The impact of undergraduate research experiences on students' academic development and retention in STEM fields is significant. Students' success in STEM fields is based on developing strong research and critical thinking skills that make it essential for students to engage in research activities throughout their academic programs. This work evaluates the effectiveness of undergraduate research experiences with respect to its influence on student retention and academic development. The cases presented are based on years of experience implementing undergraduate research programs in various STEM fields at Colorado State University Pueblo (CSU Pueblo) funded by HSI STEM Grants. The study seeks to establish a correlation between students' reten

Thermal performance of closed wet cooling tower has been investigated experimentally and theoretically
in this work. The theoretical model based on heat and mass transfer equations and heat and mass transfer balance equations which are established for steady state case. A new small indirect cooling tower was used for conducting experiments. The cooling capacity of cooling tower is 1 kW for an inlet water temperature of 38oC, a water mass velocity 2.3 kg/m2.s and an air wet bulb temperature of 26oC. This study investigates the relationship between saturation efficiency, cooling capacity and coefficient of performance of closed wet cooling tower versus different operating parameters such wet-bulb temperature, variable air-spray water fl

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a distinctive form of Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) that has attracted increasing research attention recently. The purpose of this study is to comprehensively investigate the elements constituting a VANET system and to address several challenges that have to be overcome to enable a reliable wireless communications within a vehicular environment. Furthermore, the study undertakes a survey of the taxonomy of existing VANET routing protocols, with particular emphasis on the strengths and limitations of these protocols in order to help solve VANET routing issues. Moreover, as mobile users demand constant network access regardless of their location, this study seeks to evaluate various mobility models for vehi

Merging biometrics with cryptography has become more familiar and a great scientific field was born for researchers. Biometrics adds distinctive property to the security systems, due biometrics is unique and individual features for every person. In this study, a new method is presented for ciphering data based on fingerprint features. This research is done by addressing plaintext message based on positions of extracted minutiae from fingerprint into a generated random text file regardless the size of data. The proposed method can be explained in three scenarios. In the first scenario the message was used inside random text directly at positions of minutiae in the second scenario the message was encrypted with a choosen word before ciphering

In this paper, the error distribution function is estimated for the single index model by the empirical distribution function and the kernel distribution function. Refined minimum average variance estimation (RMAVE) method is used for estimating single index model. We use simulation experiments to compare the two estimation methods for error distribution function with different sample sizes, the results show that the kernel distribution function is better than the empirical distribution function.

Secure information transmission over the internet is becoming an important requirement in data communication. These days, authenticity, secrecy, and confidentiality are the most important concerns in securing data communication. For that reason, information hiding methods are used, such as Cryptography, Steganography and Watermarking methods, to secure data transmission, where cryptography method is used to encrypt the information in an unreadable form. At the same time, steganography covers the information within images, audio or video. Finally, watermarking is used to protect information from intruders. This paper proposed a new cryptography method by using thre