Computer Engineering Commons^™

Evolution And Analysis Of Neuromorphic Flapping-Wing Flight Controllers, Sanjay Kumar Boddhu

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The control of insect-sized flapping-wing micro air vehicles is attracting increasing interest. Solution of the problem requires construction of a controller that is physically small, extremely power efficient, and capable. In addition, process variation in the creation of very small wings and armatures as well as the potential for accumulating damage and wear over the course of a vehicle's lifetime suggest that controllers be able to self-adapt to the specific and possibly changing nature of the vehicles in which they are embedded. Previous work with Evolvable Hardware Continuous Time Recurrent Neural Networks (CTRNNs) as applied to adaptive control of walking …

A Novel Synergistic Diagnosis Methodology For Identifying Abnormalities In Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Videos, Alexandros Karargyris

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Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is a new technology that allows medical personnel to view the gastrointestinal (GI) mucosa. It is a swallowable miniature capsule device the size of a pill that transmits thousands of screenshots of the digestive tract to a wearable receiver. When the procedure finishes the video is uploaded to a workstation for viewing. Capsule Endoscopy has been established as a tool to identify various gastrointestinal (GI) conditions, such as blood-based abnormalities, polyps, ulcers, Crohn's disease in the small intestine, where the classical endoscopy is not regularly used.

As of 2009 the market is dominated by Given Imaging …

Design And Development Of A Wireless Data Acquisition System For Fall Detection, Anoop Hanchinamane Ramakrishna

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With the mortality rate of the elderly on the rise due to fall related incidents, fall detection has become an important entity in the geriatric health care sector. The study conducted in this thesis involved the design and development of a Wireless Data Acquisition System (WDAS) with Bluetooth capabilities interfaced to pulse width modulated gyroscopic sensors. Each sensor used has a reference output pulse width which changes when rotated about its sensitive axis.Part of the effort involves the design and development of two versions of printed circuit boards for the application. Each board includes a Parallax Propeller micro- controller in …

Algorithmic Techniques Employed In The Quantification And Characterization Of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopic Data, Paul Edward Anderson

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Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) based metabolomics is a developing research field with broad applicability, including the identification of biomarkers associated with pathophysiologic changes, sample classification based on the mechanism of toxicity, and clinical diagnosis. Intrinsic to these applications is the need for statistical and computational techniques to facilitate the associated data analysis. Further, a typical 1H NMR spectrum of pure proteins, biofluids, or tissue may contain thousands of resonances (i.e., peaks), thus, a pure visual inspection is insufficient to fully utilize the spectral information.

Common practice within the NMR-based metabolomics community is to evaluate and validate novel algorithms on empirical …

Semantic Provenance: Modeling, Querying, And Application In Scientific Discovery, Satya Sanket Sahoo

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Provenance metadata, describing the history or lineage of an entity, is essential for ensuring data quality, correctness of process execution, and computing trust values. Traditionally, provenance management issues have been dealt with in the context of workflow or relational database systems. However, existing provenance systems are inadequate to address the requirements of an emerging set of applications in the new eScience or Cyberinfrastructure paradigm and the Semantic Web. Provenance in these applications incorporates complex domain semantics on a large scale with a variety of uses, including accurate interpretation by software agents, trustworthy data integration, reproducibility, attribution for commercial or legal …

Visualization Of Complex Unsteady 3d Flow: Flowing Seed Points And Dynamically Evolving Seed Curves With Applications To Vortex Visualization In Cfd Simulations Of Ultra Low Reynolds Number Insect Flight, Christopher M. Koehler

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Three dimensional integration-based geometric visualization is a very powerful tool for analyzing flow phenomena in time dependent vector fields. Streamlines in particular have many perceptual benefits due to their ability to provide a snapshot of the vectors near key features of complex 3D flows at any instant in time. However, streamlines do not lend themselves well to animation. Subtle changes in the vector field at each time step lead to increasingly large changes between streamlines with the same seed point the longer they are integrated. Path lines, which show particle trajectories over time suffer from similar problems when attempting to …

A Cryptanalysis Methodology For The Reverse Engineering Of Encrypted Information In Images, Allan Anthony Rwabutaza

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Security is an important issue related to the storage and communication of data and information. In data and information security, cryptography and steganography are two of the most common security techniques. On one hand, there is cryptography, which is the secret communication between two parties by message scrambling on the sender's side and message unscrambling on the receiver's side so that only the intended receiver gets the secret message. On the other hand, there is steganography, which is the hiding of information in a medium in such a way that no one other than the sender or the intended receiver …

Trusted Querying Over Wireless Sensor Networks And Network Security Visualization, Giovani Rimon Abuaitah

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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as an emerging technology faces numerous challenges. Sensor nodes are usually resource constrained. Sensor nodes are also vulnerable to physical attacks or node compromises. Answering queries over data is one of the basic functionalities of WSNs. Both resource constraints and security issues make designing mechanisms for data aggregation particularly challenging. In this thesis, we first explore the various security techniques for data aggregation in WSNs then we design and demonstrate the feasibility of an innovative reputation-based framework rooted in rigorous statistical theory and belief theory to characterize the trustworthiness of individual nodes and data queries in …

Tyflos: A Wearable Navigation Prototype For Blind & Visually Impaired; Design, Modelling And Experimental Results, Dimitrios Dakopoulos

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The need for assistive devices has, had and will have a large merit in many engineering research arenas. This dissertation deals with the design, modeling, implementation and experimentation of the navigation component of a wearable assistive system for blind and visually impaired people, called TYFLOS (ΤΥΦΛΟΣ) which is the Greek word for "Blind".

The current prototype consists of two mini cameras attached to a pair of conventional eye-glasses, a 2D tactile display vibration array) which consists of 16 vibrating elements arranged in a 4x4 manner, attached to an elastic vest worn on the user's abdomen, a portable computer, an ear-speaker …

Semantics Enriched Service Environments, Karthik Rajagopal Gomadam

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During the past seven years services centric computing has emerged as the preferred approach to architect complex software. Software is increasingly developed by integrating remotely existing components, popularly called services. This architectural paradigm, also called Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), brings with it the benefits of interoperability, agility and flexibility to software design and development. One can easily add or change new features to existing systems, either by the addition of new services or by replacing existing ones. Two popular approaches have emerged for realizing SOA. The first approach is based on the SOAP protocol for communication and the Web Service …

Burst Scheduling, Grooming And Qos Provisioning In Optical Burst-Switched Networks, Yuqi Fan

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The demand of network capacity has been increasing steadily with more users than ever connected to the Internet through broadband access and the popularity of video based applications, such as YouTube. Optical wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) networks are expected to form the next-generation backbone network and to fulfill the insatiable appetite for bandwidth.

Wavelength routed WDM optical networks offer the granularity of switching at a fiber, waveband, or a wavelength level. The finest granularity offered is at a wavelength level by provisioning lightpaths for different clients/services. All-optical packet switching is still deemed technically infeasible and its competitiveness as a backbone …

A Self-Configuring 3-D Body Scanner, David James Holtkamp

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A flexible, self-configuring body scanner is described that is capable of capturing and merging range data from multiple views into a single coordinate system without the use of registration. The scanner uses two disconnected frames with embedded lights to merge the coordinate systems of multiple cameras. The frame also serves in finding the laser plane as the lasers are swept over the surface from multiple locations. Both hardware and software details are presented as well as techniques for automating most aspects of the scanner. A new implicit surface implementation is also described for processing and triangulating the resulting point clouds …

Improving Remote Homology Detection Using A Sequence Property Approach, Gina Marie Cooper

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Understanding the structure and function of proteins is a key part of understanding biological systems. Although proteins are complex biological macromolecules, they are made up of only 20 basic building blocks known as amino acids. The makeup of a protein can be described as a sequence of amino acids. One of the most important tools in modern bioinformatics is the ability to search for biological sequences (such as protein sequences) that are similar to a given query sequence. There are many tools for doing this (Altschul et al., 1990, Hobohm and Sander, 1995, Thomson et al., 1994, Karplus and Barrett, …

A Study Of Hardware Efficient Recombination Variants In A Mini Population Genetic Algorithm, Shiva Satya Ramesh Varma Bhupathiraju Venkata

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Evolvable Hardware is an emerging sub-field of evolutionary computation in which evolutionary algorithms are employed to create designs for hardware devices. Recent work has combined continuous time recurrent neural networks with the Mini Population (Minipop) Evolutionary Algorithm to create self-configuring device controllers. Standard Minipop eschews recombination operators due to the belief that they increase the size of an algorithm's on chip implementation without adding significant search power for finding neural network controllers. The focus of this thesis is to challenge that thinking by testing a number of hardware efficient recombination operators against two benchmark problems. We consider variants that recombine …

Design And Performance Analysis Of A Secure Proces-Sor Scan-Sp With Crypto-Biometric Capabilities, Raghudeep Kannavara

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Secure computing is gaining importance in recent times as computing capability is increasingly becoming distributed and information is everywhere. Prevention of piracy and digital rights management has become very important. Information security is mandatory rather than an additional feature. Numerous software techniques have been proposed to provide certain level of copyright and intellectual property protection. Techniques like obfuscation attempt to transform the code into a form that is harder to reverse engineer. Tamper-proofing causes a program to malfunction when it detects that it has been modified. Software watermarking embeds copyright notice in the software code to allow the owners of …

Semantic And Role-Based Access Control For Data Grid Systems, Vineela Muppavarapu

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A Grid is an integration infrastructure for sharing and coordinated use of diverseresources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. Distributed data resources can be diverse in their formats, schema, quality, access mechanisms, ownership, access policies, and capabilities. In recent years, several organizations have started utilizing Grid technologies to deploy data-intensive and/or computation-intensive applications. As more and more organizations are sharing data resources and participating in Data Grids, the complexity and heterogeneity of the systems is increasing constantly, but their management techniques are …

Extracting, Representing And Mining Semantic Metadata From Text: Facilitating Knowledge Discovery In Biomedicine, Cartic Ramakrishnan

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The information access paradigm offered by most contemporary text information systems is a search-and-sift paradigm where users have to manually glean and aggregate relevant information from the large number of documents that are typically returned in response to keyword queries. Expecting the users to glean and aggregate information has lead to several inadequacies in these information systems. Owing to the size of many text databases, search-and-sift is a very tedious often requiring repeated keyword searches refining or generalizing queries terms. A more serious limitation arises from the lack of automated mechanisms to aggregate content across different documents to discover new …

Evolutionary Methodology For Optimization Of Image Transforms Subject To Quantization Noise, Michael Ray Peterson

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Lossy image compression algorithms sacrifice perfect imagereconstruction in favor of decreased storage requirements. Modelossy compression schemes, such as JPEG2000, rely upon the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to achieve high levels of compression while minimizing the loss of information for image reconstruction. Some compression applications require higher levels of compression than those achieved through application of the DWT and entropy coding. In such lossy systems, quantization provides high compression rates at the cost of increased distortion. Unfortunately, as the amount of quantization increases, the performance of the DWT for accurate image reconstruction deteriorates. Previous research demonstrates that a genetic algorithm can …

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Steven Perry

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Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. This dissertation proposes a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between named entities. …

Algorithmic Techniques Employed In The Isolation Of Codon Usage Biases In Prokaryotic Genomes, Douglas W. Raiford Iii

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While genomic sequencing projects are an abundant source of information for biological studies ranging from the molecular to the ecological in scale, much of the information present may yet be hidden from casual analysis. One such information domain, trends in codon usage, can provide a wealth of information about an organism's genes and their expression. Degeneracy in the genetic code allows more than one triplet codon to code for the same amino acid, and usage of these codons is often biased such that one or more of these synonymous codons is preferred. Isolation of translational efficiency bias can have important …

Energy Efficient Image Video Sensor Networks, Paul Anthony Bender

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Image Video Sensor Networks are emerging applications for sensor network technologies. The relatively large size of the data collected by image video sensors presents new challenges for the sensor network in terms of energy consumption and channel capacity. We address each of these issues through the use of a high density network deployment utilizing some nodes as dedicated relay nodes.

A high density network allows network nodes to reduce their transmission power. This reduction in transmission power allows each node to conserve power and simultaneously increases the potential for spatially concurrent transmissions within the network, resulting in improved network throughputs. …

Transformation Of Object-Oriented Associations And Embedded References To Them, Sneha Swamy

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AFIT Wide Spectrum Object Modeling Environment (AWSOME) automatically generates executable code by applying transforms to the formal specifications developed from the domain knowledge. AWSOME uses the specification language called as AFIT Wide Spectrum Language (AWL). All the transforms developed for AWSOME depend on and manipulate Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) created by parsing the formal specifications of a model. The main idea is to speed the process of creating error free code, to aid reusability of code and also to make the maintenance changes to be consistent and correct. The AWSOME metamodel contains the structural (object) model, the functional (operations) model …

Two Dimensional Localization Of Passive Uhf Rfid Tags, Bhavik Contractor

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The advent of GPS has redefined the need of a positioning system in today*#8217;s ubiquitous computing world. While GPS works satisfactorily and is quite a norm in an outdoor environment, it fails to work indoors due to the inherent complexity of an indoor environment. There is an ever increasing need to develop an indoor positioning system and a lot of research has been done to solve the problem of indoor localization. These solutions differ on the basis of cost, dependency on environment, line of sight requirements and so on.

Passive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags pose an interesting solution to …

An Analog Evolvable Hardware Device For Active Control, Saranyan A. Vigraham

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The field of Evolvable Hardware (EH) has recently gained a lot of interest due to the novel methodology it offers for designing electrical circuits and machines. EH techniques involve configuring a reconfigurable hardware platform with the aid of learning engines such as evolutionary algorithms. The EH devices normally act as closed loop controllers with the capability of learning necessary control laws adaptively. Current EH practices have several shortcomings, which have restricted their use as reliable controllers. This dissertation will present an improved EH device based on behavioral reconfigurability that addresses the current open challenges in the field of analog Evolvable …

On Optimal Survivability Design In Wdm Optical Networks Under Scheduled Traffic Models, Tianjian Li

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Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks are widely viewed as the most appropriate choice for future Internet backbone with the potential to fulfill the ever-growing demands for bandwidth. WDM divides the enormous bandwidth of an optical fiber into many non-overlapping wavelength channels, each of which may operate at the rate of 10 Gigabit per second or higher. A failure in a network such as a cable cut may result in a tremendous loss of data. Therefore, survivability is a very important issue in WDM optical networks. The objective of this dissertation is to address the survivability provisioning problem in WDM …

Implementation For A Coherent Keyword-Based Xml Query Language, Venkatakalyan Potturi

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Due to the increasing pervasiveness of data sets using the XML data format, numerous query languages have been proposed that exploit the structure inherent in XML. Many such query languages, supported by specialized XML search engines, are complex and not suitable for naive users. A simple keyword based query language is described which not only exploits the structure of XML documents to extract relevant fragments, but can also fall back on retrieval through plain text search. This thesis focuses on developing a prototype implementation for a Coherent Keyword Based XML Query Language. It analyzes the typical challenges posed by the …

An Evolutionary Programming Algorithm For Automatic Chromatogram Alignment, Bonnie Jo Schwartz

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Scientists use liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) instruments to measure metabolic responses to external stimuli. The data from these instruments can be distorted due to changes in the testing environment. Automating the removal of distortions is crucial in processing the data. The purpose of this thesis is to develop an algorithm that will automate the process.

The data produced by the LC/MS instrument were treated as images and image registration techniques were applied. A polynomial transformation function was assumed. An evolutionary programming algorithm was used to determine the coefficients of the polynomial. The data was manipulated to determine the best registration …

Role-Based Access Control For The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access And Integration (Ogsa-Dai), Anil L. Pereira

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Grid has emerged recently as an integration infrastructure for the sharing and coordinated use of diverse resources in dynamic, distributed virtual organizations (VOs). A Data Grid is an architecture for the access, exchange, and sharing of data in the Grid environment. In this dissertation, role-based access control (RBAC) systems for heterogeneous data resources in Data Grid systems are proposed. The Open Grid Services Architecture - Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI) is a widely used framework for the integration of heterogeneous data resources in Grid systems.

However, in the OGSA-DAI system, access control causes substantial administration overhead for resource providers in …

Data Mining And Analysis On Multiple Time Series Object Data, Chunyu Jiang

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Huge amount of data is available in our society and the need for turning such data into useful information and knowledge is urgent. Data mining is an important field addressing that need and significant progress has been achieved in the last decade. In several important application areas, data arises in the format of Multiple Time Series Object (MTSO) data, where each data object is an array of time series over a large set of features and each has an associated class or state. Very little research has been conducted towards this kind of data. Examples include computational toxicology, where each …

Xml Integrated Environment For Service-Oriented Data Management, Marwan Younes Maarouf

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The proliferation of XML as a family of related standards including a markup language (XML), formatting semantics (XSL style sheets), a linking syntax (XLINK), and appropriate data schema standards have emerged as a de facto standard for encoding and sharing data between various applications. XML is designed to be simple, easily parsed and self-describing. XML is based on and support the idea of separation of concerns: information content is separated from information rendering, and relationships between data elements are provided via simple nesting and references. As the XML content grows, the ability to handle schemaless XML documents becomes more critical …