Summary of Three Dissertation Recitals

Three dissertation recitals were given to fulfill the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts. The first dissertation lecture-recital was presented in Britton Recital Hall on November 13, 2020. It featured a lecture on Carl Vine and His Piano Sonatas with a focus on Vine as a composer, his compositional styles and techniques, and an analysis of his Piano Sonata No. 1 (1990) and No. 3 (1997) with a performance of both works. The second dissertation recital was performed in Britton Recital Hall on February 5, 2021. The program consisted of music by Frédéric Chopin: Rondo, Op. 1; Mazurkas, Op. 24; Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52; and Piano Sonata No. 3 in B minor, Op. 58. The third dissertation recital was given in Britton Recital Hall on March 25, 2021. It consisted of a set of works in various genres: Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV 904 by Johann Sebastian Bach; Fantasia in C minor, K. 475 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Piano Sonata No. 2 “Sonata-Fantasie” in G-sharp minor, Op. 19 by Alexander Scriabin; and Piano Sonata No. 2 (1997) by Carl Vine.AMUMusic: PerformanceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167948/1/pianoxy_1.pd

An Optimized, Easy-to-use, Open-source GPU Solver for Large-scale Inverse Homogenization Problems

We propose a high-performance GPU solver for inverse homogenization problems to design high-resolution 3D microstructures. Central to our solver is a favorable combination of data structures and algorithms, making full use of the parallel computation power of today's GPUs through a software-level design space exploration. This solver is demonstrated to optimize homogenized stiffness tensors, such as bulk modulus, shear modulus, and Poisson's ratio, under the constraint of bounded material volume. Practical high-resolution examples with 512^3(134.2 million) finite elements run in less than 32 seconds per iteration with a peak memory of 21 GB. Besides, our GPU implementation is equipped with an easy-to-use framework with less than 20 lines of code to support various objective functions defined by the homogenized stiffness tensors. Our open-source high-performance implementation is publicly accessible at https://github.com/lavenklau/homo3d

Lip Reading Deep Network Exploiting Multi-Modal Spiking Visual and Auditory Sensors

This work presents a lip reading deep neural network that fuses the asynchronous spiking outputs of two bio-inspired silicon multimodal sensors: the Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) and the Dynamic Audio Sensor (DAS). The fusion network is tested on the GRID visual-audio lipreading dataset. Classification is carried out using event-based features generated from the spikes of the DVS and DAS. Networks are trained separately on the two modalities and also jointly trained on both modalities. The jointly trained network when tested on DVS spike frames alone, showed a relative increase in accuracy of around 23% over that of the single DVS modality network

Workload-Aware and CPU Frequency Scaling for Optimal Energy Consumption in VM Allocation

In the problem of VMs consolidation for cloud energy saving, different workloads will ask for different resources. Thus, considering workload characteristic, the VM placement solution will be more reasonable. In the real world, different workload works in a varied CPU utilization during its work time according to its task characteristics. That means energy consumption related to both the CPU utilization and CPU frequency. Therefore, only using the model of CPU frequency to evaluate energy consumption is insufficient. This paper theoretically verified that there will be a CPU frequency best suit for a certain CPU utilization in order to obtain the minimum energy consumption. According to this deduction, we put forward a heuristic CPU frequency scaling algorithm VP-FS (virtual machine placement with frequency scaling). In order to carry the experiments, we realized three typical greedy algorithms for VMs placement and simulate three groups of VM tasks. Our efforts show that different workloads will affect VMs allocation results. Each group of workload has its most suitable algorithm when considering the minimum used physical machines. And because of the CPU frequency scaling, VP-FS has the best results on the total energy consumption compared with the other three algorithms under any of the three groups of workloads

OA-Bug: An Olfactory-Auditory Augmented Bug Algorithm for Swarm Robots in a Denied Environment

Searching in a denied environment is challenging for swarm robots as no assistance from GNSS, mapping, data sharing, and central processing is allowed. However, using olfactory and auditory to cooperate like animals could be an important way to improve the collaboration of swarm robots. In this paper, an Olfactory-Auditory augmented Bug algorithm (OA-Bug) is proposed for a swarm of autonomous robots to explore a denied environment. A simulation environment is built to measure the performance of OA-Bug. The coverage of the search task using OA-Bug can reach 96.93%, with the most significant improvement of 40.55% compared with a similar algorithm, SGBA. Furthermore, experiments are conducted on real swarm robots to prove the validity of OA-Bug. Results show that OA-Bug can improve the performance of swarm robots in a denied environment.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure

Numerical analysis of axial compressive behavior of RC short columns subjected to non-uniform fire: A meso-scale study

The bearing capacity and durability of reinforced concrete (RC) structures can be affected by fire. In this study, a three-dimensional (3D) meso-scale simulation model for RC short column subjected to axial compression after exposure to fire was established. The degradation effect of mechanical properties of steel bars and concrete materials after high temperature was taken into account. The bond-slip behavior between longitudinal steel bars and concrete was also considered in the model. Based on the present simulation method, the failure mode and failure mechanism of the RC short columns were investigated. Moreover, the effects of fire scenario and fire duration on the axial compression performance of RC short columns were further investigated. It is found that the meso-scale numerical model can effectively simulate the mechanical behavior of RC short columns under axial load. Moreover, with the increase of fired surfaces and fire duration, the peak bearing capacity, axial compression stiffness and ductility decrease. The mechanical properties of short columns decrease more quickly under non-uniform fire. By comparing the theoretical value with the numerical simulation value of Nut/Nu, it is found that the theoretical value is conservative

Contents and benthic fluxes of nutrients in sediment pore water of Southern Ocean

The concentration and profile characters of nutrients in sediment pore water of the South Ocean, sampled during the cruise of CHINARE218 of the austral summer 2001 /02 were determined. The results show that the content of SiO3-Si and NH4-N were much higher than other nutrients. The profile of SiO3-Si was characterized with sharp gradients near the sediment-water interface, profile distribution of silicate show that during the diagenetic reaction of silicate, dissolution was the main part. The organic matter decomposition was occurred under the anaerobic condition. Benthic fluxes of SiO3-Si, NH4-N were from pore water to overlying water, and regeneration of silicate and ammonium were the main part of the nutrient regeneration from the pore water of the study area