Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluation Of Stray Light Correction For The Thermal Infrared Sensor (Tirs) From Landsat 8, Fu Jiang

Theses

The Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) of Landsat 8 suffers from a stray light issue, where out of field-of-view (FOV) radiance reflects into the optical system and is recorded by the sensors. This is confirmed to be resulting from a defect in hardware of the third order lens. The TIRS-on-TIRS algorithm has been proposed to be an operational correction algorithm. This algorithm has an advantage of simple and easy processing steps. However, no comprehensive evaluation of the TIRS-on-TIRS algorithm has been performed to this point.

This thesis addresses a full evaluation of the performance of the algorithm with two datasets; especially …

Spatial And Temporal Deformation Pattern Of The Brain From Blunt Trauma, Abdus Ali

Theses

It is widely accepted that under extreme loadings the soft tissue of the brain will deform inside the skull, creating large amounts of both stress and strain on the tissue. This can result in a focal injury, or in the case of acceleration and deceleration, diffuse injuries. Any attempt at understanding the underlying mechanisms and effects of TBI, have to start by focusing on what is actually occurring within the brain. The objective of this experiment is to record differences in the spatial and temporal patterns of deformation within the brain during blunt trauma when changing impact parameters. A linear …

Interaction Of Voluntary Activity And Functional Electrical Stimulation In The Upper Extremity As A Method For Short-Term Alteration Of Corticospinal Excitability And Force Control, Katherine Maia Gerton

Theses

Repetitive movement training (RMT) is a well-established method for rehabilitating functional movement. However, many stroke survivors are not able to participate in RMT for the necessary duration to produce results due to rapid muscle fatigue or inability to perform the desired movement at all. Often, functional electrical stimulation (FES) is applied passively, as a rehabilitative therapy, to stroke subjects who are unable to participate in RMT. The effects of voluntary contraction and FES are not well understood for the upper extremity following a stroke. This experiment was designed to elucidate the mechanisms of functional and neurophysiological changes associated with combining …

Subject And Group Level Changes And Comparison In Functional Connectivity Under Low Vs. High Cognitively Demanding Naturalistic Viewing Conditions Using Fmri, Rakibul Hafiz

Theses

Resting State fMRI is used extensively for analysing brain regions. fMRI is also used to determine task induced activations from cerebral networks. This study involves both rest and task activation data and implements statistical methods applied on Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals. The conventional task based designs are very specific and may not reflect day to day activities. The two task conditions in this study are watching a movie called INSCAPE with low cognitive load and segments of contextual Hollywood movies under continuous and natural conditions.

The aim is to investigate individual and group level Functional Connectivity changes between …

Matrix Completion Algorithms With Applications In Biomedicine, E-Commerce And Social Science, Yiran Wang

Theses

This thesis investigates matrix completion algorithms with applications in biomedicine, e-commerce and social science. In general, matrix completion algorithms work well for low rank matrices. Such matrices find many applications in recommender systems and social network analysis. On the other hand, biological networks often yield high rank matrices. For example, the adjacency matrix representing interactions between transcription factors and target genes in the cell is a highly sparse matrix, in which most entries correspond to absent interactions and only a few entries correspond to present interactions. This sparse matrix is a high rank or even full rank matrix. Matrix completion …

Numerical Simulation For Identification Of Insects Using A Cw Lidar System, Christo Videlov

Theses

Mosquitos are the most common vector of disease in the world, causing millions of deaths a year. While curing the diseases they cause is one approach to this problem, another could be to avoid the mosquitos in the first place. Knowing their flight patterns, location, and population in one area could aid in this. Additionally, classifying the mosquitos in an area would be helpful. The age and sex of the mosquito is important to find as they affect the chances of the insect carrying diseases such as malaria or yellow fever.

Many current methodologies to monitor insects are based on …

Long-Term Changes In A Spatially Subsidized Insular Ecosystem In The Archipelago Of Bahía De Los Ángeles, Baja California, Mexico, Thais Fournier

Theses

Interactions between climate change and the processes that structure coastal communities are poorly understood.Long – term weather patterns that include extreme events (e.g., El Niño Southern Oscillation, or “ENSO”) allow us to test hypotheses of how changes in weather (e.g., precipitation) will influence communities over long time frames. One system that is particularly vulnerable to climate changes is the coastal ecotone, which occupies 8% of the earth’s surface. A large exchange of resources (spatial subsidies) link habitats across this ocean – land interface, often with dramatic consequences for the recipient systems. Spatial subsidies such as marine input influence …

Trumpocracy: The Rise Of Populism In Europe And America, Michael F. Kickham Iii

Theses

The purpose of this paper is to examine the root cause of the populist backlash that has been so prominent in recent western democracies. Populist backlashes have occurred with frequency over time, however since the turn of the 21st Century, they have occurred with increased frequency and effectiveness. This is largely due to a disconnect between political and media elites and the general public. I propose two models; the "fragment theory" and the "feedback loop" theory to help explain the increased effectiveness of populist movements. The "fragment theory" is the idea that fringe political parties are able to challenge mainstream …

Designing Simplicity To Achieve Technological Improvement: The General Electric J79 Turbojet Engine; Innovations, Achievements And Effects, Matt C. Brimer

Theses

With the beginning of powered, manned flight, the piston engine drove a propeller or multiple propellers to provide the thrust for lift required to overcome the forces of drag and gravity for flight. As aircraft speeds gradually increased over time, the power needed to overcome the aerodynamic inefficiencies of the propeller to greater speeds and altitudes were quickly realized as a hindrance to the potential of aircraft. With the turbojet engine, this new mechanism and subsequent aerodynamic changes revolutionized aircraft to increased speeds and altitude never before achievable with a piston engine. The United States, after acquiring further and more …

New Concepts For Use In Low-Energy Cardiac Defibrillation, Kayleigh Wheeler

Theses

The presence of three-dimensional rotating action potential waves, called scroll waves, in the heart causes ventricular fibrillation. Recently, there has been interest in developing low-energy methods, consisting of applying an electric field to terminate these waves, as a means of defibrillation. The success of these methods often depends on the orientation of the waves. We present computer simulations of a method that applies multiple electrical fields in a hemispherical shell system representative of the ventricles of the heart. Scroll waves in this system persist when the filament (the curve around which the wave rotates) connects the inside and outside surfaces. …

Allrecovery – Mobile App For Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Education, Yao Jia Zhang

Theses

Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is a cancer of the bone marrow. Lymphoblasts are unable to mature due to errors in signaling leading to an accumulation of non-functioning lymphoblasts. ALL is one of the most common cancers found in children; with an estimated 6590 new cases in the United States in 2016 (seer.cancer.gov, 2016). When a family finds out that their child has been diagnosed with cancer, it could be a shocking and terrifying experience. Understanding and learning about the nature of the disease can be a helpful method to cope with the fear and anxiety. ALLRecovery is created to present …

What Is The Relationship Between Conflict Management And Employee Empowerment? A Message Design Logic Perspective And Its Importance For Managers And Supervisors, Michelle Maura Fernandez

Theses

This study focused on how conflict management between employees affects employee empowerment. Conflict naturally occurs between individuals, and its management in organizations can result in positive or negative consequences. Employee empowerment influences greater job satisfaction and commitment to organizations. Based on the theory of message design logic, it was hypothesized that employees who employ rhetorical design while managing conflict will experience greater levels of empowerment. The sample consisted of 196 employees at an educational institution who completed a short, online survey. Results showed no relationship between levels of perception of empowerment and message design logic, thus not supporting the hypothesis.

So We Depart, Fraaz Khan

Theses

So We Depart is about a broken family that is abruptly reunited through a death in the family. The story is seen through the eyes of Furqan, a young Pakistani-American boy, who arrives with his mother Farida at the hospital after his grandmother’s stroke. They meet with Farida’s brother Akthar, whom she hasn’t seen in a long time. At the bedside of their dying mother, the two estranged siblings struggle to find peace with one another as they blame each other for not taking better care of their mother. Furqan observes their relationship and contemplates how he will inevitably be …

Finding Practical Way To Minimize The Time And Space Needed At The Temporary Donation Places, Reema Aldossari

Theses

This study exploits and describes how to manage donations and send them to the affected people when natural disaster occurs. Throughout my experience in working with some organizations for collecting donations, I found out that there are many problems that harden the goods. Since affected people need the help and the goods immediately, it will take time to reach and be delivered to the people who need them. The process takes a long period of time due to the following reasons: first, the donor ships unsolicited donations and that will consequently waist time and money because no one need them. …

Searching For Gravitational Waves From Scorpius X-1 With A Cross-Correlation Method: From Mock Data To Advanced Ligo, Yuanhao Zhang

Theses

Gravitational waves (GWs) are propagating ripples of space-time predicted by general relativity. 100 years after Albert Einstein published his theory of GR, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) found the first direct detection of GW in the first Advanced LIGO observing run. The GW signal known as GW150914 (Abbott et al., 2016), was the first of a series of binary black hole mergers observed by LIGO. These detections marked the beginning of gravitational-wave astronomy.

The continuous wave (CW) signal emitted by fast spinning neutron stars (NSs) is an another interesting source for a detector like LIGO. The low-mass X-ray binary …

Predicting Underperformance From Students In Upper Level Engineering Courses, William J. Darlington

Theses

Recent research in academic analytics has focused on predicting student performance within, and sometimes across courses for the purpose of informing early interventions. While such an endeavor has obvious merit, modern contructivist learning theory expresses an importance on more individualized support for students. In keeping with this theory, this research describes the development of a model that predicts student performance within a course, relative to their past academic performance. This study is done using the minimum sources of data possible while still developing an accurate model. Useful logistic models using data from the institution’s student information system, learning management system, …

Using The Opposition Effect In Remotely Sensed Data To Assist In The Retrieval Of Bulk Density, Brittany L. Ambeau

Theses

Bulk density is an important geophysical property that impacts the mobility of military vehicles and personnel. Accurate retrieval of bulk density from remotely sensed data is, therefore, needed to estimate the mobility on "off-road" terrain. For a particulate surface, the functional form of the opposition effect can provide valuable information about composition and structure. In this research, we examine the relationship between bulk density and angular width of the opposition effect for a controlled set of laboratory experiments. Given a sample with a known bulk density, we collect reflectance measurements on a spherical grid for various illumination and view geometries …

Multi-Objective Optimization Of Hospital Inpatient Bed Assignment, Brenden Hoff

Theses

Choosing which bed to assign an admitted patient to in a hospital is a complex problem. There are numerous factors to consider including the patient’s gender and isolation requirements, current bed availability, and unit configurations. This problem must be solved each time a new patient seeks admission resulting in rearrangement of already admitted patients. Each movement of an already admitted patient increases the workload for hospital staff and also increases the risk of nosocomial infections for the patient. In order to alleviate these problems we propose optimizing the patient admission process through a multi-objective model which first maximizes the overall …

An Exploration Of Rhythm Perception In African Penguins (Spheniscus Demersus), Irene A. Fobe

Theses

Rhythmic properties in penguin vocalizations may be unique to individuals. Rhythm perception is a cognitive ability previously thought to be exclusive to vocal-learning species who have the neurological complexities required to mimic conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations. Discovering rhythm perception in penguins would provide insight on penguins’ ability to recognize kin using auditory cues, and discount theories constraining rhythm perception to vocal-learning animals. The goal of this study was to learn if African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) could perceive changes in rhythm using a habituation-dishabituation paradigm. Subjects were 32-38 African penguins housed at the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester, NY. Penguins were …

Exploring Gria2 Sequence Variations Using Virtual Reality, Jimmy Fan Zhang

Theses

The effective visualization and presentation of biological data is of critical importance to research scientists. The increasing rate at which experiments generate data has only exacerbated the problem. While bioinformatics datasets continue to increase in size and complexity, the shift to adopt new user interface (UI) paradigms has historically lagged. Consequently, a major bottleneck for analysis of next-generation sequencing data is the continued use of UIs primarily inspired from the 1990’s through the early 2000’s. This paper presents the novel use of virtual reality (VR) as a medium for visualizing genomic, transcriptomic and proteomic data. Using the Gria2 (GluR2 or …

Robust And Traffic Aware Medium Access Control Mechanisms For Energy-Efficient Mm-Wave Wireless Network-On-Chip Architectures, Naseef Mansoor

Theses

To cater to the performance/watt needs, processors with multiple processing cores on the same chip have become the de-facto design choice. In such multicore systems, Network-on-Chip (NoC) serves as a communication infrastructure for data transfer among the cores on the chip. However, conventional metallic interconnect based NoCs are constrained by their long multi-hop latencies and high power consumption, limiting the performance gain in these systems. Among, different alternatives, due to the CMOS compatibility and energy-efficiency, low-latency wireless interconnect operating in the millimeter wave (mm-wave) band is nearer term solution to this multi-hop communication problem. This has led to the recent …

Evolution Of Massive Black Hole Binaries In Rotating Stellar Nuclei And Its Implications For Gravitational Wave Detection, Alexander Rasskazov

Theses

According to the currently prevailing cosmological paradigm, mergers between galaxies are an important part of their evolution. Assuming also that most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at their center, binary supermassive black holes (BSBH) should be common products of galactic mergers.

The subject of this dissertation is the dynamical evolution of a BSBH at the center of a galaxy. I calculate the rate of change of a binary's orbital elements due to interactions with the stars of the galaxy by means of 3-body scattering experiments. My model includes a new degree of freedom - the orientation of the BSBH's …

Efficient Template-Based Nanomanufacturing Of Carbon Nanotube Arrays For Cell Applications, Adeel Ahmed

Theses

Carbon nanotube arrays have been found to be highly effective at carrying out intracellular delivery of cargo at high efficiencies while ensuring cell viability. Template based chemical vapor deposition is a commonly used process to fabricate these arrays. However, current etching methods used to expose carbon nanotubes from templates are expensive and time consuming. The high cost and time-consuming processes currently required to fabricate such arrays are factors which limit the commercialization of this technology and inhibit scope for larger research programs. In this thesis, alternative nanofabrication methods were explored with the aim of making the fabrication of CNT arrays …

The Incarnation, Lingfei Zhao

Theses

In this thesis, I talk about the influence in my growth and the development of my artworks during these past two years in fine arts studio of Rochester Institute of Technology where I pursued my Master of Fine Arts degree. I analyze how I get ideas from my childhood memory and my childhood fantasy and how I begin to record my everyday dreams and put them in my artworks. Besides, I explain how I mix my dream artworks with an observation of reality at the end of my graduate study. Besides, I analyze my use of materials, my improvement of …

Developing Effective Museum Text: A Case Study From Caithness, Scotland, Heather Strachan

Theses

When walking into museums, visitors already have expectations about what they will encounter inside. Whether they are there to see a specific object or exhibit everyone expects to confront an artifact and learn about it. What visitors might not think about is how they receive the information pertaining to these objects which can come from a docent, a guide, a label, or an online source. The written word is so relied upon by museums that a visitor will encounter text from the moment they enter a museum, throughout the visit, and until they leave. This means that everywhere they look …

Discovering A Domain Knowledge Representation For Image Grouping: Multimodal Data Modeling, Fusion, And Interactive Learning, Xuan Guo

Theses

In visually-oriented specialized medical domains such as dermatology and radiology, physicians explore interesting image cases from medical image repositories for comparative case studies to aid clinical diagnoses, educate medical trainees, and support medical research. However, general image classification and retrieval approaches fail in grouping medical images from the physicians' viewpoint. This is because fully-automated learning techniques cannot yet bridge the gap between image features and domain-specific content for the absence of expert knowledge. Understanding how experts get information from medical images is therefore an important research topic.

As a prior study, we conducted data elicitation experiments, where physicians were instructed …

Applying Hierarchical Contextual Parsing With Visual Density And Geometric Features To Typeset Formula Recognition, Michael Patrick Erickson Condon

Theses

We demonstrate that recognition of scanned typeset mathematical expression images can be done by extracting maximum spanning trees from line of sight graphs weighted using geometric and visual density features. The approach used is hierarchical contextual parsing (HCP): Hierarchical in terms of starting with connected components and building to the symbol level using visual, spatial, and contextual features of connected components. Once connected components have been segmented into symbols, a new set of spatial, visual, and contextual features are extracted. One set of visual features is used for symbol classification, and another for parsing. The features are used in parsing …

Better Text Detection Through Improved K-Means-Based Feature Learning, Kardo Othman Aziz

Theses

In this thesis, we propose a different technique to initialize a Convolutional K-means. We propose Visual Similarity Sampling (VSS) to collect $8\times8$ sample patches from images for convolutional feature learning. The algorithm uses within-class and between-class cosine similarity/dissimilarity measure to collect samples from both foreground and background. Thus. VSS uses local frequency of shapes within a character patch and uses it as probability distribution to select them. Also, we show how that initializing Convolutional K-means from samples with high between-class and within-class similarity produce discriminative codebook. We test the codebook to detect text in the natural scene. We show that …

Hyperspectral And Hypertemporal Longwave Infrared Data Characterization, Nirmalan Jeganathan

Theses

The Army Research Lab conducted a persistent imaging experiment called the Spectral and Polarimetric Imagery Collection Experiment (SPICE) in 2012 and 2013 which focused on collecting and exploiting long wave infrared hyperspectral and polarimetric imagery. A part of this dataset was made for public release for research and development purposes. This thesis investigated the hyperspectral portion of this released dataset through data characterization and scene characterization of man-made and natural objects. First, the data were contrasted with MODerate resolution atmospheric TRANsmission (MODTRAN) results and found to be comparable. Instrument noise was characterized using an in-scene black panel, and was found …

360° View Camera Based Visual Assistive Technology For Contextual Scene Information, Mazin Ali

Theses

In this research project, a system is proposed to aid the visually impaired by providing partial contextual information of the surroundings using 360° view camera combined with deep learning is proposed. The system uses a 360° view camera with a mobile device to capture surrounding scene information and provide contextual information to the user in the form of audio. The system could also be used for other applications such as logo detection which visually impaired users can use for shopping assistance.

The scene information from the spherical camera feed is classified by identifying objects that contain contextual information of the …