Digital Commons Network^™

A Comparative Assessment Of The Impact Of Various Norms On Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks, Chandini Ramesh

Theses

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) provide a fascinating new paradigm in machine learning and artificial intelligence, especially in the context of unsupervised learning. GANs are quickly becoming a state of the art tool, used in various applications such as image generation, image super resolutions, text generation, text to image synthesis to name a few. However, GANs potential is restricted due to the various training difficulties. To overcome the training difficulties of GANs, the use of a more powerful measure of dissimilarity via the use of the Wasserstein distance was proposed. Thereby giving birth to the GAN extension known as Wasserstein Generative …

Exploring Deep Neural Network Models For Classification Of High-Resolution Panoramas, Deepak Sharma

Theses

The objective of this thesis is to explore Deep Learning algorithms for classifying high-resolution images. While most deep learning algorithms focus on relatively low-resolution imagery (under 400×400 pixels), very high-resolution image classification poses unique challenges. These images occur in pathology and remote sensing, but here we focus on the classification of invasive plant species. We aimed to develop a computer vision system that can provide geo-coordinates of the locations of invasive plants by processing Google Map Street View images at using finite computational resources. We explore six methods for classifying these images and compare them. Our results could significantly impact …

Structure Preserving Regularizer For Neural Style Transfer, Krushal Kyada

Theses

The aim of the project is to generate an image in the style of the image by a well-known artist. The experiment will use artificial neural networks to transfer the style of one image onto another. In Computer Vision context: capturing the content invariant that is the style of an image and applying it on the content of another image.

Initially captures the tensors that we need from the content and style image and then we pass the input image which will initially be an image with noise and our algorithm will try to minimize the loss between the input …

A Time Of Flight On-Robot Proximity Sensing System For Collaborative Robotics, Odysseus A. Adamides

Theses

The sensor system presented in this work demonstrates the results of designing an industrial grade exteroceptive sensing device for proximity sensing for collaborative robots. The intention of this design's application is to develop an on-robot small footprint proximity sensing device to prevent safety protected stops from halting a robot during a manufacturing process. Additionally, this system was design to be modular and fit on an size or shape robotic link expanding the sensor system's use cases vastly. The design was assembled and put through a number of benchmark tests to validate the performance of the time of flight (ToF) sensor …

Experimental Analysis Of Spatial Sound For Storytelling In Virtual Reality, Saylee Bhide

Theses

Spatial sound is useful in enhancing immersion and presence of the user in a virtual world. This audio design allows the game designer to place audio cues that appropriately match with the visual cues in a virtual game environment. These localized audio cues placed in a story based game environment also help to evoke an emotional response from the user and construct the narrative of the game by capturing the user’s attention towards the guiding action events in the game. Our thesis explores the usefulness of spatial sound for improving the performance and experience of a user in a virtual …

Understanding Prediction Of Low-Quality Comments In Online Science Discourse, Elizabeth R. Lucas

Theses

Online public forum discussion in the Reddit science community is moderated to ensure a high standard of scientific content in discourse. This thesis project creates predictive models to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable forum comments, and it seeks to interpret those models based on input from moderators. Information was collected from moderators (their demographics, moderation habits, moderation decisions and reasons for removing comments) to curate a deeper understanding of the online moderation community and predictive models for automated moderation support.

The Role Of Visual Identity Design In The Evolution Of Luxury Fashion Brand Strategy, Jia Cai

Theses

Fashion luxury brands have taken longer than other retail segments to understand and adapt to consumer behavior changes created by the digital revolution over the past decade. Digital and social media has created a fundamental shift in consumers expectations of their shopping experiences.

The big debate in the luxury fashion industry has been whether the integration of ‘off-line’ and ‘on-line’ actually creates value or reduces the exclusivity associated with the brands. In the past, luxury brands have relied on traditional marketing channels such as print and direct mail to engage their high-value customers. Additionally, the industry has placed an enormous …

An Empirical Study On Discovering A New Self-Admitted Technical Debt Type - Api-Debt, Ahmed Aljohani

Theses

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) is when developers intentionally choose to take short-cuts, non-optimal solutions (e.g. temporary fix or rush code development) that negatively contribute to long-term source-code quality in order to achieve short-term goals such as product deadline. Several studies have successfully identified SATD through the source-comments, classified them into five types (design debt, defect debt, documentation debt, requirement debt, and test debt) based on how they negatively affect different parts of the source-code and proposed a tool that automatically detects SATD using the source comments as input. However, few papers deeply investigate the types of SATD and their effects …

Analog Musical Distortion Circuits For Electric Guitars, Timothy Douglas Sunnerberg

Theses

Distortion, while seen as undesirable in most contexts, has taken a different role in electronic music. Musical distortion refers to nonlinear changes in a waveform, and has been used to change the sounds of electric guitars since the 1940s and 1950s. Originally, distortion was realized with broken tubes in amplifiers or torn speaker cones, but as music evolved, so did the equipment used to produce the desired sounds. Slashed speakers turned into electronic circuits in the mid 1960s, and these electronic circuits are the focus of this paper. Many papers discuss the digitization of analog circuits, but because most analog …

Design And Verification Of An Rsa Encryption Core, Gowtham Ramakrishnan

Theses

Cryptoprocessors are becoming a standard to make the data-usage more discrete. A wellknown elector-mechanical cipher machine called the “enigma machine” was used in early 20th century to encrypt all confidential military and diplomatic information. With the advent of microprocessors in late 20th century the world of cryptography revolutionized. A cryptosystem is system on chip which contains cryptography algorithms used for encryption and decryption of data. These cryptoprocessors are used in ATM’s and highly portable communication systems. Encryption and decryption are the fundamental processes behind any cryptosystem. There are many encryption and decryption algorithms available; one such algorithm is known as …

Verification Of Sha-256 And Md5 Hash Functions Using Uvm, Dinesh Anand Bashkaran

Theses

Data integrity assurance and data origin authentication are important security aspects in commerce, financial transfer, banking, software, email, data storage, etc. Cryptographic hash functions specified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides secure algorithms for data security. Hash functions are designed to digest the data and produce a hash message; a hash is a one-way function which is highly secured and difficult to invert. In this paper, two such hash algorithms are verified using the Universal Verification Methodology (UVM). UVM is IEEE 1800 standard developed to assist in the verification of digital designs; it reduces the hurdle …

Light Extraction Efficiency Of Nanostructured Iii-Nitride Light-Emitting Diodes, Yu Kee Ooi

Theses

III-nitride materials have been extensively employed in a wide variety of applications attributed to their compact sizes, lower operating voltage, higher energy efficiency and longer lifetime. Although tremendous progress has been reported for III-nitride light-emitting diodes (LEDs), further enhancement in the external quantum effciency (η_EQE), which depends upon internal quantum efficiency, injection efficiency and light extraction efficiency (η_extraction), is essential in realizing next generation high-efficiency ultraviolet (UV) and visible LEDs. Several challenges such as charge separation issue, large threading dislocation density, large refractive index contrast between GaN and air, and anisotropic emission at high Al-composition AlGaN quantum wells in the …

Post-Gated Era: Towards Integrated Urban Communities In China, Xiaojing Lin

Theses

Gated communities, which typically refer to residential compounds that have strict boundaries with entrances guarded by securities and other technology appliances for surveillance, are the most common developments in Chinese cities over the past few decades. These enclosures of isolated city blocks have caused heated discussion since The CPC (Central Committee and State Council) published a guildline in 2016 to prohibit the construction of Gated communities in Chinese cities. For unique historical and social-cultural reasons, “Gated” has been deeply embedded in Chinese traditional dwelling ideology for a long time, and it is still widely accepted by the vast majority as …

A Low-Cost Search-And-Rescue Drone Platform, Jonathan Mcclure

Theses

In this work, an unmanned aerial system is implemented to search an outdoor area for an injured or missing person (subject) without requiring a connection to a ground operator or control station. The system detects subjects using exclusively on-board hardware as it traverses a predefined search path, with each implementation envisioned as a single element of a larger swarm of identical search drones. To increase the affordability of such a swarm, the system cost per drone serves as a primary constraint. Imagery is streamed from a camera to an Odroid single-board computer, which prepares the data for inference by a …

Efficient Distribution Regression, Nicholas Wilkins

Theses

In this thesis we devise a method for performing distribution regression utilizing an extension of mixture density networks. This method will be benchmarked against other state-of-the-art methods (utilizing negative log loss) and distribution-agnostic models of similar complexity. We demonstrate that our proposed method performs at least as well as the state-of-the-art methods in distribution regression. Additionally, we show that adding distribution predictive capabilities does not significantly decrease performance in models. We illustrate how one can utilize this methodology to regress to confidence interval predictions. Finally, we demonstrate a variety of novel and interesting applications of our framework.

A Study On The Effect Of Fabric Structure And Finishing On Perceived Image Quality, Payal Sharma

Theses

Valued at nearly US 7.5 billion, the global textile industry continues on a growth trajectory. Printed textiles represent a major segment of the market, and are making significant contributions to the overall expansion of the industry. Historically, screen printing has dominated the printed textile market, but digital technologies continue to make inroads (Hayward, 2016).

One of the problems encountered in the textile industry is obtaining the desired color. Studies have shown that the texture and finishing of a fabric can have an impact on the way the ink sets on the fabric and in turn effect the quality of image. …

Design, Fabrication And Test Of A Graphene-Based Thz Modulator, Ky-El Sanchez

Theses

One of the most promising approaches to achieve high-speed wireless communication in the terahertz regime is by designing and fabricating devices based on the unique electrical properties of graphene. Certain bands in the THz range (300 GHz – 3 THz) encounter minimal water absorption over short distances and high-speed information transfer is possible. Nonetheless, conventional bulk devices cannot operate at that speed. In the more basic wireless communications system, there are three basic components: a source, a modulator and an antenna. With the use of the Rochester Institute of Technology Semiconductor manufacturing and Fabrication laboratory a graphene-based modulator was designed …

Modeling Color Appearance In Augmented Reality, Nargess Hassani

Theses

Augmented reality (AR) is a developing technology that is expected to become the next interface between humans and computers. One of the most common designs of AR devices is the optical see-through head- mounted display (HMD). In this design, the virtual content presented on the displays embedded inside the device gets optically superimposed on the real world which results in the virtual content being transparent. Color appearance in see-through designs of AR is a complicated subject, because it depends on many factors including the ambient light, the color appearance of the virtual content and color appearance of the real background. …

Design Of A Flexible Schoenhage-Strassen Fft Polynomial Multiplier With High-Level Synthesis, Kevin Millar

Theses

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a promising field because it allows for encrypted data to be sent to and operated on by untrusted parties without the risk of privacy compromise. The benefits and applications of HE are far reaching, especially in regard to cloud computing. However, current HE solutions require resource intensive arithmetic operations such as high precision, high degree polynomial multiplication resulting in a minimum computational complexity of O(n log(n)) on standard CPUs though application of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). These operations result in poor overall performance for HE schemes in software and would benefit greatly from hardware acceleration. …

Making Memories: Location-Based Learning On The Erie Canal At A National Historical Park, Katherine C. Hensel

Theses

Onsite educational programming at National Parks provides groups with a unique opportunity to interact with history and science. How can Women’s Rights National Historical Park be used to create an onsite educational tour and program that will deliver a memorable experience for their visitors? I conducted research on the history and anthropological consequences of the Erie Canal for an onsite program that will be implemented by the National Park Service. An example interpretive tour route is included that examines the significance of the Erie Canal for the movement of people, the local economy, the movement of ideas and religion, and …

Puget Sound Water Resources: Evaluating Methods For Identification And Monitoring Of Factors In The Puget Sound That Indicate Eutrophication And Hypoxia, Christine Evans, Emily Kinkle, Yu Han, Helen Baldwin-Zook

Perpetua: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at UAH

Dissolved oxygen levels have been declining in the Puget Sound since 2000 due to eutrophication, resulting in Harmful Algal Bloom (HAB) events which negatively impact water quality and wildlife in the area. Therefore, analyzing and identifying eutrophication and hypoxic events is integral to water quality control and watershed management. The project team partnered with the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission (PSMFC) Habitat Program to test methods for monitoring water quality using remote sensing. The team tested multiple algorithms utilizing Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Sentinel-2 Multispectral Imager (MSI) data to detect turbidity and chlorophyll concentrations. Using satellite imagery …

The Effect Of Familiar Location On Upper Body Strength Testing Using The 1rm Bench Press, Noah Pring, Maggi Welch

Perpetua: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at UAH

Scientific literature has indicated that academic performance improves in the same environment that it is learned in. This implies that memory depends on physical context cues, which refers to the physical surroundings in which an event occurs. No literature thus far has shown how environmental cues could relate to performance in terms of upper body muscular strength. The purpose of this study was to see how the environmental reinstatement effect affects upper body strength. It was hypothesized that participants would achieve a higher one rep max (1 RM) score in the location they are familiar with than the location they …

Front Matter

Perpetua: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at UAH

No abstract provided.

Study Of Natural Killer Cells And Their Therapeutic Role In Pediatric Cancer, Hong Ha Rosa Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

NK cells are known to play an important role in the natural defense against viral infections and tumor immune surveillance. Through complex interactions between NK cell receptors and target cell ligands, transformed or unhealthy cells are identified and rapidly eliminated. NK cells have been used for therapeutic purposes in pediatric oncology, for example by harnessing the mechanisms of NK cell surveillance in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) or intervention-augmented antibody-dependent cell-mediated cytotoxicity (ADCC) in neuroblastoma. However, the underlying cellular mechanisms in these processes are not fully understood. In my thesis research, I sought to gain a deeper understanding of the molecular …

Investigation Of Cell-Type-Specific Effects And Synergistic Interactions Between Genes In Duplication 15q Syndrome, Kevin A. Hope

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Duplication 15q syndrome (Dup15q) is a genetic disorder caused by duplications of the 15q11.2-q13.1 region and is characterized by developmental delay, autism spectrum disorder, and treatment resistant epilepsy. Extra copies of the E3 ubiquitin ligase UBE3A and elevated levels of UBE3A expression in neurons are thought to be the primary cause of Dup15q phenotypes. However, animal models overexpressing UBE3A in neurons have not successfully recapitulated all aspects of Dup15q syndrome, especially epilepsy. Here, we used Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) to investigate Dup15q syndrome. In Chapter 2 we explored whether Dube3a, the Drosophila homolog of UBE3A, is imprinted in the fly …

Molecular Mechanisms Of Metabolic Reprogramming In Pancreatic Cancer, Sonam Kumari

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Pancreatic cancer ranks as third deadliest cancer worldwide in both men and women. The lack of diagnostic methods, chemo-resistance and invasiveness of the disease diminishes the overall survival rate in patients. Dysregulated glucose metabolism and several molecular determinants including oncogenic signaling pathways play pivotal roles in the development, progression and metastasis of pancreatic cancer. The aberrant glucose metabolism is the most prevalent key factor that influences pancreatic tumorigenesis. The cancer cells of pancreas utilize oxygen for the breakdown of glucose to lactate, which is known as Warburg effect. This phenotype of pancreatic cancer encourages proliferation, growth, migration and invasive phenotypes …

An Investigation Into Clinically Relevant Determinants Of Azole Resistance In Candida Albicans, Andrew T. Nishimoto

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

"Candida albicans is a commensal organism commonly colonizing the human gut and skin. As an opportunistic pathogen, it can cause persistent and serious infections in individuals with compromised immune systems, including the very young and elderly. Moreover, C. albicans can cause a wide spectrum of diseases ranging from superficial mucosal infections to life-threatening invasions of the organs and bloodstream. Candida species are the most common cause of invasive fungal disease, which is associated with high mortality and imposes a heavy toll on the healthcare system. Over the last 30 years, the azole antifungals have been a mainstay of antifungal therapy, …

Challenging The Paradigm Of Clinical Triazole Resistance In Aspergillus Fumigatus, Jeffrey Michael Rybak

Theses and Dissertations (ETD)

Invasive aspergillosis is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among immunocompromised populations and is predicted to cause more than 200,000 life- threatening infections each year. Aspergillus fumigatus is the most prevalent pathogen isolated from patients with invasive aspergillosis, accounting for more than 60% of all cases. Currently, the only antifungal agents available with consistent activity against A. fumigatus are the mold-active triazoles and amphotericin B, of which the triazoles commonly represent both front-line and salvage therapeutic options. Unfortunately, the treatment of infections caused by A. fumigatus has recently been further complicated by the global emergence of triazole resistance among …

A Microfluidic Platform For The Simultaneous Quantification Of Methanogen Populations In Anaerobic Digestion Processes, Prince Peter Mathai, Hannah M. Dunn, Kaushik Venkiteshwaran, Daniel Zitomer, James Maki, Satoshi Ishii, Michael J. Sadowsky

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Methanogens are a diverse group of archaea that play a critical role in the global carbon cycle. The lack of appropriate molecular tools to simultaneously quantify numerous methanogenic taxa, however, has largely limited our ability to study these communities in a wide variety of habitats, such as anaerobic digesters (ADs). In this study, 34 probe-based quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays were designed to target all known methanogenic genera within the archaeal phylum Euryarchaeota. These qPCR assays were adapted to a high-throughput microfluidic platform, which allowed for the simultaneous detection and absolute quantification of numerous taxa in a single run. The …

Sharing Clinical Notes With Patients: The Nurse Practitioner Perspective, Deborah S. Adelman, Catherine Fant, Debbie Conner

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This article outlines a research project conducted to learn more about NPs' attitudes regarding sharing clinical notes with patients through a patient portal. Perceptions were positive overall. To achieve effective health outcomes, patient and family engagement is essential. Shared clinical notes provide an opportunity to achieve these goals.