This dissertation addresses two different problems: 1) coronal loop detection from solar images: and 2) salient contour group extraction from cluttered images. In the first part, we propose two different solutions to the coronal loop detection...
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...
Traditionally, fingerprint image acquisition was based on contact. However
the conventional touch-based fingerprint acquisition introduces some problems
such as distortions and deformations to the fingerprint image. The most recent
technology for...
Images, Photographic--Databases; Image processing--Digital techniques; Data mining; Cluster analysis
The performance of content-based image retrieval systems has proved to be inherently constrained by the used low level features, and cannot give satisfactory results when the user's high level concepts cannot be expressed by low level features. In...
The phase II clinical trial is a critical step in the drug development process. In the oncology setting, phase II studies typically evaluate one primary endpoint, which is efficacy. In practice, a binary measurement representing the response to the...
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...
For complex classification systems, data is usually gathered from multiple sources of information that have varying degree of reliability. In fact, assuming that the different sources have the same relevance in describing all the data might lead to...
Web search engines; Automatic abstracting; Graph theory--Data processing
After a user types in a search query on a major search engine, they are presented with a number of search results. Each search result is made up of a title, brief text summary and a URL. It is then the user's job to select documents for...
Acting; Lawrence, Jerome, 1915-2004. Night Thoreau spent in jail
This thesis considers my preparation for and performance in "The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail." Through four themed chapters (ego, intellect, energy, and fear), I explore strengths of my acting that have become weaknesses. I consider their...
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...
Computer music; Sound--Recording and reproducing--Digital techniques; Music and technology; Computer sound processing
This thesis proposes a concept called low-time-resolution (LTR) structure in music, and investigates its potential significance and application in music-related computing tasks.
The contributions of the thesis are manifold. First, it proposes a...
We study a sensor location problem that minimizes the total number of sensors to install at road intersections in a transportation network so that the traffic flows on the entire network are uniquely determined. We employ the concepts of hidden...
The Y family of DNA polymerases in higher eukaryotes contains at least four members which are implicated in potentially error-prone replication through unrepaired damage in the genome. These proteins are encoded by the REV1, POLH, POLI, and POLK...
Ethnocentrism; Mass media--Social aspects; Social problems--Press coverage; Mass media and public opinion; Mass media and race relations
This study revisits Kinder's and Kam's (2007; 2009) studies that provided
political scientists with a theoretical and operational definition of ethnocentrism-our
tendency to partition the world into in-groups and out-groups. They assert that...
Computational grids are some of the largest computer systems in existence today. Unfortunately they are also, in many cases, the least reliable. This research examines the use of redundancy with permutation as a method of improving reliability in...
Right-wing extremists--Germany; Political culture--Germany; Germany--Politics and government--1990-; Voting--Germany
Despite twenty years of political reunification Germany remains a politically, socially, and economically divided country. This has fuelled inequalities, which are used by extreme political parties to garner votes from citizens who have become...
Empathy; Social psychology; Rhetoric--Social aspects; Language and culture
Empathy has been commonly evoked within rhetoric and composition as a way to understand audiences and as a classroom ethic. This dissertation goes further in defining rhetorics of empathy, analyzing the uses of rhetorics of empathy in political and...
The trucking industry is the largest freight sector, making up about 70 percent of all domestic shipment in the United States and contributes greatly the American economy. About 10 billion tons of goods are shipped annually and of that, about...
Recent advances in high throughput methodologies offer researchers the ability to understand complex systems via high dimensional and multi-relational data. One example is the realm of molecular biology where disparate data (such as gene sequence,...
This project investigated the effect of hypothermia on the monocyte response with the goal of understanding, which intracellular processes are affected by hypothermia leading to differences in cytokine secretion. A better understanding of the...
