Digital Commons Network^™

Spectral Angle Based Unary Energy Functions For Spatial-Spectral Hyperspectral Classification Using Markov Random Fields, Utsav B. Gewali, Sildomar T. Monteiro

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we propose and compare two spectral angle based approaches for spatial-spectral classification. Our methods use the spectral angle to generate unary energies in a grid-structured Markov random field defined over the pixel labels of a hyperspectral image. The first approach is to use the exponential spectral angle mapper (ESAM) kernel/covariance function, a spectral angle based function, with the support vector machine and the Gaussian process classifier. The second approach is to directly use the minimum spectral angle between the test pixel and the training pixels as the unary energy. We compare the proposed methods with the state-of-the-art …

Multitask Learning Of Vegetation Biochemistry From Hyperspectral Data, Utsav B. Gewali, Sildomar T. Monteiro

Presentations and other scholarship

Statistical models have been successful in accurately estimating the biochemical contents of vegetation from the reflectance spectra. However, their performance deteriorates when there is a scarcity of sizable amount of ground truth data for modeling the complex non-linear relationship occurring between the spectrum and the biochemical quantity. We propose a novel Gaussian process based multitask learning method for improving the prediction of a biochemical through the transfer of knowledge from the learned models for predicting related biochemicals. This method is most advantageous when there are few ground truth data for the biochemical of interest, but plenty of ground truth data …

Characterizing The Transient Profile Shapes And Deposition Patterns Of Desiccating Colloidal Droplets, Marcette Sapphira Greyson

Theses

As a droplet containing colloidal material dries on a surface, the suspended particles are deposited onto it. Aqueous colloidal droplets often leave the majority of particles at the periphery of the deposition area. This phenomenon is known as the coffee ring effect, and it arises when a radially outward evaporative flows dominates within a droplet as it dries. This deposition non-uniformity can impact a diverse range of applications. In medical diagnostic testing, it can introduce uncertainty into microarray test results, while in inkjet printing it can produce finer printed circuitry. Controlling colloidal deposition could allow for higher-quality medical diagnostics and …

Memory Emphasizing Digital Camera, Jae Ho Seo

Theses

The thesis is focused on how users can realize the value of personal memories when they use cameras.

The design of a camera has barely changed over the hundreds of years of its history. In the current market, most companies emphasize functionalities, such as better quality images, faster processors, and safer storage. However, the basic rectangular form factor, the round lens, and the layout of control knobs and buttons are essentially the same amongst many different companies. Similar to the auto design, the camera design has changed minimally in its outer shape with slightly advanced inner components.

It is important …

Connecting For Better Health: Discovering Differences In Self-­‐Reported Preference In The Environment Of Social Media In Healthcare Communications, Ashley Zeh

Theses

Though working as a vital service to the community, health care companies have the same

challenges as other businesses needing to remain competitive in the marketplace. Health care providers, however, have the additional challenge of providing healthcare communications that are valuable to society. Social media presents a new environment for healthcare providers to communicate and form a relationship with their patient community. Better insights into this new environment are necessary in order to establish how patients self-report differences in preference for the different types of technology-mediated communications. Through survey methods, this study looks into the differences in self-reported claims of …

The Analysis Of Consumers’ Affective Responses To Brand Presentation, Awareness, And Loyalty: A Contemporary Development In Selecting Media Channels, Jessica F. Mcginn

Theses

In today’s digital age, it is becoming increasingly difficult for advertising professionals to effectively evaluate which media channel will best reach their target audience. This study investigated the differences in self-reported consumer affective responses to brand presentation, brand awareness, and brand loyalty by medium. An experiment was performed to determine if there were differences in brand presentation, brand awareness, and brand loyalty between traditional and digital media advertisements. Statistically significant differences were found between participants’ responses to viewing a Facebook-branded business page and a traditional print advertisement.

Understanding The Impact Of Diversity In Software Bugs On Bug Prediction Models, Harold Valdivia-Garcia

Theses

Nowadays, software systems are essential for businesses, users and society. At the same time such systems are growing both in complexity and size. In this context, developing high-quality software is a challenging and expensive activity for the software industry. Since software organizations are always limited by their budget, personnel and time, it is not a trivial task to allocate testing and code-review resources to areas that require the most attention. To overcome the above problem, researchers have developed software bug prediction models that can help practitioners to predict the most bug-prone software entities. Although, software bug prediction is a very …

Incorporating Gallery Lighting In A Color-­‐Managed Imaging Workflow For Cultural Heritage, Joel Witwer

Theses

Conservation prints of cultural heritage are often produced in order to preserve the appearance qualities of the cultural heritage. The standard workflow for creating these prints is to image the cultural heritage, or paintings in the case of this thesis, under a D50 light source and create a print optimized for viewing under illuminant D50. The goal of this thesis was to investigate whether incorporating an incandescent gallery light source into the workflow had the potential to better preserve the viewer experience when the artwork is seen in an incandescent gallery.

Six prints were created through various combinations of a …

Occurrence Of Reverse Side Effects In Corona Treatment Of Dispersion-Coated Paperboard And Its Influence On Grease Barrier Properties, Sami-Seppo Ovaska, Ringaudas Rinkunas, Tadeusz Lozovksi, Robertas Maldzius, Jonas Sidaravicius, Leena-Sisko Johansson, Monika Österberg, Kaj Backfolk

Journal of Applied Packaging Research

The uncoated side of dispersion-barrier-coated paperboards was exposed to positive and negative direct current corona treatments in order to confirm the occurrence of backside treatment and clarify its effects on the usability of the paperboard. The main component of the coating dispersions was hydroxypropylated potato starch and the effects of talc and styrene-butadiene latex additions on backside treatment were evaluated. Coatings with a high talc proportion showed excellent initial grease resistance, but corona-induced strikethroughs caused a drastic decrease in grease penetration time. The root-mean-square roughness measurements revealed moderate surface roughening at the backside, indicating thus backside treatment. The alterations in …

Line Drawing, Structure Clay Clay Lines Sculpture, Josh Wagner

Theses

Line is the most simplistic element in art; it has often been viewed as only a two dimensional element. However, I am concerned with the articulation of line in space and how it is used to produce sculpture. Through the use of simplistic linear elements I created complex sculptures. Positive and negative space along with the way in which the sculptures inhabited my exhibition space was very important to me.

Traditionally clay is used to make very substantial pieces that are usually solid or hollow. My structures, however, are rather fragile and linear, making clay a challenging and perhaps interesting …

A Temporally Coherent Neural Algorithm For Artistic Style Transfer, Michael Dushkoff

Theses

Within the fields of visual effects and animation, humans have historically spent countless painstaking hours mastering the skill of drawing frame-by-frame animations. One such animation technique that has been widely used in the animation and visual effects industry is called "rotoscoping" and has allowed uniquely stylized animations to capture the motion of real life action sequences, however it is a very complex and time consuming process. Automating this arduous technique would free animators from performing frame by frame stylization and allow them to concentrate on their own artistic contributions. This thesis introduces a new artificial system based on an existing …

Discovery, Cloning, Expression, Purification, And Characterization Of Phosphoglycolate Phosphatase From Staphylococcus Aureus, Isreal Moreno

Theses

Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. The multi-drug resistant nature of certain S. aureus strains makes the discovery of new drug targets for S. aureus vital. A newly discovered virulence factor from S. aureus was described as an ortholog of NagD from E. coli, a member of the nitrophenyl phosphatase family of the HAD (Haloacid Dehalogenase) superfamily. This thesis will show that this virulence factor is not an ortholog of NagD UMPase from E. coli, but rather a phosphoglycolate phosphatase (PGPase). If phosphoglycolate accumulates in the cell, it will inhibit the glycolytic enzyme triose phosphate isomerase (TPI). …

Development Of Nanosphere Lithography For Semiconductor Device Applications, Xing Lei

Theses

Nanosphere lithography, a technique of generating hexagonally packed monolayers with nanospheres, has been studied and been shown to increase the efficiency of the devices such as light emitting diodes and solar cells. In this research, the fabrication of nanosphere lithography was explored with the aim of identifying robust deposition methods. Two resultant methods yielded large (1 cm by 1 cm) monolayers of nanospheres, with further mask modification via sphere diameter reduction using reactive ion etch. Photoluminescence (PL) measurements confirmed the existence of the monolayer and the enhancement due to the addition of nanospheres. A thin layer of aluminum was deposited …

From Information Cascade To Knowledge Transfer:Predictive Analyses On Social Networks, Biru Cui

Theses

As social media continues to influence our daily life, much research has focused on analyzing characteristics of social networks and tracking how information flows in social media. Information cascade originated from the study of information diffusion which focused on how decision making is affected by others depending on the network structure. An example of such study is the SIR (Susceptible, Infected, Removed) model. The current research on information cascade mainly focuses on three open questions: diffusion model, network inference, and influence maximization. Different from these studies, this dissertation aims at deriving a better understanding to the problem of who will …

Digitabs: Share. Learn. Play, Alfredo Lopez

Theses

This project focused on designing an effective online sharing network that includes video tutorials and music tablatures of any original or pre-existing song, created and shared by fellow musicians. This network encourages people with little to no musical background to perform their own versions of songs by practicing and learning music theory in a pedagogical interactive environment.

An Analysis Of Saudis International Pleasure And Leisure Travel Behavior, Fawaz Alreshaidan

Theses

The past decade has seen the rapid increase of tourist flows from Middle East countries (World Tourism Organization, 2015). One of these countries is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. According to Tourism Information and Research Centre (2006-2012), the number of Saudi outbound tourists has been increasing continually in the last ten years. The Tourism Information and Research Centre reported 2 million outbound trips in 2006, while 21 million trips were reported in 2015. However, little is known about Saudi tourists and it is not clear what factors motivate them to travel abroad and what activities they participate in. This research …

Exploring Tripadvisor Online Reviews: The Case Of George Eastman Museum, Mussab Aljahdali

Theses

Different studies have looked at visitor related motivations and experiences under different contexts in the tourism industry. The museum-related experiences remain one of the important elements which are sought by visitors to the museums. Therefore, this study purposes to investigate and determine personal context, social context and physical contexts of George Eastman museum visitors. More importantly, the study utilised a content analysis approach in its research. The specific data about visitors to George Eastman House was obtained from the social media website TripAdvisor. The findings of the study were based on three important elements: personal context, social context and physical …

Snakes In The Nest, Shane Durgee

Theses

This document accompanies my thesis titled, Snakes in the Nest, which was exhibited in the Bevier Gallery for two weeks in April 2016, and consisted of five paintings and one sculpture. In this essay I outline both the artistic influences and theoretical research that shaped the creation of my work. I argue that the construction of my identity has been largely manipulated by a culture of escapist consumerism as well as social conditioning performed by my society to maintain a gender binary. The making of my thesis exhibition sparked an investigation into my ongoing involvement with art. This called for …

Electrical Double Layer Potential Distribution In Nanoporous Electrodes From Molecular Modeling And Classical Electrodynamics Analysis, Evan Marshall Ney

Theses

When a solid surface is immersed in a solution, the surface can become charged in a variety of ways including crystal lattice defects, dissociation of atoms or molecules, ionization of surface groups, and adsorption of external ions or, in the case of an electrode, via the application of an external potential. The excess charge at the surface results in an accumulation of mobile ions in the solution near the surface. Relative to the charge on the surface, ions of opposite charge (counterions) build up near the surface to neutralize the surface charge, and ions of like charge (coions) are depleted …

Stemming On Stem: A Stem Education Framework For Students With Disabilities, Jiwon Hwang, Jonte C. Taylor

Journal of Science Education for Students with Disabilities

There has been increased attention paid to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics also known as STEM. The focus on STEM has been both educational and occupational. Unfortunately, students with disabilities perform below their peers without disabilities in math and science. The authors discuss issues related to STEM and students with disabilities. These issues include (1) traditional views of STEM education, (2) the importance of STEM education, and (3) students with disabilities performance in STEM. The authors posit a framework for STEM education for students with disabilities and promote the incorporation of the arts to increase students’ STEM knowledge and achievement.

Identification Of Hyperelastic Anisotropic Properties In Vascular Biomechanics Based On In-­‐ Vivo And In-­‐Vitro Measurements, Nikhil Meshram

Theses

To clarify the complex interaction between mechanical and biological processes in natural or artificial (surgical) phenomena, the knowledge of the properties of biological tissues is required. It is also of interest for biochemistry, biophysics, cardiology, radiology, physiology, surgery, and pathology. In particular we require a constitutive formulation to be capable of reflecting an actual experimental data over the wide range of deformation and stresses. The constitutive equations should ideally be relatively simple, involving a few parameters, capable to predict the material response of biological tissue subject to a static or dynamic load.

Almost 30 years ago Y. C. Fung and …

How Students Choose College In Croatia, Ivana Silic

Theses

This qualitative study explores the ways in which high school students in Croatia go through the process of making their college decision, and attempts to identify the key factors that influence their decision to choose a certain college. The study used focus group methodology to gain deeper understanding of the thought process students go through from the moment they start thinking about colleges, to the moment they make their final decision. The results of this research show that high school students in Croatia tend to start thinking more seriously about where they will continue their education in the third and, …

Patient History Elicitation And Diagnostic Decision Making, Nicholas Iuliucci

Theses

Technology has changed the way people communicate, and communication between patients and medical professionals has not been exempt from these developments. Clinicians are now text messaging, emailing, and video conferencing patient. Understanding the impact of the new modalities on communication patterns is imperative to ensure quality care. Thirty-two medical professionals of varying experience conducted a patient interview with two confederate patients over an instant messaging system. The first interview was 15 minutes and the second 7 minutes, the latter condition inducing time pressure. The results demonstrated that time pressure has an adverse impact on the medical professionals’ communication patterns. The …

Analysis Of Student Preconceptions Related To Quality Of Service In Telecommunications, Mark J. Indelicato, George Zion, Joseph Nygate

Presentations and other scholarship

This study evaluates STEM students’ preconceptions regarding Quality of Service (QoS) in telecommunications and networking with the goal of understanding the nature of these preconceptions to improve student learning in this discipline. In this study we explain the importance of identifying preconceptions with which students enter our classrooms and illustrate a mechanism successfully used in this identification process. Researchers have explained it incumbent on educators to address preconceptions in order to effectively change student beliefs1 . Analyzing the causes of these will allow teachers to instruct effectively from the start of the topic rather that lose time by re-teaching the …

Covert Channel In Http User-Agents, Susan Heilman, Jonathan Williams, Daryl Johnson

Presentations and other scholarship

A subliminal covert channel establishes a nearly undetectable communication session within a pre-established data stream between two separate entities. This document explains how HTTP can be utilized to facilitate a covert channel over both local and wide area networks. The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) accounts for a majority of the Internet’s daily web traffic and is permitted within almost all network topologies. Therefore, HTTP is a prime medium for hiding messages and information communicated between separate parties. This paper illustrates a new approach to covertly encoding messages in the an HTTP message through use of the User-Agent and referrer strings …

Answer-Type Prediction For Visual Question Answering, Kushal Kafle, Christopher Kanan

Presentations and other scholarship

Recently, algorithms for object recognition and related tasks have become sufficiently proficient that new vision tasks can now be pursued. In this paper, we build a system capable of answering open-ended text-based questions about images, which is known as Visual Question Answering (VQA). Our approach’s key insight is that we can predict the form of the answer from the question. We formulate our solution in a Bayesian framework. When our approach is combined with a discriminative model, the combined model achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets for open-ended VQA: DAQUAR, COCO-QA, The VQA Dataset, and Visual7W.

Android Malware Detection Using Category-Based Machine Learning Classifiers, Huda Ali Alatwi

Theses

Android malware growth has been increasing dramatically along with increasing of the diversity and complicity of their developing techniques. Machine learning techniques are the current methods to model patterns of static features and dynamic behaviors of Android malware. Whereas the accuracy rates of the classifiers increase with increasing the quality of the features, we relate between the apps' features and the features that are needed to deliver the category's functionality. Differently, our classification approach defines legitimate static features for benign apps under a specific category as opposite to identifying malicious patterns. We utilize the features of the top rated apps …

The Importance Of 3d Motion Trajectories For Computer-Based Sign Recognition, Mark Dilsizian, Zhiqiang Tang, Dimitris Metaxas, Matt Huenerfauth, Carol Neidle

Presentations and other scholarship

Computer-based sign language recognition from video is a challenging problem because of the spatiotemporal complexities inherent in sign production and the variations within and across signers. However, linguistic information can help constrain sign recognition to make it a more feasible classification problem. We have previously explored recognition of linguistically significant 3D hand configurations, as start and end handshapes represent one major component of signs; others include hand orientation, place of articulation in space, and movement. Thus, although recognition of handshapes (on one or both hands) at the start and end of a sign is essential for sign identification, it is …

Perception Of Software Employees Towards Human Resource Development Roles, Functions, And Professionals, Bhagyashree Barhate

Theses

The purpose of this research was to explore the perception of employees working in the software industry towards Human Resource Development (HRD) roles, functions, and professionals. This research adopted a quantitative methodology and administered a survey to understand how the employees perceive the different HRD roles and their importance in the organization. The research also studied the different perceptions employees may have towards the HRD professionals and their competencies. The participants in this study belonged to the software industry and have been working in their current technical job roles for atleast a year. A survey was used to collect data …

Residual Affect, Beth A. Gilbert

Theses

Using a personal experience of surviving a sexual assault as a starting point, Residual Affect is a multimedia series incorporating still photographs and video to visually portray the aftermath of psychological trauma on a daily basis; a trauma that has long-lasting psychological ramifications; turmoil that doesn’t end with the completion of the traumatic event itself. Hinting at the original traumatic event, the imagery depicts life from the moment after tumult, exploring themes of perception, disorientation and restriction to create a larger dialog about the enduring psychological effects of a perceived life-threatening event; effects that bleed through into everyday life.