Digital Commons Network^™

Human Activity Recognition Using Wearable Sensors: A Deep Learning Approach, Jialun Xue

Theses

In the past decades, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) grabbed considerable research attentions from a wide range of pattern recognition and human–computer interaction researchers due to its prominent applications such as smart home health care. The wealth of information requires efficient classification and analysis methods. Deep learning represents a promising technique for large-scale data analytics. There are various ways of using different sensors for human activity recognition in a smartly controlled environment. Among them, physical human activity recognition through wearable sensors provides valuable information about an individual’s degree of functional ability and lifestyle. There is abundant research that works upon real …

Impact Of The Emergency Use Authorization On Ventilator Innovation, Krista Stanislow

Theses

Innovation in the medical device industry is crucial to continuously improve the health and wellbeing of society. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for ensuring the safety and effectiveness of medical devices on the market while balancing the need for continuous innovation. One way the FDA has tried to support innovation is through the development of the 510(k) pathway, which does not require clinical testing as the safety of the device is determined based on a predicate device. Many companies choose to develop products that can obtain approval through the 510(k) pathway. While the 510(k) pathway is …

Social Isolation, Fear Of Missing Out, And Social Media Use In Deaf And Hearing College Students, Conor Lake

Theses

This study investigated the relationships between social isolation, fear of missing out, self-esteem, and social media usage, and whether these relationships are different in deaf and hearing college students. Data were collected from 191 individuals (46 Deaf/Hard of Hearing, 145 hearing) via an online survey. Variables included number of social media accounts, time spent (in hours) on social media, number of times per day social media is accessed, FOMO, social media use, hearing status/identity, self-esteem, social isolation, and social media disorder. Correlational tests were conducted separately for hearing and for Deaf/HH participants. The groups had an unequal distribution of gender, …

Automatic Pain Assessment Through Facial Expressions, Ilham Seladji

Theses

Pain is a strong symptom of diseases. Being an involuntary unpleasant feeling, it can be considered as a reliable indicator of health issues. Pain has always been expressed verbally, but in some cases, traditional patient self-reporting is not efficient. On one side, there are patients who have neurological disorders and cannot express themselves accurately, as well as patients who suddenly lose consciousness due to an abrupt faintness. On another side, medical staff working in crowded hospitals need to focus on emergencies and would opt for the automation of the task of looking after hospitalized patients during their entire stay, in …

Personal Branding Strategies Of Female Entertainment Influencers On Tiktok, Shaofu Wang

Theses

This thesis employs quantitative content analysis to investigate the strategies used by female entertainment influencers (FEI) on TikTok to attract followers. The study investigated the six FEIs with the most followers on the TikTok and Douyin (Chinese version of TikTok), three each from both platforms. This study focuses on the visual framework strategy as the theoretical basis to analyze female entertainment influencers’ videos (N=90). The results show that FEIs tend to wear casual clothes and shoot videos with simple backgrounds. Most shooting angles are half-length or full-body shots, which do not display multiple feminine movements in videos.

Regression analyses were …

The Portrayal Of African Immigrants: A Framing Analysis Of Newspaper Coverage, Oluwatosin Arowosola

Theses

Immigration has been an interesting subject to the public and a prominent issue that cannot be ignored. Issues such as immigration policies and reforms, fear of immigrants bringing crime, immigrants taking jobs from native-born families, and many more. With the growth of African immigrants increasing in the United States (Pew Research, 2017), and new immigration policies put in place in 2017 during the first year of President Trump’s presidency, this study investigates how African immigrants are portrayed in The New York Times Newspaper. Using Framing theory, this study employed the content analysis method and examined newspaper articles published from 2017 …

Impact Of Professional Sports’ Twitter Content On Their Fans, Gianna Sarkis

Theses

Professional sports organizations have begun to utilize social media to create an online community for fans. These organizations have partnered with companies to create monetary value for the team and the companies, which has led sponsorship from traditional advertising in the arena or venue of the professional sports organization to their team’s Twitter account. I investigated how fans of the professional sports organization recognized sponsored content on the organizations' Twitter pages concerning the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI). I then compared the sponsored and organic contents' interaction rates to see if there were similarities or differences between those rates. The …

Combating Human Trafficking: Assessing Justice Systems Response, Carly Stephens

Theses

The purpose of this thesis was to examine and assess justice system efforts in combating human trafficking; more specifically sex trafficking. The goal was to understand how efforts of combating human trafficking started, how they progressed, and to explore where efforts remain at this time. Additionally, the goal was to identify and understand what is working in law enforcement, human trafficking courts, and policy. This included identifying issues such as disparity in law enforcement reporting, lack of recognition of sex trafficking, and outdated policies. To assess these issues, this project utilized human trafficking data available through the FBI Uniform Crime …

Suicide By Cop: A Secondary Analysis Using Open-Source News Data, Mckayla Nolan

Theses

Suicide by cop (SBC) has recently become a known phenomenon in the United States, Canada, Australia and parts on the United Kingdom as another way to complete suicide (Patton & Fremouw,2015). SBC refers to when an individual creates a scenario in which law enforcement agencies are called and have to use deadly force in order to protect themselves and the people around the individual who is attempting to take their life (Mohandie, Meloy, & Collins, 2009). The term suicide by cop was originally coined by a police officer and psychologist Karl Harris in 1983 and is the term that is …

Implementation Of Cloud Services By Using Real-Time Analysis To Reduce Energy Consumption, Ghaith Ahmed Al Zubairi

Theses

Through the continual application of sensors, wireless networking, network communication and cloud computing technology, vast volumes of data are increasingly collected in the energy sector which needs to be utilized for effective management. In this project, the overall perspective is to analyze energy consumption data collected from households’ smart meters in London and combining it with the application of cloud data technology. I will explore and utilize a state-of-the-art cloud service infrastructure to analyze and make smart decisions on managing energy usage. There is interest in using data mining techniques and time series for machine learning modelling to deliver a …

Fda Regulation Impact On Early Stage Medical Device Innovation In Academia, Keyana Fariello

Theses

The commercialization of medical products at the university level is a multilayered and challenging process. One barrier to commercialization is the difficulty of meeting Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory requirements. Regulations and standards are undoubtedly necessary to maintain the highest product safety levels, but it creates many obstacles. This paper will analyze how researchers involved with early-stage medical device innovation in a university setting deal with FDA compliance issues and the implications of this engagement for innovation. I conducted an exploratory case study of ten medical product development projects at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Overall, I found …

Bringing Batavia Armory Building Back To Life – Community Center Adaptive Reuse Design, Jiangcheng Li

Theses

Built in 1963 and situated on a 4.6-acre lot in the City of Batavia, the Batavia Armory once housed tank battalions A and B of the Genesee National Guard, but has now remained vacant for decades. Instead of demolishing the armory buildings, providing them with a new role could alleviate the environmental impact, reduce construction time, and lower the cost of investment. At the same time, new features could be brought into the existing building from aesthetic and functional perspectives, and be beneficial to the community. Currently, we are facing the COVID-19 pandemic, and the virus impacts our lives and …

Effects Of Eye Imagery On Criminal Justice And Forensic Students Cheating In Online Testing, Kortni Larue

Theses

Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) is a well-established subsection of environmental criminology in which aspects of the environment are altered in order to prevent crimes before they happen. This is primarily accomplished in two ways: physical and psychological. CPTED strategies often utilize both in order to prevent crime, but there is a lack of primarily psychologically based research in circulation. This includes the manipulation of the biopsychological response to gaze detection in order to increase prosocial behavior. Additionally, there is a lack of studies indicating if CPTED strategies are effective in a classroom setting and even less concerning online …

Exposure To Pesticides And Hepatocellular Carcinoma (Hcc) Risk In And Around Monroe County, Ny, Theodros Woldeyohannes

Theses

The impact of long-term exposure and persistence of pesticides in the environment on human biology is not completely understood. With the proliferation of pesticide application technologies, there have been documented associations between exposure to every major functional group of pesticide and adverse health effects in humans such as cancer and neurological disease. Of observed pesticide-induced cancer health-risks, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has shown some of the most significant associations. Epidemiological study is complex, especially when examining pesticide health risks. It is difficult to understand the significance behind interactions between the large list of pesticide compounds, external environmental factors, and biological variables. …

Freedom Of The Light, Kyle R. Padden

Theses

Freedom of the Light is a feature length script that follows the heir to a highly religious kingdom on her journey of self discovery and revelation. Amalye Alsean has spent her entire life in the isolationist kingdom of Caelios, being told that the other inhabitants of the continent are merciless barbaric savages. It is only when she defies her father and experiences the continent herself that she is able to see the lies she has been fed. With her newfound power and knowledge, she must confront her father and enlighten her people. The script explores the relationships between father and …

Dubai Taxi Demand Hotspots Prediction, Samer Kamal Abu Taleb

Theses

Public transportation mode like taxi service consider as an essential service in every city that can serve all gender, age, and level of people, used for to move at any time and everywhere inside or outside the city. with the new entrance of technology for transportation, the taxi industry is undergoing a rapid digital transition like many other fields, that include new inventory like Uber and Careem for taxi sharing used by smartphones. Most of the time, taxi vehicles' distribution is imbalanced due to passengers and taxi drivers' unorganized demand. The plan is always left to the driver to estimate …

Using Advanced Technologies To Connect Communities Through Shared Experiences, Shauna Cross

Theses

Lack of interactions within a shared community creates relationship barriers resulting in isolation, disconnected work teams, missed collaboration opportunities, and an overall shortage of peer connections. Community members feel connected when associations are built on perceived similarities, and the associated experiences have common features. Therefore, it is critical to understand how visually identifying and presenting associations advances opportunities to unite and remedy untapped success within a shared community.

Associations are often distinguished by similarity, contrast, and closeness. It is assumed similar stimuli evoke similar reactions, and therefore assumptions of association and connection are based on (or AKIN to) this. AKIN …

Finding A Wells Way: Using Sustainability Metrics To Determine Best Practices For Relocating Wells Barns, Sara P. Hall

Theses

Serving as a visual representation of a different time and place, barns and agricultural architecture across America have both historical and cultural values that are imitable. Evoking a strong sense of nostalgia and simplicity, barns are an often-overlooked architectural typology worth preserving. Native to Western New York, historical Wells style barns have served as an iconic agricultural symbol since the late 1800s. As the means and methods of agriculture change with technological development, more and more of these exemplary structures are becoming neglected and obsolete. Typically located in remote, rural areas, this thesis looks to determine alternate, sustainable options in …

Mental Illness Campaigns, Yiming Cui

Theses

The target population of the research is people with mental diseases. It aims to study the symptoms of their illnesses and to understand the pain they encounter from the perspective of these patients. Based on that, this research combines with strong visual design and creative layout, presents art posters with impact and influence. The purpose of the research is to give mental patients recognition, encouragement and care to a certain extent through the art form of posters. This series consists of five posters, each poster describes the five most common mental illnesses in the United States, which are anxiety, obsessive-compulsive …

Secure Outsourced Computation On Encrypted Data, Asma Aloufi

Theses

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a promising cryptographic technique that supports computations on encrypted data without requiring decryption first. This ability allows sensitive data, such as genomic, financial, or location data, to be outsourced for evaluation in a resourceful third-party such as the cloud without compromising data privacy. Basic homomorphic primitives support addition and multiplication on ciphertexts. These primitives can be utilized to represent essential computations, such as logic gates, which subsequently can support more complex functions. We propose the construction of efficient cryptographic protocols as building blocks (e.g., equality, comparison, and counting) that are commonly used in data analytics and …

The Role Of Ai & Big Data In Habit Formation, Jingyu Cao

Theses

Forming habits are not easy for everyone. It requires professional methods and strong perseverance, which people usually feel hard to do by themself. However, people are eager to form good habits to have a better life.

This study aims to determine how AI & big data could help people to form habits. There are many applications on the market that already use this method to study user behavior in order to provide better service. My research has focused on how to conduct the personal plan and its effects on the action.

In this context, Marvelous is defined as the AI …

Dysphoria Ballet: A Morning Routine, Andrew Sonntag

Theses

Dysphoria Ballet is a short, stop-motion film that portrays the internal morning routine of a particular trans woman. It is based on a series of interviews with a woman early in transition, and is what I consider to be a deconstruction, compression, and expressionist interpretation of these interviews. It was made with her enthusiastic support and approval. In this way, it might be considered a kind of animated documentary, but it is deconstructed to the point of ultimately being shown as a kind of “experimental-narrative” dance film. It is motivated by an exploration and validation of using performative expression as …

Video-Based Iris Feature Extraction And Matching Using Deep Learning, Anisia Jabin

Theses

This research is initiated to enhance the video-based eye tracker’s performance to detect small eye movements.[1] Chaudhary and Pelz, 2019, created an excellent foundation on their motion tracking of iris features to detect small eye movements[1], where they successfully used the classical handcrafted feature extraction methods like Scale InvariantFeature Transform (SIFT) to match the features on iris image frames. They extracted features from the eye-tracking videos and then used patent [2] an approach of tracking the geometric median of the distribution. This patent [2] excludes outliers, and the velocity is approximated by scaling by the sampling rate. To detect the …

Reducing Body Contact Using Smart Mobile App And Machine Learning Soltutions, Rashed Saeed Abdulrahman Shaliya

Theses

The physical contact or the daily body interaction with people by shaking hands, using electronic and payment cards or touching objects such as devices, pens, access cards and gates, all these habits increase the proportion of spreading microbes, viruses and spread diseases among the people all over the world. This project illustrates how body contact can lead to a global disaster by spreading dangerous diseases and deadly viruses among people because of their daily dealings and routine. Analytical techniques were used to explore the relevant data and visualize how body contact increases the infection of a disease to become a …

An Examination Of Meat Consumption As A Pro-Environmental Behavior And Its Weak Correlation To Delay Discounting, Sarah Parkinson

Theses

This study presented meat consumption as an environmentally relevant behavior (ERB) and examined how the delay to an environmental loss might affect peoples’ decisions to eat meat. Participants completed a delay discounting survey where they selected what percentage of meat they would eliminate from their diet based on varying delays to rising sea levels flooding of their neighborhood. After watching a brief educational video, participants completed the survey a second time to examine whether the video had any influence on discounting rates in the post-survey. Participants also completed the 27-Item Monetary Choice Questionnaire (MCQ; Kirby & Marakovic, 1996) in order …

Recommender Systems And Amazon Marketing Bias, Yousuf Alolama

Theses

Proper marketing requires a great understanding of customers' needs and how they can be presented to them properly so that they purchase the services provided by companies and generate high profits. Recommender systems are considered as an answer to this marketing scheme; through feeding it enough data on customers' purchase history, it can understand what customers usually procure and what items can be proposed to them so that more sales can be conducted, resulting in higher profits. However, with the increasing number of techniques and algorithms for recommender systems, it reduced the rate of its accuracy toward presenting customers with …

Environmental Effects Of Coronavirus Pandemic: Analysis And Prediction Of Global Air Pollution Levels, Nouf Saif Alhmoudi

Theses

The Covid-19 pandemic started last semester when I was starting on my proposal. At that time, the pandemic lockdowns were at their peak levels with strict restrictions against movements. This was the case in most countries across the world. The effect this had on the air pollution was immediately felt. There were negligible amount of flights and road traffic had also significantly reduced. This led to an amazing clearing of the skies of pollution. For the first time in years, the Himalayan mountains could be seen, and many cities saw their smog and blanket of air pollution disappear. At that …

A Convolutional Neural Network (Cnn) Based Pill Image Retrieval System, Ezekiel Adebayo Adewumi

Theses

Several works have been done in the area of image retrieval systems, and many are still trying to provide improvements for a better model for retrieving said images. Image segmentation using clustering techniques is one of the most used approaches. There are various clustering methods available, but the non-linear k-means clustering technique is the most used method. In the following research, a model of retrieving images using a non-linear classifier aided with a convolutional neural network is proposed. Both algorithms were exploited and paired in terms of feature extraction and classification. Comprehensive evaluations over a dataset containing over 7,000 pill …

Smart Grid Program For Large Firms, Masood Alolama

Theses

A smart grid can help utilities conserve energy, cut costs, increase reliability and accountability, and increase efficiency in processes. Nevertheless, the growing use of IT-based electrical power systems increases the vulnerabilities of cyber security causes which increases the importance of cyber security in interconnected power grids. Utilities should understand protection of the smart grid, including vulnerable areas, strategic issues, layered security. However, there is a lack of awareness over the country since the inhabitants less informed about its importance in our life to transform into a smart grid and being part of this plan. Knowing that the government started already …

Proactive Exploration Of Fire Incidents Using The Integration Of Direct Alarm System And Cctv System, Abdullah Ahmed Abdi

Theses

By 2050, the population of urban cities will have increased by millions of people. Statistics by the UN Department's population division of economic and social affairs (United Nations, 2018) indicate that today, at least 55% of the world's population live in urban centers. Further, the UN department forecasts that by 2050, at least 68% of the world's population will be living in urban areas. This means that more than 2.5 billion people will relocate from rural areas to urban areas. According to the International Association of Fire Service Trainers and FDNY and Standard operating procedures, the fire is the most …