A Safety Support System for Children\u27s Antiloss

In the recent past, crimes against children and the number of the missing children have been stayed at high. It is a tragic disaster for a family if their child is missing. Feeling safe about their children is very important for the parents. Therefore, there is an urgent requirement for safety support systems to prevent crimes against children and for anti-loss, particularly when the children are on their own, such as on the ways to and from schools. Thanks to the highly development of telecommunication and mobile technologies, preventive devices such as child ID kits, family trackers have come to light. However, they haven\u27t been impressive solutions yet as they only track current positions of the children and lack of intimations for the parents when their children are under potential dangers. In this thesis, a data mining framework is introduced, in which secure areas and secure paths of the children are learned based on their location histories. When the system predicts the children to be potentially unsafe (e.g., in a strange area or on a strange route), automatic reports will be sent to their parents. Furthermore, an indoor positioning method utilizing Bluetooth is also proposed. Based on the android platform, a prototype of the application for both children and parents is developed incorporating with the proposed techniques in this thesis

Design and implementation of high-bandwidth, high-resolution imaging in atomic force microscopy

Video-rate imaging with subnanometer resolution without compromising on the scan range has been a long-awaited goal in Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). The past decade saw significant advances in hardware used in atomic force microscopes, which further enable the feasibility of high-speed Atomic Force Microscopy. Control design in AFMs plays a vital role in realizing the achievable limits of the device hardware. Almost all AFMs in use today use Proportional-Integral-Derivative(PID) control designs, which can be majorly improved upon for performance and robustness. We address the problem of AFM control design through a systems approach to design model-based control laws that can give major improvements in the performance and robustness of AFM imaging. First, we propose a cascaded control design approach to tapping mode imaging, which is the most common mode of AFM imaging. The proposed approach utilizes the vertical positioning sensor in addition to the cantilever deflection sensor in the feedback loop. The control design problem is broken down into that of an inner control loop and an outer control loop. We show that by appropriate control design, unwanted effects arising out of model uncertainties and nonlinearities of the vertical positioning system are eliminated. Experimental implementation of the proposed control design shows improved imaging quality at up to 30% higher speeds. Secondly, we address a fundamental limitation in tapping mode imaging by proposing a novel transform-based imaging mode to achieve an order of magnitude improvement in AFM imaging bandwidth. We introduce a real-time transform that effects a frequency shift of a given signal. We combine model-based reference generation along with the real-time transform. The proposed method is shown to have linear dynamical characteristics, making it conducive for model-based control designs, thus paving the way for achieving superior performance and robustness in imaging

SYNTHESIS, SINTERING, AND ELECTRONIC CONDUCTIVITY STUDIES OF MEDIUM- AND HIGH-ENTROPY PEROVSKITE OXIDES

The application of the entropy concept to stabilize oxide systems opens the possibility of discovering new materials with unique structural and functional properties. High-entropy alloys and oxides, which are based on the entropy stabilization concept and composed of multi-principal elements, have the potential to tailor structural and functional properties to meet specific needs. The study of lanthanum-based perovskite materials that benefit from the entropy stabilization approach is a promising area of research.However, the inherent randomness of multi-principal elements presents new challenges, making it difficult to predict their behavior. To understand these difficulties, we have initiated a methodical investigation of La-based medium- and high-entropy perovskite oxides. This study focuses on the synthesis, characterization, sintering mechanism, and electrical conductivity properties of nine La1-xCax(A1/3, B1/3, C1/3)O3 medium-entropy perovskite oxide systems (A, B, and C = three combination of Cr or Co or Fe or Ni or Mn) and one La1-xCax(Cr0.2Co0.2Fe0.2Ni0.2Mn0.2)O3 high-entropy perovskite oxide system (for x = 0.1 to 0.3). This research aims to provide better understanding of: (1) synthesis process, (2) temperature of single-phase formation, (3) the impact of various combinations of multiple B-site transitional elements and Ca doping on crystal structure, and microstructure (4) sintering mechanism and (5) electrical conductivity properties

Essays On Asset Pricing, Debt Valuation, And Macroeconomics

My dissertation consists of three chapters which examine topics at the intersection of financial markets and macroeconomics. Two of the sections relate to the valuation of U.S. Treasury and corporate debt while the third understands the role of banking frictions on equity markets. More specifically, the first chapter asks the question, what is the role of monetary policy fluctuations for the macroeconomy and bond markets? To answer this question we design a novel asset-pricing framework which incorporates a time-varying Taylor rule for monetary policy, macroeconomic factors, and risk pricing restrictions from investor preferences. By estimating the model using U.S. term structure data, we find that monetary policy fluctuations significantly impact inflation uncertainty and bond risk exposures, but do not have a sizable effect on the first moments of macroeconomic variables. Monetary policy fluctuations contribute about 20% to the variation in bond risk premia. Models with frictions in financial contracts have been shown to create persistence effects in macroeconomic fluctuations. These persistent risks can then generate large risk premia in asset markets. Accordingly, in the second chapter, we test the ability that a particular friction, Costly State Verification (CSV), has to generate empirically plausible risk exposures in equity markets, when household investors have recursive preferences and shocks occur in the growth rate of productivity. After embedding these mechanisms into a macroeconomic model with financial intermediation, we find that the CSV friction is negligible in realistically augmenting the equity risk premium. While the friction slows the speed of capital investment, its contribution to asset markets is insignificant. The third chapter examines how firms manage debt maturity in the presence of investment opportunities. I document empirically that debt maturity tradeoffs play an important role in determining economic fluctuations and asset prices. I show at aggregate and firm levels that corporations lengthen their average maturity of debt when output and investment rates are larger. To explain these findings, I construct an economic model where firms simultaneously choose investment, short, and long-term debt. In equilibrium, long-term debt is more costly than short-term debt and is only used when investment opportunities present themselves in peaks of the business cycle

The Effectiveness of Internet Advertising on Consumer Behaviour

Advertising is a communication medium where companies made to know the consumers about the product or it is a medium where companies tries to increase the sales and branding the product and many other definitions proposed by various researches, as days past on advertising medium was classified into 2 modes 1. Online advertising and 2. Offline advertising. In this paper, internet advertising mode was explained. The objective populace becomes the publicizing companies and their customers. The research applied a defined testing strategy to pick 60 exam respondents every day.  Content research turned into utilized to dissect subjective facts simultaneously as the quantitative facts changed into broke down utilizing clean measurements utilizing SPSS. Relapse and Correlation examination changed into applied to reveal the connections among the elements. The statistics were brought via rates, implies, fashionable deviations and frequencies. The research found that web promoting turned into a hit on attain and making of mindfulness because of diverse use, and set up that its dependability as a publicizing media was low contrasted with TV. Web publicizing has huge courting with the consumers' purchase desire and along those lines is a critical determinant in impacting purchaser behaviour

Study on Torsional Behaviour of Retrofitted Rectangular RC Beams with Web Openings

In modern building construction web openings become necessary to provide utility ducts like water supply lines, air conditioning ducts etc. These ducts cause potential weakness in any construction hence affecting strength, serviceability and stability of the structure. There will be more adverse impact on structures if web opening has to pass through the beams or columns. Sometime in unavoidable situations openings are essential to pass through existing load bearing elements of structure hence required to strengthen externally to restore the strength. External jacketing by glass, carbon, basalt fibre fabrics provides a popular, simple and effective method for restoring the strength capacity of such elements. Many research works have been published on behaviour of retrofitted RCC beams with opening of different size and shapes especially under shear and flexure. Very few works are published to study the effect of beams with opening in torsion. The aim of the present work is to experimentally investigate the behaviour of rectangular RCC beams with rectangular small and large openings. The beams are retrofitted with GFRP fabrics of different orientations and width. GFRP strips of widths 10cm and 20cm fiber orientations (90/90/90/90/90) and (45/90/45/90/45) are used for retrofitting. The behaviour of beams were studied in terms of collapse load, torsional moment vs angle of twist, failure patterns

DeepFuse: A Deep Unsupervised Approach for Exposure Fusion with Extreme Exposure Image Pairs

We present a novel deep learning architecture for fusing static multi-exposure images. Current multi-exposure fusion (MEF) approaches use hand-crafted features to fuse input sequence. However, the weak hand-crafted representations are not robust to varying input conditions. Moreover, they perform poorly for extreme exposure image pairs. Thus, it is highly desirable to have a method that is robust to varying input conditions and capable of handling extreme exposure without artifacts. Deep representations have known to be robust to input conditions and have shown phenomenal performance in a supervised setting. However, the stumbling block in using deep learning for MEF was the lack of sufficient training data and an oracle to provide the ground-truth for supervision. To address the above issues, we have gathered a large dataset of multi-exposure image stacks for training and to circumvent the need for ground truth images, we propose an unsupervised deep learning framework for MEF utilizing a no-reference quality metric as loss function. The proposed approach uses a novel CNN architecture trained to learn the fusion operation without reference ground truth image. The model fuses a set of common low level features extracted from each image to generate artifact-free perceptually pleasing results. We perform extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation and show that the proposed technique outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for a variety of natural images.Comment: ICCV 201

Solid State Drive: New Challenge for Forensic Investigation

There has been a tremendous increase in the usage of electronic devices day by day. With the increase in usage of electronic devices, technology keeps on emerging. Due to the emergence of new technologies, there has always been a scope for the hackers to cash the loopholes that are available which resulted in a hefty increase in cyber crimes. Consequently, the number of investigations that require digital forensic expertise have been resulting in a huge evidence backlogs that are being encountered by the law enforcement agencies all over the world. It is anticipated that the number of cases that would require digital forensics is likely to be increased in future. The primary storage technology used for digital information has remained constant over the last two decades in the form of the magnetic disc. For decades, Hard drives have been dominating the market due to their cost and capacity. However, things are being developed and manufactured to be faster and smaller but there are few changes that truly turned to be technological revolutionary. Solid states drive familiarly known as SSD have crept up on us as they arrive under cover of the previously known technology. This paper demonstrated that the assumptions about the behavior of a storage media are no longer valid, how modern storage devices will operate under their own volition without any computer instructions. These operations are highly destructive of traditionally recoverable data. This would contaminate evidence, can make validation of digital evidence reports difficult, it can complicate the process of live and dead analysis recovery and can also complicate and frustrate the post recovery forensic analysis. This paper compared the key evidence that were identified in an HDD and SSD and discussed the key features that make SSD self-Destructive and cause difficulties for Forensic Investigations