Accurate information of power network parameters is essential for performing various power system monitoring and control tasks including state estimation, economic dispatch, and contingency analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach of power network parameter correction wherein we exploit the sparse nature of parameter errors. Parameter error correction...
Deep Learning methods have been gaining a lot of significance for various Biomedical applications for diagnosing several types of diseases. Two applications considered here are: 1) Diabetic Retinopathy Detection and 2) ECG signal Classification (or Arrhythmia Detection). Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a major cause of blindness in Diabetic patients, and...
Using robotics in education allows students to become familiar with multiple topics in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). With the use of robotic educational tools in the 8th – 12th grade classrooms, such as Sphero, Anki Cozmo, and Lego Mindstorms, few devices allow students to build the robots’ electrical...
Movement pattern detection can be applied in a variety of applications such as assisting independent living of seniors at home, behaviour understanding in surveillance systems, sports analytics, and robotics. This project develops a scheme that fuses information from different sensors to detect movement patterns. This report contains three main parts:...
Crowdsourcing is a popular paradigm to address the high demands for labeled data in big data deluge. It aims to produce accurate labels by effectively integrating noisy, non-expert labeling from crowdsourced workers (annotators). The machine learning community has been studying effective crowdsourcing methods for many years, and many models and...
In a power system, operators maintain voltage stability through adequate reactive reserves. Maintaining and accessing an efficient allocation of reactive reserves is prohibitively complex because of reactive line losses, the variety of reactive resources, and either limited or variable reactive outputs from renewable sources. By clustering the system into smaller...
Data acquisition (DAQ) systems are a necessary component for products whose outcomes depend on collected information throughout its operation. Current systems are directed towards users utilizing custom hardware, software, and requiring its user to have high-level skills in coding and system setup; but with the increasing interest in renewable energy,...
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...
This work demonstrates correlation of microwave signals encoded with 16-bit codes using the parametric interaction of spin waves. Signal processing correlators are devices that compare two signals, such as a reference code and a received code, where the output indicates the similarity between the signals. Correlators are used in communication...
Wearable sensors with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) are popular for indoor positioning and activity pattern detection. The IMUs can be connected to a wireless transmission module, allowing users to monitor and process motion-related parameters remotely. Because of the complexity and uncertainty of signals in indoor environments, a radio frequency...
This thesis deals with target localization using multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars. In the field of communications, navigation, radar, and sensing networks, one of the common and most sophisticated problems is target localization. We develop a target localization scheme in distributed MIMO radar systems using bistatic range measurements. The localization approach...
We consider the problem of computing the cannonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) for large-scale dense tensors. This work is a combination of alternating least squares and fiber sampling. Data sparsity can be leveraged to handle large tensor CPD, but this route is not feasible for dense data. Inspired by stochastic optimization's...
While electrification is currently one of the largest trends in the automotive world, other related industries are also evaluating electrification opportunities as a means to reduce environmental impact, emissions, and noise pollution. One such sector is the aviation industry. While it is generally accepted that all-electric aircraft are not a...
In any biomedical signal acquisition system, a front-end amplifier is needed to amplify low amplitude bio-signals while filtering out any unwanted low-frequency artifacts. The design of low frequency poles within the sub-Hz range implies very large time-constants which goes against system integrability. In recent years, the pseudo resistor has been...
The CMOS two-stage Operational Transconductance Amplifier (OTA) has been a key enabler for mixed-signal IC design for nearly four decades . This research focuses on a modified two-stage CMOS OTA that features load-pole cancellation (LPC); i.e., the resulting architecture is essentially a two-stage CMOS OTA with no load capacitance. The...
We consider multiple Compressive Sensing (CS) problems wherein the supports of signal vectors of CS problems are restricted to satisfy a collection of joint logical constraints, which we refer to as coupling constraints. We consider a case where the coupling constraints are encoded in a graph and present a sequential...
Ocean waves provide a promising source of renewable energy for the North American electric grid. However, ideal control of wave energy converters (WECs) requires perfect forecasting of future wave conditions, and waves can be unpredictable. This paper presents a comparison of three different prediction methods and analyzes their performance in...
The increasing demand for higher data-rates is challenging to satisfy with spectrum-deficient indoor WiFi networks. A novel hybrid WiFi Free-Space Optical (WIFO) system has been proposed to enhance the wireless capacity of indoor WiFi networks. In this thesis, an integrated optical wireless receiver is designed and integrated in 65-nm CMOS...
The thesis focuses on the development of a novel printed resistive humidity sensor and integrated flexible electronics for an RFID-enabled humidity sensing platform. We explored a hybrid nanocomposite material for humidity sensing consisting of carbon nanomaterials, conductive polymer and cellulose polymer that undergoes resistance change in response to humidity change....
In this thesis, we propose a Blockchain-based distributed protocol for enabling deployment of dynamic, on-demand IoT networks. Specifically, the proposed protocol leverages Blockchain technology to: (i) enable distributed and secure authentication, registration, and management of IoT devices; (ii) provide fast discovery of IoT resources and scalable and secure instantiation of...
Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) was initially used for anti-jamming in military applications and was later developed in other commercial applications. Walsh codes, which are a set of mutually orthogonal codes, are one type of the spreading codes used in DSSS systems. For any spreading codes of length N, these...
The machine learning and deep learning models have been very lightly explored in analyzing the behavior of On-Chip network traffic. These models have proven their potential in pattern recognition, classification etc... In this paper we analyze the spatial pattern that each workload exhibits in its life cycle during execution. We...
Ring amplification has emerged as an efficient technique to drive large capacitive loads in switched capacitor circuits. We propose circuit techniques to demonstrate the first application of a ring amplifier in a non-capacitive feedback system of a LDO. These techniques enable a simple cap-less LDO structure in 180nm CMOS that...
With the need for higher spectral efficiency and data rates the rise of simultaneous transmit-and-receive (STAR) radios is becoming increasingly valuable. While many systems employ two separate channels for transmit and receive to double the data speed, this comes at the cost of doubling the RF band. This same performance...
Real time indoor positioning awareness systems aim to add localization capabilities to upcoming wireless technologies that are quickly becoming an important feature for indoor environment. RF-based impulse-radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) is a promising technology for in-door positioning systems due to obstacle penetration capabilities, immunity to multi-path and fading, and high resolution....
This work presents an inductor less switched capacitor based energy harvester, which can simultaneously harvest from 2 energy sources (Solar + Piezo). The proposed harvester employs 2D maximum power point tracking algorithm, by changing the conversion ratios of the charge pumps for piezo and solar sources, and 1D voltage regulation...
This thesis concerns the development of a direct torque control strategy using a sliding mode control approach to optimize the power output of an oscillating water column (OWC) wave energy converter (WEC). The OWC WEC is a device that has a submerged vertical tail tube open at both ends, which...
Several hardware-based security improvements to Near Field Communication (NFC) and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) systems are developed and presented. The improvements are intended to be used in conjunction with software encryption to ensure robust security. Two main implementations for a more secure NFC or RFID system are presented: a jamming system,...
Flow rate sensors for in situ gas or liquid monitoring typically comprise multiple transducer elements, including a heater and one or more temperature sensors to measure the rate of heat energy removal by the flowing fluid. The need for multiple transducer elements limits feasibility of shrinking these sensors to microfluidic...
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...
Due to the advantages of the high surface area and high porosity, Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) materials are widely used in gas storage. As a typical MOF material, Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework-8 (Zif-8) has high selectivity and adsorption capability of carbon dioxide (CO2). In this thesis, we investigated the infrared absorption of...
Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) is a biomedical imaging technique which detects the presence of magnetic nanoparticles which have been introduced into the specimen prior to imaging. MPI has shown promise for real-time imaging with spatial resolution comparable to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MPI research has focused predominantly on the development...
The recent increase in the number of wireless devices has been driven by the growing markets of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT). Consequently, current research has focused on efficient utilization of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum to accommodate such an increase in wireless bandwidth. Alternatively, latest free-space...
Analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) are the key building block for sensor applications, such as wireless communications and digital electronics. These applications require ADCs to have medium to high accuracy (normally from 10-14 bits) and relatively low signal bandwidth (ranging from 100Hz-150kHz). Since these applications are often powered by batteries, high power...
Data centers have been charged a great amount of electric bill by the power company and demand charge can contribute up to 40% of the electric bill due to the "random" workload. This phenomenon can be avoided by using the existing Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) as the assistant power source...
There are generally two types of multiview video:(1) 3D Multiview Video (“3D MVV” also called “2D plus delta” or “stereo” multi-view video): 3D MVV is widely deployed in cinemas and in the TV industry. 3D MVV typically entails capturing video of an object using two cameras with differing view angles...
Silicon integrated circuit (IC) technology has enabled numerous electrical and optical sensors used in biological and chemical assays, where they can increase performance while decreasing cost and size compared to traditional detectors. There is significant potential to further leverage IC technology for lab-on-chip applications, creating affordable and portable medical diagnostic...
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...
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...
As the future electrical power systems tend towards smarter and greener technology, thedeployment of self-sufficient networks, or microgrids, becomes more likely. Microgridsmay operate on their own or synchronized with the main grid, thus control methodsneed to take into account islanding and reconnecting said networks. Isolation of subnetworks may be necessary...
Load modeling that can accurately represent the dynamic behavior of generators and loads is important in the operation and planning of transmission and distribution systems. Yet, it is a complex subject in power system research communities and electric utilities. The composition of the end-use loads is changing continually based on...
Hydropower is the one of the oldest renewable energy technologies and is wrongly thought of today as having little room to grow. The opportunity for new hydropower capacity is immense through both technology advancement and run-of-river new stream reach projects. Despite the age of hydropower, a divide in opinion is...
This thesis investigates a novel cycloid electric machine that integrates both cycloid gear drive and permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM), and proposes to apply the machine in robotic transmission system. Cycloid gear drive is a transmission device that is commonly used to boost up the output torque. It has been...
This work presents a new data encoding scheme: Integrated Pulse Width Modulation (iPWM) for equalizing lossy wireline channels with the aim of achieving energy efficient wireline communication. The proposed scheme is able to overcome the fundamental limitations imposed by Manchester and Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) encoding on high data rate...
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...
Mobile video streaming has become an essential application in mobile wireless networks,making up most of the mobile data of today’s Internet traffic. Studies have shown that mobile video data is projected to make up about 78 percent of the global mobile data traffic, and that global mobile data traffic is...
Several frequency and amplitude estimation algorithms are presented for balanced and unbalanced three-phase power grid systems. All the estimators are dynamic in nature and are implemented in the complex domain by transforming the three-phase power signals using Clarke’s transform. Specifically, we first construct a non-linear dynamic model of the complex...
The need to detect trace amounts of target molecules is great, particularly when it comes to biosensing. With the early detection of a disease, the odds of the successful treatment of an individual increases significantly. To enhance the capability of biomolecular detection, we have created an optical biosensor capable of...
We demonstrated a low-cost and high-sensitivity DNA detection method using quantum dot-fullerene based molecular beacons (MBs) and magnetic nanoparticles. The MB tethered magnetic nanoparticles can be well dispersed in analytes for efficient DNA capture and concentrated by an external magnetic field for enhanced fluorescence signal detection. The detection requires only...
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...