The electrical stability of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc oxide (a-IGZO) thinfilmtransistors (TFTs) is investigated for flat-panel display applications. Althoughproducts incorporating a-IGZO TFT backplanes are already commercially available,e.g., iMac with 5K retina display, technical challenges need to be addressed for nextgenerationapplications, e.g., active-matrix organic light-emitting diode displays.Device stability is one crucial issue. The...
In modern digital communication systems, error correction codes (ECC) are widely used and play an important role. The main effect of ECCs is to reduce the transmission error caused by channel noise, thereby protecting data and increasing the quality of information transmission. In addition, high spectral efficiency is desired in...
As one of the most popular data types, the point cloud is widely used in various appli- cations, including computer vision, computer graphics and robotics. The capability to directly measure 3D point clouds is invaluable in those applications as depth information could remove a lot of the segmentation ambiguities in...
RF-based signal identification and classification has received growing attention during recent years due to its potential use in many application domains. Of particular interest is Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC), which has been useful in addressing various spectrum related challenges such as signal jamming, policy enforcement, and spectrum sharing. Adopting AMC...
We explore the application of deep learning to the disparate fields of natural language processing and computational biology. Both the sentences uttered by humans as well as the RNA and protein sequences found within the cells of their bodies can be considered formal languages in computer science, as sets of...
The abilities of plant biologists to characterize the genetic basis of physiological traits are limited by their abilities to obtain quantitative data representing precise details of trait variation and mainly to collect this data on a high-throughput scale at low cost. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated unprecedented potential to automate...
There is a new possibility of generating deep ultraviolet laser radiation from a solid-state source. With recent advances in material development, a new nonlinear optical crystal provides a greater damage threshold than current materials making higher conversion efficiencies possible.
This thesis examines the possibility of using this crystal to generate...
Substations are a crucial element at the transmission and distribution level of electric power systems. The primary substation equipment (power transformers and high voltage switching equipment) is used to transfer and transform electric energy by stepping up or down the voltage in transmission substations. Secondary equipment (such as IEDs, Intelligent...
Autonomous vehicles bring great societal benefits but also potential impact and disruption to road safety, traffic congestion, and driving behaviors. One important technology that is indispensable to the success of such systems is vehicular networks. Vehicular networks provide the backbone for ensuring communication and connectivity among vehicles, all crucial to...
This work gives some theory and efficient design of binary block codes capable of controlling the deletions of the symbol “0” (referred to as 0-deletions) and/or the insertions of the symbol “0” (referred to as 0-insertions). This problem of controlling 0-deletions and/or 0-insertions (referred to as symmetric 0-errors) is shown...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore dependency speculation in Dynamic Simultaneous Multi-Threading (DSMT). DSMT is a microprocessor architecture which attempts to extract Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) from single-threaded programs at run-time. This is accomplished by running multiple iterations of program loops in parallel. The DSMT architecture was originally...
This project presents a new, and more versatile, method for performing Relief Mapping (also known as Parallax Occlusion Mapping), utilizing rates of change in texture coordinates across a polygon surface to calculate the texture sampling offsets used in the ray-tracing portion of the Relief Mapping algorithm. This new technique relies...
The increasing demand for higher data-rates in spectrum-deficient indoor WiFi networks calls for the adaptation of hybrid systems, consisting of RF and optical wireless channels. The novel hybrid WiFi Free-Space Optical (WIFO) system was introduced to enhance the wireless capacity of indoor WiFi networks. In this thesis, an optical wireless...
The widespread use of wireless devices that we have recently been witnessing, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and wirelessly accessible devices in general, is causing an unprecedented growth in the required amount of the wireless radio spectrum. On the other hand, the spectrum resource has, for the last several decades,...
Industry today is pushing personal portable handheld communication de- vices, from cellular telephones to personal navigation systems, and society is embracing the push. The goal is to make compact multi-functional handheld products that can transfer information to those around us through high bandwidth mobile communications. These modules rely heavily on...
Two aspects of ADC system performance are addressed in this work. First, the combination of the ADC and its associated reference are co-designed for an energy constrained remote sensing system. Second, sampling linearity is mathematically analyzed as a function of frequency to provide enhanced understanding into an ADC's requisite sampling...
Variability is an important and widely studied topic across domains such as version control, software product lines, and metaprogramming. This dissertation presents an investigation into the process of systematically adding variability to data structures and programs, leading to guidelines for variational data structures and implications for programs that create, manipulate,...
Inter-symbol interference is one of the major factors that make the realization of high-data-rate digital communications system complex. Current designs face two main challenges: how to efficiently utilize the available bandwidth and how to reduce the hardware complexity of the transmitter and receiver. Traditional solutions use a single-band architecture. When...
Ocean Drifters are a low-cost and easy-to-use platform that are commonly used for studying ocean currents. With added interest in studying the ocean, emphasis has been taken to make it more accessible. A pilot course focused on introducing the topic of ocean sensing was announced. The HC 407 course will...
In this work, an alternating current (ac) magnetic susceptometer is designed and implemented to track the Brownian relaxation time of magnetic nanoparticles that are suspended in a liquid medium. The detection technique based on the Brownian relaxation time of magnetic nanoparticles has found its way in a variety of biosensing...
With the evolving popularity of new computing platforms such as Ultrabooks, Tablets, and Smart Phones, and the shift to multi-core computing, power is now the key performance limiter, a departure from the traditional frequency limitation. As such, increasingly low-power design solutions feature prominently in early architectural and design space exploration...
Microfluidic devices have enabled lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems that allow for complex sample analysis and preparation in a compact form factor. One technology that may benefit from a microfluidic approach and further miniaturization is flow cytometry. Flow cytometry is an analysis technique for enumerating and characterizing populations of cells; this is...
As the sources of our electricity shift from centralized and carbon emitting, to a portfolio of distributed, clean-energy sources, the wave energy converter (WEC) has become a topic of exploration and development for providing coastal communities electric power. Part of this trend has included an effort to create open source...
Ring amplifiers (ringamps) have shown excellent power efficiency in the latest state-of-the-art analog to digital converters (ADCs). This thesis describes circuit techniques to ensure robust operation of ringamps using standard analog techniques and proportional-integral-derivative(PID) controller analogy. Large-signal and small-signal analysis of a ringamp are performed using simple RC settling and...
This work presents the design and implementation of a low power phased-array receiver frontend at 28 GHz in 65 nm CMOS. The frontend incorporates a low- power low-noise amplifier(LNA) and a passive reflection-type phase shifter (RTPS) capable of providing 360° phase shift with 5-bit phase resolution and low loss variation....
In recent years, there has been growing interest in both industry and academia to use continuous-time (CT) Δ-Σ A/D converters for wideband wireless and wireline communication applications.
So far no reported CT Δ-Σ A/D modulator achieves 14-bit or higher dynamic range (DR) with more than 2MHz signal bandwidth (equivalently 4MS/s)....
Complex digital circuits such as microprocessors typically require support circuitry that has traditionally been realized using analog or mixed-signal macros. PLL circuits are used in many integrated applications such as frequency synthesizers and inter-chip communication interfaces. As process technologies advance and grow in complexity, the challenge of maintaining required analog...
A variable gain, high linearity, low power baseband filter for WLAN applications is implemented in a 1.5 V 3 V 0.15 μm CMOS process. This fourth-order low-pass filter, which is introduced in the transmit channel as a reconstruction filter between the D/A converter and the mixer, has a measured cut-off...
Embedded passives in multi-layer media have gained importance for offering an attractive solution to the implementation of off-chip passive components in RF and mixed signal circuits, especially for wireless applications. Among the passive devices, power dividers and combiners are extensively used for a host of applications including balanced mixers, phase...
Emerging fifth generation (5G) and beyond 5G communication networks are stimulating the design of radio-frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) integrated circuits for wireless transceivers systems. While co-integration of active circuits and diverse passive components becomes feasible at these high operating frequencies, circuit design is faced with significant challenges due to...
Ever increasing global internet data traffic has driven up the demand for cutting-edge high-speed wireline communication systems including SerDes PHY for various interfaces, interconnects, data centers servers and switches in optical systems. Operating wireline communications at higher data rates leads to signals suffering from greater channel loss and exponential increase...
Recently, switched capacitor DC/DC converters are extensively used in portable electronic devices because they feature many advantages, such as high efficiency, small package, low quiescent current, minimal external components and low cost. In this thesis, two step-down switched capacitor DC/DC converters are designed. One has the fixed output options 1.5V,...
Advances in electronic systems have lead to the demand for high resolution, high bandwidth Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs). Oversampled ADCs are well- known for high accuracy applications since they benefit from noise shaping and they usually do not need highly accurate components. However, as a consequence of oversampling, they have limited...
Networks of on-line modules for Digital Signal Processing (DSP) applications have been designed and analyzed in many papers. Various arguments have been made for on-line arithmetic over other bit-serial and parallel approaches. However, the majority, if not all of the on-line network implementations presented throughout the literature do not take...
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...
VCO-based ADCs have recently emerged as attractive alternative to conventional DeltaSigma (ΔΣ) modulator architectures. Few salient features of a VCObased ADC are: 1) the quantization noise is 1st order noise shaped, 2) it is an open loop architecture, and, 3) its implementation is mostly digital in nature. Hence, they are...
Solid-state based lighting offers a number of advantages such as long life, high efficiency
and compactness compared to a conventional halogen tube based lighting.
Due to these advantages they are being increasingly used in a variety of lighting
applications including portable devices, home, and automotive lighting. Consequently,
there has been...
The increasing popularity of cellular phones with integrated cameras in the
recent past has led to major improvements in its image quality. However, integration of new features, such as mobile email, video streaming, MP3 etc. tend to put the limitation on image quality as camera phone designers struggle to manage...
Phase-Locked Loops (PLLs) are essential building blocks in many communication systems. Designing high performance analog PLLs in the presence of technology imposed constraints such as leakage, poor analog transistor behavior, process variability, and low supply voltage is a challenging task. To overcome these drawbacks, digital PLLs (DPLLs) have recently emerged...
This dissertation presents an incremental analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with digital digital-to-analog converter (DAC) mismatch correction. A theoretical time-domain analysis technique was developed to predict the noise performance of the incremental ADC, and a new optimization technique was proposed to minimize the output noise.
In the calibration mode, the incremental ADC...
This dissertation presents two high-speed pipeline successive approximation analog-to-digital converters (SAR ADCs). Capacitive DACs and resistive DACs are utilized in these two pipeline SAR ADCs, respectively.
The pipeline SAR ADC with capacitive DACs can save 50% switching power compared with other time-interleaved SAR ADCs since the total capacitance of the...
As computation power continues to grow, the demand for data transfer bandwidth is also rising. This is reflected in the increasing data-rate of high-speed links. However, the increase in data-rate is sustainable only if the I/O energy efficiency improves as well. This dissertation explores several techniques to enable high-speed links...
Ultra-high-speed (>10GS/s), medium-resolution (5~6bit), low-power (<50mW) analog-to-digital converter can find it application in the areas of digital oscilloscopes and next-generation serial link receivers. There are several challenges to enable a successful design, however. First, the time-interleaved architecture is required in order to achieve over 10GS/s sampling rate, with the trade-off...
With the ever-increasing demand for portable devices used in applications
such as wireless communication, mobile computing, consumer electronics, etc.,
the scaling of the CMOS process to deep submicron dimensions becomes more
important to achieve low-cost, low-power and high-performance digital systems.
However, this downscaling also requires similar shrinking of the supply...
The continued scaling of deep-submicron CMOS technology enables low-voltage high-frequency phase-locked loops (PLLs) to be fully integrated in complex mixed-signal systems. However, fluctuations due to the manufacturing process and variations in
environmental conditions, such as supply voltage and temperature, are also significantly increased. As a result, the performance of PLLs...
Spacecrafts experience radiation in the course of their operation
and all electronic equipment on board these spacecrafts has to
be designed to withstand the effects of this radiation.
This thesis describes the effects of total ionization dose (TID)
and single event transients (SET) in phase-locked loops - an
important circuit...
Successive approximation register analog-to-digital converters (SAR ADCs) have been widely used for medium-speed, medium-resolution applications due to their excellent power efficiency and digital compatibility. Recently, SAR ADCs are also penetrating into the applications which have been earlier dominated by delta-sigma ADCs and pipeline ADCs. However, the resolution of SAR ADCs...
Modern day CMOS processes are characterized by voltage scaling and geometry scaling. Geometry scaling helps reduce gate delays, thereby aiding in the design of data converters which use time based processing. Another artifact of geometry scaling is the increase in complexity of digital circuitry available on traditional analog ICs, as...
Sensors find a variety of applications in portable electronics, automotive and biomedical solutions. The demand for low power and high dynamic range makes the design of digital sensor readout circuits quite challenging. Traditionally, these circuits are realized using amplifiers with passive feedback or precision analog comparators which are power hungry...
Noise-shaping multibit quantizers in a ΔΣ modulator offer extra orders of noise shaping without increasing the loop-filter order and without compromising the stability of the modulator. This dissertation presents two new architectures for improving the overall performance of continuous-time ΔΣ modulators using noise-shaped quantizers.
The first modulator architecture is motivated...
Delta-Sigma (ΔΣ) analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are traditionally used in high quality audio systems, instrumentation and measurement (I&M) and biomedical devices. With the continued downscaling of CMOS technology, they are becoming popular in wideband applications such as wireless and wired communication systems,high-definition television and radar systems. There are two general realizations...
The rapid scaling of network bandwidth and data center throughput has motivated the wide adoption of high speed transceivers. Silicon photonics (Si-Photonic) is one of the most promising techniques to realize tightly integrated optical transceivers for next-generation high speed I O standards. This dissertation focuses on the design techniques of...
Metal grating based plasmonic filters are widely researched for their unique properties of field enhancement and localization of light beyond diffraction limit. However, the plasmonic grating filters reported in literature mostly have broadband outputs making them unsuitable for spectroscopy. In this project, we have designed, fabricated, and characterized an array...
Accessing information on the Web has become ingrained into our daily lives, and we seek information from many different sources, including conference and journal publications, personal web pages, and others. Increasingly, web-based information retrieval systems such as web-based search engines, library on-line catalog systems, and subscription-based federated search systems are...
Spintronics is an emerging field of research dealing with devices that can potentially exploit the additional degree of freedom provided by the electron spin along with or instead of the conventional electronic charge. One of the most promising aspects of spintronics is the potential use of magnetostatic spin waves as...
Over time, Open Source Software (OSS) has become indispensable in the creation and upkeep of software products, serving as the fundamental building block for widely used solutions in our daily lives, including applications that enable communication, entertainment, and productivity. A sustainable OSS ecosystem is one that attracts and retains a...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore the design of a multimedia extension Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) for a reconfigurable processor. An Extendable Multimedia Module (EM3) was designed as an optional module for X32V. X32V is a prototype configurable processor simulator developed at Oregon State University by John Mark...
Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in AI. Our focus is to move toward AI systems that can develop common-sense reasoning similar to humans to detect anomalies. In particular, we study the problem of detecting the violation of expectations when object appearance or motion dynamics change from...
Spreadsheets are a widely used end-user programming tool. Field audits have found that 80-90% of spreadsheets created by end users contain textual and formula errors in spreadsheets. Such errors may have severe negative consequences for users in terms of productivity, credibility, or profits. To solve the problem of spreadsheet errors,...
Induction motors are considered to be the work horse in all types of today's industries. In all mechanical applications, using an induction motor is considered to be the preferable, if not the optimum selection. Their failures, on the other hand, cause an interruption equal to their volume of dependency in...
The ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) phenomenon serves as a sensitive probe of the effective internal fields in a magnetic material. FMR spectroscopy has consequently become a well-established technique, extensively employed in assessing material properties such as magnetic anisotropy, Landé g-factor, damping parameter, and the magnetoelastic constants of magnetic materials. Determining these...
The National Conference of State Legislatures NCSL declares that 29 states have
been active in adopting and increasing renewable portfolio standards. Present
renewable portfolio standards require utilities to increase integration of renewable
energy sources such as photovoltaic (PV). The increased penetration of PV systems
is expected to destabilize the power...
3D volume segmentation is a fundamental process in many scientific and medical applications. Producing accurate segmentations, in an efficient way, is challenging, in part due to low imaging data quality (e.g., noise and low image resolution), and ambiguity in the data that can only be resolved with higher-level knowledge of...
Embedded processors are utilized in many applications with considerable time spent developing and maintaining functionality and performance. Performance being a key factor in adding features such as video and audio to a product. Configurable processors, such as X32V, allow the addition of functionality and performance without large increases in design...
Recent opportunities for new hydropower generation in the United States have often been in non-powered dams and run-of-river type flows occurring in low-impact natural areas and unregulated conduits. At the same time, a changing water resource paradigm is challenging some existing generation in drought stricken areas where supply reservoirs behind...
Modern sensor network applications are often implemented wirelessly in order to lessen installation costs and reduce deployment times. Unfortunately, these wireless sensor network (WSN) nodes must often rely on batteries or energy harvesting techniques in order to sustain their operation and supply the power needed to maintain communication within the...
Renewable energy technology continues to grow in popularity as countries aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Land based and offshore wind turbines are one option for expanding renewable energy sources. However, as wind energy adoption increases, so does the need for enhanced monitoring of wind turbines’ potential effect on local...
As the growth of renewable energy sources, such as wind, solar, and ocean wave, increases, their impact on the electrical grid has been rapidly escalating. Although renewable resources have been able to offset some traditional generation, they have also brought a need for increasing reserve capacity due to their non-dispatchable,...
Ocean Wave Energy Converters (WECs) are of interest around the globe as global economies begin to shift their interest to renewable forms of energy. However, the devices are costly to construct–a quality that can be relieved through proper modeling, control, and implementation. This paper presents the numerical and hybrid simulation...
The work detailed here is the development of simulations and fabrication techniques used for the construction of thin-film acoustic transducers for use in the parametric pumping of spin waves. The Mason Model, a 1-D equivalent circuit simulating the responses of multilayer acoustic transducers, is implemented using ABCD-parameters in MATLAB to...
The performance of the power take-off (PTO) system for a wave energy converter (WEC) depends largely on its control algorithm. This paper presents an adaptive damping control algorithm that improves power capture across a range of sea states. Validation for the numerical model was performed using data from two sources;...
Due to a lack of grain boundaries, an amorphous metal thin film (AMTF) possesses advantageous mechanical properties and enhanced chemical stability that is potentially useful for thermal inkjet (TIJ) printing applications. The use of an AMTF as a TIJ resistor or cavitation plate could lead to a thinner TIJ cavitation...
Model Predictive Control (MPC) has previously been investigated on ocean waveenergy converters (WEC) to improve the amount of power captured, while respectingthe system constraints. Previous research done in the same area, focused onbuilding a control scheme by using the knowledge of the past & current statesof the system and predicting...
In the year 2007, the worldwide energy consumption accumulated to a total of 16.5 billion MWh. While the resources of conventional energy production cause environmental damage, renewable energy sources like solar or wind power offer a solution to substitute for coal or nuclear generated power. Countries like Denmark and Spain...
Current cadmium telluride and copper indium gallium diselenide thin-film solar cells
(TFSCs) utilize thick absorbers (2 - 4 μm). For efficient carrier extraction in these TFSCs,
the absorber layer requires high carrier mobilities and a long minority carrier lifetime, which
necessitates the use of a high purity, defect-free thin film....
Engineering students spend a significant amount of their undergraduate careers focused on technical theory and practice. This intensive student prepares them for their technical challenges in the future. This training is so intense that often the more 'soft skills' such as communication, leadership, design, and troubleshooting are left out or...
The electrical grid serves as one of the major lifelines to our society. We have come to expect electricity to be available when we want it. But the system that delivers power to us is very complex and made up of many individual pieces. Maintaining and operating this system reliably...
The aim of this dissertation is to develop oxide semiconductors by radio-frequency
sputtering for thin-film transistor (TFT) applications. A variety of oxide semiconductors
are used as the TFT channel layer, including indium gallium oxide (IGO), zinc tin
oxide (ZTO), and indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO). The variety of materials used...
Ocean wave energy shows great potential as a developing form of renewable energy. However, challenges arise in maturing this technology to achieve cost-effective energy conversion. Development and testing of wave energy converters can be problematic due to the harsh environment in which they are operated. To promote development of this...
The focus of this thesis involves development of highly transparent, n-channel, accumulation- mode thin-film transistors employing a zinc tin oxide (ZTO) channel layer. ZTO-based transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) show improved device performance compared to ZnO-based TTFTs. An estimated peak effective mobility for these devices as high as ~100 cm² V⁻¹sec⁻¹...
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...
Visual information presented in diagrams promotes information processing both in an individual and in collaborative work. Previous literature has identified the role of diagrams in
understanding information processing in a variety of disciplines. In software engineering, diagrams are a prevalent method involved in process development: diagrams are used for system...
Conventional Delta-Sigma analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) utilize operational transconductance amplifiers (OTAs) in their loop filter implementation followed by multi-bit voltage domain quantizers. As CMOS integrated circuit technology scales to smaller geometries, the minimum transistor length and the intrinsic gain of the transistors decrease. Moreover, with process scaling the voltage headroom decreases...
Digital libraries are digitally accessible, organized collections of knowledge. Although under this broad definition any digitally accessible data set might be considered a digital library, the term is generally reserved for collections whose structures are carefully documented and made available in the form of so-called metadata. There is no specific...
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...
A two-channel data acquisition system for simultaneous detection and discrimination of beta particles and gamma rays has been developed. Each channel measures and analyzes the input pulses resulting from the absorption of radiation in the layers of the detector. The detector is a triple-layer phoswich (phosphor sandwich) scintillation detector followed...
Portable, high power efficiency communication devices is a growing market in the semiconductor industry. Analog-to-digital converters (ADC) are key interface that are used to digitize the sensed information. Recently, digital techniques have been proposed to improve analog building block power efficiency in sub-micron technologies. This research focuses on mixed signal...
Digitally controlled switching DC-DC converters have recently emerged as an attractive alternative to conventional switching converters based on analog control techniques. This research focuses on eliminating the issues associated with the state of the art switching converters by proposing three novel control techniques: (1) a digitally controlled Buck-Boost converter uses...
We present the evolution of a reasoning system for inferring dimension information in
spreadsheets. The three papers included in this thesis show how the initial system can be
used to check the consistency of spreadsheet formulas and thus is able to detect errors in
spreadsheets, and the evolution to a...
Compositional data is a type of data where the features are non-negative and always sum to a constant. This type of data is frequently encountered in many fields such as microbiology, geology, economics and natural language processing. Compositional data has unique statistical properties that makes it difficult to apply standard...
It is well known that multipath effects cause inter-symbol interference (ISI) for high-speed signaling and ultimately limit the achievable data rate at any frequency band. In this thesis, we study several different methods to tackle this issue and provide solutions for establishing efficient wireless links that can provide several Gbps...
A discrete trap model is developed and employed for elucidation of thin-film transistor (TFT) device physics trends. An attractive feature of this model is that only two model parameters are required, the trap energy depth, E[subscript T], and the trap density, N[subscript T]. The most relevant trends occur when E[subscript...
As the power system grows larger and more complex, real-time monitoring and control become very significant in order to achieve reliable operation of the power system. Before any security assessment can be made or control actions are taken, the reliable estimate of the existing state of the system must be...
It is possible to purchase, for as little as $10,000, a cluster of computers with the capability to rival the supercomputers of only a few years ago. Now, users that have little to no experience developing distributed applications or managing a cluster are in a position to do so. To...
Polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells are being studied for use as high efficiency power plants in alternative fuel vehicles. To maintain high efficiency the operating temperatures of the membranes in these fuel cells must be closely monitored and controlled. However, the environment inside of the fuel cell is not...
With continuing improvements in performance and capability, GPU processing has gained significant and growing interest across science and industry. With this interest, research has increasingly focused upon methods of processing algorithms with stochastic, non-uniform branching while maintaining low divergence. Central among these methods is thread-data remapping (TDR), whereby data is...
In diversity combining automatic repeat request (ARQ), erroneous packets are combined together forming a single, more reliable, packet. In this thesis, we give a diversity combining scheme for the m-ary unidirectional channel. A system using the given scheme with a t-unidirectional error detecting code is able to correct up to...
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the de-facto formalism for studying sequential decision making problems with uncertainty, ranging from classical problems such as inventory control and path planning, to more complex problems such as reservoir control under rainfall uncertainty and emergency response optimization for fire and medical emergencies. Most prior research...
Experimental game theory is the use of game theoretic abstractions—games, players, and strategies—in experiments and simulations. It is often used in cases where traditional, analytical game theory fails or is difficult to apply. This thesis collects three previously published papers that provide domain-specific language (DSL) support for defining and executing...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...