Digital Commons Network^™

Effective Algorithms For The Closest Pair And Related Problems, Xingyu Cai

Doctoral Dissertations

The Closest Pair problem aims to identify the closest pair (using some similarity measure, e.g., Euclidean distance, Dynamic Time Warping distance, etc.) of points in a metric space. This is one of the fundamental problems that has a wide range of applications in the data mining area, since most of the data can be represented in a vector form residing in a high dimensional space, and we would like to identify the relationship among those data points. Typical applications include but not limited to, social data analysis, user pattern identification, motif mining in biological data, data clustering, etc. This is …

The Intersection Of Secular Individual Therapy And Religious Beliefs: What Is The Impact On The Therapeutic Alliance?, Denise L. Jaillet Keane

Doctoral Dissertations

The profession of Social Work has moved far from its religious roots. The secularization of the profession and society as a whole has left religious persons who enter secular treatment as a minority population, particularly in the more secular parts of America such as the New England region. This study of 330 clinical social workers in New England explored their knowledge, education and attitude towards religion, as well as the incorporation of religion into clinical practice, in order to determine impacts upon the therapeutic alliance built with religious clients. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of survey data and narrative responses demonstrate …

It’S Not Always Rainbows And Unicorns: The Lived Experience Of Severe Maternal Morbidity Among Black Women, Lucinda Canty

Doctoral Dissertations

In the United States, Black women have a long history of poor maternal health outcomes. Black women are three to four times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related complication and twice as likely to experience severe maternal morbidity when compared to White women. A serious gap exists in our knowledge of the reasons for health disparities in maternal health; factors contributing to disparities in maternal health are complex and not clearly understood. The experience of severe maternal morbidity among Black women can assist with identifying the causes of these disparities and assist with the development of interventions to address …

Performance Modeling For Cloud Platforms: A Data Driven Approach, Kewen Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Software service providers are increasingly adopting cloud-based solutions to maximize resource utilization while minimizing operating cost. While performance predictability is becoming of paramount importance as the safety-critical nature of such systems continues to grow (e.g., IoT applications, infrastructure monitoring), however, large scale, high-degree of concurrency, and dynamic allocation of resources are making traditional performance modeling/tuning frameworks ill-suited that are not extendable. To address the aforementioned challenge, this thesis focuses on developing a data-driven performance modeling framework. Towards this objective, first, hierarchical performance models that can effectively capture and predict the execution time of a given job with high accuracy based …

Gaming For A Grade: How Goal Achievement And Causality Orientations Impact The Efficacy Of Games For Classroom Engagement, Academic Achievement, And Learner Satisfaction, Kara Theresa Mcgillicuddy

Doctoral Dissertations

Games and learning have many overlapping characteristics, which has led to the popular trend of using games as educational tools. However, game-based learning (GBL) has not been sufficiently evaluated through the lens of individual learner differences. The theoretical frameworks of goal achievement orientation and self-determination theory (SDT) were used in this study to examine the relationships between individual learner orientations and engagement in GBL. A pretest/posttest experimental design utilized two conditions of extrinsic reward (performance-based and participation-based) to explore how they interact with goal achievement and causality orientations. Exam performance and learner satisfaction were used as outcomes to assess the …

Sexual Assault, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms, And Sexual Functioning In Young Adult Women, Sanne Wortel

Doctoral Dissertations

Individuals with a history of sexual assault (SA) often experience subsequent sexual dysfunction. Theories posit that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms mediate this relationship; however, much of the literature is based on military samples. Young women in the years of early adulthood (i.e., 18-25) have higher rates of SA compared to other age groups, yet the implications of SA on their sexual functioning has rarely been evaluated. This project tested associations between SA, PTSD, and sexual functioning in two samples of young adult women: a college sample (230 students) and a community sample (38 low-income women of the same age). …

Isabelle Aboulker's Femmes En Fables: Contemporary French Music And The Young Singer, Janet Zimmerman

Doctoral Dissertations

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, voice teachers, tasked with encouraging healthy, productive vocal development through appropriate repertoire selection, have been wary of assigning more contemporary pieces to young singers due to the canon’s justifiable reputation for difficult vocal lines. The music of Isabelle Aboulker (b. 1938) provides voice teachers with contemporary French repertoire that not only promotes good vocal technique but also introduces young singers to the French musical canon.

This dissertation is intended not only to recommend Aboulker and her works to a wider audience but to illuminate her works’ suitability for the voice, thus encouraging thoughtful voice …

Clinical Detection Of Diagnostic Biomarker Panels Using Microfluidic Electrochemical Immunoarrays, Abby Jones

Doctoral Dissertations

Cancer is a worldwide infliction. Cancer does not discriminate. Cancer does not care if you are young or old, rich or poor, disabled or in the prime of your life. It can be caused by genetics, environmental factors and/or lifestyle. The challenge, how do we diagnose and treat such a dynamic disease? Cancer detection is expensive, invasive, inaccurate and lacks sensitivity. New methods that rely on measurements of analytes in solution for detection and quantification are promising alternatives. Panels of protein biomarkers may aid in personalized diagnosis as protein levels in patients are often upregulated or down regulated in relation …

Correlative Framework Of Techniques For The Inspection, Evaluation, And Design Of Micro-Electronic Devices, Joseph Favata

Doctoral Dissertations

Trillions of micro- and nano-electronic devices are manufactured every year. They service countless electronic systems across a diverse range of applications ranging from civilian, military, and medical sectors. Examples of these devices include: packaged and board-mounted semiconductor devices such as ceramic capacitors, CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, etc., biomedical implantable electrochemical devices such as pacemakers, defibrillators, and neural stimulators, electromechanical sensors such as MEMS/NEMS accelerometers and positioning systems and many others. Though a diverse collection of devices, they are unified by their length scale. Particularly, with respect to the ever-present objectives of device miniaturization and performance improvement. Pressures to meet these objectives …

The Experience Of Gender Role Conflict In School Shooters: A Qualitative Study, Polly Marston

Doctoral Dissertations

School shootings are becoming familiar events in America. School children live in a world where they fear violence and practice active shooter drills even during kindergarten. With no signs of the violence abating, it is of critical importance for the public to understand why these attacks are occurring.

The purpose of this study is to examine the writings of school shooters for the presence of masculine ideologies and gender role conflict. Using the qualitative directed content analysis methodology, gender role conflict theory, anda feminist theoretical perspective, the writings of seven school shooters were analyzed.

Little research attention has been …

Teachers' Self-Efficacy When Managing Disruptive Student Behaviors And Its Influence On Teacher Burnout, Gail Lanza

Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative collective case study sought to explain rural public elementary school teachers’ feelings of self-efficacy and burnout when managing student behaviors, their perceptions of student behaviors, why these perceptions exist, and strategies used, if any, that may result in increased feelings of self-efficacy and/or decreased feelings of burnout. Results indicate that teachers overwhelmingly felt the trauma affecting some students outside of school significantly limited their ability to improve student outcomes within the school setting. They felt these impacting factors are a growing problem for which they are ill-equipped to resolve. Their responses also indicated a belief that certain students …

Model-Based Efficiency Analysis Of Power Plants With Carbon Footprint Constraints, Chen Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Archival abstract submitted

Single And Multi-Photon Induced Ionization In Atoms And Molecules, Razib Obaid

Doctoral Dissertations

The response of atomic and molecular species to photoionization is being studied for decades now. These atoms and molecules respond characteristically upon absorption of photons. The interesting question is: how is the energy deposited into the atoms and molecules by this purest form of energy ultimately dissipated? The advent and development of X-ray synchrotons, free-electron lasers and the strong field optical lasers keep ushering new dimensions into this question in terms of the ability to follow rapid sequence of events, and, otherwise, hidden relaxation mechanisms.

Through the means of resonant excitation of valence and inner shell electrons of simple atom …

Liquid Phase Adsorptive Desulfurization Using Modified Zeolites For Transportation And Fuel Cell Applications, Kevin Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

Sulfur removal from transportation fuels is essential for maintaining a pollutant-free environment and ensuring a healthy life. Adsorptive desulfurization using zeolites is an attractive desulfurization method, because of its low energy and cost requirements compared with conventional hydrodesulfurization. However, diffusion limitations within the micropores of zeolites can reduce their adsorption capacity, especially when refractory sulfur compounds are present. Moreover, the coexistence of aromatics in fuels exacerbates selective adsorption of sulfur. These challenges may be alleviated through careful physical and chemical modification, without compromising important structural properties of the zeolite. The introduction of mesoporosity via the surfactant-assisted method creates well-ordered mesopores …

Replicative Bypass Of A Dna-Peptide Cross-Link And Oxidative Single And Tandem Dna Lesions In Human Cells, Spandana Naldiga

Doctoral Dissertations

DNA harbors the genetic information in all living organisms and plays a pivotal role in passing the genetic information to the next generation. All living cells are exposed to numerous exogenous and endogenous agents that damage the DNA to form different lesions or adducts in DNA. Fortuitously, diverse DNA repair mechanisms exist in the living cells, which repair these DNA adducts before the replication apparatus of the cell copies the DNA. However, frequently extensive DNA damage or slow repair may allow replication bypass of a DNA lesion. As a result, cells adapt a DNA damage tolerance mechanism, termed as translesion …

Social Media Based Algorithmic Clinical Decision Support Learning From Behavioral Predispositions, Radhika V. Medury

Doctoral Dissertations

Behavioral disorders are disabilities characterized by an individual’s mood, thinking, and social interactions. The commonality of behavioral disorders amongst the United States population has increased in the last few years, with an estimated 50% of all Americans diagnosed with a behavioral disorder at some point in their lifetime. AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder is one such behavioral disorder that is a severe public health concern because of its high prevalence, incurable nature, significant impact on domestic life, and peer relationships. Symptomatically, in theory, ADHD is characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Access to providers who can offer diagnosis and treat the disorder varies …

Nanoengineered Core-Shell Structures Using Tubile Halloysite Clay, Yusuf A. Darrat

Doctoral Dissertations

Halloysite nanotubes are a versatile nanomaterial that can be used in a wide variety of applications. They have a unique structure which could be described as a flat material that consists of silica on one side and alumina on the other; this structure is rolled up in a way naturally forming an internal 10-15 nm lumen and interlayer spacing. This could lead to many potential applications for example incorporating halloysite as a template material or as a support structure. They are an inexpensive clay material that is available in large quantities (thousands of tons), so they may be practically used …

Human Behavior Understanding For Worker-Centered Intelligent Manufacturing, Wenjin Tao

Doctoral Dissertations

“In a worker-centered intelligent manufacturing system, sensing and understanding of the worker’s behavior are the primary tasks, which are essential for automatic performance evaluation & optimization, intelligent training & assistance, and human-robot collaboration. In this study, a worker-centered training & assistant system is proposed for intelligent manufacturing, which is featured with self-awareness and active-guidance. To understand the hand behavior, a method is proposed for complex hand gesture recognition using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) with multiview augmentation and inference fusion, from depth images captured by Microsoft Kinect. To sense and understand the worker in a more comprehensive way, a multi-modal approach …

Development Of Lightweight Materials By Meso- And Microstructure Control, Myranda Shea Spratt

Doctoral Dissertations

”In this work, two lightweight structures – lattice structures and metal matrix syntactic foams (MMSF) – were studied. Honeycomb lattices were manufactured by powder bed selective laser melting (SLM) from 304L stainless steel. The wall thicknesses of these structures ranged from 0.2 to 0.5 mm. Surface roughness was the primary cause of dimensional mismatch between the expected and as-built structures with an average wall thickness increase of 0.12 mm. The strength of the honeycombs increased with increasing wall thickness. A feature of the SLM microstructure, the melt pool boundary, was also studied as a part of this work. 3D models …

Poisoning Attacks On Learning-Based Keystroke Authentication And A Residue Feature Based Defense, Zibo Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

Behavioral biometrics, such as keystroke dynamics, are characterized by relatively large variation in the input samples as compared to physiological biometrics such as fingerprints and iris. Recent advances in machine learning have resulted in behaviorbased pattern learning methods that obviate the effects of variation by mapping the variable behavior patterns to a unique identity with high accuracy. However, it has also exposed the learning systems to attacks that use updating mechanisms in learning by injecting imposter samples to deliberately drift the data to impostors’ patterns. Using the principles of adversarial drift, we develop a class of poisoning attacks, named Frog-Boiling …

Keeping Social Media Influencers Influential: Preserving Perceptions Of Authenticity While Brand Dropping, Cassandra Miriam Ditt

Doctoral Dissertations

Marketers’ use of social media influencers (SMIs)—individuals who use various social media channels to discuss a particular topic (e.g., fashion, health) or offer entertainment (e.g., comedy) and, in doing so, attract followers—to promote products, known as “influencer marketing,” is a widely employed and effective strategic tool (Linqia 2018). In fact, SMIs, who can be conceptualized as human brands (Thompson 2006), have a greater audience reach and dialogue generation compared to that of celebrities (Crimson Hexagon 2015). Further, consumers perceive SMIs’ content as trustworthy (Scott 2015), which is likely due to them being perceived as highly authentic. According to Audrezet, de …

A Framework Of Multi-Dimensional And Multi-Scale Modeling With Applications, Zilong Li

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, a framework for multi-dimensional and multi-scale modeling is proposed. The essential idea is based on oriented space curves, which can be represented as a 3D slender object or 1D step parameters. SMILES and Masks provide functionalities that extend slender objects into branched and other objects. We treat the conversion between 1D, 2D, 3D, and 4D representations as data unification. A mathematical analysis of different methods applied to helices (a special type of space curves) is also provided. Computational implementation utilizes Model-ViewController design principles to integrate data unification with graphical visualizations to create a dashboard. Applications of multi-dimensional …

Generalization Of Polynomial Chaos For Estimation Of Angular Random Variables, Christine Louise Schmid

Doctoral Dissertations

“The state of a dynamical system will rarely be known perfectly, requiring the variable elements in the state to become random variables. More accurate estimation of the uncertainty in the random variable results in a better understanding of how the random variable will behave at future points in time. Many methods exist for representing a random variable within a system including a polynomial chaos expansion (PCE), which expresses a random variable as a linear combination of basis polynomials.

Polynomial chaos expansions have been studied at length for the joint estimation of states that are purely translational (i.e. described in Cartesian …

Applications Of Information Theory In Filtering And Sensor Management, Matthew James Gualdoni

Doctoral Dissertations

“A classical sensor tasking methodology is analyzed in the context of generating sensor schedules for monitoring resident space objects (RSOs). This approach, namely maximizing the expected Kullback-Leibler divergence in a measurement update, is evaluated from a probabilistic perspective to determine the accuracy of the conventional approach. In this investigation, a newdivergence-based approach is proposed to circumvent themyopic nature of the measure, forecasting the potential information contribution to a time of interest and leveraging the system dynamics and measurement model to do so. The forecasted objective exploits properties of a batch measurement update to frequently exhibit faster optimization times when compared …

Accurate Modeling Techniques For Power Delivery, Jingdong Sun

Doctoral Dissertations

“Power delivery is essential in electronic systems to provide reliable power from voltage sources to load devices. Driven by the ambitious user demands and technology evolutions, the power delivery design is posed serious challenges. In this work, we focus on modeling two types of power delivery paths: the power distribution network (PDN) and the wireless power transfer (WPT) system.

For the modeling of PDN, a novel pattern-based analytical method is proposed for PCB-level PDN impedance calculations, which constructs an equivalent circuit with one-to-one correspondences to the PCB’s physical structure. A practical modeling methodology is also introduced to optimize the PDN …

Cyber Physical Security Of Avionic Systems, Anusha Thudimilla

Doctoral Dissertations

“Cyber-physical security is a significant concern for critical infrastructures. The exponential growth of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and the strong inter-dependency between the cyber and physical components introduces integrity issues such as vulnerability to injecting malicious data and projecting fake sensor measurements. Traditional security models partition the CPS from a security perspective into just two domains: high and low. However, this absolute partition is not adequate to address the challenges in the current CPSs as they are composed of multiple overlapping partitions. Information flow properties are one of the significant classes of cyber-physical security methods that model how inputs of a …

Secure Blockchains For Cyber-Physical Systems, Matthew Edward Wagner

Doctoral Dissertations

“Blockchains are a data structure used to perform state agreement in a distributed system across an entire network. One unique trait of blockchains is the lack of a centralized trusted third-party to control the system. This prevents a corrupted trusted third party from being able to control the entire blockchain. All nodes can reach agreement in an untrusted network where nodes do not need to trust one another to believe the accuracy of the information stored. Two main issues occur when trying to apply this technology to other applications: verifiability and scalability. In previous blockchain architectures, there is no way …

Integrated Approach To Investigate The Wellbore Integrity Under Downhole Conditions, Weicheng Zhang

Doctoral Dissertations

“The integrity of the cement sheath is the key part to maintain zonal isolation and prevent the inter-zonal communication. Loads arising from multiple stages of wellbore life span may induce various modes of cement failure within the cement (disking and radial cracks) and at the cement-casing and the cement-formation interfaces (debonding fractures). This research utilizes the integrated laboratory and numerical approach to investigate the cement hardening process, to predict the cement failure under various loading conditions. An innovative experimental setup is established to measure the cement pore pressure variation during the hardening process under downhole conditions, and a staged 3D …

Bond Behavior Of Advanced Fiber Reinforced Composite-Concrete Joints, Xingxing Zou

Doctoral Dissertations

“Externally bonding advanced composite materials to concrete structures is an effective way to improve their strength, ductility, and durability. The interfacial bond behavior is fundamental to understand the overall structural performance of concrete structures strengthened with advanced composite materials. This study includes a comprehensive investigation of the bond behavior of composite-concrete joints with different fiber reinforced composite types. First, a direct approach to determine the bond-slip relationship for fiber reinforced cementitious matrix (FRCM)-concrete joints based on fiber strain measurements was proposed. Then, an analytical solution to predict the full-range response of FRCM-concrete joints was derived by assuming a trilinear bond-slip …

Development Of A Modeling Algorithm To Predict Lean Implementation Success, Richard Charles Barclay

Doctoral Dissertations

”Lean has become a common term and goal in organizations throughout the world. The approach of eliminating waste and continuous improvement may seem simple on the surface but can be more complex when it comes to implementation. Some firms implement lean with great success, getting complete organizational buy-in and realizing the efficiencies foundational to lean. Other organizations struggle to implement lean. Never able to get the buy-in or traction needed to really institute the sort of cultural change that is often needed to implement change. It would be beneficial to have a tool that organizations could use to assess their …