Digital Commons Network^™

Induction Brazing, Austin Squire, Scott Compton, Logan Hathaway, Michael Fleming

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Our team would like to research and explore ways of designing a portable device that uses induction heating/brazing to connect two exhaust pipes together.

Dupont Seal Mold Assembly Machine, Brett Biederman, Craig Hanchett, Matthew Chilton

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The Seal Assembly Machine is a custom-built device that is designed to seat a thin polymer part between two mating pieces of metal tooling. To meet the specifications of the sponsor, the Seal Assembly machine must perform its function more quickly and accurately than manual labor at the same task. At the time of compiling this report, the machine is not yet functional due to time constraints.

Co2 Based Parachute Deployment, Anthony M. S. Settlemier, Nicholas Motter

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper describes the design process of a CO2 based parachute deployment system for the Akronauts Rocket Design team, with particular emphasis on the selection of methodologies of deployment as well as design iteration. The objective was to create a fully mechanical system in order to replace the black powder based systems that were used previously by the team.

Emphasis was put in creating a system that would function well at higher altitudes while also preventing damage to the parachute during deployment. This system emphasizes robustness under launch conditions.

Biodegradation Of Rubber Particles In Soil: Using Acclimated Bacteria Isolated From Kansas Soil To Degrade Cryogrinds In Slurry, Shane Graham

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This study investigated the viability of bioremediating rubber cryogrind using enriched indigenous bacteria. To begin the experiment, soils from three highway roadside locations in Kansas, KS 96 and West, KS 400 and 143^rd, and 199^th, were collected and transported to the lab to be studied. An initial soil characterization was run on the soil samples using distilled (DI) water mixture and 0.01 M CaCl₂ to assess conductivity. The soils were tested to gather a baseline of the relationship between pH and conductivity and the impact of its distance from the roadside. Bacteria were isolated from …

Non-Destructive Characterization Of Bio-Cemented Soils Via Seismic Wave Measurement, Kyle Best

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The final outcome of this project is to examine the mechanical and resulting physical properties of bio-treated soil through microbial activity via non-destructive testing by seismic waves. The proposed bio-treatment strategy is through supplying specific nutrients for indigenous microbes within a soil specimen which in return produce calcium carbonates. The bio-minerals produced during these biogeochemical activities will improve the mechanical properties of soil by making cementation between soil grains. Additionally, a theoretical laboratory experimentational description will be provided to explain any associative effects on a specimen's water permeability or mechanical strength due to bio-mineralization within the samples. The characterization of …

Magic: The Gathering Card Virtualizer, Vincent Garbonick, Jacen C. Conlan, Jaret A. Varn

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Any well-versed Magic: The Gathering (MTG) player or collector knows how difficult it can be to keep track of all cards in their collection. Some spend hours searching for that one specific card, and others are constantly scouring the internet for how much their collection costs. However, this issue does not only affect casual fans. Resale companies spend hours a day determining the costs of cards, and tournament judges painstakingly check players’ decks to ensure they are not cheating. To assist with these struggles, the design team proposed to create the MTG Card Virtualizer. This device scans MTG playing cards …

Amino-Polymer For Co2 Capture By Vacuum Swing Adsorption, Sean Billy

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The applications of sorbent compounds in conjunction with amines and other additives is an innovative method at combating CO2 pollution. An ideal solution would use an amine sorbent to trap the high levels of absorbed CO2 with a low binding energy (less than 45 kJ/mol) and subsequently release them into a stored vessel at ambient temperature with a vacuum swing adsorption system. Attempts at finding a best mixture will be conducted through the usage of a vacuum swing system, utilizing a bed syringe containing the sorbent mix and a vacuum syringe to pull on and subsequently release the CO2 into …

Fuel System To Envelope Interface, James Campbell

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

*NOTE THIS PROJECT IS CONFIDENTIAL*

In this project, I will investigate solutions to interfacing a fuel system with a fabric skin section

Exo-Sir: An Epidemiological Model To Analyze The Impact Of Exogenous Spread Of Infection, Nirmal Kumar Sivaraman, Manas Gaur, Shivansh Baijal, Sakthi Balan Muthiah, Amit Sheth

Publications

Epidemics like Covid-19 and Ebola have impacted people's lives significantly. The impact of mobility of people across the countries or states in the spread of epidemics has been significant. The spread of disease due to factors local to the population under consideration is termed the endogenous spread. The spread due to external factors like migration, mobility, etc. is called the exogenous spread. In this paper, we introduce the Exo-SIR model, an extension of the popular SIR model and a few variants of the model. The novelty in our model is that it captures both the exogenous and endogenous spread of …

Process Knowledge-Infused Learning For Suicidality Assessment On Social Media, Kaushik Roy, Manas Gaur, Qi Zhang, Amit Sheth

Publications

Improving the performance and natural language explanations of deep learning algorithms is a priority for adoption by humans in the real world. In several domains, such as healthcare, such technology has significant potential to reduce the burden on humans by providing quality assistance at scale. However, current methods rely on the traditional pipeline of predicting labels from data, thus completely ignoring the process and guidelines used to obtain the labels. Furthermore, post hoc explanations on the data to label prediction using explainable AI (XAI) models, while satisfactory to computer scientists, leave much to be desired to the end users due …

Comparing Symbolic And Connectionist Algorithms For Correlating The Age Of Healthy Children With Sigma-Lognormal Neuromuscular Parameters, Zigeng Zhang, Christian O'Reilly, Rejean Plamondon

Publications

It is important to accurately evaluate the motor control maturity to help physicians diagnose delayed or abnormal motor development in children. Traditionally, it has been challenging to design assessment methods that are practical and accurate at the same time. This study aims to develop an effective algorithm to predict motor control maturity based on the Kinematic Theory of rapid human movements. We used handwritten pen strokes made on an electronic tablet by 513 children (5.5 to 13 years of age). We considered two types of movements: a single stroke and a triangle drawing test. For the analysis, Sigma-Lognormal parameters were …

Ksat: Knowledge-Infused Self Attention Transformer - Integrating Multiple Domain-Specific Contexts, Kaushik Roy, Yuxin Zi, Vignesh Narayanan, Manas Gaur, Amit P. Sheth

Publications

Domain-specific language understanding requires integrating multiple pieces of relevant contextual information. For example, we see both suicide and depression related behavior (multiple contexts) in the text “I have a gun and feel pretty bad about my life, and it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I didn’t wake up tomorrow”. Domain specificity in self-attention architectures is handled by fine-tuning on excerpts from relevant domain specific resources (datasets and external knowledge - medical textbook chapters on mental health diagnosis related to suicide and depression). We propose a modified self-attention architecture Knowledge infused Self Attention Transformer (KSAT) that achieves the integration of …

Wise Causal Models: Wisdom Infused Semantics Enhanced Causal Models - A Study In Suicidality Diagnosis, Kaushik Roy, Yuxin Zi, Vignesh Narayanan, Manas Gaur, Sanjay Chandrasekar, Amit Sheth

Publications

The COVID-19 Pandemic has highlighted the gap between the number of mental health care seekers and care providers. Netizens have taken to internet-based platforms such as Reddit to express their experiences. Mental illness diagnosis processes have clinically accepted causal interpretations and semantics. Curiously, mental illness diagnosis accuracy is low relative to similar well-studied illnesses. Motivated by this discrepancy, we propose Wisdom Infused Semantics Enhanced (WISE) causal models, inspired by the wisdom of the crowd idea that learns from a collective agreement among causal models and their semantics for mental illness diagnoses. We use suicidality diagnosis task descriptions, datasets, and baseline …

Knowledge-Infused Reinforcement Learning, Kaushik Roy, Manas Gaur, Qi Zhang, Amit Sheth

Publications

Virtual health agents (VHAs) have received considerable attention, but the early focus has been on collecting data, helping patients follow generic health guidelines, and providing reminders for clinical appointments. While presenting the collected data and frequency of visits to the clinician is useful, further context and personalization are needed for a VHA to interpret and understand what the data means in clinical terms. This has made their use in managing health limited. Such understanding enables patient empowerment and self-appraisal – i.e., aiding the patient in interpreting the data to understand the changes in the patient’s health conditions, and self-management – …

Formal Modeling And Verification Of A Blockchain-Based Crowdsourcing Consensus Protocol, Hamra Afzaal, Muhammad Imran, Muhammad Umar Janjua, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat

VMASC Publications

Crowdsourcing is an effective technique that allows humans to solve complex problems that are hard to accomplish by automated tools. Some significant challenges in crowdsourcing systems include avoiding security attacks, effective trust management, and ensuring the system’s correctness. Blockchain is a promising technology that can be efficiently exploited to address security and trust issues. The consensus protocol is a core component of a blockchain network through which all the blockchain peers achieve an agreement about the state of the distributed ledger. Therefore, its security, trustworthiness, and correctness have vital importance. This work proposes a Secure and Trustworthy Blockchain-based Crowdsourcing (STBC) …

Development Of A Framework To Support Informed Shipbuilding Based On Supply Chain Disruptions, Katherine Smith, Rafael Diaz, Yuzhong Shen

VMASC Publications

In addition to stresses induced by the Covid-19 pandemic, supply chains worldwide have been growing more complex while facing a continuous onslaught of disruptions. This paper presents an analysis and extension of a graph based model for modeling and simulating the effects of such disruptions. The graph based model combines a Bayesian network approach for simulating risks with a network dependency analysis approach for simulating the propagation of disruptions through the network over time. The initial analysis provides evidence supporting extension to for using a multi-layered approach allowing for the inclusion of cyclic features in supply chain models. Initial results …

Human Ergonomic Simulation To Support The Design Of An Exoskeleton For Lashing/De-Lashing Operations Of Containers Cargo, Francesco Longo, Antonio Padovano, Vittorio Solina, Virginia D' Augusta, Stefan Venzl, Roberto Calbi, Michele Bartuni, Ornella Anastasi, Rafael Diaz

VMASC Publications

Lashing and de-lashing operations of containers cargo on board containerships are considered as quite strenuous activities in which operators are required to work continuously over a 6 or 8 hours shift with very limited break. This is mostly because containerships need to leave the port as soon as possible and containers loading and unloading operations must be executed with very high productivity (stay moored in a port is a totally unproductive time for a ship and a loss-making business for a shipping company). Operators performing lashing and de-lashing operations are subjected to intense ergonomic stress and uncomfortable working postures. To …

Healthcare 5.0 Security Framework: Applications, Issues And Future Research Directions, Mohammad Wazid, Ashok Kumar Das, Noor Mohd, Youngho Park

VMASC Publications

Healthcare 5.0 is a system that can be deployed to provide various healthcare services. It does these services by utilising a new generation of information technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big data analytics, blockchain and cloud computing. Due to the introduction of healthcare 5.0, the paradigm has been now changed. It is disease-centered to patient-centered care where it provides healthcare services and supports to the people. However, there are several security issues and challenges in healthcare 5.0 which may cause the leakage or alteration of sensitive healthcare data. This demands that we need a robust …

Combining Green Metrics And Digital Twins For Sustainability Planning And Governance Of Smart Buildings And Cities, Casey R. Corrado, Suzanne M. Delong, Emily G. Holt, Edward Y. Hua, Andreas Tolk

VMASC Publications

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes …

Leveraging Maching Learning In Financial Fraud Forensics In The Age Of Cybersecurity, Md. Ariful Haque, Sachin Shetty

VMASC Publications

Financial sectors are lucrative cyber-attack targets because of their immediate financial gain. As a result, financial institutions face challenges in developing systems that can automatically identify security breaches and separate fraudulent transactions from legitimate transactions. Today, organizations widely use machine learning techniques to identify any fraudulent behavior in customers' transactions. However, machine learning techniques are often challenging because of financial institutions' confidentiality policy, leading to not sharing the customer transaction data. This chapter discusses some crucial challenges of handling cybersecurity and fraud in the financial industry and building machine learning-based models to address those challenges. The authors utilize an open-source …

Definition And Detection Of Hypervulnerabilities Using A Framework For Assessing Port Resilience, Katherine Smith, Rafael Diaz, Yuzhong Shen, Francesco Longo

VMASC Publications

Long term plans for maritime ports are identifying investments that will increase their capacity while decreasing their environmental footprint and operating costs. These changes are leading to increases in complexity at a time when leaner practices are driving investments to become more strategic. As such, this work proposes a generalized definition that allows a system or entity to be classified as exceedingly vulnerable by comparing it to other entities. This definition is developed from a set of definitions gathered from disparate fields. From this definition grounded in theory, the initial rules for complex system implementation are developed and demonstrated on …

Coastal Housing Recovery In A Postdisaster Environment: A Supply Chain Perspective, Rafael Diaz, Joshua Behr, Beatriz Acerp

VMASC Publications

In coastal cities, the damage stemming from hurricanes and severe tropical storms may reduce housing stock. Accelerating the reconstruction of housing stock becomes crucial in minimizing the time that residents are displaced. It is critical to understand how to better coordinate all available resources for an effective and balanced reconstruction where nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, volunteers, and many other complex resources converge. This study combines Monte Carlo and beta models to assess supply, costs, and recovery times. The models capture the immediate and long-term costs of reconstruction activities under highly uncertain conditions using embedded stochastic components on projected materials, …

Impact Of Deicers On Low-Temperature Performance Of Missouri Pavements, Jun Liu, Yizhuang David Wang, Farshad Kerahroudi Saberi, Jenny Liu

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The use of deicer chemicals for highway winter maintenance operations is an essential strategy for ensuring a reasonably high level of service. It's critical to quantify their effectiveness and potentially detrimental effects on transportation infrastructure (i.e., asphalt and concrete pavements). In this study, nine deicer chemicals used in the state of Missouri were collected. The ice-melting test was conducted to quantify the performance characteristics of deicer chemicals. Freeze-thaw (F-T) test of concrete in the presence of deicer was conducted to quantify the negative effects of deicers to concrete. Low-temperature behavior of asphalt mixture affected by deicers was quantified by asphalt …

Pet Food Protector, Braeden Balch, Trey Dillan, Brandon George, David Owens

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

food consumption while keeping each pet separate from the others. The device will detect a certain pet, using a transmitter and receiver that would be on the collar of the pet and in the device itself, and enable them to access their specific food by way of an opening and closing lid. If the pet leaves the area, the food is no longer accessible. The device will also track the amount of food consumed and regulate how much food should be consumed in a given amount of time. This will allow owners to feed their pets without worrying about overeating …

Totally Tubulair - Adjustable Nasal Cannula, Megan Bruns, Emily Mcgrath, Angelina Marchio, Olivia Renkel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Many individuals require short-term and long-term oxygen therapy. These users experience discomfort and problems with the standard nasal cannula that are compounded by issues with oxygen sources being heavy with limited supply and tubing getting tangled, kinked, or not providing enough mobility. The objective of this project was to address ergonomic issues with oxygen therapy devices to increase the ease of use for healthcare workers, patients, and families. By following the engineering design process, a prototype was developed for a nasal cannula with interchangeable prongs. The new design allows users to select a prong size that is more comfortable for …

Smart Kettlebell, Cole Russell, Patrick Davis, Ryan Deboer, Isaac Stecker

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of design team 08’s senior design project is to create and implement a workout device that will be able to calculate the caloric expenditure, repetitions, and length of a workout. Once the duration of a workout is completed, the user metrics will be communicated from the kettlebell system to a user application via Bluetooth. The caloric expenditure will be used using the data that is provided from the accelerometer. The duration of the workout will be controlled using a push button that is connected to the kettlebell system that will allow for the start and stop of a …

Reinforcement Of Elastomers By Reactive Ionic Surfactant, Nicole Vickerman

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Elastomers without cross-linking agents or fillers do not have the necessary properties for practical applications in the rubber industry. Elastomers must be reinforced with fillers and/or cross-linking agents to achieve the needs of physical and mechanical properties for commercial products. Sodium octyl 6-mercaptohexyl phosphate (SOMP) and sodium ethyl (6-mercaptohexyl) phosphate (SEMP) were used to investigate the influence of a reactive ionic surfactant and its influence on the physical properties of peroxide crosslinked styrene butadiene rubber (SBR). SEMP and SOMP were both found to be able to be grafted successfully on to the SBR chains within the rubber using extraction testing …

Georgia High School Counselor Perceptions Of Careers In The Agricultural Field, Meredith Arrington

Murray State Theses and Dissertations

The word “farmer” somehow still evokes that stereotypical image of an old man in overalls wearing a straw hat and holding a pitchfork. Agriculture is our nation’s largest employer, but agriculture careers still have that stigma of being backbreaking manual labor that yields a low income and is reserved for those less educated or uneducated. At the secondary education level, this type of skewed perception by school counselors can have an impact on their abilities to counsel students who are seeking college or career advice. To meet the demands of our growing population, agricultural careers have evolved to become highly …

Who Lists 9th Covid-19 Vaccine For Emergency Use With Aim To Increase Access To Vaccination In Lower-Income Countries

Saudi Medical Journal

No abstract provided.

Finding Aid For The Dorothye Quaye Chapman Reed (Mum00799)Collection

Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids (alphabetical)

Collection of correspondence, clippings, photographs, writings, and material pertaining to the life and career of Dorothye Quaye Chapman Reed.