Digital Commons Network^™

Parental Hearing Status And Sign Language Use As Predictors Of English Literacy Outcomes For Deaf Children In A Bilingual Educational Setting, Sarah E. Kimbley

Theses

Deaf children in the United States are not achieving age-appropriate literacy in English. Nearly 90-95% of deaf infants are born to hearing parents who do not know American Sign Language (ASL). These deaf children are experiencing limited access to a spoken language and as a result do not develop skills needed to be prepared for academic learning because language acquisition during the sensitive period in development is crucial for the development of literacy skills. However, 5-10% of deaf children have deaf parents who use ASL. Studies show correlations between higher ASL fluency and higher English literacy scores in deaf children …

Reading Emotion Words In Sentences: Exploring Interactions Between Valence And Arousal, Abby Williams

Theses

Emotional information is treated differently than any other type of information and has a powerful impact on many cognitive processes, particularly attention. As there are currently two opposing theories about how emotion influences attention, the aim of this study was to test both categorical negativity theory and the arousal hypothesis simultaneously. Categorical negativity theory suggests that the valence of a word (how positive or negative it is) is what truly influences how emotional information receives attention, while the arousal hypothesis posits that the arousal level of a word (how stimulating or salient it is) determines the amount of attention it …

Deciduous Broadleaf Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function (Bsdf): Measurements, Modeling, And Impacts On Waveform Lidar Forest Assessments, Benjamin D. Roth

Theses

Lidar (light detection and ranging) remote sensing has proven high accuracy/precision for quantification of forest biophysical parameters, many of which are needed for operational and ecological management. Although the significant effect of Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Functions (BSDF) on remote sensing of vegetation is well known, current radiative transfer simulations, designed for the development of remote sensing systems for ecological observation, seldom take leaf BSDF into account. Moreover, leaf directional scattering measurements are almost nonexistent, particularly for transmission. Previous studies have been limited in their electromagnetic spectrum extent, lacked validated models to capture all angles beyond measurements, and did not adequately …

Interaction Recognition In A Paired Egocentric Video, Ajeeta Rajkumar Khatri

Theses

Wearable devices and affective computing have gained popularity in the recent times. Egocentric videos recorded using these devices can be used to understand the emotions of the camera wearer and the person interacting with the camera wearer. Emotions affect the facial expression, head movement and various other physiological factors. In order to perform this study we collected dyadic conversations (dialogues between two people) data from two different groups; one where two individuals agree on certain topic and second where two individuals disagree on certain topics. This data was collected using a wearable smart glass for video collection and a smart …

Viral – Analyzing Those That Create And Consume Content On Youtube And Social Media, Devin King

Theses

Analyzing content that has become viral through intent or by accident shows the cultural norms of society, personal interests of individuals to better themselves, and how platform algorithms in the form of search engine optimization are being used. Viral content commonly uses popular modern trends or can start them but creating outline content can yield the best results. Through creating viral content, this may lead to a platform where information can spread, revenue can be generated from, and ideas can influence new audiences, which can be useful for any corporation or individual.

The Link Between Successful Implementation Of Managerial Practices And The Success Of Family Owned Businesses In Kosovo, Rrezearta Jahiu

Theses

This research project analyzes the link between the successful implementation of managerial practices of family owned businesses in Kosovo and the performance of these companies in terms of the increase in their sales and growth. The four main groups of managerial practices, namely operations, monitoring, targets and incentives, are analyzed. These four main groups of managerial practices are subdivided into sub-practices which enables to examine the different aspects of the business in more detail. This research project provides information regarding family owned businesses and what makes them different from other forms of business ownerships. The important factors for business growth …

Environmental Sustainability: Kosovo’S Waste Management And Its Road To Circular Economy, Diella Lulaj

Theses

The aim of this project is to evaluate environmental degradation in Kosovo, by concentrating on waste management, and to give recommendations on how to improve waste management in Kosovo, through implementing circular economy concepts. More specifically, the focus of the project will be circular economy in the cycle of waste management, the possibilities and obstacles to implement it in Kosovo. Case studies are used to explain the waste management in UK and India and their process of switching from a traditional economy to a circular economy; as well as an analysis of Western Balkans’ experiences with waste management to understand …

Freelancing As A Tool Of Increasing Women’S Activity Rate In Kosovo, Ema Baraku

Theses

This research project explores the implications of freelancing in the activity rate of women in the labor market in Kosovo. It specifically analyzes the employment barriers that women encounter such as taking care of children/elders, lack of suitable and flexible jobs, and low wage. It further elaborates on the concept of freelancing and the opportunities for Kosovar youth in general and for women in particular. The research includes a review of secondary data, an online survey, and focus group discussions. Findings from the research confirm the potential of freelancing to impact the participation of women in the job market as …

Gaze Estimation Based On Multi-View Geometric Neural Networks, Devarth Parikh

Theses

Gaze and head pose estimation can play essential roles in various applications, such as human attention recognition and behavior analysis. Most of the deep neural network-based gaze estimation techniques use supervised regression techniques where features are extracted from eye images by neural networks and regress 3D gaze vectors. I plan to apply the geometric features of the eyes to determine the gaze vectors of observers relying on the concepts of 3D multiple view geometry. We develop an end to-end CNN framework for gaze estimation using 3D geometric constraints under semi-supervised and unsupervised settings and compare the results. We explore the …

Rift’Ing The Waves: Developing And Applying An Algorithm To Infer Properties Of Gravitational Wave Sources, Jacob Lange

Theses

With the Advanced LIGO and Virgo ground-based detectors consistently identifying more compact binary coalesces, the need for fast, reliable, and unbiased parameter inference is ever more vital. To that end, we introduce RIFT: an algorithm to perform Rapid parameter inference on gravitational wave sources via Iterative FiTting. To demonstrate RIFT can recover the correct parameters of coalescing compact binary systems, we compare results to the well-tested LALInference parameter inference software. We provide several examples where the unique speed and flexibility of RIFT enables otherwise intractable or awkward parameter inference analyses, such as (a) adopting costly and novel models for outgoing …

Start-Ups Through The Lens Of Marketing: The Importance Of Branding For Start-Ups And Brand Awareness, Melisa Uka

Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the importance of branding among start-ups, with a specific focus on start-ups in Kosovo. The role of branding has been drastically increasing in the last decades, as branding is becoming one of the most valuable intangible assets that a company owns regardless of whether it is a matured company or a start-up, the high growth potential newly established companies. In an effort to better understand the role of branding for Kosovo’s start-ups, this study provides qualitative insight obtained directly from start-ups’ representatives to identify whether start-ups in Kosovo recognize branding as an …

A Patient-Specific Infrared Imaging Technique For Adjunctive Breast Cancer Screening: A Clinical And Simulation - Based Approach, Alyssa Owens

Theses

Breast cancer is currently the most prevalent form of cancer in women with over 266,000 new diagnoses every year. The various methods used for breast cancer screening range in accuracy and cost, however there is no easily reproducible, reliable, low-cost screening method currently available for detecting cancer in breasts, especially with dense tissue. Steady-state Infrared Imaging (IRI) is unaffected by tissue density and has the potential to detect tumors in the breast by measuring and capturing the thermal profile on the breast surface induced by increased blood perfusion and metabolic activity in a rapidly growing malignant tumor. The current work …

Enhancing Energy Efficiency In Kosovo – Analyzing Behavioral Patterns, Vesa Recica

Theses

Energy efficiency is being considered as a highly important matter among the majority of countries due to its correlation to environmental protection, energy security, and industrial competitiveness. There are multiple factors contributing to efficient usage of energy, one of them being behavioral patterns. This project aimed at analyzing the effect of behavioral patterns in enhancing energy efficiency through looking at the relationship between level of education, level of income, age, gender, place of residence (urban vs rural) and household energy usage trends. The research was completed through four focus group discussions that were conducted in urban and rural areas in …

Hardware Intellectual Property Protection Through Obfuscation Methods, Jason Blocklove

Theses

Security is a growing concern in the hardware design world. At all stages of the Integrated Circuit (IC) lifecycle there are attacks which threaten to compromise the integrity of the design through piracy, reverse engineering, hardware Trojan insertion, physical attacks, and other side channel attacks — among other threats. Some of the most notable challenges in this field deal specifically with Intellectual Property (IP) theft and reverse engineering attacks. The IP being attacked can be ICs themselves, circuit designs making up those larger ICs, or configuration information for the devices like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Custom or proprietary cryptographic …

Translating Counting Problems Into Computable Language Expressions, Zach Prescott

Theses

The realm of automated problem solving is a relatively new field, even in the context of natural language processing. One area where this is often demonstrated is that of creating a program that can solve word problems. The program must understand the problem, perform some processing, and then convey this information to a user in a way that is accessible and understandable. There has been quite a lot of progress in this area with simpler problems. However, when it comes to understanding problems that involve a level of NLP, the results are not conclusive. In this paper, we would like …

Millennial Attitudes And Preferences Of Purchasing Prescription Eyewear, Monika Karlovic

Theses

This study focused on how influential the pros and cons of buying prescription glasses in store and online were as described by millennials living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). A qualitative research design was utilized, which included open-ended questions in a structured interview protocol. The seven participants that were interviewed were all millennials living in the GTA and have purchased eyewear online and in store. The main discoveries included participants appreciating the low prices when purchasing online, in store assistance, and the similar quality of eyewear offered online and in store. All participants stated that the fit and style …

Employing Optical Flow On Convolutional Recurrent Structures For Deepfake Detection, Akash Chintha

Theses

Deepfakes, or artificially generated audiovisual renderings, can be used to defame a public figure or influence public opinion. With the recent discovery of generative adversarial networks, an attacker using a normal desktop computer fitted with an off-the-shelf graphics processing unit can make renditions realistic enough to easily fool a human observer. Detecting deepfakes is thus becoming vital for reporters, social networks, and the general public. Preliminary research introduced simple, yet surprisingly efficient digital forensic methods for visual deepfake detection. These methods combined convolutional latent representations with bidirectional recurrent structures and entropy-based cost functions. The latent representations for the video are …

Self-Supervision Initialization For Semantic Segmentation Networks, Kenneth Alexopoulos

Theses

Convolutional neural networks excel at extracting features from signals. These features are able to be utilized for many downstream tasks. These tasks include object recognition, object detection, depth estimation, pixel level semantic segmentation, and more. These tasks can be used for applications such as autonomous driving where images captured by a camera can be used to give a detailed understanding of the scene. While these models are impressive, they can fail to generalize to new environments. This forces the cumbersome process of collecting images from multifarious environments and annotating them by hand. Annotating thousands or millions of images is both …

A Simulation Study Of Centralized Versus Decentralized Healthcare Admission Processes, Jacob Smyth

Theses

With an expanding number of healthcare clinics and a growing trend of consolidation, the possibility of a centralized location performing admission for multiple clinics has been presented as a possible method to save on operational costs. This centralized approach would cause significant changes in the admission process for decentralized clinics that have their own admission processes, and the effect on quality of care cannot be ignored when deciding which method to use. To determine the characteristics under which a centralized or decentralized admission system would be better, a discrete event simulation methodology is designed and utilized to compare the alternative …

Human-In-The-Loop Learning From Crowdsourcing And Social Media, Tong Liu

Theses

Computational social studies using public social media data have become more and more popular because of the large amount of user-generated data available. The richness of social media data, coupled with noise and subjectivity, raise significant challenges for computationally studying social issues in a feasible and scalable manner. Machine learning problems are, as a result, often subjective or ambiguous when humans are involved. That is, humans solving the same problems might come to legitimate but completely different conclusions, based on their personal experiences and beliefs. When building supervised learning models, particularly when using crowdsourced training data, multiple annotations per data …

Integrated Framework For Data Quality And Security Evaluation On Mobile Devices, Igor Khokhlov

Theses

Data quality (DQ) is an important concept that is used in the design and employment of information, data management, decision making, and engineering systems with multiple applications already available for solving specific problems. Unfortunately, conventional approaches to DQ evaluation commonly do not pay enough attention or even ignore the security and privacy of the evaluated data. In this research, we develop a framework for the DQ evaluation of the sensor originated data acquired from smartphones, that incorporates security and privacy aspects into the DQ evaluation pipeline. The framework provides support for selecting the DQ metrics and implementing their calculus by …

Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning By Recurrent Networks And Frame Order Prediction, Sai Shashidhar Nagabandi

Theses

The success of deep learning models in challenging tasks of computer vision and natural language processing depend on good vector representations of data. For example, learning efficient and salient video representations is one of the fundamental steps for many tasks like action recognition and next frame prediction. Most methods in deep learning rely on large datasets like ImageNet or MSCOCO for training, which is expensive and time consuming to collect. Some of the earlier works in video representation learning relied on encoder-decoder style networks in an unsupervised fashion, which would take in a few frames at a time. Research in …

Graph Networks For Multi-Label Image Recognition, Sidharth Makhija

Theses

Providing machines with a robust visualization of multiple objects in a scene has a myriad of applications in the physical world. This research solves the task of multi-label image recognition using a deep learning approach. For most multi-label image recognition datasets, there are multiple objects within a single image and a single label can be seen many times throughout the dataset. Therefore, it is not efficient to classify each object in isolation, rather it is important to infer the inter-dependencies between the labels. To extract a latent representation of the pixels from an image, this work uses a convolutional network …

Deepfakes Generation Using Lstm Based Generative Adversarial Networks, Akhil Santha

Theses

Deep learning has been achieving promising results across a wide range of complex task domains. However, recent advancements in deep learning have also been employed to create software which causes threats to the privacy of people and national security. One among them is deepfakes, which creates fake images as well as videos that cannot be detected as forgeries by humans. Fake speeches of world leaders can even cause threat to world stability and peace. Apart from the malicious usage, deepfakes can also be used for positive purposes such as in films for post dubbing or performing language translation. This latter …

Radio Observations Of The Neutron Star X-Ray Binary Circinus X-1: Clues On The Onset Of Radio Emission And Jet Formation, Batool Ahmad Essa Saleh Ilyasi

Theses

Circinus X-1 is a Neutron-Star X-ray Binary System which features strong and variable radio emission. This emission is triggered as a result of the interaction between neutron star and its companion as they approach periastron. Radio observations of Circinus X-1 have not been carried out over the past 7 years. Here are the results of the radio observation and monitoring campaign on Circinus X-1 with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) – Australia, at centimeter wavelengths (5.5 and 9 GHz). The radio behavior of Circinus X-1 has been monitored over two of its orbits (16.6 days each) to probe its …

Privacy-Preserving Recommendation System Using Federated Learning, Rahul Basu

Theses

Federated Learning is a form of distributed learning which leverages edge devices for training. It aims to preserve privacy by communicating users’ learning parameters and gradient updates to the global server during the training while keeping the actual data on the users’ devices. The training on global server is performed on these parameters instead of user data directly while fine tuning of the model can be done on client’s devices locally. However, federated learning is not without its shortcomings and in this thesis, we present an overview of the learning paradigm and propose a new federated recommender system framework that …

Spectral 3d Reconstruction Based On Macroscopic Oct Imaging, Xingyu Zhou

Theses

Various optical technologies have been utilized to improve art conservation by art conservators, such as laser triangulation, stereophotogrammetry, structured light, laser scanner and time of flight sensors. These methods have been deployed to capture the 3D or surface topography information of sculptures and architectures. Optical coherence tomography (OCT) has introduced new imaging methods to study the surface features and subsurface structures of delicate cultural heritage objects. However, despite its higher spatial resolution, the field of view (FOV) of OCT severely limits the size of the scanning area and does not allow macroscopic examination. To solve this issue, we develop and …

Expectations Of Generation Z When Entering The Job Market In Croatia, Goran Pekica

Theses

A new generation called Generation Z is about to enter the labor market in Croatia where employers are already facing challenges with recruitment and retention processes. With a new cohort at their doorstep, more different than similar to its predecessors, employers are presented with additional challenges. The focus of this qualitative study is on exploring early career work experiences of ten Generation Z members who study in either International Business or Information Technologies programs in Zagreb, Croatia and who are about to become part of Croatian labor force. By exploring their initial work experiences, their expectations about the work environment …

An Information Theoretic Approach To Assess Perceived Audio Quality Using Eeg With Reduced Number Of Electrodes, Sansit Das

Theses

Electroencephalograph(EEG) is a process mainly used in medical and research fields to study the electrical activities in a brain. In this technique, 128 or 256 electrodes are attached to the scalp and the electrical activities of the human brain is recorded with the help of a software. In the global scenario, the EEG responses are studied and analysed to acknowledge any disorders in the brain, such as epilepsy or head injury.

Recent studies performed by researchers, have focused on analysing these electrical activities to access perceived audio quality from users by using information theoretic approaches, such as mutual information. Experiments …

Prediction Of Gas-Hydrate Equilibrium, Stability And Kinetic Nucleation In Porous Media, Yali Zhang

Theses

Natural gas-hydrates are crystalline inclusion compounds with gas molecules (guest compounds) trapped within a host lattice formed by water molecules in an ice-like hydrogen-bonded framework. Natural gas-hydrates have the potential to become an important carbon-based resource addressing the increasing energy demand, and they pose a risk in terms of climate change. Accurate estimates of gas-hydrates global inventory, understanding of formation and dissociation processes of gas-hydrates, and evaluation of their environmental impact require models that accurately describe gas-hydrate stability in sediments and predict gas-hydrate kinetic nucleation processes. The hypothesis driving this work is that incorporation of selected sediment properties, i.e., surface …