We develop a system for simulation-based optimization of defensive formations for American football. The first component of the system is an environment for simulating football plays with real physical interactions between players and their surroundings. The simulator is built on the AGEIA PhysX engine, which incorporates rigid body dynamics and...
"The purpose of this project is to load test, and fine tune the loan search functionality of the Broker Blueprint web application, an innovative Business-to-Business (B2B) online service aiding mortgage lenders and brokers in today's highly competitive mortgage market.
Broker Blueprint enables brokers to search for suitable mortgage loans across...
We present a catalog of mutation operators for spreadsheets drawn from research into mutation testing for general purpose programming languages and from spreadsheet errors that have been reported in literature. These operators are integrated into a system, called μTest, which allows users to create and maintain spreadsheet test cases. Three...
This project aims to study the performance of Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Protocol implemented in JAVA for web applications. Secure Sockets Layer protocol allows client/server applications to communicate in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, or message forgery. In particular, this project focuses on an implementation of...
There has been little research into how end users might be able to communicate advice to machine learning systems. If this resource--the users themselves--could somehow work hand-in-hand with machine learning systems, the accuracy of learning systems could be improved and the users' understanding and trust of the system could improve...
We designed a concise way to store and manipulate GIS coverage data in a geospatial database. Our
geospatial database is implemented with PostgreSQL and PostGIS. PostgreSQL is an object-relational
database, and PostGIS supports various geospatial operations as an SQL extension. In our Oregon
Relational Spatial Topology (ORST) approach, topological relationships...
The Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD) is the department responsible for providing reasonable
accommodation to students with documented disabilities. Each term, SSD serves approximately 500
students and receives hundreds of requests for various services. These services range from alternative
testing, alternative formats, notetaking, classroom relocation, and requests for tables...
Almost every student in the School of EECS undergoes the process of Blanket Credit
Registration wherein the student has to fill out the form for registration, meet the
concerned professor and obtain his approval. The staff of the department has to maintain
the details of the student and the Professor...
3D datasets acquire great importance in the context of medical imaging. In this thesis we survey and enhance solutions to problems inherently associated with 3D datasets-processing time,noise and visualization. Efforts include development of a tool kit to provide a multi-threaded processing platform to cut processing time, produce real time visualization...
Delay insensitive asynchronous circuitry provides significant advantages with
respect to substrate noise due to localized switching. The differences between the
substrate noise from NULL Convention Logic (NCL) and traditional Clocked
Boolean Logic (CBL) are described and analyzed based on measured results. A test chip fabricated in the TSMC 0.25 um...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs), contact resistance and instability assessment.
First, determination of the contact resistance of indium tin oxide (ITO) on two wide-band gap semiconductors, zinc oxide (ZnO) and indium gallium oxide (IGO), is attempted and the effects of contact resistance on device...
Cryptographic devices leak timing and power consumption information that is easily measurable, radiation of various levels, and more. Such devices also have additional inputs, other than plaintext and keys, like voltage, which can be modified to force the device to produce certain faulty outputs that can be used to reveal...
A digital implementation of a PLL has several advantages compared to its
analog counterpart. These include easy scalability with process shrink, elimination
of the noise susceptible analog control for a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and
the inherent noise immunity of digital circuits. Several recent digital PLL (DPLL)
implementations have achieved...
High performance multi-cell delta-sigma modulators are a preferred choice in applications which require programmability. Multi-cell delta-sigma modulators with M unit cells provide 10log10(M) SQNR improvement for the same thermal noise and bias power due to the uncorrelated quantization noises of the M unit ADCs. This concept is used in this...
This dissertation presents a dual-path 2-0 MASH (Multi-stAge-noise -SHaping) ADC with two verified digital corrections of DAC mismatch error and quantization noise leakage. By using these two techniques, the requirements for the analog circuits are greatly relaxed. The dual-path structure generates two outputs, one only composed of conversion errors, the...
Scaling of CMOS technology has progressed relentlessly for the past several
decades. In order for this unprecedented scaling to benefit the performance of
large digital systems, the communication bandwidth between integrated circuits
(ICs) must scale accordingly. However, interconnect technology does not scale as
aggressively, making communication between chips the major...
As the functionality of digital chips continues to increase dramatically, chip- to-chip communication bandwidths must scale accordingly to avoid constraining the overall system performance. Therefore, high speed transceiver design has be- come an important research topic. In particular, the performance of the circuits that are responsible for timing accuracy are...
Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) with wide dynamic range and high
linearity are required for high-end audio applications. A multi-bit delta sigma
audio DAC, using a novel gain-correction technique, is described in this thesis. For
widely varying on-chip RC time constant, the DAC gain can be accurately
controlled by the correction circuitry....
A Z-parameter based macromodel for characterizing the substrate noise coupling in a lightly doped substrate at low frequencies has been developed. The model is scalable with contact geometries and separation. The cross-coupling impedance between two contacts is modeled using an improved geometric mean distance formulation. This approach obviates the need...
Packet loss, delay and time-varying bandwidth are three main problems facing multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Existing techniques such as Media-aware network protocol, network adaptive source and channel coding, etc. have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. But these techniques either need specialized...
Dynamic multithreaded processors attempt to increase the performance of a single
sequential program by dynamically extracting threads from sources such as loop
iterations. The scheduling of instructions in such a processor plays a vital role in the
amount of thread level parallelism that can be extracted and thus the overall...
The Line Integral Convolution (LIC) is a mainstay of flow visualization. It is, however, computationally intensive, which limits its interactivity. Also, when used to view three-dimensional (3D) vector fields, the resulting images are dense and cluttered, making it difficult to perceive the flow on the interior parts of the field....
Oftentimes in visualization, the goal of using volume datasets is not just to visualize them but also to analyze and compare them. In order to compare the two volumes, we cannot take all the voxels into consideration. The size of a typical volume data set is quite large (maybe a...
The primary objective of the thesis research is to study novel schemes of on-chip crosstalk suppression employing magnetic films at microwave frequencies. Since extraction of various material properties of the magnetic films is essential for successful application of the proposed method, the research also involves development of a new material...
The amount of instruction level parallelism (ILP) that can be exploited depends
greatly on the size of the instruction window and the number of in-flight instructions
the processor can support. However, this requires a register file with a large set of
physical registers for renaming and multiple ports to provide...
Full dynamic control of physically simulated characters is the holy grail of video
games and other interactive applications. Recent advances in the field have
presented controllers that can handle the balance and fall response after a
collision. This thesis addresses the development of a controller that handles the
response before...
Finding information can cost a significant amount of time, even when the information is already stored on the user’s local computer system. There is significant research aimed at reducing these time costs, but little research into exactly what these costs are or how they impact people’s use of tools and...
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), which has been very attractive for future high rate wireless communications, is very robust to channel multipath fading effect while providing high transmission data rate with high spectral efficiency.
Multiple antennas can be combined with OFDM to increase diversity gain and to improve spectral efficiency...
Software maintenance accounts for a large portion of the software development cost, particularly the process of updating programs either to adapt for requirement change or to enhance design or efficiency. Currently, program updates are generally performed manually by programmers using text editors. This is an unreliable
method because syntax and...
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna technology is promising
for high-speed wireless communications without increasing the transmission band-
width. Space time coding (STC) is a scheme that employs multiple antennas to
increase transmission rate or to improve transmission quality. STC is used widely
in mobile cellular networks, wireless local area networks (WLAN)...
As the Tekbots program expands into senior and graduate level classes at Oregon State University, so does the need arise for more complex learning platforms. These complex hardware platforms cannot be adequately tested in a manufacturing environment as we have done previously. Also, due to their complexity, these platforms require...
Authentication protocols play important roles in network security. A variety of authentication protocols ranging from complex public-key cryptosystems to simple password-based authentication schemes have been proposed. However, currently there is no fully secure authentication scheme that can resist all known attacks. When a user authentication is performed over an insecure...
The substrate noise injected by a stepped buffer circuit into two single-ended 1.5GHz low noise amplifiers is examined for a heavily doped 0.25µm CMOS process. The difference in the LNA noise rejection is characterized as a function of the size and placement of substrate contacts. The use of a resistive...
This thesis presents a model for simulating individual pedestrian motion based on empirical data. The model keeps track of a pedestrian’s position, orientation, and body configuration and leverages motion capture data to generate plausible motion. Our model can automatically incorporate a pedestrian’s physical limitations when making movement decisions, since it...
Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers’ debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information...
A digital phase locked loop (DPLL) and a statistical time-to-digital converter (STDC) were previously fabricated in a 0.35µm, 3.3V SOI CMOS process. This work summarizes these designs and characterizes the measured performance. Simulations supplement the measurements where applicable.
The DPLL was found to reach a locked state under a limited...
Achieving sharpened (enhanced detail) features of a multi-dimensional data source using the linear prediction (LP) bandwidth extrapolation (BWE) technique in the transform domain is the main objective of this research. The evolution of sensor technology has provided acquisition scenarios in which the data format is inherently multi-dimensional, including hyperspectral imaging...
The code reuse problem is a common software engineering problem in scientific computing. As a prevailing programming language in many scientific fields, Fortran does not provide support to address this problem. One particular reason is that Fortran lacks the support for generic programming. By applying program-generation techniques, we developed two...
Traditional application of Voronoi diagrams for space partitioning creates Voronoi regions, with areas determined by the generators’ relative locations and weights. Especially in the area of information space (re)construction, however, there is a need for inverse solutions; i.e., finding weights that result in regions with predefined areas. In this thesis,...
Accurate scaled modeling and simulation are critical to advancing ocean wave linear generator buoys. A 100th scaled model of ocean wave generator buoy systems is analyzed by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. These equations are numerically solved using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) by implementing the front capturing method. In this thesis,...
Power reduction can be achieved at many different levels, such as architecture, algorithm, logic, and transistor levels in circuit design. This thesis focuses on low power scheduling at the algorithm level. We present a latency-constrained scheduling and a latency and resource constrained scheduling, which minimize power consumption for the resources...
In modern on-chip memories, an increasing demand for higher performance, lower power, reduced area, and improved robustness creates a rising need for advanced microarchitecture and circuit design techniques. Particularly in large-signal multi-ported register files, these advanced design techniques include: (i) multi-banked arrays, (ii) multi-frequency arrays, (iii) multi-bit width gating, (iv)...
We present an approach for generating a character’s response in anticipation of an impending impact. Protective anticipatory movement is built upon several simple actions that have been identified as response mechanisms in monkeys and in humans. These actions are parameterized by a model of the interaction based on the approaching...
The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
This thesis presents a domain specific visual language designed to allow coaches to create content that exhibits the complex 2D interactions observed in the game of American football. Coaches can visually program the content by using symbols and drawing primitives similar to those that they currently use to design static...
Smart weapons promise to provide leap ahead capability with regard to accuracy and engagement range for medium and large caliber projectiles. One of the most critical components of a smart weapon system is its sensor suite that provides position, orientation, and velocity information as the projectile flies down range so...
As broadband Internet becomes widely available, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) applications over the Internet are becoming increasingly popular. Such an example is a video multicast application in which, one source streams a video to a large number of destination nodes through an overlay multicast tree consisting of peers.
These overlay multicast-based applications,...
Popular applications such as P2P file sharing, multiplayer gaming, videoconferencing, etc. rely on the efficiency of content distribution from a single source to multiple receivers. Most users of these applications are on the widely prevalent source constraint networks such as the Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) and wireless networks. Overlay multicast...
Ultra-wideband (UWB) communication has emerged as a very promising
technology for short-range wireless applications, including
high-speed multimedia transmissions and sensor networks. UWB
system designs involve many different aspects covering analog and
digital processing, channel estimation and modeling, and
modulation and demodulation. Although UWB still faces many
challenges, significant progress has...
Protein secondary structure prediction plays a pivotal role in predicting protein folding in three-dimensions. Its task is to assign each residue one of the three secondary structure classes helix, strand, or random coil. This is an instance of the problem of sequential supervised learning in machine learning. This thesis describes...