Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

A Computational Model For Transdermal Diffusion Of Lidocaine And Tetracaine Topical Patches, Qian Dong

Theses

In recent years, transdermal drug delivery patches (TDDP) have developed rapidly. This is because the TDD system has more advantages than traditional drug delivery systems such as oral medicine and intravenous injection. In order to reach the circulatory system of the human body, drug molecules have to pass through the epidermis (outer layer) of the skin. The barrier properties of epidermis originate from low permeability of stratum corneum (SC) which is the outermost layer of the human skin. The objective of this thesis is to build a Finite Element (FE) model, utilizing commercial FE software (ANSYS), that can be implemented …

Effectiveness Of Water Quality Benefits Provided By Stormwater Management Facilities/Infiltration Basin, Vinicius Rodrigues De Mattos Barreto

Theses

Stormwater Best Management Practices (BMP) and devices are systems frequently built under assumed design performances, but rarely verified after construction. Their effectiveness in protecting the environment against pollutants carried by stormwater runoff has been extensively questioned and investigated. This research presents a case study of an infiltration basin in Medford, NJ to verify if the 80% expected Total Suspended Solids (TSS) removal as stated in the New Jersey Stormwater BMP Manual is actually achieved. A sampling pit was installed on the site and infiltrated water samples were collected during three rain events and TSS measurements were compared with the inflow. …

Effect Of Melt Method On Thoracolumbar Connective Tissue, Faria Sanjana

Theses

Approximately, 31 million adults in the United States suffer from low back pain (LBP). Altered connective tissue structure has been identified in adults with chronic LBP. Numerous novel treatments are being developed targeting the connective tissue and nervous system to relieve people from LBP. One such self-care treatment is the MELT method. The objective of this study was to determine whether thickness of thoracolumbar connective tissue and other biomechanical and viscoelastic properties of myofascial tissue in the low back region change in subjects with chronic LBP as a result of MELT.

Using ultrasound imaging and an algorithm developed in MATLAB, …

Prediction Of The Frictional Characteristics Of Halogen-Free Ionic Liquids In Elastohydrodynamic Point Contacts., Karthik Janardhanan

Theses

Ionic Liquids have emerged as effective lubricants and additives to lubricants, in the last decade. Halogen-free ionic liquids have recently started to be considered as more environmentally stable than their halogenated counterparts, which tend to form highly toxic and corrosive acids when exposed to moisture. Most of the studies using ionic liquids as lubricants or additives of lubricants have been done experimentally. Due to the complex nature of the lubrication mechanism of these ordered fluids, the development of a theoretical model that predicts the ionic liquid lubrication ability is currently incomplete. In this study, a suitable and existing friction model …

Antibacterial Efficacy Of Nanometals In Conjunction With Electrical Stimulus, Syed A. Hussain

Theses

Hospital related infections generally result from the combined effect of preexisting bacteria on the patient and invasive devices. This demonstrates the significance in improving these medical devices to increase the quality of life of the patients that require them. This study will attempt to evaluate the antibacterial efficacy of nanocopper particles and an electrical stimulus for the usage in medical device development and the hospital environment.

For devices such as catheters, infections typically result from bacteria entering the body from the outside. This is accomplished by bacteria attaching themselves to the exterior of the device and producing biofilm which allows …

Gene Network Understanding And Analysis, Maria E. Somoza

Theses

Gene regulatory network (GRN) is a collection of regulators that interact with each other in the cell to govern the gene expression levels of mRNA and proteins. These regulators can either be DNA, RNA, protein and their complex. Transcriptional gene regulation is an important mechanisms in which an in-depth study can lead to various practical applications, and a greater understanding of how organisms control their cellular behavior. One of the most widely studied organisms in gene regulatory networks are the Mycobacterium tuberculosis and Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032.

Gene co-expression networks are of biological interests due to co-expressed genes which are …

Pen+: An Emotional Expression Device And A Mobile Application For Emotional Health, Mi-Hee Hong

Theses

Emotional health is an essential element in advancing towards one's life goals and is inextricably connected with physical and social well-being. Since emotions involve physiological, behavioral, and cognitive changes, emotional problems can cause serious problems throughout one's life.

Understanding one's emotional states precisely and suitably expressing emotions are the most salient methods for maintaining emotional health. However, managing and comprehending complicated changes in emotions can be personally challenging and demanding.

This thesis not only concentrates on the process of design thinking to determine how to enhance personal emotional intelligence but also proposes the use of both a digital device for …

Augmentation Of Experimental Design Using Statistical Power, Anil Nair

Theses

Hypothesis testing is an integral part in the process of experimental design that is used to identify significant effects in a study. A significant effect is one that is statistically determined to influence the response variable of interest and is based on the results of a hypothesis test. Any hypothesis test is prone to two types of error. When an effect is not significant in reality but the null hypothesis is rejected, then it is called a type I error and specified as α. Conversely, when an effect is significant in reality but we fail to reject the null hypothesis, …

Helios, Minh D. Le

Theses

“Helios” is an advertisement for a futuristic electric vehicle that utilizes revolutionary materials and upcoming technologies to address some of the current shortcomings of electric vehicles both aesthetically and technologically. This project explores how to create an effective advertisement for an automobile. Factors affecting consumer behavior, barriers and motivations for purchase, brand strategy, and aesthetics as well as the design of the car itself were all considered. The process for creating and assessing the advertisement will be summarized and evaluated

Wearable Wonderland: Using Interaction Design And Wearable Technology To Motivate People To Stay Active, Xi Yang

Theses

Wearable Wonderland is an interactive game about a boy's wonderful journey. The game is a mobile app that works with wearables. The goal of the thesis is to promote a healthy lifestyle using wearable technology. The target audience is young people who want to build a healthy lifestyle and become more active, ranging from ages 18 to 30.

Staying active and maintaining enough sleep is important to one’s overall wellbeing. Today, many fitness trackers and fitness apps have appeared on the market to encourage doing exercise. They can track people's activities easily. However, most of these apps cannot engage users …

Developing A Prototype System For Syndromic Surveillance And Visualization Using Social Media Data., Anup Aryal

Theses

Syndromic surveillance of emerging diseases is crucial for timely planning and execution of epidemic response from both local and global authorities. Traditional sources of information employed by surveillance systems are not only slow but also impractical for developing countries. Internet and social media provide a free source of a large amount of data which can be utilized for Syndromic surveillance.

We propose developing a prototype system for gathering, storing, filtering and presenting data collected from Twitter (a popular social media platform). Since social media data is inherently noisy we describe ways to preprocess the gathered data and utilize SVM (Support …

Energy Savings And Marginal Emissions Factor Approach To Emissions Reductions From Household Appliance Efficiency Improvements, Courtney N. Smith

Theses

The goal of this thesis is to estimate the total emissions avoided from replacing residential lighting and air conditioning with more energy efficient versions, while showing that the marginal emissions factor (MEF) approach to estimating these avoided emissions tends to be a more accurate method than the average emissions factor (AEF) approach. This thesis is the first to use MEFs to analyze emissions avoided from household energy efficiency improvements. This approach considers emissions avoided from the last power plant that would have been dispatched to meet demand, in contrast to the more commonly used AEF approach that considers emissions avoided …

Development Of A Data Management System For Grape Breeding Programs, Connor Fortin

Theses

Grape production is a significant industry in the U.S. and abroad, and is negatively impacted by diseases such as powdery mildew and downy mildew. Selecting vines that are disease resistant and have good fruit quality requires organized record-keeping and the ability to find useful trends in the data. In the Cornell Grape Breeding Program, and many others, data is stored in outdated systems, excel spreadsheets, and paper books; the need for a new data management system specific to grapes is prevalent. The Breeding Management System (BMS) is a crop breeding data management system that is well suited for the organization …

Sense3, Armaan Bhargava, Bruno Rocha, Lakshminarayanan Vijayaraghavan, Meith Jhaveri, Mrinal Jain, Srinivasan Thiagarajan

Theses

Sense3, at its core, is a game in which the player has to collectively use the three senses of sight, touch and hearing to primarily dodge obstacles and collect audio samples, which are vertically remixed to form music. We chose EDM themed music, coupled with a futuristic outer space theme for the art style of the game, creating an immersive environment. The game is a pseudo-endless runner, where the player has to collect all the components to assemble their music. After each play through, the game allows the player to listen to the newly assembled music before reloading. We wanted …

The Busk Below, Kenton Cummings

Theses

Whether above, or below the concrete jungle a.k.a. NYC, there is no doubt that this town is a proving ground. Countless individuals flock to the mecca city in search of success, money, and fame-looking to share their talents with anyone who will listen. No exception to this ethic, are the subway tunnels below ground that harbor an abundance of talent. Known as Street Performers, these subway buskers are more than the title mostly associated with panhandlers and beggars. Their talents captivate an audience, mostly distracted by their everyday lives, as they travel from one destination to the next. These performers …

Sketchy, Matt Ansini

Theses

Sketchy is the story of Charlie, a 30-year-old underachiever working in the IT department of an office building. Despite his best efforts, he has slowly moved up the corporate ladder that he never intended to climb. In the beginning of the film, Charlie’s long term girlfriend Julie is thrilled to hear Charlie has been offered a management position with the company. She takes it as a sign that now is the perfect time to take their relationship to the next level and get married.

Charlie, on the other hand, sees this as a different sign. He has decided that he …

Mining Knowledge Bases For Question & Answers Websites, Eduardo Coelho De Lima

Theses

We studied the problem of searching answers for questions on a Question-and-Answer Website from knowledge bases. A number of research efforts had been developed using Stack Overflow data, which is available for the public. Surprisingly, only a few papers tried to improve the search for better answers. Furthermore, current approaches for searching a Question-and-Answer Website are usually limited to the question database, which is usually the website own content. We showed it is feasible to use knowledge bases as sources for answers. We implemented both vector-space and topic-space representations for our datasets and compared these distinct techniques. Finally, we proposed …

Real-Time Aerial Vehicle Detection And Tracking Using A Multi-Modal Optical Sensor, Burak Uzkent

Theses

Vehicle tracking from an aerial platform poses a number of unique challenges including the small number of pixels representing a vehicle, large camera motion, and parallax error. For these reasons, it is accepted to be a more challenging task than traditional object tracking and it is generally tackled through a number of different sensor modalities. Recently, the Wide Area Motion Imagery sensor platform has received reasonable attention as it can provide higher resolution single band imagery in addition to its large area coverage. However, still, richer sensory information is required to persistently track vehicles or more research on the application …

Men In Vogue: A Visual Analysis Of The Male Gender On American Vogue Covers, Connor Lamb

Theses

For a better understanding of how gender is portrayed in media, it is important to include a specific investigation on how men are portrayed. This visual analysis study focused on the six unique American Vogue covers that included men to examine gender representation. All the cover images were analyzed for characteristics in the male and female cover persons’ pose, gaze, and race. Amidst current gender debates, American Vogue has portrayed both men and women together on the cover only six separate times over American Vogue’s entire history. The investigation of these six covers contributes a better understanding of how American …

Effects Of Using Ipad On First Grade Students' Achievements In Arabic Language Classes In Saudi Arabia, Jawaher Alsulami

Theses

Although the iPad device has become a new trend as a teaching and learning tool in schools, using it in Saudi schools is still relatively new. So, the purpose of the study was to investigate whether the iPad enhances the teaching and learning styles in Arabic language classes for first grade in Albushra primary school. It also examined how this new educational tool affects students' skills and achievements, how teachers and students use it in their Arabic language classes, and what are advantages and disadvantages of using it in a class and at home. The study data was collected by …

Development Of A Voice-Controlled Human-Robot Interface, Warat Khaewratana

Theses

The goal of this thesis is to develop a voice-controlled human-robot interface (HRI) which allows a person to control and communicate with a robot. Dragon NaturallySpeaking, a commercially available automatic speech recognition engine, was chosen for the development of the proposed HRI. In order to achieve the goal, the Dragon software is used to create custom commands (or macros) which must satisfy the tasks of (a) directly controlling the robot with voice, (b) writing a robot program with voice, and (c) developing a HRI which allows the human and robot to communicate with each other using speech. The key is …

Team Igniter: An Adaptive Toolkit To Guide And Leverage Collaboration In Teams Seeking To Problem-Solve And Innovate, Vinicius De Andrade Romualdo

Theses

Even though interdisciplinarity has been constantly debated and supported during faculty meetings at RIT, still, academic programs confine themselves into silos, hampering student integration. The struggle to effectively collaborate becomes evident in the existent on campus initiatives that challenge students from different disciplines to work together. The consequence is the under-utilization of the students' potential which leads to mediocre outcomes.

This thesis investigated main collaboration problems typical of groups seeking to problem-solve such as groupthink, production blocking, social loafing and social anxiety. These issues were studied in the academic context through a user-centered methodology that involved observations and interviews with …

Posthaste, Carolyn Depp

Theses

Posthaste is a short, stop-motion animated film that follows the narrative of an absent-minded teenage boy who must race to drop a letter in a distant mailbox before the mail truck arrives for its last pickup. This narrative framework is structured to allow for the exploration and experimentation with multiple animation styles. The goal was to not only practice various walk cycles at different speeds, but to also have the character emote broadly, in a more cartoonish style, and with smaller, subtler movements, all while maintaining the believability that these were all expressions of the same individual and were in …

Text Detection In Natural Scenes And Technical Diagrams With Convolutional Feature Learning And Cascaded Classification, Siyu Zhu

Theses

An enormous amount of digital images are being generated and stored every day. Understanding text in these images is an important challenge with large impacts for academic, industrial and domestic applications. Recent studies address the difficulty of separating text targets from noise and background, all of which vary greatly in natural scenes. To tackle this problem, we develop a text detection system to analyze and utilize visual information in a data driven, automatic and intelligent way.

The proposed method incorporates features learned from data, including patch-based coarse-to-fine detection (Text-Conv), connected component extraction using region growing, and graph-based word segmentation (Word-Graph). …

The Primary Volatile Composition Of Comet C/2012 K1 (Panstarrs), Nathaniel Xavier Roth

Theses

On 2014 May 22 and 24 we characterized the volatile composition of the dynamically new Oort cloud comet C/2012 K1 (PanSTARRS) using the long-slit, high resolution (λ/Δλ ≈ 25,000) infrared echelle spectrograph (NIRSPEC) at the 10 m Keck 2 telescope on Maunakea, HI. We detected fluorescent emission from six primary volatiles (H2O, HCN, CH4, C2H6, CH3OH, and CO). Upper limits were derived for C2H2, NH3, and H2CO. We report rotational temperatures, production rates, and mixing ratios (relative to water). Compared with median abundance ratios for primary volatiles in other sampled Oort cloud comets, trace gas abundance ratios in C/2012 K1 …

Healthcare Incident Reporting: The Impacts Of Usability Of Input Interfaces, Usability Of Resulting Data, And Attitudes Towards Reporting, Paul Wiele

Theses

Research into improving the safety of healthcare systems has recently focused on learning how incidents of harm to patients happen and how to prevent them. Although it is acknowledged that low participation in incident-reporting systems contributes to the problem of poor error prevention, little research has focused on improving participation. This research is focused on how both participation in and use of incident-reporting systems can be improved by examining the usability of the reporting tools. A large private hospital in the northeastern United States and the incident reporting app used there were examined as a case study. A mixed-methods approach …

Kernelized Cost-Sensitive Listwise Ranking, Gabriela Guimaraes Olinto

Theses

This thesis research aims to conduct a study on a cost-sensitive listwise approach to learning to rank.

Learning to Rank is an area of application in machine learning, typically supervised, to build ranking models for Information Retrieval systems. The training data consists of lists of items with some partial order specified induced by an ordinal score or a binary judgment (relevant/not relevant). The model purpose is to produce a permutation of the items in this list in a way which is close to the rankings in the training data. This technique has been

successfully applied to ranking, and several approaches …

Development Of A System Model For An Indirect Passive Solar Dryer With Experimental Validation, Samantha Huselstein

Theses

Solar crop drying is a cheap and effective way to preserve food material, especially in developing countries where fuel and electricity are expensive or unavailable. Some tropical fruits are difficult to transport and store leading to significant spoilage. Without access to fuel and large drying systems, preserving fruits for later use is challenging or not possible for the rural farmer. Developing low-cost, easily assembled locally and low maintenance fruit drying systems would improve access to off-season and distant markets. A mathematical model of an indirect passive solar drying system was developed to design and optimize drying systems for use in …

Evolutionary Weights For Random Subspace Learning, Andre Lobato Ramos

Theses

Ensemble learning is a widely used technique in Data Mining, this method allows us to aggregate models to reduce prediction error. There are many methods on how to perform model aggregation, one of them is known as Random Subspace Learning, which consists of building subspace of the feature space where we want to create our models. The task of selecting good subspaces and in turn produce good models for better prediction can be a daunting one, so we want to propose a new method to accomplish such a task. This proposed method allows for an automated data-driven way to attribute …