Digital Commons Network^™

Quantifying Surface Water Capture By Municipal Pumping Wells In An Urban Watershed Impacted By Road Salt, Austen York

Masters Theses

The Spring Valley sub-watershed is located within the Kalamazoo Township contains Spring Valley Lake, a man-made impoundment that ultimately discharges into the Kalamazoo River. Elevated chloride levels in pumped water from the Kalamazoo Station 14 municipal wellfield, located along the shoreline of Spring Valley Lake, has resulted in less than ideal corrosivity values for the water distribution system. Specific project objectives include: (1) identifying the cause of elevated chloride, (2) assessing surface water capture by the Station 14 wellfield, and (3) characterizing of water quality in Spring Valley Lake. Monitoring along a series of sampling transects spanning the sub-watershed, focused …

Integrating Degradation Forecasting And Abatement Framework Into Advanced Distribution Management System, Huu Phuong Hoang

All Dissertations

Future distribution grids are expected to face an increasing penetration of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DERs) and electric vehicles (EVs). This landscape change will pose challenges to the control and management of distribution grids because of the variability of renewable energy resources and EV charging. In addition, multiple DERs dispersed over networks can also challenge the grid operation and maintenance as various DERs at various locations are needed to be monitored and managed. However, customers will not be content with reductions in power quality, reliability, economy, safety, or security. To enhance the effectiveness of grid control and management, future grids …

Intelligent Resource Prediction For Hpc And Scientific Workflows, Benjamin Shealy

All Dissertations

Scientific workflows and high-performance computing (HPC) platforms are critically important to modern scientific research. In order to perform scientific experiments at scale, domain scientists must have knowledge and expertise in software and hardware systems that are highly complex and rapidly evolving. While computational expertise will be essential for domain scientists going forward, any tools or practices that reduce this burden for domain scientists will greatly increase the rate of scientific discoveries. One challenge that exists for domain scientists today is knowing the resource usage patterns of an application for the purpose of resource provisioning. A tool that accurately estimates these …

Procedural Plant Generation With Floragen, Christopher Wesley Wright

Computer Engineering

A particularly challenging aspect of game design revolves around asset creation. Often new developers become lost in nuances and time investment required to learn 3d asset creation software. While many game development platforms provide an internal asset store, these assets are often expensive or limited. These assets restrict the flexibility for a creator to fully control the product they create. A critical asset type in many games is flora. Good looking trees and plants add environmental variation when added properly. In this project, I designed and implemented an add-on dubbed FloraGen to the 3D modeling software Blender in which users …

Directional Spectral Solar Energy For Building Performance: From Simulation To Cyber-Physical Prototype, Joseph Del Rocco

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The original research and development in this dissertation contributes to the field of building performance by actively harnessing a wider spectrum of directional solar radiation for use in buildings. Solar radiation (energy) is often grouped by wavelength measurement into the spectra ultraviolet (UV), visible (light), and short and long-wave infrared (heat) on the electromagnetic spectrum. While some of this energy is directly absorbed or deflected by our atmosphere, most of it passes through, scatters about, and collides with our planet. Modern building performance simulations, tools, and control systems often oversimplify this energy into scalar values for light and heat, when …

The Social And Behavioral Influences Of Interactions With Virtual Dogs As Embodied Agents In Augmented And Virtual Reality, Nahal Norouzi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) have been researched for years and recently many of these IVAs have become commercialized and widely used by many individuals as intelligent personal assistants. The majority of these IVAs are anthropomorphic, and many are developed to resemble real humans entirely. However, real humans do not interact only with other humans in the real world, and many benefit from interactions with non-human entities. A prime example is human interactions with animals, such as dogs. Humans and dogs share a historical bond that goes back thousands of years. In the past 30 years, there has been a great …

Hypothetical Ai Arbitrators: A Deficiency In Empathy And Intuitive Decision-Making, Cole Dorsey

Arbitration Law Review (2009 - Present)

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Optical And Structural Properties Of Gesn Heterostructures, Oluwatobi Gabriel Olorunsola

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Silicon (Si)-based optoelectronics have gained traction due to its primed versatility at developing light-based technologies. Si, however, features indirect bandgap characteristics and suffers relegated optical properties compared to its III-V counterparts. III-Vs have also been hybridized to Si platforms but the resulting technologies are expensive and incompatible with standard complementary-metal-oxide-semiconductor processes. Germanium (Ge), on the other hand, have been engineered to behave like direct bandgap material through tensile strain interventions but are well short of attaining extensive wavelength coverage. To create a competitive material that evades these challenges, transitional amounts of Sn can be incorporated into Ge matrix to form …

New Titanate Bioceramic Nanomaterials For Drug Delivery And Controlled Release, Seaab Imad Sahib

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nanomaterials have attracted much attention for biomedical applications due to their unique characteristics that are proven to be potential in cell sensing, drug delivery, biological membrane penetration, biocompatibility, and tissue adhesion. The outcomes of this dissertation presented in chapter III-V mainly discuss new approaches in drug delivery, cellular uptake improvement, and neuronal regeneration and protection using a well-optimized titanium-based nanomaterial. In particular, Chapter III summarizes the impact of two different versions of the titanate nanowires on ameliorating the delivery of the antimicrobial and anticancer drug in vitro. Those drugs were loaded on the surface of the fabricated nanowires and characterized …

Maintenance Of Cognitive Demand During Repeated Task Enactments Using A Teaching Practice That Builds On Student Thinking, Joshua M. Ruk

Dissertations

Maintaining high levels of cognitive demand during task enactments can improve student learning in classrooms. Influences such as teachers' beliefs about their students’ abilities, and the curriculum that a teacher uses can affect the factors that contribute to the maintenance of cognitive demand. My study adds to what we know about such influences by looking at how a teaching practice that builds on student thinking affects the factors that contribute to the maintenance of cognitive demand, by asking:

1. What does the maintenance of cognitive demand look like when teachers are attempting to attend to student thinking during task enactment?
2. How …

Three Essays On Us Phd Education And Applications Of Machine Learning Methods, Qing Zang

Dissertations

This study mainly talks about U.S. PhD education and applications of machine learning methods. On one hand, PhD education, as a way to cultivate future researchers, attracts a lot of attention. On the other hand, machine learning methods are utilized more and more often in academic research. This study, as an attempt, would like to contribute to these two fields. The first essay discusses whether education can reduce and eliminate discrimination. By using the data of PhD recipients’ earning in the U.S., we investigate if PhD education can shrink the earning gaps in three groups: Female vs male, disabled vs …

Investigating Effects Of Microenvironmental Stress On Cell Metabolism Using Multiphoton Imaging, Lisa Rebello

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Resistance to therapy in cancer is a major cause of poor prognosis in patients. Tumor hypoxia plays an active role in mediating treatment resistance and has been linked to metastases and metastatic potential in cancer. Our research focused on three objectives: i) To understand metabolic effects of chronic and intermittent hypoxia in murine breast cancer cells and its affiliation with metastatic potential ii) To identify the metabolic changes associated with radiation therapy in a panel of radiosensitive and radioresistant human head and neck cancer cells and iii) to monitor the changes in cell metabolism associated with gain of treatment resistance. …

Parity-Time Symmetry In A Coherent Atomic Medium, Jingliang Feng

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parity-time (PT) symmetry has attracted considerable attention since optics was realized with the ability to provide a fertile platform for the exploration of PT symmetry. Although many of the previous researches on PT symmetry have been conducted in solid-state system and the network of fiber loops, coherent atomic medium offers another platform for the exploration of PT symmetry due to its easy reconfigurability and flexible tunability in parameters.

This dissertation mainly focuses on the investigations of the phenomena related to PT-symmetric optical lattice in a coherent atomic medium. First, a controllable photonic crystal with periodic Raman gain was constructed in …

On Analysing Student Resilience In Higher Education Programs Using A Data-Driven Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Ee-Peng Lim, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analysing student resilience is important as research has shown that resilience is related to students’ academic performance and their persistence through academic setbacks. While questionnaires can be conducted to assess student resilience directly, they suffer from human recall errors and deliberate suppression of true responses. In this paper, we propose ACREA, ACademic REsilience Analytics framework which adopts a data-driven approach to analyse student resilient behavior with the use of student-course data. ACREA defines academic setbacks experienced by students and measures how well students overcome such setbacks using a quasi-experimental design. By applying ACREA on a real world student-course dataset, we …

Building Action Sets In A Deep Reinforcement Learner, Yongzhao Wang, Arunesh Sinha, Sky C.H. Wang, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many policy-learning applications, the agent may execute a set of actions at each decision stage. Choosing among an exponential number of alternatives poses a computational challenge, and even representing actions naturally expressed as sets can be a tricky design problem. Building upon prior approaches that employ deep neural networks and iterative construction of action sets, we introduce a reward-shaping approach to apportion reward to each atomic action based on its marginal contribution within an action set, thereby providing useful feedback for learning to build these sets. We demonstrate our method in two environments where action spaces are combinatorial. Experiments …

The Power Of Renegotiation And Monitoring In Software Outsourcing: Substitutes Or Complements?, He Huang, Minhui Hu, Robert J. Kauffman, Hongyan Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Monitoring and contract renegotiation are two common solutions for addressing information asymmetry and uncertainty between a client and a vendor of software outsourcing services. Monitoring is mostly applied in time-and-materials contracts, as a basis for inspecting and reimbursing the vendor’s efforts in system development. Renegotiation, by contrast, is deployed in fixed-price and time-and-materials contracts to mitigate the loss of surplus from uncertainty after system development. We investigate the interaction between monitoring and renegotiation and examine the corresponding contract choice problem. We find that the client benefits from renegotiation based on two effects: an uncertainty-resolution effect and a post-development incentive effect, …

Canita: Faster Rates For Distributed Convex Optimization With Communication Compression, Zhize Li, Peter Richtarik

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the high communication cost in distributed and federated learning, methods relying on compressed communication are becoming increasingly popular. Besides, the best theoretically and practically performing gradient-type methods invariably rely on some form of acceleration/momentum to reduce the number of communications (faster convergence), e.g., Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (Nesterov, 1983, 2004) and Adam (Kingma and Ba, 2014). In order to combine the benefits of communication compression and convergence acceleration, we propose a \emph{compressed and accelerated} gradient method based on ANITA (Li, 2021) for distributed optimization, which we call CANITA. Our CANITA achieves the \emph{first accelerated rate} $O\bigg(\sqrt{\Big(1+\sqrt{\frac{\omega^3}{n}}\Big)\frac{L}{\epsilon}} + \omega\big(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\big)^{\frac{1}{3}}\bigg)$, …

Aku Research 2021, Office Of Research And Graduate Studies

Office of Research and Graduate Studies

Content

- Foreword

- Research projects

- COVID-19 Research

- University updates

Leveraging Multimodal Learning Analytics To Understand How Humans Learn With Emerging Technologies, Elizabeth Cloude

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Major education and training challenges are plaguing the United States in preparing the next generation of the future workforce to meet the demands of the 21st Century. Several calls have been released to improve education programs to ensure learners are acquiring 21st century knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). As we embark on the digital and automation ages of the 21st century, it is essential that we move away from traditional education programs that define and measure KSAs as static constructs (e.g., standardized assessments) with little consideration of the actual real-time deployment of these processes, missing critical information on the degree …

Study Of Mos2/High-K Interface And Implementation Of Mos2 Based Memristor For Neuromorphic Computing Applications, Durjoy Dev

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The scientific world is witnessing an unprecedented triumph of artificial neural network (ANN)- a computing system inspired by the biological neural network. With the enthralling quest for Internet of Everything (IoE), it is expected to have an unparalleled dominance of ANN in our day-to-day life. In recent times, memristor has come as an emerging candidate to realize ANN through emulating biological synapse and neuron behavior. Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), one well-known two-dimensional (2D) transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs), has drawn interest for high speed, flexible, low power electronic devices since it has a tunable bandgap, reasonable carrier mobility, high Young's modulus, and …

Collaborcrack: A Collaborative Password Cracking Solution For Windows Penetration Testing, Andrew Griess

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Cybersecurity professionals attempt to crack password hashes during penetration tests to determine if they are strong enough. A password hash is a way to encode a password securely. This paper describes a proof-of-concept program called CollaborCrack, a team-based password cracking solution. CollaborCrack addresses the issues of computational complexity, remote cracking security, duplication of work, and the cost associated with password cracking. To address computational complexity, CollaborCrack enables remote password cracking. Remote cracking requires additional safeguards, which CollaborCrack mitigates by storing sensitive information locally. To reduce the duplication of work, CollaborCrack provides a shared interface designed around collaboration and teamwork. CollaborCrack …

Investigating Cultural Values And Educational Technology Adoption In Central Asia: A Case Study, Randall W. Gwin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Although the adoption of new tools for communication and learning could reasonably be expected to influence culture, little is known about the relationship between cultural values and the adoption or diffusion of Web 2.0 technologies. This case study examines the way in which the cultural values of 59 teachers in four Central Asian countries influenced and were influenced by Web 2.0 technologies during five to eighteen months of online professional development. Data was collected through self-introductions, Likert-scale and open-ended prompts on initial and final surveys, online forum discussions, and capstone projects. This allows an examination of changes in the participants’ …

Exploring Hydrologic Responses To Different Wildfire Spatial Patterns Through The Lens Of Computational Modeling, Luke M. Telfer

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Severe wildfire disturbances are becoming increasingly common in high-elevation forests of the western United States. These fires alter watershed hydrologic processes, threatening critical downstream water resources and aquatic ecosystems. However, watershed-scale postfire hydrologic responses and water balance changes are highly uncertain. While postfire effects on individual processes such as runoff, infiltration, evapotranspiration, and snow dynamics are relatively well known, the role of wildfire spatial patterns in governing hydrologic connectivity and interactions between water balance components is poorly understood due to challenges associated with measuring and comparing fires at large scales. This thesis aims to examine pattern-related postfire interactions between various …

Bioactivity Assessment Of Veratrum Californicum Alkaloids, Madison Dirks

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The native Idaho plant Veratrum californicum is known to contain steroidal alkaloids that function as inhibitors of hedgehog signaling, a pathway utilized for the growth and differentiation of cells as well as proper tissue development. Veratrum californicum was originally noticed when pregnant ewes consumed the plant and later gave birth to lambs with craniofacial mutations such as a cyclopean eyes. These malformations were caused by the plant’s steroidal alkaloid cyclopamine blocking the hedgehog signaling pathway. This same pathway is used by more than 20 types of cancer for multiplication of cells. Additional alkaloids have been found in Veratrum californicum, …

Controls On The Frequency Content Of Near-Source Infrasound At An Open-Vent Volcano (Villarrica, Chile), Bryan Blake Rosenblatt

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The acoustic signals from open-vent volcanoes can contain specific information related to that volcano’s eruption dynamics and future activity. Thus, studying a specific volcano’s acoustics may provide critical warning mechanisms, signaling impending eruptions. Villarrica volcano, located in southern Chile, has an active lava lake that produces continuous infrasound with spectral peaks near 1 Hz and excursions of +/- ~0.2 Hz. The infrasound’s frequency content reveals key volcanic properties such as eruption style and crater shape. Leading up to Villarrica’s most recent paroxysm in 2015, infrasound spectral changes coincided with and indicated a rise in Villarrica’s lava lake level. As such, …

Upper Elementary Teacher Pedagogical Decision-Making In Title I English Language Arts Classrooms, Genevieve Skinner Prater

Dissertations

This study explored the pedagogical decision-making process for four English Language Arts teachers in upper elementary grades three through five in Title I schools in a state in the Rocky Mountain Mid-west. Characteristics of Title I schools vary, which might influence how teachers perceive pedagogy for English Language Arts content. This multiple case study sought to (a) determine the factors that influenced teachers’ pedagogical decisions when planning ELA instruction, (b) describe the implications of pedagogical decisions for the Title I upper elementary students, and (c) identify the challenges and opportunities of Title I upper elementary teachers’ pedagogical choices using interviews, …

A Comprehensive Analysis Of Reward Function For Adaptive Traffic Signal Control, Abu Rafe Md Jamil, Naushin Nower

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Adaptive traffic control systems (ATCS) can play an essential role in reducing traffic congestion in urban areas. The main challenge for ATSC is to determine the proper signal timing. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been used to determine proper signal timing. However, the success of the DRL algorithm depends on the appropriate reward function design. There exist various reward functions for ATSC in the existing research. This research presents a comprehensive analysis of the widely used reward function. The pros and cons of various reward algorithms were discussed, and experimental analysis shows that the multi-objective reward function enhances the …

Similarity Identification Of Large-Scale Biomedical Documents Using Cosine Similarity And Parallel Computing, Merlinda Wibowo, Christoph Quix, Nur Syahela Hussien, Herman Yuliansyah, Faisal Dharma Adhinata

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Document similarity computation is an important research topic in information retrieval, and it is a crucial issue for automatic document categorization. The similarity value is between 0 and 1, then the closest value to 1 is represented both documents is considered more relevant, vice versa. However, the large scale of textual information has created the problem of finding the relevance level between documents. Therefore, the relevance between mesh heading text in the PubMed documents is higher than the relevance of the abstract text in the PubMed documents. Furthermore, parallel computing is implemented to speed up the large-scale documents similarity identification …

Recognition Of Handwritten Javanese Script Using Backpropagation With Zoning Feature Extraction, Anik Nur Handayani, Heru Wahyu Herwanto, Katya Lindi Chandrika, Kohei Arai

Knowledge Engineering and Data Science

Backpropagation is part of supervised learning, in which the training process requires a target. The resulting error is transmitted back to the units below in its training process. Backpropagation can solve complicated problems because it consumes less memory than other algorithms. In addition, it also can produce solutions with a low error rate while executing less time. In image pattern recognition, backpropagation can be utilized for cultural preservation in many places worldwide, including Indonesia. It is used to recognize picture patterns in Javanese script writings. This study concluded that feature extraction approaches, zoning, and backpropagation could be utilized to distinguish …

Fabrication & Mechanical Properties Of Hastelloy-X Matrix Ceramic Composite, Sultan Stewart

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

In the aerospace industry, there is a desire for increased thermal and mechanical properties of sealing materials. In this thesis, porous Hastelloy-X alloy scaffolds with 80% porosity, currently used for fabricating seals in turbine applications, were used as the base material. The microstructure of the porous Hastelloy-X scaffolds was infiltrated using a room temperature curing silicate colloid (trade name -Dichtol HTWG Hydro #2506) and a novel zirconia based colloid to fabricate the metal matrix composites. Various fabrication processes, some using vacuum and pressure to assist the flow were utilized to infiltrate the scaffolds. The green composites were then cured at …