Engineering Commons^™

Bayesian Adaptive Path Allocation Techniques For Intra-Datacenter Workloads, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin, Chih-Heng Ke, Hasanen Alyasiri, Obinna Izima

Conference papers

Data center networks (DCNs) are the backbone of many cloud and Internet services. They are vulnerable to link failures, that occur on a daily basis, with a high frequency. Service disruption due to link failure may incur financial losses, compliance breaches and reputation damage. Performance metrics such as packet loss and routing flaps are negatively affected by these failure events. We propose a new Bayesian learning approach towards adaptive path allocation that aims to improve DCN performance by reducing both packet loss and routing flaps ratios. The proposed approach incorporates historical information about link failure and usage probabilities into its …

Confidence Of Graduate Students In Engineering Masters’ Programs: A Comparison Of Returners And Direct-Pathway Students, Diane Peters, Elizabeth Gross

Mechanical Engineering Presentations And Conference Materials

Confidence is a critical factor in the success of graduate students; those who are not confident of their ability to succeed will have greater difficulties in persisting and graduating with the degree that they seek. Therefore, cultivating confidence is an important part of equipping graduate students for success, and the question of where confidence comes from is an important one. In this study, 300 graduate students were surveyed, including both returners (students with a gap of at least five years between completing their undergraduate education and starting graduate study) and direct pathway students (students with a gap less than five …

Development Of An Online Course In Research For Undergraduate Students, Diane Peters, Ronald Kumon, Garielle Feeny

Mechanical Engineering Presentations And Conference Materials

This Work in Progress paper will cover the development of an online course in research practices for undergraduate students. Active participation in research is an important part of experiential learning, which can help to prepare students for careers in a variety of settings including industrial R&D departments, academia, and government research labs. Undergraduate students’ research experiences may be limited in their value, however, by the learning curve students face as they begin to conduct research. The quality of their training may also be limited, with some receiving excellent training and orientation from a strong research lab or faculty mentor, and …

Risk-Based Construction Inspection, Timothy Taylor, Shannon Rush, Steve Waddle, Hala Nassereddine, Ryan Griffith, Makram Bou Hatoum

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Retirements and other forms of attrition have reduced employment levels at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) over the past 20 years. Left in the wake of staff departures is a younger and more inexperienced workforce that shoulders numerous responsibilities. Although operations throughout the Cabinet have been affected by staff losses, construction inspection has suffered disproportionately. Strategies for mitigating the impacts of staff loss include robust knowledge management and risk-based construction inspection. This project developed several tools to help KYTC implement a risk-based construction inspection program, including (1) heat maps that qualitatively rate the levels of risk for different construction activities; …

Determinants Of Water System Management, Caleb White

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Water system management is complex, involving state, local, and federal regulations and impacting people from a wide variety of socioeconomic backgrounds. Systems in the developing and industrialized worlds both face challenges in managing water systems. Much research has been completed regarding associations of water system violations and system factors, and there has been an increased attention to issues of environmental justice – how water system violations affect communities of color, impoverished communities, and rural communities. Currently no studies have focused on the associations between socioeconomic factors and water system management violations. The goal of this research was to ascertain the …

Fragility Functions Of Manufactured Houses Under Earthquake Loads, Shuyah Tani Aurore Ouoba

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Manufactured homes are factory-built homes made of wooden structural members, then transported and installed on a given site. Manufactured housing is used in many countries, such as in Australia, and in New Zealand but remain mostly popular in the United States. In 2020, nearly 22 million people were estimated to live in manufactured homes in the United States, with an increase of more than fifty percent in the shipment over the past seven years. However, performance observations from the last decades have shown the vulnerability of manufactured homes to extreme events, like windstorms and earthquakes. Damage assessments and post-event evaluations …

Grammatical Evolution For Detecting Cyberattacks In Internet Of Things Environments, Hasanen Alyasiri, John Clark, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionising nearly every aspect of modern life, playing an ever greater role in both industrial and domestic sectors. The increasing frequency of cyber-incidents is a consequence of the pervasiveness of IoT. Threats are becoming more sophisticated, with attackers using new attacks or modifying existing ones. Security teams must deal with a diverse and complex threat landscape that is constantly evolving. Traditional security solutions cannot protect such sys- tems adequately and so researchers have begun to use Machine Learning algorithms to discover effective defence systems. In this paper, we investigate how one approach from the …

Aggregated Generic Load Curve For Residential Electric Water Heaters, Huangjie Gong, Oluwaseun M. Akeyo, Tim Rooney, Brian T. Branecky, Dan M. Ionel

Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky Faculty Publications

Advanced control techniques may be used to regulate the operation of residential appliances to establish a virtual power plant. The electric water heater may be regarded as a “uni-directional battery” and a major component of a hybrid residential energy storage system. One of the main constraints of implementing demand response with EWH relates to the unpredictable customer behavior, which influences the domestic water tank temperature as well as the EWH operation cycle. This study analyzes the operation of multiple water heaters and develops an aggregated generic water heater load curve for the average residential customer based on experimental data retrieved …

Artificial Intelligence-Based Short-Term Electric Load Forecasts For Experimental Smart Homes Including Hvac And Pv Components, Rosemary E. Alden, Cristinel Ababei, Dan M. Ionel

Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky Presentations

Problem Formulation

• To predict electric load of the total average power as well as individual components for two residencies from experimental data
• Individual residential forecasting is difficult due to high variability of appliance usage and random human behavior influences
• Separate the HVAC load from total load as a desired profile using weather relationship and minimum HVAC load at night
• Data driven approach to reduce the amount of information about the home required

A Novel Demultiplexing Scheme For Vortex Beams In Radio Communication Systems, Yanming Zhang, Lijun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The orbital angular momentum (OAM) based communication is a promising technology in the wireless communication system for its improving spectrum efficiency. However, for the OAM demultiplexing, it requires a very large aperture size in the receiving end due to the OAM beam divergence and the amplitude null in the beam center, which restricts the full development of OAM based communication. In this paper, we propose a novel partial arc sampling receiving (PASR) scheme based on the augmented dynamic mode decomposition (ADMD) to solve this issue. We explore the use of the phase delay coordinates in the conventional DMD to sort …

Development Of A Smart Grid Course In An Electrical Engineering Technology Program, Murat Kuzlu, Otilia Popescu, Vukica M. Jovanovic

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Electric power systems courses have been traditionally offered by electrical engineering technology programs for a long time, with the main objective to introduce students to the fundamental concepts in the field of electric power systems and electrical to mechanical energy conversion. A typical electric power systems course covers a variety of topics, such as general aspects of electric power system design, electric generators, components of transmission and distribution systems, power flow analysis, system operation, and performance measures. In the last decades, electric power systems have significantly modernized alongside with requirement of improvement in system efficiency, reliability, cybersecurity, and environmental sustainability. …

Senior Elective Communications Systems Courses As Pathways To Capstone Projects In Electrical Engineering Technology Program, Otilia Popescu, Murat Kuzlu

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

In any engineering program the capstone project is the most comprehensive work completed by the students, and is regarded as the pinnacle of their engineering studies, with all their course work culminating with this major design, implementation and reporting product. Coming up with the actual topic of the project is sometimes the most difficult part of the project, especially in programs where the project topics are not solely proposed by the faculty, and they are for the student and advisor to develop together. This is especially the case of engineering technology programs, where a large percentage of students have work …

A Look Into Increasing The Number Of Veterans And Former Government Employees Converting To Career And Technical Cybersecurity Teachers, Vukica M. Jovanovic, Michael Anthony Crespo, Drew E. Brown, Deborah Marshall, Otilia Popescu, Murat Kuzlu, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Linda Vahala

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

The current state of technology with recent explosions in the digital processing of paperwork, computer networking use, and online and virtual approaches to areas, which until very recently had traditional and non-computerized ways of operating, led to a steady increase in the demand for jobs in the area of computer science and cybersecurity. The education system, the pipeline for the incoming workforce, needs to keep up with this tremendous pace in technology and the job market. The current K-12 school system has been extensively challenged to fill out necessary positions in order to address the increasing need for programs that …

Jme 4110: Portable Car Wash, Coleman Kaufman, Sara Wilson

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

We met with our target customer to understand their needs for the ideal portable car wash. Their key needs included use by any sized passenger vehicle, washing the car as good as a community car wash, and must be portable. We started by researching current products that could match these needs, and then we sketched four of our own designs to match our customer’s needs. With these design sketches we used a metrics tool to determine which design was the best. From there we did engineering calculations to analyze the trouble spots in our design, such as the water pressure …

Automated Wound Segmentation And Dimension Measurement Using Rgb-D Image, Chih-Yun Pai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Accurate pressure ulcer (PrU) measurement is critical in assessing the effectiveness of PrU treatment. The traditional measurement process is manual, subjective, and requires frequent contact with the wound. The manual measurement relies on human observation which makes the measurement inconsistent, and the frequent contact with the wound increases risk of contamination or infection. The purpose of this research was to develop an automatic Pressure Ulcer Monitoring System (PrUMS) using a depth camera to provide automated, non-contact wound measurement. In this dissertation, 1) a wound segmentation with traditional machine learning method, which combines the color classification using K-Nearest Neighbors and the …

Data-Oriented Approaches Towards Mobile, Network And Secure Systems, Shangqing Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the rapid evolvement of information science, data-oriented research has solicited a new philosophy for the future mobile network and security design, since it can not only encourage new designs achieving more efficient and reliable networks, but also pose new challenges towards security designs. In this dissertation, we propose four novel data-oriented designs or frameworks to prompt or calibrate the performance with respect to efficiency, reliability, and security.

In the wireless domain, packet corruption and packet collision are two major threats that jeopardize the performance of a mobile network. To cope with the packet corruption, we propose the STAteful inter-Packet …

Assessing Intuition Used Among Undergraduate Engineering Technology And Engineering Students, Melissa Cai Shi, Therese M. Azevedo, Anne M. Lucietto

School of Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Intuition plays an essential role in decision-making and is independent of an analytical way of thinking that is considered a gut feeling. Individuals can shape their intuition, and each field of study develops a variety of skills and trains students for a way of thinking needed for that specific area. A focus on undergraduate engineering technology students and comparing them to undergraduate engineering students allows this study to examine the types of intuition used by these two groups. The Types of Intuition Scale (TIntS), an established, validated instrument, which categorizes intuition into inferential, affective, holistic abstract, and holistic big picture …

Design And Flight-Path Simulation Of A Dynamic-Soaring Uav, Gladston Joseph

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

We address the development of a dynamic-soaring capable unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) optimized for long-duration flight with no on-board power consumption. The UAV’s aerodynamic properties are captured with the integration of variable fidelity aerodynamic analyses. In addition to this, a 6 degree-of-freedom flight simulation environment is designed to include the effects of atmospheric wind conditions. A simple flight control system aids in the development of the dynamic soaring maneuver. A modular design paradigm is adopted for the aircraft dynamics model, which makes it conducive to use the same environment to simulate other aircraft models. Multiple wind-shear models are synthesized to …

Modeling Of A Hybrid-Electric System And Design Of Control Laws For Hybrid-Electric Urban Air Mobility Power Plants, Sohail Bin Salam Lahaji

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) is an emerging market and technology in the aerospace industry. These systems are being developed to overcome traffic congestion. The current designs make use of Distributed Electric Propulsion (DEP): either fully electric or hybrid electric. The hybrid engine system consists of two power sources: prime movers, such as turbine engines, and batteries. The hybrid systems offer higher range and endurance compared with the existing fully electric systems. Hybrid-electric power generation systems for AAM have different mission requirements when compared to systems used in automobiles. Therefore, there is a particular need to model hybrid-electric systems and the …

Fault Tolerant Deep Reinforcement Learning For Aerospace Applications, Christoph Elias Aoun

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

With the growing use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, a new need has risen for intelligent algorithms that not only stabilize or control the system, but rather would also include various factors such as optimality, robustness, adaptability, tracking, decision making, and many more. In this thesis, a deep-learning-based control system is designed with fault-tolerant and disturbance rejection capabilities and applied to a high-order nonlinear dynamic system. The approach uses a Reinforcement Learning architecture that combines concepts from optimal control, robust control, and game theory to create an optimally adaptive control for disturbance rejection. Additionally, a cascaded Observer-based Kalman Filter is formulated …

On The Local Heat Transfer Behavior Of Supercritical Carbon Dioxide, Neil Sullivan

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

A detailed study of the local heat transfer behavior of supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) is performed. Flows relevant to heat transfer devices, such as sCO2 heaters, recuperators, and internally cooled turbine blades are studied, with particular attention paid to data reduction methodology, and the use of appropriate reference quantities, nondimensionalizations, and correlations. Additionally, a semi-intrusive temperature measurement technique capable of obtaining highly spatially resolved temperature distributions is adapted for use in the challenging conditions of supercritical (SC) flow. SC fluids have proven difficult to study both experimentally and numerically due to dramatically changing thermodynamic and transport properties near the critical …

Forecasting Stock Exchange Data Using Group Method Of Data Handling Neural Network Approach, Marzieh Faridi Masouleh, Ahmad Bagheri

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

The increasing uncertainty of the natural world has motivated computer scientists to seek out the best approach to technological problems. Nature-inspired problem solving approaches include meta-heuristic methods that are focused on evolutionary computation and swarm intelligence. One of these problems significantly impacting information is forecasting exchange index, which is a serious concern with the growth and decline of stock as there are many reports on loss of financial resources or profitability. When the exchange includes an extensive set of diverse stock, particular concepts and mechanisms for physical security, network security, encryption, and permissions should guarantee and predict its future needs. …

Backpropagation Neural Network With Combination Of Activation Functions For Inbound Traffic Prediction, Purnawansyah Purnawansyah, Haviluddin Haviluddin, Herdianti Darwis, Huzain Azis, Yulita Salim

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Predicting network traffic is crucial for preventing congestion and gaining superior quality of network services. This research aims to use backpropagation to predict the inbound level to understand and determine internet usage. The architecture consists of one input layer, two hidden layers, and one output layer. The study compares three activation functions: sigmoid, rectified linear unit (ReLU), and hyperbolic Tangent (tanh). Three learning rates: 0.1, 0.5, and 0.9 represent low, moderate, and high rates, respectively. Based on the result, in terms of a single form of activation function, although sigmoid provides the least RMSE and MSE values, the ReLu function …

Do Missing Link Community Smell Affect Developers Productivity: An Empirical Study, Toukir Ahammed, Sumon Ahmed, Mohammed Shafiul Alam Khan

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Missing link smell occurs when developers contribute to the same source code without communicating with each other. Existing studies have analyzed the relationship of missing link smells with code smell and developer contribution. However, the productivity of developers involved in missing link smell has not been explored yet. This study investigates how productivity differs between smelly and non-smelly developers. For this purpose, the productivity of smelly and non-smelly developers of seven open-source projects are analyzed. The result shows that the developers not involved in missing link smell have more productivity than the developers involved in smells. The observed difference is …

Indonesian Sentence Boundary Detection Using Deep Learning Approaches, Joan Santoso, Esther Irawati Setiawan, Christian Nathaniel Purwanto, Fachrul Kurniawan

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Detecting the sentence boundary is one of the crucial pre-processing steps in natural language processing. It can define the boundary of a sentence since the border between a sentence, and another sentence might be ambiguous. Because there are multiple separators and dynamic sentence patterns, using a full stop at the end of a sentence is sometimes inappropriate. This research uses a deep learning approach to split each sentence from an Indonesian news document. Hence, there is no need to define any handcrafted features or rules. In Part of Speech Tagging and Named Entity Recognition, we use sequence labeling to determine …

Face Images Classification Using Vgg-Cnn, I Nyoman Gede Arya Astawa, Made Leo Radhitya, I Wayan Raka Ardana, Felix Andika Dwiyanto

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Image classification is a fundamental problem in computer vision. In facial recognition, image classification can speed up the training process and also significantly improve accuracy. The use of deep learning methods in facial recognition has been commonly used. One of them is the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) method which has high accuracy. Furthermore, this study aims to combine CNN for facial recognition and VGG for the classification process. The process begins by input the face image. Then, the preprocessor feature extractor method is used for transfer learning. This study uses a VGG-face model as an optimization model of transfer learning …

Detection Of Disease And Pest Of Kenaf Plant Based On Image Recognition With Vggnet19, Diny Melsye Nurul Fajri, Wayan Firdaus Mahmudy, Titiek Yulianti

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

One of the advantages of Kenaf fiber as an environmental management product that is currently in the center of attention is the use of Kenaf fiber for luxury car interiors with environmentally friendly plastic materials. The opportunity to export Kenaf fiber raw material will provide significant benefits, especially in the agricultural sector in Indonesia. However, there are problems in several areas of Kenaf's garden, namely plants that are attacked by diseases and pests, which cause reduced yields and even death. This problem is caused by the lack of expertise and working hours of extension workers as well as farmers' knowledge …

Arhgdia Confers Selective Advantage To Dissociated Human Pluripotent Stem Cells, Marion J. Riggs, Steven D. Sheridan, Raj R. Rao

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) have generated significant interest in the scientific community based on their potential applications in regenerative medicine. However, numerous research groups have reported a propensity for genomic alterations during hPSC culture that poses concerns for basic research and clinical applications. Work from our laboratory and others has demonstrated that amplification of chromosomal regions is correlated with increased gene expression. To date, the phenotypic association of common genomic alterations remains unclear and is a cause for concern during clinical use. In this study, we focus on trisomy 17 and a list of candidate genes with increased gene …

Response-To-Failure Analysis Of Global Food System Initiatives: A Resilience Perspective, Prince Agyemang, Ebenezer Miezah Kwofie

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

International food system initiatives have led the efforts to combat the threats to global food security resulting from the failure of the current food systems. This study set out to investigate and assess the contributions of global food system initiatives in tackling the food system challenges. In assessing the food system initiatives, we develop a three-step methodology for Food System Initiative (FSI) selection and then conduct a qualitative evaluation using relevant indicators based on food system failure narratives. Furthermore, the authors synthesize present literature in the context of the extent to which coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has compounded food …

Optimization Of 3d Printed Mold Performance For Injection Molding Via Hollow Infill Patterns, Alan Fong

University Honors Theses

The applicability of hollow infill patterns has been explored for its applications in making 3D printed polymer-based injection molds in the additive manufacturing industry. Hollow infill patterns offer a significant reduction in material costs as well as the opportunity for reducing the cooling times via pumping a coolant fluid through the hollow cavity in a similar fashion to traditional conformal cooling channels. A 3D Jacks Support Hollow mold model was determined to be the best performing design. FEA analysis was conducted to determine the maximum reduction in internal volume (percentage of material saved) that could be achieved without exceeding the …