Computer Sciences Commons^™

Model Development And Assessment Of The Gate Network In A High-Performance Sic Power Module, William Austin Curbow

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The main objective of this effort is to determine points of weakness in the gate network of a high-performance SiC power module and to offer remedies to these issues to increase the overall performance, robustness, and reliability of the technology. In order to accomplish this goal, a highly accurate model of the gate network is developed through three methods of parameter extraction: calculation, simulation, and measurement. A SPICE model of the gate network is developed to analyze four electrical issues in a high-speed, SiC-based power module including the necessary internal gate resistance for damping under-voltage and over-voltage transients, the disparity …

Hardware Ip Classification Through Weighted Characteristics, Brendan Mcgeehan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Today’s business model for hardware designs frequently incorporates third-party Intellectual Property (IP) due to the many benefits it can bring to a company. For instance, outsourcing certain components of an overall design can reduce time-to-market by allowing each party to specialize and perfect a specific part of the overall design. However, allowing third-party involvement also increases the possibility of malicious attacks, such as hardware Trojan insertion. Trojan insertion is a particularly dangerous security threat because testing the functionality of an IP can often leave the Trojan undetected. Therefore, this thesis work provides an improvement on a Trojan detection method known …

The Affective Perceptual Model: Enhancing Communication Quality For Persons With Pimd, Jadin Tredup

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Methods for prolonged compassionate care for persons with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD) require a rotating cast of import people in the subjects life in order to facilitate interaction with the external environment. As subjects continue to age, dependency on these people increases with complexity of communications while the quality of communication decreases. It is theorized that a machine learning (ML) system could replicate the attuning process and replace these people to promote independence. This thesis extends this idea to develop a conceptual and formal model and system prototype.

The main contributions of this thesis are: (1) proposal of …

Analysis Of Bitcoin Cryptocurrency And Its Mining Techniques, Suman Ghimire

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital, decentralized cryptocurrency created by an individual under pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, it is the first digital, decentralized currency. Several developers and organizations have explored the importance of digital cryptocurrency and the concept of the blockchain. Bitcoin is assumed to be one of the secure and comfortable payment methods that can be used in the upcoming days. The backbone of Bitcoin mining is the concept of the blockchain, which is assumed to beone of the ingenious invention of this century. The blockchain is the collection of blocks that are linked together in such a way …

Urban Underground Infrastructure Monitoring Iot: The Path Loss Analysis, Abdul Salam, Syed Shah

Faculty Publications

The extra quantities of wastewater entering the pipes can cause backups that result in sanitary sewer overflows. Urban underground infrastructure monitoring is important for controlling the flow of extraneous water into the pipelines. By combining the wireless underground communications and sensor solutions, the urban underground IoT applications such as real time wastewater and storm water overflow monitoring can be developed. In this paper, the path loss analysis of wireless underground communications in urban underground IoT for wastewater monitoring has been presented. It has been shown that the communication range of up to 4 kilometers can be achieved from an underground …

An Underground Radio Wave Propagation Prediction Model For Digital Agriculture, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

Underground sensing and propagation of Signals in the Soil (SitS) medium is an electromagnetic issue. The path loss prediction with higher accuracy is an open research subject in digital agriculture monitoring applications for sensing and communications. The statistical data are predominantly derived from site-specific empirical measurements, which is considered an impediment to universal application. Nevertheless, in the existing literature, statistical approaches have been applied to the SitS channel modeling, where impulse response analysis and the Friis open space transmission formula are employed as the channel modeling tool in different soil types under varying soil moisture conditions at diverse communication distances …

Autonomous Watercraft Simulation And Programming, Nicholas J. Savino

Student Scholar Showcase

Automation of various modes of transportation is thought to make travel more safe and efficient. Over the past several decades, advances to semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles have led to advanced autopilot systems on planes and boats, and an increasing popularity of self-driving cars. We predicted the motion of an autonomous vehicle using simulations in Python. The simulation models the motion of a small scale watercraft, which can then be built and programmed using an Arduino Microcontroller. We examined different control methods for a simulated rescue craft to reach a target. We also examined the effects of different factors, such as …

Feasibility And Security Analysis Of Wideband Ultrasonic Radio For Smart Home Applications, Qi Xia

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Smart home Internet-of-Things (IoT) accompanied by smart home apps has witnessed tremendous growth in the past few years. Yet, the security and privacy of the smart home IoT devices and apps have raised serious concerns, as they are getting increasingly complicated each day, expected to store and exchange extremely sensitive personal data, always on and connected, and commonly exposed to any users in a sensitive environment. Nowadays wireless smart home IoT devices rely on electromagnetic wave-based radio-frequency (RF) technology to establish fast and reliable quality network connections. However, RF has its limitations that can negatively affect the smart home user …

Underground Environment Aware Mimo Design Using Transmit And Receive Beamforming In Internet Of Underground Things, Abdul Salam

Faculty Publications

In underground (UG) multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO), the transmit beamforming is used to focus energy in the desired direction. There are three different paths in the underground soil medium through which the waves propagates to reach at the receiver. When the UG receiver receives a desired data stream only from the desired path, then the UG MIMO channel becomes three path (lateral, direct, and reflected) interference channel. Accordingly, the capacity region of the UG MIMO three path interference channel and degrees of freedom (multiplexing gain of this MIMO channel requires careful modeling). Therefore, expressions are required derived the degrees of …

On Efficiency Of Artifact Lookup Strategies In Digital Forensics, Lorenz Liebler, Patrick Schmitt, Harald Baier, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In recent years different strategies have been proposed to handle the problem of ever-growing digital forensic databases. One concept to deal with this data overload is data reduction, which essentially means to separate the wheat from the chaff, e.g., to filter in forensically relevant data. A prominent technique in the context of data reduction are hash-based solutions. Data reduction is achieved because hash values (of possibly large data input) are much smaller than the original input. Today's approaches of storing hash-based data fragments reach from large scale multithreaded databases to simple Bloom filter representations. One main focus was put on …

Variable Speed Limit Control At Sag Curves Through Connected Vehicles: Implications Of Alternative Communications And Sensing Technologies, Reza Vatani Nezafat

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Connected vehicles (CVs) will enable new applications to improve traffic flow. This study’s focus is to investigate how potential implementation of variable speed limit (VSL) through different types of communication and sensing technologies on CVs may improve traffic flow at a sag curve. At sag curves, the gradient changes from negative to positive values which causes a reduction in the roadway capacity and congestion. A VSL algorithm is developed and implemented in a simulation environment for controlling the inflow of vehicles to a sag curve on a freeway to minimize delays and increase throughput. Both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) …

Immersive Virtual Reality Attacks And The Human Joystick, Peter Casey, Ibrahim Baggili, Ananya Yarramreddy

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

This is one of the first accounts for the security analysis of consumer immersive Virtual Reality (VR) systems. This work breaks new ground, coins new terms, and constructs proof of concept implementations of attacks related to immersive VR. Our work used the two most widely adopted immersive VR systems, the HTC Vive, and the Oculus Rift. More specifically, we were able to create attacks that can potentially disorient users, turn their Head Mounted Display (HMD) camera on without their knowledge, overlay images in their field of vision, and modify VR environmental factors that force them into hitting physical objects and …

Two-On-One Pursuit With A Non-Zero Capture Radius, Patrick J. Wasz

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, we revisit the "Two Cutters and Fugitive Ship" differential game that was addressed by Isaacs, but move away from point capture. We consider a two-on-one pursuit-evasion differential game with simple motion and pursuers endowed with circular capture sets of radius l > 0. The regions in the state space where only one pursuer effects the capture and the region in the state space where both pursuers cooperatively and isochronously capture the evader are characterized, thus solving the Game of Kind. Concerning the Game of Degree, the algorithm for the synthesis of the optimal state feedback strategies of the …

Preserving Privacy In Automotive Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems, Kenneth L. Hacker

Theses and Dissertations

The automotive industry is moving towards a more connected ecosystem, with connectivity achieved through multiple wireless systems. However, in the pursuit of these technological advances and to quickly satisfy requirements imposed on manufacturers, the security of these systems is often an afterthought. It has been shown that systems in a standard new automobile that one would not expect to be vulnerable can be exploited for a variety of harmful effects. This thesis considers a seemingly benign, but government mandated, safety feature of modern vehicles; the Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS). Typical implementations have no security-oriented features, leaking data that can …

Frameup: An Incriminatory Attack On Storj: A Peer To Peer Blockchain Enabled Distributed Storage System, Xiaolu Zhang, Justin Grannis, Ibrahim Baggili, Nicole Lang Beebe

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we present a primary account of frameup, an incriminatory attack made possible because of existing implementations in distributed peer to peer storage. The frameup attack shows that an adversary has the ability to store unencrypted data on the hard drives of people renting out their hard drive space. This is important to forensic examiners as it opens the door for possibly framing an innocent victim. Our work employs Storj as an example technology, due to its popularity and market size. Storj is a blockchain enabled system that allows people to rent out their hard drive space …

Timeline2gui: A Log2timeline Csv Parser And Training Scenarios, Mark Debinski, Parvathy Mohan, Frank Breitinger

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Crimes involving digital evidence are getting more complex due to the increasing storage capacities and utilization of devices. Event reconstruction (i.e., understanding the timeline) is an essential step for investigators to understand a case where a prominent tool is Log2Timeline (a tool that creates super timelines which is a combination of several log files and events throughout a system). While these timelines provide great evidence and help to understand a case, they are complex and require tools as well as training scenarios. In this paper we present Timeline2GUI an easy-to-use python implementation to analyze CSV log files create by Log2Timeline. …

A Theoretical Model Of Underground Dipole Antennas For Communications In Internet Of Underground Things, Abdul Salam, Mehmet C. Vuran, Xin Dong, Christos Argyropoulos, Suat Irmak

Faculty Publications

The realization of Internet of Underground Things (IOUT) relies on the establishment of reliable communication links, where the antenna becomes a major design component due to the significant impacts of soil. In this paper, a theoretical model is developed to capture the impacts of change of soil moisture on the return loss, resonant frequency, and bandwidth of a buried dipole antenna. Experiments are conducted in silty clay loam, sandy, and silt loam soil, to characterize the effects of soil, in an indoor testbed and field testbeds. It is shown that at subsurface burial depths (0.1-0.4m), change in soil moisture impacts …

Applications Of Supervised Machine Learning In Autism Spectrum Disorder Research: A Review, Kayleigh K. Hyde, Marlena N. Novack, Nicholas Lahaye, Chelsea Parlett-Pelleriti, Raymond Anden, Dennis R. Dixon, Erik Linstead

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) research has yet to leverage "big data" on the same scale as other fields; however, advancements in easy, affordable data collection and analysis may soon make this a reality. Indeed, there has been a notable increase in research literature evaluating the effectiveness of machine learning for diagnosing ASD, exploring its genetic underpinnings, and designing effective interventions. This paper provides a comprehensive review of 45 papers utilizing supervised machine learning in ASD, including algorithms for classification and text analysis. The goal of the paper is to identify and describe supervised machine learning trends in ASD literature as …

Spectral Clustering For Electrical Phase Identification Using Advanced Metering Infrastructure Voltage Time Series, Logan Blakely

Dissertations and Theses

The increasing demand for and prevalence of distributed energy resources (DER) such as solar power, electric vehicles, and energy storage, present a unique set of challenges for integration into a legacy power grid, and accurate models of the low-voltage distribution systems are critical for accurate simulations of DER. Accurate labeling of the phase connections for each customer in a utility model is one area of grid topology that is known to have errors and has implications for the safety, efficiency, and hosting capacity of a distribution system. This research presents a methodology for the phase identification of customers solely using …

A Novel Cooperative Distributed Secondary Controller For Vsi And Pq Inverters Of Ac Microgrids, F. Doost Mohammadi, H. Keshtkar, A. Dehghan Banadaki, A. Feliachi

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

This paper proposes a novel cooperative secondary control strategy for microgrids which is fully distributed. There is a two-layered coordination, which exists between inverter based DGs of both types, i.e. Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) and Current Source Inverter (CSI), also called PQ inverter. In first layer of the proposed two-layered cooperative control strategy, VSIs will take care of the primary average voltage regulation by implementing the average consensus algorithm (ACA); then in the second layer of control, the PQ inverters will improve the voltage quality of the microgrid while maintaining the average voltage of buses at the same desired level. …

Deep Learning: Edge-Cloud Data Analytics For Iot, Katarina Grolinger, Ananda M. Ghosh

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

Sensors, wearables, mobile and other Internet of Thing (IoT) devices are becoming increasingly integrated in all aspects of our lives. They are capable of collecting massive quantities of data that are typically transmitted to the cloud for processing. However, this results in increased network traffic and latencies. Edge computing has a potential to remedy these challenges by moving computation physically closer to the network edge where data are generated. However, edge computing does not have sufficient resources for complex data analytics tasks. Consequently, this paper investigates merging cloud and edge computing for IoT data analytics and presents a deep learning-based …

Software Defined Networks Based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey, Mubashir Husain Rehmani, Alan Davy, Brendan Jennings, Chadi Assi

Publications

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is …

Efficient Virtual Data Center Request Embedding Based On Row-Epitaxial And Batched Greedy Algorithms, Sivaranjani B, Surendran Doraiswamy

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Data centers are becoming the main backbone of and centralized repository for all cloud-accessible services in on-demand cloud computing environments. In particular, virtual data centers (VDCs) facilitate the virtualization of all data center resources such as computing, memory, storage, and networking equipment as a single unit. It is necessary to use the data center efficiently to improve its profitability. The essential factor that significantly influences efficiency is the average number of VDC requests serviced by the infrastructure provider, and the optimal allocation of requests improves the acceptance rate. In existing VDC request embedding algorithms, data center performance factors such as …

Hybrid Control Of Five-Phase Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machine Using Space Vector Modulation, Djamel Difi, Khaled Halbaoui, Djamel Boukhetala

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper aims to study the hybrid control of a five-phase permanent-magnet synchronous machine improved by the space vector modulation (SVM) technique. The torque ripples and currents will therefore be reduced. This control is based on the theory of hybrid dynamic systems (HDS), its discrete component is the voltage inverter which has a finite number of states controlling the continuous component that represents the machine. The results of the simulation made on MATLAB/Simulink are presented and discussed in order to check the performance of the strategy of the studied control. They show, in particular, the main advantages of this control …

Design Of A Portable And Low-Cost Mass-Sensitive Sensor With The Capability Of Measurements On Various Frequency Quartz Tuning Forks, Mehmet Altay Ünal, İsmai̇l Cengi̇z Koçum, Di̇lek Çökeli̇ler Serdaroğlu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Recently, sensor and biosensor applications have become widespread and are now significant tools in the biomedical field and other areas. Since quartz tuning fork (QTF) resonance frequency depends on the mass adsorbed to its prongs, it is generally used to measure minor mass change and detect target analyte in picogram levels. This study is undertaken to design and fabricate a sensor device for the measurement of QTF transducers. When QTF sensor studies were investigated, it was found that explanations on the details of instrumentation part were limited, and in addition, there was no compact commercial products. In this study, a …

Generation Rescheduling Using Multiobjective Bilevel Optimization, Kiran Babu Vakkapatla, Srinivasa Varma Pinni

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper presents a new multiobjective optimization method that can be used for generation rescheduling in power systems. Generation rescheduling in restructured power systems is performed by the system operator for different operations like congestion management, day-ahead scheduling, and preventive maintenance. The nonlinear nature of the equations involved and the constraints on decision variables pose a challenge to find the global optimum. In order to find the global optimum using a genetic algorithm, a bilevel optimization method is proposed. In the proposed multiobjective optimization method, the objectives are classified as primary and secondary based on their relative importance. The best …

On The Output Regulation For Linear Fractional Systems, Jesus Alberto Meda Campana, Elba Cinthya Garcia Estrada, Julio Cesar Gomez Mancilla, Jose De Jesus Rubio Avila, Mario Ricardo Cruz Deviana, Ricardo Tapia Herrera

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In this work, the regulation problem is extended to the field of fractional-order linear systems considering the Caputo fractional derivative. The regulation equations are obtained on the basis of the Francis equations. It is also shown that the linear fractional regulator exists at $t=0$ only if the order of the plant is not greater than the order of the reference system.

Enabling Space Time Division Multiple Access In Ietf 6tisch Protocol, Sedat Görmüş, Sercan Külcü

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

IETF 6TiSCH standard aims to create reliable, deterministic, and low-power networks by scheduling bandwidth resources in time and frequency domains. The main emphasis of 6TiSCH protocol is that it creates Internet of things (IoT) networks with a deterministic and controllable delay. However, many of its benefits are tied to the ability of the 6TiSCH scheduler to optimally distribute radio resources among wireless nodes which may not be possible when the number of frequency resources are limited and several other wireless technologies share the same frequency band (e.g., WiFi, Bluetooth and IEEE 802.15.4). Here the integration of a low-complexity directional antenna …

Stegogis: A New Steganography Method Using The Geospatial Domain, Ömer Kurtuldu, Mehmet Demi̇rci̇

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Geographic data are used on a variety of computing devices for many different applications including navigation, tracking, location planning, and marketing. The prevalence of geographic data makes it possible to envision new useful applications. In this paper, we propose using geographic data as a medium for secret communication, or steganography. We develop a method called StegoGIS for hiding messages in geographic coordinates in the well-known binary of fast-moving objects and transmitting them secretly. We show that discovering this secret communication is practically impossible for third parties. We also show that a large amount of secret data can be transmitted this …

Improving Undersampling-Based Ensemble With Rotation Forest For Imbalanced Problem, Huaping Guo, Xiaoyu Diao, Hongbing Liu

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

As one of the most challenging and attractive issues in pattern recognition and machine learning, the imbalanced problem has attracted increasing attention. For two-class data, imbalanced data are characterized by the size of one class (majority class) being much larger than that of the other class (minority class), which makes the constructed models focus more on the majority class and ignore or even misclassify the examples of the minority class. The undersampling-based ensemble, which learns individual classifiers from undersampled balanced data, is an effective method to cope with the class-imbalance data. The problem in this method is that the size …