Digital Commons Network^™

Those Thrice Marked By Time: The Significance Of The Last Known Survivor, Their Death, And Our Remembrance, Michael Tofte

Theses

Following Adam Zarakov, the last known survivor is a significant figure and a representative of a larger type that is under-considered. Last known survivors are ubiquitous in fictional media and how history is told. Some survivors like Frank Buckles are given lavish state funerals with participation of strangers. Yet, this under-analysis is concerning as the 21^st century will likely feature the recognition of last known survivors of many significant 20^th century events. I offer one attempt of addressing this lacuna.

The first aim is to motivate philosophical interest in the phenomenon of the last known survivor. I present …

Warrant And Non-Function: A Critique Of The Sensus Divinitatis In Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology, Lukas Merrell

Theses

In recent years, there has been a surge in attempting to demonstrate how a theistic belief can be held rationality apart from classical proofs. Championed by philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff. Reformed Epistemology attempts to defend a God-belief as properly basic, which is therefore justified and warranted apart from traditional argumentation. With this in view, he put forward a position of religious epistemology that attempts to show how a GB can be on par with other beliefs we have on a daily basis that are considered rational, even if devoid of argumentation. In this paper I focus …

A Framework For Evaluating Technology-Mediated Collaborative Workflow, Christopher Bondy

Theses

The adoption of new technology into collaborative workflows has permeated every aspect of our personal and professional lives with the promise of performing work processes more efficiently and with greater capability. The continued rise of ubiquitous computing and heightened need for collaborative features suggest that a view of enabling technologies in a workflow should include the physical computing infrastructure, the collaborative interaction between humans and computers, and the informatics (i.e., collection and representation of data within the workflow). The development and integration of technology for collaborative workflows introduces many variables that are of great concern to companies, organization, and individuals. …

Lost In Transit, Drishti Bhandari

Theses

“I recognize, decontextualize, reconstruct.”

"Lost in transit" is the sense of loss that we experience when our heritage and stories are passed down to us. Like a game of Telephone, every generation loses a little of its past- which gets left behind. We do not have, in all originality, what the previous generation had. As we move through time, lived experiences change. We will never know what it felt like to live in a medieval kingdom, or to live through the renaissance. We will only ever have their echoes in pictures, stories and ruins. The only common thread is that …

Representational Enactivism, Zhexi Zhang

Theses

In the literature on enactive approaches to cognition, representationalism is often seen as a rival theory. In this paper, I argue that enactivism can be fruitfully combined with representationalism by adopting Frances Egan’s content pragmatism. This representational enactivism avoids some of the problems faced by antirepresentational versions of enactivism. Most significantly, representational enactivism accommodates empirical evidence that neural systems manipulate representations. In addition, representational enactivism provides a valuable insight into how to identify representational content, especially in brainless organisms: we can identify representational content by investigating autopoietic processes.

Kitchen Design For Water Recycling And Building New Family Relationships, Chuanhong Zhou

Theses

Air and water are the most important resource for mankind. Water conservation is a concept that everyone knows, but how many water conservation products can we see in our life? Kitchen water is one of the most important parts of domestic water use, and its life cycle in the kitchen should be given more attention. Making good use of kitchen water will bring environmental benefits to our future generations. This article will first discuss the current situation of kitchen water and the need for reuse of water resources, and then discuss the ways of reusing kitchen water. This article will …

Methods For Generating High-Fidelity Trace Chemical Residue Reflectance Signatures For Active Spectroscopy Classification Applications, Cara Patrice Murphy

Theses

Standoff detection and identification of trace chemicals in hyperspectral infrared images is an enabling capability in a variety of applications relevant to defense, law enforcement, and intelligence communities. Performance of these methods is impacted by the spectral signature variability due to the presence of contaminants, surface roughness, nonlinear effects, etc. Though multiple classes of algorithms exist for the detection and classification of these signatures, they are limited by the availability of relevant reference datasets.

In this work, we first address the lack of physics-based models that can accurately predict trace chemical spectra. Most available models assume that the chemical takes …

Combinatorial And Stochastic Approach To Parallelization Of The Kangaroo Method Of Solving The Discrete Logarithm Problem, Joe Klesczewski

Theses

The kangaroo method for the Pollard's rho algorithm provides a powerful way to solve discrete log problems. There exist parameters for it that allow it to be optimized in such a way as to prevent what are known as "useless collisions" in exchange for the limitation that the number of parallel resources used must be both finite and known ahead of time. This thesis puts forward an analysis of the situation and examines the potential acceleration that can be gained through the use of parallel resources beyond those initially utilized by an algorithm so configured.

In brief, the goal in …

Development Of A Low-Cost Eye Screening Tool For Early Detection Of Diabetic Retinopathy Using Deep Neural Network, David Mwanguo Mwasikira

Theses

It has been said that technology used in the lab does not directly transfer to what is done in healthcare. Research on the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the diagnosis of Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) has seen tremendous growth over the last couple of years but it is also true not much of that knowledge has been transferred into practice to benefit patients in need. One reason is that it’s a new frontier with untested technologies and one that is evolving too fast. Also, the Real Healthcare situation can be very complicated presenting itself with numerous challenges starting with strict …

Baby, Hexuan Cai

Theses

In this thesis, I discuss human nature by exploring the psychological state of human beings in the first period of life. A baby symbolizes the beginning of a life cycle. Most people have forgotten their state at the beginning of life, the period when human beings have the purest humanity. The baby is like a magnifying glass, completely expressing human nature, and demonstrates many different aspects of the human inner world. Through the baby, the diversity of human personality can be clearly seen, making the baby a suitable object to study human characteristics.

For me, a baby is both a …

Distfold: Distance-Guided Protein Folding, Matthew Bernardini

Theses

Protein structure prediction and its associated key sub-problems such as distance map prediction are of significance importance in biology and bioinformatics. The inter-residue distance prediction problem, or distance prediction in short, is to predict the physical distance between amino acids in a three-dimensional (3D) space, given a protein's one-dimensional sequence information. While there exist many methods to predict distance maps, there are currently no methods that can take those predicted distance maps and build 3D models from them in an ab initio way, i.e., without using any other information. This works aims to fill this gap by: a) developing a …

Family Planning Methods Among Couples Of A Selected Barangay In Tacloban City: Basis For Healthcare Program Enhancement, Ric-An Artemio S. Gadin

Theses

The increase of population affects many aspects of society, including living conditions, basic needs, employment status and most importantly the health system. It is thus imperative to adequately plan family size in order to build a stable society. But despite of the availability of family planning programs where most methods of contraception are available both in the rural and urban health centers, literatures shows that population growth is still at rise. Thus the researcher became curious of the knowledge, attitude and practices of couples in family planning. The study tried to assess the level of awareness and practices of family …

Can Feature Requests Reveal The Refactoring Types?, Sultan Fahad Almassari

Theses

Software refactoring is the process of improving the design of a software system while preserving its external behavior. In recent years, refactoring research has been growing as a response to the degradation of software quality. Recent studies performed an in-depth investigation in (1) how refactoring practices are taking place during the software evolution, (2) how to recommend refactoring to improve the design of software, and (3) what type of refactoring operations can be implemented. However, there is a lack of support when it comes to developers’ typical programming tasks, including feature updates and bug fixes. The goal of this thesis …

Using Advanced Analytics To Assist Stakeholders In Higher Education Institutions, Preethi Dsouza

Theses

Higher education institutions have access to a vast amount of student data that is recorded during the process of admissions and throughout the course of the program. After the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic most universities around the world had to either adopt a blended or a complete online mode of teaching. Students were required to access resources through a virtual learning platform and interaction with this environment also left an important trail of valuable information. Data analysis and machine learning can provide insights and predictions about students’ performances, online activities and academic progress. Advanced analytics can provide necessary …

Forensics Writer Identification Using Text Mining And Machine Learning, Saif Ali Alawar

Theses

Constant technological growth has resulted in the danger and seriousness of cyber-attacks, which has recently unmistakably developed in various institutions that have complex Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. For instance, for the last three (3) years, the most horrendous instances of cybercrimes were perceived globally with enormous information breaks, fake news spreading, cyberbullying, crypto-jacking, and cloud computing services. To this end, various agencies improvised techniques to curb this vice and bring perpetrators, both real and perceived, to book in relation to such serious cybersecurity issues. Consequently, Forensic Writer Identification was introduced as one of the most effective remedies to the concerned …

Isabella D’Este's Evolution Of Art Patronage: A Study Of A Renaissance Woman Through Iconographic And Feminist Perspectives, Katie Reinkemeyer

Theses

This thesis is based on how Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) cultivated her extensive collection of rare antiques and art, given the parallel evolution of her art commissions and political concerns as it pertains to iconography and feminism. Instead of discussing what previous scholars have researched concerning Isabella d’Este, this thesis will incorporate the iconography as it pertains to her commissions in a historiographical sense, as well as argue why this iconography would eventually become a beacon for feminist discussion. This will primarily examine Isabella’s commissions from 1494 to 1507, including her earliest portraits and the first four paintings of her studiolo. …

Theory And Algorithms For Reliable Multimodal Data Analysis, Machine Learning, And Signal Processing, Dimitris G. Chachlakis

Theses

Modern engineering systems collect large volumes of data measurements across diverse sensing modalities. These measurements can naturally be arranged in higher-order arrays of scalars which are commonly referred to as tensors. Tucker decomposition (TD) is a standard method for tensor analysis with applications in diverse fields of science and engineering. Despite its success, TD exhibits severe sensitivity against outliers —i.e., heavily corrupted entries that appear sporadically in modern datasets. We study L1-norm TD (L1-TD), a reformulation of TD that promotes robustness. For 3-way tensors, we show, for the first time, that L1-TD admits an exact solution via combinatorial optimization and …

Pedagogical Evaluation Of Cognitive Accessibility Learning Lab In The Classroom, Saad Khan

Theses

In a study conducted by Webaim, 98.1% of sites had a detectable accessibility issue. This poses a profound challenge to the 1 billion users across the world who have a disability. This indicates that developers either are not aware of how to make the sites accessible or aware of how critical it is to make the sites usable by all users. This problem is further compounded by the lack of available resources that can educate students and future developers in making their software accessible. To address current limitations/challenges, we have developed an all-in-one immersive learning experience known as the Accessibility …

Automatic Speech Recognition For Low-Resource And Morphologically Complex Languages, Ethan Morris

Theses

The application of deep neural networks to the task of acoustic modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR) has resulted in dramatic decreases of word error rates, allowing for the use of this technology in smart phones and personal home assistants in high-resource languages. Developing ASR models of this caliber, however, requires hundreds or thousands of hours of transcribed speech recordings, which presents challenges for most of the world’s languages. In this work, we investigate the applicability of three distinct architectures that have previously been used for ASR in languages with limited training resources. We tested these architectures using publicly available …

Designing A Chemotherapy Infusion Center In Buffalo, New York Using Daylighting To Aid In The Healing Process, Claire Witt

Theses

Healthcare makes up a large amount of infrastructure and while today’s designs have vastly improved over the years, incorporating more natural light can improve not only staff’s performance but also enhance a patient healing experience. Daylighting is one of the most powerful, natural product designers can use in projects. Healthcare facilities have a goal in mind when designing a hospital such as the patients healing, overall experience, and their comfort. To continue to achieve improvements in patient care, it is important to constantly evaluate current means and methods, with one element that influences the delivery of care is the design …

Predicting Smart Home's Energy In Smart Grids, Anood Alnuaimi, Hafsa Alyahya

Theses

Nowadays, data analytics plays a significant role in developing new business systems. In addition, it is taking a major part of the decision-making process in the organization. For this project we focused on predicting smart home's energy that uses smart meters starting with identifying the problem statement. We used RStudio tool to perform the data preprocessing, data exploration, machine learning algorithms implementation, and visualizations. To build our models we used a dataset from Kaggle website related to smart meters data. In addition, we have created different plots to explore and analyze the energy consumption for each appliance. The time-series analysis …

Deep Learning Of Scene-Specific Classifier For Pedestrian Detection In Dubai, Abduljalil Alolama

Theses

The performance of a generic pedestrian detector varies based on the data fed to it; when applied to a specific scene, its performance degrades dramatically, which require the detector to be fed with the specific target in mind so that it can produce the desired predictions and detect for the user the specified target. In this paper, I propose to feed the automated specialization of a scene-specific pedestrian detector, with multiple sources from pictures to even videos beginning with a generic video surveillance detector, however manually marking samples to ease the process, as the knowledge accumulated from the master program …

Api Recommendation Using Domain And Source Code Knowledge, Rana Kareem Talib Al-Rubaye

Theses

The process of migration the old retired API(Application Programming Interface) with new and most to up to date one, know as API migration. Developers need to fully understand the documentation for the retired (replaced) library and the new (replacing) library to do the appropriate migration. This manual process is complex, error-prone, and costly for companies. There have been many studies focused on the automation recommendation between different method mapping for different libraries. These studies focused on the recommendations between methods from different programming languages while non of them focused on the recommendations between methods of libraries that belong to the …

Understanding The Themes Of Disability Discourse Through Reddit Comments, Brandon Palonis

Theses

With the advent of internet forums, sharing opinions in a public sphere has never been easier, especially for those facing marginalization in their communities. Forums offer a neutral, semi-anonymous space wherein people may feel more compelled to share intimate details about the characteristics of their lives. This paper focuses on internet forums related to disabilities, specifically those found on Reddit, and uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to extract topics from the corpus of 3 subreddits: r/Blind, r/ADHD, and r/Disability. The features are then put into key term groups that are defined by a key phrase. This created category taxonomy is …

Behavior Of Steel Fiber-Reinforced Geopolymer Concrete Made With Recycled Concrete Aggregates, Abdalla Ahmed Moallim Hussein

Theses

Industrial by-products and recycled concrete aggregates (RCA) have the potential to fully replace cement and natural aggregates, respectively, in the production of concrete rather than being discarded wastefully into landfills or stockpiles. Yet, their combined use in the development of a novel RCA geopolymer concrete has been limited to nonstructural purposes, owing to the inferior mechanical and durability properties of said concrete. To improve the properties of geopolymer concrete made with RCA, steel fibers may be added to the mix. This research aims to study the feasibility of reutilizing locally available industrial solid wastes and RCA in geopolymer concrete for …

Development Of Heat Insulation Composite Materials Based On Bio-Polyesters And Natural Filler, Hyder Ali Reyah Al Abdallah

Theses

The increasing waste - bio or synthetic - is a critical issue, and managing this waste is a huge challenge for industry and academia. The use of biodegradable materials is sought as an eventual factor in decreasing the current level of waste generation. Therefore, one of the main research areas nowadays is to develop bio-composite materials over fuel-based materials where the bio-composites or waste-based composites serve several advantages both environmentally and economically, including the biodegradability feature of the bio fillers, and the affordability due to its abundant presence in nature. Bio-waste, specifically from agricultural sources, can be used as fillers …

ضمان مطابقة المبيع للمواصفات في عقد البيع الالكتروني – دراسة مقارنة, عفراء جمعة سالم معلا

Theses

يتناول هذا البحث دراسة موضوع ضمان مطابقة المبيع للمواصفات في عقد البيع الإلكتروني، والذي أفرزته التجارة الإلكترونية والتي هي أحد استخدامات الإنترنت وتعني بالأعمال\ التجارية التي تتم بين المتعاقدين عن طريق التبادل الإلكتروني للبيانات، وقد أتاحت هذه التجارة العديد من المزايا فقد أصبح من الممكن لرجال الأعمال تجنب السفر والإنتقال من بلد إلى آخر للقاء بشركائهم وعملائهم وأصبح بمقدورهم توفير الوقت والمال من أجل الترويج للمنتجات والخدمات.

ولا يخفى على الباحثة أن مجال التجارة الالكترونية هو مرحلة جديدة على رجال القانون، كما أن القوانيين الحالية ليست كافية لمواجهة هذا الوليد الجديد في مجال العلاقات التجارية الدولية، وإزاء هذا الوضع التشريعي …

Investigating The Factors That Cause Cost And Time Overrun In The Residential Construction Projects In The Uae: Project Managers Perspective, Enas Jamal Abu Namous

Theses

The construction industry is considered an essential element to stabilize countries economically. In the UAE, this sector has received a lot of attention and development since the discovery of oil. This has enhanced the continuous expansion in construction activities. Recently, the construction projects in the UAE and KSA together reached 60% of the whole projects in the Middle East region, and the majority of it was in Dubai, which in 2018 enhanced its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to reach 14.5%. Therefore, the decision-makers apply multiple methods at different projects in order to achieve the prime factors for project success which …

Modelling And Control Of A Two-Link Rigid-Flexible Manipulator, Rahma Saeed Rasheed Alnajjar

Theses

The literature lacks data on the reliability of 3D models created by Autodesk Inventor software and imported to MATLAB Simulink software in comparison to mathematically generated models. In this contribution, a two-link rigid-flexible manipulator modelled in two different methods was demonstrated, one of which is using Lagrange equations and Finite Element Method to generate a mathematical model of the manipulator, and the other is creating a 3D model with the aid of Autodesk Inventor then import to MATLAB Simulink, both models were subsequently controlled by three types of controllers, conventional PID controller, LQR controller, and LQG controller. The research demonstrated …

Partial Oxidation Of Methane To Synthesis Gas Over Ni/Γ-Al₂O₃ Catalysts: The Effect Of The Structure And The Pre-Treatment Of The Support On The Catalysts’ Performance, Sheikh Tijan Jobe

Theses

Abundant natural gas is a potential source of more cost-effective energy and its effective utilization can significantly reduce the dependence on petroleum oil. Disadvantages of natural gas as a direct fuel include its low energy density by volume, and high cost of transportation, which resulted in its underutilization as an alternative energy source. Therefore, the conversion of methane to more easily-handled and value-added products is becoming a promising route for natural gas utilization. Compared to steam reforming of methane to syngas, which is the most commercially applied conversion process, partial oxidation is a more cost-effective promising route. While noble metals …