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A Build System For Benchmarking And Comparison Of Competing System Implementations, Anthony J. Bentley

Electrical and Computer Engineering ETDs

When developing a hardware or software system, the problem at hand may lend itself to multiple solutions. During the implementation process for such systems, it can be helpful to prototype multiple versions that use distinct paradigms, and determine the efficiency of each according to some metric, such as execution time. This paper presents a portable, lightweight build system designed for easy benchmarking and verification of competing implementations of an algorithm. Also presented is a sample project that uses this system to compare the performance and correctness of CPU, GPU, and FPGA implementations of a signal recovery algorithm

Hilltopics: Volume 13, Issue 4, Hilltopics Staff

Hilltopics

No abstract provided.

Annual Forage Cropping-Systems For Midwestern Ruminant Livestock Production, John Ernest Mcmillan

Open Access Dissertations

Annual forage cropping systems are a vital aspect of livestock forage production. One area where this production system can be enhanced is the integration of novel annual forages into conventional cropping systems. Two separate projects were conducted to investigate alternative forage options in annual forage production. In the first discussed research trial, two sets of crops were sown following soft red winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) grain harvest, at two nitrogen application rates 56 and 112 kg ha-1 . The first set of crops were C4 summer annuals seeded within two weeks of wheat grain harvest and included, brown …

Security Techniques For Sensor Systems And The Internet Of Things, Daniele Midi

Open Access Dissertations

Sensor systems are becoming pervasive in many domains, and are recently being generalized by the Internet of Things (IoT). This wide deployment, however, presents significant security issues.

We develop security techniques for sensor systems and IoT, addressing all security management phases. Prior to deployment, the nodes need to be hardened. We develop nesCheck, a novel approach that combines static analysis and dynamic checking to efficiently enforce memory safety on TinyOS applications. As security guarantees come at a cost, determining which resources to protect becomes important. Our solution, OptAll, leverages game-theoretic techniques to determine the optimal allocation of security resources in …

Computational Fluid Dynamics Is Key To Better Flying Aircraft, Nihad E. Daidzic

Aviation Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Woodward Material Replenishment Loop Implementation, Peyton J. Gunnison

Honors Capstones

At Woodward Rock Cut Campus purchased material is required at each production cell in the Integration loop at the Rock Cut Campus. The purchased parts come from suppliers and begin by being stored in the warehouse, which is external to Woodward. A truck is used to transport the needed kits and point of use storage bin between the warehouse and the Rock Cut Campus. Currently there is not a schedule in place to efficiently move the carts from the warehouse to the production lines. The project’s main objective is to develop a functional and efficient reusable kitting replenishment loop. The …

Comedy Of Politics: How Satire Affects The Attitudes Towards A Politician, Marcus Braymer

2016 Fall Honors Capstone Projects - Archive

Throughout history, satirists have mocked politicians. However, in recent years politicians have involved themselves in satire, making appearances on shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. These appearances and the increasing interest in satire has led to one question, does satire affect the public opinion of politicians? In order to answer this question an experiment was designed by creating three original videos. The videos showed a fictional politician’s support of an issue, a satirist making fun of this politician, and the politician making an appearance with the satirist to make fun of himself. Participants watched these videos and …

Intracellular Biochemical Targets Of Ruthenium Polypyridyl Complexes In Multiple Cancer Cell Models, Adam S. Dayoub

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

The ruthenium (II) polypyridyl complexes [(phen)2Ru(tatpp)Ru(phen)2]4+, RPC4 and [(phen)2Ru(tatpp)]2+, RPC3 are promising anticancer candidates due to their observed cytotoxic effect against multiple cancer cell lines. These complexes contain a reactive oxygen species (ROS) creating redox-active tetraazatetrapyridopentacene (tatpp) bridge inducing cytotoxic activity against multiple cancer lines and types. Also, they have shown a selectivity towards malignant and normal cell tissue types that are of interest in cellular biological systems and treatment care. They exhibit the ability to regress tumor growth in mouse models, cleave DNA in gel assays and exhibit efficacies in a hypoxic environment similar to that of tumors in …

Implications Of Lithofacies Association And Architecture For Low And High-Accommodation System Tracts From The Sandstone Dominated Zone ( The Barren Series) Of The Cretaceous-Paleocene Raton Formation, Trinidad, Colorado, Yaqoub Y Y S M Alsayed Alrefaei

Earth & Environmental Sciences Dissertations - Archive

The Raton Formation is an Upper Cretaceous and Lower Paleocene unit that is interpreted to be deposited in various stages of high-accommodation fluvial systems. High-accommodation flood basin deposits are generally considered poor as reservoir bodies because sand bodies within these basins are considered to be small and disconnected within flood basin mud. Accordingly, they gain less attention in oil and gas exploration and in research. High-accommodation deposits in the Raton Formation contain several sand bodies with different sizes and geometries that could be good candidates for reservoir rocks. These sand bodies are common in outcrops of high-accommodation deposits in the …

Experimental Constraints On The Micromechanics Of Brittle Fragmentation During Earthquake Rupture, Troy J. Barber

Earth & Environmental Sciences Theses - Archive

Various fault damage fabrics, from gouge in the principal slip zone, to fragmented and pulverized rocks in the fault damage zone, have been attributed to brittle deformation at high strain rates during earthquake rupture. These fault zone fabrics are significant in terms of 1) the information they contain about coseismic deformation mechanisms, 2) the role they play in dissipating energy and contributing to slip weakening during earthquake rupture, and 3) their influence on fault rock mechanical and hydraulic properties. Past experimental work has shown that there exists a critical threshold in stress-strain rate space through which rock failure transitions from …

Nanopetrophysics Of The Niobrara Formation In Berthoud State #3 Well, Rafael Roberto Villegas

Earth & Environmental Sciences Theses - Archive

The advent of new drilling and completion technologies over the past two decades has made unconventional shale reservoirs the focus of much of the oil and gas exploration and production throughout the United States. Despite large estimated reserves, unconventional reservoirs are typically characterized by low porosity and extremely low matrix permeability, partly accounting for the relatively low recovery rates seen, ranging from 10-15%. Increasing production from unconventional reservoirs requires an understanding of the reservoir’s nano-petrophysical properties including pore throat size distribution and edge accessible porosity. Furthermore, an understanding of the relationship between TOC, mineralogy, and pore throat distribution is critical …

Fault Detection And Localization Techniques For Concurrent Programs, Jing Xu

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Concurrency faults are hard to detect and localize due to the nondeterministic behavior of concurrent programs. In this dissertation, we present three approaches to detecting and localizing faults in concurrent programs. The first approach identifies erroneous event patterns in a failed concurrent program execution. Given a failed execution, we characterize the execution as a sequence of context-switch points and then use controlled execution to distinguish erroneous context-switch points from benign context-switch points. Erroneous context-switch points are used to derive erroneous event patterns, which allow the user to quickly localize the actual fault. Our experiments were conducted on thirteen programs. Seven …

Exploratory Data Analysis Over Online Community Networks, Azade Nazi

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

An online community network links entities (e.g., users, products) with various relationships (e.g., friendship, co-purchase) and make such information available for access through a web interface. There are numerous such networks on the web, ranging from Twitter, Instagram, which links users as ``followers-followees'', to amazon.com, ebay.com, which links products with relationships such as ``also buy''. Online community networks often feature a web interface that only allows local-neighborhood queries - i.e., given a entity (e.g., users, products) of the community network as input, the system only returns the immediate neighbors of the entity. Further, the rate limit constraint restricts the number …

Integrative Approaches For Large-Scale Biomedical Data Analysis, Ashis Kumer Biswas

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Advancement of the Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), also known as the High Throughput Sequencing (HTS) technologies allow researchers investigate genome, transcriptome, or epigenome of any organism from any perspective, thereby contributing to the enrichment of the biomedical data repositories for many of the lesser known phenomena. The regulatory activities inside genome by the non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs), the transcribed product of the long-neglected "junk DNA" molecules is one such phenomenon. While large-scale data about the ncRNAs are becoming publicly available, the computational challenges are being imposed to the bioinformaticians for efficient mining to get reliable answers to few subtle questions. Given …

Response Of Microbial Networks And Microbiomes To The Forest-To-Pasture Conversion In Amazon Soils, Md Abdul Wadad Khan

Biology Dissertations - Archive

The Amazon rainforest is the largest tropical rainforest ecosystem in the world, and an extremely important region ecologically. Due to the growing human needs mainly for cattle ranching and cultivation, the rainforest has been in the process of clearing since 1970s losing an average of 25,000 km annually. This ecosystem conversion has a substantially adverse impact on biological diversities, in which the response of microbial diversity has not been studied until recently. Several studies showed that the conversion severely altered microbial diversities, with an increased alpha and decreased beta diversities. Given that microorganisms are closely associated with soil-associated functions, where …

Effect Of Viscoelastic Modeling Of Pcb On The Board Level Reliability Of Wafer Chip Scale Package (Wcsp) In Comparison To Orthotropic Linear Elastic Modeling, Avinash Anaskure

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

The assessment of board level solder joint reliability during thermal cycling is very important for electronic packages. During thermal cycling, the mismatch in Coefficient of Thermal Expansion (CTE) between the materials used in the package induces stress on the solder interconnects and result in deformation stresses. Finite element tools are widely used for rapid design optimization and also for understanding board level reliability issues. Lumped board properties approach, explicit geometry approach, and ECAD approach are the three widely used approaches for creating models for PCBs. In the lumped board properties approach, orthotropic elastic material properties are assigned to PCBs. However, …

Electromigration Induced Interface Reaction In Cu-Wire / Al-Pad Diffusion Couple, Patricia Aracelly Rodriguez-Salazar

Material Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

This dissertation presents experimental observations that may assist the understanding of electromigration (EM) failure mechanism active in Cu wire and Al thin film pad (wire bond). This study is motivated by an ongoing industrial effort to adapt Cu as wire bonding material for interconnection. Traditional material used for the wire bond has been Au; however, its high cost combined with its susceptibility to reliability failure caused by excessive growth of IMCs (IMC) makes Cu to be an attractive replacement. Though, since an application of Cu to wire bond technology is relatively new, many of reliability failure mechanisms are unknown especially …

A Harmonic Function Method For Eeg Source Reconstruction, Hongguang Xi

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

Neuronal activities generate the electrical current in the brain, and further result in the potential changes over the scalp. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a technique used to record the potential changes on the scalp. Even though fMRI, PET, MEG and other brain-imaging tools are widely used in brain research, they are limited by low spatial/temporal resolution, cost, mobility and suitability for long-term monitoring. In contrast, EEG signals have been successfully used to obtain useful diagnostic information (neural oscillations and response times) in clinical contexts. Further, they present the advantage to be highly portable, inexpensive, and can be acquired at the bedside …

Study Of Parameters Impacting Productivity Of Tunnel Boring Machines, Hamed Hashem Pour

Civil Engineering Theses - Archive

Tunnel construction has been on the rise for transportation of humans, freight and fluids. For a successful tunneling project, it is necessary for that tunneling contractors to have sufficient data about scope of work, project features and characteristics of the ground to estimate advance rate of the a tunnel boring machine (TBM). The main objective of this thesis is to study tunneling case studies and literature to analyze TBM productivity based on ground conditions, diameter and length of each project. Project data was tabulated and results are reported in this thesis. The methodology to conduct this research was literature search …

Recipients Of Major Scientific Awards A Descriptive And Predictive Analysis, Andrew Calvin Barbee

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Dissertations - Archive

Recent trends demonstrate an increase of women in leadership roles, STEM fields, and participating in higher education including graduate and doctoral programs, which is a result of Title IX. This quantitative study considered major scientific awards awarded to females and examines demographic characteristics of awardees from the Nobel, National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and National Science Foundation (NSF). More specifically, the following awards were examined the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the NAS Public Welfare Medal, and the NSF National Medal of Science within the discipline of Physical Science. Also, this study focused on equality to determine if a fair playing …

Administrative Strategies To Improve Teacher Recruitment And Retention In Rural Public Schools, Christine Kay Butler

Dissertations

The main purpose of this study was to gain insight into the recruitment and retention strategies popularized due to the need to meet high-quality teacher demands. Additionally, recruitment and retention strategies identified by administrators and tenured teachers working in rural public schools of Missouri as effective were collected through a survey. Administrators, as well as tenured teachers currently on staff in rural public school districts of Missouri, were the population of this study. Among 286 administrators, 95 administrative participants and 33 tenured teachers completed the survey. The survey responses were compared to determine if the administrative point-ofview was similar to …

2016 Bot Motion Index, Central Washington University Central Washington University

Board of Trustees Meeting Minutes

Motion Index of the Board of Trustees at Central Washington University, 2016.

Teaching Android Security Through Examples: A Publicly Available Database Of Vulnerable Apps, Daniel E. Krutz, Samuel A. Malachowsky

Articles

Security is hard, and teaching security can be even harder. Here we describe a public educational activity to assist in the instruction of both students and developers in creating secure Android apps. Our set of activities includes example vulnerable applications, information about each vulnerability, steps on how to repair the vulnerabilities, and information about how to confirm that the vulnerability has been properly repaired. Our primary goal is to make these activities available to other instructors for use in their classrooms ranging from the K-12 to university settings. A secondary goal of this project is to foster interest in security …

Knowledge Of Algebra For Teaching Quadratic Equations : The Impact Of Knowledge Dimensions On Planning And Pedagogical Strategies., Michael Raney

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Planning and presenting meaningful instruction in the mathematics classroom is a demanding task requiring mental flexibility as well as a solid foundation in relevant content knowledge and pedagogical strategies. In the last three decades, there has been a growing interest in the way teachers utilize this specialized mathematical knowledge for teaching algebra in the practice of teaching, specifically in planning and presenting classroom instruction. Even more recently, a growing area of emphasis has been the application of these domains of knowledge in a specific focal context involving a singular topic or unit of instruction in the mathematics classroom. This study …

Computational Methods For The Analysis Of Functional 4d-Ct Chest Images., Ahmed Soliman Naeem Soliman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Medical imaging is an important emerging technology that has been intensively used in the last few decades for disease diagnosis and monitoring as well as for the assessment of treatment effectiveness. Medical images provide a very large amount of valuable information that is too huge to be exploited by radiologists and physicians. Therefore, the design of computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) system, which can be used as an assistive tool for the medical community, is of a great importance. This dissertation deals with the development of a complete CAD system for lung cancer patients, which remains the leading cause of cancer-related death …

Dynamic Warehouse Optimization Using Predictive Analytics., Parvaneh Jahani

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The forward area is a small area of a warehouse with a low picking cost. Two approaches that are investigated for selecting the SKUs of this area and the allocated space are the static and the dynamic approaches. In the case that decisions about the forward area are made periodically (e.g. yearly) and the products' demand patterns are completely ignored, the FRP is static. We developed two heuristics that solve the large discrete assignment, allocation, and sizing problem simultaneously. Replenishing the same product in the same place of the forward area brings about a ``Locked" layout of the fast picking …

Reflectivity Of Light Emitting Diodes (Led) And Incandescent Lights On Concrete And Asphalt Pavements., Jeremy Elliott Rice

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to investigate the reflectivity of light on concrete and asphalt pavement systems. In 1983, the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) published the first recommended practice (RP-8) for the design of roadway and parking lot lighting. This design method implemented empirically tested factors which were defined as the “reduced luminance coefficients” or the R-Tables. The R-Tables are essential for proper design of light pole installation dimensions, required power, and the distribution of light. The originally tested pavements are not necessarily representative of modern pavement materials used today. Moreover, recent Light Emitting Diodes (LED) are a relatively …

Strategies And Techniques For Fabricating Mems Bistable Thermal Actuators., Dilan Ratnayake

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bistable elements are beginning to appear in the field of MEMS as they allow engineers to design sensors and actuators which require no electrical power and possess mechanical memory. This research focuses on the development of novel strategies and techniques for fabricating MEMS bistable structures to serve as no electrical power thermal actuators. Two parallel strategies were explored for the design and fabrication of the critical bistable element. Both strategies involved an extensive material study on candidate thin film materials to determine their temperature coefficient of expansion and as-deposited internal stress properties. Materials investigated included titanium tungsten, Invar, silicon nitride …

An Integrated Economic Equilibrium Model For Electricity Markets., Swapna Pothabathula

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The increasing energy challenges worldwide are forcing researchers to explore ways for energy systems that work more efficiently on their own and with each other. This thesis develops an integrated electricity market equilibrium model (EMEM) as a mixed complementarity problem (MCP). In particular, we first develop an equilibrium model to study an electricity market consisting of coal producers, electricity generation firms, natural gas producers, natural gas marketers, natural gas pipeline owners, natural gas consumers and electricity consumers. The equilibrium model not only captures a decentralized optimization for each player but considers the interaction amongst players. Second, we formulate the equilibrium …

Spreading Speeds Along Shifting Resource Gradients In Reaction-Diffusion Models And Lattice Differential Equations., Jin Shang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A reaction-diffusion model and a lattice differential equation are introduced to describe the persistence and spread of a species along a shifting habitat gradient. The species is assumed to grow everywhere in space and its growth rate is assumed to be monotone and positive along the habitat region. We show that the persistence and spreading dynamics of a species are dependent on the speed of the shifting edge of the favorable habitat, c, as well as c^*(∞) and c^*(−∞), which are formulated in terms of the dispersal kernel and species growth rates in both directions. When …