Digital Commons Network^™

Towards The Automation Of Migration And Safety Of Third-Party Libraries, Hussein Ahmed Talib Al-Rubaye

Theses

The process of migration from one library to a new, different library is very complex. Typically, the developer needs to find functions in the new library that are most adequate in replacing the functions of the retired library. This process is subjective and time-consuming as the developer needs to fully understand the documentation of both libraries to be able to migrate from an old library to a new one and find the right matching function(s) if exists. Our goal is helping the developer to have better experiences with library migration by identifying the key problems related to this process. Based …

Nereus: A Proposal For Implementing Anti-Phishing Software Using Corporate Branding Color Matching, Benjamin Heald

Theses

Over the years, many anti-phishing software packages have been developed that can reliably and accurately detect and delete phishing emails as they are received. As communication on the internet evolves, however, these existing anti-phishing systems are becoming less effective. As more users migrate away from email and into emerging technologies such as Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, new effective anti-phishing filters must be created for each new communication platform. Developers are therefore fighting an uphill battle to keep users safe. An anti-phishing mechanism that positions itself instead directly between the user and the websites they visit is therefore proposed. This …

The Role Of Sonification As A Code Navigation Aid: Improving Programming Structure Readability And Understandability For Non-Visual Users, Khaled L. Albusays

Theses

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) play an important role in the workflow of many software developers, e.g. providing syntactic highlighting or other navigation aids to support the creation of lengthy codebases. Unfortunately, such complex visual information is difficult to convey with current screen-reader technologies, thereby creating barriers for programmers who are blind, who are nevertheless using IDEs.

This dissertation is focused on utilizing audio-based techniques to assist non-visual programmers when navigating through large amounts of code. Recently, audio generation techniques have seen major improvements in their capabilities to covey visually-based information to both sighted and non-visual users – making them a …

Analyzing The Impact Of Negative Sampling On Fact-Prediction Algorithms, Iti Bansal

Theses

Knowledge graphs are useful for many applications like product recommendations and web search query engines. However, knowledge graphs are marked by incompleteness. Fact-prediction algorithms aim to expand knowledge graphs by predicting missing facts. Fact-prediction algorithms train models using positive facts present and creating negative facts not present in the knowledge graph at hand. Negative facts are obtained by corrupting information in the positive facts present in the knowledge graph at hand. Although it is generally assumed that negative facts drive the accuracy of fact-prediction algorithms, this concept has not been thoroughly examined yet. In this work, we investigate whether negative …

Hyperspectral Properties Of Date Palm Trees (Phoenix Dactylifera L.), Mohamed Ali Saeed Ahmed Al Abdouli

Theses

The goal of this study is to classify the Date Palm varieties based on hyperspectral signature technology since it is difficult to identify the Date Palm cultivars without fruits. It will also help to obtain the hyperspectral signature for different types of date palm trees. Moreover, it also assists to determine the wavelength fingerprint of each cultivar and to recommend the best classification protocol differentiating among different cultivars based on spectral signature. Utilizing the Hyperspectral imaging technology precisely on the leaves of different Date Palm cultivars, thus facilitating identification of date palm cultivars without the fruits and make the spatial …

Establishing Blockchain-Related Security Controls, Maitha Ali Al Ketbi

Theses

Blockchain technology is a secure and relatively new technology of distributed digital ledgers which is based on interlinked blocks of transactions. There is a rapid growth in the adoption of the blockchain technology in different solutions and applications and within different industries throughout the world, such as but not limited to, finance, supply chain, digital identity, energy, healthcare, real estate and government. Blockchain technology has great benefits such as decentralization, transparency, immutability and automation. Like any other emerging technology, the blockchain technology has also several risks and threats associated with its expected benefits which in turns could have a negative …

Exploring The Effectiveness Of Using Guided Reading Approach On Promoting Arab Eighth Graders’ English Reading Fluency, Rasha Moustafa Afandy

Theses

This study aimed at exploring the effect of the guided reading approach on promoting reading fluency skills for middle school students. An explanatory mixed-method design was employed to achieve the purpose of this study. The quantitative phase of the study featured a pre and post-test after the implementation of a guided reading program for six weeks. The qualitative phase of the study featured by a collection of documents of evaluations which were conducted biweekly during the implementation of the program. These evaluative checklists were used to measure the students’ progress in reading fluency skills. The participants of this study were …

2d Audio Magnetotelluric (Amt) Data Inversion Of Al-Jaww Plain Area (Al-Ain, Uae) For Groundwater Aquifer Investigations, Ahmad Esam Saeed Alfashti Alaran

Theses

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is considered within the arid climate zone having low rates of annual rainfall. The freshwater is mainly located in shallow groundwater aquifers. Understanding the depth and extent of such aquifers is an important issue for UAE local governments and environmental agencies. Hydrogeological conditions in the UAE are strongly related to the topographic features and are dominated by a mountain range in Oman at the eastern margin of the Arabian Platform. The alluvial plains such as Al-Jaww plain (eastern Al-Ain city) is considered as an important potential source of groundwater for the Al-Ain region. Al-Jaww plain …

Exploring English Teachers’ Views On Their Kindergarten Emergent Writing Practices: A Mixed Method Study, Asma Yousef Al Raeesi

Theses

This study aimed at exploring English teachers’ views on the emergent writing practices of kindergarten students. An exploratory sequential mixed method design was adopted by employing qualitative and quantitative means. In the first phase, five kindergarten teachers were selected purposively and interviewed using semi-structured interviews. The results extracted from the qualitative phase served in developing the quantitative tool. The second phase which featured a collection of quantitative data by means of a questionnaire which was distributed randomly to kindergarten teachers in all school districts in the UAE (n=210). The results gleaned from both the qualitative and the quantitative …

Synthesis, Characterization, Electronic Structure Of Biocl/Biobr/Rgo Ternary Heterojunction And Its Photocatalytic Activities, Salama Yousef Alismaail

Theses

Solar energy is free, most abundant among all renewable energy sources. Energy from the sun reaches the earth surface at a rate of 1.2 X 10⁵ TW by far, exceeding the current world energy consumption of 17 TW (1TW = 10¹² J/s). Accordingly, development of visible light driven photocatalysts is of considerable interest in clean and renewable energy, as well as in wastewater treatment.

In that context, BiOCl and BiOBr and three different mole ratio composites were prepared, characterized using UV-vis DRS, PXRD, BET, SEM, and EDX and their photocatalytic activity for the photoreduction of 4-NA was evaluated. …

On Learning And Generalization To Solve Inverse Problem Of Electrophysiological Imaging, Sandesh Ghimire

Theses

In this dissertation, we are interested in solving a linear inverse problem: inverse electrophysiological (EP) imaging, where our objective is to computationally reconstruct personalized cardiac electrical signals based on body surface electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. EP imaging has shown promise in the diagnosis and treatment planning of cardiac dysfunctions such as atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation, ischemia, infarction and ventricular arrhythmia.

Towards this goal, we frame it as a problem of learning a function from the domain of measurements to signals. Depending upon the assumptions, we present two classes of solutions: 1) Bayesian inference in a probabilistic graphical model, 2) Learning from …

Mend Magazine: Creating Awareness. Shifting Habits Of Consumption., Marie A. Fabozzi

Theses

Generation Y, or more commonly known as Millennials (born from 1981-1996) seamlessly blend the digital realm with the physical world, as a result of adolescence in a time when technology was adopted early on (Dimock, 2019 & Fromm et al, 2013). Research shows that millennials want constant participation and interactivity to be personally engaged and that millennials are a largely influential, specifically with family members (Fromm et al, 2013 and Lu et al, 2013). Combining the Millennial generation's leverage with the topic of climate crisis there is opportunity for current and future generations to establish better habits early on. By …

Integrating All Mobility Systems To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Nasser Al Suwaidi

Theses

The problem of traffic congestion is common in most urban areas with associated negative impact on the social, economic, and ecological well-being of its residents. Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in the city of Dubai with its large population and high rate of car ownership. To tackle the problem, this study looks at integrating all mobility systems in the city as a possible solution to the traffic congestion menace. The research methodology involves thematic analysis of secondary data on the subject derived from online databases and libraries. The thematic analysis revealed that Dubai had all the factors needed to …

Police Officer Coping: The Effect Of Police Culture, Management, And Family, Megan Heflin-Brand

Theses

This thesis examines the idea that police officers have supportive factors in their lives which influence coping mechanisms used to handle occupational stress. This idea comes from police culture literature which suggests that officers are encouraged to use maladaptive coping strategies like drinking and emotional suppression to deal with stress. Additional research on management support and family support are introduced as alternative supportive factors which can promote the use of adaptive coping like agency offered services and programs. This thesis uses data from “Work and Family Services for Law Enforcement Personnel in the United States” (Robert, O’Quin, & Kennedy, 2000). …

Advancements Of Gas Turbine Engines And Materials, Benjamin John Temple

Theses

This thesis starts out with a brief description of gas turbine engines and information on railroad locomotives being the gas-turbine electric locomotives with some comparison of the diesel-electric locomotives in the introduction. Section 1.1 is the research problem looking at the older gas turbine electric locomotives in the 1950’s that ran on the rail and the problems they suffered. In section 1.2 titled the purpose of the study takes a look at newer gas turbine locomotives that were being consider or has been built with improvements since the 1950’s. The objective of the study being section 1.3 looks at the …

Self-Admitted Technical Debt - An Investigation From Farm To Table To Refactoring, Ben Christians

Theses

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept which describes the self-documented contribution of technical debt to a software project in the manner of source-code comments.

SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality, but its palpable visibility draws a peculiar sort of attention from developers.

There is a need to understand the significance of engineering SATD within a software project, as these debts may have lurking repercussions.

While the oft-performed action of refactoring may work against a generalized volume of source code degradation, there exists only slight evidence suggesting that the act of refactoring has a distinct impact …

The Use Of Deep Learning Methods To Assist In The Classification Of Seismically Vulnerable Dwellings, Salman Khan

Theses

Exciting research is being conducted using Google's Street View imagery. Researchers can have access to training data that allows CNN training for topics ranging from assessing neighborhood environments to estimating the age of a building. However, due to the uncontrolled nature of imagery available via Google's Street View API, data collection can be lengthy and tedious. In an effort to help researchers gather address specific dwelling images efficiently, we developed an innovative and novel way of automatically performing this task. It was accomplished by exploiting Google's publicly available platform with a combination of 3 separate network types and post-processing techniques. …

Development Of Frenet-Serret Frame And The Apollonian Window, Syeda Fareeza Karimushan

Theses

The present study focuses on developing a Frenet-Serret frame and the Apollonian Window. In the first part of the study Apollonian disks are generated for first four generations by developing visual basic codes in excel. For the second part of the study, three orthonormal basis vectors, namely, tangent, normal, and binormal vectors have been calculated for the tangent points of Apollonian discs for the first three generations. Equations of the Normal, Osculating and Rectifying planes and Taylor Series approximation have been calculated for specific theta. Because Apollonian Window consists of planar curves with constant curvature, torsion is nowhere present. The …

Contributions Of Optical Remote Sensing To Permafrost Mapping In Donnelly Training Area, Alaska, Kiran Thapa

Theses

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OFKiran Thapa, for the Master of Science degree in Geography and Environmental Resources, presented on April 8, 2020, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.TITLE: CONTRIBUTIONS OF OPTICAL REMOTE SENSING TO PERMAFROST MAPPING IN DONNELLY TRAINING AREA, ALASKA MAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Guangxing Wang Permafrost occupies about a quarter of the northern hemisphere land with 25.5 million ha. Global warming and anthropogenic activities affect the dynamics of permafrost. Snow and permafrost, in turn, serve as an indicator of climate change and human activity disturbance. The dynamics of permafrost are often estimated using interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) methods. …

The Effect Of Phytoplankton Properties On The Ingestion Of Marine Snow By Calanus Pacificus, Grace Cawley

Theses

The aggregation of phytoplankton into marine snow provides a mechanism by which smaller particles can coagulate to form larger particles, which can be consumed at various depths or readily transported to the deep ocean and sequestered from the atmosphere on time scales of a thousand years or more. Zooplankton interacting with these large carbon-rich aggregates can obtain nutrition in environments where the phytoplankton size spectrum is small and not directly available, enhancing the possibility of obtaining adequate nutrition in environments dominated by small cells. In addition, interactions between zooplankton and marine snow can result in fragmentation, thus affecting the particle …

The Economic Impacts Of Nuclear Power Plant Closures On Rural Communities, Christina Maher

Theses

The 2015 announcement to close Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) in Buchanan, NY caused a shockwave of concerns for the local community. As a rural community, Buchanan, NY relies on major employers to provide long-lasting careers with steady incomes and steady tax revenue for the community (Mitchell, 2019). A major employer is a business that produces more goods and services than can be utilized by the local economy, and therefore it exports a significant portion of its goods and employs five hundred workers or more (Montrose EDC, 2019). The type of industries that are major employers includes manufacturing, energy plants, …

Comparison Of Longitudinal Changes In Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Between Alzheimer’S And Healthy Controls, Berk Can Yilmaz

Theses

Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) is a technique that is widely used for analyzing brain function using different approaches and methods. This study involves rs-fMRI analysis of Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals acquired from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) Patients and Healthy Controls (HC). Each subject in the study had both functional and anatomical images with at least one rs-fMRI scan with their Anatomical (T1) scans. Previous rs-fMRI studies have demonstrated that AD shows differences in Amplitude of Low Frequency (<0.1 Hz) Fluctuations (ALFF), and Regional Homogeneity (ReHo) measures according to HCs.

The aim of the study is to investigate individual and group level differences using ReHo and mALFF related …

Team Formation Using Recommendation Systems, Shreyas Patil

Theses

The importance of team formation has been realized since ages, but finding the most effective team out of the available human resources is a problem that persists to the date. Having members with complementary skills, along with a few must-have behavioral traits, such as trust and collaborativeness among the team members are the key ingredients behind team synergy and performance. This thesis designs and implements two different algorithms for the team formation problem using ideas adapted from the recommender systems literature. One of the proposed solutions uses the Glicko-2 rating system to rate the employees’ skills which can easily separate …

Path Loss Model For 2.4ghz Indoor Wireless Networks With Application To Drones, Rahul Gulia

Theses

Indoor wireless communication using Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is becoming a major need for the success of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud robotics in both developed and developing countries. With different operating conditions, interference, obstacles and type of building materials used, it is difficult to predict the path loss components in an indoor environment, which are crucial for the network design. It has been observed that the proposed indoor path loss models cannot be used for UAV operations due to variations in building materials utilized, floor plans, scattering on both ends, etc. In this work, we …

Convex Object Detection, Abhisek Dey

Theses

Scene understanding has become a fundamental research area in computer vision. To achieve this task, localizing and recognizing different objects in space is paramount. From the seminal work of face detection by Viola-Jones using cascaded Haar features to the state-of-the-art deep neural networks, object detection has evolved from just being used in limited cases to be being used extensively for detecting common and custom objects. Algorithm and hardware improvements currently allow for real time object detection on a smartphone. Typically, for each detected object, the object top-left co-ordinate along with bottom-right coordinate or width and height are returned. While this …

Open Set Classification For Deep Learning In Large-Scale And Continual Learning Models, Ryne Roady

Theses

Supervised classification methods often assume the train and test data distributions are the same and that all classes in the test set are present in the training set. However, deployed classifiers require the ability to recognize inputs from outside the training set as unknowns and update representations in near real-time to account for novel concepts unknown during offline training. This problem has been studied under multiple paradigms including out-of-distribution detection and open set recognition; however, for convolutional neural networks, there have been two major approaches: 1) inference methods to separate known inputs from unknown inputs and 2) feature space regularization …

Impact Of Celebrity Endorsement In Advertising Of High-Risk Products, Victoria Olaosebikan

Theses

Celebrity endorsement is one of the most popular and effective strategies in advertising. Celebrities are perceived as attractive and having both likable qualities and influential power. Marketers have become more aware of the influence celebrities have on individuals and have harnessed this into advertising products and services. Empirical studies have shown that celebrities have been very effective in advertising low-risk products and services. But how effective is this strategy in advertising high-risk products and services? This study employed the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the impact of a celebrity endorser compared to a non-celebrity endorser on consumer behavior in advertising …

Va-U: Addressing The Gaps In Respiratory Protection Through A Holistic Open-Sourced Design Alternative, Aishwarya Uniyal

Theses

With industrialization and urbanization, more populations, whether at the workplace or outside in the streets, find themselves exposed to contaminated air. Respiratory hazards and illnesses arising thereof are prevalent across most industries and economies. Beyond developed economies with strong labor laws, a large part of the workforce faces the lack of access to respiratory protection, which also is evident in the gaps of knowledge of its correct use. Even among the groups with access to respirators, incorrect use arising out of miscommunication or comfort is common. Evaluating the design and use of the different types of respirators while also studying …

The Role Of Activation In The Relationship Between Power Posing And Task Performance, Jeremy Walter Marshall

Theses

This research analyzed the psychophysiological effects that expansive and contractive body poses have on the human body. Participants were asked to hold either an expansive or contractive body pose for two minutes prior to participating in a Color-Word Interference Test (CWT, which induced stress) and a gambling task (which measured risk tolerance). Heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA) for each participant was measured to gauge stress throughout the experiment. Positive and negative affect scales were used to measure mood before and after posing. Results of this research did not support our hypotheses, which were: 1. Expansive, dominant poses …

Future Bound: Your Future, Your Way, Marisa Nowodworski

Theses

In modern American culture, a lack of emphasis has developed in regards to education and its value and role for the future. This has plagued the nation with despair, which has increased over the last several years. A growing interest in STEAM education and the available paths following secondary education, we can revitalize the nation and redirect our future to a more lucrative outcome: vocations, entrepreneurship, or post-secondary education based upon the correct path for each individual life.

The application of STEAM in education can create opportunities and expand knowledge in fields across the board: exposure to arts can create …