Computer Engineering Commons^™

Regen: Optimizing Genetic Selection Algorithms For Heterogeneous Computing, Scott Kenneth Swinkleb Winkleblack

Master's Theses

GenSel is a genetic selection analysis tool used to determine which genetic markers are informational for a given trait. Performing genetic selection related analyses is a time consuming and computationally expensive task. Due to an expected increase in the number of genotyped individuals, analysis times will increase dramatically. Therefore, optimization efforts must be made to keep analysis times reasonable.

This thesis focuses on optimizing one of GenSel’s underlying algorithms for heterogeneous computing. The resulting algorithm exposes task-level parallelism and data-level parallelism present but inaccessible in the original algorithm. The heterogeneous computing solution, ReGen, outperforms the optimized CPU implementation achieving a …

High-Speed Mobile Networks For Modern Farming And Agricultural Systems, Santos Najar

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT

High-Speed Mobile Networks for Modern Farming and Agricultural Systems

J.Santos Najar-Ramirez

High-speed mobile networks are necessary for agriculture to inventory individual plant health, maximize yield and minimize the resources applied. More specifically, real-time information on individual plant status is critical to decisions regarding the management of resources reserved and expended. This necessity can be met by the availability of environmental sensors (such as humidity, temperature, and pH) whose data is kept on storage servers connected to static and mobile local area networks. These static and mobile local area networks are connected to cellular, core and satellite networks. For …

Decafs: A Modular Distributed File System To Facilitate Distributed Systems Education, Halli Elaine Meth

Master's Theses

Data quantity, speed requirements, reliability constraints, and other factors encourage industry developers to build distributed systems and use distributed services. Software engineers are therefore exposed to distributed systems and services daily in the workplace. However, distributed computing is hard to teach in Computer Science courses due to the complexity distribution brings to all problem spaces. This presents a gap in education where students may not fully understand the challenges introduced with distributed systems. Teaching students distributed concepts would help better prepare them for industry development work.

DecaFS, Distributed Educational Component Adaptable File System, is a modular distributed file system designed …

Virtual Reality Engine Development, Varun Varahamurthy

Master's Theses

With the advent of modern graphics and computing hardware and cheaper sensor and display technologies, virtual reality is becoming increasingly popular in the fields of gaming, therapy, training and visualization. Earlier attempts at popularizing VR technology were plagued by issues of cost, portability and marketability to the general public. Modern screen technologies make it possible to produce cheap, light head-mounted displays (HMDs) like the Oculus Rift, and modern GPUs make it possible to create and deliver a seamless real-time 3D experience to the user. 3D sensing has found an application in virtual and augmented reality as well, allowing for a …

A System For Cell Phone Anti-Theft Through Gait Recognition, Cameron P. Cstearns Stearns

Master's Theses

Studies show that smartphone thefts are a significant problem in the United States. [30] With many upcoming proposals to decrease the theft-rate of such devices, investigating new techniques for preventing smartphone theft is an important area of research. The prevalence of new biometric identification techniques for smartphones has led some researchers to propose biometric anti-theft measures for such devices, similar to the current fingerprint authentication system for iOS. Gait identification, a relatively recent field of study, seems to be a good fit for anti-theft because of the non-intrusive nature of passive pattern recognition in walking. In this paper, we reproduce …

Optimizing Lempel-Ziv Factorization For The Gpu Architecture, Bryan Ching

Master's Theses

Lossless data compression is used to reduce storage requirements, allowing for the relief of I/O channels and better utilization of bandwidth. The Lempel-Ziv lossless compression algorithms form the basis for many of the most commonly used compression schemes. General purpose computing on graphic processing units (GPGPUs) allows us to take advantage of the massively parallel nature of GPUs for computations other that their original purpose of rendering graphics. Our work targets the use of GPUs for general lossless data compression. Specifically, we developed and ported an algorithm that constructs the Lempel-Ziv factorization directly on the GPU. Our implementation bypasses the …

Coffee: Context Observer For Fast Enthralling Entertainment, Anthony M. Lenz

Master's Theses

Desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and the Kinect, oh my! With so many devices available to the average consumer, the limitations and pitfalls of each interface are becoming more apparent. Swimming in devices, users often have to stop and think about how to interact with each device to accomplish the current tasks at hand. The goal of this thesis is to minimize user cognitive effort in handling multiple devices by creating a context aware hybrid interface. The context aware system will be explored through the hybridization of gesture and touch interfaces using a multi-touch coffee table and the next-generation Microsoft Kinect. …

Sew-Ing A Simple Endorsement Web To Incentivize Trustworthy Participatory Sensing, T. Luo, S. Kanhere, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Two crucial issues to the success of participatory sensing are (a) how to incentivize the large crowd of mobile users to participate and (b) how to ensure the sensing data to be trustworthy. While they are traditionally being studied separately in the literature, this paper proposes a Simple Endorsement Web (SEW) to address both issues in a synergistic manner. The key idea is (a) introducing a social concept called nepotism into participatory sensing, by linking mobile users into a social “web of participants” with endorsement relations, and (b) overlaying this network with investment-like economic implications. The social and economic layers …

Reduction Of Vibration-Induced Artifacts In Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, Qi Wang, Matthew Pepin, Aleck Wright, Ralf Dunkel, Tom Atwood, Balu Santhanam, Walter Gerstle, Armin W. Doerry, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Target vibrations introduce nonstationary phase modulation, which is termed the micro-Doppler effect, into returned synthetic aperture radar (SAR) signals. This causes artifacts, or ghost targets, which appear near vibrating targets in reconstructed SAR images. Recently, a vibration estimation method based on the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFrFT) has been developed. This method is capable of estimating the instantaneous vibration accelerations and vibration frequencies. In this paper, a deghosting method for vibrating targets in SAR images is proposed. For single-component vibrations, this method first exploits the estimation results provided by the DFrFT-based vibration estimation method to reconstruct the instantaneous vibration displacements. …

Electrical Machine Topologies: Hottest Topics In The Electrical Machine Research Community, Aldo Boglietti, Ayman M. El-Refaie, Oliver Drubel, Avoki M. Omekanda, Nicola Bianchi, Emmanuel B. Agamloh, Mircea Popescu, Antonino Di Gerlando, James Borg Bartolo

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this article, the state of the art in electrical machine design is outlined underlining the problems and challenges to be solved by engineers. As highlighted in this article, even if electrical machine design is often considered a mature issue from the technical and technological point of view, every year, new progresses and steps forward are made. New and more sophisticated design tools can be used worldwide, and innovative manufacturing processes, new insulation materials, and higher performance magnetic materials are available on the market. In addition, the evolution of the hardware used in digital control and new powerful power electronic …

The Mpt Assessment Deployed Via Digital Mobile Application, Niall Duffy

Dissertations

This project will look at the area of the Matching Person and Technology assessment (MPT). This project will be to develop a version of the MPT that can be deployed as a mobile application. The key research being performed in this project will be the analysis of the results given on the mobile application when compared to those given via the traditional paper method. The MPT is a very large assessment; because of this there are a number of different specific assessments like workplace and education assessments (Cook, A.M. and Hussey, S. 2001). Because of the size of the assessment …

Predicting Mortgage Arrears: An Investigation Into The Predictive Capability Of Customer Spending Patterns, Jamie Roche

Dissertations

The management of credit risk and mortgage arrears has become a very important area in financial services and banking. This dissertation set out to build a statistical model, which incorporates customer spending habits and the current equity value of a property, capable of predicting arrears. Current literature identifies many themes such as negative equity and unemployment that are common occurring factors in mortgage arrears but a multi-faceted approach was required to build a model capable of accurately predicting arrears. Property equity values were included in the model by taking the current outstanding value of the loans and using a property …

Mobile Game Application: The Magictale, Lu Cao, Albert Chang, Yetian Mao

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

Many smartphone games today consist of players making simple and repetitive actions with their fingers to play the game. Compared to traditional PC Role Playing games (RPG), current mobile games do not provide the same fictional aspects and complex components. Players creativity is almost non-existent in most simple mobile application games. To address this issue, we propose to create a IOS mobile application game which combines the complex components of traditional PC RPGs and touch screen actions of mobile games.

Resilient Families Project Web Application, Stephanie Servi, Patrick Neill

Computer Science and Engineering Senior Theses

In order to help The Resilient Families Project, a stress management course for at-risk families, we have created an online application to allow users to take stress examinations more frequently, and to record their thoughts and interactions pertaining to the project. In this paper, we document our thought process, design rationale and any other relevant information to the web application for the Resilient Families Project.

Processing Of Monolayer Materals Vlanterfacial Reactions, Peter Werner Sutter, Eli Anguelova Sutter

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A method of forming and processing of graphene is disclosed based on exposure and selective intercalation of the partially graphene-covered metal Substrate with atomic or molecular intercalation species such as oxygen (O) and nitrogen oxide (NO). The process of intercalation lifts the strong metal carbon coupling and restores the characteristic Dirac behav ior of isolated monolayer graphene. The interface of graphene with metals or metal-decorated substrates also provides for controlled chemical reactions based on novel functionality of the confined space between a metal Surface and a graphene sheet.

Volunteered Geographical Information: An Alternative Solution For Overcoming The Chasm Between Stormwater Management And Community Participation, Yanfu Zhou

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

It is a dramatic challenge to promote public engagement in stormwater management and green infrastructure initiatives. When traditional outreach approaches made important influence on public engagement, their limitations are also obvious. With the development of Web 2.0 technology, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been emerging as one of the most important user-generated geographic contents. The crowdsourcing data that generated by volunteers through geo-web, smartphones, and other geo-devices provides invaluable mass data for decision-making. VGI can provide a better understanding of planning issues and other challenges. The research aims to develop a mobile information platform to allow citizens to report the …

Global Edf Scheduling For Parallel Real-Time Tasks, Jing Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

As multicore processors become ever more prevalent, it is important for real-time programs to take advantage of intra-task parallelism in order to support computation-intensive applications with tight deadlines. In this thesis, we consider the Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) scheduling policy for task sets consisting of parallel tasks. Each task can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where nodes represent computational work and edges represent dependences between nodes. In this model, we prove that GEDF provides a capacity augmentation bound of 4-2/m and a resource augmentation bound of 2-1/m. The capacity augmentation bound acts as a linear-time schedulability …

Digital Circuit Projects: An Overview Of Digital Circuits Through Implementing Integrated Circuits - Second Edition, Charles W. Kann

Open Educational Resources

Digital circuits, often called Integrated Circuits or ICs, are the central building blocks of a Central Processing Unit (CPU). To understand how a computer works, it is essential to understand the digital circuits which make up the CPU. This text introduces the most important of these digital circuits; adders, decoders, multiplexers, D flip-flops, and simple state machines.

What makes this textbook unique is that it puts the ability to understand these circuits into the hands of anyone, from hobbyists to students studying Computer Science. This text is designed to teach digital circuits using simple projects the reader can implement. But …

Decaf: A New Event Detection Logic For The Purpose Of Fusing Delineated-Continuous Spatial Information, Kerry Q. Hart

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Geospatial information fusion is the process of synthesizing information from complementary data sources located at different points in space and time. Spatial phenomena are often measured at discrete locations by sensor networks, technicians, and volunteers; yet decisions often require information about locations where direct measurements do not exist. Traditional methods assume the spatial phenomena to be either discrete or continuous, an assumption that underlies and informs all subsequent analysis. Yet certain phenomena defy this dichotomy, alternating as they move across spatial and temporal scales. Precipitation, for example, appears continuous at large scales, but it can be temporally decomposed into discrete …

Learning Directional Co-Occurrence For Human Action Classification, Hong Liu, Mengyuan Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based methods have shown promising results for human action classification. However, state-of-art works typically utilize bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores their inherent structural relationships. To solve this problem, a descriptor, namely directional pair-wise feature (DPF), is proposed to encode the mutual direction information between pairwise words, aiming at adding more spatial discriminant to BoVW. Firstly, STIP features are extracted and classified into a set of labeled words. Then in each frame, the DPF is constructed for every pair of words with different labels, according to their assigned directional …

Building A Better Computer For The Aging Generation, Gretchen Baird, Boryeon Kwon, Dylan Lasner, Parker Swensen, Zane Ross, Adrik Gurganus

PSU High School Innovation Challenge

The problem which we have ventured out to solve is that the aging community does not have easily accessible computers and technologies.

Lifebrace: The Advanced Health Tracking Wristband, Jeremy Ferrando, Dylan O'Brien, Daniel Ortiz, Jonah Paivarinta

PSU High School Innovation Challenge

Over 28 million Americans have diabetes or pre-diabetes. Every 33 seconds someone dies of heart disease, claiming more lives than AIDS and all forms of cancer combined. Falls are the leading cause of fatal and non fatal injuries to elderly people.

These problems require constant supervision and frequent treatments to keep a patient stable, and they all become more serious with age. People with diabetes, heart conditions, or other debilitating conditions need frequent check-ups, and are always in danger of accidents. They also often need frequent doses of medicine.

The only way that these conditions can be monitored properly is …

Tech For Arthritis, Alex Gaiovych, Anna Velikoretskikh, Ephraim Lee, Karl Stephenson, Kevin Wu, Miguel Campos, Veyda Campos

PSU High School Innovation Challenge

In an era where technological advances are made on almost a daily basis, there are still many people who aren’t able or are scared to use modern technology. While computers and phones get smarter and more powerful, they are also getting smaller and more precise. Trying to push a tiny button, either real or virtual, can be a real problem for those who suffer from arthritis.

According to www.arthritis.org, over 50 million people are diagnosed with arthritis, most of which are senior citizens. Many of these seniors don’t use technology to its full potential because they simply can’t. For some, …

Data Transfer Using Light, Ryan Thomas Suarez

Computer Engineering

A proof of concerpt for data transmission using light as a medium. Data is transferred by strobing and LED faster than the human eye can detect in an attempt to come up with a more secure alternate to in-building wifi.

F-Transform Enhancement Of The Sampling Theorem And Reconstruction Of Noisy Signals, Michal Holčapek, Irina Perfilieva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

According to a sampling theorem, any band-limited and continuous signal can be uniquely reconstructed from certain of its values. We show that a reconstruction can be obtained from the set of F-transform components and moreover, the sampling theorem follows as a particular case. A special attention is paid to the case where sample values of a signal come with noise. We show that in the presence of noise, a more accurate reconstruction than that based on the sampling theorem can be obtained, if instead of noised sample values the F- transform components of the signal with respect to a generalized …

Implementation Of Prediction Algorithms To Reduce Latency In Control Of Switching Converters, Brent Bell

Electrical Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Using pulse-width modulation (PWM) to control switching converters such as a dual active bridge introduces latency into a system [1]. Latency in a switching converter decreases the effective bandwidth that the converter can be switched at and for the case of a closed loop control system decreases the effective closed loop system stability. This delay can be attributed to sampling of the control signal and calculation time for the PWM. If a prediction scheme is implemented in this calculation, the next switching time could be predicted to remove any latency. There are effectively two steps in order to achieve this …

Ua66 Ogden College Of Science & Engineering Newsletter, Cheryl Stevens, Dean

Ogden College of Science & Engineering Publications

No abstract provided.

Reducing Ambiguities In Customer Requirements Through Historical Rule-Based Knowledge In A Small Organization, Silvia Brum Preston

Dissertations

During the elicitation process the requirements for a software application are obtained from the customer. Customers often do not know how to clearly express the requirements of the application to be built, causing requirements to be ambiguous. Many studies have been found to cover different characteristics of the requirements elicitation process including methods for reducing ambiguities in requirements. The methods and findings of these studies were found to be too general when it comes to the specific domain of the requirements and knowledge about the requirements. In addition, some studies did not take into consideration the level of expertise of …

Security Analysis Of Phasor Measurement Units In Smart Grid Communication Infrastructures, Mehrnaz Sharifian

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

Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs), or synchrophasors, are rapidly being deployed in the smart grid with the goal of measuring phasor quantities concurrently from wide area distribution substations. By utilizing GPS receivers, PMUs can take a wide area snapshot of power systems. Thus, the possibility of blackouts in the smart grid, the next generation power grid, will be reduced. As the main enabler of Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS), PMUs transmit measured values to Phasor Data Concentrators (PDCs) by the synchrophasor standard IEEE C37.118. IEC 61850 and IEC 62351 are the communication protocols for the substation automation system and the security …

Protecting Patient Privacy While Preserving Medical Information For Research, Gang Xiang, Jason O'Rawe, Vladik Kreinovich, Janos Hajagos, Scott Ferson

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Patient health records possess a great deal of information that would be useful in medical research, but access to these data is impossible or severely limited because of the private nature of most personal health records. Anonymization strategies, to be effective, must usually go much further than simply omitting explicit identifiers because even statistics computed from groups of records can often be leveraged by hackers to re-identify individuals. Methods of balancing the informativeness of data for research with the information loss required to minimize disclosure risk are needed before these private data can be widely released to researchers who can …