Digital Commons Network^™

Comparison Of Strength, Ductility And Stiffness For Radius Cut And Straight Cut Of Reduced Beam Section, Venkat Ramana Reddy Vootukuri

Theses

In 1994 there was an earthquake occurred in Northridge, California which caused damage in structures built with Steel Moment Frames (SMF) due to the brittle fractures in the beam and column connections. It has led to the major modifications and improvements in the connection detailing prior to the earthquake occurred in the Northbridge. These changes came up with better materials for welding and introduced the use of cover plate and Reduced Beam Section (RBS). RBS connections are the most widely used connection today and it allows the SMF systems to yield extensively and deform plastically by avoiding brittle fracturing at …

A Qualitative Examination Of Experiences Of Acculturation, Acculturative Stress, And Coping Among Black International Students, Maame Esi Arkofoa Coleman

Theses

This study was designed to describe the experiences of acculturation, acculturative stress, and coping behaviors among Black international students. While research exists on the acculturative and coping experiences of international students in the United States, very few studies have been designed to explicitly examine the experiences of Black international students of sub-Saharan and Caribbean origins. A majority of the existing literature has focused on experiences of Asian and Latin American international students (Malcolm & Mendoza, 2014). This study was intended to provide information about the acculturative experiences of Black international students enrolled at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Interviews were conducted …

Sunday In The Shop With Rob, Robert J. Anderson

Theses

On February 21st, 2019, Southern Illinois University Department of Theater produced

Act-Based Statements Effect On Bartending Tips, Mariah Patz

Theses

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a behaviorally-based intervention that emphasizes psychological processes related to mindfulness, values, committed actions towards values, defusion from troubling thoughts, and acceptance. ACT is often used with populations who experience psychological inflexibility or stress, but not much research has been done understanding how ACT processes may affect everyday tasks within the common public or within business practices. The present study used a randomized controlled trial to determine the effect that statements related to ACT processes given while receiving a bar tending service altered the outcome tipping percentage from guests. The current research also discussed how …

Effect Of Rotational Restraints On Thermal Post Buckling Response Of Sway Columns, Kamal Regmi

Theses

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of rotational restraints on thermal post-buckling response of sway columns using geometrically nonlinear analysis. The present design approach considers columns to have failed once they buckle. However, the columns under fire load are found to exhibit significant post-buckling strength which could be utilized for more economical design. The past researchers on the nonlinear thermal analysis used isolated columns with idealized support conditions which mean the columns are assumed to be free or fully restrained in the rotation, lateral and, axial directions. However, that is seldom the case in real structures …

Forgotten Names, Nicholas William Sanders

Theses

Forgotten Names is a fifteen-minute programmatic work for wind ensemble and electronics. The piece represents my aim to express conceptually the memories of human lives being lost with the passage of time. The two salient vehicles used to convey the concept are melodic motivic development and pre-recorded electronic audio accompanying the ensemble. The prerecorded electronics work in tandem with the ensemble and provide the audience with inferable aural symbolism. These audio samples are to be triggered by a percussionist by using the free, downloadable program, Pure Data along with a performance file provided by the composer. Forgotten Names also draws …

Understanding Prediction Of Low-Quality Comments In Online Science Discourse, Elizabeth R. Lucas

Theses

Online public forum discussion in the Reddit science community is moderated to ensure a high standard of scientific content in discourse. This thesis project creates predictive models to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forum comments, and it seeks to interpret those models based on input from moderators. Information was collected from moderators (their demographics, moderation habits, moderation decisions and reasons for removing comments) to curate a deeper understanding of the online moderation community and predictive models for automated moderation support.

Structure Preserving Regularizer For Neural Style Transfer, Krushal Kyada

Theses

The aim of the project is to generate an image in the style of the image by a well-known artist. The experiment will use artificial neural networks to transfer the style of one image onto another. In Computer Vision context: capturing the content invariant that is the style of an image and applying it on the content of another image.

Initially captures the tensors that we need from the content and style image and then we pass the input image which will initially be an image with noise and our algorithm will try to minimize the loss between the input …

I Am Arbor, Anannya Sengupta

Theses

I Am Arbor is a film that captures the beauty and tragedy of Trees in our civilization, which are going through tragic transformations due to rapid urbanization. Perhaps for the first time, this short movie has created a narrative that is anchored on the feelings and emotions of Trees, their existence as families, and their collective contribution to human existence. The movie blends live action and Computer Generated Imagery (CGI), to merge real and imaginary worlds; all of which comes together to create a touching story.

The film is a product of a childhood influence coupled with children’s literature. The …

A Time Of Flight On-Robot Proximity Sensing System For Collaborative Robotics, Odysseus A. Adamides

Theses

The sensor system presented in this work demonstrates the results of designing an industrial grade exteroceptive sensing device for proximity sensing for collaborative robots. The intention of this design's application is to develop an on-robot small footprint proximity sensing device to prevent safety protected stops from halting a robot during a manufacturing process. Additionally, this system was design to be modular and fit on an size or shape robotic link expanding the sensor system's use cases vastly. The design was assembled and put through a number of benchmark tests to validate the performance of the time of flight (ToF) sensor …

Acquisition Of Hockey Goalies Kinematic Data Using Motion Capture Systems, Tzu-Ting Hsu

Theses

Hockey goalies all over the world have adopted the butterfly style of goaltending due to the fast pace of the game. However, the style of play has brought the potential for injuries to goalies. In this study, a motion capture system was used to analyze the butterfly motion performed by a human subject to quantify the kinematics and kinetics associated with the motion. Further analysis was done with the motion capture data to obtain the joint angles of the hip and the knee joints and the forces in the joints associated with the butterfly motions. Through the experiments, the kinematics …

Nmr Studies Of Translational And Rotational Diffusion Of A Phase Separating Eye Lens Protein: Bovine Γb-Crystallin, Aaron Thomas Fadden

Theses

Cataracts are one of the leading causes of blindness in the world. Cataracts can occur when proteins (known as “crystallins”) in the cytoplasm of the eye lens phase separate or associate, creating local fluctuations in the refractive index of the lens. Bovine γB-crystallin is analogous (in sequence, structure, and function) to the human γD-crystallin and can be isotopically labeled during growth with 13C and 15N when expressed in Escherichia coli. In this work, the two most important Brownian motions, rotational and translational diffusion, were measured under various temperatures and concentrations in an effort to better understand the intermolecular interactions and …

Habitat And Conservation Suitability Assessment For Shrubland Birds In Monroe County, New York, Rachel Allen

Theses

Shrublands and successional ecosystems are of special interest to land managers and conservation groups because to be maintained, they must be disturbed periodically. Shrubland birds rely on variation in the landscape, regular disturbance, and ephemeral patches of shrubs for breeding, foraging, and nesting. Many of these avian species are in decline, so monitoring and mapping shrublands is necessary for future conservation and management strategies (DeGraaf & Yamasaki, 2003; Howard et al., 2015; Litvaitis, 2003). Large proportions of shrubland bird populations rely on shrublands in the northeast states for breeding habitat, and the identification and land use monitoring of these regions …

The Role Of Visual Identity Design In The Evolution Of Luxury Fashion Brand Strategy, Jia Cai

Theses

Fashion luxury brands have taken longer than other retail segments to understand and adapt to consumer behavior changes created by the digital revolution over the past decade. Digital and social media has created a fundamental shift in consumers expectations of their shopping experiences.

The big debate in the luxury fashion industry has been whether the integration of ‘off-line’ and ‘on-line’ actually creates value or reduces the exclusivity associated with the brands. In the past, luxury brands have relied on traditional marketing channels such as print and direct mail to engage their high-value customers. Additionally, the industry has placed an enormous …

Experimental Analysis Of Spatial Sound For Storytelling In Virtual Reality, Saylee Bhide

Theses

Spatial sound is useful in enhancing immersion and presence of the user in a virtual world. This audio design allows the game designer to place audio cues that appropriately match with the visual cues in a virtual game environment. These localized audio cues placed in a story based game environment also help to evoke an emotional response from the user and construct the narrative of the game by capturing the user’s attention towards the guiding action events in the game. Our thesis explores the usefulness of spatial sound for improving the performance and experience of a user in a virtual …

Uvm Verification Of An I2c Master Core, Shravani Balaraju

Theses

With the increasing complexity of IP designs, verification has become quite popular yet is still a significant challenge for a verification engineer. A proper verification environment can bring out bugs that one may never expect in the design. On the contrary, a poorly designed verification environment could give false information about the functioning of the design and bugs may appear on the consumer’s end. Hence, the verification industry is continually looking for more efficient verification methodologies. This paper describes one such efficient methodology implemented on an Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C) system. I2C packs in itself the powerful features of the Serial …

Investigation Of The Benefits Of Interlocked Synchronous Pipelines, Sabrina Rose Levitan

Theses

The majority of today’s digital circuits use synchronous pipelines. As the technology nodes get smaller, these pipelines are facing problems with area, power, and timing. One of the major sources of power consumption is the global clock and stall signals. These signals have to be routed across large sections of the chip, and with regards to stalling the pipeline, often face significant timing issues. One solution, developed by Hans M. Jacobson et al., is “Synchronous Interlocked Pipelines”. This pipeline design combines synchronous pipelines with the handshaking of asynchronous pipelines. Asynchronous pipelines are less power intensive because they send acknowledge and …

An Empirical Study On Discovering A New Self-Admitted Technical Debt Type - Api-Debt, Ahmed Aljohani

Theses

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is when developers intentionally choose to take short-cuts, non-optimal solutions (e.g. temporary fix or rush code development) that negatively contribute to long-term source-code quality in order to achieve short-term goals such as product deadline. Several studies have successfully identified SATD through the source-comments, classified them into five types (design debt, defect debt, documentation debt, requirement debt, and test debt) based on how they negatively affect different parts of the source-code and proposed a tool that automatically detects SATD using the source comments as input. However, few papers deeply investigate the types of SATD and their effects …

Verification Of Sha-256 And Md5 Hash Functions Using Uvm, Dinesh Anand Bashkaran

Theses

Data integrity assurance and data origin authentication are important security aspects in commerce, financial transfer, banking, software, email, data storage, etc. Cryptographic hash functions specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides secure algorithms for data security. Hash functions are designed to digest the data and produce a hash message; a hash is a one-way function which is highly secured and difficult to invert. In this paper, two such hash algorithms are verified using the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). UVM is IEEE 1800 standard developed to assist in the verification of digital designs; it reduces the hurdle …

Light Extraction Efficiency Of Nanostructured Iii-Nitride Light-Emitting Diodes, Yu Kee Ooi

Theses

III-nitride materials have been extensively employed in a wide variety of applications attributed to their compact sizes, lower operating voltage, higher energy efficiency and longer lifetime. Although tremendous progress has been reported for III-nitride light-emitting diodes (LEDs), further enhancement in the external quantum effciency (η_EQE), which depends upon internal quantum efficiency, injection efficiency and light extraction efficiency (η_extraction), is essential in realizing next generation high-efficiency ultraviolet (UV) and visible LEDs. Several challenges such as charge separation issue, large threading dislocation density, large refractive index contrast between GaN and air, and anisotropic emission at high Al-composition AlGaN quantum wells in the …

Post-Gated Era: Towards Integrated Urban Communities In China, Xiaojing Lin

Theses

Gated communities, which typically refer to residential compounds that have strict boundaries with entrances guarded by securities and other technology appliances for surveillance, are the most common developments in Chinese cities over the past few decades. These enclosures of isolated city blocks have caused heated discussion since The CPC (Central Committee and State Council) published a guildline in 2016 to prohibit the construction of Gated communities in Chinese cities. For unique historical and social-cultural reasons, “Gated” has been deeply embedded in Chinese traditional dwelling ideology for a long time, and it is still widely accepted by the vast majority as …

A Low-Cost Search-And-Rescue Drone Platform, Jonathan Mcclure

Theses

In this work, an unmanned aerial system is implemented to search an outdoor area for an injured or missing person (subject) without requiring a connection to a ground operator or control station. The system detects subjects using exclusively on-board hardware as it traverses a predefined search path, with each implementation envisioned as a single element of a larger swarm of identical search drones. To increase the affordability of such a swarm, the system cost per drone serves as a primary constraint. Imagery is streamed from a camera to an Odroid single-board computer, which prepares the data for inference by a …

Biorefinery Pathways For Institutional Food Waste, Shwe Sin Win

Theses

Every day, enormous quantities of nutritious food are wasted in landfills across the globe. Agriculture and food production use intensive amounts of water, chemicals, and land, rendering food waste as a major environmental and economic concern. New York State is currently considering legislation that would ban landfill disposal of food waste produced by large institutional generators, such as universities, hospitals, sports venues, restaurants, grocery stores, etc. Institutions have concentrated populations which generate predictable volumes of food waste and waste cooking oil. At the same time, these populations need heat, electricity, vehicle fuel, and soap. Developing a biorefinery system offers great …

Efficient Distribution Regression, Nicholas Wilkins

Theses

In this thesis we devise a method for performing distribution regression utilizing an extension of mixture density networks. This method will be benchmarked against other state-of-the-art methods (utilizing negative log loss) and distribution-agnostic models of similar complexity. We demonstrate that our proposed method performs at least as well as the state-of-the-art methods in distribution regression. Additionally, we show that adding distribution predictive capabilities does not significantly decrease performance in models. We illustrate how one can utilize this methodology to regress to confidence interval predictions. Finally, we demonstrate a variety of novel and interesting applications of our framework.

A Study On The Effect Of Fabric Structure And Finishing On Perceived Image Quality, Payal Sharma

Theses

Valued at nearly US 7.5 billion, the global textile industry continues on a growth trajectory. Printed textiles represent a major segment of the market, and are making significant contributions to the overall expansion of the industry. Historically, screen printing has dominated the printed textile market, but digital technologies continue to make inroads (Hayward, 2016).

One of the problems encountered in the textile industry is obtaining the desired color. Studies have shown that the texture and finishing of a fabric can have an impact on the way the ink sets on the fabric and in turn effect the quality of image. …

Design, Fabrication And Test Of A Graphene-Based Thz Modulator, Ky-El Sanchez

Theses

One of the most promising approaches to achieve high-speed wireless communication in the terahertz regime is by designing and fabricating devices based on the unique electrical properties of graphene. Certain bands in the THz range (300 GHz – 3 THz) encounter minimal water absorption over short distances and high-speed information transfer is possible. Nonetheless, conventional bulk devices cannot operate at that speed. In the more basic wireless communications system, there are three basic components: a source, a modulator and an antenna. With the use of the Rochester Institute of Technology Semiconductor manufacturing and Fabrication laboratory a graphene-based modulator was designed …

Global Congestion And Fault Aware Wireless Interconnection Framework For Multicore Systems, Sajeed Mohammad Shahriat

Theses

Multicore processors are getting more common in the implementation of all type of computing demands, starting from personal computers to the large server farms for high computational demanding applications. The network-on-chip provides a better alternative to the traditional bus based communication infrastructure for this multicore system. Conventional wire-based NoC interconnect faces constraints due to their long multi-hop latency and high power consumption. Furthermore high traffic generating applications sometimes creates congestion in such system further degrading the systems performance. In this thesis work, a novel two-state congestion aware wireless interconnection framework for network chip is presented. This WiNoC system was designed …

Design Address On Phubbing During Dining, Shih-Hsuan Huang

Theses

Phubbing is the practice of ignoring one's companion or companions to pay attention to one's phone or other mobile device. What happens when phubbing occurs in situations such as eating with friends? Phubbing instantly stops the interaction, and this unconsciousness behavior may affect the mood of one’s companions, destroy the taste of one’s food, or ruin one’s relationships.

Using a phone while eating is not a bad practice. People often use their phones to record the moment, to capture the delicious food, or to share information with others.

The best way to deal with hurt caused by phubbing during dining …

Modeling Color Appearance In Augmented Reality, Nargess Hassani

Theses

Augmented reality (AR) is a developing technology that is expected to become the next interface between humans and computers. One of the most common designs of AR devices is the optical see-through head- mounted display (HMD). In this design, the virtual content presented on the displays embedded inside the device gets optically superimposed on the real world which results in the virtual content being transparent. Color appearance in see-through designs of AR is a complicated subject, because it depends on many factors including the ambient light, the color appearance of the virtual content and color appearance of the real background. …

Design Of A Flexible Schoenhage-Strassen Fft Polynomial Multiplier With High-Level Synthesis, Kevin Millar

Theses

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a promising field because it allows for encrypted data to be sent to and operated on by untrusted parties without the risk of privacy compromise. The benefits and applications of HE are far reaching, especially in regard to cloud computing. However, current HE solutions require resource intensive arithmetic operations such as high precision, high degree polynomial multiplication resulting in a minimum computational complexity of O(n log(n)) on standard CPUs though application of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). These operations result in poor overall performance for HE schemes in software and would benefit greatly from hardware acceleration. …