Computer Engineering Commons^™

A Dynamic Scaling Methodology For Improving Performance Of Big Data Systems, Nashmiah Alhamdawi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The continuous growth of data volume in various fields such as, healthcare, sciences, economics, and business has caused an overwhelming flow of data in the last decade. The overwhelming flow of data has raised challenges in processing, analyzing, and storing data, which lead many systems to face an issue in performance. Poor performance of systems creates negative impact such as delays, unprocessed data, and increasing response time. Processing huge amounts of data demands a powerful computational infrastructure to ensure that data processing and analysis success [7]. However, the architectures of these systems are not suitable to process that quantity of …

Availability Of Datasets For Digital Forensics–And What Is Missing, Cinthya Grajeda, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This paper targets two main goals. First, we want to provide an overview of available datasets that can be used by researchers and where to find them. Second, we want to stress the importance of sharing datasets to allow researchers to replicate results and improve the state of the art. To answer the first goal, we analyzed 715 peer-reviewed research articles from 2010 to 2015 with focus and relevance to digital forensics to see what datasets are available and focused on three major aspects: (1) the origin of the dataset (e.g., real world vs. synthetic), (2) if datasets were released …

A Scalable Solution For Interactive Video Streaming, Kamal Kayed Nayfeh

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation presents an overall solution for interactive Near Video On Demand (NVOD) systems, where limited server and network resources prevent the system from servicing all customers’ requests. The interactive nature of recent workloads complicates matters further. Interactive requests require additional resources to be handled. This dissertation analyzes the system performance under a realistic workload using different stream merging techniques and scheduling policies. It considers a wide range of system

parameters and studies their impact on the waiting and blocking metrics. In order to improve waiting customers experience, we propose a new scheduling policy for waiting customers that is fairer …

Design Automation For Carbon Nanotube Circuits Considering Performance And Security Optimization, Lin Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

As prevailing copper interconnect technology advances to its fundamental physical limit, interconnect delay due to ever-increasing wire resistivity has greatly limited the circuit miniaturization. Carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects have emerged as promising replacement materials for copper interconnects due to their superior conductivity. Buffer insertion for CNT interconnects is capable of improving circuit timing of signal nets with limited buffer deployment. However, due to the imperfection of fabricating long straight CNT, there exist significant unidimensional-spatially correlated variations on the critical CNT geometric parameters such as the diameter and density, which will affect the circuit performance.

This dissertation develops a novel timing …

An Algorithm For Reconstructing Three-Dimensional Images From Overlapping Two-Dimensional Intensity Measurements With Relaxed Camera Positioning Requirements, With Application To Additive Manufacturing, Siranee Nuchitprasitchai

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Cameras are everywhere for security purposes and there are often many cameras installed close to each other to cover areas of interest, such as airport passenger terminals. These systems are often designed to have overlapping fields of view to provide different aspects of the scene to review when, for example, law enforcement issues arise. However, these cameras are rarely, if ever positioned in a way that would be conducive to conventional stereo image processing. To address this, issue an algorithm was developed to rectify images measured under such conditions, and then perform stereo image reconstruction. The initial experiments described here …

Evaluating Intention To Use Remote Robotics Experimentation In Programming Courses, Pericles Leng Cheng

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The Digital Agenda for Europe (2015) states that there will be 825,000 unfilled vacancies for Information and Communications Technology by 2020. This lack of IT professionals stems from the small number of students graduating in computer science. To retain more students in the field, teachers can use remote robotic experiments to explain difficult concepts. This correlational study used the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) to examine if performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, and facilitating conditions can predict the intention of high school computer science teachers in Cyprus, to use remote robotic experiments in their classes. …

Foreword: Special Issue On Coalgebraic Logic, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

The second Dagstuhl seminar on coalgebraic logics took place from October 7-12, 2012, in the Leibniz Forschungszentrum Schloss Dagstuhl, following a successful earlier one in December 2009. From the 44 researchers who attended and the 30 talks presented, this collection highlights some of the progress that has been made in the field. We are grateful to Giuseppe Longo and his interest in a special issue in Mathematical Structures in Computer Science.

Quasivarieties And Varieties Of Ordered Algebras: Regularity And Exactness, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We characterise quasivarieties and varieties of ordered algebras categorically in terms of regularity, exactness and the existence of a suitable generator. The notions of regularity and exactness need to be understood in the sense of category theory enriched over posets.

We also prove that finitary varieties of ordered algebras are cocompletions of their theories under sifted colimits (again, in the enriched sense).

The Positivication Of Coalgebraic Logics, Fredrik Dahlqvist, Alexander Kurz

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

We present positive coalgebraic logic in full generality, and show how to obtain a positive coalgebraic logic from a boolean one. On the model side this involves canonically computing a endofunctor T': Pos->Pos from an endofunctor T: Set->Set, in a procedure previously defined by the second author et alii called posetification. On the syntax side, it involves canonically computing a syntax-building functor L': DL->DL from a syntax-building functor L: BA->BA, in a dual procedure which we call positivication. These operations are interesting in their own right and we explicitly compute posetifications and positivications in the case …

Why Mobile Money Users Keep Increasing? Investigating The Continuance Usage Of Mobile Money Services In Tanzania, Daniel Koloseni, Herman Mandari

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This study examined factors that affect continuance usage of mobile money services in Tanzania. The Theory of Planned Behavior was adopted as a theoretical foundation of the study. The theory was further extended by including the constructs of perceived cost, perceived trust and satisfaction as determinants of mobile money service continuance usage behaviour. A total of 309 valid and reliable responses collected using questionnaires were used for data analysis. The data were analysed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) approach. The findings depict that perceived trust, attitude and perceived behavioral control have significant influence on continuance behavioral intention while perceived trust, …

Design And Theoretical Analysis Of Advanced Power Based Positioning In Rf System, Lei Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"Accurate locating and tracking of people and resources has become a fundamental requirement for many applications. The global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) is widely used. But its accuracy suffers from signal obstruction by buildings, multipath fading, and disruption due to jamming and spoof. Hence, it is required to supplement GPS with inertial sensors and indoor localization schemes that make use of WiFi APs or beacon nodes. In the GPS-challenging or fault scenario, radio-frequency (RF) infrastructure based localization schemes can be a fallback solution for robust navigation. For the indoor/outdoor transition scenario, we propose hypothesis test based fusion method to integrate …

Quantitative Dependability And Interdependency Models For Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems, Koosha Marashi

Doctoral Dissertations

"Cyber-physical systems link cyber infrastructure with physical processes through an integrated network of physical components, sensors, actuators, and computers that are interconnected by communication links. Modern critical infrastructures such as smart grids, intelligent water distribution networks, and intelligent transportation systems are prominent examples of cyber-physical systems. Developed countries are entirely reliant on these critical infrastructures, hence the need for rigorous assessment of the trustworthiness of these systems. The objective of this research is quantitative modeling of dependability attributes -- including reliability and survivability -- of cyber-physical systems, with domain-specific case studies on smart grids and intelligent water distribution networks. To …

Survivability Modeling For Cyber-Physical Systems Subject To Data Corruption, Mark James Woodard

Doctoral Dissertations

"Cyber-physical critical infrastructures are created when traditional physical infrastructure is supplemented with advanced monitoring, control, computing, and communication capability. More intelligent decision support and improved efficacy, dependability, and security are expected. Quantitative models and evaluation methods are required for determining the extent to which a cyber-physical infrastructure improves on its physical predecessors. It is essential that these models reflect both cyber and physical aspects of operation and failure. In this dissertation, we propose quantitative models for dependability attributes, in particular, survivability, of cyber-physical systems. Any malfunction or security breach, whether cyber or physical, that causes the system operation to depart …

The Discrete Spring Transform: An Innovative Steganographic Attack, Aaron T. Sharp

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

Digital Steganography continues to evolve today, where steganographers are constantly discovering new methodologies to hide information effectively. Despite this, steganographic attacks, which seek to defeat these techniques, have continually lagged behind. The reason for this is simple: it is exceptionally difficult to defeat the unknown. Most attacks require prior knowledge or study of existing techniques in order to defeat them, and are often highly specific to certain cover media. These constraints are impractical and unrealistic to defeat steganography in modern communication networks. It follows, an effective steganographic attack must not require prior knowledge or study of techniques, and must be …

Robust And Agile System Against Fault And Anomaly Traffic In Software Defined Networks, Mihui Kim, Younghee Park, Rohit Kotalwar

Faculty Publications

The main advantage of software defined networking (SDN) is that it allows intelligent control and management of networking though programmability in real time. It enables efficient utilization of network resources through traffic engineering, and offers potential attack defense methods when abnormalities arise. However, previous studies have only identified individual solutions for respective problems, instead of finding a more global solution in real time that is capable of addressing multiple situations in network status. To cover diverse network conditions, this paper presents a comprehensive reactive system for simultaneously monitoring failures, anomalies, and attacks for high availability and reliability. We design three …

Blind Change Point Detection And Regime Segmentation Using Gaussian Process Regression, Sourav Das

Theses and Dissertations

Time-series analysis is used heavily in modeling and forecasting weather, economics, medical data as well as in various other fields. Change point detection (CPD) means finding abrupt changes in the time-series when the statistical property of a certain part of it starts to differ. CPD has attracted a lot of attention in the artificial intelligence, machine learning and data mining communities. In this thesis, a novel CPD algorithm is introduced for segmenting multivariate time-series data. The proposed algorithm is a general pipeline to process any high dimensional multivariate time-series data using nonlinear non-parametric dynamic system. It consists of manifold learning …

Mobile Application For Shipping Goods For Individuals And Truckers In India, Sendurr Selvaraj

Theses and Dissertations

India is a vast country with majority of its cities and towns connected through roads. Road transportation contributes to 86% share of the freight transport of the country with trucking companies dominating the entire space. With growing economy and demands raising, the quality of service of the trucking company remains poor. The major reasons are unorganized practice and lack of transparency. Moreover, limited access for customers to reach out to truckers to transport their goods.

This thesis aims to create a platform for customers and truckers to realize their needs with a help of a mobile application. Customers can search …

Detection Theory For Accurate And Non-Invasive Skin Cancer Diagnosis Using Dynamic Thermal Imaging, Sebastian E. Godoy, Majeed M. Hayat, David A. Ramirez, Stephen A. Myers, R. Steven Padilla, Sanjay Krishna

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Skin cancer is the most common cancer in the United States with over 3.5M annual cases. Presently, visual inspection by a dermatologist has good sensitivity (> 90%) but poor specificity (< 10%), especially for melanoma, which leads to a high number of unnecessary biopsies. Here we use dynamic thermal imaging (DTI) to demonstrate a rapid, accurate and non-invasive imaging system for detection of skin cancer. In DTI, the lesion is cooled down and the thermal recovery is recorded using infrared imaging. The thermal recovery curves of the suspected lesions are then utilized in the context of continuous-time detection theory in order to define an optimal statistical decision rule such that the sensitivity of the algorithm is guaranteed to be at a maximum for every prescribed false-alarm probability. The proposed methodology was tested in a pilot study including 140 human subjects demonstrating a sensitivity in excess of 99% for a prescribed specificity in excess of 99% for detection of skin cancer. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported accuracy for any non-invasive skin cancer diagnosis method.

Improving Peptide Identification By Considering Ordered Amino Acid Usage, Ahmed Al-Qurri

Theses and Dissertations

Proteomics has made major progress in recent years after the sequencing of the genomes of a substantial number of organisms. A typical method for identifying peptides uses a database of peptides identified using tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS). The profile of accurate mass and elution time (AMT) for peptides that need to be identified will be compared with this database. Restricting the search to those peptides detectable by MS will reduce processing time and more importantly increase accuracy. In addition, there are significant impacts for clinical studies. Proteotypic peptides are those peptides in a protein sequence that are most likely to …

Improving Facial Action Unit Recognition Using Convolutional Neural Networks, Shizhong Han

Theses and Dissertations

Recognizing facial action units (AUs) from spontaneous facial expression is a challenging problem, because of subtle facial appearance changes, free head movements, occlusions, and limited AU-coded training data. Most recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown promise on facial AU recognition. However, CNNs are often overfitted and do not generalize well to unseen subject due to limited AU-coded training images. In order to improve the performance of facial AU recognition, we developed two novel CNN frameworks, by substituting the traditional decision layer and convolutional layer with the incremental boosting layer and adaptive convolutional layer respectively, to recognize the AUs from …

Investigate Genomic 3d Structure Using Deep Neural Network, Yan Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

The 3D structures of the chromosomes play fundamental roles in essential cellular functions, e.g., gene regulation, gene expression, evolution and Hi-C technique provides the interaction density between loci on chromosomes. In this dissertation, we developed multiple algorithms, focusing the deep learning approach, to study the Hi-C datasets and the genomic 3D structures.

Building 3D structure of the genome one of the most critical purpose of the Hi-C technique. Recently, several approaches have been developed to reconstruct the 3D model of the chromosomes from HiC data. However, all of the methods are based on a particular mathematical model and lack of …

Impact Of Trucking Network Flow On Preferred Biorefinery Locations In The Southern United States, Timothy M. Young, Lee D. Han, James H. Perdue, Stephanie R. Hargrove, Frank M. Guess, Xia Huang, Chung-Hao Chen

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

The impact of the trucking transportation network flow was modeled for the southern United States. The study addresses a gap in existing research by applying a Bayesian logistic regression and Geographic Information System (GIS) geospatial analysis to predict biorefinery site locations. A one-way trucking cost assuming a 128.8 km (80-mile) haul distance was estimated by the Biomass Site Assessment model. The "median family income," "timberland annual growth-to-removal ratio," and "transportation delays" were significant in determining mill location. Transportation delays that directly impacted the costs of trucking are presented. A logistic model with Bayesian inference was used to identify preferred site …

Deep Models For Engagement Assessment With Scarce Label Information, Feng Li, Guangfan Zhang, Wei Wang, Roger Xu, Tom Schnell, Jonathan Wen, Frederic Mckenzie, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Task engagement is defined as loadings on energetic arousal (affect), task motivation, and concentration (cognition) [1]. It is usually challenging and expensive to label cognitive state data, and traditional computational models trained with limited label information for engagement assessment do not perform well because of overfitting. In this paper, we proposed two deep models (i.e., a deep classifier and a deep autoencoder) for engagement assessment with scarce label information. We recruited 15 pilots to conduct a 4-h flight simulation from Seattle to Chicago and recorded their electroencephalograph (EEG) signals during the simulation. Experts carefully examined the EEG signals and labeled …

A Sound Idea: An Investigation Into Accessible Video Game Design For The Deaf And Hard Of Hearing, Luke James Brook

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

A widely accepted, and incorrect, assumption towards hearing accessibility in video games is that deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) users are those who encounter the least barriers and are generally well catered for. Rapid advancement in video game technology has seen video game sound evolve from simple blips generated by internal circuitry to fully realised digital audio used to convey critical information. To accommodate the DHH, this information needs to be conveyed in an alternative manner. However, evidence suggests existing accessible design solutions for the DHH lack specificity and are insufficient. Thus, the inability to hear, or hear well, …

Leveraging The Srtp Protocol For Over-The-Network Memory Acquisition Of A Ge Fanuc Series 90-30, George Denton, Filip Karpisek, Frank Breitinger, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) are common components implemented across many industries such as manufacturing, water management, travel, aerospace and hospitals to name a few. Given their broad deployment in critical systems, they became and still are a common target for cyber attacks; the most prominent one being Stuxnet. Often PLCs (especially older ones) are only protected by an outer line of defense (e.g., a firewall) but once an attacker gains access to the system or the network, there might not be any other defense layers. In this scenario, a forensic investigator should not rely on the existing software as it …

Using Sound To Describe Scenes With Still And Moving Obstacles, Kawin Metsiritrakul

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The information human get from sight and hearing sense are similar. With these correlations, there are many works that take this idea to describe the spatial information with sound. The previous works only described the nearest obstacle with the direction and distance information to sound. To let the user clearly understand the spatial information in the scene, we aim to develop the describing solution from spatial information to auditory information including direction, distance, boundary and speed info with the multiple obstacle descriptions. The participants took the experiment by controlling the character and avoiding the obstacles in the different scenarios to …

Developing An Area Classification System From Mobile Phone Usage Data, Naruethai Thongphasook

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Since human activities are vary by time and place, there have been many attempts to extract social behavior in spatial studies which included area use in the city. This information helps gaining advantages in city and facilities planning. Nowadays, many people carry mobile phone with them for communication purpose. This motivates us to analyze mobile phone usage in different area types. This thesis proposes method of an analysis for area use classification from mobile phone usage pattern. CDR data was used to define mobile phone usage pattern by hour from 1:00 to 24:00 and day of week from Monday to …

Automatic 3d Hair Model From Small Set Of Images, Nuttapon Vanakittistien

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

We present a system for creating hair model that matches a user's hairstyle from images. The model consists of guide hair strands and can be used in a real-time hair simulator. Our goal differs from most previous work which aims to create realistic high resolution hair for off-line applications or create mesh of the exterior of the hair volume for image manipulation. Our primary aim is for user to be able to put his/her hairstyle into game or other real-time applications. By taking photos in 8 views of the user's head using a smart phone camera and segmenting images with …

Random Field Optimization Using Local Label Hierarchy, Sangsan Leelhapantu

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

Random field formulation has proven to be a powerful framework for solving various computer vision tasks, specifically those involving assigning labels to image pixels or superpixels subjected to spatial relationships and visual contexts, due to the ability to intuitively incorporate global and local information. Unfortunately, solving these problems can be impractical when large number of variables and possible labels are present as the computational complexity grows fast with the problem size. In this thesis, we propose a speedup scheme for random field optimization using local label hierarchy. We focus on problems in which the label space has a natural ordering …

Efficient And Robust Grasp Planning Based On Independent Contact Region And Caging, Teesit Makapunyo

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

A conventional way to find a proper grasp to grab and hold any object is to measure its stability which usually is based on physical constraint called force-closure. This execution works well from the theoretical point of view but often fails on an actual robot due to many reasons such as intrinsic errors in robot's system and a disparity between real and simulated physics. Several research works introduced methods to alleviate those issues and increase the success rate of grasping for a real robot. Caging and Independent Contact Region are ones of them. In this work, we investigate a method …