Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Structural Analysis Of Poloidal And Toroidal Plasmons And Fields Of Multilayer Nanorings, Kumar Vijay Garapati

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Multilayered metallo-dielectric nanoparticles are increasingly considered in various applications to control the spatial and temporal behavior of electromagnetic fields. In particular, the surface mode excitation by photons or electrons in metal nanorings finds significant applications because of the implied field distribution and electromagnetic energy confinement. However, most solid nanorings that are multilayered and/or embedded in a medium have non-simply connected geometry resulting in surface modes which are not linearly independent. That is, unlike particle plasmon eigenmodes in other geometries, the amplitudes of the eigenmodes of tori exhibit a distinct forward and backward coupling. We investigate the surface modes of such …

Investigating Students’ Basic Needs And Motivation In College Chemistry Courses With The Lens Of Self-Determination Theory, Yujuan Liu

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

More graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathmetics (STEM) fields are needed to keep our nation’s preeminance in the global fields of technology and science. However, fewer than 40% of students who intend to major in STEM fields when entering college complete a STEM degree. Therefore, it is important to explore factors to improve student persistence in STEM fields at the college level as well as to understand the interrelationship between student motivation, academic achievement, and persistence. Motivation is strongly associated with student achievement and persistence; meanwhile, academic achievement can also affect persistence. Self-determination theory (SDT) represents a framework of …

Computing The Rectilinear Crossing Number Of K, Soundarya Revoori

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rectilinear crossing number of a graph is the number of crossing edges in a drawing with all straight line edges. The problem of drawing an n-vertex complete graph such that its rectilinear crossing number is minimum is known to be an NP-Hard problem. In this thesis, we present a heuristic that attempts to achieve the theoretical lower bound value of the rectilinear crossing number of a n+1 vertex complete graph from that of n vertices. Our algorithm accepts an optimal or near-optimal rectilinear drawing of K_n graph as input and tries to place a new node such that …

Potential Impacts Of Accelerated Sea-Level Rise And Hurricane-Induced Storm Surge In Western Pasco County, Florida, Kittiya Harris

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Sea levels have risen approximately 20 cm since the beginning of the 20th century and more than 3 cm in the past 20 years, suggesting that global sea level rise is accelerating. As sea levels continue to rise and storms become more intense, coastal property and populations become more susceptible to damage. Florida is especially vulnerable to hurricane-induced storm surge (HSS) and the onset of accelerated sea-level rise (ASLR) due to its extensive coastline and high population density along the coast. The main purpose of this research is to assess the potential economic impacts of ASLR and HSS for two …

Toward The Synthesis Of Naphthalene-Bridged Bis-Triazole Bimetallic Complexes, Sean M. Johnson

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bimetallic complexes are known to have unique electronic properties and are used in a variety of organic transformations as catalysts. The use of naphthalene-bridged bis- triazoles (NBT) for bimetallic complexes is unknown. NBTs have the unique property of being fluorescent stemming from a twisted intramolecular charge transfer. With the non- coplanar geometry and the distance between the 1,2,3-triazole rings, we hypothesized that 1,8-bis(4-phenyl-2H-1,2,3-triazol-2-yl)naphthalene (12) would be a suitable ligand to synthesize a bimetallic complex. The synthesis of 12 was optimized for large scale synthesis and was synthesized on a 78 mmol scale in 15% total yield. Metal complexation …

Prevalence Of Typical Images In High School Geometry Textbooks, Megan N. Cannon

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Visualization in mathematics can be discussed in many ways; it is a broad term that references physical visualization objects as well as the process in which we picture images and manipulate them in our minds. Research suggests that visualization can be a powerful tool in mathematics for intuitive understanding, providing and/or supporting proof and reasoning, and assisting in comprehension. The literature also reveals some difficulties related to the use of visualization, particularly how illustrations can mislead students if they are not comfortable seeing concepts represented in varied ways. However, despite the extensive research on the benefits and challenges of visualization …

Time Series Online Empirical Bayesian Kernel Density Segmentation: Applications In Real Time Activity Recognition Using Smartphone Accelerometer, Shuang Na

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Time series analysis has been explored by the researchers in many areas such, as statistical research, engineering applications, medical analysis, and finance study. To represent the data more efficiently, the mining process is supported by time series segmentation. Time series segmentation algorithm looks for the change points between two different patterns and develops a suitable model, depending on the data observed in such segment. Based on the issue of limited computing and storage capability, it is necessary to consider an adaptive and incremental online segmentation method. In this study, we propose an Online Empirical Bayesian Kernel Segmentation (OBKS), which combines …

Cybersecurity: Probabilistic Behavior Of Vulnerability And Life Cycle, Sasith Maduranga Rajasooriya

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Analysis on Vulnerabilities and Vulnerability Life Cycle is at the core of Cybersecurity related studies. Vulnerability Life Cycle discussed by S. Frei and studies by several other scholars have noted the importance of this approach. Application of Statistical Methodologies in Cybersecurity related studies call for a greater deal of new information. Using currently available data from National Vulnerability Database this study develops and presents a set of useful Statistical tools to be applied in Cybersecurity related decision making processes.

In the present study, the concept of Vulnerability Space is defined as a probability space. Relevant theoretical analyses are conducted and …

Spatial And Temporal Variation In Mangrove Distribution (1950-2014) In Tampa, Florida Usa, Carolyn Cheatham Rhodes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

I carried out an observational study of historic high resolution aerial imagery spanning six decades (1950-2014) to identify recent and historic spatial extent of mangrove forests, within the municipal boundaries of the City of Tampa, Florida USA. My objectives were to map mangrove distribution and spatial extent and any change or patterns of change discernable. I observed variable patterns of change and rates of expansion varied between sites spatially as well as within sites between time intervals. I found notable changes in mangrove extent in the Tampa from historic and modern aerial imagery for the ~64-year period between 1950 and …

Lump, Complexiton And Algebro-Geometric Solutions To Soliton Equations, Yuan Zhou

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In chapter 2, we study two Kaup-Newell-type matrix spectral problems, derive their soliton hierarchies within the zero curvature formulation, and furnish their bi-Hamiltonian structures by the trace identity to show that they are integrable in the Liouville sense. In chapter 5, we obtain the Riemann theta function representation of solutions for the first hierarchy of generalized Kaup-Newell systems.

In chapter 3, using Hirota bilinear forms, we discuss positive quadratic polynomial solutions to generalized bilinear equations, which generate lump or lump-type solutions to nonlinear evolution equations, and propose an algorithm for computing higher-order lump or lump-type solutions. In chapter 4, we …

Carbon And Nutrient Balances In Microalgal Bioenergy System, Eunyoung Lee

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research investigated life cycle environmental impacts and benefits of an integrated microalgae system with wastewater treatment system using an integrated process modeling approach combined with experimentation. The overall goal of this research is to understand energy, carbon and nutrient balances in the integrated system and to evaluate the environmental impacts and benefits of the integrated system from a carbon, nutrient, and energy perspective. In this study, four major research tasks were designed to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the environmental and economic sustainability of the integrated system, which included development of an integrated co-limitation kinetic model for microalgae …

Cybersecurity: Stochastic Analysis And Modelling Of Vulnerabilities To Determine The Network Security And Attackers Behavior, Pubudu Kalpani Kaluarachchi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Development of Cybersecurity processes and strategies should take two main approaches. One is to develop an efficient and effective set of methodologies to identify software vulnerabilities and patch them before being exploited. Second is to develop a set of methodologies to predict the behavior of attackers and execute defending techniques based on attacking behavior. Managing of Vulnerabilities and analyzing them is directly related to the first approach. Developing of methodologies and models to predict the behavior of attackers is related to the second approach. Both these approaches are inseparably interconnected. Our effort in this study mainly focuses on developing useful …

The Rhetoric Of Scientific Authority: A Rhetorical Examination Of _An Inconvenient Truth_, Alexander W. Morales

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project examines how scientific authority is produced through rhetorical practices instead of the “information deficit” model of science communication. By conducting a rhetorical analysis of the science documentary An Inconvenient Truth, this project demonstrates how the documentary format itself and the film’s leading agent, former United States Vice President Al Gore, attempt to persuade audiences through building degrees of scientific authority by employing multiple rhetorics or narrative themes of science to bolster the scientific facts supporting anthropogenic climate change. Additionally, I demonstrate how these narrative themes parallel three scholarly themes within the rhetoric of science literature: science …

Flexible And Feasible Support Measures For Mining Frequent Patterns In Large Labeled Graphs, Jinghan Meng

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In recent years, the popularity of graph databases has grown rapidly. This paper focuses on single-graph as an effective model to represent information and its related graph mining techniques. In frequent pattern mining in a single-graph setting, there are two main problems: support measure and search scheme. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for constructing support measures that brings together existing minimum-image-based and overlap-graph-based support measures. Our framework is built on the concept of occurrence / instance hypergraphs. Based on that, we present two new support measures: minimum instance (MI) measure and minimum vertex cover (MVC) measure, that …

An Assessment Of Constructed Wetland Treatment System Cells: Removal Of Excess Nutrients And Pollutants From Municipal Wastewater In Lakeland, Florida, Molly Klinepeter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Wastewater treatment wetlands are proven valuable alternatives to the treatment of wastewater in a more natural environment. These wetlands can be natural or constructed, and come in a variety of types and sizes. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficiency of water treatment for nutrients and pollutants utilized by the City of Lakeland in treating their municipal wastewater by wetland treatment system cells. This study is important in order to ensure the successful use of the wetland, as well as to determine the impacts previous phosphorus mining use may have on the effectiveness of treatment. Following FDEP …

Pollen Forecasting In Sarasota, Florida, Daniel J. Gessman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Current predictions of pollen levels rely strictly on historical Averages, regardless of environmental factors that might affect the timing of pollen release by different plants. For this thesis, the goal was to develop a statistical model that will accurately forecast pollen levels by correlating those daily counts to atmospheric and meteorological conditions. This project used ARIMA modeling on IBM’s SPSS Statistics 24 of daily pollen count information for multiple allergenic pollens in the Sarasota County, Florida area over a 11-year period. The pollen species in question for this project are oak and cypress trees, grass, and ragweed pollens; and Alternaria …

(Dis)Enchanted: (Re)Constructing Love And Creating Community In The, Shannon A. Suddeth

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines a queer fan community for the television show Once Upon a Time (OUAT) that utilizes the social networking site Tumblr as their primary base of fan activity. The Swan Queen fan community is comprised of individuals that collectively support and celebrate a non-canon romantic relationship between two of the female lead characters of the show rather than the canonic, heterocentric relationships that occur between the two women and their respective male love interests. I answer two research questions in this study: First, how are members of the Swan Queen fan community developing counter narratives of …

Estimation Of Human Poses Categories And Physical Object Properties From Motion Trajectories, Mona Fathollahi Ghezelghieh

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Despite the impressive advancements in people detection and tracking, safety is still a key barrier to the deployment of autonomous vehicles in urban environments [1]. For example, in non-autonomous technology, there is an implicit communication between the people crossing the street and the driver to make sure they have communicated their intent to the driver. Therefore, it is crucial for the autonomous car to infer the future intent of the pedestrian quickly. We believe that human body orientation with respect to the camera can help the intelligent unit of the car to anticipate the future movement of the pedestrians. To …

Analysis Of A Potential A(H7n9) Influenza Pandemic Outbreak In The U.S., Walter A. Silva Sotillo

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a collection of manuscripts that describe development of models and model implementation to analyze impact of potential A(H7N9) pandemic influenza outbreak in the U.S. Though this virus is still only animal-to-human transmittable, it has potential to become human-to-human transmittable and trigger a pandemic. This work is motivated by the negative impact on human lives that this virus has already caused in China, and is intended to support public health officials in preparing to protect U.S. population from a potential outbreak of pandemic scale.

An agent-based (AB) simulation model is used to replicate the social dynamics of the …

Photopolymerization Synthesis Of Magnetic Nanoparticle Embedded Nanogels For Targeted Biotherapeutic Delivery, Daniel Jonwal Denmark

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Conventional therapeutic techniques treat the patient by delivering a biotherapeutic to the entire body rather than the target tissue. In the case of chemotherapy, the biotherapeutic is a drug that kills healthy and diseased cells indiscriminately which can lead to undesirable side effects. With targeted delivery, biotherapeutics can be delivered directly to the diseased tissue significantly reducing exposure to otherwise healthy tissue. Typical composite delivery devices are minimally composed of a stimuli responsive polymer, such as poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), allowing for triggered release when heated beyond approximately 32 °C, and magnetic nanoparticles which enable targeting as well as provide a mechanism for …

Quantifying And Modeling Surface Inflow And Groundwater Infiltration Into Sanitary Sewers In Southern Pinellas County, Fl, Megan E. Long

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Following large rain events, excess flow in sanitary sewers from inflow and infiltration (I/I) cause sanitary sewer overflows (SSO), resulting in significant problems for Pinellas County and the Tampa Bay area. Stormwater enters the sanitary sewers as inflow from improper or illegal surface connections, and groundwater enters the system as infiltration through cracks in subsurface infrastructure. This pilot study was designed to develop methods to separate and quantify the components of I/I and to build a predictive model using flowmeter and rainfall data.

To identify surface inflow, daily wastewater production and groundwater infiltration patterns were filtered from the flow data, …

Active Cleaning Of Label Noise Using Support Vector Machines, Rajmadhan Ekambaram

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Large scale datasets collected using non-expert labelers are prone to labeling errors. Errors in the given labels or label noise affect the classifier performance, classifier complexity, class proportions, etc. It may be that a relatively small, but important class needs to have all its examples identified. Typical solutions to the label noise problem involve creating classifiers that are robust or tolerant to errors in the labels, or removing the suspected examples using machine learning algorithms. Finding the label noise examples through a manual review process is largely unexplored due to the cost and time factors involved. Nevertheless, we believe it …

Lost In The Crowd: Are Large Social Graphs Inherently Indistinguishable?, Subramanian Viswanathan Vadamalai

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Real social graphs datasets are fundamental to understanding a variety of phenomena, such as epidemics, crowd management and political uprisings, yet releasing digital recordings of such datasets exposes the participants to privacy violations. A safer approach to making real social network topologies available is to anonymize them by modifying the graph structure enough as to decouple the node identity from its social ties, yet preserving the graph characteristics in aggregate. At scale, this approach comes with a significant challenge in computational complexity.

This thesis questions the need to structurally anonymize very large graphs. Intuitively, the larger the graph, the easier …

Influence Of Environmental Parameters On Mold Sampling Results, Benjamin Fishman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Mold is a type of fungus present in nearly all environments. Mold thrives under several environmental parameters such as high humidity and an adequate food source. A professional, such as an industrial hygienist, can measure mold in indoor and outdoor environments. Industrial hygienists commonly use a cascade impactor with a culture plate to capture air within a sampling area. While collecting air samples, environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide are recorded. A laboratory then cultures and analyzes the samples, identifying the types and amounts of viable mold found in the sampling area.

In this study, a data …

Characterizing Benthic Habitats Using Multibeam Sonar And Towed Underwater Video In Two Marine Protected Areas On The West Florida Shelf, Usa, Jennifer L. Brizzolara

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates a way to characterize the geology and biology of the seafloor in two Marine Protected Areas on the West Florida Shelf. Characterization of benthic habitats needs to include sufficient detail to represent the complex and heterogeneous bottom types. Characterizations can be interpreted from multiple data sets and displayed as benthic habitat maps. Multibeam sonar bathymetry and backscatter provide full spatial data coverage, but interpretation of such data requires some form of ground truth (to characterize the habitat). Imagery from towed underwater video provides continuous transects of seafloor data, which provide a more efficient method than data from …

Effects Of Temperature On The Emission Rate Of Formaldehyde From Medium Density Fiberboard In A Controlled Chamber, William Swankie

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Formaldehyde is a colorless gas that is found naturally in the environment. It is a popular additive in many consumer products including composite wood products. Composite wood products are engineered wood panels produced from pressing pieces, chips, particles, or fibers of wood together at high temperatures held together with a bonding agent. This bonding agent is often formaldehyde-containing resins that are known to release formaldehyde over time. This is concerning because of the carcinogenic classification of formaldehyde, the wide spread application of composite wood products, and the increasing amount of time spent in the indoor environment.

In a controlled 0.53 …

Real-Time Classification Of Biomedical Signals, Parkinson’S Analytical Model, Abolfazl Saghafi

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reach of technological innovation continues to grow, changing all industries as it evolves. In healthcare, technology is increasingly playing a role in almost all processes, from patient registration to data monitoring, from lab tests to self-care tools. The increase in the amount and diversity of generated clinical data requires development of new technologies and procedures capable of integrating and analyzing the BIG generated information as well as providing support in their interpretation.

To that extent, this dissertation focuses on the analysis and processing of biomedical signals, specifically brain and heart signals, using advanced machine learning techniques. That is, the …

An Anthropological Study Of Security Operations Centers To Improve Operational Efficiency, Sathya Chandran Sundaramurthy

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Security Operation Centers (SOCs) have become an integral component of business organizations all over the world. The concept of a SOC has existed for a few years now yet there is no systematic study documenting the occurrences of their operations. A lack of documented operational knowledge makes it a challenge for security researchers interested in improving operational efficiency through algorithms, tools, and processes.

SOC environments operate under a secrecy culture as a result of which researchers are not trusted by analysts and their managers. This lack of trust leads to only superficial information through methods such as interviews. Moreover, security …

Experimental Analysis On The Feasibility Of Voice Based Symmetric Key Generation For Embedded Devices, Surya Bharat Kamineni

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we present results of an experimental study in order to generate a secure cryptographic key from the user’s voice which is to be shared between two mobile devices. We identified two security threats related to this problem, discussed the challenges to design the key generation/sharing mechanism, and proposed a new protocol based on bloom filters that overcomes the two main attacks by the intruder. One is when the attacker places its device in the close vicinity of the location where the user attempts to generate/share the key in order to derive the key from eavesdropping on communication …

The Ability Of An Aquatic Invader To Uptake Nutrients In An Upstream Estuarine Environment: Implications For Reducing The Intensity And Frequency Of Massive Fish Kills In Florida, Melissa L. Kerr

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations