Digital Commons Network^™

The Role Of Spontaneous Activity In Maturation Of The Calyx Of Held Nerve Terminal And Its Synaptic Target In The Medial Nucleus Of The Trapezoid Body, Daniel Tatsuo Heller

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neural circuit formation is a complex process involving synergistic roles between neurons and glial cells regulated by coordinated genetic and molecular cues and activity-dependent mechanisms. The canonical pathway for synapse formation begins with neurogenesis and migration followed by axonal outgrowth and dendritic arborization allowing for the capture and formation of nascent synapses. These initial synaptic contacts are exuberant in nature ensuring proper neural connectivity and undergo a period of pruning of superfluous inputs followed by maturation and strengthening of the remaining contacts. This maturation includes pre- and postsynaptic specialization of the active zone, localization and clustering of ion channels, and …

The Role Of L-Fucose In Dendritic Cell Antigen Presentation And Polarization, Chase J. Burton

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the FDA approval of IL-2 in cancer treatment in the 1980s, immunotherapy has emerged as the standard of care for several tumor types (e.g., melanoma, lung, bladder, colorectal). However, approximately 70 percent of cancer patients, independent of prior treatment or staging, administered immunotherapy will not achieve complete responses and will exhibit disease progression. Several factors have been identified to contribute to treatment failure, including the accumulation of intratumoral immunosuppressive cell populations, insufficient tumor-infiltrating anti-tumor immune populations, or the occurrence of immunoediting on tumor cells. Current strategies to circumvent immunosuppression either lack durable response to new immunosuppressive mechanisms the tumor …

Enhancing The Performance Of Interdependent Stormwater Drainage And Roadway Systems Under Future Conditions, Chao Ye

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Flooding can cause extensive and devastating damage to human properties, including damage to homes, businesses, infrastructure systems, and personal belongings and it has become a threatening challenge during the past decades due to the massive damage brought to communities, infrastructures, and ecosystems. As climate change intensifies, the frequency and severity of flooding issues are expected to increase, exacerbating the existing flooding risks for vulnerable communities. Various approaches of modeling, optimizing, and designing for multiple levels of flooding problems have been adopted to deal with flooding control studies and research to alleviate the flooding risks on multiple levels of communities. This …

Learning Resilience: Veterans Of Color Learning Positive Coping Strategies., William Carpenter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore how veterans of color learned positive coping strategies to endure the challenges experienced during their transition from active duty. There has been limited research examining the veterans’ of color experiences during their transition from active duty military. The research questions focused on how veterans of color were learning to adjust and cope in response to the adverse experiences they encountered during their transition. The theoretical framework used for this investigation was a combination of Mezirow’s transformative learning theory and adult learning theory.

For this study, seven Black Post 9/11 veterans of African …

Advances In Model Reference Adaptive Control: Exploring Gain Scheduling, Scalability, And Time-Varying Command Following, Jesse Jaramillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Feedback control architectures are fundamental for achieving a desired response in physical systems. A robust and reliable design must account for system uncertainties and exogenous disturbances, which may arise from phenomena such as modeling approximations, nonlinearities, degraded modes of operations, wind gusts, or structural impairments. Two widely recognized methods to mitigate the negative impact of uncertainties and disturbances are robust and adaptive control architectures. Specifically, robust control designs ensure stability by considering a worst-case scenario, which can potentially lead to suboptimal performance or steady-state errors depending on the nature of the uncertainty. In contrast, adaptive control designs offer the capability …

Photodegradation And Microencapsulation Of Organic Thermochromic Material For Application As Building Coating Envelope, Sushant Madhukar Nagare

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Due to exponential urbanization, residential building electrical loads have increased over the past decades. Also, deforestation has led to increased urban heat island effects, due to which summer has been scorching and winter has become freezing. This further increases the load on generation due to the extensive use of heating and cooling systems. New techniques, such as cool building materials and green building concepts, compensate for the load. The building can be coated with a material that has heat reflectivity capability for summer and heat-trapping capability for winter. One such material is thermochromic, which turns white upon heating and black …

From Graph Theory For Robust Deep Networks To Graph Learning For Multimodal Cancer Analysis, Asim Waqas

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intersection of graph theory and deep learning, focusing on enhancing the robustness of deep neural networks (DNNs) and applying these advancements to complex problems like cancer diagnosis and treatment. We investigate the structural properties of graphs and their influence on neural network performance, particularly in multimodal learning. The work delves into the design space of DNN architectures using graph-theoretic measures, transforming graphs into DNN architectures for various tasks, and examining their robustness against noise and adversarial attacks. The study extends to medical imaging, highlighting advanced DNN architectures like U-Net for brain tumor segmentation. It addresses the …

Investigation Of The Use Of Recycled Concrete Aggregates In Porous Asphalt Mixture, Asad Elmagarhe

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to address the national need for using recycled concrete in road pavements. This is especially important in the governmental and corporate sectors, where reducing the cost and carbon footprint of construction projects is a priority. The long-term goal is to meet the public demand for environmentally friendly infrastructure and minimize the harmful effects of waste disposal on humans and the environment.

The project focuses on using recycled concrete aggregate (RCA) in porous asphalt pavement to reduce stormwater runoff, a popular environmentally friendly road design. However, compared to regular dense asphalt mixtures, porous asphalt mixtures (PAM) are more …

Evaluation Practices In National Science Foundation Research Experiences For Undergraduates Programs, Aly Busse

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to assess and describe the status of program evaluation within the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites. The National Science Foundation's REU program supports thousands of undergraduates annually in hands-on, immersive research experiences under the mentorship of science professionals. To date, there is a lack of published or accessible evaluation results from these REU programs and it is unknown what evaluation approaches are being used in the REU programs, how they are designed and implemented, how evaluation findings are utilized, and what barriers to evaluation activities exist. A self-administered electronic …

Gender Role Depictions In Arabic Children’S Picture Books, Aljawharah A. Almuqbil

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to explore gender role depictions in children's Arabic picture books. The importance of this study emerged from its focus on young children, where the concept of gender begins to be constructed. This study provided insight into the nature of gender roles in children’s picture books, especially under the remarkable changes that Saudi society is witnessing and the lack of Arab studies in this area. Social cognitive theory, gender schema theory, and critical literacy pedagogy guided the study. A sample of 26 picture books was selected from the Child Book Club at King Abdulaziz Public Library and analyzed …

Economic Planning And Operation Of Ev Charging Infrastructure Participating In Electric Power Markets, Diwas Paudel

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming more common, there are not enough charging infrastructures to keep up with the projected EV charging demands. This necessitates investment from private enterprises in the charging infrastructure, along with additional government investments, to support the expected EV growth. The profit potential of the EV charging business will be crucial in attracting private enterprises to invest in the infrastructure. The profitability of these infrastructures depends on their location and effective operation. The charging infrastructure needs to be strategically placed and sized in the service area of interest. Once built, they need a robust strategy to …

Optimizing Cybersecurity Operations Using Data-Driven Intelligence, Jalal Ghadermazi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity operations centers (CSOCs) play a crucial role in safeguarding organizations from cyber threats. CSOC operations are divided into two main areas: Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and security response team (SRT) operations. Machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) advancements have significantly improved IDSs. IDS can be either flow-based, suitable for offline analysis, or packet-based, which analyze traffic in real-time. However, packet-based IDS often treat packets independently, ignoring the sequential nature of network communication. Additionally, recent ML/DL approaches also struggle with capturing global and structural information and novel attack detection due to their reliance on labeled data. The SRT within …

Transforming Organizational Cyber Security With Artificial Intelligence And Data-Driven Optimization, Soumyadeep Hore

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a comprehensive framework for enhancing organizational cybersecurity through data-driven intelligence. The research integrates multiple methodologies to tackle challenges in network intrusion detection and vulnerability management within cybersecurity operations centers (CSOCs). First, the research investigates vulnerability prioritization and mitigation techniques currently employed by CSOCs. To further streamline the vulnerability prioritization and mitigation process a machine learning (ML)-based Vulnerability Priority Scoring System (VPSS) is introduced, significantly improving the prioritization and mitigation of context-sensitive vulnerabilities. The VPSS outperforms traditional methods, reducing the cumulative vulnerability exposure score by up to 30% by considering both organizational context and vulnerability severity. Next, the …

A Robust Data-Driven Framework For Artificial Intelligent Systems, Quoc H. Nguyen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated remarkable performance across various domains. However, their robustness remains a critical concern, particularly in terms of data and model reliability. This dissertation aims to address the challenges associated with building robust AI systems by focusing on two key aspects: data robustness and model robustness. Data robustness poses significant challenges, including data shift, concept shifting, limited and imbalanced datasets, and interoperability issues in IoT systems for data collection. Existing methods fall short in handling dynamic business objectives and evolving data landscapes effectively. To bridge these gaps, we propose an IoT framework that ensures interoperability, seamless …

Black Holes In Time: The Effect Of Grid Radiation On The Tumor Immune Microenvironment, Rebecca A. Bekker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Tumor-immune interactions shape a developing tumor and its tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) resulting in either well-infiltrated, immunologically inflamed ‘hot’ tumor beds, or ‘cold’ immune deserts with low levels of infiltration. The pre-treatment immune state of the TIME is associated with treatment outcome; immunologically hot tumors generally exhibit better responses to radio- and immunotherapy than cold tumors. However, radiotherapy is known to induce opposing immunological consequences, resulting in both immunostimulatory and inhibitory responses. In fact, it is thought that the radiation induced tumoricidal immune response is curtailed by subsequent applications of radiation. Thus, I hypothesize that spatially fractionated radiotherapy (SFRT), administered …

Model-Based Systems Engineering For Engineering Education Systems Simulation, Pallavi Singh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the engineering education system continuously evolves to meet the demands of modern industry and society, there is a need for a methodology that would manage and resolve the complexities inherent in engineering educational systems. Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) is a structured approach to system design that utilizes models across all stages of the system's life cycle and supports requirements management, design, analysis, verification, and validation processes. While MBSE has been applied successfully in industries like defense, aerospace, and automotive, its application in engineering educational systems remains unexplored. This dissertation develops a dynamic model of the university-level engineering education system …

‘The Overheated World’: Crisis Politics And Neoliberal Inertia, Shomik Chakrabarti

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers were forced to balance the maintenance of ongoing economic activity alongside the measures advised by epidemiologists and other public health officials to contain the viral spread. The magnitude of the pandemic forced major conduits of the global economy to come to a sudden halt through incidents such as border closures, supply chain disruptions, lockdowns and calls for individuals to distance themselves from one another. Like the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, COVID-19 was thought to signal an inflection point for neoliberal political economy where a possible post-neoliberal era would develop in the aftermath …

Reaching New Generations: Exploring Museums' Social Media Strategies For Engaging Younger Audiences In The Post-Covid-19 Era, Lauren Parker

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the evolving landscape of museum communication and marketing strategies on social media, particularly focusing on engaging younger audiences in the post-COVID-19 era. Through qualitative interviews with marketing managers and social media coordinators from ten American museums, this research identifies strategic communication goals, changes in social media strategies post-pandemic, and specific tactics for engaging younger audiences, especially on TikTok. The study revealed that museums have key strategic communication goals for their use of social media: increasing visibility and awareness, fostering community engagement, and providing educational outreach. Post-pandemic, museums significantly enhanced their digital presence by increasing digital programming, utilizing …

Anonymized Identity Recognition And Classification Using Privacy Preserving Facial Encoding, Manas Sanjay Pakalapati

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The need for sharing large-scale datasets to train deep neural network models, particularly in healthcare, raises significant data security and privacy concerns. To address these issues, methods such as data encryption or encoding are utilized. These techniques can encrypt the data and make it unreadable to humans, while still retaining its usefulness for training models.

In this study, we investigate various image encoding techniques designed to protect privacy by making images unrecognizable while still retaining their usefulness for model training. Our investigation utilized publicly available facial databases and focused on evaluating the trade-offs inherent in image encoding techniques, with a …

Cues And Identity: Assessing Substance Use Cues, Life Experience, And Context, Katelynn Carlsen

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project employs Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) methods alongside semi-structured interviews to examine substance use cues, or “triggers”, in the everyday context. This includes repeated assessment of participants’ behaviors and thoughts over time. EMA allows researchers to sample phenomena the moment they occur within the context. These methods are most used in psychology and clinical science. Current research on substance use relies on lab-based assessments to understand cues and their relationship to consumption (Carter and Tiffany 1999, Conklin and Tiffany 2003, Witteman et al. 2015). This analysis uses data collected by the Cues in the Everyday (CITED) Team. The CITED …

Aligning Clinical Productivity Of Cancer Care Providers: A Simulation-Based Approach, Maile Sinclair-Baxter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The growing number of cancer patients over the years has presented many challenges and opportunities for improvement in the healthcare system. These challenges and opportunities have demonstrated the need for a tool that can enhance the clinical productivity of healthcare providers, ultimately impacting patients’ overall experience. We studied the clinical Full Time Equivalency (cFTE) for providers at a cancer research center. cFTE is the percentage of time allocated for clinical work. In this cancer research center, the clinical work of each provider is supposed to match a targeted cFTE. The cancer research center’s concern was that the provider’s clinical productivity …

Advancing Adversarial Audio: Human-In-The-Loop Black-Box Attacks, Rui Duan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Adversarial audio attacks pose significant security challenges to real-world audio applications. Attackers may manipulate speech to impersonate a speaker, gaining access to smart devices like Amazon Echo. In audio applications, there are two key areas: music and speech. In music, most attackers create a small noise-like perturbation on the original signal to evade copyright detection. However, this method degrades music's perceived quality for human listeners. In the speech, creating an adversarial example often requires many queries to the target model, a process too cumbersome for practical use in real-world scenarios, like interacting with smart devices numerous times.

In this dissertation, …

An Assessment Of A Haptic-Based Ergonomic Intervention At An Aerospace Manufacturing Facility, Chase Mcdonald

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis was to evaluate the effectiveness and sustainability of a haptic-based intervention designed to reduce hand motions and, consequently, the risk of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) among operators in a manufacturing facility. The intervention involved using ergonomic gloves equipped with haptic feedback, intended to encourage proper hand motion and reduce unnecessary movements.

Over a six-month period, data was collected from operators wearing the haptic gloves, focusing on two key metrics: Duty Cycle and Motion Rate. These metrics were chosen to normalize the data, accounting for the variability in duration for each individual operator who wore the device. …

Incidence Of Reportable Exertional Heat Illness During Deepwater Horizon Cleanup, Fisher R. Morris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to explore the relationship between incidence of recordable exertional heat illness (EHI) and daily high wet bulb globe temperature (WBGTmax) or daily high Heat Index (HImax). Additionally, the effect of the previous day’s exposure to heat stress was investigated. Illness and injury records were collected during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill response. All OSHA recordable EHI cases were extracted for study. The highest estimated WBGT and HI on the day of incident were compared to the prior day. The overall incidence of recordable EHIs was 0.74 cases/100 FTE and the incidence for exposures ≥ …

Specification, Enforcement, And Measurement Of Integrity Policies, Kevin Dennis

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The first step to improving an organization's security posture is to define the organization's security goals. At a technical level, these goals are expressed as security policies. Security policies are predicates over programs, that return true or false if the program adheres to the policy. Defining these policies correctly is thus essential to ensuring the overarching security goals are met, but it is often quite difficult to translate human-oriented goals into their technical policy counterparts. In addition, these policies must be specified so that they are enforceable while minimizing false positives and false negatives. Integrity policies, which specify how data …

Investigating The Impact Of Inverter-Based Resources On Power Grid Dynamics, Ratik Mittal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the stability challenges posed by integrating Inverter-Based Resources (IBR) into power grids, particularly focusing on two major scenarios: IBRs connected to weak grid interconnections and their performance in series-compensated networks. With the increasing dependency on renewable energy sources, ensuring the stability of these grids is crucial. A multilayered investigative approach is employed, utilizing Electromagnetic Transient Simulations that model grid systems interfaced with IBRs. These simulations are pivotal as they emulate real-world stability issues and provide a foundational understanding of grid interactions. In this dissertation two major types of IBR control are modeled and analyzed: Grid Following Control …

Investigation Of Self-Assembly Of Hen Egg White Lysozyme Fibrils, Nabila Bushra

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Amyloid proteins are a large group of proteins that tend to aggregate and form insoluble fibrils with a characteristic cross-β sheet structure. Intriguingly, this process of “amyloid formation” has been simultaneously linked to devastating human diseases called amyloidoses, ranging from Alzheimer’s Disease, cardiac amyloidoses to type II diabetes, as well as functional biological responses such as hormone storage and sperm quality control. Amyloid fibrils have also attracted significant attention for their unique mechanical, chemical, and optical characteristics, establishing them as promising tough biomaterials. The urgent need to find treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, and the demand for safe and renewable biomaterials …

Evaluation Of Reduced Graphene Oxide For Advanced Thermal Management In Microwave Electronics Packaging, Utkarsh Misra

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The continuous push towards making electronic devices smaller and denser, largely driven by the demand for higher power capabilities, has led to a critical need for innovative and comprehensive methods for managing the heat these devices generate. Traditional cooling solutions for electronics often rely on methods such as copper-based layers or channels to distribute and dispel heat. However, these conventional methods and materials are becoming increasingly insufficient, especially for Radio Frequency (RF) and millimeter-wave electronics. These components are becoming ever more compact while requiring more power, thus presenting unique challenges for thermal management in their packaging.

In this thesis we …

Use Of Nanoparticle Additives To Achieve Desirable Properties In Fluorine-Free Firefighting Foams, Annelise Kathleen Curtin

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Class B Firefighting foams play a crucial role in protecting equipment and people fromliquid fuel fires but concerns regarding the impacts of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) have resulted in bans on the use of aqueous film forming foam (AFFF). Fluorine-free replacements are yet to achieve the same level of performance. Nanoparticles including silica and clay have been used to improve foam stability, especially in environments where hydrocarbon fuels are present. These materials have also been used in solid composites to improve fire resistance. The stability of aqueous foams containing silica and Laponite RD nanoparticles along with surfactants of different …

High-Performance Computing In Next-Generation Sequencing Read Alignment, Minh H. Pham

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Advancements in Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) have dramatically reduced the cost and increased the speed of DNA sequencing. However, this rapid influx of data necessitates efficient and robust analysis tools, particularly for the complex task of aligning short NGS reads to reference genomes such as the human genome. We explore groundbreaking computational strategies and hardware acceleration to optimize this critical alignment process. This dissertation is structured around three innovative studies. First, we introduce a novel approach to dynamic memory allocation tailored for massively parallel systems, particularly Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), to support NGS alignment and other applications. Unlike traditional memory allocators …