Digital Commons Network^™

Confronting Barriers To Human-Robot Cooperation: Balancing Efficiency And Risk In Machine Behavior, Tim Whiting

Theses and Dissertations

In strategically rich settings in which machines and people do not fully share the same preferences, machines must learn to cooperate and compromise with people to establish mutually successful relationships. However, designing machines that effectively cooperate with people in these settings is difficult due to a variety of technical and psychological challenges. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a series of user studies in which we investigated human-human, robot-robot, and human-robot cooperation in a simple, yet strategically rich, resource-sharing scenario called the Block Dilemma, a game in which players must balance fairness, efficiency, and risk. While both human-human and …

The Resistance Of The Hondureña: Bridging Literary Graveyards Through A Postcolonial-Ecofeminist Approach, Anna Linnea Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the socio-cultural aspects of two geo-political zones in Honduras; its northeast coastal areas, focusing on the Afro-Indigenous Garífuna women, and its mainland, focusing on Indigenous/mestizo women. These two areas will be explored as they pertain to themes of gender and ecology. This will be accomplished by pulling from Neelam Jabeen’s Postcolonial-Ecofeminist lens. Through this lens, the focus of my research lies within the geopolitical zones of both coastal and mainland Honduras. The focus is placed on the relationship of women and the environments that surround them, which are placed in danger by neoliberal structures both domestically and …

Ani-Kitu Hwagi Center Places: A Study Of Survivance, Tyler Michael Mantia

Theses and Dissertations

Ani-Kitu Hwagi (Cherokee) settlements across the Southeastern United States have been intensively studied to evaluate how social dynamics, gender roles, and economic disruption came to impact levels of stability and variability within both domestic and public structures or spaces during the seventeenth to eighteenth century. Some studies characterize this period by using the term “Shatter Zone” to describe a historical model for the US Southeast that emphasizes a landscape of disruption characterized by population displacement, widespread disease, increased levels of slavery, and economic disruption. I reorient analyses of archaeological evidence of this timeframe in terms of center places, a conceptual …

Characterization Of Adaptations That Confer Increased Resistance To High Salinity In Brine Shrimp, Jasmine Hatcher-Moorman

Theses and Dissertations

Brine shrimp (Artemia salina) are osmoregulators that survive in ~4.5 M salt. Osmoregulating organs in brine shrimp are predicted to mimic a mechanism of osmoregulation in teleost fish involving NKA, NKCC, CFTR-like Cl- channels, and sodium-specific transport through tight paracelleular tight junctions in gut and gill epithelia. Pharmocological studies of low and high salt adapted brine shrimp show that key transporters involved in teleost fish osmoregulation are also vital to brine shrimp survival in hypersaline environments. Artemia express two Na/K pump isozymes formed by different α-submits associating with a common β-subunit. A “normal” α-subunit (α1NN) or a special α-subunit (α2KK) …

Behavioral And Physiological Effects Of Heavy Metals On Fish: A Review And Preliminary Results, Diana V. Morales

Theses and Dissertations

Pollution, specifically heavy metal pollution, in various bodies of water has been a significant issue for decades. Research has been conducted on heavy metals and their effects on the environment, larger fish species, and humans since the 1970s (Skidmore, 1964; Adeniyi et al., 2007; Adeosun et al., 2015; Bawuro et al., 2018). It is known that zinc is a neurotoxin in some species and causes harm to the environment. It is also known that it causes harm to people if it is ingested or if they are exposed to it for long periods of time (Mahurpawar, 2015; Mizuno and Kawahara, …

Imaginary Landscapes, Richard Oliver Reed

Theses and Dissertations

Worldbuilding is a common practice that informs and enriches our everyday experience. My practice of worldbuilding investigates the conception of an interior landscape. Through my cultural and material influences I construct spaces that highlight imagination and escapism. These overlooked practices serve an important mediative function in our lives. In a digital world where our play spaces and workspaces overlap it becomes harder to distinguish between them. How do we differentiate the real from the unreal? Perhaps the distinction isn’t as clear as it seems.

Improving Capture Methods For Neonate Ungulates, Matthew T. Turnley

Theses and Dissertations

The capture of neonate ungulates has played an integral role in studies of habitat selection, phenology, survival, and other topics of ecological interest. However, neonates can be difficult for researchers to locate and capture. Neonate ungulates are born in habitats with reduced visibility, frequently spend time in a concealed, prone position, and may display cryptic coloration. In an attempt to improve researchers' likelihood of locating and capturing neonate ungulates, multiple capture methods have been developed. Much remains unknown about biases associated with capture methods and how to further improve capture methods once biases are understood. Our objectives were to determine …

Plasticity In Female Incubation Behaviour Mitigates Effects Of Experimentally Increased Nestbox Temperature On House Wren Nestling Growth And Survival, Paige Anne Farchmin

Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, temperatures have increased globally, and by different amounts locally. As local climates change and temperatures increase, nestlings from a variety of bird species are exposed to the threat of increased oxidative stress, producing adverse effects on growth and survival of offspring. One defence against oxidative stress is to increase the dietary intake of antioxidants. I tested the hypothesis that experimental heating of house wren nests during the incubation period leads to increased oxidative stress in offspring. I predicted that experimental heating of nests would lead to decreased growth and survival of young, but that these negative effects …

A Meta-Analytic Comparison Of Protein Hydrolysate And Intact Protein Effects On Postexercise Plasma Insulin And Glucagon Responses In Healthy, Trained Males, Tzu-Yu Kuo

Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: To conduct a meta-analysis to evaluate how protein hydrolysate and carbohydrate (CHO) mixtures compare with intact protein CHO mixtures in regards to post-exercise plasma insulin and glucagon responses in healthy endurance trained male participants. Methods: Studies were identified via the online databases PubMed, Google scholar, Cochrane, and MDPI. Investigations that measured insulin and/or glucagon via needle biopsy during recovery (with the first measurement taken ≤ 30 min post-exercise) following a standardized exercise bout (any type) with the ingestion of carbohydrate only vs. carbohydrate and protein (pro) were included in this meta-analysis. Random-effects meta-analyses (CHO+pro vs. CHO only) and subgroup …

Gone With The Soul, Japheth Asiedu-Kwarteng

Theses and Dissertations

The artworks presented in this statement are my visual vocabulary discussing the experiences of the diaspora. They discuss how people of the diaspora, especially the Ghanaian/African diaspora, negotiates spaces away from their homeland. On the other hand, they discuss the “diasporan’s” experiences of being a stranger in their homeland during a visit after a long stay away. Premised on being in the diaspora without my young family, I discuss my experiences of separation, belonging, fear, anxiety, perception, pain, stress, nostalgia, confusion, acceptance, rejection, and other complexities of living a dual life and having a transnational identity.

Native American Women's Standpoint: Narratives About Identity, Kaitlyn Nicole Sullivan

Theses and Dissertations

The present study explored the lived experiences of Native American women and possible reasons why they perceive themselves in the way that they do. Female participants (N=10) were asked to share about their lives for approximately an hour each. Participants were encouraged to discuss their Native American heritage as well as their opinions on Media. Participants' views on media were varied. However, many participants felt that they were more connected to the earth than their White counterparts were As many Native American women have grown up living in a White-dominant world, this may affect how they perceive themselves.

KEYWORDS: Native …

Understanding The Pathogenesis Of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Using A Caenorhabditis Elegans Model, Kiley Hughes

Theses and Dissertations

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is an x-linked degenerative disease that affects one out of every 3,500 males. This disease is produced by loss of function mutations in the dystrophin gene that results in the absence of the dystrophin protein from muscles and other tissues. Loss of dystrophin leads to progressive muscle weakness, loss of ambulation, and premature death. At the cellular level, patients present with increased sarcoplasmic calcium, loss of sarcomeric integrity, and mitochondrial damage. There is no cure for DMD. Understanding the progression of the disease and developing effective treatments has been hampered by lack of animal models able …

Thermal And Hormonal Effects On Gene Expression And Development In The Red-Eared Slider Turtle, Rosario A. Marroquin-Flores

Theses and Dissertations

Sex determination refers to the process by which cues from genes (genotypic sex determination) or environmental conditions (environmental sex determination) trigger bipotential gonads to develop into either ovaries or testes. Temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD) is a well-studied form of environmental sex determination in reptiles. The red-eared slider turtle (Trachemys scripta elegans) exhibits a form of TSD where cool incubation temperatures produce males and warm incubation temperatures produce females. In species with TSD, gonadal differentiation is regulated by network of genes and hormones that induce male or female development. TSD is most frequently studied in the laboratory using constant male and …

The Application Of Virtual Reality In Firefighting Training, Dylan A. Gagnon

Theses and Dissertations

Immersive simulations such as virtual reality is becoming more prevalent for use in training environments for many professions. United States Air Force firefighters may benefit from incorporating VR technology into their training program to increase organizational commitment, job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and job performance. With implementing a new training platform, it is also important to understand the relationship between these variables and the perceived benefits and efficacy of the VR training, which has not yet been studied in previous research. This study addresses this issue by gathering data from fire departments currently fielding a VR fire training platform.

Military Personnel Flight Customer Wait Time Reduction Model Using Simulation, Nicholas C. Anderson

Theses and Dissertations

Customers at Military Personnel Flights (MPFs) have been experiencing long wait times. These customers are typically employees of the United States Air Force and every moment spent waiting for service is a moment they are away from their actual jobs. By reducing the mean wait time of MPF customers, manhours can be saved and customer complaints may be alleviated. This research uses data collected from an MPF to build a discrete-event simulation model of an MPF. A full factorial experimental design was conducted in the model using five factors. The factors included the total number of employees, the total number …

A Decision Support Simulation To Analyze Scheduling Alternatives For Applicant Processing At Military Entrance Processing Stations (Meps), Jonathan M. Escamilla

Theses and Dissertations

Applicant processing at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS) is conducted via a batch arrival process by which all applicants arrive at the beginning of the processing day. Pursuit of alternate processing scenarios has never progressed beyond the pilot stage, possibly because the Command lacks a general decision support model to evaluate the impacts of proposed policies on applicant processing operations. This research creates a discrete event simulation of MEPS applicant processing operations and applies the model to three alternative applicant processing scenarios: split-shift, appointment- based, and express-lane. Results are examined and compared to benchmarks using multiple performance measurements.

Narrative Analysis Of Open-Source Social Media Activity In The Indopacom Aor, Aaron K. Glenn

Theses and Dissertations

Emotion classification can be a powerful tool to derive narratives from social media data. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) can meet or exceed the performance of state-of-the-art traditional machine learning techniques using exclusively open-source data and models. Specifically, these results show that RNN variants can produce more than an 8% gain in accuracy in comparison to Logistic Regression and SVM techniques and a 15% gain over Random Forest when using FastText embeddings. This research found a statistical significance in the performance of a single layer Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) model over a 2-layer stacked Bi-LSTM model. This research also found …

Improving Anonymized Search Relevance With Natural Language Processing And Machine Learning, Niko A. Petrocelli

Theses and Dissertations

Users often sacrifice personal data for more relevant search results, presenting a problem to communities that desire both search anonymity and relevant results. To balance these priorities, this research examines the impact of using Siamese networks to extend word embeddings into document embeddings and detect similarities between documents. The predicted similarity can locally re-rank search results provided from various sources. This technique is leveraged to limit the amount of information collected from a user by a search engine. A prototype is produced by applying the methodology in a real-world search environment. The prototype yielded an additional function of finding new …

Relative Magnetic Position And Rotation Sensor Assisted Dual-Foot Pedestrian Dead Reckoning, Jenario Y. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

The use of wearable foot-based inertial measurement units (IMUs) incorporated in a navigation system can address the problem of single-person location tracking in situations and environments where GPS signals may be unavailable or inconsistent. This Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) approach enables standalone personal tracking. A notable solution involves using inertial measurement units (IMUs) in a filter to apply zero-velocity updates to a Kalman filter to get a position solution. This paper continues on the path of the former method by investigating the feasibility of PDR using a pair of low cost IMUs along with a pair of relative position and …

Automated Aircraft Visual Inspection With Artificial Data Generation Enabled Deep Learning, Nathan J. Gaul

Theses and Dissertations

Aircraft visual inspection, which is essential to daily maintenance of an aircraft, is expensive and time-consuming to perform. Augmenting trained maintenance technicians with automated UAVs to collect and analyze images for aircraft inspection is an active research topic and a potential application of CNNs. Training datasets for niche research topics such as aircraft visual inspection are small and challenging to produce, and the manual process of labeling these datasets often produces subjective annotations. Recently, researchers have produced several successful applications of artificially generated datasets with domain randomization for training CNNs for real-world computer vision problems. The research outlined herein builds …

Predicting Tf33-Pw-100a Engine Failures Due To Oil Issues Using Survival Analyses, Anna M. Davis

Theses and Dissertations

In 2007, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment pushed for the need to transition to a Condition Based Maintenance Plus (CBM ) initiative for weapon systems in the U.S. Department of Defense. The CBM initiative can help increase aircraft availability (AA) for the United States Air Force. There are many reasons where AA can be affected but one such issue is engine availability primarily due to oil issues. Within the CBM perspective, this study examines the risk of a jet engine failure due to an oil issue and attempts to predict an engines time until next …

Development Of A Methodology For The Quantification Of Reaerosolization Of A Biological Contaminant Surrogate Particle From Military Uniform Fabric, George D. Cooksey

Theses and Dissertations

During a mass casualty medical evacuation after a bioaerosol attack, a decontamination method is needed that is effective at both decontamination and preventing the secondary hazard of biological particles reaerosolizing from contaminated clothing. However, neither the efficacy of current decontamination methods nor the risk of biological particle reaerosolization is significantly explored in existing literature. The goals of this thesis were to develop a repeatable methodology to quantify the reaerosolization of a biological contaminate off Airman Battle Uniform (ABU) fabric swatches, and to test the efficacy of one decontamination method (high-volume, low-pressure water) using 1 mpolystyrene latex (PSL) spheres as a …

A Scientometric Analysis Of Smart Sensors In Facility Management And Applications In Air Force Operations, Joseph-Thomas H. Lehotsky

Theses and Dissertations

To investigate the areas which smart sensors can be implemented to assist facility managers to optimize limited resources, this research consists of a scientometric analysis to identify the areas of research quantitatively and qualitatively. Existing literature related to smart sensors in facility management operations were compiled and trends were analyzed to determine the ways in which researchers have been applying this technology. The title, abstracts, and keyword were used to perform frequency, networking, and clustering analysis. This research effort serves to provide ways in which Air Force installations can implement smart sensors in a way which fulfills the initiatives posed …

Analysis Of Generalized Artificial Intelligence Potential Through Reinforcement And Deep Reinforcement Learning Approaches, Jonathan Turner

Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence is the next competitive domain; the first nation to develop human level artificial intelligence will have an impact similar to the development of the atomic bomb. To maintain the security of the United States and her people, the Department of Defense has funded research into the development of artificial intelligence and its applications. This research uses reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning methods as proxies for current and future artificial intelligence agents and to assess potential issues in development. Agent performance were compared across two games and one excursion: Cargo Loading, Tower of Hanoi, and Knapsack Problem, respectively. …

Global Sporadic-E Climatological Analysis Using Gps Radio Occultation And Ionosonde Data, Travis J. Hodos

Theses and Dissertations

A climatology of sporadic-E (Es) derived from a combined data set of GPS radio occultation (GPS-RO) and ground-based ionosonde soundings is presented for the period from September 2006 to February 2019. The ionosonde soundings were measured using the Lowell Digisonde International (LDI) Global Ionosphere Radio Observatory (GIRO) network consisting of 65 sites and 13,141,060 total soundings. The GPS-RO observations were taken aboard the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) satellites and processed using two binary Es detection algorithms, totaling 9,072,922 occultations. The first algorithm is an S4 amplitude threshold calibrated to the occurrence of any blanketing Es …

God, Me, And Thee: Associations Between Religion, Sexuality, And Marital Connection, Rebecca Walker Clarke

Theses and Dissertations

There is a well-established and positive association between religiosity and marital satisfaction. What is less clear is the effect of religiosity on marital sexual outcomes, with research findings that have run the gamut from negative to positive. Given that most religions teach that marriage is the divinely appointed context for a sexual relationship, religious persons who are married and in sexual relationships could have a different experience with sex than those who are not in a marital sexual relationship. Although the majority of the population in the United States is religious, sex in religious marriages has received scant research attention. …

Taxonomic And Phylogenetic Diversity Of Pitcher Plant Bogs In Georgia's Coastal Plain, Melanie Flood

Theses and Dissertations

Diversity studies via floristic survey and taxonomic metrics have proven essential for discerning community composition and biodiversity, however, phylogenetic analyses are necessary to reveal underlying evolutionary change and potential community assembly patterns. Pitcher plant bogs are highly diverse, highly understudied habitats that contain numerous listed and at-risk plant and animal species of Georgia.

In this study I investigated the taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of pitcher plant bogs by asking the following questions:

1) What is the taxonomic diversity of pitcher plant bogs,

2) What is the dispersion of phylogenetic diversity within bog habitats, and

3) Does taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity …

Cobalt Ferrite Nano-Composites For The Oxidation Of Phenols In Oil Refinery Wastewater, Amira Mohamed

Theses and Dissertations

Phenolic compounds have the tendency to persist in the environment over a long period making them a main source of concern because of their toxic characteristics towards humans and animals (Bruce et al., 1987). Therefore, existence of phenolic compounds in aquatic environment is unfavourable and as a result, many treatment techniques have been implemented to treat the wastewater produced from petroleum refineries. Petroleum refineries are among the top industries that produces significant quantities of high phenol concentration wastewater. Photo-catalysis is a promising and effective method to treat phenol present in oil refineries effluent. In this study, the photo-catalyst used is …

An Other Word For It Is Us, Aca Carle

Theses and Dissertations

I am contemplating language and animacy; their enmeshment with each other and their connective fibers between beings. My art follows from the belief that animacy is inherent in matter and that language is inherent in animacy.

“Only by affirming the animateness of perceived things do we allow our words to emerge directly from the depths of our ongoing reciprocity with the world.” (Abramb 56)

Investigating How Ecologically Relevant Thermal Conditions Affect Gonadal Development In A Turtle With Temperature-Dependent Sex Determination, Anthony Trey Breitenbach

Theses and Dissertations

In turtles and numerous other reptilian species, sex is determined by the environmental temperatures during embryonic development, which is referred to temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). In the type of TSD common in turtles, cool temperatures (below 29 °C) during embryonic development produce mainly males while warm temperatures (above 29 °C) produce mainly females. Gonadal differentiation in TSD species involves numerous genes that are also necessary to produce a testis or ovary in species with genotypic sex determination. However, most of what we know about TSD comes from studies performed in the laboratory using constant temperature incubation conditions, which are not …