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

: The Aluminium (Al) material emerged as a plasmonic material in the wavelength ranges from the ultraviolet to the visible bands in different on-chip plasmonic applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the effect of using Al on the electromagnetic (EM) field distribution of a compact hybrid plasmonic waveguide (HPW) acting as a polarization rotator. We compare the performance of Al with other familiar metals that are widely used as plasmonic materials, which are Silver (Ag) and Gold (Au). Furthermore, we study the effect of reducing the geometrical dimensions of the used materials on the EM field distributions inside the HPW and, consequently, on the efficiency of the polarization rotation. We perform the study based o

Incremental Sheet Metal Forming (ISMF) is a modern sheet metal forming technology which offers the possibility of manufacturing 3D complex parts of thin sheet metals using the CNC milling machine. The surface quality is a very important aspect in any manufacturing process. Therefore, this study focuses on the resultant residual stresses by forming parameters, namely; (tool shape, step over, feed rate, and slope angle) using Taguchi method for the products formed by single point incremental forming process (SPIF). For evaluating the surface quality, practical experiments to produce pyramid like shape have been implemented on aluminum sheets (AA1050) for thickness (0.9) mm. Three types of tool shape used in this work, the spherical tool ga

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Corona virus sickness has become a big public health issue in 2019. Because of its contact-transparent characteristics, it is rapidly spreading. The use of a face mask is among the most efficient methods for preventing the transmission of the Covid-19 virus. Wearing the face mask alone can cut the chance of catching the virus by over 70\%. Consequently, World Health Organization (WHO) advised wearing masks in crowded places as precautionary measures. Because of the incorrect use of facial masks, illnesses have spread rapidly in some locations. To solve this challenge, we needed a reliable mask monitoring system. Numerous government entities are attempting to make wearing a face mask mandatory; this process can be facilitated by using face m

Voice Activity Detection (VAD) is considered as an important pre-processing step in speech processing systems such as speech enhancement, speech recognition, gender and age identification. VAD helps in reducing the time required to process speech data and to improve final system accuracy by focusing the work on the voiced part of the speech. An automatic technique for VAD using Fuzzy-Neuro technique (FN-AVAD) is presented in this paper. The aim of this work is to alleviate the problem of choosing the best threshold value in traditional VAD methods and achieves automaticity by combining fuzzy clustering and machine learning techniques. Four features are extracted from each speech segment, which are short term energy, zero-crossing rate, auto