Computer Engineering Commons^™

Wisdom Of Artificial Crowds Feature Selection In Untargeted Metabolomics: An Application To The Development Of A Blood-Based Diagnostic Test For Thrombotic Myocardial Infarction, Patrick J. Trainor, Roman V. Yampolskiy, Andrew P. Defilippis

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Introduction: Heart disease remains a leading cause of global mortality. While acute myocardial infarction (colloquially: heart attack), has multiple proximate causes, proximate etiology cannot be determined by a blood-based diagnostic test. We enrolled a suitable patient cohort and conducted a non-targeted quantification of plasma metabolites by mass spectrometry for developing a test that can differentiate between thrombotic MI, non-thrombotic MI, and stable disease. A significant challenge in developing such a diagnostic test is solving the NP-hard problem of feature selection for constructing an optimal statistical classifier. Objective: We employed a Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) strategy for solving the feature …

Remote Vibration Estimation Using Displaced-Phase-Center Antenna Sar For Strong Clutter Environments, Justin B. Campbell, Francisco Pérez, Qi Wang, Balasubramaniam Santhanam, Ralf Dunkel, Armin W. Doerry, Thomas Atwood, Majeed M. Hayat

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

It has been previously demonstrated that it is possible to perform remote vibrometry using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in conjunction with the discrete fractional Fourier transform (DFrFT). Specifically, the DFrFT estimates the chirp parameters (related to the instantaneous acceleration of a vibrating object) of a slow-time signal associated with the SAR image. However, ground clutter surrounding a vibrating object introduces uncertainties in the estimate of the chirp parameter retrieved via the DFrFT method. To overcome this shortcoming, various techniques based on subspace decomposition of the SAR slow-time signal have been developed. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of these techniques is limited to …

Optimizing The Use Of A Liquid Handling Robot To Conduct A High Throughput Forward Chemical Genetics Screen Of Arabidopsis Thaliana, B. Kirtley Amos, Victoria G. Pook, Seth Debolt

Horticulture Faculty Publications

Chemical genetics is increasingly being employed to decode traits in plants that may be recalcitrant to traditional genetics due to gene redundancy or lethality. However, the probability of a synthetic small molecule being bioactive is low; therefore, thousands of molecules must be tested in order to find those of interest. Liquid handling robotics systems are designed to handle large numbers of samples, increasing the speed with which a chemical library can be screened in addition to minimizing/standardizing error. To achieve a high-throughput forward chemical genetics screen of a library of 50,000 small molecules on Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), protocols using a …

A Strategic Audit Of Chegg, Jacob Melcher

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

The paper researches and discusses the strategy of Chegg in the past and future with regards to what was taught in UNL’s MNGT 495H course. The data was compiled from online resources including the company’s website and financials along with insights learned during an internship and interviews done in the Summer of 2016 and Spring of 2018. The insights of how Chegg went from a textbook rental company to the student learning hub it is today include experienced leaders, acquisitions and mergers, and being ahead of the curve in the industry. The final recommendation for Chegg’s strategy is to widen …

Comparative Study Of Deep Learning Models For Network Intrusion Detection, Brian Lee, Sandhya Amaresh, Clifford Green, Daniel Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present a comparative evaluation of deep learning approaches to network intrusion detection. A Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a critical component of every Internet connected system due to likely attacks from both external and internal sources. A NIDS is used to detect network born attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, malware replication, and intruders that are operating within the system. Multiple deep learning approaches have been proposed for intrusion detection systems. We evaluate three models, a vanilla deep neural net (DNN), self-taught learning (STL) approach, and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based Long Short …

Comparative Study: Reducing Cost To Manage Accessibility With Existing Data, Claire Chu, Bill Kerneckel, Eric C. Larson, Nathan Mowat, Christopher Woodard

SMU Data Science Review

“Project Sidewalk” is an existing research effort that focuses on mapping accessibility issues for handicapped persons to efficiently plan wheelchair and mobile scooter friendly routes around Washington D.C. As supporters of this project, we utilized the data “Project Sidewalk” collected and used it to confirm predictions about where problem sidewalks exist based on real estate and crime data. We present a study that identifies correlations found between accessibility data and crime and housing statistics in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. We identify the key reasons for increased accessibility and the issues with the current infrastructure management system. After a thorough …

Distributed Iterative Graph Processing Using Nosql With Data Locality, Ayam Pokhrel

LSU Master's Theses

A tremendous amount of data is generated every day from a wide range of sources such as social networks, sensors, and application logs. Among them, graph data is one type that represents valuable relationships between various entities. Analytics of large graphs has become an essential part of business processes and scientific studies because it leads to deep and meaningful insights into the related domain based on the connections between various entities. However, the optimal processing of large-scale iterative graph computations is very challenging due to the issues like fault tolerance, high memory requirement, parallelization, and scalability. Most of the contemporary …

Library Awesome Sauce Undergraduate Research, Jeremy Evert, Phillip Joe Fitzsimmons, Hector Lucas

Faculty Articles & Research

Library Awesome Sauce Undergraduate Research was a presentation at the 2018 CADRE Conference in Stillwater, OK. The presenters discussed their collaboration on a video project to film interviews of students giving progress reports about their software engineering projects. The videos were posted on the institutional repository.

The speakers discussed Student-Led research and the role that academic libraries play in facilitating student and faculty research and publishing for all disciplines on campus.

Correlated Network Of Networks Enhances Robustness Against Catastrophic Failures, Byungjoon Min, Muhua Zheng

Publications and Research

Networks in nature rarely function in isolation but instead interact with one another with a form of a network of networks (NoN). A network of networks with interdependency between distinct networks contains instability of abrupt collapse related to the global rule of activation. As a remedy of the collapse instability, here we investigate a model of correlated NoN. We find that the collapse instability can be removed when hubs provide the majority of interconnections and interconnections are convergent between hubs. Thus, our study identifies a stable structure of correlated NoN against catastrophic failures. Our result further suggests a plausible way …

Early Alert Of At-Risk Students: An Ontology-Driven Framework, Elias S. Lopez

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

As higher education continues to adapt to the constantly shifting conditions that society places on institutions, the enigma of student attrition continues to trouble universities. Early alerts for students who are at-risk academically have been introduced as a method for solving student attrition at these institutions. Early alert systems are designed to provide students who are academically at-risk a prompt indication so that they may correct their performance and make progress towards successful semester completion. Many early alert systems have been introduced and implemented at various institutions with varying levels of success. Currently, early alert systems employ different techniques for …

A Route Less Traveled: Principals’ Perceptions Of Alternative Licensed Cte Teachers, Scott R. Bartholomew, Emma P. Bullock, Louis S. Nadelson

Faculty Publications

The shortage of teachers prepared to teach career and technical education (CTE) courses, or willing to work in certain locations (e.g. inner city, rural), has motivated the desire to explore solutions such as alternative routes to teacher licensure (ARL). Most ARL programs bypass colleges of education and provide a different approach to preparing individuals to teach, leaving many to wonder about the quality and knowledge of these teachers. Specific areas, such as CTE, have seen a large influx of ARL teachers in recent years. We sought to determine school principals’ perceptions of ARL CTE teachers. We found principal support for …

Representation Of Characters By Gender Across Video Game Covers Of Different Ratings, Alexandra Cassidy, Aaron Cornell, Emily Burgess, Stephen Burgess, Jeremy Evert

Student Research

This research was in response to the perception that females are under-represented in gaming culture. Pew Research Center (2015) found that both males and females thought more males played video games (60%). However, there is not a statistically significant difference in the percentage of males and females who have ever played video games (50% M 48% F). There is the perception that the advertising and production of video games contribute to the different stereotypes associated with men and women in gaming culture. According to research about gender and video game production, both male and female employees who work in the …

Cost-Effective Techniques For Continuous Integration Testing, Jingjing Liang

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Continuous integration (CI) development environments allow software engineers to frequently integrate and test their code. While CI environments provide advantages, they also utilize non-trivial amounts of time and resources. To address this issue, researchers have adapted techniques for test case prioritization (TCP) and regression test selection (RTS) to CI environments.

To date, current TCP techniques under CI environments have operated on test suites, and have not achieved substantial improvements. In this thesis, we use a lightweight approach based on test suite failure and execution history, and “continuously” prioritizes commits that are waiting for execution in response to the arrival of …

Mechanical Characterization Of Polysilicon Mems: A Hybrid Tmcmc/Pod-Kriging Approach, Ramin Mirzazadeh, Saeed Eftekhar Azam, Stefano Mariani

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Faculty Publications

Microscale uncertainties related to the geometry and morphology of polycrystalline silicon films, constituting the movable structures of micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), were investigated through a joint numerical/experimental approach. An on-chip testing device was designed and fabricated to deform a compliant polysilicon beam. In previous studies, we showed that the scattering in the input–output characteristics of the device can be properly described only if statistical features related to the morphology of the columnar polysilicon film and to the etching process adopted to release the movable structure are taken into account. In this work, a high fidelity finite element model of the …

Strategic Implications Of Blockchain, William R. Adams

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis introduces blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, and discusses how best to conceptualize it relative to other technologies. Following an explanation of the fundamentals of blockchain, also known as the distributed ledger, I identify the characteristics of the technology. Building upon blockchain’s inherent strengths and limitations, I explore potential business applications of blockchain. Finally, I recommend that leaders continue to track the development and adoption of blockchain technology, even if they decide that implementing it does not align with their organization’s strategy at present.

Electrical And Material Properties Of Hydrothermally Grown Single Crystal (111) Uo2, Christina L. Dugan, George Glenn Peterson, Alyssa Mock, Christopher Young, J. Matthew Mann, Michael Nastasi, Mathias Schubert, Lu Wang, Wai-Ning Mei, Iori Tanabe, Peter A. Dowben, James Petrosky

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

The semiconductor and optical properties of UO₂ are investigated. The very long drift carrier lifetimes, obtained from current-voltage I(V) and capacitance-voltage C(V) measurements, along with the well-defined optical properties provide little evidence of an abundance of material defects away from the surface region. Schottky barrier formation may be possible, but very much dependent on the choice of contact and surface stoichiometry and we find that Ohmic contacts are in fact favored. Depth resolved photoemission provided evidence of a chemical shift at the surface. Density functional theory, with the Heyd-Scuseria-Ernzerhof (HSE) functional, indicates a band gap of a 2.19 eV …

Degradation Modeling And Rul Prediction Using Wiener Process Subject To Multiple Change Points And Unit Heterogeneity, Yuxin Wen, Jianguo Wu, Devashish Das, Tzu-Liang Bill Tseng

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Degradation modeling is critical for health condition monitoring and remaining useful life prediction (RUL). The prognostic accuracy highly depends on the capability of modeling the evolution of degradation signals. In many practical applications, however, the degradation signals show multiple phases, where the conventional degradation models are often inadequate. To better characterize the degradation signals of multiple-phase characteristics, we propose a multiple change-point Wiener process as a degradation model. To take into account the between-unit heterogeneity, a fully Bayesian approach is developed where all model parameters are assumed random. At the offline stage, an empirical two-stage process is proposed for model …

Multi-Objective Resource Provisioning In Network Function Virtualization Infrastructures, Diogo Oliveira

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Network function virtualization (NFV) and software-dened networking (SDN) are two recent networking paradigms that strive to increase manageability, scalability, pro- grammability and dynamism. The former decouples network functions and hosting devices, while the latter decouples the data and control planes. As more and more service providers adopt these new paradigms, there is a growing need to address multi-failure conditions, particularly those arising from large-scale disaster events. Overall, addressing the virtual network function (VNF) placement and routing problem is crucial to deploy NFV surviv- ability. In particular, many studies have inspected non-survivable VNF provisioning, however no known work have proposed survivable/resilient …

Resampling Methods And Visualization Tools For Computer Performance Comparisons In The Presence Of Performance Variation, Samuel Oridge Irving

LSU Master's Theses

Performance variability, stemming from non-deterministic hardware and software behaviors or deterministic behaviors such as measurement bias, is a well-known phenomenon of computer systems which increases the difficulty of comparing computer performance metrics and is slated to become even more of a concern as interest in Big Data Analytics increases. Conventional methods use various measures (such as geometric mean) to quantify the performance of different benchmarks to compare computers without considering this variability which may lead to wrong conclusions. In this paper, we propose three resampling methods for performance evaluation and comparison: a randomization test for a general performance comparison between …

Crawling Tor's Hidden Services And Depicting Their Interconnectivity, John-Luke N. Navarro

Honors Theses

The Tor network is a popular online privacy platform that enables anonymous browsing, but is also notorious for the vast number of illicit marketplaces, goods and services available to users. Tor's protocols also secure hosted websites, known as hidden services, against unwanted tracking and location. Tor has attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies, who are interested in hidden service data analysis. However, little large-scale analysis is currently performed. To help address this issue, I constructed two tools. A specialized web crawler downloads bulk page-content from Tor's hidden services. This program crawls the Tor Network broadly, securely, and with more …

Image Processing Applications In Real Life: 2d Fragmented Image And Document Reassembly And Frequency Division Multiplexed Imaging, Houman Kamran Habibkhani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this era of modern technology, image processing is one the most studied disciplines of signal processing and its applications can be found in every aspect of our daily life. In this work three main applications for image processing has been studied.

In chapter 1, frequency division multiplexed imaging (FDMI), a novel idea in the field of computational photography, has been introduced. Using FDMI, multiple images are captured simultaneously in a single shot and can later be extracted from the multiplexed image. This is achieved by spatially modulating the images so that they are placed at different locations in the …

Social Recommendations For Personalized Fitness Assistance, Saumil Dharia, Magdalini Eirinaki, Vijesh Jain, Jvalant Patel, Iraklis Varlamis, Jainikkumar Vora, Rizen Yamauchi

Faculty Publications

Wearable technology allows users to monitor their activity and pursue a healthy lifestyle through the use of embedded sensors. Such wearables usually connect to a mobile application that allows them to set their profile and keep track of their goals. However, due to the relatively “high maintenance” of such applications, where a significant amount of user feedback is expected, users who are very busy, or not as self-motivated, stop using them after a while. It has been shown that accountability improves commitment to an exercise routine. In this work, we present the PRO-Fit framework, a personalized fitness assistant aiming at …

Week 4 Lab: Counterlist, Michelle Shu, David Soon, Nyc Tech-In-Residence Corps

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus and materials for the course "CSC 59940: Front-End Web Application Development" delivered at the City College of New York in Spring 2018 by Michelle Shu and David Moon as part of the Tech-in-Residence Corps program.

Application Of Huffman Data Compression Algorithm In Hashing Computation, Lakshmi Narasimha Devulapalli Venkata,

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Cryptography is the art of protecting information by encrypting the original message into an unreadable format. A cryptographic hash function is a hash function which takes an arbitrary length of the text message as input and converts that text into a fixed length of encrypted characters which is infeasible to invert. The values returned by the hash function are called as the message digest or simply hash values. Because of its versatility, hash functions are used in many applications such as message authentication, digital signatures, and password hashing [Thomsen and Knudsen, 2005].

The purpose of this study is to apply …

Criteria-Based Encryption, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Guomin Yang, Willy Susilo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a new type of public-key encryption called Criteria-based Encryption (or , for short). Different from Attribute-based Encryption, in , we consider the access policies as criteria carrying different weights. A user must hold some cases (or answers) satisfying the criteria and have sufficient weights in order to successfully decrypt a message. We then propose two Schemes under different settings: the first scheme requires a user to have at least one case for a criterion specified by the encryptor in the access structure, while the second scheme requires a user to have all the cases for each criterion. We …

Design And Implementation Of An Artificial Neural Network Controller For Quadrotor Flight In Confined Environment, Ahmed Mekky

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Quadrotors offer practical solutions for many applications, such as emergency rescue, surveillance, military operations, videography and many more. For this reason, they have recently attracted the attention of research and industry. Even though they have been intensively studied, quadrotors still suffer from some challenges that limit their use, such as trajectory measurement, attitude estimation, obstacle avoidance, safety precautions, and land cybersecurity. One major problem is flying in a confined environment, such as closed buildings and tunnels, where the aerodynamics around the quadrotor are affected by close proximity objects, which result in tracking performance deterioration, and sometimes instability. To address this …

Power-Efficient And Highly Scalable Parallel Graph Sampling Using Fpgas, Muhammad Usman Tariq

Masters Theses

Energy efficiency is a crucial problem in data centers where big data is generally represented by directed or undirected graphs. Analysis of this big data graph is challenging due to volume and velocity of the data as well as irregular memory access patterns. Graph sampling is one of the most effective ways to reduce the size of graph while maintaining crucial characteristics. This thesis presents design and implementation of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based graph sampling method which is both time- and energy-efficient. This is in contrast to existing parallel approaches which include memory-distributed clusters, multicore and GPUs. …

Modelling And Visualizing Selected Molecular Communication Processes In Biological Organisms: A Multi-Layer Perspective, Aditya Immaneni

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The future pervasive communication and computing devices are envisioned to be tightly integrated with biological systems, i.e., the Internet of Bio-Nano Things. In particular, the study and exploitation of existing processes for the biochemical information exchange and elaboration in biological systems are currently at the forefront of this research direction. Molecular Communication (MC), which studies biochemical information systems with theory and tools from computer communication engineering, has been recently proposed to model and characterize the aforementioned processes. Combined with the rapidly growing field of bio-informatics, which creates a rich profusion of biological data and tools to mine the underlying information, …

2018 (Spring) Ensi Informer Magazine, Morehead State University. Engineering Sciences Department

ENSI Informer Magazine Archive

The ENSI Informer Magazine published in the spring of 2018.

Structural And Photoluminescence Properties Of Zno Thin Films Deposited By Ultrasonic Spray Pyrolysis, Iwan Sugihartono, Erfan Handoko, Vivi Fauzia, Artoto Arkundato, Lara Permata Sari

Makara Journal of Technology

Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films on a silicon (Si) (111) substrate were grown herein using ultrasonic spray pyrolysis at 450 °C with different Zn concentrations. The ZnO thin films had X-ray diffraction patterns of a polycrystalline hexagonal wurtzite structure. The (002) and (101) peak intensities changed under different Zn concentrations. Furthermore, according to Scherer's and Stokes–Wilson equations, the crystallite size and the internal strain of the ZnO thin films in the (002) and (101) peaks changed with the Zn concentration. Optically, the photoluminescence spectra indicated that the ratio of the UV/GB emission of the ZnO thin films was the highest …