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Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program

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https://hdl.handle.net/1853/70802

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Office of Undergraduate Education

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 23

Gender Differences in Spatial Abilities

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) McNulty, Kathleen Patricia

The purpose of this study is to summarize past research concerning gender differences in spatial abilities through the use of a detailed meta-analysis. Many investigators have claimed that there is a significant gender difference in spatial abilities which favors males; however, no study to date has established what is the nature and magnitude of gender differences in spatial abilities across all of the domains that encompass spatial ability. Over 676 articles were reviewed for inclusion within the meta-analysis. Seventy-three articles were considered for statistical analysis after considering the inclusion criteria. The results indicate that males demonstrate greater spatial abilities than females across all of the domains that comprise the ability. Finally, I review the impact of these results in the context of enduring educational and occupational issues regarding gender. Key Words: Gender Differences, Sex Differences, Spatial Abilities
Image Analysis of Acoustically Excited Bluff Body Flames

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Plaks, Dmitriy Vital

This thesis analyzes the effects of various bluff bodies on the downstream flow field. Bluff bodies, for example, those typically found in jet engine augmentors, are objects designed to impede the flow in order to stabilize a flame. The effects of different bluff body shapes (cylindrical and triangular), size (6.35 mm, 9.53 mm, 12.7 mm, and 19.1 mm) and heat release are examined with respect to their influence on downstream vorticity strength, vortex separation distance, and vorticity divergence angle. Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) is used to obtain the velocity field data from which the vorticity field is calculated. The mean flow velocity, U∞ is 2.7 m/s, and the flow is acoustically excited at 300 Hz with a normalized acoustic velocity of u'/U∞ = 0.8. The vorticity divergence angle increases with increasing bluff body size, is not affected by bluff body shape, and has a non-linear correlation with heat release. Downstream vorticity strength is affected by all three parameters (bluff body shape, size and heat release) in a non-linear manner. Vortex separation distance is a function primarily of bluff body size, increasing for larger bodies; however, the separation distance decreases with increasing heat release. Bluff body shape also has an effect on vortex separation distance as the cylindrical bluff body creates a larger separation distance between vortices.
High-Throughput Screening of Antimalarials via Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS)

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Johnson, Kristin R.

The counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals, especially antimalarials, is a well-recognized and growing public health problem. There have been an alarming number of reports of counterfeit antimalarials throughout the world and insufficient regulations and xactivity. Thus there is an urgent need for a rapid and sensitive authentication and screening tool for multiple antimalarials. While many methods have been developed using HPLC, MS, or LC-MS to screen individual antimalarials, no methods are available for the analysis of multiple antimalarial drugs within a single run. In this study, Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) with multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) was used as a selective and rapid way to screen ten common antimalarials. The compounds were first individually analyzed using electrospray ionization mass-spectrometry (ESI-MS). Following this, a corresponding MS/MS spectrum was obtained to enable selection of the optimal unimolecular decay fragmentation ( transition ) of each antimalarial. Finally, these single reaction monitoring (SRM) transitions were combined into a method that utilizes HPLC separation followed by multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) in an ion trap mass analyzer allowing for sequential screening of a mixture of these compounds within a single LC-MS/MS run. This method has both pharmaceutical and medical applications with the capability of providing drug quality control measurements and the detection of many drugs and their metabolites in biological samples.
Age Related Effects of Emotions on Brain Potentials

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Roman, John William

This experiment will use event-related brain potential (ERP) measures to investigate the time course of emotional expression processing across six emotions (happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust, and neutral) in young and older adults. The experiment had participants perform a gender-discrimination task irrelevant to emotion. At frontocentral electrode locations approximately 160ms post stimulus, younger adults demonstrated a greater positivity for fearful faces as compared to neutral faces. Older adults showed no such effect. When presented with emotional expressions younger adults showed early activation at pre-frontal electrodes followed by activation at more posterior electrode sites. This also contrasted with older adults, who demonstrated persistent pre-frontal activations that began around 160ms and persisted until 800ms. Older adults absence of a positivity elicited by fearful expressions relative to neutral expressions and the presence of an increased pre-frontal activation offers some support for the socio-emotional selectivity theory, which holds that older adults use cognitive emotion processes to regulate emotional stimuli.
Learning Behaviors Through Demonstration: Artificial Intelligence for Non-Player Characters in an Interactive Drama

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Amundsen, Thomas Charles

In both the game industry and the academic community, there have not been many attempts to create complete interactive drama systems. I am working with a group that will be the first to undertake this daunting challenge, and one of the most important components in such a system is artificial intelligence (AI) to control the behaviors of non-player characters. Traditional approaches to designing the AI for any kind of interactive game involves designing characters who follow scripted behaviors. This method is cumbersome and amounts to gameplay that is repetitive and thus inhuman. This paper will describe my attempt to design a system that will allow an expert user to demonstrate behaviors to the system, which the system will use to learn how to behave on its own using case-based reasoning. The end result of this work will not only benefit interactive dramas but may help in the design of game AI for other genres of video games or simulations.
Low Static Power and High Throughput Wave-Pipelined Global Interconnect Circuits

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Youngblood, Mark William

This research project will explore a low-power, high-throughput design using high threshold voltage transistors in combination with wave-pipelining techniques across global interconnect circuits.
Stern-Volmer Quenching of Conjugated Polymers: A Study of Fluorophore Concentration

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Vaughns, Christopher Franklin

The purpose of this thesis is to re-examine the independence of Stern Volmer constants on the fluorophore concentration. Conventional theory suggests that Stern-Volmer constants are independent of fluorophore concentration. Using PPEs as fluorophore, the Stern-Volmer constants were obtained for different PPE concentrations quenched with TbCl3. Stern-Volmer constants increased with decreasing PPE concentration.
Evaluating the effectiveness of using touch sensor capacitors as an input device for a wrist watch computer

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Wilson, Gregory

On the go computing is becoming more important for users who wish to access information from anywhere. Wearable computers are an optimal solution to achieving this feat because it allows for easy accessibility and quick use. There are many challenges that arise with small computers worn on the body. One of the most common issues is the interaction between the computer and the user and more specifically how the user enters input. In this paper we research a potential effective way to interact with a wrist watch by mounting touch sensors on the watch band.
Emotion Biases in Older and Younger Adults: Novelty Preference as an Index of Attention

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-12-17) Brauer, Anne Lisa

Past research indicates that emotionally-relevant stimuli attract visual attention, but also that the relationship between emotion and attention allocation varies between young and older adults. Although both young and older adults respond automatically to threatening stimuli, older adults spend more time attending to positive stimuli, while younger adults attend more to all types of emotional stimuli. This age difference is proposed to be an effect of older adults emotion-regulation goals in attention allocation. The present study used eye tracking to establish a sensitive measure of attention novelty preference and to observe the age-disparate effects of emotional valence on overt visual attention over time. Although older and younger adults showed similar novelty preferences to emotional (happy, angry, sad) stimuli compared to neutral and familiar stimuli, the time course of effect varied between the groups. Older adults allocated more attention to negative stimuli in the first few seconds of looking and more toward stimuli near the end of the 10-second looking period, whereas younger adults preferred all emotional stimuli to neutral and to familiar stimuli throughout the looking period. Novelty preference appears to be an effective way to measure differences in preferences for emotional information between age groups.
Undergraduate Research on Robotics

(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2007-11-26) London, Lionel ; Friedman, David ; Bardagjy, Andrew