Active contour models have been widely applied to image segmentation and
analysis. It has been successfully used in contour detection for object recognition,
computer vision, computer graphics, and biomedical image processing such as X-ray,
MRI and Ultrasound images.
The energy-minimizing active contour models or snakes were developed by Kass,
Witkin...
Humans are remarkably efficient in learning by interacting with other people and observing their behavior. Children learn by watching their parents’ actions and mimic their behavior. When they are not sure about their parents demonstration, they communicate with them, ask questions, and learn from their feedback. On the other hand,...
Semi-supervised clustering aims to improve clustering performance by considering user supervision in the form of pairwise constraints. In this paper, we study the active learning problem of selecting pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints for semisupervised clustering. We consider active learning in an iterative manner where in each iteration queries are...
Successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters are popular for medium accuracy, medium speed and low power applications, such as in biomedical applications. They have low latency and simple architecture compared with ΔΣ ADCs. This is because of SAR ADCs’ binary searching scheme. Furthermore, SAR ADCs can apply oversampling and noise shaping schemes...
Knowledge workers are struggling in the information flood. There is a growing interest in intelligent desktop environments that help knowledge workers organize their daily life. Intelligent desktop environments allow the desktop user to define a set of “activities” that characterize the user’s desktop work. These environments then attempt to identify...
Partial programming is a field of study where users specify an outline or skeleton of a program, but leave various parts undefined. The undefined parts are then completed by an external mechanism to form a complete program. Adaptation-Based Programming (ABP) is a method of partial programming that utilizes techniques from...
The broadband wireless interference in a computer platform is resulted by multiple electro-magnetic emission sources. This non-Gaussian interference is proved to be double-sided K-distributed in previous research. With the limitation of transmission power and dimension of the device, interference mitigation is an efficient way to improve received signal bit error...
This thesis presents an adaptive modulation scheme using a Walsh-code modulator. The Walsh-code modulator consists of a dynamic demultiplexer and predetermined sets of orthogonal Walsh-Hadamard codes. The demultiplexer can demultiplex the input bit stream into a maximum of thirty-two sub-streams. The Walsh- Hadamard codes are used to spread the spectrum...
As the number of mobile devices accessing large-scale WLANs such as campus
and metropolitan area networks increases, the need for load balancing among the
cells becomes crucial. In addition, the network must also support some minimum
handoff tolerance defined by an application.
A number of load balancing techniques have been...
Movement intent decoders, which interpret volitional movement intent from human bioelectric signals, can be incorporated into modern neuroprostheses to offer people living with limb loss or paralysis the potential to regain their lost motor control. Machine learning methods have become the research standard for continuous decoders with high degrees of...
Rapid advances in wireless networking have led to more mobile phones, PDAs, and other digital mobile devices becoming ubiquitously connected to the Internet. As the demand of delay sensitive real-time applications for these portable devices increases, providing seamless connectivity to wireless networks becomes a critical issue. For this reason, a...
The ubiquity of high quality video and proliferation of mobile devices has contributed to an unprecedented rise in video consumption. HTTP, in conjunction with adaptive streaming, has become the de facto mechanism for delivering the vast majority of video as it readily caters to heterogeneous networks and devices. This dissertation...
Heatmap regression has became one of the mainstream approaches to localize facial landmarks. As Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) are becoming popular in solving computer vision tasks, extensive research has been done on these architectures. However, the loss function for heatmap regression is rarely studied. In...
The exponential rate of advances in modern communication devices in the last several years have brought us higher levels of functionality and performance as well as reductions in physical size and power consumption. To continue this rate of advancement, next generation systems require wider bandwidth and higher resolution ADCs. Additionally,...
The Internet is growing rapidly in terms of websites, users and uses. People use the Internet for reference, shopping, social networking, communications, business and much more. Though the Internet is useful, there are many risks associated with its use, like malicious websites, identity theft, hateful content and fraudulent practices. Online...
Markov Decision Process (MDP) is a well-known framework for devising the optimal decision making strategies under uncertainty. Typically, the decision maker assumes a stationary environment which is characterized by a time-invariant transition probability matrix. However, in many real-world scenarios, this assumption is not justified, thus the optimal strategy might not...
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)...
Traditionally linear actuator applications are addressed by the use of hydraulic systems. The high maintenance cost and poor reliability will always be the most critical problem in the real applications. Benefited from both the high mechanical advantage of the roll screw and the simple structure of the switched reluctance motor,...
The appropriate separation of concerns is a fundamental engineering principle. A concern, for software developers, is that which must be represented by code in a program; by extension, separation of concerns is the ability to represent a single concern in a single appropriate programming language construct. Advanced separation of concerns...
This dissertation proposes the use of advanced time-varying approaches for modeling the dynamics of the multipath channel in wireless communication networks. These advanced time-varying approaches include linear Kalman innovation models in observable block companion form, and neural network-based models. The e˙ectiveness of these type of models is evaluated through three...
Preventative methods for software reverse engineering have been given greater attention in recent times due to the increase in computational resources and tools available to the public. The inherent security provided by encoding source into machine code (executable form) can no longer be assumed, given the availability of effective automated...
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...
Simultaneous translation, which translates concurrently with the source language speech, is widely used in many scenarios including multilateral organizations. However, it is well known to be one of the most challenging tasks for humans due to the simultaneous perception and production in two languages. On the other hand, simultaneous translation...
Global Positioning Systems have allowed for precise timing of power system measurements over wide areas. This newly found capability has the potential to provide much greater insight into the operation of the power system and its response to contingencies, but few analytical techniques currently exist that provide enough robustness and...
Question Answering in natural language processing has achieved significant progress in recent years. Yet, training and testing set methodology to evaluate the language models has proved inadequate. Adversarial examples aid us in finding loopholes inside these models and provide insights into their inner workings. In this work, an evaluation based...
We consider the problem of strategic adversarial planning in a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. Strategic adversarial planning is the generation of a network of high-level tasks to satisfy goals while anticipating an adversary's actions. In this thesis we describe an abstract state and action space used for planning in an...
Complex games such as RTS games are naturally formalized
as Markov games. Given a Markov game, it is often possible
to hand-code or learn a set of policies that capture the
diversity of possible strategies. It is also often possible to
hand-code or learn an abstract simulator of the game...
Increased penetration of renewable energy sources results in higher operating reserve requirements, due to the inherent variability and uncertainty of these resources. Many studies, primarily focusing on wind and solar, have determined that geographic diversity of variable renewables substantially reduces system variability and uncertainty. The Pacific Northwest is well suited...
The tools and infrastructure used in tech, including Open Source Software (OSS), can embed “inclusivity bugs”—features that disproportionately disadvantage particular groups of contributors. To see whether OSS developers have existing practices to ward off such bugs, we surveyed 266 OSS developers. Our results show that a majority (77%) of developers...
The aim of the research undertaken for this thesis was to develop a new high-performance amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) for use as a channel layer in a thin-film transistor (TFT). AOS TFTs offer higher electron mobility than the established amorphous silicon based technology. A new channel material comprised of aluminum...
This thesis presents algorithms and tools for the automated design of RF LC CMOS voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) with low phase noise given a set of specifications. The electromagnetic solver, ASITIC, combined with the circuit simulator, SpectreRF, allows optimization of the VCO circuit parameters and inductor layout. This approach gives...
Within the past several years the technology of high-throughput sequencing has transformed the study of biology by offering unprecedented access to life's fundamental building block, DNA. With this transformation's potential a host of brand-new challenges have emerged, many of which lend themselves to being solved through computational methods. From de...
The research presented herein represents an effort to combine the ultra-smooth surface of an amorphous metal thin film (AMTF) with a solution-processed dielectric synthesized via prompt inorganic condensation (PIC). Analysis of dielectric film quality is carried out via electrical measurements of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diodes. Anneals at 500 and 700 °C...
The objective of this thesis is to provide an initial demonstration of two-terminal and three-terminal electronic devices employing amorphous multi-component metallic film
(AMMF) electrodes. Such a demonstration is successfully achieved in the fabrication of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diode and hot electron transistor (HETs) structures employing ZrCuAlNi AMMF electrodes. The ultra-smooth surface...
Amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) thin-film transistors (TFTs) constitute the central theme of this thesis. Within this theme, three primary areas of focus are pursued.
The first focus is the realization of a transparent three-stage ring oscillator with buffered output and an output frequency in the megahertz range. This leads to...
The focus of this thesis is the investigation of thin-film transistors (TFTs) based on amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) in two circuit applications. To date, circuits implemented with AOS-based TFTs have been primarily enhancement-enhancement inverters, ring oscillators based on these inverters operating at peak frequencies up to ~400 kHz, and two-transistor...
In this thesis, convergence of time inhomogeneous Markov chains is studied using an adiabatic approach. The adiabatic framework considers slowly changing systems and the adiabatic time quantifies the time required for the change such that the final state of the system is close to some equilibrium state. This approach is...
Renewable energy, particularly wind power, has increased dramatically over the past two decades. In the Pacific Northwest, the power system has accommodated a large amount of new wind power. The variability of wind power has introduced many challenges, requiring additional reserve generation to be available to maintain system stability. The...
Students’ success is one of the foremost objectives in higher education, and their self-efficacy plays a prominent role in students’ achieving their full potentials. It is especially important in STEM fields, which often suffer from higher attrition rates. Therefore, it is important to understand students’ self-efficacy levels at an early...
This thesis considers the problem of training convolutional neural networks for online visual tracking. A major challenge for single object visual tracking is that most training sets with frame-level track annotations are quite small, due to the prohibitive cost of manual annotation. Current training approaches either supplement the annotations with...
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm brought an ever-increasing dependence on low-power devices to collect sensor data and transmit that information to the cloud, placing greater demand on connectivity and lifespan. In response, rapid worldwide innovation demonstrates the trade-offs in processing, communication, and energy consumption with diverse approaches to low-power...
Smart home devices, such as voice assistants, smart lights, and smart video doorbells have become a part of end users' daily lives. Many of these devices combine their features with other services and smart devices to create a simple and efficient user experience. This is partly because of the contribution...
Protecting end-users privacy and building trust are the two most important factors needed to support the growth of ecommerce. The increased dependence on the Internet for a wide variety of daily transactions causes a corresponding loss in privacy for many users, as virtually all websites collect data from users directly...
This thesis presents a Z-parameter based model to predict the substratenoise coupling between two contacts in a heavily doped substrate for frequenciesless than 2 GHz. The empirical model is scalable with contact size and spacingsbetween the contacts and model parameters can be readily extracted from simu-lated or measured data. The...
As more features are being integrated into mobile platforms, the demand for
long battery life during standby mode has been increasing. Light load efficiency
becomes one of essential features in today's DC-DC converter. The most effective
method to improve light load efficiency is to operate the DC-DC converter under
pulse-frequency-modulation...
Mutation analysis is a well-known method for measuring the quality of test suites. However, it is computationally intensive compared to other measures, which makes it hard to use in practice. Choosing a smaller subset of mutations to run is a simple approach that can alleviate this problem. Mutation operator selection...
We model the popular board game of Clue as an MDP and evaluate Monte-Carlo policy rollout in a simulated environment pitting different agents and policies against each other. We describe the choices we made in the representation, along with some of the problems we encountered along the way. We find...
An enhanced swing differential Colpitts VCO (ESDC-VCO) dramatically improves
the swing of a Colpitts VCO by allowing the signal to swing below ground and above the
supply voltage. Fabricated in a 1P8M 0.13 um CMOS process, the ESDC-VCO operates
at 4.9GHz with a 0.475-V supply and consumes 2.7mW. The measured...
Macrosomia is a medical term describing a new baby born with an excessive birth weight (greater than 4000g). Fetal macrosomia may lead to both pregnancy complications, and increased risk of mother's and baby's health problems after birth. But the potential complications may be mitigated by a cesarean delivery. As such,...