Computer Engineering Commons^™

Development Of A Performance Assessment System For Language Learning, Imen Kasrani

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Recent advances in computer-assisted, language-speaking, learning/training technology have demonstrated its promising potential to improve the outcome of language learning in early education, special education, English as a Second Language (ESL), and foreign language. The growing number of readily available mobile app-based solutions help encourage interest in learning to speak a foreign language, but their effectiveness is limited due to their lack of objective assessment and performance feedback resembling expert judgment. For example, it has been recognized that, in early education, students learn best with one-on-one instructions. Unfortunately, teachers do not have the time, and it is challenging to extend the …

Development Of An Android Based Performance Assessment System For Motivational Interviewing Training, Sowmya Pappu

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Motivational Interviewing (MI) has been proved to be an effective Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) technique. It is an evidence-based practice used to identify, reduce, and prevent problematic use, abuse, and dependence on alcohol and illicit drugs. It emphasizes on patient-centered counseling approach that can help resolve their ambivalence through a non-confrontational, goal-oriented style for eliciting behavior change from the patient, almost like patients talk themselves into change. This approach provokes less resistance and stimulates the progress of patients at their own pace towards deciding about planning, making and sustaining positive behavioral change. Thus, training medical professionals …

Packmule, Jared M. Alexander, Jared J. Ford, Timothy J. Griffiths, Andray Pennington

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

People face demands of hauling equipment and belongings with them every day, whether it be for work or leisure. This design report discusses and details a product that would allow people to overcome the struggles of this. The Packmule is an autonomous following robot that has the capability of carrying a load up to 30 pounds. The design involves two independently controlled motors operating two drive wheels so that the Packmule will be flexible in the directions it can move. There are also two more steering wheels for support of the base and the load inside. The way in which …

Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, Austin R. Tyler, Chris R. Estock, Johnathan P. Johenning, Garrett W. Chonko, Allen C. Gilleland

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) draws teams from various universities to compete in the annual autonomous vehicle challenge at the Oakland University campus. To compete, a vehicle must be fully autonomous and can navigate a course designated by various obstacles and painted white lines. Some design challenges are motor control, navigation, environment sensing and safety. A complex navigation system will utilize several tools including a high-precision differential GPS. The vehicle’s surroundings will be mapped using a combination of Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and computer-vision enabled imaging. To comply with IGVC rules, the vehicle must also follow several safety …

System For Workout Information Management, Mark Archual, Ethan E. Schweinsberg

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Power racks are a weight machine used by swimmers to provide resistance while they swim away from a wall toward the center of the pool. The objective of this project is to build a modular data system that can be added to these machines to record and log quantitative information during their use. This information will be stored on a web server, and made available to the user for analysis and visualization through a web application. Workout data can also be downloaded and interpreted at a later time, independent of the web application. The data system should be water resistant, …

Smart Fan, Jacob A. Carroll, Joshua B. Blanchard, Peter A. Gross, Joshua D. Riegel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Modern box fans offer a simple solution to cooling an area. However, the simplicity that makes these fans appealing also limits their potential. A smart box fan that preserves its original simplicity while providing enhanced technological features such as smartphone connectivity and variable speed selection should lead to ease of use, improved performance, and increased customer satisfaction. To this end, a regular box fan will be instrumented and technology-enhanced, thus “smart fan.” The standard AC motor will be replaced with a DC motor for finer speed selection over the allowable range. The smart fan will offer three categories of operation: …

Gymfo: A Gym Finding Ios App Using Google Maps Api, Clay A. Wyers

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project explores iOS mobile app development. I developed a gym finding app in Swift, using Google Maps APIs,and called it Gymfo. Other technologies were studied as well, including the cloud computing service Microsoft Azure. Through this project I learned the basics of XCode and Swift, Google APIs, and sending and receiving HTTP requests. The final product is an iOS app that allows users to search for nearby gyms and displays the results on an interactive map.

System Identification Of A Circulation Control Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Mohammed Agha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The advancement in automation and sensory systems in recent years has led to an increase the demand of UAV missions. Due to this increase in demand, the research community has gained interest in investigating UAV performance enhancing systems. Circulation Control (CC), which is an active control flow method used to enhance UAV lift, is a performance enhancing system currently studied. In prior research, experimental studies have shown that Circulation Control wings (CCW) implemented on class-I UAVs can reduce take-off distance by 54%. Wind tunnel tests reveal that CC improves aircraft payload capabilities through lift enhancement. Increasing aircraft payload capabilities causes …

Reducing The Overhead Of Memory Space, Network Communication And Disk I/O For Analytic Frameworks In Big Data Ecosystem, Xuhong Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

To facilitate big data processing, many distributed analytic frameworks and storage systems such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Hama, Apache Spark and Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) have been developed. Currently, many researchers are conducting research to either make them more scalable or enabling them to support more analysis applications. In my PhD study, I conducted three main works in this topic, which are minimizing the communication delay in Apache Hama, minimizing the memory space and computational overhead in HDFS and minimizing the disk I/O overhead for approximation applications in Hadoop ecosystem. Specifically, In Apache Hama, communication delay makes up a …

Improving Usability And Scalability Of Big Data Workflows In The Cloud, Aravind Mohan

Wayne State University Dissertations

Big data workflows have recently emerged as the next generation of data-centric workflow technologies to address the five “V” challenges of big data: volume, variety, velocity, veracity, and value. More formally, a big data workflow is the computerized modeling and automation of a process consisting of a set of computational tasks and their data interdependencies to process and analyze data of ever increasing in scale, complexity, and rate of acquisition. The convergence of big data and workflows creates new challenges in workflow community.

First, the variety of big data results in a need for integrating large number of remote Web …

Blown To Bits Project, David Schmidt

Informatics Open Educational Resources

The book, Blown to Bits, uncovers the many ways that the new digital world has changed and is changing our whole environment. Some changes are incremental but others are more revolutionary. Some of the changes that we welcome are slowly eroding our privacy and are changing the rules of ownership. This book illuminates the complexities of these changes. I have attempted to capture the central points in selected chapters, and in some cases I have added new material or new examples to replace dated material. I picked chapters to summarize that address the following topics (and more). There are many …

Clustering Opportunistic Ant-Based Routing Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks, Xinlu Li, Brian Keegan, Fredrick Mtenzi

Conference papers

The wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have a wide range of applications in many ereas, including many kinds of uses such as environmental monitoring and chemical detection. Due to the restriction of energy supply, the improvement of routing performance is the major motivation in WSNs. We present a Clustering Opportunistic Ant-based Routing protocol (COAR), which comprises the following main contributions to achieve high energy efficient and well load-balance: (i) in the clustering algorithm, we caculate the theoretical value of energy dissipation, which will make the number of clusters fluctuate around the expected value, (ii) define novel heuristic function and pheromone update …

Efficient Reasoning Algorithms For Fragments Of Horn Description Logics, David Carral

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We characterize two fragments of Horn Description Logics and we define two specialized reasoning algorithms that effectively solve the standard reasoning tasks over each of such fragments. We believe our work to be of general interest since (1) a rather large proportion of real-world Horn ontologies belong to some of these two fragments and (2) the implementations based on our reasoning approach significantly outperform state-of-the-art reasoners. Claims (1) and (2) are extensively proven via empirically evaluation.

Multi-Class Classification Of Textual Data: Detection And Mitigation Of Cheating In Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games, Naga Sai Nikhil Maguluri

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The success of any multiplayer game depends on the player’s experience. Cheating/Hacking undermines the player’s experience and thus the success of that game. Cheaters, who use hacks, bots or trainers are ruining the gaming experience of a player and are making him leave the game. As the video game industry is a constantly increasing multibillion dollar economy, it is crucial to assure and maintain a state of security. Players reflect their gaming experience in one of the following places: multiplayer chat, game reviews, and social media. This thesis is an exploratory study where our goal is to experiment and propose …

Sched-Its: An Interactive Tutoring System To Teach Cpu Scheduling Concepts In An Operating Systems Course, Bharath Kumar Koya

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Operating systems is an essential course in computer science curriculum, which helps students to develop a mental model of how computer operating systems work. The internal mechanisms and processes of an operating system (OS) are often complex, non-deterministic and intangible which makes them difficult for students to understand. One such concept is central processing unit (CPU) scheduling. CPU scheduling forms the basis of the multiprogramming in an OS. In practice, OS courses involve classroom lectures describing high-level abstractions of the concepts, and students complete programming assignments to apply the material in a more concrete way. Depending on the programming assignments, …

An Optimization Compiler Framework Based On Polyhedron Model For Gpgpus, Lifeng Liu

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General purpose GPU (GPGPU) is an effective many-core architecture that can yield high throughput for many scientific applications with thread-level parallelism. However, several challenges still limit further performance improvements and make GPU programming challenging for programmers who lack the knowledge of GPU hardware architecture. In this dissertation, we describe an Optimization Compiler Framework Based on Polyhedron Model for GPGPUs to bridge the speed gap between the GPU cores and the off-chip memory and improve the overall performance of the GPU systems. The optimization compiler framework includes a detailed data reuse analyzer based on the extended polyhedron model for GPU kernels, …

Oclep+: One-Class Intrusion Detection Using Length Of Patterns, Sai Kiran Pentukar

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In an earlier paper, a method called One-class Classification using Length statistics of (jumping) Emerging Patterns (OCLEP) was introduced for masquerader detection. Jumping emerging patterns (JEPs) for a test instance are minimal patterns that match the test instance but they do not match any normal instances. OCLEP was based on the observation that one needs long JEPs to differentiate an instance of one class from instances of the same class, but needs short JEPs to differentiate an instance of one class from instances of a different class. In this thesis, we present OCLEP+, One-class Classification using Length statistics of Emerging …

Conditional Correlation Analysis, Sanjeev Bhatta

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Correlation analysis is a frequently used statistical measure to examine the relationship among variables in different practical applications. However, the traditional correlation analysis uses an overly simplistic method to do so. It measures how two variables are related in an application by examining only their relationship in the entire underlying data space. As a result, traditional correlation analysis may miss a strong correlation between those variables especially when that relationship exists in the small subpopulation of the larger data space. This is no longer acceptable and may lose a fair share of information in this era of Big Data which …

Rendering Owl In Latex For Improved Readability: Extensions To The Owlapi, Cogan M. Shimizu

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As ontology engineering is inherently a multidisciplinary process, it is necessary to utilize multiple vehicles to present an ontology to a user. In order to examine the content of an ontology, formal logic renderings of the axioms appear to be a very helpful approach for some. This thesis introduces a number of incremental improvements to the OWLAPI's \LaTeX{} rendering framework in order to improve the readability, concision, and correctness of OWL files translated into Description Logic and First Order Logic. In addition, we examine the efficacy of these renderings as vehicles for understanding an ontology.

Deep Learning Approach For Intrusion Detection System (Ids) In The Internet Of Things (Iot) Network Using Gated Recurrent Neural Networks (Gru), Manoj Kumar Putchala

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is a complex paradigm where billions of devices are connected to a network. These connected devices form an intelligent system of systems that share the data without human-to-computer or human-to-human interaction. These systems extract meaningful data that can transform human lives, businesses, and the world in significant ways. However, the reality of IoT is prone to countless cyber-attacks in the extremely hostile environment like the internet. The recent hack of 2014 Jeep Cherokee, iStan pacemaker, and a German steel plant are a few notable security breaches. To secure an IoT system, the traditional high-end security …

Portable Motion Lab For Diagnostic And Rehabilitation Processes, Yogesh Laxman Chavan

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In this thesis research, we have explored the capabilities of a household body-tracking device - Microsoft Xbox Kinect for motion analysis and assessment to assist patient’s rehabilitation after joint replacement and repair surgeries. In particular, we have combined the motion tracking capabilities of Kinect with the 3D modelling of human body for accurate and intuitive movement assessment and feedback. Our prototype system demonstrates the effective and efficient workflow of motion capturing, data processing and analyzing and augmented reality based presentation, resulting in a design which is not only accurate, reliable and robust, but also extremely cost- and space-efficient. Furthermore, we …

Detecting Information Leakage In Android Malware Using Static Taint Analysis, Soham P. Kelkar

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According to Google, Android now runs on 1.4 billion devices. The growing popularity has attracted attackers to use Android as a platform to conduct malicious activities. To achieve these malicious activities some attacker choose to develop malicious Apps to steal information from the Android users. As the modern day smartphones process, a lot of sensitive information, information security, and privacy becoming a potential target for the attacker. The malicious Apps steal information from the infected phone and send this information to the attacker-controlled URLs using various Android sink functions. Therefore, it necessary to protect data as it can prove detrimental …

Harassment Detection On Twitter Using Conversations, Venkatesh Edupuganti

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Social media has brought people closer than ever before, but the use of social media has also brought with it a risk of online harassment. Such harassment can have a serious impact on a person such as causing low self-esteem and depression. The past research on detecting harassment on social media is primarily based on the content of messages exchanged on social media. The lack of context when relying on a single social media post can result in a high degree of false alarms. In this study, I focus on the reliable detection of harassment on Twitter by better understanding …

Semantic Web Foundations For Representing, Reasoning, And Traversing Contextualized Knowledge Graphs, Vinh Thi Kim Nguyen

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Semantic Web technologies such as RDF and OWL have become World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for knowledge representation and reasoning. RDF triples about triples, or meta triples, form the basis for a contextualized knowledge graph. They represent the contextual information about individual triples such as the source, the occurring time or place, or the certainty. However, an efficient RDF representation for such meta-knowledge of triples remains a major limitation of the RDF data model. The existing reification approach allows such meta-knowledge of RDF triples to be expressed in RDF by using four triples per reified triple. While reification is …

Automated Rendering Of Schema Diagram For Ontologies, Nazifa Karima

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Semantic Web extends the current web, using ontologies, metadata and other technologies to establish links between terms and concepts. This enables machines to automatically integrate information across different platforms utilizing the standard definitions. Furthermore, reasoning agents can infer new knowledge by gathering existing information and these additional connections between them. As a result of being designed and maintained independently, data sources exhibit highly heterogeneous nature. This increases the complexity of data integration and hinders interoperability. However, if we can align the overlapping concepts among different domains of knowledge, the prospect of achieving interoperability and integration without having any intermediate reasoning …

Adapting The Search Space While Limiting Damage During Learning In A Simulated Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle, Monica Sam

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Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are characterized by closely coupled physical and software components that operate simultaneously on different spatial and temporal scales; exhibit multiple and distinct behavioral modalities; and interact with one another in ways not entirely predictable at the time of design. A commonly appearing type of CPS are systems that contain one or more smart components that adapt locally in response to global measurements of whole system performance. An example of a smart component robotic CPS system is a Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FW-MAV) that contains wing motion oscillators that control their wing flapping patterns to enable the …

Development Of An Ultra-Portable Non-Contact Wound Measurement System, Anka Babu Billa

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Continuous monitoring of changes in wound size is key to correctly predict whether wounds will heal readily with conventional treatment or require more aggressive treatment strategies. Unfortunately, existing wound measurement solutions don't meet the clinical demand due to their limitations in accuracy, operating complexity and time, acquisition and operation cost, or reproducibility, resulting in unnecessarily lengthy recovery or extra treatment procedures, incurring an excessively high financial cost, and in many cases extended usage of addictive painkillers. In this thesis, we proposed and developed a low cost, a portable non-contact solution that combines multi-spectral imaging and a portfolio of imaging processing …

Investigation Of The Use Of 3-D Printer Platform As Building Block For Rapid Design Of Research And Manufacturing Tool, Handy Chandra

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis attempts to show how an open source 3-D printer platform, the self replicating rapid prototype (RepRap), could be used to accelerate the development of research and manufacturing tools. Two projects are shown as examples, both utilizing components of the 3-D printer platform.

The first project is to develop an instrument capable of performing automated large-area four-point probe measurements. A modified RepRap 3-D Printer with a four-point probe in place of the 3-D printer head is utilized as a precision positioning platform. The printer together with custom designed measurement circuit and software performs automated measurement on multiple points on …

Low-Cost Open-Source Gmaw-Based Metal 3-D Printing: Monitoring, Slicer, Optimization, And Applications, Yuenyong Nilsiam

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Low-cost and open-source gas metal arc welding (GMAW)-based 3-D printing has been demonstrated yet the electrical design and software was not developed enough to enable wide-spread adoption. This thesis provides three novel technical improvements based on the application of mechatronic and software theory that when combined demonstrate the ability for distributed digital manufacturing at the small and medium enterprise scale of steel and aluminum parts. First, low cost metal inert gas welders contain no power monitoring needed to tune GMAW 3-D printers. To obtain this data about power and energy usage during the printing, an integrated monitoring system was developed …

Heterogeneous Multi-Sensor Fusion For 2d And 3d Pose Estimation, Hanieh Deilamsalehy

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Sensor fusion is a process in which data from different sensors is combined to acquire an output that cannot be obtained from individual sensors. This dissertation first considers a 2D image level real world problem from rail industry and proposes a novel solution using sensor fusion, then proceeds further to the more complicated 3D problem of multi sensor fusion for UAV pose estimation.

One of the most important safety-related tasks in the rail industry is an early detection of defective rolling stock components. Railway wheels and wheel bearings are two components prone to damage due to their interactions with the …