Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fast Fourier Transforms Over Prime Fields Of Large Characteristic And Their Implementation On Graphics Processing Units, Davood Mohajerani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Prime field arithmetic plays a central role in computer algebra and supports computation in Galois fields which are essential to coding theory and cryptography algorithms. The prime fields that are used in computer algebra systems, in particular in the implementation of modular methods, are often of small characteristic, that is, based on prime numbers that fit on a machine word. Increasing precision beyond the machine word size can be done via the Chinese Remaindering Theorem or Hensel Lemma. In this thesis, we consider prime fields of large characteristic, typically fitting on n machine words, where n is a power of …

Analysis Of 3d Cone-Beam Ct Image Reconstruction Performance On A Fpga, Devin Held

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Efficient and accurate tomographic image reconstruction has been an intensive topic of research due to the increasing everyday usage in areas such as radiology, biology, and materials science. Computed tomography (CT) scans are used to analyze internal structures through capture of x-ray images. Cone-beam CT scans project a cone-shaped x-ray to capture 2D image data from a single focal point, rotating around the object. CT scans are prone to multiple artifacts, including motion blur, streaks, and pixel irregularities, therefore must be run through image reconstruction software to reduce visual artifacts. The most common algorithm used is the Feldkamp, Davis, and …

Regulatory Compliance-Oriented Impediments And Associated Effort Estimation Metrics In Requirements Engineering For Contractual Systems Engineering Projects, Md Rashed I. Nekvi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Large-scale contractual systems engineering projects often need to comply with a myriad of government regulations and standards as part of contractual fulfillment. A key activity in the requirements engineering (RE) process for such a project is to elicit appropriate requirements from the regulations and standards that apply to the target system. However, there are impediments in achieving compliance due to such factors as: the voluminous contract and its high-level specifications, large number of regulatory documents, and multiple domains of the system. Little empirical research has been conducted on developing a shared understanding of the compliance-oriented complexities involved in such projects, …

Color Separation For Background Subtraction, Jiaqi Zhou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Background subtraction is a vital step in many computer vision systems. In background subtraction, one is given two (or more) frames of a video sequence taken with a still camera. Due to the stationarity of the camera, any color change in the scene is mainly due to the presence of moving objects. The goal of background subtraction is to separate the moving objects (also called the foreground) from the stationary background. Many background subtraction approaches have been proposed over the years. They are usually composed of two distinct stages, background modeling and foreground detection.

Most of the standard background subtraction …

Cultural Diversity In Artificial Societies: Case Studies Of The Maya Peoples, Roberto Ulloa

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The existence of cultural diversity in a connected world is paradoxical given that all individuals constantly interact and share information, and that individuals are all part of one giant network of connections. In the long term, it seems logical to assume that everybody should hold the same cultural information and, therefore, the same culture. Yet cultural diversity is still manifest around the globe. Cultural diversity as a phenomenon becomes even more puzzling when we take into account how it survives catastrophic events which regularly befall societies, such as invasions, natural disasters, and civil wars. In this thesis, agent-based computer simulations …

Towards Comprehensive Parametric Code Generation Targeting Graphics Processing Units In Support Of Scientific Computation, Ning Xie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The most popular multithreaded languages based on the fork-join concurrency model (CIlkPlus, OpenMP) are currently being extended to support other forms of parallelism (vectorization, pipelining and single-instruction-multiple-data (SIMD)). In the SIMD case, the objective is to execute the corresponding code on a many-core device, like a GPGPU, for which the CUDA language is a natural choice. Since the programming concepts of CilkPlus and OpenMP are very different from those of CUDA, it is desirable to automatically generate optimized CUDA-like code from CilkPlus or OpenMP.

In this thesis, we propose an accelerator model for annotated C/C++ code together with an implementation …

On The Promotion Of The Social Web Intelligence, Taraneh Khazaei

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Given the ever-growing information generated through various online social outlets, analytical research on social media has intensified in the past few years from all walks of life. In particular, works on social Web intelligence foster and benefit from the wisdom of the crowds and attempt to derive actionable information from such data. In the form of collective intelligence, crowds gather together and contribute to solving problems that may be difficult or impossible to solve by individuals and single computers. In addition, the consumer insight revealed from social footprints can be leveraged to build powerful business intelligence tools, enabling efficient and …

Automatic Fracture Orientation Extraction From Sfm Point Clouds, Jon Kissi

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Geology seeks to understand the history of the Earth and its surface processes through charac- terisation of surface formations and rock units. Chief among the geologists’ tools are rock unit orientation measurements, such as Strike, Dip and Dip Direction. These allow an understanding of both surface and sub-structure on both the local and macro scale.

Although the way these techniques can be used to characterise geology are well understood, the need to collect these measurements by hand adds time and expense to the work of the geologist, precludes spontaneity in field work, and coverage is limited to where the geologist …

Development Of Anatomical And Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Measures Of Alzheimer Disease, Samaneh Kazemifar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Alzheimer disease is considered to be a progressive neurodegenerative condition, clinically characterized by cognitive dysfunction and memory impairments. Incorporating imaging biomarkers in the early diagnosis and monitoring of disease progression is increasingly important in the evaluation of novel treatments. The purpose of the work in this thesis was to develop and evaluate novel structural and functional biomarkers of disease to improve Alzheimer disease diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Our overarching hypothesis is that magnetic resonance imaging methods that sensitively measure brain structure and functional impairment have the potential to identify people with Alzheimer’s disease prior to the onset of cognitive decline. …

Neurosurgical Ultrasound Pose Estimation Using Image-Based Registration And Sensor Fusion - A Feasibility Study, Utsav Pardasani

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Modern neurosurgical procedures often rely on computer-assisted real-time guidance using multiple medical imaging modalities. State-of-the-art commercial products enable the fusion of pre-operative with intra-operative images (e.g., magnetic resonance [MR] with ultrasound [US] images), as well as the on-screen visualization of procedures in progress. In so doing, US images can be employed as a template to which pre-operative images can be registered, to correct for anatomical changes, to provide live-image feedback, and consequently to improve confidence when making resection margin decisions near eloquent regions during tumour surgery.

In spite of the potential for tracked ultrasound to improve many neurosurgical procedures, it …

Using A Real-Time Object Detection Application To Illustrate Effectiveness Of Offloading And Prefetching In Cloudlet Architecture, Xutong Zhu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, we designed and implemented two versions of a real-time object de- tection application: A stand alone version and a cloud version. Through applying the application to a cloudlet environment, we are able to perform experiments and uses the results to illustrate the potential improvement that a cloudlet architecture can bring to mobile applications that require access to large amounts of cloud data or intensive com- putation. Potential improvements include data access speed, reduced CPU and memory usages as well as reduced battery consumption on mobile devices.

Identifying Individual Driver Behaviour Using In-Vehicle Can-Bus Signals Of Pre-Turning Maneuvers, Mahboubeh Zardosht

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

All drivers have their own driving style while performing different driving maneuvers. They vary in using vehicle’s control devices such as the steering wheel, pedals, gears etc. In this thesis, we analyze driving behavior in different timeframes prior to turns. We employ data obtained from actual driving behavior in an urban environment collected from the CAN-Bus of an instrumented vehicle. Five CAN-Bus signals, vehicle speed, gas pedal pressure, brake pedal pressure, steering wheel angle, and acceleration, is collected for 5, 10, and 15 seconds of driving prior to each turn. We consider all turns for each driver as well as …

Algorithms For Glycan Structure Identification With Tandem Mass Spectrometry, Weiping Sun

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Glycosylation is a frequently observed post-translational modification (PTM) of proteins. It has been estimated over half of eukaryotic proteins in nature are glycoproteins. Glycoprotein analysis plays a vital role in drug preparation. Thus, characterization of glycans that are linked to proteins has become necessary in glycoproteomics. Mass spectrometry has become an effective analytical technique for glycoproteomics analysis because of its high throughput and sensitivity. The large amount of spectral data collected in a mass spectrometry experiment makes manual interpretation impossible and requires effective computational approaches for automated analysis. Different algorithmic solutions have been proposed to address the challenges in glycoproteomics …

Complex Event Processing As A Service In Multi-Cloud Environments, Wilson A. Higashino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The rise of mobile technologies and the Internet of Things, combined with advances in Web technologies, have created a new Big Data world in which the volume and velocity of data generation have achieved an unprecedented scale. As a technology created to process continuous streams of data, Complex Event Processing (CEP) has been often related to Big Data and used as a tool to obtain real-time insights. However, despite this recent surge of interest, the CEP market is still dominated by solutions that are costly and inflexible or too low-level and hard to operate.

To address these problems, this research …

Molecular Distance Maps: An Alignment-Free Computational Tool For Analyzing And Visualizing Dna Sequences' Interrelationships, Rallis Karamichalis

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In an attempt to identify and classify species based on genetic evidence, we propose a novel combination of methods to quantify and visualize the interrelationships between thousand of species. This is possible by using Chaos Game Representation (CGR) of DNA sequences to compute genomic signatures which we then compare by computing pairwise distances. In the last step, the original DNA sequences are embedded in a high dimensional space using Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) before everything is projected on a Euclidean 3D space.

To start with, we apply this method to a mitochondrial DNA dataset from NCBI containing over 3,000 species. The …

A Data Fusion Approach To Automated Decision Making In Intelligent Vehicles, Besat Zardosht

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The goal of an intelligent transportation system is to increase safety, convenience and efficiency in driving. Besides these obvious advantages, the integration of intelligent features and autonomous functionalities on vehicles will lead to major economic benefits from reduced fuel consumption to efficient exploitation of the road network.

While giving this information to the driver can be useful, there is also the possibility of overloading the driver with too much information. Existing vehicles already have some mechanisms to take certain actions if the driver fails to act. Future vehicles will need more complex decision making modules which receive the raw data …

Collective Contextual Anomaly Detection For Building Energy Consumption, Daniel Berhane Araya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Commercial and residential buildings are responsible for a substantial portion of total global energy consumption and as a result make a significant contribution to global carbon emissions. Hence, energy-saving goals that target buildings can have a major impact in reducing environmental damage. During building operation, a significant amount of energy is wasted due to equipment and human-related faults. To reduce waste, today's smart buildings monitor energy usage with the aim of identifying abnormal consumption behaviour and notifying the building manager to implement appropriate energy-saving procedures. To this end, this research proposes the \textit{ensemble anomaly detection} (EAD) framework. The EAD is …

Agora: A Knowledge Marketplace For Machine Learning, Mauro Ribeiro

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

More and more data are becoming part of people's lives. With the popularization of technologies like sensors, and the Internet of Things, data gathering is becoming possible and accessible for users. With these data in hand, users should be able to extract insights from them, and they want results as soon as possible. Average users have little or no experience in data analytics and machine learning and are not great observers who can collect enough data to build their own machine learning models. With large quantities of similar data being generated around the world and many machine learning models being …

Using Physical And Social Sensors In Real-Time Data Streaming For Natural Hazard Monitoring And Response, Yelena Kropivnitskaya

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Technological breakthroughs in computing over the last few decades have resulted in important advances in natural hazards analysis. In particular, integration of a wide variety of information sources, including observations from spatially-referenced physical sensors and new social media sources, enables better estimates of real-time hazard. The main goal of this work is to utilize innovative streaming algorithms for improved real-time seismic hazard analysis by integrating different data sources and processing tools into cloud applications. In streaming algorithms, a sequence of items from physical and social sensors can be processed in as little as one pass with no need to store …

Climbing Up Cloud Nine: Performance Enhancement Techniques For Cloud Computing Environments, Mohamed Abusharkh

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

With the transformation of cloud computing technologies from an attractive trend to a business reality, the need is more pressing than ever for efficient cloud service management tools and techniques. As cloud technologies continue to mature, the service model, resource allocation methodologies, energy efficiency models and general service management schemes are not yet saturated. The burden of making this all tick perfectly falls on cloud providers. Surely, economy of scale revenues and leveraging existing infrastructure and giant workforce are there as positives, but it is far from straightforward operation from that point. Performance and service delivery will still depend on …

An Exercise And Sports Equipment Recognition System, Siddarth Kalra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Most mobile health management applications today require manual input or use sensors like the accelerometer or GPS to record user data. The onboard camera remains underused. We propose an Exercise and Sports Equipment Recognition System (ESRS) that can recognize physical activity equipment from raw image data. This system can be integrated with mobile phones to allow the camera to become a primary input device for recording physical activity. We employ a deep convolutional neural network to train models capable of recognizing 14 different equipment categories. Furthermore, we propose a preprocessing scheme that uses color normalization and denoising techniques to improve …

Advanced Driving Assistance Prediction Systems, Maedeh Hesabgar

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Future automobiles are going to experience a fundamental evolution by installing semiotic predictor driver assistance equipment. To meet these equipment, Continuous driving-behavioral data have to be observed and processed to construct powerful predictive driving assistants. In this thesis, we focus on raw driving-behavioral data and present a prediction method which is able to prognosticate the next driving-behavioral state. This method has been constructed based on the unsupervised double articulation analyzer method (DAA) which is able to segment meaningless continuous driving-behavioral data into a meaningful sequence of driving situations. Thereafter, our novel model by mining the sequences of driving situations can …

Machine Learning Of Lifestyle Data For Diabetes, Yan Luo

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Self-Monitoring of Blood Glucose (SMBG) for Type-2 Diabetes (T2D) remains highly challenging for both patients and doctors due to the complexities of diabetic lifestyle data logging and insufficient short-term and personalized recommendations/advice. The recent mobile diabetes management systems have been proved clinically effective to facilitate self-management. However, most such systems have poor usability and are limited in data analytic functionalities. These two challenges are connected and affected by each other. The ease of data recording brings better data for applicable data analytic algorithms. On the other hand, the irrelevant or inaccurate data input will certainly commit errors and noises. The …

Feature Encoding Strategies For Multi-View Image Classification, Kyle Doerr

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Machine vision systems can vary greatly in size and complexity depending on the task at hand. However, the purpose of inspection, quality and reliability remains the same. This work sets out to bridge the gap between traditional machine vision and computer vision. By applying powerful computer vision techniques, we are able to achieve more robust solutions in manufacturing settings. This thesis presents a framework for applying powerful new image classification techniques used for image retrieval in the Bag of Words (BoW) framework. In addition, an exhaustive evaluation of commonly used feature pooling approaches is conducted with results showing that spatial …

Dynamically Testing Graphical User Interfaces, Santo Carino

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Software test generation for GUIs is a hard problem. The goal of this thesis is to investigate different methods for dynamically generating tests for GUIs. We introduce the concept of an event-pair graph, which is used to represent and measure test suites, and show how it can be used to generate tests and measure GUI coverage. Before we can begin generating tests, we first want to determine which is better: a small test suite with a few long tests or a large test suite with many short tests. Therefore, we designed and conducted a study to determine which is more …