Computer Engineering Commons^™

Computational Modeling For Transportation Network Security, Sherif A. Tolba

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Data Exploration Interface For Digital Forensics, Varun Dontula

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The fast capacity growth of cheap storage devices presents an ever-growing problem of scale for digital forensic investigations. One aspect of scale problem in the forensic process is the need for new approaches to visually presenting and analyzing large amounts of data. Current generation of tools universally employ three basic GUI components—trees, tables, and viewers—to present all relevant information. This approach is not scalable as increasing the size of the input data leads to a proportional increase in the amount of data presented to the analyst.

We present an alternative approach, which leverages data visualization techniques to provide a more …

Reducing Data Loss And Saving Money By Acquiring Data Loss Prevention Software, Patarika Tipwong

Technical Reports

Choosing and implementing the right security software tools can protect a company’s assets. In particular, data breaches might not happen if a company is aware of its information flow and has the proper tool to protect it. This thesis paper will explain why and how acquiring data loss prevention (DLP) software will help a company to reduce data loss, mitigate the loss impact and save money. Facts and examples are provided to support and illustrate the statement above.

Detection Of Diffuse Sea Floor Venting Using Structured Light Imaging, Gabrielle Inglis, Clara Smart, Christopher Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Efficiently identifying and localizing diffuse sea floor venting at hydrothermal and cold seep sites is often difficult. Actively venting fluids are usually identified by a temperature induced optical shimmering seen during direct visual inspections or in video data collected by vehicles working close to the sea floor. Relying on such direct methods complicates establishing spatial relations between areas within a survey covering a broad area. Our recent work with a structured light laser system has shown that venting can also be detected in the image data in an automated fashion. A structured light laser system consists of a camera and …

Remote Analysis Of Grain Size Characteristic In Submarine Pyroclastic Deposits From Kolumbo Volcano, Greece, Clara Smart, D. P. Whitesell, Christopher N. Roman, Steven Carey

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Grain size characteristics of pyroclastic deposits provide valuable information about source eruption energetics and depositional processes. Maximum size and sorting are often used to discriminate between fallout and sediment gravity flow processes during explosive eruptions. In the submarine environment the collection of such data in thick pyroclastic sequences is extremely challenging and potentially time consuming. A method has been developed to extract grain size information from stereo images collected by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). In the summer of 2010 the ROV Hercules collected a suite of stereo images from a thick pumice sequence in the caldera walls of Kolumbo …

A Study Of Correlations Between The Definition And Application Of The Gene Ontology, Yuji Mo

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When using the Gene Ontology (GO), nucleotide and amino acid sequences are annotated by terms in a structured and controlled vocabulary organized into relational graphs. The usage of the vocabulary (GO terms) in the annotation of these sequences may diverge from the relations defined in the ontology. We measure the consistency of the use of GO terms by comparing GO's defined structure to the terms' application. To do this, we first use synthetic data with different characteristics to understand how these characteristics influence the correlation values determined by various similarity measures. Using these results as a baseline, we found that …

State-Based Techniques For Designing, Verifying And Debugging Message Passing Systems, Rajaa Khaled Alqudah

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science - Dissertations

Message passing systems support the applications of concurrent events, where independent or semi-independent events occur simultaneously in a nondeterministic fashion. The nature of independence, random interactions and concurrency made the code development of such applications complicated and error-prone. Conventional code development environments or IDEs, such as Microsoft Visual Studio, provide little programming support in this regard. Furthermore, ensuring the correctness of a message passing system is a challenge. Typically, it is important to guarantee that a system meets its desired specifications along its construction process. Model checking is one of the techniques used in software verification which has proven to …

Efficient Approximation For Security Games With Interval Uncertainty, Chris Kiekintveld, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

There are an increasing number of applications of security games. One of the key challenges for this field going forward is to address the problem of model uncertainty and the robustness of the game-theoretic solutions. Most existing methods for dealing with payoff uncertainty are Bayesian methods which are NP-hard and have difficulty scaling to very large problems. In this work we consider an alternative approach based on interval uncertainty. For a variant of security games with interval uncertainty we introduce a polynomial-time approximation algorithm that can compute very accurate solutions within a given error bound.

Assessment Of Functional Impairment In Human Locomotion: A Fuzzy-Motivated Approach, Murad Alaqtash, Thompson Sarkodie-Gyan, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Many neurological disorders result in disordered motion. The effects of a disorder can be decrease by an appropriate rehabilitation. To make rehabilitation efficient, we need to monitor the patient and check how well he or she improves. In our previous papers, we proposed a fuzzy-based semi-heuristic method of gauging how well a patient improved. Surprisingly, this semi-heuristic method turned out to be more efficient that we expected. In this paper, we provide a justification for this efficiency.

In the future, it is desirable to combine this fuzzy-assessment approach with results by Alavarez-Alvarez, Trivino, and Cordon who use fuzzy techniques …

Constraint Optimization: From Efficient Computation Of What Can Be Achieved To Efficient Computation Of A Way To Achieve The Corresponding Optimum, Ali Jalal-Kamali, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many practically useful cases, we know how to efficiently compute the exact range of a function over given intervals (and, possibly, under additional constraints). In other words, we know how to efficiently compute the minimum and maximum of a given function f(x₁, ..., x_n) on any box. From the practical viewpoint, it is important not only to find the value of the corresponding maximum or minimum, but also to know for what values of the parameters x_i this optimum is attained. We prove a general result: that if we can efficiently compute the optimum, …

Why Bernstein Polynomials Are Better: Fuzzy-Inspired Justification, Jaime Nava, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

It is well known that an arbitrary continuous function on a bounded set -- e.g., on an interval [a,b] -- can be, with any given accuracy, approximated by a polynomial. Usually, polynomials are described as linear combinations of monomials. It turns out that in many computational problems, it is more efficient to represent a polynomial as Bernstein polynomials -- e.g., for functions of one variable, a linear combination of terms (x-a)^k * (b-x)^n-k. In this paper, we provide a simple fuzzy-based explanation of why Bernstein polynomials are often more efficient, and we show how this informal explanation …

Semi-Heuristic Poverty Measures Used By Economists: Justification Motivated By Fuzzy Techniques, Karen Villaverde, Nagwa Albehery, Tonghui Wang, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

To properly gauge the extent of poverty in a country or in a region, economists use semi-heuristic poverty measures such as the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) metric. These measures are used because it was empirically shown that they capture the commonsense meaning of the extent of poverty better than previously proposed measures. However, the fact that these measures are better then a few earlier proposed ones does not necessarily mean that these measures are the best possible; so, it is desirable to look for optimal poverty measures. In this paper, we first use fuzzy techniques to provide a commonsense interpretation of FGT …

In The Beginning Was The Word, And The Word Was Fuzzy, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

No abstract provided.

Powersearch: Augmenting Mobile Phone Search Through Personalization, Xiangyu Liu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cell phone has become a fundamental element of people's life. People use it to call each other, browse websites, send text messages, etc. Among all the functionalities, the most important and frequently used is the search functionality. Based on ComScore, in July 2008, Google was estimated to host 235 millions searches per day. However, unlike the search on desktop, the search on cell phone has one critical constrain: battery. Cell phone performing a normal Google search, the battery drains very fast. The reason is that when sending a query to and fetching the results from Google, cell phone keeps communicating …

Stability And Classification Performance Of Feature Selection Techniques, Huanjing Wang, Taghi Khoshgoftaar, Qianhui Liang

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Feature selection techniques can be evaluated based on either model performance or the stability (robustness) of the technique. The ideal situation is to choose a feature selec- tion technique that is robust to change, while also ensuring that models built with the selected features perform well. One domain where feature selection is especially important is software defect prediction, where large numbers of met- rics collected from previous software projects are used to help engineers focus their efforts on the most faulty mod- ules. This study presents a comprehensive empirical ex- amination of seven filter-based feature ranking techniques (rankers) applied to …

Mapping Device With Wireless Communication, Xiangyu Liu

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Wireless communication is one of the most powerful communication methods that people use nowadays. The key advantage of wireless communications is that it can cover large distances without having to run any cables from one end to the other. Based on this advantage, wireless communication has many important applications, such as remote controls, cell phones, and global positioning system (GPS). This senior design project is developed to use wireless communication technology to map the geographic characteristics of an unknown place. It contains two wireless communication modules with Atmega1281 microprocessor, two robots with the 8051 microcontroller, six pairs of infrared transmitters …

Fast Super-Resolution With Affine Motion Using An Adaptive Wiener Filter And Its Application To Airborne Imaging, Russell C. Hardie, Kenneth J. Barnard, Raúl Ordóñez

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Fast nonuniform interpolation based super-resolution (SR) has traditionally been limited to applications with translational interframe motion. This is in part because such methods are based on an underlying assumption that the warping and blurring components in the observation model commute. For translational motion this is the case, but it is not true in general. This presents a problem for applications such as airborne imaging where translation may be insufficient. Here we present a new Fourier domain analysis to show that, for many image systems, an affine warping model with limited zoom and shear approximately commutes with the point spread function …

Requirements Specification For Dsic: Distribution System For Information And Collaboration, Alex Abrahamian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

There seems to exist an invisible barrier between people that should be connected but for whatever reasons (don't hang out in the same circles, don't go to the same meetings, or are geographically separated) haven't met each other yet.

Normally these people will only meet when others bring them together or they are thrown together on a project. DSIC aims to preempt the person discovery process by allowing a way for people to post ideas, events, and other collaborations in a single place that can then be searched by other users.

The system utilizes postings, user profiles, and a tagging …

Cplop - Cal Poly's Library Of Pyroprints, Kevin Webb

Computer Engineering

California Polytechnic Library of Pyroprints, CPLOP, is a web driven data-base application that stores data from the biology’s departments E. coli Pyrosequencing project. Some of this data was stored in Excel datasheets, while data from the pyrosequencing machines was stored as just a list of random .xml files. There was no useful way to organize and store the massive amounts of data from multiple file sources in one location, nor to perform the complicated searches and comparisons that the project requires. CPLOP’s primary goal is to store such data in three organized tables that relate to one another. It was …

Accelerating Pattern Recognition Algorithms On Parallel Computing Architectures, Kenneth Rice

All Dissertations

The move to more parallel computing architectures places more responsibility on the programmer to achieve greater performance. The programmer must now have a greater understanding of the underlying architecture and the inherent algorithmic parallelism. Using parallel computing architectures for exploiting algorithmic parallelism can be a complex task. This dissertation demonstrates various techniques for using parallel computing architectures to exploit algorithmic parallelism. Specifically, three pattern recognition (PR) approaches are examined for acceleration across multiple parallel computing architectures, namely field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and general purpose graphical processing units (GPGPUs).
Phase-only filter correlation for fingerprint identification was studied as the first …

Tracking Web Video Topics: Discovery, Visualization, And Monitoring, Juan Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong-Dong Zhang, Jin-Tao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the massive growth of web-shared videos in Internet, efficient organization and monitoring of videos remains a practical challenge. While nowadays broadcasting channels are keen to monitor online events, identifying topics of interest from huge volume of user uploaded videos and giving recommendation to emerging topics are by no means easy. Specifically, such process involves discovering of new topic, visualization of the topic content, and incremental monitoring of topic evolution. This paper studies the problem from three aspects. First, given a large set of videos collected over months, an efficient algorithm based on salient trajectory extraction on a topic evolution …

A Quantitative Performance Analysis Of 2.5 Ghz And 3.65 Ghz Mobile Wimax, Pradhumna L. Shrestha

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Mobile WiMAX has emerged as a prime contender for the de-facto ITU’s 4G standard. It provides high data rate with large coverage and vehicular mobility support. It has been, and is being, widely deployed in diverse applications like video streaming, broadcasting and data service. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) issues licenses to operate Mobile WiMAX services in several spectrums, among which 2.5 GHz and 3.65 GHz are the most common. Because the 2.5 GHz spectrum suffers the least propagation losses, it has been widely applied commercially. For this reason, academic and industrial researchers have given it particular attention. However, in …

A Novel Telecommunications-Based Approach To Mathematical Modeling Of Hiv Infection, Aaron T. Sharp

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

It is well known that biological systems utilize communication in some form, one prolific example of this is the propagation of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) in the human body. By modeling HIV infection as a communication system, we hope to gain a unique insight into HIV and biological communication systems in general. Such a model would provide researchers a platform for experimenting and simulating various biological communication systems. We have previously developed a layered communication protocol for interpreting biological communication systems using telecommunications paradigms and will apply said model to HIV proliferation. We will also demonstrate the effectiveness of the …

Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency For Constraint Satisfaction: A Structure-Based Approach For Adjusting Consistency And Managing Propagation, Robert J. Woodward

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Freuder and Elfe [1996] introduced Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (NIC) as a local consistency property defined on the values in the variables' domains of a Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). Debruyne and Bessiere [2011] showed that enforcing NIC on binary CSPs is ineffective on sparse graph and too costly on dense graphs. In this thesis, we propose Relational Neighborhood Inverse Consistency (RNIC), an extension of NIC defined as a local consistency property on the tuples of the relations of a CSP. We characterize RNIC for both binary and non-binary CSPs, and propose an algorithm for enforcing it whose complexity is bounded by …

Location Cheating: A Security Challenge To Location-Based Social Network Services, Mai Ren

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Location-based mobile social network services such as Foursquare and Gowalla have grown exponentially over the past several years. These location-based services utilize the geographical position to enrich user experiences in a variety of contexts, including location-based searching and location-based mobile advertising. To attract more users, the location-based mobile social network services provide real-world rewards to the user, when a user checks in at a certain venue or location. This gives incentives for users to cheat on their locations.

In this thesis, we investigate the threat of location cheating attacks, find the root cause of the vulnerability, and outline the possible …

A New Approach To Dynamic Modeling Of Continuum Robots, Nivedhitha Giri

All Theses

ABSTRACT
In this thesis, a new approach for developing practically realizable dynamic models for continuum robots is proposed. Based on the new dynamic models developed, a novel technique for analyzing the capabilities of continuum manipulators to be employed in various real world applications has also been proposed and developed.
A section of a continuum arm is modeled using lumped model elements (masses, springs and dampers). It is shown that this model, although an approximation to a continuum structure, can be used to conveniently analyze the dynamics of the arm with suitable tradeoff in accuracy of modeling. This relatively simple model …

Measuring Digital System Latency From Sensing To Actuation At Continuous 1 Millisecond Resolution, Weixin Wu

All Theses

This thesis describes a new method for measuring the end-to-end latency between sensing and actuation in a digital computing system. Compared to previous work, which generally measures the latency at 16-33 ms intervals or at discrete events separated by hundreds of ms, our new method measures the latency continuously at 1 millisecond resolution. This allows for the observation of variations in latency over sub 1 s periods, instead of relying upon averages of measurements. We have applied our method to two systems, the ?rst using a camera for sensing and an LCD monitor for actuation, and the second using an …

The Design Of A Haptic Device For Training And Evaluating Surgeon And Novice Laparoscopic Movement Skills, Ryan Bontreger

All Theses

As proper levels of force application are necessary to ensure patient safety, and training hours with an expert on live subjects are difficult, enhanced computer-based training is needed to teach the next generation of surgeons. Considering the role of touch in surgery, there is a need for a device capable of discerning the haptic ability of surgical trainees. This need is amplified by minimally invasive surgical techniques where a surgeon's sense of tissue properties comes not directly through their own hands but indirectly through the tools. A haptic device capable of producing a realistic range of forces and motions that …

A Comparison Of The Performance Of Neural Q-Learning And Soar-Rl On A Derivative Of The Block Design (Bd)/Block Design Multiple Choice (Bdmc) Subtests On The Wisc-Iv Intelligence Test, Charreau Bell

All Theses

Teaching an autonomous agent to perform tasks that are simple to humans can be complex, especially when the task requires successive steps, has a low likelihood of successful completion with a brute force approach, and when the solution space is too large or too complex to be explicitly encoded. Reinforcement learning algorithms are particularly suited to such situations, and are based on rewards that help the agent to find the optimal action to execute given a certain state. The task investigated in this thesis is a modified form of the Block Design (BD) and Block Design Multiple Choice (BDMC) subtests, …

Parallel Implementation Of The Singular Value Decomposition Using Opencl, Bhushan Rayrikar

All Theses

General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) have massively parallel computational capabilities. Low cost and ease of programming make them a popular choice over other parallel architectures such as large clusters and accelerators such as Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Mature programming frameworks for GPGPUs, such as CUDA from Nvidia and OpenCL from the Khronos Group, reduce the learning curve and development time for programming GPGPU architectures. OpenCL, a relatively new industry standard for parallel computing makes it possible to write a single program for heterogeneous platforms that is portable across multiple platforms including GPGPUs and multi-core processors with minimal coding modifications.
GPGPU …