Engineering Commons^™

Combined Behavioral And Engineering Approach To Preventing Highway Fatalities, Benjamin Blandford, Reginald Souleyrette, Caitlin N. Pope, Tony Fields, Erin Lammers-Staats

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

Traditional, single-discipline highway safety approaches can be augmented through multidisciplinary approaches that consider both engineering and behavioral interventions (e.g., education, enforcement, public outreach campaigns). Leveraging a systems-based conceptual framework of roadway safety, multiple forms of statistical and geospatial analysis, and SPF modeling and network screening, this report proposes and demonstrates methods for unpacking the influence of behavioral-related factors on crash occurrences and outcomes. The primary focus is on behaviors targeted in the Strategic Highway Safety Plan — aggressive driving, distracted driving, impaired driving, and driving without proper restraint (i.e., seatbelts). Based on application of these methods, the report highlights ...

Approach To Problem Solving And Use Of Intuition By Engineering Technology Students, Meher R. Taleyarkhan, Anne M. Lucietto, Natalie L. F. Hobson, Therese M. Azevedo

Journal of Global Education and Research

Engineering technology students often forgo a methodical approach of solving or answering questions on assignments or exams in favor of an intuition-based approach, emphasizing educated guessing (Broberg et al., 2008). Faculty observations have noted these student solutions often provide explanations, usually sans calculations, to support answers the students believe to be reasonable when in reality deviated from the correct answer. An extensive study was developed to assess several distinctions between student intuition and use of cognition in problem solving, as related to a generalized student population. The study was comprised of a survey and interview. The survey utilized two instruments ...

Like You Search, Gipson Bachman

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

As consumers continue to make their purchases solely online without visiting brick-and-mortar stores, they increasingly look for ways to “touch, feel and try on” products without actually doing so. We believe social media influencers provide a way to do this, with the influencers themselves acting as “stand-ins” for consumers in their place. Finding influencers that look like you in 2022 sounds like it would be easy, but it isn’t. Until now.

LIKE YOU aims to answer this gap in the market by creating a proprietary search engine that, through answering a few questions, recommends a list of influencers that ...

A Review On Nanomaterials And Nanohybrids Based Bio-Nanocomposites For Food Packaging, Kalpani Y. Perera, Amit K. Jaiswal, Swarna Jaiswal

Articles

With an increasing demand for a novel, eco-friendly, high-performance packaging material “bio-nanocomposites” has attracted great attention in recent years. The review article aims at to evaluating recent innovation in bio-nanocomposites for food packaging applications. The current trends and research over the last three years of the various bio-nanocomposites including inorganic, organic nanomaterials, and nanohybrids, which are suitable as food packaging materials due to their advanced properties such as high mechanical, thermal, barrier, antimicrobial, and antioxidant are described in detail. In addition, the legislation, migration studies, and SWOT analysis on bio-nanocomposite film have been discussed. It has been observed that the ...

Light Field Salient Object Detection: A Review And Benchmark, Keren Fu, Yao Jiang, Ge-Peng Ji, Tao Zhou, Qijun Zhao, Deng-Ping Fan

Computational Visual Media

Salient object detection (SOD) is a long-standing research topic in computer vision with increasing interest in the past decade. Since light fields record comprehensive information of natural scenes that benefit SOD in a number of ways, using light field inputs to improve saliency detection over conventional RGB inputs is an emerging trend. This paper provides the first comprehensive review and a benchmark for light field SOD, which has long been lacking in the saliency community. Firstly, we introduce light fields, including theory and data forms, and then review existing studies on light field SOD, covering ten traditional models, seven deep ...

Recent Advances In Glinty Appearance Rendering, Junqiu Zhu, Sizhe Zhao, Yanning Xu, Xiangxu Meng, Lu Wang, Ling-Qi Yan

Computational Visual Media

The interaction between light and materials is key to physically-based realistic rendering. However, it is also complex to analyze, especially when the materials contain a large number of details and thus exhibit "glinty" visual effects. Recent methods of producing glinty appearance are expected to be important in next-generation computer graphics. We provide here a comprehensive survey on recent glinty appearance rendering. We start with a definition of glinty appearance based on microfacet theory, and then summarize research works in terms of representation and practical rendering. We have implemented typical methods using our unified platform and compare them in terms of ...

Automatic Location And Semantic Labeling Of Landmarks On 3d Human Body Models, Shan Luo, Qitong Zhang, Jieqing Feng

Computational Visual Media

Landmarks on human body models are of great significance for applications such as digital anthropometry and clothing design. The diversity of pose and shape of human body models and the semantic gap make landmarking a challenging problem. Inthis paper, a learning-based method is proposed to locate landmarks on human body models by analyzing the relationship between geometric descriptors and semantic labels of landmarks. A shape alignmentalgorithm is proposed to align human body models to break symmetric ambiguity. A symmetry-awaredescriptor is proposed based on the structure of the human body models, which is robust to both pose and shape variations in ...

Constructing Self-Supporting Surfaces With Planar Quadrilateral Elements, Long Ma, Sidan Yao, Jianmin Zheng, Yang Liu, Yuanfeng Zhou, Shi-Qing Xin, Ying He

Computational Visual Media

We present a simple yet effective method for constructing 3D self-supporting surfaces with planar quadrilateral (PQ) elements. Starting with a triangular discretization of a self-supporting surface, we firstcompute the principal curvatures and directions of each triangular face using a new discrete differential geometryapproach, yielding more accurate results than existing methods. Then, we smooth the principal direction field to reduce the number of singularities. Next, we partition all faces into two groups in terms of principalcurvature difference. For each face with small curvature difference, we compute a stretch matrix that turns the principal directions into a pair of conjugate directions. For ...

Blnet: Bidirectional Learning Network For Point Clouds, Wenkai Han, Hai Wu, Chenglu Wen, Cheng Wang, Xin Li

Computational Visual Media

The key challenge in processing point clouds lies in the inherent lack of ordering and irregularity of the 3D points. By relying on per-point multi-layer perceptions (MLPs), most existing point-based approaches only address the first issue yet ignore the second one. Directly convolving kernels with irregular points will result in loss of shape information. This paper introduces a novel point-based bidirectional learning network (BLNet) to analyze irregular 3D points. BLNet optimizes the learning of 3D points through two iterative operations: feature-guided point shifting and feature learning from shifted points, so as to minimise intra-class variances, leading to a more regular ...

Joint Self-Supervised And Reference-Guided Learning For Depth Inpainting, Heng Wu, Kui Fu, Yifan Zhao, Haokun Song, Jia Li

Computational Visual Media

Depth information can benefit various computer vision tasks on both images and videos. However, depth maps may suffer from invalid values in many pixels, and also large holes. To improve such data, we propose a joint self-supervised and reference-guided learning approach for depth inpainting. For the self-supervised learning strategy, we introduce an improved spatial convolutional sparse coding module in which total variation regularization is employed to enhance the structural information while preserving edge information. This module alternately learns a convolutional dictionary and sparse coding from a corrupted depth map. Then, both the learned convolutional dictionary and sparse coding are convolved ...

Image-Guided Color Mapping For Categorical Data Visualization, Qian Zheng, Min Lu, Sicong Wu, Ruizhen Hu, Joel Lanir, Hui Huang

Computational Visual Media

Appropriate color mapping for categorical data visualization can significantly facilitate the discovery of underlying data patterns and effectively bring out visual aesthetics. Some systems suggest pre-defined palettes for this task. However, a predefined color mapping is not always optimal, failing to consider users’ needs for customization. Given an input cate-gorical data visualization and a reference image, we present an effective method to automatically generate a coloring that resembles the reference while allowing classes to be easily distinguished. We extract a color palette with high perceptual distance between the colors by sampling dominant and discriminable colors from the image’s color ...

Self-Supervised Coarse-To-Fine Monocular Depth Estimation Using A Lightweight Attention Module, Yuanzhen Li, Fei Luo, Chunxia Xiao

Computational Visual Media

Self-supervised monocular depth estimation has been widely investigated and applied in previous works. However, existing methods suffer from texture-copy, depth drift, and incomplete structure. It is difficult for normal CNN networks to completely understand the relationship between the object and its surrounding environment. Moreover, it is hard to design the depth smoothness loss to balance depth smoothness and sharpness. To address these issues, we propose a coarse-to-fine method with a normalized convolutional block attention module (NCBAM). In the coarse estimation stage, we incorporate the NCBAM into depth and pose networks to overcome the texture-copy and depth drift problems. Then, we ...

High Fidelity Virtual Try-On Network Via Semantic Adaptation And Distributed Componentization, Chenghu Du, Feng Yu, Minghua Jiang, Ailing Hua, Yaxin Zhao, Xiong Wei, Tao Peng, Xinrong Hu

Computational Visual Media

Image-based virtual try-on systems have significant commercial value in online garment shopping. However, prior methods fail to appropriately handle details, so are defective in maintaining the original appearance of organizational items including arms, the neck, and in-shop garments. We propose a novel high fidelity virtual try-on network to generate realistic results. Specifically, a distributed pipeline is used for simultaneous generation of organizational items. First, the in-shop garment is warped using thin plate splines (TPS) to give a coarse shape reference, and then a corresponding target semantic map is generated, which can adaptively respond to the distribution of different items triggered ...

Live Imaging Of Micro And Macro Wettability Variations Of Carbonate Oil Reservoirs For Enhanced Oil Recovery And Co/ Trapping/Storage, Anastasia Ivanova, A. Orekhov, S. Markovic, Stefan Iglauer, P. Grishin, A. Cheremisin

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Carbonate hydrocarbon reservoirs are considered as potential candidates for chemically enhanced oil recovery and for CO² geological storage. However, investigation of one main controlling parameter—wettability—is usually performed by conventional integral methods at the core-scale. Moreover, literature reports show that wettability distribution may vary at the micro-scale due to the chemical heterogeneity of the reservoir and residing fluids. These differences may profoundly affect the derivation of other reservoir parameters such as relative permeability and capillary pressure, thus rendering subsequent simulations inaccurate. Here we developed an innovative approach by comparing the wettability distribution on carbonates at micro and macro-scale by ...

Numerical Modeling And Simulating Thermal Performance Of Printed Circuit Boards, Paul R. Ziegenfelder

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates how heat transfer theory can be applied to evaluate the thermal performance of printed circuit board (PCB) designs. A model was developed for correlating theory to the physical parameters relating to the construction of the PCB and a computer application was developed to perform the thermal analysis. The application allows the importation of common PCB design files for a straightforward and quick analysis of a PCB design’s thermal performance. The application is open-source to allows for further development and free access from the public.

Development Of An Excel Model To Evaluate The Stability Of Slopes, Bradley Davis

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports

This objective of this study is to determine a method or tool for taking given slope stability parameters and quickly and effectively determining the factor of safety against sliding of fully softened slopes. This study evaluates the effects of soil and geometric parameters of common slopes, and models these properties in a hypothetical model. The methodology is based on a parametric analysis using the Spencer’s Method of Slices limit equilibrium analysis used in the computer program Slide2. A parametric analysis is performed to determine which soil and/or geometric properties have a high influence on slope stability. The parametric ...

Increasing Production Of Therapeutic Mabs In Cho Cells Through Genetic Engineering, Charles Barentine

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Between 2014 and 2018, the global market for therapeutic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) rose from $60 billion to $115.2 billion with a projected value of $300 billion by 2025. These molecules are used to effectively treat some of the most challenging illnesses from auto-immune diseases to cancer. While mAbs are highly valuable with potent applications, their production at scale remains an outstanding challenge. These molecules are largely produced in Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells that require highly specific conditions to produce a useful product.

Genetic engineering presents one solution to overcome productivity limits. With the advent of CRISPR (clustered regularly ...

Low Resource Assay For Tracking Sars-Cov-2 In Wastewater, Julissa Van Renselaar

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wastewater based epidemiology (WBE) allows for the tracking of nucleic acid of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater which gives the opportunity for the public and government officials to be informed about the infectivity of the virus in a community. Advances have been made in WBE that have allowed for higher performance, lower resource use, and faster turnaround time. An adapted concentration method of spin column direct extraction has yielded a proxy virus recovery of 83%, consumable cost of $2.01 per sample, and a turnaround time of 0.33 hour/sample. Other concentration methods have lower proxy virus recoveries, comparable cost, and ...

A Novel Microgrid Fault Detection And Classification Method Using Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform And An Augmented Lagrangian Particle Swarm Optimization-Support Vector Machine, Masoud Ahmadipour, Muhammad Murtadha Othman, Rui Bo, Zainal Salam, Hussein Mohammed Ridha, Kamrul Hasan

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, an intelligent method for fault detection and classification for a microgrid (MG) was proposed. The idea was based on the combination of three computational tools: signal processing using the maximal overlap discrete wavelet packet transform (MODWPT), parameter optimization by the augmented Lagrangian particle swarm optimization (ALPSO), and machine learning using the support vector machine (SVM). The MODWPT was applied to preprocess half cycle of the post-fault current samples measured at both ends of feeders. The wavelet coefficients derived from the MODWPT were statistically evaluated using the mean, standard deviation, energy, skewness, kurtosis, logarithmic energy entropy, max, min ...

Cyclic Porewater Pressure Generation In Intact Silty Soils, Arash Khosravifar, Stephen Dickenson, Diane Moug

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The results of cyclic strain-controlled, constant volume direct simple shear (CDSS) tests and field shaking tests have been evaluated for intact, natural, low-plastic silts from six different fine-grained soils with 54%–100% fines content, 47%–83% silt content, and plasticity indices (PI) ranging from nonplastic to 16. These tests constitute a subset of a larger archive of CDSS tests performed on silt deposits from the Pacific Northwest, British Columbia, and Alaska collected and analyzed by the co-authors. The cyclic data are presented in this paper for two objectives: (a) to characterize cyclically-induced excess pore pressure generation in intermediate soils with ...