Digital Commons Network^™

Development And Characterization Of Novel Iii-V Materials For High Efficiency Photovoltaics, Zachary Shible Bittner

Theses

Photovoltaics (PV) are an enabling technology in the field of aerospace, allowing satellites to operate far beyond the technological limitations of chemical batteries by providing a constant power source. However, launch costs and payload volume constraints result in a demand for the highest possible mass and volume specific power generation capability, a proxy for which is device power conversion efficiency. Enhancing the efficiency of III-V PV devices beyond the single-junction Shockley Queisser (SQ) limit has been a driving goal in PV development. Two competing loss mechanisms are thermalization, where photon energy in excess of the absorbing material’s bandgap is lost …

An Application Of Deep-Learning To Understand Human Perception Of Art, Sanjana Kapisthalam

Theses

Eye movement patterns are known to differ when looking at stimuli given a different task, but less is known about how these patterns change as a function of expertise. When a particular visual pattern is viewed, a particular sequence of eye movements are executed and this sequence is defined as scanpath. In this work we made an attempt to answer the question, “Do art novices and experts look at paintings differently?” If they do, we should be able to discriminate between the two groups using machine learning applied to their scanpaths. This can be done using algorithms for Multi-Fixation Pattern …

Equitable Pricing Of Episodes Of Care In A Cluster-Based Bundled Payment System, Bikram P. Singh

Theses

Most of the individuals in the United States are concerned about healthcare affordability and rising healthcare costs. The prevalent healthcare cost reimbursement system, Fee-For-Service (FFS) has been deemed as a key driver for increasing healthcare costs. Bundle payments (BP) has been suggested as an alternative to replace FFS and has shown to reduce the rising healthcare costs. Under BP, the expected set of services involved in treating a diagnosis, or episode of care, is reimbursed by a single payment. We propose a systemic pricing of multiple diagnosis under a Cluster-Based Bundle Payment system (CBBP), where for a given diagnosis, groups …

Exploring The Supply Side Of Food And Beverage Festivals In Saudi Arabia, Mossa Ahmed Haressy

Theses

Recently, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) announced its intention to begin implementing a tourist visa regime to streamline entry of tourists into the country and, therefore, attract more international visitors. Food and Beverage festivals (F&B) are targeted as a crucial part of the events sector in Saudi Arabia as they align well with agricultural traditions and Middle East culture to attract both domestic and foreign tourist. The aim of this study was to explore the characteristics, management, and goals of F&B festivals in Saudi Arabia. F&B event organizers were utilized to collect data regarding seven established F&B festivals that …

Properties Of Mixing Sac Solder Alloys With Bismuth-Containing Solder Alloys For A Low Reflow Temperature Process, Tayler John Swanson

Theses

The subject of extensive research has been the establishing of lower temperature soldering of electronic assemblies that are similar to the once common yet still preferred eutectic Tin-Lead (SnPb) soldering manufacturing processes that are below 217˚C. This research opportunity will contribute data on mixed solder alloy assemblies that can be formed at lower process temperatures. There are many environmental and economic benefits of avoiding the current reliability concerns of assembling electronics at the standard high temperatures which peak at 230˚C 260˚C. To reduce this temperature the use of Bismuth containing solder pastes are mixing with the standard high temperature SAC …

Increasing Revenue By Applying Machine Learning To Congestion Management In Sdn, Nabarun Jana

Theses

With the advent of 5G, IoT and 4k videos, online gaming, movie streaming and other data intensive applications, the demand for data is sky rocketing. Due to this surge in data, the load on the network increases. This heightened network load causes degradation in network performance. Which can lead to the customer Service Provider (CSP)s loosing revenue if the Service Level Agreement (SLA) are not met.

This report describes how machine learning techniques such as tit for tat can be applied to telecom networks. Machine learning applied to telecom networks help detect congestion and maintain SLAs while increasing yield (revenue). …

Automatic Modulation Classification Using Cyclic Features Via Compressed Sensing, Andrew J. Ramsey

Theses

Cognitive Radios (CRs) are designed to operate with minimal interference to the Primary User (PU), the incumbent to a radio spectrum band. To ensure that the interference generated does not exceed a specific level, an estimate of the Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) for the PU’s channel is required. This can be accomplished through determining the modulation scheme in use, as it is directly correlated with the SINR. To this end, an Automatic Modulation Classification (AMC) scheme is developed via cyclic feature detection that is successful even with signal bandwidths that exceed the sampling rate of the CR. …

Transcriptome-Wide Analysis Of Vsv Strains With Varying Ability To Block Nf-Κb, Thomas M. Russell

Theses

Vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) is a negative sense, single-stranded RNA (ssRNA) virus that is currently studied for its uses as a vaccine viral vector and its potential in oncolytic therapy. The M protein of VSV is the active participant in the virus’s abrogation of the host innate immune response. This activity is thought to be due to the M protein’s ability to downregulate overall host transcription by blocking nuclear transport. A VSV mutant containing a D52G mutation in the M protein (22-20) has been shown to block nuclear transport while being defective as a suppressor of NF-κB activation. It is …

A Method For Use Phase Definition As Integrated Into An Object-Oriented Approach To Life Cycle Assessment, Alissa Marie Santucci

Theses

As global environmental concerns increase, industries continue to respond prominently to meeting sustainable practice standards through technological innovations and new business models. However, current sustainability measurement tools, including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), do not provide practitioners with sufficiently standardized methodology, which leads to uncertainty and limited comparability of results. This research develops a systematic Object-Oriented LCA method to define and quantify the consumed life of a product system during the use scenario under analysis. In this method, the Cumulative Damage Function (CDF) quantifies the consumed life of a product by using inputs of total efficiency or damage, scaling parameters and …

Eazytrack: Exploring Next-Gen Technology And User Experience Design To Help Relieve Stress, Kaiyi Dong

Theses

In this competitive society with the pace of people’s life speeding up, stress is inevitable. Too much stress though will bring negative effects on people’s physical and emotional wellbeing. According to a survey the American Psychological Association conducted from 2007 to 2016, very few actions are being taken to prevent or relieve stress effectively even though an increasing number of people have realized that stress has an impact on health and wellbeing.¹ Untreated chronic stress can contribute to severe health problems including anxiety, insomnia, muscle pain, high blood pressure, and a weakened immune system.² Today, there are many stress trackers …

Automatic Trellis Generation For Demodulation Of Faster Than Nyquist Signals, Deepan Govindaraj

Theses

Mobile communication has become one of the most important and fast developing technology in the past couple of decades. Future of telecommunication raises a high demand for higher data rate and system capacity. There are plenty of researches taking place across the world to provide a better service. One such research is Faster than Nyquist signaling and it has grabbed the attention of many researchers in the recent past. In digital communication implemented using Nyquist pulses, the pulse rate is upper-bounded by twice the channel bandwidth. Signaling above this rate results in the loss of pulse orthogonality and introduces ISI. …

Poly(Lactic Acid) (Pla), Poly(-Caprolactone) (Pcl) And Thermoplastic Starch (Tps) Blends For Compostable Packaging Applications, Rui Wang

Theses

The increasing severe plastic issue has brought the biodegradable polymers into the top researching field. The various bioplastics become a promising way to reduce the solid waste and boost the sustainable development of the world. This study focused on the performance of ternary blend of PLA, PCL and TPS. All these three materials are playing an essential role in the bioplastic industry due to their outstanding properties and 100% biodegradable. However, the drawbacks of each material limited its application in packaging. This study aimed to overcome the shortcomings by blending PLA, PCL and TPS in an optimal composition, and proper …

Vr Interactive Prototype: The Future Wardrobe. Explore Vr Interaction Design For The Sense Of Presence Enhancement Through An Immersive Vr Installation, Jing Lyu

Theses

Virtual Reality (VR) is a new platform that provides the public with an immersive experience in a virtual space. With the development and promotion of VR hardware devices, virtual reality technology is applied in various industries such as the advertising of products, traveling, game, art, therapy, education and many others. Unlike media such as videos and pictures, VR applications allow users to interact with content instead of only watching. Beyond the novelty of the technology, for a meaningful immersive experience, VR interaction design and visual design must work together to place the user in a natural and comfortable state. The …

Sense - Recommendation System Based On Affective Interpretations Of Social Media Posts: A Proposed User Interface Design, Zheng Zhang

Theses

It is now easier and cheaper for people to get involved in technology, and most people are obtaining or receiving tons of information nowadays, such as recommendations. Different recommendations are filled with our devices like smartphones, tablets or even wearable devices. However, most searches and recommendation systems fail to take into consideration the emotional context related to a user’s input and action, and as a consequence, people can hardly receive personalized, emotion-related, user-based recommendations. Though people are given various choices about lives based on searches and saved data, those recommendations can hardly improve the stress and difficulties of accomplishing daily …

Predictive Models In Brain Connectivity Analysis, Guenadie Nibbs

Theses

Neuroscience have been the field with most significant contributions to the study of the human brain. The development of new techniques for image acquisition has made possible the improvement of extracting quality information of brain activity. Utilizing functional MRIs, is possible to measure brain activity based on changes of the oxygen level in the blood at certain period of time. This imaging data is transformed into numerical values using a software that maps all the information into a data object. Taking advantage of the availability of functional connectivity information of the human brain, the present study shows a widespread process …

Try To Remember Breath, Rita Chapman

Theses

A collection of original poems.

Residents' Attitudes Toward A Proposed Tourism Development In Jeddah City In Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Basendwah

Theses

Residents agreement toward tourism development is crucial for the tourism industry to succeed. In 2013, the Saudi Arabia government formed the 2030 vision, which aims to invest in tourism and minimize the exporting of oil as a source of income. Many tourism investments in Saudi Arabia have begun specifically in the city of Jeddah. The purpose of this study is to identify the residents’ perception toward the proposed tourism development in Jeddah. Unlike most of the study, the residents’ perception will be measured before the tourism development plan takes a place.

Lone: An Interactive Mobile Application Introducing An Authentic Shopping Experience. Discover Joys Of The World, Experience Authentic Shopping., Xi He

Theses

LONE is an interactive mobile application, which introduces an authentic international shopping experience, helps customers to buy authentic products from a small store in another country. Based on the survey of usage of cross-border e-commerce in selected countries done by United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and Statista, today’s customers have higher demands on traveling and purchasing authentic products from overseas ever than before. Since the majority of them don’t have the time or budget of going around the world, people buying authentic items from other places become one of the sources for people to get to understand about …

Modeling And Extraction Of Transport Parameters To Simulate Drug Delivery In The Murine Cochlea, Kevin Wilson

Theses

The usage of 1D and 3D models to simulate drug transport through the inner ear is a prominent method in cochlear fluid pharmacokinetics. However, the data used to create these models, is often based on invasive sampling methods that limit the spatial resolution given the size of the cochlear compartments within which solute can be measured. In this work by leveraging 3-D registered micro-Computed Tomography (μCT) scans of the murine cochlea that have been taken as iodinated contrast agent is delivered to it, we extract transport parameters and simulate a forward 1D model that allows variable and pulsatile delivery profiles …

Statistical Aspects Of Music Mining: Naive Dictionary Representation, Qiuyi Wu

Theses

Extensive studies have been conducted on both musical scores and audio tracks of western classical music with the finality of learning and detecting the key in which a particular piece of music was played. Both the Bayesian Approach and modern unsupervised learning via latent Dirichlet allocation have been used for such learning tasks. In this research work, we propose and develop the novel idea of treating musical sheets as literary documents in the traditional text analytics parlance, to fully benefit from the vast amount of research already existing in statistical text mining and topic modeling.

We specifically introduce the idea …

Id: An Animation With An Environment About The Ego And The Id, Huangzhi Tang

Theses

When people discover their inner worlds, they would feel different psyches inside. According to the human psyche conception of Sigmund Freud, there are three kinds of psyches in human minds. They are the id, ego, and super-ego, representing instinct, reality, and morality.

What is worth noticing is the relationship between the ego and id. While the ego is the part people know most because it is generally conscious, the id is the most mysterious, because it is enormous and completely subconscious. Also, they talk because the ego is a

mediator between the id and the real world. However, while the …

Atmosphere Of An Explosion, Sarah Kinard

Theses

The thesis work explores the impact of an abusive environment and in what ways that abuse influences and directs an individual's state of mind. My creative exploration comes from my intimate, personal childhood memories and experiences. Working through the influences that the cycle of trauma creates, led me to the use of a variety of materials to focus in a singular voice in this body of work. I developed a symbolic and emotive visual vocabulary that speaks about how I have been shaped both spiritually and emotionally, through my exposure and my journey of self-healing. I will discuss in this …

Multi-Modal Deep Learning To Understand Vision And Language, Shagan Sah

Theses

Developing intelligent agents that can perceive and understand the rich visual world around us has been a long-standing goal in the field of artificial intelligence. In the last few years, significant progress has been made towards this goal and deep learning has been attributed to recent incredible advances in general visual and language understanding. Convolutional neural networks have been used to learn image representations while recurrent neural networks have demonstrated the ability to generate text from visual stimuli. In this thesis, we develop methods and techniques using hybrid convolutional and recurrent neural network architectures that connect visual data and natural …

Bad Droid! An In-Depth Empirical Study On The Occurrence And Impact Of Android Specific Code Smells, Khalid Saeed Almalki

Theses

Knowing the impact of bad programming practices or code smells has led researchers to conduct numerous studies in software maintenance. Most of the studies have defined code smells as bad practices that may affect the quality of the software. However, most of the existing research is heavily focused on detecting traditional code smells and less focused on mobile application specific Android code smells. Presently, there is a few papers that focus on android code smells - a catalog for Android code smells. This catalog defines 30 Android specific code smell that may impact maintainability of an app. In this research, …

Research & Development Of A Sensory Exploration System, Surabhi Vijay Rajandekar

Theses

Learning Disabilities affect individuals in all age groups and affect how one comprehends the information they receive. Individuals with learning disabilities are often distracted by their surroundings and face difficulties to follow paths in surroundings. Learning disabilities can be addressed with proper support, feedback, and assistive technology. Schools provide children a favorable environment to learn and can support overcoming such difficulties with the help of different activities. This paper discusses the design of a sensory exploration system for individuals with Autism Spectrum to help them learn how to follow paths and not get distracted. The sensory exploration system is called …

The Transition Of The College Quarterback To The Nfl: Why The Hardest Position In Sports Is Getting Easier, Derik Abbott

Theses

The NFL is changing. Score boards are being lit up by young quarterbacks like never seen before. Rookie quarterbacks are playing like 10 year veterans. Offenses are playing at light speed paces. But why? This Thesis paper looks to uncover why college quarterbacks are playing at MVP caliber levels at such a young age. With research in multiple fields such as analytics, neuroscience, youth football developmental leagues and artificial intelligence,, this paper seeks to determine the relationship between what strategies front offices and coaching staffs are using and the high success rate of young quarterbacks in the National Football League. …

The Photometric Effect Of Macroscopic Surface Roughness On Sediment Surfaces, Greg Badura

Theses

The focus of this work was on explaining the effect of macroscopic surface roughness on the reflected light from a soil surface. These questions extend from deciding how to best describe roughness mathematically, to figuring out how to quantify its effect on the spectral reflectance from a soil’s surface. In this document, I provide a background of the fundamental literature in the fields of remote sensing and computer vision that have been instrumental in my research. I then outline the software and hardware tools that I have developed to quantify roughness. This includes a detailed outline of a custom "LiDAR" …

Amelia: An Animated Short Film About Giving And Receiving Help, Emma Yun-Chieh Hsieh

Theses

Amelia is an animated short film that expresses a personal journey of finding the importance of the balance between giving and receiving. “Giving is better than taking” is a common concept people are taught since young age in Asian culture; however, if there is no common ground in giving and receiving the positive notion of helping others can become negative for the giver.

There are several elements in the film indicate that life is an infinite journey of self-improvement. Amelia starts and ends at the same place, with different quotes, while her mental state changes along with her energy. Sunrise …

Art Museums And Early Childhood: Enhanced Interactions For Young Audiences In Art Museums, Evgenia Tranevskaya

Theses

Muse House is an engaging experience for young audiences in art museums.

This project was conceived as an appealing and creative way to attract families with little children to art museums and galleries, for the reason that these places are not parent’s first-choice of leisure time with their children. Children 3–6 years old tend to explore the environment using all their senses, but in art museums, there is hardly anything they can touch. The content in art museums is usually not meant for the young audiences, and children easily get bored and tired. If tangible objects and age-appropriate activities are …

Chinese Ornaments Of The Imperial Robe: A Modern Motif Design Interpretation, Xiaoya Shen

Theses

“Twelve Ornaments” are a group of ancient Chinese symbols and designs that are considered highly auspicious. In ancient China, because they signified authority and power, they were employed in the decoration of textile fabrics, and were embroidered on vestments of state, such as the Imperial Robe. They are the patterns that could represent the essence of Chinese traditional national dress.

This thesis project is based on the analysis, research and summarization of this design history as well as the establishment of effective visual design solutions intended to transform the twelve ornaments into modern motif designs. The design will retain the …