Computer Engineering Commons^™

Design And Implementation Of An Asynchronous Null Convention Logic (Ncl) Fpga, Indira Priyadarshini Dugganapally

Masters Theses

"This Master’s thesis outlines the design of a completely asynchronous Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) for implementing NULL Convention Logic (NCL) digital circuits. The proposed design uses four Configurable Logic Blocks (CLB), each of which in turn is designed using four Logic Elements (LE) to implement NCL logic function. Each LE can be configured to function as any one of the 27 fundamental NCL gates. A Logic Element is designed by concatenating a Look-Up-Table (LUT) with a pull-up pull-down transistor chain and a hysteresis loop. The interconnections and the switch box are designed using pass transistors and SRAM. In this …

Self-Reported Cyber Crime: An Analysis On The Effects Of Anonymity And Pre-Employment Integrity, Ibrahim Baggili, Marcus Rogers

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

A key issue facing today’s society is the increase in cyber crimes. Cyber crimes pose threats to nations, organizations and individuals across the globe. Much of the research in cyber crime has risen from computer science-centric programs, and little experimental research has been performed on the psychology of cyber crime. This has caused a knowledge gap in the study of cyber crime. To this end, this research focuses on understanding psychological concepts related to cyber crime. Through an experimental design, participants were randomly assigned to three groups with varying degrees of anonymity. After each treatment, participants were asked to self-report …

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches For Developing Serious Games In Higher Education: Frameworks For Food Safety And Environmental Health Education, Pauline Rooney, K.C. O'Rourke, Greg Burke, Brian Mac Namee, Claudia Igbrude

Conference papers

While some educators have adopted commercial off the-shelf games for use in the classroom, such games may not always meet the individual requirements of lecturers whose courses are tied to specific learning utcomes. An alternative is to capitalise on in-house expertise in Higher Education and create serious games through cross-disciplinary team projects. This paper outlines such a project within one Higher Education institution. It describes synergies created across disciplines as a result of the collaboration on game design and implementation. It looks at tensions generated between the pedagogical requirements (of lecturers), entertainment objectives (of games designers) and technical excellence (sought …

Compensating For Expressiveness In Queries To A Content Based Music Information Retrieval System, Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea, Mikel Gainza, Padraig Cunningham

Conference papers

MATT2 is a content based music information retrieval system adapted to the characteristics of traditional Irish dance music. MATT2 compensates for expressive artefacts commonly employed by traditional musicians. Specifically these are ornamentation, "the long note", reversing and phrasing. In this paper we describe the main components of MATT2 and present an experiment where we demonstrate that using this higher level knowledge of melodic similarity in traditional Irish dance music results in a significant improvement in annotation accuracy over standard approaches from the MIR literature.

Error Metrics For Impaired Auditory Nerve Responses Of Different Phoneme Groups, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

An auditory nerve model allows faster investigation of new signal processing algorithms for hearing aids. This paper presents a study of the degradation of auditory nerve (AN) responses at a phonetic level for a range of sensorineural hearing losses and flat audiograms. The AN model of Zilany & Bruce was used to compute responses to a diverse set of phoneme rich sentences from the TIMIT database. The characteristics of both the average discharge rate and spike timing of the responses are discussed. The experiments demonstrate that a mean absolute error metric provides a useful measure of average discharge rates but …

Measurement Of Phonemic Degradation In Sensorineural Hearing Loss Using A Computational Model Of The Auditory Periphery, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

A computational model of the auditory periphery enables faster investigation of new signal processing algorithms for hearing aids. This paper presents a study of the degradation of auditory nerve (AN) responses at a phonetic level for a range of sensorineural hearing losses. The AN model of Zilany & Bruce was used to compute responses to a diverse set of phoneme rich sentences from the TIMIT database. The characteristics of both the average discharge rate and spike timing of the responses are discussed. The experiments demonstrate that the model responses are consistent with respect to impairment and inaudible thresholds.

The Development Of A Prototype Robotic Platform On Which Awareness Strategies Can Be Implemented, Sean Kinsella

Theses

This thesis describes the design and development of the hardware and software for a prototype robotic platform on which awareness strategies can be developed. The mobile prototype platform designed over the course of work is capable of operating as a distributed or centralised system.

There is no singular definition of awareness for a robotic system and the development of awareness strategies is complex and requires expertise in many scientific disciplines. This paper describes the different types of awareness associated with robotic systems and the technology required to implement this awareness. A review of sensors critical to the development of awareness …

Design Of A Low Voltage Analog To Digital Converter, Praveen Kumar Palakurthi

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

For the past 40 years, the number of transistors per chip has been increasing at an exponential rate confirming Moore's Law regarding the growth of chip complexity. Increases in transistor count have led to enhancements in functionality and made possible products with features that were unimaginable ten years ago. Consequently, the resulting increase in digitization in all electronics, across a wide range of applications, requires the Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) with a higher resolution and lower power consumption. The evolution of the integrated circuit technologies and scaling methodologies partially helps in providing faster circuits and allowing complex functionalities in a given …

System Design And Integration For Repeated Impact Tests, Cheng Lin, Gene Hou, Sebastian Bawab, Timothy Coats, Hesham Nassar

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

The design and integration of an impact-testing machine is particularly for the test of an object which is repeatedly dropped down from a specified height. Four linear actuators with two on each of the two magnetic rails are used to lift up an object weighing up to 70 lbs. Each actuator is powered and controlled by an industrial amplifier. A Programmable Logical Controller (PLC) is applied to activate these four actuators simultaneously and repeatedly. Accelerometers using an National Instruments (NI) data acquisition system are used to measure the impact force during the tests. Students gain design and implementation experiences from …

Assessing The Legal Risks In Network Forensic Probing, Michael Losavio, Olfa Nasraoui, Vincent Thacker, Jeff Marean, Nick Miles, Roman Yampolskiy, Ibrahim Imam

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper presents a framework for identifying the legal risks associated with performing network forensics on public networks. The framework is discussed in the context of the Gnutella P2P network protocol for which the legal issues related to authorized access have not yet been addressed.

An Enhanced Data Mining Life Cycle, Markus Hofmann, Brendan Tierney

Conference papers

Data mining projects are complex and can have a high failure rate. In order to improve project management and success rates of such projects a life cycle is vital to the overall success of the project. This paper reports on a research project that was concerned with the life cycle development for data mining projects, its team members and their role. The paper provides a detailed view of the design and development of the data mining life cycle called DMLC. The life cycle aims to support all members of data mining project teams as well as IT managers and academic …

Agent Based Modeling In Computer Graphics And Games, Brian Macnamee

Books/Book Chapters

As graphics technology has improved in recent years, more and more importance has been placed on the behavior of virtual characters in applications set in virtual worlds in areas such as games, movies and simulations. The behavior of virtual characters should be believable in order to create the illusion that these virtual worlds are populated with living characters. This has led to the application of agent-based modeling to the control of these virtual characters. There are a number of advantages of using agent-based modeling techniques which include the fact that they remove the requirement for hand controlling all agents in …

A Physics-Based Modeling And Real-Time Simulation Of Biomechanical Diffusion Process Through Optical Imaged Alveolar Tissues On Graphical Processing Units, Ilhan Kaya

Link Foundation Modeling, Simulation and Training Fellowship Reports

Tissue engineering has broad applications fro1n creating the much needed engineered tissue and organ structures for regenerative medicine to providing in vitro testbeds for drug testing. In the later, application domain, creating alveolar lung tissue and simulating the diffusion process of oxygen and other possible agents front the air into the blood stream as well as modeling the removal of carbon dioxide and other possible entities-from the blood stream are of critical importance to simulating lung functions in various environments. In this paper, we propose a physics-based model to simulate the alveolar gas exchange and the alveolar diffusion process. Tissue …

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

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 …

Gathering Cows Using Virtual Fencing Methodologies, Dean M. Anderson, Marek Doniec, Carrick Detweiler, Iuliu Vesilescu, Daniela Rus, Barbara Nolen, Roy Libeau

School of Computing: Conference and Workshop Papers

Free-ranging livestock are classically controlled by herders. Holding, moving, or gathering free-ranging cattle requires flexible husbandry practices for efficient and effective lowstress animal management. Behavioral theory and practical experience indicates cattle can be taught to respond to auditory cues. Preliminary research has demonstrated that cows can be gathered autonomously using recorded audio cues associated with manual gathering. However, efficient gathering requires movement in the proper direction. Therefore, we believe using audio cues administered from directional virtual fencing (DVF™) equipment can facilitate proper animal orientation and facilitate the gathering of animals with minimal human intervention. Results from applying directional audio cues …

Achievable Rates And Resource Allocation Strategies For Imperfectly Known Fading Relay Channels, Junwei Zhang, M. Cenk Gursoy

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Achievable rates and resource allocation strategies for imperfectly known fading relay channels are studied. It is assumed that communication starts with the network training phase in which the receivers estimate the fading coefficients. Achievable rate expressions for amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward relaying schemes with different degrees of cooperation are obtained. We identify efficient strategies in three resource allocation problems: (1) power allocation between data and training symbols, (2) time/bandwidth allocation to the relay, and (3) power allocation between the source and relay in the presence of total power constraints. It is noted that unless the source-relay channel quality is high, cooperation …

Sequencing, Analysis, And Annotation Of Expressed Sequence Tags For Camelus Dromedarius, Abdulaziz M. Al-Swailem, Maher M. Shehata, Faisel M. Abu-Duhier, Essam J. Al-Yamani, Khalid A. Al-Busadah, Mohammed S. Al-Arawi, Ali Y. Al-Khider, Abdullah N. Al-Muhaimeed, Fahad H. Al-Qahtani, Manee M. Manee, Badr M. Al-Shomrani, Saad M. Al-Qhtani, Amer S. Al-Harthi, Kadir C. Akdemir, Mehmet S. Inan, Hasan H. Otu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

Despite its economical, cultural, and biological importance, there has not been a large scale sequencing project to date for Camelus dromedarius. With the goal of sequencing complete DNA of the organism, we first established and sequenced camel EST libraries, generating 70,272 reads. Following trimming, chimera check, repeat masking, cluster and assembly, we obtained 23,602 putative gene sequences, out of which over 4,500 potentially novel or fast evolving gene sequences do not carry any homology to other available genomes. Functional annotation of sequences with similarities in nucleotide and protein databases has been obtained using Gene Ontology classification. Comparison to available …

Genes Differentially Expressed By Cumulus Cells And Assays Using Same To Identify Pregnancy Competent Oocytes, Jose B. Cibelli, Amy E. Iager, Hasan H. Otu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A genetic means of identifying "pregnancy competent" oocytes is provided. The means comprises detecting the level of expression of one or more genes that are expressed at characteristic levels (upregulated or downregulated) in cumulus cells derived from pregnancy competent oocytes. This characteristic gene expression level, or pattern referred to herein as the "pregnancy signature", also can be used to identify subjects with underlying conditions that impair or prevent the development of a viable pregnancy, e.g., pre-menopausal condition, other hormonal dysfunction, ovarian dysfunction, ovarian cyst, cancer or other cell proliferation disorder, autoimmune disease and the like. In preferred embodiments the …

Sample Investigating System, Martin M. Liphardt, Thomas E. Tiwald, Blaine D. Johs, Jeffery S. Hale, Craig M. Herzinger, Steven E. Green, Ping He, Ronald A. Synowicki, John A. Woollam

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A spectroscopic system for adjusting spacing between an adjacent source/detector as a unit, and a sample, and a reflecting means for directing an incident beam which refelcts from said sample back onto said sample and then into the detector along a locus which is in a plance of incidence that is offset from that of the incident beam, or directly from the reflecting means into the detecor, including means for reducing reflections of a beam fo electromagnetic from the back of a sample, including methodology of use.

Simulation Of Coherent Radar Imaging Using Continuous Wave Noise Radar, Jing Xu, Michael Hoffman, B.L. Cheong, R.D. Palmer

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A computationally simple cross-correlation model for multiple backscattering from a continuous wave (CW) noise radar is developed and verified with theoretical analysis and brute-force time-domain simulations. Based on this cross-correlation model, a modification of an existing numerical method originally developed by Holdsworth and Reid for spaced antenna (SA) pulsed radar is used to simulate the estimated cross correlation corresponding to atmospheric backscattering using a coherent CW noise radar. Subse- quently, coherent radar imaging (CRI) processing comparisons between the CW noise radar and a con- ventional pulsed radar are presented that verify the potential of CW noise radar for atmospheric imaging.

Correction To “The Theory Of Quaternion Orthogonal Designs”, Tadeusz Wysocki, Beata J. Wysocki, Sarah Spence Adams

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications (to 2015)

Seberry et al. claimed that even though the dual-polarized transmission channel cannot be considered as described by means of a single quaternionic gain, the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding rule can be decoupled for orthogonal space–time-polarization block codes (OSTPBCs) derived from quaternion orthogonal designs (QODs) [1, Sec. IV]. Regretfully, a correction is necessary, and we will show that decoupled decoding using the method presented therein is only optimal for codes derived from certain QODs, not from arbitrary QODs as previously suggested.

Performance Evaluation Of Network-On-Chip Interconnect Architectures, Xinan Zhou

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With a communication design style, Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have been proposed as a new Multi-Processor System-on-Chip paradigm. Simulation and functional validation are essential to assess the correctness and performance of the NoC design. In this thesis, a cycle-accurate NoC simulation system in Verilog HDL is developed to evaluate the performance of various NoC architectures. First, a library of NoC components is developed based on an existing design. Each NoC architecture to be evaluated is constructed from the library according to the topology description which specifies the network topology, network size, and routing algorithm. The network performance of four NoC architectures under …