Digital Commons Network^™

Investigation Of Methods For Machine Learning Associations Between Genetic Variations And Phenotype, Amanda M. Hartung

Theses

The relationship between genetics and phenotype is a complex one that remains poorly understood. Many factors contribute to the relationship between genetic variations and differences in phenotype. An improved understanding of the genetic underpinnings of various phenotypes can help us make important advances in testing for, preventing, treating, and curing a number of diseases and disorders.

The recent popularization of direct-to-consumer sequencing services, coupled with consumers releasing their genetic information for public use, has led to an unprecedented level of access to genetic information. Crowd-sourcing the problem of developing robust genome-wide association techniques for ever larger amounts of data is …

Image Quality Modeling And Optimization For Non-Conventional Aperture Imaging Systems, Philip S. Salvaggio

Theses

The majority of image quality studies have been performed on systems with conventional aperture functions. These systems have straightforward aperture designs and well-understood behavior. Image quality for these systems can be predicted by the General Image Quality Equation (GIQE). However, in order to continue pushing the boundaries of imaging, more control over the point spread function of an imaging system may be necessary. This requires modifications in the pupil plane of a system, causing a departure from the realm of most image quality studies. Examples include sparse apertures, synthetic apertures, coded apertures and phase elements. This work will focus on …

Incorporating Gallery Lighting In A Color-­‐Managed Imaging Workflow For Cultural Heritage, Joel Witwer

Theses

Conservation prints of cultural heritage are often produced in order to preserve the appearance qualities of the cultural heritage. The standard workflow for creating these prints is to image the cultural heritage, or paintings in the case of this thesis, under a D50 light source and create a print optimized for viewing under illuminant D50. The goal of this thesis was to investigate whether incorporating an incandescent gallery light source into the workflow had the potential to better preserve the viewer experience when the artwork is seen in an incandescent gallery.

Six prints were created through various combinations of a …

Predicting Choices In Bumblebees (Bombus Impatiens): Learning Rules And The Two-Armed Bandit, Isabel Lucia Rojas-Ferrer

Theses

Animals must make estimates about possible resources in order to choose the resource which will save them time and energy while conferring high energetic content. In order to make the most optimal decision, foragers must use various parameters to come up with an accurate estimate for each possible alternative. Learning rules allow us the possibility of analyzing which parameters animals may be using in order to make the best decision. We use compare known learning rules (i.e. Linear Operator Rule, Relative Payoff Sum Rule, Perfect Memory) and experimental data extracted from bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) subjected to a two armed bandit …

An Evaluation Of The Silicon Spectral Range For Determination Of Nutrient Content Of Grape Vines, Grant W.F. Anderson

Theses

The grape industry relies on in situ crop assessment to aid in the day-to-day and seasonal management of their crop. In the case of soil-plant chemistry interactions, there are six key nutrients of interest to viticulturists in the growing of wine grapes: nitrogen, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium, zinc, and boron. Traditional methods of determining the levels of these nutrients are through collection and chemical analysis of petiole samples from the grape vines themselves. In this study, however, we collected ground-level observations of the spectra of the grape vines using a hyperspectral spectroradiometer (0.4-2.5µm range; 1nm resampled spectral interval) at the same …

Evaluation Of Sensor, Environment And Operational Factors Impacting The Use Of Multiple Sensor Constellations For Long Term Resource Monitoring, Rajagopalan Rengarajan

Theses

Moderate resolution remote sensing data offers the potential to monitor the long and short term trends in the condition of the Earth’s resources at finer spatial scales and over longer time periods. While improved calibration (radiometric and geometric), free access (Landsat, Sentinel, CBERS), and higher level products in reflectance units have made it easier for the science community to derive the biophysical parameters from these remotely sensed data, a number of issues still affect the analysis of multi-temporal datasets. These are primarily due to sources that are inherent in the process of imaging from single or multiple sensors. Some of …

Spectral Target Detecting Using Schroedinger Eigenmaps, Leidy P. Dorado-Munoz

Theses

Applications of optical remote sensing processes include environmental monitoring, military monitoring, meteorology, mapping, surveillance, etc. Many of these tasks include the detection of specific objects or materials, usually few or small, which are surrounded by other materials that clutter the scene and hide the relevant information. This target detection process has been boosted lately by the use of hyperspectral imagery (HSI) since its high spectral dimension provides more detailed spectral information that is desirable in data exploitation. Typical spectral target detectors rely on statistical or geometric models to characterize the spectral variability of the data. However, in many cases these …

Examining The Differences In After-Sale Service Quality Perceptions Between Managers And Customers In The Automobile Industry And Their Impact On Customer Satisfaction, Mohamed Al Hammadi

Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore how service managers and their customers perceive the after-sale service quality provided by automobile service centers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a goal to identify the existence of gaps, if any, between their perceptions and how they can impact customer satisfaction level. A qualitative phenomenological method was implemented to gather a description of the participants’ actual experiences, and data were collected using semi-structured interviews with seven service mangers and 20 customers. The structure of the managers’ interview questions was designed to go beyond identifying the most important factors that customers …

Remote Access And Computerized User Control Of Robotic Micromanipulators, Ryan M. Dunn

Theses

Nano- and micromanipulators are critical research tools in numerous fields including micro-manufacturing and disease study. Despite their importance, nano- and micromanipulation systems remain inaccessible to many groups due to price and lack of portability. An intuitive and remotely accessible manipulation system helps mitigate this access problem. Previously, optimal control hardware for single-probe manipulation and the effect of latency on user performance were not well understood. Remote access demands full computerization; graphical user interfaces with networking capabilities were developed to fulfill this requirement and allow the use of numerous hardware controllers. Virtual environments were created to simulate the use of a …

Partial Aborts For Transactions Via First Class Continuations, Matthew Le

Theses

Software transactional memory (STM) has proven to be a useful abstraction for developing concurrent applications where programmers denote transactions with an atomic construct that delimits a collection of reads and writes to shared mutable references. The runtime system then guarantees that all transactions are observed to execute atomically with respect to each other. Traditionally, when the runtime system detects that one transaction conflicts with another, it aborts one of the transactions and restarts its execution from the beginning. This can lead to problems with both execution time and throughput.

This thesis presents a novel approach that uses first-class continuations to …

Discovery, Cloning, Expression, Purification, And Characterization Of Phosphoglycolate Phosphatase From Staphylococcus Aureus, Isreal Moreno

Theses

Staphylococcus aureus is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections. The multi-drug resistant nature of certain S. aureus strains makes the discovery of new drug targets for S. aureus vital. A newly discovered virulence factor from S. aureus was described as an ortholog of NagD from E. coli, a member of the nitrophenyl phosphatase family of the HAD (Haloacid Dehalogenase) superfamily. This thesis will show that this virulence factor is not an ortholog of NagD UMPase from E. coli, but rather a phosphoglycolate phosphatase (PGPase). If phosphoglycolate accumulates in the cell, it will inhibit the glycolytic enzyme triose phosphate isomerase (TPI). …

Re-Thinking The Urban Form Of Social Housing In Brazil: A Search For Urban Sustainability, Lis Moreira Cavalcante

Theses

During the last decade, Brazil has witnessed the construction of an unprecedented number of social housing developments, due to an ambitious federal program named “My House My Life” (Minha Casa Minha Vida - MCMV). In seven years, it has contracted 4.2 million of housing units, and 2.6 million of them were already delivered to beneficiaries. The program is currently in its third phase, and it covers three different ranges of income with two main goals: to boost the construction sector and reduce the housing deficit of the country by encouraging homeownership. However, the resultant large scale developments are providing residents …

Knowledge-Based Decision Making For Simulating Cyber Attack Behaviors, Stephen Frank Moskal

Theses

Computer networks are becoming more complex as the reliance on these network increases in this era of exponential technological growth. This makes the potential gains for criminal activity on these networks extremely serious and can not only devastate organizations or enterprises but also the general population. As complexity of the network increases so does the difficulty to protect the networks as more potential vulnerabilities are introduced. Despite best efforts, traditional defenses like Intrusion Detection Systems and penetration tests are rendered ineffective to even amateur cyber adversaries. Networks now need to be analyzed at all times to preemptively detect weaknesses which …

Visual Odometry Estimation Using Selective Features, Vishwas Venkatachalapathy

Theses

The rapid growth in computational power and technology has enabled the automotive industry to do extensive research into autonomous vehicles. So called self- driven cars are seen everywhere, being developed from many companies like, Google, Mercedes Benz, Delphi, Tesla, Uber and many others. One of the challenging tasks for these vehicles is to track incremental motion in runtime and to analyze surroundings for accurate localization. This crucial information is used by many internal systems like active suspension control, autonomous steering, lane change assist and many such applications. All these systems rely on incremental motion to infer logical conclusions. Measurement of …

Digitabs: Share. Learn. Play, Alfredo Lopez

Theses

This project focused on designing an effective online sharing network that includes video tutorials and music tablatures of any original or pre-existing song, created and shared by fellow musicians. This network encourages people with little to no musical background to perform their own versions of songs by practicing and learning music theory in a pedagogical interactive environment.

Influence Of Flexibility On Work Life Balance, Nikolina Birimisa

Theses

Generation Y is entering into workforce and one of their needs in workplace is work life balance (Schulte, 2015). If employers want to retain them, they need to recognize it (Ingham, 2015). Different studies show, that flexibility has strong correlation with work life balance (Clark, 2000). Furthermore, literature review indicated that there is no sufficient data about Generation Y in Croatia. These indications showed the need for further research.

The purpose of this quantitative, survey method, study was to test whether work place flexibility, including factors of job content, time schedule and location, positively influences work life balance for Generation …

Electrical Double Layer Potential Distribution In Nanoporous Electrodes From Molecular Modeling And Classical Electrodynamics Analysis, Evan Marshall Ney

Theses

When a solid surface is immersed in a solution, the surface can become charged in a variety of ways including crystal lattice defects, dissociation of atoms or molecules, ionization of surface groups, and adsorption of external ions or, in the case of an electrode, via the application of an external potential. The excess charge at the surface results in an accumulation of mobile ions in the solution near the surface. Relative to the charge on the surface, ions of opposite charge (counterions) build up near the surface to neutralize the surface charge, and ions of like charge (coions) are depleted …

A Qualitative Analysis Of Effectiveness, Efficiency And Equity Of Payment For Ecosystem Services In A User-Financed And A Government-Financed Program, Tanya Williams

Theses

Payment for Ecosystems Services (PES) programs which are considered as incentivized mechanisms has been implemented in Latin America as a strategy to reduce deforestation by rewarding landowners (sellers) to protect forests and to provide ecosystem services to ecosystem users/beneficiaries (buyers).

Two common management structures for PES programs have been implemented in Latin America: Government-financed and User-financed. User-financed PES programs are promoted as being more environmentally effective and cost-effective compared with Government-financed programs. Government-financed PES programs are perceived as less effective than User-financed PES due to the inclusion of equity as a critical policy outcome of PES.

In this thesis, an …

Identification Of Hyperelastic Anisotropic Properties In Vascular Biomechanics Based On In-­‐ Vivo And In-­‐Vitro Measurements, Nikhil Meshram

Theses

To clarify the complex interaction between mechanical and biological processes in natural or artificial (surgical) phenomena, the knowledge of the properties of biological tissues is required. It is also of interest for biochemistry, biophysics, cardiology, radiology, physiology, surgery, and pathology. In particular we require a constitutive formulation to be capable of reflecting an actual experimental data over the wide range of deformation and stresses. The constitutive equations should ideally be relatively simple, involving a few parameters, capable to predict the material response of biological tissue subject to a static or dynamic load.

Almost 30 years ago Y. C. Fung and …

Patient History Elicitation And Diagnostic Decision Making, Nicholas Iuliucci

Theses

Technology has changed the way people communicate, and communication between patients and medical professionals has not been exempt from these developments. Clinicians are now text messaging, emailing, and video conferencing patient. Understanding the impact of the new modalities on communication patterns is imperative to ensure quality care. Thirty-two medical professionals of varying experience conducted a patient interview with two confederate patients over an instant messaging system. The first interview was 15 minutes and the second 7 minutes, the latter condition inducing time pressure. The results demonstrated that time pressure has an adverse impact on the medical professionals’ communication patterns. The …

Propagation Of Sensor Noise In Navigation Equations And High Accuracy Dynamic Calibration Of Sensors, Timothy A. Nichols

Theses

Accurate navigation in GPS denied locations is extremely hard to achieve. Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) are currently the only reasonable onboard alternative to GPS but INS has error terms that grow very quickly. Even current high-end INSs have an error exceeding one km after only ten minutes of use. A high-accuracy INS would be very useful in underwater applications, spacecraft and extraterrestrial rovers, and military applications. This thesis seeks to enable such Inertial Navigation Systems.

Android Malware Detection Using Category-Based Machine Learning Classifiers, Huda Ali Alatwi

Theses

Android malware growth has been increasing dramatically along with increasing of the diversity and complicity of their developing techniques. Machine learning techniques are the current methods to model patterns of static features and dynamic behaviors of Android malware. Whereas the accuracy rates of the classifiers increase with increasing the quality of the features, we relate between the apps' features and the features that are needed to deliver the category's functionality. Differently, our classification approach defines legitimate static features for benign apps under a specific category as opposite to identifying malicious patterns. We utilize the features of the top rated apps …

Statistical Approaches For Signal Processing With Application To Automatic Singer Identification, Shiteng Yang

Theses

In the music world, the oldest instrument is known as the singing voice that plays an important role in musical recordings. The singer's identity serves as a primary aid for people to organize, browse, and retrieve music recordings. In this thesis, we focus on the problem of singer identification based on the acoustic features of singing voice. An automatic singer identification system is constructed and has achieved a very high identification accuracy. This system consists of three crucial parts: singing voice detection, background music removal and pattern recognition. These parts are introduced and explored in great details in this thesis. …

Energy Dispersion Model Using Tight Binding Theory, Divya S. Vajpey

Theses

2-D Semiconductors are novel materials in the field of nano-electronics. Their unusual transport properties have led to an extensive research attention towards similar materials. Graphene has carriers that exhibit an effective "speed of light" (106 m/s) in the low energy range of

This research proposes to achieve a common energy dispersion model for different hybridized structures, using tight binding theory. The goal is to achieve a suitable starting point to obtain practical electronic transport calculations for complex atomic structures. We begin with analyzing the electronic properties by obtaining the analytic solution of the wave function, from the Schrödinger equation. We …

An Adaptive Algorithm For Range Queries In Differential Privacy, Asma Alnemari

Theses

Preserving privacy while publishing data for analysis by researchers is an issue which has considerable attention recently. ε-differential privacy is a solution that guarantees the privacy while publishing sets of data or some information about them. This work aimed to develop a mechanism that answers a given workload of range queries efficiently under differential privacy. Therefore, an algorithm was implemented during this project to satisfy differential privacy by controlling the noise added to the answers according to the input data and the given workload. The algorithm first produces two partitions of the data domain. The first partition will be produced …

Optimum Distance Between Ground Base Stations For High-Speed Train Communications Using Free-Space Optical Laser Links, Sina Fathi Kazerooni

Theses

High-Speed trains (HSTs) can travel at speeds up to 430 Km/h. The increasing adoption rate of HSTs, and large number of Internet-connected digital devices, pose a great demand for a fast and reliable Internet connection in high-speed trains. Different radio-frequency (RF) wireless communication systems have been studied for HSTs. However, RF wireless communications in high-speed mobility environments suffer from frequent handovers, penetration loss, and Doppler effect. These problems promote the use of other technologies such as free-space optical (FSO) communications to provide reliable Internet connection for HST’s passengers.

Two different approaches for performing signal handover using FSO technology for ground …

Data Analytics With Mapreduce In Apache Spark And Hadoop Systems, Zongxuan Du

Theses

MapReduce comes from a traditional problem solving method: separating a big problem and solving each small parts. With the target of computing larger dataset in more efficient and cheaper way, this is implement into a programming mode to deal with massive quantity of data. The users get a map function and use it to abstract dataset into key / value logical pair and then use a reduce function to group all value with the same key. With this mode, task can be automatic spread the job into clusters grouped by lots of normal computers. MapReduce program can be easily implemented …

Response Of Stretch-Injured Schwann Cells, Stephanie Iring

Theses

Axon fibers are covered by myelin sheath. After axonal damage, demyelination follows with the production of debris. In the Central Nervous System many studies have been performed to observe and analyze stretch injured axons, but very little has been done to study the white matter axonal tracts, oligodendrocytes. Schwann cells can help take a first look into stretch injured glia cells from the Peripheral nervous system. In order to observe changes in Schwann Cells a stretch injury device is used to produce the effects of severe and moderate injuries. Schwann Cells are stretch injured in both their undifferentiated and differentiated …

Multisensory Integration In Weakly Electric Fish, Andrea Roeser

Theses

Animals integrate information from across sensory systems, such as vision and hearing, to improve perception. To understand how neural circuits in the central nervous system integrate information from different senses, the responses of midbrain neurons to two categories of electrosensory stimuli in Eigenmannia virescens were studied. The first category of stimulus is electrical signals with frequencies below 50 Hz that are encoded in the activity of ampullary receptors. The second category is amplitude modulations of the electric organ discharge, which are encoded by p-type tuberous receptors. Six multisensory neurons were found that responded to both categories of stimuli. However, when …

Preparation, Ignition And Combustion Of Reactive Metal-Sulfur Nanocomposites, Ziyue Zhong

Theses

Mechanical milling is applied to synthesize reactive metal-sulfur nanocomposites. Specifically, magnesium-sulfur, aluminum-sulfur and zirconium-sulfur nanocomposite powders are prepared. Each powder particle contained homogeneously mixed sulfur and respective metal. These materials are expected to be stable in room air. They are also expected to release sulfur upon ignition; the released sulfur may serve as a biocidal agent. The ignition temperatures of the three prepared sulfur-bearing materials fall in a range of 750 - 1000 K. All prepared materials are successfully ignited in electrostatic discharge experiment as well as in a constant volume explosion experiment. The most sensitive material to spark ignition …