Uncertainty, Sensitivity and Geostatistical Studies of Flow and Contaminant Transport in Heterogeneous Unsaturated Zone by Feng Pan Dr. Zhongbo Yu, Examination Committee Chair Associate Professor of Hydrology University of Nevada Las Vegas Dr. Jianting Zhu, Examination Committee Co-Chair Associate Professor of Hydrologic Science Desert Research Institute The objectives of this study are: (1) to...

Fatigue-driven damage propagation is one of the most unpredictable failure mechanisms for a large variety of mechanical and structural systems subjected to cyclic and/or random operational loads during their service life. Therefore, monitoring the critical components of these systems, assessing their structural integrity, recursively predicting their remaining fatigue life (RFL), and providing ...

The use of feature enhancement techniques to obtain estimates of the clean parameters is a common approach for robust automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the decoding algorithm typically ignores how accurate these estimates are. Uncertainty decoding methods incorporate this type of information. In this paper, we develop a formulation of the uncertainty decoding paradigm for Frequency F...

Many artificial intelligence techniques rely on heuristic search through large spaces. Because the computational effort required to search through these spaces reduces the applicability of the techniques, a number of parallel and distributed approaches to search have been introduced to improve the performance of certain aspects of the search process. However, theoretical and experimental result...

The ability to quantify uncertainty in information extracted from spectroscopic measurements is important in numerous fields. The traditional approach of repetitive measurements may be impractical or impossible in some measurements scenarios, while chi-squared analysis does not provide insight into the sources of uncertainty. As such, a need exists for analytical expressions for estimating unce...

Uncertainty in production prediction has been subject to numerous investigations. Geological and reservoir engineering data comprise a huge number of data entries to the simulation models. Thus, uncertainty of these data can largely affect the reliability of the simulation model. Due to these reasons, it is worthy to present the desired quantity with a probability distribution instead of a sing...

We present a method for determining the uncertainty in the measurement of parameters that describe the dynamics of a Foucault's pendulum. In the document, we review how these parameters can be obtained. Then, we propose a method for evaluating the uncertainty in their determination. We illustrate the method with experimentation made on a 28m height pendulum located at 20° 35' north latitude.

[1] The optimal parameters and uncertainty estimation of land surface models require that appropriate length of forcing and calibration data be selected for computing error functions. Most of the previous studies used less than two years of data to optimize land surface models. In this study, 18-year hydrometeorological data at Valdai, Russia, were used to run the Chameleon Surface Model (CHASM...

Modeling and simulation efforts continue to expand in areas where they have been used for some time, and they are also beginning to be used in new application areas. Modeling and simulation have been heavily used in risk assessment for high-consequence systems, such as nuclear power reactors, underground storage of radioactive wastes, and the nuclear weapon stockpile. For complex engineered or ...

Robot manipulators enable large-scale factory automation of simple and repeated tasks. Each manipulation is the result of the robot design and the command inputs provided by the operator. In this study, we focus on the accuracy improvement of practical robot manipulation under uncertainty, resulting in path-specific error values. Existing techniques for reducing the errors use high-precision se...