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Examining The Design And Usability Of Telemedicine Communications: A Mixed-Methods Study, Jessica Campbell Jan 2020

Examining The Design And Usability Of Telemedicine Communications: A Mixed-Methods Study, Jessica Campbell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This dissertation describes a mixed-methods study that examines the usability of telemedicine provider interfaces. This study consisted of content analysis, survey, and think aloud methodologies, which afford a multifaceted corpus of data for which to draw inferences and identify design features and functions that negatively impact usability. Usability is a critical component of the user experience with a telemedicine provider interface and can suede or impede the acceptance and adoption of telemedicine. Telemedicine has the potential to increase quality healthcare access and positive health outcomes for individuals who use it, and usability is a key component of technology acceptance and …

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Atomic Scale Processes And Electronic Band Structure Engineering In Thin Layered Materials, Brandon Blue Jan 2020

Atomic Scale Processes And Electronic Band Structure Engineering In Thin Layered Materials, Brandon Blue

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this work, a variety of layered materials are considered for their potential technologic applications and the role of structure on the physical properties of the material system as a whole. Transition metal dichalcogenides form the core of the work discussed here, with additional results from an iron pnictide-based superconductor and for a biologically-sourced proton conductor. Here, a commercial scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with liquid cryogenic cooling provides information about both the atomic-scale structure of the surface and the local electronic density of states (LDOS) as a function of position. The interplay of superconducting and charge-density wave states is discussed …

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Seeds Of Doubt, Amber Hilson Jan 2020

Seeds Of Doubt, Amber Hilson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Seeds of Doubt is a two-dimensional (2D) animated film that explores how anxiety can stifle personal growth. The film demonstrates how accepting and coping with this anxiety can help you return to a place of calm and allow you to blossom. Roma, a young witch, struggles to use her magic to successfully make her crops grow. Her lack of confidence leaves her stuck inside the greenhouse until she is ready to move on to the tomato fields outside. She must first re-center herself and overcome her self-doubt before it consumes her completely. This idea is sourced largely from my own …

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Exploring Academic Stressors Related To Second Language Acquisition And Barriers Of Turkish-International Graduate Students Studying Education In The Southeast United States, Nermin Ciloglu Cakmakci Jan 2020

Exploring Academic Stressors Related To Second Language Acquisition And Barriers Of Turkish-International Graduate Students Studying Education In The Southeast United States, Nermin Ciloglu Cakmakci

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Many students around the world have a strong desire to study in the United States, and in recent years international students in the United States have enrolled at an all-time high. There is a significant need to learn more about these students' needs and strategies to identify the most effective practices to improve their academic life and life quality. The demand for overcoming life challenges in a new country and achieve high academic performance with their second language creates high stress for these international students. One of the groups among these international students that has been understudied is the Turkish …

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In Sickness Or In Health: The Impact Of Disease Burdens On The Likelihood Of Violent Conflict, Devyn Escalanti Jan 2020

In Sickness Or In Health: The Impact Of Disease Burdens On The Likelihood Of Violent Conflict, Devyn Escalanti

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This paper expands on the relationship between disease burdens and the onset of violent conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1990-2012. Most studies have focused on conflict as a cause of HIV transmission, while some suggest that HIV infection rates, by substantially reducing life-expectancy, increase the onset of violence by lowering the opportunity cost of rebelling for HIV-positive individuals. This paper argues that to the degree that life expectancy is important to opportunity costs, it is more likely driven by other factors. First, I argue preventable diseases that are less connected to individual decision-making, and the presence of poor health infrastructure …

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Application Of Reliability Centered Maintenance In Railway Tracks, Sarita Rattanakunuprakarn Jan 2020

Application Of Reliability Centered Maintenance In Railway Tracks, Sarita Rattanakunuprakarn

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Rail transport has played a significant role for a long time in the U.S. history. As other alternative transport modes have been developed, rail transport has increasingly faced more challenges to stay competitive. While heavy use of the rail, shortened service life and the need to meet consumer expectations have placed challenges, maintenance has become an integral part of the railway industry to assure efficacy and reliability of rail transportation. For this reason, there is a constant need to improve maintenance for a number of purposes, such as safety, quality, capacity, reliability, availability, punctuality, etc. In addition, optimizing maintenance strategy …

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Mobile Health Technology To Enhance Healthcare Service Delivery In Developing Nations (Saudi Arabia), Nawaf Khan Jan 2020

Mobile Health Technology To Enhance Healthcare Service Delivery In Developing Nations (Saudi Arabia), Nawaf Khan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Saudi Arabia is among the countries that have very high prevalence rates of diabetes and hypertension, with prevalence rates of almost 18% and 25%, respectively. The majority of patients with diabetes and hypertension fail to manage their diseases and to show up for their follow up appointments. Mhealth technology is among the interventions that have been recently adopted to overcome these issues and improve the quality of healthcare services. This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of a mobile phone application named diabetes and hypertension application (DHA Tracking) to promote adherence for patients with diabetes and hypertension in Mecca, Saudi …

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A Descriptive Study Of The Relationship Between Stress, Person-Environment Fit, And Turnover Intention Of Wait Staff In Central Florida Independent And Regional Chain Restaurants, Sejal Madhubhai Jan 2020

A Descriptive Study Of The Relationship Between Stress, Person-Environment Fit, And Turnover Intention Of Wait Staff In Central Florida Independent And Regional Chain Restaurants, Sejal Madhubhai

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This descriptive study examined turnover intention for wait staff working at independent and regional chain restaurants in central Florida. The purpose of this dissertation in practice was to understand the role that stress, Person-Environment Fit, and demographics play in turnover intention. A self-report questionnaire was distributed to wait staff in central Florida via social media websites. The self-report questionnaire consisted of the Perceived Person-Environment Fit Scale (PPEFS), the General Workplace Stress Scale (GWSS), and the Turnover Intention Scale (TIS-6). A total of 265 responses were collected from participants and the responses were analyzed using a stepwise regression and two multilinear …

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Infrastructure For Performance Monitoring And Analysis Of Systems And Applications, Ramin Izadpanah Jan 2020

Infrastructure For Performance Monitoring And Analysis Of Systems And Applications, Ramin Izadpanah

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The growth of High Performance Computer (HPC) systems increases the complexity with respect to understanding resource utilization, system management, and performance issues. HPC performance monitoring tools need to collect information at both the application and system levels to yield a complete performance picture. Existing approaches limit the abilities of the users to do meaningful analysis on actionable timescale. Efficient infrastructures are required to support largescale systems performance data analysis for both run-time troubleshooting and post-run processing modes. In this dissertation, we present methods to fill these gaps in the infrastructure for HPC performance monitoring and analysis. First, we enhance the …

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A Computational Biomechanical Model-Based Optimization Of Fulcrum Support In Orthosis Enabled Closed Reduction Of Developmental Dysplasia Of The Hip, Christopher Rose Jan 2020

A Computational Biomechanical Model-Based Optimization Of Fulcrum Support In Orthosis Enabled Closed Reduction Of Developmental Dysplasia Of The Hip, Christopher Rose

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Hip abduction orthosis devices (HAOD) are used to reduce the hip joint of infants affected by developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH). HAOD have been successful for mild cases of DDH and ineffective for severe cases. Efforts in understanding the biomechanics of lower limbs have been made to improve the success rate of current treatment methods, especially for Grade IV dislocations (G4). The aim of this dissertation is twofold: first, it proposes the use of a varying fulcrum point (FP) located below the leg to improve DDH treatment; and secondly, it defines the optimal FP (OP) location for a broad …

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Exploring The Cultural Identity And School Efficacy Of Students Through The Lens Of Digital Storytelling, Rachael Mack Jan 2020

Exploring The Cultural Identity And School Efficacy Of Students Through The Lens Of Digital Storytelling, Rachael Mack

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Digital storytelling is a modern storytelling method that uses videos, images, and audio to share knowledge, wisdom, values, and personal stories from the point of view of the creator in a 2-8-minute first person narrative. This study explored the cultural identity and school efficacy of students through the lens of digital storytelling. This mixed-methods study consisted of both qualitative and quantitative measures. A survey was conducted using the In-Group Identification Scale, the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity, and the School Efficacy Scale as the quantitative measures, and qualitative data was generated from the transcription and analysis of the digital storytelling …

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Algorithms And Applications Of Novel Capsule Networks, Rodney Lalonde Jan 2020

Algorithms And Applications Of Novel Capsule Networks, Rodney Lalonde

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Convolutional neural networks, despite their profound impact in countless domains, suffer from significant shortcomings. Linearly-combined scalar feature representations and max pooling operations lead to spatial ambiguities and a lack of robustness to pose variations. Capsule networks can potentially alleviate these issues by storing and routing the pose information of extracted features through their architectures, seeking agreement between the lower-level predictions of higher-level poses at each layer. In this dissertation, we make several key contributions to advance the algorithms of capsule networks in segmentation and classification applications. We create the first ever capsule-based segmentation network in the literature, SegCaps, by introducing …

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Sex, Gender, Sexual Assault, And Rape On The Red Pill: A Thematic And Linguistic Analysis, Walker Talton Jan 2020

Sex, Gender, Sexual Assault, And Rape On The Red Pill: A Thematic And Linguistic Analysis, Walker Talton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The digital space has offered fertile new territory to connect with like-minded individuals and discuss anything and everything. This has resulted in the creation of the Manosphere, a collection of men concerned about the state of men and masculinity and how society views and treats men. One of the places online this community has found a home is the popular website Reddit, which offers the ability to create individual pages in which communities can form around and discuss and share information on almost any topic they desire. This study aimed to investigate the ways in which one community on Reddit, …

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Effects Of Nurses' Workload On Creativity And Innovation: Examining The Role Of Trait Mindfulness As A Moderator, Kinjal Chheda Jan 2020

Effects Of Nurses' Workload On Creativity And Innovation: Examining The Role Of Trait Mindfulness As A Moderator, Kinjal Chheda

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The workload is one of the dominant stressful factors among the nursing occupation that results in negative consequences at the individual, team, and organizational levels. On the other hand, creativity and innovation can help nurses and organizations to provide better patient care and maintain a competitive edge in a fast dynamic environment. However, this becomes challenging when nurses are exposed to a frequent increase in workload. Within this study, I first examine the form of the relationships between 1) workload (stressor) and creativity (outcome 1); and 2) workload and innovation (outcome 2) to comprehend the optimal conditions to achieve positive …

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Dynamic Modeling And Simulation Of A Power Plant Steam Condenser On The Siemens Sppa-T3000 Platform, Mohammad Odeh Jan 2020

Dynamic Modeling And Simulation Of A Power Plant Steam Condenser On The Siemens Sppa-T3000 Platform, Mohammad Odeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With rapidly increasing computational power, modeling and simulation of complex systems is gradually becoming the norm for evaluating and predicting performance. This research focuses on modeling and simulating thermodynamic behavior of condensers within Combined Cycle Power Plants. This is particularly useful for power generation companies as this allows a wide range of operating conditions to be simulated and characterized without risking damage or the need to shut down the power plant, all of which results in losing revenue in the process. Moreover, being able to observe the thermodynamic evolution of the system provides useful insight into efficiency and response to …

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The Improvement Of Shewhart-Stable Time Series Processes By Applying Jensen-Shannon Complexity Measures To Characterize Emergent Structure, Blaine Lorimer Jan 2020

The Improvement Of Shewhart-Stable Time Series Processes By Applying Jensen-Shannon Complexity Measures To Characterize Emergent Structure, Blaine Lorimer

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Despite the nearly universal imperative to continuously improve processes, Shewhart-stable time series are often ignored for improvement because of various generalized assumptions and "rules", many of which are actually very context dependent. The process control literature presents widely divergent views, including the extreme position that stable processes are completely random and therefore any further compensation ("tampering") can only increase process variability. The traditional reductionist approach to process improvement characterizes underlying factors using statistical variance measures, which has been very effective for unstable processes. However, this approach, especially when it involves Shewhart control charts, is generally much less effective for directing …

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Undergraduate Nursing Students' Depth Of Reflection And Perceptions Of Self-Debriefing Following Virtual Simulation: A Multi-Method Descriptive Study, Valorie Mackenna Jan 2020

Undergraduate Nursing Students' Depth Of Reflection And Perceptions Of Self-Debriefing Following Virtual Simulation: A Multi-Method Descriptive Study, Valorie Mackenna

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Virtual simulation is a method of simulation-based education in which students participate in a clinical experience within a computer program and away from a clinical environment or classroom. This innovation makes simulation more accessible for learning, but also more challenging when it comes to providing a debriefing activity directly afterward by a facilitator. The purpose of debriefing is to afford learners the opportunity to reflect on the experience with a goal toward improvement. From the best practice standards, two recommendations stipulate that a debriefing session should occur soon after a simulation and should promote reflection. Self-debriefing is uniquely capable of …

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Rethinking Burnout In Informal Caregivers: Development And Validation Of The Informal Caregiver Burnout Inventory - 10 Item Form, Nicholas James Jan 2020

Rethinking Burnout In Informal Caregivers: Development And Validation Of The Informal Caregiver Burnout Inventory - 10 Item Form, Nicholas James

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Measurement of informal caregiver burnout is typically achieved by re-purposing scales of occupational burnout. Such approaches have several methodological and theoretical weaknesses. This paper proposes a new tool for measuring caregiver burnout: The Informal Caregiver Burnout Inventory (ICBI). In the first portion of this study, focused feedback was collected from within-field experts and caregivers. Following item revision, an online sample of informal US caregivers of an individual with dementia was collected. Item Response Theory analysis was used to prune low-information or low-consistency items from the scale. The finalized ICBI contained 10 items and showed strong convergent validity, adequately differentiated burnout …

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Additive Manufacturing Of Elastomeric Lung Phantoms In Radiation Oncology, Jonathan Sookdeo Jan 2020

Additive Manufacturing Of Elastomeric Lung Phantoms In Radiation Oncology, Jonathan Sookdeo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Cancer is a particularly difficult disease to manage and treat, with cancer of the lung being a notably complex disease to treat with radiation therapy. In this study, a stereolithography-based 3D printing process was developed to fabricate human lung phantoms with identical mechanical and physical properties of human lungs in order to assist with targeted radiation therapy. A highly flexible UV photopolymer material with an elastic modulus of approximately 350 KPa was formulated for use in a custom-built stereolithography-based 3D printing apparatus. The printer built for 3D printing of the photopolymer features a large build volume with off-shelf components with …

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Identifying Diurnal Variability Of Brain Connectivity Patterns Using Graph Theory, Farzad Vasheghani Farahani Jan 2020

Identifying Diurnal Variability Of Brain Connectivity Patterns Using Graph Theory, Farzad Vasheghani Farahani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Circadian rhythms are 24-hour fluctuations determining periodicity in a wide range of physiological processes, including neural activity and hormone secretion, which controls sleeping and feeding habits. Despite significant diurnal variation in human brain function, neuroscientists have rarely considered the effects of time-of-day on their studies. Moreover, there are interpersonal discrepancies in sleep-wake patterns, diurnal preferences, and daytime alertness (known as chronotypes), which can cause different diurnal profiles in human cognition and brain performance. The study of circadian typology differences has increased in recent years, however, examining the effects of both time-of-day and people's chronotype requires further elucidation. In the present …

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The Effects Of Gesture Presentation In Video Games, Jack Oakley Jan 2020

The Effects Of Gesture Presentation In Video Games, Jack Oakley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

As everyday and commonplace technology continues to move toward touch devices and virtual reality devices, more and more video games are using gestures as forms of gameplay. While there is much research focused on gestures as user interface navigation methods, we wanted to look into how gestures affect gameplay when used as a gameplay mechanic. In particular, we set out to determine how different ways of presenting gestures might affect the game's difficulty and flow. We designed two versions of a zombie game where the zombies are killed by drawing gestures. The first version of the game is a touchscreen-based …

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Target Acquisition Performance Improvement With Boost And Restoration Filtering Using Deep-Electron-Well Infrared Detectors, Robert Short Jan 2020

Target Acquisition Performance Improvement With Boost And Restoration Filtering Using Deep-Electron-Well Infrared Detectors, Robert Short

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Recent advances in infrared focal plane fabrication have allowed for the production of sensors with small detector size (small pitch) and long integration time (deep electron wells) in large-format arrays. Individually, these are all welcome developments, but we raise the question of whether it is possible to utilize all of these technologies in concert to optimize performance. If so, a key part of such a system will be digital boost filtering, to recover the performance loss due to diffraction blur. We describe a system design concept called PWP (Pitch-Well-Processing) that uses each of these features along with Wiener filtering to …

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Smartphone Sensor-Based Pedestrian Activity Recognition For P2v Communication And Warning System, Dhrubo Hasan Chowdhury Jan 2020

Smartphone Sensor-Based Pedestrian Activity Recognition For P2v Communication And Warning System, Dhrubo Hasan Chowdhury

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The ubiquity of smartphones has made a remarkable influence on everyone's day to day life. Variety of useful built-in sensors provide smartphones with a convenient floor for data collection and analysis. Application development based on the user's location and movement is not a difficult task nowadays. But injuries and deaths due to smartphone-distracted movement on roadways is on the increase. This study explores the capabilities of smartphone inertial sensors for pedestrian activity recognition. Smartphone distracted movements can be predicted from the associated pedestrian's posture, thus inertial sensors can provide effective solution for this specific task. Volunteers were asked to perform …

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Action Recognition In Still Images: Confluence Of Multilinear Methods And Deep Learning, Marjaneh Safaei Jan 2020

Action Recognition In Still Images: Confluence Of Multilinear Methods And Deep Learning, Marjaneh Safaei

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Motion is a missing information in an image, however, it is a valuable cue for action recognition. Thus, lack of motion information in a single image makes action recognition for still images inherently a very challenging problem in computer vision. In this dissertation, we show that both spatial and temporal patterns provide crucial information for recognizing human actions. Therefore, action recognition depends not only on the spatially-salient pixels, but also on the temporal patterns of those pixels. To address the challenge caused by the absence of temporal information in a single image, we introduce five effective action classification methodologies along …

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Seismocardiography - Genesis, And Utilization Of Machine Learning For Variability Reduction And Improved Cardiac Health Monitoring, Peshala Thibbotuwawa Gamage Jan 2020

Seismocardiography - Genesis, And Utilization Of Machine Learning For Variability Reduction And Improved Cardiac Health Monitoring, Peshala Thibbotuwawa Gamage

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Seismocardiography (SCG) is the measured chest surface vibrations resulting from cardiac activity. Although SCG can contain information that correlate with cardiac health, its utility may be limited by lack of understanding of the signal genesis and a variability that can mask subtle SCG changes. The current research utilized medical imaging reconstruction and finite element method (FEM) to simulate SCG by modeling the propagation of myocardial movements to the chest surface. FEM analysis provided a link between myocardial movements and the SCG signals measured at the chest surface and suggested that myocardial movement is a primary source of SCG. Increased understanding …

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Efficient String Algorithms With Applications In Bioinformatics, Sahar Hooshmand Jan 2020

Efficient String Algorithms With Applications In Bioinformatics, Sahar Hooshmand

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The work presented in this dissertation deals with establishing efficient methods for solving some algorithmic problems, which have applications to Bioinformatics. After a short introduction in Chapter 1, an algorithm for genome mappability problem is presented in Chapter 2. Genome mappability is a measure for the approximate repeat structure of the genome with respect to substrings of specific length and a tolerance to define the number of mismatches. The similarity between reads is measured by using the Hamming distance function. Genome mappability is computed for each position in the string and has several applications in designing high-throughput short-read sequencing experiments. …

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Learning Context-Sensitive Human Emotions In Categorical And Dimensional Domains, Pooyan Balouchian Jan 2020

Learning Context-Sensitive Human Emotions In Categorical And Dimensional Domains, Pooyan Balouchian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Still image emotion recognition (ER) has been receiving increasing attention in recent years due to the tremendous amount of social media content on the Web. Many works offer both categorical and dimensional methods to detect image sentiments, while others focus on extracting the true social signals, such as happiness and anger. Deep learning architectures have delivered great suc- cess, however, their dependency on large-scale datasets labeled with (1) emotion, and (2) valence, arousal and dominance, in categorical and dimensional domains respectively, introduce challenges the community tries to tackle. Emotions offer dissimilar semantics when aroused in different con- texts, however "context-sensitive" …

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Improving The Security Of Critical Infrastructure: Metrics, Measurements, And Analysis, Jeman Park Jan 2020

Improving The Security Of Critical Infrastructure: Metrics, Measurements, And Analysis, Jeman Park

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In this work, we propose three important contributions needed in the process of improving the security of the critical infrastructure: metrics, measurement, and analysis. To improve security, metrics are key to ensuring the accuracy of the assessment and evaluation. Measurements are the core of the process of identifying the causality and effectiveness of various behaviors, and accurate measurement with the right assumptions is a cornerstone for accurate analysis. Finally, contextualized analysis essential for understanding measurements. Different results can be derived for the same data according to the analysis method, and it can serve as a basis for understanding and improving …

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Decentralized Adaptable Task Allocation For Ongoing Tasks, Vera Kazakova Jan 2020

Decentralized Adaptable Task Allocation For Ongoing Tasks, Vera Kazakova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis extends an existing bio-inspired model for decentralized task allocation and benchmarks it against alternative approaches to assess robustness in dynamic conditions, applicability to domains with ongoing and hierarchical tasks, and scalability to large teams of agents. The work addresses decentralized task allocation of simple non-communicating agents in dynamic environments of multiple tasks. Multi-area patrolling is used as the sample domain: specific number of agents is required to successfully patrol each area on each timestep, indefinitely, until the system's security needs. Agents must individually decide whether to patrol and where (i.e., task availability is not limited by task demand …

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Prediction Of Pedestrians' Red Light Violations Using Deep Learning, Shile Zhang Jan 2020

Prediction Of Pedestrians' Red Light Violations Using Deep Learning, Shile Zhang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Pedestrians are regarded as Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). Each year, thousands of pedestrians' deaths are caused by traffic crashes, which take up 16% of the total road fatalities and injuries in the U.S. (FHWA, 2018). Crashes can happen if there are interactions between VRUs and motorized transportation. And pedestrians' unexpected crossings, such as red-light violations at the signalized intersections, would expose them to motorized transportation and cause potential collisions. This thesis is intended to predict the pedestrians' red-light violation behaviors at the signalized crosswalks based on an LSTM (Long Short-term Memory) neural network. With video data collected from real traffic …

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