Digital Commons Network^™

Iron Oxide And Calcite Associated With Leptothrix Sp. Biofilms Within An Estavelle In The Upper Floridan Aquifer, Lee J. Florea, Chasity L. Stinson, Josh Brewer, Rick Fowler, B Joe Kearns, Anthony M. Greco

International Journal of Speleology

In Thornton’s Cave, an estavelle in west-central Florida, SEM, EDS, and XRD data reveal biofilms that are predominantly comprised of FeOOH-encrusted hollow sheaths that are overgrown and intercalated with calcite. Fragments of this crystalline biofilm adhere to the walls and ceiling as water levels vary within the cave. Those on the wall have a ‘cornflake’ appearance and those affixed to the ceiling hang as fibrous membranes. PCR of DNA in the active biofilm, combined with morphologic data from the tubes in SEM micrographs, point to Leptothrix sp., a common Fe-oxidizing bacteria, as the primary organism in the biofilm. Recent discoveries …

Automated Tool For Software Requirements Inspection, Pradeep Amaran

Computer Science

The software inspection process is a very cost effective method of identifying defects in documents produced during the software life cycle, leading to higher quality software with lower field failures. Manual inspections are labor intensive and dependent on human factors (e.g., preparation, moderation, and cooperation among development and quality assurance teams). An automated software inspection tool replaces a labor intensive manual approach of performing the inspection process. An automated inspection tool will offer greater efficiencies than any techniques involving manual inspections. Automation allows stakeholders (e.g., authors, inspectors) to closely work in coordination using the tool. Authors can host documents, view …

Algorithms For Coverage Improvement In A Sensor Network, Sunil Reddy Maddi

Computer Science

Sensors are devices which have the ability to receive and respond to a signal. These sensors, when used as a group, form a sensor network. Sensors in a sensor network can communicate and transmit data. In the early stages of research on sensor networks, only static sensors were used to form a sensor network. As research advanced, a combination of static and mobile sensors was used to form a wireless sensor network instead of just static sensors. The primary advantage of this type of sensor network over a sensor network with static sensors is the ability of mobile sensors to …

Job Aggregation Search Engine, Anita Sundaram

Computer Science

In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a Job Aggregation Search Engine (JASE) that acts as a one-stop-shop for listing recently posted jobs across top multiple job search engines. There are multiple job search engines available that receive and present jobs posted by employers. The JASE system extracts data from multiple websites and presents the job data in a consistent and presentable format. The objective of this paper is to implement a job search tool that seeks to reduce the browsing time of the user querying multiple job websites for the same job criteria. It also aims …

Pomdp Planning In Service Composition, Chen Min

Computer Science

Automated vVeb service composition is becoming an increasingly important research topic. It describes the automatic process of composing atomic services into a chain of services that provide a specific functionality that could not be achieved by atomic services alone. A service-oriented environment is dynamic in nature, meaning that services come online and go offiine, services change their functionality, etc. Current classical AI planning techniques suffer from the assumption of deterministic behavior of \Veb services and require execution monitoring for service failures. To address this concern, Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP) in workflow composition has been used. POMDPs provide a …

Bayesian Approach For Detection Classification, Anupama Reddy Annapureddy

Computer Science

The objective of this paper is to develop and test a software system that uses incomplete information from a collection of sensors to classify different objects present in a particular area with a pre-specified probability. The objects in the study are referred to as vehicles called the Bus and the Truck. Intruding vehicles move across a designated geographical area. Sensors that have been placed in that area detect vehicles and calculate probabilities that a vehicle is of a specific type conditioned on the type of vehicle that is actually detected. The goal is to determine unconditional probabilities that a given …

Multi-Agent Based Simulation Of An Unmanned Aerial Vehicles System, Karthiksivaram Murugesan

Computer Science

The rapid growth of using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) for civilian and military applications has promoted the development of research in many areas. Most of the unmanned aerial vehicles in use are manually controlled. Often, UAVs require highly trained pilot operators. Hence, the main challenge faced by researchers has been to make UAVs autonomous or semiautonomous. The goal of this research project is to develop and implement a simulation for a user-defined environment allowing UAVs to maneuver in free environments and obstacle-laden environments using Boid's algorithm of flocking with obstacle avoidance. The users are permitted to analyze the maneuvering area …

Shortest Path In A Wireless Sensor Network With Multiple Sensor Failures, Sandeep Reddy Poreddy

Computer Science

This paper shows how a shortest path can be obtained in a wireless sensor network, between a source sensor and a destination sensor, in a hop-by-hop fashion, considering multiple sensor failures along the path of data transmission. A wireless sensor network consists of a number of sensors spread across a geographical area; these sensors are distributed either randomly or systematically. Every sensor possesses the capability to communicate with other sensors, and each sensor possesses some level of intelligence to perform processing of the signals. Efficiency of a sensor network depends on the design of the network topology. The network must …

Graduate School Application Archive System (Gsaas), Nazeer Ahmed Khan Fazal

Computer Science

The advent of using web applications has dramatically changed the way people access data and understand these concepts. Users have expressed problems involved with accessing the data in an easy and effective way with control for users. Therefore, many reviews agree that the issue warrants attention; however, consensus dissolves around how to respond to the problem. The literature review examines one approach to solving this problem. The purpose of this paper is to explain how to implement a comprehensive solution for a behavioral approach to the complex problem and also to explain how to build a web-application system from the …

The Grid Scan Heuristic For Extending Lifetime In Wireless Sensor Networks, Srikar Pachva

Computer Science

Wireless Sensor Networks, consisting of sensing devices which sense the environment and communicate information among each other, is an emergent field in wireless networking with many potential applications. Efficiency of energy consumption is an important objective in these wireless sensor networks. All these sensor nodes have limited battery supplies and limited sensing capabilities. Network Lifetime of wireless sensor networks has a strong dependence on sensors' battery power. Since these sensor networks have large numbers of nodes, allowing some nodes to sleep for particular intervals of time can result in an increase of network lifetime. In this paper, a sleep scheduling …

Maximizing Sensor Coverage Using Displacement To Remove Overlaps, Kareemullah Khan Fazal

Computer Science

Sensor networks are wireless networks with small, low-cost sensors which collect and disseminate environmental data. They are used for monitoring and controlling physical environments from remote locations with better accuracy. Sensors have a lot of constraints and challenges. One of the main concerns is the coverage and redistribution of the sensors, without any overlap, in order to achieve maximum coverage with limited usage of energy. The first section of the paper gives a brief overview of the sensors, the sensor network, the various applications where sensors are used, and challenges faced in setting up a sensor network. The next section …

Genetic Search For Multi School Routing, Arjun Sivaram Kumar Ganesan

Computer Science

In genetic search for multi school routing, a set of commonly shared school buses and vans with capacity, travel speed and travel time limitations are used to service students from their pick up locations to their respective schools. The goal is to reduce the number of buses used, the total travel time of the students and the total operating cost of the school buses. This paper focuses on the optimization of the routes using genetic algorithm that is widely applied for combinatorial optimization problems including vehicle routing problems with time windows. The proposed genetic algorithm uses the genetic representation of …

Multi-Style Web Content Restructuring For Efficient Mobile Web Browsing, Xiaojun Xia

Computer Science

Mobile devices such as smart phones, PDAs, and tablets are getting more and more popular every day. As a result, more people tend to use mobile devices to access Web contents. Therefore, mobile browsing becomes an important means of Internet access for daily life. In order to have smooth and user-friendly Web browsing experiences, Web designers should consider the limitations of mobile devices, such as a small screen size. However, most Web sites do not provide a mobile version, which makes it difficult to browse the contents on the small screens of mobile devices. This study presents a novel approach …

Data Replication Strategies In Cloud Computing, Yang Liu

Computer Science

Data replication is a widely used technique in various systems. For example, it can be employed in large-scale distributed file systems to increase data availability and system reliability, or it can be used in many network models (e.g. data grid, Amazon CloudFront) to reduce access latency and network bandwidth consumption, etc. I study a series of problems that related to the data replication method in Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and in Amazon CloudFront service. Data failure, which is caused by hardware failure or malfunction, software error, human error, is the greatest threat to the file storage system. I present …

Distance-Aware Relay Placement And Scheduling In Wireless Networks., Shi Bai

Computer Science

The WiMAX technology and cognitive radio have been active topics in wireless networks. A WiMAX mesh network is able to provide larger wireless coverage, higher network capacity and Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) communications. Cognitive radios enable dynamic spectrum access over a large frequency range. These characteristics make WiMAX mesh networks and cognitive radio networks able to provide users with low-cost, high-speed and long-range wireless communications, as well as better Quality of Service. However, there are still several challenges and problems to be solved in this area, such as relay station placement problems and scheduling problems. In this thesis, I studied a distance-aware …

Dom Structure Based Web Pattern Mining, Naresh Pillarikuppam

Computer Science

A rapid expansion in the Web has motivated several studies to understand and recognize the implementation structure underlying the interface. Though the presentation of the Web pages looks different, those Web pages may share the same semantic structure to organize information. Those common semantic structures are referred to as Web patterns. There are no strict rules for implementing the HTML structure of the web pages, and the implementation of each web page might not be consistent across the entire website. Also, the HTML implementation of one website varies from other websites. This makes it difficult to recognize the Web patterns …

Demonstrating Bid Rigging With A Shopping Agent Application Using Jade, Dinesh Sivanandam

Computer Science

This paper presents the implementation of a shopping-cart agent that demonstrated collusion in online bidding. Collusion is an agreement between two or more persons, sometimes illegal and therefore secretive, to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights; or to obtain an objective forbidden by law, typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair advantage [15]. It is an agreement among firms to divide the market, set prices, or limit production. The paper has the shopping agent and its bid-rigging methods implemented using the Java Agent Development Framework (JADE), which helps develop agent-based applications. JADE uses …

Vector-Item Pattern Mining Algorithms And Their Applications, Jianfei Wu

Computer Science

Advances in storage technology have long been driving the need for new data mining techniques. Not only are typical data sets becoming larger, but the diversity of available attributes is increasing in many problem domains. In biological applications for example, a single protein may have associated sequence-, text-, graph-, continuous and item data. Correspondingly, there is growing need for techniques to find patterns in such complex data. Many techniques exist for mapping specific types of data to vector space representations, such as the bag-of-words model for text [58] or embedding in vector spaces of graphs [94, 91]. However, there are …

Modeling Of Dynamic Pricing Of Energy For A Smart Grid Using A Multi-Agent Framework, Harvinder Kaur

Computer Science

The use of smart grids is being promoted to address issues such as energy independence, global warming and emergency resilience. A smart grid is a digitized form of the power grid and is comprised of an intelligent monitoring system that keeps track of the two-way digital communications in the system. A multi-agent system is a collection of interacting intelligent agents that can be used in problem solving for systems that are difficult or impossible to be solved by an individual agent. Applications of multi-agent systems can range from transportation, logistics, graphics, networking and mobile technologies to modeling real world scenarios …

Analysis Of Security Vulnerabilities In Web Applications Using Threat Modeling, Samuel Sudhakar Kondamarri

Computer Science

Software security issues have been a major concern to the cyberspace community; therefore, a great deal of research on security testing has been performed, and various security testing techniques have been developed. A security process that is integrated into the application development cycle is required for creating a secure system. A part of this process is to create a threat profile for an application. The present project explains this process as a case study for analyzing a web application using Threat Modeling. This analysis can be used in the security testing approach that derives test cases from design level artifacts.

Positioning Of Relay Stations In Wireless Sensor Networks, Nikhil Koganti

Computer Science

A sensor is a device which can detect or measure a physical property and which records, indicates, or otherwise responds to the signal received. A wireless sensor in a network can communicate with the sensors located within its transmission range. In this paper, the capacity enhancement problem by adding a relay station to the sensor network was studied which can result in efficient and scalable design. Major concerns of the wireless sensors addressed in this paper are reducing the number of hops a message needs to make from one sensor to a different sensor before it reaches the base station, …

Grid Frequency And Voltage Support Using Photovoltaic Systems With Energy Storage Assist, Ravi Bhatt

Masters Theses

"An optimized operating scheme for a grid-connected community based photovoltaic (PV) system is described. The system can participate in grid ancillary services like frequency and voltage regulation functions based on the Smart Grid framework. The proposed model comprises of a PV plant with Li-ion batteries coupled to the grid by means of a three-phase inverter. A two-way communication between the PV plant and the grid is assumed. The PV/storage plant provides constant updates on its current kW/kVar capability and the grid transmits the demand for specific amounts of power and for specific lengths of time. The battery charging energy can …

The Sorption Of Chemical And Nuclear Contaminants From Soil And Water Using Nanosize Particles Of Hydroxyapatite, Chyrene Joseph

Masters Theses

"High surface area (>200 m²/g) crystals composed of nanosize (30-50nm) hydroxyapatite; (Ca₅(PO₄)₃OH) particles are being investigated as an alternative in cleaing [sic] contaminated groundwater and soil by removing toxic wastes and radionuclides. Static batch tests were carried out at 2, 4, 8, 24 and 120 hour time periods by reacting hydroxyapatite with individual solutions prepared with specific elements to evaluate the applicability of hydroxyapatite in removing potential contaminants. Chemical analyses on leachant solutions, leachate solutions, and post-reaction digested solids were conducted by Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectroscopy to determine the extent of ion removal. Removal of these ions is expected …

Maggie And Her Students: Talking And Reasoning In A Reform-Based Mathematics Classroom, Debra Louise Semm Rich

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

In this qualitative case study, I explored how Maggie, the teacher, and her students used language to advance students' conceptual understanding of mathematics in a reform-based mathematics classroom. Specifically I sought to describe how Maggie's reform-based mathematics classroom environment impacted the quantity and quality of mathematical language spoken by her students. Maggie's eighth-grade mathematics classroom was observed during a course of study on data and statistics. Three semi-structured interviews with Maggie, artifacts provided by her, and fourteen 52-minute classroom lessons, supported with field notes, were analyzed.

Environmental themes were revealed as they related to Maggie, her beliefs, goals, knowledge, and …

Optimal Control Of A Helicopter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Uav), David John Nodland

Masters Theses

"This thesis addresses optimal control of a helicopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Helicopter UAVs may be widely used for both military and civilian operations. Because these helicopters are underactuated nonlinear mechanical systems, high-performance controller design for them presents a challenge. This thesis presents an optimal controller design via both state and output feedback for trajectory tracking of a helicopter UAV using a neural network (NN). The state and output-feedback control system utilizes the backstepping methodology, employing kinematic and dynamic controllers while the output feedback approach uses an observer in addition to these controllers. The online approximator-based dynamic controller learns the …

Synthesis And Toxicity Studies Of Imidazolium-Based Ionic Liquids, Ninu Madria

Masters Theses

"There is a considerable recent interest in the applications of room temperature ionic liquids (RTILs) as green solvents in organic synthesis and as nonvolatile electrolytes in lithium ion batteries. A variety of commercially available imidazolium based RTILs have been used for these applications, mainly due to their negligible vapor pressures, high thermal stabilities, wide liquid range, wide electrochemical windows and high anodic stability. The state of the art lithium ion batteries require the use of electrolytes that have relatively low viscosities at temperatures as low as -35°C. This thesis describes the synthesis of novel oxygenated and fluorinated imidazolium based RTILs …

Novel Transparent Conductive Materials: Understanding And Prediction, Yaou Song

Masters Theses

"Transparent conductive oxides (TCOs) such as doped In₂O₃, ZnO, SnO₂ or CdO are highly attractive due to their special properties, which are electrical conductivity and optical transparency. The lack of complete understanding of the fundamentals behind this unique phenomena and rapidly increasing commercial demand draw a lot of interest in investigating this kind of materials. More efficient, environmentally friendly and less expensive transparent conductive materials are needed for a variety of applications, and a general understanding of the origins of the unusual behavior would help further search for potential transparent conductive (TC) candidates. Understanding the basic properties of conventional TCOs …

Virtual Dance And Motion-Capture, Marc Boucher

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

A general view of various ways in which virtual dance can be understood is presented in the first part of this article. It then appraises the uses of the term “virtual” in previous studies of digital dance. A more in-depth view of virtual dance as it relates to motion-capture is offered, and key issues are discussed regarding computer animation, digital imaging, motion signature, virtual reality and interactivity. The paper proposes that some forms of virtual dance be defined in relation to both digital technologies and contemporary theories of virtuality.

Cylinders And Spheres : Toddlers Engage In Problem Solving, Rosemary Geiken

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Every day more six million infants and toddlers (children under 3 years of age) enter some kind of out-of-home care, with 22% of this group attending center-based programs. Studies on the quality of care in centers indicate that 40% of these children are in poor quality settings while 51 % are in mediocre to medium quality settings. Two factors contributing to these low ratings are lack of age-appropriate materials and lack of learning opportunities. To address these data Piaget's theory of constructivism guided the design of a study to provide evidence of construction of knowledge that occurred when toddlers were …

Enrollment Of Students With Disabilities In Career And Technical Education, Cory C. Johnson

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The enrollment patterns of students with and without disabilities in Career and Technical Education (CTE) were examined. Data were collected from the transcripts and Individualized Education Plans (IEP) of 27 students with disabilities and the transcripts of 27 students without disabilities from three school districts at the end of their senior year. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistical analyses to describe differences between the enrollment patterns of students with and without disabilities as well as between students with different types and severity of disability. Overall, students in special education earned more CTE credits than students in general education. Additionally, …