Computer Engineering Commons^™

Dynamic Modeling And Optimal Design For Net Zero Energy Houses Including Hybrid Electric And Thermal Energy Storage, Huangjie Gong, Vandana Rallabandi, Dan M. Ionel, Donald Colliver, Shaun Duerr, Cristinel Ababei

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Net zero energy (NZE) houses purchase zero net metered electricity from the grid over a year. Technical challenges brought forth by NZE homes are related to the intermittent nature of solar generation, and are due to the fact that peak solar generation and load are not coincident. This leads to a large rate of change of load, and in case of high PV penetration communities, often requires the installation of gas power plants to service this variability. This article proposes a hybrid energy storage system including batteries and a variable power electric water heater which enables the NZE homes to …

Modeling And Simulation Of A 20kv Ultra-Fast Dc Circuit Breaker For Electric Shipboard Applications, Trevor Arvin, Jiangbiao He, Nathan Weise, Tiefu Zhao

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A novel hybrid circuit breaker for medium voltage dc (MVDC) electric shipboard power systems is proposed. The breaker combines the benefits of the efficiency of a mechanical breaker and the interruption speed of a solid-state breaker. The proposed breaker utilizes a fast-ramping current source with a fast-actuating vacuum interrupter (VI) to provided ultra-fast response time and high on-state efficiency. During normal operation, nominal load current flows through the vacuum interrupter in the main conduction branch, providing a low-resistance path with negligible losses. During a fault, a current zero crossing is achieved by the use of a controllable resonant current source …

Learning Acoustic Word Embeddings With Dynamic Time Warping Triplet Networks, Denis Shitov, Elena Pirogova, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Margaret Lech

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

In the last years, acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) have gained significant interest in the research community. It applies specifically to the application of acoustic embeddings in the Query-by Example Spoken Term Detection (QbE-STD) search and related word discrimination tasks. It has been shown that AWEs learned for the word or phone classification in one or several languages can outperform approaches that use dynamic time warping (DTW). In this paper, a new method of learning AWEs in the DTW framework is proposed. It employs a multitask triplet neural network to generate the AWEs. The triplet network learns acoustic representations of words …

Cup-Net: Compressed Ultrafast Photography Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Matthew Parker

ENGS 88 Honors Thesis (AB Students)

Compressed ultrafast photography (CUP) is a cutting-edge imaging technique that uses a variation of the traditional streak camera to obtain video at 100 billion frames per second with a single exposure. In order to achieve this level of temporal detail, CUP leverages compressed sensing (CS). Compressed sensing theory states that a compressed representation of an image can be directly acquired using a non-adaptive measurement matrix so long as the encoding matrix follows certain properties such as restrictive isometry and incoherence. This compressed representation of the original scene can later be reconstructed back into the original form. CUP applies CS by …

A Proactive-Restoration Technique For Sdns, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin

Conference papers

Failure incidents result in temporarily preventing the network from delivering services properly. Such a deterioration in services called service unavailability. The traditional fault management techniques, i.e. protection and restoration, are inevitably concerned with service unavailability due to the convergence time that is required to achieve the recovery when a failure occurs. However, with the global view feature of software-defined networking a failure prediction is becoming attainable, which in turn reduces the service interruptions that originated by failures. In this paper, we propose a proactive restoration technique that reconfigure the vulnerable routes which are likely to be affected if the …

High Speed, High Current Monitoring System, Nicolette Lila Ray

Electrical Engineering

Electronics testing requires lengthy data collection and analysis. Streamlining at least part of this process allows resource reallocation, and faster data processing. Verifying a signal’s efficiency is key specification for a component’s datasheet. This project focuses on streamlining data collection when measuring a device’s output current. It combines amplifier design and digital interfacing to perform monitor a device’s output current. A computer-enable interface displays a graphical output current representation. It ensures accurate, high speed, high current measurements while removing a person’s need to manually plot data after testing. A new testing method provides room for company and product growth with …

Biometric Identification With Ecg Signals, Connor Lindstrom, Jonathan Wood, Jacob Torchia, Jonathan Lee

Electrical Engineering

This project introduces a new form of biometric identification with an ECG signal with the use of machine learning concepts. The ECG signal makes a good candidate for identification because of its unique characteristics that make it easy to distinguish individuals from one another. A patient who has previously had ECG scans stored in a database before, can be verified using this program. This project has the capability of identifying a person or verifying a person solely using their ECG signal. Utilizing this biometric identification, hospitals would be able to add to the reliability of their identification process. Additionally, companies …

Polyone Smartphone, Joshua Zalmanowitz, Chi Nguyen, Gerome Cacho, Chris Lim

Electrical Engineering

The Poly One Smartphone is a student designed smartphone built to explore the implementation of 5G, provide a hardware solution to ensure personal information security and privacy, and provide longer battery life. The key features of this smartphone include but are not limited to a main cpu, some form of network connectivity in the form of Wi-fi or Cellular Data, calling functionality, a rechargeable battery that works with common power connection protocols, and compatibility with popular applications.

Upgrading Of A Data Communication And Computer Networks Course In Engineering Technology Program, Murat Kuzlu, Otilia Popescu

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Data network communications is traditionally a course offered by computer engineering technology curricula, with the primary objective to introduce to the fundamental concepts in data communication and computer networks, as well as some level of hands-on component related to this area. Typical topics in such courses are the layered model of data communication, specifically the OSI seven-layered model, Internet routing, communication standards, protocols and technologies, and learning methods used to design the network and send data over the network in a secure manner. In the last decades, the data communication and applications have grown and become ubiquitous in both industry …

Lawn Buddy, Jayson Johnston, Andrew Brown, Jacob Maljian

Electrical Engineering

Grass lawns are a common hallmark of the American home. In 2019, a survey from the National Association of Landscape Professionals found that 81% of all Americans owned a lawn [1]. Mowing is a time consuming and costly chore that is part of maintaining a grass lawn. The manual labor in mowing a lawn can exceed 40 hours per year [2]. People commonly incur weekly costs on mowing services to save time. Traditional gas powered mowers are physically demanding and use engines that need routine maintenance. They operate loudly enough that users should be wearing hearing protection and the noise …

The Characterization Of Effective Electromagnetic Fields On The Safety And Quality Of Low-Moisture Foods (Effs) - Prototype Device Development, Joe G. Sandoval

Electrical Engineering

Contamination of low-moisture foods including flour, wheat grain, baby formula, and more, have increasingly become a concern due to sanitizing challenges. While industrial food processors have long used RF heating to sanitize mass quantities, an equivalent consumer device is absent from the market today. The Characterization of Effective Electromagnetic Fields on the Safety and Quality of Low-Moisture Foods (EEFS) project is an interdisciplinary effort to develop an RF heating consumer device to sanitize low-moisture foods.

A prototype device was designed to sanitize low-moisture food items using RF heating acceptable for commercial or consumer applications.

Reading Robot, Gillian Watts, Andrew Myers, Sabrinna Tan, Taylor Klein, Omeed Djassemi

General Engineering

Presently, there is an insufficient availability of human experts to assist students in reading competency and comprehension. Our team’s goal was to create an improved socially assistive robot for use by therapists, teachers, and parents to help children and adults develop reading skills while they do not have access to specialists. HAPI is a socially assistive robot that we created with the goal of helping students practice their reading comprehension skills. HAPI enables a student to improve their reading skills without an educator present, while enabling educators to review the student's performance remotely. Design constraints included: physical size, weight, duration …

Work-In-Progress: Augmented Reality System For Vehicle Health Diagnostics And Maintenance, Yuzhong Shen, Anthony W. Dean, Rafael Landaeta

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper discusses undergraduate research to develop an augmented reality (AR) system for diagnostics and maintenance of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) employed by U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps. The JLTV’s diagnostic information will be accessed by attaching a Bluetooth adaptor (Ford Reference Vehicle Interface) to JLTV’s On-board diagnostics (OBD) system. The proposed AR system will be developed for mobile devices (Android and iOS tablets and phones) and it communicates with the JLTV’s OBD via Bluetooth. The AR application will contain a simplistic user interface that reads diagnostic data from the JLTV, shows vehicle sensors, and allows users …

Flux-Switching Permanent Magnet Machines: A Review Of Opportunities And Challenges—Part I: Fundamentals And Topologies, Hao Chen, Ayman M. El-Refaie, Nabeel A. O. Demerdash

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Flux-switching permanent magnet (FSPM) machines have been gaining interest over the last few decades. This is due to the several advantages that this type of machines provides. These advantages include high torque density due to the flux-focusing effects, favorable thermal management due to the location of PMs on the stator, passive and hence robust rotor structure which is suitable for high-speed applications, etc. The two-part companion articles are going to provide a comprehensive analysis of FSPM machines in terms of opportunities and challenges. In the first part of these two-part series, it covers the principle theory, computation methods, various topologies …

An Autoencoder And Artificial Neural Network-Based Method To Estimate Parity Status Of Wild Mosquitoes From Near-Infrared Spectra, Masabho Peter Milali, Samson S. Kiware, Nicodem J. Govella, Fredros Okumu, Naveen K. Bansal, Serdar Bozdag, Jacques D. Charlwood, Marta F. Maia, Sheila B. Ogoma, Floyd E. Dowell, George Corliss, Maggy T. Sikulu-Lord, Richard J. Povinelli

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

After mating, female mosquitoes need animal blood to develop their eggs. In the process of acquiring blood, they may acquire pathogens, which may cause different diseases in humans such as malaria, zika, dengue, and chikungunya. Therefore, knowing the parity status of mosquitoes is useful in control and evaluation of infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitoes, where parous mosquitoes are assumed to be potentially infectious. Ovary dissections, which are currently used to determine the parity status of mosquitoes, are very tedious and limited to few experts. An alternative to ovary dissections is near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which can estimate the age in days …

Communications With Spectrum Sharing In 5g Networks Via Drone-Mounted Base Stations, Liang Zhang

Dissertations

The fifth generation wireless network is designed to accommodate enormous traffic demands for the next decade and to satisfy varying quality of service for different users. Drone-mounted base stations (DBSs) characterized by high mobility and low cost intrinsic attributes can be deployed to enhance the network capacity. In-band full-duplex (IBFD) is a promising technology for future wireless communications that can potentially enhance the spectrum efficiency and the throughput capacity. Therefore, the following issues have been identified and investigated in this dissertation in order to achieve high spectrum efficiency and high user quality of service.

First, the problem of deploying DBSs …

Evaluating Driving Performance Of A Novel Behavior Planning Model On Connected Autonomous Vehicles, Keyur Shah

Honors Scholar Theses

Many current algorithms and approaches in autonomous driving attempt to solve the "trajectory generation" or "trajectory following” problems: given a target behavior (e.g. stay in the current lane at the speed limit or change lane), what trajectory should the vehicle follow, and what inputs should the driving agent apply to the throttle and brake to achieve this trajectory? In this work, we instead focus on the “behavior planning” problem—specifically, should an autonomous vehicle change lane or keep lane given the current state of the system?

In addition, current theory mainly focuses on single-vehicle systems, where vehicles do not communicate with …

Reducing Run-Time Adaptation Space Via Analysis Of Possible Utility Bounds, Clay Stevens, Hamid Bagheri

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Self-adaptive systems often employ dynamic programming or similar techniques to select optimal adaptations at run-time. These techniques suffer from the “curse of dimensionality", increasing the cost of run-time adaptation decisions. We propose a novel approach that improves upon the state-of-the-art proactive self-adaptation techniques to reduce the number of possible adaptations that need be considered for each run-time adaptation decision. The approach, realized in a tool called Thallium, employs a combination of automated formal modeling techniques to (i) analyze a structural model of the system showing which configurations are reachable from other configurations and (ii) compute the utility that can be …

Side-Channel Power Resistance For Encryption Algorithms Using Implementation Diversity, Ivan M. Bow

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This thesis paper investigates countermeasures to hardware side-channel attacks and proposes a new solution to this ever growing threat against data integrity and security. The side-channel attack methods, differential power analysis and correlation power analysis, are both very powerful techniques and are used to gain access to secrets inside of a field programmable gate array that are otherwise inaccessible, in particular the cryptographic key for the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm. To counter these attacks, we propose a method of changing the internal hardware configuration of the field programmable gate array using dynamic partial reconfiguration. Using this method, we change the …

Design Of A Drone-Flight-Enabled Wireless Isolation Chamber, John Wensowitch

Electrical Engineering Theses and Dissertations

The next wave of drone applications is moving from repeatable, single-drone activities such as evaluating propagation environments to team-based, multi-drone objectives such as drone-based emergency services. In parallel, testbeds have sought to evaluate emerging concepts such as highly-directional and distributed wireless communications. However, there is a lack of intersection between the two works to characterize the impact of the drone body, antenna placement, swarm topologies, and multi-dimensional connectivity needs that require in-flight experimentation with a surrounding testbed infrastructure. In this work, we design a drone-flight-enabled isolation chamber to capture complex spatial wireless channel relationships that drone links experience as applications …

A Quantile-Based Approach For Transmission Expansion Planning, Jairo Cervantes, F. Fred Choobineh

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Transmission expansion planning is an integral part of power system planning and consists of generating and selecting transmission proposals for maintaining sufficient transmission capacity to satisfy the electric load. Specifically, the desire to increase the use of renewable energy has exposed the limitations of transmission networks and has elevated the importance of transmission expansion planning. However, considering the random nature of renewable sources in conjunction with the power outages makes the planning process very challenging. We present a new procedure for selecting the best transmission enhancement proposal from a set of finite proposals under uncertainty. The selection is based on …

Joint-Srvdnet: Joint Super Resolution And Vehicle Detection Network, Moktari Mostofa, Syeda Nyma Ferdous, Benjamin S. Riggan, Nasser M. Nasrabadi

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

In many domestic and military applications, aerial vehicle detection and super-resolution algorithms are frequently developed and applied independently. However, aerial vehicle detection on super resolved images remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in the super-resolved images. To address this problem, we propose a Joint Super-Resolution and Vehicle Detection Network (Joint SRVDNet) that tries to generate discriminative, high-resolution images of vehicles from low-resolution aerial images. First, aerial images are up-scaled by a factor of 4x using a Multi-scale Generative Adversarial Network (MsGAN), which has multiple intermediate outputs with increasing resolutions. Second, a detector is trained on …

Rapid Restoration Techniques For Software-Defined Networks, Ali Malik, Ruairí De Fréin, Benjamin Aziz

Articles

There is increasing demand in modern day business applications for communication networks to be robust and reliable due to the complexity and critical nature of such applications. As such, data delivery is expected to be reliable and secure even in the harshest of environments. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is gaining traction as a promising approach for designing network architectures which are robust and flexible. One reason for this is that separating the data plane from the control plane, increases the controller’s ability to configure the network rapidly. When network failure events occur, the network manager may trade-off the optimality of the …

Stochastic Simulation Of Cellular Metabolism, Emalie J. Clement, Thomas T. Schulze, Ghada A. Soliman, Beata Joanna Wysocki, Paul H. Davis, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Increased technological methods have enabled the investigation of biology at nanoscale levels. Such systems require the use of computational methods to comprehend the complex interactions that occur. The dynamics of metabolic systems have been traditionally described utilizing differential equations without fully capturing the heterogeneity of biological systems. Stochastic modeling approaches have recently emerged with the capacity to incorporate the statistical properties of such systems. However, the processing of stochastic algorithms is a computationally intensive task with intrinsic limitations. Alternatively, the queueing theory approach, historically used in the evaluation of telecommunication networks, can significantly reduce the computational power required to generate …

Analysis And Design Of A Soft Switching Z-Source Boost Dc-Dc Converter, Mahdi Rezvanyvardom, Amin Mirzaei

Emirates Journal for Engineering Research

This paper proposes a high step-up fully soft switched Z-source Boost DC-DC converter, which uses two resonant paths to create soft switching conditions for switches and diodes and also increases the voltage gain. The proposed converter only has one switch, so it has a simple structure. Furthermore, its control circuit remains pulse width modulation. Since soft switching conditions are provided for all switching elements, the converter efficiency is very high. This converter also has all advantages of Z-source converters. The converter is analyzed and simulated in PSPICE software. The results confirm the aforementioned advantages and features of the proposed converter

Ml-Medic: A Preliminary Study Of An Interactive Visual Analysis Tool Facilitating Clinical Applications Of Machine Learning For Precision Medicine, Laura Stevens, David Kao, Jennifer Hall, Carsten Görg, Kaitlyn Abdo, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Accessible interactive tools that integrate machine learning methods with clinical research and reduce the programming experience required are needed to move science forward. Here, we present Machine Learning for Medical Exploration and Data-Inspired Care (ML-MEDIC), a point-and-click, interactive tool with a visual interface for facilitating machine learning and statistical analyses in clinical research. We deployed ML-MEDIC in the American Heart Association (AHA) Precision Medicine Platform to provide secure internet access and facilitate collaboration. ML-MEDIC’s efficacy for facilitating the adoption of machine learning was evaluated through two case studies in collaboration with clinical domain experts. A domain expert review was also …

Zenneck Waves In Decision Agriculture: An Empirical Verification And Application In Em-Based Underground Wireless Power Transfer, Usman Raza, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

In this article, the results of experiments for the observation of Zenneck surface waves in sub GHz frequency range using dipole antennas are presented. Experiments are conducted over three different soils for communications distances of up to 1 m. This empirical analysis confirms the existence of Zenneck waves over the soil surface. Through the power delay profile (PDP) analysis, it has been shown that other subsurface components exhibit rapid decay as compared to the Zenneck waves. A potential application of the Zenneck waves for energy transmission in the area of decision agriculture is explored. Accordingly, a novel wireless through-the-soil power …

Small Mode Volume Plasmonic Film-Coupled Nanostar Resonators, Negar Charchi, Ying Li, Margaret Huber, Elyahb Allie Kwizera, Xiaohua Huang, Christos Argyropoulos, Thang Hoang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Confining and controlling light in extreme subwavelength scales are tantalizing tasks. In this work, we report a study of individual plasmonic film-coupled nanostar resonators where polarized plasmonic optical modes are trapped in ultrasmall volumes. Individual gold nanostars, separated from a flat gold film by a thin dielectric spacer layer, exhibit a strong light confinement between the sub-10 nm volume of the nanostar's tips and the film. Through dark field scattering measurements of many individual nanostars, a statistical observation of the scattered spectra is obtained and compared with extensive simulation data to reveal the origins of the resonant peaks. We observe …

Deep Learning And Polar Transformation To Achieve A Novel Adaptive Automatic Modulation Classification Framework, Pejman Ghasemzadeh

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

Automatic modulation classification (AMC) is an approach that can be leveraged to identify an observed signal's most likely employed modulation scheme without any a priori knowledge of the intercepted signal. Of the three primary approaches proposed in literature, which are likelihood-based, distribution test-based, and feature-based (FB), the latter is considered to be the most promising approach for real-world implementations due to its favorable computational complexity and classification accuracy. FB AMC is comprised of two stages: feature extraction and labeling. In this thesis, we enhance the FB approach in both stages. In the feature extraction stage, we propose a new architecture …

An Fpga-Based Hardware Accelerator For The Digital Image Correlation Engine, Keaten Stokke

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The work presented in this thesis was aimed at the development of a hardware accelerator for the Digital Image Correlation engine (DICe) and compare two methods of data access, USB and Ethernet. The original DICe software package was created by Sandia National Laboratories and is written in C++. The software runs on any typical workstation PC and performs image correlation on available frame data produced by a camera. When DICe is introduced to a high volume of frames, the correlation time is on the order of days. The time to process and analyze data with DICe becomes a concern when …