Digital Commons Network^™

Communication Of Feelings, Linge Lin

Theses

The making of art should not be isolated from the idea of its audiences who make the artwork complete. However, it might end up as something insincere if one tries to please their audience too much. When an artist initiates a conversation with an audience, they must not be overwhelmed by the idea of appealing to them. I used this principle throughout the process of making my thesis film, Hold Me, which depicts my experience of coming-out to my mother, and our confrontations afterward. The film traces my life trajectory from my childhood until now, and illustrates how I started …

Modeling Perceptual Trade-Offs For Designing Hdr Displays, Yongmin Park

Theses

Display technology has evolved in pursuit of perceptual pleasure by providing realism and visual impact. The endeavor of the evolution has brought HDR displays to the market. HDR displays, which have become the mainstream display technology recently, are considered not only the present but also the future of displays because of their daunting technical goals: A peak luminance of 10,000 cd/m^2 and near-monochromatic primaries. However, both positive and negative prospects in terms of perceptual aspects for future HDR displays coexist. On the positive side, it is expected that HDR displays will provide better image quality and more vivid color. On …

Concretization Of Depression, Jing Zhou

Theses

Depression is a common mental disorder, but many people cannot understand the pain experienced by depression patients. Even after having a certain understanding of depression, it is difficult for us as normal people to empathize with the true inner feelings of depression patients. However, some people not only fail to understand the depressed patients, but they also speak slanderously and scold these depressive patients for their overly emotional actions. For these reasons, I want to show the true feelings of depression patients or the pain experienced as a depression patient through motion graphics. Motion graphic is an effective way to …

Methane Emissions From Stormwater Ponds, Brianna Pollard

Theses

Methane (CH4) is a powerful greenhouse gas that has a global warming potential 28 times larger than carbon dioxide (CO2) on a 100-year horizon. Methane emissions from inland freshwater sources are not as well understood as those from other sources; however, current estimates suggest that they account for a significant portion of global CH4 emissions. Emissions from inland waters are difficult to measure due to their high spatiotemporal variability, leading to high levels of uncertainty and a need for more CH4 flux data from these freshwater systems. Increased runoff associated with urbanization has led to construction of man-made inland waters …

Orthorexia Nervosa: A Multidisciplinary Analysis Of The Gaps In Current Research, Education, And Diagnostic Efforts, Olivia Drew Garror

Theses

Background: Orthorexia nervosa (ON), a term coined in the late 1990s by Steven Bratman, MD, is characterized by an obsessive preoccupation with practicing a “healthy diet”. There is scant reliable literature on the topic and it remains unrecognized as a diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders 5. Thus, debate surrounding its legitimacy as a diagnosis continues. However, eating disorders (EDs) in the category Other Specified Feeding and Eating Disorder (OSFED), including ON, account for the highest percentage of ED diagnoses in the U.S. Although primary care physicians are often the first to encounter patients suffering from …

Fpga Architecture And Verification Of Built In Self-Test (Bist) For 32-Bit Adder/Subtracter Using De0-Nano Fpga And Analog Discovery 2 Hardware, Nedim Hamzic

Theses

The integrated circuit (IC) is an integral part of everyday modern technology, and its application is very attractive to hardware and software design engineers because of its versatility, integration, power consumption, cost, and board area reduction. IC is available in various types such as Field Programming Gate Array (FPGA), Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), System on Chip (SoC) architecture, Digital Signal Processing (DSP), microcontrollers (μC), and many more. With technology demand focused on faster, low power consumption, efficient IC application, design engineers are facing tremendous challenges in developing and testing integrated circuits that guaranty functionality, high fault coverage, and reliability …

Design Of Reversible Quantum Logic Structures In Cmos Technology, Bahar Canga

Theses

Reversible logic gates have an equal number of inputs and outputs, which also makes it possible to reverse calculate and reconstruct the inputs from the outputs. Quantum logic elements are inherently reversible and requires very little energy to operate. Some of the most common uses of Quantum Computers are in the design of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Deep Neural Networks (DNN) and for machine learning (ML) purposes. In this research, the reversible logic gates were designed with 45ηm CMOS technology modeled after reversible quantum logic gates. As a proof of concept, hardware that provided Sigmoid Neuron Functionality was carried out …

Polarization Dynamics In Nonlinear Photonic Resonators, Saif A. Al Graiti

Theses

The global market demand for higher-bandwidth communication is increasing exponentially. Although optical networks provide high transmission speed using light to transmit signals, a bottleneck-inducing conversion is often needed to perform the processing of optical signals in the electrical domain. Such processing imposes a major barrier that would limit the high transmission speed of fiber-optic communications. This bottleneck conversion may be mitigated by extending signal-processing capabilities directly into the optical domain itself. Thus, I have studied the dynamics of optical polarization in a nonlinear photonic resonator to understand a new optical physical behavior to enhance the capabilities of optical signal processing. …

State Of Refactoring Adoption: Towards Better Understanding Developer Perception Of Refactoring, Eman Abdullah Alomar

Theses

Context: Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects. Objective: We aim at exploring …

Integration Of A Visible-Telecom Photon Pair Source With Silicon Photonics For Quantum Communication, Vijay Soorya Shunmuga Sundaram

Theses

Reliable transfer of quantum information between nodes of quantum processors and memories is crucial for the realization of many groundbreaking technologies. These include distributed sensing, distributed computation, entanglement swapping, quantum metrology, quantum key distribution etc... which would vastly expand the potential of today’s quantum computers and form the framework for a secure quantum internet. However, most quantum nodes are accessed using visible photons which are incompatible with the telecom-band optical fiber network. In this thesis, we propose a method to bridge this spectral mismatch between the quantum nodes and the communication channel using a highly non-degenerate (810nm+1550nm) photon pair source …

The Inclusion Of Children Of The Autism Spectrum In Kosovo’S Education (K-12): A Policy Review, Aurora Kingji

Theses

This research was conducted to unravel the factors that need to be taken into consideration when drafting a policy for the inclusion of children in Kosovo’s education from grades K – 12. A literature review of existing materials on the history, general information, the legal perspective, the educational perspective, and the socio-cultural perspectives, on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is presented. Moreover, the results of primary data gathered from 13 interviews spanning across the aforementioned fields (policy, education, society/culture) have been collected. This data has been analyzed using the knowledge, attitude, practice (KPA) approach. KPA has been applied to, among others, …

Investigating Expansion And Extinction In The Planetary Nebula Ngc 7027 With Hst, Paula M. Moraga Baez

Theses

Planetary nebulae are a late stage of the evolution of intermediate-mass (~1-8 solar mass) stars. A planetary nebula is formed after an asymptotic giant branch star's ejected mass becomes ionized by the stellar core, which is on its way to becoming a white dwarf. The shaping of planetary nebulae is slowly unveiled through studies of young and evolving nebulae such as NGC 7027. I have conducted an extensive analysis of the first-ever suite of contemporaneous panchromatic Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 (HST/WFC3) images of NGC 7027, extending from near-UV to near-IR. Extinction correction is performed successfully on several …

System Integration Of A Tour Guide Robot, Suhasa Prabhu Kandikere

Theses

In today's world, people visit many attractive places. On such an occasion, It is of utmost importance to be accompanied by a tour guide, who is known to explain about the cultural and historical importance of places. Due to the advancements in technology, smartphones today have the capability to help a person navigate to any place in the world and can itself act as a tour guide by explaining a significance of a place. However, the person while looking into his phone might not watch his/her step and might collide with other moving person or objects. With a phone tour …

Lightfastness Of Water-Based Inks Vs. Latex Water-Based Inks, David Lopez Lopez

Theses

This study focused on the lightfastness properties of non-latex water-based inkjet inks and latex inkjet inks for conventional process colors, i.e., cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Lightfastness is defined as the property of ink that describes the degree of resistance to fading when exposed to light. Lightfastness varies among inks based on their formulation. The degradation of inks caused by light happens when the light is absorbed by the pigments and reacts with the pigments and molecules in the printed substrate. This research evaluated the lightfastness degree of water-based inkjet inks vs. latex inkjet inks. The experiment used printed samples …

Literature-Assisted Validation Of A Novel Causal Inference Graph In A Sparsely Sampled Multi-Regimen Exercise Data, Aditya Gupta

Theses

Background. Causal mechanisms supporting the cardio-metabolic benefits of exercise can be identified for individuals who cannot exercise. With the use of appropriate causal discovery algorithms, the causal pathways can be found for even sparsely sampled data which will help direct drug discovery and pharmaceutical industries to create the appropriate drug to maintain muscles. Objective. The purpose of this study was to infer novel causal source-target interactions active in sparsely sampled data and embed these in a broader causal network extracted from the literature to test their alignment with community-wide prior knowledge and their mechanistic validity in the context of regulatory …

Promol: Updating The Template Based Structural Alignment Plugin, Mariah Robertson

Theses

Abstract In silico methods have contributed greatly to our understanding of the molecular world. PyMOL, an open-source 3D molecular visualization software, produces high quality images and videos of proteins. Here, we discuss a plugin called ProMOL that augments PyMOL’s capabilities by adding a way to decipher unknown proteins using template-based structural alignment. Software is constantly updated to meet the demands of users. ProMOL fell behind in this regard and required a major overhaul in its code to work with older and newer versions of PyMOL. This included multiple API updates, Python language migration, and code optimizations. The result of the …

Intelligent Lower-Layer Denial-Of-Service Attacks Against Cellular Vehicle-To-Everything, Geoff Twardokus

Theses

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication promises a wide range of benefits for society. Within future V2X-enabled intelligent transportation systems, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication will allow vehicles to directly exchange messages, improving their situational awareness and allowing drivers or (semi-)autonomous vehicles to avoid collisions, particularly in non-line-of-sight scenarios. Thus, V2V has the potential to reduce annual vehicular crashes and fatalities by hundreds of thousands. Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) is rapidly supplanting older V2V protocols and will play a critical role in achieving these outcomes. As extremely low latency is required to facilitate split-second collision avoidance maneuvers, ensuring the availability of C-V2X is imperative for safe …

Do Novice Nurses Utilize Reflection For Clinical Reasoning?, Jennifer Slate

Theses

This study aimed to answer the following questions.

1. If novice nurses, less than 18 months experience, utilize reflection without prompting in their practice?
2. If so, does using reflection foster clinical reasoning in novice nurses?

The use of reflection in novice nurses would foster their ability for clinical reasoning resulting in increased professional competence and self-confidence.

Hyperspectral Polarization Data For Particulate Materials, Rachel Golding

Theses

Polarization is a useful quantity in understanding optical data. However, it is also one of the least understood quantities in remote sensing of granular media, and knowledge is particularly sparse in the area of hyperspectral data. There particularly have been few studies of the negative branch of polarization and these models have had limited success in describing observation. This thesis reviews previous studies of both positive and negative polarization by Hapke, Shkuratov, and others, presents experimental results taken in the Rochester Institute of Technology’s GRIT laboratory, and describes plans for future research to understand and model polarization. Experimentation described in …

An Exploratory Assessment Of Peer-Reviewed Life Science Literature Statement Readability Used In Text-Based Interpretive Analyses, Jeremy Jackson

Theses

This project looked to explore the process of one of the scientific community’s leading text mining software, Pathway Studio, which efficiently streamlines the tedious task of information sorting and gathering in a clinical setting. To do this Pathway Studio implements a sentiment scoring algorithm which decides, based on interpreting literature similarly to natural human understanding, what sections of literature are most relevant to a given search request and provides corresponding peer-reviewed work in the industry. The novel statistics derived of its performance are used to establish an average form of a statement which reflects that of a standard level of …

The Effect Of Galaxy Interactions On Star Formation And Agn Activity At 0:5 < Z < 3:0, Ekta Arjunkumar Shah

Theses

Galaxy interactions and mergers play an important role in the hierarchical formation and evolution of galaxies. Studies in the nearby universe show a higher star formation rate (SFR) and active galactic nuclei (AGN) fraction in interacting and merging galaxies than in their isolated counterparts, indicating that such interactions are important contributors to star formation and black hole growth. A large fraction of massive galaxies is thought to be affected by galaxy mergers at high redshifts because the galaxy merger rate increases with redshift. We use deep observations and cosmological simulations to study the role of galaxy mergers and interactions in …

Prison Rape Elimination Act, 2003: Individual Factors For Victimization And Offending, Bailey Saldana

Theses

The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 was passed in order to provide a set of guidelines for reporting and reacting to prison rapes (PREA, 2020). This project uses secondary data from the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities to identify factors associated with prison rape victimization. Rates of institutional violence have not decreased as have the rates of violence outside of institutions (Wooldredge, 2020; Morgan & Truman, 2020). One area of institutional violence research that is lacking is prison rape research. As more research is done on prison rape victimization, this project extends on this body …

Deep Learning Models To Characterize Smooth Muscle Fibers In Hematoxylin And Eosin Stained Histopathological Images Of The Urinary Bladder, Sridevi Kayyur Subramanya

Theses

Muscularis propria (MP) and muscularis mucosa (MM), two types of smooth muscle fibers in the urinary bladder, are major benchmarks in staging bladder cancer to distinguish between muscle-invasive (MP invasion) and non-muscle-invasive (MM invasion) diseases. While patients with non-muscle-invasive tumor can be treated conservatively involving transurethral resection (TUR) only, more aggressive treatment options, such as removal of the entire bladder, known as radical cystectomy (RC) which may severely degrade the quality of patient’s life, are often required in those with muscle-invasive tumor. Hence, given two types of image datasets, hematoxylin & eosin-stained histopathological images from RC and TUR specimens, we …

Effect Of Nanoparticle And Acoustic Assisted Spalling On Iii-V Thin Film Photovoltaic Device Characteristics, David Smith

Theses

Thin film III-V photovoltaics (PV) are a high efficiency, low weight alternative to silicon. However, high costs make practical use cases limited to weight specific applications. These high costs are largely contained in material costs and especially thick substrates used as seed and handle layers for devices grown atop them. Removal and reuse of the substrates post device growth leads to a significant reduction in the material cost to make these devices. Acoustic assisted spalling (Sonic Wafering) is a low-cost substrate removal method that has the potential to significantly reduce costs related to the fabrication of III-V PVs. This thesis …

Loose Connections In The Just Society, Benjamin Parviz

Theses

John Rawls’ influential A Theory of Justice presents a liberal theory in which individuals gain “a sense of justice” that commits them to the success of the just society above other interests or life plans. Critics of Rawlsian liberalism such as Taylor, Sandel, MacIntyre, Walzer, and the communitarians have variously complained that his theory inadequately accounts for individual commitment to community as distinct from commitment to the whole of society. In this essay I consider Rawls’s theory in light of the arguments of these community concerned critics in order to understand whether these complaints have any merit. In particular, I …

Zygomorphic Flowers May Reduce Extinction Rates By Allowing Angiosperms To Occur In Low Abundances, Maria Belen Alvestegui

Theses

The high species richness that angiosperm show has been extensively correlated with key floral innovations. Key floral traits contribute to species boundaries and the origin of new species. However, how these relate to extinction remains largely untested. Among the multiple theories that attribute diversification to floral innovations, the reduced extinction model predicts that floral specialization allows the persistence of small populations and avoids their loss. Bilateral symmetry (zygomorphy) is a trait that has evolved recurrently in angiosperms. It is a form of floral specialization that restricts pollination to fewer visitors and precisely places pollen to ensure more effective transmission of …

Domain Generalization And Adaptation With Generative Modeling And Representation Learning, Jaideep Vitthal Murkute

Theses

Despite the success of deep learning methods on object recognition tasks, one of the challenges deep learning systems face in the real world is the ability to perform well on the visually different data samples i.e. under a distribution shift caused by the samples of the same object category but from the significantly different visual domain. Many approaches have been proposed in both of these settings, however, not many other works focus on the generative modeling in this context, neither focus on studying the structure of hidden representations learned by the deep learning models. We hypothesize that learning the generative …

Bodies, Blood, And Fluids As Resistance In Feminist Art, Laura Alice Page

Theses

This thesis looks at examples of women’s bodies and their fluids being used as both subject and media in performance art. These selected works of art are analyzed for how the inclusion of these images and issues creates resistance through visibility in a society that seeks to sanitize and commodify women’s bodies. This thesis will focus on women’s bodies as a medium in performance art. It will also describe menstrual blood as a medium and how this seeks to highlight and make visible and normal this important and natural bodily function. It also looks at the use of other bodily …

Digital Marketing For Small Businesses During Covid-19 And Beyond, Emily Lenore Guyer

Theses

The directed project has two parts: the Prospectus for AMC 60000 Thesis/Directed Project I, and the website https://eguyer123.wixsite.com/directedproject2 for AMC 61000 Thesis/Directed Project II. The website takes this information and puts it into resources, namely infographics and videos. My goal is to help small businesses, whether they are established and transitioning from traditional to digital marketing, or brand new and are starting their marketing strategies from scratch. Throughout this project, they’ll learn the importance of navigating social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, and digital marketing through the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Real-Time Uav Pose Estimation And Tracking Using Fpga Accelerated April Tag, Ethan Tola

Theses

April Tags and other passive fiducial markers are widely used to determine localization using a monocular camera. It utilizes specialized algorithms that detect markers to calculate their orientation and distance in three dimensional (3-D) space. The video and image processing steps performed to use these fiducial systems dominate the computation time of the algorithms. Low latency is a key component for the real-time application of these fiducial markers. The drawbacks of performing the video and image processing in software is the difficulty in performing the same operation in parallel effectively. Specialized hardware instantiations with the same algorithm scan efficiently parallelize …