FPGA based Uniform Channelizer Implementation

Channelizers are widely used in modern digital communication systems. Advanced uniform multirate channelization have been theoretically proved to be capable of reducing the computational load, with a better performance. Therefore, in this thesis, we implement these designs on a FPGA board for the sake of the comprehensive evaluation of resource usage, performance and frequency response. The uniform filter-banks are one of the most essential unit in channelization. The Generalised Discrete Fourier Transform Modulated Filter Bank (GDFT-FB), as an important variant of basic a DFT-FB, has been implemented in FPGA and demonstrated with a better computational saving rather than traditional schemes. Moreover the oversampling version is demonstrated to have a better frequency response with an acceptable amount of extra resources. On the other hand, frequency response masking (FRM) techniques is able to reduce the number of coefficients. Therefore, the full FRM GDFT-FB and alternative narrowband FRM GDFT-FB are both implemented in FPGA platform, in order to achieve a better performance and hardware efficiency

Dietary calcium and phosphorous requirements and feed management for nursery pigs

Doctor of PhilosophyDepartment of Animal Sciences and IndustryRobert D. GoodbandMichael D. TokachThe dissertation consisted of 6 chapters involving studies in heavy weight market pig production, dietary Ca and P requirements for nursery pigs, antimicrobial resistance development in finishing pig microbiota, seasonal growth variability in commercial pig production, and leftover feed management in wean-to-finish pig productions. The first chapter presents a thorough review of published studies involving genetic selection, nutritional requirements, health, welfare, and pork quality of finishing pigs with marketing weight greater than 130 kg and assessed future research needs. Chapter 2 describes 2 experiments that evaluated the growth performance and percentage bone ash of early nursery pigs fed various combinations of Ca and P provided by inorganic sources or phytase. Feeding more than 0.90% dietary Ca decreased average daily gain (ADG), average daily feed intake (ADFI), gain:feed ratio (G:F), and percentage bone ash when diets were at or below NRC (2012) requirement for standardized total tract digestible (STTD) P. However, adding inorganic P or phytase to P deficient diets improved pig performance and alleviated the negative impacts of high dietary Ca concentration on growth performance. The experiment presented in chapter 3 characterized the dose-response to increasing digestible P in diets without or with 2,000 units of phytase for 6- to 13-kg pigs. Increasing STTD P from 80 to 140% of NRC (2012) requirement estimates in diets without phytase, and from 100 to 170% of NRC (2012) in diets with phytase, improved ADG, G:F, and percentage of bone ash. Estimated STTD P requirements varied depending on the response criteria and statistical models and ranged from 91 to >140% of NRC (2012) in diets without phytase, and from 116 to >170% of NRC (2012) for diets containing phytase. In addition, phytase exerted an extra-phosphoric effect on promoting pig growth and improved the P dose responses for ADG and G:F. In chapter 4, a study was conducted to determine the effects of tylosin administration route (through feed, drinking water, or intramuscular injection) on the growth performance and the development of antimicrobial resistance in fecal enterococci of finishing pigs. Pigs that received tylosin injection had decreased ADG and G:F compared with control pigs that did not receive any antibiotic treatment, which may be due to a stress response to the handling during injection administration. Moreover, tylosin administration via injection and feed resulted in a higher probability of enterococcal resistance to erythromycin and tylosin compared with drinking water treatment. Chapter 5 presents a retrospective analysis on the seasonal growth patterns of nursery and finishing pigs in 3 commercial production systems located in the Midwest US. Nursery ADG and ADFI expressed prominent seasonal variations and were similar among systems, whereas nursery G:F was not affected by season. Finisher ADG, ADFI, and G:F varied over seasons, but the magnitudes and patterns of change were system dependent. This chapter also presents the concepts underlying the implementation of a multi-level linear mixed model of production records to analyze seasonality and potentially other decision factors in commercial systems. Finally, in chapter 6, 2 experiments were conducted regarding the strategy of managing leftover finisher feed in a wean-to-finish production system. Experiment 1 evaluated the timing (phase) of feeding 2.5 kg/pig of finisher feed in a 5-phase nursery program. All growth responses decreased immediately when the finisher feed was blended into nursery diets; however, pigs greater than 11 kg (phase 3) had improved ability to compensate for the negative effects of finisher feed on overall growth performance. Experiment 2 was then carried out to investigate the maximum amount of finisher feed can be fed to 11-kg pigs. Increasing the finisher feed budget from 0 to 3.75 kg/pig resulted in a linear decrease in ADG and ADFI. However, the economic analysis indicated no change in income-over-feed-cost due to the timing and dose of blending finisher feed into nursery diets

NOMA-enhanced computation over multi-access channels

Massive numbers of nodes will be connected in future wireless networks. This brings great difficulty to collect a large amount of data. Instead of collecting the data individually, computation over multi-access channels (CoMAC) provides an intelligent solution by computing a desired function over the air based on the signal-superposition property of wireless channels. To improve the spectrum efficiency in conventional CoMAC, we propose the use of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) for functions in CoMAC. The desired functions are decomposed into several sub-functions, and multiple sub-functions are selected to be superposed over each resource block (RB). The corresponding achievable rate is derived based on sub-function superposition, which prevents a vanishing computation rate for large numbers of nodes. We further study the limiting case when the number of nodes goes to infinity. An exact expression of the rate is derived that provides a lower bound on the computation rate. Compared with existing CoMAC, the NOMA-based CoMAC not only achieves a higher computation rate but also provides an improved non-vanishing rate. Furthermore, the diversity order of the computation rate is derived, which shows that the system performance is dominated by the node with the worst channel gain among these sub-functions in each RB

First jump time in simulation of sampling trajectories of affine jump-diffusions driven by α-stable white noise

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we derive an explicit expression of the (theoretical) solutions of stochastic differential equa- tions with affine coefficients driven by α-stable white noise. This is done by means of Itˆo formula. Secondly, we develop a detection al- gorithm for the first jump time in simulation of sampling trajectories which are described by the solutions. The algorithm is carried out through a multivariate Lagrange interpolation approach. To this end, we utilise a computer simulation algorithm in MATLAB to visualise the sampling trajectories of the jump-diffusions for two combinations of parameters arising in the modelling structure of stochastic differ- ential equations with affine coefficients

Electrostatically tunable axisymmetric vibrations of soft electro-active tubes

Due to their unique electromechanical coupling properties, soft electro-active (SEA) resonators are actively tunable, extremely suitable, and practically important for designing the next-generation acoustic and vibration treatment devices. In this paper, we investigate the electrostatically tunable axisymmetric vibrations of SEA tubes with different geometric sizes. We consider both axisymmetric torsional and longitudinal vibrations for an incompressible SEA cylindrical tube under inhomogeneous biasing fields induced by radial electric voltage and axial pre-stretch. We then employ the state-space method, which combines the state-space formalism in cylindrical coordinates with the approximate laminate technique, to derive the frequency equations for two separate classes of axisymmetric vibration of the tube subjected to appropriate boundary conditions. We perform numerical calculations to validate the convergence and accuracy of the state-space method and to illuminate that the axisymmetric vibration characteristics of SEA tubes may be tuned significantly by adjusting the electromechanical biasing fields as well as altering the tube geometry. The reported results provide a solid guidance for the proper design of tunable resonant devices composed of SEA tube

Extraction, isolation, structural characterization, and antioxidant activity of polysaccharides from elderberry fruit

The isolation, purification, and antioxidant activity of polysaccharides extracted from elderberry fruits were studied. Two neutral polysaccharides (EFP-0 and EFP-1) and three acidic polysaccharides (EFP-2, EFP-3, and EFP-4) were isolated from elderberry. EFP-0, EFP-1, EFP-2, EFP-3, and EFP-4 all contain arabinose, galactose, glucose, and mannose, with molecular weights of 1.7981 × 106, 7.0523 × 106, 7.7638 × 106, 4.3855 × 105, and 7.3173 × 105 Da, respectively. Structural characterization showed that the backbone of EFP-2 consisted of →4)-Manp (1→4)-β-D-Glcp (1→ and →4)-β-D-Glcp (1→5)-α-L-Araf (1→units, and T-α-L-Araf (1→ and T-β-D-Galp (1→ residues were detected by methylation analysis and NMR analysis. In addition, the MTT assay and zebrafish oxidative damage assay showed that EFP-2 had a protective effect on H2O2-damaged RAW264.7 cells in a dose-dependent manner, and zebrafish with the addition of EFP-2 would have low levels of ROS in vivo which showed significant antioxidant activity. Therefore, the results showed that the elderberry polysaccharides have antioxidant activity and can be used as potential antioxidants in functional foods

Accelerate Presolve in Large-Scale Linear Programming via Reinforcement Learning

Large-scale LP problems from industry usually contain much redundancy that severely hurts the efficiency and reliability of solving LPs, making presolve (i.e., the problem simplification module) one of the most critical components in modern LP solvers. However, how to design high-quality presolve routines -- that is, the program determining (P1) which presolvers to select, (P2) in what order to execute, and (P3) when to stop -- remains a highly challenging task due to the extensive requirements on expert knowledge and the large search space. Due to the sequential decision property of the task and the lack of expert demonstrations, we propose a simple and efficient reinforcement learning (RL) framework -- namely, reinforcement learning for presolve (RL4Presolve) -- to tackle (P1)-(P3) simultaneously. Specifically, we formulate the routine design task as a Markov decision process and propose an RL framework with adaptive action sequences to generate high-quality presolve routines efficiently. Note that adaptive action sequences help learn complex behaviors efficiently and adapt to various benchmarks. Experiments on two solvers (open-source and commercial) and eight benchmarks (real-world and synthetic) demonstrate that RL4Presolve significantly and consistently improves the efficiency of solving large-scale LPs, especially on benchmarks from industry. Furthermore, we optimize the hard-coded presolve routines in LP solvers by extracting rules from learned policies for simple and efficient deployment to Huawei's supply chain. The results show encouraging economic and academic potential for incorporating machine learning to modern solvers