Digital Commons Network^™

Care-Portal: A Clinician-Centered Digital Health Portal For Wearable Data Analytics, Shejar Sadhu

Open Access Master's Theses

Growth of “e-health” (electronic health) is unprecedented especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Wearable technology such as smartwatches and smart finger rings have the capability to remotely monitor and quantify biometric and daily life activity parameters such as heart rate, body temperature, sleep, exercise, sedentary periods, and others from patients when they are in naturalistic environments such as home, school, work, and sports. This wearable technology can also be used to remotely monitor longitudinal symptomatic changes in chronic and acute conditions such as neurological and psychiatric disorders that may require some indicators of psychological stress in daily life settings. Wearable technology …

Rapid Automatized Naming (Ran) And Real Word Reading Fluency: An Eye-Tracking Study, Alexia Martins

Open Access Master's Theses

Although literacy skills, as typically measured by reading accuracy and fluency, are known to greatly influence a child’s later academic and social success, national literacy rates continue to decrease across grade levels. Research has shown that serial rapid automatized naming (RAN) is one of the best predictors of reading fluency; however, there is significant variability regarding the specific relationship between RAN and reading as noted between meta-analyses, age groups, RAN stimuli, and measures of socioeconomic status (SES). This study aims to investigate the relationship between serial RAN and 1) real word reading fluency and 2) socioeconomic status (SES) across thirty-three …

A Spatio-Temporal Analysis Of The American Woodcock, Anna R. Fateiger

Open Access Master's Theses

The decline in young forests has caused almost 70% of the birds that flourish in such habitats to experience a severe population decline over the past 60 years. The American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) is no exception to this population reduction due to its heavy reliance on such habitats, making them a key indicator species for young forest management. Conservationists rely on information received from tracking woodcock for details about the young forest vegetation in hopes of preserving the habitat and protecting the wildlife that flourishes in such areas. This paper expands on previous research that focused heavily on …

Phytochemical Analysis And Biological Evaluation Of Maple (Acer Saccharum) Sap Water, Kara Torrey

Open Access Master's Theses

Our laboratory initiated a comprehensive research program to investigate the phytochemical composition and biological effects of an ethyl acetate maple water extract (MWX), in comparison to other maple food extracts. Created by boiling and evaporating maple sap (Acer saccharum), maple syrup has become a popular alternative sweetener. The raw sap of the maple tree has been consumed by indigenous cultures for centuries, but recently, maple water products have gained the interest of consumers seeking plant derived functional beverages with added health benefits. Based on previous studies by our group, we hypothesize that maple water (and MWX) contains many …

Predicting Pain Presence In Icu Patients Using Physiological Signals, Derek Jacobs

Open Access Master's Theses

Physiological data can be used to detect the presence of pain, a problem that up to this point has entirely subjective solutions. While there are general indicators of pain, physiological signals have been shown to alter as a response to painful stimuli. Prior work has primarily focused on predicting a level of pain reported by a patient based on the assumption that pain is present. In this work, we present a means of using machine learning to identify the presence of pain using data collected from a freely available database MIMIC-III. Our methodology involves constructing an image reconstruction based classifier …

Under Guard: A Case Study Of The S.S. Black Point And U-853 For The Production Of More Comprehensive War Memorials And Public Exhibits, Rebecca Sobus

Open Access Master's Theses

The following project addresses how the preservation of memory is affected when memorials and public exhibits develop within a dispersed material cultural landscape. To address this problem, the Battle of Point Judith in May 1945 is used a case study. The Battle of Point Judith and its associated wrecks, the German U-853 and the American SS Black Point, display the positives and negatives of memorialization and public exhibition for historical artifacts across a decentralized material cultural landscape. After analyzing the characteristics of memorials, museums, and memorial-museums through additional examples like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Hiroshima, it may be seen that the Battle …

The Alice Atom Compendium, Nick Mendillo

Open Access Master's Theses

Using an original work of fiction, a novel I had written titled The Alice Atom, I have created multiple levels of media that encompass several aspects of said novel’s central theme – the desire to find meaning in not only products we create but the act of ‘following one’s dream.’ To achieve a personal goal is to follow, chase, or accomplish their ‘dreams,’ but I intended to explore the question of what that pursuit can tangibly look like. The action of the novel involves the protagonist literally searching for a woman he has imbued with deep philosophical meaning. I, …

Developing A Novel Small-Scale Test To Predict Large-Scale Explosivity, Justin C. Hunter

Open Access Master's Theses

An accurate small-scale (gram) test that predicts large-scale (kg) explosivity is crucial for organizations to make accurate informed decisions when creating regulations, safety, and transportation guidelines. There have been several lab-based tests developed to provide information on whether a new substance has explosive potential, but they fail to consider how energetic materials behave on the large-scale. The concern is many non-ideal explosives, such as fuel oxidizer mixtures, have failure radii that are larger than the 48 mm diameter tube used in the United Nation (UN) test series. In addition, the UN test series uses at least 1.3 kgs of material, …

Sedimentary Accumulation Of Black Carbon On The East Coast Of The United States, Ita Wulandari

Open Access Master's Theses

Sedimentary black carbon (BC) accumulation in shelf sediment along the US East Coast reflected incomplete combustion from natural and human activities. One of the BC materials is soot, a light-absorbing particulate matter, deposited and incorporated with the sediment consisting of various materials, including inorganic and organic carbon. We collected sediment core from two stations in North Carolina (ST02) and Florida (ST12) in the spring of 2017. We analyzed soot BC using the chemo-thermal oxidation method at 375 C (CTO- 375), total organic carbon (TOC) from inorganic carbon removal, stable carbon isotope δ13C from each BC and TOC sample, Polycyclic aromatic …

Diving In: Learning Best Practices From Belize’S Managed Access Program Fisheries Policy, Mary Carper

Open Access Master's Theses

Belize has recently transitioned from an open access fisheries management regime to a program called Managed Access, based on a form of spatial management known as Territorial User Rights for Fishers (TURFs). Coastal communities rely on fishing activity for a variety of reasons including food and job security. Community well-being refers to the holistic definition of the human state, indicated by a variety of socioeconomic factors. This multi-strategy research with a concurrent nested design looks at a combination of interview and archival document data, along with demographics from the Statistical Institute of Belize in order to understand the impacts of …

Do Environmentally Relevant Concentrations Of Microplastics Pose A Threat To The Eastern Oyster, Crassostrea Virginica?, Hannah Haskell

Open Access Master's Theses

It is well known that microplastics are ubiquitous within the marine environment and that organisms are interacting with them. However, information on the potential impacts this pollutant may have on an organism are less well understood, especially in response to environmentally relevant microplastic concentrations The aim of this study was to determine if environmentally relevant microplastic exposure has any physiological impact on the eastern oyster, Crassostrea virginica. We exposed C. virginica to daily doses of polyester microfibers based on concentrations reported from the field (0, 2, & 95 fibers L-1) as well as a higher concentration similar to those …

The 1697 Project: Unraveling A Mystery Surrounding A Set Of Patchwork Blocks, Katherine E. Williams-O'Donnell

Open Access Master's Theses

The University of Rhode Island’s Historic Textile and Costume Collection (HTCC) recently accessioned a grouping of disarticulated patchwork blocks that once belonged to a coverlet. The coverlet was assumed to have been created in 1697 in British North America, making it the oldest firmly dated patchwork currently known to exist and placing this art form in the European colonies fifty years earlier than previously documented. However, because the blocks were disarticulated with companion pieces spread between numerous collections, it was crucial to analyze the blocks in depth to understand if this origin story was correct or had been manufactured later …

Translation And Validation Of Myeloid Derived Suppressor Cell Proteomic Targets In Liver And Lung Tumors, Justin Trickett

Open Access Master's Theses

Advancements in technology have made possible the development of highly personalized and efficacious medicines. Various forms of immunotherapy have demonstrated clinical utility in the treatment of blood-based cancers (e.g., leukemia, lymphoma, etc.). Cells in the tumor microenvironment (TME) of solid tumors can suppress the immune response of T cells, therefore hindering the efficacy of T-cell immunotherapies. Consequently, a growing number of studies are investigating methods of modulating the TME for improving immunotherapeutic outcomes in this context. Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are one such cell responsible for diminishing the activity of immune cells by secreting immunosuppressive cytokines. Recent studies show that …

Wireless Temperature Sensing Using Transient Sintering Behavior Of Glass Ceramics, Noah Alexander Burke

Open Access Master's Theses

Temperature measurements are critical in gas turbine engine design but difficult to obtain due to the extreme environment. Temperature indicating paints (thermal paints) have been used for decades to map maximum temperature fields on superalloy components but have numerous weaknesses. Developed here are three novel glass-ceramic thermal paints that undergo viscous flow sintering to indicate temperatures up to 900°C, with high resolution (±5°C), by an optical transition. The paints adhere to Nickel-based superalloys due to their matching coefficients of thermal expansion and function for times above 60 hours. By utilizing automation and a UV:VIS spectrometer, quantitative temperature maps can be …

Estimating Optimal Treatment Regimes Using Pairwise Comparison, Wenqiu Cao

Open Access Master's Theses

A treatment regimen is a decision rule that can be used to guide clinicians in connecting patients' information to the feasible treatment strategy. Estimating optimal treatment regimens has gained increasing attention in the statistics field. New models based on machine learning approaches, such as outcome weighted learning (OWL) and entropy learning (EL), were suggested to overcome the computational challenge of the doubly robust estimation due to nonconvexity and non-differentiability. However, substituting the 0-1 loss by a smooth loss leads to the lack of estimation consistency within the class under consideration. To solve this problem, concordance-assisted learning (CAL) was then proposed …

Shear Wave Inversion Using Fiber-Optic Distributed Acoustic Sensing On The Seafloor, Isabella Casteel

Open Access Master's Theses

Geoacoustic analysis is necessary to characterize the soil profile of a site for a variety of applications, such as earthquake site response or soil-structure interaction analysis. The objectives of this thesis were to: 1.) measure Scholte waves using a fiber optic DAS cable deployed in the seabed and calculate a dispersion curve, and 2.) compare dispersion curves produced from a fiber optic DAS cable and geophone array deployed on land. A dock test was performed by creating an underwater impulse signal near an underwater DAS cable. A valid dispersion curve was not produced because the gauge length was too large …

Enhanced Deep Template-Based Object Instance Detection, Travis Frink

Open Access Master's Theses

Three alterations are investigated: The addition of a feature pyramid network to improve small object recognition, a loss weighting strategy dependent on object poses, and the addition of a transformer for feature comparisons.As a result increased performance was achieved for both the FPN and loss weighting alterations while the transformer alterations slightly underperformed the original model.

Measuring And Modeling Turbulence Using Particle Image Velocimetry And Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics; Applications To External Flows, Sandra Deeb

Open Access Master's Theses

Understanding the flow field around objects (i.e. external flow) is very important for various engineering and scientific application at all scales. The overall objective of this study is to better understand the flow field and turbulence in a wave-current flume for internal and external flow studies using particle image velocimetry and to investigate the capabilities and limitations of the Lagrangian smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method to simulate external flows using the collected experimental data in the wave-current flume. Laboratory studies are useful for observation of physical phenomena in a controlled environment in addition to their being less expensive and more …

Assessing The Impact Of Subaerial Vegetation To Mitigate Coastal Erosion During Extreme Storms, Felix Groetsch

Open Access Master's Theses

In a changing climate, protecting developed coastal areas becomes more challenging, as they are strongly affected by increasingly severe storms and rising sea levels. This study aims to assess the vegetation's role in protecting New England coastal communities. Using the morphodynamic model XBeach, a static and a dynamic modeling approach are implemented to (1) improve the mapping of published vegetation coverage data, (2) calibrate the XBeach model, (3) investigate the parameterization of subaerial vegetation in the model, and (4) assess how coastal vegetation management policy influences the mitigating effect of vegetation for the selected site.

A comprehensive literature review and …

Bioconcentration Of Pfas From Afff Environmental Exposure: Evidence Of Precursor Bioaccumulation In Fathead Minnows, Nicholas Hill

Open Access Master's Theses

Exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has been associated with toxicities in wildlife and negative health effects in humans. Decades of fire training activity at Joint Base, Cape Cod, Massachusetts incorporated the use of aqueous film forming foam (AFFF) which resulted in long-term PFAS contamination of sediments, groundwater, and hydrologically connected surface waters. To explore the bioaccumulative potential of PFAS residing in complex environmental mixtures, a mesocosm was established to evaluate bioconcentration of PFAS from AFFF-contaminated groundwater by flow-through design. Fathead minnows (n = 24) were exposed to PFAS in groundwater over a 21-day period and tissue specific PFAS …

Parallelized Implementation Of A Genetic Algorithm On A Field Programmable Gate Array (Fpga) To Provide Heuristic Solutions For The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (Cvrp), Maximilian Jakob Heer

Open Access Master's Theses

This thesis reports on the implementation of a Genetic Algorithm for finding heuristic solutions to the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) on High-Performance Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The heuristic approach to the class of NP-hard problems related to the Travelling-Salesman-Problem (TSP) has a long tradition in computer science, with this thesis being directly based on an implementation of a specialized Genetic Algorithm for a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). In my work, I describe how the algorithmic structure can be directly transformed into an adapted computing architecture with special focus on the highest possible degree of parallelism. For that, the …

Expert Elicitation Regarding Effectiveness Of Recent North Atlantic Right Whale Protection Agreement, Jessica Marie Hiltz

Open Access Master's Theses

With the rise of offshore wind energy in the United States, there has been increasing concern about how offshore wind turbine installation and operation is affecting benthic and pelagic marine life (Bailey et al. 2010). Increased, localized ocean noise resulting from project-related activities, such as vessel traffic, surveying, and turbine installation, has the potential to disturb or injure nearby marine life. Increased vessel traffic heightens the probability of a vessel strike occurring, and noise produced during the turbine installation phase, in which pile-driving is used to hammer and secure turbines to the seafloor, is significantly loud and widespread. This noise …

Predictors Of Epi Procolon Utilization, Eric Lamy

Open Access Master's Theses

Background: According to the American Cancer Society, despite being one of the most preventable forms of cancer, colorectal cancer (CRC) is the fourth most common type of cancer and is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States (US). The 2020 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates that around one quarter of the US population aged 50 to 75 and over one half of those in their early 50s remain unscreened despite being at risk. In 2016, the United State Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test for CRC screening called Epi proColon. Epi proColon …

Coastal Inundation Due To Sea Level Rise And Its Impact On The Barrington Bridge, Bristol County, Ri, Laura Meyer

Open Access Master's Theses

Climate change is a problem that has intensified in recent years. With the great increase in global electricity consumption, the peak in carbon-based fuel combustion in conjunction with deforestation is leading to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Carbon dioxide traps heat near the Earth's surface, causing global warming. This leads to more frequent and intense storms, heat waves, and rising sea levels. Coastal communities and infrastructure are becoming increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

The scope of the project is to develop an assessment of the impact of climate change such as sea-level rise in combination …

Life Cycle Assessment Of Energy Retrofitting Strategies For Residential Buildings In Rhode Island, Moritz Mussotter

Open Access Master's Theses

Retrofitting existing buildings has been identified as an essential strategy to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the building sector. This study examines the environmental and financial performance of different retrofitting strategies that aim to reduce the GHG emissions of a model single-family building in Rhode Island using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).

The LCA shows that retrofitting strategies can reduce the GWP by up to 41 % over the remaining service life while saving more than $ 28,000 over that period. This can be achieved through installing programmable thermostats and scheduled temperature setpoints, air sealing the building, installing a more …

Modeling Rhode Island Food Production Potential Under Different Production Scenarios, Nina Oberg

Open Access Master's Theses

Food sovereignty emphasizes the rights of people to have control over their food system. Relocalizing food production and limiting dependence on global industrial supply chains is necessary to increase food sovereignty in regions dominated by conventional food systems. In the US, the New England region aims to relocalize production by producing 50 percent of food consumed in the region by the year 2060. Rhode Island can contribute to this goal by expanding production and strengthening local food systems, thus serving as a model for New England and other urbanizing regions globally. For this study, a site suitability analysis was performed …

Analyzing Land Cover And Land Use Changes Detection In The Brahmaputra River Basin, Darya Shahidi Masouleh

Open Access Master's Theses

The Brahmaputra River basin (BRB) is one of the largest in Asia, spread over the countries of China, Bhutan, India, and Bangladesh, having a total area of 5,73,000 Sq.km. It is one of the last major free-flowing rivers in the world, and the river and its tributaries provide important social, environmental, cultural, and economic services to more than 60 million people for their livelihood in Bangladesh, northeastern India, Bhutan, and China. The BRB is undergoing rapid environmental changes in recent decades. One of the most important drivers of this change is Land Use, and Land Cover (LULC) changes in this …

A Proteomic Approach To Understanding Regulatory Pathways In Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (Nafld), Teresa Sierra

Open Access Master's Theses

Background and Objectives:Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) encompasses the progressive hepatic pathologies from steatosis, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), fibrosis, and irreversible cirrhosis in populations with little to no alcohol consumption. The disease is prevalent in societies dominated by Western dietary patterns and is associated with obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, type-2 diabetes mellitus, and metabolic syndrome. The pathogenesis of NAFLD is multifaceted and not completely understood. A proteomic analysis of a human liver tissue repository (n = 106) was used to gain insight into dysregulated pathways and significantly altered protein expression in NAFLD without or with fibrosis as well as NAFLD and diabetes …

Anti-Microbial Peptide Database, Anusha Singamaneni

Open Access Master's Theses

The goal of this thesis is to re-design and re-implement a functioning and efficient database with uniformity, coherence and most importantly transparency which clearly explains the system needs, methods and procedures openly to the users. The main users of the database are researchers, biologists, biochemists and engineers. We also developed a tool called MIC (Minimum Inhibitory Concentration) for the users of the database by which, researchers can upload their lab data, perform the calculation for average peptides with timepoints and see results using graphical visualizations.In addition, we developed a user-friendly web interface to support transparency. We revisited the normalization of …

Parent-Child Attachment, Parenting Practices And Their Effects On Adolescent Social Competence: The Mediating Role Of Income Among Vulnerable Families, Margaret Stark

Open Access Master's Theses

Parent-child attachment has been found to be a powerful predictor of children's social competence later in life (Bowlby, 1989; Weinfield, 1997). Additionally, Swanson et al. (2011) found that negative parenting practices, too, are predictive of adolescent social competence. However, less is known about the impact of positive parenting practices on social competence outcomes. Several studies have identified the importance of social competence as it enables individuals to interact with others in various environments, and serves as a protective factor to engaging in risky behavior, such as substance use (Griffin et al., 2001; Romppanen et al., 2021). The current study examined …