Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item HERE I AM: AN EXPLORATION OF VIRTUAL LIVE PERFORMANCE(2021) Bennett, Jeremy Donnell; Mezzocchi, Jared; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis is a series of observations and explorations documenting my experiences as both an artistic collaborator and contributor of the Davis Performing Arts Center at Georgetown University’s production of Here I Am. The production opened April 15th, 2021 as a virtual live performance streamed through YouTube. Here I Am was an original performance by Mélisande (Meli) Short-Colomb with direction by Derek Goldman and Nikkole Salter, music composition and vocal performance by Somi Kakoma, multimedia design by Jared Mezzocchi, sound design by Andre Pluess and lighting design by Alberto Segarra.Item READING IN PRINT AND DIGITALLY: PROFILING AND INTERVENING IN UNDERGRADUATES’ MULTIMODAL TEXT PROCESSING, COMPREHENSION, AND CALIBRATION(2019) Singer Trakhman, Lauren Melissa; Alexander, Patricia A; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)As a consequence of today’s rapid-paced society and ever-changing technologies, students are frequently called upon to process texts in print and digitally. Further, multimodal texts are standard in textbooks and foundational to learning. Nonetheless, little is understood about the effects of reading multimodal texts in print or digitally. In Study I, the students read weather and soil passages in print and digitally. These readings were taken from an introductory geology textbook that incorporated various graphic displays. While reading, novel data-gathering measures and procedures were used to capture real-time behaviors. As students read in print, their behaviors were recorded by a GoPro@ camera and tracked by the movement of a pen. When reading digitally, students’ actions were recorded by Camtasia@ Screen Capture software and by the movement of the screen cursor used to indicate their position in the text. After reading, students answered comprehension questions that differ in specificity (i.e., main idea to key concepts) that cover content from three sources: text only; visual only; and, both text and visual. Finally, after reading in each medium, undergraduates rated their performance on the comprehension measure on a scale of 0-100 for each passage. The accuracy of these ratings formed the basis of the calibration score. The processing data were analyzed using Latent Class Analysis. In Study II, an intervention aimed at improving students’ comprehension and calibration when reading digitally were introduced to participants from Study I who returned to the lab about two weeks later. Next, the undergraduates repeated the procedure for digital reading outlined in Study I with a passage on volcanoes. In Study I, students performed better when reading in print and spent more time with the text but were better calibrated when reading digitally. Three clusters were identified for the print data, and three clusters were identified for the digital data. Cluster movement across mediums suggests that some participants treat digital texts differently than when reading in print. After the intervention in Study II, comprehension scores and duration increased but calibration accuracy scores worsened. The LCA revealed three clusters, each showing improvement in processing behaviors, comprehension, or reading duration.Item EURYDICE: AN EXPLORATION OF PROJECTION DESIGN IDEAS AND PROCESS FOR THE UNIVERSTIY OF MARYLAND’S DEPARTMENT OF THEATRE, DANCE AND PERFORMING STUDIES, 2018 PRODUCTION(2018) Costello, Mark Alan; Kachman, Misha; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The following thesis navigates the artistic ideas and concepts, design process, and execution of Mark Costello’s projections design for the University of Maryland’s production of Eurydice. The production opened February 9, 2018 in the Kay Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The play was written by Sarah Ruhl and directed by Mitchell Hébert. Matthew Buttrey designed set, Peter Leibold designed lighting, B. Benjamin Weigel designed costumes, and Matthew Nielson designed sound.Item Resiliency Assessment and Enhancement of Intrinsic Fingerprinting(2012) Chuang, Wei-Hong; Wu, Min; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Intrinsic fingerprinting is a class of digital forensic technology that can detect traces left in digital multimedia data in order to reveal data processing history and determine data integrity. Many existing intrinsic fingerprinting schemes have implicitly assumed favorable operating conditions whose validity may become uncertain in reality. In order to establish intrinsic fingerprinting as a credible approach to digital multimedia authentication, it is important to understand and enhance its resiliency under unfavorable scenarios. This dissertation addresses various resiliency aspects that can appear in a broad range of intrinsic fingerprints. The first aspect concerns intrinsic fingerprints that are designed to identify a particular component in the processing chain. Such fingerprints are potentially subject to changes due to input content variations and/or post-processing, and it is desirable to ensure their identifiability in such situations. Taking an image-based intrinsic fingerprinting technique for source camera model identification as a representative example, our investigations reveal that the fingerprints have a substantial dependency on image content. Such dependency limits the achievable identification accuracy, which is penalized by a mismatch between training and testing image content. To mitigate such a mismatch, we propose schemes to incorporate image content into training image selection and significantly improve the identification performance. We also consider the effect of post-processing against intrinsic fingerprinting, and study source camera identification based on imaging noise extracted from low-bit-rate compressed videos. While such compression reduces the fingerprint quality, we exploit different compression levels within the same video to achieve more efficient and accurate identification. The second aspect of resiliency addresses anti-forensics, namely, adversarial actions that intentionally manipulate intrinsic fingerprints. We investigate the cost-effectiveness of anti-forensic operations that counteract color interpolation identification. Our analysis pinpoints the inherent vulnerabilities of color interpolation identification, and motivates countermeasures and refined anti-forensic strategies. We also study the anti-forensics of an emerging space-time localization technique for digital recordings based on electrical network frequency analysis. Detection schemes against anti-forensic operations are devised under a mathematical framework. For both problems, game-theoretic approaches are employed to characterize the interplay between forensic analysts and adversaries and to derive optimal strategies. The third aspect regards the resilient and robust representation of intrinsic fingerprints for multiple forensic identification tasks. We propose to use the empirical frequency response as a generic type of intrinsic fingerprint that can facilitate the identification of various linear and shift-invariant (LSI) and non-LSI operations.Item Behavior Modeling and Forensics for Multimedia Social Networks(2009) Lin, Wan-Yi; Liu, K.J. Ray; Electrical Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Within the past decades, the explosive combination of multimedia signal processing, communications and networking technologies has facilitated the sharing of digital multimedia data and enabled pervasive digital media distribution over all kinds of networks. People involved in the sharing and distribution of multimedia contents form \emph{multimedia social networks} in which users share and exchange multimedia content, as well as other resources. Users in a multimedia social network have different objectives and influence each other's decision and performance. It is of ample importance to understand how users interact with and respond to each other and analyze the impact of human factors on multimedia systems. This thesis illustrates various aspects of issues and problems in multimedia social networks via two case studies of human behavior in multimedia fingerprinting and peer-to-peer live streaming. Since media security and content protection is a major issue in current multimedia systems, this thesis first studies the user dynamics of multimedia fingerprinting social networks. We investigate the side information which improves the traitor-tracing performance and provide the optimal strategies for both users (fingerprint detector and the colluders) in the multimedia fingerprinting social network. Furthermore, before a collusion being successfully mounted, the colluders must be stimulated to cooperate with each other and all colluders have to agree on the attack strategy. Therefore, not all types of collusion are possible. We reduce the possible collusion set by analyzing the incentives and bargaining behavior among colluders. We show that the optimal strategies designed based on human behavior can provide more information to the fingerprint detector and effectively improve the collusion resistance. The second part of this thesis focuses on understanding modelling and analyzing user dynamics for users in various types of peer-to-peer live streaming social networks. We stimulate user cooperation by designing the optimal, cheat-proof, and attack-resistant strategies for peer-to-peer live streaming social networks over Internet as well as wireless networks. Also, as more and more smart-phone users subscribe to the live-streaming service, a reasonable market price has to be set to prevent the users from reselling the live video. We start from analyzing the equilibrium between the users who want to resell the video and the potential buyers to provide the optimal price for the content owner.Item Geographies of Violence. Contemporary Chronicles of Violence in the Americas(2005-05-06) Beroiz, Luciana; Peres, Phyllis; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation analyzes the works of contemporary artists from the Americas who produce representations of urban violence through multi-media chronicles. The chroniclers studied are the Chilean Pedro Lemebel, the Brazilians Paulo Lins, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, and the U.S. Latinos Joseph Rodríguez, Rubén Martínez, and Luis Rodríguez. The texts produced by these artists not only represent and explain contemporary geographies of violence but also become geographies of violence that audiences need to learn to inhabit and traverse. This dissertation addresses how the chronicle, in particular, articulates violence, identifies the advantages of using this genre to represent urban violence, considers how existing geographies of violence are distributed within the city and discusses how relevant the notion of space is to both their material development and manifestation and their symbolic presence through the chronicle. The comparative textual analysis of the selected chronicles demonstrates how violence is understood and represented by contemporary artists with different backgrounds and exposes the differences and similarities of their representations. Reading these chroniclers comparatively enables the consideration of a variety of different media through which violence is expressed in order to determine how the choices made by the artists affect the reception of their works. Such analysis allows an in-depth study of what these artists do with the genre of the chronicle: first, how having chosen the chronicle affects their particular renditions of violence; second, how the chronicle as a genre is affected by the specific content of urban violence; and, ultimately, how the chronicle is redefined by specific aesthetic manipulations. Finally, because each of the chroniclers selected for this study engages in translation practices, either as translators of their own work or as translators of other artists' work, this dissertation considers how their representations of urban violence are affected when they "travel" across a variety of media-- that is, not only how the choice of media shapes these artists' representation of urban violence and their manipulation of the chronicle but also how their translation or transference from one medium to another impacts on their original representation of violence.