2017 Student Project Showcase

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The 2017 Student Project Showcase was held on April 21, 2017 from 1-4 pm in the Cayan Library. The Showcase featured over 40 projects from a variety of disciplines and programs.

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    Field-Enhanced Near-Infrared Reflector (NIR) as Smart Glass for Solar Panels
    (2017-04) Altwerger, Mark; Gherasoiu, Iulian; Efstathiadis, Harry
    Solar panels are ensembles of solar cells that convert solar light into electricity. During the operation, the temperature of the solar panel can reach as much as 900C. With each degree centigrade the conversion efficiency of the solar generator decreases by 0.46%. Thus, in a hot summer day, the power generated can decrease by as much as 30%. Therefore the development of a versatile and robust, metamaterial that can reflect near infrared heat radiation (NIR) in the range 0.7-2.5 μm while transmitting more than 90% of the visible light intensity is highly desirable. Metal oxides can be used to manage the light reflectance over the long wavelength range. However, to obtain high reflectivity starting at shorter wavelengths, the doping concentration of the metal oxide has to be increased above the level of 1x1021/cm3. At these concentrations the dopant incorporates not only substitutionally but large amounts will also be found interstitially. Interstitial dopants have been shown to produce carriers with heavier effective mass, decreased mobility, and deeper donor states that significantly decrease the transmittance. Ultimately substitutional dopants degrade the crystallinity of the host material, generating compensating defects that limit the achievable carrier density. The metamaterial that we propose is a robust, thin film structure that has the ability to reflect near infrared heat radiation (NIR) with λ>1.1 μm while transmitting more than 90% of the visible light intensity. To circumvent the need for excessive dopant incorporation we have designed a structure that alternates insulating and conducting layers of silicon dioxide (SiO2) and silicon doped zinc oxide film (ZnO:Si). This structure is deposited by magnetron sputtering from Si and ZnO targets at low temperature. The ability to reflect NIR and transmit selected wavelength rage is obtained through the field-enhanced electron concentration of the moderately doped ZnO thin film at the dielectric/ZnO:Si interface. Solar panel’s glass covered with this thin film can achieve the radiative cooling of the solar cells without interfering with the conversion into electricity of the photons with wavelengths shorter than 1.1 μm.
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    Are You Flying Under The Radar?.... Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Health
    (2017-04) Clement-O’Brien, Karen; Knuijt, Kristen; Guzda, Malgorzata T.; Springall, Kristi
    The purpose of this poster is to promote mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) well-being in the young adult population of Onondaga County Community. Goals are to recognize resources in the Onondaga Community which can be accessed to assist with the prevention and promotion of mental health, to explain coping strategies which can be utilized to manage periods of increasing stress or anxiety, and to describe an action plan for a person who requires assistance to keep them safe and free of escalating behaviors. MEB is essential to well-being. The incidence of young people affected by MEB disorders is one in five nationally. About three-fourths of all MEB disorders are diagnosed between the ages of 14 – 24 years which includes conduct disorders, depression, and substance abuse. According to the New York State Prevention Agenda – Promote Mental Health and Prevent Substance Abuse Action Plan 2017 and the Onondaga County Indicators for Tracking Public Health Priority Areas, the Onondaga County scores higher than the New York State percentage for the mental health and substance abuse indicators (Onondaga County Public Health (2017). Methods are to assess the Onondaga County for community programs and opportunities to promote a reduction in MEB, identify strategies to promote a reduction in suicide among young adults, and to identify strategies to assist the young adult to assess their MEB health. Results are to engage learners in a participatory learning activity at the poster display, survey the learner for their rating of knowledge pre- and post activity, and distribute a “pocket guide” of resources & strategies for future reference. Conclusions are that MEB disorders can be prevented, according to the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine (New York State Department of Health, 2016). Best opportunities to improve mental health of the public are interventions delivered before a disorder manifests itself and prevent the disorder in the first place. Young adults of Onondaga County will leave the poster presentation with strategies to assist with MEB in the future.
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    Comparing Linux Firewalls
    (SUNY Polytechnic Institute, 2017-04) Schuettinger, Jesse
    A firewall is a requirement for enterprise-level organizations and is recommended in any network environment. In some cases, a firewall may be necessary, but purchasing a hardware firewall might be out of the scope of the organization’s budget. In this case, depending on the amount of traffic that is expected to traverse the network, an existing unused desktop computer or rack mounted server could become the hardware firewall, reducing the overall cost of the firewall protection. This can be accomplished with a Linux-Based Firewall Operating System. So, to determine what firewall is a best fit for the network, I created a series of tests. These tests will provide comparable data in both an unconfigured and configured firewall environment. With this information, we can better determine which Linux-Based Firewall Operating System would be best for our needs. To compare these firewalls in detail, I decided to test the throughput and latency, determine if the firewall is stateful or stateless, and to see if it can withstand a common attack. To test throughput and latency, I extrapolated the output that iperf gives into a bash script, which outputs a csv file. To determine if a firewall is stateful or stateless, I extrapolated the percentage that wily-possum.py outputs into another csv file. The higher the percentage, the more likely the firewall is stateless. To see if the firewall can withstand a xmas tree attack, I created a script that will capture packets while an all-port xmas nmap scan is running. During that capture, the packets are being filtered out to find a response packet holding certain flags in their headers. The script will then determine if those packets existed, and if so, the attack was successful. With these three scripts in mind, we run them under the baseline network, according to the topology. Then, run these scripts again through one non-configured firewall at a time. Then, run the scripts one last time through these firewalls, but with the added configurations. After all these tests are complete, the numerical and graphical data resulting from the output files will help determine which firewall performs best. Ipfire was designed with security as a very high priority. Doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but ipfire does take their security very seriously. In my experiment, and based on their website, this open-sourced firewall implicitly blocks practically anything that tries to establish a connection from the outside. Ipcop is like ipfire, but it is geared towards SOHO environments. Making it one of the most user-friendly open-sourced firewalls available. Out of all three firewalls I’ve chosen for this experiment, ClearOS was “clearly” the outlier of the bunch. After playing around with this one, I had the impression that there wasn’t a command line interface associated with this build. It has an interactive menu that can be accessed directly, and has a user-friendly web interface as well. After some research and further interaction, I discovered that there is a command line. So, I could implement the configurations into the system.
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    Putative Role for METTL1 in Human Gliobastoma
    (2017-04) Seaman, Jessica; Endres, Lauren
    Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a deadly cancer affecting the late adult and elderly population. Although GBM can be subdivided into a number of distinct types, aberrant methylation effects define certain subtypes, such as the glioblastoma CpG island methylator phenotype (G-CIMP) subtype, and more recently, the proneural subtype. In GBM as a whole, gene amplification of methyltransferases – enzymes that catalyze the transfer of a -CH3 methyl group to nucleic acids - are a common theme. This type of gene amplification event leads to hyper-activity of the enzyme, and contributes to the methylator phenotype; however, the role that the methylator phenotype plays in GBM not completely understood. Here we mined cancer genome datasets for alterations of methyltransferases that target the nucleic acid, transfer RNA (tRNA). METTL1 was identified as the highest amplified tRNA methyltransferase in glioblastomas. METTL1's orthologue in yeast, TRM8, has been studied to some extent, and is known to target several tRNA species (tRNAVAL-AAC, tRNAMET, tRNAPHE, tRNAVAL) as part of the cell’s response to heat shock (REF). Overall, this work suggests a putative role for tRNA methylation in GBM formation through the amplification of METTL1, and suggests that tRNA methylation is an important component of the methylator phenotype. Future work will be to identify which tRNAs are targeted by METTL1 and the role it plays in the development of GBM.
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    Comparing Pre-Built Hypervisors
    (2017-04) Chien, Taylor
    There are a lot of Hypervisors out there, from almost every developer. VMWare isn't the only option anymore, with free and open source hypervisors everywhere now. However, in terms of usability, building a system from scratch is something that only advanced users should attempt. I decided that I should compare the most popular hypervisors to each other and see if there was actually any differences in performance. The original list ranged form open-source-based options to Microsoft, VMWare, and Solaris, but eventually, I settled on four that were easily accessible, widely used, and free. The final listing is: Proxmox VE 4.5 XenServer 7 Hyper-V Server 2016 Vmware vSphere/ESXi In the past, I had used XenServer and Proxmox for the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Network and Computer Security Club's network, one of my jobs at Paul Smith's College involved the use of their vSphere cluster and scoping out potential replacements, and I had also used Proxmox, XenServer, and Microsoft's Hyper-V personally before starting this project.