Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Songbirds, Pesticides, And Golf Courses: Exposure And Effects, Ryan Brennan Burdge

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

New Developments In Xanthate Ester Chemistry And The Potential For Protecting Group Applications, Matthew Hobson Jones

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

A Symbolic Sonification Of L-Systems, Adam James Wilson

Publications and Research

This paper describes a simple technique for the sonification of branching structures in plants. The example is intended to illustrate a qualitative definition of best practices for sonification aimed at the production of musical material. Visually manifest results of tree growth are modelled and subsequently mapped to pitch, time, and amplitude. Sample results are provided in symbolic music notation.

Water Quality In Headwater Streams: A Test Of Best Management Practices, Jonathan Worth Holley

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

No abstract provided.

The Impact On Organizational Performance Of Contextual Factors, Strategy And Management Control Systems, Nazmi Saeb Jarrar

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This dissertation examined antecedents of the use of contemporary management control systems (MCS) by testing the alignment of strategic and contextual variables with variables of contemporary systems of control in the organization. The study further explored the performance consequences of the implementation of these control systems, and the manner in which strategy can influence the organization’s control culture and management accounting practices. The impact of contextual factors, notably size and structural arrangements, such as decentralization and diversification, on management's choice of control systems were also examined. Hence, the study addressed the need for a better understanding of the association between …

Gis Data: Mathews County, Virginia Shoreline Inventory Report Methods And Guidelines, Marcia Berman, Harry Berquist, Sharon Killeen, Carl Hershner, Karinna Nunez, Karen Reay, Tamia Rudnicky, Daniel E. Schatt, David Weiss

Data

The data inventory developed for the Shoreline Situation Reports are based on a three-tiered shoreline assessment approach. This assessment characterizes conditions in the shorezone observed from a small boat moving along the shoreline. Handheld GPS units record data observations in the field. The three tiered shoreline assessment approach divides the shorezone into three regions:

1. the immediate riparian zone, evaluated for land use

2. the bank, evaluated for height, stability and natural protection

3. the shoreline, describing the presence of shoreline structures for shore protection and recreational purposes.

Three GIS coverages are generated from the collection technique. The Mathews_lubc coverage are features related …

Understanding How Disease And Environment Combine To Structure Resistance In Estuarine Bivalve Populations, Eileen E. Hofmann, David Bushek, Susan E. Ford, Ximing Guo, Dale Haidvogel, Dennis Hedgecock, John M. Klinck, Coren Milbury, Diego Narvaez, Eric Powell, Yongping Wang, Zhiren Wang, Liusuo Zhang

CCPO Publications

Delaware Bay oyster (Crassostrea virginica) populations are influenced by two lethal parasites that cause Dermo and MSX diseases. As part of the US National Science Foundation Ecology of Infectious Diseases initiative, a program developed for Delaware Bay focuses on understanding how oyster population genetics and population dynamics interact with the environment and these parasites to structure he host populations, and how these interactions might modified by climate change. Laboratory and field studies undertaken during this program include identifying genes related to MSX and Dermo disease resistance, potential regions for refugia and the mechanisms that allow them to exist, …

Interactions Between Macroalgae And The Sediment Microbial Community: Nutrient Cycling Within Shallow Coastal Bays, Amber Kay Hardison

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Ephemeral macroalgal blooms are considered a symptom of eutrophication in shallow coastal lagoons, but their influence on nutrient cycling dynamics in these systems is not fully understood. From 2006-2008, I conducted a series of experiments to determine the influence of living and senescent macroalgae on sediment carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling in coastal lagoons along the Delmarva Peninsula, USA. In particular, I focused on how macroalgae affect the microbial community at the sediment-water interface of shallow subtidal sediments because this complex consortium of autotrophic (e.g. benthic microalgae, BMA) and heterotrophic (e.g. bacteria) organisms plays a critical role in nutrient …

Assessing Genetic Variation Within And Among Native Populations And Hatchery Stocks Of Crassostrea Ariakensis Using Microsatellite Markers, Jie Xiao

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

Assessing genetic variation within and among native populations and hatchery stocks of Crassostrea ariakensis using microsatellite markers In response to the dramatic decline of eastern oyster (Crassostrea virginica) populations in the Chesapeake Bay, introduction of the non-native Asian oyster Crassostrea ariakensis has been proposed. Currently several hatchery stocks of C. ariakensis, derived from a few wild populations along the coast of Japan and China, are being maintained in U.S. hatcheries in the Pacific northwest and on the east coast. In recent years, as the risks of the proposed introduction are being assessed, these hatchery animals have been widely used for …

Analysis Of An Openmp Program For Race Detection, Dhaval Shah

Master's Projects

The race condition in a shared memory parallel program is subtle and harder to find than in a sequential program. The race conditions cause non-deterministic and unexpected results from the program. It should be avoided in the parallel region of OpenMP programs. The proposed OpenMP Race Avoidance Tool statically analyzes the parallel region. It gives alerts regarding possible data races in that parallel region. The proposed tool has the capability to analyze the basic frequently occurring non-nested ‘for loop(s)’. We are comparing the results of the proposed tool with the commercially available static analysis tool named Intel Parallel Lint and …

Objective Measurement Of Speech Quality In Voip Over Wireless Lan During Handoff, Nidhi Marwaha Gambhir

Master's Projects

Quality of Service is a very important factor to determine the quality of a VoIP call. Different subjective and objective models exist for evaluating the speech quality in VoIP. E-model is one of the objective methods of measuring the speech quality; it considers various factors like packet loss, delay and codec impairments. The calculations of Emodel are not very accurate in case of handovers – when a VoIP call moves from one wireless LAN to another. This project conducted experimental evaluation of performance of E-model during handovers and proposes a new approach to accurately calculate the speech quality of VoIP …

Expert Finding Using Social Networking, Parin Shah

Master's Projects

In today’s world, knowledge transfer is considered an important and essential activity for the success of an enterprise. Large corporations have realized the need to reuse existing knowledge rather than spend time and effort on solving the same problems again. For these reasons, most corporations now have knowledge repositories. These repositories are visited for possible solutions whenever there is a problem that cannot be easily resolved by using the expertise of the existing team. Apart from this, the problems faced by the people in the company can also be resolved by asking for help from expert in that problem domain. …

Online Circular Calendar, Praveen Athmanathan Panneerselvam

Master's Projects

A calendar is a system to organize days for social, commercial or administrative purpose. Many calendar systems are available today. The calendar system helps the user in scheduling his/her events or tasks over a time period. This period may be an hour, a day, or even months. Due to increase in user’s activities, events that need to be scheduled in the calendar grow tremendously. Moreover, there are events that occur every year which require a good visualization for mental manipulation. As a result there is a difficulty in organizing these events in the current calendar system. The main idea of …

An Automata Based Text Analysis System, Yue Lu

Master's Projects

This report describes and implements an automata based text analysis system. We have collected some of the writing samples. Each sample establishes a tree, and uses the ALERGIA algorithm to merge all compatible nodes in order to get a merged stochastic finite automaton. We store these automatons which demonstrate writing style of the sample texts in the hard drive. For a new testing piece, we can test if it has similar writing style compared to those sample texts.

Automated Artice Generation Using The Web, Gaurang Patel

Master's Projects

An article generation application is an intelligent mining engine that looks for web content, then combines and organizes this content in a meaningful way to generate an article. This contrasts with a search engine which generates a list of links to pages containing keywords. This writing project is about such an article generation tool. Our tool generates articles on the topic entered by the user using information available on the web. The articles have well defined sections, each talking about different aspect of the topic.

Web Based Recommender Systems And Rating Prediction, Tho Nguyen

Master's Projects

This project implements a recommender system on large dataset of Netflix’s movies. This project also tries to improve recommender systems by incorporating confidence interval and genres of movies. This new approach enhances the performance and quality of service of recommender systems and gives better result than Netflix commercial recommender system, Cinematch.

Evaluations And Enhancements In 802.11n Wlans – Error-Sensitive Adaptive Frame Aggregation, Ken Chan

Master's Projects

IEEE 802.11n is a developing next-generation standard for wireless local area network (LAN). Seamless multimedia traffic connection will become possible with the 802.11n improvement in the Physical and MAC layer. The new 802.11n frame aggregation technique is particularly important for enhancing MAC layer efficiency under high speed wireless LAN. Although the frame aggregation can increase the efficiency in the MAC layer, it does not provide good performance in high BER channels when using large frame aggregation size. An Optimal Frame Aggregation (OFA) technique for AMSDU frame under different BERs in 802.11n WLANs was proposed. However, the suggested algorithm does not …

Performance Study Of Fmipv6-Based Cross-Layer Wimax Handover Scheme For Supporting Voip Service, Heejung Kim

Master's Projects

This report presents performance study of the FMIPv6-based cross-layer handover scheme for VoIP supports over mobile WiMAX network. For this performance validation and evaluation, the handover delays for four different handover mechanisms are formulated and ns2 based simulation module has been developed. The handover delay, the total delay, and the R factor representing VoIP quality are measured to evaluate the VoIP support characteristics of the FMIPv6-based cross-layer scheme. Simulation results verified that the proposed FMIPv6-based cross-layer handover scheme, compared to the non-cross-layer scheme, successfully reduces total handover delay by almost 50% for the case of layer-3 handover. Further, simulation was …

Priority Based Routing For Mobile Peer-To-Peer Communications, Swathi Venugopal

Master's Projects

In a Mobile Peer-to-Peer (MP2P) network, mobile nodes share their resources among one another in a mobile wireless environment. Communication among nodes in MP2P network has become an important area for research due to the significance of its applications. The success of these MP2P applications depends on the number of users in the network, popularity of services offered, quick response and faster access to services. Some services offered could be more popular than others and some peers may contribute more to the network by catering to more requests compared to other peers. In priority based routing mechanism, there is an …

Is Four File Chess A Draw?, Michael Karbushev

Master's Projects

In this work, we prove that in the game of FOUR FILE Chess, White has at least a Draw. FOUR FILE is a chess variant proposed by John Selfridge, in which only the `a', `c', `e', and `g' les are used. All chess rules are as usual, except that all moves must end on one of these les, and the game starts with the other four les vacant. Here, we prove that the White has at least a draw, by showing that White has a strategy to avoid a loss. We also show that Black can avoid a loss for …

Available Bandwidth Inference Based On Node-Centric Clusters, Seetharam Samptur

Master's Projects

End-to-End Available Bandwidth (AB) is a real-time network metric that is useful for a wide range of applications including content distribution networks, multimedia streaming applications and overlay networks. In a large network with several thousand nodes, it is infeasible to perform all-pair bandwidth measurements as AB measurements could induce traffic overhead along the path. Also because of its dynamic nature, the measurements have to be performed frequently thus imposing significant probe traffic overhead on the network. In this paper, we discuss a clustering based distributed algorithm to infer the AB between any pair of nodes in a large network based …

Improving Web Recommendations Using Web Usage Mining And Web Semantics, Neha Saxena

Master's Projects

This project addresses the topic of improving web recommendations. With the immense increase in the number of websites and web pages on the internet, the issue of suggesting users with the web pages in the area of their interest needs to be addressed as best as possible. Various approaches have been proposed over the years by many researchers and each of them has taken the solution of creating personalized web recommendations a step ahead. Yet, owing to the large possibilities of further improvement, the system proposed in this report takes generating web recommendations one more step ahead. The proposed system …

Visualization Of Tree-Structured Data Through A Multi Touch User Interface, David Andrews

Master's Projects

This writing project examines different types of visualizations for tree-structured data sets. Visualizations discussed include link-node diagrams and treemap diagrams. Also discussed is recent innovations with regards to distinguishing multi touch from single touch technology. I explore the requirements needed to build a multi touch table top surface, and describe the process of building one. I then describe my proposed method of visualizing tree-structured data and how it can be implemented using Core Animation technology. I also propose a means of interacting with the data through a multi touch interface, and discuss which gestures can be used to navigate the …

Client-Side Page Element Web-Caching, Ramya Karri

Master's Projects

When a user explores different web pages in a given website, the website typically sends the entire requested page even if only a portion of the page was different to the current page. That is, two pages on a given website might share elements on the page like search bar, left bar, navigation controls, advertisements, etc., but this information is retransmitted. Most of the users spent their time on the front-end while downloading all the components in the page. Nowadays, server-side caching of page elements is often done using tools like memcached. The aim of my project is to explore …

Knowledge Engineering From Data Perspective: Granular Computing Approach, Rushin Barot

Master's Projects

The concept of rough set theory is a mathematical approach to uncertainly and vagueness in data analysis, introduced by Zdzislaw Pawlak in 1980s. Rough set theory assumes the underlying structure of knowledge is a partition. We have extended Pawlak’s concept of knowledge to coverings. We have taken a soft approach regarding any generalized subset as a basic knowledge. We regard a covering as basic knowledge from which the theory of knowledge approximations and learning, knowledge dependency and reduct are developed.

Distributed Port Scanning Detection, Himanshu Singh

Master's Projects

Conventional Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) have heavyweight processing and memory requirements as they maintain per flow state using data structures like linked lists or trees. This is required for some specialized jobs such as Stateful Packet Inspection (SPI) where the network communications between entities are recreated in its entirety to inspect application level data. The downside to this approach is that the NIDS must be in a position to view all inbound and outbound traffic of the protected network. The NIDS can be overwhelmed by a DDoS attack since most of these try and exhaust the available state of …

Total Recall For Ajax Applications – Firefox Extension, Smita Periyapatna

Master's Projects

Ajax, or AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), is a group of interrelated web development techniques used to create interactive web applications or rich Internet applications[9]. Web applications can retrieve data from the server asynchronously in the background without interfering with the display and behavior of an existing web page. [9] One of the biggest problems with Ajax applications is saving state and accommodating the succession of the history controls, (Back/forward buttons). Ajax allows documents to become stateful, but when the user intuitively goes for the history controls in the browser window, things go wrong. The user expects to see the …

Hunting For Undetectable Metamorphic Viruses, Da Lin

Master's Projects

Commercial anti-virus scanners are generally signature based, that is, they scan for known patterns to determine whether a file is infected by a virus or not. To evade signature-based detection, virus writers have adopted code obfuscation techniques to create highly metamorphic computer viruses. Since metamorphic viruses change their appearance from generation to generation, signature-based scanners cannot detect all instances of such viruses. To combat metamorphic viruses, detection tools based on statistical analysis have been studied. A tool based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) was previously developed and the results are encouraging—it has been shown that metamorphic viruses created by a …

Improving Location Determination For Non-Gps Devices, Varun Sud

Master's Projects

Location awareness is one of the most important information that an individual looks for, both in an outdoor and indoor environment. One of the primary location determination techniques is the Global Positioning system, though this system provides a good accuracy in an outdoor environment, its accuracy decreases in densely populated areas and in an indoor environment a GPS system ceases to provide location information since the satellite signal cannot permeate through the roof and the walls. Various location estimation techniques have been proposed for location estimation in an indoor environment, some utilizing the signal strength of a wifi transmitter, while …

Priority Based Power Management And Reduced Downtime In Data Centers, Barath Kuppuswamy

Master's Projects

The project deals successfully with software that performs priority based power management and reduced downtime for virtual machines running in data centers. The software deals with power management only at the processor level. The software automatically performs load distribution among servers in data centers to save power. In addition, the software also lets administrator of data centers to mark certain virtual machines, which run user applications, as critical to minimize downtimes for these virtual machines. The software reveals that energy consumption can be minimized while maintaining high runtime availability for the mission critical applications. The software operates in Green mode …