ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Johnston, Carol
- Creators: Xue, Guoliang
- Creators: Shen, Wei
Description
Sparsity has become an important modeling tool in areas such as genetics, signal and audio processing, medical image processing, etc. Via the penalization of l-1 norm based regularization, the structured sparse learning algorithms can produce highly accurate models while imposing various predefined structures on the data, such as feature groups or graphs. In this thesis, I first propose to solve a sparse learning model with a general group structure, where the predefined groups may overlap with each other. Then, I present three real world applications which can benefit from the group structured sparse learning technique. In the first application, I study the Alzheimer's Disease diagnosis problem using multi-modality neuroimaging data. In this dataset, not every subject has all data sources available, exhibiting an unique and challenging block-wise missing pattern. In the second application, I study the automatic annotation and retrieval of fruit-fly gene expression pattern images. Combined with the spatial information, sparse learning techniques can be used to construct effective representation of the expression images. In the third application, I present a new computational approach to annotate developmental stage for Drosophila embryos in the gene expression images. In addition, it provides a stage score that enables one to more finely annotate each embryo so that they are divided into early and late periods of development within standard stage demarcations. Stage scores help us to illuminate global gene activities and changes much better, and more refined stage annotations improve our ability to better interpret results when expression pattern matches are discovered between genes.
ContributorsYuan, Lei (Author) / Ye, Jieping (Thesis advisor) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Kumar, Sudhir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The body is capable of regulating hunger in several ways. Some of these hunger regulation methods are innate, such as genetics, and some, such as the responses to stress and to the smell of food, are innate but can be affected by body conditions such as BMI and physical activity. Further, some hunger regulation methods stem from learned behaviors originating from cultural pressures or parenting styles. These latter regulation methods for hunger can be grouped into the categories: emotion, environment, and physical. The factors that regulate hunger can also influence the incidence of disordered eating, such as eating in the absence of hunger (EAH). Eating in the absence of hunger can occur in one of two scenarios, continuous EAH or beginning EAH. College students are at a particularly high risk for EAH and weight gain due to stress, social pressures, and the constant availability of energy dense and nutrient poor food options. The purpose of this study is to validate a modified EAH-C survey in college students and to discover which of the three latent factors (emotion, environment, physical) best predicts continual and beginning EAH. To do so, a modified EAH-C survey, with additional demographic components, was administered to students at a major southwest university. This survey contained two questions, one each for continuing and beginning EAH, regarding 14 factors related to emotional, physical, or environmental reasons that may trigger EAH. The results from this study revealed that the continual and beginning EAH surveys displayed good internal consistency reliability. We found that for beginning and continuing EAH, although emotion is the strongest predictor of EAH, all three latent factors are significant predictors of EAH. In addition, we found that environmental factors had the greatest influence on an individual's likelihood to continue to eat in the absence of hunger. Due to statistical abnormalities and differing numbers of factors in each category, we were unable to determine which of the three factors exerted the greatest influence on an individual's likelihood to begin eating in the absence of hunger. These results can be utilized to develop educational tools aimed at reducing EAH in college students, and ultimately reducing the likelihood for unhealthy weight gain and health complications related to obesity.
ContributorsGoett, Taylor (Author) / Johnston, Carol (Thesis advisor) / Lee, Chong (Committee member) / Lespron, Christy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The rapid advancement of wireless technology has instigated the broad deployment of wireless networks. Different types of networks have been developed, including wireless sensor networks, mobile ad hoc networks, wireless local area networks, and cellular networks. These networks have different structures and applications, and require different control algorithms. The focus of this thesis is to design scheduling and power control algorithms in wireless networks, and analyze their performances. In this thesis, we first study the multicast capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. Gupta and Kumar studied the scaling law of the unicast capacity of wireless ad hoc networks. They derived the order of the unicast throughput, as the number of nodes in the network goes to infinity. In our work, we characterize the scaling of the multicast capacity of large-scale MANETs under a delay constraint D. We first derive an upper bound on the multicast throughput, and then propose a lower bound on the multicast capacity by proposing a joint coding-scheduling algorithm that achieves a throughput within logarithmic factor of the upper bound. We then study the power control problem in ad-hoc wireless networks. We propose a distributed power control algorithm based on the Gibbs sampler, and prove that the algorithm is throughput optimal. Finally, we consider the scheduling algorithm in collocated wireless networks with flow-level dynamics. Specifically, we study the delay performance of workload-based scheduling algorithm with SRPT as a tie-breaking rule. We demonstrate the superior flow-level delay performance of the proposed algorithm using simulations.
ContributorsZhou, Shan (Author) / Ying, Lei (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Yanchao (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In October, 2009, participants of the Arizona Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) began receiving monthly Cash Value Vouchers (CVV) worth between six and 10 dollars towards the purchase of fresh fruits and vegetables. Data from the Arizona Department of Health Services (ADHS) showed CVV redemption rates in the first two years of the program were lower than the national average of 77% redemption. In response, the ADHS WIC Food List was expanded to also include canned and frozen fruits and vegetables. More recent data from ADHS suggest that redemption rates are improving, but variably exist among different WIC sub-populations. The purpose of this project was to identify themes related to the ease or difficulty of WIC CVV use amongst different categories of low-redeeming WIC participants. A total of 8 focus groups were conducted, four at a clinic in each of two Valley cities: Surprise and Mesa. Each of the four focus groups comprised one of four targeted WIC participant categories: pregnant, postpartum, breastfeeding, and children with participation ranging from 3-9 participants per group. Using the general inductive approach, recordings of the focus groups were transcribed, hand-coded and uploaded into qualitative analysis software resulting in four emergent themes including: interactions and shopping strategies, maximizing WIC value, redemption issues, and effect of rule change. Researchers identified twelve different subthemes related to the emergent theme of interactions and strategies to improve their experience, including economic considerations during redemption. Barriers related to interactions existed that made their purchase difficult, most notably anger from the cashier and other shoppers. However, participants made use of a number of strategies to facilitate WIC purchases or extract more value out of WIC benefits, such as pooling their CVV. Finally, it appears that the fruit and vegetable rule change was well received by those who were aware of the change. These data suggest a number of important avenues for future research, including verifying these themes are important within a larger, representative sample of Arizona WIC participants, and exploring strategies to minimize barriers identified by participants, such as use of electronic benefits transfer-style cards (EBT).
ContributorsBertmann, Farryl M. W (Author) / Wharton, Christopher (Christopher Mack), 1977- (Thesis advisor) / Ohri-Vachaspati, Punam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Hampl, Jeffrey (Committee member) / Dixit-Joshi, Sujata (Committee member) / Barroso, Cristina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The rapid advances in wireless communications and networking have given rise to a number of emerging heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks along with novel networking paradigms, including wireless sensor networks, mobile crowdsourcing, and mobile social networking. While offering promising solutions to a wide range of new applications, their widespread adoption and large-scale deployment are often hindered by people's concerns about the security, user privacy, or both. In this dissertation, we aim to address a number of challenging security and privacy issues in heterogeneous wireless and mobile networks in an attempt to foster their widespread adoption. Our contributions are mainly fivefold. First, we introduce a novel secure and loss-resilient code dissemination scheme for wireless sensor networks deployed in hostile and harsh environments. Second, we devise a novel scheme to enable mobile users to detect any inauthentic or unsound location-based top-k query result returned by an untrusted location-based service providers. Third, we develop a novel verifiable privacy-preserving aggregation scheme for people-centric mobile sensing systems. Fourth, we present a suite of privacy-preserving profile matching protocols for proximity-based mobile social networking, which can support a wide range of matching metrics with different privacy levels. Last, we present a secure combination scheme for crowdsourcing-based cooperative spectrum sensing systems that can enable robust primary user detection even when malicious cognitive radio users constitute the majority.
ContributorsZhang, Rui (Author) / Zhang, Yanchao (Thesis advisor) / Duman, Tolga Mete (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
There are several visual dimensions of food that can affect food intake, example portion size, color, and variety. This dissertation elucidates the effect of number of pieces of food on preference and amount of food consumed in humans and motivation for food in animals. Chapter 2 Experiment 1 showed that rats preferred and also ran faster for multiple pieces (30, 10 mg pellets) than an equicaloric, single piece of food (300 mg) showing that multiple pieces of food are more rewarding than a single piece. Chapter 2 Experiment 2 showed that rats preferred a 30-pellet food portion clustered together rather than scattered. Preference and motivation for clustered food pieces may be interpreted based on the optimal foraging theory that animals prefer foods that can maximize energy gain and minimize the risk of predation. Chapter 3 Experiment 1 showed that college students preferred and ate less of a multiple-piece than a single-piece portion and also ate less in a test meal following the multiple-piece than single-piece portion. Chapter 3 Experiment 2 replicated the results in Experiment 1 and used a bagel instead of chicken. Chapter 4 showed that college students given a five-piece chicken portion scattered on a plate ate less in a meal and in a subsequent test meal than those given the same portion clustered together. This is consistent with the hypothesis that multiple pieces of food may appear like more food because they take up a larger surface area than a single-piece portion. All together, these studies show that number and surface area occupied by food pieces are important visual cues determining food choice in animals and both food choice and intake in humans.
ContributorsBajaj, Devina (Author) / Phillips, Elizabeth D. (Thesis advisor) / Cohen, Adam (Committee member) / Johnston, Carol (Committee member) / Bimonte-Nelson, Heather A. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A principal goal of this dissertation is to study stochastic optimization and real-time scheduling in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) ranging from real-time wireless systems to energy systems to distributed control systems. Under this common theme, this dissertation can be broadly organized into three parts based on the system environments. The first part investigates stochastic optimization in real-time wireless systems, with the focus on the deadline-aware scheduling for real-time traffic. The optimal solution to such scheduling problems requires to explicitly taking into account the coupling in the deadline-aware transmissions and stochastic characteristics of the traffic, which involves a dynamic program that is traditionally known to be intractable or computationally expensive to implement. First, real-time scheduling with adaptive network coding over memoryless channels is studied, and a polynomial-time complexity algorithm is developed to characterize the optimal real-time scheduling. Then, real-time scheduling over Markovian channels is investigated, where channel conditions are time-varying and online channel learning is necessary, and the optimal scheduling policies in different traffic regimes are studied. The second part focuses on the stochastic optimization and real-time scheduling involved in energy systems. First, risk-aware scheduling and dispatch for plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) are studied, aiming to jointly optimize the EV charging cost and the risk of the load mismatch between the forecasted and the actual EV loads, due to the random driving activities of EVs. Then, the integration of wind generation at high penetration levels into bulk power grids is considered. Joint optimization of economic dispatch and interruptible load management is investigated using short-term wind farm generation forecast. The third part studies stochastic optimization in distributed control systems under different network environments. First, distributed spectrum access in cognitive radio networks is investigated by using pricing approach, where primary users (PUs) sell the temporarily unused spectrum and secondary users compete via random access for such spectrum opportunities. The optimal pricing strategy for PUs and the corresponding distributed implementation of spectrum access control are developed to maximize the PU's revenue. Then, a systematic study of the nonconvex utility-based power control problem is presented under the physical interference model in ad-hoc networks. Distributed power control schemes are devised to maximize the system utility, by leveraging the extended duality theory and simulated annealing.
ContributorsYang, Lei (Author) / Zhang, Junshan (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Ying, Lei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Dietary protein is known to increase postprandial thermogenesis more so than carbohydrates or fats, probably related to the fact that amino acids have no immediate form of storage in the body and can become toxic if not readily incorporated into body tissues or excreted. It is also well documented that subjects report greater satiety on high- versus low-protein diets and that subject compliance tends to be greater on high-protein diets, thus contributing to their popularity. What is not as well known is how a high-protein diet affects resting metabolic rate over time, and what is even less well known is if resting metabolic rate changes significantly when a person consuming an omnivorous diet suddenly adopts a vegetarian one. This pilot study sought to determine whether subjects adopting a vegetarian diet would report decreased satiety or demonstrate a decreased metabolic rate due to a change in protein intake and possible increase in carbohydrates. Further, this study sought to validate a new device called the SenseWear Armband (SWA) to determine if it might be sensitive enough to detect subtle changes in metabolic rate related to diet. Subjects were tested twice on all variables, at baseline and post-test. Independent and related samples tests revealed no significant differences between or within groups for any variable at any time point in the study. The SWA had a strong positive correlation to the Oxycon Mobile metabolic cart but due to a lack of change in metabolic rate, its sensitivity was undetermined. These data do not support the theory that adopting a vegetarian diet results in a long-term change in metabolic rate.
ContributorsMoore, Amy (Author) / Johnston, Carol (Thesis advisor) / Appel, Christy (Thesis advisor) / Gaesser, Glenn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Communication networks, both wired and wireless, are expected to have a certain level of fault-tolerance capability.These networks are also expected to ensure a graceful degradation in performance when some of the network components fail. Traditional studies on fault tolerance in communication networks, for the most part, make no assumptions regarding the location of node/link faults, i.e., the faulty nodes and links may be close to each other or far from each other. However, in many real life scenarios, there exists a strong spatial correlation among the faulty nodes and links. Such failures are often encountered in disaster situations, e.g., natural calamities or enemy attacks. In presence of such region-based faults, many of traditional network analysis and fault-tolerant metrics, that are valid under non-spatially correlated faults, are no longer applicable. To this effect, the main thrust of this research is design and analysis of robust networks in presence of such region-based faults. One important finding of this research is that if some prior knowledge is available on the maximum size of the region that might be affected due to a region-based fault, this piece of knowledge can be effectively utilized for resource efficient design of networks. It has been shown in this dissertation that in some scenarios, effective utilization of this knowledge may result in substantial saving is transmission power in wireless networks. In this dissertation, the impact of region-based faults on the connectivity of wireless networks has been studied and a new metric, region-based connectivity, is proposed to measure the fault-tolerance capability of a network. In addition, novel metrics, such as the region-based component decomposition number(RBCDN) and region-based largest component size(RBLCS) have been proposed to capture the network state, when a region-based fault disconnects the network. Finally, this dissertation presents efficient resource allocation techniques that ensure tolerance against region-based faults, in distributed file storage networks and data center networks.
ContributorsBanerjee, Sujogya (Author) / Sen, Arunabha (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Richa, Andrea (Committee member) / Hurlbert, Glenn (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Objective: Vinegar consumption studies have demonstrated possible therapeutic effects in reducing HbA1c and postprandial glycemia. The purpose of the study was to closely examine the effects of a commercial vinegar drink on daily fluctuations in fasting glucose concentrations and postprandial glycemia, and on HbA1c, in individuals at risk for Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2D). Design: Thirteen women and one man (21-62 y; mean, 46.0±3.9 y) participated in this 12-week parallel-arm trial. Participants were recruited from a campus community and were healthy and not diabetic by self-report. Participants were not prescribed oral hypoglycemic medications or insulin; other medications were allowed if use was stable for > 3 months. Subjects were randomized to one of two groups: VIN (8 ounces vinegar drink providing 1.5 g acetic acid) or CON (1 vinegar pill providing 0.04 g acetic acid). Treatments were taken twice daily immediately prior to the lunch and dinner meals. Venous blood samples were drawn at trial weeks 0 and 12 to measure insulin, fasting glucose, and HbA1c. Subjects recorded fasting glucose and 2-h postprandial glycemia concentrations daily using a glucometer. Results: The VIN group showed significant reductions in fasting capillary blood glucose concentrations (p=0.05) that were immediate and sustained throughout the duration of the study. The VIN group had reductions in 2-h postprandial glucose (mean change of −7.6±6.8 mg/dL over the 12-week trial), but this value was not significantly different than that for the CON group (mean change of 3.3±5.3 mg/dL over the 12-week trial, p=0.232). HbA1c did not significantly change (p=0.702), but the reduction in HbA1c in the VIN group, −0.14±0.1%, may have physiological relevance. Conclusions: Significant reductions in HbA1c were not observed after daily consumption of a vinegar drink containing 1.5 g acetic acid in non-diabetic individuals. However, the vinegar drink did significantly reduce fasting capillary blood glucose concentrations in these individuals as compared to a vinegar pill containing 0.04 g acetic acid. These results support a therapeutic effect for vinegar in T2D prevention and progression, specifically in high-risk populations.
ContributorsQuagliano, Samantha (Author) / Johnston, Carol (Thesis advisor) / Appel, Christy (Committee member) / Dixon, Kathleen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013