Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Image Complexity On Early Exit Neural Networks For Edge Applications, Sharan Vidash Vidya Shanmugham

Theses

The advancement of deep learning methods has ushered in novel research in the field of computer vision as the success of deep learning methods are irrefutable when it comes to images and video data. However deep learning methods such as convolutional neural networks are computationally heavy and need specialized hardware to give results within a reasonable time. Early-exit neural networks offer a solution to reducing computational complexity by placing exits in traditional networks bypassing the need to compute the output of all convolutional layers. In this thesis, a reinforcement learning-based exit selection algorithm for early-exit neural networks is analyzed. The …

Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting In Self-Organizing Maps, Hitesh Ulhas Mangala Vaidya

Theses

An agent that is capable of continual or lifelong learning is able to continuously learn from potentially infinite streams of pattern sensory data. One major historic difficulty in building agents capable of such learning is that neural systems struggle to retain previously-acquired knowledge when learning from new data samples. This problem is known as catastrophic forgetting and remains an unsolved problem in the domain of machine learning to this day. To overcome catastrophic forgetting, different approaches have been proposed. One major line of thought advocates the use of memory buffers to store data where the stored data is then used …

A Comprehensive Approach To Automated Sign Language Translation, Tejaswini Ananthanarayana

Theses

Many sign languages are bonafide natural languages with grammatical rules and lexicons, hence can benefit from neural machine translation methods. As significant advances are being made in natural language processing (specifically neural machine translation) and in computer vision processes, specifically image and video captioning, related methods can be further researched to boost automated sign language understanding. This is an especially challenging AI research area due to the involvement of a continuous visual-spatial modality, where meaning is often derived from context. To this end, this thesis is focused on the study and development of new computational methods and training mechanisms to …

Material Characterization For Microwave Absorbing And Shielding Applications, Muhammed Shafeeque Kallumottakkal

Theses

The rapid advancement and widespread of microwave and RF-communication systems have contributed to an abundant rise in electromagnetic energy radiation in our living environment. Such an increase in microwave sources is due to the development and advancement in communication techniques (mobile phones, laptops, and antennas for aeronautics or automobile) and electronic warfare in the military field (radar and satellite). To address these concerns, EM absorbing materials are used to ensure public safety and the safety of military operations. Various types of EM absorbing materials made up of composite materials have been produced and studied. This thesis discusses the microwave properties …

Effect Of Breathing Exercises On Perceived Stress Level Among The French-Speaking Community In Abu Dhabi, Uae: A Comparative Study Between Online And Mobile Application Delivery Methods, Nathalie El Asmar

Theses

Breathing exercises have many health benefits, especially in terms of stress reduction. Several studies have examined the effect of breathing on stress levels; however, there is a lack of studies comparing delivery methods. This study aimed to compare the difference in perceived stress levels in people who performed breathing exercises face-to-face using an online video conferencing tool versus people who used a mobile breathing application. The sample consisted of sixty-two French-speaking individuals living in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Before beginning the study, volunteers completed the Perceived Stress Scale-14 items. Those with results that showed a medium to a high …

Exploring The Impact Of Guided Writing Strategies On Fifth-Grade Efl Students' Narrative Writing Skills, Haya Husam Sabbah

Theses

This study is about investigating the effects of guided writing strategies on Arab students' EFL narrative writing skills and their perceptions regarding the use of such a strategy. For the study, a quasi-experimental design was used to obtain data from 30 EFL fifth-grade students in an American-curriculum school in Al Ain, UAE. Participants were divided into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. Data were collected using a questionnaire survey and a writing test containing a set of criteria for narrative writing skills. The results of the study showed that students in the experimental group were positively affected …

Teachers’ Perceptions Of Teaching Mathematics Online In Elementary Schools In Al Ain., Kamar Fayez Kamar

Theses

Online learning is an active method of learning in our lives, and it has been implemented in all the schools in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Many methods such as platforms, online educational websites, and other applications were used by teachers to support online learning, and to be able to assist students to achieve their goals and accomplish what is required from their curriculum. The main objective of this study is to examine teachers’ perceptions toward teaching mathematics using online learning in elementary schools. Data was collected from 90 (n= 90) elementary teachers in Al Ain City, UAE, during the …

Biosensor Devices Based On Graphene And 2d Materials, Suhada Aidrous Poovathy

Theses

Nanomaterials offered new improvements and developments to the bio-sensing field due to their unique physical and chemical properties. Unique and exceptional electronic properties, such as the ultrahigh surface-to-volume ratio and the excellent electrical properties of the 2D materials like in graphene, making these materials promising for future smaller and faster electronics, but an extensive amount of research is still needed. This thesis is concerned with the study of the integration of 2D material graphene in the development of sensitive and rapid biosensors. The main objective of this thesis is to understand the features and characteristics of graphene, evaluate the scope …

Gated Communities In The Uae: From A Social Sustainability Barrier To A Catalyst, Marwa Salem Al Jaberi

Theses

Gated communities are commonly defined as residential areas with restricted access, where commonly public spaces are privatized. The main characteristic of gated communities, based on the physical aspect of the development, involves gates, walls, guards, and closed-circuit surveillance. Scholarly studies have focused on the phenomenon of gated communities through covering its implications on the society and the city, where the benefits of this type of development have been frequently questioned. Gated communities have been linked with their negative impacts on the communities as socially segregated areas form the surrounding urban context. Nonetheless, several other studies advocated paradoxical theories related to …

Examining Mentorship In The Field Of Sign Language Interpreting: An Application Of Relational Dialectics Theory, Hanna Hoekman

Theses

Using relational dialectics theory, this study examined mentoring approaches and dialectical tensions that occur in mentoring relationships in the field of sign language interpreting. The traditional function of a mentor is to provide guidance or support to someone who has less experience than themselves. This study focuses on a deeper understanding of the dynamics of mentoring relationships in the field of sign language interpreting. Using a qualitative approach, I conducted semi-structured interviews with sign language interpreters who have been in the role of mentor and mentee. The results, based on interviews with mentors and mentees, show that mentors and mentees …

Meaningful Use Of The Ehr-Evaluating The Internal And External Factors Affecting The Timeliness Of Patient Referrals, Beverly J. Schacherbauer

Theses

This project aimed to evaluate specialty referral wait times in a large academic medical center. Internal (organizational) as well as external (patient specific) factors were examined. Additionally, although specific to this QI project, the need to examine the accuracy of EHR data was identified and included. A retrospective review of one month of referral data to five medical specialties was completed (n=752). Logistic regression and multivariable analysis was used to determine whether age, race, insurance, specialty, or days from referral to appointment were associated with delays to timely access. Referrals with significant delays were further reviewed to identify additional factors …

Central Nervous System: Development, Function, And Applications Of The Glymphatic System (With Additional Neuroscience Topics), Austin Fisher

Theses

The presence of accumulated toxic protein aggregations such as amyloid-β, tau, and α- synuclein are implicated in the development of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s (Soto 2003). Thus, the clearance or removal of these harmful byproducts in healthy brain aging previously represented an unknown system whose functionality is likely to be clinically significant. The finding that directional flow of CSF and interstitial fluid through the brain ensures brain clearance sparked numerous research projects which sought to elaborate on what is now known as the glymphatic system. After initial research revealed the fundamentals of the glymphatic system, scientist J. Iliff defined …

Can Providing Positive Interactions With Snakes Change A Person’S Perception Of Dangerous Wildlife Interactions?, Bethany Walker

Theses

Due to a long co-evolutionary history between placental mammals and reptiles, primates demonstrate aversive responses to snakes. In humans, this can result in ophidiophobia, or the fear of snakes which can arise due to cultural backgrounds, traumatic experiences, or fear instilled by others. However, these reptiles fill essential roles in ecosystems. Conservation and outreach efforts are important to help our population understand snakes’ role in our lives and the state’s broader biodiversity. Negative experiences or preconceptions about snakes can make this message hard to share with the public. Educators can help prevent intentional harm to some of these organisms through …

South To South: Connections In The Ordinary, Fostering Empathy By Encouraging Travel Through Design, Bethany Wetzel

Theses

South 2 South: Connections in the Ordinary, explores similarities between South Korea and Alabama through a designed sensory experience that allows users to engage in cross-cultural information in an inviting and familiar way with the use of recognizable motifs in order to reduce fear, foster empathy, and encourage travel. The creation of South 2 South was informed by research on travel fears, empathy, and transnational relations between the two regions. South 2 South helps facilitate the beginnings of these interactions by presenting new cultural information directly to the more insular communities of northeast Alabama. My hope is that South …

Where Are The Women? A Feminist Field Guide To The Museum, Taylor Weaver

Theses

Linda Nochlin’s seminal 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was at the fore of the great battle cries of many feminist scholars that drew attention to the limitation’s that female artist’s face in the art world. Women have systematically been left out of the art historical narrative while their male counterparts remain at the forefront.

There are many women that are very prominently represented in museums. They are largely nude and have been represented by male artists. While I do not argue that nudity in paintings should not exist, I do insist that museum goers become …

Game-Based Learning: Building Competence In Visual Literacy Through Simulation, Carol Record

Theses

Game-based learning is an ideal experiential learning framework for introducing the critique process to reduce student anxiety and create competence in visual literacy and self-assessment. Critique, the assessment, and analysis of one’s work is an essential step in any creative process. It is an integral part of art school. However, it can also be a source of high anxiety for new students. This paper discusses the importance of critique, the challenges associated with teaching critique, and the benefits of utilizing game-based learning. Examples of game-based learning solutions are explored, including the development of, and response to, Lumen, a card game …

Social Media Practices For Churches, Jordyn Helgen

Theses

This project focuses on providing a resource for churches and similar nonprofit organizations to utilize in order to maximize their social media strategy and generate ideas for content. Furthermore, it will help these organizations to better understand social media and how they can use social media tools to accentuate their religious values and accomplish their mission.

Anchor Self-Calibrating Schemes For Uwb Based Indoor Localization, Jonathan Pereira

Theses

Traditional indoor localization techniques that use Received Signal Strength or Inertial Measurement Units for dead-reckoning suffer from signal attenuation and sensor drift, resulting in inaccurate position estimates. Newly available Ultra-Wideband radio modules can measure distances at a centimeter-level accuracy while mitigating the effects of multipath propagation due to their very fine time resolution. Known locations of fixed anchor nodes are required to determine the position of tag nodes within an indoor environment. For a large system consisting of several anchor nodes spanning a wide area, physically mapping out the locations of each anchor node is a tedious task and thus …

Data Augmentation For Automatic Speech Recognition For Low Resource Languages, Ronit Damania

Theses

In this thesis, we explore several novel data augmentation methods for improving the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) on low-resource languages. Using a 100-hour subset of English LibriSpeech to simulate a low-resource setting, we compare the well-known SpecAugment augmentation approach to these new methods, along with several other competitive baselines. We then apply the most promising combinations of models and augmentation methods to three genuinely under-resourced languages using the 40-hour Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu datasets from the 2021 Interspeech Low Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Challenge for Indian Languages. Our data augmentation approaches, coupled with state-of-the-art acoustic model architectures and language …

The Public Poster: An Exploration Of Storytelling In Poster Design, Elizabeth Hiler

Theses

Research suggests that it is incredibly difficult for a person to change their mind. Confirmation bias and echo chambers are just a few of the reasons people do not give themselves the opportunity to explore new stories, ideas, beliefs. It is now our challenge to connect with people in unconventional ways and explore storytelling in new spaces to give difficult topics more accessibility to public discourse. The Public Protest Poster can be found at the start of most movements for social and political change by creating a simplified statement with a strong graphic for instant impact. Yet, protest posters rely …

Paid Time Off And Work-Life Balance In An Ambulatory Surgical Center, Elizabeth S. Harmon

Theses

To investigate what was considered important to the staff regarding the current paid time off method used in an ambulatory surgical center with the purpose of discovering what works well for an acceptable work-life balance. Considerable research has shown that an adequate work-life balance in the nursing profession is necessary for job satisfaction and retention. The method to request paid time off is often cumbersome and unreliable, resulting in frustration of the nursing staff. Alternatives for granting paid time off requests in an outpatient facility have not been investigated. A non-experimental, two-step study was conducted using qualitative and quantitative methods.

The Improvement Of The Healthcare Industry In Dubai By Using Robotic Nurses During Covid-19, Ahlam Hasan Alhaili

Theses

The project aims to highlight the necessity to improve the Dubai healthcare industry that witnesses limited smart responses during the global pandemic of Covid-19. Mainly by suggesting a solution to overcome problems like nursing staff shortage in Dubai hospitals during Covid-19, which negatively affects the healthcare system's resiliency to a health crisis. The project suggests the smart approach of using robotic nurses to overcome this problem and other issues related to nursing staff, like minimizing direct contact with patients, focusing more on the more complex tasks, leaving more straightforward tasks for robots, and provide the technology that can increase their …

The Importance Of Shifting From Massive To Sustainable Tourism Model: The Case Study Of The City Of Dubrovnik, Niko Katusic

Theses

Tourism is currently one of the largest economical income generators for Croatia and especially for the city of Dubrovnik. Desired worldwide for its economic benefits tourism is going to double during the next 20 years. Considering mass tourism as the main definition for tourism in 21 century that cannot be neglected by current efforts to implement sustainable tourism, this paper draws attention to improved satisfaction that sustainable tourism can provide to locals and tourists operating in the city of Dubrovnik. The question of satisfaction level for stakeholders in tourism destinations is connected to the psychological characteristics and motivation of tourists …

Tuberculosis Screening And Education In The Urban Public School District, Nikolaos S. Moraros

Theses

Tuberculosis (TB) is the world's deadliest curable communicable infectious disease. The eradication of TB is a significantly important intractable global public health challenge for health agencies at all levels. Global migration, cultural-socioeconomic factors and increase of multidrug-resistance tuberculosis (MDR-TB) affect the epidemiology of TB in the United States and other countries worldwide. Studies have shown that increase in TB knowledge and understanding contributes to early TB screenings/diagnosis, interventions and treatments, result in reducing MDR-TB, rates of TB transmissions, relapse, morbidity and mortality. The purpose of this project is: (1) to develop a TB screening risk assessment protocol for the Urban …

An Ethnographic Study Of Pre-Graduate Precepted Nursing Student Clinical Placements In Long-Term Care Homes, Fran M. Meloche

Theses

Long-Term Care (LTC) home recruitment challenges and nursing student disinterest in such clinical placements and careers, underscore this study's urgent need. This qualitative focused ethnography explored preceptor, faculty advisor, and pre-graduate student beliefs, values, and practices contributing to positive LTC home clinical placements.

Comparing Adobe’S Unsharp Masks And High-Pass Filters In Photoshop Using The Visual Information Fidelity Metric, Nhung T. Pham

Theses

The present study examines image sharpening techniques quantitatively. A technique known as unsharp masking has been the preferred image sharpening technique for imaging professionals for many years. More recently, another professional-level sharpening solution has been introduced, namely, the high-pass filter technique of image sharpening. An extensive review of the literature revealed no purely quantitative studies that compared these techniques. The present research compares unsharp masking (USM) and high-pass filter (HPF) sharpening using an image quality metric known as Visual Information Fidelity (VIF). Prior researchers have used VIF data in research aimed at improving the USM sharpening technique. The present study …

منھج الرؤى السلوكیة في السیاسات العامة ومدى إمكانية تطبيقه في المؤسسات الحكومية في دولة الامارات العربیة المتحدة, خلیفة عبد لله علي الربیعي

Theses

انطلقت ھذه الدراسة من إشكالیة ندرة الدراسات المحلیة عن منھجیة الرؤى السلوكیة كإحدى الأدوات الجديدة للسياسات العامة، والتي تكمل الأدوات والمنھجیة التقلیدیة للسياسات العامة والتي تتميز بإمكانية اختبار السیاسات العامة قبل تطبیقھا، ومدى إمكانية استخدامها في المؤسسات الحكومية في دولة الامارات العربیة المتحدة.

فقامت الدراسة بدایة بتناول نشأة الإدارة العامة ونشأة السیاسات العامة والارتباط الوثيق والمتكامل بین المفهومين. بعد ذلك ناقشت الرسالة نشأة الإدارة العامة وتطورها في دولة الامارات ثم تطرقت بعد ذلك الى مناقشة أنواع مؤسسات الإدارة العامة المعنية بصنع السیاسات العامة في دولة الامارات العربیة المتحدة، ثم تناولت نشأة مفھوم الرؤى السلوكیة وتطوره خلال عقد من الزمن، وكذلك …

The Impact Of Readmission On Family Caregivers Of Children Following Ventricular Peritoneal Shunt Surgery, Mary Uwhuba

Theses

Family caregivers work tirelessly to ensure their loved ones don't need to return to the hospital after discharge. This study will examine the impact of readmission on family caregivers of children who have had ventricular peritoneal shunt (VPS) surgery and been readmitted by looking at the economic, social, familial, and personal strains of caregiving. This study is a descriptive study. The Impact on Family Scale survey (Stein & Jessop, 1985) was used to judge if family caregivers were affected by child's readmission.

Examining Own-Race Bias: A Cooperation And Memory Study Using Diverse Emojis, Jillian Franks

Theses

Other-race-effect or own-race bias is a well-documented phenomenon in memory. Findings suggest that humans are better at recognizing and remembering faces of their own race than other races. Previous research suggests that these results are due to a lack of interracial contact or exposure to other racial groups. Evidence from previous studies has demonstrated that individuals process own-race faces differently than other-race faces, paying more attention to more salient features that become better encoded. While there is empirical support for both hypotheses, it has yet to be studied if the other-race effect for memory extends to representational human faces, for …

Barriers To Using Certified Interpreters In The Hospital Setting: The Hispanic Bilingual Nurse Experience, Misara S. Bambao

Theses

The law requires that certified interpreters are available to translate information to patients regarding their healthcare. Due to perceived barrier of time, Hispanic bilingual nurses are regularly called upon to fill this gap in communication. This study investigates the Hispanic bilingual nurse's perspective on being pulled from their primary assignment to translate for patients other than their own. The purpose of this study was to understand Hispanic bilingual nurses' perceptions and experiences translating at the bedside.