Engineering Commons^™

The Santa Clara, 2019-05-09, Santa Clara University

The Santa Clara

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The Effect Of Heterobifunctional Crosslinkers On Hema Hydrogel Modulus And Toughness, Elizabeth M. Boazak, Vaughn K. Greene Jr., Debra T. Auguste

Publications and Research

The use of hydrogels in load bearing applications is often limited by insufficient toughness. 2-Hydroxyethyl methacrylate (HEMA) based hydrogels are appealing for translational work, as they are affordable and the use of HEMA is FDA approved. Furthermore, HEMA is photopolymerizable, providing spatiotemporal control over mechanical properties. We evaluated the ability of vinyl methacrylate (VM), allyl methacrylate (AM), and 3-(Acryloyloxy)-2-hydroxypropyl methacrylate (AHPM) to tune hydrogel toughness and Young’s modulus. The crosslinkers were selected due to their heterobifunctionality (vinyl and methacrylate) and similar size and structure to EGDMA, which was shown previously to increase toughness as compared to longer crosslinkers. Vinyl methacrylate …

Problem Based Learning: A Case Study From Mechanical Engineering, Kevin Delaney, Ger Nagle

Conference papers

Engineering graduates today must be capable of much more than solving technical problems taught in engineering school. Despite learning to quantify the performance of certain engineering objects, undergraduate students find it challenging to integrate these elements into basic design concepts through a coherent and systematic design process. To help students develop real-world engineering skills as part of their engineering education, the Mechanical Engineering Discipline in Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) introduced Problem Based Learning (PBL) for Third Year Mechanical Engineering students in 2005.

A recent review of this teaching approach highlighted deficiencies not envisaged when the initial PBL module was …

Development Of Digital Bathymetry Maps For Lakes Azuei And Enriquillo Using Sonar And Remote Sensing Techniques, Michael Piasecki, Mahrokh Moknatian, Fred Moshary, Jorge Gonzalez

Publications and Research

This article presents an improved algorithm for optimization and development of a digital bathymetric model (DBM) for Lake Azuei (LA) (Haiti) and Lake Enriquillo (LE) (Dominican Republic) using the ANUDEM method. Both sonar data and contour lines of the lakes’ layout extracted using Landsat imagery were compiled for bathymetry development. We show that the performance of the ANUDEM method was strongly dependent on the density and irregularity of the spatial distribution of the data. Changing the resolution of the output grids and deriving auxiliary topographically corrected contours improved the ANUDEM performance and minimized the systematic errors of the method. Statistical …

Worker Demographics And Earnings On Amazon Mechanical Turk: An Exploratory Analysis, Kotaro Hara, Kristy Milland, Benjamin V. Hanrahan, Chris Callison-Burch, Abigail Adams, Saiph Savage, Jeffrey P. Bigham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prior research reported that workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) are underpaid, earning about $2/h. But the prior research did not investigate the difference in wage due to worker characteristics (e.g., country of residence). We present the first data-driven analysis on wage gap on AMT. Using work log data and demographic data collected via online survey, we analyse the gap in wage due to different factors. We show that there is indeed wage gap; for example, workers in the U.S. earn $3.01/h while those in India earn $1.41/h on average.

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2019, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge. The senior design competition helps focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on …

A Modular Data Acquisition Device And Biosignal Amplifier Design, Erin Bratu

Honors Theses

The purpose of this research project is to revise a previous design of a modular data collection device and to develop a biosignal amplifier for use in EEG research. The primary goals of the device redesign were to address the challenges identified at the conclusion of the previous research and to either reaffirm or update various aspects of the implementation – primarily the main components that make up the device. The amplifier circuitry is designed to provide both amplification of the input signals and preliminary filtering of undesirable noise artifacts caused by common environmental sources. Both the collection device and …

Transportation Engineering Student Takes Two Major Awards | College Of Engineering, Utah State University

College of Engineering News

Utah State University PhD student of transportation engineering Yi He won the 2019 Utah Institute of Transportation Engineers student paper competition and was awarded a $1,000 scholarship from the Northern Utah Women's Transportation Seminar.

Using The Xenopus Developmental Eye Regrowth Stystem To Distinguish The Role Of Developmental Versus Regenerative Mechanisms, Cindy X. Kha, Dylan J. Guerin, Kelly Ai-Sun Tseng

Life Sciences Faculty Research

A longstanding challenge in regeneration biology is to understand the role of developmental mechanisms in restoring lost or damaged tissues and organs. As these body structures were built during embryogenesis, it is not surprising that a number of developmental mechanisms are also active during regeneration. However, it remains unclear whether developmental mechanisms act similarly or differently during regeneration as compared to development. Since regeneration is studied in the context of mature, differentiated tissues, it is difficult to evaluate comparative studies with developmental processes due to the latter’s highly proliferative environment. We have taken a more direct approach to study regeneration …

Do Transportation Network Companies Decrease Or Increase Congestion?, Gregory D. Erhardt, Sneha Roy, Drew Cooper, Bhargava Sana, Mei Chen, Joe Castiglione

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

This research examines whether transportation network companies (TNCs), such as Uber and Lyft, live up to their stated vision of reducing congestion in major cities. Existing research has produced conflicting results and has been hampered by a lack of data. Using data scraped from the application programming interfaces of two TNCs, combined with observed travel time data, we find that contrary to their vision, TNCs are the biggest contributor to growing traffic congestion in San Francisco. Between 2010 and 2016, weekday vehicle hours of delay increased by 62% compared to 22% in a counterfactual 2016 scenario without TNCs. The findings …

Equivalent Annual Operating Cost Of Reactors In A Discrete Optimized Styrene Process, S Arizona Morgan-Harris

Honors Theses

Beginning in the fall semester, I was a member of a team that simulated and optimized a styrene production process in Microsoft Excel. After the base case was simulated, parametric and topological optimizations were completed. The optimizations had to be completed in a certain order that starts with the reactor section, then move to the separation section, heat recovery section, heating/cooling utilities section, and ends with the water and effluent treatment section. During this project, the first three sections were explored. Optimizing the base case was completed by making these changes to see how they increased the net present value …

A Cooperative Overlay Approach At The Physical Layer Of Cognitive Radio For Digital Agriculture, Abdul Salam, Umit Karabiyik

Faculty Publications

In digital agriculture, the cognitive radio technology is being envisaged as solution to spectral shortage problems by allowing agricultural cognitive users to co-exist with noncognitive users in the same spectrum on the field. Cognitive radios increase system capacity and spectral efficiency by sensing the spectrum and adapting the transmission parameters. This design requires a robust, adaptable and flexible physical layer to support cognitive radio functionality. In this paper, a novel physical layer architecture for cognitive radio based on cognition, cooperation, and cognitive interference avoidance has been developed by using power control for digital agriculture applications. The design is based on …

Low-Energy Acceleration Of Binarized Convolutional Neural Networks Using A Spin Hall Effect Based Logic-In-Memory Architecture, Ashkan Samiee, Payal Borulkar, Ronald F. Demara, Peiyi Zhao, Yu Bai

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Deep Learning (DL) offers the advantages of high accuracy performance at tasks such as image recognition, learning of complex intelligent behaviors, and large-scale information retrieval problems such as intelligent web search. To attain the benefits of DL, the high computational and energy-consumption demands imposed by the underlying processing, interconnect, and memory devices on which software-based DL executes can benefit substantially from innovative hardware implementations. Logic-in-Memory (LIM) architectures offer potential approaches to attaining such throughput goals within area and energy constraints starting with the lowest layers of the hardware stack. In this paper, we develop a Spintronic Logic-in-Memory (S-LIM) XNOR neural …

Safety Culture Awareness In Aviation Maintenance: Foundations To Present, Tori Kobayashi

Student Works

Safety Culture awareness in aviation maintenance organizations is necessary for the performance of effective maintenance and the safe operation of aircraft. Maintenance organizations that promote a strong culture of safety encourage honesty and integrity within the workplace. The environment where maintenance is performed differs from other aviation related operations. The promotion of safety in maintenance operations has been proven over time in publications written by the earliest pioneer in aviation safety, Jerome Lederer. The awareness of safety culture in aviation maintenance has evolved with the industry to the present day.

Differential Estimation Of Audiograms Using Gaussian Process Active Model Selection, Trevor Larsen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Classical methods for psychometric function estimation either require excessive resources to perform, as in the method of constants, or produce only a low resolution approximation of the target psychometric function, as in adaptive staircase or up-down procedures. This thesis makes two primary contributions to the estimation of the audiogram, a clinically relevant psychometric function estimated by querying a patient’s for audibility of a collection of tones. First, it covers the implementation of a Gaussian process model for learning an audiogram using another audiogram as a prior belief to speed up the learning procedure. Second, it implements a use case of …

Development Of A Design Guideline For Pile Foundations Subjected To Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Spreading, Milad Souri, Arash Khosravifar

Student Research Symposium

Past earthquakes confirmed that seismically induced kinematic loads from soil lateral spreading and inertial loads from structure can cause severe damages to pile foundations. The research questions are:

• How to combine inertial and kinematic loads in design of pile foundations in liquefied soil?
• How the combination of inertia and kinematics changes with depth?
• How this combination is affected by long-duration earthquakes?
• How this combination affects inelastic demands in piles?

Explanation Methods For Neural Networks, Jack H. Chen, Christof Teuscher

Student Research Symposium

Neural Networks (NNs) have become a basis of almost all state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms and classifiers. While NNs have been shown to generalize well to real-world examples, researchers have struggled to show why they work on an intuitive level. We designed several methods to explain the decisions of two state-of-the-art NN classifiers, ResNet and an All-CNN, in the context of the Japanese Society of Radiological Technology (JSRT) lung nodule dataset and the CIFAR-10 image dataset. Leading explanation methods LIME and Grad-CAM generate variations of heat maps which represent the regions of the input determined salient by the NN. We analyze …

Diagnostic Imaging Of Structural Concrete Using Ground Penetrating Radar And Ultrasonic Array, Sina Mehdinia, Thomas Schumacher, Eric Wan, Xubo Song

Student Research Symposium

Structural concrete is the most widely used construction material in the world. Many structures critical to a society such as bridges, hospitals, and airports are built with concrete. While this material is well understood from a mechanical design point of view, still no accurate quantitative tools exist to assess it for damage and deterioration. This is of particular concern for an urban area like Portland with a mega-thrust earthquake waiting to occur. Non-destructive evaluation tools that can quickly and accurately give a full picture of the integrity of structural concrete elements will be key to help plan effective and safe …

An Assessment Of The Decision Making Units’ Efficiency In Service Systems (The Case Of Cellular Telecom), Maoloud Dabab, Timothy R. Anderson

Student Research Symposium

Most tools and models on performance and quality of service management are generic and do not solve the complex technical systems, which the most critical component on the network and where these tools should be applied. The objective of this research is to assess the cellular performance and Base Transceiver Station (BTS) efficiency by proposing a robust model that is derived from multiple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) based on technical and financial aspects. The novelty of this research provides a comprehensive multidimensional model for tuning the BTS parameters, which can lead to developing a standard global mobile network KPI. The …

Reliable Explanations Via Adversarial Examples On Robust Networks, Walt Woods, Jack H. Chen, Christof Teuscher

Student Research Symposium

Neural Networks (NNs) are increasingly used as the basis of advanced machine learning techniques in sensitive fields such as autonomous vehicles and medical imaging. However, NNs have been found vulnerable to a class of imperceptible attacks, called adversarial examples, which arbitrarily alter the output of the network. To close the schism between needing reliability in real-world applications and the fragility of NNs, we propose a new method for stabilizing networks, and show that as an added bonus, our technique results in reliable, high-fidelity explanations for the NN's decision. Compared to the state-of-the-art, this technique increased the area under the curve …

Exploring And Expanding The One-Pixel Attack, Umairullah Khan, Walt Woods, Christof Teuscher

Student Research Symposium

In machine learning research, adversarial examples are normal inputs to a classifier that have been specifically perturbed to cause the model to misclassify the input. These perturbations rarely affect the human readability of an input, even though the model’s output is drastically different. Recent work has demonstrated that image-classifying deep neural networks (DNNs) can be reliably fooled with the modification of a single pixel in the input image, without knowledge of a DNN’s internal parameters. This “one-pixel attack” utilizes an iterative evolutionary optimizer known as differential evolution (DE) to find the most effective pixel to perturb, via the evaluation of …

Congratulations 2019 Graduates | College Of Engineering, Utah State University

College of Engineering News

The College of Engineering at Utah State Univerisity congratulates all students who graduated May 2.

Computationally Efficient Optimization Of A Five-Phase Flux-Switching Pm Machine Under Different Operating Conditions, Hao Chen, Xiangdong Liu, Nabeel Demerdash, Ayman M. El-Refaie, Zhen Chen, Jiangbiao He

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

This paper investigates the comparative design optimizations of a five-phase outer-rotor flux-switching permanent magnet (FSPM) machine for in-wheel traction applications. To improve the comprehensive performance of the motor, two kinds of large-scale design optimizations under different operating conditions are performed and compared, including the traditional optimization performed at the rated operating point and the optimization targeting the whole driving cycles. Three driving cycles are taken into account, namely, the urban dynamometer driving schedule (UDDS), the highway fuel economy driving schedule (HWFET), and the combined UDDS/HWFET, representing the city, highway, and combined city/highway driving, respectively. Meanwhile, the computationally efficient finite-element analysis …

A Review On Mixed Criticality Methods, Alex Jenkel

Recent Advances in Real-Time Systems

Within the study of mixed criticality scheduling, there are many different aspects that must be considered—resources, processor speeds, number of processors, etc.—that make scheduling theories difficult to produce. Two papers address specific aspects of mixed criticality scheduling, and this paper compares the two different methods and also builds upon them.

High Speed Mid Altitude Aircraft Project, Eric Yan

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This project designs aircraft that addresses the space constraint that limits airport capacity by exploiting lift created by flying aircraft at high speeds (350-500KIAS) in the mid altitudes of FL100-FL200 to increase the payload of smaller aircraft. Three solutions with the length and wingspan footprint of the Boeing 737-800 are produced using the software X-Plane, then virtually flight tested for various performance data. The results find that adoption of these designs can yield significant capacity increases, albeit at reduced fuel efficiency.

Twitter And Disasters: A Social Resilience Fingerprint, Benjamin A. Rachunok, Jackson B. Bennett, Roshanak Nateghi

Purdue University Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund

Understanding the resilience of a community facing a crisis event is critical to improving its adaptive capacity. Community resilience has been conceptualized as a function of the resilience of components of a community such as ecological, infrastructure, economic, and social systems, etc. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a “resilience fingerprint” and propose a multi-dimensional method for analyzing components of community resilience by leveraging existing definitions of community resilience with data from the social network Twitter. Twitter data from 14 events are analyzed and their resulting resilience fingerprints computed. We compare the fingerprints between events and show that …

Wearable Devices For Single-Cell Sensing And Transfection, Lingqian Chang, Yu-Chieh Wang, Faheem Ershad, Ruiguo Yang, Cunjiang Yu, Yubo Fan

Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering: Faculty Publications

Wearable healthcare devices are mainly used for biosensing and transdermal delivery. Recent advances in wearable biosensors allow for long-term and real-time monitoring of physiological conditions at a cellular resolution. Transdermal drug delivery systems have been further scaled down, enabling wide selections of cargo, from natural molecules (e.g., insulin and glucose) to bioengineered molecules (e.g., nanoparticles). Some emerging nanopatches show promise for precise single-cell gene transfection in vivo and have advantages over conventional tools in terms of delivery efficiency, safety, and controllability of delivered dose. In this review, we discuss recent technical advances in wearable micro/nano devices with unique capabilities or …

Synergy And Timing: A Concurrent Mass Medical Campaign Predicted To Augment Indoor Residual Spraying For Malaria, Richard C. Elliott, David L. Smith, Dorothy C. Echodu

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Control programmes for high burden countries are tasked with charting effective multi-year strategies for malaria control within significant resource constraints. Synergies between different control tools, in which more than additive benefit accrues from interventions used together, are of interest because they may be used to obtain savings or to maximize health impact per expenditure. One commonly used intervention in sub-Saharan Africa is indoor residual spraying (IRS), typically deployed through a mass campaign. While possible synergies between IRS and long-lasting insecticide-treated nets (LLINs) have been investigated in multiple transmission settings, coordinated synergy between IRS and other mass medical distribution campaigns …

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