Digital Commons Network^™

Lambdanet: A Novel Architecture For Unstructured Change Detection, Bryan Matthew Blakeslee

Theses

The goal of this thesis is the development of LambdaNet, a new type of network architecture for the performance of unstructured change detection. LambdaNet combines concepts from Siamese and semantic segmentation architectures, and is capable of identifying and localizing the significant differences between image pairs while simultaneously disregarding background noise. Changes are marked at the pixel level, by interpreting change detection as a binary (change/no change) classification problem.

Development of this architecture began with an evaluation of several candidate models, inspired by other successful network architectures and layers, including VGG, ResNet, and the Res2Net layer. Once the best performing LambdaNet …

The Dishwasher, Kaiyuan Deng

Theses

The Dishwasher is a 2D animated thesis film that lasts 5 minutes and 27 seconds. This animated short film shows a story of a young man, Kai, who dreams of becoming an artist in the US; however, he has to wash dishes for his living. One day, the dish machine is out of control because of Kai’s careless mistake. The manager sees the situation and begins to blame Kai. While the manager yells at him, Kai notices a funny animation loop appearing on the spinning dishes, which makes him laugh. After the manager leaves, Kai looks at his face reflected …

An Analysis Of The Radiometric Quality Of Small Unmanned Aircraft System Imagery, Baabak G. Mamaghani

Theses

In recent years, significant advancements have been made in both sensor technology and small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS). Improved sensor technology has provided users with cheaper, lighter, and higher resolution imaging tools, while new sUAS platforms have become cheaper, more stable and easier to navigate both manually and programmatically. These enhancements have provided remote sensing solutions for both commercial and research applications that were previously unachievable. However, this has provided non-scientific practitioners with access to technology and techniques previously only available to remote sensing professionals, sometimes leading to improper diagnoses and results. The work accomplished in this dissertation demonstrates the …

The Innocent Game, Kibaek Sung

Theses

Everyone has an innocent childhood. People often reminisce about the old days, pursuing happiness today rather than tomorrow's worries and anxieties. Innocence is an expression of the good value inherent in man, which breaks down the walls and loosens tensions between people. However, childhood innocence is weakened and fainted after continual exposure to the world. The world we live in is not simple or tolerant enough to let people live as an innocent child. Just like games, the situations of today and tomorrow can be completely different depending on how we play on the gameboard of life. The current society …

Design Of An Efficient Design For Test (Dft) Architecture And It's Verification Using Universal Verification Methodology, Sushmitha Mavuram

Theses

The complexity of the circuit design has been significantly increased from 1980’s till date, and until 80’s, due to less complexity and technology node being down to 180nm, the need for Design for Test (DFT) equipment was not as important. The few System on Chips (SoC) were tested using test patterns sent from the external test equipment. As the technology node shrunk further, the devices became faster and the complexity of S0C’s increased as the chip could accommodate more transistors. The SoC’s have become more vulnerable to physical defects. Quality factor became a major issue, which pushed the industry standard …

Understanding Judith In A Misogynistic World: Female Representations In 16th Century Florence, Annissa Conditt

Theses

Judith is a brave female biblical heroine that performs the courageous act of decapitating Holofernes to save the town of Bethulia. Many artworks of Judith provide a different perception of her, as artists portray Judith as weak, feeble, and indifferent; thus, stripping her of the courageous and heroic portrayal that she deserves. The action of a female dominating and overpowering a man is unusual for the time; however, Judith was considered a very significant symbol for Florence and the Medici family, as she represented liberty, virtue, and victory over the strong. Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes was commissioned and created for …

Developing Musicians Out Of Instrumentalists: A Comprehensive Guide To Improve Intonation Skills In Intermediate Band, Andrew Bryant Smith

Theses

This project will focus on the fundamental skills taught in an intermediate band program and assess skills needed to enhance their musicianship. One of the primary musical components studied is the development of individual and group intonation by utilizing a more concrete focus on the development of fundamental skills associated. The final deliverable focused on the fundamental skills needed to improve intonation. The guide will also include a compilation of instrument-specific strategies and tendencies having to do with the development of the skills outlined.

Artemisia: A Reflection Of Women’S Rights, Julie Mcgrath

Theses

This thesis will analyze and document the historiographic perspective of Artemisia Gentileschi and the changing perspective of the artist and her artwork since the 1960s. The research will explore the changing of perception of Artemisia through various methodologies to understand the evolution of her story. By looking at the change from modernism to postmodernism, I will explain how the latter opened up the feminist movement and methodology, and how the four waves of feminism have directly impacted the perception of her life and her body of work. Without these changes, scholarship would not have developed a greater understanding of Artemisia …

Leveraging Technology And Culturally Relevant Content To Enhance Student Engagement And Classroom Management, Andrea Wojciehowski

Theses

The project focuses upon the application of culturally relevant content, and implementing technology as a means to enhance student engagement, and classroom management. The purpose of the project was to research current classroom management strategies, and implement these strategies, using technology to enhance student engagement, and in turn, enhance student learning, while decreasing disruptive behaviors.

Introducing Digital Content To Kclc, Chad Briesacher

Theses

No abstract provided.

User Preference In Detail-Enhancement Adjustments For Images Captured By Camera Phones, Pawan Khake

Theses

Most smartphones now come with an integrated camera. Such a smartphone is called a camera phone. Popularity of camera phones is rising and it is expected that 87.8% of United States population will possess camera phones by year 2020 (Euromonitor International, 2017). A camera phone’s workflow for capturing, editing, and sharing images on social media has become very efficient. Its ease of use, accessibility, and automatic exposure settings to capture an image has contributed to its popularity. Camera phones are more compact and convenient than professional DSLR cameras. The popularity of this technology has created a need to study and …

Oblivion, Deema Ali

Theses

Oblivion tells a story of a plain-looking individual named Miech at a gritty, damp subway station en route to catch a movie. As he waits for a train, he faces a troubling memory of a past relationship and is confronted by a projection of his inner emotions that takes the form of a creature. In a desperate attempt to escape from this manifestation, he shifts his attention to his external surroundings only to find that his fellow commuters also have similar creatures. In Oblivion, I address a very human experience through the spectacle of an animated lens. This film is …

Improvements To A Thermally Actuated Mems Viscosity Sensor, Shreyas Choudhary

Theses

Being able to measure and monitor the viscosity of a fluid accurately and in real-time can provide insights and prevent field failures of lubricated mechanical elements. A micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) viscosity sensor that measures the properties of liquids through thermal vibrations of a silicon membrane has been previously developed. The device measures viscosity through three different characteristics: the frequency, amplitude and the quality factor of the vibrating membrane. The membrane is actuated via a short pulse of heat delivered by the heater resistor provided by an external voltage. The pulse width is controlled by a waveform generator and …

Exploring Hls Coding Techniques To Achieve Desired Turbo Decoder Architectures, Thomas Cenova

Theses

Software defined radio (SDR) platforms implement many digital signal processing algorithms. These can be accelerated on an FPGA to meet performance requirements. Due to the flexibility of SDR's and continually evolving communications protocols, high level synthesis (HLS) is a promising alternative to standard handcrafted design flows. A crucial component in any SDR is the error correction codes (ECC). Turbo codes are a common ECC that are implemented on an FPGA due to their computational complexity. The goal of this thesis is to explore the HLS coding techniques required to produce a design that targets the desired hardware architecture and can …

Formally Verified Space-Safety For Program Transformations, Jason Carr

Theses

Existing work on compilers has often primarily concerned itself with preserving behavior, but programs have other facets besides their observable behavior. We expect that the performance of our code is preserved and bettered by the compiler, not made worse. Unfortunately, that's exactly what sometimes occurs in modern optimizing compilers. Poor representations or incorrect optimizations may preserve the correct behavior, but push that program into a different complexity class entirely. We've seen such blowups like this occurring in practice, and many transformations have pitfalls which can cause issues. Even when a program is not dramatically worsened, it can cause the program …

Perceptions Of The Ethics Of Persuasive Technology, Christopher C. Branch

Theses

This thesis explores the perceptions of the ethics of persuasive technology as applied to the design of user interfaces. The intentions are to learn whether consumers of software see persuasion through technology as ethical, whether producers of software view the development of persuasive technology as ethical, and whether these opinions can be reconciled. This research consists of a review of relevant literature on the topic, a survey of software consumers, interviews with software producers, and an analysis of the data, resulting in conclusions intended to influence the responsible design of user interfaces in the future.

The results suggest a number …

Understanding Gaps Between Established Software Engineering Process Knowledge And Its Actual Implementation, Sayantika Bhattacharya

Theses

A part of Software Engineering (SE) Process Improvement is to identify and bridge the gaps between what we learn about established SE Processes and what we actually execute. Students majoring in SE degrees learn about various established SE processes in class and also try to execute them in their academic projects. In our research, we analyze student SE projects and interview these project teams to identify the gaps between what students learn in class about SE processes, what they think they execute, along with understanding the cause behind these gaps.

Modeling Interacting Time-Series Signals, Kantha Girish Gangadhara

Theses

Many real-life systems consist of multiple information signals which might be potentially interacting with each other over time. These interactions can be estimated/modeled using techniques like Pearson Correlation (PC), Time lagged Cross Correlation (TLCC) and windowed TLCC, Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and coupled Hidden Markov Model (cHMM). These techniques, excluding cHMM, cannot capture non-linear interactions and does not work well with multi-variate data. Although cHMM can capture the interactions effectively, it is bound by Markov property and other assumptions like latent variables, prior distributions, etc. These influence the performance of the model significantly. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is a variant …

Spatially-Explicit Snap Bean Flowering And Disease Prediction Using Imaging Spectroscopy From Unmanned Aerial Systems, Ethan W. Hughes

Theses

Sclerotinia sclerotiorum, or white mold, is a fungus that infects the flowers of snap bean plants and causes a subsequent reduction in snap bean pods, which adversely impacts yield. Timing the application of white mold fungicide thus is essential to preventing the disease, and is most effective when applied during the flowering stage. However, most of the flowers are located beneath the canopy, i.e., hidden by foliage, which makes spectral detection of flowering via the leaf/canopy spectra paramount. The overarching objectives of this research therefore are to i) identify spectral signatures for the onset of flowering to optimally time the …

Machine Learning For Robust Understanding Of Scene Materials In Hyperspectral Images, Utsav B. Gewali

Theses

The major challenges in hyperspectral (HS) imaging and data analysis are expensive sensors, high dimensionality of the signal, limited ground truth, and spectral variability. This dissertation develops and analyzes machine learning based methods to address these problems. In the first part, we examine one of the most important HS data analysis tasks-vegetation parameter estimation. We present two Gaussian processes based approaches for improving the accuracy of vegetation parameter retrieval when ground truth is limited and/or spectral variability is high. The first is the adoption of covariance functions based on well-established metrics, such as, spectral angle and spectral correlation, which are …

Mydoula: An Interactive Screening And Support System For The Prevention Of Perinatal Mood Disorders, Meghan M. Lewis

Theses

Perinatal Mood Disorders (PMDs) are the leading complication in pregnancies today. They stretch beyond the mother and can affect fathers and non-biological parents or guardians as well. The negative implications of these disorders diffuse out through the family into society as a catalyst for hindered child development, attachment disorders, lower cognitive abilities, and behavioral issues. They often have a profoundly negative effect on the family unit such as causing higher rates of violence, divorce, and loss of work. Parents experiencing mood disorders often have lower compliance rates when it comes to safety measures, such as using child car seats and …

Poly-Gan: A Multi-Conditioned Gan For Multiple Tasks, Nilesh Pandey

Theses

We present Poly-GAN, a novel conditional GAN architecture that is motivated by different Image generation and manipulation applications like Fashion Synthesis, an application where garments are automatically placed on images of human models at an arbitrary pose, image inpainting, an application where we try to recover a damaged image using the edges or a rough sketch of the image. While different applications use different GAN setup for image generation, we propose only one architecture for multiple applications with little to no change in the pipeline. Poly-GAN allows conditioning on multiple inputs and is suitable for many different tasks. Our novel …

Using Reduced Graphs For Efficient Hls Scheduling, Stephanie Soldavini

Theses

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is the process of inferring a digital circuit from a high-level algorithmic description provided as a software implementation, usually in C/C++. HLS tools will parse the input code and then perform three main steps: allocation, scheduling, and binding. This results in a hardware architecture which can then be represented as a Register-Transfer Level (RTL) model using a Hardware Description Language (HDL), such as VHDL or Verilog. Allocation determines the amount of resources needed, scheduling finds the order in which operations should occur, and binding maps operations onto the allocated hardware resources. Two main challenges of scheduling are …

An Ar Enhancement Of Printed Educational Resources: Keeping Printed Educational Materials Competitive In A Digital Age, Dax Simitch Warke

Theses

Digital resources have begun to take over our educational system and overshadow traditional printed resources. While these digital resources are becoming increasingly popular research has shown that printed resources have notable benefits that should not be dismissed. Enhancing these printed resources with augmented reality (AR) technology will allow them to be competitive with digital resources while preserving their academic benefits. The readily available smart devices carried in the pockets of most students have already prepared many classrooms for the use of AR. The interactive and visual potential of AR makes it an appealing educational tool that can dramatically improve the …

Thermal Characterization Of Infrared Images For Breast Cancer Detection, Solomiya Vysochanska

Theses

One of the most common diseases affecting women is breast cancer. As a result, diagnosis and monitoring of breast health is viewed as a lifesaving procedure. Thermography shows promise for diagnosing breast cancer especially for dense breasts on which mammography does not work well. It is a noninvasive and inexpensive method based on the principle that malignant tumors have a higher metabolic rate and therefore emit more heat. A new segmentation algorithm was developed for a recent database of thermal images obtained from patients lying in the prone position. The algorithm was successful in isolating the breast from rest of …

Methods And Algorithms For Cardiovascular Hemodynamics With Applications To Noninvasive Monitoring Of Proximal Blood Pressure And Cardiac Output Using Pulse Transit Time, Yashar Seyed Vahedein

Theses

Advanced health monitoring and diagnostics technology are essential to reduce the unrivaled number of human fatalities due to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Traditionally, gold standard CVD diagnosis involves direct measurements of the aortic blood pressure (central BP) and flow by cardiac catheterization, which can lead to certain complications. Understanding the inner-workings of the cardiovascular system through patient-specific cardiovascular modeling can provide new means to CVD diagnosis and relating treatment. BP and flow waves propagate back and forth from heart to the peripheral sites, while carrying information about the properties of the arterial network. Their speed of propagation, magnitude and shape are …

What A Night, Jose Hidalgo Thormann

Theses

Producing an audiovisual work is the ability to transform an idea, a story, a script into a tangible product, to bring it closer to the screen. After the production of any project, it is ready to be filmed. In this project, you can find the memories to carry out the production of a fiction short film entitled What A Night. This paper discusses the making of the short film by Jose Hidalgo Thormann to fulfill his thesis requirement to receive his MFA in Film and Animation from the Rochester Institute of Technology

Uvm Verification Of A Floating Point Multiplier, Nicholas J. Marsaw

Theses

Increased design complexity has resulted in the need for efficient verification. The verification process is crucial for discovering and fixing bugs prior to fabrication and system integration. However, as designs increase in complexity, the use of traditional verification techniques with VHDL and Verilog may fall short to provide a proper toolset. Especially when performing verification on designs involving audio signal processing, untested corner cases and bugs may result in significant and sometimes undiscovered processing errors. This paper explores the use of SystemVerilog and the universal verification methodology (UVM) class library to verify a pipelined floating-point multiplier (FMULT) within the adaptive …

A Novel System To Improve Over-Speeding Traffic Violation Ticketing Using A Black Box, Gaurav Mohan Shende

Theses

The paper will discuss the implementation of a novel system using a black box to make the overspeeding ticketing system more robust. The system will provide a physical proof of the drivers driving statistics. The system consist of three parts. First being a black box implementation using a raspberry pi 3b+ on the drivers side. It will track the current speed of the car via OBD-ii port with timestamp. Second being IOT device on the sheriff’s side which can fetch the speed information for past 20 minutes (speed information before vehicle came to compelete stantstill) from the black box and …

Perception Methods For Speed And Separation Monitoring Using Time-Of-Flight Sensor Arrays, Sarthak Arora

Theses

This work presents the development of a perception pipeline to passively track the partial human ground pose in the context of human robot collaboration. The main motivation behind this work is to provide a speed and separation monitoring based safety controller with an estimate of human position on the factory floor. Three time-of-flight sensing rings affixed to the major links of an industrial manipulator are used to implement the aforementioned. Along with a convolutional neural network based unknown obstacle detection strategy, the ground position of the human operator is estimated and tracked using sparse 3-D point inputs. Experiments to analyze …