Digital Commons Network^™

Rethinking University Selection For Students Through Real Life Testimonials, Pranav Shinde

Theses

The university selection process for students is a complicated process owing to the amount of investment and dedication it takes to take such a big step. The average cost and the time spent is a big factors and it is important to make a choice that students will cherish and make sure to see out through the entire course. However, in the course of making this decision, students have to rely on internet-based material such as university websites, comparison websites, and data-backed of to entice students which always necessarily isn’t right. What if students had an easier way to communicate …

Gyri: Language Learning In The Context Of Your Life, Laura Woodrow

Theses

Many people want to reap the benefits of learning a new language, but your ability to pick up a new language decreases drastically as you age. Immersion is a successful method of learning a new language, much like children learn their native language. Current solutions mainly use spaced repetition through digital means, much like you would discover in a traditional classroom. However, mixed reality can be leveraged to provide an immersive learning experience to the user/s, creating a cognitive link between their environment and the language they are learning. Not only can this method of language learning create an immersive …

Interaction With Accessibility On Digital Gaming Platform, Thomas Scott Rothdeutsch

Theses

This project focuses on the designing an user-interface to solve these issues with these certain accessibilities could lead to a better, functionable platform that allows the user with disabilities to be able to play the digital games. It can be projected on projector or touchscreen technology, using its function to provide more availability to support the players to reduce their struggle interacting with an actual physical board and card games. These struggles include opening the packaging, losing pieces, instructions are confusing and constantly moving around to be on the right spot. The features with accessibility will include icons for the …

Bioinformatics Analyses Of New Genes Of Focus In The Research Of Autism With Dogs, Rats, And A Variety Of Other Model Organisms, Aaron Pennington

Theses

Autism is a mental disorder in which multiple genes are involved in the development of its various symptoms. However, as a result of the challenges inherent to identifying the responsible genes, many studies are ongoing and inconclusive. 1 To date, studies have shown that two genes, BAG3 and PALLD, were upregulated in autistic individuals. 2–6 BAG3 encodes BAG cochaperone 3 32; while PALLD encodes Palladin, Cytoskeletal Associated Protein 33. This project analyzed the similarities and differences between the human BAG3 and PALLD genes and those in various model organisms. While it is likely that epigenetic modifications affect the expression and …

Open Museum：Make Art Accessible, Make Appreciators Becoming Creators, Collectors And Promoters, Zhenhua Yu

Theses

As a human activity that expresses emotional power, beauty, technical ability, or conceptual ideas, art has a long history and a large fan base. However, while people's interest in art has never waned, it has rarely increased. The lack of interactivity of art in comparison to other information on the Internet is a significant disadvantage, and the recent reduction in museum visitors due to COVID-19 has also hampered the growth of the art industry. My thesis addresses these issues and attempts to create new opportunities for the growth of the art world by combining art appreciation, art collecting, and art …

Ruminations, Maria Barbara Ileana Kane

Theses

Ruminations is an experimental exhibition which seeks to explore the integration of technology into traditional art. By combining traditional woodblock prints with augmented reality, Ruminations attempts to evoke empathy from the viewer regarding the topic of mental illness. Each AR experience illustrates, though imagery and animation, a different mental illness or psychological phenomenon. The viewer sees each experience separately over a printed background, expanding on the traditional frame and reaching into the world around us.

Intelligent Tutoring In A Vr Classroom, Harendar Pharswan

Theses

ITS(Intelligent Tutoring Systems) have played a significant role in today’s smart learning educational technology environment, where students are given feedback instantly at scale. However, the current, more practically inclined approaches de-emphasize the reliance on the problematic student model, i.e. student's motivation, emotional state and interest instead put more effort into the construction of theory-based user interfaces. Although research in ITS has produced many interesting theoretical insights, there are relatively few ITS which are regularly and effectively used. Through research conducted into current practices in ITS, gaps within the system have been noted. Specifically, the paper attempts to propose a solution …

Infomixup : An Intuitive And Information-Driven Approach To Robust Generalization, Andrew H. Meyer

Theses

The discovery of Adversarial Examples — data points which are easily recognized by humans, but which fool artificial classifiers with ease, is relatively new in the world of machine learning. Corruptions imperceptible to the human eye are often sufficient to fool state of the art classifiers. The resolution of this problem has been the subject of a great deal of research in recent years as the prevalence of Deep Neural Networks grows in everyday systems. To this end, we propose InfoMixup , a novel method to improve the robustness of Deep Neural Networks without significantly affecting performance on clean samples. …

Coffit: An Interaction Design Project For Remote Employees To Enjoy Casual Talks And Interact With Each Other In A Virtual Environment, Yifei (Effie) Wang

Theses

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed a portion of people’s way of living and forced a radical shift in working habits. Due to restrictions of non-essential travel and the need for social distancing, many companies have adopted a work-from-home policy for their employees; with some even allowing it to be a permanent move. The policy creates a number of benefits such as increased productivity, reduced commuting time costs, attracting the best talent from any location, and more. And yet challenges have appeared. Long-term remote workers frequently experience feelings of loneliness and isolation, as well as a decline in …

The Earth Disk Model: Analysis And Integration Of Protoplanetary Disk Mineralogy And Structure, William Allen Richard Grimble

Theses

Our understanding of how exoplanets form and evolve relies on analyses of both the mineralogy of protoplanetary disks and their detailed structures; however, these key complementary aspects of disks are usually studied separately. We present initial results from a hybrid model that combines the empirical characterization of the mineralogy of a disk, as determined from its mid-infrared spectral features, with the well-tested MCFOST radiative transfer disk model that takes into account realistic disk density and temperature structures, a combination we call the EaRTH Disk Model. With the results of the mineralogy detection serving as input to the radiative transfer model, …

World War Ii American Propaganda: The Art And Appeal Behind Women On The Domestic Front, Katherine Grace Noe

Theses

While men served their country through military duty during the second World War, women were encouraged to do their part in ways that challenged their traditional roles as the American housewife. Because so many men were off at the front, the United States government had to create new ways to manipulate and persuade American women to join the workforce. Posters and other media featured strong, relatable women and phrases that encouraged women to serve. Propaganda not only suggested how women should act, but also manipulated society’s view of women’s role in the war efforts. Most people are familiar with iconic …

Investigating Kandinsky's Inspiration From Michelangelo Buonarroti, Asal F. Morvari

Theses

This study aims to analyze Kandinsky's The Last Judgment painting and compare it with Michelangelo's The Last Judgment to show that Michelangelo's work influenced Kandinsky's painting. For this study, the mixed-methods methodology is applied, which refers to an emergent methodology of research that advances the systematic integration or combining of quantitative and qualitative analysis within a single investigation. Mathematical analysis and a review of Kandinsky's books and manuscripts are considered. Image processing analysis is applied using biorthogonal Wavelet analysis and Canny Edge detection, in conjunction with Kandinsky's writings on color theory, to determine whether Kandinsky was inspired by Michelangelo's The …

Southern African American Communities: The Portrait Photography Of Florestine Perrault Collins And Richard Samuel Roberts, Stephanie M. Woody-Groshelle

Theses

This thesis is about the portrait photographers, Florestine Perrault Collins (1895-1988) and Richard Samuel Roberts (1880-1936), and how their photographs portrayed “non-othering” representations of their sitters. Collin and Roberts’ works are compared to Southern white photographers from the Jim Crow era to argue for how “non-othering” portraits of their community members were produced. This impacts the way identity can be perceived. Religious and educational themed portraits are used to align a visually associated identity with social values the New Orleans Creole and Columbia, South Carolina communities had. This thesis considers Collins’ and Roberts’ portraits in relation to the state of …

Towards Real-Time Classification Of Human Imagined Language, Joseph Zonghi

Theses

The primary goal of this research was to develop a system capable of predicting a given user's imagined language in real time using their brainwave data. This research analyzed both FPGA-based and software based approaches to real-time classification of imagined language. The classification was binary between English and Japanese, and a dataset containing imagined speech from both languages was also created. Another goal of this research was to consider the effects of quantization of the network weights in order to examine the resulting utilization of the FPGA to allow for other applications to run in conjunction with our proposed system. …

Mathematical Modeling Of Seir Model With Generalized Incidence Function And The Extension To Covid-19 Model, Shymaa Mohammad Dadoa

Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic had shown the importance of the SEIR model in predicting the outcome of the disease spread and to find the best strategies to contain the pandemic. As this type of model has a limited number of compartments, many other models were derived from the SEIR model to cover, to the maximum, the complex dynamics of the disease spread. These extensions of the SEIR model bring natural validity questions: How can we validate these models? and how far/close are these extended models from giving us real insights into the pandemic?

This thesis investigates the SEIR epidemic model and …

Advanced Lease Caching, Matthew Gould

Theses

Since the dawn of computing, CPU performance has continually grown, buoyed by Moore's Law. Execution speed for parallelizable programs in particular has massively increased with the now widespread employment of GPUs, TPUs, and FPGAs, capable of preforming hundreds of computations simultaneously, for data processing. A major bottleneck for further performance increases, which has impeded speedup of sequential programming in particular, is the processor memory performance gap. One of the approaches to address this block is improving cache management algorithms. Caching is transparent to software, but traditional caching algorithms forgo hardware-software collaboration. Previous work introduced the idea of assigning leases to …

Contraband, Omer Enes Demir

Theses

Contraband is a short fiction film about a young woman’s struggle to escape from a criminal life. As she is forced to smuggle drugs during prison visits to her husband, she must decide whether to protect him or abandon him. Leaving might give her a chance to save herself and her child from this life and have a better future. The movie takes place in modern-day Los Angeles. This paper describes and analyzes my filmmaking process as the writer and director of Contraband, and how my life experience and inspirations influenced my work.

Synthesis Of Modular Do3a-Based High-Relaxivity Contrast Agents For Mri Of Prostate Cancer, Dana Qiang Murphy Soika

Theses

Contrast agents (CAs) are small molecules used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to help diagnose various forms of cancer. While MRI is advantageous over other clinical imaging techniques, limitations of today’s contrast agents containing gadolinium (Gd) hinder their safety, sensitivity, and specificity. The conventional CAs that MRI relies on are considered low-relaxivity and are not optimally effective at enhancing MR signal. Additionally, they lack cell-specificity and circulate throughout the body. Furthermore, unbound Gd3+ is nephrogenic which prevents its use in patients with impaired renal function. In the clinic, these limitations mean high dosages of these compounds must be administered to …

Data-Driven Equations For Coevolving Network Systems, Nicholas John

Theses

The framework of coevolving networks is a tool to model large-scale interacting dynamical systems undergoing change in connective structure, describing phenomena such as epidemic spreading on social networks with individuals changing their connections to avoid infection. Along with direct computational simulation, coevolving network systems are often formulated in terms of systems of ordinary differential equations in their descriptive statistics. The equation approach reduces the computational burden of analyzing the systems, but deriving equations becomes difficult as the underlying model becomes more complicated and as the desire for accuracy increases. We present an approach to construct equations for coevolving network systems …

A Method For Measuring Puffing And Respiratory Parameters Of Tobacco Users Within Their Natural Usage Environment, Shehan Jayasekera

Theses

Background: Although researchers have investigated the puffing behavior of tobacco products, no attempt has yet been made to observe both puffing and respiratory behaviors simultaneously in the natural use environment. Observation of puffing behavior alone is insufficient for predicting the health effects of tobacco use, as it can only be used to estimate the amount of emissions generated and transferred to the oral cavity. Respiration behavior must be observed for the estimation of delivery and retention of nicotine and other HPHCs in the lungs. Parameters that quantify respiratory behavior include inhalation and exhalation volumes, flow rates, and durations, as well …

An Investigation Of Novel Object Recognition Memory In A North American River Otter (Lontra Canadensis), Jessica J. Wegman

Theses

Memory is the mental processes of receiving and storing information for later retrieval, with long-term memories being those that are stored longer than 30 seconds. Little research has been done to investigate memory in any of the 13 species of otters. Object recognition memory has the potential to aid otters in identifying conspecifics, prey, and predators, which would contribute to better survival and fitness. Object recognition memory has been investigated in many non-human animals using the novel object recognition (NOR) task. This study was the first to investigate long-term object recognition memory in the North American river otter using the …

On Uncertainty Propagation In Image-Guided Renal Navigation: Exploring Uncertainty Reduction Techniques Through Simulation And In Vitro Phantom Evaluation, Peter Jackson

Theses

Image-guided interventions (IGIs) entail the use of imaging to augment or replace direct vision during therapeutic interventions, with the overall goal is to provide effective treatment in a less invasive manner, as an alternative to traditional open surgery, while reducing patient trauma and shortening the recovery time post-procedure. IGIs rely on pre-operative images, surgical tracking and localization systems, and intra-operative images to provide correct views of the surgical scene. Pre-operative images are used to generate patient-specific anatomical models that are then registered to the patient using the surgical tracking system, and often complemented with real-time, intra-operative images. IGI systems are …

Cochlear Compartments Segmentation And Pharmacokinetics Using Micro Computed Tomography Images, Sanketh Satyanarayana Moudgalya

Theses

Local drug delivery to the inner ear via micropump implants has the potential to be much more effective than oral drug delivery for treating patients with sensorineural hearing loss and to protect hearing from ototoxic insult due to noise exposure. Delivering appropriate concentrations of drugs to the necessary cochlear compartments is of paramount importance; however, directly measuring local drug concentrations over time throughout the cochlea is not possible. Indirect measurement using otoacoustic emissions and auditory brainstem response are ineffective as they only provide an estimate of concentration and are susceptible to non-linear sensitivity effects. Imaging modalities such as MRI with …

Canine Gait Analysis: Interactive Online Tutorials For Veterinary Students, Allison Buck

Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to produce interactive tutorials that veterinary students can use to explore concepts that are often difficult to conceptualize, including (a) change in joint function, (b) muscle action and innervation, and (c) recognizing and locating normal vs. abnormal structure and function. Elements of this thesis include a complete 3D skeleton constructed using a series of canine CT (DICOM) files, illustrated overlays on video footage of a dog undergoing examination, and short interactive self-assessment tools. Students will be able to deconstruct and toggle components of the skeleton, as well as view the animated skeleton superimposed over …

Selfies And The Self: The Influence Of Instagram Posting On Self And Cognition, Giovanni Castillo

Theses

Research on Social Networking Sites (SNS) has shown a variety of both beneficial and detrimental psychological and cognitive outcomes associated with high frequency usage. We conducted an online study consisting of a series of questionnaires and a working memory task to explore the relationship between Instagram use intensity and cognition. The present study first investigated the relationship between Instagram (IG) use intensity, rumination, and cognitive failures. We randomly assigned participants into a selfie-posting, selfie-sending, or likes/comments reporting condition to determine whether selfie-posting behavior affects working memory performance. While we did not find significant associations between IG use intensity, rumination, and …

Efficient Photonic Integrated Circuits – Optimizing Fiber-To-Chip Coupling, Modulation, And Detection, Peichuan Yin

Theses

Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are attracting attention in a wide range of applications due to their superior performance over traditional discrete photonic devices. However, the development of PICs is bottlenecked by the integration of different fundamental building blocks. High sensitivity and diverse material properties hinder the realization of a monolithic photonic integrated circuit platform. High-efficiency solutions for photonic device integration are critical for making high-performance and low-cost devices. The objective of this work is to demonstrate high-efficiency optimization methods for a comprehensive photonic integrated chip system. This work analyzes the transition of optical signal waves between each component in a …

Hexgen Roguevania, Conrad Garcia

Theses

This project is inspired by procedural generation methods, Metroid, Castlevania, Rogue, and modern roguelikes. This project is structured around the notion of how procedural game content can be experienced when it is tied directly to player progression. The focus of this project incorporates procedurally generated content so that it can be altered during gameplay. In a sense, this idea brings level content to the player, instead of the player travelling to new zones. The resulting game world starts visually coherent, changing into a world that resembles a patchwork of different biomes crafted by the player’s decisions to progress the game’s …

In Search Of The Pelasgians: Discursive Strategies And Greek Identities From The Archaic Period To The Roman Imperial Era, Tristn Lambright

Theses

In ancient literature, the Pelasgians appear as an ambiguously defined and geographically ubiquitous primeval ethnic group or tribe. Various classical writers describe the Pelasgians as simultaneously pre-Hellenic and non-Hellenic –– ancestral and barbarian, chronologically earlier and essentially different. The ongoing ideological and rhetorical negotiations of Pelasgian identity in ancient literature played a critical role in discussions of Greekness –– discussions rooted in the distant past, informed by fluid and contradictory myths, and shaped by intellectual, social, and political transformations of the period. By contextualizing these discussions, this study attempts not simply a reconstruction of the mythological Pelasgians, but a reconstruction …

Distribution Of Carrion-Associated Beetles And Their Phoretic Mites Along An Urban-Rural Gradient In Northeast Alabama, Kennedy Norris

Theses

Global insect decline has been linked to urbanization, most notably by habitat fragmentation. These insects perform important ecological functions such as pollination, managing pests, and decomposing carrion to recycle nutrients back into the environment. Despite the importance of nutrient recycling behavior displayed by carrion-associated beetles, little research has been done on them in the southeastern US. Previous studies have found a relationship between urbanization, less favorable environmental conditions, carrion availability, and decreased insect diversity. However, no studies have been conducted in the southeastern United States on the relationship of these beetles to their environment despite having the highest rates of …

Smart And Intelligent Automation For Industry 4.0 Using Millimeter-Wave And Deep Reinforcement Learning, Abhishek Vashist

Theses

Innovations in communication systems, compute hardware, and deep learning algorithms have led to the advancement of smart industry automation. Smart automation includes industrial sectors such as intelligent warehouse management, smart infrastructure for first responders, and smart monitoring systems. Automation aims to maximize efficiency, safety, and reliability. Autonomous forklifts can significantly increase productivity, reduce safety-related accidents, and improve operation speed to enhance the efficiency of a warehouse. Forklifts or robotic agents are required to perform different tasks such as position estimation, mapping, and dispatching. Each of the tasks involves different requirements and design constraints. Smart infrastructure for first responder applications requires …