Digital Commons Network^™

Directly Comparing Synthetic And Real Binary Black Hole Coalescence Sources With Numerical Solutions Of Einstein’S Equation, Jacob A. Lange

Theses

We compare real and synthetic data directly to complete numerical relativity simulations of binary black holes. Even though our method largely agrees with \cite{PEPaper}, our method goes beyond the existing semi-analytic models that were used. Comparisons with only the quadrupole modes constrain the redshifted mass $M_{z}\in[64 M_{\bigodot}-82 M_{\bigodot}]$, mass ratio $1/q=m_2/m_1\in[0.6,1]$, effective aligned spin $\chi_{eff}\in[-0.3,0.2]$, where $\chi_{eff}=(\mathbf{S}_1/m_1+\mathbf{S_2}/m_2)\cdot\mathbf{\hat{L}}/M$. If we include the octopole modes, we can constrain the mass ratio even better. Even though the spins are correlated, both magnitude and directions are not significantly constrained by the data. We determine that an upper limit for the spin magnitudes up to …

Matlab System Simulation: Solar-Dehumidification For Low Volume Water Production In Remote Regions, Daniel Appiah-Mensah

Theses

Modern techniques for water desalination focus on large scale industrial plants. These plants often require a large amount of resources in capital and location for efficient operation. As a result, the worldwide toll on human deaths from poor access to clean water was estimated above 1.7 million. To provide a low cost and resource system for water production, this study aims to test the feasibility of a portable solar dehumidification system to produce enough daily drinking water for four adults (about 4 gallons). The system concept design consists of using a heat chamber (solar still) and polluted water to heat …

Towards Trustworthy Version Control Systems: Enhancing The Security Of Subversion, Ruchir Arya

Theses

Software development often relies on a Version Control System (VCS) to manage the source code, documentation and configuration of files. A VCS allows team development in which multiple developers can work simultaneously on source code updates. It also provides the ability to keep track of the historical changes made to the data over time, including the ability to retrieve previous versions of the source code in order to locate and fix bugs, and roll back to earlier versions in case the working version becomes buggy or unstable.

Apache Subversion (SVN) is a popular version control system that uses a client-server …

The "Rib" Of The South? An Analysis Of Feminine Agency Among Southern Elite Women Of The Antebellum Period (1815-1860), Louann Marie Sabatini

Theses

No abstract provided.

Hyperspectral Vehicle Brdf Learning: An Exploration Of Vehicle Re Ectance Variation And Optimal Measures Of Spectral Similarity For Vehicle Reacquisition And Tracking Algorithms, Joseph Svejkosky

Theses

The spectral signatures of vehicles in hyperspectral imagery exhibit temporal variations due to the preponderance of surfaces with material properties that display non-Lambertian bi-directional reflectance distribution functions (BRDFs). These temporal variations are caused by changing illumination conditions, changing sun-target-sensor geometry, changing road surface properties, and changing vehicle orientations. To quantify these variations and determine their relative importance in a sub-pixel vehicle reacquisition and tracking scenario, a hyperspectral vehicle BRDF sampling experiment was conducted in which four vehicles were rotated at different orientations and imaged over a six-hour period. The hyperspectral imagery was calibrated using novel in-scene methods and converted to …

An Empirical Demonstration Of The Probabilistic Upper Bound Of The Adaptive Boosting Test Error, Paige Houston

Theses

Statistical machine learning uses data to model a relationship between many parameters, or explanatory variables, and a response variable. The adaptive boosting algorithm is a machine learning method that can be used to model relationships of classification data. This method uses a weak base learner to improve accuracy of predicting the correct response class from a set of variables. Because of its learnability, adaptive boosting yields an exponentially decreasing empirical error. From this, an empirical error bound can be derived from the boosting algorithm. This empirical error bound inspires us to see if there is a generalized error bound and …

Development Of A Graduate Course On The Transition To Internet Protocol Version 6, Venu Gopal Kakarla

Theses

Internet and mobile connectivity has grown tremendously in the last few decades, creating an ever increasing demand for Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. The pool of Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses, once assumed to be more than sufficient for every person on this planet, has reached its final stages of depletion. With The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority’s (IANA) global pools depleted, and four of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIR) pools down to the their last /8 block, the remaining addresses will not last very long.

In order to ensure continuous growth of the internet in the foreseeable future, we …

Cohousing In The Flower City: A Carbon Capture Design, Samuel Elliot

Theses

Our climate is changing rapidly due to an excess of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. A major force behind the release of these gases is the means by which we generate our energy — the combustion of fossil fuels. One of the biggest drivers of this energy demand within the United States is our built environment and more pointedly our cold-climate, urban based, residential building stock. All signs indicate that unless steps are taken, this demand will continue to grow. Ed Mazria’s Architecture 2030 Challenge proposes an ambitious plan for achieving carbon neutrality in buildings by 2030. What if …

Rolling Horizon Workforce Schedule To Assign Workers To Tasks In A Learning/Forgetting Environment, Bhanu Krishna Potluri

Theses

The variability in demand across the planning horizon and the presence of heterogeneous workforces where workers learn and forget at different rates make the process of building and managing a workforce challenging. When integrating learning and forgetting functions of workers into workforce scheduling, the previous experience of a worker on a task can have significant impact on productivity. While making assignments over an infinite planning horizon is ideal, the learning/forgetting function significantly increases problem complexity and solution difficulty as the length of planning horizon increases. In this thesis, a multi-period rolling horizon worker-task assignment framework is developed to overcome computational …

Detection Of Anomalous Vehicle Loading, Troy Mckay

Theses

Determining the mass of a vehicle from ground based passive sensor data is important for many security and traffic safety reasons. A vehicle consists of multiple dependent and independent systems that each respond differently to changes in vehicle mass. In some cases, the responses of these vehicle systems can be measured remotely. If these remotely sensed system responses are correlated to the vehicle's mass, and the required vehicle parameters were known, it would be possible to calculate the mass of the vehicle as a function of these responses.

The research described here investigates multiple vehicle phenomenologies and their correlation to …

An Empirical Study On Code Comprehension: Dci Compared To Oo, Hector A. Valdecantos

Theses

Comprehension of source code affects software development, especially its maintenance where reading code is the most time consuming performed activity. A programming paradigm imposes a style of arranging the source code that is aligned with a way of thinking toward a computable solution. Then, a programming paradigm with a programming language represents an important factor for source code comprehension. Object-Oriented (OO) is the dominant paradigm today. Although, it was criticized from its beginning and recently an alternative has been proposed. In an OO source code, system functions cannot escape outside the definition of classes and their descriptions live inside multiple …

Bayesian Inference With Combined Dynamic And Sparsity Models: Application In 3d Electrophysiological Imaging, Jingjia Xu

Theses

Data-driven inference is widely encountered in various scientific domains to convert the observed measurements into information that cannot be directly observed about a system. Despite the quickly-developing sensor and imaging technologies, in many domains, data collection remains an expensive endeavor due to financial and physical constraints. To overcome the limits in data and to reduce the demand on expensive data collection, it is important to incorporate prior information in order to place the data-driven inference in a domain-relevant context and to improve its accuracy.

Two sources of assumptions have been used successfully in many inverse problem applications. One is the …

Learning For Cross-Layer Resource Allocation In The Framework Of Cognitive Wireless Networks, Wenbo Wang

Theses

The framework of cognitive wireless networks is expected to endow wireless devices with a cognition-intelligence ability with which they can efficiently learn and respond to the dynamic wireless environment. In this dissertation, we focus on the problem of developing cognitive network control mechanisms without knowing in advance an accurate network model. We study a series of cross-layer resource allocation problems in cognitive wireless networks. Based on model-free learning, optimization and game theory, we propose a framework of self-organized, adaptive strategy learning for wireless devices to (implicitly) build the understanding of the network dynamics through trial-and-error.

The work of this dissertation …

Ecologically Inspired Metrics For Rare Earth Element Critical Material Systems, Berlyn Jo Hubler

Theses

Greenhouse gas emission reduction targets have increased demand for clean energy technologies, and the growth required for these technologies has led to concern over material availability and criticality. Critical materials are defined as having risks associated with them such as supply gaps or price volatility. Existing metrics for criticality determination are narrowly focused on physical scarcity of single materials, whereas many critical materials are byproducts of large, complex, interconnected material systems. Industrial ecology borrows methods from ecology to study complex material and energy flows, which can be used for a systems-perspective analysis. In this work, critical rare earth material systems …

Modelling Of Information Flow And Resource Utilization In The Edge Distributed Web System, Bryan Thomas Meyers

Theses

The adoption of Distributed Web Systems (DWS) into modern engineering design process has dramatically increased in recent years. The Engineering Design Guide and Environment (EDGE) is one such DWS, intended to provide an integrated set of tools for use in the development of new products and services. Previous attempts to improve the efficiency and scalability of DWS focused largely on hardware utilization (i.e. multithreading and virtualization) and software scalability (i.e. load balancing and cloud services). However, these techniques are often limited to analysis of the computational complexity of the algorithms implemented.

This work seeks to improve the understanding of efficiency …

Characterization And Reduction Of Noise In Manifold Representations Of Hyperspectral Imagery, Can Jin

Theses

A new workflow to produce dimensionality reduced manifold coordinates based on the improvements of landmark Isometric Mapping (ISOMAP) algorithms using local spectral models is proposed. Manifold space from nonlinear dimensionality reduction better addresses the nonlinearity of the hyperspectral data and often has better per- formance comparing to the results of linear methods such as Minimum Noise Fraction (MNF). The dissertation mainly focuses on using adaptive local spectral models to fur- ther improve the performance of ISOMAP algorithms by addressing local noise issues and perform guided landmark selection and nearest neighborhood construction in local spectral subsets. This work could benefit the …

Joint Source-Channel Coding Optimized On End-To-End Distortion For Multimedia Source, Ebrahim Jarvis

Theses

In order to achieve high efficiency, multimedia source coding usually relies on the use of predictive coding. While more efficient, source coding based on predictive coding has been considered to be more sensitive to errors during communication. With the current volume and importance of multimedia communication, minimizing the overall distortion during communication over an error-prone channel is critical. In addition, for real-time scenarios, it is necessary to consider additional constraints such as fix and small delay for a given bit rate. To comply with these requirements, we seek an efficient joint source-channel coding scheme.

In this work, end-to-end distortion is …

Characterizing The Transient Profile Shapes And Deposition Patterns Of Desiccating Colloidal Droplets, Marcette Sapphira Greyson

Theses

As a droplet containing colloidal material dries on a surface, the suspended particles are deposited onto it. Aqueous colloidal droplets often leave the majority of particles at the periphery of the deposition area. This phenomenon is known as the coffee ring effect, and it arises when a radially outward evaporative flows dominates within a droplet as it dries. This deposition non-uniformity can impact a diverse range of applications. In medical diagnostic testing, it can introduce uncertainty into microarray test results, while in inkjet printing it can produce finer printed circuitry. Controlling colloidal deposition could allow for higher-quality medical diagnostics and …

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 …

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 …

Line Drawing, Structure Clay Clay Lines Sculpture, Josh Wagner

Theses

Line is the most simplistic element in art; it has often been viewed as only a two dimensional element. However, I am concerned with the articulation of line in space and how it is used to produce sculpture. Through the use of simplistic linear elements I created complex sculptures. Positive and negative space along with the way in which the sculptures inhabited my exhibition space was very important to me.

Traditionally clay is used to make very substantial pieces that are usually solid or hollow. My structures, however, are rather fragile and linear, making clay a challenging and perhaps interesting …

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 …

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 …

A Temporally Coherent Neural Algorithm For Artistic Style Transfer, Michael Dushkoff

Theses

Within the fields of visual effects and animation, humans have historically spent countless painstaking hours mastering the skill of drawing frame-by-frame animations. One such animation technique that has been widely used in the animation and visual effects industry is called "rotoscoping" and has allowed uniquely stylized animations to capture the motion of real life action sequences, however it is a very complex and time consuming process. Automating this arduous technique would free animators from performing frame by frame stylization and allow them to concentrate on their own artistic contributions. This thesis introduces a new artificial system based on an existing …

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 …

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 …

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 …