Designing and Teaching Multidisciplinary Project-Based Courses to Satisfy the ABET 2000 Engineering Criteria

One important educational outcome required of any engineering programme, as per ABET 2000 Criteria 3, is the ability of engineering graduates to function in multidisciplinary teams. In order to address this requirement, the curriculum committees of the engineering programmes at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW), Fort Wayne, USA, have designed several multidisciplinary project-based courses. These courses involve computer, electrical and mechanical engineering students. Five multidisciplinary project-based courses, which are distributed over the freshman, sophomore and senior years, have been developed and implemented. In these courses, real world multidisciplinary design experiences are used to prepare IPFW graduates to enter today’s workforce. In this article, the authors present a brief description of these courses along with the authors’ experiences in the development and teaching of the five multidisciplinary project-based courses

The impact of multi-mappings in short read mapping

© 2018 Dr. Seyed Mohammad Hossein OloomiDetermining the DNA sequence of an organism is an essential step in many biological studies. The high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies break the DNA molecule randomly into many small fragments and determine the sequences of these fragments in parallel. Given these short sequences, referred to as reads, efficient algorithms are used to assemble reads back into a full genome sequence. In read mapping, the reads are aligned against a reference genome sequence to construct the sequence of the target genome. Resolution of multi-mappings when a read can be aligned to more than one location in a reference sequence is a significant problem in the processing of short read data. The read aligners either discard multi-mappings, report one location randomly, or report all candidate mapping locations. These strategies may result in important biological variations being missed or false positives to be introduced. Furthermore, most of the existing multi-mapping resolution tools are developed to be used with RNA-Seq data and focus on correcting the abundance of genes and transcripts rather than considering the sequence alignment of multi-mappings. In this thesis, we first review the sources of multi-mappings and the current approaches for resolving them. We then investigate the impact of multi-mapping in read mapping in order to find how challenging the structure of the reference genome and multi-reads can be for an accurate read mapping or a downstream analysis. The findings show the importance of multi-mapping resolution in read mapping, while our approaches to analysis can be used to discover the extent to which multi-mappings can affect mapping accuracy for a given genome and to provide insight into the likely accuracy and limitations of the mapping results. We then present a new method for Probabilistic Resolution of Multi-mappings (PROM) in high-throughput DNA Sequencing that takes into account the sequence alignment of uniquely mapped reads and multi-reads with nucleotide precision to determine the correct location for multi-reads. The results of evaluation with real and simulated data shows that it yields a significant improvement in the accuracy of read mapping and variant calling. Finally, we demonstrate a biological case study where resolution of multi-mappings with PROM can help the downstream analysis. We use the outcome of PROM multi-mapping resolution to identify mutations in the 23S rRNA gene, which has four copies in N. gonorrhoeae genome. Use of PROM enables identification of mutation in this multi-copy gene even with high-precision variant calling. In addition, it provides a general approach for estimating the number of mutant alleles without requiring read alignment against a masked genome

Reduced-Order Controller Design with Low Sensitivity to Small Feedback Delays

Reduced-order controller design for a class of interconnected singularly perturbed system is considered. Using the singular perturbation and sensitivity theories, a controller is designed that reduces the trajectory sensitivity to small feedback delays. A numerical algorithm for the computation of the feedback gain is presented. Application of the results to the control of a continuous stirred tank reactor is demonstrated

Realization and canonical Presentation of Linear Systems through I/O Maps

In this paper, we use input and output maps to develop simple procedures to obtain minimal realizations for linear continuous-time systems. The procedures developed are numerically efficient and yield explicit formulae for the state-space matrices of the realization in terms of the system parameters, notably the system eigenvalues. Both systems with distinct eigenvalues and repeated eigenvalues are treated. We also present a procedure for transforming a realization obtained through the input or output map to Jordan canonical form. The transformation matrices required to transform the realization to Jordan canonical form are specified entirely in terms of the system eigenvalues. We illustrate the results obtained with several examples

On the Well Posedness of Singularly Perturbed Fault Detection Filters

In this paper, we study the well posedness of observer-based fault detection filters using the theory of singular perturbation. By proper scaling of the fault maps, it is shown that the ill-conditioning of the residual fault projector can be alleviated. This allows the construction of an approximate projector in terms of the projectors for the slow and fast subsystems

Electronically Controlled Expansion Valve for Use in a Geothermal Heat Pump System

This paper presents a detailed design of a development control board that can control an electronic expansion valve in a geothermal heat pump. The design utilized a microcontroller based system with a fuzzy control algorithm, and a temperature and pressure sensor configuration at the inlet of the compressor. The fuzzy control was designed and simulated using Simulink in Matlab. The control algorithm takes the information that the microcontroller obtained from the pressure and temperature sensor and adjusts the valve accordingly to control the amount of superheat. The controller was able to bring the superheat to the desired set point of 10°F ±2°F and maintain it

An evaluation of the effect of blood and human serum on the surface microhardness and surface microstructure of mineral trioxide aggregate

P>Aim Short-term and long-term evaluation of the effect of whole human blood or serum contamination on the surface microhardness value and microstructure of white and grey mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA). Methodology Three groups of 10 samples for each type of MTA were prepared. The first group was mixed with and exposed to fresh whole human blood. The second and third groups were mixed with distilled water and exposed to fresh whole human blood or human serum, respectively. The control group samples were mixed with and exposed to distilled water. During preparation, 1 g of MTA was triturated with 0.33 g of the selected liquid using an amalgamator and placed inside borosilicate cylindrical moulds. The samples were treated with ultrasonic energy. Vickers surface microhardness values were compared after 4 and 180 days. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis was performed after 4 days. Results White MTA had a greater microhardness value than grey MTA in all groups. There was a significant difference between the control and the experimental groups (P < 0.00001). There was no significant difference between the microhardness values obtained after 4 and 180 days, apart from grey MTA mixed with blood or exposed to serum (P < 0.00001). SEM analysis showed the contaminated samples were devoid of acicular crystals that were prominent in the control groups. Conclusion Blood contamination had a detrimental effect on the surface microhardness of MTA in the short and long term. If blood or serum contamination is unavoidable under clinical conditions, it might be preferable to use white MTA