A comprehensive portfolio by Cassandra Malmquist with a focus in Lighting Design in theatre and dance at the University of Iowa.

Increasingly competitive markets lead brand managers to search for new methods to improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and promote customer loyalty. Sensory marketing has the potential to meet those objectives. Sensory marketing programs are designed to engage consumers’ senses and affect perceptions, judgments, and behaviors. Ambient light color is an environmental variable with the potential to influence the customer experience in lodging industry sensory marketing programs. Contrast theory and disconfirmation of expectations served as the theoretical framework for this study. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to examine the relationships between ambient light color, consumer spending, and perceptions in a hotel lobby bar. Four ambient light colors were examined: blue, green, red, and yellow. The sample included 374 individuals who made at least one purchase from a single hotel lobby bar over a one month data collection period. Data were collected for customer spending and customer perceptions using a server log and customer survey. There were three key findings. First, ambient color did not significantly affect customer spending. Second, ambient color did not significantly affect overall satisfaction. Third, customer spending was significantly correlated with stress level and negatively correlated with overall customer satisfaction, for all color groups combined. The use of alcohol to reduce stress complicates the analysis for ambient light color selection in a bar environment. Overall, the study findings are promising and form a foundation for practitioners to experiment with a multiplicity of sensory marketing programs.

Accurate assessment of road luminance provided by overhead streetlights helps to optimize the visibility of objects on the road and therefore promotes driver safety, while minimizing energy consumption. To calculate road luminance, the road surface reflectivity has to be known. Odyssey Energy Limited has developed a prototype system that has the potential to determine the road reflectivity properties at high speed. In this thesis, an investigation into the prototype system has been conducted and further enhancement and redesign has been done. A portable on-site road surface reflectivity measurement system that complies with the Commission Internationale de I' Eclairage (CIE) standard was developed. The road test of this new system has been carried out on a series of Hamilton city roads. It proved that the new system is capable of measuring the road surface reflectivity and classifying the road into its appropriate R class according to the CIE standards specified in street lighting design criteria. Later the OEL prototype system was calibrated against the new system to find out the correlation between the two systems.

One of the greatest technological breakthroughs of humanity was the ability to construct a device and eventually a system which would provide a more efficient, safe, clean, convenient and relatively inexpensive form of illumination than ever used previously electric light. The introduction of this new technology into Oregon communities in the early years of this century was a remarkable accomplishment. Along with memories of the light itself, important and intriguing recollections of "life lived yesterday" are often associated with these early days of electric lighting. Because these "yesterdays" are becoming more distant from the present, persons holding those memories are reaching ages where such information becomes difficult to recall, vague, distorted and often forgotten altogether. In this study, memories of how electric light affected people were recalled differently in some aspect by informants, whether it was used for the purpose of lighting streets and buildings or on personal properties within the home and on farms. Published information describing the effects of electric lighting on society is relatively scarce. Consequently, persons with important previous experiences are in many instances the only source of insight on how our predecessors lived before electric light was in use and especially how this technological breakthrough may or may not have affected their lives. Those published descriptions of pre-electric life that do exist are most commonly found in obscure publications, often originating in small or private electric company newsletters and annual reports. Very few of these reports were compiled in a systematic scheme later to be interpreted quantitatively and in light of previous research. My own interest in this subject was piqued when I realized that both oral histories and technical data on how electricity affected individuals of the Pacific Northwest region is profoundly poor in comparison to material available on other parts of the country. With this understanding, 32 individuals representing a span of 30 years, five states and 15 different communities throughout Oregon, were interviewed over the course of four months. The informants were asked questions pertaining to their lifestyle and memories before, during and after the introduction of electricity, and more specifically about the advent of electric light into their communities and homes. Because the study utilized a minuscule sample size in comparison to the state population, generalizations were not appropriate. Nevertheless, the oral histories provided a greater insight into how the introduction of electric light and electric power affected the life of an Oregonian. / Graduation date: 1994

Dimensional metrology is of prime importance in the industrial and scientific domains, particularly in the field of quality control of manufactured products. In robotics too: without dimensional sensors, robots would be nothing else more than automatons, going through the same repetitive tasks again and again in a carefully controlled environment. This thesis deals with a noncontact measurement technique involving active vision, called triangulation under laser plane lighting. This optomechatronic method consists in projecting a laser sheet on an object or a surface under test, and analyzing the intersecting curve on an image taken by a camera. It allows making a wide variety of dimensional, noncontact and nondestructive, measurements (length, area, volume, diameter, curvature, reverse engineering,...). The original approach of the work is that the focus is brought on the determination of specific, restricted dimensional information on objects of diverse, but a priori known, shapes with the objective of achieving metrological performances in agreement with the industrial requirements. Furthermore, ambulatory instruments­i.e. devices that are at least portable, or even handheld­are exclusively aimed, using low-cost components. Another objective is to obtain systems for which an industrial transposition to innovative instrumental products is feasible. The text is divided in two distinct parts, both strongly correlated. The first one deals with all the theoretical aspects of the method: camera model, passage from 2-D image to 3-D scene, image processing, calibration, accuracy analysis... The performances of the developed models are also studied, in terms of robustness and repeatability. The second part describes four innovative applications of our own: the diameter measurement of cylindrical and of spherical objects, dimensional measurements in the building sector and the determination of the road surface microtexture. The achieved accuracies are globally of about 1%.

Humans recognize optical reflectance properties of surfaces such as metal, plastic, or paper from a single image without knowledge of illumination. We develop a machine vision system to perform similar recognition tasks automatically. Reflectance estimation under unknown, arbitrary illumination proves highly underconstrained due to the variety of potential illumination distributions and surface reflectance properties. We have found that the spatial structure of real-world illumination possesses some of the statistical regularities observed in the natural image statistics literature. A human or computer vision system may be able to exploit this prior information to determine the most likely surface reflectance given an observed image. We develop an algorithm for reflectance classification under unknown real-world illumination, which learns relationships between surface reflectance and certain features (statistics) computed from a single observed image. We also develop an automatic feature selection method.

The human visual system is adept at detecting and encoding statistical regularities in its spatio-temporal environment. Here we report an unexpected failure of this ability in the context of perceiving inconsistencies in illumination distributions across a scene. Contrary to predictions from previous studies [Enns and Rensink, 1990; Sun and Perona, 1996a, 1996b, 1997], we find that the visual system displays a remarkable lack of sensitivity to illumination inconsistencies, both in experimental stimuli and in images of real scenes. Our results allow us to draw inferences regarding how the visual system encodes illumination distributions across scenes. Specifically, they suggest that the visual system does not verify the global consistency of locally derived estimates of illumination direction.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri--Rolla, 2007. / Vita. The entire thesis text is included in file. Title from title screen of thesis/dissertation PDF file (viewed April 17, 2007) Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-91).

Dimensional metrology is of prime importance in the industrial and scientific domains, particularly in the field of quality control of manufactured products. In robotics too: without dimensional sensors, robots would be nothing else more than automatons, going through the same repetitive tasks again and again in a carefully controlled environment. This thesis deals with a noncontact measurement technique involving active vision, called triangulation under laser plane lighting. This optomechatronic method consists in projecting a laser sheet on an object or a surface under test, and analyzing the intersecting curve on an image taken by a camera. It allows making a wide variety of dimensional, noncontact and nondestructive, measurements (length, area, volume, diameter, curvature, reverse engineering,...). The original approach of the work is that the focus is brought on the determination of specific, restricted dimensional information on objects of diverse, but a priori known, shapes with the objective of achieving metrological performances in agreement with the industrial requirements. Furthermore, ambulatory instruments­i.e. devices that are at least portable, or even handheld­are exclusively aimed, using low-cost components. Another objective is to obtain systems for which an industrial transposition to innovative instrumental products is feasible. The text is divided in two distinct parts, both strongly correlated. The first one deals with all the theoretical aspects of the method: camera model, passage from 2-D image to 3-D scene, image processing, calibration, accuracy analysis... The performances of the developed models are also studied, in terms of robustness and repeatability. The second part describes four innovative applications of our own: the diameter measurement of cylindrical and of spherical objects, dimensional measurements in the building sector and the determination of the road surface microtexture. The achieved accuracies are globally of about 1%.

The roads constitute a major part of the nation’sinfrastructure. For the society and the individuals it isimportant with a well functioning road network. To sustain theimpact from traffic intensity and heavy loads durable pavementsare demanded. Concrete pavements for roads with high trafficintensity and heavy loads are common in the USA and in severalEuropean countries. In Sweden, less than 1 % of the roadnetwork consists of concrete roads. The research about concrete road pavements has been focusingon development of design methods and studies of surfaceproperties like friction, longitudinal evenness, wearresistance and noise. To increase the knowledge and use ofconcrete roads there is a need to optimise the differentfunctional properties with regard to each other and to socialfactors. The objective of this doctoral thesis is to survey, analyseand quantify relationships between functional properties ofconcrete roads and social factors such as environmental impact,traffic and user safety, riding comfort and economicconsiderations (costs). The goal is to develop a model that canbe used as an instrument for optimising the concrete roaddesign. This thesis describes a thorough literature investigation,special studies on road lighting design of concrete pavements,laboratory investigations about saw-cutting times for jointsand bonding properties of dowels and development of anoptimisation model. The literature investigation has resultedin compiled knowledge on functional properties of concreteroads and their relationships with social factors. A compiledanalysis has also been performed from follow-ups of the fourconcrete roads constructed in Sweden in the 1990s. From thespecial study on road lighting design, proposals are made forusing new values for brightness and specularity and changingthe classification of wet concrete pavements. Theinvestigations of joint performance have given recommendationsfor the earliest saw-cutting time for joints in concrete roads.An optimisation model is proposed, and presently parts of themodel can be used for economic comparisons between differentalternatives. The proposed model needs further research regardingvaluation of the relationships before the model can be used asa total model. Other areas interesting for further researchare: road lighting design and especially wet pavements, upperbound of sawcutting time for joints and further analysis ofdowel performance.