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 multi-focus image fusion method can fuse more than one focused image to generate a single image with more accurate description. The purpose of image fusion is to generate one image by combining information from many source images of the same scene. In this paper, a multi-focus image fusion method is proposed with a hybrid pixel level obtained in the spatial and transform domains. The proposed method is implemented on multi-focus source images in YCbCr color space. As the first step two-level stationary wavelet transform was applied on the Y channel of two source images. The fused Y channel is implemented by using many fusion rule techniques. The Cb and Cr channels of the source images are fused using principal component analysis (PCA).

Experimental measurements of viscosity and thermal conductivity of single layer of graphene . based DI-water nanofluid are performed as a function of  concentrations (0.1-1wt%) and temperatures between (5 to 35ºC). The result reveals that the thermal conductivity of GNPs nanofluids was increased with increasing the nanoparticle weight fraction concentration and temperature, while the maximum enhancement was about 22% for concentration of 1 wt.% at
35ºC. These experimental results were compared with some theoretical models and a good agreement between Nan’s model and the experimental results was observed. The viscosity of the graphene nanofluid displays Newtonian and Non-Newtonian behaviors with respect to nanoparticles concen

Baghdad city has been faced numerous issues related to freshwater environment deteriorations due to many reasons, mainly was the discharge of wastewater without adequate treatment. Al-Rustamiya Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) have been constructed among many plants in Baghdad city to reduce the amount of wastewater discharged into natural environment and its subsequent adverse effects. This study was conducted to evaluate the performance of the plant which consist of a conventional activated sludge (CAS) and sequencing batch reactors (SBR) systems as secondary treatment units and its ability to meet Iraqi specifications. A reliability level determination and analysis also were conducted to find the plant's stability an

Four new copolymers were synthesized from reaction of bis acid monomer 3-((4-carboxyphenyl) diazenyl)-5-chloro-2-hydroxybenzoic acid with five diacidhydrazide in presence of poly phosphoric acid. The resulted monomers and copolymers have been characterized by FT-IR, 1H-NMR, 13C-NMR spectroscopy as well as EIMs technique. The number averages of molecular weights of the copolymers are between 4822 and 9144, and their polydispersity indexes are between 1.02 and 2.15. All the copolymers show good thermal stability with the temperatures higher than 305.86 C when losing 10% weight under nitrogen. The cyclic voltammetry (CV) measurement and the electrochemical band gaps (Eg) of these copolymers are found below 2.00 ev.

      Big data usually running in large-scale and centralized key management systems. However, the centralized key management systems are increasing the problems such as single point of failure, exchanging a secret key over insecure channels, third-party query, and key escrow problem. To avoid these problems, we propose an improved certificate-based encryption scheme that ensures data confidentiality by combining symmetric and asymmetric cryptography schemes. The combination can be implemented by using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH). The proposed scheme is an enhanced version of the Certificate-Based Encryption (CBE) scheme and preserves all its advantages. However

Breast cancer is one of the most common malignant diseases among women;
Mammography is at present one of the available method for early detection of
abnormalities which is related to breast cancer. There are different lesions that are
breast cancer characteristic such as masses and calcifications which can be detected
trough this technique. This paper proposes a computer aided diagnostic system for
the extraction of features like masses and calcifications lesions in mammograms for
early detection of breast cancer. The proposed technique is based on a two-step
procedure: (a) unsupervised segmentation method includes two stages performed
using the minimum distance (MD) criterion, (b) feature extraction based on Gray

Anemia is one of the common types of blood diseases, it lead to lack of number of RBCs (Red Blood Cell) and amount hemoglobin level in the blood is lower than normal.
In this paper a new algorithm is presented to recognize Anemia in digital images based on moment variant. The algorithm is accomplished using the following phases: preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification (using Decision Tree), the extracted features that are used for classification are Moment Invariant and Geometric Feature.
The Best obtained classification rates was 84% is obtained when using Moment Invariants features and 74 % is obtained when using Geometric Feature. Results indicate that the proposed algorithm is very effective in detect