Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Highly Transparent Conductive Electrode With Ultra-Low Haze By Grain Boundary Modification Of Aqueous Solution Fabricated Alumina-Doped Zinc Oxide Nanocrystals, Qiong Nian, Michael J. Callahan, David C. Look, Harry Efstathiadis, John Bailey, Gary J. Cheng

Physics Faculty Publications

Commercial production of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) polycrystalline films requires high electrical conductivity with minimal degradation in optical transparency. Aqueous solution deposited TCO films would reduce production costs of TCO films but suffer from low electrical mobility, which severely degrades both electrical conductivity and optical transparency in the visible spectrum. Here, we demonstrated that grain boundary modification by ultra-violet laser crystallization (UVLC) of solution deposited aluminium-doped zinc oxide (AZO) nanocrystals results in high Hall mobility, with a corresponding dramatic improvement in AZO electrical conductance. The AZO films after laser irradiation exhibit electrical mobility up to 18.1 cm² V^{−1 …}

Evaluating Threats To The Rare Butterfly, Pieris Virginiensis, Samantha Lynn Davis

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Humans have caused drastic changes in ecosystems and communities through their modification of the natural landscape. Rare species, often highly specialized, are more impacted by these changes. Pieris virginiensis is a rare butterfly native to eastern North America that is a species of concern due to negative influences from habitat loss and plant invasion. This thesis discusses several threats to P. virginiensis, including habitat loss, climate change, competition, and the cascading effects of a novel European invasive plant, Alliaria petiolata, that attracts oviposition but does not allow for larval survival.

First, I examined a local extinction event and …

Work Function Modification Of Metal Electrodes Via Printing Of Pedot:Pss And Carbon Nanotubes, Carly A. Jordan

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Work function tunability of metal electrodes provides a route to improving performance of organic electronic devices. Using an electrode with a different work function changes the potential barrier at the polymer/electrode interface, leading to altered device characteristics, such as turn-on voltage in light emitting diodes or series resistance photodiodes. In this work, we explore work function modification by employing solution-based conducting materials, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) : poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), printed as overcoatings on oxidized Ni. The capability of direct write technologies, namely inkjet and aerosol jet printing, to control thin film thickness is investigated. The correlation between film …

Processing And Interpretation Of Three-Component Borehole/Surface Seismic Data Over Gabor Gas Storage Field, Li Wei

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Analysis of a seismic dataset recorded as part of a collaborative project between Wright State University, Spectraseis, Precision Geophysical, and Dominion East Ohio over the Gabor gas storage field, Canton, Ohio, is the topic of this study. Two types of sources (vibroseis and small seismic shot-holes) as well as three types of recording systems (passive 3C broadband on the surface, experimental 3C borehole sondes, and conventional 2D surface geophone profiles) were employed with different purposes. The shot hole explosives were calibration check-shots for the 3C borehole array repeatedly deployed at multiple levels. The vibrators of the conventional 2D seismic profiles …

Atmospheric Effects On Radar/Ladar Detection Of Seismic Activity, Michelle Frances Via

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This thesis investigates how well ground vibrations can be detected at ladar or radar wavelengths and how the atmosphere may impact the observation of such activity. First understanding atmospheric hindrances at each of these wavelengths is helpful to prioritize by those yielding best transmission results. A prerequisite to the outdoor field experiment performed for this study involves analyzing atmospheric effects characterization at six probable wavelengths using the Laser Environmental Effects Definition and Reference tool (LEEDR) developed by the Air Force Institute of Technology's (AFIT) Center for Directed Energy (CDE). These wavelengths, selected from the shortwave infrared and microwave portions of …

Owl Query Answering Using Machine Learning, Todd Huster

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The formal semantics of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) enables automated reasoning over OWL knowledge bases, which in turn can be used for a variety of purposes including knowledge base development, querying and management. Automated reasoning is usually done by means of deductive (proof-theoretic) algorithms which are either provably sound and complete or employ approximate methods to trade some correctness for improved efficiency. As has been argued elsewhere, however, reasoning methods for the Semantic Web do not necessarily have to be based on deductive methods, and approximate reasoning using statistical or machine-learning approaches may bring improved speed while maintaining high …

Computational Estimation Of The Pka's Of Purines And Related Compounds, Kara L. Geremia

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The acid dissociation value pKa of a compound provides important information regarding the neutral and ionic forms of the compound present under different conditions. However, for many compounds experimental pKa values are not available, and for others the measured values are sometimes uncertain. Consequently, having a computational means for estimating pKa values can be of benefit for biochemical, pharmaceutical, polymer, and many other studies. Purines form a key group of bioactive compounds whose acid/base activities are of considerable interest. The purine class includes such diverse compounds as the nucleic acid bases adenine and guanine, the gout-related compound uric acid, the …

Orthogonal Moment-Based Human Shape Query And Action Recognition From 3d Point Cloud Patches, Huaining Cheng

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With the recent proliferation of 3D sensors such as Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR), it is essential to develop feature representation methods that can best characterize the point clouds produced by these devices. When these devices are employed in targeting and surveillance of human actions from both ground and aerial platforms, the corresponding point clouds of body shape often comprise low-resolution, disjoint, and irregular patches of points resulted from self-occlusions and viewing angle variations. The prevailing method of depth image analysis has the limitation of relying on 2D features that are not native representation of 3D spatial relationships. On the …

Determination Of Vp, Vs, Glacial Drift Thickness And Poisson's Ratio At A Site In Jay County, Indiana, Using Seismic Refraction And Multichannel Analysis Of Surface Wave (Masw) Analysis On A Common Data Set, Shamim Ahammod

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In July 2013, an industry-scale seismic reflection survey was conducted at a site in northern Jay County, Indiana, by geophysics students and faculty of Wright State University. As a part of that effort, a separate near-surface seismic dataset was collected to examine the Vp, Vs, and Poisson's Ratio of the glacial drift and upper bedrock. This near-surface study successfully used a common dataset that was separately analyzed for both Vp (seismic refraction) and Vs (MASW) to calculate the Poisson's Ratio of the glacial drift and underlying bedrock. The driller's log for a water well near the east end of this …

Feature Extraction Using Dimensionality Reduction Techniques: Capturing The Human Perspective, Ashley B. Coleman

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The purpose of this paper is to determine if any of the four commonly used dimensionality reduction techniques are reliable at extracting the same features that humans perceive as distinguishable features. The four dimensionality reduction techniques that were used in this experiment were Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS), Isomap and Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA). These four techniques were applied to a dataset of images that consist of five infrared military vehicles. Out of the four techniques three out of the five resulting dimensions of PCA matched a human feature. One out of five dimensions of MDS matched …

Ontology Pattern-Based Data Integration, Adila Alfa Krisnadhi

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Data integration is concerned with providing a unified access to data residing at multiple sources. Such a unified access is realized by having a global schema and a set of mappings between the global schema and the local schemas of each data source, which specify how user queries at the global schema can be translated into queries at the local schemas. Data sources are typically developed and maintained independently, and thus, highly heterogeneous. This causes difficulties in integration because of the lack of interoperability in the aspect of architecture, data format, as well as syntax and semantics of the data. …

Features For Ranking Tweets Based On Credibility And Newsworthiness, Jacob W. Ross

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We create a robust and general feature set for learning to rank algorithms that rank tweets based on credibility and newsworthiness. In previous works, it has been demonstrated that when the training and testing data are from two distinct time periods, the ranker performs poorly. We improve upon previous work by creating a feature set that does not over fit a particular year or set of topics. This is critical given how people utilize social media changes as time progresses, and the topics discussed vary. In addition, we are constantly gaining new tweet data. Thus, it is important to be …

Dna-Nucleobase Guanine As Passivation/Gate Dielectric Layer For Flexible Gfet-Based Sensor Applications, Adrienne Dee Williams

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The main goal of this dissertation was two-fold: first, to study and design a graphene-based transistor environmentally friendly by replacing a standard substrate and gate dielectric with different flexible/rigid and biodegradable films and secondly, to study their effects on graphene's charge carrier mobility. A thin film of deoxyribonucleic acid nucleobase purine guanine deposited by physical vapor deposition onto up to ten layers of graphene that were transferred onto various rigid and flexible substrates was characterized more thoroughly. Several test platforms were fabricated with guanine 1) as a standalone gate dielectric, 2) as the control and 3) as a passivation layer …

Domain-Specific Document Retrieval Framework For Near Real-Time Social Health Data, Swapnil Soni

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With the advent of web search and microblogging, the percentage of Online Health Information Seekers (OHIS) using these services to share and seek health information in real-time has increased exponentially. Recently, Twitter has emerged as one of the primary mediums for sharing and seeking of the latest information related to a variety of topics, including health information. Although Twitter is an excellent information source, the identification of useful information from the deluge of tweets is one of the major challenges. Twitter search is limited to keyword-based techniques to retrieve information for a given query and sometimes the results do not …

Automatic Emotion Identification From Text, Wenbo Wang

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People's emotions can be gleaned from their text using machine learning techniques to build models that exploit large self-labeled emotion data from social media. Further, the self-labeled emotion data can be effectively adapted to train emotion classifiers in different target domains where training data are sparse.

Emotions are both prevalent in and essential to most aspects of our lives. They influence our decision-making, affect our social relationships and shape our daily behavior. With the rapid growth of emotion-rich textual content, such as microblog posts, blog posts, and forum discussions, there is a growing need to develop algorithms and techniques for …

Efficient Training Of Small Kernel Convolutional Neural Networks Using Fast Fourier Transform, Tyler Highlander

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Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are currently state-of-the-art for various classification tasks, but are computationally expensive. Propagating through the convolutional layers is very slow, as each kernel in each layer must sequentially calculate many inner products for a single forward and backward propagation which equates to O(N^2 n^2) per kernel per layer where the inputs are N x N arrays and the kernels are n x n arrays. Convolution can be efficiently performed as a Hadamard product in the frequency domain. The bottleneck is the transformation which has a cost of O(N^2 log_2 N) using the fast Fourier transform (FFT). However, …

A Language For Inconsistency-Tolerant Ontology Mapping, Kunal Sengupta

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Ontology alignment plays a key role in enabling interoperability among various data sources present in the web. The nature of the world is such, that the same concepts differ in meaning, often so slightly, which makes it difficult to relate these concepts. It is the omni-present heterogeneity that is at the core of the web. The research work presented in this dissertation, is driven by the goal of providing a robust ontology alignment language for the semantic web, as we show that description logics based alignment languages are not suitable for aligning ontologies.

The adoption of the semantic web technologies …

Whole-Lake Primary Production Calculator, Colin D. Leong

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This work describes an implementation of a model for estimation of both benthic and phytoplanktonic primary production in lakes. The web application makes use of interpolation techniques to allow estimates of primary production using values for photosynthesis/irradiance parameters at only 5 depths. These estimates compare favorably in accuracy with estimates using values listed at over one hundred depths. Validation of the implementation was done by comparison with primary production results from the Northern Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research database.

Assessment Of The Applicability Of Terahertz Spectroscopic Breath Sensing Towards Monitoring Type 1 Diabetic Mellitus, Jessica Rose Thomas

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Type 1 diabetes is a condition that cumulatively costs around $14.9 billion in medical expenses every year in the United States. Besides being costly, the monitoring of this disease is invasive, painful, and often embarrassing to the afflicted individual; blood and urine testing is currently the daily method of monitoring blood glucose and ketone levels in the body of type 1 diabetics. Though the use of these samples is standard, another avenue for possibly determining blood glucose has not been completely explored. With over 3000 chemicals reportedly found in exhaled human breath, biomarkers associated with this disorder and many of …

Verification And Validation Of A Transient Heat Exchanger Model, Jayme Lee Carper

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A statistical based verification and validation process is applied to the transient modeling of a shell and tube heat exchanger. A generic model of a heat exchanger was developed based on first principles as a sub-system of a larger thermal system model. This model was originally created without any experimental data, as it was not readily available. To provide the data necessary to apply the validation process, a thermal emulator was designed and built that allowed control of all system inputs to the heat exchanger, while also providing the instrumentation to record all required data. A wide test matrix was …

Water Quality Of The Upper Little Miami River Watershed In Ohio: Impacts Of Natural And Anthropogenic Processes, David Allan Huff

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Stream water quality is increasingly threatened by expanding anthropogenic activities, mainly through point source discharges and urban and agricultural runoffs of contaminants getting through a water body's watershed resulting in pollution. Concerns developed as to whether urban or agricultural type activities were causing most water quality impairment issues in the upper Little Miami River watershed in southwest Ohio.

Characterizing the upper Little Miami River (LMR) watershed with respect to water chemistry and Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) while evaluating the sources of any higher than expected natural parameter concentrations, with a strong emphasis on the nutrients phosphorus and nitrate, serves as …

Tuning The Physical Properties Of Poly(Arylene Ether)S Prepared From 3,5-Difluorobenzene Sulfonamides, Renata Mitton

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A series of functionalized poly(arylene ether)s, PAEs, based on 3,5-difluorobenzene sulfonamides with varying groups on the sulfonamide moiety were investigated. The main goal of the project was to tune the physical properties of the PAEs by altering the organic groups present on the sulfonamide nitrogen atom, including combinations of aryl iodide, alkyl, allyl, 4-ethoxycarboxylphenyl and benzyl moieties.

Using 3,5-difluorobenzenesulfonyl chloride as a starting material, N-R1-N-R2-3,5-difluorobenzenesulfonamides were prepared, followed by conversion to the corresponding PAEs by reaction of 3,5-difluorobenzene sulfonamides with Bisphenol-A, via a typical NAS polycondensation. Copolymers with varying contents of the functional monomer ranging from 10 to 25 %, …

Cometabolic Biodegradation Of Halogenated Aliphatic Hydrocarbons By Ammonia-Oxidizing Microorganisms Naturally Associated With Wetland Plant Roots, Ke Qin

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Bench-scale microcosms with wetland plant roots were investigated to characterize the microbial contributions to contaminant degradation of halogenated aliphatic hydrocarbons (HAHs) with ammonium. The batch system microcosms consisted of a known mass of wetland plant roots in aerobic growth media where the roots provided both an inoculum of root-associated ammonium-oxidizing microorganisms and a microbial habitat. Aqueous growth media, ammonium, and HAHs including trichloroethene (TCE), cis-1,2-dichloroethene (cis-DCE), chloroform (CF), 1,1,2-trichloroethane (1,1,2-TCA), ethylene dibromide (EDB, or 1,2-dibromoethane, 1,2-DBA) and 1,2-dichloroethane (1,2-DCA) were replaced weekly in batch microcosms while retaining roots and root-associated biomass.

Molecular biology results indicated that ammonium-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) were …

World-Wide Body Size Patterns In Freshwater Fish By Geography, Size Class, Trophic Level, And Taxonomy, Shishir Adhikari

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The unifying themes of my thesis are patterns in world-wide freshwater fish body sizes and their underlying mechanisms. First, I explored Bergmann's rule in unprecedented detail, which states that body size is negatively correlated to temperature. Categorizing species by body size into quantiles and by trophic levels, I regressed the classes against latitude, temperature, seasonality, minimum temperature and habitable space. I found that Bergmann's rule applies to freshwater fish in general but the strength varies by size class and trophic levels. I concluded that Bergmann's rule in fish is driven by the exclusion of small fish from cold climate due …

Investigation Of Solvent-Dependent Properties Of Donor And Acceptor Materials For Photovoltaic Applications, Anna L. Foote

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The choice of solvent and additive has been shown to affect efficiency of organic solar cell devices. To gain a basic understanding of the role of solvents in influencing overall device performance, we present a comparative study on the physical properties of donor: acceptor mixtures in different solvents. Investigations have been carried out for P3HT (poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl)), PTB7 (poly[4,8-bis[(2-ethylhexyl)oxy]benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b']-dithiophene-2,6-diyl][3-fluro-2-[2-ethylhexyl)carbonyl[thieno[3,4-b]thiophenediyl]]), PC61BM ([6,6]-phenyl-C60-butyric acid methyl ester), and PC71BM ([6,6]-phenyl-C70-butyric acid methyl ester). The physical properties reported are based on UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy, resistance measurements, cyclic voltammetry measurements, and surface energy characterizations of the organic films. The solvents used to prepare the organic films …

Laser Guide Star Design Project For The Usaf John Bryan State Park Quad Axis Observatory, Nathan Michael Figlewski

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Atmospheric Turbulence has long remained one of the great unsolved problems in physics. Laser guide stars were invented in order for telescopes to overcome atmospheric turbulence while used in combination with adaptive optics. This study focuses on the design and implementation phase of a Rayleigh laser guide star for the John Bryan State Park Observatory, owned and operated by the United States Air Force. Atmospheric simulations, as well as optical modelling of proposed equipment, were completed to optimize the design of this laser guide star. In addition, a novel method for the implementation of the guide star onto this very …

Temporally Biased Search Result Snippets, J. Abhiram Tatineni

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The search engine result snippets are an important source of information for the user to obtain quick insights into the corresponding result documents. When the search terms are too general, like a person's name or a company's name, creating an appropriate snippet that effectively summarizes the document's content can be challenging owing to multiple occurrences of the search term in the top ranked documents, without a simple means to select a subset of sentences containing them to form result snippet. In web pages classified as narratives and news articles, multiple references to explicit, implicit and relative temporal expressions can be …

Direct Optimization For Classification With Boosting, Shaodan Zhai

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Boosting, as one of the state-of-the-art classification approaches, is widely used in the industry for a broad range of problems. The existing boosting methods often formulate classification tasks as a convex optimization problem by using surrogates of performance measures. While the convex surrogates are computationally efficient to globally optimize, they are sensitive to outliers and inconsistent under some conditions. On the other hand, boosting's success can be ascribed to maximizing the margins, but few boosting approaches are designed to directly maximize the margin. In this research, we design novel boosting algorithms that directly optimize non-convex performance measures, including the empirical …

Contrast Pattern Aided Regression And Classification, Vahid Taslimitehrani

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Regression and classification techniques play an essential role in many data mining tasks and have broad applications. However, most of the state-of-the-art regression and classification techniques are often unable to adequately model the interactions among predictor variables in highly heterogeneous datasets. New techniques that can effectively model such complex and heterogeneous structures are needed to significantly improve prediction accuracy. In this dissertation, we propose a novel type of accurate and interpretable regression and classification models, named as Pattern Aided Regression (PXR) and Pattern Aided Classification (PXC) respectively. Both PXR and PXC rely on identifying regions in the data space where …

(261, 105, 42) Abelian Difference Sets Do Not Exist, James Robert Hufford Jr.

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Difference sets in the group Z3 x Z3 x Z37 and the group Z3 x Z9 x Z7 are known not to exist. The only open abelian case with a sylow-3 subgroup rank 2 listed in Vera-Lopez and Sanchez's table is Z3 x Z3 x Z29. We prove for Vera-Lopez and Sanchez's table that difference sets do not exist in the open group allowing the appropriate entry to be "no". We also prove that there exist no difference sets (261, 105, 42) for any group with order 261.