Computer Engineering Commons^™

Experimental Boss Design And Testing, Joseph P. Mistretta

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Over the years, gaming has developed rapidly from simple pixel-based experiences to fully blown three-dimensional worlds. As developing technologies improve, so does the complexity and flexibility of what can be created. Encounters, along with all aspects of any gaming experience, have evolved along with the technologies that create them. These intense combat instances, often times referred to as “bosses”, represent a chance for the developer to challenge player skill, cooperation, and coordination. In addition to being major challenges, encounters also allow players to feel a sense of progression as they learn and adapt to mechanics incorporated within an encounter’s design. …

Vcare: A Personal Emergency Response System To Promote Safe And Independent Living Among Elders Staying By Themselves In Community Or Residential Settings, Priyankar Bhattacharjee

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

‘Population aging’ is a growing concern for most of us living in the twenty first century, primarily because many of us in the next few years will have a senior person to care for - spending money towards their healthcare expenditures AND/OR having to balance a full-time job with the responsibility of care-giving, travelling from another city to be with this elderly citizen who might be our parent, grand-parent or even community elders. As informal care-givers, if somehow we were able to monitor the day-to-day activities of our elderly dependents, and be alerted when wrong happens to them that would …

Micro-Policies: Formally Verified, Tag-Based Security Monitors, Arthur Azevedo De Amorim, Maxime Denes, Nick Giannarakis, Cătălin Hriţcu, Benjamin C. Pierce, Antal Spector-Zabusky, Andrew Tolmach

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Recent advances in hardware design have demonstrated mechanisms allowing a wide range of low-level security policies (or micro-policies) to be expressed using rules on metadata tags. We propose a methodology for defining and reasoning about such tag-based reference monitors in terms of a high-level “symbolic machine,” and we use this methodology to define and formally verify micro-policies for dynamic sealing, compartmentalization, control-flow integrity, and memory safety; in addition, we show how to use the tagging mechanism to protect its own integrity. For each micro-policy, we prove by refinement that the symbolic machine instantiated with the policy’s rules embodies a high-level …

Self-Organizing Neural Networks Integrating Domain Knowledge And Reinforcement Learning, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Jacek M. Zurada

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of domain knowledge in learning systems is expected to improve learning efficiency and reduce model complexity. However, due to the incompatibility with knowledge structure of the learning systems and real-time exploratory nature of reinforcement learning (RL), domain knowledge cannot be inserted directly. In this paper, we show how self-organizing neural networks designed for online and incremental adaptation can integrate domain knowledge and RL. Specifically, symbol-based domain knowledge is translated into numeric patterns before inserting into the self-organizing neural networks. To ensure effective use of domain knowledge, we present an analysis of how the inserted knowledge is used by …

Formal Specification And Refinement Of The Navigation Tasks Of Autonomous Robots, Eman Rabiah

Theses

Autonomous robots are hybrid systems whose role in our daily life is becoming increasingly critical. They are tasked with various activities requiring reliability, safety, and correctness of their software-controlled behavior. Formal methods have been proved effective in addressing development issues associated with these software qualities. However, even though autonomous robot navigation is a primordial function, there is no research dealing with enhancing reliability of the navigation algorithms. Thus, our focus is to investigate this type of algorithms, and specifically path planning, a fundamental and critical functionality supporting autonomy. We formally address the issue of enhancing reliability of the widely-used A* …

Reality Mining Techniques Applied To Telecommunication Data, Sunil Maharjan

Theses

In this thesis, the application of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) techniques are examined in order to further develop and improve the field of Reality Mining. Reality Mining refers to the collection of machine sensed environmental data, from which, it is hoped future human social behaviour can be predicted. Large datasets for Reality Mining study have been generated by recording the patterns of human activity and social interactions over an extended period of time. Reality Mining techniques can provide information on important social clues for the better understanding of how humans live their lives. This information can then be used to help …

Using Unrestricted Mobile Sensors To Infer Tapped And Traced User Inputs, Trang Duyen Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

As of January 2014, 58% of Americans over the age of 18 own a smart phone. Of these smart phones, Android devices provide some security by requiring that third-party application developers declare to users which components and features their applications will access. However, many of the real-time environmental sensors on devices are exempt from this requirement. We evaluate the possibility of exploiting this freedom to discretely use these sensors and expand on previous work by developing an application that can use the gyroscope and accelerometer to interpret what the user has written, even of trace input is used. Trace input …

Enabling Runtime Self-Coordination Of Reconfigurable Embedded Smart Cameras In Distributed Networks, Franck Ulrich Yonga Yonga

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Smart camera networks are real-time distributed embedded systems able to perform computer vision using multiple cameras. This new approach is a confluence of four major disciplines (computer vision, image sensors, embedded computing and sensor networks) and has been subject of intensive work in the past decades. The recent advances in computer vision and network communication, and the rapid growing in the field of high-performance computing, especially using reconfigurable devices, have enabled the design of more robust smart camera systems. Despite these advancements, the effectiveness of current networked vision systems (compared to their operating costs) is still disappointing; the main reason …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Segmentation Of Pulmonary Nodules In Computed Tomography Using A Regression Neural Network Approach And Its Application To The Lung Image Database Consortium And Image Database Resource Initiative Dataset, Temesguen Messay, Russell C. Hardie, Timothy R. Tuinstra

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

We present new pulmonary nodule segmentation algorithms for computed tomography (CT). These include a fully-automated (FA) system, a semi-automated (SA) system, and a hybrid system. Like most traditional systems, the new FA system requires only a single user-supplied cue point. On the other hand, the SA system represents a new algorithm class requiring 8 user-supplied control points. This does increase the burden on the user, but we show that the resulting system is highly robust and can handle a variety of challenging cases. The proposed hybrid system starts with the FA system. If improved segmentation results are needed, the SA …

Design And Verification Environment For High-Performance Video-Based Embedded Systems, Michael Mefenza Nentedem

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a method and a tool to enable design and verification of computation demanding embedded vision-based systems is presented. Starting with an executable specification in OpenCV, we provide subsequent refinements and verification down to a system-on-chip prototype into an FPGA-Based smart camera. At each level of abstraction, properties of image processing applications are used along with structure composition to provide a generic architecture that can be automatically verified and mapped to the lower abstraction level. The result is a framework that encapsulates the computer vision library OpenCV at the highest level, integrates Accelera's System-C/TLM with UVM and QEMU-OS …

Data Integrity Verification In Cloud Computing, Katanosh Morovat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cloud computing is an architecture model which provides computing and storage capacity as a service over the internet. Cloud computing should provide secure services for users and owners of data as well. Cloud computing services are a completely internet-based technology where data are stored and maintained in the data center of a cloud provider. Lack of appropriate control over the data might incur several security issues. As a result, some data stored in the cloud must be protected at all times. These types of data are called sensitive data. Sensitive data is defined as data that must be protected against …

Multimodal Content Delivery For Geo-Services, Keith Gardiner

Doctoral

This thesis describes a body of work carried out over several research projects in the area of multimodal interaction for location-based services. Research in this area has progressed from using simulated mobile environments to demonstrate the visual modality, to the ubiquitous delivery of rich media using multimodal interfaces (geo- services). To effectively deliver these services, research focused on innovative solutions to real-world problems in a number of disciplines including geo-location, mobile spatial interaction, location-based services, rich media interfaces and auditory user interfaces. My original contributions to knowledge are made in the areas of multimodal interaction underpinned by advances in geo-location …

Novel Bioinformatic Approaches For Analyzing Next-Generation Sequencing Data, Yan Peng

Dissertations

In general, DNA reconstruction is deemed as the key of molecular biology since it makes people realize how genotype affects phenotypes. The DNA sequencing technology emerged exactly towards this and has greatly promoted molecular biology’s development. The traditional method, "Sanger," is effective but extremely expensive on a cost-per-base basis. This shortcoming of Sanger method leads to the rapid development of next-generation sequencing technologies. The NGS technologies are widely used by virtue of their low-cost, high-throughput, and fast nature. However, they still face major drawbacks such as huge amounts of data as well as relatively short read length compared with traditional …

Secure And Reliable Routing Protocol For Transmission Data In Wireless Sensor Mesh Networks, Nooh Adel Bany Muhammad

Dissertations

Abstract

Sensor nodes collect data from the physical world then exchange it until it reaches the intended destination. This information can be sensitive, such as battlefield surveillance. Therefore, providing secure and continuous data transmissions among sensor nodes in wireless network environments is crucial. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have limited resources, limited computation capabilities, and the exchange of data through the air and deployment in accessible areas makes the energy, security, and routing major concerns in WSN. In this research we are looking at security issues for the above reasons. WSN is susceptible to malicious activities such as hacking and physical …

Using A Nearest Neighbor Algorithm And Logistic Regression To Assess Hazard Identification In The U.S. Army Risk Management Process, Heath L. Mccormick

Theses and Dissertations

This research considers whether a person's demographic and experiential attributes play a significant role in how they perceive the presence or absence of hazards in a given situation. The goal of the research is to show that participants with enlisted military experience, prior to being commissioned as a junior officer, would be more successful at identifying the hazards presented in military scenarios than those who had only been trained on the process via their pre-commissioning and initial entry courses of instruction. The research study involves the use of two surveys with realistic military scenarios including both Foot March and Maintenance …

Design And Development Of Two Component Hydrogel Ejector For Three-Dimensional Cell Growth, Thomas Dunkle, Jessica Deschamps, Connie Dam

Honors Scholar Theses

Hydrogels are useful in wound healing, drug delivery, and tissue engineering applications, but the available methods of injecting them quickly and noninvasively are limited. The medical industry does not yet have access to an all-purpose device that can quickly synthesize hydrogels of different shapes and sizes. Many synthesis procedures that have been developed result in the formation of amorphous hydrogels. While generally useful, amorphous hydrogels exhibit limited capability in tissue engineering applications, especially due to their viscous properties. This endeavor aims to modulate the appropriate gelation parameters, optimize the injection process, and create a prototype that allows for the extrusion …

Speech Data Analysis For Semantic Indexing Of Video Of Simulated Medical Crises., Shuangshuang Jiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Simulation for Pediatric Assessment, Resuscitation, and Communication (SPARC) group within the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Louisville, was established to enhance the care of children by using simulation based educational methodologies to improve patient safety and strengthen clinician-patient interactions. After each simulation session, the physician must manually review and annotate the recordings and then debrief the trainees. The physician responsible for the simulation has recorded 100s of videos, and is seeking solutions that can automate the process. This dissertation introduces our developed system for efficient segmentation and semantic indexing of videos of medical simulations using machine learning …

An Island-Based Approach For Rna-Seq Differential Expression Analysis., Abdallah Eteleeb

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

High-throughput mRNA sequencing (also known as RNA-Seq) promises to be the technique of choice for studying transcriptome profiles, offering several advantages over old techniques such as microarrays. This technique provides the ability to develop precise methodologies for a variety of RNA-Seq applications including gene expression quantification, novel transcript and exon discovery, differential expression (DE) and splice variant detection. The detection of significantly changing features (e.g. genes, transcript isoforms, exons) in expression across biological samples is a primary application of RNA-Seq. Uncovering which features are significantly differentially expressed between samples can provide insight into their functions. One major limitation with the …

A Forensics Software Toolkit For Dna Steganalysis., Marc Bjoern Beck

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in genetic engineering have allowed the insertion of artificial DNA strands into the living cells of organisms. Several methods have been developed to insert information into a DNA sequence for the purpose of data storage, watermarking, or communication of secret messages. The ability to detect, extract, and decode messages from DNA is important for forensic data collection and for data security. We have developed a software toolkit that is able to detect the presence of a hidden message within a DNA sequence, extract that message, and then decode it. The toolkit is able to detect, extract, and decode …

Cloud-Based Strategies For Robust Connectivity And Efficient Transmission In Vehicular Networks, Ke Xu

All Dissertations

Leveraging multiple wireless technologies and radio access networks, vehicles on the move have the potential to get ubiquitous broadband Internet connectivity. Many studies have put lots of efforts on vehicle-to-vehicle networks for relaying strategies, popular content distribution, etc. However, in dominant infrastructure-based vehicular networks, supporting continuous and fast data transfer for today's prevalent services, e.g. video streaming, for vehicles anytime and anywhere is still a difficult research problem. By looking into such problem, impacts such as intermittent connectivity, dynamic network topology, fluctuating signal coverage, and inefficient transmissions, all result from two root causes in vehicular network- mobility and limited infrastructure …

Energy Harvesting And Storage: The Catalyst To The Power Constraint For Leveraging Internet Of Things (Iot) On Trains, Kelechi Nwogu

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

The success of Wireless Sensor Networks is heavily constrained by its reliance on storage technology like batteries, which are a finite resource. Whilst the number of transistors in an IC doubles every 18 months, the energy density of batteries is relatively flat during the same time period. This is a key challenge in leveraging the Internet of Things on trains.

The gravity of this problem is increased by an order of magnitude when the network is to be scaled up to hundreds or thousands of nodes. Comprehensive research and development efforts have been devoted to building ultra-low power sensors. These …

An Online Wear State Monitoring Methodology For Off-The-Shelf Embedded Processors, Srinath Arunachalam

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Every year transistors are becoming smaller and smaller. The continued trend of transistors becoming smaller has led to double amount of transistors being placed in the same area of space from its previous generation. This has led to an exponential increase in the amount of power per unit volume on-chip, which has resulted in increasing temperature. In turn, the increase in temperature directly leads to the increase in the rate of wear of a processor. Negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI) is one of the most dominant integrated circuit (IC) failure mechanisms [5, 13] that strongly depends on temperature. NBTI manifests in …

Matchmaking Game Players On Public Transport, Nairan Zhang, Youngki Lee, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper extends our recent work, called GameOn, which presented a system for allowing public transport commuters to engage in multiplayer games with fellow commuters traveling on the same bus or train. An important challenge for GameOn is to group players with reliable connections into the same game. In this case, the meaning of reliability has two dimensions. First, the network connectivity (TCP, UDP etc.) should be robust. Second, the players should be collocated with each other for a sufficiently long duration so that a game session will not be terminated by players leaving the public transport modality such as …

Measuring Centralities For Transportation Networks Beyond Structures, Yew-Yih Cheng, Lee Ka Wei, Roy, Ee-Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In an urban city, its transportation network supports efficient flow of people between different parts of the city. Failures in the network can cause major disruptions to commuter and business activities which can result in both significant economic and time losses. In this paper, we investigate the use of centrality measures to determine critical nodes in a transportation network so as to improve the design of the network as well as to devise plans for coping with the network failures. Most centrality measures in social network analysis research unfortunately consider only topological structure of the network and are oblivious of …

Ambient Rendezvous: Energy Efficient Neighbor Discovery Via Acoustic Sensing, Keyu Wang, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu, Lionel M. Ni

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The continual proliferation of mobile devices has stimulated the development of opportunistic encounter-based networking and has spurred a myriad of proximity-based mobile applications. A primary cornerstone of such applications is to discover neighboring devices effectively and efficiently. Despite extensive protocol optimization, current neighbor discovery modalities mainly rely on radio interfaces, whose energy and wake up delay required to initiate, configure and operate these protocols hamper practical applicability. Unlike conventional schemes that actively emit radio tones, we exploit ubiquitous audio events to discover neighbors passively. The rationale is that spatially adjacent neighbors tend to share similar ambient acoustic environments. We propose …

Phaseu: Real-Time Los Identification With Wifi, Chenshu Wu, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Kun Qian, Yunhao Liu, Mingyan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

WiFi technology has fostered numerous mobile computing applications, such as adaptive communication, finegrained localization, gesture recognition, etc., which often achieve better performance or rely on the availability of Line-Of-Sight (LOS) signal propagation. Thus the awareness of LOS and NonLine-Of-Sight (NLOS) plays as a key enabler for them. Realtime LOS identification on commodity WiFi devices, however, is challenging due to limited bandwidth of WiFi and resulting coarse multipath resolution. In this work, we explore and exploit the phase feature of PHY layer information, harnessing both space diversity with antenna elements and frequency diversity with OFDM subcarriers. On this basis, we propose …

Mining Patterns Of Unsatisfiable Constraints To Detect Infeasible Paths, Sun Ding, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Detection of infeasible paths is required in many areas including test coverage analysis, test case generation, security vulnerability analysis, etc. Existing approaches typically use static analysis coupled with symbolic evaluation, heuristics, or path-pattern analysis. This paper is related to these approaches but with a different objective. It is to analyze code of real systems to build patterns of unsatisfiable constraints in infeasible paths. The resulting patterns can be used to detect infeasible paths without the use of constraint solver and evaluation of function calls involved, thus improving scalability. The patterns can be built gradually. Evaluation of the proposed approach shows …

Synthetic Aperture Radar: Rapid Detection Of Target Motion In Matlab, Daniel S. Kassen

Master's Theses

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has come into widespread use in several civilian and military applications. The focus of this paper is the military application of imaging point targets captured by an airborne SAR platform. Using the traditional SAR method of determining target motion by analyzing the difference between subsequent images takes a relatively large amount of processing resources. Using methods in this thesis, target motion can be estimated before even a single image is obtained, reducing the amount of time and power used by a significantly large amount. This thesis builds on work done by Brain Zaharri and David So. …

Developing An Application For Evolutionary Search For Computational Models Of Cellular Development, Nicolas Scott Cornia

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

VPEvolve is a free and open source application that utilizes a Visual Programming Environment (VPE) for the setup of the Genetic Algorithm (GA), for optimization of computational models. Specifically, the User Interface uses connected glyphs to represent the genetic operators of mutation, reproduction, fitness and selection. These glyphs give the user an intuitive way to set the parameters for the GA, and better visualization of the population's flow through these operators.

VPEvolve is currently being developed alongside research being done in Biocomputing to create models of cellular regeneration based on the regenerative properties of Planaria or flatworms. Since these models …