Digital Commons Network^™

Qualitative & Quantitative Analyses Of Existing Buildings’ Adaptability, Zoraya Roldan Rockow

All Dissertations

In order to promote resiliency and sustainability, there is a benefit to making buildings more adaptable. Adaptable buildings are believed to be more likely to be modified, changed, or reused instead of being demolished. The research goals revolved around understanding what features, if any, can be implemented during the design phase to make a building more adaptable in the future. Three objectives were included for this research:

1. Compare qualitative data from real-world adaptation projects with Design for Adaptability (DfA) strategies reported in the literature.

2. Create a model for quantifying the “openness” of floorplans.

3. Measure the relationship (if …

Analysis Of Allocation Rules For Heart Transplantation, Farhad Hasankhani Kohneh Shahri

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, we utilize several mathematical, optimization, and simulation techniques to improve the outcomes of organ transplantation allocation systems. Specifically, in Chapter 1, we build a Monte Carlo simulation model of the heart transplantation system in the United States that can be used to compare the performance of different allocation policies and predict the future of allocation systems. In Chapter 2, we develop a constrained Markov Decision model of the transplant queuing system and investigate optimal allocation rules for heart transplantation in the presence of certain fairness constraints. In Chapter 3, we introduce a new measure of fairness in …

Multi Sensor Multi Target Perception And Tracking For Informed Decisions In Public Road Scenarios, Andinet Negash Hunde

All Dissertations

Multi-target tracking in public traffic calls for a tracking system with automated track initiation and termination facilities in a randomly evolving driving environment. Besides, the key problem of data association needs to be handled effectively considering the limitations in the computational resources on-board an autonomous car. The challenge of the tracking problem is further evident in the use of high-resolution automotive sensors which return multiple detections per object. Furthermore, it is customary to use multiple sensors that cover different and/or over-lapping Field of View and fuse sensor detections to provide robust and reliable tracking. As a consequence, in high-resolution multi-sensor …

Geometric-Based Optimization Algorithms For Cable Routing And Branching In Cluttered Environments, Nafiseh Masoudi

All Dissertations

The need for designing lighter and more compact systems often leaves limited space for planning routes for the connectors that enable interactions among the system’s components. Finding optimal routes for these connectors in a densely populated environment left behind at the detail design stage has been a challenging problem for decades.

A variety of deterministic as well as heuristic methods has been developed to address different instances of this problem. While the focus of the deterministic methods is primarily on the optimality of the final solution, the heuristics offer acceptable solutions, especially for such problems, in a reasonable amount of …

It Is All About Location: Smartphones And Tracking The Spread Of Covid-19, Jordan Frith, Michael Saker

Publications

Mobile phone location data have become tied to understandings of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data visualizations have used mobile phone data to inform people about how mobility practices may be linked to the spread of the virus, and governments have explored contact tracing that relies upon mobile phone data. This article examines how these uses of location data implicate three particular issues that have been present in the growing body of locative media research: (1) anonymized data are often not anonymous, (2) location data are not always representative and can exacerbate inequality, and (3) location data are a …

It Is All About Location: Smartphones And Tracking The Spread Of Covid-19, Jordan Frith, Michael Saker

Publications

Mobile phone location data have become tied to understandings of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data visualizations have used mobile phone data to inform people about how mobility practices may be linked to the spread of the virus, and governments have explored contact tracing that relies upon mobile phone data. This article examines how these uses of location data implicate three particular issues that have been present in the growing body of locative media research: (1) anonymized data are often not anonymous, (2) location data are not always representative and can exacerbate inequality, and (3) location data are a …

Data Literacies And Social Justice: Exploring Critical Data Literacies Through Sociocultural Perspectives, Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, Simon Knight, Alyssa Friend Wise, Thomas M. Philip, Maria C. Olivares, Sarah Van Wart, Sepehr Vakil, Jessica Marshall, Tapan Parikh, M. Lisette Lopez, Michelle Hoda Wilkerson, Kris Gutierrez, Shiyan Jiang, Jennifer B. Kahn

Publications

The ability to interpret, evaluate, and make data-based decisions is critical in the age of big data. Normative scripts around the use of data position them as a privileged epistemic form conferring authority through objectivity that can serve as a lever for effecting change. However, humans and materials shape how data are created and used which can reinscribe existing power relations in society at large (Van Wart, Lanouette & Parikh, 2020). Thus, research is needed on how learners can be supported to engage in critical data literacies through sociocultural perspectives. As a field intimately concerned with data-based reasoning, social justice, …

Students’ Epistemic Connections Between Science Inquiry Practices And Disciplinary Ideas In A Computational Science Unit, Sugat Dabholkar, Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens, Michael Horn, Uri Wilensky

Publications

Teaching science inquiry practices, especially the more contemporary ones, such as computational thinking practices, requires designing newer learning environments and appropriate pedagogical scaffolds. Using such learning environments, when students construct knowledge about disciplinary ideas using inquiry practices, it is important that they make connections between the two. We call such connections epistemic connections, which are about constructing knowledge using science inquiry practices. In this paper, we discuss the design of a computational thinking integrated biology unit as an Emergent Systems Microworlds (ESM) based curriculum. Using Epistemic Network Analysis, we investigate how the design of unit support students’ learning through making …

Identity Negotiation Of Pre-Service Teachers Of English As A Foreign Language, Hazel Vega, Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens

Publications

The study of teacher identity has gained prominence in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching. However, the construction of EFL teacher identity is underresearched, particularly how teachers navigate dominant discourses around native non-native speakers. This paper presents a qualitative study examining four pre-service teachers in an EFL education program. Grounded in the community of practice identity negotiation framework, results suggest that EFL pre-service teachers’ processes of identity negotiation mainly resided somewhere between adoption and rejection of legitimate practices in the EFL teacher community, in what we call a zone of tension. The findings of this research indicate that pre-service …

Clemson Commencement Program,May 2020, Clemson University

Clemson Commencement Programs

No abstract provided.

Security Analysis Of A Blockchain Network, Naazira Badar Bhat

All Theses

Blockchains have gained popularity due to their versatility and wide range of application. Blockchains are a decentralized data structure guaranteeing integrity and non-repudiation of data We use this to secure provenance meta-data. A blockchain can be seen as a distributed database, or a public ledger of transactions or digital events that have occurred and have been shared among participating parties. A consensus is required to verify each transaction. Blockchains are finding use in cryptocurrencies, academics, clinical trials, healthcare and agriculture. However, like other networks, we need to verify the robustness and availability of the blockchain networks. In this thesis, we …

Detecting Partisan Gerrymandering Through Mathematical Analysis: A Case Study Of South Carolina, Anna Marie Vagnozzi

All Theses

Partisan gerrymandering, the process of drawing the district boundaries of election maps unfairly for a given party's political gain, is a practice that originated in the early 1800s and persists today. As partisan gerrymandering cases have met varying degrees of success in state and federal courts, now more than ever is there a need to define rigorous methods of assessing the partisan bias of election maps. In practice, two primary mathematical tools are utilized to quantify gerrymandering: measures of partisan bias and outlier analysis methods.

This thesis analyzes the 2011 and 2018 Congressional districting plans of Pennsylvania and uses the …

Nano-Scintillators As Next Generation Tools For Optogenetics, Ashley Dickey

All Dissertations

Optogenetics is a technique that is used to study neural pathways and has the ability to activate or silence synaptic behavior using visible light. Currently, the visible light sources used for optogenetics are surgically implanted into the brain tissue, but this harmful and invasive technique may be avoided if suitable scintillating nanoparticles can be inserted via injection. The proposed nano-scintillator particles must adhere to rigorous parameters including being under 100 nm, uniform, nontoxic, and dispersible to be successful in this biological system. The phase, crystallinity, and dopant concentration must be optimized to absorb X-ray radiation and emit photons of the …

Essays On Benchmarking And Shadow Pricing, Shirong Zhao

All Dissertations

In the first chapter, we examine the performance of Chinese commercial banks before, during, and after the 2008 global financial crisis and the 2008--2010 China's 4 trillion Renminbi stimulus plan. Fully nonparametric methods are used to estimate technical efficiencies. Recently-developed statistical results are used to test for changes in efficiencies as well as productivity over time, and to test for changes in technology over time. We also test for differences in efficiency and productivity between big and small banks, and between domestic and foreign banks. We find evidence of the non-convexity of banks' production set. The data reveal that technical …

Modeling And Optimization Of Self-Healing Polymers, Amy Murdaugh

All Theses

Continuous interests in developing self-healable polymers are driven by the desire to extend life spans of existing functional materials. Combining mathematical modeling and optimization approaches with experimental studies, an ultimate aim is to predict the flow and macroscopic wound closures in polymeric materials. Corresponding numerical simulations to experimental results are presented, utilizing two mathematical models that describe bulk or layer flow. An optimization routine for this self-healing process is described and implemented using two different approaches, competitive with each other with respect to accuracy. Finally a multi-layer model is simulated to show the flow profile of multiple layers rather than …

Articulating The Cloud: Understanding Data Centers, Renewable Energy, And Public Policy, Bailey R. Troutman

All Theses

Experts urge that drastic steps must be taken to reduce carbon dioxide emissions as the ongoing climate crisis worsens. Amid this, it is also important to understand the relationships between media infrastructures and the finite resources they require. This thesis goes beyond arguing that data centers are inherently unsustainable media infrastructures that consumers rely on to access the Internet and cloud storage. Instead, this thesis focuses on Google as an industry leading company in the United States to assess how the company understands their role in the climate crisis, and how they define renewable energy and sustainability. To do so, …

Evaluating Hue Shifts In Spot Color Tints In Flexographic Package Printing, Himanshu Rana

All Theses

Packaging helps to preserve, protect, dispense, communicate, and sell a product. Color is a key contributor to the communication and selling functions. In order to achieve a specific color appearance on a given packaging substrate, spot color printing uses custom formulated inks. The standard colorimetric values for solids of spot colors are well defined by either Pantone® specifications, International Commission on Illumination (CIE) L*a*b*C*ho values, spectral data, or with a combination of these. While the colorimetric standards for tints of spot colors exist in the form of digital libraries such as PantoneLIVE or as Color Exchange Format (CxF-4a) data, spot …

Learning Styles Of Undergraduate Construction Management Students And Their Impact On Best Practices For Online Education, Robert Dawson Coffey

All Theses

Construction Science and Management (CSM) students at Clemson University took a self-assessment survey to determine their preferred learning style to determine if their preferred learning style is correlated to their GPA. Also, both CSM students and instructors took a survey on course methodology to determine if their perceptions of course methodology were congruent. The results of these surveys and subsequent analyses were insignificant, and because of their insignificance, they did not factor into best practice recommendations for online course design and delivery for construction management. The greatest contributing factors for best practices in online course delivery in construction management came …

Prime Stability In Intermediate Extensions Of Integral Domains, Philip De Castro

All Theses

We consider integral domains $R\subset S \subset T$, where $T$ is integral over $R$. In particular, we study the behavior of an element $p \in R$ which is prime in both $R$ and $T$ and which may or may not be prime in $S$. If $p$ remains prime in $S$, we say that $p$ has prime stability. Otherwise, $p$ does not have prime stability. We first consider the case of a quadratic ring of integers, $\ints \subset \ints[\omega]$, with $\ints[\omega]$ a quadratic extension of $\ints$. We proceed to prove results using Legendre, Jacobi, and Kronecker symbols and field discriminants, using …

Crash Severity Analysis Using Ridit Scoring For Midblock Crashes In South Carolina, Saurabh Bikram Basnet

All Theses

This thesis focused on using a statistical model called the RIDIT analysis to perform a comparative study of severity crashes for different facility types in South Carolina. RIDIT uses the proportion of injury crashes and our analysis used three levels of injury categories, Fatal, Injury, and PDO as an indicator of severity level using three years of crash data from 2016 to 2018. There was two main focus of this study, first to compare the severity of two different network-screening methods (intersection to intersection and short 100’ buffers) used to identify the hotspot location for high crash incidence. We compared …

A Mean-Risk Mixed Integer Nonlinear Program For Network Protection, Amy Elizabeth Burton

All Theses

Many of the infrastructure sectors that are considered to be crucial by the Department of Homeland Security include networked systems (physical and temporal) that function to move some commodity like electricity, people, or even communication from one location of importance to another. The costs associated with these flows make up the price of the network's normal functionality. These networks have limited capacities, which cause the marginal cost of a unit of flow across an edge to increase as congestion builds. In order to limit the expense of a network's normal demand we aim to increase the resilience of the system …

Test Frame Design For Characterization Of Additive Manufacturing Compliant Materials, Sean Fry

All Theses

With the application of using surrogate models with General Purpose Graphics Processing (GPGPU) computing to meet the need for “real-time” characterization of nonlinear anisotropic material systems and the growing work of using multiaxial robotic test frames for material characterization, there has been a solution for a specific application towards additive manufacturing materials, specifically polymers. Traditional testing using uniaxial and biaxial test machines has proven insufficient in characterizing the material properties of additive manufacturing materials, therefore developing a need for a multiaxial testing machine for characterization that can dynamically excite strain states for a more in-depth look at the material properties. …

Delineating The Relationship Between Cardiovascular Physiology And Subject Characteristics Using Computational Modeling And Systemic Review, Aseem Pradhan

All Theses

Lumped Parameter Networks (LPN) are computational models that can capture the systemic responses of the cardiovascular system. An LPN describes the systemic behavior by providing outputs such as the blood pressure, flowrate, and heart chamber volume at the points defined in the network. To use the LPN for medical applications, it needs to provide output values that represent the physiology of realistic subjects. The cardiovascular system exhibits short-term and long-term adaptations to factors such as aging, weight gain, exercise, etc. Therefore, subject characteristics such as age, height, weight, etc. affect the output values of the LPN. Current literature reports the …

Scheduling Control For Many-Server Queues When Customers Change Class, Mary Elizabeth Saine

All Theses

We consider a two class, many-server queueing system which allows for customer abandonment and class changes. With the objective to minimize the long-run average holding cost, we formulate a stochastic queueing control problem. Instead of solving this directly, we apply a fluid scaling to obtain a deterministic counterpart to the problem. By considering the equilibrium of the deterministic solution, we can solve the resulting control problem, referred to as the equilibrium control problem (ECP), and use the solution to propose a priority policy for the original stochastic queueing system. We prove that in an overloaded system, under a fluid scaling, …

A Projection-Free Algorithm For Solving Support Vector Machine Models, Seyed Hamid Nazari

All Theses

In this thesis our goal is to solve the dual problem of the support vector machine (SVM) problem, which is an example of convex smooth optimization problem over a polytope. To this goal, we apply the conditional gradient (CG) method by providing explicit solution to the linear programming (LP) subproblem. We also describe the conditional gradient sliding (CGS) method that can be considered as an improvement of CG in terms of number of gradient evaluations. Even though CGS performs better than CG in terms of optimal complexity bounds, it is not a practical method because it requires the knowledge of …

The Impact Of Self-Regulated Strategy Development On The Expository Writing Performance Of High School Students At-Risk For Emotional And Behavioral Disorders, Simone Elyse Adams

All Dissertations

High school students at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) experience academic difficulties and gaps in achievement in writing. Research has indicated that evidence-based practices (EBP) are needed to address their writing deficits. Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) is considered an evidence-based writing practice for students with disabilities. Although SRSD is an evidence-based practice, there is a lack of research investigating SRSD for high school students at-risk for EBD. This multiprobe multiple baseline study investigated the impact SRSD has on the expository writing performance and writing self-efficacy of high school students at-risk for EBD. Results revealed that students’ writing performance …

From Protein Folding To Protein Binding, Nayere Tajielyato

All Dissertations

Proteins are involved in many essential roles in the cell including controlling cell dynamics, mobilizing the intracellular response, cell shape etc. A large population of proteins are required to interact with other organelles or other proteins to accomplish their function. Studying protein folding and stability is a great approach to guide the understanding of protein interactions, functions and structures. To implement Gibbs folding free energy of a protein (∆G_folding), the structural information of the native (folded) and unfolded (denatured) state is needed. In this dissertation, we build the ensemble structures for the unfolded state utilizing a random coil model; which …

Codes And Sequences For Information Retrieval And Stream Ciphers, Travis Alan Baumbaugh

All Dissertations

Given a self-similar structure in codes and de Bruijn sequences, recursive techniques may be used to analyze and construct them. Batch codes partition the indices of code words into m buckets, where recovery of t symbols is accomplished by accessing at most tau in each bucket. This finds use in the retrieval of information spread over several devices. We introduce the concept of optimal batch codes, showing that binary Hamming codes and first order Reed-Muller codes are optimal. Then we study batch properties of binary Reed-Muller codes which have order less than half their length.

Cartesian codes are defined by …

Finding The Ephemeral: Aura, Apperception, And Digitally-Mediated Music, Rodger Eugene Bishop

All Theses

This paper attends the live music performance in the 21st century to reconsider German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s theses on the authenticity of art in his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin focuses on the emergent technology of photography in the 20th century as a method of technical reproduction of the art object, and, as he indicates, as having “captured a place of its own among the artistic processes” (219-20). Benjamin proposes several theories on the mechanical reproducibility and distribution of art within the culture industry, and his attention to the aura of the …

Worst Case Datasets For Solving Binary Logistic Regression Via Deterministic First-Order Methods, Trevor Squires

All Theses

In this thesis, we construct worst case binary logistic regression datasets for any deterministic first order methods. We show that our datasets require at least $\cO(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ first-order oracle inquires to obtain a $\varepsilon-$approximate solution under the assumption that the problem dimension is sufficiently large. Using our result, on worst case datasets we conclude that existing algorithms such as Nesterov's Optimal Gradient Descent are optimal algorithms for solving binary logistic regression under large scale assumptions. Our analysis combines Nemirovski's Krylov subspace technique and Nesterov's construction of worst case convex quadratic programming problem instance. Our result is the first worst case dataset …