2021 MU Theses - Freely available online
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Item Dashboard design and usability study for geospatially enabled information seeking to assist pandemic response and resilience(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2021) Young, Tiffany Carissa; Shyu, Chi-RenCounties in Missouri are primarily rural. Rural communities often consist of individuals with poor health, lower economic status, and lack of public health infrastructure. During the COVID- 19 pandemic, most research was centered around urban-based data and thus did not provide the full-picture of vulnerabilities present in rural counties for stakeholders to consider when proactively planning for pandemics and making policies in regards to mitigation. To bridge the gap of urban and rural data availability, our team developed two interactive COVID-19 risk assessment dashboards using a 3-step design process that included identifying dashboard functionality based on the goals of stakeholders, collecting COVID-19 risk factor data, and selecting the appropriate type of dashboard visualizations in order for stakeholder needs to be met. Database processes were also created to promote a dynamic design in which risk factors can be easily updated, added, and removed from the risk assessment as COVID-19 progresses and more evidence is collected, keeping the risk assessment relevant. Using our dashboards, users can create customized risk assessments based on six categories of risk: susceptibility, transmission, accessibility, socioeconomic, health culture, and exposure, and geospatially visualize risk throughout counties with the ability to apply a rural/urban filter. Users can also drill-down to a specific county and learn about the prevalence and magnitude of 87 risk factors while looking for spatial trends and how counties with specific risk profiles were affected by COVID-19. A usability study was conducted to ensure that our platform is meaningful and can be easily navigated to aid with pandemic mitigation, healthcare planning, and research. An optimized version of this tool would not only help with planning for COVID-19 variants, future pandemics, and research in Missouri, but also be applied to all states of the United StatItem Location prediction and trajectory optimization in multi-UAV application missions(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2021) Singh, Rounak; Calyam, PrasadUnmanned aerial vehicles (a.k.a. drones) have a wide range of applications in e.g., aerial surveillance, mapping, imaging, monitoring, maritime operations, parcel delivery, and disaster response management. Their operations require reliable networking environments and location-based services in air-to-air links with cooperative drones, or air-to-ground links in concert with ground control stations. When equipped with high-resolution video cameras or sensors to gain environmental situation awareness through object detection/tracking, precise location predictions of individual or groups of drones at any instant possible is critical for continuous guidance. The location predictions then can be used in trajectory optimization for achieving efficient operations (i.e., through effective resource utilization in terms of energy or network bandwidth consumption) and safe operations (i.e., through avoidance of obstacles or sudden landing) within application missions. In this thesis, we explain a diverse set of techniques involved in drone location prediction, position and velocity estimation and trajectory optimization involving: (i) Kalman Filtering techniques, and (ii) Machine Learning models such as reinforcement learning and deep-reinforcement learning. These techniques facilitate the drones to follow intelligent paths and establish optimal trajectories while carrying out successful application missions under given resource and network constraints. We detail the techniques using two scenarios. The first scenario involves location prediction based intelligent packet transfer between drones in a disaster response scenario using the various Kalman Filtering techniques. The second scenario involves a learning-based trajectory optimization that uses various reinforcement learning models for maintaining high video resolution and effective network performance in a civil application scenario such as aerial monitoring of persons/objects. We conclude with a list of open challenges and future works for intelligent path planning of drones using location prediction and trajectory optimization techniques.Item E-scooter simulator development and applications(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2021) Qi, Weitong; Sun, CarlosAlthough electric scooters have brought a lot of convenience to people's lives, the laws and regulations related to it are just being developed, and the number of people injured by electric scooters is increasing every year. Most of the published literature on electric scooters is from a safety perspective, while this research is more from the perspective of people's riding behavior. To better understanding people's riding behavior, the ZouSim E-Scooter simulator was built. The design process of the simulator can be divided into two parts, hardware development and software development. The hardware development includes the construction of the simulator base and the applications of the measurement sensors. The software development includes the use of Arduino for data collection and transmission, and the use of Unity3D for scenario creating. Due to the COVID-19 epidemic, this research only includes 25 human subjects, and all subjects experienced the same scenarios to ensure the validity of the data. The collected data shows that when the subjects were not educated, 60 percent of them chose to ride on the sidewalk. After being educated, only 3 percent of them chose to ride on the sidewalk. This shows that electric scooter education is effective on most riders. Upon the completion of the test, each subject was given a post-simulation survey. From the survey results, 76 percent of the human subjects admitted that they had never worn a helmet when riding an electric scooter, and only 8 percent of the test subjects said that they always wear a helmet when riding an electric scooter. Moreover, 56 percent of the test subjects said that even though they knew that riding on the sidewalk might have potential risks to pedestrians, they still preferred to ride on the sidewalk because they were uncomfortable with riding on the street next to vehicles. Policy makers could consider this preference in formulating rules and policies instead of regulating E-Scooters solely because they are motorized.Item Migrations of love and circumstance: a history of intimacy and policy in the migration of Italian war brides, 1943-1954(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2021) Limmer, Michael Bird; Reeder, Linda S.In the spring of 1946, the foreign brides and children of American soldiers from the Second World War migrated to the United States through mass migrations coordinated by the War Department. This project contextualizes the lives of Italian war brides in regards to twentieth-century migration through their experiences in Italy, within American immigration policy, and their lives after immigration to America. War brides emerged from the mass global deployment of the American G.I.s through an array of coercive and consensual social-sexual encounters abroad. The Allied Military Government, Congress, and the War Department sought to control their interactions in the war-torn and inequal sexual economy of Italy, but their efforts had limited effect. Propaganda depicted Italian women in paradoxical imaginaries, but much to the dismay of overseeing institutions, these soldiers and foreign women married and had sexual relations. After the war, the restrictions and bureaucracy of the immigration system that inhibited immigration frustrated soldiers, their foreign wives, and in-laws. This required Congress to reckon with their competing desires to uphold restriction while doing everything for the soldier. This led to the facilitation and privileged immigration of war brides that established conjugal love and heteronormativity within the quota system. In America, war brides, tied to their soldier husbands, experienced an isolating migration experience away from ethnicity and towards domesticity. The complicated origins of immigration and the context of war shaped a new kind of migration around war bride identity that was anchored in a new kind of domestic assimilation that erased their migrant identities and migration experience.Item Neotectonic assessment of the southern Wassuk Range, western Nevada(University of Missouri--Columbia, 2021) Heins, Julie; Gomez, FranciscoActive deformation across western North America is distributed across a broad zone spanning from the San Andreas fault system to the Basin and Range Province. The Wassuk Range fault zone (WRFZ), located within the Walker Lane deformation belt of the western Basin and Range, is a N- to NNW-striking normal fault system. With its oblique orientation to the wide-scale, NW-trending shear between Pacific and North American plates, it demonstrates a transtensional regime. The Whiskey Flat study area (southern WRFZ) corresponds with east-dipping, late Quaternary fault scarps ([tilde] 1-7 meters) along the range front. Seismic and photogrammetric methods were used to examine underlying geometry and fault scarp morphology. Through these imaging techniques, fault scarp degradation modeling assessed the kinematic evolution and longterm slip rate of [tilde] 0.10-0.36 mm/yr, accommodating 0.49-1.4 mm/yr of E-W extension. Significantly, this extension rate is slightly faster than northern and central segments of the Wassuk Range. Holocene earthquakes are estimated to have occurred between 687 and 3774 years ago with magnitudes that range from 6.9 to 7.1. In addition, seismic refraction imaging reveals a potential asymmetric half-graben formation, supporting the idea of a dominant normal fault system that aligns with the broad, NW-trending, rightlateral shear of the Walker Lane and associating plate boundaries. This study demonstrates how structural evolution, neotectonic activity, and future deformation can be gleaned from seismic imaging techniques and numerical models of landscape morphology.