Presentation given for scholars in hemispheric American studies, October 8, 2008

Presentation given at the Teaching with Technology brown bag, Rice University, October 15, 2008

Network tomography is a promising technique for characterizing the internal behavior of large-scale networks based solely on end-to-end measurements. Despite the efficiency of active probing in most network loss tomography methods, these measurements impose an additional burden on the network in terms of bandwidth and network resources. They can ...

Information processing is performed when a system preserves some aspects of the information encoded by its input while it suppresses others. To describe a system's information processing capability, input and output need to be compared in a way invariant to the signal's form and how it represents information. We describe an approach to quantify ...

This thesis describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a software system for optimizing synthesized logic circuits. The particular implementation described is targeted to the Xilinx Virtex family of FPGAs, but the techniques developed are relevant to other families of array-based semi-custom programmable logic circuits. One of the unique ...

Ever increasing demand for high data rate wireless transmissions with high spectral efficiency leads to utilization of communication systems with multiple transmit and receive antennas. In addition, excellent error-rate performance can be achieved with iterative receiver structure composed of inner detection and outer decoding. In this work we design ...

Echocardiographic imaging is a primary modality in the diagnosis of heart disease. Compared to other imaging techniques, such as X-Ray, MRI, and PET, ultrasound imaging owes its great popularity to the fact that it is a safe and non-invasive procedure for visualizing the heart and vasculature. The ultrasound image however is corrupted by speckle, ...

Good signal representation and the corresponding signal processing algorithms lie at the heart of the signal processing research effort. Since the 1980's wavelet analysis has become more and more a mature tool in many applications such as image compression due to some key advantages over the traditional Fourier analysis. In this thesis we first develop ...

In low dispersion fibers, the four-wave mixing (FWM) spectrum is symmetric with respect to the zero-dispersion wavelength. This thesis analyzes a wavelength shift keying (WSK) technique, a modification of the standard wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system. WSK uses symmetric wavelength assignment and balanced detection to cancel FWM crosstalk ...

Using a coding theoretic approach, we achieve unsupervised image segmentation by implementing Rissanen's concept of Minimum Description Length (MDL) for estimating piecewise homogeneous regions in images. MDL offers a mathematical foundation for balancing brevity of descriptions against their fidelity to the data by penalizing overly complex ...