Digital Commons Network^™

The Impact Of Herbivory On Methane Cycling In A Created Wetland, Briana B. Stringer

Theses

Wetlands have been identified as one of the largest sources of atmospheric methane (CH4), an important greenhouse gas with 28 times the global warming potential of CO2. Due to the complexity of wetland ecosystems, they have also been identified as one of the largest sources of uncertainties in the global CH4 budget. Net CH4 emissions are controlled by microbial production, consumption by methanotrophs, and transport to the atmosphere through diffusion, ebullition, and plant-mediated transport. Herbivory has the potential to alter these processes, with recent studies showing both positive and negative effects of herbivory on emissions and uncertainty in which components …

Institutional Anomie Theory: Does Market Mentality Mediate Normative Flexibility?, Christopher David Cassity

Theses

Institutional Anomie Theory argues instrumental crime and violence are a result of weakened social controls that are caused by an imbalance of values favoring the economy. Anomie causes a new moral standard to emerge, one that encourages normative flexibility to achieve goals. The emphasis on the economy permeates into noneconomic institutions that cause them to adopt economic principles and weakens them. The result of this process is that individuals may develop market mentality. Past research has considered normative flexibility to be embedded within market mentality. However, this assumption has not been formally tested. The concepts may be theoretically distinct and …

A Reputation Score Driven E-Mail Mitigation System, Tommy Chin

Theses

E-mail inspection and mitigation systems are necessary in today's world due to frequent bombardment of adversarial attacks leverage phishing techniques. The process and accuracy in identifying a phishing attack present significant challenges due to data encryption hindering the ability to conduct signature matching, context analysis of a message, and synchronization of alerts in distributed detection systems. The author recognizes a grand challenge that the increase in the number of data analysis systems corresponds to an overall increase in the delivery time delay of an e-mail message. This work enhances PhishLimiter as a solution to combat phishing attacks using machine learning …

Smarter Simulation Placement Of Kilonova Light Curve Models For Computationally Inexpensive Surrogate Model Creation, Marko Ristic

Theses

The first detected binary neutron star merger GW170817 allowed for the simultaneous detection of gravitational and electromagnetic waves which started the era of multi-messenger astrophysics. The existence of an electromagnetic counterpart to a compact object merger allowed for a significantly deeper analysis of the merger event and much tighter resultant constraints on existing physical models of neutron stars, nuclear physics, and the Universe itself.

Multi-messenger analysis requires sophisticated source modeling. For the foreseeable future, demanding computational resource costs will result in a sparse availability of state-of-the-art neutron star merger light curve simulations. Astrophysical inference can proceed using an alternate approach …

A Case Study: Can 3d Printers Be Used To Address The Prosthetic Needs Of Amputees In The Dominican Republic?, Adriana Coll De Pena

Theses

With a history of recurring occupations and dictatorships, the development of the Dominican national infrastructure has been heavily interrupted by continuous transfers of power. As a result, the lack of a lean government structure is evident when studying the national healthcare system. Despite numerous organizations and agencies overseeing the needs of amputees across the country, only about 347 of the estimated 5,350 new amputees receive prosthetics per year (ARS Humano Salud, 2020; Asociación Dominicana de Rehabilitación, 2018, 2019). Although the needs of this large underserved population are not being met, the implementation of more cost-effective 3D printing technologies seems difficult …

Cross Cultural Study On Creativity: How Do Croatian Working Professionals And Emirati Working Professionals Conceptualize Creativity?, Alice Almer

Theses

Living in very dynamic and uncertain times, we can witness the power and the necessity of utilizing creativity and innovation as they can provide solutions to complex problems. However, how we see and define creativity is influenced by many factors, and culture is one of them. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of culture on creativity conceptualization. Specifically, the objective was to find out whether the working professionals of Croatia and the working professionals of the United Arab Emirates view creativity differently. In order to investigate this, a cross-sectional study involving 109 participants from Croatia and …

Catalyst-Free Heteroepitaxy Of Iii-V Semiconductor Nanowires On Silicon, Graphene, And Molybdenum Disulfide, Mohadeseh Asadolahi Baboli

Theses

The research presented in this dissertation pioneered three novel nano-material systems, including vertically aligned InAlAs nanowires (NWs) on two-dimensional (2-D) graphene, InAs NWs on 2-D MoS2, and GaAsP NWs on Si using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Bottom up integratiton of NW structures enable heteroepitaxy of largely dissimilar III-V compounds on foreign substrates and provide a basis for design of high-performance devices that are otherwise inaccessible using thin- films or planar geometries. During conventional heteroepitaxy of planar geometries, strict constraints are imposed by the need to match lattice parameters, thermal expansion coefficients, and polar coherence between adjacent dissimilar materials. Semiconductor …

On The Use Of Rapid-Scan, Low Point Density Terrestrial Laser Scanning (Tls) For Structural Assessment Of Complex Forest Environments, Ali Rouzbeh Kargar

Theses

Forests fulfill an important role in natural ecosystems, e.g., they provide food, fiber, habitat, and biodiversity, all of which contribute to stable ecosystems. Assessing and modeling the structure and characteristics in forests can lead to a better understanding and management of these resources. Traditional methods for collecting forest traits, known as “forest inventory”, is achieved using rough proxies, such as stem diameter, tree height, and foliar coverage; such parameters are limited in their ability to capture fine-scale structural variation in forest environments. It is in this context that terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has come to the fore as a tool …

Interactions Of Photosensitizers With Model Membranes And Their Applications In Photodynamic Therapy, Poornima Kalyanram

Theses

Cancer is caused by the uncontrolled growth and spread of abnormal cells resulting in 1 in 6 deaths every day. The most common treatment methods include surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. These techniques are invasive, aggressive, and non-specific to cancer cells. Therefore, alternative therapies which are both potent and does not interfere with the quality of living are on a rise. Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) is an approved alternative remedy in the treatment of cancer. The efficacy of PDT depends on the penetration power of the photosensitizer (PS) when injected into to the site of tumor. However, due to complexity involved in …

An Ar Safety Instruction App Designed For Kids, Shaowei Leng

Theses

Safety is very important for little kids. Our children could be harmed by various kinds of danger. According to the statistics, among those 0 to 19 years of age, more than 12,000 people die from unintentional injuries . Meanwhile, more than 9.2 million of them are treated in emergency departments for nonfatal injuries .

There are few lessons which could teach kids about what can do with the surroundings and what they could not do. Few kids know when facing threats, how to fix it.

In this paper, a safety instruction app is designed for kids. The app could help …

Flash Lamp Annealed Ltps Tfts With Ito Bottom-Gate Structures, Adam Rosenfeld

Theses

As displays continue to increase in resolution and refresh rate, new materials for thin film transistors (TFTs) are required. Low temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) formed by excimer laser annealing (ELA) has been very successful and has been implemented in small displays, but cost and scalability issues prevent it from entering larger display products. Currently LPTS TFTs are top-gate structures due to manufacturing challenges associated with crystallizing thin film silicon when a thermally conductive gate is under portions and insulating glass under others. Bottom-gate devices offer the benefit of higher breakdown voltage, better dielectric-semiconductor interface quality, and direct access to the …

Anomaly Detection In Videos Through Deep Unsupervised Techniques, Parikshit Prashant Shembekar

Theses

Identifying abnormality in videos is an area of active research. Most of the work makes extensive use of supervised approaches, even though these methods often give superior performances the major drawback being abnormalities cannot be conformed to select classes, thus the need for unsupervised models to approach this task. We introduce Dirichlet Process Mixture Models (DPMM) along with Autoencoders to learn the normality in the data. Autoencoders have been extensively used in the literature for feature extraction and enable us to capture rich features into a small dimensional space. We use the Stick Breaking formulation of the DPMM which is …

The Fate Of Stellar Material: Radio Molecular Line Studies Of Nearby Planetary Nebulae, Jesse Bublitz

Theses

Planetary nebulae constitute the near-end stages of low-to-intermediate-mass stars, when their ejected envelopes of gas and dust become ionized by their unveiled stellar cores. As essential components of our understanding of late-stage stellar evolution and the enrichment of the interstellar medium in the products of stellar nucleosynthesis, planetary nebulae serve as laboratories for the study of plasma physics and shock processes in astrophysical environments. While known mainly for their optical emission lines and high ionization states due to high-energy radiation from their hot central stars, certain planetary nebulae also contain large masses of molecular gas and dust that surround or …

Art As Alchemy: The Meaning Of Bartholomeus Spranger's Hermaphroditus And The Nymph Salmacis And Scylla And Glaucus, Peter Kos

Theses

The subject of this study is two paintings by Bartholomeus Spranger titled Glaucus and Scylla (Fig. 1) and Hermaphroditus and the Nymph Salmacis (Fig. 2). Building upon the work of scholars who have argued for a possible alchemical interpretation of at least one of the paintings in the context of its execution for Emperor Rudolf II, this study goes beyond merely suggesting an alchemical connection, and argues that the two paintings, forming a pendant pair, depict two attempts at the alchemist’s magnum opus—one a failure, the other a success. This study further argues that the paintings are not merely inert …

Scenes Of Secession: National Identity In The Art And Architecture Of Southern Slavic Crownlands Of The Late Austro-Hungarian Empire, Preston Alport Hereford

Theses

Set against the backdrop of the segmented power of the Double Monarchy of the Austro- Hungarian Empire, artistic Secession movements reminiscent of the influential movement in Vienna took shape in the smaller cities of the Southern Slavic crownland territories of the Empire. However, despite strong cultural ties to Vienna and other large artistic centers like Munich, Secession took on different ideological and artistic forms in Zagreb and Ljubljana than in the imperial capital. As the Hungarian-administered capital of Croatia-Slavonia, Zagreb was an early adopter of educational and cultural infrastructure, like schools of applied arts and new theaters, that doubly demonstrated …

An Analysis Of The Scintillation Properties Of Several Materials For Radiation Detection, Luke John Laffey

Theses

The accurate detection and identification of ionizing radiation and radioisotopes is of significant interest to governments, industry and the scientific community, particularly for use in detecting illicit radioactive weapons, among other uses. Of all the methods to detect radiation, scintillation has been a mainstay among handheld or portable detectors owing primarily to its simple equipment requirements. In particular, inorganic crystals and plastic scintillators are two scintillating materials with promising characteristics for use in particle identification. In this work, two promising materials are compared to more common detectors of the same type. The inorganic scintillator SrI2:Eu3% is compared to 2 other …

Using Classification For Analysis Of Multi-Modal Video Summarization, Brendan Wells

Theses

Video Summarization refers to taking the important contents of a video and condensing it down to an easily consumable piece of data without having to watch the entire video. Currently, Millions of Videos are being recorded and shared every day. These videos range from the consumer level, such as a birthday party or wedding video, all the way up to industry such as film and television. We have constructed a model that seeks to address the problem of not being able to consume all the media that is being presented to you because of time constraints. To do this, we …

Accessibility In User Reviews For Mobile Apps: An Automated Detection Approach, Murtaza Tamjeed

Theses

In recent years, mobile accessibility has become an important trend with the goal of allowing all users the possibility of using any app without many restrictions. Recent work demonstrated that user reviews include insights that are useful for app evolution. However, with the increase in the amount of received reviews, manually analyzing them is tedious and time-consuming, especially when searching for accessibility reviews. The goal of this thesis is to support the automated identification of accessibility in user reviews, to help practitioners in prioritizing their handling, and thus, creating more inclusive apps. Particularly, we design a model that takes as …

Antipodal Robotic Grasping Using Deep Learning, Shirin Joshi

Theses

In this work, we discuss two implementations that predict antipodal grasps for novel objects: A deep Q-learning approach and a Generative Residual Convolutional Neural Network approach. We present a deep reinforcement learning based method to solve the problem of robotic grasping using visio-motor feedback. The use of a deep learning based approach reduces the complexity caused by the use of hand-designed features. Our method uses an off-policy reinforcement learning framework to learn the grasping policy. We use the double deep Q-learning framework along with a novel Grasp-Q-Network to output grasp probabilities used to learn grasps that maximize the pick success. …

Exploring The Influence Of Energy Constraints On Liquid State Machines, Andrew Fountain

Theses

Biological organisms operate under severe energy constraints but are still the most powerful computational systems that we know of. In contrast, modern AI algorithms are generally implemented on power-hungry hardware resources such as GPUs, limiting their use at the edge. This work explores the application of biologically-inspired energy constraints to spiking neural networks to better understand their effects on network dynamics and learning and to gain insight into the creation of more energy-efficient AI. Energy constraints are modeled by abstracting the role of astrocytes in metabolizing glucose and regulating the activity-driven distribution of ATP molecules to “pools” of neurons and …

Astralis: Discover 1000 Years Of You, Emma Canfield

Theses

Problem

We are defined by our memories and experiences. Despite the proliferation of family photos and video media, we lack an engaging way to connect our memories and experiences to those images. Online genealogical programs (such as Ancestry, MyHeritage, or FamilySearch) remain two-dimensional and inherently confusing to navigate. As soon as the user chooses to dive more deeply into one relative’s additional family, they leave the view they were in and cannot easily navigate back, or even see themselves in context any longer. Similarly, image archiving programs (such as Apple Photos, Shutterfly) or AmazonPhotos) are simplistic and rely on a …

Leveraging Programmable Data Plane For Compressing Forwarding Tables, Garegin Grigoryan

Theses

The Forwarding Information Base (FIB) resides in the data plane of a routing device and is used to forward packets to a next-hop, based on packets' destination IP addresses. The constant growth of a FIB forces network operators to spend more resources on maintaining memory with line-rate Longest Prefix Match (LPM) lookup in a FIB, namely, expensive and energy-hungry Ternary Content-Addressable Memory (TCAM) chips. In this work, we review two different approaches used to mitigate the FIB overflow problem. First, we investigate FIB aggregation, i.e., merging adjacent or overlapping routes with the same next-hop while preserving the forwarding behavior of …

A Semi-Empirical Compact Model For Igzo Tft To Assess The Impact Of Parasitic Elements In Active Matrix Pixel Designs, Hector Alejandro Rubio Rivera

Theses

In this work, an empirical off-state model was developed for amorphous IGZO TFTs with the purpose of creating a compact model in conjunction with an existing on-state model. The implementation of the compact model was done in Verilog-A to assess the impact of parasitc elements such as source/drain series resistance, and source/drain-to-gate overlap capacitances in a 2T1C pixel circuit. A novel region of operation was presented defined as a bridge between the subthreshold and the on-state regions. Two approaches were followed to solve for the fitting parameters inside this bridge region; an analytical and an empirical approach.

The analytical solution …

Clam: Compiler Lease Of Cache Memory, Ian Prechtl

Theses

Caching is a common solution to the data movement performance bottleneck of today’s computational systems and networks. Traditional caching examines program behavior and cache optimization separately, limiting performance. Recently, a new cache policy called Compiler Lease of cAche Memory (CLAM), has been suggested for program-based cache management. CLAM manages cache memory by allowing the compiler to assign leases, or lifespans, to cached items over a hardware-software interface, known as lease cache. Lease cache affords new performance potential, by way of program-driven cache optimization. It is applicable to existing cache architecture optimizations, and can be used to emulate other cache policies. …

Visual Structure Editing Of Math Formulas, Gavin Nishizawa

Theses

Math formulas can be large and complex resulting in correspondingly large and complex LaTeX math strings for expressing them. We design operations to visually edit the typeset LaTeX formulas. The operations are invoked via the formula's control points, which are created as a way to specify an operation associated with the point's location relative to a symbol in the formula. At the control points, formulas can be extended in multiple ways, LaTeX can be inserted locally by typing, an existing formula can be inserted, or part of the formula itself can be moved to that point. Parts of formulas can …

Inclusive Public Terminal Device Design: A Self-Service Ticket Vending System, Zhuoyi Zhou

Theses

As information and communication technologies continue to be integrated into every aspect of people's daily lives, a wide variety of public terminal devices that provide self-service have begun to emerge in a variety of public spaces. Its rapid development covers a wide range of industries, including banking and finance, medical services, transportation, and tourism. Self-service terminals have gradually replaced manual services with their high efficiency, speed, and low cost. At first, the self-service is designed to reduce the burden on manual service and, it is efficient and can bring more benefits to the business. Under such conditions how to solve …

Evaluation Of The Premarket Tobacco Product Application For Electronic Cigarettes, Maya Lara

Theses

Use of tobacco has remained one of the most lethal pastimes within the United States. With the creation of new products, like electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), more and more individuals have begun to engage in this activity. In 2019, an epidemic surrounding the use of e-cigarettes emerged causing a multitude of users to suffer harmful respiratory illnesses. These events triggered the need for further investigation not only into the research used to analyze e-cigarettes, but also the regulation process used to validate them. E-cigarettes, like their predecessor traditional cigarettes, are regulated by the Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) within the United …

Characterization Of A Single Photon Sensing And Photon Number Resolving Cmos Detector For Astrophysics, Justin P. Gallagher

Theses

Next-generation NASA missions, such as the LUVIOR and HabEx concepts, require single photon counting large-format detectors. Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) have typically been used for optical applications in similar flagship missions of the past. CCDs have excellent properties in most metrics but have their own challenges for single photon counting applications. First, typical CCDs have a read noise of a few electrons, although recent modifications (EMCCDs) use an on-chip gain to amplify the signal above the read noise. Secondly, the signal is carried by charge that is transferred across the detector array. While CCDs for NASA missions are carefully fabricated …

A Data-Parallel Approach For Efficient Resource Utilization In Distributed Serverless Deep Learning, Kevin Tunder Elom Assogba

Theses

Serverless computing is an integral part of the recent success of cloud computing, offering cost and performance efficiency for small and large scale distributed systems. Owing to the increasing interest of developers in integrating distributed computing techniques into deep learning frameworks for better performance, serverless infrastructures have been the choice of many to host their applications. However, this computing architecture bears resource limitations which challenge the successful completion of many deep learning jobs.

In our research, an approach is presented to address timeout and memory resource limitations which are two key issues to deep learning on serverless infrastructures. Focusing on …

Machine-Assisted Translation By Human-In-The-Loop Crowdsourcing For Bambara, Allahsera Auguste Tapo

Theses

Language is more than a tool of conveying information; it is utilized in all aspects of our lives. Yet only a small number of languages in the 7,000 languages worldwide are highly resourced by human language technologies (HLT). Despite African languages representing over 2,000 languages, only a few African languages are highly resourced, for which there exists a considerable amount of parallel digital data.

We present a novel approach to machine translation (MT) for under-resourced languages by improving the quality of the model using a paradigm called ``humans in the Loop.''

This thesis describes the work carried out to create …