UNT Theses and Dissertations - 106 Matching Results

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Design and Implementation of Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks for Environmental Monitoring Applications

Description: Environmental monitoring represents a major application domain for wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, despite significant advances in recent years, there are still many challenging issues to be addressed to exploit the full potential of the emerging WSN technology. In this dissertation, we introduce the design and implementation of low-power wireless sensor networks for long-term, autonomous, and near-real-time environmental monitoring applications. We have developed an out-of-box solutio… more
Date: May 2010
Creator: Yang, Jue
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Socioscope: Human Relationship and Behavior Analysis in Mobile Social Networks

Description: The widely used mobile phone, as well as its related technologies had opened opportunities for a complete change on how people interact and build relationship across geographic and time considerations. The convenience of instant communication by mobile phones that broke the barrier of space and time is evidently the key motivational point on why such technologies so important in people's life and daily activities. Mobile phones have become the most popular communication tools. Mobile phone tech… more
Date: August 2010
Creator: Zhang, Huiqi
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A Framework for Analyzing and Optimizing Regional Bio-Emergency Response Plans

Description: The presence of naturally occurring and man-made public health threats necessitate the design and implementation of mitigation strategies, such that adequate response is provided in a timely manner. Since multiple variables, such as geographic properties, resource constraints, and government mandated time-frames must be accounted for, computational methods provide the necessary tools to develop contingency response plans while respecting underlying data and assumptions. A typical response sc… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Schneider, Tamara
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The Influence of Social Network Graph Structure on Disease Dynamics in a Simulated Environment

Description: The fight against epidemics/pandemics is one of man versus nature. Technological advances have not only improved existing methods for monitoring and controlling disease outbreaks, but have also provided new means for investigation, such as through modeling and simulation. This dissertation explores the relationship between social structure and disease dynamics. Social structures are modeled as graphs, and outbreaks are simulated based on a well-recognized standard, the susceptible-infectious… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Johnson, Tina V.
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Process-Voltage-Temperature Aware Nanoscale Circuit Optimization

Description: Embedded systems which are targeted towards portable applications are required to have low power consumption because such portable devices are typically powered by batteries. During the memory accesses of such battery operated portable systems, including laptops, cell phones and other devices, a significant amount of power or energy is consumed which significantly affects the battery life. Therefore, efficient and leakage power saving cache designs are needed for longer operation of battery pow… more
Date: December 2010
Creator: Thakral, Garima
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Exploring Privacy in Location-based Services Using Cryptographic Protocols

Description: Location-based services (LBS) are available on a variety of mobile platforms like cell phones, PDA's, etc. and an increasing number of users subscribe to and use these services. Two of the popular models of information flow in LBS are the client-server model and the peer-to-peer model, in both of which, existing approaches do not always provide privacy for all parties concerned. In this work, I study the feasibility of applying cryptographic protocols to design privacy-preserving solutions for … more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Vishwanathan, Roopa
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Physical-Layer Network Coding for MIMO Systems

Description: The future wireless communication systems are required to meet the growing demands of reliability, bandwidth capacity, and mobility. However, as corruptions such as fading effects, thermal noise, are present in the channel, the occurrence of errors is unavoidable. Motivated by this, the work in this dissertation attempts to improve the system performance by way of exploiting schemes which statistically reduce the error rate, and in turn boost the system throughput. The network can be studied us… more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Xu, Ning
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Toward a Data-Type-Based Real Time Geospatial Data Stream Management System

Description: The advent of sensory and communication technologies enables the generation and consumption of large volumes of streaming data. Many of these data streams are geo-referenced. Existing spatio-temporal databases and data stream management systems are not capable of handling real time queries on spatial extents. In this thesis, we investigated several fundamental research issues toward building a data-type-based real time geospatial data stream management system. The thesis makes contributions in … more
Date: May 2011
Creator: Zhang, Chengyang
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Joint Schemes for Physical Layer Security and Error Correction

Description: The major challenges facing resource constraint wireless devices are error resilience, security and speed. Three joint schemes are presented in this research which could be broadly divided into error correction based and cipher based. The error correction based ciphers take advantage of the properties of LDPC codes and Nordstrom Robinson code. A cipher-based cryptosystem is also presented in this research. The complexity of this scheme is reduced compared to conventional schemes. The securities… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Adamo, Oluwayomi Bamidele
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Measuring Semantic Relatedness Using Salient Encyclopedic Concepts

Description: While pragmatics, through its integration of situational awareness and real world relevant knowledge, offers a high level of analysis that is suitable for real interpretation of natural dialogue, semantics, on the other end, represents a lower yet more tractable and affordable linguistic level of analysis using current technologies. Generally, the understanding of semantic meaning in literature has revolved around the famous quote ``You shall know a word by the company it keeps''. In this thes… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Hassan, Samer
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Scene Analysis Using Scale Invariant Feature Extraction and Probabilistic Modeling

Description: Conventional pattern recognition systems have two components: feature analysis and pattern classification. For any object in an image, features could be considered as the major characteristic of the object either for object recognition or object tracking purpose. Features extracted from a training image, can be used to identify the object when attempting to locate the object in a test image containing many other objects. To perform reliable scene analysis, it is important that the features extr… more
Date: August 2011
Creator: Shen, Yao
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Indoor Localization Using Magnetic Fields

Description: Indoor localization consists of locating oneself inside new buildings. GPS does not work indoors due to multipath reflection and signal blockage. WiFi based systems assume ubiquitous availability and infrastructure based systems require expensive installations, hence making indoor localization an open problem. This dissertation consists of solving the problem of indoor localization by thoroughly exploiting the indoor ambient magnetic fields comprising mainly of disturbances termed as anomalies … more
Date: December 2011
Creator: Pathapati Subbu, Kalyan Sasidhar
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Investigating the Extractive Summarization of Literary Novels

Description: Abstract Due to the vast amount of information we are faced with, summarization has become a critical necessity of everyday human life. Given that a large fraction of the electronic documents available online and elsewhere consist of short texts such as Web pages, news articles, scientific reports, and others, the focus of natural language processing techniques to date has been on the automation of methods targeting short documents. We are witnessing however a change: an increasingly larger n… more
Date: December 2011
Creator: Ceylan, Hakan
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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GPS CaPPture: a System for GPS Trajectory Collection, Processing, and Destination Prediction

Description: In the United States, smartphone ownership surpassed 69.5 million in February 2011 with a large portion of those users (20%) downloading applications (apps) that enhance the usability of a device by adding additional functionality. a large percentage of apps are written specifically to utilize the geographical position of a mobile device. One of the prime factors in developing location prediction models is the use of historical data to train such a model. with larger sets of training data, pred… more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Griffin, Terry W.
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Incremental Learning with Large Datasets

Description: This dissertation focuses on the novel learning strategy based on geometric support vector machines to address the difficulties of processing immense data set. Support vector machines find the hyper-plane that maximizes the margin between two classes, and the decision boundary is represented with a few training samples it becomes a favorable choice for incremental learning. The dissertation presents a novel method Geometric Incremental Support Vector Machines (GISVMs) to address both efficiency… more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Giritharan, Balathasan
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Metamodeling-based Fast Optimization of Nanoscale Ams-socs

Description: Modern consumer electronic systems are mostly based on analog and digital circuits and are designed as analog/mixed-signal systems on chip (AMS-SoCs). the integration of analog and digital circuits on the same die makes the system cost effective. in AMS-SoCs, analog and mixed-signal portions have not traditionally received much attention due to their complexity. As the fabrication technology advances, the simulation times for AMS-SoC circuits become more complex and take significant amounts of … more
Date: May 2012
Creator: Garitselov, Oleg
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Multi-perspective, Multi-modal Image Registration and Fusion

Description: Multi-modal image fusion is an active research area with many civilian and military applications. Fusion is defined as strategic combination of information collected by various sensors from different locations or different types in order to obtain a better understanding of an observed scene or situation. Fusion of multi-modal images cannot be completed unless these two modalities are spatially aligned. In this research, I consider two important problems. Multi-modal, multi-perspective image reg… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Belkhouche, Mohammed Yassine
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Sentence Similarity Analysis with Applications in Automatic Short Answer Grading

Description: In this dissertation, I explore unsupervised techniques for the task of automatic short answer grading. I compare a number of knowledge-based and corpus-based measures of text similarity, evaluate the effect of domain and size on the corpus-based measures, and also introduce a novel technique to improve the performance of the system by integrating automatic feedback from the student answers. I continue to combine graph alignment features with lexical semantic similarity measures and employ mach… more
Date: August 2012
Creator: Mohler, Michael A. G.
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Modeling Synergistic Relationships Between Words and Images

Description: Texts and images provide alternative, yet orthogonal views of the same underlying cognitive concept. By uncovering synergistic, semantic relationships that exist between words and images, I am working to develop novel techniques that can help improve tasks in natural language processing, as well as effective models for text-to-image synthesis, image retrieval, and automatic image annotation. Specifically, in my dissertation, I will explore the interoperability of features between language and v… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Leong, Chee Wee
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Source and Channel Coding Strategies for Wireless Sensor Networks

Description: In this dissertation, I focus on source coding techniques as well as channel coding techniques. I addressed the challenges in WSN by developing (1) a new source coding strategy for erasure channels that has better distortion performance compared to MDC; (2) a new cooperative channel coding strategy for multiple access channels that has better channel outage performances compared to MIMO; (3) a new source-channel cooperation strategy to accomplish source-to-fusion center communication that reduc… more
Date: December 2012
Creator: Li, Li
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Extrapolating Subjectivity Research to Other Languages

Description: Socrates articulated it best, "Speak, so I may see you." Indeed, language represents an invisible probe into the mind. It is the medium through which we express our deepest thoughts, our aspirations, our views, our feelings, our inner reality. From the beginning of artificial intelligence, researchers have sought to impart human like understanding to machines. As much of our language represents a form of self expression, capturing thoughts, beliefs, evaluations, opinions, and emotions which are… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Banea, Carmen
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Partner: UNT Libraries
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Finding Meaning in Context Using Graph Algorithms in Mono- and Cross-lingual Settings

Description: Making computers automatically find the appropriate meaning of words in context is an interesting problem that has proven to be one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing (NLP). Widespread potential applications of a possible solution to the problem could be envisaged in several NLP tasks such as text simplification, language learning, machine translation, query expansion, information retrieval and text summarization. Ambiguity of words has always been a challenge in these… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Sinha, Ravi Som
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Layout-accurate Ultra-fast System-level Design Exploration Through Verilog-ams

Description: This research addresses problems in designing analog and mixed-signal (AMS) systems by bridging the gap between system-level and circuit-level simulation by making simulations fast like system-level and accurate like circuit-level. The tools proposed include metamodel integrated Verilog-AMS based design exploration flows. The research involves design centering, metamodel generation flows for creating efficient behavioral models, and Verilog-AMS integration techniques for model realization. The … more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Zheng, Geng
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Optimizing Non-pharmaceutical Interventions Using Multi-coaffiliation Networks

Description: Computational modeling is of fundamental significance in mapping possible disease spread, and designing strategies for its mitigation. Conventional contact networks implement the simulation of interactions as random occurrences, presenting public health bodies with a difficult trade off between a realistic model granularity and robust design of intervention strategies. Recently, researchers have been investigating the use of agent-based models (ABMs) to embrace the complexity of real world inte… more
Date: May 2013
Creator: Loza, Olivia G.
Item Type: Refine your search to only Thesis or Dissertation
Partner: UNT Libraries
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