Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes (technically 11,842 > 10 acres)! This bold proclamation can be seen everywhere from license plates to tourism pamphlets; it reveals how much water matters to the state on not only a commercial level, but as the very identity of the community. At the...
With a glut of competing priorities, the financial industry faces major challenges in extracting timely, relevant, and specifically-focused information from text. Without clear-cut business cases, making the investment in text analysis methods does not justify the return on investment. Furthermore, the business landscape continues to become increasingly complex, and at...
Using transcripts from Kansas State University Libraries’ (KSUL) virtual reference services (VRS), an experimental design was created to investigate the value and impact of different natural language processing techniques in the context of creating predictive models. Models were created to use only the first few word tokens supplied by VRS...
This study explored the mentoring experiences of doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) doctoral degree programs at Northwestern University. Research suggests that mentoring relationships support student success in STEM disciplines, and further, that lack of mentorship may be a barrier for female students. A mixed-methods approach employing...
Regtech, a reference to the application of new technologies to bank regulation, mandates a conversation about reducing the burden of bank regulation by letting computers take over some of the handling of regulatory text. Bank regulations and the related manuals, guidance, or other supplements are mostly unstructured. Software tools and...
Miniaturized, wireless instrumentation is now a reality and this thesis describes development of such a system to monitor crack response. Comparison of environmental (long-term) and blast-induced (dynamic) crack width changes in residential structures has lead to a new approach to monitoring and controlling construction vibrations. In wireless systems transducer power...
The thesis describes the second phase of development of the Autonomous Crack Comparometer (ACC) system to incorporate measurements of ground motions and add several changes in the autonomous operation. In order to obtain the ground motion and air blast data, four additional transducers have been added. There are now a...
This thesis summarizes two further developments of the Autonomous Crack Monitoring (ACM) system, which facilitates simultaneous measurement of crack response to environmental changes and various dynamic events. The first component was measurement of crack responses in three different materials and locations in a residential structure subjected to ground vibrations produced...
This thesis summarized the qualification and testing of two commercial Autonomous Crack Monitoring (ACM) systems for use in measuring micrometer displacement of cracks. Qualification involved the assessment of both laboratory and field performance in a residential structure subjected to nearby quarry blasting for the production of roadway aggregate. Aggregate and...
Autonomous Crack Monitoring (ACM) and Autonomous Crack Propagation Sensing (ACPS) are two types of structural health monitoring in which characteristics of cracks are recorded over long periods of time. ACM seeks to correlate changes in widths of cosmetic cracks in structures to nearby blasting or construction vibration activity for the...