"The untold story of how Japan became a cultural superpower through the fantastic inventions that captured-and transformed-the world's imagination. The Walkman. Karaoke. Pikachu. Pac-Man. Akira. Emoji. We've all fallen in love with one or another of Japan's pop-culture creations, from the techy...

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. July 2011. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: Vladimir S. Cherkassky. 1 computer file (PDF) xii, 129 pages.

The problem of learning a latent model for sparse or low-dimensional representation of high-dimensional data has attracted significant attention for many years. This thesis focuses on learning latent models for sparse or low-dimensional representation of images, dynamic data, and documents with...

We study sequential decision making problems in cooperative systems where different agents with different information want to achieve a common objective. The sequential nature of the decision problem implies that all decisions can be arranged in a sequence such that the information available to...

Design of a classifier consists of two stages: feature extraction and classifier learning. For a better performance, the nature, characteristics, or underlying structure of data should be taken into account in either of the stages when we design a classifier. In this thesis, we present kernel...

Complex engineering systems such as automobiles and chillers in heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems are being equipped with increasingly sophisticated electronic systems. Operational problems associated with degraded components, failed sensors, improper installation, poor...

Understanding the relationship between technology and economics is fundamental to making judicious policy and design decisions. Many technologies that are successful in meeting their technical goals often fail to get adopted due to economic factors. This holds true even for networked systems,...

Since the Morris worm was released in 1988, Internet worms continue to be one of top security threats. For example, the Conficker worm infected 9 to 15 million machines in early 2009 and shut down the service of some critical government and medical networks. Moreover, it constructed a massive...

The acceptance of the nodal pricing system as a mechanism to organize wholesale power markets has exposed both generators and consumers to unprecedented volatile prices. Most of the volatility follows from the method for valuing congestion on the network. Generators and wholesale consumers pay...

The Internet has become the standard infrastructure for all kinds of communications. At the same time, the emergence of cloud computing and web services has significantly strengthened requirements for the Internet to display greater robustness to disruptions and higher flexibility to support...

Multivariate Gaussian mixtures are widely used in science and engineering for density estimation, model-based data clustering, and statistical classification. A difficult problem, of special interest for clustering, is estimating the model order, i.e. the number of mixture components. Use of...

This research involves the use of robust systems theory tools to deal with identification,model uncertainty and optimization in macroeconomic stabilization problems,in order to avoid Lucas Critique.This is accomplished by using time domain based robust semi-blind identificationto obtain models...

This thesis concerns the problem of efficient resourceallocation under constraints. In many applications a finitebudget is used and allocating it efficiently can improveperformance. In the context of medical imaging the constraint is exposure to ionizing radiation, e.g., computed tomography...

The EU Barcelona target assumes a close causal relationship between corporate R&D, the competitiveness of business firms and the economic performance of industrial countries. Testing this hypothesis, this paper contrasts innovation and production activities in four research-intensive...

The EU Barcelona target assumes a close causal relationship between corporate R&D, the competitiveness of business firms and the economic performance of industrial countries. Testing this hypothesis, this paper contrasts innovation and production activities in four research-intensive...

The preservation of physical security for computer systems has long been used as a foundation for computational trust. This requirement has come as a result of the use of shared secrets as host identifiers since there has been no empirical means of ascertaining the trustworthiness of a host in...

"Scholars have long noted the significant impact of general purpose technologies (GPTs) on the economy. However, limited attention has been paid to exploring how they are employed to generate inventions in downstream sectors (crossover inventions), and what factors may facilitate such diffusion....

We conduct a case study of the linkages of task organization, human capital accumulation and wages in Morocco, using matched worker-firm data for Electrical-mechanical and Textile-clothing industries. In order to integrate task organization into the interacting processes of workers' training and...

Scholars have long noted the significant impact of general purpose technologies (GPTs) on the economy. However, limited attention has been paid to exploring how they are employed to generate inventions in downstream sectors (crossover inventions), and what factors may facilitate such diffusion....

The success of the Internet has brought out extraordinary benefits to our society. Current Internet infrastructure has become much more complicated than that in the early 90's when it was first deployed for commercial use. Due to limitations in the initial design of the Internet, security issues...

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In this dissertation, I develop a new theoretical framework for the modeling, pricing analysis, and computation of solutions to electric power supply chains with power generators, suppliers, transmission service providers, and the inclusion of consumer demands. In particular, I advocate the...

Electricity has become a integral part of life during the nineteenth and twentieth century. As a society we have become more reliant on electric energy and it is consideredan essential service by the majority of customers. As such electric utilities are under increasing pressure to provide a...

This project investigates the potential for microphone arrays within a security setting,particularly through exploiting their ability to change their directivity pattern, thus,changing its direction of hearing.In single microphone systems speech and other signals of interest can be severely...

This dissertation aims to achieve two goals. The first is to model the strategic interactions of firms that own cascaded reservoir-hydro plants in oligopolistic and mixed oligopolistic hydrothermal electricity generation markets. Although competition in thermal generation has been extensively...

The set of optimization problems in electric power systems engineering known collectively as Optimal Power Flow (OPF) is one of the most practically important and well-researched subfields of constrained nonlinear optimization. OPF has enjoyed a rich history of research, innovation, and...

This dissertation studies several security issues in data networks, to reveal the vulnerability, to propose defense mechanisms, to provide better tools for analysis, and to develop good security architecture. This dissertation consists of the following three parts: (1) Internet-like topologies...

In recent years, fast spreading worms have become one of the major threats to the security of the Internet. Code Red, Nimda, Slammer, Blaster, MyDoom... these worms kept hitting the Internet and caused severe damage to our society. However, until now we have not fully understand the behaviors of...

This paper proposes a new approach of generation expansion planning and its risk assessment under the competitive market environment. Different from the traditional probabilistic production costing (PPC) method under monopoly environment which is based on the deterministic generator loading...

The real electricity markets are usually oligopoly, where market suppliers (generators) have some market power and can adopt strategic bidding strategies for maximum profits. Generally, the game-theory based methods are the natural way to analyze the market equilibrium and study the strategic...

An extended complex system is a large scale hierarchical system controlled by two or more teams of decision-makers. The teams may have different objective functions, and often can be in direct conflict with each other. Within each team, the decision-makers must cooperate for the collective...