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‘The Magic Of Flowers’: An Explorative Study Into The Ways Floral Decorations Influence The Experience Of Guests In A Food Setting, In Contemporary Ireland, Johanna Banaditsch

Dissertations

This research project explores the influence of floral decorations on the experience of a diner in a food setting in contemporary Ireland by examining what and how dining experiences are designed, where floral decorations are relevant in this context and how they specifically influence people in these settings.

The research was conducted using the philosophical worldview of interpretivism. In order to answer the five sub-research questions and thus achieve the research aim, the research draws on existing literature on hospitality experiences, literature on the influence of flowers and qualitative primary research conducted through semi-structured in-depth interviews with flower providers and …

Family Dining: Food And Drink In The Sopranos – A Gastrocritical Approach, Lisa Davies

Dissertations

This thesis uses gastrocriticism to explore food and drink in the 86 episodes of the long-form narrative HBO television series The Sopranos. Gastrocriticism is an emerging branch of literary criticism that draws on scholarship from a range of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology and cultural studies. A deeper understanding of the series was gained by using a structured framework of enquiry to explore narrative, setting, characterisation and genre through the lens of food and foodways. The Sopranos is a story of an Italian-American crime family and food is abundant in the series and bound up with the identity of …

Concurrent Study Of The Impact Of An Institutionalized Diversity Plan On The Perceived Sense Of Academic Achievement, Sense Of Belonging, And Program Completion Among African American Students In A Midwest Community College, Tyianna Thompson

Dissertations

This dissertation explored how an institutionalized diversity plan impacts perceived academic achievement, sense of belonging, and program completion among African American students. The concurrent mixed-methods methodology followed a single case study design to explore the impact of an institutionalized diversity plan in a Midwest community college. Both quantitative and qualitative data were gathered and analyzed. The results of this study revealed that although diversity and inclusion programs are somewhat effective in higher education, more needs to be done to satisfy the needs of minority students in higher education. According to the findings of this study, most students felt a sense …

Faculty Perception Of The Impact Of Covid-19: A Descriptive Case Study Analysis, Traci Pooler

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to get an understanding of college faculty experiences and perceptions of student learning outcomes during forced virtual instruction in the spring 2020 semester. The study was limited to faculty who taught at one of the 18 member institutions of the Association of Kentucky Colleges and Universities (AIKCU). Factors such as the discipline being taught were considered. Other factors considered were faculty experience with virtual instruction, the availability of technology for faculty and students, and the support provided to students and faculty amid the transition to virtual instruction. The survey reviewed responses from each AIKCU …

Agreement Of Psychiatric Diagnoses Within And Between Groups Of Mental Health Clinicians From Different Disciplines, Wade Mcguire

Dissertations

The development of therapy as a treatment option for mental health problems has led to the creation of different disciplines. Each discipline has developed its own conceptualization of classification and treatment of mental health problems. These conceptualizations have led to different areas of focus for each of the disciplines, specifically counseling, psychology, and social work. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether these areas of focus influence how each discipline diagnoses. For this study, data was collected by having clinicians provide diagnoses for three fictitious clients. The vignettes for the clients were taken from a psychopathology textbook to …

Examining The Relationship Between Psychological Well-Being And Academic Performance Among First-Year College Students In A U.S. Mid-South University, Ya-Hsin Hsiao

Dissertations

This study examined the relationship between psychological well-being and college students. In addition, I looked at how COVID-19 impacted their psychological well-being. I used Ryff and Keyes’ (1995) 18-item Scale of Psychological Well-Being (SPWB-18) to measure participants' psychological well-being. Other demographic information such as race, gender, first-generation college student status, college readiness, and Pell Grant eligibility were collected from the WKU’s Institutes of Research.

Data were analyzed using multiple regressions that controlled for the effects of ethnicity, gender, first-generation status, and socioeconomic status. Moreover, the impact of COVID-19 on psychological well-being was evaluated and reported. In this dataset, the internal …

The Effects Of Personalized Learning On Student Achievement, Keile Phillips

Dissertations

Although many studies have been conducted on personalized learning strategies, teacher attitudes and perceptions, and student engagement, few studies have focused on personalized learning and its impact on student achievement when compared to the traditional classroom. The purpose of this study was to determine if personalized learning increased student achievement in three school districts by analyzing student assessments for three consecutive school years. The study utilized data from three school districts located in Western Kentucky for the 2016-2017, 2017-2018, and 2018-2019 school years. The data were collected from Renaissance Learning for math and reading. In addition to examining the students’ …

Development Of A Hospital Discharge Planning System Augmented With A Neural Clinical Decision Support Engine, David Mulqueen

Dissertations

The process of discharging patients from a tertiary care hospital, is one of the key activities to ensure the efficient and effective operation of a hospital. However, the decision to discharge a patient from a hospital is complex, as it requires multiple interactions with nurses, family, consultants, health information records and doctors, which can be very time consuming and prone to error. This thesis descries how a neural network based Clinical Decision Support system can be developed, to help in the decision making process and dramatically reduce the time and effort in running the discharge process in a hospital. A …

Exploring Gender Bias In Semantic Representations For Occupational Classification In Nlp: Techniques And Mitigation Strategies, Joseph Michael O'Carroll

Dissertations

Gender bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP) models is a non-trivial problem that can perpetuate and amplify existing societal biases. This thesis investigates gender bias in occupation classification and explores the effectiveness of different debiasing methods for language models to reduce the impact of bias in the model’s representations. The study employs a data-driven empirical methodology focusing heavily on experimentation and result investigation. The study uses five distinct semantic representations and models with varying levels of complexity to classify the occupation of individuals based on their biographies.

Explaining Deep Q-Learning Experience Replay With Shapley Additive Explanations, Robert S. Sullivan

Dissertations

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promise in optimizing complex control and decision-making processes but Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) lacks interpretability, limiting its adoption in regulated sectors like manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. Difficulties arise from DRL’s opaque decision-making, hindering efficiency and resource use, this issue is amplified with every advancement. While many seek to move from Experience Replay to A3C, the latter demands more resources. Despite efforts to improve Experience Replay selection strategies, there is a tendency to keep capacity high. This dissertation investigates training a Deep Convolutional Q-learning agent across 20 Atari games, in solving a control task, physics task, …

The Use Of Data Balancing Algorithms To Correct For The Under-Representation Of Female Patients In A Cardiovascular Dataset, Sian Miller

Dissertations

Given that women are under-represented in medical datasets, and that machine learning classification algorithms are known to exhibit bias towards the majority class, the growing application of machine learning in the medical field risks resulting in worse medical outcomes for female patients. The Heart Failure Prediction (HFP) dataset is a historical dataset used for the training of models for the prediction of heart disease. This dataset contains significantly fewer female patients than male patients, and as such it is expected that models trained using this data will inherit a gender bias to favour male patients. This dissertation explores the use …

On The Edge Of Leadership: Narratives Of Asian Indian American Women In Higher Education In The United States, Denozy Sharma

Dissertations

This study was an investigation of the experiences of Asian Indian American Women (AIAW) in higher education in the United States. The motivation of this study was to gain a better understanding of Asian Indian American Women who, in spite of their rising presence in academia and educational attainment, are noticeably underrepresented in academic leadership roles. Asian Indian American women fall far behind White females in leadership positions in higher education.

A qualitative research methodology has been conducted. The investigation involved the narratives of the five female participants (faculty members and/or administrators in U.S. higher education) who identified themselves as …

The Prevalence Of Mirror Gazing Behaviors In Men, Rutuja Pramod Chinchankar

Dissertations

Muscle Dysmorphia is when the individual is preoccupied with the idea that his or her body build is too small or insufficiently muscular. This study looked at the distinct criteria of MD, which is persistently and obsessively checking one’s appearance in the mirror and being dissatisfied with it. It studied the reasons behind these repetitive mirror-gazing behaviors. This study also attempted to understand the effect of an individual’s age, educational background, religious orientation, sexual orientation, and socio-economic status on his predisposition to MD via mirror-gazing behaviors. This study used a qualitative research design. Part I of the study included participants …

An Investigative Analysis On Female Presence And Highly Ranked Positions In Professional Kitchens In Ireland, Roann Byrne

Dissertations

This study aims to gain an understanding of the state of the cheffing industry currently, to analyse whether there is a lack of women within the industry particularly in positions of high power. This research intends to understand the causes for the lack and showcase possible solutions and recommendations for this. It exists as a role of advocacy; hoping to inspire more people into the career of cheffing, and to retain women within it. It aspires to challenge and thus forth change the narratives that have pushed many people, particularly women, out of this work for so long. This research …

Collaboration Among Parents Of African-American Students And A Church Sponsored Tutoring Program, Latiya Evette Kirby-Curlin

Dissertations

This study examines the lived experiences of African-American parents with children who attend a church-sponsored tutoring program. While this study focuses on the African- American parents' perspectives and lived experiences, the study provides an insight into the barriers that impact the implementation and success of the program, challenges of parental involvement, and promotes a higher level of academic achievement in education. This study provides information about lessening the barriers and the way in which parent involvement plays an essential part in a child's education. This qualitative study consisted of nine semi-structured interviews that focused on capturing information as well as …

Black Women Vice Presidents Of Student Affairs At Community Colleges Leadership Pathways And Barriers, Danielle Sims Brooks

Dissertations

This study explored the lived experiences of five Black women Vice Presidents of Student Affairs (VPSAs) at community colleges through narrative inquiry to get a better understanding of the strategies Black women deploy to be successful as well as the challenges and barriers they must navigate. Data was analyzed from a purposeful sample of five Black women VPSAs to get a better understanding of the experiences of Black women executive leaders in higher education. Participants shared many similarities in their educational and professional backgrounds in higher education by their experiences with leading and developing essential areas in student affairs. Findings …

More Than Midnight Feasts?: A Gastrocritical Reading Of Enid Blyton’S Malory Towers, St. Clare’S And The Naughtiest Girl In The School Series, Rebecca Broomfield

Dissertations

Food is fundamental to life. It is also fundamental to culture; through our production, manipulation and consumption of foodstuffs, the way in which we eat has amassed a range of rituals and rules. This suggests that food can be used to indicate more than mere biological need. Food and foodways are a common occurrence throughout literature, not least children’s literature. This thesis applies gastrocriticism as a paradigm to investigate the use of food and foodways in Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, St. Clare’s and The Naughtiest Girl school series. Gastrocriticism is an emerging form of literary criticism that considers the complex …

Market Segmentation Of Wine In Ireland: Are We Fostering A Desirable Consumption Culture?, Enea Bent

Dissertations

The aim of this research is to evaluate the wine sector in Ireland and its impact on the wine consumption culture that is being promoted here as a result. With supermarkets leading in terms of sales, this study evaluates the product offering of the various types of retailers and the attainability of the same to different demographics of consumer. A high level of government intervention in the industry is highlighted throughout the study, the intention and subsequent successes and failures are examined. A comparison to the rest of Europe and the United Kingdom is carried out to understand Ireland’s position …

Dark Patterns: Effect On Overall User Experience And Site Revisitation, Deon Soul Calawen

Dissertations

Dark patterns are user interfaces purposefully designed to manipulate users into doing something they might not otherwise do for the benefit of an online service. This study investigates the impact of dark patterns on overall user experience and site revisitation in the context of airline websites. In order to assess potential dark pattern effects, two versions of the same airline website were compared: a dark version containing dark pattern elements and a bright version free of manipulative interfaces. User experience for both websites were assessed quantitatively through a survey containing a User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) and a System Usability Scale …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

Improving Dysarthric Speech Recognition By Enriching Training Datasets, Sophie Cullen

Dissertations

Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder that results from disruptions in the neuro-motor interface and is characterised by poor articulation of phonemes and hyper-nasality and is characteristically different from normal speech. Many modern automatic speech recognition systems focus on a narrow range of speech diversity therefore as a consequence of this they exclude a groups of speakers who deviate in aspects of gender, race, age and speech impairment when building training datasets. This study attempts to develop an automatic speech recognition system that deals with dysarthric speech with limited dysarthric speech data. Speech utterances collected from the TORGO database are …

Evaluating The Performance Of Vision Transformer Architecture For Deepfake Image Classification, Devesan Govindasamy

Dissertations

Deepfake classification has seen some impressive results lately, with the experimentation of various deep learning methodologies, researchers were able to design some state-of-the art techniques. This study attempts to use an existing technology “Transformers” in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which has been a de-facto standard in text processing for the purposes of Computer Vision. Transformers use a mechanism called “self-attention”, which is different from CNN and LSTM. This study uses a novel technique that considers images as 16x16 words (Dosovitskiy et al., 2021) to train a deep neural network with “self-attention” blocks to detect deepfakes. It creates …

Measuring And Comparing Social Bias In Static And Contextual Word Embeddings, Alan Cueva Mora

Dissertations

Word embeddings have been considered one of the biggest breakthroughs of deep learning for natural language processing. They are learned numerical vector representations of words where similar words have similar representations. Contextual word embeddings are the promising second-generation of word embeddings assigning a representation to a word based on its context. This can result in different representations for the same word depending on the context (e.g. river bank and commercial bank). There is evidence of social bias (human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs) in word embeddings. While detecting bias in static (classical or non-contextual) word …

An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Subjective Mental Workload And Objective Indicators Of User Activity, Greg Byrne

Dissertations

Whilst the concept of physical workload is intuitively understood and readily applicable in system design, the same cannot be said of mental workload (MWL), despite its importance in our increasingly technological society. Despite its origin in the mid 20th century, the very concept of ”mental workload” is still a topic of debate in the literature, although it can be loosely defined as “the amount of mental work necessary for a person to complete a task” (Miller, 1956; Longo, 2014). Several methods have been utilized to measure of MWL, including physiological methods such as neuro-imagery, performance-based metrics, and subjective measures via …

The Impact Of Emotion Focused Features On Svm And Mlr Models For Depression Detection, Alexandria Mulligan

Dissertations

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common mental health diagnosis with estimates upwards of 25% of the United States population remain undiagnosed. Psychomotor symptoms of MDD impacts speed of control of the vocal tract, glottal source features and the rhythm of speech. Speech enables people to perceive the emotion of the speaker and MDD decreases the mood magnitudes expressed by an individual. This study asks the questions: “if high level features deigned to combine acoustic features related to emotion detection are added to glottal source features and mean response time in support vector machines and multivariate logistic regression models, would …

Evaluating The Performance Impact Of Fine-Tuning Optimization Strategies On Pre-Trained Distilbert Models Towards Hate Speech Detection In Social Media, Aidan Mcgovern

Dissertations

Hate speech can be defined as forms of expression that incite hatred or encourage violence towards a person or group based on race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Hate speech has gravitated towards social media as its primary platform, and its propagation represents profound risks to both the mental well-being and physical safety of targeted groups. Countermeasures to moderate hate speech face challenges due to the volumes of data generated in social media, leading companies, and the research community to evaluate methods to automate its detection. The emergence of BERT and other pre-trained transformer-based models for transfer learning in the …

Evaluation Of Automated Eye Blink Artefact Removal Using Stacked Dense Autoencoder, Matthew Rigney

Dissertations

The presence of artefacts in Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals can have a considerable impact on the information they portray. In this comparative study, the automated removal of eye blink artefacts using the constrained latent representation of a stacked dense autoencoders (SDAE) and comparing its ability to that of the manual independent component analysis (ICA) approach was evaluated. A comparative evaluation of 5 stacked dense autoencoder architectures lead to a chosen architecture for which the ability to automatically detect and remove eye blink artefacts were both statistically and humanistically evaluated. The ability of the stacked dense autoencoder was statistically evaluated with the …

Covid-19: A Review Of Random Testing As An Augmentation Of A Close-Contact Testing Regime In Response To The Covid-19 Pandemic, John Mcdonnell

Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the world with a huge challenge to balance the health of the population with the scale of stringent response measures. Policy makers need evidence based recommendations to inform their response to the pandemic and the ever changing landscape it creates. Testing and isolation of infected individuals plays a critical role in containing the spread of the disease, but is aimed primarily at detecting symptomatic individuals. However, asymptomatic individuals are much more difficult to detect. This study presents the augmentation of a close contact testing regime with random testing to examine the elect on the number …

Examining The Effects Of Disabilities On Vr Usage And Accessibility Issues For Persons With Disabilities, Sean Williams

Dissertations

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology that’s popularity has been increasing at a yearly rate. Despite this, concerns about the accessibility of VR devices are ever-growing as many users struggle to use the technology, especially users with disabilities. This study analyses how different types of disabilities affect how often a user uses VR and any associated re-occurring difficulties that are related to specific types of disability. To do this, a previous survey regarding VR accessibility run by Disability Visibility Project and ILMxLAB is examined. In this survey, 79 participants who identify as having a disability answered questions related to …

The Impact Of Social Networking Sites On Online Boundaries And Relationship Satisfaction, Jay Ingram

Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to increase understanding of how the use of social networking and online boundaries affects relationship satisfaction. Because the literature has not yet addressed how social networking intrusion affects couples, this study draws on previous research of face-to-face boundary setting. An instrument was developed specifically for this study to measure the extent of intrusion of social networking use from factors of romantic jealousy, partner surveillance, and relationship conflict. Previous research found these factors to have a negative impact on relationship satisfaction in face-to-face situations.

Three hundred thirty-one participants completed the Relationship Assessment Scale, the Social …