Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Design And Modeling Of A New Biomimetic Soft Robotic Jellyfish Using Ipmc-Based Electroactive Polymers, Zakai J. Olsen, Kwang J. Kim

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Research

Smart materials and soft robotics have been seen to be particularly well-suited for developing biomimetic devices and are active fields of research. In this study, the design and modeling of a new biomimetic soft robot is described. Initial work was made in the modeling of a biomimetic robot based on the locomotion and kinematics of jellyfish. Modifications were made to the governing equations for jellyfish locomotion that accounted for geometric differences between biology and the robotic design. In particular, the capability of the model to account for the mass and geometry of the robot design has been added for better …

Experimental Demonstration Of Deterministic Chaos In A Waste Oil Biodiesel Semi-Industrial Furnace Combustion System, Shengyang Gao, Fashe Li, Qintai Xiao, Jianxin Xu, Huage Wang, Hua Wang

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, the nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the oxygen-enriched combustion of waste oil biodiesel in semi-industrial furnaces were tested by the power spectrum, phase space reconstruction, the largest Lyapunov exponents, and the 0-1 test method. To express the influences of the system parameters, experiments were carried out under different oxygen content conditions (21%, 25%, 28%, 31%, and 33%). Higher oxygen enrichment degrees contribute to finer combustion sufficiency, which produces flames with high luminance. Flame luminance and temperature can be represented by different gray scale values of flame images. The chaotic characteristics of gray scale time series under different oxygen …

Effect Of Galaxy Mergers On Star-Formation Rates, W. J. Pearson, L. Wang, M. Alpaslan, I. Baldry, M. Bilicki, M. J.I. Brown, M. W. Grootes, Benne W. Holwerda, T. D. Kitching, S. Kruk, F. F.S. Van Der Tak

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Context. Galaxy mergers and interactions are an integral part of our basic understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve over time. However, the effect that galaxy mergers have on star-formation rates (SFRs) is contested, with observations of galaxy mergers showing reduced, enhanced, and highly enhanced star formation. Aims. We aim to determine the effect of galaxy mergers on the SFR of galaxies using statistically large samples of galaxies, totalling over 200 000, which is over a large redshift range from 0.0 to 4.0. Methods. We trained and used convolutional neural networks to create binary merger identifications (merger or non-merger) in …

Default Parallels: The Science Potential Of Jwst Parallel Observations During Tso Primary Observations, Benne W. Holwerda, Jonathan Fraine, Nelly Mouawad, Joanna S. Bridge

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will observe several stars for long cumulative durations while pursuing exoplanets as primary science targets for both Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) and very likely General Observer (GO) programs. Here we argue in favor of an automatic default parallel program to observe, e.g., using the F200W/F277W filters or grism of NIRCAM/NIRISS in order to find high redshift (z (Formula Presented) 10) galaxies, cool red/brown dwarf substellar objects, solar system objects, and observations of serendipitous planetary transits. We argue here the need for automated exploratory astrophysical observations with unused JWST instruments during these long-duration exoplanet observations. …

Light-Field Style Transfer, David Marvin Hart

Theses and Dissertations

For many years, light fields have been a unique way of capturing a scene. By using a particular set of optics, a light field camera is able to, in a single moment, take images of the same scene from multiple perspectives. These perspectives can be used to calculate the scene geometry and allow for effects not possible with standard photographs, such as refocus and the creation of novel views.Neural style transfer is the process of training a neural network to render photographs in the style of a particular painting or piece of art. This is a simple process for a …

Hyperpolarized Relaxometry Based Nuclear T1 Noise Spectroscopy In Diamond, A. Ajoy, B. Safvati, R. Nazaryan, J. T. Oon, B. Han, P. Raghavan, R. Nirodi, A. Aguilar, K. Liu, X. Cai, X. Lv, E. Druga, C. Ramanathan, J. A. Reimer, C. A. Meriles, D. Suter, A. Pines

Publications and Research

The origins of spin lifetimes in quantum systems is a matter of importance in several areas of quantum information. Spectrally mapping spin relaxation processes provides insight into their origin and motivates methods to mitigate them. In this paper, we map nuclear relaxation in a prototypical system of ¹³C nuclei in diamond coupled to Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centers over a wide field range (1 mT-7 T). Nuclear hyperpolarization through optically pumped NV electrons allows signal measurement savings exceeding million-fold over conventional methods. Through a systematic study with varying substitutional electron (P1 center) and ¹³C concentrations, we identify the operational …

A Rotating Aperture Mask For Small Telescopes, Edward L. Foley

Master's Theses

Observing the dynamic interaction between stars and their close stellar neighbors is key to establishing the stars’ orbits, masses, and other properties. Our ability to visually discriminate nearby stars is limited by the power of our telescopes, posing a challenge to astronomers at small observatories that contribute to binary star surveys. Masks placed at the telescope aperture promise to augment the resolving power of telescopes of all sizes, but many of these masks must be manually and repetitively reoriented about the optical axis to achieve their full benefits. This paper introduces a design concept for a mask rotation mechanism that …

Recommending Games To Adults With Autism Spectrum Disorder(Asd) For Skill Enhancement Using Minecraft, Alisha Banskota

Theses and Dissertations

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a long-standing mental condition characterized by hindered mental growth and development. In 2018, 168 out of 10,000 children are said to be affected with Autism in the USA. As these children move to adulthood, they have difficulty in communicating with others, expressing themselves, maintaining eye contact, developing a well-functioning motor skill or sensory sensitivity, and paying attention for longer period. Some of these abnormalities, however, can be gradually improved if they are treated appropriately during their adulthood. Studies have shown that people with ASD can enhance their social-interactive skills by playing video games. During the …

Revisiting Collaboration Through Mixed Reality: The Evolution Of Groupware, Barrett Ens, Joel Lanir, Anthony Tang, Scott Bateman, Gun Lee, Thammathip Piumsomboon, Mark Billinghurst

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaborative Mixed Reality (MR) systems are at a critical point in time as they are soon to become more commonplace. However, MR technology has only recently matured to the point where researchers can focus deeply on the nuances of supporting collaboration, rather than needing to focus on creating the enabling technology. In parallel, but largely independently, the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has focused on the fundamental concerns that underlie human communication and collaboration over the past 30-plus years. Since MR research is now on the brink of moving into the real world, we reflect on three decades …

Coverage-Guided Fuzzing For Feedforward Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Hongxu Chen, Yi Li, Lei Ma, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural network (DNN) has been widely applied to safety-critical scenarios such as autonomous vehicle, security surveillance, and cyber-physical control systems. Yet, the incorrect behaviors of DNNs can lead to severe accidents and tremendous losses due to hidden defects. In this paper, we present DeepHunter, a general-purpose fuzzing framework for detecting defects of DNNs. DeepHunter is inspired by traditional grey-box fuzzing and aims to increase the overall test coverage by applying adaptive heuristics according to runtime feedback. Specifically, DeepHunter provides a series of seed selection strategies, metamorphic mutation strategies, and testing criteria customized to DNN testing; all these components support …

Deepmutation++: A Mutation Testing Framework For Deep Learning Systems, Qiang Hu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Bing Yu, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly expanding their real-world applications across domains, e.g., image processing, speech recognition and natural language processing. However, there is still limited tool support for DNN testing in terms of test data quality and model robustness. In this paper, we introduce a mutation testing-based tool for DNNs, DeepMutation++, which facilitates the DNN quality evaluation, supporting both feed-forward neural networks (FNNs) and stateful recurrent neural networks (RNNs). It not only enables static analysis of the robustness of a DNN model against the input as a whole, but also allows the identification of the vulnerable segments of a …

Safe Inputs Approximation For Black-Box Systems, Bai Xue, Yang Liu, Lei Ma, Xiyue Zhang, Meng Sun, Xiaofei Xie

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a family of independent and identically distributed samples extracted from the input region and their corresponding outputs, in this paper we propose a method to under-approximate the set of safe inputs that lead the blackbox system to respect a given safety specification. Our method falls within the framework of probably approximately correct (PAC) learning. The computed under-approximation comes with statistical soundness provided by the underlying PAC learning process. Such a set, which we call a PAC under-approximation, is obtained by computing a PAC model of the black-box system with respect to the specified safety specification. In our method, the …

Semi-Supervised Entity Alignment Via Joint Knowledge Embedding Model And Cross-Graph Model, Chengjiang Li, Yixin Cao, Lei Hou, Jiaxin Shi, Juanzi Li, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity alignment aims at integrating complementary knowledge graphs (KGs) from different sources or languages, which may benefit many knowledge-driven applications. It is challenging due to the heterogeneity of KGs and limited seed alignments. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised entity alignment method by joint Knowledge Embedding model and Cross-Graph model (KECG). It can make better use of seed alignments to propagate over the entire graphs with KG-based constraints. Specifically, as for the knowledge embedding model, we utilize TransE to implicitly complete two KGs towards consistency and learn relational constraints between entities. As for the cross-graph model, we extend Graph …

Gender And Racial Diversity In Commercial Brands’ Advertising Images On Social Media, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gender and racial diversity in the mediated images from the media shape our perception of different demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender and racial diversity of 85,957 advertising images shared by the 73 top international brands on Instagram and Facebook. We hope that our analyses give guidelines on how to build a fully automated watchdog for gender and racial diversity in online advertisements.

Assessing The Generalizability Of Code2vec Token Embeddings, Hong Jin Kang, Tegawende F. Bissyande, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as sentiment analysis or syntactic parsing, have benefited from the development of word embedding models. In particular, regardless of the training algorithms, the learned embeddings have often been shown to be generalizable to different NLP tasks. In contrast, despite recent momentum on word embeddings for source code, the literature lacks evidence of their generalizability beyond the example task they have been trained for. In this experience paper, we identify 3 potential downstream tasks, namely code comments generation, code authorship identification, and code clones detection, that source code token embedding models can be applied …

Ridesourcing Systems: A Framework And Review, Hai Wang, Hai Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development and popularization of mobile and wireless communication technologies, ridesourcing companies have been able to leverage internet-based platforms to operate e-hailing services in many cities around the world. These companies connect passengers and drivers in real time and are disruptively changing the transportation indus- try. As pioneers in a general sharing economy context, ridesourcing shared transportation platforms consist of a typical two-sided market. On the demand side, passengers are sensi- tive to the price and quality of the service. On the supply side, drivers, as freelancers, make working decisions flexibly based on their income from the platform …

Secure Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to an increasing number of avenues for conducting cross-VM side-channel attacks, the security of multi-tenant public IaaS cloud environments is a growing concern. These attacks allow an adversary to steal private information from a target user whose VM instance is co-located with that of the adversary. In this paper, we focus on secure VM placement algorithms which a cloud provider can use for the automatic enforcement of security against such co-location based attacks. To do so, we first establish a metric for evaluating and quantifying co-location security of multi-tenant public IaaS clouds, and then propose a novel VM placement …

When Players Affect Target Values: Modeling And Solving Dynamic Partially Observable Security Games, Xinrun Wang, Milind Tambe, Branislav Bosanky, Bo An

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most of the current security models assume that the values of targets/areas are static or the changes (if any) are scheduled and known to the defender. Unfortunately, such models are not sufficient for many domains, where actions of the players modify the values of the targets. Examples include wildlife scenarios, where the attacker can increase value of targets by secretly building supporting facilities. To address such security game domains with player-affected values, we first propose DPOS3G, a novel partially observable stochastic Stackelberg game where target values are determined by the players’ actions; the defender can only partially observe these targets’ …

Saffron: Adaptive Grammar-Based Fuzzing For Worst-Case Analysis, Xuan Bach D. Le, Corina Pasareanu, Rohan Padhye, David Lo, Willem Visser, Koushik Sen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fuzz testing has been gaining ground recently with substantial efforts devoted to the area. Typically, fuzzers take a set of seed inputs and leverage random mutations to continually improve the inputs with respect to a cost, e.g. program code coverage, to discover vulnerabilities or bugs. Following this methodology, fuzzers are very good at generating unstructured inputs that achieve high coverage. However fuzzers are less effective when the inputs are structured, say they conform to an input grammar. Due to the nature of random mutations, the overwhelming abundance of inputs generated by this common fuzzing practice often adversely hinders the effectiveness …

Emotion-Aware Chat Machine: Automatic Emotional Response Generation For Human-Like Emotional Interaction, Wei Wei, Jiayi Liu, Xianling Mao, Guibing Guo, Feida Zhu, Pan Zhou, Yuchong Hu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The consistency of a response to a given post at semantic-level and emotional-level is essential for a dialogue system to deliver human-like interactions. However, this challenge is not well addressed in the literature, since most of the approaches neglect the emotional information conveyed by a post while generating responses. This article addresses this problem by proposing a unified end-to-end neural architecture, which is capable of simultaneously encoding the semantics and the emotions in a post for generating more intelligent responses with appropriately expressed emotions. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms …

Chemical Process Development, University Of North Dakota. Energy And Environmental Research Center

EERC Brochures and Fact Sheets

Fact sheet on the Energy & Environmental Research Center’s chemical process development capabilities, facilities and equipment, and history.

Liability For Ai Decision-Making: Some Legal And Ethical Considerations, Iria Giuffrida

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Characterization And Longitudinal Assessment Of Daily Quality Assurance For An Mr-Guided Radiotherapy (Mrgrt) Linac, Kathryn Mittauer

All Publications

No abstract provided.

A Socio-Demographic Analysis Of Responses To Terrorism, Gabriel Rubin, Christopher Salvatore

Christopher Salvatore

Extensive research has found that there are differences in reported levels of fear of crime and associated protective actions influenced by socio-demographic characteristics such as race and gender. Further studies, the majority of which focused on violent and property crime, have found that specific demographic characteristics influence fear of crime and protective behaviors. However, little research has focused on the influence of socio-demographic characteristics on perceptions, and protective actions in response to the threat of terrorism. Using data from the General Social Survey, this study compared individual-level protective actions and perceptions of the effectiveness of protective responses to the 9/11 …

On The Sparre-Andersen Risk Models, Ruixi Zhang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis develops several strategies for calculating ruin-related quantities for a variety of extended risk models. We focus on the Sparre-Andersen risk model, also known as the renewal risk model. The idea of arbitrary distribution for the waiting time between claim payments arose in the 1950’s from the collective risk theory, and received many extensions and modifications in recent years. Our goal is to tackle model assumptions that are either too relaxed for traditional methods to apply, or so complicated that elaborate algebraic tools are needed to obtain explicit solutions.

In Chapter 2, we consider a Lévy risk process and …

Artificial Intelligence And The Challenge For Rural Medicine, James Denvir

Marshall Journal of Medicine

Recent advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning are beginning to have an impact on everyday experiences, from natural language processing used in automated telephone call centers to semi-autonomous vehicles. These techniques have also been applied to medical care. In this editorial we discuss applications of AI to medicine and argue for a proactive approach to include rural medicine in this paradigm shift.

Read And Publish: What Can Libraries Expect?, Josh Horowitz

Charleston Library Conference

The author provides a publisher's perspective on the challenges and opportunities faced by a mid-sized society in navigating the current transition to open access licensing models.

Data Curation Workshop: Tips And Tools For Today, Matthew M. Benzing

Charleston Library Conference

The current state of research data is like a disorganized photo collection: a mix of formats scattered across different media without a lot of authority control. That is changing as the need to make data available to researchers across the world is becoming recognized. Researchers know that their data needs to be maintained and made accessible, but often they do not have the time or the inclination to get involved in all of the details. This provides an excellent opportunity for librarians. Data curation is the process of preparing data to be made available in a repository with the goal …

Neogene Chemical Weathering And Provenance Records Of The Western Himalaya Preserved In The Arabian Sea, Peng Zhou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Some tectonic models for the Himalaya emphasize the importance of surface processes in controlling the structural evolution. To investigate this tectonic–climatic interactions, and the weathering and erosion of the western Himalaya, International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 355 drilled two sites (site U1456 and U1457) in Laxmi Basin, which located in the Eastern Arabian Sea. In my research project, I plan to use a series of geochemical and geochronological methods on the sediment samples from the cores of these two sites, and sediments from an industrial borehole Indus Marine A-1, which near the Indus river mouth, to reconstruct a climatic …

Development And Evaluation Of Silica-Based Lectin Microcolumns For Glycoform Analysis Of Alpha1-Acid Glycoprotein, Chenhua Zhang, David S. Hage

David Hage Publications

Silica-based lectin microcolumns were developed and optimized for the separation and analysis of glycoform fractions in alpha1-acid glycoprotein (AGP) based on both the degree of branching and level of fucosylation. Concanavalin A (Con A) and Aleuria Aurantia lectin (AAL) were immobilized onto HPLC-grade silica by reductive amination and packed into 2.1 mm i.d. × 5.0 cm microcolumns. Factors examined for these microcolumns include their protein content, binding capacity, binding strength and band-broadening under isocratic conditions (Con A) or step elution conditions (AAL) and in the presence of various flow rates or temperatures. These factors were examined by using experiments based …