Digital Commons Network^™

For The Sensing Of Viral Dna: An Integrated Polydimethylsiloxane Accurate Crispr Detection (Impact) System, Kenneth N. Hass

Theses

Infectious disease outbreaks have become more frequent and extreme in recent years, and as populations continue to grow and the world becomes more interconnected, they show no signs of stopping. The current COVID-19 pandemic affecting the world and grinding economies to a halt was known about months ago but could not be contained. One of the largest issues facing the containment of infectious disease is a lack of real-time, point-of-care detection devices which can accurately and effectively identify those who are infected so they can be treated and quarantined. Here, an Integrated Micropillar Polydimethylsiloxane Accurate CRISPR Detection (IMPACT) system is …

Design And Simulation Analysis Of Deep Learning Based Approaches And Multi-Attribute Algorithms For Warehouse Task Selection, Prashant Sankaran

Theses

With the growth and adoption of global supply chains and internet technologies, warehouse operations have become more demanding. Particularly, the number of orders being processed over a given time frame is drastically increasing, leading to more work content. This makes operational tasks, such as material retrieval and storage, done manually more inefficient. To improve system-level warehouse efficiency, collaborating Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are needed. Several design challenges encompass an AV, some critical aspects are navigation, path planning, obstacle avoidance, task selection decisions, communication, and control systems. The current study addresses the warehouse task selection problem given a dynamic pending task list …

Empowering Young Adults: The Adolescent Insight Development Model, Joshua M. Hamilton

Theses

Quality of life and ease of reintegration into the family and the community are particularly important for the adolescent or young adult with mental illness. Such rehabilitation has long been focused on empowerment, partly by developing insight into one's illness. Current applications of insight assessment appear to be limited to inpatient assessment rather than fostering its development. Further, no single assessment protocol adequately addresses all accepted dimensions of insight. These tools are written for use by a trained observer rather than as a self-reflection tool. The clinical language of the existing tools precludes their usefulness for self-assessment by adolescent patients …

Effects Of Heterogeneity, Technological Progress And Interaction On Carbon Mitigation Costs, Saptarshi Das

Theses

As many societal needs compete with sustainability for a finite pool of public resources, understanding the cost of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions has become a critical sustainability question. The Marginal Abatement Cost Curve (MACC) is a widely used approach to characterize mitigation costs. It is constructed by ordering technological and other interventions to mitigating an emission from lowest to highest cost, indicating the cumulative mitigation possible for each intervention. It is clearly a simplification of a complex techno-economic system and has been criticized for neglecting factors such as dynamics, consumer behavior, non-cost barriers to adoption, and interactions between technologies. However, …

Nearshore Vertical Distribution Of Barnacle Cyprids: Temporal Patterns And Hydrographic Variability, Gabriela Yamhure

Theses

Most benthic organisms living in the intertidal zone have planktonic larvae that reside temporarily in the water column before settling in their adult habitats. Larvae aggregate in offshore larval pools, and transport horizontally and vertically in the water to remain in the nearshore and during their pelagic life. While some horizontal transport of larvae can be attributed to advection, behavioral responses, like vertical swimming and buoyancy control, allow larvae to position themselves at depths where flow direction can be exploited. Thus, knowledge on how vertical larval distribution relates to physical processes can be fundamental to better understand larval transport. These …

Applying Systems Pharmacology To The Treatment Of Chronic Illness Using Novel Scoring And Translational Methods, Spencer Richman

Theses

Chronic illnesses are poorly understood diseases that are often highly resistant to treatment. The prevalence and severity of these illnesses necessitates new methods for treatment development that diverge from the paradigm of one drug, one illness. Instead, multidrug interventions that utilize repurposable, previously approved drugs could be far more advantageous. In order to support this, a novel scoring framework and accompanying set of tools, collectively termed DrugAble, have been developed. DrugAble scores proposed, model-based treatment target solutions by analyzing drug-target interaction data and addressing the network complexity of these solutions. Actionability scores that summarize the likelihood of a proposed target …

Visualization & Automation Of Shams Dubai Report, Noora Ibrahim Alblooshi

Theses

Dubai’s Smart Grid strategy includes the implementation of Distributed Energy Resources and Distribution Automation (DA) facilities to continuous monitoring and remote control from DEWA’s Distribution Control Center (DCC) , and, in some cases, automatic control of electric distribution assets operated at 33kV or lower. The increase level of telemetry and automation in the field imposes a greater challenge in monitoring and live data visualization for establishing a decision support system that empowers distribution system operators and enables optimal control of existing and planned assets. This challenge can be overcome through introducing data science tools in the sector of energy. Through …

High – Rise Housing And Social Interaction Study Under Current Chinese High-Rise Residential Situation, Yao Yao

Theses

High-rise residential buildings, accommodating the significant amount of Chinese population in urban areas, has been the most primary housing style in great cities of China today, due to the conflict between severe Chinese land use and huge population. However, after moving to high-rise housing, Chinese residents in high-rise buildings barely have social interaction with each other compared with the past decades. Additionally, less social interaction in residential housing could lead to a series of problems which have a negative influence on people’s daily lives.

Through a summary of previous research and a questionnaire, to investigate the current situation of social …

A Study On Dna Memory Encoding Architecture, Robert W. Mason

Theses

The amount of raw generated data is growing at an exponential rate due to the greatly increasing number of sensors in electronic systems. While the majority of this data is never used, it is often kept for cases such as failure analysis. As such, archival memory storage, where data can be stored at an extremely high density at the cost of read latency, is becoming more popular than ever for long term storage. In biological organisms, Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is used as a method of storing information in terms of simple building blocks, as to allow for larger and more …

Forecasting Energy Demand & Peak Load Days With The Inclusion Of Solar Energy Production, Connor Rollins

Theses

The addition of solar panels to forecasting energy demand and peak energy demand presents an entirely new challenge to a facility. By having to account for the varying energy generation from the solar panels on any given day based on the weather it becomes increasingly difficult to accurately predict energy demand. With renewable energy sources becoming more prevalent, new methods to track peak energy demand are needed to account for the energy provided by renewable sources. We know from previous research that Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models are both capable of accurately forecasting …

New Technology For Old Models: Can Dioramas Resonate With A Modern Audience?, Carmen Ibis Lopez

Theses

This thesis uses visitor studies from the Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC) to investigate whether dioramas are still a useful, resonant tool for visitor engagement and if they do fulfill this purpose, how do they do so. The case study is the newly revamped diorama Rochester in 1838: Young Lion of the West at the RMSC. This diorama, a 70-year-old model, has been mixed with modern Virtual Reality (VR) technology to create an experience that will provide the visitor with a new perspective on an old model. As context, this thesis uses the history of the diorama to show …

Decolonization Of Zimbabwean Museums: The Movement Toward Practices Informed By Indigineous Cultures, Rebecca Jarrett

Theses

Since Zimbabwe won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1980, the country has sought to embrace and reinterpret its own cultural history. Influences of the colonial era linger in museums, especially in the areas of architecture, interpretation, administration, and community relations. How can Zimbabwean museums systematically identify the colonial influences affecting them, deconstruct those influences, and form new models that reaffirm indigenous cultures and stimulate growth for cultural institutions? The sources cited within this document discuss Zimbabwean history, colonial history, and cultural heritage. The BaTonga Community Museum, the first museum to serve a minority ethnic group, is an important …

Randomizable Phenology-Dependent Corn Canopy For Simulated Remote Sensing Of Agricultural Scenes, M Grady Saunders

Theses

Crop health assessment and yield prediction from multi-spectral remote sensing imagery are ongoing areas of interest in precision agriculture. It is in these contexts that simulation-based techniques are useful to investigate system parameters, perform preliminary experiments, etc., because remote sensing systems can be prohibitively expensive to design, deploy, and operate. However, such techniques require realistic and reliable models of the real world. We thus present a randomizable time-dependent model of corn (Zea mays L.) canopy, which is suitable for procedural generation of high-fidelity virtual corn fields at any time in the vegetative growth phase, with application to simulated remote sensing …

Let's Go Camping: A Physical Experience On A Virtual Platform, Monica Conary

Theses

Camp Kawanhee is celebrating its 100th Anniversary in 2020. How can creating an Esri Story Map using archival materials from the camp at its 100th Anniversary help individuals connect to their own time at camp, engage with the camp’s history, and offer present experiences? By utilizing the software Story Maps, I have created a platform that shares special moments in Camp Kawanhee’s history. Digitized items from my summer at Camp Kawanhee (brochures, pamphlets, letters, and photographs) are utilized in my story map to create a narrative of the past and present. By drawing upon literature on digital tourism and history, …

Toward Data-Driven Discovery Of Software Vulnerabilities, Nuthan Munaiah

Theses

Over the years, Software Engineering, as a discipline, has recognized the potential for engineers to make mistakes and has incorporated processes to prevent such mistakes from becoming exploitable vulnerabilities. These processes span the spectrum from using unit/integration/fuzz testing, static/dynamic/hybrid analysis, and (automatic) patching to discover instances of vulnerabilities to leveraging data mining and machine learning to collect metrics that characterize attributes indicative of vulnerabilities. Among these processes, metrics have the potential to uncover systemic problems in the product, process, or people that could lead to vulnerabilities being introduced, rather than identifying specific instances of vulnerabilities. The insights from metrics can …

Exploring Students Mental Behaviors Using Unsupervised Learning Algorithms And Graph Theory, Abdullah Hussein Mohsen

Theses

With the high amount of mentally seeking behaviors among students nationwide according to Healthy minds network survey (2019) and lack of related studies to students mental health in the Gulf region, a gap is created Fatima Al-Darmaki et al. (2015) this project is executed to fill the gap by utilizing data analytics techniques to generate insights that can be used to support future decisions. Students who suffer from mental disorders are most likely to disengage from university which can be translated into a dropout. Many organizations are conducting periodically to capture as many insights to tackle those behaviors. This project …

Animal Testing Sentimental Analysis Using Twitter, Afra Naji Saeed Almansoori

Theses

This research explores attitudes towards the testing of cosmetics on animals, as pressure is increasing all over the world to stop animal testing and different countries have introduced policies to ban it. It is estimated that more than 115 million animals worldwide are used in laboratory experiments every year. But because only a small proportion of countries collect and publish data concerning use of animals for testing and research, the precise numbers are unknown. This research was designed to investigate whether awareness of the issue impacts whether or not people support animal testing. The research hypothesis is that the reason …

Investigating Emotion-Label And Emotion-Laden Words In A Semantic Satiation Paradigm, Ryan Hildebrandt

Theses

Current literature suggests emotion-label words (e.g., sad) and emotion-laden words (e.g., funeral) are processed differently.  The central focus of the present study was to investigate how valence and emotion word type influence how words are processed. A satiation paradigm was used to characterize the relationship between the processing of emotion-label and emotion-laden words of positive and negative valence. It was hypothesized that, in addition to the standard slowed response times to satiated words, emotion-label words would exhibit greater satiation and priming effects than emotion-laden words.  Analyses indicated expected priming and satiation effects across a range of other stimulus characteristics. Neutral …

Nonlinear Optics In Photonic Ultrawide-Bandgap Circuits, Michael Larry Fanto

Theses

Ultrawide-bandgap semiconductors have an important role for many applications ranging from power electronics to photonics. The semiconductor material with the largest bandgap is aluminum nitride with a maximum bandgap of 6.28 eV, corresponding to a wavelength transparency extending to 197 nm. The large transparency window makes aluminum nitride a promising optical material for applications that span from the infrared to ultraviolet. Along with these properties, aluminum nitride is a non-centrosymmetric crystal allowing exploitation of the second order nonlinearity and the electro-optic effect. This thesis will cover the synthesis of the material, a number of characterization techniques that verify the quality …

Data Representation For Motor Imagery Classification, Andrew Festa

Theses

While much progress has been made towards the advancement of brain-controlled interfaces (BCI), there remains an information gap between the various domains involved in progressing this area of research. Thus, this research seeks to address this gap through creation of a method of representing brainwave signals in a manner that is intuitive and easy to interpret for both neuroscientists and computer scientists. This method of data representation was evaluated on the ability of the model to accurately classify motor imagery events in a timely manner.

The proposed data representation of electroencephalographic signals in the form of signal images was found …

Designing A Mental Health Institute For Adolescents In Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia (Healing Architecture), Heba Bin Seddeq

Theses

The society in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia obstructs people who want to see a psychiatrist, especially adolescents. Based on the lack of mental health support in Saudi Arabia, this thesis will introduce a mental health institute project for adolescents that puts more attention on specific design factors, such as daylighting, color, and green roofs. These aspects provide help for the recovery process by supporting healing according to many psychological studies. This psychiatric institute will be specialized for teenagers 10-19 because the early intervention at this critical period has the possibility for the potential for making a lifelong difference. by …

Efficient Algorithms For Unrelated Parallel Machine Scheduling Considering Time Of Use Pricing And Demand Charges, Brady Collea

Theses

There is an ever-increasing focus on sustainability and energy consumption worldwide. Manufacturing is one of the major areas where energy reduction is not only environmentally beneficial, but also incredibly financially beneficial. These industrial consumers pay for their electricity according to prices that fluctuate throughout the day. These price fluctuations are in place to shift consumption away from “peak” times, when electricity is in the highest demand. In addition to this consumption cost, industrial consumers are charged according to their highest level of demand in a given window of time in the form of demand charges. This paper presents multiple solution …

The Impact Of Pocket Parks To Enhance Public Space And Realm In Ajman, Uae, Manal Abdalla Al Shamsi

Theses

Green spaces in urban life play an important role in maintaining healthy lifestyle and providing a calm and peaceful place for roaming around. Large new urban park projects are gradually decreasing in dense cities, and small green spaces like pocket parks are likely to become more important. However previous studies showed that multiple research studies on small urban green spaces have been conducted. On infill sites and other overlooked city corners, pocket parks are created. Apart from the obvious benefits of the ecosystem and the environment, they can be a small but important step towards a fair architecture. The project …

Exhibition Labels: Language, Accessibility And Inclusion, Brienna Johnson-Morris

Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between language and visitor experience as key facets of accessibility and inclusion by asking how museums use language to address visitor experience and facilitate engagement. When museums are sources of exclusion, a barrier exists between potential visitors and the collections on view, effectively gatekeeping cultural heritage, arts, and humanities. To examine the extent to which language contributes to this, I discuss power dynamics and language, specifically how language contributes to and supports social hierarchy. Then I relate this research to museum education and evaluate how discursive power dynamics operate within these institutions. Combining museum education …

“Natural State”: Navigating The Experiences Of Black Women’S Natural Hair Identities, Leah Green

Theses

In 2009, The “Natural hair movement” developed and was widely discussed in online discourse. The goal of this contemporary movement was to encourage Black women to wear their natural hair to work in an effort to combat internalized negative images Black women might have surrounding natural hair. This transformative movement resulted in many books and articles being written on the shared experiences and adversities many Black women face about choosing to wear their natural hair today in the workplace. These inspiring books and articles prompted this project which will track my journey and the results of conducting a Black hair …

Walk A Mile In Their Shoes: Empathy And Rehumanization In Community-Based Programming, Rachel Baldwin

Theses

In the past decade, museums have been changing their missions, definitions, and exhibitions to focus on activism and the interpretation of the controversial and polarizing. Through exhibiting controversy and engaging visitors with it, museums have attempted to foster feelings of empathy. This paper summarizes the results of the research done on community-based projects from the 2020 exhibition Hostile Terrain 94 and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Hostile Terrain 94 is an international pop-up exhibit concerning the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. RIT will be exhibiting a piece of this map which will come together at the National …

Impact Analysis Of Electric Vehicle Demand On Demand Profile, Electricity Charges And System Emissions Of Rochester Institute Of Technology, Akshata Shanbhag

Theses

In view of growing concerns of greenhouse gas emissions, electrification in the transportation fleet is expected to increase globally. To accommodate the incoming increase in energy demand from vehicle charging, the existing electrical network should be managed in a way that the load is operated with no electrical instability. Peak demand occurrences which could be measured daily, annually, weekly, monthly or annually should be avoided in order to maintain the health of the electrical network and reduce demand charges billed to the end energy user. Moreover, depending on the emissions factor of the fuel mix used in a region for …

Machine Learning-Enabled Resource Allocation For Underlay Cognitive Radio Networks, Fatemeh Shah Mohammadi

Theses

Due to the rapid growth of new wireless communication services and applications, much attention has been directed to frequency spectrum resources and the way they are regulated. Considering that the radio spectrum is a natural limited resource, supporting the ever increasing demands for higher capacity and higher data rates for diverse sets of users, services and applications is a challenging task which requires innovative technologies capable of providing new ways of efficiently exploiting the available radio spectrum. Consequently, dynamic spectrum access (DSA) has been proposed as a replacement for static spectrum allocation policies. The DSA is implemented in three modes …

Representations And Representation Learning For Image Aesthetics Prediction And Image Enhancement, Michal Kucer

Theses

With the continual improvement in cell phone cameras and improvements in the connectivity of mobile devices, we have seen an exponential increase in the images that are captured, stored and shared on social media. For example, as of July 1st 2017 Instagram had over 715 million registered users which had posted just shy of 35 billion images. This represented approximately seven and nine-fold increase in the number of users and photos present on Instagram since 2012. Whether the images are stored on personal computers or reside on social networks (e.g. Instagram, Flickr), the sheer number of images calls for methods …

نطاق الرقابة القضائية على مشروعية القرارات التأديبية في دولة الإمارات العربية المتحدة, نوره حمد راشد رحمه الدرمكي

Theses

يهدف هذا البحث إلى دراسة نطاق الرقابة القضائية التي يمارسها القاضي الإداري على القرارات التأديبية، وهي الرقابة التي تقوم على عدد من المبادئ الأساسية التي تتفق مع مفهوم الدولة القائم على سيادة القانون، والتي يهدف بها المشرع إلى حماية الموظف العام من تعسف الإدارة. وقد مرت الرقابة القضائية على مشروعية القرارات التأديبية بتطورات ومراحل، حيث أدرك القضاء الإداري وهو يباشر وظيفته الرقابية اتساع السلطات التقديرية للإدارة على حساب حقوق الأفراد وحرياتهم، ومن هنا سعى لتوسيع عملية الرقابة على أعمال الإدارة لتشمل نواحي أكثر مما كانت عليه في السابق، فقد تحولت هذه الرقابة من رقابة ضيقة ومحدودة إلى رقابة أكثر توسعا،ً …