Electrical and Computer Engineering Commons^™

Preface, Shahram Latifi

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

No abstract provided.

Data-Based Nonlinear Model Identification In Economic Model Predictive Control, Laura Giuliani, Helen Durand

Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Faculty Research Publications

Many chemical/petrochemical processes in industry are not completely modeled from a first-principles perspective because of the complexity of the underlying physico-chemical phenomena and the cost of obtaining more accurate, physically relevant models. System identification methods have been utilized successfully for developing empirical, though not necessarily physical, models for advanced model-based control designs such as model predictive control (MPC) for decades. However, a fairly recent development in MPC is economic model predictive control (EMPC), which is an MPC formulated with an economics-based objective function that may operate a process in a dynamic (i.e., off steady-state) fashion, in which case the details …

Cmos Radioactive Isotope Identification With Multichannel Analyzer And Embedded Neural Network, Samuel Murray

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

A radiation detection and identification system is designed and implemented to perform gamma ray spectroscopy on radioactive sources and identify which isotopes are present in the sources. A multichannel analyzer is implemented on an ASIC to process the signal produced from gamma rays detected by a scintillator and photomultiplier tube and to quantize the gamma ray energies to build a histogram. A fast, low memory embedded neural network is implemented on a microcontroller ASIC to identify the isotopes present in the gamma ray histogram produced by the multichannel analyzer in real time.

Advisors: Sina Balkir and Michael W. Hoffman

Reliability And Uniformity Enhancement In 8t-Sram Based Pufs Operating At Ntc, Pramesh Pandey, Asmita Pal, Koushik Chakraborty, Sanghamitra Roy

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

SRAM-based PUFs (SPUFs) have emerged as promising security primitives for low-power devices. However, operating 8T-SPUFs at Near-Threshold Computing (NTC) realm is plagued by exacerbated process variation (PV) sensitivity which thwarts their reliable operation. In this paper, we demonstrate the massive degradation in the reliability and uniformity characteristics of 8T-SPUF. By exploiting the opportunities bestowed by schematic asymmetry of 8T-SPUF cells, we propose biasing and sizing based design strategies. Our techniques achieve an immense improvement of more than 55% in the percentage of unreliable cells and improves the proximity to ideal uniformity by 82%, over a baseline NTC 8T-SPUF with no …

Query-Constraint-Based Mining Of Association Rules For Exploratory Analysis Of Clinical Datasets In The National Sleep Research Resource, Rashmie Abeysinghe, Licong Cui

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Background: Association Rule Mining (ARM) has been widely used by biomedical researchers to perform exploratory data analysis and uncover potential relationships among variables in biomedical datasets. However, when biomedical datasets are high-dimensional, performing ARM on such datasets will yield a large number of rules, many of which may be uninteresting. Especially for imbalanced datasets, performing ARM directly would result in uninteresting rules that are dominated by certain variables that capture general characteristics.

Methods: We introduce a query-constraint-based ARM (QARM) approach for exploratory analysis of multiple, diverse clinical datasets in the National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR). QARM enables rule mining on …

Adoption Of An Internet Of Things Framework For Distributed Energy Resource Coordination And Control, Tylor Slay

Dissertations and Theses

Increasing penetration of non-dispatchable renewable energy resources and greater peak power demand present growing challenges to Bulk Power System (BPS) reliability and resilience. This research investigates the use of an Internet of Things (IoT) framework for large scale Distributed Energy Resource (DER) aggregation and control to reduce energy imbalance caused by stochastic renewable generation. The aggregator developed for this research is Distributed Energy Resource Aggregation System (DERAS). DERAS comprises two AllJoyn applications written in C++. The first application is the Energy Management System (EMS), which aggregates, emulates, and controls connected DERs. The second application is the Distributed Management System (DMS), …

Advanced Recurrent Network-Based Hybrid Acoustic Models For Low Resource Speech Recognition, Jian Kang, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Wei-Wei Liu, Jia Liu, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown an ability to model temporal dependencies. However, the problem of exploding or vanishing gradients has limited their application. In recent years, long short-term memory RNNs (LSTM RNNs) have been proposed to solve this problem and have achieved excellent results. Bidirectional LSTM (BLSTM), which uses both preceding and following context, has shown particularly good performance. However, the computational requirements of BLSTM approaches are quite heavy, even when implemented efficiently with GPU-based high performance computers. In addition, because the output of LSTM units is bounded, there is often still a vanishing gradient issue over multiple layers. …

Relative Navigation: A Keyframe-Based Approach For Observable Gps-Degraded Navigation, David O. Wheeler, Daniel P. Koch, James S. Jackson, Timothy W. Mclain, Randal W. Beard

Faculty Publications

State estimation for micro air vehicles (MAVs) often depends heavily on reliable global measurements such as GPS. When global measurements are unavailable, additional sensors, such as cameras or laser scanners, are commonly used to provide measurements of the MAV’s translation and rotation relative to a previously observed keyframe image or scan. With the use of only relative sensors, however, the global position and heading of the vehicle are unobservable and cannot be reliably reconstructed. Many existing approaches work with respect to a global reference frame, resulting in a loss of state observability. This article highlights that unobservability leads to inconsistency …

A Comparative Study Of Signal Processing Methods For Fetal Phonocardiography Analysis, Venkata Akshay Bhargav Krishna Vadali

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

More than one million fetal deaths occur in the United States every year [1]. Monitoring the long-term heart rate variability provides a great amount of information about the fetal health condition which requires continuous monitoring of the fetal heart rate. All the existing technologies have either complex instrumentation or need a trained professional at all times or both. The existing technologies are proven to be impractical for continuous monitoring [2]. Hence, there is an increased interest towards noninvasive, continuous monitoring, and less expensive technologies like fetal phonocardiography.

Fetal Phonocardiography (FPCG) signal is obtained by placing an acoustic transducer on the …

Tunable Plasmonic Resonances In Highly Porous Nano-Bamboo Si-Au Superlattice-Type Thin Films, Ufuk Kılıç, Alyssa Mock, René Feder, Derek Sekora, Matthew J. Hilfiker, Rafal Korlacki, Eva Schubert, Christos Argyropoulos, Mathias Schubert

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

We report on fabrication of spatially-coherent columnar plasmonic nanostructure superlattice-type thin films with high porosity and strong optical anisotropy using glancing angle deposition. Subsequent and repeated depositions of silicon and gold lead to nanometer-dimension subcolumns with controlled lengths. The superlattice-type columns resemble bamboo structures where smaller column sections of gold form junctions sandwiched between larger silicon column sections (“nano-bamboo”). We perform generalized spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements and finite element method computations to elucidate the strongly anisotropic optical properties of the highly-porous nano-bamboo structures. The occurrence of a strongly localized plasmonic mode with displacement pattern reminiscent of a dark quadrupole mode is …

Capacitive Pcb Security For Active Tamper And Alteration Detection, Casey Petersen

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

The purpose of the research presented is to establish the viability of using capacitive based sensors for the purpose of hardware security at the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) level. Capacitive sensors are traditionally used to sense changes to the areas surrounding the sensing pads in applications such as sensing proximity, position, humidity, fluid levels and much more.

The specific sensor used for this research is an inductor-capacitor (LC) based Capacitance-to-Digital Converter. This configuration is virtually immune to EM noise because it is a tank circuit and therefore filters out the noise which, in the past, caused reliability issues with these …

Pulse Sharpening Circuit For Explosive Emission Cathode Driver, Nicholas D. Kallas

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Explosive field emission cathodes (EEC), used for the generation of relativistic electron beams, require short rise-time high-voltage pulses in order to minimize the extraction of off-energy electrons. To this end, a rise-time sharpening circuit has been developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The circuit consists of a 7 nF water-filled peaking capacitor with an integrated self-breakdown switch designed to operate up to -300 kV. This unit is intended to reduce the rise-time of a 4-stage Type-E PFN Marx Generator that will be used to study operational characteristics of velvet cathodes. Simulations of the peaking circuit show a reduction …

Intelligent Computational Transportation, Yuming Zhang

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Transportation is commonplace around our world. Numerous researchers dedicate great efforts to vast transportation research topics. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate and address a couple of transportation problems with respect to geographic discretization, pavement surface automatic examination, and traffic ow simulation, using advanced computational technologies. Many applications require a discretized 2D geographic map such that local information can be accessed efficiently. For example, map matching, which aligns a sequence of observed positions to a real-world road network, needs to find all the nearby road segments to the individual positions. To this end, the map is discretized by …

Selected Applications Of Silicon Nanopillar Arrays., Behnam Kheyraddini Mousavi

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Interaction of optical waves with nanostructures made of various material systems has been the subject of intensive research for many years. These researches have been mainly driven by the need to make smaller optical devices and exploiting the functionalities offered by light-matter interaction in nanoscale. Majority of the nanostructures are fabricated using electron beam (e-beam) lithography that is slow and expensive. As such alternative methods have been developed to enable nanoscale fabrication faster and less expensive. Among these interferometric lithography (IL) is a relatively simple method for quick fabrication of nanostructures. As IL method generates periodic patterns, exploring the potential …

Coreless And Conventional Axial Flux Permanent Magnet Motors For Solar Cars, Narges Taran, Vandana Rallabandi, Greg Heins, Dan M. Ionel

Power and Energy Institute of Kentucky Faculty Publications

Axial flux permanent magnet (AFPM) motors are suitable options for solar-powered vehicles due to their compact structure and high torque density. Furthermore, certain types of AFPM machines may be configured without stator cores, which eliminates associated losses and cogging torque and simplifies the manufacturing and assembly. This paper examines two machine designs for use in the solar-powered vehicle of the challenger class-a single rotor, single stator conventional AFPM machine, and a coreless AFPM machine with multiple stator and rotor disks. The response surface methodology (RSM) is utilized for the systematic comparison of the conventional and coreless topologies and to select …

High-Performance Testbed For Vision-Aided Autonomous Navigation For Quadrotor Uavs In Cluttered Environments, Shakeeb Ahmad

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

This thesis presents the development of an aerial robotic testbed based on Robot Operating System (ROS). The purpose of this high-performance testbed is to develop a system capable of performing robust navigation tasks using vision tools such as a stereo camera. While ensuring the computation of robot odometery, the system is also capable of sensing the environment using the same stereo camera. Hence, all the navigation tasks are performed using a stereo camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) as the main sensor suite. ROS is used as a framework for software integration due to its capabilities to provide efficient …

Microwave Characterization Of Printable Dielectric Inks Using Additive Manufacturing Methods, Seth York

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Two methods of dielectric characterization are presented that offer quick and cost-effective solutions for screening complex dielectric material properties. Through Direct-Print Additive Manufacturing (DPAM) methods, a dielectric material of choice is dispensed into a capacitor structure and characterized through 1-port s-parameter measurements. The presented methods use fixtures that are modeled and validated through simulation then implemented in practice. Advanced simulations are performed to gain insights which are used to optimize the dielectric characterization performance of the fixtures. Additional investigations are performed which investigate the durability of the fixture and material within by exposing the combination to rough environmental conditions for …

Compact Hardware Implementation Of A Sha-3 Core For Wireless Body Sensor Networks, Yi Yang, Debiao He, Neeraj Kumar, Sherali Zeadally

Information Science Faculty Publications

One of the most important Internet of Things applications is the wireless body sensor network (WBSN), which can provide universal health care, disease prevention, and control. Due to large deployments of small scale smart sensors in WBSNs, security, and privacy guarantees (e.g., security and safety-critical data, sensitive private information) are becoming a challenging issue because these sensor nodes communicate using an open channel, i.e., Internet. We implement data integrity (to resist against malicious tampering) using the secure hash algorithm 3 (SHA-3) when smart sensors in WBSNs communicate with each other using the Internet. Due to the limited resources (i.e., storage, …

Correction: Orbital Angular Momentum Generation And Detection By Geometric-Phase Based Metasurfaces [Appl. Sci., 8, (2018), (362)] Doi:10.3390/App8030362, Menglin L.N. Chen, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang, Wei E.I. Sha

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We, the authors, wish to make the following corrections to our paper [1]. We found that the literature we listed on page 2 has a mistake: "Afterwards, many other devices for OAM generation have been proposed, such as the cylindrical lens in 1993 [30], spiral phase plates (SPPs) in 1994 [31], q plates in 2006 [32]." We would like to give credit to the first phase rotor filter [2] and remove the year for the designs. Thus, the statement would be changed to: "In 1992, a phase rotor filter was devised to introduce the azimuthal phase term [30]. Afterwards, many …

Synchronization In An Externally Driven Mechanical Oscillators Experiment, Sumit Chhabria

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

Our experimental system studies the effects of externally controlled oscillation on directly and indirectly driven system of metronomes. This is analogous to many practical systems such as pacemaker effect on heart cells, the external light effect on the suprachiasmatic nucleus in the brain. Here the pacemaker can be compared to an external driving force to the system where the heart cells are our oscillating system. Also, in the suprachiasmatic nucleus cell system, the external input is external light which synchronizes the cell. We explore the synchronization of directly and indirectly driven metronomes due to externally provided forcing.

We designed an …

Short-Term Tracking Of Orientation With Inertial Sensors, Golriz Sedaghat

Dissertations and Theses

In the past several years, IMU's have been widely used to measure the orientation of a moving body over a continuous period of time. Although, inertial navigation is a common approach for estimating the orientation, it greatly suffers from the accumulation of error in the orientation estimation. Most of the current common practices apply zero velocity update as a calibration method to address this problem and improve the estimation accuracy. However, this approach requires the sensors to be stationary frequently.

This thesis introduces a novel method of calibration for estimating the elevation and bank angles of the orientation over a …

Non-Gnss Smartphone Pedestrian Navigation Using Barometric Elevation And Digital Map-Matching, Daniel Broyles, Kyle J. Kauffman, John F. Raquet, Piotr Smagowski

Faculty Publications

Pedestrian navigation in outdoor environments where global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are unavailable is a challenging problem. Existing technologies that have attempted to address this problemoften require external reference signals or specialized hardware, the extra size,weight, power, and cost of which are unsuitable for many applications. This article presents a real-time, self-contained outdoor navigation application that uses only the existing sensors on a smartphone in conjunction with a preloaded digital elevation map. The core algorithm implements a particle filter, which fuses sensor data with a stochastic pedestrian motion model to predict the user’s position. The smartphone’s barometric elevation is then …

Optimal Multidimensional Droop Control For Wind Resources In Dc Microgrids, Kaitlyn J. Bunker, Wayne Weaver

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The inclusion of electricity generation from wind in microgrids presents an important opportunity in modern electric power systems. Various control strategies can be pursued for wind resources connected in microgrids, and droop control is a promising option since communication between microgrid components is not required. Traditional droop control does have the drawback of not allowing much or all of the available wind power to be utilized in the microgrid. This paper presents a novel droop control strategy, modifying the traditional approach and building an optimal droop surface at a higher dimension. A method for determining the optimal droop control surface …

Survey Results On Adults And Cybersecurity Education, Frank Breitinger, Joseph Ricci, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Cyberattacks and identity theft are common problems nowadays where researchers often say that humans are the weakest link in the security chain. Therefore, this survey focused on analyzing the interest for adults for ‘cyber threat education seminars’, e.g., how to project themselves and their loved ones. Specifically, we asked questions to understand a possible audience, willingness for paying / time commitment, or fields of interest as well as background and previous training experience. The survey was conducted in late 2016 and taken by 233 participants. The results show that many are worried about cyber threats and about their children exploring …

Novel Compact Narrow-Linewidth Mid-Infrared Lasers For Sensing Applications, Behsan Behzadi

Optical Science and Engineering ETDs

The mid-infrared (2-14 μm) spectral region contains the strong absorption lines of many important molecular species, which make this region crucial for several well-know applications such as spectroscopy, chemical and biochemical sensing, security, and industrial monitoring. To fully exploit this region through absorption spectroscopic techniques, compact and low-cost narrow-linewidth (NLW) mid-infrared (MIR) laser sources are of primary importance.

This thesis is focused on three novel compact NLW MIR lasers: demonstration and characterization of a new glass-based spherical microlaser, investigation of the performance of a novel fiber laser, and the design of a monolithic laser on a silicon chip. Starting with …

Adaptive Virtual Impedance Droop Control Based On Consensus Control Of Reactive Current, Zhilin Lu, Qing Wei, Yiyi Zhang, Junhui Zhao, Emad Manla

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

It is difficult to achieve accurate distribution of reactive power based on conventional droop control due to the line impedance mismatch in an islanded microgrid. An adaptive virtual impendence method based on consensus control of reactive current is proposed in this paper. A distributed control structure without the central controller has been established. In this structure, each distributed generation unit (DG) is an independent agent, one-way communication is used between the adjacent DGs, and the reactive power sharing is equivalent to a problem of reactive power current consensus. It has been proven that the system is asymptotically stable under the …

Multirate Frequency Transformations: Wideband Am-Fm Demodulation With Applications To Signal Processing And Communications, Wenjing Liu

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

The AM-FM (amplitude & frequency modulation) signal model finds numerous applications in image processing, communications, and speech processing. The traditional approaches towards demodulation of signals in this category are the analytic signal approach, frequency tracking, or the energy operator approach. These approaches however, assume that the amplitude and frequency components are slowly time-varying, e.g., narrowband and incur significant demodulation error in the wideband scenarios. In this thesis, we extend a two-stage approach towards wideband AM-FM demodulation that combines multirate frequency transformations (MFT) enacted through a combination of multirate systems with traditional demodulation techniques, e.g., the Teager-Kasiser energy operator demodulation (ESA) …

Design And Implementation Of 60 Ghz Cavity Backed Patch Antennas, Kasey Chun

Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's Theses

As the lower range of radio frequency spectrum become more cluttered and the demand for faster data rates and greater bandwidth grows, next generation wireless technology is pushed to innovate and provide needed resources. Major technology companies such as Samsung, intel, Qualcomm Inc. and Google have been investing at millimeter-wave band frequencies to address this imminent need. The fifth generation of telecommunication technology could be perceived as a paradigm shift in the way we see and think about wireless communication. This next generation technology is intended to enable other up and coming industries and services such as internet of things …

Analysis Of Grapevine Gene Expression Data Using Node-Based Resilience Clustering, Jeffrey Dale, John Matta, Susanne Howard, Gunes Ercal, Wenping Qiu, Tayo Obafemi-Ajayi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Powdery mildew is the most economically important disease of cultivated grapevines worldwide. In the agricultural community, there is a great need for better understanding of the complex genetic basis of powdery mildew (PM) resistance by delineating possible gene biomarkers associated with the plants' defense mechanisms. Machine learning techniques can be applied to analysis of gene expression data to aid knowledge discovery of disease fighting genes. In this work, we apply a data-driven computational model, utilizing a graph-based clustering algorithm - Node-Based Resilience Clustering (NBRClust), to analyze grapevine gene expression data to identify possible gene biomarkers associated with powdery mildew disease …

Decentralized Optimal Control With Application In Power System, Boyu Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

An output-feedback decentralized optimal controller is proposed for power systems with renewable energy penetration. Renewable energy source is modeled similar to the classical generator model and is equipped with the unified power flow controller (UPFC). The transient performance of power system is considered and stability of the dynamical states are investigated. An offline decentralized optimal controller is designed that utilizes only the local states. The network comprises conventional synchronous generators as well as renewable sources with inverter equipped with UPFC. Subsequently, the optimal decentralized controller is compared to the initial stabilizing controller used to obtain the optimal controller. An online …