Engineering Commons^™

Rational Design Of Peptide-Based Materials Informed By Multiscale Molecular Dynamics Simulations, Dhwanit Rahul Dave

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The challenge of establishing a sustainable and circular economy for materials in medicine and technology necessitates bioinspired design. Nature's intricate machinery, forged through evolution, relies on a finite set of biomolecular building blocks with through-bond and through-space interactions. Repurposing these molecular building blocks requires a seamless integration of computational modeling, design, and experimental validation. The tools and concepts developed in this thesis pioneer new directions in peptide-materials design, grounded in fundamental principles of physical chemistry. We present a synergistic approach that integrates experimental designs and computational methods, specifically molecular dynamics simulations, to gain in-depth molecular insights crucial for advancing the …

Containerization Of Seafarers In The International Shipping Industry: Contemporary Seamanship, Maritime Social Infrastructures, And Mobility Politics Of Global Logistics, Liang Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation discusses the mobility politics of container shipping and argues that technological development, political-economic order, and social infrastructure co-produce one another. Containerization, the use of standardized containers to carry cargo across modes of transportation that is said to have revolutionized and globalized international trade since the late 1950s, has served to expand and extend the power of international coalitions of states and corporations to control the movements of commodities (shipments) and labor (seafarers). The advent and development of containerization was driven by a sociotechnical imaginary and international social contract of seamless shipping and cargo flows. In practice, this liberal, …

Multi-Perspective Analysis For Derivative Financial Product Prediction With Stacked Recurrent Neural Networks, Natural Language Processing And Large Language Model, Ethan Lo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study developed a multi-perspective, AI-powered model for predicting E-Mini S&P 500 Index Futures prices, tackling the challenging market dynamics of these derivative financial instruments. Leveraging FinBERT for analysis of Wall Street Journal data alongside technical indicators, trader positioning, and economic factors, my stacked recurrent neural network built with LSTMs and GRUs achieves significantly improved accuracy compared to single sub-models. Furthermore, ChatGPT generation of human-readable analysis reports demonstrates the feasibility of using large language models in financial analysis. This research pioneers the use of stacked RNNs and LLMs for multi-perspective financial analysis, offering a novel blueprint for automated prediction and …

Uncertainties In Retrieval Of Remote Sensing Reflectance From Ocean Color Satellite Observations, Eder I. Herrera Estrella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Ocean Color radiometry uses remote sensing to interpret ocean dynamics by retrieving remote sensing reflectance (𝑅𝑟𝑠) from satellite imagery at different scales and over different time periods. 𝑅𝑟𝑠 spectrum characterizes the ocean color that we observe, and from which we can discern concentrations of chlorophyll, organic and inorganic particles, and carbon fluxes in the ocean and atmosphere. 𝑅𝑟𝑠 is derived from the total radiance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). However, it only represents up to ten percent of the total signal. Hence, the retrieval of 𝑅𝑟𝑠 from the total radiance at TOA involves the application of atmospheric correction …

Construction And Performance Optimization Of Bioconjugated Nanosensors For Early Detection Of Breast Cancer And Pro-Inflammatory Diseases, Pooja Gaikwad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, nanosensors have emerged as a tool with strong potential in medical diagnostics. Single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) based optical nanosensors have notably garnered interest due to the unique characteristics of their near-infrared fluorescence emission, including tissue transparency, photostability, and various chiralities with discrete absorption and fluorescence emission bands. Additionally, the optoelectronic properties of SWCNT are sensitive to the surrounding environment, which makes them suitable for in vitro and in vivo biosensing. Single-stranded (ss) DNA-wrapped SWCNTs have been reported as optical nanosensors for cancers and metabolic diseases. Breast cancer and cardiovascular diseases are the most common causes of death …

Quantifying Temperature-, Pressure-, And Nuclear Quantum Effects On Hydrophobic And Hydrophilic Water-Mediated Interactions, Justin T. Engstler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Water-mediated interactions (WMIs) are responsible for diverse processes in aqueous solutions, including protein folding and nanoparticle aggregation. WMI may be affected by changes in temperature and pressure, and hence, they can alter chemical/physical processes that occur in aqueous environments. Traditionally, attention has been focused on hydrophobic interactions while, in comparison, the role of hydrophilic and hybrid (hydrophobic–hydrophilic) interactions have been mostly overlooked. Here, we study the role of T and P on the WMI between nanoscale (i) hydrophobic–hydrophobic, (ii) hydrophilic–hydrophilic, and (iii) hydrophilic–hydrophobic pairs of (hydroxylated/non-hydroxylated) graphene-based surfaces. We find that hydrophobic, hydrophilic, and hybrid interactions are all sensitive to …

Tunable Linear And Nonlinear Metasurfaces Based On Hybrid Gold-Graphene Plasmons, Matthew Feinstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Optical Metasurfaces are planar structures that are patterned with subwavelength structures and are very thin compared to the wavelength of light. Despite their thinness, these structured materials can strongly interact with incident light to effect the functionalities of conventional optical components, such as rotation of the polarization state, beam steering, lensing, spectral filtering, and holography, to name a few. Metasurfaces can also facilitate nonlinear optical effects, such as the mixing of beams at different frequencies to generate a beam at a new frequency.

The ability to alter the behavior of a metasurface during operation is highly desired for applications such …

Stand-Up Comedy Visualized, Berna Yenidogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stand-up comedy has become an increasingly popular form of comedy in the recent years and comedians reach audiences beyond the halls they are performing through streaming services, podcasts and social media. While comedic performances are typically judged by how 'funny' they are, which could be proxied by the frequency and intensity of laughs through the performance, comedians also explore untapped social issues and provoke conversation, especially in this age where interaction with artists goes beyond their act. It is easy to see commonalities in the topics addressed in comedians’ work such as relationships, race and politics.This project provides an interactive …

Resource Management In Mobile Edge Computing For Compute-Intensive Application, Xiaojie Zhang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With current and future mobile applications (e.g., healthcare, connected vehicles, and smart grids) becoming increasingly compute-intensive for many mission-critical use cases, the energy and computing capacities of embedded mobile devices are proving to be insufficient to handle all in-device computation. To address the energy and computing shortages of mobile devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a major distributed computing paradigm. Compared to traditional cloud-based computing, MEC integrates network control, distributed computing, and storage to customizable, fast, reliable, and secure edge services that are closer to the user and data sites. However, the diversity of applications and a variety …

Bitrdf: Extending Rdf For Bitemporal Data, Di Wu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Internet is not only a platform for communication, transactions, and cloud storage, but it is also a large knowledge store where people as well as machines can create, manipulate, infer, and make use of data and knowledge. The Semantic Web was developed for this purpose. It aims to help machines understand the meaning of data and knowledge so that machines can use the data and knowledge in decision making. The Resource Description Framework (RDF) forms the foundation of the Semantic Web which is organized as the Semantic Web Layer Cake. RDF is limited and can only express a binary …

Deception Detection Across Domains, Languages And Modalities, Subhadarshi Panda

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

With the increase of deception and misinformation especially in social media, it has become crucial to develop machine learning methods to automatically identify deception. In this dissertation, we identify key challenges underlying text-based deception detection in a cross-domain setting, where we do not have training data in the target domain. We analyze the differences between domains and as a result develop methods to improve cross-domain deception detection. We additionally develop approaches that take advantage of cross-lingual properties to support deception detection across languages. This involves the usage of either multilingual NLP models or translation models. Finally, to better understand multi-modal …

Coded Matrix Multiplication, Xiaodi Fan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Matrix multiplication is a fundamental building block in many machine learning models. As the input matrices may be too large to be multiplied on a single server, it is common to split input matrices into multiple sub-matrices and execute the multiplications on different servers. However, in a distributed infrastructure, it is common to observe stragglers whose performance is significantly lower than other servers at some time. Compared to replicating each task on multiple servers, coded matrix multiplication, i.e., a combination of coding theoretic techniques and distributed matrix multiplication, can tolerate the same number of stragglers with much fewer servers. The …

A Python Implementation Of The Quasi-Harmonic Approximation: Ab-Initio Study Of The Thermoelastic Properties Of Magnesium Oxide And Calcium Oxide, Adewumi Bakare

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

When heated up, materials change volume, typically they expand, and they also change their elastic properties, typically by softening. Computational methods to calculate materials properties at finite temperature are needed to compensate for the lack of experimental data, as well as to predict materials properties at conditions difficult to be reached in experimental labs. In this research project, I designed a set of Python codes implementing a quasi-harmonic approximation (QHA) method to calculate thermodynamic functions at constant volume, equation of state, and the isothermal Bulk modulus of cubic materials. To validate the new computational tools, this implementation of QHA has …

A Machine Learning Approach To Predicting The Onset Of Type Ii Diabetes In A Sample Of Pima Indian Women, Meriem Benarbia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Type II diabetes is a disease that affects how the body regulates and uses sugar (glucose) as a fuel. This chronic disease results in too much sugar circulating in the bloodstream. High blood sugar levels can lead to circulatory, nervous, and immune systems disorders. Machine learning (ML) techniques have proven their strength in diabetes diagnosis. In this paper, we aimed to contribute to the literature on the use of ML methods by examining the value of a number of supervised machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, decision tree classifiers, random forest classifiers, and support vector classifiers to identify factors …

Designing The Electrode Geometry And Electrolyte To Enhance The Product Selectivity And Activity In Carbon Dioxide Electroreduction, Samaneh Sharifi Golru

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Excessive utilization of the fossil fuels due to the rapid growth of the global population has resulted in a dramatic increase in the carbon dioxide (CO₂) level in the atmosphere which is the main reason for global warming and climate change. Therefore, green technologies are in high demand to develop carbon-neutral energy cycles. In this regard, CO₂ electroreduction (CO2ER) has been proposed as a promising approach for CO₂ utilization. CO2ER can mitigate the CO₂ level in the atmosphere as well as produce value-added chemicals and fuels at ambient conditions. Despite the benefits of CO_{2 …}

Happiness And Policy Implications: A Sociological View, Sarah M. Kahl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The World Happiness Report is released every year, ranking each country by who is “happier” and explaining the variables and data they have used. This project attempts to build from that base and create a machine learning algorithm that can predict if a country will be in a “happy” or “could be happier” category. Findings show that taking a broader scope of variables can better help predict happiness. Policy implications are discussed in using both big data and considering social indicators to make better and lasting policies.

Representation Learning For Chemical Activity Predictions, Mohamed S. Ayed

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Computational prediction of a phenotypic response upon the chemical perturbation on a biological system plays an important role in drug discovery and many other applications. Chemical fingerprints derived from chemical structures are a widely used feature to build machine learning models. However, the fingerprints ignore the biological context, thus, they suffer from several problems such as the activity cliff and curse of dimensionality. Fundamentally, the chemical modulation of biological activities is a multi-scale process. It is the genome-wide chemical-target interactions that modulate chemical phenotypic responses. Thus, the genome-scale chemical-target interaction profile will more directly correlate with in vitro and in …

Tools And Strategies For The Patterning Of Bioactive Molecules And Macromolecules, Daniel J. Valles

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hypersurface Photolithography (HP) is a printing method for fabricating structures and patterns composed of soft materials bound to solid surfaces and with ~1 micrometer resolution in the x, y, and z dimensions. This platform leverages benign, low intensity light to perform photochemical surface reactions with spatial and temporal control of irradiation, and, as a result, is particularly useful for patterning delicate organic and biological material. In particular, surface- initiated controlled radical polymerizations can be leveraged to create arbitrary polymer and block- copolymer brush patterns. Chapter 1 will review the advances in instrumentation architectures from our group that have made these …

Molecular Dynamics Simulations Of Self-Assemblies In Nature And Nanotechnology, Phu Khanh Tang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nature usually divides complex systems into smaller building blocks specializing in a few tasks since one entity cannot achieve everything. Therefore, self-assembly is a robust tool exploited by Nature to build hierarchical systems that accomplish unique functions. The cell membrane distinguishes itself as an example of Nature’s self-assembly, defining and protecting the cell. By mimicking Nature’s designs using synthetically designed self-assemblies, researchers with advanced nanotechnological comprehension can manipulate these synthetic self-assemblies to improve many aspects of modern medicine and materials science. Understanding the competing underlying molecular interactions in self-assembly is always of interest to the academic scientific community and industry. …

The Impact Of User Control And Transparency In App Design On Privacy Concerns And Behavior Of Mobile App Users, Arwa Alawajy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mobile apps have unprecedented access to sensitive personal information. The increasing commodification of mobile-user data motivates us to explore the vital role of app developers in protecting users’ privacy. This dissertation examines the privacy of mobile app users from the perspective of HCI. According to Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory, people believe they own their personal information and have the right to control how or with whom they share this information. In practice, individuals manage their privacy system and the boundaries between the public and private domain. Users make privacy disclosure decisions according to their individual characteristics and the perceptions …

Efficient Protocols For Multi-Party Computation, Tahereh Jafarikhah

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows a group of parties to compute a join function on their inputs without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. We demonstrate secure function evaluation protocols for branching programs, where the communication complexity is linear in the size of the inputs, and polynomial in the security parameter. Our result is based on the circular security of the Paillier's encryption scheme. Our work followed the breakthrough results by Boyle et al. [9; 11]. They presented a Homomorphic Secret Sharing scheme which allows the non-interactive computation of Branching Programs over shares of the secret inputs. …

Applying Deep Learning On Financial Sentiment Analysis, Cuiyuan Wang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Portfolio Investment has always been appealing to investors and researchers. In the past, people tend to use historical trading information of the securities to predict the return or manage the portfolio. Nowadays, the literature has been proved that the market sentiment could predict asset prices. Specifically, it has been shown that the stock market movement is related to financial news and social media events. Thus, it becomes necessary to extract the sentiment of the financial news. We explicitly introduce the application of dictionary methods, traditional machine learning models and deep learning models on text classification. The experiment results show that …

The Legacy Of Car-Share And Light-Rail Transit For Mobility And Accessibility Improvements In Economically Marginalized Neighborhoods In The New York Metro Area, Kyeongsu Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the value of the car-share program and a new light rail system with respect to their impact on mobility and accessibility improvements in economically and transportation access-wise marginalized neighborhoods in NYC and its adjacent communities. It consists of three main essays that took deep dives into how each new service or system altered mobility or accessibility for those in need. The first essay (Chapter 2) investigates car-share vehicle utilization rates of the Zipcar across NYC. It assesses the utilization rates by vehicle type, service location, time period, and weekday usage compared to weekend activity. With a multivariate …

Nature-Inspired Electrode Materials For Next Generation Sustainable Energy Storage, Mikhail Miroshnikov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite revolutionizing the world of portable electronics, the contemporary lithium-ion battery (LIB) suffers from challenges associated with the cost, safety, and environmental impact of transition metal oxide-based intercalation cathodes. To alleviate these issues, naturally occurring organic molecules may serve as sustainable alternatives to traditional inorganic cathode materials. The electrochemical properties of organic compounds are derived from redox-active functional groups containing oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur. Additionally, these functional groups are capable of coordinating metal ions beyond lithium, allowing for compatibility with sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) and other earth abundant metal-based energy storage systems. However, despite competitive performance against commercialized cathode materials, much …

Analysis Of Pro-Drop Errors In L2 English By L1 Spanish Speakers, Marcos R. Ynoa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Although educators and linguists have described and studied L2 learner errors, often from the perspective of positive and negative transfer (Krashen, 1981), there is relatively little empirical data on the frequencies of L2 error types. Learner error rankings do exist (Donahue, 2001) (Cambridge learner corpus; (Nicholls, 1999)), but these rankings are often too general and may overlook specifics when it comes to particular language learner groups. The goal of our work is to develop a tool that can be used to explore error patterns, address educator needs, and help answer research questions in L2 language learning. The tool we have …

Ii-Vi Type-Ii Quantum Dot Superlattices For Novel Applications, Vasilios Deligiannakis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, we discuss the growth procedure and the characterization results obtained for epitaxially grown submonolayer type-II quantum dot superlattices made of II-VI semiconductors. We have investigated the spin dynamics of ZnSe layers with embedded type-II ZnTe quantum dots and the use of (Zn)CdTe/ZnCdSe QDs for intermediate band solar cell (IBSC). Samples with a higher quantum dot density exhibit longer electron spin lifetimes, up to ~1 ns at low temperatures. Tellurium isoelectronic centers, which form in the ZnSe spacer regions as a result of the growth conditions, were also probed. A new growth sequence for type-II (Zn)CdTe/ZnCdSe (QDs) was …

The Water/Energy Nexus: Climate, Consumption And Ecosystem Services, Hildegaard D. Link

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Water and energy are drivers of living systems. This work provides an assessment of the Water Energy Nexus in the United States, comparing the well-watered north-east and the arid west. Electric grid systems are most stressed on hot summer afternoons. Grid stress can lead to cascading failures of electricity, water and wastewater treatment systems. (Zimmerman, 2017) Water for power generation and/or water supply depend on ecosystem services. The ecosystem services and resource trade-offs embedded in provision of a watt of power and an ounce of potable water, however, have yet to be comprehensively enumerated nor have the cost relationships been …

Minimalistic Peptide-Based Supramolecular Systems Relevant To The Chemical Origin Of Life, Daniela Kroiss

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All forms of life are based on biopolymers, which are made up of a selection of simple building blocks, such as amino acids, nucleotides, fatty acids and sugars. Their individual properties govern their interactions, giving rise to complex supramolecular structures with highly specialized functionality, including ligand recognition, catalysis and compartmentalization. In this thesis, we aim to answer the question whether short peptides could have acted as precursors of modern proteins during prebiotic evolution. Using a combination of experimental and computational techniques, we screened a large molecular search space for peptide sequences that are capable of forming supramolecular complexes with adenosine …

Renal Specific Rnai Delivery By Fibrillar Nanoparticle Excipients, Sam Wong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

RNA interference (RNAi) is a powerful tool to manipulate the phenotype of an organism by silencing the expression of specific genes and is viewed as a highly promising platform for treating undruggable targets and disorders where small molecule drugs and antibodies would fail. However, development of RNAi based therapies has faced major barriers including cellular and tissue-specific uptake of the Small Interfering RNA (siRNA). Utilizing different nanoparticles as RNAi excipients, cellular uptake and gene silencing potency can be greatly improved. The research in Dr. McDevitt groups has fibrillar carbon nanotubes (CNT) as carriers for siRNA for gene silencing in vitro …

Synthesis And Characterization Of Dielectric And Multiferroic Nanocrystalline Transition Metal Oxide Materials And Nanocomposites, Frederick A. Pearsall

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nanocrystalline transition metal oxides with unique chemical, physical, magnetic and dielectric properties have very broad applications, ranging from photocatalysis, capacitor energy storage and 4-state memory. Frequency stable, high permittivity nanocomposite capacitors produced under mild processing conditions offer an attractive replacement to MLCCs derived from conventional ceramic firing. In one project reported herein, 0-3 nanocomposites were prepared using BaTiO₃ (barium titanate, BTO) nanocrystals, suspended in a poly(furfuryl alcohol) matrix, resulting in a stable, high effective permittivity, low and stable loss dielectric. Effective medium approximations were used to compare this with similar nanocomposite systems. The use of synthesized BTO nanocrystal photocatalysts …