A solution to the vehicle state estimation problem is given using the Kalman filtering and the Particle filtering theories. Vehicle states are necessary for an active or a semi-active suspension control system, which is intended to enhance ride comfort, road handling and stability of the vehicle. Due to a lack of information on road disturbances, conventional estimation techniques fail to provide accurate estimates of all the required states. The proposed estimation algorithm, named Supervisory Kalman Filter (SKF), consists of a Kalman filter with an extra update step which is inspired by the particle filtering technique. The extra step, called a supervisory layer, operates on the portion of the state vector that cannot be estimated by the Kalman filter. First, it produces N randomly generated state vectors, the particles, which are distributed based on the Kalman filter’s last updated estimate. Then, a resampling stage is implemented to collect the particles with higher probability. The effectiveness of the SKF is demonstrated by comparing its estimation results with that of the Kalman filter and the particle filter when a test vehicle is passing over a bump. The estimation results confirm that the SKF precisely estimates those states of the vehicle that cannot be estimated by either the Kalman filter or the particle filter, without any direct measurement of the road disturbance inputs. Once the vehicle states are provided, a suspension control law, the Skyhook strategy, processes the current states and adjusts the damping forces accordingly to provide a better and safer ride for the vehicle passengers. This thesis presents a novel systematic and practical methodology for the design and implementation of the Skyhook control strategy for vehicle’s semi-active suspension systems. Typically, the semi-active control strategies (including the Skyhook strategy) have switching natures. This makes the design process difficult and highly dependent on extensive trial and error. The proposed methodology maps the discontinuous control system model to a continuous linear region, where all the time/frequency design techniques, established in the conventional control system theory, can be applied. If the semiactive control law is designed to satisfy ride and stability requirements, an inverse mapping offers the ultimate control law. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology in the design of a semi-active suspension control system for a Cadillac SRX 2005 is demonstrated by real-time road tests. The road tests results verify that the use of the newly developed systematic design methodology reduces the required time and effort in real industrial problems.

The evolution of the Internet has brought us into a world that represents a huge amount of information items such as music, movies, books, web pages, etc. with varying quality. As a result of this huge universe of items, people get confused and the question &ldquo / Which one should I choose?&rdquo / arises in their minds. Recommendation Systems address the problem of getting confused about items to choose, and filter a specific type of information with a specific information filtering technique that attempts to present information items that are likely of interest to the user. A variety of information filtering techniques have been proposed for performing recommendations, including content-based and collaborative techniques which are the most commonly used approaches in recommendation systems. This thesis work introduces ReMovender, a content-based movie recommendation system which is empowered by collaborative missing data prediction. The distinctive point of this study lies in the methodology used to correlate the users in the system with one another and the usage of the content information of movies. ReMovender makes it possible for the users to rate movies in a scale from one to five. By using these ratings, it finds similarities among the users in a collaborative manner to predict the missing ratings data. As for the content-based part, a set of movie features are used in order to correlate the movies and produce recommendations for the users.

ITC/USA 2006 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Second Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 23-26, 2006 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Spatial multiplexing (SM) systems have received significant attention because the architecture offers high spectral efficiency. However, relatively little research exists on optimization of SM systems in the presence of jamming. In a spatially uncoded SM system, such as V-BLAST, the channel state information is assumed to be unavailable a priori at both transmitter and receiver. Here, Kalman filtering is used to estimate the Rayleigh fading channel at the receiver. The spatial correlation of the jammer plus noise is also estimated, and spatial whitening to reject the jammers is employed in both the Kalman channel estimator and detector. To avoid the exponential complexity of maximum-likelihood (ML) detection, the QRD-M algorithm is employed. In contrast to sphere decoding, QRD-M has fixed decoding complexity of order O(M), and is thus attractive for hardware implementation. The performance of the joint Kalman filter channel estimator, spatial whitener and QRD-M detector is verfied by simulations.

ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / Modern telemetry systems require flexible sampling rates for analog signal conditioning within telemetry encoders in order to optimize mission formats for varying data acquisition needs and data rate constraints. Implementing a variable sample rate signal conditioning module for a telemetry encoder requires consideration of several possible architectural topologies that place different system requirements on data acquisition modules within the encoder in order to maintain adequate signal fidelity of sensor information. This paper focuses on the requirements, design considerations and tradeoffs associated with differing architectural topologies for implementing a variable sample rate signal conditioning module and the resulting implications on the encoder system's data acquisition units.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / An acoustic modem employing direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) signaling is considered with LDPC coding. The underwater acoustic channel is tracked using a Kalman filter which requires accurate data decisions. To improve KF performance and reduce the overall error rate, joint iterative LDPC decoding and channel estimation is proposed based on a factor graph and sum-product algorithm approximation. In this scheme, the decoder posterior log likelihood ratios (LLRs) provide data decisions for the KF. Decoder extrinsic LLRs are similarly incorporated into the detector LLRs to yield improved priors for decoding. Error rate simulations of the overall modem are provided for a shallow-water channel model with Ricean/Rayleigh fading.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Modern telemetry systems require flexible bit rate telemetry encoders in order to optimize mission formats for varying data rate requirements and/or signal to noise conditions given a fixed transmitter power. Implementing a variable bit rate telemetry encoder requires consideration of several possible architectural topologies that place different system requirements on data acquisition modules within the encoder in order to maintain adequate signal fidelity of sensor information. This paper focuses on the requirements, design considerations and tradeoffs associated with differing architectural topologies for implementing a variable bit rate encoder and the resulting implications on the encoder systems data acquisition units.

ITC/USA 2007 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Third Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 22-25, 2007 / Riviera Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Sixteen years ago, RCC added Chapter 8 to the IRIG-106 standard for the acquisition of 100% MIL-STD-1553 data from up to eight buses for recording and/or transmission. In the past 5 years, the RCC recording committee added Chapter 10 to the IRIG-106 standard for acquisition of 100% data from PCM, MIL-STD-1553 busses, Video, ARINC-429, Ethernet, IEEE-1394, and others. IRIG-106 Chapter 10 recorder suppliers have further developed customer-specific interfaces to meet additional customer needs. These needs have included unique radar and avionic bus interfaces such as F-16 Fibre Channel, F-35 Fibre Channel, F-22 FOTR, and others. IRIG-106 Chapter 8 and Chapter 10 have provided major challenges to the user community when the acquired avionics bus data included data that must be filtered and never leave the test platform via TM or recording media. The preferred method of filtering data to ensure that it is never recorded or transmitted is to do so at the interface level with the avionic busses. This paper describes the data filtering used on the F-22 Program for the MIL-STD-1553 buses and the FOTR bus as part of the IRIG-106 Chapter 10 Multiplexer/Recorder System. This filtering method blocks selected data at the interface level prior to being transferred over the system bus to the media(s). Additionally, the paper describes the configuration method for defining the data to be blocked and the report generated in order to allow for a second party to verify proper programming of the system.

Personal learning environments (PLEs) aim at putting the learner central stage and comprise a technological approach towards learning tools, services, and artifacts gathered from various usage contexts and to be used by learners. Due to the varying technical skills and competences of PLE users, recommendations appear to be useful for empowering learners to set up their environments so that they can connect to learner networks and collaborate on shared artifacts by using the tools available. In this paper we examine different recommender strategies on their applicability in PLE settings. After reviewing different techniques given by literature and experimenting with our prototypic PLE solution we come to the conclusion to start with an item-based strategy and extend it with model-based and iterative techniques for generating recommendations for PLEs. (author's abstract)

In this thesis, a class of combinatorial optimization methods rooted in statistical mechanics and their use in signal processing applications will be discussed. The thesis consists of two separate parts. The first part deals with the rationale for my work and also covers the background information necessary to put the second part, which consists of a number of papers, in context. There are (at least) two sides to an optimization problem---the problem statement arising from an application or a design and the selection of an algorithm to solve the problem. In this work the problem statements are practical problems, of combinatorial nature, frequently encountered in signal processing and the algorithms of choice are annealing based algorithms, founded in statistical mechanics. From my work, it is my experience that solving a particular problem often leads to new developments on the part of the algorithm which, in turn, open up possibilities to apply the modified algorithm to a new set of problems, leading to a continuously improving algorithm and a growing field of applications. The included papers deal with the application of annealing optimization methods to the problems of configuring active noise and vibration control systems, digital filter design and adaptive filtering. They also describe the successive development of a highly efficient entropy-directed deterministic annealing (EDDA) optimization algorithm detailed in the final paper.

Communities of practices are particular and identified knowledge networks involved in a new global, virtual and digital framework. The study of their specific characteristics, the Legitimate Peripheral Participation and the duality Reification/Participation, provides the necessary background to understand and formalize the barriers and the limits in this new context. <br />In order to overcome these ones, the analysis of the tools and the methods for computerized reification (content analysis, information architecture, information visualization) and for enrichment and assessment of content and users (Human-Computer Interactions, Collaborative filtering) enables to develop a methodology to support the application of an automated and interactive reification process in a virtual Communities of Practices.