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Pages
- Title
- Digital Dissonance: Horror Cultures in the Age of Convergent Technologies.
- Creator
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Powell, Daniel, McDaniel, Rudy, Campbell, James, Brenckle, Martha, Arnzen, Michael, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
The first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century...
Show moreThe first two decades of the new millennium have witnessed an abundance of change in the areas of textual production, digital communication, and our collective engagement with the Internet. This study explores these changes, which have yielded both positive and negative cultural and developmental outcomes, as products of digital dissonance. Dissonance is characterized by the disruptive consequences inherent in technology's incursion into the print publication cultures of the twentieth century, the explosion in social-media interaction that is changing the complexion of human contact, and our expanding reliance on the World Wide Web for negotiating commerce, culture, and communication.This study explores digital dissonance through the prism of an emerging literary subgenre called technohorror. Artists working in the area of technohorror are creating works that leverage the qualities of plausibility, mundanity, and surprise to tell important stories about how technology is altering the human experience in the twenty-first century. This study explores such subjects as paradigmatic changes in textual production methods, dynamic authorial hybridity, digital materiality in folklore studies, posthumanism, transhumanism, cognitive diminution, and physical degeneration as explored in works of technohorror.The work's rhetorical architecture includes elements of both theoretical and qualitative research. This project expands on City University of New York philosophy professor No(&)#235;l Carroll's definition of art-horror in developing a formal explanation of technohorror and then exploring that literary subgenre through the analysis of a series of contemporary texts and industry-related trends. The study also contains original interviews with active scholars, artists, editors, and librarians in the horror field to gain a variety of perspectives on these complicated subjects.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2017
- Identifier
- CFE0006642, ucf:51231
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006642
- Title
- Investigating The Relationship Between Adverse Events and Infrastructure Development in an Active War Theater Using Soft Computing Techniques.
- Creator
-
Cakit, Erman, Karwowski, Waldemar, Lee, Gene, Thompson, William, Mikusinski, Piotr, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
The military recently recognized the importance of taking sociocultural factors into consideration. Therefore, Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) modeling has been getting much attention in current and future operational requirements to successfully understand the effects of social and cultural factors on human behavior. There are different kinds of modeling approaches to the data that are being used in this field and so far none of them has been widely accepted. HSCB modeling needs the...
Show moreThe military recently recognized the importance of taking sociocultural factors into consideration. Therefore, Human Social Culture Behavior (HSCB) modeling has been getting much attention in current and future operational requirements to successfully understand the effects of social and cultural factors on human behavior. There are different kinds of modeling approaches to the data that are being used in this field and so far none of them has been widely accepted. HSCB modeling needs the capability to represent complex, ill-defined, and imprecise concepts, and soft computing modeling can deal with these concepts. There is currently no study on the use of any computational methodology for representing the relationship between adverse events and infrastructure development investments in an active war theater. This study investigates the relationship between adverse events and infrastructure development projects in an active war theater using soft computing techniques including fuzzy inference systems (FIS), artificial neural networks (ANNs), and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) that directly benefits from their accuracy in prediction applications. Fourteen developmental and economic improvement project types were selected based on allocated budget values and a number of projects at different time periods, urban and rural population density, and total adverse event numbers at previous month selected as independent variables. A total of four outputs reflecting the adverse events in terms of the number of people killed, wounded, hijacked, and total number of adverse events has been estimated. For each model, the data was grouped for training and testing as follows: years between 2004 and 2009 (for training purpose) and year 2010 (for testing). Ninety-six different models were developed and investigated for Afghanistan and the country was divided into seven regions for analysis purposes. Performance of each model was investigated and compared to all other models with the calculated mean absolute error (MAE) values and the prediction accuracy within (&)#177;1 error range (difference between actual and predicted value). Furthermore, sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the effects of input values on dependent variables and to rank the top ten input parameters in order of importance.According to the the results obtained, it was concluded that the ANNs, FIS, and ANFIS are useful modeling techniques for predicting the number of adverse events based on historical development or economic projects' data. When the model accuracy was calculated based on the MAE for each of the models, the ANN had better predictive accuracy than FIS and ANFIS models in general as demonstrated by experimental results. The percentages of prediction accuracy with values found within (&)#177;1 error range around 90%. The sensitivity analysis results show that the importance of economic development projects varies based on the regions, population density, and occurrence of adverse events in Afghanistan. For the purpose of allocating resources and development of regions, the results can be summarized by examining the relationship between adverse events and infrastructure development in an active war theater; emphasis was on predicting the occurrence of events and assessing the potential impact of regional infrastructure development efforts on reducing number of such events.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2013
- Identifier
- CFE0004826, ucf:49757
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004826
- Title
- Modeling and Spray Pyrolysis Processing of Mixed Metal Oxide Nano-Composite Gas Sensor Films.
- Creator
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Khatami, Seyed Mohammad Navid, Ilegbusi, Olusegun, Deng, Weiwei, Kassab, Alain, Coffey, Kevin, Divo, Eduardo, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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The role of sensor technology is obvious in improvement and optimization of many industrial processes. The sensor films, which are considered the core of chemical sensors, have the capability to detect the presence and concentration of a specific chemical substance. Such sensor films achieve selectivity by detecting the interaction of the specific chemical substance with the sensor material through selective binding, adsorption and permeation of analyte. This research focuses on development...
Show moreThe role of sensor technology is obvious in improvement and optimization of many industrial processes. The sensor films, which are considered the core of chemical sensors, have the capability to detect the presence and concentration of a specific chemical substance. Such sensor films achieve selectivity by detecting the interaction of the specific chemical substance with the sensor material through selective binding, adsorption and permeation of analyte. This research focuses on development and verification of a comprehensive mathematical model of mixed metal oxide thin film growth using spray pyrolysis technique (SPT). An experimental setup is used to synthesize mixed metal oxide films on a heated substrate. The films are analyzed using a variety of characterization tools. The results are used to validate the mathematical model. There are three main stages to achieve this goal: 1) A Lagrangian-Eulerian method is applied to develop a CFD model of atomizing multi-component solution. The model predicts droplet characteristics in flight, such as spatial distribution of droplet size and concentration. 2) Upon reaching the droplets on the substrate, a mathematical model of multi-phase transport and chemical reaction phenomena in a single droplet is developed and used to predict the deposition of thin film. The various stages of droplet morphology associated with surface energy and evaporation are predicted. 3) The processed films are characterized for morphology and chemical composition (SEM, XPS) and the data are used to validate the models as well as investigate the influence of process parameters on the structural characteristics of mixed metal oxide films. The structural characteristics are investigated of nano structured thin films comprising of ZnO, SnO2, ZnO+In2O3 and SnO2+In2O3 composites. The model adequately predicts the size distribution and film thickness when the nanocrystals are well-structured at the controlled temperature and concentration.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFE0005817, ucf:50048
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005817
- Title
- TOWARD BUILDING A SOCIAL ROBOT WITH AN EMOTION-BASED INTERNAL CONTROL AND EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION TO ENHANCE HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION.
- Creator
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Marpaung, Andreas, Lisetti, Christine, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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In this thesis, we aim at modeling some aspects of the functional role of emotions on an autonomous embodied agent. We begin by describing our robotic prototype, Cherry--a robot with the task of being a tour guide and an office assistant for the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Cherry did not have a formal emotion representation of internal states, but did have the ability to express emotions through her multimodal interface. The thesis presents the results of...
Show moreIn this thesis, we aim at modeling some aspects of the functional role of emotions on an autonomous embodied agent. We begin by describing our robotic prototype, Cherry--a robot with the task of being a tour guide and an office assistant for the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Cherry did not have a formal emotion representation of internal states, but did have the ability to express emotions through her multimodal interface. The thesis presents the results of a survey we performed via our social informatics approach where we found that: (1) the idea of having emotions in a robot was warmly accepted by Cherry's users, and (2) the intended users were pleased with our initial interface design and functionalities. Guided by these results, we transferred our previous code to a human-height and more robust robot--Petra, the PeopleBot™--where we began to build a formal emotion mechanism and representation for internal states to correspond to the external expressions of Cherry's interface. We describe our overall three-layered architecture, and propose the design of the sensory motor level (the first layer of the three-layered architecture) inspired by the Multilevel Process Theory of Emotion on one hand, and hybrid robotic architecture on the other hand. The sensory-motor level receives and processes incoming stimuli with fuzzy logic and produces emotion-like states without any further willful planning or learning. We will discuss how Petra has been equipped with sonar and vision for obstacle avoidance as well as vision for face recognition, which are used when she roams around the hallway to engage in social interactions with humans. We hope that the sensory motor level in Petra could serve as a foundation for further works in modeling the three-layered architecture of the Emotion State Generator.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2004
- Identifier
- CFE0000286, ucf:46228
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0000286
- Title
- YOU'VE GOT MAIL: THE STUDY OF THE ATTORNEY-CLIENT PRIVILEGE AND THE USE OF ELECTRONIC MAIL.
- Creator
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McConnell, Justin, Cook, Kathy, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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The prolific use of the internet and electronic mail within the legal profession presents novel challenges to the application of the attorney-client privilege; especially, in regards to protecting intended confidential communications relayed through e-mail. This thesis addresses the question of whether an attorney in Florida, through electronic mail use, can waive his client's right to the protections of the attorney-client privilege. After a review of current case law, law review articles,...
Show moreThe prolific use of the internet and electronic mail within the legal profession presents novel challenges to the application of the attorney-client privilege; especially, in regards to protecting intended confidential communications relayed through e-mail. This thesis addresses the question of whether an attorney in Florida, through electronic mail use, can waive his client's right to the protections of the attorney-client privilege. After a review of current case law, law review articles, statutes, and texts, this thesis concluded that an attorney's communication through e-mail warrants a reasonable expectation of privacy, permitting the attorney to speak in reasonable confidence to clients through the web. However, attorneys, ethically, should consider the strong repercussions for using such a potentially transparent medium for communication. By examining the relationship between current law, the application of the attorney-client privilege, and a reasonable expectation of privacy, this study provides a comprehensive analysis for attorneys concerned with electronic mail usage. Lastly, this thesis provides attorneys with best practices for their electronic mail communications.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFH0003832, ucf:44756
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH0003832
- Title
- Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing Interplay to Achieve Higher Yields at Reduced Costs using SMART Techniques.
- Creator
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Oberai, Ankush Bharati, Yuan, Jiann-Shiun, Abdolvand, Reza, Georgiopoulos, Michael, Sundaram, Kalpathy, Reilly, Charles, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
Since the outset of IC Semiconductor market there has been a gap between its design and manufacturing communities. This gap continued to grow as the device geometries started to shrink and the manufacturing processes and tools got more complex. This gap lowered the manufacturing yield, leading to higher cost of ICs and delay in their time to market. It also impacted performance of the ICs, impacting the overall functionality of the systems they were integrated in. However, in the recent years...
Show moreSince the outset of IC Semiconductor market there has been a gap between its design and manufacturing communities. This gap continued to grow as the device geometries started to shrink and the manufacturing processes and tools got more complex. This gap lowered the manufacturing yield, leading to higher cost of ICs and delay in their time to market. It also impacted performance of the ICs, impacting the overall functionality of the systems they were integrated in. However, in the recent years there have been major efforts to bridge the gap between design and manufacturing using software solutions by providing closer collaborations techniques between design and manufacturing communities. The root cause of this gap is inherited by the difference in the knowledge and skills required by the two communities. The IC design community is more microelectronics, electrical engineering and software driven whereas the IC manufacturing community is more driven by material science, mechanical engineering, physics and robotics. The cross training between the two is almost nonexistence and not even mandated. This gap is deemed to widen, with demand for more complex designs and miniaturization of electronic appliance-products. Growing need for MEMS, 3-D NANDS and IOTs are other drivers that could widen the gap between design and manufacturing. To bridge this gap, it is critical to have close loop solutions between design and manufacturing This could be achieved by SMART automation on both sides by using Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Big Data algorithms. Lack of automation and predictive capabilities have even made the situation worse on the yield and total turnaround times. With the growing fabless and foundry business model, bridging the gap has become even more critical. Smart Manufacturing philosophy must be adapted to make this bridge possible. We need to understand the Fab-fabless collaboration requirements and the mechanism to bring design to the manufacturing floor for yield improvement. Additionally, design community must be educated with manufacturing process and tool knowledge, so they can design for improved manufacturability. This study will require understanding of elements impacting manufacturing on both ends of the design and manufacturing process. Additionally, we need to understand the process rules that need to be followed closely in the design phase. Best suited SMART automation techniques to bridge the gap need to be studied and analyzed for their effectiveness.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2018
- Identifier
- CFE0007351, ucf:52096
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007351
- Title
- Adaptive Architectural Strategies for Resilient Energy-Aware Computing.
- Creator
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Ashraf, Rizwan, DeMara, Ronald, Lin, Mingjie, Wang, Jun, Jha, Sumit, Johnson, Mark, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Reconfigurable logic or Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices have the ability to dynamically adapt the computational circuit based on user-specified or operating-condition requirements. Such hardware platforms are utilized in this dissertation to develop adaptive techniques for achieving reliable and sustainable operation while autonomously meeting these requirements. In particular, the properties of resource uniformity and in-field reconfiguration via on-chip processors are exploited...
Show moreReconfigurable logic or Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices have the ability to dynamically adapt the computational circuit based on user-specified or operating-condition requirements. Such hardware platforms are utilized in this dissertation to develop adaptive techniques for achieving reliable and sustainable operation while autonomously meeting these requirements. In particular, the properties of resource uniformity and in-field reconfiguration via on-chip processors are exploited to implement Evolvable Hardware (EHW). EHW utilize genetic algorithms to realize logic circuits at runtime, as directed by the objective function. However, the size of problems solved using EHW as compared with traditional approaches has been limited to relatively compact circuits. This is due to the increase in complexity of the genetic algorithm with increase in circuit size. To address this research challenge of scalability, the Netlist-Driven Evolutionary Refurbishment (NDER) technique was designed and implemented herein to enable on-the-fly permanent fault mitigation in FPGA circuits. NDER has been shown to achieve refurbishment of relatively large sized benchmark circuits as compared to related works. Additionally, Design Diversity (DD) techniques which are used to aid such evolutionary refurbishment techniques are also proposed and the efficacy of various DD techniques is quantified and evaluated.Similarly, there exists a growing need for adaptable logic datapaths in custom-designed nanometer-scale ICs, for ensuring operational reliability in the presence of Process, Voltage, and Temperature (PVT) and, transistor-aging variations owing to decreased feature sizes for electronic devices. Without such adaptability, excessive design guardbands are required to maintain the desired integration and performance levels. To address these challenges, the circuit-level technique of Self-Recovery Enabled Logic (SREL) was designed herein. At design-time, vulnerable portions of the circuit identified using conventional Electronic Design Automation tools are replicated to provide post-fabrication adaptability via intelligent techniques. In-situ timing sensors are utilized in a feedback loop to activate suitable datapaths based on current conditions that optimize performance and energy consumption. Primarily, SREL is able to mitigate the timing degradations caused due to transistor aging effects in sub-micron devices by reducing the stress induced on active elements by utilizing power-gating. As a result, fewer guardbands need to be included to achieve comparable performance levels which leads to considerable energy savings over the operational lifetime.The need for energy-efficient operation in current computing systems has given rise to Near-Threshold Computing as opposed to the conventional approach of operating devices at nominal voltage. In particular, the goal of exascale computing initiative in High Performance Computing (HPC) is to achieve 1 EFLOPS under the power budget of 20MW. However, it comes at the cost of increased reliability concerns, such as the increase in performance variations and soft errors. This has given rise to increased resiliency requirements for HPC applications in terms of ensuring functionality within given error thresholds while operating at lower voltages. My dissertation research devised techniques and tools to quantify the effects of radiation-induced transient faults in distributed applications on large-scale systems. A combination of compiler-level code transformation and instrumentation are employed for runtime monitoring to assess the speed and depth of application state corruption as a result of fault injection. Finally, fault propagation models are derived for each HPC application that can be used to estimate the number of corrupted memory locations at runtime. Additionally, the tradeoffs between performance and vulnerability and the causal relations between compiler optimization and application vulnerability are investigated.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2015
- Identifier
- CFE0006206, ucf:52889
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0006206
- Title
- The Response of American Police Agencies to Digital Evidence.
- Creator
-
Yesilyurt, Hamdi, Wan, Thomas, Potter, Roberto, Applegate, Brandon, Lang, Sheau-Dong, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
Little is known about the variation in digital forensics practice in the United States as adopted by large local police agencies. This study investigated how environmental constraints, contextual factors, organizational complexity, and organizational control relate to the adoption of digital forensics practice. This study integrated 3 theoretical perspectives in organizational studies to guide the analysis of the relations: institutional theory, contingency theory, and adoption-of-innovation...
Show moreLittle is known about the variation in digital forensics practice in the United States as adopted by large local police agencies. This study investigated how environmental constraints, contextual factors, organizational complexity, and organizational control relate to the adoption of digital forensics practice. This study integrated 3 theoretical perspectives in organizational studies to guide the analysis of the relations: institutional theory, contingency theory, and adoption-of-innovation theory. Institutional theory was used to analyze the impact of environmental constraints on the adoption of innovation, and contingency theory was used to examine the impacts of organizational control on the adoption of innovation. Adoption of innovation theory was employed to describe the degree to which digital forensics practice has been adopted by large municipal police agencies having 100 or more sworn police officers.The data set was assembled primarily by using Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) 2003 and 1999. Dr. Edward Maguire`s survey was used to obtain 1 variable. The joining up of the data set to construct the sample resulted in 345 large local police agencies. The descriptive results on the degree of adoption of digital forensics practice indicate that 37.7% of large local police agencies have dedicated personnel to address digital evidence, 32.8% of police agencies address digital evidence but do not have dedicated personnel, and only 24.3% of police agencies have a specialized unit with full-time personnel to address digital evidence. About 5% of local police agencies do nothing to address digital evidence in any circumstance. These descriptive statistics indicate that digital evidence is a matter of concern for most large local police agencies and that they respond to varying degrees to digital evidence at the organizational level. Agencies that have not adopted digital forensics practice are in the minority. The structural equation model was used to test the hypothesized relations, easing the rigorous analysis of relations between latent constructs and several indicator variables. Environmental constraints have the largest impact on the adoption of innovation, exerting a positive influence. No statistically significant relation was found between organizational control and adoption of digital forensic practice. Contextual factors (task scope and personnel size) positively influence the adoption of digital forensics. Structural control factors, including administrative weight and formalization, have no significant influence on the adoption of innovation. The conclusions of the study are as follows. Police agencies adopt digital forensics practice primarily by relying on environmental constraints. Police agencies exposed to higher environmental constraints are more frequently expected to adopt digital forensics practice. Because organizational control of police agencies is not significantly related to digital forensics practice adoption, police agencies do not take their organizational control extensively into consideration when they consider adopting digital forensics practice. The positive influence of task scope and size on digital forensics practice adoption was expected. The extent of task scope and the number of personnel indicate a higher capacity for police agencies to adopt digital forensics practice. Administrative weight and formalization do not influence the adoption of digital forensics practice. Therefore, structural control and coordination are not important for large local police agencies to adopt digital forensics practice.The results of the study indicate that the adoption of digital forensics practice is based primarily on environmental constraints. Therefore, more drastic impacts on digital forensics practice should be expected from local police agencies' environments than from internal organizational factors. Researchers investigating the influence of various factors on the adoption of digital forensics practice should further examine environmental variables. The unexpected results concerning the impact of administrative weight and formalization should be researched with broader considerations.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFE0004181, ucf:49081
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004181
- Title
- FILM COOLING WITH WAKE PASSING APPLIED TO AN ANNULAR ENDWALL.
- Creator
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Tran, Nghia, Kapat, Jayanta, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
Advancement in turbine technology has far reaching effects on today's society and environment. With more than 90% of electricity and 100% of commercial air transport being produced by the usage of gas turbine, any advancement in turbine technology can have an impact on fuel used, pollutants and carbon dioxide emitted to the environment. Within the turbine engine, fully understanding film cooling is critical to reliability of a turbine engine. Film cooling is an efficient way to protect...
Show moreAdvancement in turbine technology has far reaching effects on today's society and environment. With more than 90% of electricity and 100% of commercial air transport being produced by the usage of gas turbine, any advancement in turbine technology can have an impact on fuel used, pollutants and carbon dioxide emitted to the environment. Within the turbine engine, fully understanding film cooling is critical to reliability of a turbine engine. Film cooling is an efficient way to protect the engine surface from the extremely hot incoming gas, which is at a temperature much higher than allowable temperature of even the most advanced super alloy used in turbine. Film cooling performance is affected by many factors: geometrical factors and as well as flow conditions. In most of the film cooling literature, film effectiveness has been used as criterion to judge and/or compare between film cooling designs. Film uniformity is also a critical factor, since it determines how well the coolant spread out downstream to protect the hot-gas-path surface of a gas turbine engine. Even after consideration of all geometrical factors and flow conditions, the film effectiveness is still affected by the stator-rotor interaction, in particular by the moving wakes produced by upstream airfoils. A complete analysis of end wall film cooling inside turbine is required to fully understand the phenomena. This full analysis is almost impossible in the academic arena. Therefore, a simplified but critical experimental rig and computational fluid model were designed to capture the effect of wake on film cooling inside an annular test section. The moving wakes are created by rotating a wheel with 12 spokes or rods with a variable speed motor. Thus changing the motor speed will alter the wake passing frequency. This design is an advancement over most previous studies in rectangular duct, which cannot simulate wakes in an annular passage as in an engine. This rig also includes film injection that allows study of impact of moving wakes on film cooling. This wake is a simplified representation of the trailing edge created by an upstream airfoil. An annulus with 30° pitch test section is considered in this study. This experimental rig is based on an existing flat plate film cooling (BFC) rig that has been validated in the past. Measurement of velocity profiles within the moving wake downstream from the wake generator is used to validate the CFD rotating wake model. The open literature on film cooling and past experiments performed in the laboratory validated the CFD film cooling model. With these validations completed, the full CFD model predicts the wake and film cooling interaction. Nine CFD cases were considered by varying the film cooling blowing ratio and the wake Strouhal number. The results indicated that wakes highly enhance film cooling effectiveness near film cooling holes and degrades the film blanket downstream of the film injection, at the moment of wake passing. However, the time-averaged film cooling effectiveness is more or less the same with or without wake.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2010
- Identifier
- CFE0003483, ucf:48956
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003483
- Title
- The Impact of using a Computer Algebra System in High School Calculus on High Performing Students' Conceptual and Procedural Understanding.
- Creator
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Bawatneh, Zyad, Haciomeroglu, Erhan, Dixon, Juli, Ortiz, Enrique, Saleh, Suha, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
Recently, there has been an increasing interest in high school mathematics education, especially in the teaching and learning of calculus. For example, studies conducted by Bressoud (2010); Judson and Nishimori (2005); Koh and Divaharan (2011); and St. Jarre (2008) all looked at how to improve the understanding of calculus students and what roles the educator must take to ensure that their students are successful. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a significant...
Show moreRecently, there has been an increasing interest in high school mathematics education, especially in the teaching and learning of calculus. For example, studies conducted by Bressoud (2010); Judson and Nishimori (2005); Koh and Divaharan (2011); and St. Jarre (2008) all looked at how to improve the understanding of calculus students and what roles the educator must take to ensure that their students are successful. The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a significant difference between instruction using computer algebra system (CAS) compared to instruction using the graphing calculator in high school calculus on students' conceptual and procedural understanding. This study explored and compared two different types of instruction based on the use of two different types of technology, CAS and graphing calculator. The total population for this study consisted of 333 students. There were 187 students classified as using the graphing calculator and 146 students classified as using CAS. The data for this study were collected from four Advanced Placement (AP) calculus AB courses from high schools in Florida. The study used observations and two sets of calculus tasks in order to gather data. The research questions for this study looked at comparing the grades of students categorized based on the type of instruction received during the learning of calculus. The statistical procedure that was used was a simple one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results indicated that there was no significant difference between the two types of instruction on the students' procedural knowledge, however, there was statistical significance on the students' conceptual understanding in favor of the CAS students. The study introduces a framework on how to obtain information about the effects of different types of instruction on students' understanding of calculus. The results of this study contribute in assisting teachers and future researchers on how to analyze student work in order to obtain information about the students' conceptual and procedural understanding of first semester calculus.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2012
- Identifier
- CFE0004514, ucf:49278
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004514
- Title
- Resource Management in Large-scale Systems.
- Creator
-
Paya, Ashkan, Marinescu, Dan, Wocjan, Pawel, Bassiouni, Mostafa, Mucciolo, Eduardo, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
The focus of this thesis is resource management in large-scale systems. Our primary concerns are energy management and practical principles for self-organization and self-management. The main contributions of our work are:1. Models. We proposed several models for different aspects of resource management, e.g., energy-aware load balancing and application scaling for the cloud ecosystem, hierarchical architecture model for self-organizing and self-manageable systems and a new cloud delivery...
Show moreThe focus of this thesis is resource management in large-scale systems. Our primary concerns are energy management and practical principles for self-organization and self-management. The main contributions of our work are:1. Models. We proposed several models for different aspects of resource management, e.g., energy-aware load balancing and application scaling for the cloud ecosystem, hierarchical architecture model for self-organizing and self-manageable systems and a new cloud delivery model based on auction-driven self-organization approach.2. Algorithms. We also proposed several different algorithms for the models described above. Algorithms such as coalition formation, combinatorial auctions and clustering algorithm for scale-free organizations of scale-free networks.3. Evaluation. Eventually we conducted different evaluations for the proposed models and algorithms in order to verify them. All the simulations reported in this thesis had been carried out on different instances and services of Amazon Web Services (AWS).All of these modules will be discussed in detail in the following chapters respectively.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2015
- Identifier
- CFE0005862, ucf:50913
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005862
- Title
- Development of a Chemical Kinetic Model for a Fluidized-bed Sewage Sludge Gasifier.
- Creator
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Champion, Wyatt, Cooper, Charles, Mackie, Kevin, Randall, Andrew, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
As the need for both sustainable energy production and waste minimization increases, the gasification of biomass becomes an increasingly important process. What would otherwise be considered waste can now be used as fuel, and the benefits of volume reduction through gasification are seen in the increased lifespan of landfills. Fluidized-bed gasification is a particularly robust technology, and allows for the conversion of most types of waste biomass.Within a fluidized-bed gasifier, thermal...
Show moreAs the need for both sustainable energy production and waste minimization increases, the gasification of biomass becomes an increasingly important process. What would otherwise be considered waste can now be used as fuel, and the benefits of volume reduction through gasification are seen in the increased lifespan of landfills. Fluidized-bed gasification is a particularly robust technology, and allows for the conversion of most types of waste biomass.Within a fluidized-bed gasifier, thermal medium (sand) is heated to operating temperature (around 1350(&)deg;F) and begins to fluidize due to the rapid expansion of air entering the bottom of the reactor. This fluidization allows for excellent heat transfer and contact between gases and solids, and prevents localized (")hot spots(") within the gasifier, thereby reducing the occurrence of ash agglomeration within the gasifier. Solids enter the middle of the gasifier and are rapidly dried and devolatilized, and the products of this step are subsequently oxidized and then reduced in the remainder of the gasifier. A syngas composed mainly of N2, H2O, CO2, CO, CH4, and H2 exits the top of the gasifier.A computer model was developed to predict the syngas composition and flow rate, as well as ash composition and mass flow rate from a fluidized-bed gasifier. A review of the literature was performed to determine the most appropriate modeling approach. A chemical kinetic model was chosen, and developed in MATLAB using the Newton-Raphson method to solve sets of 18 simultaneous equations. These equations account for mass and energy balances throughout the gasifier. The chemical kinetic rate expressions for these reactions were sourced from the literature, and some values modified to better fit the predicted gas composition to literature data.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2013
- Identifier
- CFE0005089, ucf:50746
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005089
- Title
- Facilitating Information Retrieval in Social Media User Interfaces.
- Creator
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Costello, Anthony, Tang, Yubo, Fiore, Stephen, Goldiez, Brian, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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As the amount of computer mediated information (e.g., emails, documents, multi-media) we need to process grows, our need to rapidly sort, organize and store electronic information likewise increases. In order to store information effectively, we must find ways to sort through it and organize it in a manner that facilitates efficient retrieval. The instantaneous and emergent nature of communications across networks like Twitter makes them suitable for discussing events (e.g., natural disasters...
Show moreAs the amount of computer mediated information (e.g., emails, documents, multi-media) we need to process grows, our need to rapidly sort, organize and store electronic information likewise increases. In order to store information effectively, we must find ways to sort through it and organize it in a manner that facilitates efficient retrieval. The instantaneous and emergent nature of communications across networks like Twitter makes them suitable for discussing events (e.g., natural disasters) that are amorphous and prone to rapid changes. It can be difficult for an individual human to filter through and organize the large amounts of information that can pass through these types of social networks when events are unfolding rapidly. A common feature of social networks is the images (e.g., human faces, inanimate objects) that are often used by those who send messages across these networks. Humans have a particularly strong ability to recognize and differentiate between human Faces. This effect may also extend to recalling information associated with each human Face. This study investigated the difference between human Face images, non-human Face images and alphanumeric labels as retrieval cues under different levels of Task Load. Participants were required to recall key pieces of event information as they emerged from a Twitter-style message feed during a simulated natural disaster. A counter-balanced within-subjects design was used for this experiment. Participants were exposed to low, medium and high Task Load while responding to five different types of recall cues: (1) Nickname, (2) Non-Face, (3) Non-Face (&) Nickname, (4) Face and (5) Face (&) Nickname. The task required participants to organize information regarding emergencies (e.g., car accidents) from a Twitter-style message feed. The messages reported various events such as fires occurring around a fictional city. Each message was associated with a different recall cue type, depending on the experimental condition. Following the task, participants were asked to recall the information associated with one of the cues they worked with during the task. Results indicate that under medium and high Task Load, both Non-Face and Face retrieval cues increased recall performance over Nickname alone with Non-Faces resulting in the highest mean recall scores. When comparing medium to high Task Load: Face (&) Nickname and Non-Face significantly outperformed the Face condition. The performance in Non-Face (&) Nickname was significantly better than Face (&) Nickname. No significant difference was found between Non-Faces and Non-Faces (&) Nickname. Subjective Task Load scores indicate that participants experienced lower mental workload when using Non-Face cues than using Nickname or Face cues. Generally, these results indicate that under medium and high Task Load levels, images outperformed alphanumeric nicknames, Non-Face images outperformed Face images, and combining alphanumeric nicknames with images may have offered a significant performance advantage only when the image is that of a Face. Both theoretical and practical design implications are provided from these findings.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFE0005318, ucf:50524
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0005318
- Title
- Using Hashtags to Disambiguate Aboutness in Social Media Discourse: A Case Study of #OrlandoStrong.
- Creator
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DeArmas, Nicholas, Vie, Stephanie, Salter, Anastasia, Beever, Jonathan, Dodd, Melissa, Wheeler, Stephanie, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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While the field of writing studies has studied digital writing as a response to multiple calls for more research on digital forms of writing, research on hashtags has yet to build bridges between different disciplines' approaches to studying the uses and effects of hashtags. This dissertation builds that bridge in its interdisciplinary approach to the study of hashtags by focusing on how hashtags can be fully appreciated at the intersection of the fields of information research, linguistics,...
Show moreWhile the field of writing studies has studied digital writing as a response to multiple calls for more research on digital forms of writing, research on hashtags has yet to build bridges between different disciplines' approaches to studying the uses and effects of hashtags. This dissertation builds that bridge in its interdisciplinary approach to the study of hashtags by focusing on how hashtags can be fully appreciated at the intersection of the fields of information research, linguistics, rhetoric, ethics, writing studies, new media studies, and discourse studies. Hashtags are writing innovations that perform unique digital functions rhetorically while still hearkening back to functions of both print and oral rhetorical traditions. Hashtags function linguistically as indicators of semantic meaning; additionally, hashtags also perform the role of search queries on social media, retrieving texts that include the same hashtag. Information researchers refer to the relationship between a search query and its results using the term (")aboutness(") (Kehoe and Gee, 2011). By considering how hashtags have an aboutness, the humanities can call upon information research to better understand the digital aspects of the hashtag's search function. Especially when hashtags are used to organize discourse, aboutness has an effect on how a discourse community's agendas and goals are expressed, as well as framing what is relevant and irrelevant to the discourse. As digital activists increasingly use hashtags to organize and circulate the goals of their discourse communities, knowledge of ethical strategies for hashtag use will help to better preserve a relevant aboutness for their discourse while enabling them to better leverage their hashtag for circulation. In this dissertation, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Twitter discourse that used #OrlandoStrong over the five-month period before the first anniversary of the Pulse shooting, I trace how the #OrlandoStrong discourse community used innovative rhetorical strategies to combat irrelevant content from ambiguating their discourse space. In Chapter One, I acknowledge the call from scholars to study digital tools and briefly describe the history of the Pulse shooting, reflecting on non-digital texts that employed #OrlandoStrong as memorials in the Orlando area. In Chapter Two, I focus on the literature surrounding hashtags, discourse, aboutness, intertextuality, hashtag activism, and informational compositions. In Chapter Three, I provide an overview of the stages of grounded theory methodology and the implications of critical discourse analysis before I detail how I approached the collection, coding, and analysis of the #OrlandoStrong Tweets I studied. The results of my study are reported in Chapter Four, offering examples of Tweets that were important to understanding how the discourse space became ambiguous through the use of hashtags. In Chapter Five, I reflect on ethical approaches to understanding the consequences of hashtag use, and then I offer an ethical recommendation for hashtag use by hashtag activists. I conclude Chapter Five with an example of a classroom activity that allows students to use hashtags to better understand the relationship between aboutness, (dis)ambiguation, discourse communities, and ethics. This classroom activity is provided with the hope that instructors from different disciplines will be able to provide ethical recommendations to future activists who may benefit from these rhetorical strategies.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2018
- Identifier
- CFE0007322, ucf:52136
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0007322
- Title
- PATTERNS OF MOTION: DISCOVERY AND GENERALIZED REPRESENTATION.
- Creator
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Saleemi, Imran, Shah, Mubarak, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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In this dissertation, we address the problem of discovery and representation of motion patterns in a variety of scenarios, commonly encountered in vision applications. The overarching goal is to devise a generic representation, that captures any kind of object motion observable in video sequences. Such motion is a significant source of information typically employed for diverse applications such as tracking, anomaly detection, and action and event recognition. We present statistical...
Show moreIn this dissertation, we address the problem of discovery and representation of motion patterns in a variety of scenarios, commonly encountered in vision applications. The overarching goal is to devise a generic representation, that captures any kind of object motion observable in video sequences. Such motion is a significant source of information typically employed for diverse applications such as tracking, anomaly detection, and action and event recognition. We present statistical frameworks for representation of motion characteristics of objects, learned from tracks or optical flow, for static as well as moving cameras, and propose algorithms for their application to a variety of problems. The proposed motion pattern models and learning methods are general enough to be employed in a variety of problems as we demonstrate experimentally. We first propose a novel method to model and learn the scene activity, observed by a static camera. The motion patterns of objects in the scene are modeled in the form of a multivariate non-parametric probability density function of spatiotemporal variables (object locations and transition times between them). Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is used to learn this model in a completely unsupervised fashion. Learning is accomplished by observing the trajectories of objects by a static camera over extended periods of time. The model encodes the probabilistic nature of the behavior of moving objects in the scene and is useful for activity analysis applications, such as persistent tracking and anomalous motion detection. In addition, the model also captures salient scene features, such as, the areas of occlusion and most likely paths. Once the model is learned, we use a unified Markov Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) based framework for generating the most likely paths in the scene, improving foreground detection, persistent labelling of objects during tracking and deciding whether a given trajectory represents an anomaly to the observed motion patterns. Experiments with real world videos are reported which validate the proposed approach. The representation and estimation framework proposed above, however, has a few limitations. This algorithm proposes to use a single global statistical distribution to represent all kinds of motion observed in a particular scene. It therefore, does not find a separation between multiple semantically distinct motion patterns in the scene. Instead, the learned model is a joint distribution over all possible patterns followed by objects. To overcome this limitation, we then propose a superior method for the discovery and statistical representation of motion patterns in a scene. The advantages of this approach over the first one are two-fold: first, this model is applicable to scenes of dense crowded motion where tracking may not be feasible, and second, it distinguishes between motion patterns that are distinct at a semantic level of abstraction. We propose a mixture model representation of salient patterns of optical flow, and present an algorithm for learning these patterns from dense optical flow in a hierarchical, unsupervised fashion. Using low level cues of noisy optical flow, K-means is employed to initialize a Gaussian mixture model for temporally segmented clips of video. The components of this mixture are then filtered and instances of motion patterns are computed using a simple motion model, by linking components across space and time. Motion patterns are then initialized and membership of instances in different motion patterns is established by using KL divergence between mixture distributions of pattern instances. Finally, a pixel level representation of motion patterns is proposed by deriving conditional expectation of optical flow. Results of extensive experiments are presented for multiple surveillance sequences containing numerous patterns involving both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The proposed method exploits optical flow as the low level feature and performs a hierarchical clustering to obtain motion patterns; and we observe that the use of optical flow is also an integral part of a variety of other vision applications, for example, as features based representation of human actions. We, therefore, propose a new representation for articulated human actions using the motion patterns. The representation is based on hierarchical clustering of observed optical flow in four dimensional, spatial and motion flow space. The automatically discovered motion patterns, are the primitive actions, representative of flow at salient regions on the human body, much like trajectories of body joints, which are notoriously difficult to obtain automatically. The proposed method works in a completely unsupervised fashion, and in sharp contrast to state of the art representations like bag of video words, provides a truly semantically meaningful representation. Each primitive action depicts the most atomic sub-action, like left arm moving upwards, or right leg moving downward and leftward, and is represented by a mixture of four dimensional Gaussian distributions. A sequence of primitive actions are discovered in the test video, and labelled by computing the KL divergence between mixtures. The entire video sequence containing the human action, is thus reduced to a simple string, which is matched against similar strings of training videos to classify the action. The string matching is performed by global alignment, using the well-known Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. Experiments reported on multiple human actions data sets, confirm the validity, simplicity, and semantically meaningful nature of the proposed representation. Results obtained are encouraging and comparable to the state of the art.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFE0003646, ucf:48836
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003646
- Title
- BRAVE NEW WORLD RELOADED: ADVOCATING FOR BASIC CONSTITUTIONAL SEARCH PROTECTIONS TO APPLY TO CELL PHONES FROM EAVESDROPPING AND TRACKING BY THE GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATE ENTITIES.
- Creator
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Berrios-Ayala, Mark, Milon, Abby, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Imagine a world where someone's personal information is constantly compromised, where federal government entities AKA Big Brother always knows what anyone is Googling, who an individual is texting, and their emoticons on Twitter. Government entities have been doing this for years; they never cared if they were breaking the law or their moral compass of human dignity. Every day the Federal government blatantly siphons data with programs from the original ECHELON to the new series like PRISM...
Show moreImagine a world where someone's personal information is constantly compromised, where federal government entities AKA Big Brother always knows what anyone is Googling, who an individual is texting, and their emoticons on Twitter. Government entities have been doing this for years; they never cared if they were breaking the law or their moral compass of human dignity. Every day the Federal government blatantly siphons data with programs from the original ECHELON to the new series like PRISM and Xkeyscore so they can keep their tabs on issues that are none of their business; namely, the personal lives of millions. Our allies are taking note; some are learning our bad habits, from Government Communications Headquarters' (GCHQ) mass shadowing sharing plan to America's Russian inspiration, SORM. Some countries are following the United States' poster child pose of a Brave New World like order of global events. Others like Germany are showing their resolve in their disdain for the rise of tyranny. Soon, these new found surveillance troubles will test the resolve of the American Constitution and its nation's strong love and tradition of liberty. Courts are currently at work to resolve how current concepts of liberty and privacy apply to the current conditions facing the privacy of society. It remains to be determined how liberty will be affected as well; liberty for the United States of America, for the European Union, the Russian Federation and for the people of the World in regards to the extent of privacy in today's blurred privacy expectations.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFH0004537, ucf:45187
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH0004537
