Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Tagamajig: Image Recognition Via Crowdsourcing, Gregory Martin Simpson

Masters Theses

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) Library possesses thousands of unlabeled gray-scale photographs from the Smoky Mountains circa the 1920s - 1940s. Their current method of identifying and labeling attributes of the photographs is to do so manually. This is problematic both because of the scale of the collection as well as the reliance on an individual's limited knowledge of the area's numerous landmarks.

In the past few years, similar dilemmas have been tackled via an approach known as crowd computing. Some examples include Floating Forests, in which users are asked to identify and mark kelp forests in satellite images, …

Three Body Interactions Of Rare Gas Solids Calculated Within The Einstein Model, Dan D'Andrea

Masters Theses

Three body interactions can become important in solids at higher pressures and densities as the molecules can come into close contact. At low temperatures, accurate studies of three body interactions in solids require averaging the three-body terms over the molecules' zero point motions. An efficient, but approximate, averaging approach is based on a polynomial approximation of the three-body term. The polynomial approximation can be developed as a function of the symmetry coordinates of a triangle displaced from its average geometry and also as a function of the Cartesian zero point displacements from each atom’s average position. The polynomial approximation approach …

Pdroid, Joe Larry Allen

Masters Theses

When an end user attempts to download an app on the Google Play Store they receive two related items that can be used to assess the potential threats of an application, the list of permissions used by the application and the textual description of the application. However, this raises several concerns. First, applications tend to use more permissions than they need and end users are not tech-savvy enough to fully understand the security risks. Therefore, it is challenging to assess the threats of an application fully by only seeing the permissions. On the other hand, most textual descriptions do not …

A Haptic Surface Robot Interface For Large-Format Touchscreen Displays, Mark Price

Masters Theses

This thesis presents the design for a novel haptic interface for large-format touchscreens. Techniques such as electrovibration, ultrasonic vibration, and external braked devices have been developed by other researchers to deliver haptic feedback to touchscreen users. However, these methods do not address the need for spatial constraints that only restrict user motion in the direction of the constraint. This technology gap contributes to the lack of haptic technology available for touchscreen-based upper-limb rehabilitation, despite the prevalent use of haptics in other forms of robotic rehabilitation. The goal of this thesis is to display kinesthetic haptic constraints to the touchscreen user …

Scalable Parallelization Of A Markov Coalescent Genealogy Sampler, Philip E. Davis

Masters Theses

Coalescent genealogy samplers are effective tools for the study of population genetics. They are used to estimate the historical parameters of a population based upon the sampling of present-day genetic information. A popular approach employs Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. While effective, these methods are very computationally intensive, often taking weeks to run. Although attempts have been made to leverage parallelism in an effort to reduce runtimes, they have not resulted in scalable solutions. Due to the inherently sequential nature of MCMC methods, their performance has suffered diminishing returns when applied to large-scale computing clusters. In the interests of …

Design Of An Intrusion Detection System (Ids) And An Intrusion Prevention System (Ips) For The Eiu Cybersecurity Laboratory, Adekunle Adeyemo

Masters Theses

Cyber Security will always be a subject of discussion for a long time to come. Research has shown that there is massive growth of cyber-crime and the currently available number of Cyber Security experts to counter this is limited. Although there are multiple resources discussing Cyber Security, but access to training in practical applications is limited. As an institution, Eastern Illinois University (EIU) is set to start Masters of Science in Cyber Security in Fall 2017. Then the challenge is how EIU will expose students to the practical reality of Cyber Security where they can learn different detection, prevention and …

Care-Chair: Opportunistic Health Assessment With Smart Sensing On Chair Backrest, Rakesh Kumar

Masters Theses

"A vast majority of the population spend most of their time in a sedentary position, which potentially makes a chair a huge source of information about a person's daily activity. This information, which often gets ignored, can reveal important health data but the overhead and the time consumption needed to track the daily activity of a person is a major hurdle. Considering this, a simple and cost-efficient sensory system, named Care-Chair, with four square force sensitive resistors on the backrest of a chair has been designed to collect the activity details and breathing rate of the users. The Care-Chair system …

Composite Model Representation For Computer Aided Design Of Functionally Gradient Materials, Fangquan Wang

Masters Theses

"Functionally Gradient Materials (FGMs) feature smooth transition from one material to another within a single object. FGMs modeling is considered to be one of the new challenges in Computer Aided Design (CAD) area. To overcome this challenge, this thesis presents a composite approach to model FGMs. The input in STL format can be meshed and voxelized in FGMs modeling system. The material composition in each voxel can be generated from multiple different types of control features. And LTI filters including Gaussian Filter and Average Filter are applied to blur default material features in order to generate FGMs inside models. The …

Automated Design Of Boolean Satisfiability Solvers Employing Evolutionary Computation, Alex Raymond Bertels

Masters Theses

"Modern society gives rise to complex problems which sometimes lend themselves to being transformed into Boolean satisfiability (SAT) decision problems; this thesis presents an example from the program understanding domain. Current conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) SAT solvers employ all-purpose heuristics for making decisions when finding truth assignments for arbitrary logical expressions called SAT instances. The instances derived from a particular problem class exhibit a unique underlying structure which impacts a solver's effectiveness. Thus, tailoring the solver heuristics to a particular problem class can significantly enhance the solver's performance; however, manual specialization is very labor intensive. Automated development may apply hyper-heuristics …