Digital Commons Network^™

Leverage Social Filtering To Enhance Viewing Experience With Amazon Prime Video, Wen-Hua Chen

Theses

The development of technology has changed the way viewers consume video contents. With the rising of streaming services, video contents are gathered in one big platform, making them much more accessible than ever before. However, in the meantime, the ever increasing content choices on streaming services overwhelm and frustrate us, reducing our satisfaction with the experience. In addition, as recently as just a few years ago, television was a communal experience. We would watch TV together, on one shared screen. Now, we are isolated when using video streaming services on personal screens.

This project is aimed to enhance viewing experience …

Bayesian Methods For Radiometric Calibration In Motion Picture Encoding Workflows, Ricardo R. Figueroa

Theses

A method for estimating the Camera Response Function (CRF) of an electronic motion picture camera is presented in this work. The accurate estimation of the CRF allows for proper encoding of camera exposures into motion picture post-production workflows, like the Academy Color Encoding Specification (ACES), this being a necessary step to correctly combine images from different capture sources into one cohesive final production and minimize non-creative manual adjustments.

Although there are well known standard CRFs implemented in typical video camera workflows, motion picture workflows and newer High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging workflows have introduced new standard CRFs as well as …

Exploration Of The Process Of Building Brand Equity As A Digital Painter, Andrew Lim

Theses

The mainstream debut of the World Wide Web in the 20th century has increased the use of branding from its simple origins of being a visual marker into a multi-faceted entity. Branding has evolved to become a multi-faceted effort that creates rational and emotional attributes and can foster interactions and develop and deepen relationships with customers (Rubinstein, 2002).

The boom of the Internet brought forth new inventions and software that affected many industries, particularly the arts. A new emergent form of art known as digital painting emerged where a drawing tablet, stylus and digital image rendering software such as Adobe …

Have Objects, Will Travel: Object-Based Outreach To Solstice Independent Living At Fairport, New York, Taylor Carpenter

Theses

This thesis details my process in designing and delivering a program, “The Evolution of the Erie Canal,” to residents of the Solstice Senior Living at Fairport, New York, utilizing objects from the Rochester Museum & Science Center’s teaching collection. Given the ever-increasing population of American adults aged 55 and older, it is more important than ever for museums to create engaging programs aimed at this sector of the population. The goal of this project was to create a meaningful object-based experience for participants through discussion and reminiscence. My sources include findings from similar projects, literature on working with adult audiences, …

Conceptions Of Refactoring: An Investigation Of Stack Overflow Posts, Steven David Simmons

Theses

Refactoring is a common activity in software development. Developers make changes in the code in order to achieve a desired effect such as better performance, conformance to new business rules, or the removal of code anti-patterns such as code smells. However, refactoring operations often fail to achieve the results that are expected of them. There have been many studies conducted to assess their impact and effectiveness in different scenarios, but they have not returned consistent results. At times, studies have even shown decreasing and increasing in code quality from the same operation.

This study investigated whether a common set of …

Implementation Of A Digital Asset Management System Using Human-Centered Design, Lynne Tseng

Theses

With all the people and activities involved, modern marketing and strategic communications departments are complex organizations. This complexity can lead to longer lead times to complete projects within specific and deadline-driven timeframes. Therefore, companies are turning to digital asset management (DAM) systems to streamline their workflows and become more efficient. However, without a comprehensive and strategic implementation plan, DAM systems are significantly less likely to be adopted by their end-users. This paper describes how a DAM system was selected and implemented in the marketing and strategic communications department of a large health system. By using a human-centered design methodology to …

An Assessment Of Media Consumers’ Ability To Distinguish The Level Of Post-Processing In Journalistic Images, Emily Shriver

Theses

Photojournalists are held to a high degree of ethics because of the importance and impact of their work. To address this, several professional photojournalist organizations and publishers have created guidelines on how to appropriately post-process an image. Today the average media consumer is exposed to a diverse news landscape, and there is a tendency for consumers to trust photojournalistic images as being representative of the truth (Farid, 2006). This research considers to what extent can the average media consumer distinguish between ethically and unethically post-processed images.

This study aimed to discover how well people can distinguish between three categories of …

Breathing Pacer Device For Stress And Anxiety Relief, Maria Grazia Guerrero Bejarano

Theses

Stress and stress-related physical and mental diseases are increasing and affecting more people every day. There have been many approaches to try to solve this issue. Many of them are based on the idea that meditation and mindfulness breathing could improve these conditions. The problem is that not everyone can achieve those levels of meditation for that to work. Another issue is that those solutions are relying on a particular way of breathing to help all.

In contrast, this project developed under research that shows that the amount of CO₂ in a person's exhaled breath could be an indicator of …

Radar-Aware Transmission And Scheduling For Cognitive Radio Dynamic Spectrum Access In The Cbrs Radio Band, Dennis P. Bleier

Theses

Use of the wireless spectrum is increasing. In order to meet the throughput requirements, Dynamic Spectrum Access is a popular technique to maximize spectrum usage. This can be applied to the Citizen Broadband Radio Service (3550-3700MHz), a band recently opened by the Federal Communications Commission for opportunistic access. This radio band can be accessed as long as no higher priority users are interfered with. The top priority users are called incumbents, which are commonly naval radar. Naval radars transmit a focused beam that can be modelled as a periodic function. Lower tier users are prohibited from transmitting when their transmissions …

Design Of Hardware Cnn Accelerators For Audio And Image Classification, Rohini Jayachandre Gillela

Theses

Ever wondered how the world was before the internet was invented? You might soon wonder how the world would survive without self-driving cars and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The extensive research taking place in this rapidly evolving field is making self-driving cars futuristic and more reliable. The goal of this research is to design and develop hardware Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) accelerators for self-driving cars, that can process audio and visual sensory information. The idea is to imitate a human brain that takes audio and visual data as input while driving. To achieve a single die that can process …

Elucidating The Effect Of Temperature And Concentration On The Rotational Diffusion Of Yb– Crystallin To Elucidate Inter-Protein Interactions, Olivia Fraser

Theses

γB – crystallin is a 21 kDa protein found in the lens of the bovine eye, existing without turnover. It shares 76% sequence identity with a human lens protein, γD – crystallin, with a structural RMSD of 0.8 Å by Dali (174 residues, Cα atoms only). Damages to and abnormalities on crystallin proteins can lead to phase separation and aggregation in the lens, resulting from aberrant inter-protein interactions, which can lead to partial or total blindness by cataract. The purpose of this work is to elucidate global inter-protein interactions of wild-type γB – crystallin by T1 and T2 relaxation NMR …

Detecting Performance Regression Inducing Code Changes Using Static And Dynamic Metrics, Hiten Gupta

Theses

Performance regression testing is a cost-intensive task as it delays the system development. The process, if performed in Iterations, significantly slows down the developer’s pace. Hence, it is essential to execute the performance tests only on the new commit and not the whole system, as regression is induced by a newly made change to the system. This work presents a novel contribution to the detection of performance regression inducing code changes to solve the optimization problem. In this study, we combine the static and dynamic metrics as features to train classifiers to predict the performance regression if introduced by the …

Design And Production Of 3d Animation Short Film “Memories Of The Post-80s”, Hui Shen

Theses

“The memories of the post-80s” is a 2minutes and 8 seconds 3D animated short film which tells a story of a young man named Kai who born in the post-80s in China, living in a modern, high-tech environment, but falling into a fantasy dream and reminiscing about his simple and happy life as a child. The most important question expressed in this short film is whether a more convenient, high-tech, fast-paced modern life is proportional to people's happiness index. The main reasons for this problem are multiple, such as working pressure, stressful life, repayment of loans, health, and so on. …

High-Capacity Directional Graph Networks, Miguel Dominguez

Theses

Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have proven themselves to be a useful tool in many computer vision problems. One of the most popular forms of the DNN is the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The CNN effectively learns features on images by learning a weighted sum of local neighborhoods of pixels, creating filtered versions of the image. Point cloud analysis seems like it would benefit from this useful model. However, point clouds are much less structured than images. Many analogues to CNNs for point clouds have been proposed in the literature, but they are often much more constrained networks than the typical …

Audience Preference For Engagement With Online Museums, Xiang Chen

Theses

With the rapid development of science and technology, “digitization” as a new structure carrier of information codes has been widely used by more and more people. Contemporary museums are no longer confined to the traditional mode of exhibition, but now are able to employ a high degree of integration of conventional physical displays and digital technology. Through various channels, such as social media, website platforms, documentaries and movies, and related apps, museums enhance the interaction and experience of the audience. This research project surveyed Chinese and American college students about their engagement with museums and the effectiveness of digital technology …

An Analysis Of Happiness Meter Data Through Data Mining Tools And Sentiment Classification, Maitha Ahmed Hussain Alblooshi

Theses

Customer satisfaction in the organization's services can play a crucial role in reforming their business strategy for better productivity. Some organizations measure their customer satisfaction through the percentage of happiness rate, some through non-systematic surveys, and some through direct interviews with their customers. Customers’ feedbacks can be gathered in two formats; structured data (numeric ratings) and unstructured data (comments). Being able to have a comprehensive measure of the quality of government services by considering those two formats makes it a big challenge to make useful insights from data for customers and decision-makers. The work in this paper analyzes customers' votes …

Nonlinear Photon Pair Generation In A Highly Dispersive Medium, David J. Starling, Jacob Poirier, Michael Fanto, Jeffrey A. Steidle, Christopher C. Tison, Gregory A. Howland, Stefan F. Preble

Articles

Photon pair generation in silicon photonic integrated circuits relies on four wave mixing via the third order nonlinearity. Due to phase matching requirements and group velocity dispersion, this method has typically required TE polarized light. Here, we demonstrate TM polarized photon pair production in linearly uncoupled silicon resonators with more than an order of magnitude more dispersion than previous work. We achieve measured rates above 2.8 kHz and a heralded second order correlation of . This method enables phase matching in dispersive media and paves the way for novel entanglement generation in silicon photonic devices

The Effectiveness Of Covert Vs. Overt Brand Visibility In Video Advertising, Mingyue Zhang

Theses

This research is a mixed-methods (qualitative and quantitative) and semi-structured (survey and interview) study on the effectiveness of covert vs. overt commercials towards the influence of the brand attitude and purchase intention of consumers. Covert commercials are video advertisements that present the promoted brand and sponsor unclearly, and make its marketing nature hard to recognize at first sight. Overt commercials are video advertisements that present the promoted brand and sponsor clearly, and disclose its sponsor and marketing nature expressively. The survey and interview are designed to measure participants’ responses to four commercials, either covert or overt, with regards to the …

Toy Design For Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder Based On Existing Therapeutic Training Methods, Ye Wang

Theses

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) behave in different ways from other children as well as face enormous problems in their daily life. Previous research has found that physical treatment not only improves their body functions, but also benefits their mental development. Play therapy is a very effective way to help children with ASD since playing is the way children express themselves. However, after field research and benchmarking, I found that there are few toys helping them with their developmental coordination, which is necessary especially for children with ASD. In this paper, I have designed a series of devices for …

Crowdsourcing In China: Exploring The Work Experience Of Solo Crowdworkers And Crowdfarm Workers, Yihong Wang, Konstantinos Papangelis, Michael Saker, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Alan Chamberlain, Javed-Vassilis Khan

Presentations and other scholarship

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article addresses this gap as one of its primary concerns. Drawing on a study that involves 48 participants, our research explores, compares and contrasts the work experiences of solo crowdworkers to those of crowdfarm workers. Our findings illustrate that the work experiences and context of the solo workers and …

Completing A Crowdsourcing Task Instead Of An Assignment; What Do University Students Think?, Javed-Vassilis Khan, Konstantinos Papangelis, Panos Markopoulos

Presentations and other scholarship

University educators actively seek realistic projects to include in their educational activities. However, finding an actually realistic project is not trivial. The rise of crowdsourcing platforms, in which a variety of tasks are offered in the form of an open call, might be an alternative source to help educators scaleup project-based learning. But how do university students feel about executing crowdsourcing tasks instead of their typical assignments? In a study with 24 industrial design students, we investigate students' attitudes on introducing crowdsourcing tasks as assignments. Based on our study we offer four suggestions to universities that consider integrating crowdsourcing tasks …

Smart Cities At Play: Lived Experiences, Emerging Forms Of Playfulness, And Problems Of Participation, Konstantinos Papangelis, Jin-Ha Lee, Michael Saker, Catherine Jones

Presentations and other scholarship

In recent years, the notion of smart cities has become the focus of a growing body of research. To date, much of this attention has revolved around the technical aspect, with related concerns including the creation and implementation of suitable smart city technologies. What is notably missing from these discussions, however, is a consideration of the lived experience of supposedly 'smart spaces' and the extent to which physical and digital environments are currently producing new forms of play and playfulness that can be contextualized within this field. With this in mind, the purpose of our workshop is as follows. First, …

You Know That Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want To Feel That., Jin Chan

Theses

You Know that Feeling You Get Right After You Vomit? Yeah, I Want to Feel That is an ongoing collection of photographic and sculptural components existing as found object mixedmedia such as oranges, wood, flowers, and inkjet prints held by T-pins. Through a surrealistic indulgence of abjection and uncanniness, with an implied bodily violence, this series of work comes to an understanding of time, identity, and existing between social boundaries creating a push and pull to define “in-betweenness”. This contradiction causes a psychic dissonance, or a mental contradiction of belonging; to exist in-between is to exist uncannily. “In-betweenness” is represented …

Cruces, Carlos Mario Tobon Franco

Theses

Cruces is a multimedia installation depicting immigrant conditions and experiences throughout landscapes, Latinx communities, and borderlands. Made during the last two years, it is constructed as a multivocal ethnography of immigrants with varying legal statuses, countries of origin, and stages in their journey. The imagery, sounds, and narratives are composed of the distributed yet relational geographies of immigrants’ experience and the pieces are structured to highlight the constitutive elements of human mobilities, such as trains, rivers and immigration hubs, as well as the natural obstacles they face in their perilous transit, such as forests and deserts.

The fieldwork was carried …

Dog Days On The Chaparral, Hugo Teixeira

Theses

Dog Days on the Chaparral is an installation comprised of three photographic sculptures made in response to the question “where are you from?” Although I define myself as both Portuguese and American, as someone who immigrated as a child, my identification as either ebbs and flows. The work embodies this slipperiness—a complicated emotional geography—in fabricated sculptures which collage images of two landscapes, the California chaparral and Portuguese montado, as proxies for these two homes and identities. I employ vernacular building materials and tools, such as lumber, engineered wood, common fasteners, house paint and steel clamps to create a literal and …

Because The Sun Hath Looked Upon Me, Granville Carroll

Theses

"Because the Sun Hath Looked Upon Me" is a photographic project examining identity construction on an individual, society, and cosmological level. It is a response to racial limitations and judgements thrust upon the African diaspora. I reimagine my identity through Afrofuturism by intersecting cosmology, philosophy, and spirituality. Using digital technology, I composite photographs to create new landscapes and self-portraits. The landscapes are my vision of the promised land; the ground references the physical world, the sky becomes a canvas for projection and imagination, and the horizon acts as a symbol for the liminal space between the physical and ethereal. The …

In Praise Of Shadows, Jiageng Lin

Theses

In Praise of Shadows is a body of work that explores and pushes the boundaries and meanings of photographic materials, apparatus, and perception. This project started with the desire to challenge the traditional view of photography as a purely representational medium and reveal its hidden processes. Photographs have always been something to look through; what is shown in the image area matters. In Praise of Shadows utilizes basic photographic elements, camera, paper, and photo-sensitive materials as subjects to challenge the perception of photography as simply something to look through. Each work in In Praise of Shadows exhibits varying characteristics that …

Polarization Engineering For Deep-Ultraviolet Light-Emitting Diodes, Cheng Liu

Theses

The new Coronavirus or Covid-19 has already became a world-wide pandemic. As of April 22nd, 2020, there are more than 2593129 confirmed case and 179725 total deaths. To fight against the Coronavirus, tremendous efforts have been made for slowing down the spread, such as social distancing. Recently, deep-ultraviolet (DUV) light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are demonstrated to be super effective to deactivate the virus/bacteria. In addition, the outstanding properties such as long life-time, compact size and environmental-friendly from DUV LEDs make them ideal for protecting people from the Coronavirus. However, all AlGaN-based DUV LEDs suffers from low external quantum efficiency issue. Among …

Effects Of Prior Land Use, Carbon Availability, And Hydrology On Nitrogen Cycling In Created Freshwater Wetlands, Michael Mcgowan

Theses

Freshwater wetlands are a critical feature of the landscape, providing important ecosystem services such as nutrient removal. However, created wetlands often fail to meet functional performance criteria, frequently due to shortcomings in management of key functional drivers, especially hydrology and soil quality. In natural wetlands, hydrology, carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) availability play an important role in nutrient cycling. However, controls on the relative importance of denitrification and N fixation, and release of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O ) are poorly understood in created wetlands. The tradeoff between these processes and the mechanisms for improved management are are imperative …

The Accessibility Of Mathematical Notation On The Web And Beyond, Jason White

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

This paper serves two purposes. First, it offers an overview of the role of the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) in representing mathematical notation on the Web, and its significance for accessibility. To orient the discussion, hypotheses are advanced regarding users’ needs in connection with the accessibility of mathematical notation. Second, current developments in the evolution of MathML are reviewed, noting their consequences for accessibility, and commenting on prospects for future improvement in the concrete experiences of users of assistive technologies. Recommendations are advanced for further research and development activities, emphasizing the cognitive aspects of user interface design.