Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Novel Approach To Integrate Can Based Vehicle Sensors With Gps Using Adaptive Filters To Improve Localization Precision In Connected Vehicles From A Systems Engineering Perspective, Abhijit Vasili

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research and development in Connected Vehicles (CV) Technologies has increased exponentially, with the allocation of 75 MHz radio spectrum in the 5.9 GHz band by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) dedicated to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in 1999 and 30 MHz in the 5.9 GHz by the European Telecommunication Standards Institution (ETSI). Many applications have been tested and deployed in pilot programs across many cities all over the world.

CV pilot programs have played a vital role in evaluating the effectiveness and impact of the technology and understanding the effects of the applications over the safety of road users. The …

Fighting Mass Diffusion Of Fake News On Social Media, Abdallah Musmar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Fake news has been considered one of the most challenging problems in the last few years. The effects of spreading fake news over social media platforms are widely observed across the globe as the depth and velocity of fake news reach far more than real news (Vosoughi et al., 2018). The plan for the following dissertation is to investigate the mass spread of fake news across social media and propose a framework to fight the spread of fake news by mixing preventive methods that could hinder the overall percentage of fake news sharing. We plan to create a study on …

Assessing Morphological Response And Vulnerability Of Barrier Islands To Extreme Storms In Northwest Florida, Jacob Adam

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Barrier islands shield the mainland coast from the effects of extreme storms such as increased wave energy and storm surge. During these events, however, barrier morphology can be altered by erosive forces. Thus, compromising the protection offered and leading to increased impact on the mainland. The St. Joseph Peninsula, located in the Northwest of the Gulf of Mexico, is one such barrier at threat from storm-induced erosion. Presented here is an assessment of morphology change induced by two major storms to impact the peninsula, Hurricanes Dennis 2005 and Michael 2018. These changes characterize the erosive/depositional patterns that can be expected …

Constructing Frameworks For Task-Optimized Visualizations, Ghulam Jilani Abdul Rahim Quadri

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visualization is crucial in today’s data-driven world to augment and enhance human understanding and decision-making. Effective visualizations must support accuracy in visual task performance and expressive data communication. Effective visualization design depends on the visual channels used, chart types, or visual tasks. However, design choices and visual judgment are co-related, and effectiveness is not one-dimensional, leading to a significant need to understand the intersection of these factors to create optimized visualizations. Hence, constructing frameworks that consider both design decisions and the task being performed enables optimizing visualization design to maximize efficacy. This dissertation describes experiments, techniques, and user studies to …

Employees Breaking Bad With Technology: An Exploratory Analysis Of Human Factors That Drive Cyberspace Insider Threats, Marcus L. Green

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As implementation of computer systems has continued to grow in business contexts, employee-driven cyberspace infractions have also grown in number. Employee cyberspace behaviors have continued to have detrimental effects on company computer systems. Actions that violate company cybersecurity policies can be either malicious or unmalicious. Solutions, by and large, have been electronic and centered on hardware and software. Those proposing solutions have begun to shift their focus to human risk vulnerabilities.

This study was novel in that its focus was identification of individual, cultural, and technological risk factors that drive cyberspace insider threat activities. Identifying factors that reduce insider threat …

An Introduction To Calling Bullshit: Learning To Think Outside The Black Box, Jevin D. West, Carl T. Bergstrom

Numeracy

Bergstrom, Carl T. and Jevin D. West. 2020. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. (New York: Random House) 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509202.

While statistical methods receive greater attention, the art of critically evaluating information in everyday life more commonly depends on thinking outside the black box of the algorithm. In this piece we introduce readers to our book and associated online teaching materials—for readers who want to more capably call “bullshit” or to teach their students to do the same.

Human-Centered Cybersecurity Research — Anthropological Findings From Two Longitudinal Studies, Anwesh Tuladhar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cybersecurity is a pressing issue. Researchers have proposed numerous security solutions over the years in order to combat security issues but it is still common to find known, well understood security issues in production environments. In this thesis, I seek to find the underlying reasons to why existing security solutions and best practices are not consistently applied and how to improve the utilization of secure best practices. To this end, I adopt the anthropological research method of long term participant observation and embed myself in real-world settings in order to understand the existence of security issues and the perception of …

Learning From The Seed: Illuminating Black Girlhood In Sustainable Living Paradigms, Toni Powell Powell Young

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The contemporary image of sustainable living presents a culturally narrow view of its participants and the manner of engaging in sustainable living paradigms. Through crystallization (Ellingson, 2009) I present a mixed methods approach that emphasizes participant observation, visual, mediated, and discursive analyses, as well as demonstrates the efficacy of Culture Centered Black Feminist Auto/Ethnography. This project seeks to highlight and place within historical context, the ways in which African American girls, who are largely left out of the prevailing image of sustainability, perform and articulate sustainability for themselves, in their homes, and throughout their home communities.

In their everyday lives, …

Be Careful! That Is Probably Bullshit! Review Of Calling Bullshit: The Art Of Skepticism In A Data-Driven World By Carl T. Bergstrom And Jevin D. West, James B. Schreiber

Numeracy

Bergstrom, C. T., & West, J. D. 2021. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World. NY: Random House. 336 pp. ISBN 978-0525509189

The authors provide a journey through the numerical bullshit that surrounds our daily lives. Each chapter has multiple examples of specific types of bullshit that each of us experience on any given day. Most importantly, information on how to identify bullshit and refute it are provided so that reader finishes the book with a set of skills to be a more engaged and critical interpreter of information. The writing has a quick and lively …

Development And Validation Of A Scale To Measure Songwriting Self-Efficacy (Sses) With Secondary Music Students, Patrick K. Cooper

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social cognitive theory was developed to explain how individuals learn, in part, by witnessing the behavior of others. Self-efficacy is a construct within social cognitive theory which indicates the beliefs that an individual can be successful at a task under specific situational demands. The sources of self-efficacy include self-evaluating past experiences to predict future success, comparing our abilities to those around us, the verbal and social feedback we get from others, and the physiological feelings we experience when engaged in or thinking about the task. Measures of self-efficacy have been shown to be accurate predictors of successful learning outcomes, achievement, …

Data-Driven Studies On Social Networks: Privacy And Simulation, Yasanka Sameera Horawalavithana

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Social media datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, adoption of behavior, crowd management, and political uprisings. At the same time, many such datasets capturing computer-mediated social interactions are recorded nowadays by individual researchers or by organizations. However, while the need for real social graphs and the supply of such datasets are well established, the flow of data from data owners to researchers is significantly hampered by privacy risks: even when humans’ identities are removed, or data is anonymized to some extent, studies have proven repeatedly that re-identifying anonymized user identities (i.e., de-anonymization) is doable …

Designing Targeted Mobile Advertising Campaigns, Kimia Keshanian

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

With the proliferation of smart, handheld devices, there has been a multifold increase in the ability of firms to target and engage with customers through mobile advertising. Therefore, not surprisingly, mobile advertising campaigns have become an integral aspect of firms’ brand building activities, such as improving the awareness and overall visibility of firms' brands. In addition, retailers are increasingly using mobile advertising for targeted promotional activities that increase in-store visits and eventual sales conversions. However, in recent years, mobile or in general online advertising campaigns have been facing one major challenge and one major threat that can negatively impact the …

Improving Environmental Protection: One Imagined Touch At A Time, Luke Ingalls Liska

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Can imagined touch of flora and fauna (i.e., the plants and animals of the natural world) make you more willing to support environmental protection efforts? Across seven studies, I demonstrate that by asking consumers to imagine touching fauna, marketers can encourage consumers to become more engaged in environmental protection efforts. This effect occurs because imagined touch generates haptic imagery, which enhances a consumer’s emotional attachment to fauna. I demonstrate that emotional attachment to fauna induced via imagined touch enhances individual’s willingness to share Facebook posts, improves their willingness to support increased fines for environment-related offenses, and increases the number of …

Green Business And The Culture Of Capitalism: Constructing Narratives Of Environmentalism, Julia S. Jester

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are widespread colloquial arguments claiming that any actions taken to combat climate change will be bad for business and the economy, scaring people into continuing their support for the status quo for fear of their financial security. Alternatively, those attempting to combat ecological destruction have subsequently made transitions to sustainable development of products and shifting consumer behavior within this system. There is one core argument that both sides have, albeit in different ways – capitalism and environmentalism are seemingly incompatible; one cannot be successful without the eradication of the other. While it may appear there are only strict binary …

Optimization And Machine Learning Methods For Solving Combinatorial Problems In Urban Transportation, Aigerim Bogyrbayeva

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates three applications of emerging technologies for urban trans- portation. In the first chapter, we design a new market for fractional ownership of au- tonomous vehicles (AVs), in which an AV is co-leased by a group of individuals. We present a practical iterative auction based on the combinatorial clock auction to match the interested customers together and determine their payments. In designing such an auction, we con- sider continuous-time items (time slots) which are defined by bidders, and naturally exploit driverless mobility of AVs to form co-leasing groups. To relieve the computational burdens of both bidders and the …

Adaptive Network Slicing In Fog Ran For Iot With Heterogeneous Latency And Computing Requirements: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach, Almuthanna Nassar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In view of the recent advances in Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the emerging new breed of smart city applications and intelligent vehicular systems driven by artificial intelligence, fog radio access network (F-RAN) has been recently introduced for the next generation wireless communications. The capability of F-RAN has emerged to overcome the latency limitations of cloud-RAN (C-RAN) and assure the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the ultra-reliable-low-latency-communication (URLLC) for IoT applications. To this end, fog nodes (FNs) are equipped with computing, signal processing and storage capabilities to extend the inherent operations and services of the cloud to the edge. However, …

A Macro Analysis Of Illegal Hunting And Fishing Across Texas Counties: Using An Economic Structural Approach, Leo J. Genco Jr.

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this disseration is to examine the distribution of illegal hunting and fishing violations across Texas counties in respect to the economic structure. Illegal hunting plays a part in the extraction of resources that are overly withdrawn, and criminologists have ignored this form of deviancy that has large ramifications for the environment. To view this criminal phenomenon, the study uses the Treadmill of Production theory to determine economic structural factors and whether those factors explain the distribution of illegal hunting and fishing. Using regression analyses and SatScan, the findings suggested that while there are significant factors related to …

The Communicative Constitution Of Environment: Land, Weather, Climate, Leanna K. Smithberger

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My project examines the communicative constitution of environment: how we mediate environment in discursive practice, and arrange chaotic and complex timeplaces into organized relationships of agents and objects which act and are acted upon. Climate scholars across disciplines are calling for a paradigm shift in how we understand, study, inhabit, and relate to Earth’s varied environments. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how communication practices do the work of constituting the environment as we know it, and therefore conclude with the hopeful suggestion that these same practices can be used to do the work of a paradigm shift — that is, …

The General Psychopathology Factor (P) From Adolescence To Adulthood: Disentangling The Developmental Trajectories Of P Using A Multi-Method Approach, Alexandria M. Choate

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Considerable attention is directed towards studying co-occurring psychopathology through the lens of a general factor (p-factor). However, the developmental trajectories and stability of the p-factor have yet to be fully understood. Study 1 first examined the explanatory power of dynamic mutualism theory — an alternative framework positing the p-factor to be a product of lower-level symptom interactions rather than the inherent cause of them. Predictions of dynamic mutualism were tested using three distinct statistical approaches including: longitudinal bifactor models, random-intercept cross-lagged panel models (RI-CLPMs), and network models. Next, given prior suggestions that borderline personality disorder (BPD) could be a marker …