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The Field Of Tya On The Soccer Field: Using Drama Strategies To Enhance Youth Soccer Coaching Practices, Brittany Caine Jan 2020

The Field Of Tya On The Soccer Field: Using Drama Strategies To Enhance Youth Soccer Coaching Practices, Brittany Caine

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This thesis explores best practices for applying drama strategies to coaching youth soccer. How does drama pedagogy translate to sports? Do drama techniques improve youth soccer? How can using drama- based strategies when coaching youth soccer enhance my own coaching abilities and thus improve the quality of youth soccer instruction and experience? This study applies various drama techniques to pre- written coaching curriculum. This manifested in heavily detailed games, supported by pantomime, storytelling, and narrative exploration, all of which further engaged the children in their soccer exercises. This thesis is supplemented by research on best practices regarding youth soccer, as …

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Parallelized X-Ray Tracing With Gpu Ray-Tracing Engine, Joseph Ulseth Jan 2020

Parallelized X-Ray Tracing With Gpu Ray-Tracing Engine, Joseph Ulseth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

X-ray diffraction tomography (XDT) is used to probe material composition of objects, providing improved contrast between materials compared to conventional transmission based computed tomography (CT). In this work, a small angle approximation to Bragg's Equation of diffraction is coupled with parallelized computing using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate XDT simulations. The approximation gives rise to a simple yet useful proportionality between momentum transfer, radial distance of diffracted signal with respect to incoming beam's location, and depth of material, so that ray tracing may be parallelized. NVIDIA's OptiX ray-tracing engine, a parallelized pipeline for GPUs, is employed to perform XDT …

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Nonlinear Optical Mechanisms In Semiconductors And Enhanced Nonlinearities At Epsilon-Near-Zero, Sepehr Ahmadzadeh Benis Jan 2020

Nonlinear Optical Mechanisms In Semiconductors And Enhanced Nonlinearities At Epsilon-Near-Zero, Sepehr Ahmadzadeh Benis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Light does not interact with itself in linear optical materials. Such interactions occur only in non-linear optical (NLO) materials and typically require high intensity optical beams to be signifi-cant. The ever-increasing role of NLO, where intense light may change the properties of the me-dium, has created a pressing demand to invent materials for achieving more efficient light-light and light-matter interaction due to their potential capacity to augment and possibly replace cur-rent technologies with more efficient devices. There are numerous applications of NLO devices in fundamental science, technology, health, and defense such as all-optical computation and sig-nal processing, ultrashort laser technology, …

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Selective Subtraction: An Extension Of Background Subtraction, Adeel Bhutta Jan 2020

Selective Subtraction: An Extension Of Background Subtraction, Adeel Bhutta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Background subtraction or scene modeling techniques model the background of the scene using the stationarity property and classify the scene into two classes of foreground and background. In doing so, most moving objects become foreground indiscriminately, except for perhaps some waving tree leaves, water ripples, or a water fountain, which are typically "learned" as part of the background using a large training set of video data. Traditional techniques exhibit a number of limitations including inability to model partial background or subtract partial foreground, inflexibility of the model being used, need for large training data and computational inefficiency. In this thesis, …

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The Physical Properties Of Asteroids, Leos Pohl Jan 2020

The Physical Properties Of Asteroids, Leos Pohl

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The Small Bodies of the Solar System are leftover material from the formation of planets. Compared with planetary bodies, they have undergone little transformation. Embedded in their physical properties, they provide clues to the conditions and processes that took place since the condensation of the Solar Nebula. Furthermore, asteroids are sources of raw materials that are becoming more costly to obtain from the interior of the Earth. The possibilities of extracting those materials has become a topic of significant interest. In this dissertation, I explore several properties of asteroid material: strength of asteroids, their shielding properties against high energetic particles …

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A Mixed Method Analysis Of Factors Influencing Success And Failure In Undergraduate Engineering Capstone Design Experiences, Kurt Stresau Jan 2020

A Mixed Method Analysis Of Factors Influencing Success And Failure In Undergraduate Engineering Capstone Design Experiences, Kurt Stresau

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The engineering undergraduate curriculum presents substantial opportunities for improvement. Society is calling for a transformation. As the culminating experience for undergraduate engineering students, capstone design team projects represent a window on the curriculum and a particularly fertile ground for understanding these opportunities. However, the factors that influence success and failure in capstone remains an area of inquiry. The work presented here proposes to help us develop a deeper understanding of these factors. The research presented here uses a mixed methods analysis approach for identifying the critical factors impacting capstone design team success, where success is defined from both student and …

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Seismic Design Optimization Of Steel Structures Using Genetic Algorithm, Tiancheng Wang Jan 2020

Seismic Design Optimization Of Steel Structures Using Genetic Algorithm, Tiancheng Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Current seismic codes do not incorporate a well-established methodology for the selection of passive dampers type and their topological distribution and properties along the height of structures. Achieving the intended performance is made more complicated when structures are subject to extreme events and operate well within their inelastic range. This thesis utilizes a self-organizing genetic algorithm (soGA) with probabilistic gene-by-gene crossover and an adaptive active ground motion subset scheme to efficiently find optimal designs of low-rise steel frames subject to large number of extreme ground motions. Different types of passive dampers were considered, while the steel frames were modeled using …

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Mean Field Optimal Control And Related Problems, Wei Yan Jan 2020

Mean Field Optimal Control And Related Problems, Wei Yan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

It has been decades since the first paper that mean field problems were studied. More and more problems are considered or solved as new methods and new concepts have been developed. In this dissertation, we will present a series of results on (recursive) mean field stochastic optimal control problems. Comparing our results with those in the classical stochastic optimal control theory, there are following significant differences. First, the value function of a mean field optimal control problem is not Markovian any more, even when coefficient functions in the problem are deterministic. Second, the cost functional we considered is induced by …

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Tunable Few- To Many-Cycle Source For High-Order Harmonic Generation And Time-Resolved Spectroscopy, John Beetar Jan 2020

Tunable Few- To Many-Cycle Source For High-Order Harmonic Generation And Time-Resolved Spectroscopy, John Beetar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The temporal confinement of laser light pulses to durations approaching the optical period, and the subsequent conversion of these pulses into extreme ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths through the process of high-order harmonic generation (HHG), has enabled measurement and control of ultrafast processes spanning picosecond to attosecond timescales. Typically achieved by nonlinear compression of multi-cycle pulses in gas-filled hollow-core fibers, compression to single-and even sub-cycle durations is now becoming routine due to the availability of state-of-the-art Ti:sapphire laser amplifiers outputting millijoule level pulses with pulse durations below ten cycles. Even so, reliance on mJ-level Ti:sapphire lasers has in most cases limited …

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3d Localization Of Defects In Facility Inspections, Nicholas Califano Jan 2020

3d Localization Of Defects In Facility Inspections, Nicholas Califano

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Wind tunnels are crucial facilities that support the aerospace industry. However, these facilities are large, complex, and pose unique maintenance and inspection requirements. Manual inspections to identify defects such as cracks, missing fasteners, leaks, and foreign objects are important but labor and schedule intensive. The goal of this thesis is to utilize small Unmanned Aircraft Systems with onboard cameras and computer vision-based analysis to automate the inspection of the interior and exterior of NASA's critical wind tunnel facilities. Missing fasteners are detected as the defect class, and existing fasteners are detected to provide potential future missing fastener sites for preventative …

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On Patching Learning Discrepancies In Neural Network Training, Mohamed Elfeki Jan 2020

On Patching Learning Discrepancies In Neural Network Training, Mohamed Elfeki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Neural network's ability to model data patterns proved to be immensely useful in a plethora of practical applications. However, using the physical world's data can be problematic since it is often cluttered, crowded with scattered insignificant patterns, contain unusual compositions, and widely infiltrated with biases and imbalances. Consequently, training a neural network to find meaningful patterns in seas of chaotic data points becomes virtually as hard as finding a needle in a haystack. Specifically, attempting to simulate real-world multi-modal noisy distributions with high precision leads the network to learn an ill-informed inference distribution. In this work, we discuss four techniques …

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Investigation Of Recurrent Neural Network Architectures Based Deep Learning For Short-Term Traffic Speed Forecasting, Armando Fandango Jan 2020

Investigation Of Recurrent Neural Network Architectures Based Deep Learning For Short-Term Traffic Speed Forecasting, Armando Fandango

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The availability of large tranches of data and its influence on traffic flow, make the problem of short-term traffic speed prediction very complex in nature. For more than 40 years, various statistical time series forecasting methods have been applied for traffic speed prediction, and in the last 20 years, machine learning-based methods have gained prevalence. However, more recently, recurrent neural network (RNN) based methods have emerged to show better results for traffic speed prediction\cite{tian2015pred, zhao2017lstm,fu2017usin,chen2016long,dai2017deep,dai2019deep, kanestrom2017traf,shao2016traf,jia2017traf}. As the interest in applying RNN models to the traffic speed predictions started to grow, we found some critical and important unanswered questions with …

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Distributed Multi-Agent Optimization And Control With Applications In Smart Grid, Towfiq Rahman Jan 2020

Distributed Multi-Agent Optimization And Control With Applications In Smart Grid, Towfiq Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With recent advancements in network technologies like 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), the size and complexity of networked interconnected agents have increased rapidly. Although centralized schemes have simpler algorithm design, in practicality, it creates high computational complexity and requires high bandwidth for centralized data pooling. In this dissertation, for distributed optimization of networked multi-agent architecture, the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is investigated. In particular, a new adaptive-gain ADMM algorithm is derived in closed form and under the standard convex property to greatly speed up the convergence of ADMM-based distributed optimization. Using the Lyapunov direct approach, the proposed …

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Study On Comprehensive Mechanical Properties Of Metallic Matrix Cnt Nano-Composites, Shutao Song Jan 2020

Study On Comprehensive Mechanical Properties Of Metallic Matrix Cnt Nano-Composites, Shutao Song

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Carbon nanotubes (CNT) have excellent mechanical strengths, electrical conductivity, and thermal conductivity. CNT reinforced metallic nano-composites are viewed as a great candidate to replace traditional alloy materials. It has been shown that CNTs can greatly enhance the strength, thermal conductivity, and electrical conductivity of composites. However, the ductility of composites would deteriorate due to the addition of CNTs if the fabrication or/and processing methods are not improved or well designed. This dissertation investigated (1) the strengthening mechanisms of CNT on metallic matrix, such as mechanical strength and thermal conductivity, and (2) analytical modeling on the strength-ductility trade-off of CNT reinforced …

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The Dollar General: Continuous Custom Gesture Recognition Techniques At Everyday Low Prices, Eugene Taranta Jan 2020

The Dollar General: Continuous Custom Gesture Recognition Techniques At Everyday Low Prices, Eugene Taranta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Humans use gestures to emphasize ideas and disseminate information. Their importance is apparent in how we continuously augment social interactions with motion—gesticulating in harmony with nearly every utterance to ensure observers understand that which we wish to communicate, and their relevance has not escaped the HCI community's attention. For almost as long as computers have been able to sample human motion at the user interface boundary, software systems have been made to understand gestures as command metaphors. Customization, in particular, has great potential to improve user experience, whereby users map specific gestures to specific software functions. However, custom gesture recognition …

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Advanced Econometic Models For Modeling Flows: Application To Shared Economy, Bibhas Dey Jan 2020

Advanced Econometic Models For Modeling Flows: Application To Shared Economy, Bibhas Dey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Travel and tourism industry is undergoing transformation with the flourishing of online sharing economy marketplaces such as Bike Share services, Uber/Lyft (for taxi services), Eatwith (for community restaurants), and AirBnB (for accommodation). The current research effort contributes to literature on sharing economy service flow analysis by formulating and estiamting econometric approaches for analyzing frequency variables. The sharing economy alternatives investigated include: (a) accommodation service (AirBnB), (b) bikeshare service (Citi bike, NYC) and (c) ride hailing service (UBER/LYFT/Taxi). In the first part of the dissertation, we develop a copula based negative binomial count model framework to count AirBnB listings at census …

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Towards Large-Scale And Robust Code Authorship Identification With Deep Feature Learning, Mohammed Abuhamad Jan 2020

Towards Large-Scale And Robust Code Authorship Identification With Deep Feature Learning, Mohammed Abuhamad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Successful software authorship identification has both software forensics applications and privacy implications. However, the process requires an efficient extraction of quality authorship attributes. The extraction of such attributes is very challenging due to several factors such as the variety of software formats, number of available samples, and possible obfuscation or adversarial manipulation. We focus on software authorship identification from three central perspectives: large-scale single-authored software, real-world multi-authored software, and the robustness assessment of code authorship identification methods against adversarial attacks. First, we propose DL-CAIS, a deep Learning-based approach for software authorship attribution, that facilitates large-scale, format-independent, language-oblivious, and obfuscation-resilient software …

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Space Weathering Simulation Trends On Carbonaceous Chondrites, Andrew Malfavon Jan 2020

Space Weathering Simulation Trends On Carbonaceous Chondrites, Andrew Malfavon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Space weathering on primitive asteroids is an ongoing area of research. Primitive asteroids have low geometric albedo (= 0.15) and mostly featureless visible spectra (~0.5 - 0.9 µm) (Campins et al. 2018). Higher albedo S-type asteroids and their corresponding meteorites, ordinary chondrites, have well-characterized space weathering effects. The generally lower albedo primitive asteroids and their less common corresponding meteorites, carbonaceous chondrites, have shown various, sometimes disagreeing results in laboratory simulations. Experiments simulating solar wind exposure on carbonaceous chondrites by Lantz et al. (2017) and Nakamura et al. 2019 showed complex trends on different types of meteorite samples. Thompson et al. …

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The Level Of Creative Thinking Of Stem-Oriented Middle And High School Children Associated With The Level Of Self-Motivated Play And Success Within A Builder Game And Engagement In Builder Gaming Communities' Social Media Culture, John Aedo Jan 2020

The Level Of Creative Thinking Of Stem-Oriented Middle And High School Children Associated With The Level Of Self-Motivated Play And Success Within A Builder Game And Engagement In Builder Gaming Communities' Social Media Culture, John Aedo

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Literature indicates that the United States has fallen behind other countries in the world in terms of creativity. At the same, children's self-motivated gaming and involvement in gaming communities have grown as a major pass time. The literature is inconsistent on the relationship between games and creativity with some indicating benefit while others indicate harm. Might the observed level of creative thinking among children be associated with the level of a priori self-motivated engagement with creative games and associated social media? Given the wide spectrum of the kinds of games, this research considers the "builder" (e.g. Minecraft) genre and related …

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Analyzing And Detecting Internet Of Things Malware Using Residual Static Graph- And String-Based Artifacts, Hisham Alasmary Jan 2020

Analyzing And Detecting Internet Of Things Malware Using Residual Static Graph- And String-Based Artifacts, Hisham Alasmary

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has become wider and adopted many features from social networks and mainly uses sensing devices technologies, causing a rapid increase in production and adoption. However, security and privacy are serious threats that users usually take precautions to protect their devices and information. Thus, understanding the security shortcomings at first stage will educate IoT users to protect their connected things. Understanding IoT software through analysis, comparison (with other types of malware), and detection (from benign IoT) is an essential problem to mitigate security threats. We focus on two central perspectives, the graph and string representations …

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High-Speed Interferometry And Visible Videography For Meniscus Curvature Analysis During Anisotropic Hemiwicking, John Bal Jan 2020

High-Speed Interferometry And Visible Videography For Meniscus Curvature Analysis During Anisotropic Hemiwicking, John Bal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Recent advancements in microelectronics have increased the need for thermal management systems capable of high heat flux dissipation within significant spatial constraints. One method of increasing local heat fluxes is the fabrication of superhydrophilic materials via micro/nanostructuring of the surface. Superhydrophilic surfaces act in a self-pumping capacity, spreading fluid beyond its intrinsic meniscus length to form thin-films, a process known as "hemiwicking", with practical applications in evaporative cooling, as well as flow, pool, and thin-film boiling. Of particular interest is anisotropic hemiwicking via asymmetric microstructuring. The microscopic asymmetricity of the design induces a macroscopically preferred direction of wicking, which has …

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A Comprehensive Investigation Of Hispanic Student Success In Gateway Stem Courses At Five State Of Florida Institutions, Renee Becker Jan 2020

A Comprehensive Investigation Of Hispanic Student Success In Gateway Stem Courses At Five State Of Florida Institutions, Renee Becker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

National employment data forecasts a significant need for graduates in the STEM disciplines for middle-income American jobs. If the American labor force is to keep pace with the global economy, it is critically important that American higher education increase STEM degree production. Currently, minority populations lack access and thus opportunity for success in higher education, but, among them, Hispanic peoples account for about 59 million Americans, are the youngest demographic, and have the highest growth rate of any ethnic group. Hispanic students are inadequately represented in higher education enrollment numbers, graduation rates, graduate degree attainment, and STEM degree attainment. While …

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Transfunctions And Other Topics In Measure Theory, Jason Bentley Jan 2020

Transfunctions And Other Topics In Measure Theory, Jason Bentley

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Measures are versatile objects which can represent how populations or supplies are distributed within a given space by assigning sizes to subregions (or subsets) of that space. To model how populations or supplies are shifted from one configuration to another, it is natural to use functions between measures, called transfunctions. Any measurable function can be identified with its push-forward transfunction. Other transfunctions exist such as convolution operators. In this manner, transfunctions are treated as generalized functions. This dissertation serves to build the theory of transfunctions and their connections to other mathematical fields. Transfunctions that identify with continuous or measurable push-forward …

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Open-Ended Search Through Minimal Criterion Coevolution, Jonathan Brant Jan 2020

Open-Ended Search Through Minimal Criterion Coevolution, Jonathan Brant

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Search processes guided by objectives are ubiquitous in machine learning. They iteratively reward artifacts based on their proximity to an optimization target, and terminate upon solution space convergence. Some recent studies take a different approach, capitalizing on the disconnect between mainstream methods in artificial intelligence and the field's biological inspirations. Natural evolution has an unparalleled propensity for generating well-adapted artifacts, but these artifacts are decidedly non-convergent. This new class of non-objective algorithms induce a divergent search by rewarding solutions according to their novelty with respect to prior discoveries. While the diversity of resulting innovations exhibit marked parallels to natural evolution, …

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Exoplanets: Correlated Noise And Cautionary Tales, Ryan Challener Jan 2020

Exoplanets: Correlated Noise And Cautionary Tales, Ryan Challener

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Transiting exoplanets provide the best opportunity for planetary characterization, and thus the search for life outside the Solar System. These planets orbit such that they pass in front ("transit'') and behind ("eclipse'') their host star, and a spectrum of the lost flux constrains the atmospheric properties of the planet. In transits, the flux modulation scales with the cross-sectional area of the planet, and the spectrum includes signatures of molecules in the upper atmosphere of the planet's terminator, which the host star's light passes through on the way to the observer. With eclipses, the lost flux is the direct emission of …

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Extracting Data-Level Parallelism In High-Level Synthesis For Reconfigurable Architectures, Juan Andres Escobedo Contreras Jan 2020

Extracting Data-Level Parallelism In High-Level Synthesis For Reconfigurable Architectures, Juan Andres Escobedo Contreras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools are a set of algorithms that allow programmers to obtain implementable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code from specifications written high-level, sequential languages such as C, C++, or Java. HLS has allowed programmers to code in their preferred language while still obtaining all the benefits hardware acceleration has to offer without them needing to be intimately familiar with the hardware platform of the accelerator. In this work we summarize and expand upon several of our approaches to improve the automatic memory banking capabilities of HLS tools targeting reconfigurable architectures, namely Field-Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGA's. We explored …

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Under Pressure: Analysis Of An Undergraduate Intervention For Stem Students In Academic Decline, Dena Ford Jan 2020

Under Pressure: Analysis Of An Undergraduate Intervention For Stem Students In Academic Decline, Dena Ford

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Students who successfully persist in STEM majors often gain positive attention highlighting their preparation and ability, though far too often, students who struggle while persisting in the major go unnoticed. This research analyzed demographics and characteristics of select undergraduate STEM majors with a focus on biology and forensic science who were not reaching the major GPA benchmark requirements. These students were persisting while in academic decline. Characteristics of interest in this study include self-reported level of familial pressure to be in the major, anxiety level of current declared major, and course workload anxiety level as well as admit type (either …

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Data-Driven Nonlinear Control Designs For Constrained Systems, Roland Harvey Jan 2020

Data-Driven Nonlinear Control Designs For Constrained Systems, Roland Harvey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Systems with nonlinear dynamics are theoretically constrained to the realm of nonlinear analysis and design, while explicit constraints are expressed as equalities or inequalities of state, input, and output vectors of differential equations. Few control designs exist for systems with such explicit constraints, and no generalized solution has been provided. This dissertation presents general techniques to design stabilizing controls for a specific class of nonlinear systems with constraints on input and output, and verifies that such designs are straightforward to implement in selected applications. Additionally, a closed-form technique for an open-loop problem with unsolvable dynamic equations is developed. Typical optimal …

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Interactions Between Humans, Virtual Agent Characters And Virtual Avatars, Tamara Griffith Jan 2020

Interactions Between Humans, Virtual Agent Characters And Virtual Avatars, Tamara Griffith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Simulations allow people to experience events as if they were happening in the real world in a way that is safer and less expensive than live training. Despite improvements in realism in simulated environments, one area that still presents a challenge is interpersonal interactions. The subtleties of what makes an interaction rich are difficult to define. We may never fully understand the complexity of human interchanges, however there is value in building on existing research into how individuals react to virtual characters to inform future investments. Virtual characters can either be automated through computational processes, referred to as agents, or …

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High-Fidelity Mini-Led And Micro-Led Displays, Yuge Huang Jan 2020

High-Fidelity Mini-Led And Micro-Led Displays, Yuge Huang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Mini-LED and micro-LED are emerging disruptive display technologies, because they can work as local dimmable backlight to significantly enhance the dynamic range of conventional LCDs, or as sunlight readable emissive displays. However, there are still unresolved issues impairing their display fidelity: 1) motion blur on high-resolution, large-size and high-luminance devices, 2) limited contrast ratio on mini-LED backlit LCD (mLED-LCD), 3) relatively high power consumption, and 4) compromised ambient contrast ratio. This dissertation tackles with each of these issues for achieving high display fidelity. Motion blur is caused by slow liquid crystal response time and image update delays. Low-duty ratio operation …

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