Recently our lab has shown that with broadband stimuli (either visual noise or natural scenes), performance for detecting oriented content is worst at horizontal, best at the obliques, and intermediate at vertical orientations--an anisotropy...
Missing data is very common in survey research. However, currently few guidelines exist with regard to the diagnosis and remedy to missing data in survey research. The goal of this thesis was to investigate properties and effects of three selected...
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (U.S.); Academic achievement--Kentucky; Teachers--Certification--Kentucky; Teacher effectiveness--Kentucky
This dissertation focused on the link between quality teaching and its potential impact on student achievement. National Board Certification is used to represent quality teaching and student achievement is measured by the Kentucky Core Content...
Human-computer interaction; Computer vision; Human-machine systems; Nonverbal communication
Hand gesture recognition (HGR) is an important research topic because some
situations require silent communication with sign languages. Computational HGR
systems assist silent communication, and help people learn a sign language.
In this thesis. a...
Speech intelligibility has been found to improve with prior exposure to a reverberant room environment. It is believed that perceptual mechanisms help maintain accurate speech perception under these adverse conditions. Potential factors underlying...
The area of Knowledge discovery and data mining is growing rapidly. Feature Discretization is a crucial issue in Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD), or Data Mining because most data sets used in real world applications have features with...
For more than a hundred million years, male plethodontid salamanders have
utilized non-volatile, proteinaceous courtship pheromones to regulate female mating
receptivity and promote mating success. These pheromones - which are delivered...
Swarm Intelligence (SI) techniques were inspired by bee swarms, ant colonies, and most
recently, bird flocks. Flock-based Swarm Intelligence (FSI) has several unique features, namely
decentralized control, collaborative learning, high exploration...
Heart--Diseases--Diagnosis; Diagnostic imaging; Magnetic resonance imaging; Imaging systems in medicine
Many cardiac diseases, such as myocardial ischemia, secondary to coronary artery disease, may be identified and localized through the analysis of cardiac deformations. Early efforts for quantifying ventricular wall motion used surgical implantation...
High-throughput sequencing has provided a myriad of genetic data for thousands of organisms. Computational analysis of one data type, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) yields insight into gene expression, alternative splicing, tissue specificity gene...
Since the beginning of the VLSI era, various technologies have been adopted for developing the design and characterization of analog circuits. For robust design, the influences of the process parameter variations have been considered over the...
Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy; Spectrum analysis--Data processing
Since its development, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become one of the primary methods of chemists for structure elucidation, which is the determination of a compound's molecular structure. Current software packages enable scientists to...
Student counselors; Problem youth--Education; Academic achievement
"If this generation of youth is lost, much of the hope for an economically, socially and technologically strong nation will also be lost." - Kuykendall, 1992 When youths become convinced that they will not be able to make it in mainstream...
Due to the complex nature of interactions at the genomic level as well as the large number of proteins present in an organism, understanding the functions of various genes that are expressed is essential. Creating an analysis pipeline for Expressed...
Recently, social multimedia-sharing websites, which allow users to upload, annotate, and share online photo or video collections, have become increasingly popular. The user tags or annotations constitute the new multimedia "meta-data". We...
To manage large image databases, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) emerged as a new research subject. CBIR involves the development of automated methods to use visual features in searching and retrieving. Unfortunately, the performance of most...
African Americans--Politics and government; Local elections; Metropolitan government; Voting research
Despite the fact that few large metropolitan areas have had city-county consolidations, interest remains high in these mergers as a means of restructuring urban government. Evaluation literature on city-county consolidations generally focuses on...
Electronic surveillance; Information technology--Social aspects; Computer networks--Design and construction
Because of the anonymity that P2P networks provide, they are an ideal medium for
the exchange of contraband material such as child pornography. Unfortunately, not
much research has been conducted on how to best monitor these types of networks
for...
This thesis and exhibition examine the connection between neurobiology and Op Art. Neurobiological explanations of Op Art's effects are explored as a means to offer insight into the processes of the human mind and eye, and to provide explanations...
Background: Helicobacter pylori (Hp) establishes life-long gastric infection in billions of humans, and is often responsible for diseases such as peptic ulcer and gastric cancer. Cumulative actions of genetic drift and natural selection over...
