Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimizing Radiology Peer Review: A Mathematical Model For Selecting Future Cases Based On Prior Errors, Yun Robert Sheu, Elie Feder, Igor Balsim, Victor F. Levin, Andrew G. Bleicher, Barton F. Branstetter Iv

Publications and Research

Introduction: Peer review is an essential process for physicians because it facilitates improved quality of patient care and continuing physician learning and improvement. However, peer review often is not well received by radiologists, who note that it is time intensive, subjective, and lacks demonstrable impact on patient care. Current advances in peer review include the RADPEER system with its standardization of discrepancies and incorporation of the peer review process into the PACS itself. Our purpose was to build on RADPEER and similar systems by using a mathematical model to optimally select the types of cases to be reviewed, for each …

Stable Isotopic And Geochemical Variability Within Shallow Groundwater Beneath A Hardwood Hammock And Surface Water In An Adjoining Slough (Everglades National Park, Fl), Lee J. Florea, Dorien K. Mcgee, Jonathan G. Wynn

Earth, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications

Data from a ten-month monitoring study during 2007 in south Florida provide insight into the variation of δ18O, δD, and δ13C of DOC in surface water and shallow groundwater of the Everglades ecosystem. Bi-monthly samples were taken from surface water and time-averaged precipitation at Taylor Slough, and shallow groundwater from a well and a small cave within Palma Vista Hammock, an exposure of the Upper Pleistocene Miami Limestone.

δ18O and δD values in shallow groundwater from the well and cave remain near the mean of -2.4 ‰ and -12 ‰, respectively (VSMOW scale). 18O and D are enriched in surface …

Reducing Cluster Power Consumption By Dynamically Suspending Idle Nodes, Brian Michael Oppenheim

Master's Theses

Close to 1% of the world's electricity is consumed by computer servers. Given that the increased use of electricity raises costs and damages the environment, optimizing the world's computing infrastructure for power consumption is worthwhile. This thesis is one attempt at such an optimization. In particular, I began by building a cluster of 6 Intel Atom based low-power nodes to perform work analogous to data center clusters. Then, I installed a version of Hadoop modified with a novel power management system on the cluster. The power management system uses different algorithms to determine when to turn off idle nodes in …

Remediation Of Soil Hydrophobicity On A Coastal Usga Sand-Based Golf Green, Troy David Thompson

Master's Theses

Managing soil hydrophobicity caused by localized dry spots (LDS) on sand based golf greens has become one of the greatest challenges for golf course superintendents and managers, especially as water restrictions intensify. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of thirteen soil surfactants in eliminating LDS and in maximizing root zone soil moisture on a sand based USGA golf green located on the California Central Coast. Potential water repellency of air dried cores (measured utilizing the water droplet penetration time (WDPT) method), phytotoxicity, and climate were analyzed during two experimental trials. Phytotoxicity data was collected for Trial …

Influences Of Environmental Education Programs On The Participant's Affinity For Nature, Justin Alan Schmillen

Master's Theses

This study was conducted to determine the change, and the factors influencing the change, in the participant’s affinity for nature resulting from an environmental education experience. In addition, this study also examined the change and factors of change in aspects of the participant’s affinity for nature that directly relate to marine and coastal resources and environments. An adapted version of the Affinity for Nature scale, an outcome measuring instrument used by the American Camp Association was used to collect data from participants (n=529) at Rancho El Chorro Outdoor School and Camp Ocean Pines, whose experience included an overnight component and …

Water Conservation For The County Of San Luis Obispo, Dimitri Theodore Antoniou

Master's Theses

This study is an academic research project completed to satisfy the California Polytechnic Master Thesis Requirement for the Master Degree of City and Regional Planning in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

The County of San Luis Obispo Planning and Building Department is the client for this professional project. The project was requested by the County of San Luis Obispo to assist in its water conservation efforts and to help achieve a 20 percent per capita reduction of water use by the year 2020.

The project consists of two documents: A Handbook of Water Conservation Technologies and Practices (Handbook) …

Real-Time Visualizations Of Ocean Data Collected By The Norus Glider, Daniel M. Medina

Master's Theses

Scientific visualization computer applications generate visual representations of large and complex sets of science data. These types of applications allow scientists to gain greater knowledge and insight into their data. For example, the visualization of environmental data is of particular interest to biologists when trying to understand how complex variables interact. Modern robotics and sensors have expanded the ability to collect environmental data, thus, the size and variety of these data-sets have likewise grown. Oftentimes, the collected data are deposited into files and databases where they sit in their separate and unique formats. Without easy to use visualization tools, it …

Comparison Of Two Potential Streamgage Locations On Scott Creek At Swanton Pacific Ranch, California, Matthew C. Scrudato

Master's Theses

Two locations on Scott Creek, located 12 miles north of Santa Cruz California, are being considered for the installation of a streamgage to measure discharge. Each location offers unique considerations and challenges in gage construction and discharge measurement capabilities. A detailed flood frequency analysis was completed using a direct watershed comparison, direct equations developed by Waananen and Crippen, a Log Pearson Type III Frequency Distribution, a regional analysis, and two-station comparisons. Final results indicate a 100-year recurrence interval of 6,310 ft3/s at the Upper Scott Creek location and 6,520 ft3/s at the lower location. A detailed indirect measurement revealed that …

Effects Of Recycled Water On Landscape Plants, Casey R. Miranda

Master's Theses

ABSTRACT EFFECTS OF RECYCLED WATER ON LANDSCAPE PLANTS Casey Ray Miranda Recycled water is water that has been previously used, has suffered a loss of quality, and has been properly treated for redistribution (Wu et al. 2001). The use of recycled water as an alternative to fresh water in the landscape can have positive and negative effects. Experimentation on 40 different plant species during a 32 week period (2 phases of 16 weeks), was conducted to analyze the effects of recycled water irrigation on the appearance of landscape plants. Each species of plant was planted into 10 individual number 2 …

A Comparison Of Lidar Generated Channel Features With Ground-Surveyed Channel Features In The Little Creek Watershed, Ryan M. Hilburn

Master's Theses

Detecting change in stream channel features over time is important in understanding channel morphology and the effects of both natural and anthropogenic influences. Channel features historically, and now currently, are being measured using a variety of ground survey techniques. These surveys require substantial time commitments and funding to complete. Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) is an airborne laser mapping technology that holds promise to provide an alternative to ground-based survey methods. For this study, ground surveys were used to verify the accuracy of data collected using airborne LiDAR. Fifty nine cross-sectional profiles were surveyed in the Little Creek watershed at …

El Niño-Southern Oscillation Effect On A Fire Regime In Northeastern Mexico Has Changed Over Time, Larissa L. Yocom Kent, Peter Z. Fule, Peter M. Brown, Julian Cerano, Jose Villanueva-Diaz, Donald A. Falk, Eladio Cornejo-Oviedo

Wildland Resources Faculty Publications

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climate-forcing mechanism that has been shown to affect precipitation and the occurrence of wildfires in many parts of the world. In the southern United States and northern Mexico, warm events (El Niño) are associated with moist winter conditions and fewer fires, while cool events (La Niña) tend to favor dry winters and more fires. We tested this relationship in a region of northeastern Mexico by characterizing the historical fire regime and climatic influences. Fire regimes were reconstructed from fire-scar samples collected from 100 trees in three high-elevation sites on Peña Nevada in …

Measuring Atmospheric Scattering From Digital Images Of Urban Scenery Using Temporal Polarization-Based Vision, Tarek El-Gaaly

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Suspended atmospheric particles (particulate matter) are a form of air pollution that visually degrades urban scenery and is hazardous to human health and the environment. Current environmental monitoring devices are limited in their capability of measuring average particulate matter (PM) over large areas. Quantifying the visual effects of haze in digital images of urban scenery and correlating these effects to PM levels is a vital step in more practically monitoring our environment. Current image haze extraction algorithms remove all the haze from the scene and hence produce unnatural scenes for the sole purpose of enhancing vision. We present two algorithms …

An Extended Configurable Uml Activity Diagram And A Transformation Algorithm For Business Process Reference Modeling, Yosra Osama Badr

Archived Theses and Dissertations

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions provide generic off-the-shelf reference models usually known as "best practices". The configuration !individualization of the reference model to meet specific requirements of business end users however, is a difficult task. The available modeling languages do not provide a complete configurable language that could be used to model configurable reference models. More specifically, there is no algorithm that monitors the transformation of configurable UML Activity Diagram (AD) models while preserving the syntactic correctness of the model. To fill these gaps we propose an extended UML AD modeling language which we named Configurable UML Activity Diagram (C-UML …

Improving The Teaching Of Econometrics At Pace University Using Stata, Gregory Colman

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

The goal of this grant was to improve the teaching of econometrics at Pace using the computer program, Stata, the most widely-used econometrics software among applied economists.

The Gel Documentation System: A Cornerstone To The Implementation Of The Introduction To Biotechnology And Introduction To Bioinformatics Cross-Disciplinary Course Series, Marcy Kelly, Gregory Lampard, Constance Knapp

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

No abstract provided.

Structural And Stratigraphic Control On The Migration Of A Contaminant Plume At The P Reactor Area, Savannah River Site, South Carolina, Antonio E. Cameron González, Camelia C. Knapp, Michael G. Waddell, Adrian Addison, John M. Shafer

Faculty Publications

Geophysical methods, including a shallow seismic reflection (SSR) survey, surface and borehole ground-penetrating radar (GPR) data, and electrical resistivity imaging (ERI), were conducted at the Savannah River site (SRS), South Carolina, to investigate the shallow stratigraphy, hydrogeophysical zonation, and the applicability and performance of these geophysical techniques for hydrogeological characterization in contaminant areas. The study site is the P Reactor area located within the upper Atlantic coastal plain, with clastic sediments ranging from Late Cretaceous to Miocene in age. The target of this research was the delineation and prediction of migration pathways of a trichloroethylene (TCE) contaminant plume that originates …

Geodesic Graph Cut For Interactive Image Segmentation, Bryan S. Morse, Brian L. Price, Scott Cohen

Faculty Publications

Interactive segmentation is useful for selecting objects of interest in images and continues to be a topic of much study. Methods that grow regions from foreground/background seeds, such as the recent geodesic segmentation approach, avoid the boundary-length bias of graph-cut methods but have their own bias towards minimizing paths to the seeds, resulting in increased sensitivity to seed placement. The lack of edge modeling in geodesic or similar approaches limits their ability to precisely localize object boundaries, something at which graph-cut methods generally excel. This paper presents a method for combining geodesicdistance information with edge information in a graphcut optimization …

Simultaneous Foreground, Background, And Alpha Estimation For Image Matting, Bryan S. Morse, Brian L. Price, Scott Cohen

Faculty Publications

Image matting is the process of extracting a soft segmentation of an object in an image as defined by the matting equation. Most current techniques focus largely on computing the alpha values of unknown pixels and treat computation of the foreground and background colors as an afterthought, if at all. However, for many applications, such as compositing an object into a new scene or deleting an object from the scene, the foreground and background colors are vital for an acceptable answer. We propose a method of solving for the foreground, background, and alpha of an unknown region in an image …

Parallel Active Learning: Eliminating Wait Time With Minimal Staleness, Paul Felt, Robbie Haertel, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

A practical concern for Active Learning (AL) is the amount of time human experts must wait for the next instance to label. We propose a method for eliminating this wait time independent of specific learning and scoring algorithms by making scores always available for all instances, using old (stale) scores when necessary. The time during which the expert is annotating is used to train models and score instances–in parallel–to maximize the recency of the scores. Our method can be seen as a parameterless, dynamic batch AL algorithm. We analyze the amount of staleness introduced by various AL schemes and then …

The Teaching Of Equation Solving: Approaches In Standards-Based And Traditional Curricula In The United States, Jinfa Cai, Bikai Nie, John Moyer

Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Faculty Research and Publications

This paper discusses the approaches to teaching linear equation solving that are embedded in a Standards-based mathematics curriculum (Connected Mathematics Program or CMP) and in a traditional mathematics curriculum (Glencoe Mathematics) in the United States. Overall, the CMP curriculum takes a functional approach to teaching equation solving, while Glencoe Mathematics takes a structural approach. The functional approach emphasizes the important ideas of change and variation in situations and contexts. It also emphasizes the representation of relationships between variables. The structural approach, on the other hand, requires students to work abstractly with symbols and follow procedures in a systematic way. …

Otl: A Framework Of Online Transfer Learning, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate a new machine learning framework called Online Transfer Learning (OTL) that aims to transfer knowledge from some source domain to an online learning task on a target domain. We do not assume the target data follows the same class or generative distribution as the source data, and our key motivation is to improve a supervised online learning task in a target domain by exploiting the knowledge that had been learned from large amount of training data in source domains. OTL is in general challenging since data in both domains not only can be different in …

On Trustworthiness Of Cpu Usage Metering And Accounting, Mei Liu, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In the envisaged utility computing paradigm, a user taps a service provider’s computing resources to accomplish her tasks, without deploying the needed hardware and software in her own IT infrastructure. To make the service profitable, the service provider charges the user based on the resources consumed. A commonly billed resource is CPU usage. A key factor to ensure the success of such a business model is the trustworthiness of the resource metering scheme. In this paper, we provide a systematic study on the trustworthiness of CPU usage metering. Our results show that the metering schemes in commodity operating systems should …

Efficient Mutual Nearest Neighbor Query Processing For Moving Object Trajectories, Yunjun Gao, Baihua Zheng, Gencai Chen, Qing Li, Chun Chen, Gang Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a set D of trajectories, a query object q, and a query time extent Γ, a mutual (i.e., symmetric) nearest neighbor (MNN) query over trajectories finds from D, the set of trajectories that are among the k1 nearest neighbors (NNs) of q within Γ, and meanwhile, have q as one of their k2 NNs. This type of queries is useful in many applications such as decision making, data mining, and pattern recognition, as it considers both the proximity of the trajectories to q and the proximity of q to the trajectories. In this paper, we first formalize MNN search …

Resource Allocation In Distributed Mixed-Criticality Cyber-Physical Systems, Karthik Lakshmanan, Dionisio De Niz, Ragunathan (Raj) Rajkumar, Gabriel A. Moreno

Gabriel A. Moreno

Large-scale distributed cyber-physical systems will have many sensors/actuators (each with local micro-controllers), and a distributed communication/computing backbone with multiple processors. Many cyber-physical applications will be safety critical and in many cases unexpected workload spikes are likely to occur due to unpredictable changes in the physical environment. In the face of such overload scenarios, the desirable property in such systems is that the most critical applications continue to meet their deadlines. In this paper, we capture this mixed-criticality property by developing a formal overload-resilience metric called ductility. The generality of ductility enables it to evaluate any scheduling algorithm from the perspective …

The First Ten Months Of Investigation Of Gravity Waves And Temperature Variability Over The Andes., Jonathan R. Pugmire, Neal Criddle, Michael J. Taylor, Dominique Pautet, Yucheng Zhao

Jonathan Pugmire

The Andes region is an excellent natural laboratory for investigating gravity wave influences on the Upper Mesospheric and Lower Thermospheric (MLT) dynamics: during the summer months the dominant gravity waves result from deep convection arising from severe thunderstorms over the continent to the east. In winter this convective activity is expected to be replaced by strong orographic forcing due to intense prevailing zonal winds blowing eastward from the Pacific Ocean and suddenly encountering the towering Andes mountain range (6000m). This creates large amplitude mountain waves that have been measured well into the stratosphere and most recently penetration occasionally into the …

On Distance-Based Permutation Tests For Between-Group Comparisons, Philip T. Reiss, M. Henry H. Stevens, Zarrar Shehzad, Eva Petkova, Michael P. Milham

Philip T. Reiss

Permutation tests based on distances among multivariate observations have found many applications in the biological sciences. Two major testing frameworks of this kind are multiresponse permutation procedures and pseudo-F tests arising from a distance-based extension of multivariate analysis of variance. In this paper we derive conditions under which these two frameworks are equivalent. The methods and equivalence results are illustrated by reanalyzing an ecological data set and by a novel application to functional magnetic resonance imaging data.

Variance Reduction Techniques For Estimating Quantiles And Value-At-Risk, Fang Chu

Dissertations

Quantiles, as a performance measure, arise in many practical contexts. In finance, quantiles are called values-at-risk (VARs), and they are widely used in the financial industry to measure portfolio risk. When the cumulative distribution function is unknown, the quantile can not be computed exactly and must be estimated. In addition to computing a point estimate for the quantile, it is important to also provide a confidence interval for the quantile as a way of indicating the error in the estimate. A problem with crude Monte Carlo is that the resulting confidence interval may be large, which is often the case …

New Data Structures, Models, And Algorithms For Real-Time Resource Management, Xinfa Hu

Dissertations

Real-time resource management is the core and critical task in real-time systems. This dissertation explores new data structures, models, and algorithms for real-time resource management.

At first, novel data structures, i.e., a class of Testing Interval Trees (TITs), are proposed to help build efficient scheduling modules in real-time systems. With a general data structure, i.e., the TIT* tree, the average costs of the schedulability tests in a wide variety of real-time systems can be reduced. With the Testing Interval Tree for Vacancy analysis (TIT-V), the complexities of the schedulability tests in a class of parallel/distributed real-time systems can be effectively …

Modeling With Bivariate Geometric Distributions, Jing Li

Dissertations

This dissertation studied systems with several components which were subject to different types of failures. Systems with two components having frequency counts in the domain of positive integers, and the survival time of each component following geometric or mixture geometric distribution can be classified into this category. Examples of such systems include twin engines of an airplane and the paired organs in a human body. It was found that such a system, using conditional arguments, can be characterized as multivariate geometric distributions. It was proved that these characterizations of the geometric models can be achieved using conditional probabilities, conditional failure …

Type-1 Diabetes Risk Prediction Using Multiple Kernel Learning, Paras Garg

Theses

This thesis presents an analysis of multiple kernel learning (MKL) for type-1 diabetes risk prediction. MKL combines different models and representation of data to find a linear combination of these representations of the data. MKL has been successfully been implemented in image detection, splice site detection, ribosomal and membrane protein prediction, etc. In this thesis, this method was applied for Genome-wide association study (GWAS) for classifying cases and controls.

This thesis has shown that combined kernel does not perform better than the individual kernels and that MKL does not select the best model for this problem. Also, the effect of …