Digital Commons Network^™

On Determination Of Curvature In Range Images And Volumes, Jacob D. Hauenstein

Dissertations

Determination of surface and hypersurface curvature is considered here. Focus is on the (1) introduction of four new methods for determining surface curvature in range images, (2) introduction of three new methods for determining surface curvature in volumes, (3) introduction of two new methods for determining hypersurface curvature in volumes, and (4) evaluative studies of such types of methods. The evaluative studies include evaluations of existing and new methods based on the accuracy of the determined curvatures, run times, and results on a set of curvature-based tasks.

Improved Modeling And Verification Of Metrology On Small Radius Optics, Reem Alsalamah

Dissertations

This dissertation employs a graphical method of laser beam propagation analysis, the yybar diagram, to develop analytical solutions for a difficult optical metrology challenge: modeling of the behaviour of an interferometric system when testing small radius objects. The method presented utilizes the yybar diagram for Gaussian beams to model interferometric systems. The method enables rapid, intuitive layout and understanding of the complex properties of beam propagation, yielding algebraic calculations producing quantitative results. We first derive a relation for minimum test radius; the smallest radius part that can produce a perfect fluffed fringe, wherein the test and reference waves are identical …

Ultrafast Time-Frequency Spectroscopy Based On Few-Cycle Pump-Probe Transient Reflectometry, Hemang Jani

Dissertations

Over the last decade, advances in novel materials such as two-dimensional (2D) materials, metamaterials, plasmonics, and negative-electron-affinity (NEA) structures have triggered rapid growth in the development of ultrafast optoelectronic devices. This calls for simple yet effective approaches to characterize ultrafast dynamics in these materials and devices. An important aspect of this thesis research is to demonstrate one such approach by amalgamation of state-of-the-art in ultrashort light pulse source with a classical pump-probe methodology to develop a Few-Cycle Pump-Probe Reflectometer (PPR) system, which can offer both high temporal resolution and broad spectral coverage. As one of its applications, this work focuses …

Evaluation Of An Embedded Process Prediction Intrusion Prevention System For Industrial Control Systems, Aaron W. Werth

Dissertations

Highly notable cyber-attacks, such as Stuxnet [44] and the Marocchi attack [18], have targeted critical infrastructure with the goal of affecting physical processes to cause harm. This work presents a payload analysis-based Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) to detect similar attacks by predicting what harm the attacks could cause to the physical process. The IPS developed is called the Embedded Process Prediction Intrusion Prevention System (EPPIPS). EPPIPS will examine incoming command packets and programs that are destined for a Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) that interacts with a physical process. If EPPIPS predicts these packets or programs to be harmful, EPPIPS can …

Teachers' Implementation Of And Stages Of Concern Regarding English Language Arts (Ela) Common Core State Standards (Ccss) In New York State, Alozie Augustine Ogbonna

Dissertations

Problem

In the State of New York, the adoption and implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and associated high-stakes assessments have sparked debates among educators, parents, students and politicians. Educators are concerned about its impact on students' test scores, graduation rates and school funding. With mounting accountability threats, teachers are forced to teach to the test in order to produce desirable test scores (Zimmerman, 2010, as cited in Pinar, 2012, p.17). Unfortunately, there were no studies that promoted understanding of teachers' concerns and the extent to which they were implementing the CCSS. The purpose of this study was …

Preservice Teachers' Preferred Definitions Of Intelligence, And Related Demographics (Age, Gender, Educational Level, Academic Domains And Educational Psychology Enrollment), As Predictors Of Their Implicit Beliefs Of Intelligence, Michelle A. Bacchiocchi

Dissertations

Problem

Just as teachers help their students bridge their prior knowledge to new understandings of ideas including conceptions of intelligence, preservice teachers as future teachers are undergoing the same training and work environment. Preservice teachers' implicit beliefs and their preferred definitions of intelligence are important, since as persons of authority they influence children and their beliefs about ability. For future teachers, there is limited empirical evidence exploring preservice teachers' implicit beliefs about intelligence and how they define intelligence.

Method

A survey was used to collect data on implicit beliefs about intelligence and definitions of intelligence from a sample of 262 …

High Stakes Testing And School Characteristics: A Comparative Study, Kelsey M. Dailey

Dissertations

Problem

The purpose of this quantitative, correlational study was to better understand the relationship between the 2016 Grade 10 ISTEP+ English passing rate and 2018 graduation rate amongst 290 Indiana high schools and the following variables: school size, average SAT reading score, percentage of students passing advanced placement (AP) exams, percentage of special education students, percentage of free or reduced lunch students, percentage of English Language Learner students, and percentage of minority ethnic group students.. The results of the research may further evaluate how 2016 school characteristics are related to the Grade 10, 2016 ISTEP+ English which may suggest future …

Metal Ions Impact On Shewanella Oneidensis Mr-1 Adhesion To Ito Electrode And The Enhancement Of Current Output, Aisha Awad Alshahrani

Dissertations

The goal of this study is to enhance the efficiency of bacterial extracellular electron transfer (EET) in Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 by enhancing adhesion to the electrode's surface. Our results clearly show a major difference in the attachment and behavior of Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 for Ca2+, Pb2+, Cd2+, and Mg2+, compared to the control. the final microbial coverage, as measured by confocal microscopy and cathodic peak charge in cyclic voltammetry (Qpc), increases with increasing metal ion concentrations. We found the cells attached to the electrode increased more with the addition of metal ion concentrations in the following order of metals: Ca2+ …

Exploring The Educational Journeys Of African American Honors Alumni(Nae), Sammie Marie Burton

Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation was to explore and examine the experiences of African American students to and through collegiate honors programs. I aimed to provide another frame for understanding intellectuals by exploring the educational journeys of eight (8) African American, high-achieving alumni(nae). Through qualitative inquiry, this study gives an in-depth understanding to the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that helped students navigate challenging academic settings and evaluate the importance of honors education for students within the Black community. Guided by critical race theory (CRT), findings from this study will provide the research community with entry points to social justice practice …

Teacher Perceptions And Experiences With Self-Regulation Strategies In General Education Classrooms, Sofia Flores-Perez

Dissertations

General education teachers are now serving students with both special education needs and regular education students within a general education environment. Inclusionary practices are increasingly becoming common practice. However, teacher prep-programs concentrate on lesson planning and not enough training is emphasized on classroom management or behavior/academic intervention strategies. There is a dearth of qualitative studies gaining teachers perspectives on this phenomenon. This qualitative study will seek to gain insight about teachers' experiences, perspectives, and practices regarding implementation of self-regulation strategies within a general education setting. the research questions will gain insight on what strategies could look like in a general …

Elucidating The Impact And Mechanism Of Hepatitis C Virus Cell-To-Cell Spread, Karina Durso-Cain

Dissertations

Virus cell-to-cell spread has been implicated in the establishment of persistent infection and has been shown to be involved in the transmission of antiviral resistant mutants. However, relatively little is known about how virus cell-to-cell spread impacts infection or the specific mechanisms by which cell-to-cell spread occurs. as such, this dissertation focused on investigating HCV cell-to-cell spread not only to learn more about this medically important virus, but also to determine the broader impact cell-to-cell spread has on viral infection dynamics, identify the cellular factors involved, and perhaps ultimately provide insight into antiviral strategies that might enhance the barrier to …

Optimization Of Microbial Fuel Cells, Norberto M. Gonzalez

Dissertations

Optimization of microbial fuel cells is investigated by utilizing Shewanella oneidensis as a model microorganism. the microbe's ability to grow and use glucose as a carbon source is explored under varying oxygen environments through an offline PMP derivatization method and HPLC analysis. Shewanella growth and glucose utilization is enhanced under aerobic environments; however, under microaerobic environments the addition of ferric iron results in a faster exponential growth initialization. a flavin mononucleotide modified indium tin oxide electrode is prepared and characterized for its usefulness in microbial fuel cells by controlled potential electrolysis, cyclic voltammetry, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy studies. the electrode …

Teacher Leadership: A Case Study In The Preparation Of Future Teacher Leaders, Abigail Hasebroock

Dissertations

Over the past century, Pre-Kindergarten through 12th grade (PK-12) schools evolved into hierarchical learning organizations that centralized power, decision-making, and leadership at the top in the hands of a few predominantly male administrators. the teaching force, by contrast, became majority female. While teacher education programs formalized, the accountability movement that swept across the U.S. schooling system during the 1980s led to narrowed teacher educator programs and licensure requirements. Consequently, traditional teacher education programs in four-year universities focused more on theory and pedagogy but less on praxis and leadership in the name of producing highly-qualified teachers. Today, new pathways for teacher …

Lewis Acid-Carbonyl Solution Interactions And Their Implications In Catalytic Systems, Carly Soren Hanson

Dissertations

The utilization of Lewis acids to activate substrates containing carbonyls is ubiquitous in organic synthetic methods. in order to facilitate the development of novel reaction pathways and understand existing methods, it is necessary to determine the solution interactions between Lewis acids and Lewis bases. Historically, the characterization of the interactions of Lewis pairs has relied on solid state infrared (IR) spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography, as well as in situ NMR. I have developed a method utilizing in situ IR spectroscopy and solution conductivity towards the identification of the solution structures formed when a range of carbonyl compounds are combined with …

Evaluating The Impact Of Marriage Renewal Workshop On Marital Satisfaction, Communication, Conflict Management, And Forgiveness: A Quantitative And Qualitative Analysis, Hien T. Kim Nguyen

Dissertations

The objectives of this study were to examine the impact of the Marriage Renewal Workshop (MRW) program for relationship satisfaction, communication skills, conflict resolution skills and levels of forgiveness among Vietnamese American married couple participants and their perceptions of the program's impact regarding these outcome variables. This evaluation mixed-method study employed a group of 64 participants who participated in before, after (using 4 closed-ended and open-ended questions) and six-week follow-up surveys and a group of 11 program participants who volunteered for in-depth interviews. Quantitative data were examined by using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and Mann-Whitney U Test, whereas qualitative …

O'Shaughnessy Program Review, Natalya Sagalov

Dissertations

Loyola Academy, a Jesuit High School, seeks to create college-bound students through a rigorous curriculum that focuses on academics, faith, and physical fitness. Students who require additional academic support participate in the O'Shaughnessy program, a structured class that focuses on literacy and student skills. in 2015, the O'Shaughnessy program was changed from a four-year program to a two-year program to better prepare students for the independence of college. the purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of this change while focusing on best practices in secondary reading instruction and study skills in a college readiness framework. as Loyola …

Heard Least But Matter Most: Listening To Youth Voice To Understand The Process Of Youth Empowerment, Carly Michelle Tindall-Biggins

Dissertations

The current literature pertaining to youth empowerment documents several outcomes associated with these processes. Despite this knowledge base, little is understood about the processes through which these outcomes are achieved. Increased understanding of these processes is necessary to help further facilitate the successful implementation of these processes across school and community contexts. the purpose of this study was to examine the factors which contribute to the successful enactment of empowerment processes. This study utilized a qualitative case study design to examine the empowerment processes in place within a community outside a large metropolitan area in the Midwest. Results identified various …

Development Of Methods For The Removal Of Selected Pollutants From Several Matrices And Identification Of Unknown Pollutants Adsorbed Onto Plastics Collected From Freshwater, Kathryn Marie Renyer

Dissertations

Plastic pollution represents one of greatest anthropogenic threats to the environment. Five to ten billion tons of plastic are manufactured every year. Currently, Earth's ecosystem is contaminated with billions of tons of plastic debris, much of which cannot be recycled. Over time, this plastic debris decomposes into small particles. Small plastic particles are known to adsorb toxic compounds in marine environments. My research is concerned with creating novel methods for the detection and quantification of selected persistent organic pollutants from several media. Specifically, I developed methods for the detection and quantification of endosulfan sulfate (ESS) from Lumbricus terrestris tissue and …

Electron Transfer Of Shewanella Oneidensis Mr-1 At Clay-Modified Ito Electrode, Reem Faez Alshehri

Dissertations

Various strategies have been established to enhance the extracellular electron transfer and energy output capability of microbial fuel cells, with the majority being aimed at anode modification. The anode has a significant impact on the electricity generation performance of MFCs because it is in direct contact with the microorganisms. The materials of the anode should be favorable for the bacterial cell and capable to facilitate the electron transfer. Developing of an electrode using low-cost and effective materials assists to enhance the bacterial cell attachment and extracellular electron transfer. This provides a significant improvement in MFC performance. In this study, clay …

Changing Concepts Of Merit In China's Education System: An Oral Historical Research Of Teachers In Key Schools, Yao Chen

Dissertations

This study examines teachers' views of meritocracy and how their conceptions and views influence their everyday practices in schools with regard to producing, recognizing, and awarding individual merit in China's key schools. This study uses a qualitative methodology, especially oral history interviews. It shows that the meaning of merit has changed over time, depending on cultural and institutional contexts during China's transition from Mao's age to the present. Thirteen teachers, who have been working in the education system of China since the early 1980s, and who have worked as teachers in China's key (magnet/elite) schools (including higher education institutions), were …

Brain Disease Detection From Eegs: Comparing Spiking And Recurrent Neural Networks For Non-Stationary Time Series Classification, Hristo Stoev

Dissertations

Modeling non-stationary time series data is a difficult problem area in AI, due to the fact that the statistical properties of the data change as the time series progresses. This complicates the classification of non-stationary time series, which is a method used in the detection of brain diseases from EEGs. Various techniques have been developed in the field of deep learning for tackling this problem, with recurrent neural networks (RNN) approaches utilising Long short-term memory (LSTM) architectures achieving a high degree of success. This study implements a new, spiking neural network-based approach to time series classification for the purpose of …

Content-Based Filtering Recommendation Approach To Label Irish Legal Judgements, Sandesh Gangadhar

Dissertations

Machine learning approaches are applied across several domains to either simplify or automate tasks which directly result in saved time or cost. Text document labelling is one such task that requires immense human knowledge about the domain and efforts to review, understand and label the documents. The company Stare Decisis summarises legal judgements and labels them as they are made available on Irish public legal source www.courts.ie. This research presents a recommendation-based approach to reduce the time for solicitors at Stare Decisis by reducing many numbers of available labels to pick from to a concentrated few that potentially contains the …

Optimization Of Home Mortgage Mover Predictive Model Applying Geo-Spatial Analysis And Machine Learning Techniques, Natalia Riscovaia

Dissertations

In the last decade digital innovations and online banking services have significantly changed customers banking preferences and behaviour. Banking industry is going through the changes and developments in the provision of banking services that are affecting the structure and the organization of the bank network. However, private home loan, referred as Home Mortgage hereinafter, continue to remain among the products, that customers prefer to have personal interaction about with professional advisors prior making the decision to apply for the loan with financial institution.

Synthetic Data Generation Using Wasserstein Conditional Gans With Gradient Penalty (Wcgans-Gp), Manhar Singh Walia

Dissertations

With data protection requirements becoming stricter, the data privacy has become increasingly important and more crucial than ever. This has led to restrictions on the availability and dissemination of real-world datasets. Synthetic data offers a viable solution to overcome barriers of data access and sharing. Existing data generation methods require a great deal of user-defined rules, manual interactions and domainspecific knowledge. Moreover, they are not able to balance the trade-off between datausability and privacy. Deep learning based methods like GANs have seen remarkable success in synthesizing images by automatically learning the complicated distributions and patterns of real data. But they …

Improving Transfer Learning For Use In Multi-Spectral Data, Yuvraj Sharma

Dissertations

Recently Nasa as well as the European Space Agency have made observational satellites images public. The main reason behind opening it to public is to foster research among university students and corporations alike. Sentinel is a program by the European Space Agency which has plans to release a series of seven satellites in lower earth orbit for observing land and sea patterns. Recently huge datasets have been made public by the Sentinel program. Many advancements have been made in the field of computer vision in the last decade. Krizhevsky, Sutskever & Hinton, 2012, revolutionized the field of image analysis by …

Convex Relaxations Of A Continuum Aggregation Model, And Their Efficient Numerical Solution, Mahdi Bandegi

Dissertations

In this dissertation, the global minimization of a large deviations rate function (the Helmholtz free energy functional) for the Boltzmann distribution is discussed. The Helmholtz functional arises in large systems of interacting particles — which are widely used as models in computational chemistry and molecular dynamics. Global minimizers of the rate function (Helmholtz functional) characterize the asymptotics of the partition function and thereby determine many important physical properties such as self-assembly, or phase transitions. Finding and verifying local minima to the Helmholtz free energy functional is relatively straightforward. However, finding and verifying global minima is much more difficult since the …

Quantitative Metrics For Mutation Testing, Amani M. Ayad

Dissertations

Program mutation is the process of generating versions of a base program by applying elementary syntactic modifications; this technique has been used in program testing in a variety of applications, most notably to assess the quality of a test data set. A good test set will discover the difference between the original program and mutant except if the mutant is semantically equivalent to the original program, despite being syntactically distinct.

Equivalent mutants are a major nuisance in the practice of mutation testing, because they introduce a significant amount of bias and uncertainty in the analysis of test results; indeed, mutants …

Dimension Reduction Techniques For High Dimensional And Ultra-High Dimensional Data, Subha Datta

Dissertations

This dissertation introduces two statistical techniques to tackle high-dimensional data, which is very commonplace nowadays. It consists of two topics which are inter-related by a common link, dimension reduction.

The first topic is a recently introduced classification technique, the weighted principal support vector machine (WPSVM), which is incorporated into a spatial point process framework. The WPSVM possesses an additional parameter, a weight parameter, besides the regularization parameter. Most statistical techniques, including WPSVM, have an inherent assumption of independence, which means the data points are not connected with each other in any manner. But spatial data violates this assumption. Correlation between …

Early Detection Of Fake News On Social Media, Yang Liu

Dissertations

The ever-increasing popularity and convenience of social media enable the rapid widespread of fake news, which can cause a series of negative impacts both on individuals and society. Early detection of fake news is essential to minimize its social harm. Existing machine learning approaches are incapable of detecting a fake news story soon after it starts to spread, because they require certain amounts of data to reach decent effectiveness which take time to accumulate. To solve this problem, this research first analyzes and finds that, on social media, the user characteristics of fake news spreaders distribute significantly differently from those …

Investigation Of Small-Scale Energy Release And Transfer Processes In The Solar Atmosphere With High-Resolution Observations In Infrared, Xu Yang

Dissertations

Solar spectrum in the infrared (IR) contains abundant information of solar activities, however, it has not spectral lines in the solar IR spectrum provide different tools to probe the solar atmosphere in various heights. This radiation band in such relatively long wavelength includes various atom and molecule spectral lines that are generated by relatively small energy level transitions. The temperature-sensitive and highly dynamic spectral lines could reveal the energy transmission process more easily than those in the visible wavelength of solar emission. Moreover, the better magnetic sensitivities for the infrared lines resulting from their longer wavelength make them detect the …