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Ge1-ySny alloys represent a new class of photonic materials for integrated optoelectronics on Si. In this work, the electrical and optical properties of Ge1-ySny alloy films grown on Si, with concentrations in the range 0 ≤ y ≤ 0.04, are studied via a variety of methods. The first microelectronic devices

Ge1-ySny alloys represent a new class of photonic materials for integrated optoelectronics on Si. In this work, the electrical and optical properties of Ge1-ySny alloy films grown on Si, with concentrations in the range 0 ≤ y ≤ 0.04, are studied via a variety of methods. The first microelectronic devices from GeSn films were fabricated using newly developed CMOS-compatible protocols, and the devices were characterized with respect to their electrical properties and optical response. The detectors were found to have a detection range that extends into the near-IR, and the detection edge is found to shift to longer wavelengths with increasing Sn content, mainly due to the compositional dependence of the direct band gap E0. With only 2 % Sn, all of the telecommunication bands are covered by a single detector. Room temperature photoluminescence was observed from GeSn films with Sn content up to 4 %. The peak wavelength of the emission was found to shift to lower energies with increasing Sn content, corresponding to the decrease in the direct band gap E0 of the material. An additional peak in the spectrum was assigned to the indirect band gap. The separation between the direct and indirect peaks was found to decrease with increasing Sn concentration, as expected. Electroluminescence was also observed from Ge/Si and Ge0.98Sn0.02 photodiodes under forward bias, and the luminescence spectra were found to match well with the observed photoluminescence spectra. A theoretical expression was developed for the luminescence due to the direct band gap and fit to the data.
ContributorsMathews, Jay (Author) / Menéndez, Jose (Thesis advisor) / Kouvetakis, John (Thesis advisor) / Drucker, Jeffery (Committee member) / Chizmeshya, Andrew (Committee member) / Ponce, Fernando (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
This dissertation transforms a set of system complexity reduction problems to feature selection problems. Three systems are considered: classification based on association rules, network structure learning, and time series classification. Furthermore, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree models. Associative classifiers can achieve

This dissertation transforms a set of system complexity reduction problems to feature selection problems. Three systems are considered: classification based on association rules, network structure learning, and time series classification. Furthermore, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree models. Associative classifiers can achieve high accuracy, but the combination of many rules is difficult to interpret. Rule condition subset selection (RCSS) methods for associative classification are considered. RCSS aims to prune the rule conditions into a subset via feature selection. The subset then can be summarized into rule-based classifiers. Experiments show that classifiers after RCSS can substantially improve the classification interpretability without loss of accuracy. An ensemble feature selection method is proposed to learn Markov blankets for either discrete or continuous networks (without linear, Gaussian assumptions). The method is compared to a Bayesian local structure learning algorithm and to alternative feature selection methods in the causal structure learning problem. Feature selection is also used to enhance the interpretability of time series classification. Existing time series classification algorithms (such as nearest-neighbor with dynamic time warping measures) are accurate but difficult to interpret. This research leverages the time-ordering of the data to extract features, and generates an effective and efficient classifier referred to as a time series forest (TSF). The computational complexity of TSF is only linear in the length of time series, and interpretable features can be extracted. These features can be further reduced, and summarized for even better interpretability. Lastly, two variable importance measures are proposed to reduce the feature selection bias in tree-based ensemble models. It is well known that bias can occur when predictor attributes have different numbers of values. Two methods are proposed to solve the bias problem. One uses an out-of-bag sampling method called OOBForest, and the other, based on the new concept of a partial permutation test, is called a pForest. Experimental results show the existing methods are not always reliable for multi-valued predictors, while the proposed methods have advantages.
ContributorsDeng, Houtao (Author) / Runger, George C. (Thesis advisor) / Lohr, Sharon L (Committee member) / Pan, Rong (Committee member) / Zhang, Muhong (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs

Real-world environments are characterized by non-stationary and continuously evolving data. Learning a classification model on this data would require a framework that is able to adapt itself to newer circumstances. Under such circumstances, transfer learning has come to be a dependable methodology for improving classification performance with reduced training costs and without the need for explicit relearning from scratch. In this thesis, a novel instance transfer technique that adapts a "Cost-sensitive" variation of AdaBoost is presented. The method capitalizes on the theoretical and functional properties of AdaBoost to selectively reuse outdated training instances obtained from a "source" domain to effectively classify unseen instances occurring in a different, but related "target" domain. The algorithm is evaluated on real-world classification problems namely accelerometer based 3D gesture recognition, smart home activity recognition and text categorization. The performance on these datasets is analyzed and evaluated against popular boosting-based instance transfer techniques. In addition, supporting empirical studies, that investigate some of the less explored bottlenecks of boosting based instance transfer methods, are presented, to understand the suitability and effectiveness of this form of knowledge transfer.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ashok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
This thesis investigated two different thermal flow sensors for intravascular shear stress analysis. They were based on heat transfer principle, which heat convection from the resistively heated element to the flowing fluid was measured as a function of the changes in voltage. For both sensors, the resistively heated elements were

This thesis investigated two different thermal flow sensors for intravascular shear stress analysis. They were based on heat transfer principle, which heat convection from the resistively heated element to the flowing fluid was measured as a function of the changes in voltage. For both sensors, the resistively heated elements were made of Ti/Pt strips with the thickness 0.12 µm and 0.02 µm. The resistance of the sensing element was measured at approximately 1.6-1.7 kohms;. A linear relation between the resistance and temperature was established over the temperature ranging from 22 degree Celsius to 80 degree Celsius and the temperature coefficient of resistance (TCR) was at approximately 0.12 %/degree Celsius. The first thermal flow sensor was one-dimensional (1-D) flexible shear stress sensor. The structure was sensing element sandwiched by a biocompatible polymer "poly-para-xylylene", also known as Parylene, which provided both insulation of electrodes and flexibility of the sensors. A constant-temperature (CT) circuit was designed as the read out circuit based on 0.6 µm CMOS (Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) process. The 1-D shear stress sensor suffered from a large measurement error. Because when the sensor was inserted into blood vessels, it was impossible to mount the sensor to the wall as calibrated in micro fluidic channels. According to the previous simulation work, the shear stress was varying and the sensor itself changed the shear stress distribution. We proposed a three-dimensional (3-D) thermal flow sensor, with three-axis of sensing elements integrated in one sensor. It was in the similar shape as a hexagonal prism with diagonal of 1000 µm. On the top of the sensor, there were five bond pads for external wires over 500 µm thick silicon substrate. In each nonadjacent side surface, there was a bended parylene branch with one sensing element. Based on the unique 3-D structure, the sensor was able to obtain data along three axes. With computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model, it is possible to locate the sensor in the blood vessels and give us a better understanding of shear stress distribution in the presence of time-varying component of blood flow and realize more accurate assessment of intravascular convective heat transfer.
ContributorsTang, Rui (Author) / Yu, Hongyu (Thesis advisor) / Jiang, Hanqing (Committee member) / Pan, George (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
TaxiWorld is a Matlab simulation of a city with a fleet of taxis which operate within it, with the goal of transporting passengers to their destinations. The size of the city, as well as the number of available taxis and the frequency and general locations of fare appearances can all

TaxiWorld is a Matlab simulation of a city with a fleet of taxis which operate within it, with the goal of transporting passengers to their destinations. The size of the city, as well as the number of available taxis and the frequency and general locations of fare appearances can all be set on a scenario-by-scenario basis. The taxis must attempt to service the fares as quickly as possible, by picking each one up and carrying it to its drop-off location. The TaxiWorld scenario is formally modeled using both Decentralized Partially-Observable Markov Decision Processes (Dec-POMDPs) and Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs). The purpose of developing formal models is to learn how to build and use formal Markov models, such as can be given to planners to solve for optimal policies in problem domains. However, finding optimal solutions for Dec-POMDPs is NEXP-Complete, so an empirical algorithm was also developed as an improvement to the method already in use on the simulator, and the methods were compared in identical scenarios to determine which is more effective. The empirical method is of course not optimal - rather, it attempts to simply account for some of the most important factors to achieve an acceptable level of effectiveness while still retaining a reasonable level of computational complexity for online solving.
ContributorsWhite, Christopher (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Gupta, Sandeep (Committee member) / Varsamopoulos, Georgios (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Action language C+ is a formalism for describing properties of actions, which is based on nonmonotonic causal logic. The definite fragment of C+ is implemented in the Causal Calculator (CCalc), which is based on the reduction of nonmonotonic causal logic to propositional logic. This thesis describes the language

Action language C+ is a formalism for describing properties of actions, which is based on nonmonotonic causal logic. The definite fragment of C+ is implemented in the Causal Calculator (CCalc), which is based on the reduction of nonmonotonic causal logic to propositional logic. This thesis describes the language of CCalc in terms of answer set programming (ASP), based on the translation of nonmonotonic causal logic to formulas under the stable model semantics. I designed a standard library which describes the constructs of the input language of CCalc in terms of ASP, allowing a simple modular method to represent CCalc input programs in the language of ASP. Using the combination of system F2LP and answer set solvers, this method achieves functionality close to that of CCalc while taking advantage of answer set solvers to yield efficient computation that is orders of magnitude faster than CCalc for many benchmark examples. In support of this, I created an automated translation system Cplus2ASP that implements the translation and encoding method and automatically invokes the necessary software to solve the translated input programs.
ContributorsCasolary, Michael (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Linear Temporal Logic is gaining increasing popularity as a high level specification language for robot motion planning due to its expressive power and scalability of LTL control synthesis algorithms. This formalism, however, requires expert knowledge and makes it inaccessible to non-expert users. This thesis introduces a graphical specification environment to

Linear Temporal Logic is gaining increasing popularity as a high level specification language for robot motion planning due to its expressive power and scalability of LTL control synthesis algorithms. This formalism, however, requires expert knowledge and makes it inaccessible to non-expert users. This thesis introduces a graphical specification environment to create high level motion plans to control robots in the field by converting a visual representation of the motion/task plan into a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specification. The visual interface is built on the Android tablet platform and provides functionality to create task plans through a set of well defined gestures and on screen controls. It uses the notion of waypoints to quickly and efficiently describe the motion plan and enables a variety of complex Linear Temporal Logic specifications to be described succinctly and intuitively by the user without the need for the knowledge and understanding of LTL specification. Thus, it opens avenues for its use by personnel in military, warehouse management, and search and rescue missions. This thesis describes the construction of LTL for various scenarios used for robot navigation using the visual interface developed and leverages the use of existing LTL based motion planners to carry out the task plan by a robot.
ContributorsSrinivas, Shashank (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling language in order to enhance expressivity, such as incorporating aggregates and interfaces with ontologies. Also, in order to overcome the grounding bottleneck of computation in ASP, there are increasing interests in integrating ASP with other computing paradigms, such as Constraint Programming (CP) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Due to the non-monotonic nature of the ASP semantics, such enhancements turned out to be non-trivial and the existing extensions are not fully satisfactory. We observe that one main reason for the difficulties rooted in the propositional semantics of ASP, which is limited in handling first-order constructs (such as aggregates and ontologies) and functions (such as constraint variables in CP and SMT) in natural ways. This dissertation presents a unifying view on these extensions by viewing them as instances of formulas with generalized quantifiers and intensional functions. We extend the first-order stable model semantics by by Ferraris, Lee, and Lifschitz to allow generalized quantifiers, which cover aggregate, DL-atoms, constraints and SMT theory atoms as special cases. Using this unifying framework, we study and relate different extensions of ASP. We also present a tight integration of ASP with SMT, based on which we enhance action language C+ to handle reasoning about continuous changes. Our framework yields a systematic approach to study and extend non-monotonic languages.
ContributorsMeng, Yunsong (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Objective of this thesis project is to build a prototype using Linear Temporal Logic specifications for generating a 2D motion plan commanding an iRobot to fulfill the specifications. This thesis project was created for Cyber Physical Systems Lab in Arizona State University. The end product of this thesis is creation

Objective of this thesis project is to build a prototype using Linear Temporal Logic specifications for generating a 2D motion plan commanding an iRobot to fulfill the specifications. This thesis project was created for Cyber Physical Systems Lab in Arizona State University. The end product of this thesis is creation of a software solution which can be used in the academia and industry for research in cyber physical systems related applications. The major features of the project are: creating a modular system for motion planning, use of Robot Operating System (ROS), use of triangulation for environment decomposition and using stargazer sensor for localization. The project is built on an open source software called ROS which provides an environment where it is very easy to integrate different modules be it software or hardware on a Linux based platform. Use of ROS implies the project or its modules can be adapted quickly for different applications as the need arises. The final software package created and tested takes a data file as its input which contains the LTL specifications, a symbols list used in the LTL and finally the environment polygon data containing real world coordinates for all polygons and also information on neighbors and parents of each polygon. The software package successfully ran the experiment of coverage, reachability with avoidance and sequencing.
ContributorsPandya, Parth (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a

The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a large amount of data is cheap and easy, annotating them with class labels is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. This has paved the way for research in the field of active learning. Such algorithms automatically select the salient and exemplar instances from large quantities of unlabeled data and are effective in reducing human labeling effort in inducing classification models. To utilize the possible presence of multiple labeling agents, there have been attempts towards a batch mode form of active learning, where a batch of data instances is selected simultaneously for manual annotation. This dissertation is aimed at the development of novel batch mode active learning algorithms to reduce manual effort in training classification models in real world multimedia pattern recognition applications. Four major contributions are proposed in this work: $(i)$ a framework for dynamic batch mode active learning, where the batch size and the specific data instances to be queried are selected adaptively through a single formulation, based on the complexity of the data stream in question, $(ii)$ a batch mode active learning strategy for fuzzy label classification problems, where there is an inherent imprecision and vagueness in the class label definitions, $(iii)$ batch mode active learning algorithms based on convex relaxations of an NP-hard integer quadratic programming (IQP) problem, with guaranteed bounds on the solution quality and $(iv)$ an active matrix completion algorithm and its application to solve several variants of the active learning problem (transductive active learning, multi-label active learning, active feature acquisition and active learning for regression). These contributions are validated on the face recognition and facial expression recognition problems (which are commonly encountered in real world applications like robotics, security and assistive technology for the blind and the visually impaired) and also on collaborative filtering applications like movie recommendation.
ContributorsChakraborty, Shayok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Balasubramanian, Vineeth N. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013