Digital Commons Network^™

Better Fit: A Conceptual Solution For Seamless Exercise Experience, Hongwei Huang

Theses

The development of fitness technology has changed the way we exercise over time, and each technology has allowed people to exercise independently in various ways, such as wearable devices, fitness apps, game consoles, and even social media. The consequence is that more people get used to exercising solely with their digital device and get motivated from virtual communities rather than in a real environment. However, the research shows there can be even more benefit for people by exercising with others in a physical space.

The thesis utilizes UX design methodologies to develop a seamless-workout experience that enables a user to …

Resilient Housing Design For Tsunami Prone Andaman And Nicobar Islands In India, Sabyasachi Das

Theses

Human settlement along coastal areas has grown dramatically over the last two decades. Unfortunately, coastal areas are prone to natural disasters caused by climate change and tectonic shifts underwater in the adjacent water bodies, resulting in loss of life and property. Tsunami is a form of natural disaster which occurs because of earthquakes under oceans and seas creating large waves which flood or wash out any coastal cities or islands located in the area impacted.

In 2004 the Indian Ocean Tsunami had an enormous impact on the coastal cities in Southeast Asia causing loss of thousands of lives and making …

Deer: Creating A Realistic 3d Animal Using Photogrammetry, Karie Carita

Theses

Creating a 3D animal using the process of photogrammetry can bring more realism to a user’s game experience.

In the 3D world, there are various ways for creating animals in video games. Specifically, quadrupeds are known to be very challenging. Since technology is evolving every day, there are always newer ways of creating video game assets. It is challenging to have complex model details and also have smooth real-time rendering in a game engine.

Photogrammetry can capture exact details of a real world animal and incorporate them into a 3D asset. The purpose for using this process is to create …

The Soul’S Speaker: Give Your Eyes Some Rest, Fuye Zhang

Theses

The students studying in colleges often fix their eyes on books, on computer screens and archives for a long time to gain knowledge. As a result of this, their eyeballs often turn red out of fatigue. Researches have shown that college students lack the awareness of the benefits of giving their eyes some rest. However, there are few of eye protection advertisements which suggest the need for students to give their eyes some rest. As a designer, I need to let people know the important roles that eyes play in the human body. I feel it is important for designers …

Dzone: An Interactive Platform For Designers Seeking And Sharing Ideas., Yidie Xue

Theses

The principle of design is to create something both beautiful and effective. However, not all designs are created equal. There are plenty of inefficient designs in existence. The reason is not because of bad designers, but because of the lacking platforms for designers to communicate and test their designs.

There are many tools available, both application and website, for designers to express their ideas. However, the majority of these resources are focused on sharing project on the social media and treat it like an element of personal portfolio. Platforms for designers to actually test their project, gathering critical product-developing feedback …

An Alternative Approach To Counting Minimum (S; T)-Cuts In Planar Graphs, Rachel E. Silva

Theses

Finding and counting minimum cuts in graphs can be useful in image processing and segmentation and in networking systems such as computer or road networks. Researchers have previously developed polynomial-time algorithms to count minimum cuts in planar graphs which utilize the relationship between maximum network flows and minimum cuts.

This thesis presents a polynomial-time algorithm to count the number of minimum (s,t)-cuts in a planar graph without first finding a maximum flow. The presented algorithm is dependent on the finding that (s,t)-cuts in a planar graph correlate to certain cycles found in the dual of that graph, which can be …

Datasets Used In Fifteen Years Of Automated Requirements Traceability Research, Palak Sharma

Theses

Datasets are crucial to advance automated software traceability research. Acquiring such datasets come in a high cost and require expert knowledge to manually collect and validate them. Obtaining such software development datasets has been one of the most frequently reported barrier for researchers in the software engineering domain in general. This problem is even more acute in field of requirement traceability, which plays crucial role in safety critical and highly regulated systems. Therefore, the main motivation behind this work is to analyze the current state of art of datasets used in the field of software traceability.

This work presents a …

Audialtext: Improving Communication Accessibility For The Deaf Through Automatic Voice-Recognition And Wearable Smart-Technology., Ernest Roszkowski

Theses

Whether you are ordering food at a restaurant, asking for directions, or receiving a phone call from a family member, it is apparent that human communication is an important part of everyday life. Those who are deaf have limited communication accessibility compared to their hearing counterparts, and by default, obtain less public information and face more obstacles during social interactions.

This thesis project will attempt to bridge this communication gap through the exploration of human interactions with user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. The goal is to design and develop an application concept for wearable smart-technology that will …

Accelerating Stochastic Random Projection Neural Networks, Swathika Ramakrishnan

Theses

Artificial Neural Network (ANN), a computational model based on the biological neural networks, has a recent resurgence in machine intelligence with breakthrough results in pattern recognition, speech recognition, and mapping. This has led to a growing interest in designing dedicated hardware substrates for ANNs with a goal of achieving energy efficiency, high network connectivity and better computational capabilities that are typically not optimized in software ANN stack. Using stochastic computing is a natural choice to reduce the total system energy, where a signal is expressed through the statistical distribution of the logical values as a random bit stream. Generally, the …

Abyss, Manojh Reddy

Theses

“When the human civilization continues to pursue its darker deeds, the wrong doings, the dark demons in every individual, the rage we show towards Mother Nature is the path to the end of the entire civilization. And, that end will not come with a bang, but with a whimper “ - Manojh Reddy

Systemverilog Verification Of Wishbone-Compliant Serial Peripheral Interface, Avinash Srinivasan

Theses

Synchronous serial interfaces provide economical on-board communication between the processor, digital to analog and analog to digital converters, memory, and other building blocks on the chip. A number of Integrated Circuit (IC) manufacturers develop and produce components that are compatible with serial interfaces. The common serial interfaces include Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C), Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter (UART), and Universal Serial Bus (USB). SPI is widely used and advantageous over other serial interfaces due to its features of simplicity, low cost, clock synchronous, and non-interrupting high-speed data transfer rate. SPI is the core controller of the design. An …

Optimization Of Residential Battery Energy Storage System Scheduling For Cost And Emissions Reductions, Zachary Olivieri

Theses

The introduction of dynamic electricity pricing structures such as Time of Use (TOU) rates and Day Ahead Pricing (DAP) in residential markets has created the possibility for customers to reduce their electric bills by using energy storage systems for load shifting and/or peak load shaving. While there are numerous system designs and model formulations for minimizing electric bills under these rate structures the use of these systems has the potential to cause an increase in emissions from the electricity system. The Increase in emissions is linked to the difference in fuel mix of marginal generators throughout the day as well …

The Impact Of White Space On User Experience For Tablet Editions Of Magazines, Fanyi Cheng

Theses

After declining for six years (Wang, 2016), printed magazines are facing the dilemma of a paperless era. As magazine publishing emerges into the digital world, it needs to achieve the degree of readers’ desire that is comparable to or surpassing print publications.

Limited research has been done regarding white space in digital magazines. This thesis aimed to investigate how user experience is affected by white space in the layout of digital editions of food magazines designed for the Apple iPad.

The study focused on the evaluation of white space as the factor influencing the quality of the user experience. White …

Physical Properties Of Topological Insulator: Bismuth Selenide Thin Films, Yub Raj Sapkota

Theses

Topological Insulator (TI) is new classes of materials with gapless surface states and insulating bulk. The topological connection can be traced back to the discovery of Integer Quantum Hall Effect in 1980. In the last decade, new categories of topological insulators were predicted and later discovered, that have gained a lot of attraction for room-temperature applications. Since the experimental observation of single Dirac cone on the surface states of Bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3) in 2009, it has emerged as the prototype. Bismuth Selenide has one of the highest bulk band gaps of 0.3 eV among all TI materials. While its single …

Parent-Child Interaction Therapy For Children With Autism, Tiffany Thomas

Theses

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a pervasive lifelong developmental delay with a prevalence of 1 in 68 children. This growing epidemic occurs for unspecified causes and researchers continue to explore evidence-based treatments available. Parent–child interaction therapy (PCIT) is a parent training program, initially developed for implementation with typically-developing children. PCIT has shown effectiveness in increasing child compliance, minimizing disruptive problem, improving parent-child relationship satisfaction, and communication. The present study investigated the efficacy of PCIT as an evidence-based practice (EBP) for children with ASD by implementing a non-concurrent multiple baseline design across three participants. Results indicated socially significant increases in child …

Re:Act A Three-Way Communication Interactive Design System For School-Family Partnerships, Yoon Jin Lee

Theses

Using interaction design to create conversation to help create a personalized learning environment in and out of elementary classrooms for achieving students’ academic and mental success from a three-way communication between teachers, students, and parents

Many elementary school teachers encounter problems interacting with each student individually. Also, many parents are losing chances to track their child’s development and achievement closely in both physical and mental perspectives because of their busy schedules. There are several web and mobile applications to assist with these issues, but most of those are too focused on grading students’ positive and negative behavior and two-way communication …

American Teenage Vision And The Value Of Cool, Elizabeth Stegner

Theses

One quarter of American youth have a vision problem that, left untreated, can impact personality and academic achievement. The vast majority of these cases could be remediated with a pair of eyeglasses. However, even when kids and teenagers are prescribed glasses, many do not wear them. This thesis questions why this problem - which has a seemingly straightforward solution and clear benefit - has not been resolved. First, it discusses current literature and qualitative research on the prevalence of eye correction issues. This paper also focuses on how American teenagers specifically are impacted by this problem. Finally, it suggests a …

A Power Efficient Server-To-Server Wireless Data Center Network Architecture Using 60 Ghz Links, Sree Gowrishankar Umamaheswaran

Theses

Data Centers have become the digital backbone of the modern society with the advent of cloud computing, social networking, big data analytics etc. They play a vital role in processing a large amount of information generated. The number of data centers and the servers present in them have been on the rise over the last decade. This has eventually led to the increase in the power consumption of the data center due to the power-hungry interconnect fabric which consists of switches, routers and switching fabric necessary for communication in the data center. Moreover, a major portion of the power consumed …

Investigation Of Blend Time For Turbulent Newtonian Fluids In Stirred Tanks, Aaron Strand

Theses

A blend time investigation for stirred tanks was conducted to study the effect of impeller type (A310 Hydrofoil, Pitched-Blade Turbine, Rushton Turbine), impeller diameter (D/T = 1/5, 1/3, and 1/2), and impeller off-bottom distance (C/T = 1/5, 1/3, and 1/2) while considering tank diameter (T = 0.80 and 1.22 m) and mean specific energy dissipation (ε = 0.005 and 0.010 W/kg) for turbulent Newtonian fluids with square batch aspect ratios. The response of conductivity probes to the injection of a sodium chloride tracer was monitored to experimentally measure blend time for 108 unique setups. The results of the blend time …

Exact Localized Solutions Of The Nonlinear Dirac Equation, Yaser Hasan Sabbah

Theses

The nonlinear Dirac equation is a relativistic classical field theory that describes the behavior of a system of self-interacting spinor fields. According to this theory, the interactions among spinor fields are represented by additional Kerr-nonlinearity added to the Dirac equation, which justifies and models the noticed solitonic behavior of the systems. There are various models of the nonlinear Dirac equation which differ from each other in the factors taken into account in the modelling, especially the mode of the coupling among the spinor fields as well as the nature of the system represented by the model. In this present thesis, …

Accelerating Homomorphic Encryption In The Cloud Environment Through High-Level Synthesis And Reconfigurable Resources, Michael J. Foster

Theses

The recent surge in cloud services is revolutionizing the way that data is stored and processed. Everyone with an internet connection, from large corporations to small companies and private individuals, now have access to cutting-edge processing power and vast amounts of data storage. This rise in cloud computing and storage, however, has brought with it a need for a new type of security. In order to have access to cloud services, users must allow the service provider to have full access to their private, unencrypted data. Users are required to trust the integrity of the service provider and the security …

How Should You Plan Your App’S Features? Selecting And Prioritizing A Mobile App’S Initial Features Based On User Reviews, Rebaz Saber Saleh

Theses

The app market is extremely competitive, with users typically having several alternative app possibilities. To attract and retain users, it is imperative for developers to consider the ratings and reviews their apps receive. App reviews frequently contain feature requests, sometimes hidden among complaints. Developers use these complaints and requests to improve their apps, thus increasing their rating which is incredibly important for attracting new users. Unfortunately, developers of new apps are at a severe disadvantage: They do not have the benefit of existing reviews, with only the reviews of similar apps to potentially rely upon. To address this problem, we …

Seek Another Land, Phillip Leteka

Theses

A family in a country village is tested and torn apart by their own religious fanaticism. A young shoemaker, Eynaud (Matty Oaks), has to stand up against conformity after his sick wife, Çyska (Caroline Duncan), is put through an extreme ordeal by her parents due to their religious beliefs.

2-D Electrophoresis Modeling Of Multienzyme Cutting Of Polypeptides, Howard Mayes

Theses

2-Dimensional Electrophoresis is one of the tools in the identification of proteins by molecular weight and pH. The display of molecular weight allows the researcher to quickly identify whether a specific protein or peptide string is in the sample. The pH measurement allows even better resolution between different species in the sample. The MultiEnzyme ElectroPhoresis (MEEP) program tries to model that by providing a graph that displays separated protein strings by both molecular weight and pH. The ability to cleave the protein with 43 different enzyme variations allows the researcher to analyze appropriate enzymes to isolate a protein subsequence before …

Thickness And Morphology Analysis Of Squaraine Based Films Using Advanced Afm And Xrd., Kenny Baptiste

Theses

The thickness and morphology of squaraine based OPV’s have been explored by our group and the accuracy of their measurement is the focus of this study. The effect of thickness on these squaraine based devices still suffers from a lack of detail. This lack of understanding about the role of thickness in SQ: PCBM devices, specifically, retards optimization efforts. Before we can deduce how active layer thickness affects performance in OPV SQ: PCBM devices, data need to be generated. The determination of the thickness of the active layer and phase domain size in OPV’s is facilitated by instruments that can …

Visualization And Analysis Of A Numerical Simulation Of Gw150914, Nicole Rosato

Theses

We present a visualization and analysis of a supercomputer simulation displaying the apparent horizons' curvature and radiation emitted from a binary black hole system modeling the LIGO observed signal GW150914. The simulation follows the system from seven orbits prior to merger down to the resultant final Kerr black hole. Apparent horizons are calculated during the simulation with mean curvature data displayed on them. Radiation data was visualized via the real part of the $\Psi_4$ component of the Weyl scalars, which were determined using a numerical quasi-Kinnersley method. We also present a comparative study of the differences in using the quasi-Kinnersley …

Re-Envisioning Kindergarten Learning Spaces In The U.S Education System, Suhina Agarwal

Theses

The thesis work aims at improving the learning environments of the Kindergarten classrooms in the United States by taking inspiration from a very simple and popular play element namely the ‘blocks’. The classroom environments and learning methods have not seen a significant change since the time of the Industrial Revolution. The essence of school education remains the same, which is expected to be a closed classroom, conventional furniture and the teacher determining the learning activities. With the changing times, as new studies on multiple styles of learning and brain functions emerge, there is a need to customize education and cater …

Physical Property Extraction Of Powder Contaminated Surfaces From Longwave Infrared Hyperspectral Imagery, Timothy Gibbs

Theses

The detection and characterization of powdered contaminants is a challenging aspect of remote sensing in the longwave infrared spectral region. Powders are small in size (less than 45 microns in diameter) and exhibit weakened spectral features due to increased volume scattering, which is more prevalent as particle size decreases. Meanwhile, atmospheric effects such as wind, clouds, or shadowing cause large fluctuations in temperature of a surface on a microscale. This affects the ability of temperature emissivity separation algorithms to adequately derive a material’s spectral emissivity from spectral radiance measurements. Hazardous powdered contaminants that are inaccessible need to be monitored from …

General Relativistic Gas Dynamics In The Central Cavity Of Binary Black Holes, Dennis B. Bowen

Theses

Supermassive binary black holes (SMBBHs) represent an excellent candidate for future combined gravitational wave and electromagnetic astrophysics, commonly referred to as multimessenger astrophysics. While much is known about the gravitational wave signal of merging BBHs, little is known about the electromagnetic emission. Modeling the electromagnetic emission coincident with gravitational waves requires simulations of SMBBHs coupled to their astrophysical environment, particularly during the late stages of inspiral and merger. These simulations necessitate a broad range of physics including general relativity, magnetohydrodynamics, and radiation physics.

In this Dissertation we present simulations of SMBBHs coupled to their astrophysical environment. We explore, for the …

An Examination Of The Methods And Practices Applied In The Delivery Of Training In Enterprise Start-Up Initiatives, Maire Vieux

Theses

This study is an examination of the methods and practices applied in the delivery of training in enterprise start-up initiatives. It aims to identify an enterprising approach to learning which can be applied to instill enterprise successfully in enterprise founders. The key questions intrinsic to this research are: to determine the efficacy of the strategies employed by the various stakeholders to infuse entrepreneurial learning throughout the entire programme; and to determine if entrepreneurial learning has a positive impact on the entrepreneurial mind-set and behaviour of participants of enterprise start-up initiatives.

The research proposes a conceptual framework, which identifies key theories …