This dissertation studies two different wireless microwave sensing applications in the subjects of environmental monitoring and biomedical devices. The environmental sensing application presents a design of novel wireless sensor node configurations. These nodes are intended to be used specifically in a built environment of railroad track ballast for its health...
Radio frequency (RF) sensing arises as a promising option for enabling the internet of things (IoT) applications that transform our life into a world of smart homes, smart cities, and smart industries. The innovation of IoT reveals the benefits of RF sensing across cost, pervasiveness, unobtrusiveness, and privacy. However, challenges...
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...
Ring Amplifier serves as a great candidate both for precision amplification and fast integration in the discrete time system. It can be utilized in high-performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs). In high-speed ADC utilizing pipelined architectures with residue amplification, Successive-Approximation Register (SAR) ADCs as the sub-ADC and power efficient Ring Amplifier based...
Recent advances in computing, communication, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have made our world more interconnected and data-rich than ever with the proliferation of smart devices and sensors. As a result, we are increasingly dependent on electronic devices and sensors to automate away life’s mundane parts. For example, in business...
NAND flash based solid state drives (SSDs) require out-of-place updating due to the characteristics of flash memories. In addition, due to the mismatched granularity between read/write and erase operations, a cleaning policy involving garbage collection and wear leveling has to perform data migration incurring high overhead. Another challenge is that...
Artificial collectives are useful for accomplishing tasks that require teamwork from multiple simple robots. Multiple robot and collective testbeds have been developed, yet none stay committed to leverage the local interactions, group size, and imperfect information assumptions that strengthen biological collectives. A review of the collective and multiple robot literature,...
Within the past decade, the continued-scaling of CMOS processes and improvements in industry mixed-signal integrated-circuit designs have enabled a rapid decrease in the cost, form-factor, and power for point-of-care diagnostics and electrochemical instrumentation. Similarly, advances in low-power RF designs have prompted entire System-on-Modules supporting widely varied Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The...
In recent years, RF (Radio Frequency) device fingerprinting using deep learning has emerged as a method of identifying devices solely by their RF transmissions. Conventional approaches to this type of device fingerprinting are not portable to different domains. That is, if a model for this purpose is trained on data...
Due to increasing populations, food production must increase significantly to be sustainable. The Internet of Things has been shown to have potential in the field of agriculture to make farming practices more efficient. However, for IoT to be properly integrated into agriculture, sensors must be applied within the field and...
Is it possible to determine whether a signal violates a formula in Signal Temporal Logic (STL), if the monitor only has access to a low-resolution version of the signal? We answer this question affirmatively by demonstrating that temporal logic has a multiresolution structure, which parallels the multiresolution structure of signals....
Thermoelectric generators (TEGs) have gained much popularity in the search for alternatives to clean sources to harvest energy. Given their capability to harness an electric potential given a temperature differential across their opposing faces, and the foreseeable prevalence of naturally and/or commonly occurring temperature gradients in multiple applications, TEGs are...
The goal of this project is to create a lightweight radioactive isotope identification program for an embedded system using the C programming language to perform isotope matching on a subset of isotopes. First, the physics behind radioactive spectra and their key features are explained. Next, the characteristics of the spectra...
This work – in which three peer-reviewed academic papers are presented – addresses the ap-plication of Bayesian Reinforcement Learning to the control of a class of ocean wave energy conversion systems. The first paper presents a comparison of a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) based wave energy converter controller against standard Reactive Damping...
Multiple wave energy converter (WEC) archetypes exist with varying power take-off (PTO) designs in the attempt to maximize ocean energy harnessed and converted into useful energy. The pendulum PTO is popular for its simple, yet robust functionality due to its internally located components and simple operation. Additionally, this PTO does...
Hydrokinetic turbines are an emerging form of renewable energy generation. Although similar to wind turbines, hydrokinetic systems incur extra costs and face constraints in available footprint. SiC power semiconductors within the required power electronics improve the performance. With higher switching afforded by SiC devices, the footprint of passive components for...
To detail common paths followed by companies to produce innovative products, I reviewed existing literature and conducted several semi-structured interviews with a variety of people from different companies and fields. Based on this research, I found that most (but not all) innovative products follow a few general paths. These paths...
The deployment of advanced technology standards for 5G and beyond in cellular networks has resulted in interest in integrated circuits (ICs) operating at frequencies above 10GHz. This has sparked research on wideband circuits in commercial low-cost silicon technologies, operating at high RF and mm-wave frequencies. Given the wide range of...
Wind turbines serve an increasing proportion of total energy generation, with expanded onshore and offshore installations proceeding worldwide. Continued construction, expansion, and operation of wind energy installations must be managed in conjunction with effects on local and migratory wildlife, specifically bird and bat species that may be affected by wind...
Despite near unanimous opinion on the consequences of climate change by scientific community, the rate at which carbon is emitted into the atmosphere continues to increase. The need for a clean and sustainable source of energy is therefore one of humankind's most urgent challenges. Solar energy is the most abundant...