Student Researchers’ Abstracts College of Business

College of Education

Perceptions and Experiences of Individuals Utilizing the Office of Disability Resources at Purdue University Calumet.

Mentor(s): Emily Hixon

Undergraduate

Poster Presentation

The quality of support services offered by the Office of Disability Resources (ODR), faculty, and staff at Purdue University Calumet (PUC) plays an instrumental part in the development and overall success of students with disabilities. Assessing the perceptions of individuals utilizing the ODR at PUC is an essential part of evaluating current services, addressing potential needs, and understanding experiences of students with disabilities who seek accommodations for their learning. One hundred sixty-six students who are currently utilizing the services of the ODR are being surveyed to determine their perceptions on the following: the accommodation request process, ODR services, experiences with professors, and experiences at PUC as a student with a disability. The findings will be used to better understand the experiences of students with disabilities at PUC, and provide feedback to the ODR as they seek to continually improve their services to meet student needs.

Silencing The Pain: Dark Narratives and Depression in Adolescent Literature

Mentor(s): Mark Letcher and Colette Morrow

Graduate

Poster Presentation

Young readers have been turning the pages through dark narratives about vampires, zombies, wizards, and Knights. They also turned to Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games series to read about teenagers killing one another to survive in a dystopian world. However, some dark narratives deal with real problems adolescents have been facing for decades—depression and suicide. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between the ages of twelve through twenty-four years of age; additionally there are young people who attempt suicide and fail to kill themselves (cdc.gov). Various books in adolescent literature touch on themes of suicide and depression and have made their way into classrooms and the best sellers list. The goal of my research is to prove how the books can raise the consciousness of teenage suicide and attempted suicide in modern day society. The books for the research project will include Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of being a Wallflower, Ned Vizzini’s it’s Kind of a Funny Story, and Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why. These books deal with social issues which cause young people to commit suicide attempts including sexual abuse, bullying, anxiety, and hopelessness. Suicide is a social issue many people avoid.

College of Engineering, Mathematics, and Statistics

HVAC Design

Mentor(s): George Nnanna

Graduate

Oral Presentation

The HVAC design calculations project will be to provide correctly sized heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems for the Net Zero Energy design for green building. We will calculate heating and cooling loads and design the selected HVAC system for the sustaintable building design, while demonstrating compliance with latest editions of ASHRAE Standards 90.1,198.1.

A Robust Bit Modification Audio Steganography for Covert Communication

Mentor(s): Kaliappan Gopalan

Graduate

Oral Presentation

Modification of bit values of samples for data embedding on a cover audio signal has been shown as a viable technique for steganography and watermarking. Data can be embedded in the different specified sample bit index, but it will be related to a tradeoff between viability of the data in the presence of noise, robustness and imperceptibility. While a high threshold of audio sample can carry data at higher bit indices, the robustness can be raised and it can be susceptible to noise even at low levels, with sample amplitudes changed significantly. However too high threshold and bit indices will decrease the secrecy of data and affect the quality of the audio, both detrimental for covert or secure communication. In this research, modification of the high threshold sample embedding is shown to increase noise immunity with correct data retrieval at a lower payload, but without sacrificing indiscernibility. Experimental results using a database of utterances between air traffic controllers and pilots show zero to low bit error rate of hidden data recovery at added noise levels of 60 dB SNR.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging Application

Mentor(s): Bin Chen

Graduate

Oral Presentation

Diseases like Multiple Sclerosis (MS), and mild traumatic brain injury affects many people around the world. However at the same time, there is no single test that can detect these diseases and conditions which makes the diagnosis and treatment for the patients get delayed. Diffusion tensor imaging is a promising technique to detect the lesions in the brain. By using Matlab, C# and Python programming language, this application is able to give user various methods to view the diffusion data including the regular functional MRI, MD and FA value map. In order to make the application more powerful, this application also provides the deep analysis of the data which include the streamlines and the results of the bundled streamlines. If the user has 3D monitor, this application also can provide stereoscopic view of the 3D streamline and bundle results with interlaced mode and red and green mode.

Evaluating the Effects of Noise-induced Cochlear Synaptopathy on Behavioral Thresholds in Chinchillas

Mentor(s): Michael Heinz

Graduate

Oral Presentation

Individuals overexposed to load sounds often have reduced audiometric thresholds and poor speech intelligibility. However, even some people with normal thresholds complain of having difficulties understanding speech in noise. Moderately noise-exposed animals show loss of auditory-nerve synapses on inner hair cells, despite of recovered thresholds. In animals, cochlear synaptopathy selectively affect auditory-nerve fibers, specifically the low-spontaneous-rate fibers. Human studies show evidence that is consistent with the idea of cochlear synaptopathy and difficulties understanding speech in noise with normal thresholds. Based on the contribution of low-spontaneous-rate fibers to coding in noise and temporal-modulation coding at high sound levels (critical for speech perception), this study aims to behaviorally assess the detection abilities of chinchillas in tone-in-noise and sinusoidal-amplitude-modulation tasks. Chinchillas were trained using a positive-reinforcement operant-conditioning paradigm to perform tasks of auditory detection. Results will allow us (in collaboration with colleagues in the UK) to translate our results to human psychoacoustic research and have bettter understanding of hidden hearing loss in humans.