Digital Commons Network^™

Product Design For Repairability: Identifying Failure Modes With Topic Modeling And Designing For Electronic Waste Reuse, Claire J. Franz

Master's Theses

Design for repairability is imperative to making products that last long enough to justify the resources they consume and the pollution they generate. While design for repairability has been gaining steady momentum, especially with recent advances in Right to Repair legislation, there is still work to be done. There are gaps in both the tools available for repair-conscious designers and the products coming onto store shelves. This thesis work aims to help set sails in the right direction on both fronts.

This research explores the use of topic modeling (a natural language processing technique) to extract repairability design insights from …

Deciphering The Contribution Of Microglia To Neurodegeneration In Friedreich's Ataxia, Sydney N. Gillette

Master's Theses

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) is the most prevalent inherited ataxia, affecting one in every 50,000 individuals in the United States. This hereditary condition is caused by an abnormal GAA trinucleotide repeat expansion within the first intron of the frataxin gene resulting in decreased levels of the frataxin protein (FXN). Insufficient cellular frataxin levels results in iron accumulation, increased reactive oxygen species production and mitochondrial dysfunction. Tissues most heavily impacted are those most dependent on oxidative phosphorylation as an energy source and include the nervous system and muscle tissue. This is evident in the clinical phenotype which includes muscle weakness, ataxia, neurodegeneration …

Going Rogue: Existence, Spectral Stability, And Bifurcations Of Rogue Waves In Integrable And Non-Integrable Lattice Models, Madison L. Lytle

Master's Theses

The study of large nonlinear waves that seem to “appear out of nowhere and disappear without a trace”, known as rogue or freak waves, began largely in response to observations of catastrophic ocean waves. However, the study of rogue waves has since been expanded to a wider collection of physical scenarios, including discrete systems, such as those that appear in optics, as opposed to the continuous system of water waves. Waves in these discrete settings can be modeled as solutions to lattice wave equations.

The nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE) is one of the most ubiquitous continuous wave models for physical …

Morp: Monocular Orientation Regression Pipeline, Jacob Gunderson

Master's Theses

Orientation estimation of objects plays a pivotal role in robotics, self-driving cars, and augmented reality. Beyond mere position, accurately determining the orientation of objects is essential for constructing precise models of the physical world. While 2D object detection has made significant strides, the field of orientation estimation still faces several challenges. Our research addresses these hurdles by proposing an efficient pipeline which facilitates rapid creation of labeled training data and enables direct regression of object orientation from a single image. We start by creating a digital twin of a physical object using an iPhone, followed by generating synthetic images using …

Hydrological Analysis Of Post-Fire Responses Within The Little Creek Watershed Of Swanton Pacific Ranch, Alexander Jeffrey Wiens

Master's Theses

Climate change and a growing wildland-urban interface are associated with an increase in the number and severity of wildfires. While severe wildfires do cause a costly and dangerous impact on the environment and the public, their after-effects comprise important subjects of study. In post-fire hydrologic studies, the reduced infiltration and plant cover that results from wildfires can commonly be associated with increased peakflows and erosion. Phenomena such as the flooding and debris flows in Montecito after the Thomas Fire in late 2017 can have important implications on infrastructure and human lives. Quantifying post-fire peak flows and flooding volumes has therefore …

Point Cloud Initialization Techniques For Gaussian Splatting, Daniel L. Levin

Master's Theses

Over the past year, 3D Gaussian Splatting has become a widespread research topic of interest. It has proven itself against other popular Novel View Synthesis algorithms
like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) by replacing the approximation function with
a modified point cloud. This modified point cloud allows for the rendering of novel
views in real time. While this gives Gaussian Splatting an advantage over algorithms
like NeRF, it shares the same issue of requiring prior camera intrinsics such as a Point
Cloud and Camera Poses. Most Gaussian Splatting pipelines use Colmap Sparse, a
Structure-from-Motion (SfM) technology that efficiently registers the necessary …

Unraveling The History Of Deforestation In The Amazon Rainforest With Statistical Modeling, Ryan Destefano

Master's Theses

The Amazon rainforest, a vital ecosystem of immense biodiversity and global climate significance, faces the ongoing threat of deforestation driven by agricultural expansion. This thesis employs remote sensing techniques, focusing on the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) derived from Landsat satellite imagery, to track land cover dynamics within the Amazon. The study examines historical land cover changes in current plantations in Peru and Brazil, regions where the exact timing of deforestation is uncertain. By analyzing EVI measurements dating back to 1984, inflection points indicative of deforestation events preceding plantation establishment are identified. Statistical modeling techniques, including spline fitting to analyze time …

Scalable Hybrid Neuromorphic Accelerator & Hybrid Neural Networks, Joshua Nardone

Master's Theses

With machine learning workloads currently at very large scales, models are distributed across large compute systems. On distributed systems, the performance of these models are limited by the bandwidth limitations of chip-to-chip communication. To relieve this bottleneck, spiking neural networks (SNNs) can be utilized to reduce inter-chip communication traffic utilizing inherit network sparsity. However, in comparison to traditional artificial neural networks (ANNs), SNNs can have significant degradation in performance with increased network scale and complexity.

This research proposes a hybrid neural network accelerator that uses the best of both spiking and non-spiking layers by allocating a majority of resources to …

Development Of A Deep Learning Algorithm Using Electromyography (Emg) And Acceleration To Monitor Upper Extremity Behavior With Application To Individuals Post-Stroke, Nathan Dodd

Master's Theses

Stroke is a chronic illness which often impairs survivors for extended periods of time,

leaving the individual limited in motor function. The ability to perform daily activities

(ADL) is closely linked to motor recovery following a stroke. The objective of

this work is to employ surface electromyography (sEMG) gathered through a novel,

wearable armband sensor to monitor and quantify ADL performance. The first contribution

of this work seeks to develop a relationship between sEMG and and grip

aperture, a metric tied to the success of post-stroke individuals’ functional independence.

The second contribution of this work aims to develop a deep …

A Hybrid Computer To Solve The Selective Harmonic Minimization Problem In Single-Phase Inverters, Dillon Nguyen

Master's Theses

Power electronics possess forms of non-ideality due to the nonlinearity present in physical switches. These switches are driven with pulse width modulation (PWM), which properly down-converts or up-converts based on converter topology. When these switches turn on or off, they introduce the main proponent of efficiency loss: harmonics. This becomes a nonlinear optimization problem with many converters. The solution proposed in this thesis is an analog/digital hybrid computer that utilizes the speed of analog computation and the accuracy of digital computing together. A Plexim RT Box provides the programmability needed for algorithms, while the analog circuit provides low-power, high-speed computation …

Optimal False Data Injection (Fdi) In Simulated Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (Cacc) Systems, Lovro Dukic

Master's Theses

In the rapidly advancing field of autonomous vehicles, ensuring the security and reliability of self-driving systems is crucial. Autonomous vehicle systems, such as cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), must undergo significant research and testing before their integration into commercial intelligent transportation systems. CACC considers multiple vehicles in close proximity as a single entity, or platoon, with each vehicle equipped with a controller that uses sensor-based measurements and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to control inter-vehicle spacing. While this system offers numerous potential benefits for traffic safety and efficiency, it is also susceptible to False Data Injection (FDI) attacks, which can cause the …

Kgscore-Open: Leveraging Knowledge Graph Semantics For Open-Qa Evaluation, Nicholas Hausman

Master's Theses

Evaluating active Question Answering (QA) systems, as users ask questions outside of the original testing data, has proven to be difficult, due to the difficulty of gauging answer quality without ground truth responses. We propose KGScore-Open, a configurable system capable of scoring questions and answers in Open Domain Question Answering (Open-QA) without ground truth answers present by leveraging DBPedia, a Knowledge Graph (KG) derived from Wikipedia, to score question-answer pairs. The system maps entities from questions and answers to DBPedia nodes, constructs a Knowledge Graph based on these entities, and calculates a relatedness score. Our system is validated on multiple …

Emerging Diseases, Abiotic Disorders, And Macrophomina Root Rot Management Of California Strawberry, Cooper Calvin

Master's Theses

Strawberry is an economically important crop in California, with an estimated value of $2.68 billion in 2023. In California strawberry production, mitigation of low plant health and yield often focuses on major soilborne pathogens, while the contribution of minor pathogens and abiotic disorders to production shortcomings are often overlooked. The objectives of the first project in this thesis are to determine the pathogenicity of multiple minor pathogens and quantify other biotic and abiotic factors that can reduce plant health such as viruses and soil salinity. Two pathogens of the black root rot complex, Pythium spp. and Rhizoctonia spp. as well …

Artificial Intelligence For Mitigation Against Array Perturbations In Direction Of Arrival Estimation, Mathew Shaham

Master's Theses

Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation with digital arrays under unknown Gaussian distributed element location perturbation has detrimental effects to the performance of traditional DOA estimation techniques. This work proposes an artificial intelligence (AI) approach as a solution to this problem. A Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) is proposed and experimentation into network parameters, classification networks, and how the DCNN is applied to the DOA problem are studied. It is shown that this AI based approach is successful in estimating the DOA with perturbed arrays where traditional approaches fail.

Design And Assembly Of A Variable Buoyancy System For An Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, Evan Brown

Master's Theses

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) play a vital role in the surveillance and mapping of our oceans, often requiring extensive travel in extreme environments. These data-gathering missions benefit from extended durations, making the minimization of power consumption a key consideration in AUV design. One effective strategy to reduce energy use in AUVs is to implement a variable buoyancy system (VBS) for depth control. The purpose of this work is to design, develop, test, and model a variable buoyancy system to enhance the efficiency and capabilities of a high-speed, long-range AUV.

After evaluating various VBS designs, a piston-cylinder buoyancy system was selected …

Trauma-Informed Teaching With Adult English Language Learners: A Study In A Community-Based Organization, Elizabeth Eastman

Doctoral Dissertations

Often, immigrants in the United States have suffered traumatic experiences in their home country, on their journey to the U.S., and/or in their process of acculturation. In English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classes, symptoms of trauma can interfere with learning and acculturation. Trauma-Informed teaching can meet the needs of students who have been impacted by trauma but it is not often used in ESOL classes. This is due to a lack of teacher training, and a gap in the literature on the effects of the approach and studies that explore the perspectives of the students. Based in phenomenology …

Minimal Justice, Bernhard Schlink

Cardozo Law Review

Stating what maximum justice demands is straightforward. Justice prevails if everyone is treated equally whenever anything is distributed or if any unequal distribution reflects a particular achievement or needs, and if compensation is always granted if something is taken. Such distribution includes according or assigning any kind of right or duty, which may take the form of opportunities, positions, services, and obligations. When it comes to what may be taken and the form that compensation assumes, the spectrum ranges from property or life and limb, taken through criminal acts and paid for by punishment for such crimes, to intentional or …

Correlation Of Hepcidin With Some Biochemical Parameters In Iraqi Children With Growth Hormone Deficiency, Nawras Farhan Ali, Wafaa R. Alfatlawi, Abdulnasser M. Algebori, Noor Thair Tahir

Baghdad Science Journal

Hepcidin (Hep.) is a protein that maintains iron balance in the body. The Information about the role of Hep. in pathophysiology that is associated with growth hormone deficiency (GHD) is scarce. This study evaluates the correlation of Hep. with some biochemical parameters: Growth Hormone (GH), Insulin-Like Factor-1 (IGF-1), Iron, Vitamin D, Alkaline Phosphatase (ALP), Calcium, Phosphorous, and Ferritin in growth hormone deficient children. Children with GHD (60) and healthy volunteers (60) participated in this study, and their serum samples are collected from National Diabetes Center- Almustansirya University from the period January to April 2022. Enzyme Linked Immune Sorbent Assay (ELIZA) …

A Multi-Objective Facility Coverage Location Problem For Emergency Medical Service Decisions In Hajj, Huda Zaki Naji, Mohanad Al-Behadili, Mohammad Sari Kadim

Baghdad Science Journal

This paper proposes a multi-objective facility model of coverage location problem to determine the number, locations, and redeployments of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) system. The EMS runs with two types of ambulances, Basic Life Support (BLS) and Advance Life Support (ALS). The suggested Multi-objective Coverage Location model (MO-CL) considers a bi-objective function, which is minimizing the EMS costs and the fatigue of EMS crew members. This can be managed by reducing the number of redeployments for both types of ambulances while still providing the required coverage levels. The MO-CL model is based on the approximation hypercube model that eliminates the …

Gps/Imu Board, Luke Chen, Steve Tran

Electrical Engineering

Providing information on a vehicle’s location during a competition can be used to provide greater insight to progress the car is making or what portion of the track caused failure. As a result, we will be designing a board that includes a Global Positioning System (GPS) and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) module to provide position coordinates, which is driven by an STM32 processor to feed into the DAQ through Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol.

The GPS module will produce an initial positioning and will continue to do so unless it is unable to create a solution, possibly due to over-arching …

2-Channel Eeg Neurofeedback System, Tim Erwin, Donna Nikjou, Sebastian Turkewitz

Electrical Engineering

This work describes the design of an EEG-based neurofeedback system which provides users with real-time feedback on their level of focus or relaxation. By analyzing the spectral content of the brain activity measured via scalp electrodes, focus and relaxation levels can be quantified. Based on these measurements, live feedback in the form of moving bar graphs is provided to users, allowing them to gain awareness of their mental-state and more efficiently learn how to consciously relax or focus. This project covers the design of the system, including amplification and filtering stages, digitization, and signal processing. The system interfaces with a …

On Academic Lawyers In The U.S. Government: Walter’S Wisdom, Harold Hongju Koh

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Safe Storage And Self-Defense From Heller To Bruen, Joseph Blocher

North Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Comx 111a.51: Introduction To Public Speaking, Zita K. Ottersbach

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Phsx 207n.01: College Physics Ii, Bradford L. Halfpap

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Coun 540.01: Individual Appraisal, Veronica I. Johnson

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Edld 653.50: School Personnel Administration, Erica L. Allen

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Libm 468.50s: Administration And Assessment Of The Library Media Program, I.A. Tava Smathers

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Actg 498.01: Business Internship, Michelle Schwartz

University of Montana Course Syllabi, 2021-2025

No abstract provided.

Judicial Discipline Through The Prism Of Public Law Values: A Critical Analysis Of Bill C-9, An Act To Reform The Judges Act, Richard Devlin, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Bill C-9 is the first legislative reform to the Judges Act in five decades. The goal of the legislation is to enhance public confidence in the administration of justice by modernizing the complaints and discipline system for federally appointed judges. In a previous essay published in Volume ?? of the Advocates’ Quarterly we offered a normative framework for assessment of a complaints and discipline system and identified seven key strengths of Bill C-9. In this sequel, we continue to apply this normative framework and argue that the legislation is marred by five significant weaknesses. We conclude that because the reforms …