Many important application problems in engineering can be formalized as nonlinear
optimization tasks. However, numerical methods for solving such problems
are brittle and do not scale well. For example, these methods depend critically
on choosing a good starting point from which to perform the optimization search.
In high-dimensional spaces, numerical...
Physical activity recognition using accelerometer data is a rapidly emerging field with many real-world applications. Much of the previous work in this area has assumed that the accelerometer data has already been segmented into pure activities, and the activity recognition task has been to classify these segments. In reality, activity...
In this thesis, A nonlinear methodology for the control of the highly
maneuverable, high performance aircraft HARV (F-18) is studied by using sliding-mode
control (SMC). This control law, which takes a continuous function when the
input constraints are not considered, satisfies the reachability condition by which
concerned states are driven...
Automatic analysis of American football videos can help teams develop strategies and extract patterns with less human effort. In this work, we focus on the problem of automatically determining which team is on offense/defense, which is an important subproblem for higher-level analysis. While seemingly mundane, this problem is quite challenging...
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...
In this work, we first introduce a novel approach to the long term irrigation scheduling
using Genetic Algorithms (GAs). We explore the effectiveness of GAs in the context of
optimizing nonlinear crop models and describe application requirements and implementation of
the technique. GAs were found to converge quickly to near-optimal...
Ocean wave energy is a new and developing field of renewable energy with great potential. The energy contained in one meter of an average wave off the coast of Newport Oregon could supply dozens of homes with electricity. However, ocean waves are usually quite irregular which leads to large bursts...
With the development of technologies in genome sequencing and variant detection, a huge number of variants are detected. To further analyze the variants, it requires an efficient tool to annotate the functional effect of variants. This project managed to develop an efficient program to annotate the functional effect of variants...
Anomaly detection has been used in variety of applications in practice, including cyber-security, fraud detection and detecting faults in safety critical systems, etc. Anomaly detectors produce a ranked list of statistical anomalies, which are typically examined by human analysts in order to extract the actual anomalies of interest. Unfortunately, most...
Bayesian Optimization (BO) methods are often used to optimize an unknown function f(•) that is costly to evaluate. They typically work in an iterative manner. In each iteration, given a set of observation points, BO algorithms select k ≥ 1 points to be evaluated. The results of those points are...