Functional programming is concerned with referential transparency, that is, given a certain function and its parameter, that the result will always be the same. However, it seems that this is violated in applications involving uncertainty, such as rolling a dice. This thesis defines the background of probabilistic programming and domain-specific...
This thesis describes the implementation of an interface for querying established correspondences between anatomical structures across species. I was the main developer of this query engine, called the Comparative Anatomy Information System. My work involved developing methods to query the knowledge base, perform the specified comparison, display the anatomical hierarchies...
Situated off the west coast of Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand, Phu Quoc archipelago and its waters are well-known for their rich natural resources, especially the bounty of fishery resources. Under increasing pressure from the growing population, fishing, and tourism development, there is a strong need to formulate an...
Until recently, research has not considered whether the design of end-user programming environments, such as spreadsheets, multimedia authoring languages, and CAD systems, affects males and females differently. As a result, we began investigating how the two genders are impacted by end-user programming software and whether attention to gender differences is...
Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems have recently been considered as one of the most significant technology breakthroughs for modern wireless communications, due to the higher spectral efficiency and improved link reliability. The sphere decoding algorithm (SDA) has been widely used for maximum likelihood (ML) detection in MIMO systems. It is...
SIMCOMP is a computer programming system which is designed to aid biologists with a limited knowledge of FORTRAN programming to design and execute compartment-flow simulations. The system is designed to minimize the programming overhead required by any computer language while maintaining
sufficient flexibility of FORTRAN. This flexibility does allow interfacing...
FLEX1 is a general model processor, patterned after Klir's
General Sequential System Paradigm (Figure 1). Specifically, the
processor is a discrete time flux oriented realization of the general
paradigm and can process non-linear, non-stationary, environmentally
controlled state variable system models with explicit memory. The
current version is restricted to not...
Alternating-current thin-film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) devices are metal-insulator-semiconductorinsulator-
metal (MISIM) structures which emit light under high field, pulsed excitation. One aspect of ACTFEL operation that is not well understood is the aging of such devices with operating time. One of the primary goals of
this thesis is to characterize the kinetics...
Hardware cryptography offers a reliable way to provide security for data that is sent over networks. Security processors have taken the stage in the movement for secure computing. Some of the more prominent security processors belong to the S1 family created by Motorola. The primary goal of this thesis is...
This study dealt with research problems at the landscape level. The objectives of this thesis were to develop tools to study and characterize landscapes and to interface with a geographic information system (GIS), to evaluate landscape indices, and to examine development of forest cutting patterns under different cutting methods and...
Automated recognition of object categories in images is a critical step for many real-world computer vision applications. Interest region detectors and region descriptors have been widely employed to tackle the variability of objects in pose, scale, lighting, texture, color, and so on. Different types of object recognition problems usually require...
AE32000 microprocessor was developed mainly to address the need for the reduction in the amount of memory accesses in embedded applications. One of the primary goals of a computer architect is the design and construction of machines, that support the efficient execution of the programs that will run on them....
Edit distances are a well-established technique for classification problems. They have been employed successfully in many classification problems including chromosome classification and hand-written digit recognition. Virtually all machine learning algorithms represent the objects to be classified as vectors of features. However, edit distances provide only a measure of the difference...
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...
This thesis explores the implementation of learning based control with predictive cruise control and the potential this technology has for increasing fuel efficiency while keeping on a well maintained schedule for commercial trucks. Traditional cruise control is wasteful when maintaining a constant velocity over rolling hills. Predictive cruise control is...
This dissertation explores the idea of applying machine learning technologies to help computer users find information and better organize electronic resources, by presenting the research work conducted in the following three applications: FolderPredictor, Stacking Recommendation Engines, and Integrating Learning and Reasoning.
FolderPredictor is an intelligent desktop software tool that helps...
Participation in physical activity has important health benefits among individuals with disabilities, whereas inactive lifestyles may lead to secondary limiting health conditions. However, few people with disabilities regularly participate in the recommended amount of health-related physical activities. Low rate of participation may be related to low motivation due to interconnected...
Recent advances in wireless technologies have helped the proliferation of wireless devices, ranging from hand-held devices such as cellular phones to more powerful mobile computing platforms as such laptops [1]. Along with that, the end users’
applications running on these devices, ranging from text message to multimedia applications such as...
While there are many ways to evaluate a user interface design, the user's mental workload and situation awareness (SA) are particularly important considerations in the supervisory control of safety-critical systems. Typically, operators of these systems must monitor high-volume, time-sensitive status information. Interface design for this domain can be challenging and...
Behavioral modeling is increasingly an imperative component of system design as the systems under construction become more and more complex. Without behavioral modeling available to the modern designer, design and verification of these systems would be much more laborious. Additionally, with the increasing computational power of today's modeling and simulation...
Trends in wireless networks are increasingly pointing towards a future with multi-hop
networks deployed in multi-channel environments. In this thesis, we present the design
for iMAC—a protocol targeted at medium access control in such environments. iMAC
uses control packets on a common control channel to faciliate a three-way handshake
between...
Production planning in fish processing is heavily dependent on the raw material supply. Because of the uncertainties associated with the quantity of catch and its composition, planning for production is a difficult task. Until recently the fish processing plants in Iceland also had to accept the entire loads of fishing...
For many decades, production and assembly lines have played an important role in industrial manufacturing systems. In particular, they have proved to be an efficient way to organize the production of high volume products in many industries. In their effort to improve the efficiency of production lines, researchers encountered two...
To be competitive in domestic and international markets, manufacturing management is routinely faced with the decision to automate or replace existing production facilities with advanced manufacturing technologies. Installation of advanced manufacturing technologies requires high capital investment, and there is much evidence to suggest that automation for automation's sake has proven...
Uninhabited aerial vehicles, also called UAVs are currently controller by a combination of a human pilot at a remote location, and autopilot systems similar to those found on commercial aircraft. As UAVs transition from remote piloting to fully autonomous operation, control laws must be developed for the tasks to be...
This dissertation addresses two fundamental problems in computer vision—namely,
multitarget tracking and event recognition in videos. These problems are challenging
because uncertainty may arise from a host of sources, including motion blur,
occlusions, and dynamic cluttered backgrounds. We show that these challenges can be
successfully addressed by using a multiscale,...
The objective of this research was to provide a definitive description of the processes within the physician-patient encounter in an office setting. This description would take the form of a formal process model of the encounter in a provider's office setting, as this represents the most common situation during patient...
This work presents a residential load simulation framework that allows the user to test the effectiveness of peak reduction, peak shifting, and valley filling load management strategies on a representative residential load prior to physical smart sensor and load control deployment. The simulation methodology uses household occupancy, appliance time-of-use, and...
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...
The meaning of biological sequences is a central problem
of modern biology. Although string matching is well understood
in the edit-distance model, biological strings
with transpositions and inversions violate this model's
assumptions. To align biologically reasonable strings, we
proposed the Walking Tree Method [4,5,6,7,8], an
approximate string alignment method that...
We describe the design of a domain-specific language (DSL) for the specification of generic ocean modeling tools, and we describe the
implementation of its compiler. The goal of the DSL is to allow the specification of widely usable tools for ocean modeling once, and to allow its translation into different...
This paper presents qualitative results from interviews with knowledge workers about their recovery strategies after interruptions. Special focus is given to when these strategies fail due to the nature of the interruption and existing computer support. Potential solutions offered by participants to overcome some of these problems are presented. These...
This dissertation investigates the use of a hardware mechanism called Eager Data Transfer (EDT) for achieving the reduction of communication latency for user-level network protocol. To reach the goal, the dissertation addresses the following research issues. First, the development of a communication system performance evaluation tool called Linux/SimOS is presented....
Parallel languages rarely specify parallel I/O constructs, and existing commercial systems provide the programmer with a low-level I/O interface. We present design principles for integrating I/O into languages and show how these principles are applied to a virtual-processor-oriented language. We show how machine-independent modes are used to support both high...
The stupendous growth in wireless and mobile devices in the recent years has prompted researchers to look at innovative approaches that enable effective use of the available resources. In this thesis, we propose a medium access control (MAC) protocol, referred to as EM-MAC, that enables wireless devices with multi-channel access...
The search for archaeological materials dating to 15,000 yr BP along the southern Oregon coast is a formidable task. Using ethnographic, theoretical, and archaeological data, landscape resources which would have influenced land-use and occupation location decisions in the past are highlighted. Additionally, environmental data pertaining to the late Pleistocene is...
This work presents improvements to a multi-core performance/power simulator. The improvements which include updated power models, voltage scaling aware models, and an application specific benchmark, are done to increase the accuracy of power models under voltage and frequency scaling. Improvements to the simulator enable more accurate design space exploration for...
A method for improving performance/watt of an embedded single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) architecture using application-guided a priori scheduling of hardware resources is presented. A multi-core architectural simulator is adopted that accurately estimates power, performance, and utilization of various processor components (logic, interconnect and memory). A greedy search is then performed on...
Streaming media and interactive television viewing experiences are becoming more commonplace with the introduction of services such as Netflix Streaming, the Apple TV, and Google TV aided by the increase adoption of broadband internet. As these services make their way into the living room, and developers struggle to accommodate more...
Recent work has shown humanoid robots with spinal columns, instead of rigid torsos, benefit from both better balance and an increased ability to absorb external impact. Similarly, snake robots have shown promise as a viable option for exploration in confined spaces with limited human access, such as during power plant...
The problem of ensuring Quality of Service (QoS) on a TCP/IP based fixed-infrastructure network has been well studied and several working proposals exist. An allied problem is that of ensuring QoS on an ad-hoc wireless network, where the requirements are similar, but the operating conditions are different enough to warrant...
There is a growing interest in bringing online and streaming content to the television. Gaming platforms such as the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii are at the center of this digital convergence; platforms for accessing new media services. This presents a number of interface challenges, as controllers designed for gaming...
A GIS analysis procedure was developed to explore relationships between imagery, yield data, soil information, and other assessments of a field or orchard. A set of conversion utilities, a spreadsheet, and an inexpensive shape file viewer were used to manipulate, plot, and display data. Specific features described include procedures used...
Introduction: Management of complex systems is facilitated through effective information systems that provide real-time data to decision makers. For example, instrument panels in airplanes ensure that pilots have well-designed feedback concerning the status of mission-critical variables. Problem: While pilots have dashboards for feedback and communication, healthcare executives may be unaware...
Identifying the most relevant items in an e-commerce site is becoming more and more
difficult nowadays because of the heavy overload of information. A Java Recommender
System that uses Collaborative Filtering techniques has been developed to reduce such
information overload and even personalize the information to the individual’s preference.
The...
"Collaborative filtering algorithms’ performances have been evaluated using a variety of metrics.
These metrics, such as Mean Absolute Error and Precision, have often ignored recommendations for
which they do not have data. Ignoring these recommendations has provided numbers which do not
accurately represent the user experience. Qualitatively we have seen...
In this report, I first introduce three areas of interest to collaborative filtering researchers, namely: (a) how to solve the sparsity and scalability problems in recommendation systems; (b) how to rapidly develop and test collaborative filtering algorithms; and (c) how to apply collaborative filtering to unbounded numeric preference data. In...
The growth of applications for embedded processors has spawned a need for highly configurable devices. Custom microprocessors have long life cycles for a fast paced market, where as off-the-shelf designs often do not provide the level of configuration, nor the ability to allow system-on-chip designs. This paper presents a description...