Digital Commons Network^™

Predicting Violent Crime Reports From Geospatial And Temporal Attributes Of Us 911 Emergency Call Data, Vincent Corcoran

Dissertations

The aim of this study is to create a model to predict which 911 calls will result in crime reports of a violent nature. Such a prediction model could be used by the police to prioritise calls which are most likely to lead to violent crime reports. The model will use geospatial and temporal attributes of the call to predict whether a crime report will be generated. To create this model, a dataset of characteristics relating to the neighbourhood where the 911 call originated will be created and combined with characteristics related to the time of the 911 call. Geospatial …

Enhancing Partially Labelled Data: Self Learning And Word Vectors In Natural Language Processing, Eamon Mcentee

Dissertations

There has been an explosion in unstructured text data in recent years with services like Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp helping drive this growth. Many of these companies are facing pressure to monitor the content on their platforms and as such Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques are more important than ever. There are many applications of NLP ranging from spam filtering, sentiment analysis of social media, automatic text summarisation and document classification.

Performance Comparison Of Hybrid Cnn-Svm And Cnn-Xgboost Models In Concrete Crack Detection, Sahana Thiyagarajan

Dissertations

Detection of cracks mainly has been a sort of essential step in visual inspection involved in construction engineering as it is the commonly used building material and cracks in them is an early sign of de-basement. It is hard to find cracks by a visual check for the massive structures. So, the development of crack detecting systems generally has been a critical issue. The utilization of contextual image processing in crack detection is constrained, as image data usually taken under real-world situations vary widely and also includes the complex modelling of cracks and the extraction of handcrafted features. Therefore the …

A Comparative Analysis Of Student Success And Perceptions Of Engagement Between Face-To-Face And Online College Courses, Shane Carroll May

Dissertations

The traditional face-to-face classroom is slowly losing its place in education as online learning becomes increasingly popular. With the growth of online learning, it falls to educators, administrators, and researchers to ensure students enrolled in online courses are being given an education equal to students enrolled in face-to-face courses. Beyond ensuring the students in online courses perform the same as their peers in traditional courses, students across all delivery systems need to be engaged. In this study, the effectiveness and perceived engagement of students between online and face-to-face courses were examined comparing outcomes, attendance, and withdrawal rates; and perceptions of …

An Initial Investigation Of The Role Of The Northeastern Alabama Plateaus In Modifying The Near-Storm Environment Of Potentially Tornadic Storms, Anthony Walter Lyza

Dissertations

The effects of terrain on tornadoes are poorly understood. Efforts to understand terrain effects on tornadoes have been limited in scope, typically examining a small number of cases with limited observations or idealized numerical simulations. One region where topography has been thought to potentially impact tornado frequency is along the Sand Mountain and Lookout Mountain plateaus in northeastern Alabama. It has been suspected that storms often intensify and produce tornadoes upon reaching these plateaus, particularly Sand Mountain. The role of these plateaus in modifying the near-storm environment and storm evolution became a focus of the VORTEX-SE field campaign beginning in …

Using Satellite Observations Of River Height And Vegetation To Improve National Water Model Initialization And Streamflow Prediction, Nicholas J. Elmer

Dissertations

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Water Prediction (OWP) implemented an operational, high-resolution National Water Model (NWM) in August 2016 to provide unprecedented hydrologic forecast capabilities on a national scale. The NWM, which will become the standard for operational hydrologic forecasting in the United States in a few years, provides streamflow forecasts for 2.7 million channel reaches within the continental United States. However, only 0.25% of these channel reaches are currently being initialized with actual observations gathered by approximately 7000 in-situ U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) stream gauges. Furthermore, no other satellite datasets are being assimilated or …

Characterization Of Bacterial Peptidyl-Trna Hydrolase 1 From Different Phylogenetic Clades, Daniel Joseph Scott Strange

Dissertations

Antibiotic resistant bacterial infections have become increasingly difficult to treat resulting in approximately 23,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Some bacterial infections, like P. aeruginosa and M. tuberculosis, have become pan- and multi-drug resistance further limiting treatment options. This has placed an increased demand on the medical community to find novel antibiotics and novel antibiotic drug targets that can be used for narrow spectrum inhibition of bacteria. One such target is bacterial peptidyl- tRNA hydrolase 1 (Pth1). Pth1 recycles tRNA by hydrolyzing the bond between peptidyl-tRNA and the growing polypeptide chain during abortive translation, thus, allowing free tRNA …

Molecular Role Of Angiopoietin-Like 4'S Carboxy-Terminal Domain In Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Progression, Crissy L. Tarver

Dissertations

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) represents 85% of pancreatic cancers. With early stage diagnosis, PDAC has a relative five-year survival rate of 34% but drops to 3% with metastasis. There is a lack of distinct symptoms and dependable biomarkers which delays diagnosis, leading to poor prognosis. Angiopoietin-like 4 (ANGPTL4) protein has been indicated in the progression of several types of aggressive cancer. ANGPTL4 is natively present in two fragments, an amino-terminus coiled-coil domain (nANGPTL4) and a carboxy-terminus fibrinogen-like domain (cANGPTL4), which have demonstrated diverse biological functions. Biochemical studies have been performed but a full structural understanding of functions and interactions is …

Generating Cyberattack Model Components From An Attack Pattern Database, Tymaine S. Whitaker

Dissertations

The number, variety, sophistication, and consequences of cyberattacks are all growing. The developers and users of computer systems should have some knowledge of the different types of cyberattacks that can occur. Models of cyberattack patterns can contribute to that knowledge. Executable models of cyberattacks used to simulate the attacks can reveal system vulnerabilities and improve decisions made by both attackers and defenders during attacks. One type of cyberattack model, Attack Trees, supports visualization and formal analysis of cyberattacks. A second type of model, Petri nets with Players, Strategies, and Costs (PNPSC), was developed specifically for cyberattack modeling as part of …

Reinforcement Learning Applied To Manufacturing Material Handling, Swetha Govindaiah

Dissertations

Applying machine learning methods to improve the efficiency of complex manufacturing processes, such as material handling, can be challenging. The interconnectedness of the multiple components that make up such processes and the typically large number of variables required to specify procedures and plans within them combine to make it very difficult to map the details of a real-world manufacturing process to an abstract mathematical representation suitable for machine learning methods. This work comprises both applied and theoretical results. On the applied side, machine learning, in particular reinforcement learning, was used to generate increasingly efficient plans for material handling to satisfy …

Hardware Data Value Tracing In Multicores, Mounika Ponugoti

Dissertations

Embedded computing systems powered by modern systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) running sophisticated software applications are indispensable in modern communi-cation, transportation, infrastructure, medicine, military, and entertainment. Semi-conductor technology trends have enabled the design of SoCs that often combine multiple processor cores, hardware accelerators, direct memory controllers, and pe-ripheral interfaces, all connected through an on-chip interconnect. Faster, cheaper, and smaller SoCs have in turn enabled new applications that may have tens of mil-lions of lines of code. These trends have led to rising software engineering costs in modern embedded systems that currently account for over 80% of the total engineer-ing costs. Recent studies found …

Synthesizing Realistic Social Networks Using Personality Compatibility, Daniel Anthony O'Neil

Dissertations

Social structures and interpersonal relationships may be represented in abstract mathematical objects known as social networks. A social network consists of nodes corresponding to people and links between pairs of nodes corresponding to relationships between those people. Social networks can be constructed by examining groups of people and identifying the relationships of interest between them. There are circumstances where such empirical social networks are unavailable, or their use would be undesirable. Consequently, methods to generate synthetic social networks that are not identical to real-world networks but have desired structural similarities to them are valuable. A process for generating synthetic social …

Protocol Misbehavior Mitigation Framework For Broadcast Communications In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Kumar Sharshembiev

Dissertations

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) have a great potential to become the next technological paradigm shift to enable Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Over the years, significant research progress has been made in VANETs to develop standards, protocols and applications to improve driver/passenger safety, traffic efficiency, and general cooperative awareness. Broadcast communications are the main critical information dissemination method in VANETs. Such wireless broadcasts empower highly dynamic network nodes in VANETs to quickly share pertinent information (emergency accident alert, road conditions, etc.) with each other. The highly dynamic nature of moving nodes and geographical constraints make the VANET topology a complex …

Analytical Aeroelastic Models For Chordwise And Spanwise Flexible Flapping Wings In Forward Flight, Deepa Kodali

Dissertations

Animal wings deform significantly during flight. However, the aerodynamic features of flexible wings interacting with the surrounding fluid have not been adequately explored. One of the main challenges in predicting aerodynamic forces is that the wing shape and motion are a priori unknown. In this dissertation, two-way coupled analytical fluid-structure interaction models for chordwise and spanwise flexible flapping wings in forward flight are derived. The unsteady aeroelasticity is modeled with the Euler-Bernoulli beam and Theodorsen equations under the small deformation assumption. The two-way coupling for a chordwise flexible airfoil is realized by considering the trailing-edge deformation relative to the leading-edge …

Analysis And Mitigation Of Laser Frequency Drift And Its Application In Fiber-Optic Sensing, Dipen Barot

Dissertations

Ultralow-noise and ultra-stable sources of reference signals in the optical domain have become indispensable for applications such as precision measurements, optical sensing, optical frequency metrology, coherent optical communications, and microwave photonics. Such sources possess not only very narrow linewidth but also absolute frequency stability. Attaining high frequency stability in the optical domain requires innovative approaches to analyze and mitigate frequency noises and drifts. In this dissertation, a novel scheme of laser frequency analysis with improved specificity is proposed and demonstrated. The proposed method is based on power spectral density (PSD) measurement in the radio-frequency (RF) range aided by electronic frequency …

Development Of Low Stress, Broadband X-Ray Optic Multilayer Coatings, Danielle Nicole Gurgew

Dissertations

The design and development of an in-house X-ray optic multilayer coating deposition system and coating test facility has provided a substantial contribution to research and development of reflective X-ray optic coatings at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). An extensive validation study of the system's capabilities to deposit repeatable, multilayer reflective X-ray optic coatings of various complexities is discussed and the deposition of initial broadband multilayer coatings are presented. Additionally, a coating stress study has been conducted where intrinsic coating stress was measured and characterized for both periodic and depth-graded multilayer coatings. Several stress reduction techniques, post-deposition annealing and stress …

Shock Waves And Nonlinear Plasma Waves Mediated By Pickup Ions And Energetic Particles, Parisa Mostafavi

Dissertations

Shock waves occur frequently in the heliosphere and interstellar medium. They are a manifestation of the nonlinear character of plasma and can accelerate particles to very high energies. At a fundamental physics level, energetic particles determine the dissipative process governing the structure of shock waves. The observations made by many spacecraft demonstrate that the solar wind in the heliosphere is indeed mediated by nonthermal energetic particles such as solar energetic particles (SEPs) and pickup ions (PUIs). For instance, New Horizon observations showed that PUIs dominate the internal pressure in the outer heliosphere (McComas et al. 2017). Energetic PUIs are not …

Local Supervised Methods And Uncertainty Quantification For Boundary Detection In Images, Margaret Coreen Lund

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Attack Reconstruction And Secure State Estimation In Cyber-Physical Systems Using Sliding Mode Observers, Shamila Nateghiboroujeni

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Fixed And Angle-Scanning Spectropolarimetry, Sahar Ansar Nouri

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Is There A Correlation Between Wikidata Revisions And Trending Hashtags On Twitter?, Paula Dooley

Dissertations

Twitter is a microblogging application used by its members to interact and stay socially connected by sharing instant messages called tweets that are up to 280 characters long. Within these tweets, users can add hashtags to relate the message to a topic that is shared among users. Wikidata is a central knowledge base of information relying on its members and machines bots to keeping its content up to date. The data is stored in a highly structured format with the added SPARQL protocol and RDF Query Language (SPARQL) endpoint to allow users to query its knowledge base.

Forecasting Anomalous Events And Performance Correlation Analysis In Event Data, Sonya Leech [Thesis]

Dissertations

Classical and Deep Learning methods are quite common approaches for anomaly detection. Extensive research has been conducted on single point anomalies. Collective anomalies that occur over a set of two or more durations are less likely to happen by chance than that of a single point anomaly. Being able to observe and predict these anomalous events may reduce the risk of a server’s performance. This paper presents a comparative analysis into time-series forecasting of collective anomalous events using two procedures. One is a classical SARIMA model and the other is a deep learning Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) model. It then …

Laying The Foundation To Improve Literacy In A K-12 Islamic School Through The Introduction Of A Professional Learning Community: A Formative Evaluation, Hanan Matari, Ruqia Ali

Dissertations

To improve professional development, a professional learning community (PLC) was initiated at a small, K–12 Islamic school in northwest suburban Chicago, IL. This evaluation describes and assesses the initiation and year-one implementation of the PLC, and focuses on teachers’ literacy instruction skills. A formative evaluation approach was used to monitor and assess progress and encourage teachers’ ownership of their learning. Teachers collaborated in large and smaller grade or subject area PLC groups to identify, chart, and implement new teaching strategies under peer observation for feedback. Teachers succeeded in establishing school-wide literacy strategies; however, issues challenged the PLC’s future—time, resources, and …

Patient Outcomes Associated With Delayed Rapid Response System Activation: A Retrospective Comparative Study, Ricardo Padilla

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of the dissertation study was to determine the difference in survival and length of stay (LOS) between patients who experienced a delay in Rapid Response System (RRS) activation and those patients who had no delay.

Rationale: There is evidence to support that the RRS is often not activated in a timely manner potentially leading to negative patient outcomes.

Background: Delaying treatment for in-hospital clinical deterioration has been associated with Serious Adverse Events (SAEs), including increased mortality, protracted LOS during hospitalization, and significant increased financial costs. The RRS was created as a hospital-wide approach to prevent SAEs; however, …

The Practice Of Assessment Data Use In Student Affairs: The Need For An Expanded Conceptualization, Mark D. Manderino

Dissertations

Over the past three decades, student affairs assessment, as an organized functional area, has matured and established itself as an essential and expected component within higher education in the United States (Elkins, 2015; Ewell, 2002; Henning & Roberts, 2016). While professionals know that data use is part of the process of assessment (Banta & Blaich, 2010), there has not been sufficient evidence of what use of assessment looks like both in higher education and specifically student affairs, or how best practice strategies encourage assessment data use (Kinzie, Hutchings, Jankowski, 2015). There is a dearth of empirical evidence related to use …

Explicitly Teaching Scientific Argumentation: Using Action Research To Study High School Science Readiness And Detracking, Ami Lefevre

Dissertations

Access to advanced-level science courses can be difficult for those students who start in a tracked system. Tracking is an educational practice where students are assigned to different classes based on ability level. African American and Hispanic students are most at risk since most minority students are found in the lower level track (Burris, 2014; Mehan, 2015; Oakes, 2005). This investigation used an action research approach to determine how explicitly taught elements of scientific argumentation would impact student mastery of argument skills and influence instructional practices by a professional learning community. A mixed method study was used to collect qualitative …

Charter Schools And Special Education Enrollment Rates, Mary Ann Lind

Dissertations

There is a growing concern that public charter schools, as publicly funded entities, which are mandated to ensure FAPE and IDEA, are lagging significantly behind public non-charter schools, when it comes to special education student enrollment. This potentially creates an unbalanced special education student ratio between public non-charter schools and public charters. This dissertation examines the enrollment rates of special education students between public charters and public non-charter schools in a large, metropolitan American school district, over a five-year period. This body of work examines causality and the effect of enrollment data along with the potential implications.

Daxx As A Restrictor Of Tumor Initiating Cell Survival In Er+ Breast Cancer And Its Therapeutic Implications, Daniel Seamus Peiffer

Dissertations

Breast cancer overall is the second most common cause of cancer related death in women, with one in eight women being diagnosed during their lifetime. Breast cancer itself is divided into subtypes based on the expression levels of the hormone receptors including the estrogen receptor (ER) and the progesterone receptor (PR), as well as expression of the growth factor receptor epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). ER+ breast cancer is the most common breast cancer diagnosis, and these tumors are defined as being initially dependent on activation of the receptor for growth. Based on this, targeted endocrine therapies (ETs) have …

Perceptions Of High School Principals Of The Role Of Multi-Tiered Systems Of Support-- Formally Rti-- In Bringing About Social Justice And Equity For Black Boys, La Wanna Marie Wells

Dissertations

Historically, Black males are disproportionately represented as the least likely to graduate at every level of education and the demographic most likely placed in Special Education courses, incarcerated, as victims of homicide and who live in poverty. The United States of America implemented a voluntary program, Multi-tiered Systems of Support for educators to "intervene" with proactive measures that target groups that systemically fail: students of color, English learners, students with disabilities and the poor. The purpose of this research is to observe the perceptions of school principals who have implemented Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) as an education program for …

Determination Of The Roles Of Non-Conserved Residues Surrounding The Functional Ggq Motif Of Rf2 In Translation Arrest, Jerusha Salome Emmanuel

Dissertations

The metabolism of bacteria is finely tuned through differential regulation of gene expression, which allows bacteria to adapt to changes in the external environment. Oftentimes, expression of genes is regulated during protein synthesis. Changes in concentration and chemical composition of factors involved in protein synthesis contribute to the regulation of the expression of genes. Such differences are often exploited by researchers to control cell growth of microorganism of health and industrially relevant. Regulation of protein synthesis often produces the machinery called ribosome to stall (also known as ribosome arrest), where interactions between ribosomal nucleotides, translation factors, the nascent peptide and …