The quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) computing paradigm is used to implement Rule 110, a unique one-dimensional cellular automata (CA) that has been proven to be Turing complete. A Turing complete architecture is capable of universal computing, which means that it could be used to implement any arbitrary computation. The optimized design of a single Rule 110 cell is presented, first using Boolean algebra and then by the use of QCA cells. This is followed by simulations to verify the correct behavior of the device and a method for efficiently filling a two-dimensional region with a one-dimensional CA device.

Many engineering programs incorporate project-based, service learning into traditional classes and capstone experience. These projects focus on service-related challenges that impact the local, national, or international community and could be described as “humanitarian” or “for the greater good”. While these projects have shown positive benefits for recruitment, retention, and student diversity, what has been unexamined is whether student motivations in these projects differ from their peers in more traditional capstone projects. We hypothesize that students in service-oriented capstone projects may feel greater motivation and engagement with their project due to its service components as compared to their peers in other capstone projects. We address this question by examining the experiences of capstone students at two different institutions. York College of Pennsylvania and Valparaiso University are both small, comprehensive, private universities with engineering programs that engage in a variety of capstone projects. At each institution we administered surveys with capstone students to assess their interests, motivations, and engagement in their capstone projects. By comparing student responses and evaluating the level of service that each project embodies, we can assess whether students in differing projects show different motivations. Our results provide insights into methods for maintaining student success in capstone projects and for selecting future projects.

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Session 3138 Scientific Visualization for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey D. Will, Eric W. Johnson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Valparaiso University Introduction It has been said that one of the greatest challenges for students learning subjects in STEM is the need for the ability to think in three dimensions [1]. However, these skills are typically underdeveloped in undergraduates, even in the best of students [2]. Even though there is widespread need of students to understand and visualize spatial relationships [3], surprisingly little work has been done in the field of education to address this need. Hardware to accomplish this goal has been in existence for several decades, though only since 1993 has it seen applications in education [4]. Educational advances have increased since that time, albeit slowly. Important advances include Christopher Dede’s application of visualization hardware to general scientific concepts [5], and the teaching of electromagnetics in particular with the well-known MaxwellWorld [6]. Other applications include education of elementary school students in basic zoological concepts at Georgia Tech [7, 8], the NICE project for elementary education at the University of Illinois at Chicago [9]-[11], and engineering education research at East Carolina University [12]. This paper describes the efforts at Valparaiso University to augment students’ education in several areas of science, mathematics, and engineering by using three-dimensional visualization hardware. Utilizing a newly available, low-cost system, the advances here promise wide-spread application due to the financial feasibility of this hardware to most universities. We discuss several custom-developed applications, in addition to their use in undergraduate courses. Hardware System In the past decade, visualization systems have cost from $300,000 to several million dollars. On the low end, companies such as FakeSpace (www.fakespace.com) have made available such devices as a one-user ImmersaDesk, offering a display of roughly three by four feet. High end systems such as the 6-walled CAVE at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign utilize 10’x10’ walls on all sides of the user to create a truly immersive effect. Such systems can cost on the order of $10M. Due to the high cost of such systems, most work done in visualization has not focused on education. The investment required to purchase visualization systems has been out of the reach of most teaching-oriented schools, and has not allowed them to be prevalent in classrooms. However, within the past few years, low-cost devices offering much of the functionality of classic systems for one or two orders of magnitude less in cost have become available. These devices are based on commercially available commodity computer hardware, only recently powerful enough to drive graphics-intensive applications. Such systems are typically PC-based utilizing a high-end graphics card and LCD projectors. These devices project a three- dimensional image onto a large screen, giving the user a sense of immersion and allowing a Proceedings of the 2004 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2004, American Society for Engineering Education

This paper describes an effort to build and evaluate the effectiveness of an immersive 3-D visualization system to help increase the awareness that students have when designing software that has a high level of accessibility for the differently abled. The demonstration utilizes an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment in which we simulated two types of colorblindness in a generally familiar environment. We report on the initial trial of this tool and the results of student surveys designed to assess impact on student perception and understanding and demonstrate that the use of virtual environments can give students greater empathy for individuals with visual impairments.

Quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) are a leading example of field-coupled nanocomputing (FCN) devices. All FCN devices rely on local field interactions among nanoscale building blocks that are arranged in patterns to perform useful calculations. Many methods have been introduced to simulate these devices, but not all of those methods are guaranteed to give correct results. The only method that is certain to give the correct results is constructing and diagonalizing the Hamiltonian operator using a full-basis set for the entire device. Not only does this give all stable states of the device (necessarily including the ground state), it also allows the detection of non-polarized states of QCA and other FCN cells. Unfortunately, simulating moderately complex devices using the full-basis set has been prohibitively expensive, both in storage space and in calculation time. The authors present a new method for calculating the eigenstates of a full-basis set Hamiltonian and use this method to demonstrate that at least one previously published QCA device does not, in fact, operate as it was simulated and described in the previous work. Identifying an error in a previously published device using a heretofore computationally infeasible simulation shows the value of using the exact full-basis calculation in the simulation of QCA devices.

Coplanar wire crossing has been a major challenge for quantum-dot cellular automata systems since their development. Several possible solutions have been presented, but they have either relied on non-adjacent cell interactions or have required switching time that scales with the number of inputs or outputs. In this paper, the authors present a signal distribution grid that enables multiple parallel crossings, while doing so with only adjacent cell interactions, a constant time for signal distribution regardless of the number of inputs or outputs, and regularly shaped and contiguous clocking regions that will be relatively easier to fabricate. The utility of this device is demonstrated by the design of a one-bit full adder that meets all of the listed requirements.

This paper reports on the continued work on image analysis of the Farm Security Administration -- Office of War Information Photography Collection team, supported through an XSEDE grant (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) and Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS). The team is refining existing algorithms, developing new algorithms and executing them on the Comet supercomputer to analyze the FSA-OWI corpus from 1935-1944, held by the Library of Congress (LOC). The project spans many fields within the humanities and beyond, including photography, art, visual rhetoric, linguistics, American history, anthropology, and geography, as well as appealing to the general public. Progress includes refining image, metadata, and lexical semantics analysis, as well as developing a search, retrieval, and sorting interface through Clowder, which will serve as the public portal. Methods and tool refinement for this project are suitable for use on other large image corpora.

This paper reports on the initial work and future trajectory of the Image Analysis of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photography Collection team, supported through an XSEDE startup grant and Extended Collaborative Support Service (ECSS). The team is developing and utilizing existing algorithms and running them on Comet to analyze the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information image corpus from 1935-1944, held by the Library of Congress (LOC) and accessible online to the public. The project serves many fields within the humanities, including photography, art, visual rhetoric, linguistics, American history, anthropology, and geography, as well as the general public. Through robust image, metadata, and lexical semantics analysis, researchers will gain deeper insight into photographic techniques and aesthetics employed by FSA photographers, editorial decisions, and overall collection content. By pairing image analysis with metadata analysis, including lexio-semantic extraction, the opportunities for deep data mining of this collection expand even further.

The work in this paper describes the applicati on of an optimized eigensolver algorithm to produce the kernel calculations for simulating quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) circuits, an emerging implementation of quantum computing The application of the locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient (LOBPCG) method to calculate the eigenvalues and eigenvectors for this simulation was shown to exhibit a 15.6 speedup over the commonly used QR-method for a representative simulation and has specific advantages for the Hermitian, positive-definite, sparse matrices commonly encountered in simulating the Time-Independent Schrödinger equation. We present the computational savings for a simulation analyzing the effect of stray charges near a four-cell line of QCA cells with a single driver cell, and we discuss implications for wider application. We further discuss issues of problem preconditioning which are specific to QCA simulation when utilizing the LOBPCG method.

The authors analyze the effect of stray charges near a line of quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) cells. Considering both the ground-state polarization and the excitation energy of the system, it is determined that there is a 129-nm-wide region surrounding a QCA wire where a stray charge will cause the wire to fail. This calculation is the result of a full-basis-set simulation of a four-cell line. A comparison is made between cells with parallel-spin electrons and those with antiparallel spin electrons, showing that they yield essentially identical results. Therefore, the added complexity of accounting for antiparallel spins does not yield superior simulation results. Finally, a comparison is made between the full-basis calculations and the results of the same calculation using the intercellular Hartree approximation (ICHA). The similarity of these two results demonstrates that the ICHA method is a valid tool for studying the effect of stray charges in larger systems.

PurposeMobile manipulators offer great capability, but their teleoperation is often an overwhelming task for humans due to the many degrees‐of‐freedom of control available from both the mobile platform and the associated manipulator. The purpose of this paper is to address the question of how these controls should be mapped to the robotic mobile platform and its manipulator for “optimal teleoperation”, for the special case of an omnidirectional mobile platform and two joint (with wrist) planar manipulator.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors summarize the results of a study to optimize the teleoperation interface for a two‐link planar manipulator with a wrist that was mounted on an omni‐directional mobile platform.FindingsThe research comprised a carefully‐controlled study using 33 human subjects in seven different treatments of possible control interfaces.Research limitations/implicationsUsers performed movement and manipulation tasks, and their performance was measured on several scales.Practical implicationsBased on this study, the authors present guidelines for optimizing mobile manipulator control interfaces and motivate future research using the method of controlled multi‐user trials.Social implicationsThis research has the potential to guide the improvement of interfaces for mobile robots in military, service, and security applications.Originality/valueThe value of this research extends to optimizing remote control schemes to relieve operator fatigue and optimize interface design.

Numerous publications have emphasized the importance of technical communication skills in the field of engineering. Capstone Senior Design courses are typically selected to evaluate and enhance the technical communication skills of engineering students. To effectively implement technical communication into a Capstone Senior Design course, four main challenges must be overcome. The first challenge is to provide students with consistent, quality feedback. The second challenge is to overcome resource constraints to effectively implement communication instruction in the course. The third challenge is to provide students with exposure to multiple communication mediums and audiences. The fourth challenge is to develop techniques to motivate students to improve their communication skills. This paper provides the techniques used in the Valparaiso University Capstone Senior Design course to address all four of these challenges.

Virtual Reality systems enable organizations to cut costs and time, maintain financial and organizational control over the development process, digitally evaluate products before having them created, and allow for greater creative exploration. In this book, VR developers Alan Craig, William Sherman, and Jeffrey Will examine a comprehensive collection of current,unique, and foundational VR applications in a multitude of fields, such as business, science, medicine, art, entertainment, and public safety among others. An insider's view of what works, what doesn't work, and why, Developing Virtual Reality Applications explores core technical information and background theory as well as the evolution of key applications from their genesis to their most current form. Developmental techniques are cross-referenced between different applications linking information to describe overall VR trends and fundamental best practices. This synergy, coupled with the most up to date research being conducted, provides a hands-on guide for building applications, and an enhanced, panoramic view of VR development. Developing Virtual Reality Applications is an indispensable one-stop reference for anyone working in this burgeoning field. Dozens of detailed application descriptions provide practical ideas for VR development in ALL areas of interest! Development techniques are cross referenced between different application areas, providing fundamental best practices! Includes a media-rich companion website with hours of footage from application demonstrations

This chapter focuses on virtual reality (VR) applications, its benefits, form, and genre. Form and genre are two terms often used to evaluate and discuss the content of media. Form is related to how the narrative is constructed and presented to the audience. Genre is a way to categorize style: Science fiction or mystery, opera or symphony, abstract or representational are all genres of particular media. In VR, genre is typically associated with the class of problem being addressed and form with the method of interaction and presentation. Through the examination of some of the application fields that have benefited from the use of virtual reality, one can get a better sense of how well VR can be applied in other fields. A standard architectural VR application has an obvious three-dimensional representation to make the virtual world look like the real world. Virtual reality has also been applied to other areas of use, such as medical, educational, and artistic uses.

Technological change has placed a strain on the educational system. In trying to keep pace with the information explosion associated with the technology revolution, educators have had to devote more time and energy to simple information transfer, leaving little time to help beginners apply information.

Virtual reality is being applied in a variety of ways to contribute to the public safety and military operations. One of the highest uses of any technology is to save lives. Virtual reality is used to help save lives indirectly by training firefighters, police, and military personnel, as well as in educating the general public, in how to respond in various dangerous situations ranging from natural disasters such as tornados and earthquakes to acts of terrorism. Many applications appropriate for public safety and military have a requirement of being very closely coupled to the physical world. As such, hap- tic feedback and locomotion feedback devices can be very important. Much like commercial pilots learning to fly a Boeing 747 in a flight simulator, military pilots can learn how to fly an F-117A, and they must learn not only the flight control operations but also combat maneuvers under military conditions. For instance, the Virtual Reality/Intelligent Simulation (VR/IS) team at Sandia National Laboratories created a system for VR Assault Planning Training or Rehearsal (VRaptor). VRaptor is a system that provides the capability for end user instructors to create scenarios for situational training, including options to manipulate the environment as the training is taking place.