Digital Commons Network^™

A Robotic System For In-Situ Measurement Of Soil Total Carbon And Nitrogen, Husein Harun

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Surges in the cost of fertilizer in recent times coupled with the environmental effects of their over-application have driven the need for farmers to optimize the amount of fertilizer they apply on the farm. One of the key steps in determining the right amount of fertilizer to apply in a given field is measuring the amount of nutrients present in the soil. To ascertain nutrient deficiencies, most farmers perform wet chemistry analysis of soil samples which requires a lot of time and is expensive. In this research project, a robotic system was designed and developed that could autonomously move to …

Dynamic Fallowing In The Middle Rio Grande: A Look At The Environmental Water Leasing Program, Jared Wood

Water Resources Professional Project Reports

The Environmental Water Leasing Program (EWLP) is a federally-funded collaborative effort of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that has paid irrigators in the Middle Rio Grande to temporarily lease water rights and forgo their water use so that it may be used to provide environmental flows for the endangered Rio Grande Silvery Minnow. The program operates in a sometimes socially contentious context, in a region with an overallocated, legally constrained water system, to offer much needed water management flexibility. While dynamic fallowing payments for ecosystem services programs like the EWLP are common policy …

July 2023 News, Office Of Sustainability

Office of Sustainability Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Artificial Intelligence Tool For The Study Of Covid-19 Microdroplet Spread Across The Human Diameter And Airborne Space, Hesham H. Alsaadi, Monther Aldwairi, Faten Yasin, Sandra C.P. Cachinho, Abdullah Hussein

All Works

The 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19), with a point of origin in Wuhan, China, has spread rapidly all over the world. It turned into a raging pandemic wrecking havoc on health care facilities, world economy and affecting everyone’s life to date. With every new variant, rate of transmission, spread of infections and the number of cases continues to rise at an international level and scale. There are limited reliable researches that study microdroplets spread and transmissions from human sneeze or cough in the airborne space. In this paper, we propose an intelligent technique to visualize, detect, measure the distance …

Jme 4110: Upgraded Refrigeration Door Cycling System, Keenan Bland, Kelvin Woods, Tyler Mclaughlin

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

This project focuses on improvements to a door cycling system. Both a fortified rope for the pulley system, ensuring extended operation, and the integration of a support track. This track is designed to bolster the clevis linked to an air piston that facilitates smooth piston rod travel without deflection. With these advancements, our door cycling system attains a new level of reliability, durability and functionality.

Jme 4110: Door Cycling Station, Briana Kagy, Alexander Clark, William Todd, Seth Flamm

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

The objective of this project was to design and build a door cycling station to be used for fatigue testing commercial refrigerator doors, including the door gaskets, hinges, and handles. The system must be low maintenance and reliable for at least two million cycles, and it must fit within the provided budget. The design concept includes a rodless pneumatic cylinder and a system of wear-resistant ropes, eyebolts, and pulleys.

Jme 4110: Automated Railway Decoupler, Optimized, Robert Murphy, Grace Stonner, Adam Young, Matt Stokes

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

Disconnecting freight cars from one another in trains that may be many thousands of feet long involves the dangerous and inefficient operation of manual decoupling. We have produced a system that enables freight cars to disconnect remotely, streamlining rail operations and boosting efficiency.

Jme 4110: Remote Rail Switch, Tyler Teague, Nolan Celestine, Kameron Ripple, Dylan Light

Washington University / UMSL Mechanical Engineering Design Project JME 4110

When a rail line splits into 2 lines going in different directions, a switch must be manually thrown to determine which way the train goes. Our task is to create a device that would attach to the existing switch and be capable of throwing said switch remotely while still allowing for manual throwing if necessary. This document entails concept generation, embodiment, analysis, and a final working prototype that solves this problem.

Mapping Ecotourism Potential In Bangladesh: The Integration Of An Analytical Hierarchy Algorithm And Geospatial Data, Muhallil Abtahee, Afra Anika Islam, Md. Nazmul Haque, Hasan Zonaed, Samiha Mahzabin Ritu, S. M. Imdadul Islam, Atiq Zaman

Civil Engineering Faculty Publications

The significance of ecotourism has been increasing due to its potential for biodiversity preservation, economic advancement, and the promotion of sustainability awareness. In this research, geospatial analysis and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to identify feasible ecotourism sites in Bangladesh. The study applied Geographical Information System–Remote Sensing (GIS-RS) parameters and weighted overlay techniques for selected ecotourism characteristics, such as natural attractiveness, topographic features, accessibility, proximity to facilities, and community characteristics. The study found that a significant proportion (around 44%) of Bangladesh’s land exhibits high potential for ecotourism. Cox’s Bazar, Chittagong, and Rangamati are particularly favorable ecotourism locations. However, …

Whether Report? Understanding Just Culture Through Safety Reporting, James Norman

Aviation Faculty Publications

Improving our understanding from safety reporting is part of the raison d'etre of Just Culture, and voluntary reporting has a critical role. Comparing the attitudes and behaviors of pilots, dispatchers, air traffic controllers, and maintenance personnel, this paper highlighting dissertation research finds important differences between the groups, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities ahead. This study found that (1) principles of Just Culture in the US have not permeated significantly beyond pilots and dispatchers, (2) maintenance and ATC personnel reported a lack of resources and opportunities for remediation, with reporting programs often being punitive or perceived as such, and …

Operationalizing The Duty Of Care Through Rubrics, Emily Faulconer

Publications

Laboratory experiments are a key aspect of science education. However, they do have risks, and accidents do happen. Science educators have a duty of care, which includes duty of instruction. One tool that can be leveraged for duty of instruction is course rubrics. Including clear safety criteria in the rubric operationalizes the duty of care and allows students to clearly understand safety expectations and competencies. Specifically, the use of organizing schemes such as RAMP (recognize hazards, assess risks, minimize risks, prepare for emergencies) in rubrics can provide clear communication to students.

Prompt To Be Consistent Is Better Than Self-Consistent? Few-Shot And Zero-Shot Fact Verification With Pre-Trained Language Models, Fengzhu Zeng, Wei Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Few-shot or zero-shot fact verification only relies on a few or no labeled training examples. In this paper, we propose a novel method called ProToCo, to Prompt pre-trained language models (PLMs) To be Consistent, for improving the factuality assessment capability of PLMs in the few-shot and zero-shot settings. Given a claim-evidence pair, ProToCo generates multiple variants of the claim with different relations and frames a simple consistency mechanism as constraints for making compatible predictions across these variants. We update PLMs by using parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), leading to more accurate predictions in few-shot and zero-shot fact verification tasks. Our experiments on …

A Data-Driven Approach For Scheduling Bus Services Subject To Demand Constraints, Brahmanage Janaka Chathuranga Thilakarathna, Thivya Kandappu, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Passenger satisfaction is extremely important for the success of a public transportation system. Many studies have shown that passenger satisfaction strongly depends on the time they have to wait at the bus stop (waiting time) to get on a bus. To be specific, user satisfaction drops faster as the waiting time increases. Therefore, service providers want to provide a bus to the waiting passengers within a threshold to keep them satisfied. It is a two-pronged problem: (a) to satisfy more passengers the transport planner may increase the frequency of the buses, and (b) in turn, the increased frequency may impact …

Maximum Activation 3d Cube Transition System For Virtual Emotion Surveillance, Taewoo Lee, Jalel Ben-Othman, Hyunbum Kim

All Works

The concept of barrier coverage has been utilized for with various applications of surveillance, object tracking in smart cities. In barrier coverage, it is desirable to have large number of active barriers to maximize lifetime of UAV-assisted application. Because existing studies primarily focused on the formation of barriers in two-dimensional area with limited applicability, it is indispensable to extend the barrier constructions in three-dimensional area. In this letter, a cube transition barrier system using smart UAVs is designed for three-dimensional space. Then, we formally define a problem whose goal is to maximize the number of cube transition barriers by applying …

Suspicious Behavior Detection With Temporal Feature Extraction And Time-Series Classification For Shoplifting Crime Prevention, Amril Nazir, Rohan Mitra, Hana Sulieman, Firuz Kamalov

All Works

The rise in crime rates in many parts of the world, coupled with advancements in computer vision, has increased the need for automated crime detection services. To address this issue, we propose a new approach for detecting suspicious behavior as a means of preventing shoplifting. Existing methods are based on the use of convolutional neural networks that rely on extracting spatial features from pixel values. In contrast, our proposed method employs object detection based on YOLOv5 with Deep Sort to track people through a video, using the resulting bounding box coordinates as temporal features. The extracted temporal features are then …

Forecasting >100 Mev Sep Events And Intensity Based On Cme And Other Solar Activities Using Machine Learning, Daniel Lee Griessler

Theses and Dissertations

There is a severe risk for astronauts and machinery from high intensity Solar Energetic Particle (SEP) events which can be mitigated through accurate forecast of their presence and peak intensity. By using characteristics of CME and other space weather phenomena, machine learning techniques have the potential to classify and predict the peak intensity of SEP events. The extreme scarcity of SEP events in current datasets poses a challenge to traditional machine learning techniques. In this work, we first demonstrate classifier machine learning techniques that can achieve an F1 score of 0.800 in forecasting SEP events. We then propose techniques for …

Lessening Student Anxiety With Docker, Kourtnee Fernalld

Theses and Dissertations

Remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the educational landscape for hands-on Computer Science courses. This paradigm shift accelerated the transition from traditional in-person programming labs to decentralized student-provided resources. Even as students returned to in-person learning, many continued to rely on their personal computers rather than embracing university-provided labs. However, this shift to decentralized, heterogeneous environments introduces various information technology and instructional challenges. The recent emergence of lightweight, container-based virtualization presents a unique opportunity to address these challenges by offering standardized environments on decentralized platforms. To investigate this opportunity, we implemented lightweight virtualization for three undergraduate computer science courses …

Artificial Intelligence-Based Smarter Accessibility Evaluations For Comprehensive And Personalized Assessment, Sayeda Farzana Aktar

Dissertations (1934 -)

The research focuses on utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms to enhance accessibility for people with disabilities (PwD) in three areas: public buildings, homes, and medical devices. The overarching goal is to improve the accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness of accessibility evaluation systems by leveraging smarter technologies. For public buildings, the challenge lies in developing an accurate and reliable accessibility evaluation system. AI can play a crucial role by analyzing data, identifying potential barriers, and assessing the accessibility of various features within buildings. By training ML algorithms on relevant data, the system can learn to make accurate predictions …

The Effect Of Microstructural Defects And Geometrical Features On Fatigue Behavior Of Superelastic Nitinol Wires, Parisa Shabani Nezhad

Dissertations (1934 -)

Nitinol is an alloy of nickel and titanium, which exhibits outstanding functional properties, such as shape memory and superelastic behavior. Superelastic nitinol wires exhibit recoverable strains that are significantly greater than traditional alloys. In most of its applications, nitinol is exposed to cyclic loads, which results in functional and/or structural fatigue that ultimately leads to failure. The classical fatigue theories do not appropriately address the fatigue performance of superelastic nitinol due to the complex nature of the martensitic transformation. It has been shown that the main fatigue crack initiation sites, other than surfaces, are microstructural inhomogeneities such as voids and …

Camas, Summer 2023

Camas

Nonfiction:

Avispas / Leanna Torres -- The Flaw / Lena Beck -- Vignettes / Jody Pasdigselv

Fiction:

Trying / Liz Stewart -- Milepost Seven / Sandra Khalil -- On Mammals and Bird Shit and Freedom / Izabela Garcia-Arce

Poetry:

this queer conundrum / Ash Sward -- the grackles of santa rosa / Stephani Twidwell -- god tries to go viral in the multiverse / Shannan Mann -- Notes On An Escape Attempt / Quinn Bailey -- self-portrait: reflection / E.W.L. Johnson -- Surrender / Luke Bednarek -- Paradise Lost / Derek Otsuji -- Dreaming Through My Hat …

Conducting Oral History: Background And Methods, Katrine Barber

History Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter-length essay describes the practice of oral history through real world examples: the steps to conducting oral history interviews, things to consider when developing a project or an interview plan, and ethical considerations. How oral history has enlarged the historical record and changed scholarly interpretation of the past are highlighted.

Empowering Stroke Recovery: Harnessing The Power Of Healthcare Technology & Wearables, Tailar Johnson

Occupational Therapy Student Capstones

No abstract provided.

A Virtual Workplace Wellness Program For Remote Workers, Janelle Candaza

Occupational Therapy Student Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Tc-Ptp-Mediated Suppression Of Autophagy During Skin Carcinogenesis, Obed Asare

Theses and Dissertations

Ultraviolet B (UVB) radiation can distort cellular homeostasis and predispose the skin to carcinogenesis. Amongst the deteriorating effects of the sun’s UVB radiation on cellular homeostasis is the formation of DNA photoproducts such as cyclobutene pyrimidine dimers. These photoproducts can cause significant changes in the structure and conformation of the DNA, inducing gene mutations which may accumulate to trigger the formation of skin cancer. Photoproducts are typically repaired by nucleotide excision repair. Notwithstanding, when the repair mechanism fails, apoptosis ensues to prevent the accumulation of mutations and to restore cellular homeostasis. We have identified T-cell protein tyrosine phosphatase (TC-PTP) as …

Using Deep Learning For Encrypted Traffic Analysis Of Amazon Echo, Surendra Pathak

Theses and Dissertations

The adoption of the Amazon Echo family of devices in modern homes has become very widespread at the current time, with hundreds of millions of devices sold. Moreover, the global smart speaker market size is growing vigorously and is projected to continue to bigger. Smart speakers allow users hands-free interaction by allowing voice control, promoting human-computer interaction to greater avenues. Though smart speaker can be useful assistant, it has some serious security concerns that need to be studied. In this study, an analysis of the security and privacy concerns of smart speakers is presented along with a passive attack, namely …

Initial Investigation Of Using The Waste Rubber Tires As A New Sustainable Material For Electric Conductive Rigid Pavement, Islam Radwan

Theses and Dissertations

The accumulation of snow on roadway surfaces has the potential to result in deadly accidents and financial damage. Traditional de-icing procedures, which include the use of chemicals or salt and the use of heavy machinery, may have a negative effect on the environment and the structural integrity of highway infrastructure systems, and they are not sustainable at all. In addition, these methods are considered labor-intensive and dangerous, especially in crowded areas. The use of heated pavement systems (HPS), which can be in the form of hydronic (HHPS) or electrically conductive concrete (ECON), has gained popularity in recent years as a …

The First Peoples Of The Lower Rio Grande Valley Of Texas And Northern Mexico: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Defining The Paleoindian Period, Starr Elena Hein

Theses and Dissertations

The archaeological record of the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and northern Mexico is poorly understood. There are few excavated sites at which Paleoindian cultural materials have been found, and in these cases the context is uncertain. In order to better understand the Paleoindian period, projectile points that reside in private collections are documented, and the time period they are assigned to, based on absolute dating from surrounding regions, is used to cross-date local materials. This is limited by the lack of named typology for Upper Paleolithic materials in the Americas. Clovis is well represented in the Lower Rio …

A Data-Driven Method For Damage Detection In An Open Deck Steel Truss Railroad Bridge Under The Moving Train Load, Mahesh Pokhrel

Theses and Dissertations

Open-Deck (OD) steel truss railroad bridges are one of the most common types of railroad bridges in the United States. They are, however, significantly vulnerable to the dynamic effects of moving train load. In the long run, these dynamic effects cause fatigue damage to the structural members. The damage in most of the railroad bridges are monitored by visual inspections which are sometimes unreliable and inconsistent due to human error. This study explores the identification and classification of damage to an open deck railroad bridge from both time-domain (statistical features) and time-frequency domain features (Hilbert-Huang Transform) extracted through acceleration response …

Exploring The Localization Of Light In Discrete Systems With Conducted Symmetries, Aria Hajikhani

Theses and Dissertations

Controlling the localization of light has been studied through many approaches and has become a subject matter of interest due to potential applications in various fields. In this thesis, we will explore discrete systems with conducted symmetries, in both quantum and classical aspects, to establish a deeper understanding of light localization. First, we investigate atom-light interactions through exploring the Jaynes-Cummings model. We then introduce coupled cavity arrays (CCAs) where photons can hop between neighboring cavities and each cavity in the array may interact with one or more atoms. Specifically, we focus on systems in which one two-level atom is connected …

Image Segmentation With Human-In-The-Loop In Automated De-Caking Process For Powder Bed Additive Manufacturing, Vincent Opare Addo Asare-Manu

Theses and Dissertations

Additive manufacturing (AM) becomes a critical technology that increases the speed and flexibility of production and reduces the lead time for high-mix, low-volume manufacturing. One of the major bottlenecks in further increasing its productivity lies around its post-processing procedures. This work focuses on tackling a critical and inevitable step in powder-bed additive manufacturing processes, i.e., powder cleaning or de-caking. Pressing concerns can be raised with human involvement when performing this task manually. Therefore, a robot-driven automatic powder cleaning system could be an alternative to reducing time consumption and increasing safety for AM operators. However, since the color and surface texture …