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

    In data mining and machine learning methods, it is traditionally assumed that training data, test data, and the data that will be processed in the future, should have the same feature space distribution. This is a condition that will not happen in the real world. In order to overcome this challenge, domain adaptation-based methods are used. One of the existing challenges in domain adaptation-based methods is to select the most efficient features so that they can also show the most efficiency in the destination database. In this paper, a new feature selection method based on deep reinforcement learning is proposed. In the proposed method, in order to select the best and most appropriate features, the essential policies

The aim of this paper is to compare between classical and fuzzy filters for removing different types of noise in gray scale images. The processing used consists of three steps. First, different types of noise are added to the original image to produce a noisy image (with different noise ratios). Second, classical and fuzzy filters are used to filter the noisy image. Finally, comparing between resulting images depending on a quantitative measure called Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) to determine the best filter in each case.
The image used in this paper is a 512 * 512 pixel and the size of all filters is a square window of size 3*3. Results indicate that fuzzy filters achieve varying successes in noise reduction in image compared to

: 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

Several new derivatives of 1,3,4-oxadiazoles and 1,2,4-triazoles linked to 3,4,5,6-tetrachlorophthalimide moiety were synthesized through following multisteps. The first step involved preparation of 3,4,5,6-tetrachlorophthalimide via reaction of 3,4,5,6-tetrachlorophthalic anhydride with urea at high temperature. Treatment of the resulted imide with ethyl chloroacetate in the second step afforded tetrachlorophthalimidyl ester which inturn was introduced in reaction with hydrazine hydrate in the third step, producing the corresponding acetohydrazide. The synthesized acetohydrazide was introduced in different synthetic paths including treatment with phenyl isothiocyanate or reaction with carbon disulfide in alkaline solution then with hydr

The aim of the research is to identify the effectiveness of the educational pillars strategy based on Vygotsky's theory in mathematical achievement and information processing of first-grade intermediate students. In pursuit of the research objectives, the experimental method was used, and the quasi-experimental design was used for two equivalent groups, one control group taught traditionally and the other experi-mental taught according to the educational pillars strategy. The research sample consisted of (66) female students from the first intermediate grade, who were inten-tionally chosen after ensuring their equivalence, taking into account several factors, most notably chronological age and their level of mathematics, and they we

BACKGROUND: The rapidly growing knowledge regarding factors controlling tumour growth, with the new modalities of therapy acting on the biological activity of the tumours draw the attention of most cancer researches nowadays and represent a major focus for clinical oncology practice. For the detection of HER2/neu protein overexpression and gene amplification, immunohistochemistry (IHC) and in-situ hybridisation (ISH) is the recommended techniques, respectively, with high concordance between the two techniques. The current United Kingdom recommendations for HER2/neu testing are either for a two-tier system using IHC with reflex ISH testing in equivocal positive cases, or a one-tier ISH strategy. AIM: To compare the results of HER2/neu gene s

The current study is the identification and isolation dermatophyte species in clinical isolates by both Sabouraud’s Dextrose Agar (SDA) and on Dermatophyte Test Medium (DTM). Clinical specimens of hair, nails and skin scales were collected from patients with dermatophytosis and submitted to direct microscopic examination after immersion in 20% of potassium hydroxide solution. The clinical specimens were cultured on SDA containing chloramphenicol and cycloheximide, and on DTM. Tinea corporis showed the highest prevalent dermatophyte infection among patients (26.7%), followed by Tinea pedis (23.3%), whereas Tinea manuum exhibited the lowest fungal infection (6.7 %). Rural areas revealed the highest prevalence of dermatophyte in