2006 Projects
Efficient Clustering of Sensor Networks.
Advisor: Dr. Mili
Wireless sensor networks consist of a collection of geographically dispersed nodes that are used to collaboratively collect data about their surrounding. They are increasingly used in applications from environment monitoring to military surveillance and rapid intervention. Each sensor node is equipped with sensing, communication, computation, and storage capacity. Typically, nodes are equipped with a battery, the only source of power. A common strategy to minimize power consumption during the operation of sensor networks is to organize in smaller sub-networks called clusters. This process of clustering must, at the same time, require little communication and produce an efficient organization. In this research, we examine existing clustering approaches, and propose a new method. The proposed method is compared with existing approaches in terms of power used and quality of the result.
Lecture Notes |
Virtual Nursing Simulator With Haptic Force-Feedback for Oral Hygiene
Advisor: Dr. Elhajj
Nurses and nursing students' performances in oral-hygiene in nursing homes are inadequate due to the displeasure with the nature of the task. Our goal is to provide the students the skills in proper oral hygiene by providing them with a virtual training tool for oral hygiene. The tool being developed provides the nursing student with a virtual toothbrush controlled through a Phantom Omni stylus. As the student brushes the 3D model of the mouth, they receive realistic haptic feedback. The tool evaluates the performance of the student and provides them with feedback and guidance.
Lecture Notes |
A Secure Scheme for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks
Students:
Advisor: Dr. Fu
Wireless ad-hoc networks consist of self-organizing nodes that communicate without the use of routers, servers, or any fixed infrastructure. They find their applications in military tactical networks, personal area networks, sensor networks, collaborative networks and disaster area networks. Nodes within ad hoc networks are typically mobile, so the networks are usually referred to as Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). We focus on the key management scheme - one of the core schemes for deploying security services in wireless ad hoc networks. We propose a hierarchical mobile certificate authority (HMCA) scheme for large scale wireless ad-hoc networks by exploring the heterogeneous security and physical characteristics of mobile nodes. In particular, we develop the architecture and relevant protocols for HMCA to provide major certification services such as certificate issuing, renewal, retrieval, and revocation. We also consider the situations where any client node, certificate issuing node, or regional leader node dies or moves to another region within the network. In this project, we will implement and evaluate the proposed architecture and protocols with the simulation tool "QualNet".
Lecture Notes |
Application of Coherence Network to Retinal Ganglion Cell Regeneration.
Advisor: Dr. Zohdy
The traditional approach in studying the morphological development of the retinal ganglion cells includes a static depiction of the known biochemical pathway. We are interested in applying the concepts of a coherence network to known biochemical pathways in hopes of identifying previously unidentified biochemical participants. A coherence network is created where molecules and proteins in said biochemical pathways are represented by nodes and the relationships between them are evaluated through arcs. This will be used to simulate the morphological development of the retinal ganglion cells and help pinpoint the key molecules that are involved.
Lecture Notes |
3D Shape Descriptors: 4D Hyperspherical Harmonics An Exploration into the Fourth Dimension
Advisor: Dr. Li
Matching 3D images remains a challenging problem. Most search engines on the internet use textual description to match images. More sophisticated systems use shape descriptors that are automatically constructed from the original 3D shape. Good shape descriptors must be insensitive to noise, orientation, scale, or translation. They must be fast to compute, small in size, and easy to compare. In this research, we are proposing a novel method for creating 3D shape descriptors. It is inspired from the descriptors using 3D spherical harmonics. 3D spherical harmonics present the benefits of being insensitive to noise, orientation, scale, and translation, and of being relatively fast to compute. On the other hand, they have the disadvantage of requiring 3D storage. We address this problem by using 4D hyperspherical harmonics. A 3D object is mapped to the 4D unit hypersphere. The 4D hyperspherical harmonics have the same advantage of the 3D harmonics and the added benefit that they only require two-dimensional storage as a vector.
Lecture Notes |
