Digital Commons Network^™

Alternative Restraint Methods In Child Restraint Systems, Kazimierz Andrzej Czubernat

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on methods to reduce the frequency of negative health events experienced by premature and low birth weight infants in child safety seats as well as methods to mitigate some of the risk of injury to an infant during both crash events and aggressive driving conditions. Simulations were carried out using a computer model of an anthropomorphic testing device within a child safety seat subjected to various aggressive driving conditions, a frontal impact, and a side impact. The performance of the system was based on neck angle, observed head acceleration and various loads in the neck of the …

Detect Spammers In Online Social Networks, Yi Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Fake followers in online social networks (OSNs) are the accounts that are created to boost the rank of some targets. These spammers can be generated by programs or human beings, making them hard to identify. In this thesis, we propose a novel spammer detection method by detecting near-duplicate accounts who share most of the followers. It is hard to discover such near-duplicates on large social networks that provide limited remote access. We identify the near-duplicates and the corresponding spammers by estimating the Jaccard similarity using star sampling, a combination of uniform random sampling and breadth-first crawling. Then we applied our …

New Materials And Methods For The Fabrication Of Large-Area Stretchable Electronics, Heather Lynn Filiatrault,

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses three main challenges towards the fabrication of large-area stretchable electronic devices. First, we replaced expensive photolithography techniques with low-cost methods to achieve highly stretchable gold films on elastomers. Second, we enabled the fabrication of large-area stretchable pixels through the incorporation of stretchable elastomers in the emissive layer of light-emitting devices. Third, we made progress towards theinception of air-stable large-area stretchable electronics by developing methods to deposit conductive metal films on new highly impermeable stretchablesubstrates.

Chapter 2 describes the deposition of a low-cost, microstructured glue interlayer on an elastomeric substrate to enable the fabrication of gold films with …

Chipless Radio Frequency Identification (Rfid) Tag Utilizing Beamforming Technique, Ali Attaran

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This work is a paper based dissertation which presents a new method to design low cost chipless radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags using MEMS technology. The proposed chipless tag can be batch-fabricated using a basic MEMS fabrication process. The chipless tag can operate over a wide range of frequencies including the conventional UHF band for RFID applications. The elimination of the chip can reduces the tag price to the extent that it becomes an alternative solution to barcode labels. A prototype of the tag is implemented using a basic fabrication process and measurements are performed to validate its functionality. For the …

Physicochemical Gradients, Diffusive Flux And Biostabilization Of Oil Sands Tailings Material, Thomas Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Extraction of raw bitumen from the Athabasca Oil Sands through open-pit mining produces waste materials called tailings, which are housed in large settling basins called tailings ponds. As consolidation of fines (sands, silts and clays) occurs, biogeochemical cycling of nutrients and an overall REDOX environment establishes, as with any natural wetland or lake sediment environment. These biogeochemical processes play a role in the dynamic nature of these tailings ponds over time, and directly implicate the future fate of these ponds as they are prepared for reclamation to wetlands or End-Pit Lake environments. This thesis tracks general chemistry and physico-chemical gradients …

Energy Efficient Reconfigurable Mac Protocol For Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network, Khaja Mohammad Shazzad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In a multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network~(UWASN) the challenges of the medium access control~(MAC) are different than that of single hop fully connected network. Existing MAC solutions try to solve the challenges of MAC control by channel reservation or contention elimination techniques. These techniques heavily depend on the transmissions of control packets that result in large overhead specially in terms of energy consumptions. In this thesis, a multi-hop enabled energy efficient MAC protocol for UWASN is proposed by exploiting a novel 2-phase contention resolution technique that minimizes the usage of control packets by utilizing short duration tones.~A probabilistic model of …

Paper Caskets, Emilia Danielewska

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

"Paper Caskets" is a collection of prose poetry that reveals and exposes the dead. The manuscript, made up for four parts, proposes a poetics of the box - as coffin, as prose parameters of the page, as photograph, as state of mind and body in the face of death. The poetry partially draws inspiration from postmortem photographs of children, recounting how the bodies come to have their pictures taken and how those who work and mourn affect the process. The poetry also locates death in the everyday: in the garden, on the beach, at a dance recital. Between artistry and …

Generation Of Model Systems For The Study Of Novel Cell Cycle Regulation In Development: Implications For Spy1 In Tumour Susceptibility, Bre-Anne Fifield

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cell cycle regulation lies at the heart of all developmental decisions, and aberrant regulation represents an important step in the onset of tumourigenesis. Alterations in cell cycle regulators are known to play a critical role in promoting tumour formation in a wide variety of tissues. The cyclin-like protein Spy1 is capable of binding and activating CDK2 and promoting progression through G1/S phase of the cell cycle. Spy1 can also target the cell cycle inhibitor p27 for degradation, and it has been shown to override cellular checkpoints and apoptotic pathways in response to DNA damage leading to enhanced cell survival. Previous …

Optimal Design Of Battery-Ultracapacitor Hybrid Source Light/Heavy Electrified Vehicle, Seyed Mahdi Mousavi Sangdehi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contributes to the optimal design of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid sources light/heavy duty electrified vehicle power-train architectures. Electrified vehicle (EV) in automotive technology is one of the major solutions to today’s environmental concerns such as air pollution and greenhouse effects. Light duty and heavy duty EVs can reduce the amount of the pollution effectively. Since, in this area all researches deal with optimal cost of the system and rarely consider the regenerate brake energy, the lack of comprehensive study on other important issues on optimal sizing including size, space, and acceleration time is feeling. Also it is necessary to be …

Investigating Potential Combinations Of Visual Features Towards Improvement Of Full-Reference And No-Reference Image Quality Assessment, Ashirbani Saha

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Objective assessment of image quality is the process of automatic assignment of a scalar score to an image such that the rating or score corresponds to the score provided by the Human Visual System (HVS). Despite extensive studies since the last two decades, it remains a challenging problem in image processing due to the presence of different types of distortions and limited knowledge of the HVS. Existing approaches for assessing the perceptual quality of images have relied on a number of methodologies that directly apply known properties of the HVS, construct hypotheses considering the HVS as a blackbox and use …