Preventive maintenance is a broad term that encompasses a set of activities aimed at improving the overall reliability and availability of a system. Preventive maintenance involves a basic trade-off between the costs of conducting...
Influenza--United States--Management; Epidemics--Management; Health services administration; Mathematical optimization
Pandemic influenza has been an important public health concern. During the 20th century, three major pandemics of influenza occurred in 1918, 1957, and 1968. The pandemic of 1918 caused 40 to 50 million deaths worldwide and more than 500,000 deaths...
Pattern recognition systems; Cluster analysis; Data mining
Despite the large number of existing clustering methods, clustering remains a challenging task especially when the structure of the data does not correspond to easily separable categories, and when clusters vary in size, density and shape. Existing...
The revolution in information technology and the explosion in the use of computing devices in people's everyday activities has forever changed the perspective of the data mining and machine learning fields. The enormous amounts of easily...
Emergency management--Kentucky; Assistance in emergencies--Kentucky; Disaster relief--Kentucky; Transportation--Planning
Large-scale emergencies caused by earthquake, tornado, pandemic flu, terrorism attacks and so on can wreak havoc to communities. In order to mitigate the impact of the events, emergency stockpiles of food, water, medicine and other materials have...
In this dissertation, standardized methods for measuring electron emission (EE) from nanostructured materials are established. Design of an emitter array platform, synthesis and nanomanipulation of different types of are successfully conducted....
Pattern perception--Data processing; Pattern recognition systems; Land mines--Detection; Data mining
For complex detection and classification problems, involving data with large intra-class variations and noisy inputs, no single source of information can provide a satisfactory solution. As a result, combination of multiple classifiers is playing...
In order to satisfy customer expectations, a ground vehicle must be designed to meet a broad range of performance requirements. A satisfactory vehicle design process implements a set of requirements reflecting necessary, but perhaps not sufficient...
Accelerated life testing; Reliability (Engineering); Service life (Engineering)
This dissertation is focused on finding lower confidence limits for the reliability of systems consisting of Wei bull components when the reliability demonstration testing (RDT) is conducted with zero failures. The usual methods for the parameter...
The management of power and the optimization of systems generating and using power are critical technologies. A new architecture is developed to advance the current state of the art by providing an intelligent and autonomous solution for power...
Enzymatic hydrolysis is the most common method of producing fermentable sugars from lignocellulosic biomass. Limitations to this step include the high cost of enzymes, and the time required to process the biomass. To increase the throughput and...
Nosocomial infections; Catheterization--Complications; Drug resistance in microorganisms
Catheters represent an essential part of the management of critically and chronically ill patients. However, their use is often plagued by catheter related blood stream infections (CRBSIs), which are associated with increased morbidity, hospital...
Wind power has the potential to provide access to electricity to areas lacking the resources to create industrial power plants, as well as supplement residential energy supplies. The low resource investment and ease of installation make it ideal...
Human adult olfactory epithelium contains neural progenitors (hONPs) which replace damaged cellular components throughout life. Methods to isolate and expand the hONPs have been developed in our laboratory. In response to morphogens, the hONPs...
The purpose of this dissertation was to demonstrate that a new method of direct intracellular energy delivery was effective in maintaining viability of in vitro Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cells (HUVECs) when exposed to chemical ischemia for...
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...
Critical thinking--Study and teaching (Higher); Critical thinking--Ability testing; Social work education
This study utilized the standardized California Critical Thinking Skills Test (CCTST) Form 2000 to measure students' pretest and post test critical thinking abilities prior to and upon completion of a critical thinking infused curriculum. In...
The advent of larger storage spaces, affordable digital capturing devices, and an ever growing online community dedicated to sharing images has created a great need for efficient analysis methods. In fact, analyzing images for the purpose of...
Business logistics; Production management; Manufacturing processes; Industrial efficiency
In today's competitive business environment, companies face enormous pressure and must continuously search for ways to design new products, manufacture and distribute them in an efficient and effective fashion. After years of focusing on reduction...
