Digital Commons Network^™

December 13, 2003 (Pages 6005-6196), Pennsylvania Legislative Reference Bureau

Volume 33 (2003)

No abstract provided.

Commencement Convocation Program, Tampa Campus, December 13, 2003, University Of South Florida

USF Graduation and Convocation Programs

King O'Neal Scholars - Stephanie Alexis Alford, Ann Marie Galle, Jeffery Kehu Harper, Peggy Kledzik, Debra Anne Brown, Sharon Lee Kephart, and Brian Christopher Hayes; Honorary Doctorate of Humanities - Delia P. Sanchez; Honorary Doctorate of Business Administration - Leslie Muma

Generalizing List Scheduling For Stochastic Soft Real-Time Parallel Applications, Yoginder Singh Dandass

Theses and Dissertations

Advanced architecture processors provide features such as caches and branch prediction that result in improved, but variable, execution time of software. Hard real-time systems require tasks to complete within timing constraints. Consequently, hard real-time systems are typically designed conservatively through the use of tasks? worst-case execution times (WCET) in order to compute deterministic schedules that guarantee task?s execution within giving time constraints. This use of pessimistic execution time assumptions provides real-time guarantees at the cost of decreased performance and resource utilization. In soft real-time systems, however, meeting deadlines is not an absolute requirement (i.e., missing a few deadlines does not …

Solutions To The Navier-Stokes Equations In A Non-Inertial Reference Frame, Kishore Satya Majety

Theses and Dissertations

A general rotating frame formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations has been added to the incompressible and arbitrary Mach number versions of UNCLE. While eliminating the need for moving grids, this formulation also reduces the error caused by linear approximations of rotational motion. The formulation is validated for single axis rotations by comparing the simulations of a marine propeller and an isolated helicopter rotor with experimental data. A simulation of the helicopter rotor in pitching motion is also performed. Results are compared between the non-inertial reference frame formulation and absolute frame solver for a prolate spheroid with all the components of …

Analysis Of A Thin-Walled Curved Rectangular Beam With Five Degrees Of Freedom, Khurram Zeshan Moghal

Theses and Dissertations

A study of a thin-walled curved rectangular box beam under torsion and out-of-plane bending is documented in this thesis. A new one-dimensional theory that takes into account warping and distortion in the beam cross-sections is the main focus. Existing available theories for thin-walled curved beams lack rigorous theoretical development, and most have ignored the effects of warping and distortion. A higher order theory including two additional degrees of freedom corresponding to warping and distortion was derived. The conventional three degrees of freedom model was compared with the new five degrees of freedom model. The variation of beam thickness to control …

Applicability Of Semi-Tension Fields To The Back Panel Of A Pick-Up Truck, Shubha S. Tangirala

Theses and Dissertations

The study and design of light-weight automobiles has emerged as an important area of interest in the government, academia, and the manufacturing industry. Significant advances in vehicle weight reduction technologies have taken place in almost all fields of transportation. Weight reduction is identified as a key factor to achieving fuel-economy, energy efficiency and environmental safety. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate cost effective design methodologies that enable fabrication of light weight structures, which subsequently result in a fuel saving. A few important techniques and trends of weight reduction in the automotive industry over the past few years …

Application Of Reinforcement Learning To Multi-Agent Production Scheduling, Yi-Chi Wang

Theses and Dissertations

Reinforcement learning (RL) has received attention in recent years from agent-based researchers because it can be applied to problems where autonomous agents learn to select proper actions for achieving their goals based on interactions with their environment. Each time an agent performs an action, the environment¡Šs response, as indicated by its new state, is used by the agent to reward or penalize its action. The agent¡Šs goal is to maximize the total amount of reward it receives over the long run. Although there have been several successful examples demonstrating the usefulness of RL, its application to manufacturing systems has not …

Automated Accident Detection In Intersections Via Digital Audio Signal Processing, Navaneethakrishnan Balraj

Theses and Dissertations

The aim of this thesis is to design a system for automated accident detection in intersections. The input to the system is a three-second audio signal. The system can be operated in two modes: two-class and multi-class. The output of the two-class system is a label of ?crash? or ?non-crash?. In the multi-class system, the output is the label of ?crash? or various non-crash incidents including ?pile drive?, ?brake?, and ?normal-traffic? sounds. The system designed has three main steps in processing the input audio signal. They are: feature extraction, feature optimization and classification. Five different methods of feature extraction are …

Effects Of Transcription Errors On Supervised Learning In Speech Recognition, Ramasubramanian H. Sundaram

Theses and Dissertations

Supervised learning using Hidden Markov Models has been used to train acoustic models for automatic speech recognition for several years. Typically clean transcriptions form the basis for this training regimen. However, results have shown that using sources of readily available transcriptions, which can be erroneous at times (e.g., closed captions) do not degrade the performance significantly. This work analyzes the effects of mislabeled data on recognition accuracy. For this purpose, the training is performed using manually corrupted training data and the results are observed on three different databases: TIDigits, Alphadigits and SwitchBoard. For Alphadigits, with 16% of data mislabeled, the …

Commencement Convocation Exercises - December 2003, Prairie View A&M University

Commencement and Convocation Exercises

No abstract provided.

Integrating Algorithmic And Systemic Load Balancing Strategies In Parallel Scientific Applications, Sheikh Khaled Ghafoor

Theses and Dissertations

Load imbalance is a major source of performance degradation in parallel scientific applications. Load balancing increases the efficient use of existing resources and improves performance of parallel applications running in distributed environments. At a coarse level of granularity, advances in runtime systems for parallel programs have been proposed in order to control available resources as efficiently as possible by utilizing idle resources and using task migration. At a finer granularity level, advances in algorithmic strategies for dynamically balancing computational loads by data redistribution have been proposed in order to respond to variations in processor performance during the execution of a …

Fully Scalable Video Coding Using Redundant-Wavelet Multihypothesis And Motion-Compensated Temporal Filtering, Yonghui Wang

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a fully scalable video coding system is proposed. This system achieves full temporal, resolution, and fidelity scalability by combining mesh-based motion-compensated temporal filtering, multihypothesis motion compensation, and an embedded 3D wavelet-coefficient coder. The first major contribution of this work is the introduction of the redundant-wavelet multihypothesis paradigm into motion-compensated temporal filtering, which is achieved by deploying temporal filtering in the domain of a spatially redundant wavelet transform. A regular triangle mesh is used to track motion between frames, and an affine transform between mesh triangles implements motion compensation within a lifting-based temporal transform. Experimental results reveal that …

Network Training For Continuous Speech Recognition, Issac John Alphonso

Theses and Dissertations

Spoken language processing is one of the oldest and most natural modes of information exchange between humans beings. For centuries, people have tried to develop machines that can understand and produce speech the way humans do so naturally. The biggest problem in our inability to model speech with computer programs and mathematics results from the fact that language is instinctive, whereas, the vocabulary and dialect used in communication are learned. Human beings are genetically equipped with the ability to learn languages, and culture imprints the vocabulary and dialect on each member of society. This thesis examines the role of pattern …

New Visualization Techniques For Multi-Dimensional Variables In Complex Physical Domains, Rhonda J. Vickery

Theses and Dissertations

This work presents the new Synthesized Cell Texture (SCT) algorithm for visualizing related multiple scalar value fields within the same 3D space. The SCT method is particularly well suited to scalar quantities that could be represented in the physical domain as size fractionated particles, such as in the study of sedimentation, atmospheric aerosols, or precipitation. There are two components to this contribution. First a Scaling and Distribution (SAD) algorithm provides a means of specifying a multi-scalar field in terms of a maximum cell resolution (or density of represented values). This information is used to scale the multi-scalar field values for …

Improvements On Heat Flux And Heat Conductance Estimation With Applications To Metal Castings, Xingjian Xue

Theses and Dissertations

Heat flux and heat conductance at the metal mold interface plays a key role in controlling the final metal casting strength. It is difficult to obtain these parameters through direct measurement because of the required placement of sensors, however they can be obtained through inverse heat conduction calculations. Existing inverse heat conduction methods are analyzed and classified into three categories, i.e., direct inverse methods, observer-based methods and optimization methods. The solution of the direct inverse methods is based on the linear relationship between heat flux and temperature (either in the time domain or in the frequency domain) and is calculated …

Service Based Marketplace For Applications, Anand Kumar Kalyanasundaram

Theses and Dissertations

The Grid has revolutionized the way computations are done on the Internet. Access to remote computational resources and ad hoc creation of virtual organizations across administrative domains opens new opportunities on the Grid. The newly developed web services based Open Grid Services Architecture makes the Grid more accessible by allowing the Grid to be constructed from distinct platform independent components. Together they provide an environment for application sharing (or trading), collaborations and access to remote data repositories. The application marketplace is a natural extension to this application sharing environment. The marketplace addresses the fact that the existing infrastructure is still …

Performance Analysis Of Advanced Front Ends On The Aurora Large Vocabulary Evaluation, Naveen Parihar

Theses and Dissertations

Over the past few years, speech recognition technology performance on tasks ranging from isolated digit recognition to conversational speech has dramatically improved. Performance on limited recognition tasks in noiseree environments is comparable to that achieved by human transcribers. This advancement in automatic speech recognition technology along with an increase in the compute power of mobile devices, standardization of communication protocols, and the explosion in the popularity of the mobile devices, has created an interest in flexible voice interfaces for mobile devices. However, speech recognition performance degrades dramatically in mobile environments which are inherently noisy. In the recent past, a great …

Quality Improvements In Extruded Meshes Using Topologically Adaptive Generalized Elements, Satish Chalasani

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, a novel method to extrude near-body meshes from surface meshes of arbitrary topology that exploits topologically adaptive generalized elements to improve mesh quality is presented. Specifically, an advancing layer algorithm to generate near-body meshes which are appropriate for viscous fluid flows is discussed. First, an orthogonal two-layer algebraic reference mesh is generated. The reference mesh is then smoothed using a locally three-dimensional Poisson-type mesh generation equation that is generalized to smooth extruded meshes of arbitrary surface topology. Local quality improvement operations such as edge collapse, face refinement, and local reconnection are performed in each layer to drive …

Limitations Of Principal Component Analysis For Dimensionality-Reduction For Classification Of Hyperspectral Data, Anil Meerasa Cheriyadat

Theses and Dissertations

It is a popular practice in the remote-sensing community to apply principal component analysis (PCA) on a higher-dimensional feature space to achieve dimensionality-reduction. Several factors that have led to the popularity of PCA include its simplicity, ease of use, availability as part of popular remote-sensing packages, and optimal nature in terms of mean square error. These advantages have prompted the remote-sensing research community to overlook many limitations of PCA when used as a dimensionality-reduction tool for classification and target-detection applications. This thesis addresses the limitations of PCA when used as a dimensionality-reduction technique for extracting discriminating features from hyperspectral data. …

Remote Control Of Heating, Ventilating, And Air Conditioning System With Labview, Yu-Loong Liew

Theses and Dissertations

Recent technological advances have extended the use of some old technology such as the X-10 home automation. With the use of X-10 and the Internet, a remote control home is possible. One of the major energy consumption appliances in a house is the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning system. The main objective of this study is to explore the possibility of using X-10 and the Internet to serve as an energy saving system. A simulation is used to estimate the energy consumption.

Towards A Taxonomy Of Aspect-Oriented Programming., Mario Bernard Hankerson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As programs continue to increase in size, it has become increasingly difficult to separate concerns into well localized modules, which leads to code tangling- crosscutting code spread throughout several modules. Thus, Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) offers a solution to creating modules with little or no crosscutting concerns. AOP presents the notion of aspects, and demonstrates how crosscutting concerns can be taken out of modules and placed into a centralized location.

In this paper, a taxonomy of aspect-oriented programming, as well as a basic overview and introduction of AOP, will be presented in order to assist future researchers in getting started on …

Awareness And Acceptance Of Biotechnology Issues Among Youth, Undergraduates, And Adults, Susan Fritz, Dann E. Husmann, Gary Wingenbach, Tracy Rutherford, Valerie Egger, Preeti Wadhwa

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

To be successful both domestically and internationally, biotechnology must establish an acceptable position in the sociopolitical framework. This United States (US) study assessed levels of awareness and acceptance of biotechnology issues among youth (n = 283), undergraduate students (n = 330), and adults (n = 166). The percentage of adults who were aware of how biotechnology would affect food, health, and the environment was almost three times that of youth respondents. It was concluded that consumer groups would most likely be impacted by accurate, unbiased agricultural biotechnology information delivered through the Internet and newspapers that originates from reliable, accessible, and …

Probabilistic Design Optimization Of Built-Up Aircraft Structures With Application, Qiulin Xie

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis discusses a methodology for probabilistic design optimization of aircraft structures subject to a multidisciplinary set of requirements originating from the desire to minimize structural weight while fulfilling the demands for quality, safety, producibility, and affordability. With this design methodology as the framework, a software is developed, which is capable of performing design optimization of metallic built-up beam structures where the material properties, external load, as well as the structural dimensions are treated as probabilistic random variables. The structural and failure analyses are based on analytical and semi-empirical methods whereas the component reliability analysis is based on advanced first-order …

Factors Forecasting The Effect Of Rapid Prototyping Technologies On Engineering Design Education., Jeffrey Dale Mather

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents information gathered and analyzed through an electronic internet-based Delphi Survey process. The purpose of this study is to identify a consensus of factors that might forecast the future effects of Rapid Prototyping (RP) technology on engineering design education when used for the purpose of overcoming the limitations of 2D representation of 3D space. The identification of consensus was developed from the collection of opinions from a panel of experts in RP technology.

Early adopters of emerging technologies can reduce risk through careful research, but decisions must often be made before significant quantitative data are available. Expert subjective …

Visual Framing: A Study In Face-Ism From The Websites For The 108th United States Congress., Beth Johnson Anderson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Websites are being used by increasing numbers to target a market with a message unfiltered by the media. This content analysis examined the website front-screens for the members of the 108th United States Congress to determine if the photographic images displayed reinforced the media's stereotypical frame of female politicians. A total of 3,892 photographic images were captured from 540 websites and coded using the face-ism index. Overall, the results supported the face-ism theory. Images of females were cropped lower on their bodies than images of males. The face-ism effect was not supported until the number of people in the photograph …

Illinois State University, One Hundred And Forty-Fifth Annual Commencement, December 13, 2003, Illinois State University

Commencement Programs

Normal, Illinois
Illinois State University
One Hundred and Forty-Fifth Annual Commencement
Saturday
December 13, 2003

Faculty Adoption And Integration Of Technology At East Tennessee State University., Tammy L. Barnes

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the demographic characteristics of faculty related to (1) faculty integration of technology, (2) the utilization of technological tools, (3) and the knowledge of computers and information technology of full-time faculty members at East Tennessee State University.

Four hundred forty-three full-time faculty from East Tennessee State University were surveyed. The total mailed and e-mailed returned responses for this study were 205. Eighteen hypotheses generated from 3 research questions were tested using Pearson Product-Moment Correlation, Analysis of Variance, Two-Way Analysis of Variance, and Multiple Regression Analysis.

This study showed that full-time faculty …

Jeffersonianism And 19th Century American Maritime Defense Policy., Christopher Taylor Ziegler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper analyzes the fundamental maritime defense mentality that permeated America throughout the early part of the Republic. For fear of economic debt and foreign wars, Thomas Jefferson and his Republican party, opposed the construction of a formidable blue water naval force. Instead, they argued for a small naval force capable of engaging the Barbary pirates and other small similar forces. For protection of the nation and commerce, they wanted a strictly defensive strategy developed around coastal gunboats and harbor fortifications. This research will analyze the naval aspect of this defense mentality from its creation in 1794, through the War …

An Analytical Method To Determine The Mechanical Properties Of Linear Viscoelastic Solids, Rani W. Sullivan

Theses and Dissertations

A new methodology has been developed to model the viscoelastic behavior of solids using a general spectrum function. Not all materials can be modeled using simple Kelvin-Voigt (K-V) or Maxwell elements where the viscoelastic parameters are constants. There is a need for a general spectrum function that can be used to model the Lame' functions which constitute all properties of interest. Thus far, there is no method like the one presented in this study that can determine the moduli of viscoelastic materials. This study develops a methodology by which the time dependent properties of homogeneous and non-homogeneous materials may be …

An Investigation Of The Standardized Multiple-Choice Departmental Calculus I Final Examination, Maria Elizabeth Bearden

Theses and Dissertations

At Mississippi State University, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, a standardized multiple-choice departmental final examination (SMCDF) was administered at the end of the Calculus I mathematics course. This practice was abolished at the end of the spring 1997 semester. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a difference in students¡¯ success in subsequent calculus courses as measured by a student¡¯s grade. If there was a difference, was it consistent along varying levels of students¡¯ ACT mathematics scores. A two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run on the data. The variables were the five student ACT Mathematics …