Computer Engineering Commons^™

Comparison Of Lqr And Lqr-Mrac For Linear Tractor-Trailer Model, Kevin Richard Gasik

Master's Theses

The United States trucking industry is immense. Employing over three million drivers and traveling to every city in the country. Semi-Trucks travel millions of miles each week and encompass roads that civilians travel on. These vehicles should be safe and allow efficient travel for all. Autonomous vehicles have been discussed in controls for many decades. Now fleets of autonomous vehicles are beginning their integration into society. The ability to create an autonomous system requires domain and system specific knowledge. Approaches to implement a fully autonomous vehicle have been developed using different techniques in control systems such as Kalman Filters, Neural …

The Most Powerful Thing, Caitlin Jankiewicz

Lake Union Herald

No abstract provided.

Image Processing Algorithms For Elastin Lamellae Inside Cardiovascular Arteries, Mahmoud Habibnezhad

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Automated image processing methods are greatly needed to replace the tedious, manual histology analysis still performed by many physicians. This thesis focuses on pathological studies that express the essential role of elastin lamella in the resilience and elastic properties of the arterial blood vessels. Due to the stochastic nature of the shape and distribution of the elastin layers, their morphological features appear as the best candidates to develop a mathematical formulation for the resistance behavior of elastic tissues. However, even for trained physicians and their assistants, the current measurement procedures are highly error-prone and prolonged. This thesis successfully integrates such …

A Survey On The Role Of Individual Differences On Visual Analytics Interactions: Masters Project Report, Jesse Huang, Alvitta Ottley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

There is ample evidence in the visualization commu- nity that individual differences matter. These prior works high- light various traits and cognitive abilities that can modulate the use of the visualization systems and demonstrate a measurable influence on speed, accuracy, process, and attention. Perhaps the most important implication of this body of work is that we can use individual differences as a mechanism for estimating people’s potential to effectively leverage visual interfaces or to identify those people who may struggle. As visual literacy and data fluency continue to become essential skills for our everyday lives, we must embrace the growing …

Smart Home Audio Assistant, Xipeng Wang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report introduces an audio processing algorithm. It provides a way to access smart devices using audio. Although there are many audio assistants already on the market, most of them will not be able to control the smart devices. Therefore, this new system presented in this report will provide a way to analysis the customer’s questions. Then the algorithm will be able to query smart device information, modify the schedule or provide the reason for some arrangement.

Operating Systems Laboratory, Emt 2390l, Course Outline, Jose Reyes Alamo

Open Educational Resources

Students study the characteristics of operating systems used in IBM systems. They learn how to install the operating systems and set it up to control the computer hardware. They also learn to use the features of the operating systems to manage the computer system.

Heterogeneous Reconfigurable Fabrics For In-Circuit Training And Evaluation Of Neuromorphic Architectures, Ramtin Mohammadizand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A heterogeneous device technology reconfigurable logic fabric is proposed which leverages the cooperating advantages of distinct magnetic random access memory (MRAM)-based look-up tables (LUTs) to realize sequential logic circuits, along with conventional SRAM-based LUTs to realize combinational logic paths. The resulting Hybrid Spin/Charge FPGA (HSC-FPGA) using magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) devices within this topology demonstrates commensurate reductions in area and power consumption over fabrics having LUTs constructed with either individual technology alone. Herein, a hierarchical top-down design approach is used to develop the HSCFPGA starting from the configurable logic block (CLB) and slice structures down to LUT circuits and the …

Leveraging The Intrinsic Switching Behaviors Of Spintronic Devices For Digital And Neuromorphic Circuits, Steven Pyle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With semiconductor technology scaling approaching atomic limits, novel approaches utilizing new memory and computation elements are sought in order to realize increased density, enhanced functionality, and new computational paradigms. Spintronic devices offer intriguing avenues to improve digital circuits by leveraging non-volatility to reduce static power dissipation and vertical integration for increased density. Novel hybrid spintronic-CMOS digital circuits are developed herein that illustrate enhanced functionality at reduced static power consumption and area cost. The developed spin-CMOS D Flip-Flop offers improved power-gating strategies by achieving instant store/restore capabilities while using 10 fewer transistors than typical CMOS-only implementations. The spin-CMOS Muller C-Element developed …

Value-Of-Information Based Data Collection In Underwater Sensor Networks, Fahad Khan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Underwater sensor networks are deployed in marine environments, presenting specific challenges compared to sensor networks deployed in terrestrial settings. Among the major issues that underwater sensor networks face is communication medium limitations that result in low bandwidth and long latency. This creates problems when these networks need to transmit large amounts of data over long distances. A possible solution to address this issue is to use mobile sinks such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to offload these large quantities of data. Such mobile sinks are called data mules. Often it is the case that a sensor network is deployed to …

Granny Pod Virtual Assistant, David Connolly, Bing Chen

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Dr. Chen is working on a sustainable small house (SSH) project, sometimes called the “Granny Pod”. Regulations will soon allow homeowners to house their parents on their property, which can be an opportunity live independently in a cheap, sustainable, and convenient alternative to a retirement community. To help achieve this vision, a Virtual Assistant system for the SSH was developed. The system uses a Google Home or Amazon Echo to respond to the voice command “Hey Google (or Alexa), I need help” by contacting the nearby homeowner or caretaker. It alerts the resident who is at the door when the …

Towards A Prototype Platform For Ros Integrations On A Ground Robot, Taylor Joseph Linville Whitaker

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this work was to develop, evaluate, and demonstrate a prototype robot platform on which ROS integrations could be explored. With observations of features and requirements of existing industrial and service mobile ground robots, a platform was designed and outfitted with appropriate components to enable the most common operational-critical functionalities and account for unforeseen components and features. The resulting Arlo Demonstration Robot accommodates basic mapping, localization, and navigation in both two and three-dimensional space as well as additional safety and teleoperation features. The control system is centered around the Zybo Z7 FPGA SoC hosting a custom hardware design. …

A Data-Driven Approach For Detecting Stress In Plants Using Hyperspectral Imagery, Suraj Gampa

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A phenotype is an observable characteristic of an individual and is a function of its genotype and its growth environment. Individuals with different genotypes are impacted differently by exposure to the same environment. Therefore, phenotypes are often used to understand morphological and physiological changes in plants as a function of genotype and biotic and abiotic stress conditions. Phenotypes that measure the level of stress can help mitigate the adverse impacts on the growth cycle of the plant. Image-based plant phenotyping has the potential for early stress detection by means of computing responsive phenotypes in a non-intrusive manner. A large number …

Classification Of The 4 Stages Of Diabetic Retinopathy Using A Low Complexity Convolutional Neural Network., Zeliha Ogur

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Diabetic Retinopathy is an eye disease that affects the blood vessels of the retina tissue found in the back of the eye. The blood vessels in the retina discharge fluid or cause hemorrhage when affected by diabetic retinopathy. It leads to loss of eye vision with people with diabetics and also among working adults. The disease may advance in four stages which include Mild nonproliferative, moderate nonproliferative, severe nonproliferative and proliferative diabetic retinopathy. In the mild stage also known as background retinopathy, lumps occur in the blood vessel and distort a little amount of blood. At this stage, you are …

Hardware Ip Classification Through Weighted Characteristics, Brendan Mcgeehan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s business model for hardware designs frequently incorporates third-party Intellectual Property (IP) due to the many benefits it can bring to a company. For instance, outsourcing certain components of an overall design can reduce time-to-market by allowing each party to specialize and perfect a specific part of the overall design. However, allowing third-party involvement also increases the possibility of malicious attacks, such as hardware Trojan insertion. Trojan insertion is a particularly dangerous security threat because testing the functionality of an IP can often leave the Trojan undetected. Therefore, this thesis work provides an improvement on a Trojan detection method known …

Interoperable E-Infrastructure Services In Arabia, Salem Al-Agtash, Roberto Barbera

Computer Science and Engineering

e-Infrastructures became critical platforms that integrate computational resources, facilities and repositories globally. The coordination and harmonization of advanced e-Infrastructure project developed with partners from Europe, Latin America, Arabia, Africa, China, and India contributed to developing interoperable platforms based on identity federation and science gateway technologies. This paper presents these technologies to support key services in the development of Arabia networking and services platform for research and education. The platform provides scientists, teachers, and students with seamless access to a variety of advanced resources, services, and applications available at regional e-Infrastructures in Europe and elsewhere. Users simply enter the credentials provided …

Segmentation And Classification Of Lung Nodules From Thoracic Ct Scans : Methods Based On Dictionary Learning And Deep Convolutional Neural Networks., Mohammad Mehdi Farhangi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lung cancer is a leading cause of cancer death in the world. Key to survival of patients is early diagnosis. Studies have demonstrated that screening high risk patients with Low-dose Computed Tomography (CT) is invaluable for reducing morbidity and mortality. Computer Aided Diagnosis (CADx) systems can assist radiologists and care providers in reading and analyzing lung CT images to segment, classify, and keep track of nodules for signs of cancer. In this thesis, we propose a CADx system for this purpose. To predict lung nodule malignancy, we propose a new deep learning framework that combines Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and …

Asynchronous Circuit Synthesis Using Multi-Threshold Null Convention Logic, Nicholas Renoudet Mize

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the demand for an energy-efficient alternative to traditional synchronous circuit design grows, hardware designers must reconsider the traditional clock tree. By doing away with the constrains of a clock, asynchronous sequential circuit designs can achieve a much greater level of efficiency. The utilization of asynchronous logic synthesis flows has enabled researchers to better implement asynchronous circuit designs which have been optimized using the same industry standard tools that are already used in sequential synchronous designs. This thesis offers a new flow for such tools which implements the MTNCL asynchronous circuit architecture.

Debiasing The Human-Recommender System Feedback Loop In Collaborative Filtering, Wenlong Sun, Sami Khenissi, Olfa Nasraoui, Patrick Shafto

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Recommender Systems (RSs) are widely used to help online users discover products, books, news, music, movies, courses, restaurants,etc. Because a traditional recommendation strategy always shows the most relevant items (thus with highest predicted rating), traditional RS’s are expected to make popular items become even more popular and non-popular items become even less popular which in turn further divides the haves (popular) from the have-nots (un-popular). Therefore, a major problem with RSs is that they may introduce biases affecting the exposure of items, thus creating a popularity divide of items during the feedback loop that occurs with users, and this may …

A Purely Defeasible Argumentation Framework, Zimi Li

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Argumentation theory is concerned with the way that intelligent agents discuss whether some statement holds. It is a claim-based theory that is widely used in many areas, such as law, linguistics and computer science. In the past few years, formal argumentation frameworks have been heavily studied and applications have been proposed in fields such as natural language processing, the semantic web and multi-agent systems. Studying argumentation provides results which help in developing tools and applications in these areas. Argumentation is interesting as a logic-based approach to deal with inconsistent information. Arguments are constructed using a process like logical inference, with …

Fashion Merchandising: An Augmented Reality, Naeha A. Sayed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

There is a continuous and constant transformation in the field of Augmented Reality (AR), both in the Retail, and the Manufacturing sector. It has started to influence everything from fashion runway shows to online shopping. Consumers dynamics have shifted in the fashion industry, the ways becoming more dominant than the old observant ones- the simple buying experience no longer satisfies them. Due to the emergence of the new digital platforms and technological enhancements, the consumers are looking for more- be it a more exciting buying experience or more user interaction or more enhanced products. This technological change starts with the …

Efficient Private Information Retrieval, Konstantinos Nikolopoulos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

A vast amount of today's Internet users' on line activities consists of queries to various types of databases. From traditional search engines to modern cloud based services, a person's everyday queries over a period of time on various data sources, will leave a trail visible to the query processor, which can reveal significant and possibly sensitive information about her. Private Information Retrieval (PIR) algorithms can be leveraged for providing perfect privacy to users' queries, though at a restrictive computational cost. In this work, we consider today's highly distributed computing environments, as well as certain secure-hardware devices, for optimizing existing PIR …

Compliance Of Open Source Ehr Applications With Hipaa And Onc Security And Privacy Requirements, Maryam Farhadi, Hisham Haddad, Hossain Shahriar

Master of Science in Computer Science Theses

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are digital versions of paper-based patient's health information. EHR applications are increasingly being adopted in many countries. They have resulted in improved quality in healthcare, convenient access to histories of patient medication and clinic visits, easier follow up of patient treatment plans, and precise medical decision-making process. EHR applications are guided by measures of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability. However, there have been reported breaches of Protected Health Identifier (PHI) data stored by EHR applications. In many reported breaches, improper use of EHRs has resulted in disclosure …

The Use Of Generic Scripting In Certain Application Development Projects, Vance Allen Etnyre, Jian Denny Lin, Nanfei Sun

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This article discusses generic scripting, a useful scripting technology for developing applications. In its simplest use, generic scripting can be used as a documentation tool to replace flowcharting or pseudocode. in certain situations, generic scripting can lead directly to a working application without the need to write, compile and test a new program. Generic scripting is discussed as a tool which can be used in logical design, detailed design and implementation of a new application. An example is presented to show how generic scripting can be used by non-programmers to simplify the development of applications. This example is used to …

College Choice Criteria Utilizing Conjoint Analysis Enabled On A Saas Platform, Alison Munsch

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

College enrollments and low to moderate household incomes are stagnating while tuition costs are increasing. The New York State Legislature enacted the nation’s first tuition-free degree program, the Excelsior Scholarship, designed to make a college education more affordable to middle class families. This legislation can impact what institution of higher education students will choose upon high school graduation. In order to understand the choice criteria for selecting an institution of higher education, a research study was conducted among a representative sample of high school upper classmen and parents of this respondent segment. The data collection and analysis were accomplished using …

An Explainable Sequence-Based Deep Learning Predictor With Applications To Song Recommendation And Text Classification., Khalil Damak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Streaming applications are now the predominant tools for listening to music. What makes the success of such software is the availability of songs and especially their ability to provide users with relevant personalized recommendations. State of the art music recommender systems mainly rely on either Matrix factorization-based collaborative filtering approaches or deep learning architectures. Deep learning models usually use metadata for content-based filtering or predict the next user interaction (listening to a song) using a memory-based deep learning structure that learns from temporal sequences of user actions. Despite advances in deep learning models for song recommendation systems, none has taken …

Unicorn Framework: A User-Centric Approach Toward Formal Verification Of Privacy Norms, Rezvan Joshaghani

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In the development of complex systems, such as user-centric privacy management systems with multiple components and attributes, it is important to formalize the process and develop mathematical models that can be utilized to automatically make decisions on the information sharing actions of users. While valuable, the current state-of-the-art models are mostly based on enterprise/organizational privacy perspectives and leave the main actor, i.e., the user, uninvolved or with limited ability to control information sharing actions. These approaches cannot be applied to a user-centric environment since user privacy policies are dynamic because they change based on the information sharing context and environment. …

Application-Specific Memory Subsystem Benchmarking, Mahesh Lakshminarasimhan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Application performance often depends on achieved memory bandwidth. Achieved memory bandwidth varies greatly given specific combinations of instruction mix and order, working set size, and access pattern. Achieving good application performance depends on optimizing these characteristics within the constraints of the given application. This task is complicated due to the lack of information about the impact of small changes on the performance. Some information is provided by benchmarks, but most memory benchmarks are confined to simple access patterns that are not representative of patterns found in real applications.

This thesis presents AdaptMemBench, a configurable benchmark framework designed to explore the …

3d Printed Smart Mobile, Bingfang Chen

Publications and Research

The goal of this research project is to design and build a prototype of a smart mobile robot to participate and compete in IEEE Micro-mouse and similar competitions. The robot has to find its way out of a maze as quickly as possible, by exploring and learning the paths in the maze. 3D printing technology will be used to build a lightweight robot frame so that it can move at a fast speed.

Formal Trust Architecture For Assuring Trusted Interactions In The Internet Of Things, Milankumar Patel

Theses and Dissertations

The Internet of Things (IoT) has provided a flexible platform for a large number of heterogeneous devices to dynamically join and leave the network. This enhances the availability of a diverse range of services provided by a network. However, this dynamic expansion of the network with mobile IoT devices introduces a major challenge to security especially related to management of trust across the IoT platforms. Furthermore, IoT is open and distributed in nature, which allows the integration and registration of diverse entities. Thus arises the necessity for a mechanism that can ensure the selection of secure and trusted devices as …

Design Of Remote Datalogger Connection And Live Data Tweeting System, Zachary Wofford

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Low-Impact Development (LID) is an attempt to sustainably respond to the potential hazards posed by urban expansion. Green roofs are an example of LID design meant to reduce the amount of runoff from storm events that are becoming more intense and less predictable while also providing insulation to buildings. LID has not yet been widely adopted as it is often a more expensive alternative to conventional infrastructure (Bowman et. al., 2009). However, its benefits are apparent. The University of Arkansas Honors College awarded a grant to research the large green roof atop Hillside Auditorium. One part of this grant is …