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The Feasibility Of 18f-Fdg Labeled Rbc And Pet/Ct Imaging Blood Perfusion And Vascular Dysfunction Measurements In Pre-Clinical Research, Shaowei Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Heart disease, dementia, and stroke are significant public health issues and leading causes of mortality and morbidity worldwide. Abnormalities in blood perfusion and vascular structures are seen in varieties of pathologies, including cerebrovascular diseases like stroke and dementia, hypertension, cardiovascular disease like atherosclerosis, diabetes, peripheral artery disease, and vasculitis, and tumor angiogenesis. Imaging perfusion/vascular abnormalities in these patients often plays a vital role in clinical diagnosis and treatment decisions.

Vascular diseases typically present as macrovascular or microvascular diseases. Microvascular disease (MVD) refers to vascular disease primarily affecting the arterioles, venules, and capillaries in various organs. Furthermore, MVD is widely found …

Turkic Interlingua: A Case Study Of Machine Translation In Low-Resource Languages, Jamshidbek Mirzakhalov

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Machine Translation (MT) has the potential to bridge the gap between the developed world and the marginalized communities by making information more accessible in real-time. While there are over 7000 spoken languages in the world, only about a hundred have access to high-quality MT systems and even fewer enjoy the benefits of more advanced language technologies. Unfortunately, resource scarcity and the lack of digital infrastructure are only some of the many challenges associated with globalizing NLP. Many large-scale multilingual studies and datasets often get little to no feedback from native speakers or linguistic experts of the languages involved, leading to …

Chorine Conversion: Biological And Water Quality Impact On Activated Carbon Block Point Of Use Filters, Horace S. Jakpa

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Point-of-use (POU) activated carbon (AC) filters are ubiquitous in many U.S. households. AC can reduce concentrations of lead, other heavy metals, and mitigate taste and odor issues. However, AC filters also remove residual disinfectants, thus allowing for the proliferation of microbes in the filter. In chloraminated systems, this can lead to localized, filter-induced nitrification. Most notably, high nitrite and nitrate in drinking water can cause methemoglobinemia (blue baby syndrome) in children under the age of three, raising public health concerns.

As a control measure for nitrification within distribution systems, utilities practice periodic, short-term secondary disinfectant switches from chloramine to free …

American Military Service And Identity: From The Militia To The All-Volunteer Force, Andrew C. Sparks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this project is to examine the growth of the American military service regimes along with how the American State used those regimes to construct American identity. To accomplish this, this project looks at the length of American war as a dependent variable from the types of war fought and the military service regimes. Over the course of this study, we examine four distinct eras: the militia regime, the coercive regime, the Peacetime Draft, and the All-Volunteer Force. Each of these correspond to various types of identity development, which include individual state, regional/national, international, and retrospective identity, respectively. …

Health Risk Assessment Of Local Populations Ingesting Water With Naturally Occurring Arsenic And Fecal Related Contaminants In Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, Marisol Alvarez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lake Atitlan, Guatemala acts as a sink for wastewater discharge and as a source of drinking water. The populations living in the lake basin are primarily indigenous with a large percentage (70%) living in poverty. Wastewater effluent entering the lake poses an immediate health risk to those using it as a drinking-water source. Additionally, the lake is surrounded by three volcanoes and the water has concentrations of naturally occurring arsenic above the recommended reference level of 10 µg/L. Arsenic is acutely poisonous at high concentrations and has carcinogenic and neurological effects when chronically exposed at low concentrations.

The goal of …

Strategies For Achieving The United States Health System's Quadruple Aim By Enhancing The Primary Care Level, Jennifer L. Mendoza-Alonzo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The quadruple aim is an approach to optimize the performance of the health system in the United States and consists of four dimensions. The main objective is to improve the population's health, followed by reducing cost, improving patients' experience, and increasing providers' satisfaction. In the present doctoral dissertation, I explore three strategies that help accomplish the quadruple aim at the primary care level. The analysis combines data science and operation research principles to address health system engineering questions.

Each strategy proposed in this document emphasizes one objective more than another; however, all of them in conjunction serve to attain the …

Women Entrepreneurs In China: Dialectical Discourses, Situated Activities, And The (Re)Production Of Gender And Entrepreneurship, Zhenyu Tian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the number of women entrepreneurs on the rise globally, the business world and the identity of the entrepreneur remain to be normed masculine and male gender stereotyped. This male gender stereotyping situates women who practice entrepreneurship in disadvantages, limiting their access to resources on which they depend to make meaning of their activities and identities. This imbalanced masculine gender order also manifests in China’s economy. Women entrepreneurs in China face complex contradictions and challenges when navigating an arena that privileges men and masculinity. However, not much is known about the micro-dynamics of Chinese women’s entrepreneurial experiences in light of …

A Study Of The Implementation Of Technology In The Elementary Setting, Matthew J. Hoff

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this self-study was to explore the technology implementation that took place at one Title I elementary school over the course of a four-year period. The implementation of technology in the school was undertaken for three specific reasons: to invigorate school culture, to enhance classroom instruction, and to raise student achievement.

The research of the technology implementation at Comet Elementary used a self-study approach. Data collected and analyzed during the self-study included the following: school culture and climate surveys, teacher evaluations and observations, student standardized assessments, school budgets, teacher technology integration surveys, and student technology integration surveys.

The …

Packaging Of Active Rf Beamforming Ic Utilizing Additive Manufacturing, Ryan Murphy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Packaging of an RF Beamforming IC was performed using an additive manufacturingplatform with FDM, microdispensing, laser subtractive manufacturing, and milling. The beamforming IC was embedded within a multilayer device structure in order to feed a 2x2 antenna sub-array in a compact and completely integrated package. Additive manufacturing allows for simple variation in material parameters and properties that enhances the ability to develop integrated system packaging. This study builds on previous investigations and demonstrates the ability to embed an active RF device with measurable gain within a printed plastic substrate. Critical to developing a repeatable method for this packaging solution, initial …

Sensible/Latent Hybrid Thermal Energy Storage For The Supercritical Carbon Dioxide Brayton Cycle, Kelly Osterman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mitigating the effects of climate change will require rapid deployment of a carbon-free electricity system that includes all available forms of zero-carbon energy. Both renewables and nuclear show great promise, but both come with drawbacks. Power production from wind and solar is limited to times when their respective resources are available, while nuclear is limited in its ability to adjust its output according to the ever-varying demand for electricity. Additionally, the systems must be affordable. One way to reduce the cost of thermal power plants (concentrated solar power and nuclear) is to use new power cycles, such as the supercritical …

Parallel Computation Of Feynman Path Integrals And Many-Body Polarization With Application To Metal-Organic Materials, Brant H. Tudor

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Space Research Group is a computational outfit, and so the work presented herein will reflect that. Much of our simulation code is developed in-house and so what follows is a small exploration of that development—although the physics underpinning our software development is never ignored for long. Following the programming centric work, the code and the physics are put to the test. The final chapter describes a scientific endeavor in which a new, robust force field has been validated. Indeed, the new potential has taken a first step in proving itself by making accurate predictions in what have historically found …

Dynamic Loading Directed Neural Stem Cell Differentiation, Abdullah Revaha Akdemir

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Spinal cord injuries (SCI) are among the biggest challenges for medical and engineering fields in the modern era. Many people experience various accidents every year that cause major irreversible trauma in the spinal cord. Damaged neural cells caused by SCI cannot be regenerated, and patients have to live with pain, spasms, or loss of movement. Stem cell differentiation can be a potential solution to generate enough neurol cells in vitro to apply at the defective region. In this research, the impact of dynamic mechanical stimulation on the differentiation of PC-12 cell lines towards neurol cells was studied. Models to apply …

Theory And Application Of Dielectric Rod Antennas And Arrays, Gabriel Saffold

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dielectric rods have been used for many years as waveguides and radiators. Their low loss as a transmission line and tendency to radiate at discontinuities have proven useful in applications ranging from fiber optic cables to naval fire control radar. Although this technology is well es- tablished, advances in additive manufacturing techniques and associated materials combined with the ubiquity of wireless communications and their shift to higher frequencies have generated re- newed interest in dielectric rods. Dielectric rod antennas have moderate gain and less conductive loss at higher frequencies. Similar to other surface wave antennas, they can achieve broadband performance.This …

Bridging The Innovatino Gap At Socom, Gregory J. Ingram

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to provide a case study of how a highly bureaucratic organization located on a relatively inaccessible military base created organizational structures and climates to minimize innovation time and efforts. Typical approaches to government acquisition are not conducive to innovation and inhibit it in many cases. Conducting business with any government element, including the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), can be difficult. A few of the physical and regulatory challenges include gaining access to MacDill Air Force Base, entering the SOCOM compound and the prohibition of electronic devices on the compound. Another noteworthy challenge …

On The Application Of Recursive Nonlinear State Transformations And Nonlinear Feedback To Enable Continuous Thrust Spacecraft Orbital Rendezvous, Parisa Khosravi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a method to address exact feedback linearization problems based on the recursive application of approximate feedback linearization techniques. An approximate feedback linearization method is applied recursively to systems which are known to be an exact feedback linearizable to obtain a family of exact solutions up to the ρ-th degree utilizing the null space that appears as part of the computations. The coordinate transformation and feedback parameters are computed symbolically using a one-step approach in multi-stage form. This algorithm is algebraic and computationally simpler than solving the set of nonlinear partial differential equations. We employ the approximate feedback …

A Barker Type Approach For Measuring And Interpreting Vle Of Polymer Mixed Solvent Systems, Vaishali Jain

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The environment around us has a great impact on human health. A polluted environment can adversely impact human health and cause diseases like cancer, skin diseases, breathing problems and many more and hence altering the quality of life. Hence it is very important to develop sensors that can efficiently detect these harmful substances from environment. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are carbon-based chemical substances that are volatile even at ambient temperature and pressure conditions which enter the atmosphere through industrial processes, building materials, etc.

Acoustic wave devices can detect very low concentrations (ppm, ppb) of organic compounds in the environment. A …

Architectural Complexity Of Oyster Reefs: Evaluating The Relationship Between Interstitial Spaces And Macroinvertebrates, Elizabeth A. Salewski

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Understanding how organisms utilize and interact with habitat features may improve predictions of habitat preferences and species interactions, and may assist in the development of conservation and management strategies. The architecture of a habitat provides a complex array of structural features that influences interactions between the abiotic and biotic factors, and impact the biodiversity and species abundance through altering recruitment patterns and the survival of associated fauna. Characterizing potential refugia however has been challenging with minimal attempts to measure interstitial space size and abundance in reef systems. Here, I present novel methodology utilizing 3D technology to characterize interstitial spaces within …

Gao Bid Protests By Small Business: Analysis Of Perceived And Reported Outcomes In Federal Contracting, David M. Snyder

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to better understand GAO bid protest outcomes, if they are perceived as effective by stakeholders particularly small businesses, and what implications perceptions of outcomes have for small businesses. As a small business owner in the U.S. Federal government contracting space, the rationale for this research improves my business’s performance and inform other small business practitioners of the practical utility of GAO protests. The GAO protest system is well intended American innovation in accountability of government agencies’ acquisition of supplies and services.

The GAO reports protest outcome rates are reflected as moderately effective at approximately …

Investigation Of Coo Ato For Solar Cells And Infrared Sheaths, Manopriya Devisetty Subramanyam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Solar as an energy source is expected to grow fastest from now to 2050. Increasing the efficiency is usually achieved by increasing the short circuit current density (JSC) and/or the fill factor. Improving the efficiency of solar cells will be an ongoing effort.Structurally solar technologies can be classified into two types, wafer-based and thin-film-based. Wafer solar cells have been used in this study. The anti-reflective layer on top of solar cells has been fabricated by a process called electrospinning to tune the solar cells' top surface with the desired thickness and dimensions of the nanofibers. The nanofibers' dimensions, shape, and …

Investigating The Hydrology Of The Western Greenland Ice Sheet: Spatiotemporal Variability And Implications On Ice-Dynamics, Jessica Z. Mejia

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since the 1990's the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has been losing mass at an accelerating rate in response to climatic warming and is currently the largest terrestrial contributor to sea-level rise. While ice sheet models agree the GrIS will continue losing mass throughout the century, there are significant uncertainties associated with future sea-level rise contributions. Predicting the GrIS's response to future climate warming scenarios is limited by gaps in our understanding of the links between ice sheet hydrology and dynamics. Meltwater produced on the ice surface flows within supraglacial streams that deliver it to crevasses or moulins—vertical conduits extending from …

Sulfate Optimization In The Cement-Slag Blended System Based On Calorimetry And Strength Studies, Mustafa Fincan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Optimization of sulfur trioxide (SO³) content is typically conducted for plain cements (OPC-based) paste or mortar systems using compressive strength testing and isothermal calorimetry for quality control. The objective of these procedures is to ensure adequate strength and set properties by controlling the time of occurrence of the aluminate peak by adjusting the SO³ content by incremental addition of sulfate in the form of hemihydrate at three or more levels, at the same time attempting to maximize either strength or heat of hydration at 1 and 3 days. The inclusion of supplementary cementitious materials such as blast …

Insights Into The Role Of Metal Composition, Preparation Method, Catalyst Pretreatment For Application In The Development Of Catalytic Reforming Materials For Intensified Conversion Of Biogas Sourced Methane, Yetunde Oluwatosin Sokefun

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The combustion of fossil fuel sources, crude oil, natural gas, and coal to meet the world’s energy demand has contributed to the increased emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases to the environment. These negative contributions and their resulting impact on environmental conditions and several reports of their peak production and eventual depletion have influenced the need for cleaner and alternative energy production using renewable energy sources.

From the available renewable energy sources ranging from wind, solar, hydrothermal, geothermal, and biomass, biomass is an attractive option because it is largely ubiquitous and a waste commodity that can be converted …

Analysis Of Denial Of Service Attacks In Emerging Software Defined Network Infrastructures, Andrea P. Wright

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Software defined networking (SDN) improves upon traditional networking protocol technologies by decoupling the data and control planes and moving all control provisioning decisions to a centralized SDN controller entity. This concept has matured over the last decade, having gained strong industry traction, and is now being widely deployed within enterprise and carrier networks to streamline network services provisioning and reduce costs. Overall, centralized control delivers much more cost-effective and flexible networking setups that can support a wide range of customized user-driven network management applications, e.g., traffic engineering, security, survivability, admission control, policy control, etc.

However, the separation of the data …

An Automated Framework For Connected Speech Evaluation Of Neurodegenerative Disease: A Case Study In Parkinson's Disease, Sai Bharadwaj Appakaya

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Neurodegenerative diseases affect millions of people around the world. The progressive degeneration worsens the symptoms, heavily impacting the quality of life of the patients as well as the caregivers. Speech production is one of the physiological processes affected by neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and Parkinson’s disease (PD). Speech is the most basic form of communication, and the effect of neurodegeneration degrades speech production, thereby reducing social interaction and mental well-being. PD is the second most common neurodegenerative disease affecting speech production in 90% of the diagnosed individuals. Speech analysis methods for PD in clinical methods …

School Music Administration During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Trauma, Loss, Meaning, Change, And Innovation, Christopher Burns

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

On Friday, March 13, 2020, the School District of Osceola closed its doors for Spring Break and did not open again until 3 weeks later in a digital capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way teachers and students learned. The band, chorus, and orchestra classrooms were empty, and replaced with digital meetings with the need to unmute and turn cameras on. This study is an autoethnographic narrative of my life during the COVID-19 pandemic as a district resource for the teachers that I serve. While music administration has existed in many forms over the past 100 years, there are no …

Eav Fleet Management In Transportation And Power Systems, Dongfang Zhao

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Electrical vehicles (EV) by the nature of the technology assume a dual role of supplying transportation mobility and storing electric power. Thus, operations of EV impact both transportation and power grid systems. The design of infrastructure and operations of EV fleet is critical to the benefit of both systems to the society. Thus, this study proposes three models to investigate the optimal design of the infrastructure in both systems and the operations of EV fleets: 1) a dynamic and time-continuous optimization model seeking the optimal design of charging station location and EAV deployment is developed in a station-based car-sharing service …

Corrosion Rate Prediction In Frp-Concrete Repair, Mohammad A. Khawaja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research has proven that wrapping structural elements with fiber-reinforced polymers (FRPs) slows down chloride-induced corrosion rate but does not stop it. Although FRP has been used for corrosion repair for over 40 years, predictive corrosion rate models for FRP-concrete systems are limited in literature. This dissertation presents an oxygen diffusion-based predictive framework to estimate corrosion rate in FRP-concrete systems.

The dissertation has three main components. First, a core framework that is referred to as Khawaja-Sen-Bhethanabotla (KSB) model. In the KSB model, statistical methods were used to extend experimental data on oxygen permeation coefficients. These data were for one and two …

Impact Of Grain Morphology On The Temporal Evolution Of Interfacial Area During Multi-Phase Flow In Porous Media, Fizza Zahid

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many environmental issues deal with the movement of immiscible fluids in the subsurface, e.g., cleanup of oil spills and geological carbon dioxide sequestration. Engineers face a constant challenge to improve the efficiency of these processes. This can be facilitated by studying the underlying physics of how fluids flow and interact in these systems.

Traditionally, lab experiments can provide reliable information about fluid architecture in porous medium, such as trapped fluid volumes and contact area between two immiscible fluids (interfacial area). However, these methods can be expensive and tedious. A well designed numerical experiment is not only able to describe fluid …

Power System Optimization Methods: Convex Relaxation And Benders Decomposition, Minyue Ma

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Power system optimization methods are wildly used to solve power system problems. Engineers adopt different methods to keep the reliability and efficiency of the power system operation, planning and control. This dissertation focuses on the application and implementation of two optimization methods: Convex relaxation and Benders' decomposition.

The first part of the dissertation focuses on the application of convex relaxation to solve Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) problems. In the completed work, a 3-node cycle based sparse convex relaxation is proposed to solve ACOPF problems. This method adds virtual lines in minimal chordless cycles to decompose each of them …

Analysis Of Contextual Emotions Using Multimodal Data, Saurabh Hinduja

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Affective computing builds and evaluates systems that can recognize, interpret, and simulate human emotion. It is an interdisciplinary field, which includes computer science, psychology, and many others. For years, human emotion has been studied in psychology but recently has become a prominent field in computer science. Largely, the field of affective computing has been focused on analyzing static facial expressions to recognize human emotions, without taking bias (e.g. gender, data bias), context, or temporal information into account. Psychology has shown the difficulty of analyzing emotions without incorporating this type of information. In this dissertation, we have proposed new approaches to …