Computer Engineering Commons^™

Efficiency Theory: A Unifying Theory For Information, Computation And Intelligence, Roman V. Yampolskiy

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The paper serves as the first contribution towards the development of the theory of efficiency: a unifying framework for the currently disjoint theories of information, complexity, communication and computation. Realizing the defining nature of the brute force approach in the fundamental concepts in all of the above mentioned fields, the paper suggests using efficiency or improvement over the brute force algorithm as a common unifying factor necessary for the creation of a unified theory of information manipulation. By defining such diverse terms as randomness, knowledge, intelligence and computability in terms of a common denominator we are able to bring together …

Clustering Algorithms For Maximizing The Lifetime Of Wireless Sensor Networks With Energy-Harvesting Sensors, Pengfei Zhang, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivated by recent developments in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), we present several efficient clustering algorithms for maximizing the lifetime of WSNs, i.e., the duration till a certain percentage of the nodes die. Specifically, an optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the lifetime of a single-cluster network, followed by an extension to handle multi-cluster networks. Then we study the joint problem of prolonging network lifetime by introducing energy-harvesting (EH) nodes. An algorithm is proposed for maximizing the network lifetime where EH nodes serve as dedicated relay nodes for cluster heads (CHs). Theoretical analysis and extensive simulation results show that the proposed …

An Experimental Study For Inter-User Interference Mitigation In Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Bin Cao, Yu Ge, Chee Wee Kim, Gang Feng, Hwee-Pink Tan, Yun Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Inter-user interference degrades the reliability of data delivery in wireless body sensor networks (WBSNs) in dense deployments when multiple users wearing WBSNs are in close proximity to one another. The impact of such interference in realistic WBSN systems is significant but is not well explored. To this end, we investigate and analyze the impact of inter-user interference on packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput. We conduct extensive experiments based on the TelosB WBSN platform, considering unslotted carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision avoidance (CA) and slotted CSMA/CA modes in IEEE 802.15.4 MAC, respectively. In order to mitigate interuser interference, …

Image Search By Graph-Based Label Propagation With Image Representation From Dnn, Yingwei Pan, Yao Ting, Kuiyuan Yang, Houqiang Li, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jingdong Wang, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our objective is to estimate the relevance of an image to a query for image search purposes. We address two limitations of the existing image search engines in this paper. First, there is no straightforward way of bridging the gap between semantic textual queries as well as users’ search intents and image visual content. Image search engines therefore primarily rely on static and textual features. Visual features are mainly used to identify potentially useful recurrent patterns or relevant training examples for complementing search by image reranking. Second, image rankers are trained on query-image pairs labeled by human experts, making the …

Annotation For Free: Video Tagging By Mining User Search Behavior, Yao Ting, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The problem of tagging is mostly considered from the perspectives of machine learning and data-driven philosophy. A fundamental issue that underlies the success of these approaches is the visual similarity, ranging from the nearest neighbor search to manifold learning, to identify similar instances of an example for tag completion. The need to searching for millions of visual examples in high-dimensional feature space, however, makes the task computationally expensive. Moreover, the results can suffer from robustness problem, when the underlying data, such as online videos, are rich of semantics and the similarity is difficult to be learnt from low-level features. This …

Error Recovered Hierarchical Classification, Shiai Zhu, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hierarchical classification (HC) is a popular and efficient way for detecting the semantic concepts from the images. However, the conventional HC, which always selects the branch with the highest classification response to go on, has the risk of propagating serious errors from higher levels of the hierarchy to the lower levels. We argue that the highestresponse-first strategy is too arbitrary, because the candidate nodes are considered individually which ignores the semantic relationship among them. In this paper, we propose a novel method for HC, which is able to utilize the semantic relationship among candidate nodes and their children to recover …

Money Laundering Detection Framework To Link The Disparate And Evolving Schemes, Murad Mehmet, Duminda Wijesekera, Miguel F. Buchholtz

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Money launderers hide traces of their transactions with the involvement of entities that participate in sophisticated schemes. Money laundering detection requires unraveling concealed connections among multiple but seemingly unrelated human money laundering networks, ties among actors of those schemes, and amounts of funds transferred among those entities. The link among small networks, either financial or social, is the primary factor that facilitates money laundering. Hence, the analysis of relations among money laundering networks is required to present the full structure of complex schemes. We propose a framework that uses sequence matching, case-based analysis, social network analysis, and complex event processing …

Trust-But-Verify: Guaranteeing The Integrity Of User-Generated Content In Online Applications, Akshay Dua

Dissertations and Theses

Online applications that are open to participation lack reliable methods to establish the integrity of user-generated information. Users may unknowingly own compromised devices, or intentionally publish forged information. In these scenarios, applications need some way to determine the "correctness" of autonomously generated information. Towards that end, this thesis presents a "trust-but-verify" approach that enables open online applications to independently verify the information generated by each participant. In addition to enabling independent verification, our framework allows an application to verify less information from more trustworthy users and verify more information from less trustworthy ones. Thus, an application can trade-off performance for …

Self-Timed Dram Data Interface, Rajesh Nerkar

Dissertations and Theses

A DRAM communicates with a processing unit via two interfaces: a data interface and a command interface. In today's DRAMs, also known as synchronous DRAMs (SDRAMs), both interfaces use a clock to communicate with the processing unit. The clock times the communication between the processing unit and the SDRAM on both the data interface and the command interface.

We propose a self-timed DRAM. The self-timed DRAM introduces more flexibility into the DRAM interface by eliminating the clock. The command interface and the data interface each communicate with the processing unit using a handshake protocol rather than a clock.

This thesis …

Isolation Of High Quality Graphene From Ru By Solution Phase Intercalation, E. Koren, Eli A. Sutter, S. Bliznakov, F. Ivars-Barcelo, P. Sutter

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

2013 AIP Publishing LLC

A Review Of Micro-Contact Physics For Microelectromechanical Systems (Mems) Metal Contact Switches, Benjamin F. Toller, Ronald A. Coutu Jr., John W. Mcbride

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Innovations in relevant micro-contact areas are highlighted, these include, design, contact resistance modeling, contact materials, performance and reliability. For each area the basic theory and relevant innovations are explored. A brief comparison of actuation methods is provided to show why electrostatic actuation is most commonly used by radio frequency microelectromechanical systems designers. An examination of the important characteristics of the contact interface such as modeling and material choice is discussed. Micro-contact resistance models based on plastic, elastic-plastic and elastic deformations are reviewed. Much of the modeling for metal contact micro-switches centers around contact area and surface roughness. Surface roughness and …

Judging Emotion From Low-Pass Filtered Naturalistic Emotional Speech, John Snel, Charlie Cullen

Conference papers

In speech, low frequency regions play a significant role in paralinguistic communication such as the conveyance of emotion or mood. The extent to which lower frequencies signify or contribute to affective speech is still an area for investigation. To investigate paralinguistic cues, and remove interference from linguistic cues, researchers can low-pass filter the speech signal on the assumption that certain acoustic cues characterizing affect are still discernible. Low-pass filtering is a practical technique to investigate paralinguistic phenomena, and is used here to investigate the inference of naturalistic emotional speech. This paper investigates how listeners perceive the level of Activation, and …

Nonlinear Dynamics Of Bragg-Domain Acousto-Optic Hybrid Feedback For First-Order Scattering Of Profiled Optical Beams, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Fares S. Almehmadi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

A series of recent studies involving hybrid acousto-optic (AO) scattering in the Bragg domain under first-order feedback have shown the ability of the AO feedback system to encrypt, transmit and decrypt RF information applied via the sound driver. The basic premise of this operation is founded on the chaotic nature of the hybrid Bragg cell under feedback.

Using Meta-Ethnography To Synthesize Research: A Worked Example Of The Relations Between Personality On Software Team Processes, Fabio Q. B. Silva Dr., Shirley S. J. O. Cruz, Tatiana B. Gouveia, Luiz Fernando Capretz

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Context: The increase in the number of qualitative and mixed-methods research published in software engineering has created an opportunity for further knowledge generation through the synthesis of studies with similar aims. This is particularly true in the research on human aspects because the phenomena of interest are often better understood using qualitative research. However, the use of qualitative synthesis methods is not widespread and worked examples of their consistent application in software engineering are needed. Objective: To explore the use of meta-ethnography in the synthesis of empirical studies in software engineering through an example using studies about the relations between …

Evaluating The Presence Of A Victim Cache On An Arm Processor, Lakshmi Vidya Peri

Computer Science Graduate Projects and Theses

Mobile processor is a CPU designed to save power. It is found in mobile computers and cell phones. A CPU chip, designed for portable computers, is typically housed in a smaller chip package, but more importantly, in order to run cooler, it uses lower voltages than its desktop counterpart and has more "sleep mode" capability. A mobile processor can be throttled down to different power levels and/or sections of the chip can be turned off entirely when not in use. ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA). The relative simplicity of ARM processors makes …

The Mayaarch3d Project: A 3d Webgis For Analyzing Ancient Architecture And Landscapes, Jennifer Von Schwerin, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Fabio Remondino, Giorgio Agugario, Gabrio Girardi

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

There is a need in the humanities for a 3D WebGIS with analytical tools that allow researchers to analyze 3D models linked to spatially referenced data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow for complex spatial analysis of 2.5D data. For example, they offer bird’s eye views of landscapes with extruded building footprints, but one cannot ‘get on the ground’ and interact with true 3D models from a pedestrian perspective. Meanwhile, 3D models and virtual environments visualize data in 3D space, but analytical tools are simple rotation or lighting effects. The MayaArch3D Project is developing a 3D WebGIS—called QueryArch3D—to allow these two …

Passive Mimo Radar Detection, Daniel E. Hack

Theses and Dissertations

Passive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar is a sensor network comprised of multiple distributed receivers that detects and localizes targets using the emissions from multiple non-cooperative radio frequency transmitters. This dissertation advances the theory of centralized passive MIMO radar (PMR) detection by proposing two novel generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT) detectors. The first addresses detection in PMR networks without direct-path signals. The second addresses detection in PMR networks with direct-path signals. The probability distributions of both test statistics are investigated using recent results from random matrix theory. Equivalence is established between PMR networks without direct-path signals and passive source localization (PSL) …

Examples Where The Conjunctive And Dempster’S Rules Are Insensitive, Florentin Smarandache, Jean Dezert, Valeri Kroumov

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this paper we present several counter-examples to the Conjunctive rule and to Dempster rule of combinations in information fusion.

Reliability-Performance Trade-Offs In Photonic Noc Architectures, Pradheep Khanna Kaliraj

Theses

Advancements in the field of chip fabrication has facilitated in integrating more number of transistors in a given area which lead to the era of multi-core processors. Interconnect became the bottleneck for the multi-core processors as the number of cores in a chip increased. The traditional bus based architectures, which are currently used in the processors, cannot scale up to support the increasing number of cores in a multi-core chip. Hence, Network-on-Chip (NoC) is the preferred communication backbone for modern multicore chips. However, the multi-hop data transmission using wireline interconnects result in high energy dissipation and latency. Hence, many alternative …

Enhancing Electromagnetic Side-Channel Analysis In An Operational Environment, David P. Montminy

Theses and Dissertations

Side-channel attacks exploit the unintentional emissions from cryptographic devices to determine the secret encryption key. This research identifies methods to make attacks demonstrated in an academic environment more operationally relevant. Algebraic cryptanalysis is used to reconcile redundant information extracted from side-channel attacks on the AES key schedule. A novel thresholding technique is used to select key byte guesses for a satisfiability solver resulting in a 97.5% success rate despite failing for 100% of attacks using standard methods. Two techniques are developed to compensate for differences in emissions from training and test devices dramatically improving the effectiveness of cross device template …

Radio Frequency Based Programmable Logic Controller Anomaly Detection, Samuel J. Stone

Theses and Dissertations

The research goal involved developing improved methods for securing Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) devices against unauthorized entry and mitigating the risk of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) attack by detecting malicious software and/or trojan hardware. A Correlation Based Anomaly Detection (CBAD) process was developed to enable 1) software anomaly detection discriminating between various operating conditions to detect malfunctioning or malicious software, firmware, etc., and 2) hardware component discrimination discriminating between various hardware components to detect malfunctioning or counterfeit, trojan, etc., components.

Automated Multi-Objective Design Optimization Of Pm Ac Machines Using Computationally Efficient Fea And Differential Evolution, Gennadi Y. Sizov, Peng Zhang, Dan M. Ionel, Nabeel Demerdash, Marius Rosu

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The design optimization methods described in this paper are employing an ultrafast computationally efficient finite element analysis technique. A minimum number of magnetostatic solutions are used for the analysis, which makes possible the study of thousands of candidate motor designs with typical PC-workstation computational resources. A multi-objective differential evolution algorithm that considers a large number of independent stator and rotor geometric variables and performance criteria, such as average and ripple torque, losses, and efficiency, is used. The optimization method is demonstrated on different permanent magnet (PM) ac synchronous motors in the kilowatt and megawatt power ranges. For the low-power PM …

Securearray: Improving Wifi Security With Fine-Grained Physical-Layer, Jie Xiong, Kyle Jamieson

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the important role that WiFi networks play in home and enterprise networks they are relatively weak from a security standpoint. With easily available directional antennas, attackers can be physically located off-site, yet compromise WiFi security protocols such as WEP, WPA, and even to some extent WPA2 through a range of exploits specific to those protocols, or simply by running dictionary and human-factors attacks on users' poorly-chosen passwords. This presents a security risk to the entire home or enterprise network. To mitigate this ongoing problem, we propose SecureArray, a system designed to operate alongside existing wireless security protocols, adding defense …

Web-Scale Near-Duplicate Search: Techniques And Applications, Chong-Wah Ngo, Changsheng Xu, Wessel Kraaij, Abdulmotaleb El Saddik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents some of the most recent advances in the research on Web-scale near-duplicate search and explores the potential for bringing this research a substantial step further. It contains high-quality contributions addressing various aspects of the Web-scale near-duplicate search problem in a number of relevant domains. The topics range from feature representation, matching, and indexing from different novel aspects to the adaptation of current technologies for mobile media search and photo archaeology mining.

Learning Spatio-Temporal Co-Occurrence Correlograms For Efficient Human Action Classification, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatio-temporal interest point (STIP) based features show great promises in human action analysis with high efficiency and robustness. However, they typically focus on bag-of-visual words (BoVW), which omits any correlation among words and shows limited discrimination in real-world videos. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to add the spatio-temporal co-occurrence relationships of visual words to BoVW for a richer representation. Rather than assigning a particular scale on videos, we adopt the normalized google-like distance (NGLD) to measure the words' co-occurrence semantics, which grasps the videos' structure information in a statistical way. All pairwise distances in spatial and temporal …

Inferring Ongoing Human Activities Based On Recurrent Self-Organizing Map Trajectory, Qianru Sun, Hong Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically inferring ongoing activities is to enable the early recognition of unfinished activities, which is quite meaningful for applications, such as online human-machine interaction and security monitoring. State-of-the-art methods use the spatiotemporal interest point (STIP) based features as the low-level video description to handle complex scenes. While the existing problem is that typical bag-of-visual words (BoVW) focuses on the statistical distribution of features but ignores the inherent contexts in activity sequences, resulting in low discrimination when directly dealing with limited observations. To solve this problem, the Recurrent Self-Organizing Map (RSOM), which was designed to process sequential data, is novelly adopted …

Development Of The In Vivo Multicolor Photoacoustic Flow Cytometer, Mustafa Sarimollaoglu

Theses and Dissertations

Flow cytometry is a powerful tool for analysis of cells in artificial flow. This highly accurate technology, using multicolor fluorescent probes and lasers with different wavelengths, provides fast multiparameter quantification of the biological properties of cells. Invasive extraction of cells from an organism, however, leads to changes in cell properties and low sensitivity, and prevents studying cells in their native environment. Challenges to advances in in vivo flow cytometry include fluorescent probe toxicity, strong background, and number of colors, as well as assessment of small vessels. To overcome these limitations, photoacoustic flow cytometry (PAFC) was introduced. PAFC is based on …

Protein Structure Validation And Identification From Unassigned Residual Dipolar Coupling Data Using 2d-Pdpa, Arjang Fahim, Rishi Mukhopadhyay, Ryan Yandle, James H. Prestegard, Homayoun Valafar

Faculty Publications

More than 90% of protein structures submitted to the PDB each year are homologous to some previously characterized protein structure. The extensive resources that are required for structural characterization of proteins can be justified for the 10% of the novel structures, but not for the remaining 90%. This report presents the 2D-PDPA method, which utilizes unassigned residual dipolar coupling in order to address the economics of structure determination of routine proteins by reducing the data acquisition and processing time. 2D-PDPA has been demonstrated to successfully identify the correct structure of an array of proteins that range from 46 to 445 …

A Forward-Secure Certificate-Based Signature Scheme, Jiguo Li, Huiyun Teng, Xinyu Huang, Yichen Zhang, Jianying Zhou

Faculty Publications

Cryptographic computations are often carried out on insecure devices for which the threat of key exposure raises a serious concern. In an effort to address the key exposure problem, the notion of forward security was first presented by Günther in 1990. In a forward-secure scheme, secret keys are updated at regular periods of time; exposure of the secret key corresponding to a given time period does not enable an adversary to ‘break’ the scheme for any prior time period. In this paper, we first introduce forward security into certificate-based cryptography and define the security model of forward-secure certificate-based signatures (CBSs). …

Forensic Analysis Of Whatsapp On Android Smartphones, Neha S. Thakur

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Android forensics has evolved over time offering significant opportunities and exciting challenges. On one hand, being an open source platform Android is giving developers the freedom to contribute to the rapid growth of the Android market whereas on the other hand Android users may not be aware of the security and privacy implications of installing these applications on their phones. Users may assume that a password-locked device protects their personal information, but applications may retain private information on devices, in ways that users might not anticipate. In this thesis we will be concentrating on one such application called 'WhatsApp', a …