Digital Commons Network^™

A Study On The Social And The Environmental Impacts Of Bottled Water & A Design Solution To Improve The User Experience Of Reusable Water Bottles, Chia-Wei Chang

Theses

The consumption of bottled water is likely to emerge as a global trend in the coming decades. The expansion of the bottled water industry and rapid growth of bottled water sales has caused serious concerns regarding the possible contamination of bottled water, the impact of its refuse on the environment, and the management of water resources. Some factors accelerating the sales and use of bottled water are complex and multifaceted and involve pollution, values, politics, water shortages, commercial behaviors, consumption behaviors, a widening disparity between the rich and poor within society, and the unfair distribution of resources. Any single solution …

Designing Children’S Interactive Pop-Up Books: Creating Enhanced Experiences Through The Incorporation Of Animation Principles And Interactive Design., Michael Begay

Theses

This thesis, Designing Children’s Interactive Pop-up Books: Creating enhanced experiences through the incorporation of animation principles and interactive design, created by Michael Begay, explores how interactive design and computer graphics can be used to create enhanced user experiences in children’s book design. Key factors taken into consideration during the creation of this thesis include children’s book design, typography, storytelling, animation principles, and interactive design principles.

In order to explore the effect computer graphic design has on creating an enhanced user experience in pop-up book design, this project starts with research on writing a compelling, age appropriate story for children between …

The Long Walk, Joe Columbia

Theses

The “Long Walk” is the concept for my body of work consisting of a group of items that tell a visual story about life and metaphorical transcendence. There are common processes used to make the work with changes in materials, surface, and form that give each sub body of work its individual character and meaning. The vessels I created are based on historical research of funerary urns modified in design, and material to explore what makes a vessel transcend its utilitarian design and become a metaphor for life. Ultimately this exploration led me to look within myself for the answer …

The Evaluation Of Process Safety Management Effectiveness In The Oil And Gas Sector: Case Of Sonatrach, Algeria, Salim Ghettas

Theses

Over the last decade the process sector has experienced unprecedented process incidents that are due to a combination of organizational, technical, and cultural deficiencies. Thus, Process Safety Management (PSM) has become a subject of great interest for process companies, governments, and professional associations. In fact, many researchers have questioned the effectiveness of PSM programs in process companies and discussed the features of a quality PSM program.

Indeed, a review of the literature reveals several PSM issues in this sector internationally, which are mainly about organizational safety culture, maintenance and operational integrity of processes, PSM performance measurement, employee training, and knowledge …

Clarifying Techniques For Unique Robotic Surgeries, Samantha Bundy

Theses

My thesis, Clarifying Techniques for Unique Robotic Surgeries, is a teaching tool comprised of surgical video paired with medical illustrations. The intended learner is robot-asstisted surgeons who are looking to expand their skills by learning new techniques and procedures that have previously been done without robot assistance. This tool is originally the brainchild of Dr. Khurshid Guru, a urology surgeon at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, whose skills are renowned world-wide in the robotic surgery community. Dr. Guru has developed and used these techniques with great success for urological cancer treatment. As a leader in his field, he was eager to …

A Voxel-Based Approach For Imaging Voids In Three-Dimensional Point Clouds, Katie N. Salvaggio

Theses

Geographically accurate scene models have enormous potential beyond that of just simple visualizations in regard to automated scene generation. In recent years, thanks to ever increasing computational efficiencies, there has been significant growth in both the computer vision and photogrammetry communities pertaining to automatic scene reconstruction from multiple-view imagery. The result of these algorithms is a three-dimensional (3D) point cloud which can be used to derive a final model using surface reconstruction techniques. However, the fidelity of these point clouds has not been well studied, and voids often exist within the point cloud. Voids exist in texturally difficult areas, as …

Directing Attention In An Augmented Reality Environment: An Attentional Tunneling Evaluation, Alan J. Lambie

Theses

Augmented Reality applications use explicit cuing to support visual search. Explicit cues can help improve visual search performance but they can also cause perceptual issues such as attentional tunneling. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the relationship between directing attention and attentional tunneling, in a dual task structure. One task was tracking a target in motion and the other was detection of non-target elements. Three conditions were tested: baseline without cuing the target, cuing the target with the average scene color, and using a red cue. A different color for the cue was used to vary the attentional tunneling level. …

The Digitization And Accessibility Of Documents: A Case Study At The Rochester Public Library, Kirsten Feigel

Theses

Technology has proven to benefit human experience and achievement in many ways and has become a growing aspect of visitor engagement, documentation, and research in museums. Collections professionals in libraries and archives, as well as museums, are committing to processing artifacts, in many cases, to make them digitally accessible online. Such collections of online assets are classified as digital libraries, which become online tools used for research and descriptive search engines to assist individuals beyond the need of the physical interaction at the place of learning. This thesis provides an overview of the four outline digital repositories based in the …

Living Dragons: Illustrating Vfx Character Creation Techniques, Karen Vandivert

Theses

Living Dragons is a 3D character design Master’s thesis project in which four visual special effects technologies (puppetry, stop motion, CGI, and motion capture) are represented with four different characters intended to represent the archetypes of those technologies. The goal is to foster curiosity in these topics and encourage its audience to explore their new interests further. The project itself is meant to be casual and fun, an inviting place to begin learning about a new topic. This project is also meant to explore how character design can be used to convey how technology works, and to utilize that design …

无法抗拒 – Untranslatable, Yuanyuan Liu

Theses

As an artist, there are several themes I find of interest within the medium of photography including the relationship between the lens and the eye, aspects related to imagination and truth, as well as history and tendency. I believe that photography is the best medium for my current body of work because it inherently allows one to reflect on the conflict between reality and construction/fabrication. This is the main theme conveyed in this work. The title, 无法抗拒-Untranslatable, describes the problematic aspect of expressing oneself in a different (foreign) language and the feeling of inadequacy experienced therein. Any individual who is …

Early Pioneers, Philip Szrama

Theses

Rochester, NY has a rich history of innovation and visionary ideas. Many people who hear or talk about Rochester outside of the area are not familiar with the people who called Rochester their home. These pioneers took advantage of the areas strategic placement in the United States and use it to help achieve great things. The use of a short motion graphics piece can help people get a taste of what some of the early pioneers achieved.

Content, planning, and organization of this piece has been completed through research on four specific people (George Eastman, John Jacob Bausch, Henry Lomb, …

Community Crime Mapping: Increasing Predictive Policing With Dynamic Symbol Sets, Michael Chaszczewski

Theses

Crime prevention is an important area of study in our society that plays an integral role in the lives of citizens and the local police who enlist the aid of strategic counter crime plans to tackle the urgency created everyday when crimes are committed. This mode of counter acting crime is termed “problem oriented policing” and is a policing approach where individual pieces of police data are critically examined with the hope that the findings learned will lead to discovering a new and more effective counter crime strategy. Crime mapping is one of these analyzed tools allowing officers to understand …

Studies Of Gas Absorption In Infrared Spectra Of Carbon-Rich Agb Stars, Xingchao Yu

Theses

An asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star is a dying, Sun-like star, and it is actively expelling its mass into an envelope around the star, forming a circumstellar shell. Infrared spectra can reveal the composition of the material within this shell, informing studies of the recycling of the products of stellar nuclear processing in the Universe. In this study, we want to identify how the differing metallicities of our own, relatively metal-rich Milky Way galaxy and the nearby, lower metallicity Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy affect gas composition in the circumstellar shells of carbon-rich AGB stars.

Radiative transfer models are created …

Digital Museum Consortia: A Prototype For Interconnected And Accessible Database Design, Ben Heller

Theses

The evolution of the internet and devices allowing access to it indicate that users trend toward networking and interconnectivity in their daily lives. Museums have started to tread into this territory—that is, crafting, managing, and maintaining an effective internet presence and ancillary content tools—on their own. However, many museums still rely upon the earliest types of education and interpretation tools, such as audio tours and recordings that address content from one collection. Moving beyond a single institution’s holdings, a shared database of museum content including photos of artifacts and objects, historic documents, and videos would allow users to examine pieces …

Development And Characterization Of A Gaas Nipi Superlattice Solar Cell, Michael A. Slocum

Theses

The development of photovoltaics as an energy source has been propelled by numerous technological advancements over the past 60 years to now enable the conversion of sunlight into power at an efficiency of 46%. This enables power production that is cleaner, and more transferrable to locations off the grid than ever before, however new technologies are required to further increase efficiency while driving down costs. Currently a large effort is being made to achieve intermediate band solar cells (IBSC) that more efficiently convert energy from the entire solar spectrum. This is enabled through multiple techniques, including quantum dots (QDs), and …

Time Out: Influence Of User Experience Design On Behavior To Reduce Smartphone Use, Tejal Sampat

Theses

We are more connected than we used to be but people are becoming disengaged from the real world. Are smartphones a blessing or a bane? That depends on how we use it. Being hooked to a smartphone while interacting with family or friends is a definite no-no.

To address the issue of being neglected in social situations, timeOut allows neglected users to send anonymous timeouts to obsessive smartphone users who are preoccupied with their smartphones and are in close proximity to neglected users. The timeOut app allows neglected users to express their feelings without upsetting or embarrassing anyone. The application …

Data-Ink Ratio And Task Complexity In Graph Comprehension, Kevin Mcgurgan

Theses

Human processing of graphical information is a topic which has wide-reaching implications for decision-making in a variety of contexts. A deeper understanding of the processes of graphical perception can lead to the development of design guidelines which can enhance performance in graphical perception tasks. This study evaluates the data-ink ratio guideline, which recommends the removal of non-data graph elements, resulting in minimalist graph designs. In an experiment, participants answered graph comprehension questions using bar graphs and boxplots with varying data-ink ratios. Participants answered questions with similar levels of accuracy and mental effort. Some participants drew on graphs, reducing the data-ink …

Museums And Visitors With Autism: An Overview Of Programs, Rachel Varner

Theses

Across the world, several museums are committed to accessibility and accommodations for the general public, such as closed captions for the D/HH (deaf and hard-of-hearing) visitors and ramps for wheelchair users. However, not all disabilities and disorders are visible. When it comes to working with people who have a specific disability or disorder, it is critical that museum professionals be aware of what should be done to ensure that visitors with disabilities or disorders have a pleasant experience in the museum. Numerous museums have already created programs for people with specific disabilities or disorders. Workshops about disabilities and disorders should …

Dreamland:, Xiaohe Shen

Theses

I was attracted by the interaction between dream and reality. Not long before I started my thesis, I read Freud’s book, The Interpretation of Dreams, and it quite interested me. In Freud’s theory, the complete personality is composed of id, ego and super-ego. The id is the set of coordinated instinctual trends; the super-ego plays the critical and moralizing role; and the ego is the organized, realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego. The super-ego can stop one from doing certain things that one’s id may want to do. These three parts dominate a …

Information Security Policy For E-Government In Saudi Arabia: Effectiveness, Vulnerabilities And Threats, Khaled Algarni

Theses

This study focuses on the issue of information security policy for e-government in Saudi Arabia. It evaluates the three fundamental pillars that determine data security such as effectiveness, vulnerabilities, and threats. The paper is seeking to reveal the risks of information security policy for e-government in Saudi Arabia as well as to examine the vulnerabilities and the effectiveness of the system.

The methodology applied inductive approach where both qualitative and quantitative research method were used. A survey by use of questionnaires and an interview was conducted.

Perspectives Of Chaos: Determining Meaning Through Interpretation, Benjamin M. Schmidt

Theses

None provided

Frequency Constraints On D.C. Biasing In Deep Submicron Technologies, Jonathan Thomas Zimmermann

Theses

The progression of technology has required smaller devices to achieve faster circuits and more power-efficient systems. However, with supply voltage and device intrinsic gain decreasing, device biasing in deep sub-micron technologies can be challenging. A low-voltage current source is analyzed in a 28 nm CMOS, 0.85 V supply, technology to take into account undesirable effects introduced by aggressively scaled technologies. The analysis includes intrinsic gain degradation as well as short-channel effects to create a more accurate design methodology. Amplifier design challenges in deep sub-micron technologies are discussed along with a DAC bias correction technique. Frequency dependence of output resistance for …

Allocation Of Workers Utilizing Models With Learning, Forgetting, And Various Work Structures, Austin T. Chacosky

Theses

Much of the literature on cross-training and worker assignment problems focus on simulating production systems under cross-training methods. Many have found that for specific systems some methods of allocating workers are better performing than others in terms of overall productivity and ability to deal with change. This has lead researchers to create mathematical programming models with a goal of finding optimal levels of cross-training by changing worker allocations. Learning and forgetting curves have been a key method to improve the solutions produced by the optimization models, but learning curves are often nonlinear causing increased solving times. Because of this, most …

Do Bugs Foreshadow Vulnerabilities? A Study Of The Chromium Project, Felivel Camilo

Theses

As developers face ever-increasing pressure to engineer secure software, researchers are building an understanding of security-sensitive bugs (i.e. vulnerabilities). Research into mining software repositories has greatly increased our understanding of software quality via empirical study of bugs. However, conceptually vulnerabilities are different from bugs: they represent abusive functionality as opposed to wrong or insufficient functionality commonly associated with traditional, non-security bugs. In this study, we performed an in-depth analysis of the Chromium project to empirically examine the relationship between bugs and vulnerabilities. We mined 374,686 bugs and 703 post-release vulnerabilities over five Chromium releases that span six years of development. …

Utilizing Crime Analysis To Evaluate Criminal Justice Initiatives, Peter Tran

Theses

With a population of over 200,000 and an average homicide rate of 18 to 20 per 100,000, Rochester remains a focal location for determining the most effective method for combating crime. Housing, community outreach, and street corner crackdowns are examples of criminal justice initiatives used in Rochester with the goal to improve quality of life, establish community relationships, and decrease crime. The objective of this research is to identify the effectiveness of housing, community outreach, and street corner crackdowns as crime prevention tools. Strengths and weaknesses of each criminal justice initiative are evaluated through crime analysis, crime mapping, regression analysis, …

Effective And Efficient Communication And Collaboration In Participatory Environments, Shiraz Qayyum

Theses

Participatory environments pose significant challenges to deploying real applications. This dissertation investigates exploitation of opportunistic contacts to enable effective and efficient data transfers in challenged participatory environments.

There are three main contributions in this dissertation:

1. A novel scheme for predicting contact volume during an opportunistic contact (PCV);

2. A method for computing paths with combined optimal stability and capacity (COSC) in opportunistic networks; and

3. An algorithm for mobility and orientation estimation in mobile environments (MOEME).

The proposed novel scheme called PCV predicts contact volume in soft real-time. The scheme employs initial position and velocity vectors of nodes along …

Paradise In The East, Hui Ouyang

Theses

“Paradise in the East” is a 3D animation that explores the use of 3D character design, rigging, animation and landscaping to create a hyper-realistic look of some of China’s astonishingly diverse landscapes. This project referenced some of China’s most recognizable locations such as The Great Wall, Zhang Jiajie National Park, West Lake, etc.

Uncomfortably Numb: News Media’S Effects On Generational Perceptions Of Cancer Prevention, Jillian Elizabeth Seaton Ference

Theses

This study investigated the effects news media have on perceptions of cancer prevention for three generations: Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Generation Y. It explored the relationship between self-reported exposure to general news media and knowledge of cancer prevention by generation, the relationship between self-reported exposure to news media by generation, and the likelihood of participating in preventative actions. A snowball survey was distributed throughout Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Statistically significant relationships were found between exposure to news media pertaining to cancer and knowledge about cancer, as well as exposure to general news media and knowledge about cancer prevention. Differences …

Flow Boiling In Open Microchannels With Tapered Manifolds Using Ethanol In A Gravity-Driven Flow, Philipp K. Buchling Rego

Theses

Flow boiling in microchannel heat sinks has been researched extensively for its use in the cooling of high-power electronics. Previous works have proven open microchannels with tapered gap manifolds are effective in delivering enhanced flow boiling performance, with significant reductions in pressure drop. This work explores the feasibility of employing ethanol as a dielectric fluid in an open microchannel geometry with tapered manifolds, under a gravity-driven flow. A heat flux of 217 ± 13 W/cm2 was dissipated with a pressure drop of only 8.8 ± 0.5 kPa. Parametric trends are presented regarding flow rate, taper, pressure drop characteristics, and their …

Everything I Love Restored, Matthew Freeman

Theses

This book of new poems documents my trials and triumphs in my recovery from a Dual Diagnosis...