The evolution of software applications from single desktops to sophisticated cloud-based systems is challenging. In particular, applications that involve massive data sets, such as geospatial applications and data science applications are challenging for domain experts who are suddenly constructing these sophisticated code bases. Relatively new software practices, such as Microservice infrastructure and DevOps, give us an opportunity to improve development, maintenance and efficiency for the entire software lifecycle. Microservices and DevOps have become adopted by software developers in the past few years, as they have relieved many of the burdens associated with software evolution. Microservices is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services. DevOps is a set of practices that automates the processes between software development and IT teams, in order to build, test, and release software faster and increase reliability. Combined with lightweight virtualization solutions, such as containers, this technology will not only improve response rates in cloud-based solutions but also drastically improve the efficiency of software development. This thesis studies two applications that apply Microservices and DevOps within a domain-specific application. The advantages and disadvantages of Microservices architecture and DevOps are evaluated through the design and development on two different platforms---a batch-based cloud system, and a general purpose cloud environment. / Graduate

Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) is an emerging transdiagnostic treatment which aims to attenuate common psychological problems including shame and self-criticism through building compassionate skills. These problems are considered relevant and implicated in the maintenance of eating disorders. Imagery in particular has attracted attention as an important treatment technique for its strong links with memory. The aim of this thesis was to explore the effect of Compassion Focused Imagery (CFI) in women with sub-clinical eating disorder symptoms. Paper 1 is a systematic review of the CFT literature across disorders and in transdiagnostic groups. The main aims of the review were to evaluate the literature, synthesise the content of CFT across studies and provide preliminary effect size calculations. Eighteen articles were identified including clinical and non-clinical, treatment and experimental studies. The current body of evidence includes transdiagnostic samples, eating disorders, psychosis, acquired brain injury, depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), personality disorder, individuals high in self-criticism and those with acne. The review includes a synthesis of intervention content, modalities, training and supervision of CFT within the literature. Strongest evidence was identified within transdiagnostic groups with more limited evidence for CFT within PTSD, personality disorders, acne sufferers and high self-critics. Effect sizes varied from 0-0.9 across shame, self-criticism and self-compassion outcomes. The area is limited by few controlled evaluations and heterogeneous content of interventions. Paper 2 is an experimental study of the effect on CFI in an analogue (sub-clinical) sample of women with elevated levels of eating disorder symptoms. Following baseline assessments measuring shame, self-criticism, self-compassion and stress, anxiety and depression, women with global scores of 2.5 or over on the Eating Disorders Examination Questionnaire (EDE-Q) were randomly allocated to either CFI condition in which they were instructed to create an image of a compassionate other or to a neutral imagery condition which involved creating an image of a neutral object. A third group of individuals with global scores of 1.0 or less on the EDE-Q were recruited for comparison only. Following a practice period of five-to-seven days, participants were assessed a final time. Controlling for baseline scores, significantly greater reductions in shame were reported in the CFI group compared with the neutral imagery group. Increases in self-compassion and decreases in self-criticism and depression, anxiety and stress were favourable in the CFI group compared with those in the neutral imagery group; however, these findings did not reach statistical significance. Compassion focused imagery appeared to be well tolerated within the CFI group. Clinical and theoretical implications and future research directions are discussed. The third chapter offers a reflective discussion on the methodological strengths and weaknesses, clinical and theoretical implications beginning with the systematic review followed by the empirical paper. Chapter 3 concludes with a final section on personal and professional reflections throughout the research process.

The aim of this research thesis was to investigate whether there are any cognitive factors that might influence reported dream colour. This question was prompted by the existence of a period of time in the early 20th century when the majority of people reported having greyscale dreams, and coloured dreaming was treated as an anomaly. On the level of individual differences, age, visual imagery abilities and memory for colour were singled out as the potential contributors to reports of greyscale television and the changes in the methodology of research were preliminarily identified as the possible causes of the historical trends in the colour of dreams, and the first empirical studies in this thesis address these issues. Subsequent studies explored the role of visual imagery ability, and individual differences in cognitive representation and memory in determining the reporting of colour in dreams. Overall a total of seven studies are reported The range of methods employed in these studies was diverse and required the development of new measures of colour memory and visual imagery. Some studies employed diaries to gather dream data and allowed cross-sectional (e.g. age) or cross-cultural comparisons. Others were more laboratory-based and explored data concerning visual memory and imagery performance with diverse dependent measures (e.g. response time data). In addition these studies involved the development of a novel coding scheme for visual dream content. While it was impossible to decisively support or disprove the idea that greyscale dream reports reflect genuine dream experiences, the research carried out for this thesis provided many fascinating insights into the factors that determine how we dream and how we report our dreams, highlighting the role of our cognitive abilities and preferences. Moreover, the studies have uncovered novel ways in which visual imagery preferences shape how we remember and report our experiences. The implications of these findings are important not just for the methodology of dream research, but for the whole field of cognitive and applied psychology

Imagética motora é um processo mental que produz modulações na amplitude dos sinas de eletroencefalogramas em progresso. Os padrões presentes nestas modulações podem ser usados para classificar este processo mental, mas a identificação destes padrões não é uma tarefa trivial, porque eles estão presentes em bandas de frequências que são específicas para cada pessoa. Neste trabalho, apresenta-se um novo método para selecionar as bandas de frequência específicas para cada pessoa baseado na arquitetura do método Filter Bank Common Spatial Pattern. Para selecionar as bandas de frequência mais relevantes para cada pessoa, o método proposto aplica uma busca exaustiva para encontrar o melhor subconjunto de bandas de frequência contendo os padrões mais discriminativos dentro de um espaço de busca restrito a um tamanho fixo para este subconjunto. Esse tamanho é determinado usando validação cruzada e o método Sequential Forward Floating Selection. O método proposto foi avaliado usando a base de dados pública 2b da BCI Competition IV, mostrando melhores resultados do que todos os métodos também avaliados nessa base de dados. / Motor imagery is a mental process that when performed, produces modulations in the amplitude of ongoing electroencephalogram signals. These modulations happen following a series of patterns that can be used to classify this mental process, but the detection of those patterns is not a trivial task, because they occur in frequency bands that are specific for each person. In this work, we present a method to select these subject-specific frequency bands based on the arquitecture of the Filter Bank Common Spatial Pattern approach. To select the most relevant frequency bands for each person, our method uses an exhaustive search to find the best subset of frequency bands containing the most discriminative patterns, but with one restriction, the search space is restricted to find a subset with a fixed number of frequency bands. The number is determined using cross-validation and the Sequential Forward Floating Selection method. We demonstrate that, using the data set 2b of the BCI Competition IV, our method is more accurate than current methods evaluated on the same data set.

Public school teachers face a great amount of stress, and that stress may lead to other adverse health outcomes. This study examined elementary public school teachers' stress levels before and after the use of guided imagery relaxation. Guided by the transactional model of stress and coping as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this research was to evaluate the use of guided imagery as an effective technique in the stress reduction of elementary public school teachers, thus enhancing the learning experience of students and creating healthier public school teachers. Eighty-one teachers (71 women, 10 men) participated in this study by completing the Classroom Appraisal of Resources and Demands Inventory Elementary Version. Several variables were examined including gender, years of experience, and adverse health as related to stress experiences. A repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that guided imagery relaxation was statistically significant in reducing stress levels of public school teachers. These results have implications for positive social change by illuminating the utility of a stress-reduction technique for public school teachers. School administrators and educators may find these results useful in their work to retain talented teachers.

Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) produces spatial images with pixels that, instead of consisting of three colors, consist of hundreds of spectral measurements. Because there are so many measurements for each pixel, analysis of HSI is difficult. Frequently, standard techniques are used to help make analysis more tractable by representing the HSI data in a different manner. This research explores the utility of representing the HSI data in a learned dictionary basis for the express purpose of material identification and classification. Multiclass classification is performed on the transformed data using the RandomForests algorithm. Performance results are reported. In addition to classification, single material detection is considered also. Commonly used detection algorithm performance is demonstrated on both raw radiance pixels and HSI represented in dictionary-learned bases. Comparison results are shown which indicate that detection on dictionary-learned sparse representations perform as well as detection on radiance. In addition, a different method of performing detection, capitalizing on dictionary learning is established and performance comparisons are reported, showing gains over traditional detection methods.

The opioid epidemic in the United States continues to be a national health crisis affecting all populations. From 1999 to 2016, more than half a million people died from drug overdose. Nonpharmacological therapies are underused in nursing practice due to the gap in nurses' baseline knowledge and confidence related to nonpharmacological techniques for pain management. The purpose of this scholarly project was to develop and implement an expert-reviewed, evidence-based education program focused on nonpharmacological techniques for pain management. Participants included 18 registered nurses (RNs) from an orthopedic unit in a large academic medical center. A 45-minute educational session was conducted for RNs. A pre/postquestionnaire, including a 5-point Likert scale on nurses' self-perceived knowledge and confidence in using selected nonpharmacological techniques, was the method of data collection. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The results indicated an increase in nurses' self-perceived knowledge in all nonpharmacological techniques. The most significant increase in knowledge posteducation intervention was guided imagery with an increase of 72% in terms of the response Good. The data analysis indicates that the nurses self-perceived confidence posteducation intervention increased in terms of the response Good by 50 % and response Excellent by 33% demonstrating the efficacy of an evidence- based education program on nonpharmacological techniques. The implications of this project for social change include the empowerment of nurses to provide holistic patient-centered care, opioid sparing in keeping in alignment with patient safety, and the development of an evidence-based program that can be replicated in other settings.

Early in his career, Martin Luther twice published (1516 and 1518) prefaces for the anonymous German work, Eyn deutsch Theologia. In these prefaces, as well as in a number of letters, he repeatedly praised the work. His positive appraisal stemmed from his belief that the work replicated not only the foundational teachings of St. Paul, but was consonant with the Pauline interpretations of St. Augustine and Johannes Tauler. Young Luther found in these authors a consistent metaphor for Christian existence: dying and rising with Christ. This narrative enabled Christians to experience death and resurrection as a future hope, as well as a present existential reality within their lives. Young Luther believed that the varied narratives inherent in late medieval spirituality had placed Christ at the periphery of Christian spirituality rather than at its core. Consequently, he repeatedly sought to correct this misplacement and return Christ to the center of Christian life and piety. This dissertation examines this Pauline metaphor, the contemplative spirituality the young Luther built upon it, and the sixteenth-century reception of this spirituality. Chapter one introduces the project and offers a short survey of the literature on Luther's spirituality. Chapter two reviews contemplation in Scripture, then considers St. Paul's presentation of his metaphor. It also discusses how the contemplative writings of St. Augustine, Tauler, and the Frankfurter (the anonymous author of Eyn deutsch Theologia), made use of this Pauline metaphor. Chapters three and four consider Luther's creative employment of the Pauline narrative in five of his devotional works from 1519: Ein Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligen Leidens Christi, Ein Sermon von der Bereitung zum Sterben, Ein Sermon von dem heiligen hochwürdigen Sakrament der Taufe, Ein Sermon vom Sakrament des Leichnams Christi und von den Brüderschaften, and Tessaradecas Consolatoria pro laborantibus et oneratis. In each case, Luther built upon existing devotional genres, yet altered their contents and/or form by importing the Pauline metaphor. Chapter five inquires into the sixteenth-century reception of these five devotional works. Paying particular attention to interpretative clues left in correspondence, commentaries, marginal notes and illustrations by a number of publishers and translators, it demonstrates that these persons not only perceived of these writings as contemplative devotional exercises, but chose to market them explicitly as such. It would seem that Luther's "theology of the cross" expressed itself in a corresponding spirituality of "death and resurrection." Although this spirituality entailed a specific contemplative progression, it was adaptable to the life circumstances of any Christian. This universality contributed to the popularity of Luther's early spiritual writings. Young Luther's narrative imagery along with the publishers' additional illustrations helped to revise spiritual practices and reshape Christian piety throughout the sixteenth century.

This work concentrates on the topic of remote sensing using a multispectral imag-ing system for water management and agriculture applications. The platform, which is alight-weight inexpensive runway-free unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), namely, AggieAir, ispresented initially. A major portion of this work focuses on the development of a light-weight multispectral imager payload for the AggieAir platform, called GhostFoto. Theimager is band-recongurable, covering both visual red, green, and blue (RGB) and nearinfrared (NIR) spectrum, and interfaced with UAV on-board computer. The developmentof the image processing techniques, which are based on the collected multispectral aerialimages, is also presented in this work. One application is to perform fully autonomous rivertracking for applications such as river water management. Simulation based on aerial mul-tispectral images is done to demonstrate the feasibility of the developed algorithm. Othereort is made to create a systematic method to generate normalized difference vegetationindex (NDVI) using the airborne imagery. The GhostFoto multispectral imaging systembased on AggieAir architecture is proven to be an innovative and useful tool.

The present study used a sample of 171 college students from the University of South Florida to examine the effects of different types of mental practice on dart-throwing performance. This study examined the effects of imagery and video modeling on an immediately following physical task As suspected, the video modeling condition under these circumstances was associated with poorer performance than the imagery and control conditions. The imagery condition, however, resulted in no difference in performance from the control condition. Discussions of the results and future avenues of research (including gender effects) are also mentioned.