Computer Engineering Commons^™

Internet Of Things In Smart Agriculture: Enabling Technologies, Abdul Salam, Syed Shah

Faculty Publications

In this paper, an IoT technology research and innovation roadmap for the field of precision agriculture (PA) is presented. Many recent practical trends and the challenges have been highlighted. Some important objectives for integrated technology research and education in precision agriculture are described. Effective IoT based communications and sensing approaches to mitigate challenges in the area of precision agriculture are presented.

Autonomous Combat Robot, Andrew J. Szabo Ii, Chris Heldman, Tristin Weber, Tanya Tebcherani, Holden Leblanc, Fabian Ardeljan

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This honors project will also serve as an engineering senior design project.

The objective is to design and build the software and electrical systems for a 60 lb weight class combat robot that will function autonomously and outperform manually driven robots during competition.

While running autonomously, the robot will use LiDAR sensors to detect and attack opponent robots. This robot will also be able to be remote controlled in manual mode. This will mitigate the risk in case the autonomy or sensors fail. LED lights on the robot will indicate whether it is in autonomous or manual mode. The system …

Safe Pass, Alycia Riese, Julia Hariharan, Greg Synek, Jonathan Hall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this project is to design a sensor to be mounted on Class IV and higher vehicles to detect on-coming traffic. If traffic has been detected, the system is to warn drivers behind the stopped vehicle that passing is unsafe. The vehicle detection is to be implemented using a LiDAR detection method along with signal processing. A wireless transceiver is to transmit from the front radar module to the rear warning indicator module when the conditions are unsafe for passing. The project goals are to increase road safety and maintain traffic flow. The report details the challenges due …

A Practitioner Survey Exploring The Value Of Forensic Tools, Ai, Filtering, & Safer Presentation For Investigating Child Sexual Abuse Material, Laura Sanchez, Cinthya Grajeda, Ibrahim Baggili, Cory Hall

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

For those investigating cases of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), there is the potential harm of experiencing trauma after illicit content exposure over a period of time. Research has shown that those working on such cases can experience psychological distress. As a result, there has been a greater effort to create and implement technologies that reduce exposure to CSAM. However, not much work has explored gathering insight regarding the functionality, effectiveness, accuracy, and importance of digital forensic tools and data science technologies from practitioners who use them. This study focused specifically on examining the value practitioners give to the tools …

Curricular Optimization: Solving For The Optimal Student Success Pathway, William G. Thompson-Arjona

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Considering the significant investment of higher education made by students and their families, graduating in a timely manner is of the utmost importance. Delay attributed to drop out or the retaking of a course adds cost and negatively affects a student’s academic progression. Considering this, it becomes paramount for institutions to focus on student success in relation to term scheduling.

Often overlooked, complexity of a course schedule may be one of the most important factors in whether or not a student successfully completes his or her degree. More often than not students entering an institution as a first time full …

The Next-Generation Retail Electricity Market In The Context Of Distributed Energy Resources: Vision And Integrating Framework, Josue Campos Do Prado, Wei Qiao, Liyan Qu, Julio Romero Aguero

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The increasing adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs) and smart grid technologies (SGTs) by end-user retail customers is changing significantly both technical and economic operations in the distribution grid. The next-generation retail electricity market will promote decentralization, efficiency, and competitiveness by accommodating existing and new agents through new business models and transactive approaches in an advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). However, these changes will bring several technical challenges to be addressed in transmission and distribution systems. Considerable activities have been carried out worldwide to study the impacts of integrating DERs into the grid and in the wholesale electricity market. However, the …

The Temporal-Spatial Evolution Of Electron Dynamics Induced By Femtosecond Double Pulses, Changji Pan, Lan Jiang, Jingya Sun, Qingsong Wang, Feifei Wang, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The temporal and spatial electron dynamics were investigated under irradiation of temporally shaped femtosecond double pulses. Filament split was observed upon arrival of the second pulse, which was attributed to the emergence of transient high-reflective surface induced by the first pulse. The electron density analysis showed that the total deposition energy of double pulses case was generally higher than that of single pulse case. Particularly, the maximum deposition energy was obtained at 350 fs separation time of double pulses. The results of our experiment demonstrated optimization of energy deposition efficiency by temporally shaping laser pulses, which will benefit the fabrication …

Neutrophil Activation In Systemic Capillary Leak Syndrome (Clarkson Disease), Zhihui Xie, Douglas B. Kuhns, Xuesong Gu, Hasan H. Otu, Towia A. Libermann, John I. Gallin, Samir M. Parikh, Kirk M. Druey

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Systemic capillary leak syndrome (SCLS; Clarkson disease) is a rare orphan disorder characterized by transient yet recurrent episodes of hypotension and peripheral oedema due to diffuse vascular leakage of fluids and proteins into soft tissues. Humoral mediators, cellular responses and genetic features accounting for the clinical phenotype of SCLS are virtually unknown. Here, we searched for factors altered in acute SCLS plasma relative to matched convalescent samples using multiplexed aptamer‐based proteomic screening. Relative amounts of 612 proteins were changed greater than twofold and 81 proteins were changed at least threefold. Among the most enriched proteins in acute SCLS plasma were …

Direct Observation Of Structure-Assisted Filament Splitting During Ultrafast Multiplepulse Laser Ablation, Feifei Wang, Changji Pan, Jingya Sun, Qingsong Wang, Yongfeng Lu, Lan Jiang

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Laser-induced plasma evolution in fused silica through multipulse laser ablation was studied using pump-probe technology. Filament splitting was observed in the early stage of plasma evolution (before ~300 fs). This phenomenon can be attributed to competition between laser divergent propagation induced by a pre-pulse-induced crater and the nonlinear self-focusing effect. This effect was validated through simulation results. With the increasing pulse number, the appearance of filament peak electron density was postponed. Furthermore, a second peak in the filament and peak position separation were observed because of an optical path difference between the lasers propagating from the crater center and edge. …

Monitoring Aging Of Power Semiconductor Devices Based On Case Temperature, Wei Qiao, Ze Wang, Liyan Qu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The aging of an electronic component in an electronic power converter can be monitored based on two or more case temperature measurements. A power electronic device is enclosed in a package having a baseplate, in which the power electronic device generates heat during operation and the baseplate transfers heat to a heat dissipating device or a cooling device. Sensors measure temperatures at first and second locations on a surface of the baseplate. A data processor calculates a value for a first parameter based on the temperatures at the first and second locations, in which the first parameter is indicative of …

Multi-Pig Part Detection And Association With A Fully-Convolutional Network, Eric T. Psota, Mateusz Mittek, Lance C. Pérez, Ty Schmidt, Benny Mote

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Computer vision systems have the potential to provide automated, non-invasive monitoring of livestock animals, however, the lack of public datasets with well-defined targets and evaluation metrics presents a significant challenge for researchers. Consequently, existing solutions often focus on achieving task-specific objectives using relatively small, private datasets. This work introduces a new dataset and method for instance-level detection of multiple pigs in group-housed environments. The method uses a single fully-convolutional neural network to detect the location and orientation of each animal, where both body part locations and pairwise associations are represented in the image space. Accompanying this method is a new …

Beam Manipulation Mechanisms Of Dielectric Metasurfaces, Baoshan Guo, Lan Jiang, Yanhong Hua, Ningwei Zhan, Jingang Jia, Kunpeng Chu, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Dielectric metasurfaces can achieve flexible beam manipulations. Herein, we study dielectric metasurfaces with different refractive indices, periods, incident angles, and cross-sectional shapes to determine the metasurface working mechanisms. Perfect transmission mainly depends on multipolar interference that can be used to control the transmission modes through the hybrid periods, hybrid cross sections, and multilayers. Perfect reflection is strongly influenced by the period of the metasurface and occurs only when the period is shorter than incident wavelength, which can be attributed to the lattice coupling. Furthermore, lattice coupling can be classified into two types with distinct properties: vertical mode and horizontal mode …

Foreword For The Inaugural Issue, Dongming Guo, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing is a leading, worldwide scientific journal focused on the fields of extreme manufacturing. Published within it are the latest scientific and engineering achievements in related fields, as well as pioneering scientific, technological, and engineering innovations and developments.

Zebrafish Macroh2a Variants Have Distinct Embryo Localization And Function, E. Gonzalez-Munoz, Y. Arboleda-Estudillo, S. K. Chanumolu, H. H. Otu, J. B. Cibelli

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Mouse and cell-based studies have shown that macroH2A histone variants predominantly associate with heterochromatin. Functional studies found that macroH2As are involved in gene repression, inhibiting the acquisition of pluripotency and preserving cell differentiation. However, only a few studies have analysed the role of macroH2A during early embryo development. We report the development of transgenic zebrafish lines expressing macroH2A isoforms (mH2A1 and mH2A2) fusion proteins (with GFP) under identified endogenous promoters. We found that mH2A1 and mH2A2 have different spatial and temporal expression patterns during embryonic development. mH2A1 is expressed mostly in the extraembryonic Yolk Syncytial Layer (YSL) starting before shield …

Rechargeable Multi - Cell Battery, Wei Qiao, Taesic Kim, Liyan Qu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A method for power management of a multi-cell battery includes identifying a desired power value and voltage value, determining a battery voltage value and a battery current value for a battery, determining a number of battery banks from a plurality of battery banks to use for the battery, where each battery bank includes one or more battery cells (or battery modules), checking availability of each of the one or more battery cells (or battery modules), selecting one or more battery banks from the plurality of battery banks, where the selection of a battery bank is based on the availability of …

On Spectral Analysis Of The Internet Delay Space And Detecting Anomalous Routing Paths, Gonca Gürsun

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Latency is one of the most critical performance metrics for a wide range of applications. Therefore, it is important to understand the underlying mechanisms that give rise to the observed latency values and diagnose the ones that are unexpectedly high. In this paper, we study the Internet delay space via robust principal component analysis (RPCA). Using RPCA, we show that the delay space, i.e. the matrix of measured round trip times between end hosts, can be decomposed into two components: the estimated latency between end hosts with respect to the current state of the Internet and the inflation on the …

Classification Of Generic System Dynamics Model Outputs Via Supervised Time Series Pattern Discovery, Mert Edali, Mustafa Gökçe Baydoğan, Gönenç Yücel

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

System dynamics (SD) is a simulation-based approach for analyzing feedback-rich systems. An ideal SD modeling cycle requires evaluating the qualitative pattern characteristics of a large set of time series model output for testing, validation, scenario analysis, and policy analysis purposes. This traditionally requires expert judgement, which limits the extent of experimentation due to time constraints. Although time series recognition approaches can help to automate such an evaluation, utilization of them has been limited to a hidden Markov model classifier, namely the Indirect Structure Testing Software (ISTS) algorithm. Despite being used within several automated model-analysis tools, ISTS has several shortcomings. In …

Graph Analysis Of Network Flow Connectivity Behaviors, Hangyu Hu, Xuemeng Zhai, Mingda Wang, Guangmin Hu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Graph-based approaches have been widely employed to facilitate in analyzing network flow connectivity behaviors, which aim to understand the impacts and patterns of network events. However, existing approaches suffer from lack of connectivity-behavior information and loss of network event identification. In this paper, we propose network flow connectivity graphs (NFCGs) to capture network flow behavior for modeling social behaviors from network entities. Given a set of flows, edges of a NFCG are generated by connecting pairwise hosts who communicate with each other. To preserve more information about network flows, we also embed node-ranking values and edge-weight vectors into the original …

A Comparative Study Of Author Gender Identification, Tuğba Yildiz

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In recent years, author gender identification has gained considerable attention in the fields of information retrieval and computational linguistics. In this paper, we employ and evaluate different learning approaches based on machine learning (ML) and neural network language models to address the problem of author gender identification. First, several ML classifiers are applied to the features obtained by bag-of-words. Secondly, datasets are represented by a low-dimensional real-valued vector using Word2vec, GloVe, and Doc2vec, which are on par with ML classifiers in terms of accuracy. Lastly, neural networks architectures, the convolution neural network and recurrent neural network, are trained and their …

Multiscanning Mode Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopy System, Mert Aktürk, Gökhan Gümüş, Baykal Sarioğlu, Yi̇ği̇t Dağhan Gökdel

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this paper, a table-top, reflective mode, laser scanning confocal microscopy system that is capable of scanning the target specimen alternately through various scanning devices and methods is proposed. We have developed a laser scanning confocal microscopy system to utilize combinations of various scanning devices and methods and to be able to characterize the optical performance of different scanners and micromirrors that are frequently used in scanning microscopy systems such as multiphoton microscopy, optical coherence tomography, or confocal microscopy. By integrating the scanner to be characterized on the same optical path with a galvanometric scan mirror, which is the conventional …

Hybrid Self-Controlled Precharge-Free Cam Design For Low Power And High Performance, V V Satyanarayana Satti, Sridevi Sriadibhatla

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Content-addressable memory (CAM) is a prominent hardware for high-speed lookup search, but consumes larger power. Traditional NOR and NAND match-line (ML) architectures suffer from a short circuit current path sharing and charge sharing respectively during precharge. The recently proposed precharge-free CAM suffers from high search delay and the subsequently proposed self-controlled precharge-free CAM suffers from high power consumption. This paper presents a hybrid self-controlled precharge-free (HSCPF) CAM architecture, which uses a novel charge control circuitry to reduce search delay as well as power consumption. The proposed and existing CAM ML architectures were developed using CMOS 45nm technology node with a …

Structure Tensor Adaptive Total Variation For Image Restoration, Surya Prasath, Dang Nh Thanh

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Image denoising and restoration is one of the basic requirements in many digital image processing systems. Variational regularization methods are widely used for removing noise without destroying edges that are important visual cues. This paper provides an adaptive version of the total variation regularization model that incorporates structure tensor eigenvalues for better edge preservation without creating blocky artifacts associated with gradient-based approaches. Experimental results on a variety of noisy images indicate that the proposed structure tensor adaptive total variation obtains promising results and compared with other methods, gets better structure preservation and robust noise removal.

A Kalman Filter Application For Rainfall Estimation Using Radar Reflectivity Measurements, Engi̇n Maşazade, Ali̇ Kemal Bakir, Pinar Kirci

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The rainfall amount observed at a given location mostly depend on the cloud density, which can be quantified with the reflectivity values observed by meteorology weather radars. In this study, we aim to estimate the rainfall amount using a Kalman filter with radar reflectivity measurements. We first assume that the amount of rainfall observed at automatic weather observation stations (AWOSs) are elements of an unknown state vector and consider the Kalman filter process model as the true rainfall amounts observed at these AWOSs over time. For the measurement model of the Kalman filter, we use the radar reflectivity values observed …

Probabilistic Small-Signal Stability Analysis Of Power System With Solar Farm Integration, Samundra Gurung, Sumate Naetiladdanon, Anawach Sangswang

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Currently, large-scale solar farms are being rapidly integrated in electrical grids all over the world. However, the photovoltaic (PV) output power is highly intermittent in nature and can also be correlated with other solar farms located at different places. Moreover, the increasing PV penetration also results in large solar forecast error and its impact on power system stability should be estimated. The effects of these quantities on small-signal stability are difficult to quantify using deterministic techniques but can be conveniently estimated using probabilistic methods. For this purpose, the authors have developed a method of probabilistic analysis based on combined cumulant …

A Hybrid Model For The Prediction Of Aluminum Foil Output Thickness In Cold Rolling Process, Ali̇ Öztürk, Ri̇fat Şeherli̇

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This study proposes a hybrid model composed of multiple prediction algorithms and an autoregressive moving average (ARMA) module for the thickness prediction. In order to attain higher accuracy, the prediction algorithms were globally combined by simple voting to reduce the effect of the inductive bias imposed by each algorithm on the dataset. The global multiexpert combination (GMEC) system included the multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN), radial basis function network (RBFN), multiple linear regression (MLR), and support vector machines (SVM) algorithms. The proposed hybrid model extends the GMEC system by integrating an ARMA module for the output. On the test dataset, …

Triangular Slotted Ground Plane: A Key To Realizing High-Gain, Cross-Polarization-Free Microstrip Antenna With Improved Bandwidth, Abhijyoti Ghosh, Banani Basu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

A simple rectangular microstrip antenna with triangular slotted ground plane has been studied both theoretically and experimentally to improve shortcomings like low gain (5 - 6 dBi), narrow bandwidth (3% - 4%), and poor copolarization (CP) to cross-polarization (XP) isolation, i.e. polarization purity (typically 10 - 12 dB), of conventional rectangular microstrip patch antennas. By placing two pairs of triangular shaped slots on the ground plane just below the nonradiating edges of the patch, high gain (around 9 dBi) and more than 22 dB polarization purity over a wide elevation angle has been achieved. The proposed antenna covers almost the …

Invisible Watermarking Framework That Authenticates And Prevents The Visualization Of Anaglyph Images For Copyright Protection, David-Octavio Muñoz-Ramirez, Volodymyr Ponomaryov, Rogelio Reyes-Reyes, Clara Cruz-Ramos, Beatriz-Paulina Garcia-Salgado

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this work, a watermarking framework to authenticate and protect the copyright that prevents the visualization of nonauthorized anaglyph images is proposed. Designed scheme embeds a binary watermark and the Blue channel of the anaglyph image into the discrete cosine transform domain of the original image. The proposed method applies the quantization index modulation-dither modulation algorithm and a combination of Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem with repetition codes, which permit to increase the capability in recovering the watermark. Additionally, Hash algorithm is used to scramble the component where the watermark should be embedding, guaranteeing a higher security performance of the scheme. This new technique …

Combined Feature Compression Encoding In Image Retrieval, Lu Huo, Leijie Zhang

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Recently, features extracted by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are popularly used for image retrieval. In CNN representation, high-level features are usually chosen to represent the images in coarse-grained datasets, while mid-level features are successfully applied to describe the images for fine-grained datasets. In this paper, we combine these different levels of features as a joint feature to propose a robust representation that is suitable for both coarse-grained and fine-grained image retrieval datasets. In addition, in order to solve the problem that the efficiency of image retrieval is influenced by the dimensionality of indexing, a unified subspace learning model named spectral …

A Hybrid Of Tropical-Singular Value Decomposition Method For Salt And Pepper Noise Removal, Achmad Abdurrazzaq, Ismail Mohd, Ahmad Kadri Junoh, Zainab Yahya

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The unknown information contained in an image that causes the change of information in the image is called noise. In this paper, we propose a new method for removing salt and pepper noise by using singular value decomposition and the concept of tropical algebra operations. To determine the performance of the proposed method, 20 test images are used as samples. Then three different image quality assessments are used: peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity (SSIM), and image enhancement factor (IEF). In addition, six different filtering methods, i.e. MF, DWMF, PSMF, MDBUTM, NAFSM, and BPDF, are used to compare the performance …

A Novel Algorithm For Frequency Extraction Of Abs Signals By Using Dtdnns, Mohammad Ali Shafieian, Hamed Banizaman, Shahrzad Sedaghat

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Intelligent transportations system (ITSs) have emerged to increase safety and convenience of people in vehicles. In an ITS, communication devices in the vehicle or along the streets send the information gathered from the vehicle to information management centers as well as sending processed information to the vehicle. Furthermore, it is necessary to locate the exact location of the vehicle on a digital map in order to navigate the vehicle precisely in control and navigation systems. One of the technologies for this purpose is the antilock brake system (ABS), which can avoid accidents effectively and can also be utilized to determine …