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Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering

Cognitive Memory Effects On Non-Linear Video-Based Learning, Katherine Renee Comeaux Jan 2005

Cognitive Memory Effects On Non-Linear Video-Based Learning, Katherine Renee Comeaux

LSU Master's Theses

During an informative learning process, information, material, facts and ideas are typically conveyed in a linear arrangement. Individuals are frequently distracted during this process with their attention being diverted to an interruption (Internet, phone call, etc). When presented with any new information, the mind evolves through problem solving and evaluation procedures. The way in which that information is processed and perceived depends on: (a) original presentation (b) examination of material and (c) an individualistic measurement of success. However, when faced with an interruption, the person is forced to deal with non-linear arrangement of information. This research investigates nonlinear presentation or …


An Application Of Parallel Computation To Collaborative Optimization, Shahab Nayyer Jan 2005

An Application Of Parallel Computation To Collaborative Optimization, Shahab Nayyer

LSU Master's Theses

Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) has evolved as a discipline which provides a body of methods and techniques to assist engineers in solving large scale design problems. There are many frameworks for formulating MDO problems. These frameworks can be broadly classified as single-level or bi-level formulations. Collaborative Optimization (CO) is one of the popular bi-level formulations to solve an MDO problem. There are numerous design optimization problems which are highly CPU time intensive and require a long simulation time. With the advent of cheaper and faster available PC’s, distributed parallel computer clusters have become very popular. These clusters provide large computing …


Usability Of Home Cholesterol Test Kits And Their Impact On Patients' Decision, Deepti Surabattula Jan 2005

Usability Of Home Cholesterol Test Kits And Their Impact On Patients' Decision, Deepti Surabattula

LSU Master's Theses

Release of home health testing kits into the market has enabled people to take care of their own health. Misinterpretation of results and delays in treatments are the major concerns of the doctors. In the present study, two cholesterol test kits, AccuchekÒ Instant plusÒ and Home Access® Instant Cholesterol Test, were compared on the basis of user performance, accuracy, and the patient’s future medical decisions based on the test results. The study was conducted with 30 participants, 15 men and 15 women. Participants tested their overall cholesterol level with both kits. In addition, a clinical cholesterol evaluation, the medical gold …


Musculoskeletal Disorders In Dentistry, Frank Maurice Pitts Jan 2005

Musculoskeletal Disorders In Dentistry, Frank Maurice Pitts

LSU Master's Theses

Because of the common occurrence of pain experienced by dental professionals during the course of a workday and throughout their career, an epidemiological and a field study were performed in an effort to contribute to the prevention of musculoskeletal disorders in dentistry. The aim of the thesis is two fold: to assess the perception of occupational pain and discomfort felt by dentists through a perception based survey and to assess the muscle behavior of dentists during isotonic postures while performing various dental procedures on their first and last patients in a given work day. One hundred (100) dentists participated in …


A Study Of Distributed Clustering Of Vector Time Series On The Grid By Task Farming, Arun B. Nayar Jan 2005

A Study Of Distributed Clustering Of Vector Time Series On The Grid By Task Farming, Arun B. Nayar

LSU Master's Theses

Traditional data mining methods were limited by availability of computing resources like network bandwidth, storage space and processing power. These algorithms were developed to work around this problem by looking at a small cross-section of the whole data available. However since a major chunk of the data is kept out, the predictions were generally inaccurate and missed out on significant features that was part of the data. Today with resources growing at almost the same pace as data, it is possible to rethink mining algorithms to work on distributed resources and essentially distributed data. Distributed data mining thus holds great …


Effect Of Back Belt On Inter-Joint Coordination And Postural Index Value Under Self Selected Manual Lifting Technique, Ashish Dashrathrao Nimbarte Jan 2005

Effect Of Back Belt On Inter-Joint Coordination And Postural Index Value Under Self Selected Manual Lifting Technique, Ashish Dashrathrao Nimbarte

LSU Master's Theses

Over the past decade increasing number of US companies have been encouraging the use of abdominal support as a part of their efforts to reduce the human and economic costs due to back injuries. Back belts are assumed to prevent injuries by restricting posture, increasing intra abdominal pressure, providing psychological effect and relaxing trunk muscle to provide circumferential support around the pelvis ring. This research deals in detail with the posture restriction caused by back belt. Two-dimensional kinematic data was collected from ten subjects using nine marker positions. Angular displacement of nine body angles was compared. The kinematic relationship, posture, …


Semantic Classification Of Rural And Urban Images Using Learning Vector Quantization, Prakash Thulasiraman Jan 2005

Semantic Classification Of Rural And Urban Images Using Learning Vector Quantization, Prakash Thulasiraman

LSU Master's Theses

One of the major hurdles in semantic image classification is that only low-level features can be reliably extracted from images as opposed to higher level features (objects present in the scene and their inter-relationships). The main challenge lies in grouping images into semantically meaningful categories based on the available low-level visual features of the images. It is important that we have a classification method that will handle a complex image dataset with not so well defined boundaries between clusters. Learning Vector Quantization (LVQ) neural networks offer a great deal of robustness in clustering complex datasets. This study presents a semantic …


Hierarchical Indexing For Region Based Image Retrieval, Eka Aulia Jan 2005

Hierarchical Indexing For Region Based Image Retrieval, Eka Aulia

LSU Master's Theses

Region-based image retrieval system has been an active research area. In this study we developed an improved region-based image retrieval system. The system applies image segmentation to divide an image into discrete regions, which if the segmentation is ideal, correspond to objects. The focus of this research is to improve the capture of regions so as to enhance indexing and retrieval performance and also to provide a better similarity distance computation. During image segmentation, we developed a modified k-means clustering algorithm for image retrieval where hierarchical clustering algorithm is used to generate the initial number of clusters and the cluster …


Effects Of Mental Rotation, Visual Aids And Training On Inspection Performance During Airport Baggage Inspection, Sunil Addepalli Jan 2005

Effects Of Mental Rotation, Visual Aids And Training On Inspection Performance During Airport Baggage Inspection, Sunil Addepalli

LSU Master's Theses

Since 9/11, airport security has become an area of critical national security. The current study investigates the effect of mental rotation training and the presence of visual decision aids on inspection performance. Forty-eight participants were divided into two groups (Group A and Group B) of twenty-four each. Each group was provided with training on visual inspection, baggage screening and on using the software simulation of airport baggage inspection. Participants had to identify from images any object that cannot be allowed on a passenger plane and register a response by clicking one of the buttons, “Threat” or “No Threat”. Participants in …