Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Buffalo, 1995. / "May 1995." Includes bibliographical references (p. 80-89). Also available in print.

Thesis (Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2004. / Thesis advisor(s): Clark Robertson. Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-87). Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004. Directed by Mark A. Clements. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-128).

An introduction on random numbers, their history and applications is given, along with explanations of different methods currently used to generate them. Such generators can be of different kinds, and in particular they can be based on physical systems or algorithmic procedures. The latter type of procedures gives rise to pseudo-random number generators. Specifically, several such generators which are based on elliptic curves are examined. Therefore, in order to ease understanding, a basic primer on elliptic curves over fields and the operations arising from their group structure is also provided. Empirical tests to verify randomness of generated sequences are then considered. Afterwards, there are some statistical considerations and observations about theoretical properties of the generators at hand, useful in order to use them optimally. Finally, several randomly generated curves are created and used to produce pseudo-random sequences which are then tested by means of the previously described generators. In the end, an analysis of the results is attempted and some final considerations are made.

With the increasing popularity of social networking applications, large volumes of graph data are becoming available. Large graphs are also derived by structure extraction from relational, text, or scientific data (e.g., relational tuple networks, citation graphs, ontology networks, protein-protein interaction graphs). Nodeto-node proximity is the key building block for many graph based applications that search or analyze the data. Among various proximity measures, random walk with restart (RWR) is widely adapted because of its ability to consider the global structure of the whole network. Although RWR-based similarity search has been well studied before, there is no prior work on reverse top-k proximity search in graphs based on RWR. We discuss the applicability of this query and show that the direct application of existing methods on RWR-based similarity search to solve reverse top-k queries has very high computational and storage demands. To address this issue, we propose an indexing technique, paired with an on-line reverse top-k search algorithm. In the indexing step, we compute from the graph G a graph index, which is based on a K X |V| matrix, containing in each column v the K largest approximate proximity values from v to any other node in G. K is application-dependent and represents the highest value of k in a practical reverse top-k query. At each column v of the index, the approximate values are lower bounds of the K largest proximity values from v to all other nodes. Given the graph index and a reverse top-k query q (k _ K), we prove that the exact proximities from any node v to query q can be efficiently computed by applying the power method. By comparing these with the corresponding lower bounds taken from the k-th row of the graph index, we are able to determine which nodes are certainly not in the reverse top-k result of q. For some of the remaining nodes, we may also be able to determine that they are certainly in the reverse top-k result of q, based on derived upper bounds for the k-th largest proximity value from them. Finally, for any candidate that remains, we progressively refine its approximate proximities, until based on its lower or upper bound it can be determined not to be or to be in the result. The proximities refined during a reverse top-k are used to update the graph index, making its values progressively more accurate for future queries. Our experimental evaluation shows that our technique is efficient and has manageable storage requirements even when applied on very large graphs. We also show the effectiveness of the reverse top-k search in the scenarios of spam detection and determining the popularity of authors. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Master / Master of Philosophy

In this paper we present the results of a first empirical investigation on how the quality of non-uniform variates is influenced by the underlying uniform RNG and the transformation method used. We use well known standard RNGs and transformation methods to the normal distribution as examples. We find that except for transformed density rejection methods, which do not seem to introduce any additional defects, the quality of the underlying uniform RNG can be both increased and decreased by transformations to non-uniform distributions. (author's abstract) / Series: Preprint Series / Department of Applied Statistics and Data Processing

In a time when cattle herds grow continually larger the need for automatic methods to detect diseases is ever increasing. One possible method to discover diseases is to use thermal images and automatic head and eye detectors. In this thesis an eye detector and a head detector is implemented using the Random Forests classifier. During the implementation the classifier is evaluated using three different descriptors: Histogram of Oriented Gradients, Local Binary Patterns, and a descriptor based on pixel differences. An alternative classifier, the Support Vector Machine, is also evaluated for comparison against Random Forests. The thesis results show that Histogram of Oriented Gradients performs well as a description of cattle heads, while Local Binary Patterns performs well as a description of cattle eyes. The provided descriptor performs almost equally well in both cases. The results also show that Random Forests performs approximately as good as the Support Vector Machine, when the Support Vector Machine is paired with Local Binary Patterns for both heads and eyes. Finally the thesis results indicate that it is easier to detect and locate cattle heads than it is to detect and locate cattle eyes. For eyes, combining a head detector and an eye detector is shown to give a better result than only using an eye detector. In this combination heads are first detected in images, followed by using the eye detector in areas classified as heads.

The next generation of mobile telecommunication, 5G, will be specified in the near future. One of the proposed changes relative to the previous generation, 4G,is the inclusion of a new system control plane (SCP). The purpose of the SCP is to improve system scalability, forward compatibility, peak performance and to enable a higher degree of support for advanced antenna techniques. This is done by logically separating data transmitted explicitly from and to the user, the dynamic transmissions, from the broadcasted transmissions that remain constant regardless of user activity, the static transmissions, and by then redesigning the static part to make it more lean. This is expected to have several positive effects such as considerably more free resources, resulting in energy savings and potentially increased usage of MIMO. Knowing what effect the SCP has upon aspects such as random access is of importance when designing the solution that will go into the standard. Simulations show that there is potential in the inclusion of the new SCP. While the simulated 5G candidate systems that include the SCP have an increased delay when running the random access procedure, some aspects of the procedure have been improved. The main differences relative to the simulated 4G system are the performance of the first message in the procedure, which increased, and the performance of the second message in the procedure, which decreased. The deficiencies found in the handling of the second message, however, can be alleviated by using a more proper algorithm and channel design than what was used in this study.

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Computer Science and Information Systems / Master / Master of Philosophy

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