Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Consistency Of Projected Drought Over The Sahel With Changes In The Monsoon Circulation And Extremes In A Regional Climate Model Projections, M. B. Sylla, A. T. Gaye, G. S. Jenkins, Jeremy S. Pal, F. Giorgi

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Works

As a step toward an increased understanding of climate change over West Africa, in this paper we analyze the relationship between rainfall changes and monsoon dynamics in high-resolution regional climate model experiments performed using the Regional Climate Model (RegCM3). Multidecadal simulations are carried out for present-day and future climate conditions under increased greenhouse gas forcing driven by the global climate model European Center/Hamburg 5 (ECHAM5). Compared to the present day, the future scenario simulation produces drier conditions over the Sahel and wetter conditions over orographic areas. The Sahel drying is accompanied by a weaker monsoon flow, a southward migration and …

Situating Sotl Within The Disciplines: Mathematics In The United States As A Case Study, Jacqueline Dewar, Curtis Bennett

Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science Faculty Works

After two decades of work, many in the SoTL community are pondering the future of the SoTL movement. Will it sustain its influence? Will it continue to attract new participants? What role should the disciplines play? From the perspective of mathematics, this paper examines efforts by the Carnegie Academy and individuals within the mathematical community to build disciplinary support for the scholarship of teaching and learning. The authors, both mathematicians and Carnegie scholars, restrict their observations to the efforts undertaken in the United States during the last decade and examine the situation in mathematics in greater depth than has heretofore …

An Attempt To Find Neighbors, Yong Shi, Ryan Rosenblum

Faculty Articles

In this paper, we present our continuous research on similarity search problems. Previously we proposed PanKNN[18]which is a novel technique that explores the meaning of K nearest neighbors from a new perspective, redefines the distances between data points and a given query point Q, and efficiently and effectively selects data points which are closest to Q. It can be applied in various data mining fields. In this paper, we present our approach to solving the similarity search problem in the presence of obstacles. We apply the concept of obstacle points and process the similarity search problems in a different way. …

Wetland Program Plan For Nebraska, Ted Lagrange

Nebraska Game and Parks Commission: White Papers, Conference Presentations, and Manuscripts

The State of Nebraska plans to continue to implement its wetland program over the next three calendar years (2011-2013). In 2011, Nebraska will undertake an intensification study to assess the condition of its wetlands in 10 different wetland complexes. The State will use this information to improve our understanding of baseline wetland conditions, and to prioritize wetland restoration and protection activities. Nebraska will continue to work in partnership with landowners, agencies, and organizations to restore and protect 9,000 acres of wetlands. The priorities for the restoration and protection will be determined by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and the …

Spawning-Related Movements Of Barred Sand Bass Paralabrax Nebulifer, In Southern California: Interpretations From Two Decades Of Historical Tag And Recapture Data, E. T. Jarvis, Christi Linardich, C. F. Valle

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

During the 1960s and 1990s, the California Department of Fish and Game tagged 8,634 barred sand bass in southern California, and 972 fish (11%) were recaptured. Tag returns suggest barred sand bass are transient aggregate spawners that form spawning aggregations consisting of both resident and migrant individuals. Spawning residency at a historic spawning location was estimated by the frequency of returns over time; most same-year returns (82%, n  =  141) were recaptured within a 7 to 35-day period. The maximum recapture distance was 92 km. The average (± SD) non-spawning season recapture distance from peak spawning season tagging locations was …

Revelations Of Adaptive Technology Hiding In Your Operating System, Kathleen P. King

Leadership, Counseling, Adult, Career and Higher Education Faculty Publications

Pre-publication version of a chapter about the assistive technology tools and resources available for free in Windows OS and Mac OS. Introducing higher education faculty to free resources, features and programs which they can recommend to their students or perhaps use for themselves (for instance for fading eyesight or hearing). In addition, the chapter briefly shares strategies and examples of how they might be used.

The book will have an entire chapter dedicated to assistive technology as well. This is a popularized assistive technology chapter for generalist, NON special education, faculty to become acquainted with readily available and free resources. …

Modeling The Vertical Distributions Of Downwelling Plane Irradiance And Diffuse Attenuation Coefficient In Optically Deep Waters, X. J. Pan, Richard C. Zimmerman

OES Faculty Publications

The diffuse attenuation coefficient Kᵈ is critical to understand the vertical distribution of underwater downwelling irradiance (Eᵈ). Theoretically Eᵈ is composed of the direct solar beam and the diffuse sky irradiance. Applying the statistical results from Hydrolight radiative transfer simulations, Kᵈ is expressed into a mathematical equation (named as PZ06) integrated from the contribution of direct solar beam and diffuse sky irradiance with the knowledge of sky and water conditions. The percent root mean square errors (RMSE) for the vertical distribution of Eᵈ(z) under various sky and water conditions between PZ06 and Hydrolight results are typically less than 4%. Field …

Glacier (?) National Park, Judy Mcilrath

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

In this Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum activity, students examine data pertaining to the disappearing glaciers in Glacier National Park. After calculating percentage change of the number of glaciers from 1850 (150) to 1968 (50) and 2009 (26), they move on to the main glacier-monitoring content of the module--area vs. time data for the Grinnell Glacier, one of 26 glaciers that remain in the park. Using a second-order polynomial (quadratic function) fitted to the data, they extrapolate to estimate when there will be no Grinnell Glacier remaining (illustrating the relevance of the question mark in the title of the module). Introductory …

Yellowstone! A National Park On A Hot Spot, Judy Mcilrath

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

This Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum activity introduces Geology of National Parks students to Yellowstone National Park. The module takes a broad overview of volcanic features of the park, including the line of calderas along the up-drift hot spot trace, the mapped area of tuffs produced by their cataclysmic eruptions, and the hydrothermal features for which the park is so well known. Students calculate the rate that the North American Plate has been moving over the hot spot, the relative volume of the materials produced in the cataclysmic eruptions, their recurrence interval, and probability of eruption in any given year. The …

Green Local Governments In Florida: Assessment Of Sustainability Performance, Naimish Upadhyay, Robert Brinkmann

School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications

The sustainability performance of local governments that adopted the Florida Green Building Coalition’s Green Local Government standard was evaluated using a web-based review and survey of 26 local governments within the context of the Three Es of environment, equity, and economic development. The results indicate that while many local governments exhibit a broad commitment to sustainability as evidenced by the inclusion of sustainability in formal documents, such efforts are not present across all government functions or departments. In addition, while local issues are often addressed, interrelated sustainability goals of equity and economic development are not clearly articulated. Most local governments …

Survival And Growth Responses Of Eight Everglades Tree Species Along An Experimental Hydrological Gradient On Two Tree Island Types, Susana L. Stoffella, Michael S. Ross, Jay P. Sah, René M. Price, Pamela L. Sullivan, Eric A. Cline, Leonard J. Scinto

FCE LTER Journal Articles

Questions: How are the early survival and growth of seedlings of Everglades tree species planted in an experimental setting on artificial tree islands affected by hydrology and substrate type? What are the implications of these responses for broader tree island restoration efforts?

Location: Loxahatchee Impoundment Landscape Assessment (LILA), Boynton Beach, Florida, USA.

Methods: An experiment was designed to test hydrological and substrate effects on seedling growth and survivorship. Two islands – a peat and a limestone-core island representing two major types found in the Everglades – were constructed in four macrocosms. A mixture of eight tree species was planted on …

Dna Linking Number Change Induced By Sequence-Specific Dna-Binding Proteins, Bo Chen, Yazhong Xiao, Chang Liu, Chen-Zhong Li, Fenfei Leng

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins play a key role in many fundamental biological processes, such as transcription, DNA replication and recombination. Very often, these DNA-binding proteins introduce structural changes to the target DNA-binding sites including DNA bending, twisting or untwisting and wrapping, which in many cases induce a linking number change (ΔLk) to the DNA-binding site. Due to the lack of a feasible approach, ΔLk induced by sequence-specific DNA-binding proteins has not been fully explored. In this paper we successfully constructed a series of DNA plasmids that carry many tandem copies of a DNA-binding site for one sequence-specific DNA-binding …

Collaborative Risk Method For Information Security Management Practices: A Case Context Within Turkey, Bilge Karabacak, Sevgi Ozkan

All Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In this case study, a collaborative risk method for information security management has been analyzed considering the common problems encountered during the implementation of ISO standards in eight Turkish public organizations. This proposed risk method has been applied within different public organizations and it has been demonstrated to be effective and problem-free. The fundamental issue is that there is no legislation that regulates the information security liabilities of the public organizations in Turkey. The findings and lessons learned presented in this case provide useful insights for practitioners when implementing information security management projects in other international public sector organizations.

Selective Cross Correlation In Passive Timing Analysis Attacks Against Low-Latency Mixes, Titus Abraham

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

A mix is a communication proxy that hides the relationship between incoming and outgoing messages. Routing traffic through a path of mixes is a powerful tool for providing privacy. When mixes are used for interactive communication, such as VoIP and web browsing, attackers can undermine user privacy by observing timing information along the path. Mixes can prevent these attacks by inserting dummy packets (cover traffic) to obfuscate timing information in each stream. Two recently proposed defenses, defensive dropping and adaptive padding, enhance cover traffic by ensuring that timing information seen at the sender is very different from that seen at …

Towards Modeling The Behavior Of Physical Intruders In A Region Monitored By A Wireless Sensor Network, Pranav Krishnamoorthy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

A priority task for homeland security is the coverage of large spans of open border that cannot be continuously physically monitored for intrusion. Low-cost monitoring solutions based on wireless sensor networks have been identified as an effective means to perform perimeter monitoring. An ad-hoc wireless sensor network scattered near a border could be used to perform surveillance over a large area with relatively little human intervention. Determining the effectiveness of such an autonomous network in detecting and thwarting an intelligent intruder is a difficult task. We propose a model for an intelligent attacker that attempts to find a detection-free path …

Detecting Medication Consumption Patterns In Assistive Environments, Jyothi K. Vinjumur

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

One of the issues in healthcare systems or medical information systems is the reduction of medical errors to ensure patient safety. Our approach is to develop a cyber physical system which applies different RFID tags to monitor medicine consumption and its impact in an assistive environment. This approach talks about detecting the medication intake pattern in an assistive environment and implements an application oriented experimental research which tracks the drug consumption pattern using RFID readers and tags, motion sensors, a wireless sensor mote and a weight sensor. In this approach, an energy efficient technique by using multiple sensor devices which …

Mathematical Modeling For Phagocyte Transmigration And Reverse Engineering, Min Gon Kang

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Computational modeling and simulation have been used as an important tool to analyze the behavior of a complex biology system. Typically, the biology system is a complex non-linear system where a large number of components are involved. One of the major obstacles in computational modeling and simulation is to determine a large number of parameters in the mathematical equations representing biological properties of the system.To tackle this problem, we have developed a global optimization method, called Discrete Selection Levenberg-Marquardt (DSLM), for parameter estimation. The method uses a non-linear least square approach to approximate the solution of over-determined systems. For fast …

A Novel Architecture For Mobility Enabled Video Conferencing In Next Generation Wireless Networks, Avinash Narayan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

The Heterogeneous nature of next generation networks requires architecture and technologies that have an intrinsic support for diversity. The plethora of existing wireless access technologies will soon be connected to Internet in the wave of "Internet of Things". We have learnt from many endeavors that no single technology exists that is ubiquitous and connects everything. In Cellular service, aside from the geographic coverage limitation, the major deficiency is lack of complete coverage inside buildings (offices, healthcare facilities, malls, and the like). Once we are inside many public buildings, cellular coverage is blocked by RF opaque walls, but may have strong …

Measuring Named Entity Similarity Through Wikipedia Category Hierarchies, Jared M. Ashman

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Identifying the semantic similarity between named entities has many applications in NLP, including information extraction and retrieval, word sense disambiguation, text summarization and type classification. Similarity between named entities or terms is commonly determined using a taxonomy based approach, but the limited scalability of existing taxonomies has led recent research to use Wikipedia's encyclopedic knowledge base to find similarity or relatedness. These existing methods using Wikipedia have so far focused on relatedness, but are not as well suited to finding similarity. In this thesis, we evaluate methods for determining the semantic similarity between named entities by associating each named entity …

Building Bayesian Network Based Expert Systems From Rules, Saravanan Thirumuruganathan

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Combining expert knowledge and user explanation with automated reasoning in domains with uncertain information poses significant challenges in terms of representation and reasoning mechanisms. In particular, reasoning structures understandable and usable by humans are often different from the ones for automated reasoning and data mining systems.Rules are a convenient and human understandable way to express domain knowledge and build expert systems. Adding certainty factors to these rules presents one way to deal with uncertainty in rule based expert systems. However such systems have limitations in accurately modeling the domain. Bayesian Network, on the other hand, is a probabilistic graphical model …

Embedded Sparse Representation For Image Classification, Jin Huang

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Image classification, such as face recognition and scene categorization, is an important research area in computer vision over the last decade. It has been successfully applied to many image analysis applications. Images usually have a large number of features, hence the dimensionality reduction methods are often employed before the subsequent classification to improve the classification results. A lot of methods have been proposed, including but not limited to PCA, ICA, LDA, and Bayesian Framework. Recently, compressive sensing and sparse learning have been widely studied and applied into computer vision research. Ma et al. suggested a new method called Sparse Representation …

Evaluation Of Ferry Based Opportunistic Message Dissemination With Deterministic Inter Contact Times, Samreen Tahir

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Opportunistic Networks are characterized by intermittent connectivity and volatile topology. In such a network scenario, traditional Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) routing protocols cannot work efficiently. Hence, a novel way of message forwarding is required that operates even when an end-to-end path between a source and destination pair may never exist. Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are an approach to alleviate network partitioning by working on the `store-carry-forward' paradigm [4]. Opportunistic Networks encompass DTNs and typically involve mobile devices that exchange data by taking advantage of their proximity to other nodes. Nodes in opportunistic networks may be heterogeneous with respect to …

Handling Periodic Signs In American Sign Language Using Synthetic Generation Of Periods, Himanshu Pahwa

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

American Sign Language (or ASL) is the dominant sign language of deaf people in United States and parts of Canada. 500,000 to 2 million people use ASL as their primary language in United States. ASL uses hands, face and body, with constantly changing movements and orientations. Since the language is based on gestures, not a printed alphabet, it gets difficult to know the associated meaning given a video. There are multimedia tools and dictionaries available to view a sign video for a given word but there are no dictionaries available which, given a sign video will respond with corresponding word. …

A Human Motion Database: The Cognitive And Parametric Sampling Of Human Motion, Arnab Biswas

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Motion databases have a strong potential to guide progress in the field of machine recognition and motion-based animation. Existing databases either have a very loose structure that do not sample the domain according to any controlled methodology or too few action samples which limits their potential to quantitatively evaluate the performance of motion-based techniques. The controlled sampling of the motor domain in the database may lead investigators to identify the fundamental difficulties of motion cognition problems and allow the addressing of these issues in a more objective way. In this thesis, we describe the construction of our Human Motion Database …

Mimic: An Active Covert Channel That Evades Regularity-Based Detection, Kush Kothari

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

A covert timing channel is a hidden communication channel based on network timing that an attacker can use to sneak secrets out of a secure system. Active covert channels, in which the attacker uses a program to automatically generate innocuous traffic to use as a medium for embedding the covert channel, are especially problematic, as they allow the attacker to output large amounts of secret data. A promising technique for detecting covert timing channels focuses on using entropy-based tests. This technique can reliably detect known covert timing channels by using a combination of entropy (EN) and conditional entropy (CE) to …

Target Tracking With Lucas-Kanade Optical Flow And Particle Filters Through Affine Transforms And Occlusion, Justin Graham

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

This paper investigates a hybrid approach derived from Lucas-Kanade optical flow tracking and particle filters that is capable of tracking objects through occlusion and affine transformations. This approach is inspired by aircraft sensor pod infrared and electro-optical tracking applications. For aircraft based sensors, it is important that a tracking system be able to track through rotations as the aircraft orbits a targeting area. It is also of use to handle cases where the target may be momentarily occluded due to other vehicles or obstacles in the area. The main focus of this investigation is to find a technique that performs …

A Framework For Real-Time Fault Detection And Response In Multi-Agent Teams, Matthew B. Middleton

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

This thesis details the creation of a fault detection and response framework that can be applied to mobile multi-agent teams. This framework unites existing concepts of conditioned based maintenance and real-time machine diagnostics with a high-level matrix based discrete event command and control system that can respond to detected mechanical faults in agents in real-time. This allows for automatic corrective actions to be taken when an agent experiences failure if redundant resources are available to replace the failed unit or for the mission planner to be notified that the mission is no longer achievable given the operating conditions of the …

Real Time Hardware And Software Systems For Micro Air Vehicle Flight Control Testing, Christopher Dale Mcmurrough

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

The trend of increasing capabilities of micro scale electrical, mechanical, and computing systems is opening up the possibilities of new unmanned vehicle platforms. Both unmanned aerial and ground vehicles have traditionally been created from large conventional platforms such as automobiles, rotorcraft, and fixed wing aircraft. These conventional chassis designs are durable and proven, but the benefits of automating these types of platforms are limited by their inherent human-centric design. Many real-world applications would benefit greatly from vehicle classes designed with unconventional means such as biologically inspired locomotion. Micro air vehicles are a class of vehicles that have recently began moving …

Fast Jamming Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks, Kartik Siddhabathula

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Non-dedicated medium of communication for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) makes them vulnerable to jamming attack where an adversary injects strong signal or noises to interfere with the transmission and thus block the channel. In applications such as border security, people are particularly interested in the areas where the channel is currently jammed. It is therefore crucial to be able to detect the jamming attacks as fast as possible. Existing studies have shown that the most effective indicator of jamming attacks is the packet delivery ratio (PDR). However, current PDR-based schemes use end-to-end packet delivery ratio, which requires one to observe …

Fast And Energy-Efficient Technique For Jammed Region Mapping In Wireless Sensor Networks, Nabila Rahman

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have great practical importance for surveillance systems to perform monitoring by acquiring and sending information about intrusions into a secured area. Very little human intervention is required for WSNs, which is one of the most desirable features of them and thus making them a cheaper and safer alternative for securing large area such as international borders. Jamming attacks in WSNs can be applied to disrupt communications among the sensor nodes in the network by barring the reception of wireless signals of the sensor nodes' transceivers. Since it is difficult to prevent jamming attacks, detection and mapping …