Digital Commons Network^™

Network Exploration Of Correlated Multivariate Protein Data For Alzheimer's Disease Association, Matthew J. Lane

Theses

Alzheimer Disease (AD) is difficult to diagnose by using genetic testing or other traditional methods. Unlike diseases with simple genetic risk components, there exists no single marker determining as to whether someone will develop AD. Furthermore, AD is highly heterogeneous and different subgroups of individuals develop the disease due to differing factors. Traditional diagnostic methods using perceivable cognitive deficiencies are often too little too late due to the brain having suffered damage from decades of disease progression. In order to observe AD at early stages prior to the observation of cognitive deficiencies, biomarkers with greater accuracy are required. By using …

Logistic Regression Slope Study, Michael J. Kist

Theses

Logistic regression is a valuable statistical tool used to model the probability of a binary response variable as a function of one or more input variables. The goal of this thesis research is to develop a better understanding of how the coefficients of a logistic regression model influence the probability of a response. Typically, the odds ratio is used for this, but this research focuses on the steepness of logistic curve near the median quantile. In order to study this, a web application using R Shiny was developed to simulate a logistic regression function based on a single continuous input …

Automated Quality Assessment Of Printed Objects Using Subjective And Objective Methods Based On Imaging And Machine Learning Techniques., Ritu Basnet

Theses

Estimating the perceived quality of printed patterns is a complex task as quality is subjective. A study was conducted to evaluate how accurately a machine learning method can predict human judgment about printed pattern quality.

The project was executed in two phases: a subjective test to evaluate the printed pattern quality and development of the machine learning classifier-based automated objective model. In the subjective experiment, human observers ranked overall visual quality. Object quality was compared based on a normalized scoring scale. There was a high correlation between subjective evaluation ratings of objects with similar defects. Observers found the contrast of …

Automatic Video Captioning Using Deep Neural Network, Thang Huy Nguyen

Theses

Video understanding has become increasingly important as surveillance, social, and informational videos weave themselves into our everyday lives. Video captioning offers a simple way to summarize, index, and search the data. Most video captioning models utilize a video encoder and captioning decoder framework. Hierarchical encoders can abstractly capture clip level temporal features to represent a video, but the clips are at fixed time steps. This thesis research introduces two models: a hierarchical model with steered captioning, and a Multi-stream Hierarchical Boundary model. The steered captioning model is the first attention model to smartly guide an attention model to appropriate locations …

An Immersive Learning Model, Shamsa Abdulla Salem Al Mazrouei

Theses

Our overarching goal is to provide children with immersive game-based learning environments to support Arabic linguistic skills acquisition. We postulate that immersion in- creases learning. To investigate this hypothesis, we developed a model and built an implementation of an educational virtual environment (EVE) that supports immersion and thus, induces effective learning. Experimental results confirm our hypothesis.

Our model integrates learning content, learning activities, immersion and gameplay. Based on our analysis of various curricula, specifically the United Arab Emirates grade one curriculum, we identified the nature of the learning content in order to satisfy the curriculum requirements. This content is conceptually …

Modeling The Mitigation Of Seawater Intrusion By Pumping Brackish Water From The Coastal Aquifer Of Wadi Ham, Uae, Modou A Sowe

Theses

The control and management of seawater intrusion in coastal aquifers is a major challenge in the field of water resources management. Seawater intrusion is a major problem in the coastal aquifer of Wadi Ham, United Arab Emirates caused by intensive groundwater abstraction from increased agricultural activities. This has caused the abonnement of salinized wells and ultimately affected farming activities and domestic water supply in the area. In this study, the 3D finite element groundwater flow and solute transport model, FEFLOW was used to simulate pumping of brackish water from the intrusion zone to control seawater intrusion in the aquifer. The …

Gallium-Doped Microporous Γ-Al2o3: The Effect Of Preparative Conditions And Composition On The Textural Properties And The Catalytic Activity In Methanol Conversion To Dimethyl Ether As A Clean Fuel Alternative, Rawad Maarouf Bou Jaber

Theses

Solid acid catalysts, such as γ-alumina, are important materials in different catalytic applications such as dehydration reactions of alcohols. Methanol is one of the most important intermediates that can be obtained from natural gas and can be further converted to other efficient fuels and chemicals. Dimethyl ether, which can be obtained from methanol, is being considered as a promising future fuel besides being the building block for several industrially important chemicals. Although γ-alumina has shown significant activity for the dehydration of methanol to dimethyl ether, improving the conversion and the selectivity at relatively low temperatures is still a major concern. …

Artificial Neural Network Based Prediction Mechanism For Wireless Network On Chips Medium Access Control, Ranjith Murugesan

Theses

As per Moore’s law, continuous improvement over silicon process technologies has made the integration of hundreds of cores on to a single chip possible. This has resulted in the paradigm shift towards multicore and many-core chips where, hundreds of cores can be integrated on the same die and interconnected using an on-chip packet-switched network called a Network-on-Chip (NoC). Various tasks running on different cores generate different rates of communication between pairs of cores. This lead to the increase in spatial and temporal variation in the workloads, which impact the long distance data communication over multi-hop wire line paths in conventional …

Microbial Degradation Of Various Organic Pollutants Using Bacteria Isolated From Petroleum Sludge, Manal Ali Alhefeiti

Theses

Intensification of agriculture and manufacturing industries has resulted in increased release of a wide range of xenobiotic compounds to the environment. The extensive discharge of hazardous waste in industrial wastewater and the recalcitrant nature of some of these organic pollutants have fueled a strong interest in exploring efficient and environmentally friendly approaches for wastewater remediation. Bioremediation approaches can provide efficient, inexpensive and environmentally safe cleanup tools. In the present study, our main objective was to isolate novel bacterial strains from UAE petroleum sludge and to examine their abilities to degrade various aromatic pollutants, including azo dyes and emerging pollutants. We …

Effects Of Environmental Diesel Exhaust Particles On Gastric Stem Cells, Heba Ahmed Mazen Al Sadik

Theses

I would like to express my special thanks to the General Secretariat of the Executive Council of Abu Dhabi Emirate and Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) for their input and support. Last, but certainly not least, these acknowledgments would be incomplete without expressing my deepest appreciation to my family. Special acknowledgment of this achievement goes to my parents, who not only showed me unconditional love, acceptance, and respect for the person that I am throughout my life, they also showed me the strength of character which has brought me to where I am today. To my wife, for her …

Unwrapping Mri Phase By Using Multi-Echo Technique, Shamma Ali Rashed Ali Al Hassani

Theses

Phase unwrapping is a classic signal processing problem and an unavoidable procedure that can be faced with in a variety of applications which are interested in the phase, such as synthetic aperture radar (SAR), field mapping in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), wavefront distortion measurement of adaptive optics, interferometry, and surface shape measurement. Although phase unwrapping is one of the most challenging tasks in signal processing because of the presence of residues, noise in the data, discontinuities or other phase particularities, there are many successful phase unwrapping techniques and algorithms that have been developed in the last decades. In this thesis, …

Mobile Big Data Analytics In Healthcare, Alramzana Nujum Navaz

Theses

Mobile and ubiquitous devices are everywhere around us generating considerable amount of data. The concept of mobile computing and analytics is expanding due to the fact that we are using mobile devices day in and out without even realizing it. These mobile devices use Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or mobile data to be intermittently connected to the world, generating, sending and receiving data on the move. Latest mobile applications incorporating graphics, video and audio are main causes of loading the mobile devices by consuming battery, memory and processing power. Mobile Big data analytics includes for instance, big health data, big location data, …

Wave Energy Assessment In Southern Central Java Island And Control Method For Maximizing The Captured Power In Wave Energy Converters, Fatima Sultan Ghdayer Ali Alaryani

Theses

This thesis discusses the wave energy potential of the Indian Ocean on the south coast of Central Java Island, where no previous known similar study has been conducted. A control technique that involves a dynamic electrical model was established. The following objectives were achieved. The first was to determine the ideal location to implement wave energy conversion (WEC), and the second objective was to simulate the significant wave height by using the novel control method.

To achieve these goals, the following steps and procedures were implemented. Wave energy assessment was conducted for the Indian Ocean on the south coast of …

Compassionately Conservative Normalized Cuts For Image Segmentation, Tyler L. Hayes

Theses

Image segmentation is a process used in computer vision to partition an image into regions with similar characteristics. One category of image segmentation algorithms is graph-based, where pixels in an image are represented by vertices in a graph and the similarity between pixels is represented by weighted edges. A segmentation of the image can be found by cutting edges between dissimilar groups of pixels in the graph, leaving different clusters or partitions of the data.

A popular graph-based method for segmenting images is the Normalized Cuts (NCuts) algorithm, which quantifies the cost for graph partitioning in a way that biases …

Alternative Processor Within Threshold: Flexible Scheduling On Heterogeneous Systems, Stavan Satish Karia

Theses

Computing systems have become increasingly heterogeneous contributing to higher performance and power efficiency. However, this is at the cost of increasing the overall complexity of designing such systems. One key challenge in the design of heterogeneous systems is the efficient scheduling of computational load. To address this challenge, this paper thoroughly analyzes state of the art scheduling policies and proposes a new dynamic scheduling heuristic: Alternative Processor within Threshold (APT). This heuristic uses a flexibility factor to attain efficient usage of the available hardware resources, taking advantage of the degree of heterogeneity of the system. In a GPU-CPU-FPGA system, tested …

Understanding Traffic Characteristics In A Server To Server Data Center Network, Siva Shankar Chandrasekaran

Theses

The number of Data Centers and the servers present in them has been on the rise over the last decade with the advent of cloud computing, social networking, Big data analytics etc. This has eventually led to the increase in the power consumption of the Data Center due to the power hungry interconnection fabric which consists of switches and routers. The scalability of the data center has also become a problem due to the interconnect cabling complexity which is also responsible for the increase in the energy used for cooling the data center as these bundles of wires reduce the …

Optimal L(H, K) Labelings Of Cartesian Products Of Complete Graphs And Paths, Krishna Vittal Ammanabrolu

Theses

In an $L(h,k)$ labeling of a graph $G$ we assign non-negative integers to the vertices of the graph such that the labels of the vertices that are at a distance of one have a difference of at least $h$ and the labels of the vertices which are at a distance of two have a difference of at least $k$. The aim in general is to minimize the $L(h,k)$ span, where the $L(h,k)$ span is the difference between highest and lowest label used. In this thesis we analyze $L(h,k)$ labelings of Cartesian products of complete graphs and path. For $h \geq …

Deep Learning Localization For Self-Driving Cars, Suvam Bag

Theses

Identifying the location of an autonomous car with the help of visual sensors can be a good alternative to traditional approaches like Global Positioning Systems (GPS) which are often inaccurate and absent due to insufficient network coverage. Recent research in deep learning has produced excellent results in different domains leading to the proposition of this thesis which uses deep learning to solve the problem of localization in smart cars with visual data.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) were used to train models on visual data corresponding to unique locations throughout a geographic location. In order to evaluate the performance of …

Electrical, Electronic And Optical Properties Of Mos2 & Ws2, Weitao Tang

Theses

Two dimensional materials such as graphene, boron nitride and transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDCs) monolayers have arisen as a new class of materials with unique properties at monolayer thickness. Their electrical, electronic and optical properties are of great importance for a variety of applications in optoelectronics as light emitters, detectors, and photovoltaic devices. This work focuses on MoS₂ and WS₂, which are two important members of the TMDC class of materials. The properties of monolayer MoS₂ and WS₂ are investigated as well as the properties of bulk MoS₂ and WS₂ to provide an understanding …

Electrical, Electronic And Optical Properties Of Mose2 And Wse2, Sushant Shashikant Rassay

Theses

Transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDC) crystals have emerged as a new class of semiconductors that display distinctive properties at monolayer thickness. Their electrical, electronic and optical properties are of particular interest and importance for applications in optoelectronics as light emitters, detectors, and photovoltaic devices. Monolayer MoSe₂ and WSe₂ have an intrinsic band-gap in the visible region of the solar spectrum (400nm - 700nm) which makes them distinct from other 2-D materials like graphene.

In this study, the electrical, electronic and optical properties of monolayer and bulk MoSe₂ and WSe₂ are studied. The electronic band structures are presented for …

Inkjet Printing Polymerized Pcda As A Means Of Serialization, Constantino Stavrou

Theses

Polymerized PCDA, otherwise known as pentacosadiynoic acid, due to its color changing response to high temperatures, has been used as a means of indicating whether the material has been exposed to high temperatures. Quick-Response codes or Q-R codes have been used as means of serialization due to their two-dimensional design, allowing for the embedding of larger amounts of information than their one-dimensional barcode predecessors.

Combining the colorimetric response of PCDA polymer with the information coding powers of Q-R codes, an improved version of the Q-R Code is made, which was used not only for serialization purposes, but as a means …

Real Time, Integrated, Paper Based Temperature Sensor For Lab On A Chip Device, Vignesh Shekhar

Theses

Temperature measurement and manipulation is a critical factor in a wide range of applications like Point Of Care Diagnostics (POC's), Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), Temperature Gradient Focusing (TGF) to cite few prominent examples. In the past decade, researchers have used various techniques to sense and control the temperature in microfluidic systems. The primary challenge has been the twin problem of integration and accuracy using minimal equipment while keeping it simple. In this study, an equipment free fabrication of the temperature sensor using filter paper impregnated with p-type colloidal PbS quantum dots is demonstrated. This sensor is later integrated into line …

Discovering Perceptions About And The Potential Demand For Unique, S.T.E.A.M. Educational Programs For Children In Osijek, Croatia, Tamara Drezner

Theses

S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) as a topic has been explored in terms of adding the arts as a basis for creativity, creative making, divergent thinking and in relation to innovation (Ghanbari, 2014). In addition, a connection between arts and future leadership might have been made by previous researchers. Moreover, S.T.E.A.M. has been researched in terms of ethical framework and demand related to education. This research paper investigated the perceptions about and the potential demand for unique, S.T.E.A.M. educational programs for children from five to ten years old, in Osijek, Croatia. Past studies regarding the implementation of program, …

Development, Validation, And Clinical Application Of A Numerical Model For Pulse Wave Velocity Propagation In A Cardiovascular System With Application To Noninvasive Blood Pressure Measurements, Jeffrey S. Lillie

Theses

High blood pressure blood pressure is an important risk factor for cardiovascular disease and affects almost one-third of the U.S. adult population. Historical cuff-less non-invasive techniques used to monitor blood pressure are not accurate and highlight the need for first principal models. The first model is a one-dimensional model for pulse wave velocity (PWV) propagation in compliant arteries that accounts for nonlinear fluids in a linear elastic thin walled vessel. The results indicate an inverse quadratic relationship (R^2=.99) between ejection time and PWV, with ejection time dominating the PWV shifts (12%). The second model predicts the general relationship between PWV …

Development & Validation Of An Improved Biomechanical Model For Motion Analysis, Darren Dawson

Theses

Three dimensional motion analysis systems are utilised across a number of different disciplines, including clinical gait analysis, sports performance studies and analysis of tasks of daily living. These systems utilise biomechanical models which define body segment coordinate systems and calculate kinematic and kinetic relationships about the joints between adjacent coordinate systems. In this study, a biomechanical model for general use in motion analysis was developed and validated. It was designed to improve upon the accuracy and capability of currently available models. The newly developed model utilises state of the art techniques to accurately define body segment coordinate systems. Accurate predictive …

Intelligent Profiling Of Blood Donors In Ireland, Joanna Kossakowska

Theses

The demand for blood products in Ireland is constantly rising due to population growth and population ageing. It is believed that within the next decade these two factors will present challenges to blood donor recruitment and the availability of blood supplies. Improving the retention of blood donors will have a positive impact on the availability of blood products. Identification of suitable donors with the potential for long-term donating can potentially enhance the predictability of blood supply levels.

This research proposes that the patterns of blood donation behaviours of donors can be isolated from blood donor databases held by blood collecting …

Examination Of Dichotomous And Centroid Tracking Of A Monopulse Angle Tracking Unit, Jonathan Thomas Andrews

Theses

This thesis mathematically describes the overall behavior of a monopulse angle tracker as it relates to transitioning to an interfering target signal. The engineering community is confident in its assessment on how an angle tracker will perform in a multi-target environment as the target-to-tracker range decreases, causing targets to leave the tracker antenna beam. When one target signal dominates due to the angular separation of the targets, the tracker will center on the dominating signal. It is not well understood how the tracker will behave when angle separation is not the limiting factor in signal strength. Analytical studies presented in …

A Bayesian Testing Strategy For The Model-Test-Model Paradigm, Geoffrey W. Paul

Theses

Testing for large and complex defense systems can be extremely expensive. A testing strategy is developed to leverage Bayesian Experimental Design concepts within the Model-Test-Model paradigm. Two utility functions are implemented to search the input space and select the test which maximizes the expected information gain per test. A priority-based strategy focuses on individual performance measures in order of importance. A weighted-sum strategy maximizes the information gained across all performance measures, with emphasis placed on higher priority measures which are further from their accuracy specifications. Monte Carlo simulations show that both strategies provide a statistically significant improvement over the baseline …

The Development Of Incentive Structure Games For Systems Engineering Training Using Multidisciplinary Principles, Joseph Harlan Clerkin

Theses

Systems at the heart of the challenges faced in systems engineering (SE) can last for decades and cost millions. Due to the long lifecycles and traditional educational methods, SE education is lacking in repetition and immediate feedback. Games offer a method for repetition and rapid feedback. Therefore, the goal of this thesis is to expand the understanding of gaming in SE. This thesis consists of three objectives: (1) explain how and why games are theoretically effective training tools; (2) demonstrate how SE-focused games can be formed—incorporating identified principles of effective games; and (3) explain how games and games research advances …

Future Digital Money: The Legal Status And Regulation Of Bitcoin In Australia, Chinelle Van Der Westhuizen

Theses

Virtual and digital crypto-currencies, specifically Bitcoin, were developed by an anonymous pseudonym ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ in 2009 and have become a developing form of payment system used by businesses and consumers. Unlike traditional payment systems, Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network with unique characteristics. Bitcoin is a private, anonymous and decentralised network that is intended to work independently from a government or banking authority. Bitcoin is therefore a network dependent upon mathematical algorithms between two users and managed through a process called ‘mining’, which is then stored within a user’s private ‘wallet’. This innovative technology offers numerous opportunities as a payment system; …