Computer Sciences Commons^™

Real-Time Rfi Mitigation In Radio Astronomy, Emily Ramey, Nick Joslyn, Richard Prestage, Michael Lam, Luke Hawkins, Tim Blattner, Mark Whitehead

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

As the use of wireless technology has increased around the world, Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) has become more and more of a problem for radio astronomers. Preventative measures exist to limit the presence of RFI, and programs exist to remove it from saved data, but the use of algorithms to detect and remove RFI as an observation is occurring is much less common. Such a method would be incredibly useful for observations in which the data must undergo several rounds of processing before being saved, as in pulsar timing studies. Strategies for real-time mitigation have been discussed and tested with …

Toward Controllable And Robust Surface Reconstruction From Spatial Curves, Zhiyang Huang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Reconstructing surface from a set of spatial curves is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and computational geometry. It often arises in many applications across various disciplines, such as industrial prototyping, artistic design and biomedical imaging. While the problem has been widely studied for years, challenges remain for handling different type of curve inputs while satisfying various constraints. We study studied three related computational tasks in this thesis. First, we propose an algorithm for reconstructing multi-labeled material interfaces from cross-sectional curves that allows for explicit topology control. Second, we addressed the consistency restoration, a critical but overlooked problem in applying …

Structured Indoor Modeling, Chen Liu

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In this dissertation, we propose data-driven approaches to reconstruct 3D models for indoor scenes which are represented in a structured way (e.g., a wall is represented by a planar surface and two rooms are connected via the wall). The structured representation of models is more application ready than dense representations (e.g., a point cloud), but poses additional challenges for reconstruction since extracting structures requires high-level understanding about geometries. To address this challenging problem, we explore two common structural regularities of indoor scenes: 1) most indoor structures consist of planar surfaces (planarity), and 2) structural surfaces (e.g., walls and floor) can …

Real-Time Reliable Middleware For Industrial Internet-Of-Things, Chao Wang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the area of adaptive real-time and fault-tolerant systems research, applied to Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems. Heterogeneous timing and reliability requirements arising from IIoT applications have posed challenges for IIoT services to efficiently differentiate and meet such requirements. Specifically, IIoT services must both differentiate processing according to applications' timing requirements (including latency, event freshness, and relative consistency of each other) and enforce the needed levels of assurance for data delivery (even as far as ensuring zero data loss). It is nontrivial for an IIoT service to efficiently differentiate such heterogeneous IIoT timing/reliability requirements to fit each application, …

High Performance Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks For Industrial Internet Of Things, Dolvara Gunatilaka

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) enable cost-effective communication for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). To achieve predictability and reliability demanded by industrial applications, industrial wireless standards (e.g., WirelessHART) incorporate a set of unique features such as a centralized management architecture, Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), and conservative channel selection. However, those features also incur significant degradation in performance, efficiency, and agility. To overcome these key limitations of existing industrial wireless technologies, this thesis work develops and empirically evaluates a suite of novel network protocols and algorithms.

The primary contributions of this thesis are four-fold. (1) We first build an experimental testbed …

Management And Security Of Multi-Cloud Applications, Lav Gupta

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Single cloud management platform technology has reached maturity and is quite successful in information technology applications. Enterprises and application service providers are increasingly adopting a multi-cloud strategy to reduce the risk of cloud service provider lock-in and cloud blackouts and, at the same time, get the benefits like competitive pricing, the flexibility of resource provisioning and better points of presence. Another class of applications that are getting cloud service providers increasingly interested in is the carriers' virtualized network services. However, virtualized carrier services require high levels of availability and performance and impose stringent requirements on cloud services. They necessitate the …

Differential Estimation Of Audiograms Using Gaussian Process Active Model Selection, Trevor Larsen

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Classical methods for psychometric function estimation either require excessive resources to perform, as in the method of constants, or produce only a low resolution approximation of the target psychometric function, as in adaptive staircase or up-down procedures. This thesis makes two primary contributions to the estimation of the audiogram, a clinically relevant psychometric function estimated by querying a patient’s for audibility of a collection of tones. First, it covers the implementation of a Gaussian process model for learning an audiogram using another audiogram as a prior belief to speed up the learning procedure. Second, it implements a use case of …

A Survey On The Role Of Individual Differences On Visual Analytics Interactions: Masters Project Report, Jesse Huang, Alvitta Ottley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

There is ample evidence in the visualization commu- nity that individual differences matter. These prior works high- light various traits and cognitive abilities that can modulate the use of the visualization systems and demonstrate a measurable influence on speed, accuracy, process, and attention. Perhaps the most important implication of this body of work is that we can use individual differences as a mechanism for estimating people’s potential to effectively leverage visual interfaces or to identify those people who may struggle. As visual literacy and data fluency continue to become essential skills for our everyday lives, we must embrace the growing …

Smart Home Audio Assistant, Xipeng Wang

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This report introduces an audio processing algorithm. It provides a way to access smart devices using audio. Although there are many audio assistants already on the market, most of them will not be able to control the smart devices. Therefore, this new system presented in this report will provide a way to analysis the customer’s questions. Then the algorithm will be able to query smart device information, modify the schedule or provide the reason for some arrangement.

Challenges In Integrating Iot In Smart Home, Leiquan Pan, Chenyang Lu

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Wireless devices have become a major part in Smart Home industry. Almost every smart home company has its own wireless solutions and cloud services. Normally, customers can only monitor and control smart devices through applications or platforms companies provided. It causes inconveniences and problems when we have lots of smart devices. In my master project, I did two projects to implement smart home IoT applications. From a single functionality IoT application to a more complicated smart home system, there are lots of challenges and problems appeared. This article will mainly focus on challenges in integrating IoT in a smart home.

Feature Extraction Form Ct Scan Of Plant Root, Chunyuan Li

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Roots are vital for plant by absorbing water and nutrients and providing anchorage from beneath the soil. These roles are closely related to the roots’ architecture, which describes the geometry of individual roots and their branching structure. We proposed a pipeline to efficiently annotate root architecture. My contribution focus on building an interactive tool to visual and annotate root architecture. Besides, we come up with heuristics to automate the annotation process.

Computational Geometry Teaching Tool, Yujie Zhou, Tao Ju

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

When students are taking Computational Geometry course which covers many geometry algorithms, most of them are difficult to follow because these algorithms are very abstract even if authors draw pictures to illustrate. In order to help students to get a better understanding of these algorithms, we decide to design Computational Geometry Teaching Tool. This tool is a web application that covers 8 geometry algorithms : Graham Scan, Quick Hull, Line Segment Intersection, Dual, Line Arrangement, Voronoi Diagram, Incremental Delaunay Triangulation and Kd Tree. First, this tool is developed by using JavaScript so that users don't need to install any software …

Learning About Large Scale Image Search: Lessons From Global Scale Hotel Recognition To Fight Sex Trafficking, Abby Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Hotel recognition is a sub-domain of scene recognition that involves determining what hotel is seen in a photograph taken in a hotel. The hotel recognition task is a challenging computer vision task due to the properties of hotel rooms, including low visual similarity between rooms in the same hotel and high visual similarity between rooms in different hotels, particularly those from the same chain. Building accurate approaches for hotel recognition is important to investigations of human trafficking. Images of human trafficking victims are often shared by traffickers among criminal networks and posted in online advertisements. These images are often taken …

Computational Explorations Of Information And Mechanism Design In Markets, Zhuoshu Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Markets or platforms assemble multiple selfishly-motivated and strategic agents. The outcomes of such agent interactions depend heavily on the rules, regulations, and norms of the platform, as well as the information available to agents. This thesis investigates the design and analysis of mechanisms and information structures through the ``computational lens'' in both static and dynamic settings. It both addresses the outcome of single platforms and fills a gap in the study of the dynamics of multiple platform interactions.

In static market settings, we are particularly interested in the role of information, because mechanisms are harder to change than the information …

Nanopower Analog Frontends For Cyber-Physical Systems, Kenji Aono

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

In a world that is increasingly dominated by advances made in digital systems, this work will explore the exploiting of naturally occurring physical phenomena to pave the way towards a self-powered sensor for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In general, a sensor frontend can be broken up into a handful of basic stages: transduction, filtering, energy conversion, measurement, and interfacing. One analog artifact that was investigated for filtering was the physical phenomenon of hysteresis induced in current-mode biquads driven near or at their saturation limit. Known as jump resonance, this analog construct facilitates a higher quality factor to be brought about without …

Concurrency Platforms For Real-Time And Cyber-Physical Systems, David Ferry

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Parallel processing is an important way to satisfy the increasingly demanding computational needs of modern real-time and cyber-physical systems, but existing parallel computing technologies primarily emphasize high-throughput and average-case performance metrics, which are largely unsuitable for direct application to real-time, safety-critical contexts. This work contrasts two concurrency platforms designed to achieve predictable worst case parallel performance for soft real-time workloads with millisecond periods and higher. One of these is then the basis for the CyberMech platform, which enables parallel real-time computing for a novel yet representative application called Real-Time Hybrid Simulation (RTHS). RTHS combines demanding parallel real-time computation with real-time …

Self-Powered Time-Keeping And Time-Of-Occurrence Sensing, Liang Zhou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Self-powered and passive Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices (e.g. RFID tags, financial assets, wireless sensors and surface-mount devices) have been widely deployed in our everyday and industrial applications. While diverse functionalities have been implemented in passive systems, the lack of a reference clock limits the design space of such devices used for applications such as time-stamping sensing, recording and dynamic authentication. Self-powered time-keeping in passive systems has been challenging because they do not have access to continuous power sources. While energy transducers can harvest power from ambient environment, the intermittent power cannot support continuous operation for reference clocks. The thesis of this …

The Example Guru: Suggesting Examples To Novice Programmers In An Artifact-Based Context, Michelle Ichinco

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Programmers in artifact-based contexts could likely benefit from skills that they do not realize exist. We define artifact-based contexts as contexts where programmers have a goal project, like an application or game, which they must figure out how to accomplish and can change along the way. Artifact-based contexts do not have quantifiable goal states, like the solution to a puzzle or the resolution of a bug in task-based contexts. Currently, programmers in artifact-based contexts have to seek out information, but may be unaware of useful information or choose not to seek out new skills. This is especially problematic for young …

Security Services Using Blockchains: A State Of The Art Survey, Maeda Zolanvari, Aiman Erbad, Raj Jain, Mohammed Samaka

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This article surveys blockchain-based approaches for several security services. These services include authentication, confidentiality, privacy and access control list (ACL), data and resource provenance, and integrity assurance. All these services are critical for the current distributed applications, especially due to the large amount of data being processed over the networks and the use of cloud computing. Authentication ensures that the user is who he/she claims to be. Confidentiality guarantees that data cannot be read by unauthorized users. Privacy provides the users the ability to control who can access their data. Provenance allows an efficient tracking of the data and resources …

Medial Axis Approximation And Regularization, Yajie Yan

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Medial axis is a classical shape descriptor. Among many good properties, medial axis is thin, centered in the shape, and topology preserving. Therefore, it is constantly sought after by researchers and practitioners in their respective domains. However, two barriers remain that hinder wide adoption of medial axis.

First, exact computation of medial axis is very difficult. Hence, in practice medial axis is approximated discretely. Though abundant approximation methods exist, they are either limited in scalability, insufficient in theoretical soundness, or susceptible to numerical issues. Second, medial axis is easily disturbed by small noises on its defining shape. A majority of …

Accurate Determination And Application Of Local Strain For Studying Tissues With Gradients In Mechanical Properties, John Boyle

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Determination of the mechanical behavior of materials requires an understanding of deformation during loading. While this is traditionally accomplished in engineering by examining a force displacement curve for a whole sample, these techniques implicitly ignore local geometric complexities and local material inhomogeneities commonly found in biologic tissues. Techniques such as normalized cross correlation have been classically applied to address this issue and resolve deformation at the local level; however, these techniques have proven unreliable when deformations become large, if the sample undergoes a rotation, and/or if strain fields become incompatible (e.g. at or near failure).

Presented here is a toolbox …

Locality-Aware Concurrency Platforms, Jordyn Chrystopher Raymond Maglalang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Modern computing systems from all domains are becoming increasingly more parallel. Manufacturers are taking advantage of the increasing number of available transistors by packaging more and more computing resources together on a single chip or within a single system. These platforms generally contain many levels of private and shared caches in addition to physically distributed main memory. Therefore, some memory is more expensive to access than other and high-performance software must consider memory locality as one of the first level considerations.

Memory locality is often difficult for application developers to consider directly, however, since many of these NUMA affects are …

Improving Pure-Tone Audiometry Using Probabilistic Machine Learning Classification, Xinyu Song

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Hearing loss is a critical public health concern, affecting hundreds millions of people worldwide and dramatically impacting quality of life for affected individuals. While treatment techniques have evolved in recent years, methods for assessing hearing ability have remained relatively unchanged for decades. The standard clinical procedure is the modified Hughson-Westlake procedure, an adaptive pure-tone detection task that is typically performed manually by audiologists, costing millions of collective hours annually among healthcare professionals. In addition to the high burden of labor, the technique provides limited detail about an individual’s hearing ability, estimating only detection thresholds at a handful of pre-defined pure-tone …

Decoupling Information And Connectivity In Information-Centric Networking, Hila Ben Abraham, Jyoti Parwatikar, John Dehart, Adam Drescher, Patrick Crowley

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

This paper introduces and demonstrates the concept of Information-Centric Transport as a mechanism for cleanly decoupling the information plane from the connectivity plane in Information-Centric Networking (ICN) architectures, such as NDN and CICN. These are coupled in today's incarnations of NDN and CICN through the use of forwarding strategy, which is the architectural component for deciding how to forward packets in the presence of either multiple next-hop options or dynamic feedback. As presently designed, forwarding strategy is not sustainable: application developers can only confidently specify strategy if they understand connectivity details, while network node operators can only confidently assign strategies …

An Improved Algorithm For Learning To Perform Exception-Tolerant Abduction, Mengxue Zhang

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Abstract

Inference from an observed or hypothesized condition to a plausible cause or explanation for this condition is known as abduction. For many tasks, the acquisition of the necessary knowledge by machine learning has been widely found to be highly effective. However, the semantics of learned knowledge are weaker than the usual classical semantics, and this necessitates new formulations of many tasks. We focus on a recently introduced formulation of the abductive inference task that is thus adapted to the semantics of machine learning. A key problem is that we cannot expect that our causes or explanations will be perfect, …

On The Aggregation Of Subjective Inputs From Multiple Sources, Mithun Chakraborty

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

When we have a population of individuals or artificially intelligent agents possessing diverse subjective inputs (e.g. predictions, opinions, etc.) about a common topic, how should we collect and combine them into a single judgment or estimate? This has long been a fundamental question across disciplines that concern themselves with forecasting and decision-making, and has attracted the attention of computer scientists particularly on account of the proliferation of online platforms for electronic commerce and the harnessing of collective intelligence. In this dissertation, I study this problem through the lens of computational social science in three main parts: (1) Incentives in information …

Code Puzzle Completion Problems In Support Of Learning Programming Independently, Kyle James Harms

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Middle school children often lack access to formal educational opportunities to learn computer programming. One way to help these children may be to provide tools that enable them to learn programming on their own independently. However, in order for these tools to be effective they must help learners acquire programming knowledge and also be motivating in independent contexts. I explore the design space of using motivating code puzzles with a method known to support independent learning: completion problems. Through this exploration, I developed code puzzle completion problems and an introductory curriculum introducing novice programmers to basic programming constructs. Through several …

Indoor Scene Localization To Fight Sex Trafficking In Hotels, Abigail Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

Images are key to fighting sex trafficking. They are: (a) used to advertise for sex services,(b) shared among criminal networks, and (c) connect a person in an image to the place where the image was taken. This work explores the ability to link images to indoor places in order to support the investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking. We propose and develop a framework that includes a database of open-source information available on the Internet, a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering additional images, and explore a variety of matching approaches based both on hand-tuned features such as SIFT and learned features …

Multipath And Rate Stability, Junjie Liu, Roch A. Guérin

All Computer Science and Engineering Research

Originally Published In Proc. IEEE Globecom Conference - CQRM: Communication QoS, Reliability & Modeling Symposium

Geometric Inference With Microlens Arrays, Ian Schillebeeckx

McKelvey School of Engineering Graduate Student Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores an alternative to traditional fiducial markers where geometric

information is inferred from the observed position of 3D points seen in an image. We offer an alternative approach which enables geometric inference based on the relative orientation

of markers in an image. We present markers fabricated from microlenses whose appearance

changes depending on the marker's orientation relative to the camera. First, we show how

to manufacture and calibrate chromo-coding lenticular arrays to create a known relationship

between the observed hue and orientation of the array. Second, we use 2 small chromo-coding lenticular arrays to estimate the pose of …