Digital Commons Network^™

Employing Optical Flow On Convolutional Recurrent Structures For Deepfake Detection, Akash Chintha

Theses

Deepfakes, or artificially generated audiovisual renderings, can be used to defame a public figure or influence public opinion. With the recent discovery of generative adversarial networks, an attacker using a normal desktop computer fitted with an off-the-shelf graphics processing unit can make renditions realistic enough to easily fool a human observer. Detecting deepfakes is thus becoming vital for reporters, social networks, and the general public. Preliminary research introduced simple, yet surprisingly efficient digital forensic methods for visual deepfake detection. These methods combined convolutional latent representations with bidirectional recurrent structures and entropy-based cost functions. The latent representations for the video are …

Global Health Education In Chinese Universities: Potential For Collaboration With Schools Of Nursing, Quanlei Li

Theses

The Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) and the Chinese Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CCUGH) were established within public health schools in North America in 2009 and in China in 2013. These consortiums are mandated to engage a variety of complementary disciplines including those in the health sphere such as public health, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing as well as those outside of the health arena, including law, environmental studies, business, anthropology, etc. Specifically, expanding the exposure of nursing students to global health curricula is critical as nurses are essential actors in the health care system: making …

Immigration, Crime, And Policy, Tiara Grayson

Theses

When viewing the criminal justice system, it is always investigated through a criminological approach. Meaning, there are numerous studies that attempt to get an understanding of why crime occurs, rather than the “why” in regards to the criminal justice system. The actors of the criminal justice system and their methods of crime control are rarely examined. In this paper, I will examine the behaviors of those who are attached to the criminal justice system; this includes the police, the media, politicians, and the public, who all play a role in how the criminal justice system functions, regarding immigration. Studying the …

Low Frequency Cyclical Potentials For Fine Tuning Nonlinear Electrokinetic Separations, Cody Justice Lentz

Theses

This work has shown a novel method for the separation of particles inside a nonlinear EK device using low frequency cyclical signals. The utility of this method was demonstrated by successfully separating micron sized polystyrene particles based on differences in particle size (2 µm vs. 5.1 µm) and by differences in particle charge (19 vs. 60 mv). In order to discover a usable signal for separation, a custom Matlab program was developed to simulate particle migration inside the device. The custom program utilized data from finite element analysis of the electric field in the device using the COMSOL Multiphysics program. …

Deepfakes Generation Using Lstm Based Generative Adversarial Networks, Akhil Santha

Theses

Deep learning has been achieving promising results across a wide range of complex task domains. However, recent advancements in deep learning have also been employed to create software which causes threats to the privacy of people and national security. One among them is deepfakes, which creates fake images as well as videos that cannot be detected as forgeries by humans. Fake speeches of world leaders can even cause threat to world stability and peace. Apart from the malicious usage, deepfakes can also be used for positive purposes such as in films for post dubbing or performing language translation. This latter …

Human-In-The-Loop Learning From Crowdsourcing And Social Media, Tong Liu

Theses

Computational social studies using public social media data have become more and more popular because of the large amount of user-generated data available. The richness of social media data, coupled with noise and subjectivity, raise significant challenges for computationally studying social issues in a feasible and scalable manner. Machine learning problems are, as a result, often subjective or ambiguous when humans are involved. That is, humans solving the same problems might come to legitimate but completely different conclusions, based on their personal experiences and beliefs. When building supervised learning models, particularly when using crowdsourced training data, multiple annotations per data …

Interactive Range Queries Under Differential Privacy, Asma Mohammed Alnemari

Theses

Differential privacy approaches employ a curator to control data sharing with analysts without compromising individual privacy. The curator’s role is to guard the data and determine what is appropriate for release using the parameter epsilon to adjust the accuracy of the released data. A low epsilon value provides more privacy, while a higher epsilon value is associated with higher accuracy. Counting queries, which ”count” the number of items in a dataset that meet specific conditions, impose additional restrictions on privacy protection. In particular, if the resulting counts are low, the data released is more specific and can lead to privacy …

Poly (Lactic Acid)/Nanoclay Nanocomposites For Packaging Applications, Maissa Akram Adi

Theses

With increasing stringent environmental regulations and attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels for polymer production, bio-based polymers are receiving appreciable global attention. In this context, bio-based poly (lactic acid) (PLA) is one of the most frequently used polymers in packaging applications. However, despite of its high versatility, this polymer is limited in packaging applications due to its low mechanical properties. The two-dimensional nanofillers such as nanoclay and graphene are well known for improving the thermo-mechanical properties of polymers at low concentrations. However, increasing higher filler concentration to improve barrier properties of polymers reduces their mechanical properties which is a …

Radio Observations Of The Neutron Star X-Ray Binary Circinus X-1: Clues On The Onset Of Radio Emission And Jet Formation, Batool Ahmad Essa Saleh Ilyasi

Theses

Circinus X-1 is a Neutron-Star X-ray Binary System which features strong and variable radio emission. This emission is triggered as a result of the interaction between neutron star and its companion as they approach periastron. Radio observations of Circinus X-1 have not been carried out over the past 7 years. Here are the results of the radio observation and monitoring campaign on Circinus X-1 with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) – Australia, at centimeter wavelengths (5.5 and 9 GHz). The radio behavior of Circinus X-1 has been monitored over two of its orbits (16.6 days each) to probe its …

Fabrication, Characterization And Applications Of Chemically Modified Planar Metallic Electrodes From Copper Clad Sheets, Rana T. Alsaidi

Theses

In this work, we developed a fabricating method for planar electrodes by milling and cutting copper-clad sheets. The main objectives of this thesis are to produce customized planar electrodes with different geometries with relatively higher reusability compared to the screen-printed electrodes available by commercial vendors. The fabricated electrodes from copper-clad sheets were electroplated with different metals using commercial electroplating baths to produce different metallic planar electrodes. Also, the fabrication of planar electrodes with cavities to be filled with modified carbon paste was done. The electroplated planar electrodes were characterized by the cyclic voltammetry technique. In addition to that, they were …

Disruptive Bussiness Model For Higher Education, Aya Rizik Abushawish

Theses

A business model is a plan for the successful operation of a business, identifying the source of revenue, the intended customers, value proposition, key resources, activities, and financing. It describes how organizations create, deliver and capture value. The recent developments in information and communications technology (ICT) disrupted most business models in different industries. The higher education industry is no exception, where it witnessed enormous integration of information and communications technologies. E-learning in higher education has made a tremendous shift in students’ life and raised the expectations of higher education service quality. The main objective of this thesis to develop a …

Biological Control Of Fusarium Wilt In Date Palm (Phoenix Dactylifera L.) In The United Arab Emirates By Endophytic Actinobacteria, Aisha Abdullah Darwish Shambeh Alblooshi

Theses

Date palm trees suffer from many various serious diseases, including sudden decline syndrome (SDS). External symptoms were characterized by whitening on one side of the rachis, progressing from the base to the apex of the leaf until the whole leaf dies; while the internal disease symptoms included reddish roots and highly coloured vascular bundles causing wilting and death of the tree. Although three Fusarium spp. (F. oxysporum, F. proliferatum and F. solani) were isolated from diseased root samples, the fungal pathogen F. solani was associated with SDS on date palm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Fusarium spp. were identified …

Biological Control Of Sudden Decline Disease Of Date Palm (Phoenix Dactylifera L.) In The United Arab Emirates, Khawla Juma Saif Zeail Alwahshi

Theses

Date palm orchards suffer from serious diseases, including sudden decline syndrome (SDS). The fungal pathogen Fusarium solani was associated with SDS on date palm in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Application of Cidely® Top (difenoconazole and cyflufenamid) significantly inhibited the fungal mycelial growth In vitro and reduced SDS development on date palm seedlings pre-inoculated with F. solani under greenhouse conditions. This is the first report confirming that the chemical fungicide Cidely® Top is strongly effective against SDS on date palm. Fungal pathogens not only inhibit plant growth directly but also induce the plant to synthesize stress ethylene. Much of the …

The Association Between Problematic Internet Use, Depressive Symptoms, Selfesteem, And Personality Traits, Basma Mubarak Yaslam Bensumaidea

Theses

A number of international studies have investigated the association between problematic internet use (PIU), personality traits, and psychopathology, however, despite their widespread prevalence, such investigations in the Middle East region remain rare. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between PIU and depression, self-esteem, and personality traits in a sample of 350 university students, aged between 17 and 33 years (mage=20.69, SD=2.14), who were residents in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Participants completed several assessments of sociodemographic variables, a validated measure of PIU, depression, self-esteem, and a measure of their personality traits. A total of 75.1% of the sample was determined …

Push Recovery For Humanoid Robots Using Linearized Double Inverted Pendulum, Saurav Singh

Theses

Biped robots have come a long way in imitating a human being's anatomy and posture. Standing balance and push recovery are some of the biggest challenges for such robots. This work presents a novel simplified model for a humanoid robot to recover from external disturbances. The proposed Linearized Double Inverted Pendulum, models the dynamics of a complex humanoid robot that can use ankle and hip recovery strategies while taking full advantage of the advances in controls theory research. To support this, an LQR based control architecture is also presented in this work. The joint torque signals are generated along with …

Multi-Sensor Fusion For 3d Object Detection, Darshan Ramesh Bhanushali

Theses

Sensing and modelling of the surrounding environment is crucial for solving many of the problems in intelligent machines like self-driving cars, autonomous robots, and augmented reality displays. Performance, reliability and safety of the autonomous agents rely heavily on the way the environment is modelled. Two-dimensional models are inadequate to capture the three-dimensional nature of real-world scenes. Three-dimensional models are necessary to achieve the standards required by the autonomy stack for intelligent agents to work alongside humans. Data driven deep learning methodologies for three-dimensional scene modelling has evolved greatly in the past few years because of the availability of huge amounts …

Rit-Eyes: Realistic Eye Image And Video Generation For Eye Tracking Applications, Nitinraj Nair

Theses

Deep neural networks for video-based eye tracking have demonstrated resilience to noisy environments, stray reflections, and low resolution. However, to train these networks, a large number of manually annotated images are required. To alleviate the cumbersome process of manual labeling, computer graphics rendering is employed to automatically generate a large corpus of annotated eye images under various conditions. In this work, we introduce a synthetic eye image and video generation platform called RIT-Eyes that improves upon previous work by adding features such as an active deformable iris, an aspherical cornea, retinal retro-reflection, and gaze-coordinated eye-lid deformations. To demonstrate the utility …

Integrated Framework For Data Quality And Security Evaluation On Mobile Devices, Igor Khokhlov

Theses

Data quality (DQ) is an important concept that is used in the design and employment of information, data management, decision making, and engineering systems with multiple applications already available for solving specific problems. Unfortunately, conventional approaches to DQ evaluation commonly do not pay enough attention or even ignore the security and privacy of the evaluated data. In this research, we develop a framework for the DQ evaluation of the sensor originated data acquired from smartphones, that incorporates security and privacy aspects into the DQ evaluation pipeline. The framework provides support for selecting the DQ metrics and implementing their calculus by …

Deep Learning For Quantitative Motion Tracking Based On Optical Coherence Tomography, Peter Abdelmalak

Theses

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a cross-sectional imaging modality based on low coherence light interferometry. OCT has been widely used in diagnostic ophthalmology and has found applications in other biomedical fields such as cancer detection and surgical guidance.

In the Laboratory of Biophotonics Imaging and Sensing at New Jersey Institute of Technology, we developed a unique needle OCT imager based on a single fiber probe for breast cancer imaging. The needle OCT imager with sub-millimeter diameter can be inserted into tissue for minimally invasive in situ breast imaging. OCT imaging provides spatial resolution similar to histology and has the potential …

Recovery Of Valuable Metals From Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries Using Organic Acids: Assessment Of Technoeconomic Feasibility, Leqi Lin

Theses

Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) are used in diverse electronic products with anticipated over 500 thousand tonnes of the waste LIBs globally in 2020. To protect the environment and also recover valuable materials such as lithium (Li) and cobalt (Co), our research employed a hydrometallurgy method and demonstrated that exposure of spent LIBs to Organic Aqua Regia (OAR) could leach Li and Co without the pre-separation of cathode from Al foil using organic solvents such as Dimethylformamide (DMF) and N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP). The leaching efficiency of 99% and 94% for Li and Co were obtained with a leaching rate of 0.021, 0.167 …

Enhanced Removal Of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (Pfoa) Via Microwave-Fenton-Reactive Membrane Filtration, Fangzhou Liu

Theses

Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), one of the common per- and poly fluorinated alkylated substances (PFASs), is increasingly detected in the environment due to the diverse industrial applications and high resistance to degradation processes. This study evaluated degradation of PFOA in microwave-assistant catalytic membrane filtration, a process that integrates microwave catalytic reactions into a ceramic membrane filtration. First, water permeation of the pristine and catalyst-coated membranes were examined under the influence of microwave irradiation to analyse the impacts of the coating layer and water temperature increase on permeate flux, which were well interpreted by three models. Then, the PFOA removal was first …

Analysis Of Gameplay Strategies In Hearthstone: A Data Science Approach, Connor W. Watson

Theses

In recent years, games have been a popular test bed for AI research, and the presence of Collectible Card Games (CCGs) in that space is still increasing. One such CCG for both competitive/casual play and AI research is Hearthstone, a two-player adversarial game where players seeks to implement one of several gameplay strategies to defeat their opponent and decrease all of their Health points to zero. Although some open source simulators exist, some of their methodologies for simulated agents create opponents with a relatively low skill level. Using evolutionary algorithms, this thesis seeks to evolve agents with a higher skill …

Prediction Of Gas-Hydrate Equilibrium, Stability And Kinetic Nucleation In Porous Media, Yali Zhang

Theses

Natural gas-hydrates are crystalline inclusion compounds with gas molecules (guest compounds) trapped within a host lattice formed by water molecules in an ice-like hydrogen-bonded framework. Natural gas-hydrates have the potential to become an important carbon-based resource addressing the increasing energy demand, and they pose a risk in terms of climate change. Accurate estimates of gas-hydrates global inventory, understanding of formation and dissociation processes of gas-hydrates, and evaluation of their environmental impact require models that accurately describe gas-hydrate stability in sediments and predict gas-hydrate kinetic nucleation processes. The hypothesis driving this work is that incorporation of selected sediment properties, i.e., surface …

Re-Engineering Universities’ Admission Process Using Artificial Intelligence And Cloud, Ammar Kamel Alrefai

Theses

Student admission system is a web application interface that students usually use to apply for admission into a university. The traditional admission process has two steps. The first step is when the students fill in a form by providing all the required information from the admission office, like the personal information, previous academic records, English test results (IELTS or TOEFL) and the program they want to study. The second step is to upload the required documents that verify the information provided in the first step, like the identity card, national number, passport copies, TOEFL/IELTS test results, past bachelor/master certificate or …

Customer Complaints Auto-Assignment Using Machine Learning Algorithms, Muammar Nasser Saleh Mohammed

Theses

Managing customer complaints is a very challenging activity, especially when it comes to a government entity like Roads a Transport Authority (RTA) that manages the roads infrastructure and services. RTA for the management of the customer complaints requires a sophisticated and intelligent responsive system for the large volume of cases and calls, which result in needs to a lot of human resources to receive, record and handle customer calls and cases. "The key customer-save course of action is the complaints-handling process. Customers who complain to service providers and are well treated by the process are less likely to churn than …

Predicting And Enhancing Employee Daily Performance For Dewa-Hv Design Department, Maryam Abdulrahim Alshenaini

Theses

The most measurement tool used to measure daily employee performance is the daily productivity rate. It is an important indicator to understand employee daily performance and achievement. As a management level or as any successful manager, they are looking to achieve a higher percentage of daily productivity per employee to increase their department's total outcome. The primary purpose of this project is to implement the predicting and model and analysis techniques to improve and forecast the productivity of HV-design employees and reduce the lost time per day. Also, this project aims to identify the current situation of daily employee performance …

The Primary Volatile Composition Of Comet C/2015 Er61 (Panstarrs), Aaron Butler

Theses

In the outer edges of the solar system exist two regions: the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. These two regions have a high amount of icy bodies (comets) orbiting the Sun. Comets located within the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt contain an ancient codex to the solar systems contents, before the formation of our solar system. Presented are near-infrared, high-resolution (λ/Δλ ~40000) data obtained from the immersion-grating echelle spectrograph iSHELL at the 3m NASA Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Maunakea, Hawaii of the Oort cloud comet C/2015 ER61 (PANSTARRS). Observations took place on April 15 and 17 in 2017 while …

Impact Of Social Media On Dubai Stock Market Using Sentiment Analysis, Khaled Fawzi Hawas

Theses

One of the main objectives of having securities stock markets is to ensure fair trading. Our analysis of this study will show how sentiment analysis and text mining techniques can help stock markets to sense wipes in the market participants' behaviors and how the market community can benefit from it. The ability to detect potential insiders and investors' mood would help the stock market to take necessary actions to protect the trading environment and enhance investors’ trust in the market. In this project, we will be building a pilot proof of concept utilizing sentiment analysis on Twitter, one of the …

An Analysis Of The Components Of Terrorism, Rhianna Hayes

Theses

Terrorism is a complex topic to study. There is no consensus on what the word terrorism means, and there is even less consensus on why groups of people go out of their way to use terrorism as a form of political expression. Various analyses and studies have been conducted to attempt to explain this complex topic. Many of these studies have drawn from criminal justice research to apply criminological theories as an explanation for terrorism. The application of criminological theories provides one baseline for people to attempt to understand terrorism. At first glance, it may seem that criminological theories will …

Untitled, Rachel Yan Gu

Theses

The surface of the world is composed of innumerable points which may be abstracted for the sake of comprehension, like molecules, numbers, and pixels, they may also be an apple, a road, or a single person. Under these points, there are numerous nets, which are independent but also link everything together. They combine all of the numerous points together, and are the foundation of the points. I hope to see the nets through the points to explore the core of the world underneath.

I reconstruct the points and nets to create a visual representation of their relationships within our physical …