Engineering Commons^™

Development Of Gene Regulatory Elements For Biosensing Applications, Mallory N. Bates

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21% of U.S adults experienced mental illnesses in 2020. Nearly 1 in 4 active- duty military personnel showed signs of mental health conditions in 2014 [89]. Mental health can be identified in the body by different biomarkers. These biomarkers potentially could be controlled by riboswitches, which could help mental illnesses and regulate diseases. Riboswitches are desirable in these cases due to responding without affecting vital functions. Riboswitches are located in mRNA and switch “ON” or “OFF” depending on the concentration of a biomarker [13]. In this research, riboswitches were re-engineered to take a known riboswitch and control its response in …

Design Of A Surrogate Hypersonic Inlet For The Hifire-6 Configuration, Joseph W. Mileski

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Shock wave-boundary layer interactions can significantly impact the operability of high-speed inlets by inducing flow separation. This flow separation is difficult to visualize in three-dimensional, inward-turning inlets because of the curved surfaces that form their internal flow paths. To remedy this challenge, a surrogate test article was created. Using the results from a previously completed Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis of the HIFiRE-6, a surrogate inlet with a rectangular isolator section was streamline-traced, allowing for the use of schlieren imagery to capture the separation bubble. This thesis discusses the process of developing the test article. Experimental results from a planned …

Data Analytics And Visualization For Virtual Simulation, Sri Lekha Koppaka

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Healthcare organizations attract a diversity of caregivers and patients by providing essential care. While interacting with people of various races, ethnicity, and economical background, caregivers need to be empathetic and compassionate. Proper training and exposure are needed to understand the patient’s background and handle different situations and provide the best care for the patient. With social determinants of health (SDOH) as the basis, the thesis focuses on providing exposure through “Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) - A simulation-based training tool” to two such scenarios covering patients from the LGBTQIA+ community & autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This interactive tool helps …

Fbxl16 Promotes Breast Cancer Cell Growth And Diminishes Fulvestrant Responsiveness By Stabilizing Erα Protein, Krushangi Nirav Shah

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Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer in women. Approximately 75% of breast cancers are estrogen receptor alpha positive (ER+) and are treatable with endocrine therapies and/or CDK inhibitors. However, endocrine therapy (ET) resistance and metastasis are major obstacles in advanced ERα+ breast cancer (ER+ BCa) therapeutics. Upregulated oncogenic ERα activity plays critical role in progression of ER+ BCa. One essential mechanism of regulating ERα signaling is the ubiquitination-dependent proteasomal degradation of ERα. Owing to its direct effect on ERα degradation, fulvestrant is a first-line FDA-approved ET for metastatic and locally advanced breast cancer and a second-line drug for treatment …

Computer Enabled Interventions To Communication And Behavioral Problems In Collaborative Work Environments, Ashutosh Shivakumar

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Task success in co-located and distributed collaborative work settings is characterized by clear and efficient communication between participating members. Communication issues like 1) Unwanted interruptions and 2) Delayed feedback in collaborative work based distributed scenarios have the potential to impede task coordination and significantly decrease the probability of accomplishing task objective. Research shows that 1) Interrupting tasks at random moments can cause users to take up to 30% longer to resume tasks, commit up to twice the errors, and experience up to twice the negative effect than when interrupted at boundaries 2) Skill retention in collaborative learning tasks improves with …

Topological Hierarchies And Decomposition: From Clustering To Persistence, Kyle A. Brown

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Hierarchical clustering is a class of algorithms commonly used in exploratory data analysis (EDA) and supervised learning. However, they suffer from some drawbacks, including the difficulty of interpreting the resulting dendrogram, arbitrariness in the choice of cut to obtain a flat clustering, and the lack of an obvious way of comparing individual clusters. In this dissertation, we develop the notion of a topological hierarchy on recursively-defined subsets of a metric space. We look to the field of topological data analysis (TDA) for the mathematical background to associate topological structures such as simplicial complexes and maps of covers to clusters in …

Influence Of Fill Percentage And Baking Parameters On The Feedability Of Metal-Cored Arc Welding Wires, Angelica Marie Black

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Adequate feedability is essential for GMAW processes to ensure efficiency. The feedability of a wire refers to the wire’s ability to feed continuously through the contact tip. While there are several known causes of feedability difficulties when using cored welding wires, there are many variables that have yet to be explored thoroughly. Three factors are investigated in this research to determine their effects on feedability of cored wires: fill percentage, baking time, and baking temperature. A set of metal-cored arc welding wires were created with various fill percentages, baking times, and baking temperatures. Tension testing, microhardness testing, microstructural characterization, and …

Virtual Reality-Based Serious Role-Playing Games As Digital Experiential Learning Tools To Deliver Healthcare Skills Through Mobile Devices, Dixit Bharatkumar Patel

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Inadequate professional training and practices related to health care may result in severe complications to care experiences and outcomes. Moreover, healthcare professionals are as susceptible to the possibility of implicit biases as any other group. Importantly, the health care training is critical and challenging as minor prejudicial beliefs have an adverse influence or serious consequences on patients' health outcomes. Thus, facilitating serious role-playing virtual care practices along with raising awareness of healthcare professionals about the enduring impact of implicit/explicit biases and Social Determinants of Health (SDH) on health outcomes assist to advance the patient-provider relation, care experiences (e.g., healthcare experience …

Automatically Inferring Image Bases Of Arm32 Binaries, Daniel T. Chong

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Reverse engineering tools rely on the critical image base value for tasks such as correctly mapping code into virtual memory for an emulator or accurately determining branch destinations for a disassembler. However, binaries are often stripped and therefore, do not explicitly state this value. Currently available solutions for calculating this essential value generally require user input in the form of parameter configurations or manual binary analysis, thus these methods are limited by the experience and knowledge of the user. In this thesis, we propose a user-independent solution for determining the image base of ARM32 binaries and describe our implementation. Our …

Transdermal Drug Delivery Systems: Analysis Of Adhesion Failure, Zachary Brooks, Tushar Goswami, Amy Neidhard-Doll, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

The most critical component of the TDDS is the adhesive, which is responsible for the safety, efficacy and quality of the patch. For drug delivery to successfully occur, the patch must adhere to the surface of the contact area. If a patch has inadequate adhesion, it is likely to fall off before the entire delivery period has been satisfied, leading to risks for the patient and others who may encounter the patch. Despite the critical concerns associated with the adhesive properties of the patches, the adhesion quality and failure mechanisms have not been fully studied. If certain molecules encounter the …

Retrospective Evaluation And Framework Development Of Bone Anisotropic Material Behavior Compared With Elastic, Elastic-Plastic, And Hyper-Elastic Properties, Farah Hamandi, James T. Tsatalis, Tarun Goswami

Biomedical, Industrial & Human Factors Engineering Faculty Publications

The main motivation for studying damage in bone tissue is to better understand how damage develops in the bone tissue and how it progresses. Such knowledge may help in the surgical aspects of joint replacement, fracture fixation or establishing the fracture tolerance of bones to prevent injury. Currently, there are no standards that create a realistic bone model with anisotropic material properties, although several protocols have been suggested. This study seeks to retrospectively evaluate the damage of bone tissue with respect to patient demography including age, gender, race, body mass index (BMI), height, and weight, and their role in causing …

Effect Of The Extended Rigid Flapping Trailing Edge Fringe On An S833 Airfoil, Hongtao Yu, Zifeng Yang

Mechanical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications

A 2D numerical simulation was conducted to investigate the effect of an extended rigid trailing edge fringe with a flapping motion on the S833 airfoil and its wake flow field, as an analogy of an owl’s wing. This study aims to characterize the influence of the extended flapping fringe on the aerodynamic performance and the wake flow characteristics downstream of the airfoil. The length (Le) and flapping frequencies (fe) of the fringe are the key parameters that dominate the impact on the airfoil and the flow field, given that the oscillation angular amplitude is fixed at 5◦. The simulation results …

Reciprocal Regulation Of Transketolase-Like 1 And Hypoxia-Inducible Factor 1 Alpha In Metabolic Reprogramming And Growth Of Diffuse Midline Glioma, H3 K27m-Mutant, Christopher Andrew Waker

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Diffuse midline glioma, K27M-mutant (DMG) are intractable brain tumors, primarily occurring in the pediatric and adolescent population. Patients have a median survival of less than one year after diagnosis. A lack of therapeutic targets has been a barrier to improvement in patient survival. Irradiation therapy improves symptoms while chemotherapy and surgical intervention, for the most part, have not yet demonstrated utility for treatment. DMG are characterized by a histone H3 mutation that results in the genome-wide loss of epigenetic-repressive marks on K27 and is associated with the misexpression of genes, like Cancer/Testis antigens. A member of this group, transketolase-like 1 …

Validating Software States Using Reverse Execution, Nathaniel Christian Boland

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A key feature of software analysis is determining whether it is possible for a program to reach a certain state. Various methods have been devised to accomplish this including directed fuzzing and dynamic execution. In this thesis we present a reverse execution engine to validate states, the Complex Emulator. The Complex Emulator seeks to validate a program state by emulating it in reverse to discover if a contradiction exists. When unknown variables are found during execution, the emulator is designed to use constraint solving to compute their values. The Complex Emulator has been tested on small assembly programs and is …

Synthetic Aperture Ladar Automatic Target Recognizer Design And Performance Prediction Via Geometric Properties Of Targets, Jacob W. Ross

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Synthetic Aperture LADAR (SAL) has several phenomenology differences from Synthetic Aperture RADAR (SAR) making it a promising candidate for automatic target recognition (ATR) purposes. The diffuse nature of SAL results in more pixels on target. Optical wavelengths offers centimeter class resolution with an aperture baseline that is 10,000 times smaller than an SAR baseline. While diffuse scattering and optical wavelengths have several advantages, there are also a number of challenges. The diffuse nature of SAL leads to a more pronounced speckle effect than in the SAR case. Optical wavelengths are more susceptible to atmospheric noise, leading to distortions in formed …

Low-Power, Low-Cost, & High-Performance Digital Designs : Multi-Bit Signed Multiplier Design Using 32nm Cmos Technology, N V Vijaya Krishna Boppana

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Binary multipliers are ubiquitous in digital hardware. Digital multipliers along with the adders play a major role in computing, communicating, and controlling devices. Multipliers are used majorly in the areas of digital signal and image processing, central processing unit (CPU) of the computers, high-performance and parallel scientific computing, machine learning, physical layer design of the communication equipment, etc. The predominant presence and increasing demand for low-power, low-cost, and high-performance digital hardware led to this work of developing optimized multiplier designs. Two optimized designs are proposed in this work. One is an optimized 8 x 8 Booth multiplier architecture which is …

Demonstration Of High-Temperature Operation Of Beta-Gallium Oxide (Β-Ga2o3) Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (Mosfet) With Electrostatic Model In Comsol, Nicholas Paul Sepelak

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β-Ga2O3 is a robust semiconductor material set with a large band gap of ~4.8 eV, low intrinsic carrier concentration, and high melting point that offers a stable platform for operating electronic devices at high temperatures and extreme environments. The first half of this thesis will cover the fabrication of a fixture and packaging to test electronic components at high temperatures. Then it will highlight the characterization of β-Ga2O3 field effect transistors from room temperature (RT) up to 500 °C. The devices, fabricated with Ni/Au and Al2O3 gate metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS), demonstrate stable operation up to 500 oC. The tested device shows …

A Cloud Computing-Based Dashboard For The Visualization Of Motivational Interviewing Metrics, E Jinq Heng

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Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based brief interventional technique that has been demonstrated to be effective in triggering behavior change in patients. To facilitate behavior change, healthcare practitioners adopt a nonconfrontational, empathetic dialogic style, a core component of MI. Despite its advantages, MI has been severely underutilized mainly due to the cognitive overload on the part of the MI dialogue evaluator, who has to assess MI dialogue in real-time and calculate MI characteristic metrics (number of open-ended questions, close-ended questions, reflection, and scale-based sentences) for immediate post-session evaluation both in MI training and clinical settings. To automate dialogue assessment and …

Simulation Of Residual Stress Generation In Additive Manufacturing Of Complex Lattice Geometries, Katie Sue Bruggeman

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Residual stresses developed during additive manufacturing (AM) can influence the mechanical performance of structural components in their intended applications. In this study, thermomechanical residual stress simulations of the laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) process are conducted for both simplified (plate and cube-shaped) geometries as well as five complex lattice geometries fabricated with Inconel 718. These simulations are conducted with the commercial software package Simufact Additive©, which uses a non-linear finite element analysis and layer-by-layer averaging approach in determining residual stresses. To verify the efficacy of the Simufact Additive© simulations, numerical results for the plate and cube-shape geometries are analyzed for …

Hypersonic Conceptual Design Tool Comparison, James G. Wnek

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The many iterations needed to explore a design space in the conceptual design process preclude the use of time-consuming RANS CFD for all but a few flight conditions. This research focuses on identifying the level of fidelity needed to adequately predict the aerothermodynamic characteristics of hypersonic vehicles. Three tools with differing levels of fidelity – CBAERO, Cart3D, and Kestrel – were used to analyze the Generic Hypersonic Vehicle (GHV) at the design condition of Mach 5.85 and an off-design condition of Mach 4.5. The results are representative of the different design tools but are not definitive due to the mesh …

Vibration Bending Fatigue Analysis Of Additively Repaired Ti-6al-4v Airfoil Blades, Lucas Jordan Smith

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Repairing airfoil blades is necessary to extend the life of turbine engines. Directed energy deposition (DED) additive manufacturing (AM) provides the ability to add material at a specific location on an existing component. In this work, AM repairs on Ti-6Al-4V airfoil blades were analyzed to determine what effect the repair will have on the blade performance in high cycle vibration fatigue testing. Targeted sections were cut out of airfoil blades near high stress locations and repaired using DED. To understand the defects that arose with this type of repair, computed tomography imaging was used to quantify the defects from the …

Novel Natural Language Processing Models For Medical Terms And Symptoms Detection In Twitter, Farahnaz Golrooy Motlagh

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This dissertation focuses on disambiguation of language use on Twitter about drug use, consumption types of drugs, drug legalization, ontology-enhanced approaches, and prediction analysis of data-driven by developing novel NLP models. Three technical aims comprise this work: (a) leveraging pattern recognition techniques to improve the quality and quantity of crawled Twitter posts related to drug abuse; (b) using an expert-curated, domain-specific DsOn ontology model that improve knowledge extraction in the form of drug-to-symptom and drug-to-side effect relations; and (c) modeling the prediction of public perception of the drug’s legalization and the sentiment analysis of drug consumption on Twitter. We collected …

Further Exploration Of Optical/Thermal Interaction Effects On High-Power Laser System Performance And Optimization Through Multiphysics System-Level Modeling, Nathaniel J. Butt

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High-power laser systems (HPLS) have wide-ranging applications in many prominent areas. HPLS use laser diodes to pump fiber gain media. Understanding the functionality of both components is critical for achieving effective HPLS operation. System optical efficiency is a function of diode junction temperature. As junction temperature changes, the wavelength spectrum of the diode output shifts causing optical power losses in the fiber gain media. Optical/thermal interactions of the dynamically coupled laser diodes and fiber gain media are not fully understood. A system level modeling approach considering the interactions between optical performance and component temperature is necessary. Four distinct models were …

A Solder-Defined Computer Architecture For Backdoor And Malware Resistance, Marc W. Abel

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This research is about securing control of those devices we most depend on for integrity and confidentiality. An emerging concern is that complex integrated circuits may be subject to exploitable defects or backdoors, and measures for inspection and audit of these chips are neither supported nor scalable. One approach for providing a “supply chain firewall” may be to forgo such components, and instead to build central processing units (CPUs) and other complex logic from simple, generic parts. This work investigates the capability and speed ceiling when open-source hardware methodologies are fused with maker-scale assembly tools and visible-scale final inspection.

The …

Few-Shot Malware Detection Using A Novel Adversarial Reprogramming Model, Ekula Praveen Kumar

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The increasing sophistication of malware has made detecting and defending against new strains a major challenge for cybersecurity. One promising approach to this problem is using machine learning techniques that extract representative features and train classification models to detect malware in an early stage. However, training such machine learning-based malware detection models represents a significant challenge that requires a large number of high-quality labeled data samples while it is very costly to obtain them in real-world scenarios. In other words, training machine learning models for malware detection requires the capability to learn from only a few labeled examples. To address …

Evaluating Similarity Of Cross-Architecture Basic Blocks, Elijah L. Meyer

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Vulnerabilities in source code can be compiled for multiple processor architectures and make their way into several different devices. Security researchers frequently have no way to obtain this source code to analyze for vulnerabilities. Therefore, the ability to effectively analyze binary code is essential. Similarity detection is one facet of binary code analysis. Because source code can be compiled for different architectures, the need can arise for detecting code similarity across architectures. This need is especially apparent when analyzing firmware from embedded computing environments such as Internet of Things devices, where the processor architecture is dependent on the product and …

Locality Analysis Of Patched Php Vulnerabilities, Luke N. Holt

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The size and complexity of modern software programs is constantly growing making it increasingly difficult to diligently find and diagnose security exploits. The ability to quickly and effectively release patches to prevent existing vulnerabilities significantly limits the exploitation of users and/or the company itself. Due to this it has become crucial to provide the capability of not only releasing a patched version, but also to do so quickly to mitigate the potential damage. In this thesis, we propose metrics for evaluating the locality between exploitable code and its corresponding sanitation API such that we can statistically determine the proximity of …

Unit Circle Roots Based Sensor Array Signal Processing, Jared P. Smith

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As technology continues to rapidly evolve, the presence of sensor arrays and the algorithms processing the data they generate take an ever-increasing role in modern human life. From remote sensing to wireless communications, the importance of sensor signal processing cannot be understated. Capon's pioneering work on minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamforming forms the basis of many modern sensor array signal processing (SASP) algorithms. In 2004, Steinhardt and Guerci proved that the roots of the polynomial corresponding to the optimal MVDR beamformer must lie on the unit circle, but this result was limited to only the MVDR. This dissertation contains …

Amygdala Modeling With Context And Motivation Using Spiking Neural Networks For Robotics Applications, Matthew Aaron Zeglen

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Cognitive capabilities for robotic applications are furthered by developing an artificial amygdala that mimics biology. The amygdala portion of the brain is commonly understood to control mood and behavior based upon sensory inputs, motivation, and context. This research builds upon prior work in creating artificial intelligence for robotics which focused on mood-generated actions. However, recent amygdala research suggests a void in greater functionality. This work developed a computational model of an amygdala, integrated this model into a robot model, and developed a comprehensive integration of the robot for simulation, and live embodiment. The developed amygdala, instantiated in the Nengo Brain …

Erk3 And Dgkζ Interact To Modulate Cell Motility In Lung Cancer Cells, Amanda Myers

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Extracellular-regulated kinase 3 (ERK3) is overexpressed in a variety of cancers, including lung cancer. This atypical mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) has a unique structure which includes a C34 domain and C-terminus and about which relatively little is known. ERK3 has been demonstrated to promote cell migration and metastasis in multiple cancer types. A yeast two-hybrid assay using ERK3 as bait indicated Diacylglycerol kinase ζ (DGKζ) is a binding partner. DGKζ is an isoform in the DGK family, all the members of which phosphorylate the lipid diacylglycerol (DAG) to generate phosphatidic acid (PA). DGKζ was shown to promote migration in mouse …