Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-186). Also available on the World Wide Web.

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία κινήθηκε ανάμεσα σε δύο στόχους. Σε πρώτο επίπεδο είναι η παρουσίαση του κατάλληλου εξοπλισμού για τον τηλεέλεγχο υποδομών ευφυούς κατοικίας με τη βοήθεια ασύρματων τεχνολογιών, όπως το GSM. Δεύτερος στόχος είναι η θεωρητική μοντελοποίηση της συμπεριφοράς του καναλιού μετάδοσης σε εσωτερικό περιβάλλον, όσον αφορά την λαμβανόμενη ισχύ και τις απώλειες που προκαλούνται από το φαινόμενο της σκίασης. Στo πρώτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται παραμετροποίηση των υποδομών της ευφυούς κατοικίας Στο δεύτερο κεφάλαιο παρουσιάζονται οι πιο σημαντικές σύγχρονες ασύρματες τεχνολογίες, ενώ παράλληλα γίνεται μια επισκόπηση ως προς τα πρωτόκολλα για την υλοποίηση της ευφυούς κατοικίας. Στο τρίτο κεφάλαιο παρουσιάζουμε το δίκτυο GSM και προτείνουμε λύσεις και εφαρμογές πάνω στην ευφυή κατοικία .Στο τέταρτο κεφάλαιο γίνεται εκτενής αναφορά στα μοντέλα που περιγράφουν την ηλεκτρομαγνητική διάδοση για το εσωτερικό περιβάλλον που μας ενδιαφέρει. Σ’ αυτό το κεφάλαιο δίνεται μια πρώτη αίσθηση του σημαντικού ρόλου των απωλειών και πως αυτές επηρεάζουν τις επικοινωνίες γενικότερα. Επίσης, εστιάζουμε στις απώλειες που προκαλούνται από το φαινόμενο της σκίασης. Τέλος, στο πέμπτο κεφάλαιο προβαίνουμε στην πειραματική διαδικασία και την θεωρητική μοντελοποίηση της συμπεριφοράς του καναλιού μετάδοσης σε τοπολογία εσωτερικού σπιτιού, σε μια κατοικία στο κέντρο της Πάτρας, Πιο συγκεκριμένα, διεξήχθη μία επαλήθευση του μοντέλου απωλειών καναλιού ενός συστήματος 802.11g Wi-Fi λειτουργίας στα 2,4 GHz, όσον αφορά την λαμβανόμενη ισχύ και τις απώλειες που προκαλούνται από το φαινόμενο της σκίασης. Στα αποτελέσματα αναγνωρίσαμε ότι η μέθοδος, που βασίζεται στο μοντέλο απώλειας καναλιού Multi-Wall-Floor, παρέχει ένα πιο αξιόπιστο υπολογισμό της απόκλισης σκίασης. / The current thesis is moved between two targets: The first objective is the presentation of appropriate equipment for remote monitoring infrastructure of a smart home using wireless technologies such as GSM. The second objective is the theoretical modeling of the behavior of the transmission channel in indoor environment of the received power and the losses caused by the phenomenon of shadowing. In the first chapter we analyse the configuration of the smart home. The second chapter presents the most important modern wireless technologies and an overview on protocols for the implementation of smart home. The third chapter presents the GSM network and proposes solutions and applications using it on a smart home. The fourth chapter includes a comprehensive reference on models that describe the electromagnetic diffusion of the internal environment. This chapter gives a first sense of the important role of the path losses and how they affect communications in general. Also, we focus on losses caused by the phenomenon of shadowing. Finally, in the fifth chapter we conduct the experiment and theoretical modeling of the behavior of the transmission channel topology in domestic house, specifically a house in the center of Patras was chosen and we conducted a verification of the path losses model of 802.11g Wi-Fi in 2,4 GHz regarding the received power and the losses caused by the phenomenon of shadowing. The results showed that the method based on Multi-Wall-Floor Model path losses, provides a more reliable calculation of the deviation bands.

The World Health Organization claims that there are more than 285 million blind and visually impaired people in the world. In the US, 25 million Americans suffer from total or partial vision loss. As a result of their impairment, they struggle with mobility problems, especially the risk of falling. According to the National Council On Aging, falls are among the primary causes for fatal injury and they are the most common cause of non-fatal trauma-related hospital admissions among older adults. Visibility, an organization that helps visually impaired people, reports that people with visual impairments are twice as likely to fall as their sighted counterparts. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 2.5 million American adults were treated for fall-related injuries in 2013, leading to over 800,000 hospitalizations and over 27,000 deaths. The total cost of fall injuries in the United States in 2013 was $31 billion, and the financial total is expected to rise to $67.7 billion by 2020. Reducing the amount of these unexpected hospital visits saves money and expands the quality of life for the affected population. Technology has completely revolutionized how nowadays activities are conducted and how var- ious tasks are accomplished, and mobile devices are at the center of this paradigm shift. According to the Pew Research Center, 64% of American adults own a smartphone currently, and this number is trending upward. Mobile computing devices have evolved to include a plethora of data sensors that can be manipulated to create solutions for humanity, including fall prevention. Fall prevention is an area of research that focuses on strengthening safety in order to prevent falls from occurring. Many fall prevention systems use sensing devices to measure the likelihood of a fall. Sensor data are usually processed using computer vision, data mining, and machine learning techniques. This work pertains to the implementation of a smartphone-based fall prevention system for the elderly and visually impaired. The system consists of two modules: fall prevention and fall detection. Fall prevention is in charge of identifying tripping hazards in the user’s surroundings. Fall detection is in charge of detecting when falls happen and alerting a person of interest. The proposed system is challenged by multiple problems: it has to run in near real time, it has to run efficiently in a smartphone hardware, it has to process structured and unstructured environments, and many more related to image analysis (occlusion, motion blur, computational complexity, etc). The fall prevention module is divided into three parts, floor detection, object-on-floor detection, and distance estimation. The evaluation process of the best approach for floor detection achieved an accuracy of 92%, a precision of 88%, and a recall of 92%. The evaluation process of the best approach for object-on-floor detection achieved an accuracy of 90%, a precision of 56%, and a recall of 78%. The evaluation process of the best approach for distance estimation achieved a MSE error of 0.45 meters. The fall detection module is approached from two perspectives, using inertial measuring units (IMU) embedded in today’s smartphones, and using a 2D camera. The evaluation process of the solution using IMUs achieved an accuracy of 83%, a precision of 89%, and a recall of 58.2%. The evaluation process of the solution that uses a 2D camera achieved an accuracy of 85.37% and a recall of 70.97%.

The aim of the master’s thesis was to design heating, ventilation and cooling systems and to evaluate possibility of using renewable sources in case of a reconstructed two-storey family house. Air to water heat pump and floor system were designed to ensure both heating and cooling supply in the building. A heat recovery ventilation system was proposed. Gains of electrical energy from photovoltaic array were calculated and then possibility of coverage the heat pump consumption was evaluated. The thesis contains required calculations including building heat losses, heat gains, air exchange rates and the dimensioning of all mentioned systems. Technical drawing is also comprised.

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Studies on the effective moment of inertia of girders that support concrete slabs using joist seats as the horizontal shear connections, and a cost efficiency analysis comparing composite and non-composite floor systems that meet vibrations design standards, were conducted. The first study was undertaken because over-prediction of girder effective moment of inertia was the suspected cause of several recent vibration problems in floors supported by widely spaced LH-series joists. Eight purpose-built floors of the type in question were subjected to experimental tests of girder effective moment of inertia and girder frequency. Frequencies were tested for two live loading cases. Three separate test configurations were made with each floor by changing the seat-to-girder connections between bolted, welded, and reinforced. In the study, 1) the accuracy of the current design practice is assessed, 2) a new relationship was proposed, and 3) suggestions for finite element modeling are made. In recent years, composite construction has been used to improve cost efficiency by reducing structural weight and in some cases by reducing story height. However, vibration problems are a design consideration in composite floors because lighter floors tend to be more lively. It is not clear if cost savings can be made with composite construction if vibrations are considered in the design. To compare the cost of composite and non-composite floors that satisfy AISC/CISC Design Guide criterion for walking excitation, four typical size bays were analyzed using commercial design software that finds the least expensive member configuration for a given bay size. All acceptable bay configurations of member sizes and spacing were evaluated for least non-composite and composite costs, then these results were compared. The findings show that composite construction can be more economical when initial dead load deflections do not control the design. / Master of Science

We have previously shown that the arcuate organization of cell fates within the ventral midbrain critically depends upon the morphogen, Sonic Hedgehog (SHH), which is secreted from a signaling center located along the ventral midline, called the floor plate (FP). Thus, it is ultimately the specification of the FP that is responsible for the patterning and specification of ventral midbrain cell fates. Interestingly, we have found that the chick midbrain FP can be divided into medial (MFP) and lateral (LFP) regions on the basis of gene expression, mode of induction and function. Overexpression of SHH alone is sufficient to recapitulate the entire pattern of ventral cell fates, although remarkably it cannot induce MFP, consistent with the observation that the MFP is refractory to any perturbations of HH signaling. In contrast, overexpression of the winged-helix transcription factor FOXA2/HNF3[beta]robustly induced the MFP fate throughout ventral midbrain while blocking its activity resulted in the absence of the MFP. Thus, by analyzing the differences between SHH and FOXA2 blockade and overexpression, we were able to attribute functions to each the LFP and the MFP. Notably, we observed that FOXA2 overexpression caused a bending of the midbrain neurepithelium that resembled the endogenous median hinge-point observed during neurulation. Additionally, FOXA2 misexpression led to a robust induction of DA progenitors and neurons that was never observed after SHH expression alone. In contrast, we found that all other ventral cell types required HH signaling directly, at a distance and early on in the development of the midbrain when its tissue size is relatively small. Additionally, HH blockade resulted in increased cell-scatter of the arcuate territories and in the disruption of the regional boundaries between the ventral midbrain and adjacent tissue. Thus, we bring new insight into the mechanism by which midbrain FP is specified and ascribe functional roles to its subregions. We propose that while the MFP regulates the production of dopaminergic progenitors and the changes in cellshape required for bending and shaping the neural tube, the LFP appears to be largely responsible for cell survival and the formation of a spatially coherent pattern of midbrain cell fates. / text

Low-density parity check (LDPC) codes have experienced tremendous popularity due to their capacity-achieving performance. In this dissertation, several different aspects of LDPC coding and its applications to magnetic storage are investigated. One of the most significant issues that impedes the use of LDPC codes in many systems is the error-rate floor phenomenon associated with their iterative decoders. By delineating the fundamental principles, we extend to partial response channels algorithms for predicting the error rate performance in the floor region for the binary-input AWGN channel. We develop three classes of decoding algorithms for mitigating the error floor by directly tackling the cause of the problem: trapping sets. In our experiments, these algorithms provide multiple orders of improvement over conventional decoders at the cost of various implementation complexity increases.Product codes are widely used in magnetic recording systems where errors are both isolated and bursty. A dual-mode decoding technique for Reed-Solomon-code-based product codes is proposed, where the second decoding mode involves maximum-likelihood erasure decoding of the binary images of the Reed-Solomon codewords. By exploring a tape storage application, we demonstrate that this dual-mode decoding system dramatically improves the performance of product codes. Moreover, the complexity added by the second decoding mode is manageable. We also show the performance of this technique on a product code which has an LDPC code in the columns.Run-length-limited (RLL) codes are ubiquitous in today's disk drives. Using RLL codes has enabled drive designers to pack data very efficiently onto the platter surface by ensuring stable symbol-timing recovery. We consider a concatenation system design with an LDPC code and an RLL code as components to simultaneously achieve desirable features such as: soft information availability to the LDPC decoder, the preservation of the LDPC code's structure, and the capability of correcting long erasure bursts.We analyze the performance of LDPC-coded magnetic recording channel in the presence of media noise. We employ advanced signal processing for the pattern-dependent-noise-predictive channel detectors, and demonstrate that a gain of over 1 dB or a linear density gain of about 8% relative to a comparable Reed-Solomon is attainable by using an LDPC code.

An optical weed sensing sprayer (WeedSeeker) was evaluated for making postemergence glyphosate herbicide applications in a Yuma, AZ lemon orchard. In addition, mechanical (disk and Perfecta cultivator) and chemical weed control strategies were compared. Results were fairly similar; however, the use of the WeedSeeker units combined with a preemergence herbicide (H1) increased weed control three fold compared to disking (D) and perfecta (P1). Additionally, when the WeedSeeker units were used in conjunction with preemergence herbicides, spray volume was reduced by 66% compared to a conventional sprayer and by 57% when used for postemergence applications only. There was a relationship between weed ground cover and the area sprayed by the WeedSeeker units indicating that maximum postemergence herbicide savings will occur at low weed densities or less than 10% groundcover. The use of a sprayer with an improved suspension system allowed for faster spraying speeds than were possible with the tractor mounted sprayer. Weed control was similar for the conventional and the WeedSeeker sprayer. However, yields were variable for both years. Future investigations will include efforts to develop crop budgets based on experimental operations

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