Digital Commons Network^™

Developing Circular Economy Through Implementing Advanced Technologies In Dubai, Hana Alsuwaidi

Theses

The UAE and Dubai have made several strides towards sustainability and in recent years Circular Economy started to be recognised in the region. It is crucial to understand that Circular Economy is not only connected to recycling municipal waste. Circular Economy is a strategy that intends to be implemented as a business model across all industries through technological advancements. First, a conceptual and theoretical framework is developed through data analytics to indicates what are the barriers that slows any economy form implementing Circular Economy, how can Circular Economy strategy be developed in Dubai through implementing technological advancements. Secondly, a wide …

Bx | Branded Ar Filters: Redefining Branded Interactions, Moses Michael Araujo

Theses

Traditional forms of experiential marketing have been interrupted by augmented reality. As augmented reality continues to grow, a new ecosystem for brand interactions has revealed a world of branded augmented content or “BX”. BX is a concept design that creates a personalized, immersive connection between brand and user through four AR filters.

Integrating All Mobility Systems To Reduce Traffic Congestion, Nasser Al Suwaidi

Theses

The problem of traffic congestion is common in most urban areas with associated negative impact on the social, economic, and ecological well-being of its residents. Traffic congestion is a common phenomenon in the city of Dubai with its large population and high rate of car ownership. To tackle the problem, this study looks at integrating all mobility systems in the city as a possible solution to the traffic congestion menace. The research methodology involves thematic analysis of secondary data on the subject derived from online databases and libraries. The thematic analysis revealed that Dubai had all the factors needed to …

Housing Occupants’ Motivational Drivers For Energy-Savings In The United Arab Emirates: An Exploratory Study, Monaya Muhammed Syam

Theses

The fast urbanization in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) accounts for 70% of energy consumption with the residential sector leading the way, urgently calling for mitigating strategies. Energy-efficient housing in hot climates has been extensively researched in terms of design, building materials and systems. However, an energy performance gap subsides as a direct result of occupants’ behaviour, catalyzing focused research. Moreover, understanding the housing occupants’ behaviour, motivation, and impetus to save energy proved to significantly increase energy savings. Exploring this topic in the UAE is vital given its distinctive specifics; fast-growing economy, harsh hot climate, and heterogeneous population. The latter …

Exploring Strategies For Optimal Student Engagement Within A Blended Learning Model, Peter Repp

Theses

This project asks how percussion student engagement might be optimized through the integration of a blended course format. Using the “practical action research” methodology, various strategies for increasing student engagement were researched and implemented. The research focused on three components of student engagement, including: 1.) cognitive investment, 2.) active participation, and 3.) emotional commitment. As a result, an innovative percussion curriculum was created which provided significantly increased opportunity for teachers to focus on these factors by utilizing a blended model of instruction.

Vintage Fashion Line, Robyn Denise Grier

Theses

This project focuses is on the history, description and current trends of lingerie fashion. The goal is to create a vintage fashion line that would appeal to today’s woman. The project not only reviews historical fashion, but looks at current lingerie fashion trends and lingerie companies.

On Learning And Generalization To Solve Inverse Problem Of Electrophysiological Imaging, Sandesh Ghimire

Theses

In this dissertation, we are interested in solving a linear inverse problem: inverse electrophysiological (EP) imaging, where our objective is to computationally reconstruct personalized cardiac electrical signals based on body surface electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. EP imaging has shown promise in the diagnosis and treatment planning of cardiac dysfunctions such as atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation, ischemia, infarction and ventricular arrhythmia.

Towards this goal, we frame it as a problem of learning a function from the domain of measurements to signals. Depending upon the assumptions, we present two classes of solutions: 1) Bayesian inference in a probabilistic graphical model, 2) Learning from …

Mend Magazine: Creating Awareness. Shifting Habits Of Consumption., Marie A. Fabozzi

Theses

Generation Y, or more commonly known as Millennials (born from 1981-1996) seamlessly blend the digital realm with the physical world, as a result of adolescence in a time when technology was adopted early on (Dimock, 2019 & Fromm et al, 2013). Research shows that millennials want constant participation and interactivity to be personally engaged and that millennials are a largely influential, specifically with family members (Fromm et al, 2013 and Lu et al, 2013). Combining the Millennial generation's leverage with the topic of climate crisis there is opportunity for current and future generations to establish better habits early on. By …

A Process Modeling Approach To Evaluating Worker Requirements For Sexual Assault Evidence Testing, Arden Bonzo

Theses

In recent years, over 100,000 untested sexual assault kits (SAKs) have been discovered in the custody of law enforcement and awaiting testing at publicly funded facilities. The backlog has been attributed to law enforcement discretion and a lack of resources at testing facilities. In response to the backlog, states have adopted various policies for testing SAKs. 11 states have adopted comprehensive policies, mandating testing of all backlogged and incoming kits, in addition to annual inventories, updated tracking systems, and increased funding for testing programs. 30 states have adopted “limited” policies and 4 states have proposed policy reforms. This research attempts …

New Approaches For Isolation And Characterization Of Extracellular Vesicles, Mehdi Dehghani

Theses

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are membrane vesicles secreted by cells and distributed widely in all biofluids. Extracellular vesicles can modulate the biological activities of the recipient cells. Due to their role in intercellular communication, they are receiving attention for therapeutic and diagnostic applications. The first step to better understand EVs and to utilize them as therapeutic and diagnostic tools is to purify them from a variety of biofluids. Membranes have been extensively used for purification of different biological species from biological fluids. As the first aim, a novel microfluidic system, termed as tangential flow for analyte capture (TFAC) was developed to …

Towards Effectiveness Of Detecting Iot Botnet Attacks Using Supervised Machine Learning, Khizer Naeem

Theses

With the rapid explosion of Internet of Things (IoT), IoT enabled devices have reached every corner of the globe, connecting billions of devices to the global internet. Botnets remain as one that can profit the most from IoT security susceptibility among other threats. Machine Learning based techniques to detect malicious traffic has been a widely researched topic in the last few years. Most of the studies simply use these techniques in an isolated fashion, where the machine learning algorithms are trained and tested on the same stream of labeled traffic. This study will attempt to analyze the use of supervised …

Nation Branding And The Case Of Saudi Vision 2030 And The Use Of Twitter, Hala Zayed Alsaaidi

Theses

Nation branding has played a pivotal role in how Saudi Arabia represents itself in the global community. This thesis analyzed Saudi Arabia’s government approach towards the implementation of a nation branding strategy using social media as a vehicle to engage with the rest of the world. The study addresses questions of how Saudi Arabia communicates through nation branding as part of its core identity and how different values are presented in the Saudi Arabia Vision 2030 on Twitter. Qualitative content analysis was used to analayze the tweets and tweet contents regarding the Vision 2030 national branding in Saudi Arabia. Data …

Phylogenomic Analysis Of Evolutionary Relationships In Ranitomeya Poison Frogs (Amphibia: Dendrobatidae) Using Ultraconserved Elements, Morgan Renee Muell

Theses

Knowledge of phylogenetic relationships among organisms is essential for anchoring evolutionary studies. Phylogenomic studies use large amounts of genetic data in analyses, which is particularly important for highly phenotypically variable taxa that are difficult to distinguish from one another without the use of genetic data, due to the abundance of homoplasy in morphological characters typically used in morphological classification. Use of genome-scale molecular data has thus become the gold standard for identifying these phylogenetic relationships, specifically in comparison to past studies based on fewer genes. Greater quantities of genetic data, in addition to finer taxon sampling, may lead to different …

Diving Into One’S Painful Past And Darkest Internal Fears: The Developmental Process Of The Thread That Snapped, Austin Brian Harrison

Theses

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OFAustin Harrison, for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Theatre, presented on April 10, 2020, at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. TITLE: DIVING INTO ONE’S PAINFUL PAST AND DARKEST INTERNAL FEARS: THE DEVELOPMENTAL PROCESS OF THE THREAD THAT SNAPPEDMAJOR PROFESSOR: Dr. Jacob Juntunen This thesis details the development of my full-length play The Thread That Snapped from its early conception in 2019 to full production at Southern Illinois University Department of Theatre’s Christian H. Moe Theatre’s space in March 2020. In writing The Thread That Snapped, I was inspired by traumatic chapters within my life …

Self-Admitted Technical Debt - An Investigation From Farm To Table To Refactoring, Ben Christians

Theses

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is a metaphorical concept which describes the self-documented contribution of technical debt to a software project in the manner of source-code comments.

SATD can linger in projects and degrade source-code quality, but its palpable visibility draws a peculiar sort of attention from developers.

There is a need to understand the significance of engineering SATD within a software project, as these debts may have lurking repercussions.

While the oft-performed action of refactoring may work against a generalized volume of source code degradation, there exists only slight evidence suggesting that the act of refactoring has a distinct impact …

Effective Activation Functions For Homomorphic Evaluation Of Deep Neural Networks, Srinath Obla

Theses

CryptoNets and subsequent work have demonstrated the capability of homomorphic encryption (HE) in the applications of private artificial intelligence (AI). While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are primarily composed of linear functions which can be homomorphically evaluated, layers such as the activation layer are non-linear and cannot be homomorphically evaluated. One of the most commonly used alternatives is approximating these non-linear functions using low-degree polynomials. However, it is difficult to generate efficient approximations and often, dataset specific improvements are required. This thesis presents a systematic method to construct HE-friendly activation functions for CNNs. We first determine the key properties in a …

The Use Of Deep Learning Methods To Assist In The Classification Of Seismically Vulnerable Dwellings, Salman Khan

Theses

Exciting research is being conducted using Google's Street View imagery. Researchers can have access to training data that allows CNN training for topics ranging from assessing neighborhood environments to estimating the age of a building. However, due to the uncontrolled nature of imagery available via Google's Street View API, data collection can be lengthy and tedious. In an effort to help researchers gather address specific dwelling images efficiently, we developed an innovative and novel way of automatically performing this task. It was accomplished by exploiting Google's publicly available platform with a combination of 3 separate network types and post-processing techniques. …

Police Officer Coping: The Effect Of Police Culture, Management, And Family, Megan Heflin-Brand

Theses

This thesis examines the idea that police officers have supportive factors in their lives which influence coping mechanisms used to handle occupational stress. This idea comes from police culture literature which suggests that officers are encouraged to use maladaptive coping strategies like drinking and emotional suppression to deal with stress. Additional research on management support and family support are introduced as alternative supportive factors which can promote the use of adaptive coping like agency offered services and programs. This thesis uses data from “Work and Family Services for Law Enforcement Personnel in the United States” (Robert, O’Quin, & Kennedy, 2000). …

Comparison Of Longitudinal Changes In Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Between Alzheimer’S And Healthy Controls, Berk Can Yilmaz

Theses

Resting State Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rs-fMRI) is a technique that is widely used for analyzing brain function using different approaches and methods. This study involves rs-fMRI analysis of Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signals acquired from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) Patients and Healthy Controls (HC). Each subject in the study had both functional and anatomical images with at least one rs-fMRI scan with their Anatomical (T1) scans. Previous rs-fMRI studies have demonstrated that AD shows differences in Amplitude of Low Frequency (<0.1 Hz) Fluctuations (ALFF), and Regional Homogeneity (ReHo) measures according to HCs.

The aim of the study is to investigate individual and group level differences using ReHo and mALFF related …

The Economic Impacts Of Nuclear Power Plant Closures On Rural Communities, Christina Maher

Theses

The 2015 announcement to close Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) in Buchanan, NY caused a shockwave of concerns for the local community. As a rural community, Buchanan, NY relies on major employers to provide long-lasting careers with steady incomes and steady tax revenue for the community (Mitchell, 2019). A major employer is a business that produces more goods and services than can be utilized by the local economy, and therefore it exports a significant portion of its goods and employs five hundred workers or more (Montrose EDC, 2019). The type of industries that are major employers includes manufacturing, energy plants, …

Path Loss Model For 2.4ghz Indoor Wireless Networks With Application To Drones, Rahul Gulia

Theses

Indoor wireless communication using Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is becoming a major need for the success of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud robotics in both developed and developing countries. With different operating conditions, interference, obstacles and type of building materials used, it is difficult to predict the path loss components in an indoor environment, which are crucial for the network design. It has been observed that the proposed indoor path loss models cannot be used for UAV operations due to variations in building materials utilized, floor plans, scattering on both ends, etc. In this work, we …

Convex Object Detection, Abhisek Dey

Theses

Scene understanding has become a fundamental research area in computer vision. To achieve this task, localizing and recognizing different objects in space is paramount. From the seminal work of face detection by Viola-Jones using cascaded Haar features to the state-of-the-art deep neural networks, object detection has evolved from just being used in limited cases to be being used extensively for detecting common and custom objects. Algorithm and hardware improvements currently allow for real time object detection on a smartphone. Typically, for each detected object, the object top-left co-ordinate along with bottom-right coordinate or width and height are returned. While this …

Open Set Classification For Deep Learning In Large-Scale And Continual Learning Models, Ryne Roady

Theses

Supervised classification methods often assume the train and test data distributions are the same and that all classes in the test set are present in the training set. However, deployed classifiers require the ability to recognize inputs from outside the training set as unknowns and update representations in near real-time to account for novel concepts unknown during offline training. This problem has been studied under multiple paradigms including out-of-distribution detection and open set recognition; however, for convolutional neural networks, there have been two major approaches: 1) inference methods to separate known inputs from unknown inputs and 2) feature space regularization …

“Take Those Old Records Off The Shelf” A Uses & Gratifications Study Of Different Music Platforms, Emily Hawk

Theses

The platforms people use to listen to music have evolved rapidly in the last fifty years. Digital streaming and digital downloads are the most popular platforms to consume music, but physical platforms like CDs and vinyl are still common or, in the case of vinyl, even growing in use. This study investigated the needs being met and the reasons behind listening to music on these different platforms. This study also compared the differences in gratifications sought between physical music platforms and non-physical music platforms. A survey shared via email, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, as well as via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk …

Impact Of Celebrity Endorsement In Advertising Of High-Risk Products, Victoria Olaosebikan

Theses

Celebrity endorsement is one of the most popular and effective strategies in advertising. Celebrities are perceived as attractive and having both likable qualities and influential power. Marketers have become more aware of the influence celebrities have on individuals and have harnessed this into advertising products and services. Empirical studies have shown that celebrities have been very effective in advertising low-risk products and services. But how effective is this strategy in advertising high-risk products and services? This study employed the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the impact of a celebrity endorser compared to a non-celebrity endorser on consumer behavior in advertising …

Va-U: Addressing The Gaps In Respiratory Protection Through A Holistic Open-Sourced Design Alternative, Aishwarya Uniyal

Theses

With industrialization and urbanization, more populations, whether at the workplace or outside in the streets, find themselves exposed to contaminated air. Respiratory hazards and illnesses arising thereof are prevalent across most industries and economies. Beyond developed economies with strong labor laws, a large part of the workforce faces the lack of access to respiratory protection, which also is evident in the gaps of knowledge of its correct use. Even among the groups with access to respirators, incorrect use arising out of miscommunication or comfort is common. Evaluating the design and use of the different types of respirators while also studying …

Design For Communication, Weiying Chen

Theses

Increasingly numbers of younger generation have settled down their new homes away from parents after years of endeavor in bigger cities in China. They leave their parents for their works and take care of their own families. Elderly care becomes a crucial problem since filial piety is a tradition and a need in Chinese culture. Because of the implementation of “One child policy” in China in such a long time, elder parents only have one child in each family, which weights much more pressure of taking care of elder parents on the “only child”. Lack of smart phones use of …

The Role Of Activation In The Relationship Between Power Posing And Task Performance, Jeremy Walter Marshall

Theses

This research analyzed the psychophysiological effects that expansive and contractive body poses have on the human body. Participants were asked to hold either an expansive or contractive body pose for two minutes prior to participating in a Color-Word Interference Test (CWT, which induced stress) and a gambling task (which measured risk tolerance). Heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA) for each participant was measured to gauge stress throughout the experiment. Positive and negative affect scales were used to measure mood before and after posing. Results of this research did not support our hypotheses, which were: 1. Expansive, dominant poses …

Future Bound: Your Future, Your Way, Marisa Nowodworski

Theses

In modern American culture, a lack of emphasis has developed in regards to education and its value and role for the future. This has plagued the nation with despair, which has increased over the last several years. A growing interest in STEAM education and the available paths following secondary education, we can revitalize the nation and redirect our future to a more lucrative outcome: vocations, entrepreneurship, or post-secondary education based upon the correct path for each individual life.

The application of STEAM in education can create opportunities and expand knowledge in fields across the board: exposure to arts can create …

Murine Flexor Tendon Repair Model With Noninvasive Assessment Of Healing With Ultrasound, Fei Rost

Theses

Flexor tendon injuries in the hands are relatively common, significantly disabling more than 100,000 people in the United States per year (Nichols 2019). The majority of flexor tendon injuries require surgical repair, but despite the advancement of technology and medicine, current treatments still yield poor outcomes. Even with prevailing treatments to improve or restore function to the affected digit(s), patients often suffer psychologically and financially in the long-term. A recent study gave a conservative estimate that flexor tendon lacerations cost the American healthcare system and taxpayers between US $240.8-409.1 million per year and emphasized the need to “focus our efforts …