Computer Engineering Commons^™

Modeling And Stability Analysis Of Nonlinear Sampled-Data Systems With Embedded Recovery Algorithms, Heber Herencia-Zapana

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Computer control systems for safety critical systems are designed to be fault tolerant and reliable, however, soft errors triggered by harsh environments can affect the performance of these control systems. The soft errors of interest which occur randomly, are nondestructive and introduce a failure that lasts a random duration. To minimize the effect of these errors, safety critical systems with error recovery mechanisms are being investigated. The main goals of this dissertation are to develop modeling and analysis tools for sampled-data control systems that are implemented with such error recovery mechanisms. First, the mathematical model and the well-posedness of the …

Biomarker Identification For Prostate Cancer Using An Efficient Feature Selection Algorithm, Vamsi Krishnam Raju Mantena

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

In recent years, there has been an increased interest in using protein mass spectrometry to identify biomarkers that discriminate diseased from healthy individuals. A biomarker is a characteristic that is objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biological processes, pathological processes, or pharmacological responses to a therapeutic intervention. Identifying biomarkers will be an important step towards disease characterization and patient management. One challenge of biomarker identification is how to handle the high dimensional mass spectral data. In this thesis, we applied an efficient feature selection algorithm to mass spectrometry data obtained from prostate tissue samples to identify prostate …

An Agent-Based Combat Simulation Framework In Support Of Effect-Based And Net-Centric Evaluation, Robert Joseph Bowen

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The use of information technologies (IT) and information networks has proliferated in industry as a method to achieve competitive advantage. The U.S. Military and its allies, in recent years, have employed IT to improve the way they conduct operations, speed decision making, and increase the span of control of commanders. This has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way military commanders employ combat units today. These (Information Age) forces no longer have to be able to see each other or even communicate directly in order to synchronize maneuvers. Dispersion is now favored over mass, relying on the IT network …

Using Timed-Release Cryptography To Mitigate Preservation Risk Of Embargo Periods, Rabia Haq

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

This research defines Time-Locked Embargo, a framework designed to mitigate the Preservation Risk Interval: the preservation risk associated with embargoed scholarly material. Due to temporary access restrictions, embargoed data cannot be distributed freely and thus preserved via data refreshing during the embargo time interval. A solution to mitigate the risk of data loss has been developed by suggesting a data dissemination framework that allows data refreshing of encrypted instances of embargoed content in an open, unrestricted scholarly community. This framework has been developed by exploiting implementations of existing technologies to"time-lock" data using Timed-Release Cryptology (TRC) so that it can be …

Performance Of Adaptive Wireless Systems With Feedback, Sirisha Koduri

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Future generations of wireless systems will employ versatile transmitters and receivers based on software defined radios that are capable of adapting in response to changes in the operating environment to meet the specified quality of service requirements. In adaptive wireless systems, transmitters use feedback from the receiver to update characteristics of the transmitted signal to changing patterns of interference. In this thesis, the performance of transmitter adaptation algorithms with limited feedback and the system performance as a function in which the interference information is quantized for transmission over the feedback channel are analyzed. The results of this thesis were presented …

Immersive Active Learning For Virtual Laboratory Experiments, Swetha Punnandla

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A Laboratory Immersive Interactive Virtual Environment (LIIVE) for scientific experiments is developed using MAY A and Virtools. The LIIVE is used as a pre-lab practice module to familiarize the students with the equipment, procedure and parameters involved in a laboratory experiment. The system has been assessed for its effectiveness as a learning tool by administering a project and a quiz to each participant and conducting a structured observation during the actual laboratory experiment on the real equipment. The learning effect achieved by the LIIVE is compared to the learning effects obtained by the less immersive 2D virtual environment and the …

Congestion Mitigation In Wireless Sensor Networks Using Single-Hop Backpressure Algorithm, Vijay Shekar Mangilipalli Gangu Sham

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks consist of a group of small components with limited resources allocated to sense the environment and transmit data to the user or interpreter. This concept is technically evolved from Sensors that are basically used to sense the environment around and collect data based on the sensing application incorporated in them. An extension to functionality of the sensors leads to the concept of sensor networks, where, in addition to gathering information at individual sensors, the data is processed and transmitted to a central station or Base station. This concept of transmitting the information from one node to the …

Using Agile Software Development Practices In A Research Oriented Distributed Simulation, Douglas James Mielke

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Although sometimes controversial, agile methodologies have proven to be a viable choice for some software development projects. Projects suited to agile methodologies are those that involve new technology, have requirements that change rapidly, and are controlled by small, talented teams. Much literature about agile software development leans towards business products and non-government entities. Only a handful of literature resources mention agile software development being used in government contracts and even fewer resources mention research projects. NASA's Airspace and Traffic Operations Simulation (ATOS) is a research oriented simulation that doesn't follow the traditional business project mold. In an effort to gain …

Integrating Preservation Functions Into The Web Server, Joan A. Smith

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Digital preservation of theWorldWideWeb poses unique challenges, different fromthe preservation issues facing professional Digital Libraries. The complete list of a website’s resources cannot be cited with confidence, and the descriptive metadata available for the resources is so minimal that it is sometimes insufficient for a browser to recognize. In short, the Web suffers from a counting problem and a representation problem. Refreshing the bits, migrating from an obsolete file format to a newer format, and other classic digital preservation problems also affect the Web. As digital collections devise solutions to these problems, the Web will also benefit. But the core …

Extending The Network Life Time In Wsn Using Energy Efficient Algorithm, Venkata Sesha Sai Koundinya Goparaju

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless Sensor networks have many potential applications. These wireless sensor networks necessitate specific design requirements of which energy efficiency is vital. The sensor networks consist of sensor nodes that operate on battery power, and replacement of these batteries is very often a strenuous task, since networks are deployed in areas where the act of replacing the batteries proves impractical.

With the limited available energy of sensor nodes, most of the energy is drained during communication. An energy efficient routing algorithm can prolong the lifetime of the network by gradually depleting the nodes in the network. Many of the routing protocols …

A Weighted Modular Principal Component Analysis Approach For Face Authentication, Chandrika Tummala

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A weighted modular approach for face authentication based on the priorities of different facial regions that change with varying poses, expressions and occlusions is presented in this thesis. This helps in verifying the identity of an individual who claims to be a subject in the database and is unaware of the presence of the face authentication system. A sequence of face images is selected from a video in a particular predefined interval and is used for verification. The face images are divided into different horizontal modules based on the regions representing facial features. A principal component analysis on these modules …

Evaluation Of The Applicability Of Jc3iedm Based Information Exchange Standardization Efforts To Link-16 Based Systems, Anthony Devivi

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Command and Control (C2) systems are critical components in decision-making systems in both the military and civilian domains. These systems act as the data evaluation and dissemination tools for larger Command, Control, Computer, Communication, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Recognizance (C4ISR) systems. Typical C2 systems accept a wide variety of inputs from many sources such as radars, weapons systems, simulators, operators, and other C2 systems. The C2 system processes the input data and presents to the user information with which decisions are made. The C2 system also determines what information should be translated and disseminated to other C2 platforms.

The basis for …

Community-Of-Interest (Coi) Model-Based Languages Enabling Composable Net-Centric Services, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

Net-centric services shall be designed to collaborate with other services used within the supported Community of Interest (COI). This requires that such services not only be integratable on the technical level and interoperable on the implementation level, but also that they are composable in the sense that they are semantically and pragmatically consistent and able to exchange information in a consistent and unambiguous way.

In order to support Command-and-Control with Composable Net-centric Services, the human-machine interoperation must be supported as well as the machine-machine interoperation. This paper shows that techniques of computer linguistic can support the human-machine interface by structuring …

Creating Preservation-Ready Web Resources, Joan A. Smith, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

There are innumerable departmental, community, and personal web sites worthy of long-term preservation but proportionally fewer archivists available to properly prepare and process such sites. We propose a simple model for such everyday web sites which takes advantage of the web server itself to help prepare the site's resources for preservation. This is accomplished by having metadata utilities analyze the resource at the time of dissemination. The web server responds to the archiving repository crawler by sending both the resource and the just-in-time generated metadata as a straight-forward XML-formatted response. We call this complex object (resource + metadata) a CRATE. …

Efficient Corona Training Protocols For Sensor Networks, Alan A. Bertossi, Stephan Olariu, Cristina M. Pinotti

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Phenomenal advances in nano-technology and packaging have made it possible to develop miniaturized low-power devices that integrate sensing, special-purpose computing, and wireless communications capabilities. It is expected that these small devices, referred to as sensors, will be mass-produced and deployed, making their production cost negligible. Due to their small form factor and modest non-renewable energy budget, individual sensors are not expected to be GPS-enabled. Moreover, in most applications, exact geographic location is not necessary, and all that the individual sensors need is a coarse-grain location awareness. The task of acquiring such a coarse-grain location awareness is referred to as training. …

Lazy Preservation: Reconstructing Websites From The Web Infrastructure, Frank Mccown

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Backup or preservation of websites is often not considered until after a catastrophic event has occurred. In the face of complete website loss, webmasters or concerned third parties have attempted to recover some of their websites from the Internet Archive. Still others have sought to retrieve missing resources from the caches of commercial search engines. Inspired by these post hoc reconstruction attempts, this dissertation introduces the concept of lazy preservation{ digital preservation performed as a result of the normal operations of the Web Infrastructure (web archives, search engines and caches). First, the Web Infrastructure (WI) is characterized by its preservation …

A Modular Kernel Linear Discriminant Analysis Of Gabor Features For Improved Face Recognition, Neeharika Gudur

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Automatic face recognition is one of the major challenges in computer vision and pattern analysis. This thesis presents an efficient face recognition system that is robust with regards to changes in illumination, facial expressions and partial occlusions. Modular Kernel Linear Discriminant Analysis performed on Gabor Features obtained from the face images is employed for improving face recognition accuracy. A face image is pre-processed using the 2D Gabor wavelet transform to achieve invariance to illumination in images. Modular approaches that divide the pre-processed images into smaller sub-images provide improved accuracy, as the facial variations in an image are confined to local …

Neighborhood Defined Adaboost Based Mixture Of Color Components For Efficient Skin Segmentation, Ramya Reddy Maaram

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A skin segmentation algorithm robust to illumination changes and skin-like backgrounds is developed in this thesis. So far skin pixel classification has been limited to only individual color spaces and there has not been a comprehensive evaluation of which color components or combination of color components would provide the best classification accuracy, Color components in a given color space form the feature set for the classification of skin pixels. The combination of the color components or the features present within a single color space may not be the best when it comes to skin pixel classification as the discriminatory power …

Simulation To Augment Standardized Patients In Obstetric Ultrasound Training, Scott Richard Guirlinger

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Standardized patients are actors used in medical training to teach and eval11atc clinical skills of students prior to their using these skills on an actual patient. Augmented Reality is a relatively new technology that can be used to augment standardized patients with abnonnalitie8 and pathologies that they cannot portray themselves as normal healthy human beings. In our project, we sought to augment standardized patients with a 12-week- old fetus in order to train and possibly evaluate medical students and professionals in performing obstetric ultrasound procedures and interpreting the corresponding ultrasound image results.

The software library ARToolkit provided the framework for …

Distributed Cluster-Based Outlier Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks, Swetha Gali

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks find several potential applications in a variety of fields, such as environmental monitoring and control, battlefields, surveillance, smart buildings, human health monitoring, etc. These sensor networks consist of a large number of very tiny, inexpensive, and low power sensor nodes, which are deployed in a variety of harsh environments that may result in the sensor data getting corrupted. It is thus critical to detect and report these abnormal values in the sensor data, in order to have a better understanding of the monitored environment. Detection of the abnormal values is of special interest for the sensor network …

Channel Management In Heterogeneous Cellular Networks, Mohammad Hadi Arbabi

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Motivated by the need to increase system capacity in the face of tight FCC regulations, modem cellular systems are under constant pressure to increase the sharing of the frequency spectrum among the users of the network.

Key to increasing system capacity is an efficient channel management strategy that provides higher capacity for the system while, at the same time, providing the users with Quality of Service guarantees. Not surprisingly, dynamic channel management has become a high profile topic in wireless communications. Consider a highly populated urban area, where mobile traffic loads are increased due to highway backups or sporting events. …

Dynamic Routing Structure For An Rti Taking An Evolutionary Approach Towards Optimization, Matthew Ryan Davis

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) is the common communication framework that High Level Architecture (HLA) simulations incorporate to exchange data. By abstracting the network communication layer from simulation, a common protocol for information exchange is achieved, allowing any RTI- based simulation to exchange data with any other. Such commonality can bring a limitation upon the network infrastructure, enforcing all federates to agree on the same communication policy. While this static network structure is not always the case, an optimal choice would be to adhere to the dynamic properties of a network. Static network configurations deny federates the ability to dynamically avoid …

A Wavelet Based Complementary Approach For Image Enhancement, Ismail Kosum

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Detail in an image means more meaningful information that is very important in many computer vision and pattern recognition applications. The object region visibility in an image plays an important role in obtaining accurate and desired information from the original image. In particular, image processing techniques developed for region segmentation and object classification have better results depending on the visibility in images. There are several enhancement techniques available which are capable of obtaining clear images with balanced lighting and contrast. In this thesis, a completely image dependent approach to enhance the luminance of images under extreme lighting conditions and a …

Detecting Compromised Nodes In Wireless Sensor Networks, Mary Lisa Mathews

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

While wireless sensor networks are proving to be a versatile tool, many of the applications in which they are utilized have sensitive data. Therefore, security is crucial in many of these applications. Once a sensor node has been compromised, the security of the network degrades quickly if measures are not taken to deal with this event. There have been many approaches researched to tackle the issue. In this thesis, an anomaly-based intrusion detection protocol is developed to detect compromised nodes in wireless sensor networks.

The proposed protocol is implemented after the sensors are deployed into the environment in which they …

Performance Analysis Of Ieee 802.11b Devices In The Presence Of Interference Aware Scheduling-Adaptive Frequency Hopping Enabled Bluetooth Devices, Deepthi Gopalpet

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless Local Area networks (WLAN) and Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) provide complimentary services using the same unlicensed radio frequency band of operation. The 802.11b WLAN operates in the 2.4 GHz band and uses a Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum technique. It is designed to cover large areas ranging up to 100 meters in diameter, which may connect hundreds of computers. Bluetooth (BT) WPAN also operates in the same frequency band as the IEEE 802.lib and it uses a Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum technique. BT is primarily used for communications between notebooks, palm units and other personal computing devices within relatively …

What Should Be In A Human Behavior Representation Federation Object Model For High Level Architecture, Gurkan Haznedaroglu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Modeling and Simulation (M&S) can assist in evaluating scenarios and enhancing the performance of operational systems. Fully integrated use of MBS can enable the evaluation of the effectiveness of proposed equipment or software in realistic simulated environments and can provide an assessment of the impacts of specific equipment or capabilities on battle outcomes. Every level, from strategic planners, technology experts, operations research analysts, weapons systems designers and users, testers, maintainers, and cost analysts, has to be interactively involved to maximize the benefits of this approach. Human behavior is a very important part of the M&S process. Especially in constructive simulations, …

Filling The Ontology Space For Coalition Battle Management Language, Charles Turnitsa, Curtis Blais, Andreas Tolk

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Coalition Battle Management Language is a language for representing and exchanging plans, orders, and reports across live, constructive and robotic forces in multi-service, multi-national and multi-organizational operations. Standardization efforts in the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization seek to define this language through three parallel activities: (1) specify a sufficient data model to unambiguously define a set of orders using the Joint Command, Control, and Consultation Information Exchange Data Model (JC3IEDM) as a starting point; (2) develop a formal grammar (lexicon and production rules) to formalize the definition of orders, requests, and reports; (3) develop a formal battle management ontology to …

Applying The Levels Of Conceptual Interoperability Model In Support Of Integratability, Interoperability, And Composability For System-Of-Systems Engineering, Andreas Tolk, Saikou Y. Diallo, Charles D. Turnitsa

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Faculty Publications

The Levels of Conceptual Interoperability Model (LCIM) was developed to cope with the different layers of interoperation of modeling & simulation applications. It introduced technical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, dynamic, and conceptual layers of interoperation and showed how they are related to the ideas of integratability, interoperability, and composability. The model was successfully applied in various domains of systems, cybernetics, and informatics.

Clarifications Of Rule 2 In Teaching Geometric Dimensioning And Tolerancing, Cheng Lin, Alok Verma

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Geometric dimensioning and tolerancing is a symbolic language used on engineering drawings and computer generated three-dimensional solid models for explicitly describing nominal geometry and its allowable variation. Application cases using the concept of Rule 2 in the Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) are presented. The rule affects all fourteen geometric characteristics. Depending on the nature and location where each feature control frame is specified, interpretation on the applicability of Rule 2 is quite inconsistent. This paper focuses on identifying the characteristics of a feature control frame to remove this inconsistency. A table is created to clarify the confusions for students …

Optimal Layout Of Multicast Groups Using Network Embedded Multicast Security In Ad Hoc Sensor Networks, Richard R. Brooks, Brijesh Pillai, Michele C. Weigle, Matthew Pirretti

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper considers the security of sensor network applications. Our approach creates multicast regions that use symmetric key cryptography for communications. Each multicast region contains a single keyserver that is used to perform key management and maintain the integrity of a multicast region. Communications between two multicast regions is performed by nodes that belong to both regions. To ease the network management burden, it is desirable for the networks to self-organize into regions and dynamically select their keyservers. This paper shows how to determine the number of keyservers (k) to use and the size in the number of hops (h) …