This dissertation investigates data reduction strategies from a signal processing perspective in centralized detection and estimation applications. First, it considers a deterministic source observed by a network of sensors and develops an analytical strategy for ranking sensor transmissions based on the magnitude of their test statistics. The benefit of the proposed strategy is that the decision to transmit or not to transmit observations to the fusion center can be made at the sensor level resulting in significant savings in transmission costs. A sensor network based on target tracking application is simulated to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed strategy over the unconstrained energy approach. Second, it considers the detection of random signals in noisy measurements and evaluates the performance of eigenvalue-based signal detectors. Due to their computational simplicity, robustness and performance, these detectors have recently received a lot of attention. When the observed random signal is correlated, several researchers claim that the performance of eigenvalue-based detectors exceeds that of the classical energy detector. However, such claims fail to consider the fact that when the signal is correlated, the optimal detector is the estimator-correlator and not the energy detector. In this dissertation, through theoretical analyses and Monte Carlo simulations, eigenvalue-based detectors …

Free and fair elections are the basis for democracy, but conducting elections is not an easy task. Different groups of people are trying to influence the outcome of the election in their favor using the range of methods, from campaigning for a particular candidate to well-financed lobbying. Often the stakes are too high, and the methods are illegal. Two main properties of any voting scheme are the privacy of a voter’s choice and the integrity of the tally. Unfortunately, they are mutually exclusive. Integrity requires making elections transparent and auditable, but at the same time, we must preserve a voter’s privacy. It is always a trade-off between these two requirements. Current voting schemes favor privacy over auditability, and thus, they are vulnerable to voting fraud. I propose two novel voting systems that can achieve both privacy and verifiability. The first protocol is based on cryptographical primitives to ensure the integrity of the final tally and privacy of the voter. The second protocol is a simple paper-based voting scheme that achieves almost the same level of security without usage of cryptography.

The spread of infectious diseases has been a public concern throughout human history. Historic recorded data has reported the severity of infectious disease epidemics in different ages. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to analyze the correlation between diseases and their environment. Nowadays, health authorities are in charge of planning strategies that guarantee the welfare of citizens. The simulation of contagion scenarios contributes to the understanding of the epidemic behavior of diseases. Computational models facilitate the study of epidemics by integrating disease and population data to the simulation. The use of detailed demographic and geographic characteristics allows researchers to construct complex models that better resemble reality and the integration of these attributes permits us to understand the rules of interaction. The interaction of individuals with similar characteristics forms synthetic structures that depict clusters of interaction. The synthetic environments facilitate the study of the spread of infectious diseases in diverse scenarios. The characteristics of the population and the disease concurrently affect the local and global epidemic progression. Every cluster’ epidemic behavior constitutes the global epidemic for a clustered population. By understanding the correlation between structured populations and the spread of a disease, current dissertation research makes possible to identify risk …

In many real-world applications, it is common to have uneven number of examples among multiple classes. The data imbalance, however, usually complicates the learning process, especially for the minority classes, and results in deteriorated performance. Boosting methods were proposed to handle the imbalance problem. These methods need elongated training time and require diversity among the classifiers of the ensemble to achieve improved performance. Additionally, extending the boosting method to handle multi-class data sets is not straightforward. Examples of applications that suffer from imbalanced multi-class data can be found in face recognition, where tens of classes exist, and in capsule endoscopy, which suffers massive imbalance between the classes. This dissertation introduces RegBoost, a new boosting framework to address the imbalanced, multi-class problems. This method applies a weighted stratified sampling technique and incorporates a regularization term that accommodates multi-class data sets and automatically determines the error bound of each base classifier. The regularization parameter penalizes the classifier when it misclassifies instances that were correctly classified in the previous iteration. The parameter additionally reduces the bias towards majority classes. Experiments are conducted using 12 diverse data sets with moderate to high imbalance ratios. The results demonstrate superior performance of the proposed method compared …

Future generation cellular networks are expected to deliver an omnipresent broadband access network for an endlessly increasing number of subscribers. Long term Evolution (LTE) represents a significant milestone towards wireless networks known as 4G cellular networks. A key feature of LTE is the implementation of enhanced Radio Resource Management (RRM) mechanism to improve the system performance. The structure of LTE networks was simplified by diminishing the number of the nodes of the core network. Also, the design of the radio protocol architecture is quite unique. In order to achieve high data rate in LTE, 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has selected Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) as an appropriate scheme in terms of downlinks. However, the proper scheme for an uplink is the Single-Carrier Frequency Domain Multiple Access due to the peak-to-average-power-ratio (PAPR) constraint. LTE packet scheduling plays a primary role as part of RRM to improve the system’s data rate as well as supporting various QoS requirements of mobile services. The major function of the LTE packet scheduler is to assign Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs) to mobile User Equipment (UE). In our work, we formed a proposed packet scheduler algorithm. The proposed scheduler algorithm acts based on the number …