Digital Commons Network^™

Method For Rounded-Leaf Offset Definition On A Medical Linear Accelerator, Brandon Cole Mader

Theses

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study Of Software Changes In Open Source Systems, Deel M. Baral

Theses

No abstract provided.

Dsp Implementation And Study Of Sliding Mode Control Algorithms For Power Factor Correction In Ac-Dc Converters, Elise Goff

Theses

No abstract provided.

Surface Plasmon Modes Of Curved Thin Metal Films And Curved Cylindrical Metal Nanowires, Hideaki Yamamoto

Theses

No abstract provided.

Stock-Out As It Relates To An Army Supply Chain : An Analysis Of Causes And Trends, Lucas Neidert

Theses

No abstract provided.

A Methodology For The Uncertainty Quantification And Sensitivity Analysis Of Turbulence Model Coefficients, Matthew C. Dunn

Theses

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study And Modeling On Selected Analog Circuits Using A Metal-Ferroelectric-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor, Mitchell Ryan Hunt

Theses

No abstract provided.

The Design State Space For Software Metrics Extraction And Analysis, Raouf Alomainy

Theses

No abstract provided.

Line And Circle Clipping Based On High Performance Gpgpu And Multithreaded Computing, Shailesh Khot

Theses

No abstract provided.

Exploring The Development Of Student Leadership Potential Within A Catholic School: A Qualitative Case Study, Gregory Hine

Theses

The focus of this research was student leadership and student leadership development in a Catholic secondary school. Central to the thesis were the leadership experiences and self-perceptions of elected students aged 15-17 years as they participated in the school’s leadership program. These insights helped the researcher characterise the functioning Program of student leadership at the school, and to discern what kinds of leaders are produced through its efforts.

The review of literature considered five established leadership models: transactional leadership, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, servant leadership, and distributed leadership. These models were analysed with regards to their strengths, limitations, and potential …

Development Of A System To Optimise Water Recharge And Timber Production From Pinus Pinaster Aiton Plantations On The Gnangara Water Mound, Scott Wood

Theses

Degree Name:

Doctor of Natural Resource Management

In 1996, the Western Australian Government decided to progressively liquidate 21,000 hectares of Pinus pinaster Aiton plantations located 20 kilometres north of Perth on the Gnangara Water Mound. The decision was made for a number of reasons but one of the principal concerns was the conflict between water use and timber production. The decision to liquidate the plantation over a prescribed period while meeting a legal requirement to produce timber for a laminated veneer lumber plant provided the opportunity to integrate the large database on plantation growth and water recharge and use operational …

Design Of A Centralised Anaerobic Digestion Plant In Ireland., Diarmuid O'Meara

Theses

Climate change is brought about by greenhouse gases emitted to the earth’s atmosphere by fossil fuels. Renewable energy sources are seen as an alternative to fossil fuels. Examples of renewable energy sources are biofuels which are a method of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases. One form of biofuels is biogas that is produced during the anaerobic digestion process. In this thesis pig slurry is used to produce biogas.

In this project, the optimum design process for a centralised anaerobic digestion plant was established in the literature review, The optimum process for anaerobic digestion plant design in Ireland was investigated. …

A Machine-Learning Approach For Workflow Identification From Low-Level Monitoring Information, Thorsten Stein

Theses

Knowing which workflows are executed within Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) is essential for successful IT management. In many cases, SOAs grew out of previous existing IT architectures; existing components are used as single services and therefore as parts of newly created workflows. Since such workflows consist of newly developed and legacy services, traditional workflow management systems often cannot be applied. This thesis presents a method for gathering information about the executed workflows within such heterogeneous environments. An implementation of a framework is presented. This framework allows the training of machine-learning algorithms with workflow models and the mapping of low-level monitoring …

Semi-Automatic Management Of Knowledge Bases Using Formal Ontologies, Andreas Textor

Theses

This thesis presents an approach that deals with the ever-growing amount of data in knowledge bases, especially concerning knowledge interoperability and formal representation of domain knowledge. There arc multiple issues that must be addressed with current systems. A multitude of different formats, sources and tools exist in a domain, and it is desirable to develop their use further towards a standardised environment. Such an environment should support both the representation and processing of data from this domain, and the connection to other domains, where necessary. In order to manage large amounts of data, it should be possible to perform whatever …

Composition-Structure-Property Relationships For Experimental Composite Nerve Guidance Conduits, Xiaofang Zhang

Theses

Many Nerve Guidance Conduits (NGCs) have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as an alternative to nerve autografting for guiding peripheral nerve regeneration. However these materials offer little therapeutic potential for favourable axon growth environment, and difficulty in balancing the mechanical properties and the degradation rate of the implanted material is also a contemporary challenge. This project involved the design of experimental composite NGCs comprising glass particles and Pluronic FI27 in the copolymer (poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid)) and examined the composition-structure-property relationships for such materials. Three glasses (0.5Si-(x) Na-0.2Ca-0.13Zn-(0.17-x) Ce) (0.0.04 > x > 0.14) were produced. Glasses were characterised using …

A Qos Aware Framework For Wireless Sensor Networks In Industrial Environments, Berta Carballido Villaverde

Theses

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a key enabling technology for industrial monitoring applications where the use of wireless infrastructure allows high adaptivity and low cost in terms of installation and retrofitting. Although WSNs present several advantages over traditional wired monitoring systems, there is significant concern as to the reliability of wireless communications due to the unpredictability of the wireless channel, which is inhibiting the widespread adoption of the technology. Furthermore, due to the diverse range of monitoring applications that are found in industrial environments and their differing requirements, there is a need for quality of service (QoS) provisioning so that …

Spectacles, Molly Agnew

Theses

The goal of this paper is to outline the production of the film "Spectacles" from inspiration to completion. Also included in this paper are supplementary materials in order to further illustrate the processes used and decisions made during production. "Spectacles" explores the importance of free play and imagination in a child's life. The film takes place in a domestic environment. The story unfolds from multiple viewpoints: the viewpoint of the protagonist, a little girl named Gigi, the viewpoint of Gigi's mother, and then finally the viewers are given their own viewpoint. These separate perspectives were challenging to establish but were …

Security Of The Sha-3 Candidates Keccak And Blue Midnight Wish: Zero-Sum Property, Liliya Andreicheva

Theses

The SHA-3 competition for the new cryptographic standard was initiated by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2007. In the following years, the event grew to one of the top areas currently being researched by the CS and cryptographic communities. The first objective of this thesis is to overview, analyse, and critique the SHA-3 competition. The second one is to perform an in-depth study of the security of two candidate hash functions, the finalist Keccak and the second round candidate Blue Midnight Wish. The study shall primarily focus on zero-sum distinguishers. First we attempt to attack reduced versions …

State Estimation Filtering Algorithms For Vehicle Attitude Determination Using A Dual-Arc Accelerometer Array And 3-Axis Rate Gyroscopes, Aaron Zimmerman

Theses

Sensor measurements are corrupted by biases, noise and drift effects and, in order to provide accurate measurements, these errors need to be estimated and, thus, eliminated. The current model used an Extended Kalman filter for the estimation of rate gyroscope measurement errors. This work improves upon that filter by applying a more robust, more accurate and more reliable Unscented Kalman filter. In addition, an algorithm for estimating the accelerometer measurement errors is developed using control theory. Using the attitude estimate from the Unscented Kalman filter, an error signal is formed between that attitude and the attitude estimates from the accelerometer …

Monte Carlo Comparison Of Back-Propagation, Conjugate-Gradient, And Finite-Difference Training Algorithms For Multilayer Perceptrons, Stephen Wehry

Theses

Monte Carlo Simulation is used to compare the performance of the Back-Propagation, Conjugate-Gradient, and Finite-Difference algorithms when training simple Multilayer Perceptron networks to solve pattern recognition and bit counting problems. Twelve individual simulations will be run for each training algorithm-test problem combination, resulting in an overall total of 72 simulations. The random elements in each Monte Carlo simulation are to be the individual synaptic weights between layers, which will be uniformly distributed. Two other factors, the size of the hidden layer and the exponent of the error function, will also be tested within the simulation plan outlined above.

Balancing Truth Error And Manual Processing In The Pdq System, Douglass Huang

Theses

Production Data Quality (PDQ) is a specialized pattern classifier whose main purpose is to assess independently the data quality of a production classifier. It accomplishes this by producing a high quality Truth from the source input, and then using the Truth to identify errors in the production classifier's output data. Previous studies have shown close agreement between PDQ processing outcomes and a particular mathematical model of the system. In this study we describe and analyze an expanded model that addresses the potential tradeoff between Truth error and manual processing in PDQ, with an eye towards informing operational decisions about precision …

Markov Chain Monte Carlo On The Gpu, Michael Dumont

Theses

Markov chains are a useful tool in statistics that allow us to sample and model a large population of individuals. We can extend this idea to the challenge of sampling solutions to problems. Using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques we can also attempt to approximate the number of solutions with a certain confidence based on the number of samples we use to compute our estimate. Even though this approximation works very well for getting accurate results for very large problems, it is still computationally intensive. Many of the current algorithms use parallel implementations to improve their performance. Modern day …

Low Vision Assistance With Mobile Devices, Mark Stump

Theses

Low vision affects many people, both young and old. Low vision conditions can range from near- and far-sightedness to conditions such as blind spots and tunnel vision. With the growing popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones, there is large opportunity for use of these multipurpose devices to provide low vision assistance. Furthermore, Google's Android operating system provides a robust environment for applications in various fields, including low vision assistance. The objective of this thesis research is to develop a system for low vision assistance that displays important information at the preferred location of the user's visual field. To that …

Layout-Based Substitution Tree Indexing And Retrieval For Mathematical Expressions, Matthew Schellenberg

Theses

We introduce a new system for layout-based indexing and retrieval of mathematical expressions using substitution trees. Substitution trees can efficiently store and find hierarchically-structured data based on similarity. Previously Kolhase and Sucan applied substitution trees to indexing mathematical expressions in operator tree representation (Content MathML) and query-by-expression retrieval. In this investigation, we use substitution trees to index mathematical expressions in symbol layout tree representation (LaTeX) to group expressions based on the similarity of their symbols, symbol layout, sub-expressions and size. We describe our novel substitution tree indexing and retrieval algorithms and our many significant contributions to the behavior of these …

Investigation Of The Effect Of Geometry And Surface Properties On Water Buildup In Pem Fuel Cell Gas Channel Corners, Cody Rath

Theses

Over the past few decades, polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells have been gaining increased attention as a possible replacement for the internal combustion engine. Fuel cell vehicles are an attractive alternative because of the fact that they can operate without the use of fossil fuels, are more efficient than internal combustion vehicles, and have no harmful emissions with the only byproducts being heat and pure water. Managing this water has been shown to be a key area of research. In order for fuel cells to operate properly, there must be a certain level of hydration present in the membrane; …

A Thermoelectric Generation Subsystem Model For Heat Recovery Simulations, Andrew Freedman

Theses

Thermoelectric devices can convert thermal energy directly into electrical energy, or they can work in reverse and use electrical energy to create a temperature gradient for cooling or heating applications. The absence of moving parts, wide range of operating temperatures, scalability, and modular capabilities makes thermoelectrics attractive for energy generation applications. They have been considered for use with vehicle exhausts, co-generation, and other energy recovery from lost heat in thermodynamic cycles. Thermoelectric devices have relatively low efficiencies but there have been recent advances in thermoelectric materials potentially opening the door to more power applications. As material advancements continue and a …

Look, Cook, Learn: A Recipe For Improved Functionality In Cooking Design, Anna Mizer

Theses

Look, Cook, Learn: A Recipe for Improved Functionality In Cooking Design is a thesis which explores the relationship and differences between print media and digital media. Both are studied in respect to instructional cooking materials with their strengths and weaknesses .The final application involves a digital application for the Apple iPad as well as a printed recipe book. The user experience is of great importance and therefor information layering, visual layout, and consumer expectations are all considered. All information that is included in both the digital application is broken into sections depending on the function or action that the user …

Towards Fpga Hardware In The Loop For Qca Simulation, Alan Olson

Theses

As transistors begin to hit raw physical limits and performance barriers, other technologies are being researched to potentially replace conventional integrated circuit technology. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is one such technology which executes computations using coulomb interactions and quantum-mechanical effects. Part of this research is pursuant to the design of circuits which exploit QCA technology and take advantage of what it has to offer. These circuits must be simulated to ensure their functionality and help prove the viability of QCA. These simulations, like many scientific computing applications, can take a long time to complete; hours or days, depending on their …

Page Layout Analysis And Classification In Complex Scanned Documents, Mustafa Erkilinc

Theses

Page layout analysis has been extensively studied since the 1980`s, particularly after computers began to be used for document storage or database units. For efficient document storage and retrieval from a database, a paper document would be transformed into its electronic version. Algorithms and methodologies are used for document image analysis in order to segment a scanned document into different regions such as text, image or line regions. To contribute a novel approach in the field of page layout analysis and classification, this algorithm is developed for both RGB space and grey-scale scanned documents without requiring any specific document types, …

Weighted And Filtered Mutual Information: A Metric For The Automated Creation Of Panoramas From Views Of Complex Scenes, Thomas Keane

Theses

To contribute a novel approach in the field of image registration and panorama creation, this algorithm foregoes any scene knowledge, requiring only modest scene overlap and an acceptable amount of entropy within each overlapping view. The weighted and filtered mutual information (WFMI) algorithm has been developed for multiple stationary, color, surveillance video camera views and relies on color gradients for feature correspondence. This is a novel extension of well-established maximization of mutual information (MMI) algorithms. Where MMI algorithms are typically applied to high altitude photography and medical imaging (scenes with relatively simple shapes and affine relationships between views), the WFMI …