Computer Engineering Commons^™

Semantic Segmentation Of Aerial Imagery Using U-Nets, Terence J. Yi

Theses and Dissertations

In situations where global positioning systems are unavailable, alternative methods of localization must be implemented. A potential step to achieving this is semantic segmentation, or the ability for a model to output class labels by pixel. This research aims to utilize datasets of varying spatial resolutions and locations to train a fully convolutional neural network architecture called the U-Net to perform segmentations of aerial images. Variations of the U-Net architecture are implemented and compared to other existing models in order to determine the best in detecting buildings and roads. A final dataset will also be created combining two datasets to …

Interoperable Ads-B Confidentiality, Brandon C. Burfeind

Theses and Dissertations

The worldwide air traffic infrastructure is in the late stages of transition from legacy transponder systems to Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) based systems. ADS-B relies on position information from GNSS and requires aircraft to transmit their identification, state, and position. ADS-B promises the availability of high-fidelity air traffic information; however, position and identification data are not secured via authentication or encryption. This lack of security for ADS-B allows non-participants to observe and collect data on both government and private flight activity. This is a proposal for a lightweight, interoperable ADS-B confidentiality protocol which uses existing format preserving encryption …

Novel On-Chip Optical Modulator Designs, Mohamed Mahmoud Ibrahim Ibrahim Elsayed

Theses and Dissertations

The huge increments in data traffic and communication over the past few decades have pushed the conventional electronic communication systems to their physical limits in terms of data rate, bandwidth and capacity. The continuous shrinking of feature sizes, the increase in the microelectronic integrated circuits complexity, and the increasing demand for higher speeds and data rates have all stimulated seeking new technology to replace the currently present microelectronics industry rather than improving it. Photonics is one of the most likely candidates to answer this pursuit for its compatibility with the fiber optic industry, which has shown a great success in …

Novel Planar Wire-Grid Antenna Arrays For Automotive Radars Operating At 77 Ghz, Hossam Helaly

Theses and Dissertations

Automotive radars are the critical components for future driving assistance technologies. Nowadays, their usage is a constraint on the premium segment automobiles; however, there are intensive studies to facilitate these technologies to the lower segment. The main challenges that face automakers to develop new automotive radars are fabrication cost, compactness, bandwidth, and radiation properties. This research focuses on developing a novel class of planar antenna arrays, which operate at a frequency of 77 GHz. The proposed arrays can be fabricated using multilayered cheap printed circuit board lamination technology. The proposed antennas are arrayed using mixed wire-gridding and corporate arraying techniques, …

Development Of Iot Based Hybrid Autonomous Network Robots (Anr), Chimsom Isidore Chukwuemeka

Theses and Dissertations

The integration of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and multirobot systems (MRS) represents an active research area supporting a wide range of applications. This is because it enables ubiquitous applications due to the robots' mobility and detection capabilities associated with its deployment. These systems have many benefits, such as perception with extended coverage that facilitate wider exploration and surveillance, efficiency in data routing, effective and reliable task environment management, etc. However, integrating two fields of research means dealing with a range of challenges such as using effective architecture for WSNs and MRS, efficient communication protocols within a network of sensors nodes …

Leveraging Peer-To-Peer Energy Sharing For Resource Optimization In Mobile Social Networks, Aashish Dhungana

Theses and Dissertations

Mobile Opportunistic Networks (MSNs) enable the interaction of mobile users in the vicinity through various short-range wireless communication technologies (e.g., Bluetooth, WiFi) and let them discover and exchange information directly or in ad hoc manner. Despite their promise to enable many exciting applications, limited battery capacity of mobile devices has become the biggest impediment to these appli- cations. The recent breakthroughs in the areas of wireless power transfer (WPT) and rechargeable lithium batteries promise the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) energy sharing (i.e., the transfer of energy from the battery of one member of the mobile network to the battery of …

Systematic Model-Based Design Assurance And Property-Based Fault Injection For Safety Critical Digital Systems, Athira Varma Jayakumar

Theses and Dissertations

With advances in sensing, wireless communications, computing, control, and automation technologies, we are witnessing the rapid uptake of Cyber-Physical Systems across many applications including connected vehicles, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, smart homes etc. Many of these applications are safety-critical in nature and they depend on the correct and safe execution of software and hardware that are intrinsically subject to faults. These faults can be design faults (Software Faults, Specification faults, etc.) or physically occurring faults (hardware failures, Single-event-upsets, etc.). Both types of faults must be addressed during the design and development of these critical systems. Several safety-critical industries have widely adopted …

Implementation Of A Hierarchical, Embedded, Cyber Attack Detection System For Spi Devices On Unmanned Aerial Systems, Jeremy J. Price

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) create security concerns as their roles expand in commercial, military, and consumer spaces. The need to secure these systems is recognized in the architecture for a Hierarchical, Embedded, Cyber Attack Detection (HECAD) system. HECAD passively monitors the communication between a flight controller and all its peripherals like sensors and actuators. It ensures the functionality of a UAS is within the set of defined behavior and reports all potential problems, whether the errors were caused by cyber attacks or other physical faults. A portion of the design for Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) devices on board a flight …

Data Science Methods For Standardization, Safety, And Quality Assurance In Radiation Oncology, Khajamoinuddin Syed

Theses and Dissertations

Radiation oncology is the field of medicine that deals with treating cancer patients through ionizing radiation. The clinical modality or technique used to treat the cancer patients in the radiation oncology domain is referred to as radiation therapy. Radiation therapy aims to deliver precisely measured dose irradiation to a defined tumor volume (target) with as minimal damage as possible to surrounding healthy tissue (organs-at-risk), resulting in eradication of the tumor, high quality of life, and prolongation of survival. A typical radiotherapy process requires the use of different clinical systems at various stages of the workflow. The data generated in these …

Mitigating Pilot Contamination Through Optimizing Pilot Allocation In Massive Mimo Systems, Rand Abdul Hussain

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation has proposed several algorithms to optimize the allocation of pilots to the users’ equipment (UEs) to mitigate the effect of the pilot contamination problem in the massive MIMO systems. Pilot contamination reduces the performance of massive MIMO systems due to the reduction in the quality of the estimated channel between a UE and the serving base station (BS). The limitation of the number of samples in a coherence block limits the number of unique mutually orthogonal pilots, and hence, reusing the set of pilots across the cells causes inter-cell interference during pilot transmission, which is called pilot contamination. …

Home Automation System By Voice Commands, Noor Kamil Abdalhameed

Theses and Dissertations

The Home Automation System is one of the most important technologies that are used by humans for controlling electrical devices to reduce manual efforts in their daily tasks. The home automation system by voice has the ability to understand thousands of voice commands and perform the required action to control various electrical devices. The voice recognition is a bit complex and challenging task since each person has his accent. Therefore, Bitvoicer Server used in the home automation system in this thesis since it supports 17 languages from 26 countries and regions, and has the ability to recognize an unlimited number …

Machine Learning In The State Design Pattern, Timothy Matthew Von Friesen

Theses and Dissertations

As the Internet of Things revolution continues to become more prevalent in humanity's daily routine, securing these devices is paramount. Society has seen a substantial increase in activity in the cyber-warfare battle space, resulting in an increasing amount of security breaches every year. The responsibility of securing our devices can no longer rely solely on cyber-security engineers keeping systems hardened through Security Technical Implementation Guides and vulnerability scans; it must shift towards the developer. Previous research has been done in this area of securing our devices. However, these solutions rely heavily on cloud computing resources to perform computationally expensive algorithms. …

Socialization Of Veterans Using Virtual Reality, Joan M. Savage

Theses and Dissertations

Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, and video games are growing in popularity and fulfilling genuine human needs that the real world is currently unable to satisfy. Games are providing rewards that reality is not. They are teaching and inspiring and engaging us in ways that reality is not (McGonigal, 2011). The purpose of this study was to capture the essence of socialization in virtual reality as a Ph.D. dissertation topic at Florida Institute of Technology - Human-Centered Design. This study used a phenomenology methodology to capture the experiences of beneficial features of players who use virtual reality. The study …

Three Dimensional Object Detection Approaches For Indoor Navigation Aid, Junxiu Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation aims to develop object detection approaches for an indoor navigation aid called smart cane. The goal of the object detection approaches is to provide object-level information of the environment to assist the visually impaired people to walk freely in the indoor environment. Although many object detection approaches have been proposed, object detection is still a challenging problem due to a large number of object categories, viewpoint changes, occlusions, cluttered backgrounds, etc. To address these challenges, first, an indoor 3D dataset is collected by using the smart cane navigation aid. Second, indoor objects are broadly divided into two types: …

A Novel Gripping System For Corrugated Box Grasping And Manipulation For Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Trigun Maroo

Theses and Dissertations

An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can carry packages to locations that are unreachable by an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) using a suitable gripper system. A novel gripping system for grasping corrugated boxes which has the potential to be mounted on a UAV is presented. The proposed gripping system uses two pairs of perpendicularly mounted linear actuators to move the end effectors, geared such that they are operated with a single control input. The mechanism is designed to handle position and orientation errors of the target object automatically in the specified grasping zone without the need of a control system. The …

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks In Transportation Data Collection And Dissemination, Kardigue Konte

Theses and Dissertations

The field of transportation is rapidly changing with new opportunities for systems solutions and emerging technologies. The global economic impact of congestion and accidents are significant. Improved means are needed to solve them. Combined with the increasing numbers of vehicles on the road, the net economic impact is measured in the many billions of dollars. Promising methodologies explored in this thesis include the use of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Interconnecting vehicles using Dedicated Short Range Communication technology (DSRC) brings many benefits. Integrating DSRC into roadway vehicles offers the promise of reducing the problems …

A Novel And Inexpensive Solution To Build Autonomous Surface Vehicles Capable Of Negotiating Highly Disturbed Environments, Jason Moulton

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation has four main contributions. The first contribution is the design and build of a fleet of long-range, medium-duration deployable autonomous surface vehicles (ASV). The second is the development, implementation, and testing of inex-pensive sensors to accurately measure wind, current, and depth environmental vari- ables. The third leverages the first two contributions, and is modeling the effects of environmental variables on an ASV, finally leading to the development of a dynamic controller enabling deployment in more uncertain conditions.

The motivation for designing and building a new ASV comes from the lack of availability of a flexible and modular platform …

Development Of A National-Scale Big Data Analytics Pipeline To Study The Potential Impacts Of Flooding On Critical Infrastructures And Communities, Nattapon Donratanapat

Theses and Dissertations

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Big data infrastructure, crowdsourcing techniques have emerged to facilitate data processing and problem solving particularly for flood emergences purposes. A Flood Analytics Information System (FAIS) has been developed as a Python Web application to gather Big data from multiple servers and analyze flooding impacts during historical and real-time events. The application is smartly designed to integrate crowd intelligence, machine learning (ML), and natural language processing of tweets to provide flood warning with the aim to improve situational awareness for flood risk management and decision making. FAIS allows the user …

Adaptive-Hybrid Redundancy For Radiation Hardening, Nicolas S. Hamilton

Theses and Dissertations

An Adaptive-Hybrid Redundancy (AHR) mitigation strategy is proposed to mitigate the effects of Single Event Upset (SEU) and Single Event Transient (SET) radiation effects. AHR is adaptive because it switches between Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) and Temporal Software Redundancy (TSR). AHR is hybrid because it uses hardware and software redundancy. AHR is demonstrated to run faster than TSR and use less energy than TMR. Furthermore, AHR allows space vehicle designers, mission planners, and operators the flexibility to determine how much time is spent in TMR and TSR. TMR mode provides faster processing at the expense of greater energy usage. TSR …

Survival Theory Modelling For Information Diffusion, Akshay Aravamudan

Theses and Dissertations

Information diffusion is the spread of information within a network. In this thesis, we model information diffusion as a survival process. We have adopted an existing algorithm called NetRate for modelling information diffusion. This model involves finding the distribution of trasmission time between two nodes in the network. We modify NetRate’s concave-down log-likelihood expression by adding partial parentage information and formulate an Expectation-Minimization (EM) algorithm to learn the parameters. We also describe a simulation scheme for NetRate inspired by point process simulation strategies. Using the assumptions of the NetRate model, we derive a a method to model popularity as a …

The Trust-Based Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process, Richard S. Seymour

Theses and Dissertations

Cooperative agent and robot systems are designed so that each is working toward the same common good. The problem is that the software systems are extremely complex and can be subverted by an adversary to either break the system or potentially worse, create sneaky agents who are willing to cooperate when the stakes are low and take selfish, greedy actions when the rewards rise. This research focuses on the ability of a group of agents to reason about the trustworthiness of each other and make decisions about whether to cooperate. A trust-based interactive partially observable Markov decision process (TI-POMDP) is …

Way-Finding: A New Approach To Studying Digital Communications, William Daniel Glade

Theses and Dissertations

This work further develops the way-finding model first proposed by Pearson and Kosicki (2017) which examines the flow of information in the digital age. Way-finding systems are online systems that help individuals find information—i.e. social media, search engines, email, etc. Using a grounded theory methodology, this new framework was explored in greater detail. Way-finding theory was created using the context of the elaboration likelihood model, gatekeeping theory, algorithmic gatekeepers, and the existence of the filter bubble phenomenon. This study establishes the three basic pillars of way-finding theory: the user’s mindset when accessing way-finding systems, the perception of how popular way-finding …

Formal Trust Architecture For Assuring Trusted Interactions In The Internet Of Things, Milankumar Patel

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a flexible platform for a large number of heterogeneous devices to dynamically join and leave the network. This enhances the availability of a diverse range of services provided by a network. However, this dynamic expansion of the network with mobile IoT devices introduces a major challenge to security especially related to management of trust across the IoT platforms. Furthermore, IoT is open and distributed in nature, which allows the integration and registration of diverse entities. Thus arises the necessity for a mechanism that can ensure the selection of secure and trusted devices as …

Wavelet–Based Functional Data Analysis For Classification And Change Point Detection, Nenad Mijatovic

Theses and Dissertations

Data collection and analysis, performed close to the source and transferred to other devices for different analysis, are the major paradigms of the Internet of Things (IoT). Usually, the raw data comes in the form of a time-series sequence that can be considered as functions, and as such can be examined by the functional analysis apparatus. Among others, the two major tasks in data analysis are (1) categorical signal classification and (2) change detection in signal statistical parameters. Here, we study both problems: featureless signal classification using discriminative interpolation regularized with the ℓ1 norm is performed using Classification by Discriminative …

Characterization Of Rf Signal Propagation For Wireless Sensor Network Deployed In Mountainous Environment, Bandar Mohammad Alshawi

Theses and Dissertations

Wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes, in mountainous forests, report real-time data to base stations concerning events, in which researchers and decision makers are interested in. A thorough research reveals the deficiency of any study modeling radio frequency (RF) in that environment. The lack of accurately modeling RF signal propagation in any environment can have a great impact on the network life, connectivity, and coverage. This dissertation models the loss of RF signal in the mountainous environment and demonstrates the inconsistency of theoretical models, compared to actual measurements. The models proposed in this research yield satisfactory results, and the theoretical models …

Drone Path Scheduling For Data Gathering In Disaster Effected Environments, James Bologna

Theses and Dissertations

Creative networks in a disaster effected area have been a concern for a long time. With the innovation of flying ad hoc networks the problem can be tackled from a more practical standpoint. The use of low altitude drones equipped with wireless transmission and receiving capability can be used under the circumstances to enable ad-hoc communication. Drone coordination and route planning is a critical consideration when determining how to gather data from ground nodes, since the drones are constrained by limited battery capacity. In this research, we set out to explore a wide range of policies for determining the trajectories …

Near Real-Time Rf-Dna Fingerprinting For Zigbee Devices Using Software Defined Radios, Frankie A. Cruz

Theses and Dissertations

Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network(s) (LR-WPAN) usage has increased as more consumers embrace Internet of Things (IoT) devices. ZigBee Physical Layer (PHY) is based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15.4 specification designed to provide a low-cost, low-power, and low-complexity solution for Wireless Sensor Network(s) (WSN). The standard’s extended battery life and reliability makes ZigBee WSN a popular choice for home automation, transportation, traffic management, Industrial Control Systems (ICS), and cyber-physical systems. As robust and versatile as the standard is, ZigBee remains vulnerable to a myriad of common network attacks. Previous research involving Radio Frequency-Distinct Native Attribute …

Machine Translation With Image Context From Mandarin Chinese To English, Brooke E. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Despite ongoing improvements in machine translation, machine translators still lack the capability of incorporating context from which source text may have been derived. Machine translators use text from a source language to translate it into a target language without observing any visual context. This work aims to produce a neural machine translation model that is capable of accepting both text and image context as a multimodal translator from Mandarin Chinese to English. The model was trained on a small multimodal dataset of 700 images and sentences, and compared to a translator trained only on the text associated with those images. …

A Blockchain-Based Anomalous Detection System For Internet Of Things Devices, Joshua K. Mosby

Theses and Dissertations

Internet of Things devices are highly susceptible to attack, and owners often fail to realize they have been compromised. This thesis describes an anomalous-based intrusion detection system that operates directly on Internet of Things devices utilizing a custom-built Blockchain. In this approach, an agent on each node compares the node's behavior to that of its peers, generating an alert if they are behaving differently. An experiment is conducted to determine the effectiveness at detecting malware. Three different code samples simulating common malware are deployed against a testbed of 12 Raspberry Pi devices. Increasing numbers are infected until two-thirds of the …

Confidence Inference In Defensive Cyber Operator Decision Making, Graig S. Ganitano

Theses and Dissertations

Cyber defense analysts face the challenge of validating machine generated alerts regarding network-based security threats. Operations tempo and systematic manpower issues have increased the importance of these individual analyst decisions, since they typically are not reviewed or changed. Analysts may not always be confident in their decisions. If confidence can be accurately assessed, then analyst decisions made under low confidence can be independently reviewed and analysts can be offered decision assistance or additional training. This work investigates the utility of using neurophysiological and behavioral correlates of decision confidence to train machine learning models to infer confidence in analyst decisions. Electroencephalography …