The thesis presents algorithms based on a linear algebraic solution for the identification of the parameters of the FIR system using only higher order statistics when only the output of the system corrupted by additive Gaussian noise is observed. All the traditional parametric methods of estimating the parameters of the system have been based on the 2nd order statistics of the output of the system. These methods suffer from the deficiency that they do not preserve the phase response of the system and hence cannot identify non-minimum phase systems. To circumvent this problem, higher order statistics which preserve the phase characteristics of a process and hence are able to identify a non-minimum phase system and also are insensitive to additive Gaussian noise have been used in recent years. Existing algorithms for the identification of the FIR parameters based on the higher order cumulants use the autocorrelation sequence as well and give erroneous results in the presence of additive colored Gaussian noise. This problem can be overcome by obtaining algorithms which do not utilize the 2nd order statistics. An existing relationship between the 2nd order and any Ith order cumulants is generalized to a relationship between any two arbitrary k, Ith order cumulants. This new relationship is used to obtain new algorithms for FIR system identification which use only cumulants of order > 2 and with no other restriction than the Gaussian nature of the additive noise sequence. Simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the failure of the existing algorithms when the imposed constraints on the 2nd order statistics of the additive noise are violated while the proposed algorithms perform very well and give consistent results. Recently, a new algebraic approach for parameter estimation method denoted the Linear Combination of Slices (LCS) method was proposed and was based on expressing the FIR parameters as a linear combination of the cumulant slices. The rank deficient cumulant matrix S formed in the LCS method can be expressed as a product of matrices which have a certain structure. The orthogonality property of the subspace orthogonal to S and the range space of S has been exploited to obtain a new class of algorithms for the estimation of the parameters of a FIR system. Numerical simulation studies have been carried out to demonstrate the good behaviour of the proposed algorithms. Analytical expressions for the covariance of the estimates of the FIR parameters of the different algorithms presented in the thesis have been obtained and numerical comparison has been done for specific cases. Numerical examples to demonstrate the application of the proposed algorithms for channel equalization in data communication and as an initial solution to the cumulant matching nonlinear optimization methods have been presented.

In speech communication systems such as voice-controlled systems, hands-free mobile telephones and hearing aids, the received signals are degraded by room reverberation and background noise. This degradation can reduce the perceived quality and intelligibility of the speech, and decrease the performance of speech enhancement and source localization. These problems are difficult to solve due to the colored and nonstationary nature of the speech signals, and features of the Room Impulse Response (RIR) such as its long duration and non-minimum phase. In this dissertation, we focus on two topics of speech enhancement and speaker localization in noisy reverberant environments. A two-stage speech enhancement method is presented to suppress both early and late reverberation in noisy speech using only one microphone. It is shown that this method works well even in highly reverberant rooms. Experiments under different acoustic conditions confirm that the proposed blind method is superior in terms of reducing early and late reverberation effects and noise compared to other well known single-microphone techniques in the literature. Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA)-based methods usually provide the most accurate source localization in adverse conditions. The key issue for these methods is to accurately estimate the TDOA using the smallest number of microphones. Two robust Time Delay Estimation (TDE) methods are proposed which use the information from only two microphones. One method is based on adaptive inverse filtering which provides superior performance even in highly reverberant and moderately noisy conditions. It also has negligible failure estimation which makes it a reliable method in realistic environments. This method has high computational complexity due to the estimation in the first stage for the first microphone. As a result, it can not be applied in time-varying environments and real-time applications. Our second method improves this problem by introducing two effective preprocessing stages for the conventional Cross Correlation (CC)-based methods. The results obtained in different noisy reverberant conditions including a real and time-varying environment demonstrate that the proposed methods are superior compared to the conventional TDE methods. / Graduate / 0544 / 0984 / saeed.mosayyebpour@gmail.com

The worldwide economic downturn and recession in the second half of 2008 were mainly the result of the crises that influenced the world‟s financial markets. After the financial crisis, the extended period of rapid credit growth that was driven by asset price increases, especially property prices, came to an end. This identified two problems central to the theme of this study. The first problem was illustrated through the recent crisis, which showed that problems in the financial sector have a potentially destabilising effect on the economy, to such an extent that they also affect the real economy. The second problem highlighted by the recent financial crisis pertains to the current macroeconomic framework, which indicates policy failure to detect and deal with financial sector instabilities. The objective of this study was to develop a framework in which the influence that rapidly growing credit and asset prices have on financial stability could be determined. Two distinct empirical models were estimated in order to reach the main objective of this study. The first model established the influence that asset prices and credit growth have on the real economy. It concluded that a long-run relationship exists between inflation, real GDP, credit extended to the private sector, house prices and share prices. A bi-directional relationship was found between house and share price, which indicates the interdependence of asset prices in SA. The transmission channels assume that credit is influenced by interest rates, but the results also found that interest rates are largely influenced by credit. The second model determined the influence of asset prices and credit on financial stability. A significant long-run relationship was found between financial stability, share and house prices, and between share prices, credit and financial stability. It was found that credit and share prices can be used to signal financial instability, and share prices can help to determine future credit extended to the private sector. In addition, the empirical analysis indicated that a credit market squeeze will be experienced after a decrease in financial stability. Lastly, credit extended will increase as a result of shock to house and share prices and financial stability will decrease when there is a shock to share and house prices. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

The worldwide economic downturn and recession in the second half of 2008 were mainly the result of the crises that influenced the world‟s financial markets. After the financial crisis, the extended period of rapid credit growth that was driven by asset price increases, especially property prices, came to an end. This identified two problems central to the theme of this study. The first problem was illustrated through the recent crisis, which showed that problems in the financial sector have a potentially destabilising effect on the economy, to such an extent that they also affect the real economy. The second problem highlighted by the recent financial crisis pertains to the current macroeconomic framework, which indicates policy failure to detect and deal with financial sector instabilities. The objective of this study was to develop a framework in which the influence that rapidly growing credit and asset prices have on financial stability could be determined. Two distinct empirical models were estimated in order to reach the main objective of this study. The first model established the influence that asset prices and credit growth have on the real economy. It concluded that a long-run relationship exists between inflation, real GDP, credit extended to the private sector, house prices and share prices. A bi-directional relationship was found between house and share price, which indicates the interdependence of asset prices in SA. The transmission channels assume that credit is influenced by interest rates, but the results also found that interest rates are largely influenced by credit. The second model determined the influence of asset prices and credit on financial stability. A significant long-run relationship was found between financial stability, share and house prices, and between share prices, credit and financial stability. It was found that credit and share prices can be used to signal financial instability, and share prices can help to determine future credit extended to the private sector. In addition, the empirical analysis indicated that a credit market squeeze will be experienced after a decrease in financial stability. Lastly, credit extended will increase as a result of shock to house and share prices and financial stability will decrease when there is a shock to share and house prices. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013

In speech communication systems such as voice-controlled systems, hands-free mobile telephones and hearing aids, the received signals are degraded by room reverberation and background noise. This degradation can reduce the perceived quality and intelligibility of the speech, and decrease the performance of speech enhancement and source localization. These problems are difficult to solve due to the colored and nonstationary nature of the speech signals, and features of the Room Impulse Response (RIR) such as its long duration and non-minimum phase. In this dissertation, we focus on two topics of speech enhancement and speaker localization in noisy reverberant environments. A two-stage speech enhancement method is presented to suppress both early and late reverberation in noisy speech using only one microphone. It is shown that this method works well even in highly reverberant rooms. Experiments under different acoustic conditions confirm that the proposed blind method is superior in terms of reducing early and late reverberation effects and noise compared to other well known single-microphone techniques in the literature. Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA)-based methods usually provide the most accurate source localization in adverse conditions. The key issue for these methods is to accurately estimate the TDOA using the smallest number of microphones. Two robust Time Delay Estimation (TDE) methods are proposed which use the information from only two microphones. One method is based on adaptive inverse filtering which provides superior performance even in highly reverberant and moderately noisy conditions. It also has negligible failure estimation which makes it a reliable method in realistic environments. This method has high computational complexity due to the estimation in the first stage for the first microphone. As a result, it can not be applied in time-varying environments and real-time applications. Our second method improves this problem by introducing two effective preprocessing stages for the conventional Cross Correlation (CC)-based methods. The results obtained in different noisy reverberant conditions including a real and time-varying environment demonstrate that the proposed methods are superior compared to the conventional TDE methods. / Graduate / 2015-04-23 / 0544 / 0984 / saeed.mosayyebpour@gmail.com

Harmonics are created by non-linear devices connected to the power system. Power system harmonics are multiples of the fundamental power system frequency and these harmonic frequencies can create distorted voltages and currents. Distortion of voltages and currents can affect the power system adversely causing power quality problems. Therefore, estimation of harmonics is of high importance for efficiency of the power system network. The problem of harmonic loss evaluation is of growing importance for renewable power system industry by impacting the operating costs and the useful life of the system components. Non-linear devices such as power electronics converters can inject harmonics alternating currents (AC) in the electrical power system. The number of sensitive loads that require ideal sinusoidal supply voltage for their proper operation has been increasing. To maintain the quality limits proposed by standards to protect the sensitive loads, it is necessary to include some form of filtering device to the power system. Harmonics also increases overall reactive power demanded by equivalent load. Filters have been devised to achieve an optimal control strategy for harmonic alleviation problems. To achieve an acceptable distortion, increase the power quality and to reduce the harmonics hence several three phase filter banks are used and connected in parallel. In this thesis, high order harmonics cases have been suppressed by employing variants of Butterworth, Chebyshev and Cauer filters. MATLAB/SIMULINK wind farm model was used to generate and analyze the different harmonics magnitude and frequency. High voltage direct current (HVDC) lines for an electrical grid that is more than50km far away wind farm generation plant was investigated for harmonics. These HVDC lines are also used in offshore wind farm plant. Investigated three-phase harmonics filters are shunt elements that are used in power systems for decreasing voltage distortion and for correcting the power factor. Renewable energy sources are not the stable source of energy generation like wind, solar and tidal e.t.c. Though they are secondary sources of generation and hard to connect with electrical grid. In near future the technique is to use the wave digital filter (WDF) or circulator-tree wave digital filter (CTWDF) for the renewable energy application can be employed to mitigate the harmonics. These WDF and CTWDF can b eused in HVDC lines and smart grid applications. A preliminary analysis is conducted for such a study.

This thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I identify and explore the fundamental relationship between income inequality and GDP volatility. I give theoretical insight of this relationship alongside empirical evidence from a sample of industrialized countries. In the second chapter, in regression estimates relating inequality to the variables of interest, I suggest that rather than aggregate inequality, the average growth rate of within-cohort inequality data should be used. In the light of my findings I then try to explore the effect of international trade on inequality in the US and UK. In the last chapter, I carry out a Monte Carlo study. This compares efficiencies of impulse response matching and GMM estimators at identifying reduced form coefficients and structural parameters on a DSGE model. / Esta tesis está dividida por tres capítulos. En el primer capítulo, llevo al interés que hay una relación fundamental entre la desigualdad de ingresos y la volatilidad de PBI. Doy pruebas teóricas para esta relación, así como empíricas de una muestra de países industrializados. En el segundo capítulo, sugiero que mejor que la desigualdad agregada, la tasa de crecimiento media de dentro de desigualdades de cohorte debería estar usada en las estimaciones de regresión que relaciona la desigualdad con las variables del interés. Entonces trato de explorar el efecto del comercio internacional en la desigualdad en los EE.UU y en el Reino Unido a la luz de mis conclusiones. En el último capítulo, realizo un estudio de Monte Carlo para comparar la eficiencia de la Correspondencia de respuesta de Impulso y peritos GMM en la identificación de los coeficientes de forma reducidos y parámetros estructurales en un modelo de DSGE.

Το αριθμητικό σύστημα υπολοίπων (RNS) έχει προταθεί ως ένας τρόπος για επιτάχυνση των αριθμητικών πράξεων του πολλαπλασιασμού και της πρόσθεσης. Ένα από τα σημαντικά πλεονεκτήματα της χρήσης του RNS είναι ότι οδηγεί σε κυκλώματα που έχουν το χαρακτηριστικό της χαμηλής κατανάλωσης. Πιο συγκεκριμένα στην παρούσα διατριβή γίνεται μια αναλυτική μελέτη πάνω στην ταχύτητα διεξαγωγής της πράξης του πολλαπλασιασμού και της άθροισης. Ο λόγος που γίνεται αυτό είναι διότι οι εφαρμογές επεξεργασίας σήματος χρησιμοποιούν ιδιαιτέρως τις προαναφερθείσες πράξεις. Επίσης γίνεται μελέτη της ισχύος που καταναλώνεται κατά την επεξεργασία ενός σήματος με τη χρήση των προτεινόμενων αριθμητικών κυκλωμάτων. Ιδιαίτερη έμφαση δίνεται στη χρήση απλών αρχιτεκτονικών τις οποίες μπορούν τα εργαλεία σύνθεσης να διαχειριστούν καλύτερα παράγοντας βέλτιστα κυκλώματα. Τέλος η διατριβή μελετά τα προβλήματα διακύμανσης των παραμέτρων του υλικού που αντιμετωπίζει η σύγχρονη τεχνολογία κατασκευής ολοκληρωμένων κυκλωμάτων. Συγκεκριμένα σε τεχνολογία μικρότερη των 90nm παρατηρείται το φαινόμενο ίδια στοιχεία κυκλώματος να συμπεριφέρονται με διαφορετικό τρόπο. Το φαινόμενο αυτό γίνεται σημαντικά πιο έντονο σε τεχνολογίες κάτω των 45nm. Η παρούσα διατριβή προτείνει λύσεις βασισμένες στην παραλληλία και την ανεξαρτησία των επεξεργαστικών πυρήνων που παρέχει το RNS, για να αντιμετωπίσει το συγκεκριμένο φαινόμενο. / The Residue Number System (RNS) has been proposed as a means to speed up the implementation of multiplication-addition intensive applications, commonly found in DSP. The main benefit of RNS is the inherent parallelism, which has been exploited to build efficient multiply-add structures, and more recently, to design low-power systems. In particular, this dissertation deals with the delay complexity of the multiply-add operation (MAC). The reason for this is that DSP applications are MAC intensive and hence this dissertation proposes solutions to increase the speed of processing. Furthermore, the study of the multiply-add operations is extended to power consumption matters. The dissertation focus on simple architectures such that EDA tools produce efficient in both power and delay, synthesized circuits. Finally the dissertation deals with variability matters that came up as the vlsi technology shrinks below 90nm. Variability becomes unaffordable especially for the 45nm technology node. This dissertation proposes solutions based on parallelism and the independence of the RNS cores to derive variation-tolerant architectures.

Nesta Dissertação propõe-se a aplicação de algoritmos genéticos para a síntese de filtros para modular sinais de controladores a estrutura variável e modo deslizante. A modulação do sinal de controle reduz a amplitude do sinal de saída e, consequentemente, pode reduzir o consumo de energia para realizar o controle e o chattering. Esses filtros também são aplicados em sistemas que possuem incertezas paramétricas nos quais nem todas as variáveis de estado são medidas. Nesses sistemas, as incertezas nos parâmetros podem impedir que seus estados sejam estimados com precisão por observadores. A síntese desses filtros necessita da obtenção da envoltória, que é o valor máximo da norma de cada resposta impulsiva admissível no sistema. Após este passo, é sintetizado um filtro que seja um majorante para a envoltória. Neste estudo, três métodos de busca da envoltória por algoritmos genéticos foram criados. Um dos métodos é o preferido, pois apresentou os melhores resultados e o menor tempo computacional. / This thesis proposes the application of genetic algorithms for the synthesis of filters which modulate signals of variable structure sliding mode controllers. The modulation of the control signal reduces the amplitude of the output signal and thus can reduce power consumption and chattering. These filters are also applied to systems with parametric uncertainties and unmeasured state variables. In these systems, the uncertainties can impair the accurate estimation of the state by means of observers. For the synthesis of these filters, it is necessary to obtain the envelope which is the maximum norm of each impulse response admissible for the system. After this step, a filter is synthesized to be an upper bound for the envelope. In this study, three methods of search of the envelope by genetic algorithms were developed. One of these methods has been giving the best results and needs the least computational time.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This work researches on free and forced vibrations of a double beam coupled system. The system is regarded as two Euler-Bernoulli beams which are parallel, have the same length, are simply supported and are connected through a viscoelastic layer. Natural frequencies and their mode shapes, also called eigenfunctions, of the coupled system are obtained through a uniform beam methodology which uses the free dynamical basis to represent the solution of the the modal equation. This study uses modal analysis and block matrix formulation, while the dynamical basis used to represent the modal solution is obtained from the dynamical solution of a fourth order differential equation whose coefficients are just those of the original problem. The natural frequencies and mode shapes of the undamped system are determined for several values of beam parameters. For the damped case, damping ratios of each beam and also of the viscoelastic layer (which characterizes the coupling the system) are considered. The forced response is represented using matrix impulse response, which is the solution of an initial value problem with impulsive initial conditions. / Neste trabalho é realizado um estudo sobre vibrações livres e forçadas de um sistema de dupla viga acoplado. O sistema é composto por duas vigas do tipo Euler-Bernoulli, paralelas, de mesmo comprimento, simplesmente apoiadas e conectadas por uma camada viscoelástica. São obtidas as frequências naturais e os modos de vibração ou autofunções do sistema acoplado utilizando uma metodologia para vigas uniformes, que usa a base dinâmica para escrever a solução da equação modal. O estudo é realizado através da análise modal e de uma formulação matricial em blocos, e a base dinâmica usada para escrever a solução da equação modal é gerada pela solução dinâmica de uma equação diferencial de quarta ordem cujos coeficientes são os mesmos do problema considerado. As frequências naturais e os modos de vibração para o sistema não amortecido são determinados para vários valores dos parâmetros da viga. Para o caso amortecido, consideramos o amortecimento individual em cada viga e o amortecimento que compõe a camada viscoelástica o qual caracteriza o acoplamento no sistema. A resposta forçada do sistema é escrita em função da resposta impulso matricial que é solução de um problema de valor inicial com condições iniciais impulsivas.