Browsing by Type "technical reports"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 130
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Additive Manufacture of Plasma Diagnostic Components Final Report Phase II(2018-04-16) Woodruff, Simon; Romero-Talamas, Carlos; You, SetthivoineThere is now a well-established set of plasma diagnostics (see e.g. [3]), but these remain some of the most expensive assemblies in fusion systems since for every system they have to be custom built, and time for diagnostic development can pace the project. Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to decrease production cost and significantly lower design time of fusion diagnostic subsystems, which would realize significant cost reduction for standard diagnostics. In some cases, these basic components can be additively manufactured for less than 1/100th costs of conventional manufacturing.In our DOE Phase II SBIR, we examined the impact that AM can have on plasma diagnostic cost by taking 15 separate diagnostics through an engineering design using Conventional Manufacturing (CM) techniques, then optimizing the design to exploit the benefits of AM. The impact of AM techniques on cost is found to be in several areas. First, the cost of materials falls because AM parts can be manufactured with little to no waste, and engineered to use less material than CM. Next, the cost of fabrication falls for AM parts relative to CM since the fabrication time can be computed exactly, and often no post-processing is required for the part to be functional. We find that AM techniques are well suited for plasma diagnostics since typical diagnostic complexity comes at no additional cost. Cooling channels, for example, can be builtin to plasma-facing components at no extra cost. Fabrication costs associated with assembly are lower for AM parts because many components can be combined and printed as monoliths, thereby mitigating the need for alignment or calibration. Finally, the cost of engineering is impacted by exploiting AM design tools that allow standard components to be customized through web-interfaces. Furthermore, we find that concept design costs can be impacted by scripting interfaces for online engineering design tools.Item An Agent-Based Approach to Ubiquitous Information Access(2001-10-12) Chakraborty, Dipanjan; Perich, Filip; Joshi, AnupamUbiquitous information access from different mobile devices is a challenge to computer science researchers. Research in this areas has focused on eliminating different wireless link related problems like bandwidth, disconnection existing in providing information to the mobile systems. This information is also assumed to be available through some services existing in the high bandwidth fixed network infrastructure. We investigate the situations where the information required is not readily available on the network and it needs to be obtained by dynamically locating the required data and then possibly initiating a series of computations to obtain the information. This paper presents a layered architecture for addressing this problem generally and also our initial implementation of this architecture.Item Analysis and Prediction of 911 Calls based on Location using Spark Big Data Platform(UMBC, 2019) Deshpande, Ketki; Pandey, Shruti; Deshpande, Sukhada; Wang, JianwuProper management of critical resources like Police Force and Ambulance Services is the key to establish peace quickly in times of crisis. When a police district receives a 911 call, quick response can be the difference between quiet handling and full riots in any area. Through this project, we have tried to determine frequent patterns for establishing association between day and time of the week, police district-based location and the reason for the call. We have also tried to predict the number of calls from a particular location (using longitude and latitude data). This data will help us manage police resources and put them to apt use as and when required. We have used Spark based algorithm known as FP-Growth for finding the frequent patterns in the calls and a couple of Regression algorithms Decision Tree and Random Forest for the prediction of calls based on location. Results show that weekend evenings are the busiest time for the emergency services, as most of the calls are made in the evenings of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Also, Northwestern, Southwestern and Northeastern Police Districts get most of the calls in the evening. Based on the existing training data, we were able to predict new calls for a particular location.Item Analysis of Data Mining Algorithms(1997-03-30) Joshi, Karuna PandeA comparative study of algorithms used in Data Mining. This paper was written as part of the MS course work for Advanced Algorithms.Item An Approach to Tuning Hyperparameters in Parallel: A Performance Study Using Climate Data CyberTraining: Big Data + High-Performance Computing + Atmospheric Sciences(2019) Becker, Charlie; Mayfield, Will D.; Murphy, Sarah Y.; Wang, Bin; Gobbert, Matthias K.; Barajas, CarlosThe ability to predict violent storms and bad weather conditions with current models can be difficult due to the immense complexity associated with weather simulation. For example when predicting a tornado caution must be used when attempting to quickly classify a weather pattern as tornadic or not tornadic. Thus one can use machine learning to quickly classify these weather patterns but great care must be taken to obtain the maximal amount of accuracy while maintaining prediction wall time. We then create a general framework for determining hyperparameters with tensorflow and keras and use it for training a convolutional neural network that specializes in classifying storms as tornadic or not tornadic based on important factors like vorticity. We demonstrate our framework’s ability to determine optimal hyperparameter values for batch size, epochs, and learning rate by examining accuracy and training time with regards to a small amount of application data. In the context of training time we leverage both CPUs and GPUs and found the performance of GPUs to be vastly superior in time taken to train the various networks than CPUs.Item Assessing Water Budget Sensitivity to Precipitation Forcing Errors in Potomac River Basin Using the VIC Hydrologic Model CyberTraining: Big Data + High-Performance Computing + Atmospheric Sciences(2019) Majumder, Reetam; Walid, Redwan; Zheng, Jianyu; Zhang, Zhibo; Wang, Jianwu; Gobbert, Matthias K.; Gangopadhyay, Aryya; Barajas, Carlos; Guo, Pei; Rajapakshe, Chamara; Markert, Kel; Mehta, Amita; Neerchal, Nagaraj K.The Potomac River Basin is a watershed located on the East Coast of the USA across West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Inter-annual variations in precipitation makes it challenging to plan for water allocation within the basin. Therefore, understanding seasonal to inter-annual variations in water availability within the basin is important for planning water resources management. We set up on a distributed-memory cluster and used the hydrologic model Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) to estimate the water budget components for the Potomac river basin from April to September 2017. We also assessed the effect of precipitation forcing errors and its variability on the water balance for the same time period. We were able to identify April and May as the months where the water balance was most sensitive to variability. Sub-basins with the highest sensitivity over the course of the six months of interest were also identified, and variability in water balance increased as we increased the variability in precipitation.Item Benchmarking parallel implementations of cloud type clustering from satellite data(UMBC) Barajas, Carlos A.; Mukherjee, Lipi; Guo, Pei; Hoban, Susan; Jin, Daeho; Gangopadhyay, Aryya; Wang, JianwuThe study of clouds, i.e., where they occur and what are their characteristics, plays a key role in the understanding of climate change. The aim of this project is to use machine learning in conjunction with parallel computing techniques to classify cloud types. Experiments with k-means clustering are conducted with two parallelism techniques.Item Best Practices in Corporate Universities(University of Baltimore, 2009-01) Wyatt-Nichol, HeatherTraining is critical to workforce development, contributes toward employee retention, and provides new skills that are required when agency missions expand. Nevertheless, few transportation agencies have addressed future workforce needs. In 2002, the National Transportation Workforce Summit, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Transportation, found that training expenditures in transportation agencies are insufficient and recommended annual investments of 2 percent of salaries. In recent years, the Maryland State Highway Administration (MSHA) has invested 1.5 percent of salaries toward education and training. Through the Transportation Education Development Pilot Program (TEDPP) grant, this best practices report in corporate universities examines the delivery mechanisms of training (e-learning, blended, and academy formats) and the efficacy of training delivery mechanisms for corporate universities within various private and public sector organizations and selected state highway administrations.Item Biophysical, morphological, canopy optical property, and productivity data from the Superior National Forest(NASA, 1992-07-01) Hall, F.G.; Huemmrich, Karl; Strebel, D.E.; Goetz, S.J.; Nickeson, J.E.; Woods, K.D.Described here are the results of a NASA field experiment conducted in the Superior National Forest near Ely, Minnesota, during the summers of 1983 and 1984. The purpose of the experiment was to examine the use of remote sensing to provide measurements of biophysical parameters in the boreal forests. Leaf area index, biomass, net primary productivity, canopy coverage, overstory and understory species composition data are reported for about 60 sites, representing a range of stand density and age for aspen and spruce. Leaf, needle, and bark high-resolution spectral reflectance and transmittance data are reported for the major boreal forest species. Canopy bidirectional reflectance measurements are provided from a helicopter-mounted Barnes Multiband Modular Radiometer (MMR) and the Thematic Mapper Simulator (TMS) on the NASA C-130 aircraft.Item BOREAS Operations 1994: Boreal Ecosystem - Atmosphere Study(NASA, 1996-09-13) Sellers, P.; Hall, F.; Huemmrich, KarlThe design of the BOREAS-94 field experiment is described in the BOREAS Experiment plan (EXPLAN-94); preliminary results and a summary of field operations and weather conditions may be found in Sellers et al. (1995). This document describes what was actually achieved in BOREAS-94. The reports from individual investigators, minutes from evening planning meetings, aircraft logs, etc., have all been analyzed to produce a condensed history of the measurements taken in the field and the experimental conditions experienced during the field year. This document is primarily intended to serve as a desktop guide for scientists and staff in the project, which will allow quick scanning across investigations prior to delving into the detailed data sets held in BORIS.Item BOREAS Operations 1996: Boreal Ecosystem - Atmosphere Study(NASA, 1997-08-12) Sellers, P.; Hall, F.; Huemmrich, KarlThe design of the BOREAS-96 field experiment is described in the BOREAS Experiment plan (EXPLAN-96); preliminary results and a summary of field operations and weather conditions may be found in Hall et al. (1997). This document describes what was actually achieved in BOREAS-96. The reports from individual investigators, minutes from evening planning meetings, aircraft logs, etc., have all been analyzed to produce a condensed history of the measurements taken in the field and the experimental conditions experienced during the field year. This document is primarily intended to serve as a desktop guide for scientists and staff in the project, which will allow quick scanning across investigations prior to delving into the detailed data sets held in BORIS.Item BOREAS RSS-1 PARABOLA SSA Surface Reflectance and Transmittance Data(NTRS, 2000-07-01) Hall, Forrest G.; Nickeson, Jaime; Deering, Donald D.; Eck, Thomas; Banerjee, BabuThe BOREAS RSS-1 team collected surface reflectance and transmittance data from three forested sites in the SSA. This data set contains averaged reflectance factors and transmitted radiances measured by the PARABOLA instrument at selected sites in the BOREAS SSA at different view angles and at three wavelength bands throughout the day. PARABOLA measurements were made during each of the three BOREAS IFCs during the growing season of 1994 at three SSA tower flux sites as well as during the FFC-T. Additional measurements were made in early and mid-1996 during the FFC-W and during IFC-2. The data are stored in tabular ASCII files.Item BOREAS TE-18 GeoSail Canopy Reflectance Model(NASA, 2000-10-01) Hall, Forrest G.; Huemmrich, KarlThe SAIL (Scattering from Arbitrarily Inclined Leaves) model was combined with the Jasinski geo metric model to simulate canopy spectral reflectance and absorption of photosynthetically active radiation for discontinuous canopies. This model is called the GeoSail model. Tree shapes are described by cylinders or cones distributed over a plane. Spectral reflectance and transmittance of trees are calculated from the SAIL model to determine the reflectance of the three components used in the geometric model: illuminated canopy, illuminated background, shadowed canopy, and shadowed background. The model code is Fortran. sample input and output data are provided in ASCII text files. The data files are available on a CD-ROM (see document number 20010000884), or from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Distributed Activity Archive Center (DAAC).Item Building communities and growing the economy: Economic impacts of Habitat for Humanity of Iowa in 2011(Iowa Research Online, 2013-04) Anthony, Jerry; Scott, Sally; Uhl, AndreaThis report quantifies certain economic impacts of Habitat for Humanity affiliates in Iowa in 2011. We used regional input-output analysis to estimate the total impacts to the state's economy that result from money directly spent and wages directly paid by Habitat for Humanity. The economic impacts presented in this report are a conservative estimate of Habitat's impacts because no single analysis can capture the benefits of all the services that Habitat provides. This report covers new home construction and rehabilitation of homes that were sold to low-income Iowa families.Item Building Textual Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modeling to Analyze Factors of Student Mobility(2021-04-28) Razavisousan, Ronak; Joshi, Karuna PandeThere is a large amount of textual data present on web content that has the potential to answers many open questions in the field of humanities and human behavior. We have developed a novel methodology, called Textual Fuzzy Interpretive Structural Modeling (TFISM), that automatically analyses large textual datasets to identify the internal and external relationships between factors in student mobility. This methodology enhances approaches of Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) to allow the input type to be textual data. It is multi-disciplinary and integrates ISM with techniques from Artificial Intelligence, Text extraction, and information retrieval. We have validated this methodology on two different datasets from social media and academic articles. In this paper, we present the results of our study to identify the critical factors and most effective factors for global student mobility.Item Calibration of Sun photometers and sky radiance sensors(National Aeronautical and Space administration,Goddard Space Flight Space Center, 2001) Pietras, Christophe; Miller, Mark; Frouin, Robert; Eck, Thomas; Holben, Brent; Marketon, JohnThe purpose of this technical report is to provide current documentation of the Sensor Intercomparison and Merger for Biological and Interdisciplinary Oceanic Studies (SIMBIOS) Project Office activities on in situ aerosol optical thickness (i.e., protocols, data QC and analysis). This documentation is necessary to ensure that critical information is related to the scientific community and NASA management. This critical information includes the technical difficulties and challenges of validating and combining ocean color data from an array of independent satellite systems to form consistent and accurate global bio-optical time series products. This technical report is not meant as a substitute for scientific literature. Instead, it will provide a ready and responsive vehicle for the multitude of technical reports issued by an operational project.Item Causality Analysis of ENSO’s Global Impacts on Climate Variables based on Data-driven Analytics and Climate Model SimulationSong, Hua; Tian, Jing; Huang, Jingfeng; Wang, Jianwu; Zhang, ZhiboNumerous studies have indicated that El Niño and the Southern Oscillation (ENSO) could have determinant impacts on remote weather and climate using the conventional correlation-based methods, which however cannot identify the cause-and-effect of such linkage and ultimately determine a direction of causality. This study employs the Vector Auto-Regressive (VAR) model estimation method with the long-term observational sea surface temperature (SST) data and the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data to demonstrate the Granger causality between ENSO and other climate attributes. Results showed that ENSO as the modulating factor can result in abnormal surface temperature, pressure, precipitation and wind circulation remotely, not vice versa. We also carry out the global climate model sensitivity simulations using the parallel computing techniques to double confirm the causality relations between ENSO and abnormal events in remote regions. Our statistical and climate model-based analyses may enrich our current understanding on the occurrences of extreme events worldwide caused by different ENSO strengths through teleconnections.Item Chandra Observation of Luminous and Ultraluminous X-ray Binaries in MIOIMukai, K.; Pence, W. D.; Snowden, S. L.; Kuntz, K. D.X-ray binaries in the Milky Way axe among the brightest objects on the Xray sky. With the increasing sensitivity of recent missions, it is now possible to study X-ray binaries in nearby galaxies. We present data on six ultraluminous binaries in the nearby spiral galaxy, M101, obtained with Chandra ACIS-S. Of these, five appear to be similar to ultraluminous sources in other galaxies, while the brightest source, P098, shows some unique characteristics. We present our interpretation of the data in terms of an optically thick outflow, and discuss implications.Item Collaborative Joins in a Pervasive Computing Environment(2003-08-12) Perich, Filip; Joshi, Anupam; Yesha, Yelena; Finin, TimLocating and obtaining context sensitive information in a mobile environment has always been a challenge. This is especially true for pervasive computing environments where in addition to limited computing and battery resources, mobile devices cannot always rely on the help of a proxy-based wired infrastructure. Rather, a collaboration among peer mobile entities is required. It allows entities to obtain data that may be otherwise inaccessible due to nature of the environment and to reduce their computation cost by reusing answers generated by other peers. We introduce the problem of data interaction among peers in ad-hoc networks and propose a collaboration query processing protocol based on the principles of Contract Nets. Once an entity identi es information it needs via the help of user's pro les, our protocol enables the device to locate data sources and obtain data matching its speci c query requiring one or more data sources. We show the effectiveness of our technique through performance evaluation of entities querying for data while moving in a city-like environment.Item Context-Aware System to Create Electronic Medical Records(2006-07-19) Agarwal, Sheetal; Joshi, Anupam; Ganous, Tim; Yesha, YelenaWe describe a prototype system to capture and interpret data in a perioper- ative environment in order to construct an Electronic Medical Encounter Record (EMR). The EMR records and correlates significant medical data and video streams with an inferred higher-level event model of the surgery. Information from Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags provides basic context information including the presence of medical staff, devices, instruments and medication in the operating room (OR). Patient monitoring systems and sensors such as pulse oximeters and anesthesia machines provide continuous streams of physiological data. These low level data streams are processed by the TelegraphCQ adaptive dataflow system to generate higher-level primitive events, such as a nurse entering the OR. A hierar- chical knowledge-based event detection system correlates primitive events, patient data and workflow data to infer high-level events, such as the onset of anesthesia. The resulting EMR provides medical staff with a permanent record of the surgery that can be used for subsequent evaluation and training.