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Description
Arachnids belong to the phylum Arthropoda, the largest phylum in the animal kingdom. Ticks are blood-feeding arachnids that vector numerous pathogens of significant medical and veterinary importance, while scorpions have become a common concern in urban desert cities due to the high level of toxicity in their venom. To date,

Arachnids belong to the phylum Arthropoda, the largest phylum in the animal kingdom. Ticks are blood-feeding arachnids that vector numerous pathogens of significant medical and veterinary importance, while scorpions have become a common concern in urban desert cities due to the high level of toxicity in their venom. To date, viruses associated with arachnids have been under sampled and understudied. Here viral metagenomics was used to explore the diversity of viruses present in ticks and scorpions. American dog ticks (Dermacentor variabilis) and blacklegged ticks (Ixodes scapularis) were collected in Pennsylvania while one hairy scorpion (Hadrurus arizonensis) and four bark scorpions (Centruroides sculpturatus) were collected in Phoenix. Novel viral genomes described here belong to the families Polyomaviridae, Anelloviridae, Genomoviridae, and a newly proposed family, Arthropolviridae.

Polyomaviruses are non-enveloped viruses with a small, circular double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) genomes that have been identified in a variety of mammals, birds and fish and are known to cause various diseases. Arthropolviridae is a proposed family of circular, large tumor antigen encoding dsDNA viruses that have a unidirectional genome organization. Genomoviruses and anelloviruses are ssDNA viruses that have circular genomes ranging in size from 2–2.4 kb and 2.1–3.8 kb, respectively. Genomoviruses are ubiquitous in the environment, having been identified in a wide range of animal, plant and environmental samples, while anelloviruses have been associated with a plethora of animals.

Here, 16 novel viruses are reported that span four viral families. Eight novel polyomaviruses were recovered from bark scorpions, three arthropolviruses were recovered from dog ticks and one arthropolvirus from a hairy scorpion. Viruses belonging to the families Polyomaviridae and Arthropolviridae are highly divergent. This is the first more extensive study of these viruses in arachnids. Three genomoviruses were recovered from both dog and deer ticks and one anellovirus was recovered from deer ticks, which are the first records of these viruses being recovered from ticks. This work highlights the diversity of dsDNA and ssDNA viruses in the arachnid population and emphasizes the importance of performing viral surveys on these populations.
ContributorsSchmidlin, Kara (Author) / Varsani, Arvind (Thesis advisor) / Van Doorslaer, Koenraad (Committee member) / Stenglein, Mark (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Signal compressed using classical compression methods can be acquired using brute force (i.e. searching for non-zero entries in component-wise). However, sparse solutions require combinatorial searches of high computations. In this thesis, instead, two Bayesian approaches are considered to recover a sparse vector from underdetermined noisy measurements. The first is constructed

Signal compressed using classical compression methods can be acquired using brute force (i.e. searching for non-zero entries in component-wise). However, sparse solutions require combinatorial searches of high computations. In this thesis, instead, two Bayesian approaches are considered to recover a sparse vector from underdetermined noisy measurements. The first is constructed using a Bernoulli-Gaussian (BG) prior distribution and is assumed to be the true generative model. The second is constructed using a Gamma-Normal (GN) prior distribution and is, therefore, a different (i.e. misspecified) model. To estimate the posterior distribution for the correctly specified scenario, an algorithm based on generalized approximated message passing (GAMP) is constructed, while an algorithm based on sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) is used for the misspecified scenario. Recovering sparse signal using Bayesian framework is one class of algorithms to solve the sparse problem. All classes of algorithms aim to get around the high computations associated with the combinatorial searches. Compressive sensing (CS) is a widely-used terminology attributed to optimize the sparse problem and its applications. Applications such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), image acquisition in radar imaging, and facial recognition. In CS literature, the target vector can be recovered either by optimizing an objective function using point estimation, or recovering a distribution of the sparse vector using Bayesian estimation. Although Bayesian framework provides an extra degree of freedom to assume a distribution that is directly applicable to the problem of interest, it is hard to find a theoretical guarantee of convergence. This limitation has shifted some of researches to use a non-Bayesian framework. This thesis tries to close this gab by proposing a Bayesian framework with a suggested theoretical bound for the assumed, not necessarily correct, distribution. In the simulation study, a general lower Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound (BCRB) bound is extracted along with misspecified Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound (MBCRB) for GN model. Both bounds are validated using mean square error (MSE) performances of the aforementioned algorithms. Also, a quantification of the performance in terms of gains versus losses is introduced as one main finding of this report.
ContributorsAlhowaish, Abdulhakim (Author) / Richmond, Christ D (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Sankar, Lalitha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
The marked increase in the inflow of remotely sensed data from satellites have trans- formed the Earth and Space Sciences to a data rich domain creating a rich repository for domain experts to analyze. These observations shed light on a diverse array of disciplines ranging from monitoring Earth system components

The marked increase in the inflow of remotely sensed data from satellites have trans- formed the Earth and Space Sciences to a data rich domain creating a rich repository for domain experts to analyze. These observations shed light on a diverse array of disciplines ranging from monitoring Earth system components to planetary explo- ration by highlighting the expected trend and patterns in the data. However, the complexity of these patterns from local to global scales, coupled with the volume of this ever-growing repository necessitates advanced techniques to sequentially process the datasets to determine the underlying trends. Such techniques essentially model the observations to learn characteristic parameters of data-generating processes and highlight anomalous planetary surface observations to help domain scientists for making informed decisions. The primary challenge in defining such models arises due to the spatio-temporal variability of these processes.

This dissertation introduces models of multispectral satellite observations that sequentially learn the expected trend from the data by extracting salient features of planetary surface observations. The main objectives are to learn the temporal variability for modeling dynamic processes and to build representations of features of interest that is learned over the lifespan of an instrument. The estimated model parameters are then exploited in detecting anomalies due to changes in land surface reflectance as well as novelties in planetary surface landforms. A model switching approach is proposed that allows the selection of the best matched representation given the observations that is designed to account for rate of time-variability in land surface. The estimated parameters are exploited to design a change detector, analyze the separability of change events, and form an expert-guided representation of planetary landforms for prioritizing the retrieval of scientifically relevant observations with both onboard and post-downlink applications.
ContributorsChakraborty, Srija (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Christensen, Philip R. (Philip Russel) (Thesis advisor) / Richmond, Christ (Committee member) / Maurer, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Robotic lower limb prostheses provide new opportunities to help transfemoral amputees regain mobility. However, their application is impeded by that the impedance control parameters need to be tuned and optimized manually by prosthetists for each individual user in different task environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of automatically learning from

Robotic lower limb prostheses provide new opportunities to help transfemoral amputees regain mobility. However, their application is impeded by that the impedance control parameters need to be tuned and optimized manually by prosthetists for each individual user in different task environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) is capable of automatically learning from interacting with the environment. It becomes a natural candidate to replace human prosthetists to customize the control parameters. However, neither traditional RL approaches nor the popular deep RL approaches are readily suitable for learning with limited number of samples and samples with large variations. This dissertation aims to explore new RL based adaptive solutions that are data-efficient for controlling robotic prostheses.

This dissertation begins by proposing a new flexible policy iteration (FPI) framework. To improve sample efficiency, FPI can utilize either on-policy or off-policy learning strategy, can learn from either online or offline data, and can even adopt exiting knowledge of an external critic. Approximate convergence to Bellman optimal solutions are guaranteed under mild conditions. Simulation studies validated that FPI was data efficient compared to several established RL methods. Furthermore, a simplified version of FPI was implemented to learn from offline data, and then the learned policy was successfully tested for tuning the control parameters online on a human subject.

Next, the dissertation discusses RL control with information transfer (RL-IT), or knowledge-guided RL (KG-RL), which is motivated to benefit from transferring knowledge acquired from one subject to another. To explore its feasibility, knowledge was extracted from data measurements of able-bodied (AB) subjects, and transferred to guide Q-learning control for an amputee in OpenSim simulations. This result again demonstrated that data and time efficiency were improved using previous knowledge.

While the present study is new and promising, there are still many open questions to be addressed in future research. To account for human adaption, the learning control objective function may be designed to incorporate human-prosthesis performance feedback such as symmetry, user comfort level and satisfaction, and user energy consumption. To make the RL based control parameter tuning practical in real life, it should be further developed and tested in different use environments, such as from level ground walking to stair ascending or descending, and from walking to running.
ContributorsGao, Xiang (Author) / Si, Jennie (Thesis advisor) / Huang, He Helen (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Disentangling latent spaces is an important research direction in the interpretability of unsupervised machine learning. Several recent works using deep learning are very effective at producing disentangled representations. However, in the unsupervised setting, there is no way to pre-specify which part of the latent space captures specific factors of

Disentangling latent spaces is an important research direction in the interpretability of unsupervised machine learning. Several recent works using deep learning are very effective at producing disentangled representations. However, in the unsupervised setting, there is no way to pre-specify which part of the latent space captures specific factors of variations. While this is generally a hard problem because of the non-existence of analytical expressions to capture these variations, there are certain factors like geometric

transforms that can be expressed analytically. Furthermore, in existing frameworks, the disentangled values are also not interpretable. The focus of this work is to disentangle these geometric factors of variations (which turn out to be nuisance factors for many applications) from the semantic content of the signal in an interpretable manner which in turn makes the features more discriminative. Experiments are designed to show the modularity of the approach with other disentangling strategies as well as on multiple one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) datasets, clearly indicating the efficacy of the proposed approach.
ContributorsKoneripalli Seetharam, Kaushik (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
A critical problem for airborne, ship board, and land based radars operating in maritime or littoral environments is the detection, identification and tracking of targets against backscattering caused by the roughness of the sea surface. Statistical models, such as the compound K-distribution (CKD), were shown to accurately describe two

A critical problem for airborne, ship board, and land based radars operating in maritime or littoral environments is the detection, identification and tracking of targets against backscattering caused by the roughness of the sea surface. Statistical models, such as the compound K-distribution (CKD), were shown to accurately describe two separate structures of the sea clutter intensity fluctuations. The first structure is the texture that is associated with long sea waves and exhibits long temporal decorrelation period. The second structure is the speckle that accounts for reflections from multiple scatters and exhibits a short temporal decorrelation period from pulse to pulse. Existing methods for estimating the CKD model parameters do not include the thermal noise power, which is critical for real sea clutter processing. Estimation methods that include the noise power are either computationally intensive or require very large data records.



This work proposes two new approaches for accurately estimating all three CKD model parameters, including noise power. The first method integrates, in an iterative fashion, the noise power estimation, using one-dimensional nonlinear curve fitting,

with the estimation of the shape and scale parameters, using closed-form solutions in terms of the CKD intensity moments. The second method is similar to the first except it replaces integer-based intensity moments with fractional moments which have been shown to achieve more accurate estimates of the shape parameter. These new methods can be implemented in real time without requiring large data records. They can also achieve accurate estimation performance as demonstrated with simulated and real sea clutter observation datasets. The work also investigates the numerically computed Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of the variance of the shape parameter estimate using intensity observations in thermal noise with unknown power. Using the CRLB, the asymptotic estimation performance behavior of the new estimators is studied and compared to that of other estimators.
ContributorsNorthrop, Judith (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Maurer, Alexander (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Transportation plays a significant role in every human's life. Numerous factors, such as cost of living, available amenities, work style, to name a few, play a vital role in determining the amount of travel time. Such factors, among others, led in part to an increased need for private transportation and,

Transportation plays a significant role in every human's life. Numerous factors, such as cost of living, available amenities, work style, to name a few, play a vital role in determining the amount of travel time. Such factors, among others, led in part to an increased need for private transportation and, consequently, leading to an increase in the purchase of private cars. Also, road safety was impacted by numerous factors such as Driving Under Influence (DUI), driver’s distraction due to the increase in the use of mobile devices while driving. These factors led to an increasing need for an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS) to help the driver stay aware of the environment and to improve road safety.

EcoCAR3 is one of the Advanced Vehicle Technology Competitions, sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DoE) and managed by Argonne National Laboratory in partnership with the North American automotive industry. Students are challenged beyond the traditional classroom environment in these competitions, where they redesign a donated production vehicle to improve energy efficiency and to meet emission standards while maintaining the features that are attractive to the customer, including but not limited to performance, consumer acceptability, safety, and cost.

This thesis presents a driver assistance system interface that was implemented as part of EcoCAR3, including the adopted sensors, hardware and software components, system implementation, validation, and testing. The implemented driver assistance system uses a combination of range measurement sensors to determine the distance, relative location, & the relative velocity of obstacles and surrounding objects together with a computer vision algorithm for obstacle detection and classification. The sensor system and vision system were tested individually and then combined within the overall system. Also, a visual and audio feedback system was designed and implemented to provide timely feedback for the driver as an attempt to enhance situational awareness and improve safety.

Since the driver assistance system was designed and developed as part of a DoE sponsored competition, the system needed to satisfy competition requirements and rules. This work attempted to optimize the system in terms of performance, robustness, and cost while satisfying these constraints.
ContributorsBalaji, Venkatesh (Author) / Karam, Lina J (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Yu, Hongbin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Ultrasound B-mode imaging is an increasingly significant medical imaging modality for clinical applications. Compared to other imaging modalities like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound imaging has the advantage of being safe, inexpensive, and portable. While two dimensional (2-D) ultrasound imaging is very popular, three dimensional (3-D)

Ultrasound B-mode imaging is an increasingly significant medical imaging modality for clinical applications. Compared to other imaging modalities like computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound imaging has the advantage of being safe, inexpensive, and portable. While two dimensional (2-D) ultrasound imaging is very popular, three dimensional (3-D) ultrasound imaging provides distinct advantages over its 2-D counterpart by providing volumetric imaging, which leads to more accurate analysis of tumor and cysts. However, the amount of received data at the front-end of 3-D system is extremely large, making it impractical for power-constrained portable systems.



In this thesis, algorithm and hardware design techniques to support a hand-held 3-D ultrasound imaging system are proposed. Synthetic aperture sequential beamforming (SASB) is chosen since its computations can be split into two stages, where the output generated of Stage 1 is significantly smaller in size compared to the input. This characteristic enables Stage 1 to be done in the front end while Stage 2 can be sent out to be processed elsewhere.



The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, 2-D SASB is extended to 3-D. Techniques to increase the volume rate of 3-D SASB through a new multi-line firing scheme and use of linear chirp as the excitation waveform, are presented. A new sparse array design that not only reduces the number of active transducers but also avoids the imaging degradation caused by grating lobes, is proposed. A combination of these techniques increases the volume rate of 3-D SASB by 4\texttimes{} without introducing extra computations at the front end.



Next, algorithmic techniques to further reduce the Stage 1 computations in the front end are presented. These include reducing the number of distinct apodization coefficients and operating with narrow-bit-width fixed-point data. A 3-D die stacked architecture is designed for the front end. This highly parallel architecture enables the signals received by 961 active transducers to be digitalized, routed by a network-on-chip, and processed in parallel. The processed data are accumulated through a bus-based structure. This architecture is synthesized using TSMC 28 nm technology node and the estimated power consumption of the front end is less than 2 W.



Finally, the Stage 2 computations are mapped onto a reconfigurable multi-core architecture, TRANSFORMER, which supports different types of on-chip memory banks and run-time reconfigurable connections between general processing elements and memory banks. The matched filtering step and the beamforming step in Stage 2 are mapped onto TRANSFORMER with different memory configurations. Gem5 simulations show that the private cache mode generates shorter execution time and higher computation efficiency compared to other cache modes. The overall execution time for Stage 2 is 14.73 ms. The average power consumption and the average Giga-operations-per-second/Watt in 14 nm technology node are 0.14 W and 103.84, respectively.
ContributorsZhou, Jian (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Wenisch, Thomas F. (Committee member) / Ogras, Umit Y. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Constant false alarm rate is one of the essential algorithms in a RADAR detection system. It allows the RADAR system to dynamically set thresholds based on the data power level to distinguish targets with interfering noise and clutters.

To have a better acknowledgment of constant false alarm rate approaches performance, three

Constant false alarm rate is one of the essential algorithms in a RADAR detection system. It allows the RADAR system to dynamically set thresholds based on the data power level to distinguish targets with interfering noise and clutters.

To have a better acknowledgment of constant false alarm rate approaches performance, three clutter models, Gamma, Weibull, and Log-normal, have been introduced to evaluate the detection's capability of each constant false alarm rate algorithm.

The order statistical constant false alarm rate approach outperforms other conventional constant false alarm rate methods, especially in clutter evolved environments. However, this method requires high power consumption due to repeat sorting.
In the automotive RADAR system, the computational complexity of algorithms is essential because this system is in real-time. Therefore, the algorithms must be fast and efficient to ensure low power consumption and processing time.

The reduced computational complexity implementations of cell-averaging and order statistic constant false alarm rate were explored. Their big O and processing time has been reduced.
ContributorsChu, Huiwen (Author) / Bliss, Daniel W. (Thesis advisor) / Alkhateeb, Ahmed (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
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Description
Infants born before 37 weeks of pregnancy are considered to be preterm. Typically, preterm infants have to be strictly monitored since they are highly susceptible to health problems like hypoxemia (low blood oxygen level), apnea, respiratory issues, cardiac problems, neurological problems as well as an increased chance of long-term health

Infants born before 37 weeks of pregnancy are considered to be preterm. Typically, preterm infants have to be strictly monitored since they are highly susceptible to health problems like hypoxemia (low blood oxygen level), apnea, respiratory issues, cardiac problems, neurological problems as well as an increased chance of long-term health issues such as cerebral palsy, asthma and sudden infant death syndrome. One of the leading health complications in preterm infants is bradycardia - which is defined as the slower than expected heart rate, generally beating lower than 60 beats per minute. Bradycardia is often accompanied by low oxygen levels and can cause additional long term health problems in the premature infant.The implementation of a non-parametric method to predict the onset of brady- cardia is presented. This method assumes no prior knowledge of the data and uses kernel density estimation to predict the future onset of bradycardia events. The data is preprocessed, and then analyzed to detect the peaks in the ECG signals, following which different kernels are implemented to estimate the shared underlying distribu- tion of the data. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using various metrics and the computational challenges and methods to overcome them are also discussed.
It is observed that the performance of the algorithm with regards to the kernels used are consistent with the theoretical performance of the kernel as presented in a previous work. The theoretical approach has also been automated in this work and the various implementation challenges have been addressed.
ContributorsMitra, Sinjini (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Moraffah, Bahman (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020