Computer Sciences Commons^™

Evaluating Optimum Levels Of Detail For 3d Interactive Aviation Maintenance Instructions, Nicholas Rohe

Open Access Theses

With the aviation industry shifting from paper based maintenance instructions to digital maintenance instructions, there needs to be a standard for what goes into creating the digital instructions. This study was done to determine what the optimum level of detail for 3D interactive aviation maintenance instructions. The definition of optimum for this study was: lowest amount of geometrical data with lowest rendering needed for comprehension and ease of use.

Survey On Wakeup Scheduling For Environmentally-Powered Wireless Sensor Networks, Alvin Cerdena Valera, Wee-Seng Soh, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in energy harvesting technologies and ultra low-power computing and communication devices are enabling the realization of environmentally-powered wireless sensor networks (EPWSNs). Because of limited and dynamic energy supply, EPWSNs are duty-cycled to achieve energy-neutrality, a condition where the energy demand does not exceed the energy supply. Duty cycling entails nodes to sleep and wakeup according to a wakeup scheduling scheme. In this paper, we survey the various wakeup scheduling schemes, with focus on their suitability for EPWSNs. A classification scheme is proposed to characterize existing wakeup scheduling schemes, with three main categories, namely, asynchronous, synchronous, and …

Action Classification By Exploring Directional Co-Occurrence Of Weighted Stips, Mengyuan Liu, Hong Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human action recognition is challenging mainly due to intro-variety, inter-ambiguity and clutter backgrounds in real videos. Bag-of-visual words model utilizes spatio-temporal interest points(STIPs), and represents action by the distribution of points which ignores visual context among points. To add more contextual information, we propose a method by encoding spatio-temporal distribution of weighted pairwise points. First, STIPs are extracted from an action sequence and clustered into visual words. Then, each word is weighted in both temporal and spatial domains to capture the relationships with other words. Finally, the directional relationships between co-occurrence pairwise words are used to encode visual contexts. We …

Hippi Care Hospital: Towards Proactive Business Processes In Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It was 2.35 am on a Saturday morning. Wiki Lim, process specialist from the Process Innovation Centre (PIC) of Hippi Care Hospital (HCH), desperately doodling on her notepad for ideas to improve service delivery at HCH’s Emergency Department (ED). HCH has committed to the public that its ED would meet the service quality criterion of serving 90% of A3 and A4 patients, non-emergency patients with moderate to mild symptoms, within 90 minutes of their arrival at the ED. The ED was not able to meet this performance goal and Dr. Edward Kim, the head of the ED at HCH, had …

Camera Viewpoint Invariant Vehicular Traffic Segmentation And Classification, Jeffrey B. Flora

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The goal of this intelligent transportation systems work is to develop a computer vision method that is view angle independent for segmenting and classifying vehicular traffic on highway systems. In order to achieve this goal, this work implements an algorithm for vehicle segmentation, feature extraction, and classification using the existing Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) infrastructure on networked traffic cameras. The VDOT traffic video is analyzed for vehicle detection and segmentation using an adaptive Gaussian mixture model algorithm. Speed estimation is performed using a single camera calibration. Size and shape features from morphological properties and texture features from histogram of …

Discretized Agent-Based Model Of Infectious Disease Spread That Uses Contact Probability, Tyrell L. Gardner

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This study uses contact probability in an agent-based model to simulate the spread of an infectious disease. In order to perform the study, the agent-based model must first be discretized into events. Each agent in the model is given its own infectious disease state machine taken from the Susceptible-Exposed-Infected-Recovered (SEIR) model. The agents move between squares in a grid environment where each square represents a group. Groups have a contact probability as an attribute that is used to predict whether an agent comes in close contact with another agent. The transitions between the states in the SEIR model are easily …

Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we formulate and study the Multi-agent Orienteering Problem with Time-dependent Capacity Constraints (MOPTCC). MOPTCC is similar to the classical orienteering problem at single-agent level: given a limited time budget, an agent travels around the network and collects rewards by visiting different nodes, with the objective of maximizing the sum of his collected rewards. The most important feature we introduce in MOPTCC is the inclusion of multiple competing agents. All agents in MOPTCC are assumed to be self-interested, and they interact with each other when arrive at certain nodes simultaneously. As all nodes are capacitated, if a particular …

Numerical Studies Of The A6 Relativistic Magnetron Using Particle-In-Cell Simulations, Vineetha Jujjavarapu

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The magnetron became a major component in radar systems around the time of the World War II. More recent radar techniques require short microwave pulses (with nanosecond pulse-widths for ultra wideband operations) and high peak power in the Giga-Watt range. In order to achieve these specifications for the military, the magnetron needs to have both a fast start and the rapid growth rate of oscillations in order to serve as a microwave source for the short-pulse applications. These two factors depend on the geometry of the cathode. Other requirements include high conversion efficiency and low leakage current (in order to …

Finite Horizon Stochastic Optimal Control Of Nonlinear Two-Player Zero-Sum Games Under Communication Constraint, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, the finite horizon stochastic optimal control of nonlinear two-player zero-sum games, referred to as Nonlinear Networked Control Systems (NNCS) two-player zero-sum game, between control and disturbance input players in the presence of unknown system dynamics and a communication network with delays and packet losses is addressed by using neuro dynamic programming (NDP). The overall objective being to find the optimal control input while maximizing the disturbance attenuation. First, a novel online neural network (NN) identifier is introduced to estimate the unknown control and disturbance coefficient matrices which are needed in the generation of optimal control input. Then, …

Near Optimal Event-Based Control Of Nonlinear Discrete Time Systems In Affine Form With Measured Input And Output Data, Avimanyu Sahoo, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, an event-based near optimal control of uncertain nonlinear discrete time systems is presented by using input-output data and approximate dynamic programming (ADP). The nonlinear system dynamics in affine form are transformed into an input-output form. Then, three neural networks (NN) with event sampled input-output vector are used, namely, the identifier NN to relax the knowledge of the system dynamics, a critic NN to approximate the value function which is the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi Bellman (HJB) equation, and an actor NN to approximate the optimal control policy, in an online manner without utilizing value or policy iterations. …

A Catalog Of While Loop Specification Patterns, Aditi Barua, Yoonsik Cheon

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

This document provides a catalog of while loop patterns along with their skeletal specifications. The specifications are written in a functional form known as intended functions. The catalog can be used to derive specifications of while loops by first matching the loops to the cataloged patterns and then instantiating the skeletal specifications of the matched patterns. Once their specifications are formulated and written, the correctness of while loops can be proved rigorously or formally using the functional program verification technique in which a program is viewed as a mathematical function from one program state to another.

Metabolomics Characterization Of U.S. And Japanese F-15 And C-130 Flight Line Crews Exposed To Jet Fuel Volatile Organic Compounds And Aerosols, Nicholas J. Delraso, David Mattie, Asao Kobayashi, Stephen W. Mitchell, Scott Dillard, Michael L. Raymer, Isaie Sibomana, Nicholas V. Reo

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Air and ground crews transfer a significant amount of jet fuel, and as a result of transfers, breathe its volatile emission from residues. Working on the flight line also exposes maintainers to exhaust from the jet fuel as engines are tested or run before and after flight. Since little is known concerning level of exposure and the corresponding biological response associated with human jet fuel exposure, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabolomics analysis of human urine was utilized for characterization of metabolite profiles of flight line personnel for potential biomarker discovery. This project was a collaborative research effort between the US …

A Method To Develop Neck Injury Criteria To Aid Design And Test Of Escape Systems Incorporating Helmet Mounted Displays, Jeffrey C. Parr

Theses and Dissertations

HMDs are becoming common human-machine interface equipment in manned military flight, but introducing this equipment into the overall aircraft escape system poses new and significant system design, development, and test concerns. Although HMDs add capabilities, which improve operator performance, the increased capability is often accompanied by increased head supported mass. The increased mass can amplify the risk of pilot neck injury during ejection when compared to lighter legacy helmets. Currently no adequate USAF neck injury criteria exist to effectively guide the requirements, design, and test of escape systems for pilots with HMDs. This research effort presents a novel method to …

Stochastic Optimal Design For Unknown Linear Discrete-Time System Zero-Sum Games In Input-Output Form Under Communication Constraints, Hao Xu, S. Jagannathan, F. L. Lewis

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, stochastic optimal strategy for unknown linear discrete-time system quadratic zero-sum games in input-output form with communication imperfections such as network-induced delays and packet losses, otherwise referred to as networked control system (NCS) zero-sum games, relating to the H∞ optimal control problem is solved in a forward-in-time manner. First, the linear discrete-time zero sum state space representation is transformed into a linear NCS in the state space form after incorporating random delays and packet losses and then into the input-output form. Subsequently, the stochastic optimal approach, referred to as adaptive dynamic programming (ADP), is introduced which estimates the …

Name-Face Association In Web Videos: A Large-Scale Dataset, Baselines, And Open Issues, Zhi-Neng Chen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wei Zhang, Juan Cao, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Associating faces appearing in Web videos with names presented in the surrounding context is an important task in many applications. However, the problem is not well investigated particularly under large-scale realistic scenario, mainly due to the scarcity of dataset constructed in such circumstance. In this paper, we introduce a Web video dataset of celebrities, named WebV-Cele, for name-face association. The dataset consists of 75 073 Internet videos of over 4 000 hours, covering 2 427 celebrities and 649 001 faces. This is, to our knowledge, the most comprehensive dataset for this problem. We describe the details of dataset construction, discuss …

Comparison Of Optimization Techniques In Large Scale Transportation Problems, Tapojit Kumar

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

The Transportation Problem is a classic Operations Research problem where the objective is to determine the schedule for transporting goods from source to destination in a way that minimizes the shipping cost while satisfying supply and demand constraints. Although it can be solved as a Linear Programming problem, other methods exist. Linear Programming makes use of the Simplex Method, an algorithm invented to solve a linear program by progressing from one extreme point of the feasible polyhedron to an adjacent one. The algorithm contains tactics like pricing and pivoting. For a Transportation Problem, a simplified version of the regular Simplex …

Verification Of Costless Merge Pairing Heaps, Joshua Vander Hook

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Most algorithms’ performance is limited by the data structures they use. Internal algorithms then decide the performance of the data structure. This cycle continues until fundamental results, verified by analysis and experiment, prevent further improvement. In this paper I examine one specific example of this. The focus of this work is primarily on a new variant of the pairing heap. I will review the new implementation, compare its theoretical performance, and discuss my original contribution: the first preliminary data on its experimental performance. It is instructive to provide some background information, followed by a formal definition of heaps in 1.1. …

Granular Matter: Microstructural Evolution And Mechanical Response, Aashish Ghimire, Ishan Srivastava, Timothy S. Fisher

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Heterogeneous (nano) composites, manufactured by the densification of variously sized grains, represent an important and ubiquitous class of technologically relevant materials. Typical grain sizes in such materials range from macroscopic to a few nanometers. The morphology exhibited by such disordered materials is complex and intricately connected with its thermal and electrical transport properties. It is important to quantify the geometric features of these materials and simulate the fabrication process. Additionally, granular materials exhibit complex structural and mechanical properties that crucially govern their reliability during industrial use. In this work, we simulate the densification of soft deformable grains from a low-density …

Vast 2014, Challenge One: Event Analysis Within Big Data, Isaac C. Sheeley, Jieqiong Zhao, Jing Xia, Shehzad Afzal, Joseph Christopher, David Ebert Dr.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

News articles and email conversation data could be very useful in the analysis of developing and ongoing events, such as preventing a potential threat or possibly even locating a missing person. There is currently no “one-size-fits-all” solution to visualizing diverse forms of datasets and their sheer sizes are far too great to efficiently analyze by brute force methods. However, using principles of Visual Analytics, it is possible to take this information overload and transform it into a useful tool to help increase the efficiency of event analysis. A visualization system was developed for email conversation networks using web technologies. An …

Improved Microrobotic Control Through Image Processing And Automated Hardware Interfacing, Archit R. Aggarwal, Wuming Jing, David J. Cappelleri

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Untethered submilliliter-sized robots (microrobots) are showing potential use in different industrial, manufacturing and medical applications. A particular type of these microrobots, magnetic robots, have shown improved performance in power and control capabilities compared to the other thermal and electrostatic based robots. However, the magnetic robot designs have not been assessed in a robust manner to understand the degree of control in different environments and their application feasibility. This research project seeks to develop a custom control software interface to provide a holistic tool for researchers to evaluate the microrobotic performance through advance control features. The software deliverable involved two main …

Bayesian Calibration Tool, Sveinn Palsson, Martin Hunt, Alejandro Strachan

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Fitting a model to data is common practice in many fields of science. The models may contain unknown parameters and often, the goal is to obtain good estimates of them. A variety of methods have been developed for this purpose. They often differ in complexity, efficiency and accuracy and some may have very limited applications. Bayesian inference methods have recently become popular for the purpose of calibrating model's parameters. The way they treat unknown quantities is completely different from any classical methods. Even though the unknown quantity is a constant, it is treated as a random variable and the desired …

Testing The Forensic Soundness Of Forensic Examination Environments On Bootable Media, Ahmed F.A.L. Mohamed, Andrew Marrington, Farkhund Iqbal, Ibrahim Baggili

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

In this work we experimentally examine the forensic soundness of the use of forensic bootable CD/DVDs as forensic examination environments. Several Linux distributions with bootable CD/DVDs which are marketed as forensic examination environments are used to perform a forensic analysis of a captured computer system. Before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination, the computer system's hard disk is removed and a forensic image acquired by a second system using a hardware write blocker. The images acquired before and after the bootable CD/DVD examination are hashed and the hash values compared. Where the hash values are inconsistent, a differential analysis is …

Preliminary Forensic Analysis Of The Xbox One, Jason Moore, Ibrahim Baggili, Andrew Marrington, Armindo Rodrigues

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video game consoles can no longer be viewed as just gaming consoles but rather as full multimedia machines, capable of desktop computer-like performance. The past has shown that game consoles have been used in criminal activities such as extortion, identity theft, and child pornography, but with their ever-increasing capabilities, the likelihood of the expansion of criminal activities conducted on or over the consoles increases. This research aimed to take the initial step of understanding the Xbox One, the most powerful Microsoft console to date. We report the outcome of conducting a forensic examination of the Xbox One, and we provide …

An Adaptive Educational Game To Help Students Learn How To Solve Systems Of Linear Equations, Wang Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Educational games have been proven to be effective in developing problem solving skills in well-defined domain, such as Math and Physics. In this thesis, an educational game called Matrix was developed to foster problem solving skills in the domain of linear algebra, particularly solving a system of linear equations. Matrix is an adaptive educational game that uses intelligent tutoring modules to guide the student's learning process and provide feedback based on the student's performance. These modules are domain module, student module, pedagogical module and presentation module. The domain module contains all the concepts the student needs to learn and an …

A Mathematical Model And Metaheuristics For Time Dependent Orienteering Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Zhi Yuan, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents a generalization of the Orienteering Problem, the Time-Dependent Orienteering Problem (TDOP) which is based on the real-life application of providing automatic tour guidance to a large leisure facility such as a theme park. In this problem, the travel time between two nodes depends on the time when the trip starts. We formulate the problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) model. We then develop various heuristics in a step by step fashion: greedy construction, local search and variable neighborhood descent, and two versions of iterated local search. The proposed metaheuristics were tested on modified benchmark instances, randomly …

Diversity-Oriented Bi-Objective Hyper-Heuristics For Patrol Scheduling, Mustafa Misir, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The patrol scheduling problem is concerned with assigning security teams to different stations for distinct time intervals while respecting a limited number of contractual constraints. The objective is to minimise the total distance travelled while maximising the coverage of the stations with respect to their security requirement levels. This paper introduces a hyper-heuristic strategy focusing on generating diverse solutions for a bi-objective patrol scheduling problem. While a variety of hyper-heuristics have been applied to a large suite of problem domains usually in the form of single-objective optimisation, we suggest an alternative approach for solving the patrol scheduling problem with two …

Modeling And Development Of Human Interface For Pedestrian Simulator, Romesh Khaddar

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

According to Traveler opinion and perception survey of 2005, 107.4 million Americans use walking as regular mode of travel, which amounts to 51% of American population. In 2009, 4092 pedestrian fatalities have been reported nationwide with a fatality rate of 1.33 which totals 59,000 crashes. Also, pedestrians are over represented in crash data by accounting more than 12% of fatalities but on 10.9% of trips. This makes a perfect case for understanding the causes behind such statistics, calling for a continuous research on pedestrians walking behavior and their interactions with surroundings.

Current research in pedestrian simulation focuses on surveys and …

Gate Monte Carlo Simulations In A Cloud Computing Environment, Blake Austin Rowedder

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The GEANT4-based GATE is a unique and powerful Monte Carlo (MC) platform, which provides a single code library allowing the simulation of specific medical physics applications, e.g. PET, SPECT, CT, radiotherapy, and hadron therapy. However, this rigorous yet flexible platform is used only sparingly in the clinic due to its lengthy calculation time. By accessing the powerful computational resources of a cloud computing environment, GATE's runtime can be significantly reduced to clinically feasible levels without the sizable investment of a local high performance cluster. This study investigated a reliable and efficient execution of GATE MC simulations using a commercial cloud …

A Comparative Study Of Underwater Robot Path Planning Algorithms For Adaptive Sampling In A Network Of Sensors, Sreeja Banerjee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Monitoring lakes, rivers, and oceans is critical to improving our understanding of complex large-scale ecosystems. We introduce a method of underwater monitoring using semi-mobile underwater sensor networks and mobile underwater robots in this thesis. The underwater robots can move freely in all dimension while the sensor nodes are anchored to the bottom of the water column and can move only up and down along the depth of the water column. We develop three different algorithms to optimize the path of the underwater robot and the positions of the sensors to improve the overall quality of sensing of an area of …

Non-Learning Semantic Analysis For Context Discovery And Sentiment Estimation: Transportation Application, Himanshu Verma

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With enormous amount of linguistic data present on web, text analysis has become one of the major fields of interest today. This field includes sentiment analysis, information retrieval, text document classification, knowledge based modeling, content similarity measure, data clustering, words prediction/correction, decision making etc. Managing and processing such data has vital importance. The field being quite broad, our focus is mainly on transportation related social media(Twitter) data extraction, text categorization/classification which can be further sub-divided into concept discovery, word sense disambiguation and sentiment analysis to analyze performance of existing transportation system worldwide. Concept discovery is the method of extracting the …