Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Toxicodynamics And Biotransformation Of Azaspiracids Incorporating Liquid Chromatography-Tandem-Mass Spectrometry (Lc-Ms/Ms) Techniques., Daniel O'Driscoll

Theses

Azaspiracids (AZAs) are a family of lipophilic polyether marine biotoxins, that have caused a number of human intoxication incidents in Europe since 1995, which was the first incident reported following the consumption by consumers of intoxicated shellfish {Mytilus edulis). This class of phycotoxins has been responsible for extended closures of shellfisheries in various locations around Europe, where levels of AZAl-3 are regulated in shellfish. Since their discovery in 1995, AZAs have become the focus of extensive research, resulting in the discovery of numerous analogues. Only AZAl and AZA2 have been found in phytoplankton and all the other analogues are believed …

Application Of Liquid Chromatography - Tandem Mass Spectrometry For The Determination Of Veterinary Drug Residues In Food Of Animal Origin, Brian Kinsella

Theses

The QuEChERS (quick, easy, cheap, effective, rugged and safe) sample preparation approach was evaluated for the extraction of anthelmintic residues from bovine milk and tissues. Liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrom.etry (LC- MS/MS) was used for detection and quantification of residues, which included the benzimidazoles (BZs), macrocyclic lactones (MLS) and the generally overlooked flukicides.

Initial work focused on the optimisation of a QuEChERS method to effectively extract anthelmintic residues from milk and liver. The method involves the extraction of residues with acetonitrile (MeCN) in the presence of salts (MgS04 and NaCl) to induce phase separation. After shaking and centrifugation, …

Scalable Multi-Modal Avatar Interface For Multi-User Environments, Brian Mac Namee, Mark Dunne, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

This research outlines an Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) interface, where multiple users will be able to interact with 3D avatars. This will take place in a distributed multi-modal environ- ment where the LOK8 Avatar System (AS) will need to locate it’s users from a crowd, using face tracking and novel 3D animation techniques.

Egal: Exploration Guided Active Learning For Tcbr, Rong Hu, Sarah Jane Delany, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

The task of building labelled case bases can be approached using active learning (AL), a process which facilitates the labelling of large collections of examples with minimal manual labelling effort. The main challenge in designing AL systems is the development of a selection strategy to choose the most informative examples to manually label. Typical selection strategies use exploitation techniques which attempt to refine uncertain areas of the decision space based on the output of a classifier. Other approaches tend to balance exploitation with exploration, selecting examples from dense and interesting regions of the domain space. In this paper we present …

Exploring The Frontier Of Uncertainty Space, Rong Hu, Patrick Lindstrom, Sarah Jane Delany, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

We aim to investigate methods balancing exploitation with exploration in active learning to improve the performance of uncertainty sampling. Two exploration guided sampling methods are compared to uncertainty sampling on various real-life datasets from the 2010 Active Learning Challenge. Our initial experiments seems to indicate that combining exploration with uncertainty sampling improves performance on certain datasets but not all.

Cognitive Effort For Multi Agent Systems, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Cognitive Effort is a multi-faceted phenomenon that has suffered from an imperfect understanding, an informal use in everyday life and numerous definitions. This paper attempts to clarify the concept, along with some of the main influencing factors, by presenting a possible heuristic formalism intended to be implemented as a computational concept, and therefore be embedded in an artificial agent capable of cognitive effort-based decision support. Its applicability in the domain of Artificial Intelligence and Multi-Agent Systems is discussed. The technical challenge of this contribution is to start an active discussion towards the formalisation of Cognitive Effort and its application in …

An Analysis Of Malfeasant Activity Directed At A Voip Honeypot, Craig Valli

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

This paper analyses data collected over a nine month period in a simple VoIP honeypot based on simple design initially put forward by Usken(2009). The honeypot collected 2083 events of malfeasant activity directed towards commonly used VoIP ports. These events resulted in a range of activity being recorded from simple enumeration to advanced probing and attempts to compromise the victim honeypot. The analysis involved traditional statistics from packet analysis, using customised scripts for extraction of data and graphical analysis using i2 Analyst Workstation. The analysis has uncovered an escalation of network activity directed towards the honeypot over a nine month …

Malware Forensics: Discovery Of The Intent Of Deception, Murray Brand, Craig Valli, Andrew Woodward

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Malicious software (malware) has a wide variety of analysis avoidance techniques that it can employ to hinder forensic analysis. Although legitimate software can incorporate the same analysis avoidance techniques to provide a measure of protection against reverse engineering and to protect intellectual property, malware invariably makes much greater use of such techniques to make detailed analysis labour intensive and very time consuming. Analysis avoidance techniques are so heavily used by malware that the detection of the use of analysis avoidance techniques could be a very good indicator of the presence of malicious intent. However, there is a tendency for analysis …

The 2009 Analysis Of Information Remaining On Disks Offered For Sale On The Second Hand Market, Andy Jones, Craig Valli, Glenn S. Dardick, Iain Sutherland, G. Dabibi, Gareth Davies

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

The ever increasing use and reliance upon computers in both the public and private sector has led to enormous numbers of computers being disposed of at the end of their useful life within an organisation. As the cost of computers has dropped, their use in the home has also continued to increase. In most organisations, computers have a relatively short life and are replaced on a regular basis with the result that, if not properly cleansed of data, they are released into the public domain containing data that can be relatively up to date. This problem is exacerbated by the …

Indiana Wildlife Disease News, Vol 5, Issue 1 -- February 2010, Joe N. Caudill, Dean Zimmerman

Indiana Wildlife Disease News

Abscesses in wildlife
Indiana Releases Third TB Quarantine
Chronic Wasting Disease Found in Virginia White-tailed deer
Update on Bovine Tuberculosis Surveillance in Wild White-tailed Deer
Indiana Chronic Wasting Disease Surveillance Update
Jennifer House, Epidemiologist Indiana State Dept of Health
Midwest Wildlife Disease Update: VHSV Now Found in All Great Lakes; Minnesota Deer Positive for Bovine Tuberculosis; No Additional CWD Found in Michigan Deer; CWD Prions in Deer Feces; WNS Now in Tennessee; Swine Brucellosis Infects Florida Hog Hunters; New Monograph on Feral Swine

From Energy Gradient And Natural Selection To Biodiversity And Stability Of Ecosystems, Bo Deng

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to incorporate well-established ecological principles into a foodweb model consisting of four trophic levels --- abiotic resources, plants, herbivores, and carnivores. The underlining principles include Kimura's neutral theory of genetic evolution, Liebig's Law of the Minimum for plant growth, Holling's functionals for herbivore foraging and carnivore predation, the One-Life Rule for all organisms, and Lotka-Volterra's model for intraand interspecific competitions. Numerical simulations of the model led to the following statistical findings: (a) particular foodwebs can give contradicting observations on biodiversity and productivity, in particular, all known functional forms -- - positive, negative, sigmoidal, and …

Metastability And Plasticity In A Conceptual Model Of Neurons, Bo Deng

Department of Mathematics: Faculty Publications

For a new class of neuron models we demonstrate here that typical membrane action potentials and spike-bursts are only transient states but appear to be asymptotically stable; and yet such metastable states are plastic — being able to dynamically change from one action potential to another with different pulse frequencies and from one spike-burst to another with different spike-per-burst numbers. The pulse and spike-burst frequencies change with individual ions’ pump currents while their corresponding metastable-plastic states maintain the same transmembrane voltage and current profiles in range. It is also demonstrated that the plasticity requires two one-way ion pumps operating in …

Towards An Automated Digital Data Forensic Model With Specific Reference To Investigation Processes, Johan Scholtz, Ajit Narayanan

Australian Digital Forensics Conference

Existing digital forensics frameworks do not provide clear guidelines for conducting digital forensics investigation. However, had a framework existed, investigations based on known procedures and processes would follow strict prescribed standardisation. This should direct investigations following a set method for comparisons; ensuring future investigation is following one standard. Digital forensics lack confirmed and tested methods; this became obvious when we consider varied interpretations of the same case by participants using different investigation methods. Previous research covered several approaches to setting a forensics framework, which are mere adaptations of previous models. We found that only a few models present a framework …

Suppression Of Octahedral Tilts And Associated Changes In Electronic Properties At Epitaxial Oxide Heterostructure Interfaces, A. Y. Borisevich, H. Y. Chang, Mark Huijben, M. P. Oxley, S. Okamoto, Manish K. Niranjan, John D. Burton, Evgeny Y. Tsymbal, Y. H. Chu, P. Yu, R. Ramesh, Sergei V. Kalinin, S. J. Pennycook

Materials Research Science and Engineering Center: Faculty Publications

Epitaxial oxide interfaces with broken translational symmetry have emerged as a central paradigm behind the novel behaviors of oxide superlattices. Here, we use scanning transmission electron microscopy to demonstrate a direct, quantitative unit-cell-by-unit-cell mapping of lattice parameters and oxygen octahedral rotations across the BiFeO₃ -La_0:7 Sr_0:3MnO₃ interface to elucidate how the change of crystal symmetry is accommodated. Combined with low-loss electron energy loss spectroscopy imaging, we demonstrate a mesoscopic antiferrodistortive phase transition near the interface in BiFeO₃ and elucidate associated changes in electronic properties in a thin layer directly adjacent to the interface.

Submillimeter-Resolution Radiography Of Shielded Structures With Laser-Accelerated Electron Beams, Viswanathan Ramanathan, Sudeep Banerjee, Nathan D. Powers, Nathaniel Cunningham, Nathan A. Chandler-Smith, Kun Zhao, Kevin J. Brown, Donald Umstadter, Shaun Clarke, Sara Pozzi, James Beene, Randy Vane, David Schultz

Donald Umstadter Publications

We investigate the use of energetic electron beams for high-resolution radiography of flaws embedded in thick solid objects. A bright, monoenergetic electron beam (with energy >100 MeV) was generated by the process of laser-wakefield acceleration through the interaction of 50-TW, 30-fs laser pulses with a supersonic helium jet. The high energy, low divergence, and small source size of these beams make them ideal for high-resolution radiographic studies of cracks or voids embedded in dense materials that are placed at a large distance from the source. We report radiographic imaging of steel with submillimeter resolution.

Twitris 2.0 : Semantically Empowered System For Understanding Perceptions From Social Data, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Hemant Purohit, Pavan Kapanipathi, Pramod Anantharam, Ajith H. Ranabahu, Vinh Nguyen, Pablo N. Mendes, Alan Gary Smith, Michael Cooney, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present Twitris 2.0, a Semantic Web application that facilitates understanding of social perceptions by Semantics-based processing of massive amounts of event-centric data. Twitris 2.0 addresses challenges in large scale processing of social data, preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties. Twitris 2.0 also covers context based semantic integration of multiple Web resources and expose semantically enriched social data to the public domain. Semantic Web technologies enable the systematic integration and analysis abilities.

Computing For The Human Experience: Semantics-Empowered Sensors, Services, And Social Computing On The Ubiquitous Web, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

People are on the verge of an era in which the human experience can be enriched in ways they couldn't have imagined two decades ago. Rather than depending on a single technology, people progressed with several whose semantics-empowered convergence and integration will enable us to capture, understand, and reapply human knowledge and intellect. Such capabilities will consequently elevate our technological ability to deal with the abstractions, concepts, and actions that characterize human experiences. This will herald computing for human experience (CHE). The CHE vision is built on a suite of technologies that serves, assists, and cooperates with humans to nondestructively …

A Qualitative Examination Of Topical Tweet And Retweet Practices, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Hemant Purohit, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This work contributes to the study of retweet behavior on Twitter surrounding real-world events. We analyze over a million tweets pertaining to three events, present general tweet properties in such topical datasets and qualitatively analyze the properties of the retweet behavior surrounding the most tweeted/viral content pieces. Findings include a clear relationship between sparse/dense retweet patterns and the content and type of a tweet itself; suggesting the need to study content properties in link-based diffusion models.

A Study In Hadoop Streaming With Matlab For Nmr Data Processing, Kalpa Gunaratna, Paul E. Anderson, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Applying Cloud computing techniques for analyzing large data sets has shown promise in many data-driven scientific applications. Our approach presented here is to use Cloud computing for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR)data analysis which normally consists of large amounts of data. Biologists often use third party or commercial software for ease of use. Enabling the capability to use this kind of software in a Cloud will be highly advantageous in many ways. Scripting languages especially designed for clouds may not have the flexibility biologists need for their purposes. Although this is true, they are familiar with special software packages that allow …

Power Of Clouds In Your Pocket: An Efficient Approach For Cloud Mobile Hybrid Application Development, Ashwin Manjunatha, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space as well as the Cloud space. Our research focuses on exploiting the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by defining a new class of applications called cloud mobile hybrid (CMH) applications and a Domain Specific …

Continuous Semantics To Analyze Real-Time Data, Amit P. Sheth, Christopher Thomas, Pankaj Mehra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Increasingly we are presented with dynamic domains involved in social, mobile, and sensor webs. Such domains are spontaneous (arising suddenly), follow a period of rapid evolution, involving real-time or near real-time data, involve many distributed participants and diverse viewpoints involving topical or contentious subjects, and involve feature context colored by local knowledge and sociocultural backgrounds. This article present continuous semantics can help us model such dynamic domains and analyze the related real-time data. Capabilities include crating dynamic domain model by mining social data, and using dynamic models for semantic analysis of real-time data.

Sensor Discovery On Linked Data, Josh Pschorr, Cory Andrew Henson, Harshal Kamlesh Patni, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

There has been a drive recently to make sensor data accessible on the Web. However, because of the vast number of sensors collecting data about our environment, finding relevant sensors on the Web is a non-trivial challenge. In this paper, we present an approach to discovering sensors through a standard service interface over Linked Data. This is accomplished with a semantic sensor network middleware that includes a sensor registry on Linked Data and a sensor discovery service that extends the OGC Sensor Web Enablement. With this approach, we are able to access and discover sensors that are positioned near named-locations …

Understanding Events Through Analysis Of Social Media, Amit P. Sheth, Hemant Purohit, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Pavan Kapanipathi, Lu Chen

Kno.e.sis Publications

Users are sharing vast amounts of social data through social networking platforms accessible by Web and increasingly via mobile devices. This opens an exciting opportunity to extract social perceptions as well as obtain insights relevant to events around us. We discuss the significant need and opportunity for analyzing event-centric user generated content on social networks, present some of the technical challenges and our approach to address them. This includes aggregating social data related to events of interest, along with Web resources (news, Wikipedia pages, multimedia) related to an event of interest, and supporting analysis along spatial, temporal, thematic, and sentiment …

Provenance Context Entity (Pace): Scalable Provenance Tracking For Scientific Rdf Data, Satya S. Sahoo, Olivier Bodenreider, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The Resource Description Framework (RDF) format is being used by a large number of scientific applications to store and disseminate their datasets. The provenance information, describing the source or lineage of the datasets, is playing an increasingly significant role in ensuring data quality, computing trust value of the datasets, and ranking query results. Current provenance tracking approaches using the RDF reification vocabulary suffer from a number of known issues, including lack of formal semantics, use of blank nodes, and application-dependent interpretation of reified RDF triples. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called Provenance Context Entity (PaCE) that uses …

Mobicloud - Making Clouds Reachable: A Toolkit For Easy And Efficient Development Of Customized Cloud Mobile Hybrid Applications, Ashwin Manjunatha, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

The advancements in computing have resulted in a boom of cheap, ubiquitous, connected mobile devices, as well as seemingly unlimited, utility style, pay as you go computing resources, commonly referred to as Cloud computing. However, taking full advantage of this mobile and cloud computing landscape, especially for the data intensive domains, has been hampered by the many heterogeneities that exist in the mobile space, as well as the Cloud space. Our research attempts to exploit the capabilities of the mobile and cloud landscape by introducing MobiCloud, an online toolkit to efficiently develop Cloud-mobile hybrid (CMH) applications. We define a CMH …

From Questions To Effective Answers: On The Utility Of Knowledge-Driven Querying Systems For Life Sciences Data, Amir H. Asiaee, Prashant Doshi, Todd Minning, Satya S. Sahoo, Priti Parikh, Amit P. Sheth, Rick L. Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

We compare two distinct approaches for querying data in the context of the life sciences. The first approach utilizes conventional databases to store the data and intuitive form-based interfaces to facilitate easy querying of the data. These interfaces could be seen as implementing a set of 'pre-canned' queries commonly used by the life science researchers that we study. The second approach is based on semantic Web technologies and is knowledge (model) driven. It utilizes a large OWL ontology and same datasets as before but associated as RDF instances of the ontology concepts. An intuitive interface is provided that allows the …

V371 Per — A Thick-Disk, Short-Period F/1o Cepheid, P. Wils, A. A. Henden, S. Kleidis, Edward G. Schmidt, D. L. Welch

Edward Schmidt Publications

V371 Per was found to be a double-mode Cepheid with a fundamental mode period of 1.738 days, the shortest among Galactic beat Cepheids, and an unusually high period ratio of 0.731, while the other Galactic beat Cepheids have period ratios between 0.697 and 0.713. The latter suggests that the star has a metallicity [Fe/H] between −1 and −0.7. The derived distance from the Galactic plane places it in the thick disk or the Halo, while all other Galactic beat Cepheids belong to the thin disk. There are indications from historical data that both the fundamental and first overtone periods have …

Managing Drought Risk On The Ranch: A Planning Guide For Great Plains Ranchers, University Of Nebraska - Lincoln National Drought Mitigation Center

National Drought Mitigation Center: Publications

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WHY PLAN FOR DROUGHT?......... 3

UNDERSTANDING DROUGHT........... 6

THE RANCH DROUGHT PLAN........... 9

COMMUNICATION AND PLANNING PARTNERS............ 10

RANCH VISION AND OBJECTIVES............. 11

SWOT ANALYSIS............... 12

INVENTORY OF RANCH RESOURCES................ 13

CRITICAL DATES AND TARGET POINTS................. 15

MONITORING PLAN AND SCHEDULE.................... 19

EVALUATE DROUGHT MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES............ 20

IMPLEMENT AND MONITOR THE DROUGHT PLAN............ 29

WORKSHEETS........... 30

Effect Of Spin-Dependent Screening On Tunneling Electroresistance And Tunneling Magnetoresistance In Multiferroic Tunnel Junctions, M. Ye. Zhuravlev, S. Maekawa, Evgeny Y. Tsymbal

Evgeny Tsymbal Publications

Using a ferroelectric barrier as a functional material in a (magnetic) tunnel junction has recently attracted significant interest due to new functionalities not available in conventional tunnel junctions. Switching a ferroelectric polarization of the barrier alters conductance resulting in a tunneling electroresistance (TER) effect. Using a ferroelectric barrier in a magnetic tunnel junction makes it mutiferroic where TER coexists with tunneling magnetoresistance (TMR). Here we develop a simple model for a multiferroic tunnel junction (MFTJ) which consists of two ferromagnetic electrodes separated by a ferroelectric barrier layer. The model explicitly includes the spin-dependent screening potential and thus extends previously developed …

Ferroelectric Dead Layer Driven By A Polar Interface, Y. Wang, Manish K. Niranjan, K. Janicka, Julian P. Velev, Mikhail Ye Zhuravlev, Sitaram Jaswal, Evgeny Y. Tsymbal

Evgeny Tsymbal Publications

Based on first-principles and model calculations we investigate the effect of polar interfaces on the ferroelectric stability of thin-film ferroelectrics. As a representative model, we consider a TiO₂ -terminated BaTiO₃ film with LaO monolayers at the two interfaces that serve as doping layers. We find that the polar interfaces create an intrinsic electric field that is screened by the electron charge leaking into the BaTiO₃ layer. The amount of the leaking charge is controlled by the boundary conditions which are different for three heterostructures considered, namely, vacuum/LaO/BaTiO₃ /LaO, LaO/BaTiO₃ , and SrRuO₃ /LaO/BaTiO_{3 …}