Computer Engineering Commons^™

Using System-On-A-Programmable-Chip Technology To Design Embedded Systems, Tyson S. Hall, James O. Hamblen

Faculty Works

This paper describes the tools, techniques, and devices used to design embedded products with system–on-a-chip (SoC) type solutions using a large Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with an internal processor core. This new FPGA-based approach is called system-on-a-programmable-chip (SoPC ). The performance tradeoffs present in SoPC systems is compared to more traditional design approaches. Commercial devices, processor cores, and CAD tool flows are described.

The issues in SoPC hardware/software design tradeoffs are examined and three example SoPC designs are presented as case studies.

Fault And Defect Tolerant Computer Architectures: Reliable Computing With Unreliable Devices, George R. Roelke Iv

Theses and Dissertations

This research addresses design of a reliable computer from unreliable device technologies. A system architecture is developed for a "fault and defect tolerant" (FDT) computer. Trade-offs between different techniques are studied and yield and hardware cost models are developed. Fault and defect tolerant designs are created for the processor and the cache memory. Simulation results for the content-addressable memory (CAM)-based cache show 90% yield with device failure probabilities of 3 x 10(-6), three orders of magnitude better than non fault tolerant caches of the same size. The entire processor achieves 70% yield with device failure probabilities exceeding 10(-6). The required …

On Mitigating Distributed Denial Of Service Attacks, Zhiqiang Gao

Dissertations

Denial of service (DoS) attacks and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are probably the most ferocious threats in the Internet, resulting in tremendous economic and social implications/impacts on our daily lives that are increasingly depending on the wellbeing of the Internet. How to mitigate these attacks effectively and efficiently has become an active research area. The critical issues here include 1) IP spoofing, i.e., forged source lIP addresses are routinely employed to conceal the identities of the attack sources and deter the efforts of detection, defense, and tracing; 2) the distributed nature, that is, hundreds or thousands of compromised …

A Wireless Method For Monitoring Medication Compliance, Jeffrey Scott Jonas

Theses

There are many devices on the market to help remind patients to take their pills, but most require observation by a caregiver to assure medication compliance. This project demonstrates three modes to detect pill removal from a pillbox: a switch under the pills, a reflective type photointerrupter and a transmissive "electric eye" photosensor. Each mode exhibited blind spots or other failures to detect pill presence, but by combining modes with complementary characteristics, the accuracy of pill detection is greatly increased.

Two methods of caregiver notification are demonstrated: text messages transmitted via an attached cellular phone, or the status is collected …

Fpga-Based Implementation Of Parallel Graph Partitioning, Mohammad Kharashgeh

Theses

Graph partitioning is a very important application that can be found in numerous areas, from finite element methods to data processing and VLSI circuit design. Many algorithms have been developed to solve this problem. Of special interest is multilevel graph partitioning that provides a very efficient solution. This method can also be parallelized and implemented on various multiprocessor architectures. Unfortunately, the target of such implementations is often unavailable high-end multiprocessor systems. Here a parallel version of this method for an in-house developed multiprocessor system is implemented on an FPGA. The system designed provides a cost-effective solution.

The design is based …

Investigation Of Negative Refractive Index In Reciprocal Chiral Materials, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Partha P. Banerjee, Pradeep R. Anugula

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

It is well known that there exist both natural materials (such as milk or sugar solution) possessing chiral (or handed) properties, as well as an increasing list of man-made materials (such as sodium bromate) that exhibit chirality. One of the principal properties of chirality is that light of any arbitrary polarization, when propagating through a chiral material, splits up into two circular polarizations propagating in different directions. In the past decade or longer, researchers have investigated electromagnetic transverse (plane) wave propagation across a non-chiral/chiral interface, and determined the electromagnetic Fresnel coefficients for such propagation. Traditionally, such coefficients are derived under …

Canica: An Ide For The Java Modeling Language, Angelica B. Perez, Yoonsik Cheon, Ann Q. Gates

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Canica is an integrated development environment for the Java Modeling Language (JML), a formal behavioral interface specification language for Java. The JML distribution includes several support tools, such as a syntax checker, a compiler, and a document generator, and there are several third-party tools available for JML. However, most of these tools are command-line-based and work in isolation. Canica glues and streamlines these tools to provide a GUI-based, integrated environment for JML; for example, it automates unit testing completely from test data generation to test execution and test result determination. In this paper, we describe the key features of Canica …

A Model-Based Workflow Approach For Scientific Applications, Leonardo Salayandia, Paulo Pinheiro Da Silva, Ann Q. Gates, Alvaro Rebellon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Productive design of scientific workflows often depends on the effectiveness of the communication between the discipline domain experts and computer scientists, including their ability to share their specific needs in the design of the workflow. Discipline domain experts and computer scientists, however, tend to have distinct needs for designing workflows including terminology, level of abstraction, workflow aspects that should be included in the design. This paper discusses the use of a Model-Based Workflow (MBW) approach as an abstract way to specify workflows that conciliate the needs of domain and computer scientists. Within the context of GEON, an NSF cyberinfrastructure for …

Workflow-Driven Ontologies: An Earth Sciences Case Study, Leonardo Salayandia, Paulo Pinheiro Da Silva, Ann Q. Gates, Flor Salcedo

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

A goal of the Geosciences Network (GEON) is to develop cyber-infrastructure that will allow earth scientists to discover access, integrate and disseminate knowledge in distributed environments such as the Web, changing the way in which research is conducted. The earth sciences community has begun the complex task of creating ontologies to support this effort. A challenge is to coalesce the needs of the earth scientists, who wish to capture knowledge in a particular discipline through the ontology, with the need to leverage the knowledge to support technology that will facilitate computation, for example, by helping the composition of services. This …

Finding Least Expensive Tolerance Solutions And Least Expensive Tolerance Revisions: Algorithms And Computational Complexity, Inna Pivkina, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

For an engineering design, tolerances in design parameters are selected so that within these tolerances, we guarantee the desired functionality. Feasible algorithms are known for solving the corresponding computational problems: the problem of finding tolerances that guarantee the given functionality, and the problem of checking whether given tolerances guarantee this functionality.

In this paper, we show that in many practical problems, the problem of choosing the optimal tolerances can also be solved by a feasible algorithm. We prove that a slightly different problem of finding the optimal tolerance revision is, in contrast, computationally difficult (namely, NP-hard). We also show that …

Wavesurfer: A Tool For Sound Analysis, Ernesto Medina, Thamar Solorio

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Researchers in the Interactive Systems Group at UTEP have been using a research tool called Didi for some time now. It was originally designed to be easily adaptable. This tool has proven to be adaptable as it has been changed by different researchers to suit particular needs. As a result, multiple versions of the program exist. In addition to this, the tool only works in Linux and has grown quite a bit. To solve these problems, the different versions could have been consolidated into one program and modified to produce a version that worked on other platforms, or another program …

Detecting Filled Pauses In Tutorial Dialogs, Gaurav Garg, Nigel Ward

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

As dialog systems become more capable, users tend to talk more spontaneously and less formally. Spontaneous speech includes features which convey information about the user's state. In particular, filled pauses, such as `um' and `uh', can indicate that the user is having trouble, wants more time, wants to hold the floor, or is uncertain. In this paper we present a first study of the acoustic characteristics of filled pauses in tutorial dialogs. We show that in this domain, as in other domains, filled pauses typically have flat pitch and fairly constant energy. We present a simple algorithm based on these …

Fast Computation Of Exact Ranges Of Symmetric Convex And Concave Functions Under Interval Uncertainty, Gang Xiang

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many statistical characteristics y=f(x1,...,xn) are continuous, symmetric, and either concave or convex; examples include population variance V=(1/n)*(x1^2+...+xn^2)-E^2 (where E=(1/n)*(x1+...+xn), Shannon's entropy S=-p1*log(p1)-..-pn*log(pn), and many other characteristics. In practice, often, we often only know the intervals Xi=[xi-,xi+] that contain the (unknown) actual inputs xi. Since different values xi from Xi lead, in general, to different values of f(x1,...,xn), we need to find the range Y={f(x1,...,xn):x1 in X1,...,xn in Xn}, i.e., the maximum and the minimum of f(x1,...,xn) over the box X1 x ... x Xn. It is known that for convex functions, there exists a feasible (polynomial-time) algorithm for computing its …

The Effectiveness Of Threshold-Based Scheduling Policies On Boinc Projects, Trilce Estrada, David A. Flores, Michela Taufer, Patricia J. Teller, Andre Kerstens, David P. Anderson

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Several scientific projects use BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) to perform large-scale simulations using volunteers� computers (workers) across the Internet. In general, the scheduling of tasks in BOINC uses a First-Come-First-Serve policy and no attention is paid to workers� past performance, such as whether they have tended to perform tasks promptly and correctly. In this paper we use SimBA, a discrete-event simulator of BOINC applications, to study new threshold-based scheduling strategies for BOINC projects that use availability and reliability metrics to classify workers and distribute tasks according to this classification. We show that if availability and reliability thresholds …

For Complex Intervals, Exact Range Computation Is Np-Hard Even For Single Use Expressions (Even For The Product), Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich, Guenter Mayer

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

One of the main problems of interval computations is to compute the range Y of the given function f(x1,...,xn) under interval uncertainty. Interval computations started with the invention of straightforward interval computations, when we simply replace each elementary arithmetic operation in the code for f with the corresponding operation from interval arithmetic. In general, this technique only leads to an enclosure for the desired range, but in the important case of single use expressions (SUE), in which each variable occurs only once, we get the exact range. Thus, for SUE expressions, there exists a feasible (polynomial-time) algorithm for computing the …

Order And Disorder, Entropy In Math, Science, Nature And The Arts, Sol Neeman Ph.D., Arie Maharshak

Engineering Studies Faculty Publications and Creative Works

Often, science and engineering students have difficult time in viewing certain concepts in their holistic form. An example for such a concept is the concept of Entropy. Although it originated from the field of thermodynamics, the relation between order and disorder is a profound one and manifests itself in various fields, sometimes unrelated, such as math and science, nature and the arts. In the discipline of physics, the amount of disorder in a system has been quantified by the concept of Entropy. In the area of information theory it provides a quantitative measure of the amount of compression that may …

Cs 209: Computer Programming For Business Ii, Dennis Kellermeier

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 209 is the second of a two quarter sequence in programming for business students. It is required for Management Information Science majors. The courses are designed to help students achieve a high degree of facility in intermediate level programming.

Cs 205-07: Computer Literacy And Office Automation, John P. Herzog

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic computer terminology, word processing, spreadsheets, databases, and graphics.

Cs 141: Computer Programming - I, Ronald F. Taylor

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course provides a general introduction to the fundamentals of computer programming. Examples from and applications to a broad range of problems are given. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed. The concepts covered will be applied to the Java programming language. Students must register for both lecture and one laboratory section. 4 credit hours. Prerequisite: MTH 127 (College Algebra) or equivalent.

Cs 466/666: Formal Languages And Automata, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course introduces the theory of formal languages and automata. The primary focus is on the two methods of defining languages: using generators (e.g., grammars/regular expressions) and using recognizers (e.g., finite state machines). Along with presenting the fundamentals, this course will develop and examine relationships among the various specification methods for the regular languages and the context-free languages, in detail. Overall, we plan to cover the first seven chapters of the text book.

Cs 241: Computer Science Ii, Eric Maston

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course is the second in the Introduction to Computer Science (24X) series. It focuses on object oriented concepts and an introduction to data structures.

Cs 415: Social Implications Of Computing, Leo Finkelstein

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

CS 415 is a communication skills course using as its subject matter current salient issues associated with the social implications of computing. In addition to the course text, you will need to use certain reading materials in the library and elsewhere, and you will be responsible for using concepts and theories provided in class lectures and discussions.

Cs 765: Foundations Of Neurocomputation, Mateen M. Rizki

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course is designed to help you develop a solid understanding of neural network algorithms and architectures. At the end of this course you should be able to read and critically evaluate most neural network papers published in major journals, (e.g. IEEE Transaction on Neural Networks, Neural Networks, and Neural Computation). In addition, you should be able to implement a broad range of network architectures and learning algorithms for a variety of applications.

Ceg 460/660-01: Introduction To Software Computer Engineering, John A. Reisner

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course introduces established practices for engineering large-scale software systems. Emphasis is placed on both the technical and managerial aspects of software engineering, and the software development process. This includes techniques for requirements elicitation, analysis, design, testing, and project management. The course emphasizes object-oriented development with the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Hands-on experience is provided through individual homework problems and a partnered project.

Ceg 720-01: Computer Architecture, Jack Jean

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

No abstract provided.

Cs 480/680: Comparative Languages, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course will introduce fundamental concepts and paradigms underlying the design of modern programming languages. For concreteness, we study the details of an object-oriented language (e.g. Java), and a functional language (e.g., Scheme). The overall goal is to enable comparison and evaluation of existing languages. The programming assignments will be coded in Java 5 and in Scheme.

Ceg 220-01: Introduction To C Programming For Engineers, Robert Helt

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

This course provides a general introduction to computers as a problem-solving tool using the C programming language. Emphasis is on algorithms and techniques useful to engineers. Topics include data representation, debugging, and program verification. 4 credit hours. Prerequisite: MTH 229 (Calculus I) or EGR 101 (Engineering Mathematics).

Ceg 260-01: Digital Computer Hardware, Travis E. Doom

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Digital Computer Hardware. Topics include switching algebra and switching functions, logic design of combinational and sequential circuits using TTL, combinational logic design with MSI and LSI, busing, storage elements, and instrumentation. 3 hours lecture, 2 hours lab. Prerequisite: CS 241.

Ceg 333-01: Introduction To Unix, Eric Maston

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Introduction to the use of UNIX and UNIX tools as a computing environment. Emphasis on the shell, files and directories, editing files, user process management, compiling, debugging and other tools such as document development.

Cs 240: Computer Science - I, Ronald F. Taylor

Computer Science & Engineering Syllabi

Basic concepts of programming and programming languages are introduced. Emphasis is on structured programming and stepwise refinement. For CS/CEG majors with familiarity of a high-level programming language. Prerequisite: MTH 130 (Precalculus) or MPL 5. 4 credit hours.