals with drop foot who were able to actively ambulate within the community were selected for participation. Each subject acclimated to the neuroprosthesis and walked on a treadmill randomly positioned in …

Efficiency Theory: A Unifying Theory For Information, Computation And Intelligence, Roman V. Yampolskiy

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The paper serves as the first contribution towards the development of the theory of efficiency: a unifying framework for the currently disjoint theories of information, complexity, communication and computation. Realizing the defining nature of the brute force approach in the fundamental concepts in all of the above mentioned fields, the paper suggests using efficiency or improvement over the brute force algorithm as a common unifying factor necessary for the creation of a unified theory of information manipulation. By defining such diverse terms as randomness, knowledge, intelligence and computability in terms of a common denominator we are able to bring together …

Identifiability Of Additive, Time-Varying Actuator And Sensor Faults By State Augmentation, Jason M. Upchurch

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Faults in dynamical systems can have serious safety and reliability implications. For example, actuator and sensor faults have been factors in past incidents and mishaps in many aerospace systems. A large body of research is devoted to developing methods to detect and identify actuator and sensor faults in such systems.

One fault detection and identification menthol employs state augmentation, whereby a set of time-varying faults of interest are modeled as outputs of exogenous linear, time-invariant systems and augmented to the state of the nominal system model. The resulting model represents the system dynamics due to a particular actuator-sensor fault configuration. …

Evidence Supporting Treatment Practice Based Delineation Of Stormwater Runoff Zones, Jacob J. Gorski

Dissertations and Theses

Particles mobilized by stormwater negatively affect receiving surface waters. Stormwater best management practices (BMPs) can reduce solids along with associated pollutants in runoff but engineers and environmental managers have been long vexed by the problem of choosing the optimal BMP for a given situation. A common BMP process for solids removal is sedimentation. This thesis addresses the question of whether the effectiveness (and thus choice) of a sedimentation device can be estimated (and thus optimized) from the particle size properties of runoff, which, in turn, could be associated with specific runoff zones or land uses. Presented here is a series …

Negotiating The Inclusion Of Nanoscience Content And Technology In Science Curriculum: An Examination Of Secondary Teachers' Thinking In A Professional Development Project, Jennifer Gayle Wells

Dissertations and Theses

The Next Generation Science Standards represent a significant challenge for K-12 school reform in the United States in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (NSTA, 2012). One important difference between the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996) and the Next Generation Science Standards (Achieve, 2013) is the more extensive inclusion of nanoscale science and technology. Teacher PD is a key vehicle for implementing this STEM education reform effort (NRC, 2012; Smith, 2001).

The context of this dissertation study is Project Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Outreach (NANO), a secondary level professional development program for teachers that provides a summer workshop, …

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Based Algorithms To Cluster Frequency Basis Functions For Monaural Sound Source Separation., Rajesh Jaiswal

Doctoral

Monophonic sound source separation (SSS) refers to a process that separates out audio signals produced from the individual sound sources in a given acoustic mixture, when the mixture signal is recorded using one microphone or is directly recorded onto one reproduction channel. Many audio applications such as pitch modification and automatic music transcription would benefit from the availability of segregated sound sources from the mixture of audio signals for further processing. Recently, Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has found application in monaural audio source separation due to its ability to factorize audio spectrograms into additive part-based basis functions, where the parts …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Encapsulated Nanosilica Particles With An Acrylic Copolymer By In Situ Emulsion Polymerization Using Thermoresponsive Nonionic Surfactant, Mostafa Yazdimamaghani, Tannaz Pourvala, Elaheh Motamedi, Babak Fathi, Daryoosh Vashaee, Lobat Tayebi

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Nanocomposites of encapsulated silica nanoparticles were prepared by in situ emulsion polymerization of acrylate monomers. The synthesized material showed good uniformity and dispersion of the inorganic components in the base polymer, which enhances the properties of the nanocomposite material. A nonionic surfactant with lower critical solution temperature (LCST) was used to encapsulate the silica nanoparticles in the acrylic copolymer matrix. This in situ method combined the surface modification and the encapsulation in a single pot, which greatly simplified the process compared with other conventional methods requiring separate processing steps. The morphology of the encapsulated nano silica particles was investigated by …

Money Laundering Detection Framework To Link The Disparate And Evolving Schemes, Murad Mehmet, Duminda Wijesekera, Miguel F. Buchholtz

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Money launderers hide traces of their transactions with the involvement of entities that participate in sophisticated schemes. Money laundering detection requires unraveling concealed connections among multiple but seemingly unrelated human money laundering networks, ties among actors of those schemes, and amounts of funds transferred among those entities. The link among small networks, either financial or social, is the primary factor that facilitates money laundering. Hence, the analysis of relations among money laundering networks is required to present the full structure of complex schemes. We propose a framework that uses sequence matching, case-based analysis, social network analysis, and complex event processing …

Optimal Via Placement In Under Filled Embedded Multimode Waveguides, Nicholas J. Riegel, Matthew Howard, Christopher Middlebrook

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The self-imaging property of multimode waveguides creates a challenging problem when finding the optimal placement position of an out-of-plane coupler for embedded waveguides. This problem is compounded when the waveguides are coupled using a small input such as a vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) or a single mode fiber where only some of the modes are generated. When the waveguide system is under filled, the coupling efficiency for the optical vertical interconnect assembly (VIA) can vary by as much as 6.2 dB depending on the length of the proceeding waveguide due to different output fields from the self-imaging property. …

Coupling Of The Biogeochemical Cycles Of Uranium And Manganese: Implications For The Fate And Transport Of Uranium In Subsurface Environments, Zimeng Wang

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Organic electron donor stimulated microbial reduction of U(VI) to U(IV) has been proposed as a strategy for the in situ immobilization of uranium contamination in the subsurface. The success of the bioremediation of uranium relies on the stability of the reduced U(IV) species: e.g., UO2) with respect to reoxidation and/or remobilization under groundwater conditions. Manganese is present at appreciable concentrations at several uranium-contaminated sites, and the redox cycling of manganese may significantly impact uranium's fate and transport. The biogeochemical coupling of uranium and manganese involves multiple interaction pathways that occur in the aqueous phase as well as at solid-water interfaces. …

Design Exploration And Analysis Of Carbon-Infiltrated Carbon Nanotube Vascular Stents, Darrell John Skousen

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to design, develop, and test coronary stent designs composed of carbon-infiltrated carbon nanotubes (CI-CNTs). Coronary stents currently have two major complications: restenosis and thrombosis. CI-CNT stents have potential to address both of these issues, and therefore may provide improved clinical outcomes. CI-CNT stent geometry is patterned using high-resolution photolithography that provide advantages in design possibilities.To develop a coronary stent, a standard design process was followed including: background, design specifications, concept generation, development, analysis, and testing. Background research was first completed and general design specifications for coronary stent performance were compiled. Multiple design concepts were …