Digital Commons Network^™

Implantable Microsystem Technologies For Nanoliter-Resolution Inner Ear Drug Delivery, Farzad Forouzandeh

Theses

Advances in protective and restorative biotherapies have created new opportunities to use site-directed, programmable drug delivery systems to treat auditory and vestibular disorders. Successful therapy development that leverages the transgenic, knock-in, and knock-out variants of mouse models of human disease requires advanced microsystems specifically designed to function with nanoliter precision and with system volumes suitable for implantation. The present work demonstrates a novel biocompatible, implantable, and scalable microsystem consisted of a thermal phase-change peristaltic micropump with wireless control and a refillable reservoir. The micropump is fabricated around a catheter microtubing (250 μm OD, 125 μm ID) that provided a biocompatible …

Examining The Conflict Between User Experience And Software Development In Industry, Marissa K. Wilson

Theses

In this age the modern consumer expects a software product to be profusely technically functional with an elegant and intuitive user interface. To accomplish this goal, it has become necessary for software development teams and user experience teams to collaborate on software projects. These two complementary teams often come from different backgrounds, with different technical knowledge, processes, management structures, and deadlines. As these teams continue to collaborate more and more the chance of encountering a conflict also increases. In this research we examine the conflict that can occur between software development and user experience teams and the possible effects on …

Scanning Single Shot Detector For Math In Document Images, Parag Shrikrishna Mali

Theses

We introduce the Scanning Single Shot Detector (ScanSSD) for detecting both embedded and displayed math expressions in document images using a single-stage network that does not require page layout, font, or, character information. ScanSSD uses sliding windows to generate sub-images of large document page images rendered at 600 dpi and applies Single Shot Detector (SSD) on each sub-image. Detection results from sub-images are pooled to generate page-level results. For pooling sub-image level detections, we introduce new methods based on the confidence scores and density of detections. ScanSSD is a modular architecture that can be easily applied to detecting other objects …

Challenges And Opportunities For Startup Innovation And Entrepreneurship As Tools Towards A Knowledge-Based Economy: The Case Of Kosovo, Xheneta Sopjani

Theses

There is a global drive to accelerate the growth and development of nations through innovation and technology. Supporting new businesses has become a priority on the global agenda and their critical role as key drivers of growth and development is beginning to be recognized in developing countries. It is crucial to distinguish and place at the heart of any strategy the significant impact of establishing new and relevant companies which will design, develop and support products and services that meet the needs of the society and are valuable for developing the economy in Kosovo. This research study, analyzes the entrepreneurship …

The Impact Of Visa Liberalization On Kosovo’S Migration Patterns, Urtina Zeka

Theses

European integration and state development are two processes that complement one another. In adherence to the Copenhagen Criteria of 1993, legal and economic reforms are compulsory conditions that have to be fulfilled by aspiring EU members. With the unfolding of the events in 2018, Kosovo is getting closer to obtaining visa liberalization. After it has successfully fulfilled the 95-point-conditions presented by the EU, on 13 September 2018, the European Parliament has voted in favor of visa liberalization for Kosovo. Besides the concerns whether Kosovo will pass the final stages of visa liberalization, another concern remains its aftermath; will visa liberalization …

Universal Healthcare Coverage And The Future Of Healthcare In Kosovo, Jona Jaha

Theses

The aim of this Honors project paper is to identify and analyze policy issues that will affect the health sector in Kosovo once universal health coverage scheme is implemented. More specifically, the study will focus on three pillars of the health sector, namely health institutions, medical personnel and citizens. Besides assessing changes on the pillars of the health sector, this study aims at evaluating the receptiveness of stakeholders to this policy issue, more specifically the citizens’ perspective on the implementation of universal health coverage in Kosovo. This study is based on a combination of qualitative research methods—primary and secondary research. …

Organizational Socialization Process And Its Impact On New Employees’ Job Satisfaction, Commitment, And Retention Intentions: Experiences From The Banking Sector In Kosovo, Donika Sollova

Theses

New employees are an important asset for every organization. Organizations continually engage in recruitment processes with the aim of hiring employees who possess the knowledge and experience that is needed in nowadays labor market. That being said, organizations ought to create a suitable environment for the accommodation of new employees in order for them to effectively use their skills and abilities to serve in the benefit of organizations. To achieve this, organizations establish socialization programs which lay the foundation of a successful work experience for new employees. Socialization process enables new employees to acquire the necessary knowledge and information to …

Human Activity Recognition And Prediction Using Rgbd Data, Paul Dixon Coen

Theses

Being able to predict and recognize human activities is an essential element for us to effectively communicate with other humans during our day to day activities. A system that is able to do this has a number of appealing applications, from assistive robotics to health care and preventative medicine. Previous work in supervised video-based human activity prediction and detection fails to capture the richness of spatiotemporal data that these activities generate. Convolutional Long short-term memory (Convolutional LSTM) networks are a useful tool in analyzing this type of data, showing good results in many other areas. This thesis’ focus is on …

Factors Influencing Farmers’ Adoption And Intentions To Adopt Pollinator Conservation Programs And Practices In Illinois, U.S.A., Christopher M. Sedivy

Theses

Due to the growing recognition of the social and ecological consequences of the global decline in pollinator species, the need for more effective policies for the conservation of pollinator habitat is now more than ever. These trends call for research that provides a deeper understanding of farmers' decision-making processes. In this regard, this study tested a modified version of the Theory of Planned Behavior as a conceptual model for explaining farmers' perceptions and behavior regarding the adoption of pollinator conservation programs and practices. Specifically, the study tested how farmers' perceived behavioral control, attitudes, subjective norms, concern about herbicide resistance issues, …

Social Media Footprints Of Public Perception On Energy Issues In The Conterminous United States, David Leifer

Theses

Energy has been at the top of the national and global political agenda along with other concomitant challenges, such as poverty, disaster and climate change. Social perception on various energy issues, such as its availability, development and consumption deeply affect our energy future. This type of information is traditionally collected through structured energy surveys. However, these surveys are often subject to formidable costs and intensive labor, as well as a lack of temporal dimensions. Social media can provide a more cost-effective solution to collect massive amount of data on public opinions in a timely manner that may complement the survey. …

Geochemistry And Organic Petrography Of The Anna Shale (Pennsylvanian) And The Occurence Of Pyrite “Suns” In Southwestern Illinois, Jacob Dyson

Theses

The Anna Shale (Pennsylvanian) is an organic-rich, marine black shale that commonly overlies the Herrin (No. 6) Coal of the Carbondale Formation, Illinois Basin. Disk-shaped iron sulfide concretions, called pyrite suns, which are commonly up to 10 cm or more across are found in the lowest few centimeters of the Anna Shale in coal mines near Sparta in southwestern Illinois. This area is the only known location where pyrite suns of this size have been found, suggesting that unusual geochemical and/or depositional conditions led to their formation. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the geochemical conditions at …

Plasmid Mediated Colistin Resistance In Enterobacteriaceae Isolated From Feces Of Broiler Chicken In The United Arab Emirates, Sara Abdelkafi Mahmoud Ali

Theses

Although human infections with colistin-resistant Mcr-producing Enterobacteriaceae have been reported from the Arabian Peninsula, the presence of mcr gene in strains of animal origin has not been studied.

Ten composite faecal samples were collected in each of four geographically distant poultry farms in Abu Dhabi Emirate. Ten colonies from McConkey agar containing 1 mg/L colistin from each sample were PCR-screened for mcr-1, mcr-2, MCR-3, mcr-4, mcr-5. Of the positive ones, one isolate representing each distinct plasmid profile was selected for susceptibility testing and for whole-genome sequencing (WGS). Transfer of the MCR-1 gene into Escherichia coli …

The Relationship Between Religion And Diet-Related Disparities In African American Men., Joel Hamilton

Theses

This study utilized a cross-sectional design to report quantitative results. Equal numbers of African American men, religious and non-religious, were sought out for comparison. Participants must have identified as African American, been 30 years of age or older, and lived within 10 miles of Carbondale, IL during the time of the study. African American men are at an increased risk of developing many diet-related disparities. This study aimed to see if religion influenced these factors.

Long-Term Durability Of Ordinary Portland Cement And Polypropylene Fiber Stabilized Soil, Suman Aryal

Theses

Soft soil stabilization frequently uses cement, lime, fly ash, etc., but very limited studies were conducted on the long-term durability of stabilized soil. The present research work deals with the long-term durability of commercially available soil (i.e., EPK clay) stabilized with ordinary Portland cement and polypropylene fiber using a realistic approach, where the effect can be noticed in each weathering cycle. In the present study, two different tests (i.e., wetting-drying and freezing-thawing) were conducted to analyze the long-term durability of stabilized soil. Cycles of higher temperature followed by rainfall, which generally occurs in southern states of the US, were analyzed …

Collaborative Uav Surveillance, Winston Smith

Theses

Autonomous collaborative robotics is a topic of significant interest to groups such as the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). These two groups have been developing systems for the operation of autonomous vehicles over the past several years, but each system has several critical drawbacks. AFRL’s Unmanned Systems Autonomy Services (UxAS) supports pathfinding for multiple tasks performed by groups of vehicles, but has no formal verification, very little physical flight time, and no concept of collision avoidance. NASA’s Independent Configurable Architecture for Reliable Operations of Unmanned Systems (ICAROUS) has collision avoidance, partial formal …

Reservoir Characterization Of The Kizler North Field, Lyon Co., Kansas, Usa, Md Nahidul Hasan

Theses

The Kizler North Field is near the western flank of the Forest City Basin in Lyon Co., Kansas, USA and produces oil from the Hunton Formation, Viola Formation and Simpson Group reservoirs. The structure strikes NW through the field that is part of a larger wrench fault system. This modern prospect analysis of the Kizler North Field, aids in understanding the reservoir properties of the Hunton Formation, Viola Formation and Simpson Group rocks, the play mechanism of the field, and provides recommendations for additional drilling locations.

A Preliminary Investigation Of A Values Intervention And A Values Reminder On Clinically Relevant Outcomes, Bruce Clark

Theses

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is designed to target psychological flexibility, broadly defined as engagement with personal values regardless of the presence of difficult private events. As engagement with valued behaviors is imperative to psychological flexibility, clarification of values is an essential skill for clients to learn. Practicing of skills in treatment has historically been a difficult hurdle for clinicians to implement between sessions for clients as well. The present study examined the utility of a novel values card sort activity, as well as the utility of a rubber band to act as a reminding agent for engagement with values. …

An Evaluation Of The Impact Of Anger On Aggression In Pretend Play And The Role Of Pretend Play In Regulating Anger In Preschoolers, Kristen Boog

Theses

Multiple studies have supported the link between anger and aggression. It is not uncommon for anger to result in aggressive acts, especially in children still learning socially appropriate ways of coping. Furthermore, childhood aggression is typically viewed as a concerning act that should be reduced or eliminated. However, some research shows that within pretend play, aggression can be adaptive. Studies have supported the Mastery/Catharsis hypothesis, the theory that aggression in pretend play acts as a release of emotions and processing of events, by showing that children who exhibit more aggression within their pretend play exhibit less aggression outside of play. …

A Microchemical Analysis Of Native Fish Passage Through Brandon Road Lock And Dam, Des Plaines River, Illinois, Claire Snyder

Theses

Modifications to Brandon Road Lock and Dam (BRLD), located on the Des Plaines River in northeastern Illinois, have been proposed to prevent the upstream transfer of aquatic invasive species, particularly Asian carps, into the Great Lakes Basin. These modifications, including the installation of an electric barrier, acoustic fish deterrent, and air bubble curtain, are designed to completely eliminate all upstream fish passage and may negatively impact native fish populations in the Des Plaines River by reducing upstream movement and potentially fragmenting populations. BRLD is situated just 21 km upstream of the Des Plaines River mouth, and fish are only able …

Spatial And Temporal Variation In The Diet Composition Of Zooplankton In Mission Bay, Bryanna Paulson

Theses

Analyses of quantitative data on zooplankton diets are vital for understanding the drivers of zooplankton abundance within an ecosystem. Such analyses also provide insight into trophic pathways within the lower planktonic food web, which support populations of higher trophic level species. This study used carbon and nitrogen stable isotope ratios of size-fractionated plankton in Mission Bay, San Diego, CA to examine the spatial and temporal variation in zooplankton trophic ecology and determine potential environmental drivers of zooplankton community structure. Carbon stable isotopes reflect primary production sources in an organism’s diet, and nitrogen stable isotope ratios can be used to estimate …

Predicting The Emotional Intensity Of Tweets, Intisar M. Alhamdan

Theses

Automated interpretation of human emotion has become increasingly important as human-computer interactions become ubiquitous. Affective computing is a field of computer science concerned with recognizing, analyzing and interpreting human emotions in a range of media, including audio, video, and text. Social media, in particular, are rich in expressions of people's moods, opinions, and sentiments. This thesis focuses on predicting the emotional intensity expressed on the social network Twitter. In this study, we use lexical features, sentiment and emotion lexicons to extract features from tweets, messages of 280 characters or less shared on Twitter. We also use a form of transfer …

Assessing The Convergence Of Iterative Parameter Estimation, Matthew Delfavero

Theses

On September 14th, 2015, the remnants of two massive stars collided, producing gravitational waves that rung out accross the universe. It has been discovered that this is fairly common. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, first predicted gravitational waves. After a century of scientific discovery, engineering marvels, and the proliferation of technology, scientists ultimately built an instrument which can detect them. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected this event, and many more in LIGO’s first and second observational runs.

Scientists model the signals that have been detected in order to study the properties of these systems. These parameters, e.g. the …

Making Tricks More Accessible: Empowering Adults With Intellectual Disabilities To Create E-Textiles, Taylor Gotfrid

Theses

E-textiles are a newly emerging technology that can be seen in consumer, educational, and hackerspace environments. Specifically, the development of e-textiles requires a minimum level of familiarity with a variety of concepts; one of which is circuit design and prototyping.

Unfortunately, people with disabilities are rarely included in the design and development of e- textiles, so methods to manipulate these wearable interactive technologies are not always accessible to creators with disabilities. Therefore, we conducted this study to begin understanding how adults with intellectual disabilities perceive and interact with this new type of electronic technology.

This research explores an accessible process …

Identifying Galaxy Mergers With Quantitative Morphological Parameters In Simulated James Webb Space Telescope Images, Caitlin Rose

Theses

Mergers play an important role in the formation and evolution of galaxies by triggering starbursts, AGN activity, and morphological transitions from disks to ellipticals. They can also cause morphological disturbances in a galaxy’s appearance, such as double nuclei, tidal tails, and other asymmetries, which can appear before or after a merger has occurred. Therefore, one way to identify low redshift galaxy mergers is to search for these morphological signatures via quantitative morphological parameters, which quantify a galaxy’s light distribution (such as Sérsic profiles, or the CAS system, G and M20, and the MID statistics). However, for high redshift galaxies, these …

Registration Of Diffusion Tensor Images In Log-Euclidean And Euclidean Space, Kevin Tuttle

Theses

Diffusion Tensor Imaging is a type of Magnetic Resonance Imaging that allows for the examination of brain connectivity and axonal integrity. Diffusion Tensor Images are created by capturing Diffusion-Weighted MRI images with specific RF pulses, inputing the images and the RF pulse gradient vectors into a set of equations, and solving the equations with linear algebra. To compare one DTI image with another, the images can be aligned using Image Registration. Image Registration works by defining a metric that describes the similarity between two images and iteratively transforming one of the images until the similarity measure is minimized. Existing methods …

Ultrafast Laser Polishing For Optical Fabrication, Lauren L. Taylor

Theses

Next-generation imaging systems for consumer electronics, AR/VR, and space telescopes require weight, size, and cost reduction while maintaining high optical performance. Freeform optics with rotationally asymmetric surface geometries condense the tasks of several spherical optics onto a single element. They are currently fabricated by ultraprecision sub-aperture tools like diamond turning and magnetorheological finishing, but the final surfaces contain mid-spatial-frequency tool marks and form errors which fall outside optical tolerances. Therefore, there remains a need for disruptive tools to generate optic-quality freeform surfaces.

This thesis work investigates a high-precision, flexible, non-contact methodology for optics polishing using femtosecond ultrafast lasers. Femtosecond lasers …

Design For Street Markets In Mainland China: Study Of Current Street Markets, The Ideal Model Of Formalized Street Markets, And Worktable Design, Jiameng Huang

Theses

Street vendors are a cultural icon and have a long history in the cities of Mainland China (abbreviated as China henceforth). However, with the development and modernization of Chinese cities, the relationship between street vendors and city managers has become increasingly tense and delicate, and conflicts between vendors and urban management are occurring at an increasing rate. This paper intends to illustrate the irreplaceability of the street markets and identify a solution for street vendors to thrive in tandem with modernization through research and design.

In many large Chinese cities, the number of food vendors has been insufficient to support …

Shadow Detection In Aerial Images Using Machine Learning, Prasanna Reddy Pulakurthi

Theses

Shadows are present in a wide range of aerial images from forested scenes to urban environments. The presence of shadows degrades the performance of computer vision algorithms in a diverse set of applications such as image registration, object segmentation, object detection and recognition. Therefore, detection and mitigation of shadows is of paramount importance and can significantly improve the performance of computer vision algorithms in the aforementioned applications. There are several existing approaches to shadow detection in aerial images including chromaticity methods, texture-based methods, geometric, physics-based methods, and approaches using neural networks in machine learning.

In this thesis, we developed seven …

Magnificent Constructions: The Role Of Environment On The Stellar Mass Growth Of Massive Galaxies, Kevin Christopher Cooke

Theses

To understand how the present day universe came to be, we must understand how the massive structures in which we live formed and evolved over the preceding billions of years. Constraining how galaxies grow are the most massive galaxies, called brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). These luminous and diffuse elliptical galaxies inhabit relaxed positions within their host cluster's gravitational potentials and provide a look at the high mass extreme of galaxy evolution. The relaxed structure, old stellar populations, and central location within the cluster indicate a high redshift formation scenario, however, star-forming BCGs have been observed at much more recent epochs. …

/Səm/ Of The Parts, Marija Ratkeviciute

Theses

This thesis focuses on the role of memory in identity development and discusses the creation of work that explores transitions that we go through in life, the effects of time on our relationships, and the shifts that happen within the person involved. The emphasis of my exploration is the investigation of states of being where the past is more than a memory, and the future is yet unclear.

Everyone grows through liminal states, especially in this time of globalization and social change. There are some rituals to help us transition into different social roles and stages of life, such as …