Computer Engineering Commons^™

Overwhelming The Saa System Of Delivery Uavs By Drone Swarming, Barry Lynn Pfaff

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As the Internet continues to replace the brick-and-mortar store as the main place for purchasing goods, web-based companies are looking for ways to reduce the cost of delivering those goods. The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, is one delivery method that is increasingly being used. These UAVs can be programmed with delivery routes and destinations and can complete the job while requiring limited intervention from human controllers. Sense and Avoidance (SAA) systems have recently been incorporated into these UAVs so that they can detect objects in their flight path, reroute the UAV accordingly and operate even more autonomously. …

Fully Transparent Computer Vision Framework For Ship Detection And Tracking In Satellite Imagery, Jason T. Gottweis

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Tracking of ships in satellite imagery is a challenging problem in remote sensing since it requires both object detection and object recognition. Most of the resources available only cover one of these problems and are often filled with machine learning techniques which are costly to train. Additionally, the techniques covered in these resources are often difficult to replicate or may be hard to combine with other solutions to get a full tracking algorithm. The proposed framework offers a transparent and efficient alternative to machine learning approaches and includes preprocessing, detection, and recognition needed for tracking. All components of the framework …

Augment The Multi-Modal Interaction Capabilities Of Hololens Through Networked Sensory Devices, Subhadra Tummalapally

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Augmented Reality (AR) places virtual contents along with real objects to enhance user perception in the physical environment. It is a technology that has shown great potential in many industries such as medicine, education and transportation. AR devices, such as Microsoft HoloLens, come with multi-modal interaction capabilities, such as voice, gesture and gaze, to support intuitive and reliable human-computer interactions. However, HoloLens gesture support is limited to simple gestures like tap, bloom and hold, it stops short to support meaningful interaction through full hand gesture and motion tracking, which may be critical in field operations of various industry practices in …

Autonomous Uav Battery Swapping, Reed Jacobsen, Nikolai Ruhe, Nathan Dornback

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

One of the main hindrances of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology are power constraints. One way to alleviate some power constraints would be for two UAVs to exchange batteries while both are in flight. Autonomous mid-air battery swapping will expand the scope of UAV technology by allowing for indefinite flight times and longer missions. A single board computer will control each UAV’s flight software to respond to inputs to align with each other mid-flight. When the two UAVs have joined, mechanical components will exchange a depleted battery on the worker UAV for a freshly charged battery that belongs to the …

Mathematically Predicting The Aleut Tribe Population Using Archaeological Data, Jack Conrad Kiefer Ii, Paden Allen Thompson

Research on Capitol Hill

Sanak Island, located off the southern Alaska Peninsula, was home to the native Aleut peoples for thousands of years. Their hunter-gatherer society depended heavily on the arctic and marine ecosystem for food resources.

In 2015, a team of archaeologists from Idaho State and Utah State universities went to the island and collected data about the Aleut population size and their diet.

This study constructed a dynamical model to mathematically predict the Aleut population over time in order to gain insights into how food resources affected the Aleut people’s ability to survive.

Ambiqual – A Full Reference Objective Quality Metric For Ambisonic Spatial Audio, Miroslaw Narbutt, Andrew Allen, Jan Skoglund, Michael Chinen, Andrew Hines

Conference papers

Streaming spatial audio over networks requires efficient encoding techniques that compress the raw audio content without compromising quality of experience. Streaming service providers such as YouTube need a perceptually relevant objective audio quality metric to monitor users’ perceived quality and spatial localization accuracy. In this paper we introduce a full reference objective spatial audio quality metric, AMBIQUAL, which assesses both Listening Quality and Localization Accuracy. In our solution both metrics are derived directly from the B-format Ambisonic audio. The metric extends and adapts the algorithm used in ViSQOLAudio, a full reference objective metric designed for assessing speech and audio quality. …

Ranking Semantics Based On Subgraphs Analysis, Pierpaolo Dondio

Conference papers

An abstract argumentation framework [15] consists of a direct graph where nodes represent arguments and arrows represent an attack relation among arguments. A semantics is used to evaluate arguments’ acceptability. In the labelling approach [7], this evaluation is done by assigning to each argument a label in, out or undec, meaning that the argument is considered consistently acceptable, non-acceptable or undecided (i.e. no decision can be taken on arguments’ acceptability).

On The Reliability, Validity And Sensitivity Of Three Mental Workload Assessment Techniques For The Evaluation Of Instructional Designs: A Case Study In A Third-Level Course, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) has been conceived for instructional designers eager to create instructional resources that are presented in a way that encourages the activities of the learners and optimise their performance, thus their learning. Although it has been researched for many years, it has been criticised because of its theoretical clarity and its methodological approach. In particular, one fundamental and open problem is the measurement of its cognitive load types and the measurement of the overall cognitive load of learners during learning tasks. This paper is aimed at investigating the reliability, validity and sensitivity of existing mental workload assessment …

Administrative Cost Reimbursement Online, Luciano Mogorovic

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Administrative Cost Reimbursement (ACR) is a program funded by the state of Ohio that reimburses non-public elementary and high schools for having employees perform a series of mandated activities. ACR Consultants is a company that collects data from schools that contains the amount of time each teacher spent on any of the mandated activities. The president of ACR Consultants is a neighbor and longtime family friend. Currently, to collect the time data, the company goes to each school it services and gives each teacher a large paper spreadsheet for them to fill in with the amount of time they spend …

A Twitter-Based Study For Understanding Public Reaction On Zika Virus, Roopteja Muppalla

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In recent times, social media platforms like Twitter have become more popular and people have become more interactive and responsive than before. People often react to every news in real-time and within no-time, the information spreads rapidly. Even with viral diseases like Zika, people tend to share their opinions and concerns on social media. This can be leveraged by the health officials to track the disease in real-time thereby reducing the time lag due to traditional surveys. A faster and accurate detection of the disease can allow health officials to understand people's opinion of the disease and take necessary precautions …

A Model For Seasonal Dynamic Networks, Jace D. Robinson

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Sociotechnological and geospatial processes exhibit time varying structure that make insight discovery challenging. This paper presents statistical model of systems with seasonal dynamics, modeled as a dynamic network, to address this challenge. It assumes the probability of edge formations depend on a type assigned to incident nodes and the current time. Time dependencies are modeled by unique seasonal processes. The model is studied on several synthetic and real datasets. Superior fidelity of this model on seasonal datasets compared to existing network models, while being able to remain equally accurate for networks with randomly changing structure, is shown. The model is …

Virtual Doctor: An Intelligent Human-Computer Dialogue System For Quick Response To People In Need, Stavros Mallios

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One of the challenges of our society is the existence of chronic-related conditions and diseases among the elderly and people at risk. Apart from the welfare of people, a significant impact of this phenomenon is the accumulation of high financial costs for both individuals and health care systems. In order to address this issue and to reduce its effects, many efforts have been made towards preventing, identifying in early stages and, generally, managing chronic-related medical conditions and diseases. As a result, there has been a keen research and market interest in health monitoring devices during the past few decades. Nevertheless, …

A Multi-Formal Languages Collaborative Scheme For Complex Human Activity Recognition And Behavioral Patterns Extraction, Anargyros Angeleas

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Human Activity Recognition is an actively researched domain for the past few decades, and is one of the most eminent applications of today. It is already part of our life, but due to high level of uncertainty and challenges of human detection, we have only application specific solutions. Thus, the problem being very demanding and still remains unsolved. Within this PhD we delve into the problem, and approach it from a variety of viewpoints. At start, we present and evaluate different architectures and frameworks for activity recognition. Henceforward, the focal point of our attention is automatic human activity recognition. We …

Use Of Adaptive Mobile Applications To Improve Mindfulness, Wiehan Boshoff

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Mindfulness is the state of retaining awareness of what is happening at the current point in time. It has been used in multiple forms to reduce stress, anxiety, and even depression. Promoting Mindfulness can be done in various ways, but current research shows a trend towards preferential usage of breathing exercises over other methods to reach a mindful state. Studies have showcased that breathing can be used as a tool to promote brain control, specifically in the auditory cortex region. Research pertaining to disorders such as Tinnitus, the phantom awareness of sound, could potentially benefit from using these brain control …

Domain-Specific Knowledge Extraction From The Web Of Data, Sarasi Lalithsena

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Domain knowledge plays a significant role in powering a number of intelligent applications such as entity recommendation, question answering, data analytics, and knowledge discovery. Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and Semantic Web communities have contributed to the representation and creation of this domain knowledge in a machine-readable form. This has resulted in a large collection of structured datasets on the Web which is commonly referred to as the Web of data. The Web of data continues to grow rapidly since its inception, which poses a number of challenges in developing intelligent applications that can benefit from its use. Majority of …

Sensor Data Streams Correlation Platform For Asthma Management, Vaikunth Sridharan

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Asthma is a high-burden chronic inflammatory disease with prevalence in children with twice the rate compared to adults. It can be improved by continuously monitoring patients and their environment using the Internet of Things (IoT) based devices. These sensor data streams so obtained are essential to comprehend multiple factors triggering asthma symptoms. In order to support physicians in exploring causal associations and finding actionable insights, a visualization system with a scalable cloud infrastructure that can process multimodal sensor data and Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) is necessary. In this thesis, we describe a cloud-based asthma management and visualization platform that …

Measuring Goal Similarity Using Concept, Context And Task Features, Vahid Eyorokon

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Goals can be described as the user's desired state of the agent and the world and are satisfied when the agent and the world are altered in such a way that the present state matches the desired state. For physical agents, they must act in the world to alter it in a series of individual atomic actions. Traditionally, agents use planning to create a chain of actions each of which altering the current world state and yielding a new one until the final action yields the desired goal state. Once this goal state has been achieved, the goal is said …

Image Stitching And Matching Tool In The Automated Iterative Reverse Engineer (Aire) Integrated Circuit Analysis Suite, David C. Bowman

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Due to current market forces, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication plants have moved outside of the US. While this is not a problem at first glance, when it comes to security-sensitive applications, over-production, device cloning, or design alteration becomes a possibility. Since these vulnerabilities exist during the fabrication phase, a Reverse Engineering (RE) step must be introduced to help ensure secure device operation. This thesis proposes several unique methods and a collection of tools to ensure trust assurance in integrated circuit design by detecting fabrication flaws and possible hardware Trojans using several image processing techniques; fused into a singular view of the …

The Feasibility Of Dementia Caregiver Task Performance Measurement Using Smart Gaming Technology, Garrett G. Goodman

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Dementia caregiver burnout is detrimental to both the familial caregiver and their loved ones with dementia. As the population of older adults increases, both the number of individuals with dementia and their corresponding caregivers increase as well. Thus, we are interested in developing a potential tool to non-invasively detect signs of caregiver burnout using a mobile application combined with machine learning. Hence, the mobile application "Caregiver Assessment using Smart Technology" (CAST) was developed which personalizes a word scramble game. The CAST application utilizes a heuristically constructed Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) optimized via a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to provide an individualized …

Development Of A Human-Ai Teaming Based Mobile Language Learning Solution For Dual Language Learners In Early And Special Educations, Saurabh Shukla

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Learning English as a secondary language is often an overwhelming challenge for dual language learners (DLLs), whose first language (L1) is not English, especially for children in early education (PreK-3 age group). These early DLLs need to devote a considerable amount of time learning to speak and read the language, in order to gain the language proficiency to function and compete in the classroom. Fear of embarrassment when mispronouncing words in front of others may drive them to remain silent; effectively hampering their participation in the class and overall curricular growth. The process of learning a new language can benefit …

Multiple Drone Detection And Acoustic Scene Classification With Deep Learning, Hari Charan Vemula

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Classification of environmental scenes and detection of events in one's environment from audio signals enables one to create better-planning agents, intelligent navigation systems, pattern recognition systems, and audio surveillance systems. This thesis will explore the use of Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN'S) with spectrograms and raw audio waveforms as inputs to Deep Neural Networks with hand engineered features extracted from large-scale feature extraction schemes to identify the acoustic scenes and events. The first part focuses on building an audio pattern recognition system capable of detecting the if there are zero, one, or two DJI phantoms in the scene within the range of …

A Framework To Understand Emoji Meaning: Similarity And Sense Disambiguation Of Emoji Using Emojinet, Sanjaya Wijeratne

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Pictographs, commonly referred to as `emoji’, have become a popular way to enhance electronic communications. They are an important component of the language used in social media. With their introduction in the late 1990’s, emoji have been widely used to enhance the sentiment, emotion, and sarcasm expressed in social media messages. They are equally popular across many social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. In 2015, Instagram reported that nearly half of the photo comments posted on Instagram contain emoji, and in the same year, Twitter reported that the `face with tears of joy’ emoji has been tweeted 6.6 …

Developing A Kinect Based Holoportation System, Soumya Chiday

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Holographic communication and distributed collaboration offer great potential for empathic computing to help remove the cost, distance, language and expertise barriers in many social and economic activities. Recent advances in AR-enhanced communication as evident by Microsoft Holoportation technology demonstrate the progress toward fully immersive collaborations distributed and remotely. Current holoportation system requires the use of extensive camera-arrays and powerful server system due to the computation demand and sensory needs to capture and reconstruct the subject of interests Thus, they suffer in mobility and applicability in real-world scenarios. In this thesis, we present an ultra-portable holoportation system design that requires only …

Using Natural Language Processing And Machine Learning For Analyzing Clinical Notes In Sickle Cell Disease Patients, Shufa Khizra

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Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is a hereditary disorder in red blood cells that can lead to excruciating pain episodes. SCD causes the normal red blood cells to distort its shape and turn into sickle shape. The distorted shape makes the hemoglobin inflexible and stick to the walls of the vessels thereby obstructing the free flow of blood and eventually making the tissues suffer from lack of oxygen. The lack of oxygen causes serious problems including Acute Chest Syndrome (ACS), stroke, infection, organ damage, and over the lifetime an SCD can harm a persons spleen, brain, kidneys, eyes, bones. Sickling of …

Resource Optimization In Wireless Sensor Networks For An Improved Field Coverage And Cooperative Target Tracking, Husam Sweidan

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

There are various challenges that face a wireless sensor network (WSN) that mainly originate from the limited resources a sensor node usually has. A sensor node often relies on a battery as a power supply which, due to its limited capacity, tends to shorten the life-time of the node and the network as a whole. Other challenges arise from the limited capabilities of the sensors/actuators a node is equipped with, leading to complication like a poor coverage of the event, or limited mobility in the environment. This dissertation deals with the coverage problem as well as the limited power and …

Implementing Write Compression In Flash Memory Using Zeckendorf Two-Round Rewriting Codes, Vincent T. Druschke

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Flash memory has become increasingly popular as the underlying storage technology for high-performance nonvolatile storage devices. However, while flash offers several benefits over alternative storage media, a number of limitations still exist within the current technology. One such limitation is that programming (altering a bit from its default value) and erasing (returning a bit to its default value) are asymmetric operations in flash memory devices: a flash memory can be programmed arbitrarily, but can only be erased in relatively large batches of storage bits called blocks, with block sizes ranging from 512K up to several megabytes. This creates a situation …

Development, Manufacture And Application Of A Solid-State Ph Sensor Using Ruthenium Oxide, Wade Lonsdale

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The measurement of pH is undertaken frequently in numerous settings for many applications. The common glass pH probe is almost ideal for measuring pH, and as such, it is used almost ubiquitously. However, glass is not ideal for all applications due to its relatively large size, fragility, need for recalibration and wet-storage. Therefore, much research has been undertaken on the use of metal oxides as an alternative for the measurement of pH.

Here, a solid-state potentiometric pH sensor is developed using ruthenium metal oxide (RuO2). Initially, pH sensitive RuO2 electrodes were prepared by deposition with radio frequency magnetron sputtering (RFMS) …

Automated Optical Mark Recognition Scoring System For Multiple-Choice Questions, Murtadha Alomran

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

Multiple-choice questions are one of the questions commonly used in assessments. It is widely used because this type of examination can be an effective and reliable way to examine the level of student’s knowledge. So far, this type of examination can either be marked by hand or with specialised answer sheets and scanning equipment. There are specialised answer sheets and scanning equipment to mark multiple-choice questions automatically. However, these are expensive, specialised and restrictive answer sheets and optical mark recognition scanners.

This research aims to design and implement a multiple-choice answer sheet and a reliable image processing-based scoring system that …

Extraction Of Patterns In Selected Network Traffic For A Precise And Efficient Intrusion Detection Approach, Priya Naran Rabadia

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis investigates a precise and efficient pattern-based intrusion detection approach by extracting patterns from sequential adversarial commands. As organisations are further placing assets within the cyber domain, mitigating the potential exposure of these assets is becoming increasingly imperative. Machine learning is the application of learning algorithms to extract knowledge from data to determine patterns between data points and make predictions. Machine learning algorithms have been used to extract patterns from sequences of commands to precisely and efficiently detect adversaries using the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol. Seeing as SSH is one of the most predominant methods of accessing systems it …

Next Generation Wireless Communication Networks: Energy And Quality Of Service Considerations, Md Munjure Mowla

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The rapid growth in global mobile phone users has resulted in an ever-increasing demand for bandwidth and enhanced quality-of-service (QoS). Several consortia comprising major international mobile operators, infrastructure manufacturers, and academic institutions are working to develop the next generation wireless communication systems fifth generation (5G) - to support high data rates and increased QoS. 5G systems are also expected to represent a greener alternative for communication systems, which is important because power consumption from the information and communication technology (ICT) sector is forecast to increase significantly by 2030. The deployment of ultra-dense heterogeneous small cell networks (SCNs) is expected to …