The inspiration for my undergraduate body of work is derived from my fascination with Henri Matisse, Jacob Lawrence, and the Impressionists. I suddenly became captivated with the Impressionist movement and the independence of abstraction. I set into motion a series of paintings and drawings featuring random African-Americans and African society representatives in vibrant color and abstracting forms, and was specifically concerned with altering the form outside of the realistic area. While in graduate school, I began to think about how the transformation from realism to abstraction combined with the conception of mortal to the immortal. I worked through ideas to see exactly where these views began, and where they would take me as an artist. Almost immediately I experimented with random figures found specifically in the N'debele culture in South Africa. In addition, I incorporated abstraction and expressive marks within the figure and slowly introduced cut paper, flat imagery and abstraction with the realistic figure. This became very challenging but I was determined to unite these ideas successfully. More recently, my work has concentrated on the essential elements that have influenced my work as an artist, which recedes to childhood. The main elements most prevalent within the work is rhythm …

As Virtual Environments (VE) become a more commonly used method of interaction and presentation, supporting users as they navigate and interact with scenarios presented in VE will be a significant issue. A key step in understanding the needs of users in these situations will be observing them perform representative tasks in a fully developed environment. In this paper, we describe the development of a test bed for interactive narrative in a virtual environment. The test bed was specifically developed to present multiple, simultaneous sequences of events (scenarios or narratives) and to support user navigation through these scenarios. These capabilities will support the development of multiple users testing scenarios, allowing us to study and better understand the needs of users of narrative VEs.

A large number of applications like multi-player games, video conferencing, chat groups and network management are presently based on multicast communication. As the group communication model is being deployed for mainstream use, it is critical to provide security mechanisms that facilitate confidentiality, authenticity and integrity in group communications. Providing security in multicast communication requires addressing the problem of scalability in group key distribution. Scalability is a concern in group communication due to group membership dynamics. Joining and leaving of members requires the distribution of a new session key to all the existing members of the group. The two approaches to key management namely centralized and distributed approaches are reviewed. A hybrid solution is then provided, which represents a improved scalable and robust approach for a secure multicast framework. This framework then is implemented in an example application of a multicast news service.

This problem in lieu of thesis report describes a practical photolithographic method to produce micro patterns on metal-oxide-semiconductor or metal-oxide-semiconductor-metal layers for electrical measurements. The desired patterns are then transferred from the photo mask to the photoresist-coated metal film by exposure, followed by wet etching. In the procedure described in this report, it was observed that microstructures as small as 27 mm with an edge roughness of ~ 2 mm can be reproducibly generated with this process. MOS capacitors and transistors structures can be fabricated by using this technique. The method described in this report requires access to only simple facilities so that it is relatively inexpensive, and the overall time required for the whole process is short.

Policy makers and households are concerned about the impact of rising energy prices on low-income households. In a trend starting in the 1970s, low-income households are spending an increasingly disproportionate share of their income on home energy. The burden on a household imposed by energy prices can be analyzed through four factors: energy price, energy consumption, income level, and level of assistance provided to help with the costs of energy. The combination of these factors indicates that the energy burden is continuing to be disproportionately large for the nation's poor. Therefore, policy makers make further efforts to alleviate this burden by modifying energy pricing regulation.

Streaming multimedia content with UDP has become popular over distributed systems such as an Internet. This may encounter many losses due to dropped packets or late arrivals at destination since UDP can only provide best effort delivery. Even UDP doesn't have any self-recovery mechanism from congestion collapse or bursty loss to inform sender of the data to adjust future transmission rate of data like in TCP. So there is a need to incorporate various control schemes like forward error control, interleaving, and congestion control and error concealment into real-time transmission to prevent from effect of losses. Loss can be repaired by retransmission if roundtrip delay is allowed, otherwise error concealment techniques will be used based on the type and amount of loss. This paper implements the interleaving technique with packet spacing of varying interleaver block size for protecting real-time data from loss and its effect during transformation across the Internet. The packets are interleaved and maintain some time gap between two consecutive packets before being transmitted into the Internet. Thus loss of packets can be reduced from congestion and preventing loss of consecutive packets of information when a burst of several packets are lost. Several experiments have been conducted with …