Digital Commons Network^™

A Visualization And Characterization Of Microstructures Of Cohesive Powders, Vineeth R. Patil

Theses

In this work, a framework for the determination of the particle positions in a fluorescent powder structure was created. The feasibility of imaging and quantifying sedimented particulate samples in air was demonstrated by using micron-sized poly-dispersed electrophotographic printing particles. Particle positions were determined by a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope (CLSM) to capture a stack of cross-sectional images of fluorescent particle clusters. The resulting images were analyzed using Matlab image processing tools. The XYZ coordinates and radii for these particles (assumed spherical) were calculated in several selected sampling volumes, and the packing fractions were calculated. A three-dimensional visualization of the particle …

When Coal Was King, Rachele Trzcinski

Theses

My work is my research. Thinking and learning are a part of my process. The lessons and challenges in one project are merely stepping stones for the next. My body of work becomes a long series that shows a connection between each piece, slowly growing and exploring. My ideas stem from my immediate surroundings. I am a reporter and my artwork is my article.

I have been researching the coal mining and other related industries of Scranton, Pennsylvania and its surrounding areas. An area that helped build the industrial revolution in America’s early years, only to be neglected once the …

Communicating Vaccination Information On Facebook Utilizing The Health Belief Model, Lindsay Case

Theses

The 2014 Disney measles outbreak brought the issue of vaccinations to the forefront of health communication across all mediums, including social media sites. While the US is considered to have one of the more successful vaccination rates globally, there remain supporters of an anti-vaccination movement and regions of the country with alarming rates of parents choosing not to vaccinate their children. This content analysis study of Facebook first identified the current trend of more activity amongst those who do not support the use of vaccines than those supporting vaccines. The user generated content was also evaluated for the use of …

The Look Of Fiction: A Visual Analysis Of The Front Covers Of The New York Times Fiction Bestsellers, Daniel Patrick Gallagher

Theses

In spite of the common saying "don't judge a book by its cover," studies show that actual books are overwhelmingly judged on the appearances of their covers. While studies have been conducted on what style or form of cover art is most attractive, most interesting, or most likely to sell, the current research conducts a visual analysis of the conventions contained in the covers of the best selling fiction books in the US, using the methods and ideas found in the theories of semiotics and visual culture, to offer a new perspective on the visual imagery of the covers. This …

Affine-Power S-Boxes Over Galois Fields With Area-Optimized Logic Implementations, Christopher Wood, Marcin Lukowiak, Stanislaw Radziszowski

Presentations and other scholarship

Cryptographic S-boxes are fundamental in key-iterated sub- stitution permutation network (SPN) designs for block ciphers. As a natural way for realizing Shannon’s confusion and diffusion properties in cryptographic primitives through nonlinear and linear behavior, re- spectively, SPN designs served as the basis for the Advanced Encryption Standard and a variety of other block ciphers. In this work we present a methodology for minimizing the logic resources for n-bit affine-power S- boxes over Galois fields based on measurable security properties and find- ing corresponding area-efficient combinational implementations in hard- ware. Motivated by the potential need for new and larger S-boxes, we …

Customizable Sponge-Based Authenticated Encryption Using 16-Bit S-Boxes, Matthew Kelly, Alan Kaminsky, Michasel Kurdziel, Marcin Lukowiak, Stanislaw Radziszowski

Presentations and other scholarship

Authenticated encryption (AE) is a symmetric key cryptographic scheme that aims to provide both confidentiality and data integrity. There are many AE algorithms in existence today. However, they are often far from ideal in terms of efficiency and ease of use. For this reason, there is ongoing effort to develop new AE algorithms that are secure, efficient, and easy to use. The sponge construction is a relatively new cryptographic primitive that has gained popularity since the sponge-based K ECCAK algorithm won the SHA-3 hashing competition. The duplex construction, which is closely related to the sponge, pro- vides promising potential for …

Is This Thing On? Determining Comfort Level With Communication Skills In A Technical Discipline, Adrienne Decker, Christopher A. Egert

Presentations and other scholarship

Students with a technology focus often express and demonstrate that they find it difficult to communicate their ideas and designs. Students in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Games and Media are further challenged in that in order to be successful in their pursuit of a career in game design and development, they need to effectively convey their game ideas and design specifications while expressing the passion for the ideas that will convince others to climb on board and work on their projects. In this paper, we discuss the way we help our students develop these skills within …

Understanding And Improving The Culture Of Hackathons: Think Global Hack Local, Adrienne Decker, Eiselt, Kurt, Voll, Kimberly

Presentations and other scholarship

Hackathons bring developers, artists and designers together around a shared challenge: ideate, plan and create an application in a highly constrained time frame. A way to socialize, solve problems, and strengthen soft and hard skills, hackathons have grown tremendously in popularity in the last half decade. Despite this growth, it has been noted that females do not participate in hackathons with the same frequency as males. Some theorize that the hackathon culture is intimidating, does not appeal to women, or that it acts to amplify pre-existing cultural biases in computing. In this paper we introduce an alternative format for hackathons …

Expanding Dimensionality In Cinema Color: Impacting Observer Metamerism Through Multiprimary Display, David L. Long

Theses

Television and cinema display are both trending towards greater ranges and saturation of reproduced colors made possible by near-monochromatic RGB illumination technologies. Through current broadcast and digital cinema standards work, system designs employing laser light sources, narrow-band LED, quantum dots and others are being actively endorsed in promotion of Wide Color Gamut (WCG). Despite artistic benefits brought to creative content producers, spectrally selective excitations of naturally different human color response functions exacerbate variability of observer experience. An exaggerated variation in color-sensing is explicitly counter to the exhaustive controls and calibrations employed in modern motion picture pipelines. Further, singular standard observer …

Ntid Focus Fall 2015, Ntid Marketing And Communications

National Technical Institute for the Deaf Papers

No abstract provided.

University Magazine Fall 2015, University News Service, Office Of Alumni Relations

University Publications

This is the official magazine for RIT Alumni. Issued thrice a year in spring, fall and winter. Printing began in 1999.

Activity Alternative Selection Considering Stochastic Reliability In Project Planning, Devdatta Deo, Michael E. Kuhl

Presentations and other scholarship

Activity Alternative Selection Considering Stochastic Reliability in Project Planning. Project management often involves the selection of alternatives from various options for completion of one or more activities. In some cases in addition to uncertainty in cost and activity completion time, the reliability of the alternatives must also be considered. This situation often arises when alternatives involve new or unproven technologies or processes. In this research, we present a stochastic simulation-based optimization method to evaluate project networks to select from among alternatives for completing project activities when several options are available with stochastic completion times and reliability in terms of the …

Rit Scholar Works User Guide, Frances Andreu

Articles

A procedural overview for accessing and submitting works in RIT Scholar Works. Latest update: October 2015

Investigation Of Reactively Sputtered Titanium Oxide Memristors, Wilkie Olin-Ammentorp

Theses

Over the previous decade, flash memory has made massive gains in storage density and market share. However, due to fundamental scaling limits being reached, a replacement memory device must be found. Resistive random access memory (RRAM) is a leading candidate to replace flash memory as a storage-class memory. RRAM is a broad classification of devices, all of which share the commonality that their information is stored in the resistance of a material. These devices are often described as being memristive.

The objective of the study performed was to develop a process for fabricating microelectronic structures to investigate the memristive behavior …

Evaluative Measures: Assessing The Effectiveness Of Exhibits And Programs In Zoos, Drew Johnson

Theses

This thesis examines program and exhibition evaluation as pertaining to zoos and aquariums in the United States from the 1960’s to the present. Research conducted for this thesis focuses on the design, implementation, and evaluation of zoological programs and exhibitions. Also examined are studies of zoo and aquarium visitors related to audience research, informal learning, and psychographics. Case studies as well as published procedural and evaluative methods from zoos and aquariums across the United States are used to identify best practices. In addition, two evaluation tool kits are presented to assist the Seneca Park Zoo with evaluative measures for exhibits …

Use Of Experts' Gaze By Novice Usability Practitioners To Perform A Better Heuristic Evaluation, Sree Anirudh J. Bhandaram

Theses

Proficiency in conducting heuristic evaluations does not come easily; it is an acquired skill that takes years to master. It is often difficult to convey an effective evaluation strategy through a verbal approach. While communicating verbally, people may prompt to where they focus their attention, but this is often difficult to convey. Through an eye tracking study, the relationship between an expert’s gaze while performing a task and a novice’s learning to better perform a heuristic evaluation will be explored. Novices concentrate on basic, but irrelevant parts of a task while processing complex stimuli whereas experts process stimuli quicker while …

Branding A Professional American Football Franchise, John J. Ragone Jr.

Theses

The original intent of my thesis was to create a professional-level team identity that a community can embrace and emotionally bond with by utilizing contemporary design trends. As I researched the visual aspects of the brand strategy, it became apparent that current trends toward multiplicity of uniform designs could become a threat to an organization’s brand equity.

A corporate identity is the strategically engineered “personality” of an organization created to facilitate business objectives. How that identity is perceived and accepted supports relationship building between an organization and its audience or customers. Brand equity is developed through ease of recognition and …

(Re)Connecting With Listeners: How Radio Stations Are Reaching Beyond The Dial (And Their Competitors) To Connect With Their Audience, Alyxandra Sherwood

Theses

Radio has a history of adapting to new technologies to spread its signal farther and more efficiently to a larger audience. With the emergence of social media, the audience has begun to use non-traditional media channels to reach back and out to each other, thus by-passing traditional media outlets such as radio. Prior studies examined how the audience has shifted its daily routine to incorporate new technology. The present study sought to determine to what extent radio stations in New York State have adapted to use non-traditional media channels, how often they update those channels, and if revenue type had …

A Cognitive Theory-Based Approach For The Evaluation And Enhancement Of Internet Security Awareness Among Children Aged 3-12 Years, Asma Eidhah M. Aloufi

Theses

In the age of technology, the Internet has spread widely and used for multiple purposes by users of all ages, especially children who start using it frequently to play in their spare time. With the use of the Internet, children must have a sufficient security awareness to avoid security risks found online. This study takes us through the journey of evaluating and enhancing the level of the Internet security awareness among a group of Saudi children aged 3-12 years. The developed evaluation survey shows that there is some awareness among the Saudi Children; however, they still need more concrete ways …

Geometric Element Test Targets For Visual Inference Of A Printer's Dimension Limitations, Shu Chang, Heng Li, Nathan Ostrout, Monika Jhuria

Presentations and other scholarship

As technologies advance in the field of additive manufacturing (AM), it increases the demand in using test targets to quantitatively appraise the performance of AM processes and parts. This study presents a unique concept to address the dimensional and geometric viability of three-dimensional (3D) printers with test targets that are unique and complementary to those currently available. We have named these distinct designed artifacts as Geometric Element Test Targets (GETTs(TM)). The concept for the targets is to rely on positioning and spatial frequency of geometric shapes to induce failures that are indicative of the system’s dimensional limitations. A distinguishing characteristic …

Comparing Uncivil Discourse With A Conversational Intelligent Agent In Public And Private Online Settings, Mark Marcello

Theses

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, 60% of participants of a survey said they have witnessed online abuse, and 66% of that abuse occurred via social media. This study looks at online communication, and tests if anonymity increases the amount of abuse that occurs during online communication. A quasi-experiment was developed to look for uncivil discourse using a conversational intelligent agent to create a controlled, repeatable conversational environment. The interactions with the agent occur in two settings: one in public at a kiosk, and a second in private. The researcher hypothesized that the interactions that occur …

Individual Colorimetric Observers For Personalized Color Imaging, Yuta Asano

Theses

Colors are typically described by three values such as RGB, XYZ, and HSV. This is rooted to the fact that humans possess three types of photoreceptors under photopic conditions, and human color vision can be characterized by a set of three color matching functions (CMFs). CMFs integrate spectra to produce three colorimetric values that are related to visual responses. In reality, large variations in CMFs exist among color-normal populations. Thus, a pair of two spectrally different stimuli might be a match for one person but a mismatch for another person, also known as observer metamerism.

Observer metamerism is a serious …

Me As Small D, Patti Durr

Presentations and other scholarship

me as small d (2015) Acrylic and mixed media on canvas 12” x 16” Mixed media self-portrait examining identity formation during public school. Exhibited at the Let There Be Light: De^ARTivism exhibit at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery in Washington, DC

3d Printed Footwear Design, Seyed Behrad Ghodsi

Theses

This project is focused on developing a range of design concepts for printable footwear. The idea is to build a consumer based system, which reduces labor for manufacturing and provides ease of access to new products for consumers.

Experts predict that everyone will have a 3D printer at home in the near future and people will be able to design and make objects on their own (Dale Nicholls 2014).

Currently the 3D printing technology is not developed enough for non-designer use. By developing a range of stylish footwear design concepts, the production process would speed up and the costs of …

Spiritus, Matthew Spaull

Theses

On February 25th, 1999, The Roman Catholic Church excommunicated Father James Callan and the parishioners of Corpus Christi Church in Rochester, NY. Covered by Media nationwide, the excommunication was portrayed as the latest struggle of progressive Catholics against the more conservative Church authorities. Growing from 200 to more than 3,000 parishioners in less than a decade, Corpus Christi became home to an impressive range of social justice programs, including a health care center, a halfway house for former prisoners, a home for recovering addicts, a hospice, and a daycare center. What got Callan and the church into trouble were the …

Analyzing Domestic Abuse Using Natural Language Processing On Social Media Data, J Nicolas Schrading

Theses

Social media and social networking play a major role in billions of lives. Publicly available posts on websites such as Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and Facebook can contain deeply personal accounts of the lives of users – and the crises they face. Health woes, family concerns, accounts of bullying, and any number of other issues that people face every day are detailed on a massive scale online. Utilizing natural language processing and machine learning techniques, these data can be analyzed to understand societal and public health issues. Expensive surveys need not be conducted with automatic understanding of social media data, allowing …

Fear Feedback Loop: Creative And Dynamic Fear Experiences Driven By User Emotion, Charlene Dimeglio

Theses

This thesis examines whether it is possible to generate fear-eliciting media that custom fits to the user. The system described uses a genetic algorithm to produce images that get more scary through the generations in reaction to either physiological signals obtained from the user or a user-provided fear rating. The system was able to detect differing levels of fear using a regression trained on EEG and heart rate data gathered while users view clips from horror movies. It was also found to produce images with significantly higher fear ratings at the fifth generation as compared to the first generation. These …

Pulsar: Design And Simulation Methodology For Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation In Photonic Network-On-Chip Architectures In Heterogeneous Multicore Systems, Kwadwo Opong-Mensah

Theses

As the computing industry moved toward faster and more energy-efficient solutions, multicore computers proved to be dependable. Soon after, the Network-on-Chip (NoC) paradigm made headway as an effective method of connecting multiple cores on a single chip. These on-chip networks have been used to relay communication between homogeneous and heterogeneous sets of cores and core clusters. However, the variation in bandwidth requirements of heterogeneous systems is often neglected. Therefore, at a given moment, bandwidth may be in excess at one node while it is insufficient at another leading to lower performance and higher energy costs. This work proposes and examines …

A Study Of Das Delays And Their Impact On The Wireless Channels With Application To Indoor Localization, Ahmed Sallam Mohamed Ibrahim

Theses

This research evaluates the Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) introduced delays and their effects on the indoor channel in simulcast situations where the effect of delays is most prevalent. Different simulcast cases that form the basic building blocks are analyzed to form an understanding of the problem. Two case studies of important indoor environments are presented. Importance of improving ray tracing simulations to include propagation and DAS delays is highlighted.

The paper also introduces a DAS element representation and delay mapping model and explores techniques of engineering DAS delays to optimize location estimation by ranging and RF fingerprinting to achieve E911 …

Empirical Measurement And Model Validation Of Infrared Spectra Of Contaminated Surfaces, Sean Archer

Theses

The goal of this thesis was to validate predicted infrared spectra of liquid contaminated surfaces from a micro-scale bi-directional reflectance distribution function (BRDF) model through the use of empirical measurement. Liquid contaminated surfaces generally require more sophisticated radiometric modeling to numerically describe surface properties. The Digital Image and Remote Sensing Image Generation (DIRSIG) model utilizes radiative transfer modeling to generate synthetic imagery for a variety of applications. Aside from DIRSIG, a micro-scale model known as microDIRSIG has been developed as a rigorous ray tracing physics-based model that could predict the BRDF of geometric surfaces that are defined as micron to …