Modern society places an increasingly high demand on data transmission. Much of that data transmission takes place through communication over the frequency spectrum. The channels on the spectrum are limited resources. Researchers realize that at certain times of day some channels are overloaded, while others are not being fully utilized. A spectrum management system may be beneficial to remedy this efficiency issue. One of the proposed systems, Cognitive Radio Network (CRN), has progressed over the years thanks to studies on a wide range of subjects, including geolocation, data throughput rate, and channel handoff selection algorithm, which provide fundamental support for the spectrum management system. To move CRN technology forward, in this thesis we propose a physical, scalable testbed for some of the extant CRN methodologies. This testbed integrates IEEE standards, FCC guidelines, and other TV band regulations to emulate CRN in real time. With careful component selections, we include sufficient operational functionalities in the system, while at the same time making sure it remains affordable. We evaluate the technical feasibility of the testbed by studying several simple CRN logics. When comparing a system with a selection table implemented to those with naive selection methods, there is more than a 60 percent improvement in the overall performance.

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, becoming readily available and affordable, applications for these devices have grown immensely. One type of application is the use of drones to fly over large areas and detect desired entities. For example, a swarm of drones could detect marine creatures near the surface of the ocean and provide users the location and type of animal found. However, even with the reduction in cost of drone technology, such applications result costly due to the use of custom hardware with built-in advanced capabilities. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to compile an easily customizable, low-cost drone design with the necessary hardware for autonomous behavior, swarm coordination, and on-board object detection capabilities. Additionally, this thesis outlines the necessary network architecture to handle the interconnection and bandwidth requirements of the drone swarm. The drone on-board system uses a PixHawk 4 flight controller to handle flight mechanics, a Raspberry Pi 4 as a companion computer for general-purpose computing power, and a NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit to perform object detection in real-time. The implemented network follows the 802.11s standard for multi-hop communications with the HWMP routing protocol. This topology allows drones to forward packets through the network, significantly extending the flight range of the swarm. Our experiments show that the selected hardware and implemented network can provide direct point-to-point communications at a range of up to 1000 feet, with extended range possible through message forwarding. The network also provides sufficient bandwidth for bandwidth intensive data such as live video streams. With an expected flight time of about 17 minutes, the proposed design offers a low-cost drone swarm solution for mid-range aerial surveillance applications.

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In this exploratory thesis project, I consider what emerging approaches we can take as social scientists to showcase and critically engage self-representations of diasporic individuals, who often lack visibility and legibility within the dominant cultural archive. Filmmaking as a social research practice can provide rich audiovisual data, physical and social access to materials for nonacademics, and opportunities to document and share subjects' comments and settings without the limitations of transcription. This is especially salient in the emerging media landscape of Web 2.0, where digital communications technology applications (such as Facebook, Skype, and Snapchat) are accessible by a global audience, and can act as tools for cultural identity production by diasporic individuals. This project documents the experiences of several first- and second-generation Bangladeshi American immigrants in relation to digital communications technology advances within the past decade, for the purposes of collecting and sharing stories of diasporic individuals, offering a venue for self-expression through empathetic interviewing and collaborative oral history methods, and contributing to the American cultural archive in the context of emerging media and academic landscapes. The full project is comprised of this text document, alongside a short documentary film containing portions of audiovisual data from interviews which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oh9puazpdrw. / Master of Science

Anomaly detection in Internet of Things (IoT) systems has become an increasingly popular field of research as the number of IoT devices proliferate year over year. Recent research often relies on machine learning algorithms to classify sensor readings directly. However, this approach leads to solutions being non-portable and unable to be applied to varying IoT platform infrastructure, as they are trained with sensor data specific to one configuration. Moreover, sensors generate varying amounts of non-standard data which complicates model training and limits generalization. This research focuses on addressing these problems in three ways a) the creation of an IoT Testbed which is configurable and parameterizable for dataset generation, b) the usage of system performance metrics as the dataset for training the anomaly classifier which ensures a fixed dataset size, and c) the application of Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (SAX) to encode patterns in system performance metrics which allows our trained Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to classify anomalies agnostic to the underlying system configuration. Our devised IoT Testbed provides a lightweight setup for data generation which directly reflects some of the most pertinent components of Industry 4.0 pipelines including a MQTT Broker, Apache Kafka, and Apache Cassandra. Additionally, our proposed solution provides improved portability over state-of-the-art models while standardizing the required training data. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing symbolized performance metrics as we were able to achieve accuracies of 95.87%, 87.33%, and 87.47% for three different IoT system configurations. The latter two accuracies represent the model’s ability to be generalized to datasets generated from differing system configurations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to gain traction and is increasingly reshaping the media and marketing communications field. While significant research has been conducted on the impact of AI in other fields, there is little empirical evidence on how AI is affecting the customer journey. The present study explored both organizations’ current use of AI tools and how customer perceptions about AI affect AI usage and adoption through the lens of diffusion of innovation theory. The research was conducted using mixed-method qualitative research. In-depth interviews and a case study content analysis were conducted to collect and analyze the data. The results suggest that consumer perceptions about AI impact levels of adoption when AI is recognized, but there appears to be cognitive dissonance regarding what constitutes AI and complicit acceptance of some of its benefits. Companies in different geographical locations have different levels of AI adoption along the diffusion of innovation stages.

My intention for this show is to explore the effect of alienation that ironically is being produced by social media. The principal concept is developed around shame, sharing, and notoriety on three different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and Telegram. This show explores the social media perception of myself in the realms of human interaction, identity, and memory in social media through the critical appropriation of the languages of design and photography. The installation with four Facebook profile pictures in large scale and framed looks at the way a personal image can convey the impression of widely different personalities. The selections of personal exchanges over Facebook and Instagram show the degree to which social media creates its own visual language and mode of communication, which sometimes becomes separated from reality and intention. The show extends its reach to performance and direct interaction with the viewer through the availability of stickers for comments by the profile pictures and a third area, where viewers can write or draw their own messages through the simple medium of chalk, which can then be rendered in virtual form through posts on a specially created webpage. The viewer should thus be challenged to ask, to what degrees do words and images communicate the essence of our selves and our own will. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Time Average Fourier Telescopy (TAFT) has been proposed as a means for obtaining high-resolution, diffraction-limited images over large distances through ground-level horizontal-path atmospheric turbulence. Image data is collected in the spatial-frequency, or Fourier, domain by means of Fourier Telescopy; an inverse two dimensional Fourier transform yields the actual image. TAFT requires active illumination of the distant object by moving interference fringe patterns. Light reflected from the object is collected by a “light-bucket” detector, and the resulting electrical signal is digitized and subjected to a series of signal processing operations, including an all-critical averaging of the amplitude and phase of a number of narrow-band signals. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-06-15T12:34:02Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Mariana Leonhardt Hallage.pdf: 4649504 bytes, checksum: 73447bf4b5dfd8e3f3979822307c794c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-06-15T12:34:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mariana Leonhardt Hallage.pdf: 4649504 bytes, checksum: 73447bf4b5dfd8e3f3979822307c794c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-03 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / This study intends to understand how fashion brands keep their strategies of branding and its own stories, while being internet’s social agents, through real time communication in digital social medias. The analysis is based by the view of the conflicting dynamic between the need showed by brands to be always visible and the scheduled volatility of images and videos produced in the cyberspace, particularly in social medias which its premise surrounds the idea of producing content units that lasts in visibility only for only day after being created and started its disclosure. To achieve this main reflection of thoughts, we intend to analyze the ephemeral audiovisual content production that three brands, being in the market as fast-fashions, besides of observing how they hand with their own image complexities by passing information of branding for volatile images. The logic of digital communication in real time and the one of fashion system are incredibly like each other, in terms of language and expressions of the needs of these brands, which will be also included here, in conclusion of this study. It will be elaborated case studies analyzing the brands C&A Brasil, Forever21 and Topshop, in their activities on digital social medias Snapchat and Instagram Stories, by collecting sixty days of image production. Talking about results, we could found content units which helps on the creation of a singular narrative strategy for each brand, maintaining their media visibility to their spectators / O presente estudo busca entender como algumas marcas de moda reiteram suas narrativas, enquanto agentes sociais na internet, através da comunicação em tempo real nas redes sociais digitais. A análise é balizada tendo em vista a dinâmica conflitante entre a necessidade que possuem, de estarem sempre visíveis, e a volatilidade programada das imagens e vídeos produzidos no ciberespaço, especificamente em redes sociais digitais, cuja premissa é que se produzam unidades de conteúdo, que durem por até um dia após o início de sua veiculação. Para atingir essa principal reflexão, analisa-se a produção de conteúdo audiovisual efêmero que três marcas em regime fast-fashion elaboraram, além de observar como lidam com complexidades imagéticas, na passagem de informação de imagem de marca para imagens voláteis. As lógicas de comunicação digital em tempo real e do sistema de moda apresentam pontos de convergência e similaridades, em termos de linguagem e expressão dos anseios dos agentes do mercado, que também serão abordados na dissertação. A análise dos dados percorre sessenta dias das marcas C&A Brasil, Forever 21 e Topshop, nas redes sociais digitais Snapchat e Instagram Stories, avaliando suas produções imagéticas. Como resultados, são evidenciados conteúdos que visam criar estrategicamente algumas narrativas, para auxiliarem as marcas na construção de uma imagem própria, singular

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-08-09T12:32:41Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Paula Teixeira Guimarães Jardim.pdf: 6666761 bytes, checksum: 33e89de5a090c67b62e49975ae5bc403 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-09T12:32:41Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Ana Paula Teixeira Guimarães Jardim.pdf: 6666761 bytes, checksum: 33e89de5a090c67b62e49975ae5bc403 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-06-29 / In the context of network cultures and transmissive communication processes, there is an increasing number of online programs and platforms that are designed to create spaces for conversation. Several of these projects are integrated systems that seek to assist their readers, spectators and followers in overcoming existential problems and thus, adopt motivational discourses. The present master 's research has as objective to carry out a cartography of the social imaginary constituted from the dialogues and the narratives of hope that circulate around a program of Catholic religious television. The corpus of analysis is composed of the transmissive discourses made by the production and presentation of the program and the testimonies sent by viewers via social networks. The theoretical foundation is composed by: Jung (relations between the idea of "hope" and the discourses of religions); Paulo Freire, (concept of hope as persistence); and Lucia Leão (network culture, cartography of the imaginary, method and processes of communication in transmedia). The research method involved: (1) bibliographic research; (2) empirical research composed of surveys of social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; and (3) organization and analysis of the data according to the mapping method of narrative imagery. As a result, we have listed: (1) a review of the state of the art on the understanding of the idea of hope in digital social network discourses; (2) development of a system for collecting and mapping data from discourses in social networks; and (3) application, exercise and creation of a mapping of the data collected / No contexto das culturas em redes e dos processos comunicacionais transmidiáticos, observa-se a presença de uma crescente quantidade de programas e plataformas online que têm por objetivo criar espaços de conversação. Vários desses projetos são sistemas integrados que buscam auxiliar seus leitores, espectadores e seguidores na superação de problemas existenciais e, assim, adotam discursos motivacionais. A presente pesquisa de mestrado tem como objetivo realizar uma cartografia do imaginário social constituído a partir dos diálogos e das narrativas de esperança que circulam em torno de um programa de televisão religioso católico. O corpus de análise é composto pelos discursos transmidiáticos realizados pela produção e apresentação do programa e pelos testemunhos enviados por telespectadores via redes sociais. A fundamentação teórica é composta por: Jung (relações entre a ideia de “esperança” e os discursos das religiões); Paulo Freire (conceito de esperança como persistência); e Lucia Leão (cultura das redes, cartografia do imaginário, método e processos de comunicação em transmídia). O método de pesquisa envolveu: (1) pesquisa bibliográfica; (2) pesquisa empírica composta por levantamento dos discursos nas plataformas de redes sociais, como Facebook, Twitter e Instagram; e (3) organização e análise dos dados segundo o método de cartografia do imaginário das narrativas. Como resultados alcançados, listamos: (1) revisão do estado da arte sobre o entendimento da ideia de esperança nos discursos das redes sociais digitais; (2) desenvolvimento de um sistema de coleta e mapeamento de dados dos discursos nas redes sociais e (3) aplicação, exercício e criação de uma cartografia dos dados coletados