Digital Commons Network^™

Design, Construction And Characterization Of A Wind Tunnel, Chang Ge

Theses

The wind tunnel is the most fundamental test equipment for aircraft testing and studying aerodynamics. Because of the complexity of the test-subject's geometry, it is difficult to study the aerodynamic pattern simply based on theoretical calculations. Most of the aerodynamics experiments still use wind tunnels. The progress of the wind tunnel is highly related to the advancements in air crafts. Aircraft manufacturing has pushed the wind tunnel technology forward. Wind tunnels can be categorized by the wind speed limit differences, which are controlled by the mechanism of the driving methods, structure applications, etc. In this case, we built a small …

Exact Genome Alignment, Nandini Ghosh

Theses

The increase in the volume of genomic data due to the decrease in the cost of whole genome sequencing techniques has opened up new avenues of research in the field of Bioinformatics, like comparative genomics and evolutionary dynamics. The fundamental task in these studies is to align the genome sequences accurately. Sequence alignment helps to identify regions of similarity between the sequences to establish their functional, evolutionary and structural relationship. The thesis investigates the performance of two sequence alignment programs LASTZ, a hash table based faster method and SSEARCH, a slower but more rigorous Smith-Waterman based approach, on whole genome …

Development Of A Finite Element Method For Light Activated Polymers, Craig Hamel

Theses

Traditional Shape Memory Polymers (SMPs) belong to a class of smart materials which have shown promise for a wide range of applications. They are characterized by their ability to maintain a temporary deformed shape and return to an original parent permanent shape. The first SMPs developed responded to changes in temperature by exploiting the difference in modulus and chain mobility through the glass transition temperature. However, in recent years, new SMPs have been developed that respond to other stimuli besides temperature; these can include electricity, magnetism, changes in chemical concentration, and even light.

In this thesis, we consider the photo-mechanical …

Communication Risk And Strategy In Temporary Organizations, Shelley R. Mcivor

Theses

Communication is a critical and emerging metric for successful outcomes in the high-stakes field of project management. Professional management societies have quantified financial losses caused by ineffective communication. Consulting project management exemplifies a maximum communication risk environment - misunderstanding threatens project finances, strict deadlines, and technical benchmarks - exacerbated by the complexity of a temporary organization structure.

The context of work in a temporary organization adds layers of ambiguity to project communications - an ill-structured domain in technical communication terms. Formal study of communication in temporary organizations is relatively new. Recent studies are derived from engineering and business management perspectives. …

Thermal Properties Of Graphene, Vishal Vijay Nakhate

Theses

The two-dimensional (2D) monolayer structure of carbon atoms were initially considered as unstable. The 2D materials have recently been discovered and many researchers have started analyzing these materials. Graphene, a two-dimensional allotrope of graphite with sp2 bonded carbon atoms, is arranged in honeycomb structure. Graphene has excellent thermal conductivity and can be considered as a potential material for applications in the electronics industry where heating of materials is a serious concern.

In this study, thermal properties of p and n doped graphene nanosheets and nanoribbons are studied as function of percentage composition of the dopants and the direction of dissipation …

Unsupervised Gene Regulatory Network Inference On Microarray Data, Nidhi Radia

Theses

Obtaining gene regulatory networks (GRNs) from expression data is a challenging and crucial task. Many computational methods and algorithms have been developed to infer gene networks for gene expression data, which are usually obtained from microarray experiments. A gene network is a method to depict the relation among clusters of genes. To infer gene networks, the unsupervised method is used in this study. The two types of data used are time-series data and steady-state data. The data is analyzed using various tools containing different algorithms and concepts. GRNs from time-series data tools are obtained using the Time-delayed Algorithm for the …

Design, Construction And Characterization Ofa Magnetic Augmented Rotation System (Mars) Based Wind Turbine, Da Li

Theses

Magnetic Augmented Rotation System (MARS) works by magnetic field coupling, to transfer torque from the driver to the rotor without contact. This characteristic has significant applications to the wind turbine but research in combination of MARS and wind turbine has not been done in the literature. In this thesis, a small-scale wind turbine is designed, built and characterized in a prototype wind tunnel. The test results are analyzed and computer-aided software simulation is used as an auxiliary method to understand the mechanism of MARS. The power coefficient of this new wind turbine is estimated to be about 40%. The “gear …

Identifying Modifier Genes In Sma Model Mice, Weiting Xu

Theses

Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) involves the loss of nerve cells called motor neurons in the spinal cord and is classified as a motor neuron disease, it affects 1 in 5000-10000 newborns, one of the leading genetic causes of infant death in USA. Mutations in the SMN1, UBA1, DYNC1H1 and VAPB genes cause spinal muscular atrophy. Extra copies of the SMN2 gene modify the severity of spinal muscular atrophy. Mutations in SMN1 (Motor Neuron 1) mainly causes SMA (Autosomal recessive inheritance). SMN1 gene mutations lead to a shortage of the SMN protein and SMN protein forms SMN complex …

Synthetic Approaches To The Understanding Of Dna Nucleobase Methylation, Jagruti Rana

Dissertations

DNA methylation is a major source of genetic variation and cancer. Methylation occurs when nucleophilic DNA bases react with methylating agent methyl methanesulfonate (MMS), dimethyl sulfate (DMS), N-methyl-N-nitrosourea (MNU), N-methyl-N-nitro-N-nitrosoguanidine (MNNG), etc. N7-methyl-2'-deoxyguanosine (N7-methyl-dG, or ^7MedG) adduct is the most abundant DNA methylation products for most methylating agents. DNA polymerase actions on ^7MedG are difficult to study due to its instability against ring- opening hydrolysis and deglycosyl ati on. Oligonucleotides containing a single chemical adduct of ^7MedG cannot be chemically synthesized. In addition, ^7MedG is unstable in vivo …

Location Reliability And Gamification Mechanisms For Mobile Crowd Sensing, Manoop Talasila

Dissertations

People-centric sensing with smart phones can be used for large scale sensing of the physical world by leveraging the sensors on the phones. This new type of sensing can be a scalable and cost-effective alternative to deploying static wireless sensor networks for dense sensing coverage across large areas. However, mobile people-centric sensing has two main issues: 1) Data reliability in sensed data and 2) Incentives for participants. To study these issues, this dissertation designs and develops McSense, a mobile crowd sensing system which provides monetary and social incentives to users.

This dissertation proposes and evaluates two protocols for location reliability …

Electronic, Optical, Mechanical And Thermoelectric Properties Of Graphene, Sarang Vilas Muley

Dissertations

Graphene, a two-dimensional allotrope of graphite with sp² bonded carbon atoms, is arranged in honeycomb structure. Its quasi one-dimensional form is graphene nanoribbon (GNR). Graphene related materials have been found to display excellent electronic, chemical, mechanical properties along with uniquely high thermal conductivity, electrical conductivity and high optical transparency. With excellent electrical characteristics such as high carrier transport properties, quantum Hall effect at room temperature and unusual magnetic properties, graphene has applications in optoelectronic devices.

Electronically, graphene is a zero bandgap semiconductor making it essential to tailor its structure for obtaining specific band structure. Narrow GNRs are known to …

Electronic, Thermoelectric And Optical Properties Of Vanadium Oxides: Vo2, V2o3 And V2o5, Chiranjivi Lamsal

Dissertations

Correlated electrons in vanadium oxides are responsible for their extreme sensitivity to external stimuli such as pressure, temperature or doping. As a result, several vanadium oxides undergo insulator-to-metal phase transition (IMT) accompanied by structural change. Unlike vanadium pentoxide (V₃O₃), vanadium dioxide (VO₃) and vanadium sesquioxide (V₃O₃) show I MT in their bulk phases. In this study, we have performed one electron Kohn-Sham electronic band-structure calculations of VO₃, V₃O₃ and V₂O₅ in both metallic and insulating phases, implementing a full ab-initio simulation package …

A Comprehensive Study Of Evolution Of Photospheric Magnetic Field And Flows Associated With Solar Eruptions, Shuo Wang

Dissertations

The rapid, irreversible change of the photospheric magnetic field has been recognized as an important element of the solar flare process. Recent theoretical work has shown that such a change would imply Lorentz force perturbations acting on both the outer solar atmosphere and the solar surface. This research uses vector magnetograms obtained with the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory to study a number of flares, which range from GOES-class C4 to X5 and occur in four active regions. In all the events, a permanent and rapid change of photospheric magnetic field closely associated with the …

Adaptive Global Optimization Algorithms, William Phillips

Dissertations

Global optimization is concerned with finding the minimum value of a function where many local minima may exist. The development of a global optimization algorithm may involve using information about the target function (e.g., differentiability) and functions based on statistical models to better the worst case time complexity and expected error of similar deterministic algorithms.

Recent algorithms are investigated, new ones proposed and their performance is analyzed. Minimum, maximum and average case error bounds for the algorithms presented are derived. Software architecture implemented with MATLAB and Java is presented and experimental results for the algorithms are displayed.

The graphical capabilities …

Enabling Virtualization Technologies For Enhanced Cloud Computing, Kashifuddin Qazi

Dissertations

Cloud Computing is a ubiquitous technology that offers various services for individual users, small businesses, as well as large scale organizations. Data-center owners maintain clusters of thousands of machines and lease out resources like CPU, memory, network bandwidth, and storage to clients. For organizations, cloud computing provides the means to offload server infrastructure and obtain resources on demand, which reduces setup costs as well as maintenance overheads. For individuals, cloud computing offers platforms, resources and services that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

At the core of cloud computing are various virtualization technologies and the resulting Virtual Machines (VMs). Virtualization …

Local Selection Of Features And Its Applications To Image Search And Annotation, Jichao Sun

Dissertations

In multimedia applications, direct representations of data objects typically involve hundreds or thousands of features. Given a query object, the similarity between the query object and a database object can be computed as the distance between their feature vectors. The neighborhood of the query object consists of those database objects that are close to the query object. The semantic quality of the neighborhood, which can be measured as the proportion of neighboring objects that share the same class label as the query object, is crucial for many applications, such as content-based image retrieval and automated image annotation. However, due to …

Rice And Mouse Quantitative Phenotype Prediction In Genome-Wide Association Studies With Support Vector Regression, Abdulrhman Fahad M. Aljouie

Theses

Quantitative phenotypes prediction from genotype data is significant for pathogenesis, crop yields, and immunity tests. The scientific community conducted many studies to find unobserved quantitative phenotype high predictive ability models. Early genome-wide association studies (GWAS) focused on genetic variants that are associated with disease or phenotype, however, these variants manly covers small portion of the whole genetic variance, and therefore, the effectiveness of predictions obtained using this information may possibly be circumscribed [ 1 ].

Instead, this study shows prediction ability from whole genome single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) data of 1940 genotyped stoke mouse with - 12k SNPs, and 413 …

Fem Of Electrospinning Compared To Inkjet Printing Model, Maikel Ghaly

Theses

Electrospinning is a process that uses electrostatic forces to produce nanofibers, or fibers in the nano scale. Nanofibers are widely used in many fields like drug delivery and tissue engineering. Nowadays, it is gaining much attention in the research community as an advantageous process. However, there are many parameters that controlnanofiber formation. This research intends to develop a model of electrospinning on the basis of an inkjet printer technique by using a computer aided simulation (COMSOL). Inkjet printing is a technique that delivers small volumes at high repetitions which can betransported by electrostatic forces through the air onto their intended …

Computer Aided Analysis Of Skin Lesions, Sukanya Panja

Theses

Effective screening to detect the skin cancer accurately in the early stage is essential for reducing the mortality of skin cancer. Surface features, such as texture and pigmentation area from the surface, epi-illumination images of the skin lesions have been well correlated to detect skin cancer. An increase in the lesion's subsurface blood volume has been correlated to early diagnosis of malignant melanoma. A method for estimating the optimal features is obtained. The optimal features help in accurately classify the skin lesion in various grades. To make the process faster these optimal features are clustered. The optimal clusters are obtained …

Cancer Risk Prediction With Next Generation Sequencing Data Using Machine Learning, Nihir Patel

Theses

The use of computational biology for next generation sequencing (NGS) analysis is rapidly increasing in genomics research. However, the effectiveness of NGS data to predict disease abundance is yet unclear. This research investigates the problem in the whole exome NGS data of the chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) available at dbGaP. Initially, raw reads from samples are aligned to the human reference genome using burrows wheeler aligner. From the samples, structural variants, namely, Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) and Insertion Deletion (INDEL) are identified and are filtered using SAMtools as well as with Genome Analyzer Tool Kit (GATK). Subsequently, the variants are …

An Embedded System Supporting Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration Of Hardware Resources For Morphological Image Processing, Gyana Ranjan Sahu

Theses

Processors for high-performance computing applications are generally designed with a focus on high clock rates, parallelism of operations and high communication bandwidth, often at the expense of large power consumption. However, the emphasis of many embedded systems and untethered devices is on minimal hardware requirements and reduced power consumption. With the incessant growth of computational needs for embedded applications, which contradict chip power and area needs, the burden is put on the hardware designers to come up with designs that optimize power and area requirements.

This thesis investigates the efficient design of an embedded system for morphological image processing applications …

Design And Analysis Of Algorithms For Similarity Search Based On Intrinsic Dimension, Xiguo Ma

Dissertations

One of the most fundamental operations employed in data mining tasks such as classification, cluster analysis, and anomaly detection, is that of similarity search. It has been used in numerous fields of application such as multimedia, information retrieval, recommender systems and pattern recognition. Specifically, a similarity query aims to retrieve from the database the most similar objects to a query object, where the underlying similarity measure is usually expressed as a distance function.

The cost of processing similarity queries has been typically assessed in terms of the representational dimension of the data involved, that is, the number of features used …

Mueller Matrix Spectroscopic Ellipsometry Of Multiferroics, Roman Basistyy

Dissertations

Multiferroics, materials which possess several ferroic orders, are the focus of research in recent years. Among these materials are oxide crystals, such as, for example, RMnO₃, RMn₂O₅, R₃Fe₅O₁₂, where R stands for rare earth ions. The most fascinating physics occurs when magnon-lattice coupling reveals itself in the far-IR spectra of multiferroics. The expected optical behavior puts multiferroics into a more general category of bi-anisotropic materials, the properties of which could be only described using anisotropic dielectric ε(ω), magnetic μ(ω), and …

Visualeyes 2020: A Software Suite To Integrate Instrumentation To Study The Near Triad Of Vergence, Stephen J. Lestrange

Theses

A complete instrumentation suite has been constructed for use in a randomized clinical trial to be funded from the National Institute of Health and study the underlying potential mechanism(s) of vision therapy. This suite is designed to track rotation of each eye (vergence) as well as measure the lens power of the eye's lens (accommodation). The system is designed to dissect the near triad which is composed of the pupil constriction, vergence and accommodation. The visual targets are programmed to be shown on two sets of computer screens which allowed vergence, accommodation and proximal vergence cues to be presented in …

2020 Vision: A Strategic Plan For Njit, Office Of The Provost

2020 Vision

No abstract provided.

Njit Libraries Annual Report: Fy2013-2014, Njit Libraries

Library Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Confidence Bands For Survival Curves Using Model Assisted Cox Regression, Shoubhik Mondal

Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to develop informative subject-specific simultaneous confidence bands (SCBs) for survival functions from right censored data. The approach is based on an extension of semiparametric random censorship models (SRCMs) to Cox regression, which produces reliable and more informative SCBs. SRCMs derive their rationale from their ability to utilize parametric ideas within the random censorship environment. Incorporating SRCMs into the existing framework produces more powerful procedures to analyze right censored data. The first part of the project focuses on proposing new estimators of Cox regression parameters and the cumulative baseline hazard function, and deriving their large …

New Directions For Remote Data Integrity Checking Of Cloud Storage, Bo Chen

Dissertations

Cloud storage services allow data owners to outsource their data, and thus reduce their workload and cost in data storage and management. However, most data owners today are still reluctant to outsource their data to the cloud storage providers (CSP), simply because they do not trust the CSPs, and have no confidence that the CSPs will secure their valuable data. This dissertation focuses on Remote Data Checking (RDC), a collection of protocols which can allow a client (data owner) to check the integrity of data outsourced at an untrusted server, and thus to audit whether the server fulfills its contractual …

Efficient Domain Decomposition Algorithms For The Solution Of The Helmholtz Equation, Dawid Midura

Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to formulate and investigate new iterative methods for the solution of scattering problems based on the domain decomposition approach. This work is divided into three parts. In the first part, a new domain decomposition method for the perfectly matched layer system of equations is presented. Analysis of a simple model problem shows that the convergence of the new algorithm is guaranteed provided that a non-local, square-root transmission operator is used. For efficiency, in practical simulations such operators need to be localized. Current, state of the art domain decomposition algorithms use the localization technique based …

The Experience Of Reducing Environmental Risks In An Environmental Justice Community, Gabriela Dory

Dissertations

Research on Environmental Justice (EJ) communities has focused on quantitative assessment of environmental hazards and general physical health problems. Little is known about how individuals living in EJ communities perceive their environmental risks and how they reduce environmental risks. The purpose of the study is to explore and describe the perceived environmental risks and the experience of reducing environmental risk among individuals living in an EJ community.

A qualitative and longitudinal design with a descriptive phenomenological method is used to recruit 23 participants living in a known EJ community in the urban area of New Jersey. A total of 43 …