Digital Commons Network^™

Reconstructing Dynamic Human Shapes From Sparse Silhouettes Via Latent Space Optimization Of Parametric Shape Models, Kanika Singla, Parma Nand

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The problem of dynamic 3D reconstruction has gained popularity over the last few years with most approaches relying on data driven learning and optimization methods. However this is quite a challenging task because of the need for tracking different features in both space and time?that too of deformable objects-where such robust tracking may not always be possible. A common way to better ground the problem is by using some forms of regularizations primarily on the shape representations. Over the years, mesh-based linear blend skinning models have been the standard for fitting templates of humans to the observed time series data …

An Exploratory Study On The Effect Of Applying Various Artificial Neural Networks To The Classification Of Lower Limb Injury, Rachel Yun, May Salama, Lamiaa Elrefaei

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

This paper explores the application of a deep neural network (DNN) framework to human gait analysis for injury classification. The paper aims to identify whether a subject is healthy or has an injury of the ankle, knee, hip, or heel solely based on ground reaction force plate measurements. We consider how three DNNs-the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), fully convolutional network (FCN), and residual network (ResNet)-can be applied to gait analysis when the number of trainable network parameters far exceeds the number of training samples, and benchmark their performance in this context against that of shallow neural networks. The DNN architectures outperformed …

Spayk: An Environment For Spiking Neural Network Simulation, Aykut Görkem Gelen, Ayten Atasoy

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

In research areas such as mobile robotics and computer vision, energy and computational efficiency have become critical. This has greatly increased interest in high-efficiency neuromorphic hardware and spiking neural networks. Because neuromorphic hardware is not yet widely available, spiking neural network studies are conducted by simulations. There are numerous simulators available today, each designed for a specific purpose. In this paper, a novel and open source package (SPAYK) for simulating spiking neural networks is presented. SPAYK has been proposed to speed up spiking neural network research. In the majority of simulators, networks are expressed with differential equations and require advanced …

Checking The Scales: A Psychometric Evaluation Of The Weight Concerns Scale In A Sample Of College-Aged Cisgender Men From The United States, Kyle M. Brasil, Callie E. Mims, Ryon C. Mcdermott, Mary E. Pritchard

Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Historically, western societies have considered body image issues to predominantly affect young, White women. While in recent years men’s body image issues have been increasingly highlighted by researchers and the media alike, many instruments currently used to identify clinically significant body image disturbances were developed and validated with samples solely of women and/or girls. One such measure, Killen et al.’s (1994) Weight Concerns Scale (WCS), was initially validated in a sample of adolescent girls. The WCS has yet to be validated in samples of men, despite being used in large national surveys of college men and women (e.g., the Healthy …

Remembering Paul Johnsgard, Linda R, Brown, Josef Kren

Zea E-Books Collection

Paul A. Johnsgard (1931–2021) was a friend of many, an artist, prolific author, teacher, and humble admirer of all living creatures. It was impossible to find someone at Nebraska Audubon Society or Nebraska Ornithologists’ Union meetings who did not know Paul Johnsgard. His more than 100 published books made him known not just in a community of ornithologists, birdwatchers, and bird lovers in the United States but also abroad. He was a world-renowned ornithologist and naturalist who remained deeply embedded in his local culture and its prairie environment.

We invited about 75 people to write a short memory of Paul. …

Application Of Traditional Vaccine Development Strategies To Sars-Cov-2, Halie M. Rando, Ronan Lordan, Alexandra J. Lee, Amruta Naik, Nils Wellhausen, Elizabeth Sell, Likhitha Kolla, Anthony Gitter, Casey S. Greene

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Over the past 150 years, vaccines have revolutionized the relationship between people and disease. During the COVID-19 pandemic, technologies such as mRNA vaccines have received attention due to their novelty and successes. However, more traditional vaccine development platforms have also yielded important tools in the worldwide fight against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). A variety of approaches have been used to develop COVID-19 vaccines that are now authorized for use in countries around the world. In this review, we highlight strategies that focus on the viral capsid and outwards, rather than on the nucleic acids inside. These approaches …

Prudex-Compass: Towards Systematic Evaluation Of Reinforcement Learning In Financial Markets, Shuo Sun, Molei Qin, Xinrun Wang, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The financial markets, which involve more than $90 trillion market capitals, attract the attention of innumerable investors around the world. Recently, reinforcement learning in financial markets (FinRL) has emerged as a promising direction to train agents for making profitable investment decisions. However, the evaluation of most FinRL methods only focuses on profit-related measures and ignores many critical axes, which are far from satisfactory for financial practitioners to deploy these methods into real-world financial markets. Therefore, we introduce PRUDEX-Compass, which has 6 axes, i.e., Profitability, Risk-control, Universality, Diversity, rEliability, and eXplainability, with a total of 17 measures for a systematic evaluation. …

Heart: Motion-Resilient Heart Rate Monitoring With In-Ear Microphones, Kayla-Jade Butkow, Ting Dang, Andrea Ferlini, Dong Ma, Mascolo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the soaring adoption of in-ear wearables, the research community has started investigating suitable in-ear heart rate (HR) detection systems. HR is a key physiological marker of cardiovascular health and physical fitness. Continuous and reliable HR monitoring with wearable devices has therefore gained increasing attention in recent years. Existing HR detection systems in wearables mainly rely on photoplethysmography (PPG) sensors, however, these are notorious for poor performance in the presence of human motion. In this work, leveraging the occlusion effect that enhances low-frequency bone-conducted sounds in the ear canal, we investigate for the first time in-ear audio-based motion-resilient HR monitoring. …

Green Data Analytics Of Supercomputing From Massive Sensor Networks: Does Workload Distribution Matter?, Zhiling Guo, Jin Li, Ram Ramesh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Energy costs represent a significant share of the total cost of ownership in high performance computing (HPC) systems. Using a unique data set collected by massive sensor networks in a peta scale national supercomputing center, we first present an explanatory model to identify key factors that affect energy consumption in supercomputing. Our analytic results show that, not only does computing node utilization significantly affect energy consumption, workload distribution among the nodes also has significant effects and could effectively be leveraged to improve energy efficiency. Next, we establish the high model performance using in-sample and out-of-sample analyses. We then develop prescriptive …

Investigating Noticeable Hand Redirection In Virtual Reality Using Physiological And Interaction Data, Martin Feick, Kora Regitz, Anthony Tang, Jungbluth

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hand redirection is effective so long as the introduced offsets are not noticeably disruptive to users. In this work we investigate the use of physiological and interaction data to detect movement discrepancies between a user's real and virtual hand, pushing towards a novel approach to identify discrepancies which are too large and therefore can be noticed. We ran a study with 22 participants, collecting EEG, ECG, EDA, RSP, and interaction data. Our results suggest that EEG and interaction data can be reliably used to detect visuo-motor discrepancies, whereas ECG and RSP seem to suffer from inconsistencies. Our findings also show …

Towards A Design Space For Storytelling On The Fashion Technology Runway, Sydney Pratte, Anthony Tang, Shannon Hoover, Maria Elena Hoover, Matt Laprarie, Catherine Larose, Lora Oehlberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fashion is driven by a narrative, i.e. a story or idea that the designer wants to convey to the audience. Fashion-tech now adds another dimension to this narrative through dynamically changing aspects of the garments. Many factors of presentation in a runway show affect how fashion-tech garments communicate a story to the audience. In this pictorial, we review a set of twenty-eight storytelling fashion-tech garments. We identify, catalogue, and categorize the factors designers used to convey stories to the audience from the runway. The design space consists of three levels: (1) the artifact-level, (2) the viewer-level, and (3) the context-level. …

Learning And Understanding User Interface Semantics From Heterogeneous Networks With Multimodal And Positional Attributes, Meng Kiat Gary Ang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User interfaces (UI) of desktop, web, and mobile applications involve a hierarchy of objects (e.g., applications, screens, view class, and other types of design objects) with multimodal (e.g., textual and visual) and positional (e.g., spatial location, sequence order, and hierarchy level) attributes. We can therefore represent a set of application UIs as a heterogeneous network with multimodal and positional attributes. Such a network not only represents how users understand the visual layout of UIs but also influences how users would interact with applications through these UIs. To model the UI semantics well for different UI annotation, search, and evaluation tasks, …

Approval Letter For The Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (Bpsou) Draft Final 2023 Residential Metals Abatement Program Borrow Amendment Work Plan (Dated January 12, 2023), Nikia Greene

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Approval Letter For The Final Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit, 2021 Unreclaimed Sites Sampling Ur-05 Site Evaluation Summary Report (February 7, 2023), Nikia Greene

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

2023 Draft Final Butte Priority Soils Operable Unit (Bpsou) Interim Site-Wide Groundwater Monitoring Quality Assurance Project Plan (Qapp) (Dated November 29, 2022), Nikia Greene

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Superconductivity And Fermi Surface Studies Of Β″-(Bedt-Ttf)2[(H2o)(Nh4)2cr(C2o4)3]·18-Crown-6, Brett Laramee, Raju Ghimire, David Graf, Lee Martin, Toby J. Blundell, Charles Agosta

Physics

We report rf-penetration depth measurements of the quasi-2D organic superconductor (Formula presented.) -(BEDT-TTF) (Formula presented.) [(H (Formula presented.) O)(NH (Formula presented.)) (Formula presented.) Cr(C (Formula presented.) O (Formula presented.)) (Formula presented.)]·18-crown-6, which has the largest separation between consecutive conduction layers of any 2D organic metal with a single packing motif. Using a contactless tunnel diode oscillator measurement technique, we show the zero-field cooling dependence and field sweeps up to 28 T oriented at various angles with respect to the crystal conduction planes. When oriented parallel to the layers, the upper critical field, (Formula presented.) T, which is the calculated paramagnetic …

Crystal Structure Of Tert-Butyl 3,6-Diiodocarbazole9-Carboxylate, Elizabeth N. Sielaff, Richard J. Staples, Shannon Biros

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

The mol­ecular structure of tert-butyl 3,6-di­iodo­carbazole-9-carboxyl­ate, C₁₇H₁₅I₂NO₂, features a nearly planar 13-membered carbazole ring with C—I bond lengths of 2.092 (4) and 2.104 (4) Å. The carbamate group has key bond lengths of 1.404 (6) Å (N—C), 1.330 (5) Å (O—C), and 1.201 (6) Å (C=O). The crystal contains inter­molecular π–π inter­actions, as well as both type I and type II inter­molecular I⋯I inter­actions.

A Mixed Phosphine Sulfide/Selenide Structure As An Instructional Example For How To Evaluate The Quality Of A Model, Sean Parkin, Jeremy Cunningham, Brian Rawls, John E. Bender, Richard J. Staples, Shannon Biros

Open Access Publishing Support Funded Articles

This paper compares variations on a structure model derived from an X-ray diffraction data set from a solid solution of chalcogenide derivatives of cis-1,2-bis­(di­phenyl­phosphan­yl)ethyl­ene, namely, 1,2-(ethene-1,2-di­yl)bis­(di­phenyl­phoshpine sulfide/selenide), C₂₆H₂₂P₂S_1.13Se_0.87. A sequence of processes are presented to ascertain the composition of the crystal, along with strategies for which aspects of the model to inspect to ensure a chemically and crystallographically realistic structure. Criteria include mis-matches between F _obs ² and F _calc ², plots of |F _obs| vs |F _calc|, residual electron density, checkCIF alerts, pitfalls …

Vision-Based Online Defect Detection Of Polymeric Film Via Structural Quality Metrics, Nathir Rawashdeh, Paniz Hazaveh, Safwan Altarazi

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

Nondestructive and contactless online approaches for detecting defects in polymer films are of significant interest in manufacturing. This paper develops vision-based quality metrics for detecting the defects of width consistency, film edge straightness, and specks in a polymeric film production process. The three metrics are calculated from an online low-cost grayscale camera positioned over the moving film before the final collection roller and can be implemented in real-time to monitor the film manufacturing for process and quality control. The objective metrics are calibrated to correlate with an expert ranking of test samples, and results show that they can be used …

Flextype: Flexible Text Input With A Small Set Of Input Gestures, Dylan Gaines, Mackenzie M. Baker, Keith Vertanen

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

In many situations, it may be impractical or impossible to enter text by selecting precise locations on a physical or touchscreen keyboard. We present an ambiguous keyboard with four character groups that has potential applications for eyes-free text entry, as well as text entry using a single switch or a brain-computer interface. We develop a procedure for optimizing these character groupings based on a disambiguation algorithm that leverages a long-span language model. We produce both alphabetically-constrained and unconstrained character groups in an offline optimization experiment and compare them in a longitudinal user study. Our results did not show a significant …

Microbial Motility At The Bottom Of North America: Digital Holographic Microscopy And Genomic Motility Signatures In Badwater Spring, Death Valley National Park, Carl Snyder, Jakob P. Centlvre, Shrikant Bhute, Jay Nadeau, Multiple Additional Authors

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Motility is widely distributed across the tree of life and can be recognized by microscopy regardless of phylogenetic affiliation, biochemical composition, or mechanism. Microscopy has thus been proposed as a potential tool for detection of biosignatures for extraterrestrial life; however, traditional light microscopy is poorly suited for this purpose, as it requires sample preparation, involves fragile moving parts, and has a limited volume of view. In this study, we deployed a field-portable digital holographic microscope (DHM) to explore microbial motility in Badwater Spring, a saline spring in Death Valley National Park, and complemented DHM imaging with 16S rRNA gene amplicon …

Nebraska Statewide Groundwater-Level Monitoring Report 2022, Aaron R. Young, Mark E. Burbach, Sue Olafsen Lackey, Robert Matthew Joeckel, Jeffrey Westrop

Conservation and Survey Division: Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Does Residue Incorporation Influence Available Nitrogen Release From Cereal Rye And Tillage Radish Cover Crops Under Controlled Conditions?, Kelsey Greub, Trenton L. Roberts

Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Nitrogen (N) captured by cover crops can be recycled for use by the following crop via decomposition and net mineralization. This study assessed the magnitude of inorganic-N released from radish (Raphanus sativus L.) and cereal rye (Secale cereale L.) residue. The experiment was designed using a five by two factorial treatment structure with five cover crop residue treatments (radish shoots, radish roots, whole radish, cereal rye shoots, and no cover crop) and two levels of residue incorporation (incorporated and surface applied). Cover crop residues were applied to a silt loam soil on an equivalent N basis, incubated for …

Predicting Locations Of Cryptic Pockets From Single Protein Structures Using The Pocketminer Graph Neural Network, Artur Meller, Michael Ward, Jonathan Borowsky, Meghana Kshirsagar, Jeffrey M Lotthammer, Felipe Oviedo, Juan Lavista Ferres, Gregory R Bowman

2020-Current year OA Pubs

Cryptic pockets expand the scope of drug discovery by enabling targeting of proteins currently considered undruggable because they lack pockets in their ground state structures. However, identifying cryptic pockets is labor-intensive and slow. The ability to accurately and rapidly predict if and where cryptic pockets are likely to form from a structure would greatly accelerate the search for druggable pockets. Here, we present PocketMiner, a graph neural network trained to predict where pockets are likely to open in molecular dynamics simulations. Applying PocketMiner to single structures from a newly curated dataset of 39 experimentally confirmed cryptic pockets demonstrates that it …

Design And Concept Of Renewable Energy Driven Auto-Detectable Railway Level Crossing Systems In Bangladesh, Iftekharuzzaman Iftekharuzzaman, Susmita Ghosh, Mohammad K. Basher, Mohammad A. Islam, Narottam Das, Mohammad Nur-E-Alam

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Bangladesh’s railway system mostly uses typical manual railway crossing techniques or boom gates through its 2955.53 km rail route all over the country. Accidents frequently happen at railway crossings due to the lack of quickly operating gate systems, and to fewer safety measures at the railway crossing as well. Currently, there are very few automatic railway crossing systems available (without obstacle detectors). Additionally, all of them are dependent on the national power grid, without a backup plan for any emergency cases. Bangladesh is still running a bit behind in generating enough power for its consumption; hence, it is not possible …

The Analysis Of A Passive Cooling Arrangement For Solar Pv Panels, Mohamad Abou Assali

Theses

The need for simple and effective solar Photovoltaics (PV) cooling techniques to enhance power generation and elongate the cell lifespan has become of greater interest in recent years. This research designs and optimizes a novel arrangement for solar photovoltaics, allowing for natural convection channel cooling and harvesting of radiation on both sides of the system. A numerical model was developed and validated to solve the conjugate radiation-convection and conduction utilizing the Monte Carlo, the 𝑘−𝜖 turbulence model and the Boussinesq approximation to solve the heat transfer in the system. The optimization was carried out for a 24% efficiency solar PV …

Thinking Global, Acting Local, Ali Gohar Qazi

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

Ongoing or continuous professional development is essential for teachers to develop and maintain the knowledge base required to produce more powerful learning outcomes among their students. Research has shown that professional development is more effective and meaningful to teachers when it is content focused, involves active learning and collective participation, and when it is sustained in duration, instead of being top-down, episodic, or delivered as ‘one-shot’ training workshops.

Policy Analysis Of Girls’ Primary School Completion In Rural Sindh: Root Causes And Policy Recommendations Using Iiep Education Policy Toolbox, Sajid Ali, Aisha Naz Ansari, Mushtaq Ahmed, Zobia Israr Ahmed, Naveed Saleh Siddique, Naveed Ahmed Shaikh, Shazia Solangi, Mujeeb Rehman Khatri, Tauseef Lateef

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

This report emerged from the policy analysis work produced as part of the course titled ‘Diagnostic tools for improving education policy planning’ by the IIEP-UNESCO with support from KIX. This course enabled us to explore diagnostic tools and their implications, specifically for developing countries, and helped the team unpack diagnostic tools and learn the history of their evolution. We further learned how the education management information system works and how data is essential for policy decisions. Finally, we engaged with real policy analysis using the IIEP Education Policy Toolbox. As a team, we chose to study the issue of girls’ …

A Comparative Analysis Of Double Reduction Policy In China, Hai Yan Wang

SOC 605 Comparative Social Policy Research Project - Student Works

The "double reduction" policy in China is designed to reduce the workload of students and prohibit out-of-school training. However, the results are not as expected. This study aims to identify potential factors that could contribute to the success of China's "double reduction" policy. The data were analysed using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods (questionnaires for students and semi-structured interviews with teachers and parents). In total, 156 valid questionnaires were collected, and 3 teachers and 3 parents were interviewed. In addition, Finland and South Korea's experiences have been used for comparison for better improvement. The results indicate that inconsistent …

Assessing Functional Biodiversity For The Future Of Plants, Planet, And People, Ali Loker

Doctor of Plant Health Program: Dissertations and Student Research

Biodiversity plays a critical role in supporting life in global ecosystems and its links to ecosystem services and sustainability are recognized by scientific and non-scientific communities. Growing awareness of the importance of biodiversity is accelerated by discussions of its loss, and how to design interventions to conserve and mitigate a biodiversity crisis. Stakeholders are funding and implementing assessment strategies at various scales to help direct conservation efforts. There is also growing interest in measuring and communicating biodiversity outcomes.

Functional biodiversity characterizes the multiplicity of life forms into groups based on their diverse contributions to natural and agro-ecosystems. Assessing functional biodiversity …