Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimal Strategies For Grassland Restoration To Increase Spatial Carrying Capacity Of Florida Sandhill Cranes In Pasco County, Florida, Ibrahim Kaya

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Florida sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis pratensis) is a non-migratory bird species occurring throughout the Florida peninsula and the Okefenokee Swamp in southeastern Georgia. Human land-altering activities have led to a substantial decline in the amount and condition of suitable habitat, including grasslands, for the species in Florida, thereby decreasing the population size significantly. Grasslands located in close proximity to nesting locations are one of the habitat types on which the population viability of the species depends, as they provide foraging and brooding habitat which is crucial for successful reproduction. The purpose of this study is to propose the most …

Using Geospatial Data To Predict The Locations Of Groundwater Discharge To Salmon-Bearing Streams, Alaska, Mary Gerlach

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Identification and protection of groundwater resources are considerations of increasing interest as climate shifts but can be challenging to accomplish in remote areas. To that end, a series of GIS techniques and weight of evidence approach were applied to determine the feasibility of remotely identifying likely areas of ground discharge. Through the confluence of topographic analyses and a novel geologic dataset, these techniques were found to consistently identify areas characterized by either shallow subsurface or aquifer-fed groundwater discharge or evidence of ephemeral surficial water features. Two distinct GIS techniques to build spatial proxies of the effects of topography and geology …

Using Tidal Analysis To Examine Lake-Aquifer Connectivity On A Modern Carbonate Platform, Ronald A. Knoll

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Lake-aquifer connectivity on carbonate platforms is governed by basin morphology which is influenced by diagenetic and depositional processes. Both these processes cause aquifer permeability to vary significantly with scale of measurement (i.e., pore-scale, well-scale, and regional-scale). Because coastal aquifers are well-known to have tidally controlled water level fluctuations, inland lakes may be used to expand the areal measurement of permeability and establish a link between well-scale and regional scale connectivity in the aquifer. To evaluate the impact of lake basin morphology on aquifer connectivity, water level fluctuations were collected at high temporal resolution in the ocean and twenty-four surface water …

Numerical Study Of Gap Distributions In Determinantal Point Process On Low Dimensional Spheres: L-Ensemble Of O(N) Model Type For N = 2 And N = 3, Xiankui Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Poisson point process is the most well-known point process with many applications. Unlike Poisson point process, which is the random set of non-intersecting points, determinantal point process refers to certain class of point processes where the points tend to interact with each other. The interaction often leads to more uniformly distributed points compared to those in Poisson point process.

In this article, we study the gap distribution of certain class of determinantal point process, L-ensemble of O(n) model type, and compare the distribution with the ones from the other known determinantal point process that appears in random matrices. Our numerical …

A Sustainability Machine: The Incineration-Based Waste Regime In Tampa, Fl, Usa, Kevin P. Martyn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent history has seen some significant changes in terms of how society thinks about and deals with its wastes. Increasingly troubling indications of the immediacy of ecological concerns, now often described by the Anthropocene concept, have been provocative of a reinvigorated fervor for a sustainability transition. As a result, sustainability has become well-established as both an urgent pursuit and an eminently pliable buzzword. This research describes and explains one key aspect of society’s pursuit of some version of sustainability: our relationship with waste.

The site of this research is Tampa, Florida, a sunbelt city with a unique waste management system. …

Current And Projected Sustainability Of The Water-Energy-Food Nexus In Caribbean Small Island Developing States, Zachary S. Winters

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Within Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), small island developing states (SIDS) of the latter are wholly reliant on their natural environments for their tourism-dependent economies yet are experiencing declining environmental health. These effects are exacerbated by Caribbean susceptibility to climate change and growing populations. With limited size, elevation, GDP, and water resources compared to Latin America, the subregion requires management and solutions tailored to the needs of each country. This study examined current and future sustainability of the Caribbean SIDS by assessing the nexus of water-energy-food (WEF) resources at the national level. In addition, the potential for nature-based solutions …

Design, Synthesis Of Axial Chiral Triazole, Jing Wang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis contains three parts: 1) The briefly review of chiral P, N-ligands. 2) The summary of triazole as ligands. 3) The attempt of designing, synthesizing the chiral triazole ligands.

In the first part, we have reviewed all the major P, N-ligands in the history, including how they were synthesized and resolved into single enantiomer. We also used some examples to show their utility potential in different reactions.

In the second part, we summarized the triazole ligands which mainly developed by our group including their structures, their potential and utility in different types of chemical reactions.

In the last part, …

Covalent Organic Frameworks As An Organic Scaffold For Heterogeneous Catalysis Including C-H Activation, Harsh Vardhan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Linking small organic molecules into an extended solid usually afford disordered amorphous polymers. The instigation of order into such a material is of profound interest to induce inherent fine control of the overall structure. Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are new class of porous crystalline material prepared by connecting organic building blocks via strong covalent bonds. The judicious choice of organic monomers can give rise to highly ordered and predictable frameworks with high crystallinity, surface area, and thermal/chemical stability. The role of connecting linkages such as B─O, C─C, C─N extends the principle of fundamental molecular covalent chemistry to the formation of …

Detecting Symptoms Of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease And Congestive Heart Failure Via Cough And Wheezing Sounds Using Smart-Phones And Machine Learning, Anthony Windmon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) are progressive disorders, and major health concerns among today’s aging population. COPD causes a large mucus buildup in the lungs, leading to chronic cough and difficulty to breathe. CHF causes fluid buildup in the lower lungs due to the failing heart, causing cough and difficulty to breath. People who are clinically diagnosed with COPD or CHF are expected to regularly monitor their symptoms and follow complex medical recommendations in an effort to prevent exacerbation. In this dissertation, we elaborate upon three different machine learning based techniques that we developed for …

Feature Selection Via Random Subsets Of Uncorrelated Features, Long Kim Dang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The role of feature selection is crucial in many applications. A few of these include computational biology, image classification and risk management. In biology, gene expression micro array data sets have been used extensively in many areas of research. These data sets typically suffer from an important problem: the ratio between the number of features over the number of examples is very high. This problem mainly affects prediction accuracy because it is best to collect more labeled examples than features. A correlation based random subspace ensemble feature selector (CCC_RSM) was proposed to handle this problem [5]. In this approach, first …

Establishing Topological Data Analysis: A Comparison Of Visualization Techniques, Tanmay J. Kotha

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

When visualizing data, we would like to convey both the data and the uncertainty associated with it. There are many incentives to do this, ranging from hurricane path projection to geographical surveys. Important decision making tasks rely upon humans perceiving a clear picture of the data and having confidence in their decisions. Topological Data Analysis has the potential to visualize the data as features or hierarchies in ways that are familiar to human intuition, and thus could help us convey the variation associated with uncertainty.

In this thesis, we evaluate four visualization techniques: color maps, isocontours, Reeb graphs, and persistence …

Development Of Ultrasonic-Based Ambient Desorption Ionization Mass Spectrometry, Linxia Song

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Ambient desorption/ionization techniques (ADI) have drawn significant attention in mass spectrometric instrumentation development. The analyte classes that are successfully studied by any ADI mass spectrometry (MS) method strongly depends on how gas-phase ions are generated. Spray-based techniques may ionize molecules across a wide range of mass-to-charge ratios, but are commonly used for polar analyte, however, suffers from severe matrix effect. Contrastingly, methods employing electric (or laser) plasmas are capable of ionization of polar and nonpolar analytes suffering from less matrix effect, but primarily targeting those with low molecular masses. Thus far, developments of universal ionization methods, which do not depend …

Understanding The Complex Ethical Landscape Of Artificial Intelligence Adoptions, Chrissann R. Ruehle

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) has existed since the 1950’s, it has experienced a series of expansions and declines over the years. Currently, AI is on an upward trajectory and has prompted the fourth industrial revolution as many scientists have noted. Some firms have rapidly embraced this technology and experienced growth while others have been slow to adopt. Naturally, this expansion often has societal impacts. The aim of this study is to explore ethical considerations that arise during the adoption of this technology. This research addressed three questions: 1. How do market and regulatory forces reportedly shape Artificial Intelligence adoptions? 2. …

Soil Characteristics Associated With Horse Cases Of Eastern Equine Encephalitis Virus In Florida, Fulya Guzelkucuk

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus (EEEV) is a mosquito-borne virus found in Florida that affects humans and horses. Also, EEEV is an agricultural land management issue in Florida, as it causes mortality in large numbers of horses each year and sometimes humans. This study investigates the characteristics of soils associated with horse cases of EEEV in the State of Florida, focusing on differences in soil characteristics between summer and winter cases. This study analyzed a total of 676 EEEV cases during 2005-2018, including 611 summer cases and 65 winter cases. Soil characteristics that were examined include: soil texture, drainage class, hydrology …

Black Lives Matter In Engineering, Too! An Environmental Justice Approach Towards Equitable Decision-Making For Stormwater Management In African American Communities, Maya Elizabeth Carrasquillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The United States and the world have recently been challenged with the disparate effects of COVID-19 and the continual killings of unarmed Black men and women across the nation. A history of anti-black racism has led to systemic structures of inequity that thread throughout institutions and communities across the nation. This environmental engineering research comes at a time when understanding how to effectively engage in, and with Black communities is at the forefront of discourse in academia, utilities and private sector.

In 2018 the Brookings Institute published a report on workforce in the water sector demonstrating the lack of diversity …

Chemical Investigation Of Floridian Mangrove Endophytes And Antarctic Marine Organisms, Bingjie Yang

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nature creates diseases and illnesses for mankind, however, nature also provides therapeutics by making biological systems produce secondary metabolites. Although the secondary metabolites originally play roles in chemical defense or evolution, researchers have been working on them for drug discovery. Plants, fungi and marine organisms have been mostly explored by natural products chemists over the century and contributed most drugs to the market. With the increasing need of new drugs resulting from drug resistance and pathogen evolution, the natural products area has been focused on developing innovative methodologies to achieve higher efficiency of isolating new bioactive compounds.

This dissertation herein …

A Chemical Investigation Of Three Antarctic Tunicates Of The Genus Synoicum, Sofia Kokkaliari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Marine invertebrates, mainly sponges, tunicates and corals, have in the past few decades attracted the interest of the scientific community in regard to their secondary metabolites and their potential as leads in drug discovery. The genus Synoicum is comprised of multiple organisms found in both deep and shallow waters, tropical and cold environments around the world. The majority of the members of this genus that have been investigated can be found in shallow tropical waters due to the ease of accessing and collecting them. Of the cold environments, Antarctica is a representative of the environments where members of the Synoicum …

Deep Learning Predictive Modeling With Data Challenges (Small, Big, Or Imbalanced), Renhao Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the real world, data used to build machine learning models always has different sizes and characteristics. These size and characteristic features, including small datasets, big datasets, imbalanced datasets, often lead to different challenges when training machine learning models. Models trained on a small number of observations tend to overfit the training data and produce inaccurate results. When it comes to big data, efficiently learning from "huge" size data in a short time becomes important. With an imbalanced dataset, learning is usually biased towards the majority class in the data and appropriate measurements are needed to check model performance.

As …

An Ethnography Of Wash Infrastructures And Governance In Sulphur Springs, Florida, Mathews Jackon Wakhungu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation describes the forces that shape the perceptions and practices in Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WaSH) services in the community of Sulphur Springs, Tampa, Florida. It also explores how these forces, perceptions, and practices produce adverse experiences and inequalities in water, sewer, drainage, and laundry services. This ethnographic study combines participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, freelisting, oral history, and GIS to uncover the context, experiences, and perceptions about WaSH in Sulphur Springs. The study finds that the present conditions and perceptions about WaSH are embedded into the historical contexts—especially racial segregation, the construction of the interstate, and multiple economic downturns …

Beyond The Hype: Challenges Of Neural Networks As Applied To Social Networks, Anthony Hernandez

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent advances in neural network-based machine learning algorithms promise a rev-olution in prediction tasks across a variety of domains. Of these, forecasting user activity insocial media is particularly relevant for problems such as modeling and predicting informa-tion diffusion and designing intervention techniques to mitigate disinformation campaigns.Another potential task is anonymizing social network datasets to facilitate their distributionand promote research. Given the success of deep generative models, it may be possible touse them for anonymization. Social media seems an ideal context for applying neural net-work techniques, as they provide large data sets and challenging prediction objectives. Yet,our experiments find a number …

Distributed Control Of Multiagent Systems Under Heterogeneity, Selahattin Burak Sarsilmaz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The overarching objective of this work is to propose solutions to quite a few distributed control problems arising from networks of heterogeneous agents or the heterogeneous nature of multiagent systems. Each problem with its solutions is concisely summarized below.

We consider the cooperative output regulation problem of heterogeneous linear multiagent systems over fixed directed communication graphs. The purpose of this problem is to design a distributed control law such that the overall closed-loop stability is ensured and the tracking error of each agent converges to zero asymptotically for a class of reference inputs and disturbances generated by a so-called exosystem. …

A Process-Based Approach To Evaluating The Role Of Organic Ligands In Trace Metal Cycling In The Marine Environment, Travis Mellett

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In addition to control by major nutrient elements (nitrogen, phosphorous, and silicon) growth and community composition of marine phytoplankton is also regulated by trace element nutrients (iron, copper, manganese, zinc, cobalt, nickel, and cadmium). Of these, iron is the most influential in the modern ocean, regulating phytoplankton growth and carbon export in high-nutrient low-chlorophyll regimes and exerting an important control on the marine nitrogen cycle through its role in di-nitrogen fixation. The distributions of these metals has the capacity to control primary production and phytoplankton community composition through differences in cellular quotas or metal sensitivities amongst species. The relationship between …

The Perceived Usefulness Of A Weather Radar Display By Tampa Bay Residents, Michelle E. Saunders

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A weather radar display is a tool that provides spatially oriented, timely information about an impending weather event. While radar is frequently used by meteorologists, emergency managers, and pilots, this tool is now readily available for individuals to use on a variety of platforms including television, computer/laptop, smartphones and tablets. Most importantly, there are hundreds of mobile weather applications available as well as online sources that provide a weather radar display. However, little is known about how individuals use a weather radar display. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is to understand why radar is sought out as a tool …

Efficient Viewshed Computation Algorithms On Gpus And Cpus, Faisal F. Qarah

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nowadays with the advance in managing and collecting large data, GIS is one of the applications that suffer from lack of efficient data management methods. GIS data often come in form of maps with different types of data such as temperature, topology, and population.

This dissertation focuses on exact-viewsheds computation for large terrains, and due to the poor performance of current exact-viewshed algorithms that may need several hours to process a midsize map, we found the need for new algorithms that are capable of efficiently computing viewshed for large size maps. This work presents a highly-efficient exact-viewshed computation algorithm based …

Socio-Technical Transitions In The Water Sector: Emerging Boundaries For Utility Resilience In Barbados, Wainella N. Isaacs

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Resilience is gaining popularity in the water sector where it described as contributing to reduced vulnerability to water-related risks and hazards including climate change. Unfortunately, literature in this area, contributed mainly from North America and Europe, is fragmented with a concentration on engineering resilience in water supply infrastructure. The absence of any scholarship on resilience for a small island nation, coupled with the absence of sociological contributors to building resilience in this sector motivated this research.

The goal of this research was to understand and evaluate how resilience is characterized and operationalized in the Barbados water and wastewater infrastructure system, …

Machine Learning For The Internet Of Things: Applications, Implementation, And Security, Vishalini Laguduva Ramnath

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence and ubiquitous sensor systems have seen tremendous advances in recent times, resulting in groundbreaking impact across domains such as healthcare, entertainment, and transportation through a collective ecosystem called the Internet of Things. The advent of 5G and improved wireless networks will further accelerate the research and development of tools in deep learning, sensor systems, and computing platforms by providing improved network latency and bandwidth. While tremendous progress has been made in the Internet of Things, current work has largely focused on building robust applications that leverage the data collected through ubiquitous sensor nodes to provide actionable rules and …

Construction Of Giant 2d And 3d Metallo-Supramolecules Based On Pyrylium Salts Chemistry, Yiming Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Pyrylium salts are a type of six-membered cationic heterocycles with one positively charged oxygen atom. Since the discovery of pyrylium salts in 1911, such salts have been underappreciated for a long time. Until 1960s, the importance of pyrylium salts has been realized as versatile precursors in a variety of organic syntheses. Due to their high reactivity towards various nucleophiles, pyrylium salts were widely used for the convenient synthesis of diverse heterocyclic compounds. Starting from 1980s, the high reactive feature of pyrylium salts were further utilized to synthesize viologen polymers with pyridinium salts in the backbones. During the past two decades, …

Relational Joins On Gpus For In-Memory Database Query Processing, Ran Rui

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Relational join processing is one of the core functionalities in database management systems. Implementing join algorithms on parallel platforms, especially modern GPUs, has gain a lot of momentum in the past decade. This dissertation addresses the following issues on GPU join algorithms. First, we present empirical evaluations of a state-of-the-art work on GPU-based join processing. Since 2008, the compute capabilities of GPUs have increased following a pace faster than that of the multi-core CPUs. We run a comprehensive set of experiments to study how join operations can benefit from such rapid expansion of GPU capabilities. We also present improved GPU …

Active Deep Learning Method To Automate Unbiased Stereology Cell Counting, Saeed Alahmari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cell quantification in histopathology images plays a significant role in understanding and diagnosing diseases such as cancer and Alzheimers. The gold-standard for quantifying cells in tissue sections is the unbiased stereology approach. Unfortunately, in unbiased stereology current practices rely on a well-trained human to manually count hundreds of cells in microscopy images. However, this human-based manual approach is time-consuming, labor-intensive, subject to human errors, recognition bias, fatigue, variable training, poor reproducibility, and inter-observer error. Thus, the lack of high-throughput technology for automating unbiased stereology analyses remains a major obstacle to further progress in a wide range of neuroscience and cancer …

Next-Generation Self-Organizing Communications Networks: Synergistic Application Of Machine Learning And User-Centric Technologies, Chetana V. Murudkar

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The telecommunications industry is going through a metamorphic journey where the 5G and 6G technologies will be deeply rooted in the society forever altering how people access and use information. In support of this transformation, this dissertation proposes a fundamental paradigm shift in the design, performance assessment, and optimization of wireless communications networks developing the next-generation self-organizing communications networks with the synergistic application of machine learning and user-centric technologies.

This dissertation gives an overview of the concept of self-organizing networks (SONs), provides insight into the “hot” technology of machine learning (ML), and offers an intuitive understanding of the user-centric (UC) …