Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fabrication And Characterization Of Boric Acid-Crosslinked Ethyl Cellulose And Polyvinyl Alcohol Films As Potential Drug Release Systems For Topical Drug Delivery, Nasrin Aliasgharlou, Farzin Asghari Sana, Saba Khoshbakht, Pezhman Zolfaghari, Hamed Charkhian

Turkish Journal of Chemistry

In this study, boric acid (BA) is employed as a crosslinking agent to improve the characteristics of two commonly used polymeric films, ethyl cellulose (EC) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), for topical drug delivery applications. The developed films are characterized by FTIR spectroscopy and SEM analysis. The results show that the surfaces of the prepared films are even and transparent, except for the BA-modified EC sample. The initial cumulative release for erythromycin (EM) is found to be 0.30 and 0.36 mg/mL for EC and PVA films, which drops to 0.25 and 0.20 mg/mL after BA crosslinking, respectively, after 1 h at …

Synthesis, Antioxidant And Antimicrobial Properties Of Novel Pyridyl-Carbonyl Thiazoles As Dendrodoine Analogs, Zafer Şahi̇n, Sevde Nur Bi̇lteki̇n, Leyla Yurttaş, Şeref Demi̇rayak

Turkish Journal of Chemistry

Marine compound dendrodoine was first obtained from tunicate species (Dendrodo grossularia). It has a five-membered ring, namely, it is a heterocycle thiadiazole, which is found rarely in natural sources. Following its biological activities, novel analogs have been investigated recently. Synthesis of the analogs for this study is realized with uncommon thiazole closure, including methylene-carbonyl condensation. Structures are elucidated by NMR (1H, 13C) and HRMS spectrums. As an alkaloid derivative, antioxidant properties were evaluated with DPPH and FRAP assays and antimicrobial effect with microdilution method. Among the series, 3bc-3cf showed higher antioxidant activity than those having 3 or 4-pyridyl substituents. There …

Active Seismic Studies In Lemon Creek Valley Glacier, Juneau, Alaska: Characterization Of Subglacial Sediments To Understand Glacier Dynamics, Lucia Fernanda Gonzalez

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Deformation and flow properties of subglacial sediments as well as the presence and volume of water at the ice/bed interface strongly influence glacier dynamics. Studies of Lemon Creek Glacier, a small temperate valley glacier in the Juneau Icefield, near Juneau, Alaska, have shown that the glacier is rapidly retreating, with a negative mass balance every year since 1957. However, the bed topography and properties of subglacial sediments at the base of Lemon Creek Glacier remained unknown until now. In this project, we process and interpret ~1-km-long NW-SE trending active-source seismic reflection profiles collected during June and July 2017 near the …

Residual Control Chart For Binary Response With Multicollinearity Covariates By Neural Network Model, Jong-Min Kim, Ning Wang, Yumin Liu, Kayoung Park

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Quality control studies have dealt with symmetrical data having the same shape with respect to left and right. In this research, we propose the residual (r) control chart for binary asymmetrical (non-symmetric) data with multicollinearity between input variables via combining principal component analysis (PCA), functional PCA (FPCA) and the generalized linear model with probit and logit link functions, and neural network regression model. The motivation in this research is that the proposed control chart method can deal with both high-dimensional correlated multivariate data and high frequency functional multivariate data by neural network model and FPCA. We show that the neural …

Investigating The Numerical Stability Of Using An Impedance Boundary Condition To Model Broadband Noise Scattering With Acoustic Liners, Michelle E. Rodio, Fang Q. Hu, Douglas M. Nark

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Publications

Reducing aircraft noise is a major objective in the field of computational aeroacoustics. When designing next generation quiet aircraft, it is important to be able to accurately and efficiently predict the acoustic scattering by an aircraft body from a given noise source. Acoustic liners are an effective tool for achieving aircraft noise reduction and are characterized by a frequency-dependent impedance value. Converted into the time-domain using Fourier transforms, an impedance boundary condition can be used to simulate the acoustic wave scattering by geometric bodies treated with acoustic liners. A Broadband Impedance Model will be discussed in which the liner impedance …

Mitochondrial Genomes And Genetic Structure Of The Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle (Lepidochelys Kempii), Hilary R. Frandsen, Diego F. Figueroa, Jeff A. George

School of Earth, Environmental, and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Kemp's ridley (Lepidochelys kempii) is the world's most endangered sea turtle species and is primarily distributed in the Gulf of Mexico. In the United States, South Padre Island, Texas serves as a key nesting ground for the species. Genetic studies of the Kemp's ridley have been used to aid in conservation and management practices, with the mitochondrial control region as the most commonly used marker due to its perceived hypervariability and ease of sequencing. However, with the advent of next generation sequencing technology, targeting complete mitochondrial genomes is now feasible. Here, we describe a more complete mitochondrial genome for …

The Trust Principles For Digital Repositories, Dawei Lin, Jonathan Crabtree, Ingrid Dillo, Robert R. Downs, Rorie Edmunds, David Giaretta, Marisa De Giusti, Hervé L'Hours, Wim Hugo, Reyna Jenkyns, Varsha Khodiyar, Maryann E. Martone, Mustapha Mokrane, Vivek Navale, Jonathan Petters, Barbara Sierman, Dina V. Sokolova, Martina Stockhause, John Westbrook

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

As information and communication technology has become pervasive in our society, we are increasingly dependent on both digital data and repositories that provide access to and enable the use of such resources. Repositories must earn the trust of the communities they intend to serve and demonstrate that they are reliable and capable of appropriately managing the data they hold.

Following a year-long public discussion and building on existing community consensus , several stakeholders, representing various segments of the digital repository community, have collaboratively developed and endorsed a set of guiding principles to demonstrate digital repository trustworthiness. Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, …

Topological Pressure And Fractal Dimensions Of Cookie-Cutter-Like Sets, Mrinal Kanti Roychowdhury

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The cookie-cutter-like set is defined as the limit set of a sequence of classical cookie-cutter mappings. For this cookie-cutter set it is shown that the topological pressure function exists, and that the fractal dimensions such as the Hausdorff dimension, the packing dimension and the box-counting dimension are all equal to the unique zero h of the pressure function. Moreover, it is shown that the h-dimensional Hausdorff measure and the h-dimensional packing measure are finite and positive.

Tunable-Focus Liquid Lens Through Charge Injection, Shizhi Qian, Wenxiang Shi, Huai Zheng, Zhaohui Liu

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Liquid lenses are the simplest and cheapest optical lenses, and various studies have been conducted to develop tunable-focus liquid lenses. In this study, a simple and easily implemented method for achieving tunable-focus liquid lenses was proposed and experimentally validated. In this method, charges induced by a corona discharge in the air were injected into dielectric liquid, resulting in “electropressure” at the interface between the air and the liquid. Through a 3D-printed U-tube structure, a tunable-focus liquid lens was fabricated and tested. Depending on the voltage, the focus of the liquid lens can be adjusted in large ranges (−∞ to −9 …

An Exploration Of Zero Waste Policies And Recommendations For Missoula, Sarah Blyth Lundquist

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

“Zero Waste” is a concept and community goal that has arisen to challenge the current consumerist economic system and offer solutions for a number of environmental issues. In adopting this goal, individuals and communities pledge to reduce and divert at least 90% of their waste in a certain number of years. These goals can be reached by employing policies, programs, and other intervention tactics which establish Zero Waste infrastructure, ensure equitable and widespread access to Zero Waste services, and provide educational outreach and resources to the community. Missoula adopted a Zero Waste goal in 2016 and created a Zero Waste …

Managing Forest Disturbances: Effects On Mule Deer And Plant Communities In Montana's Northern Forests, Teagan Ann Hayes

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) are frequently the focus of population and habitat management in the western United States. Land and wildlife managers use disturbance to reset forests to earlier successional stages and improve the quality and quantity of forage available to mule deer. However, the effects of management practices on nutrition and selection vary widely, so the implementation of management practices raises ecological as well as management-related concerns. This work investigated how disturbance from wildfire, prescribed fire, and timber harvest influences the spatial and temporal distribution of nutritional resources in mule deer summer range, and therefore, how the …

Development And Application Of A Catchment Scale Sediment Routing Model, Jordan T. Gilbert

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Sediment regimes, i.e., the processes that recruit, transport and store sediment, create the physical habitats that underpin river-floodplain ecosystems. Natural and human-induced disturbances that alter sediment regimes can have cascading effects on river and floodplain morphology, ecosystems, and a river’s ability to provide ecosystem services, yet prediction of the response of sediment dynamics to disturbance is challenging. We developed the Sediment Routing and Floodplain Exchange (SeRFE) model, which is a network-based, spatially explicit framework for modeling sediment recruitment to and subsequent transport through drainage networks. SeRFE additionally tracks the spatially and temporally variable balance between sediment supply and transport capacity. …

Modeling Hydrologic Impacts Of Tribal Water Rights Quantification And Settlement On The Flathead Indian Irrigation Project, Jordan Andrew Jimmie

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Reservation are a federally-recognized group of tribes (Kootenai, Salish, and Pend d’Oreille) located in western Montana. On the reservation lies the expansive Flathead Indian Irrigation Project (FIIP), which supplies irrigation water to approximately 127,000 acres of tribal and non-tribal agricultural land. The 1904 Flathead Allotment Act opened “surplus” land to non-native homesteaders without tribal consent, initiating the land ownership fragmentation observed on the reservation today. This legacy, combined with historically unquantified tribal reserved water rights and the antiquated state of the FIIP infrastructure, including water losses from unlined earthen canals, …

Sediment Dynamics In The Magdalena River Basin, Colombia: Implications For Understanding Tropical River Processes And Hydropower Development, Luke H. Fisher

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The Magdalena River Basin of Colombia has a globally relevant sediment flux, however, studies of the sediment regime in the basin are limited in scope. This knowledge gap limits application of understanding of sediment dynamics to hydropower decision making. To close this gap, we implemented a sediment budget framework to quantify the impacts of hydropower development in a 118,000 km² portion of the Magdalena River basin. We informed this framework with analysis of background erosion rates derived from ¹⁰Be cosmogenic nuclides and modern sediment fluxes derived from monitoring and optical remote sensing. We standardized these data to spatially …

Constant Intensity Conical Diffraction In Discrete One-Dimensional Lattices With Charge-Conjugation Symmetry, Mojgan Dehghani, Cem Yuce, Tsampikos Kottos, Hamidreza Ramezani

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We engineer anomalous conical diffraction (CD), occurring in discrete one-dimensional lattices with chargeconjugation symmetry when an exceptional point is in the proximity of the modes that compose the initial excitation. The evolving waveform propagates ballistically, acquiring a constant intensity profile within the boundaries of the spreading cone. The linear increase in the total intensity along the propagation direction is responsible for the generation of constant intensity CD.

Prioritizing Parcels For Conservation Easements Using Least-Cost Path Analyses Of Land Ownership: Case Study Within Theorized Grizzly Bear Migration Corridors Of Western Montana, Joseph H. Offer

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As the world’s human population has grown and converted large natural habitats to human dominated landscapes, the planet’s biodiversity has decreased. To combat the loss of biodiversity from human development, many conservation professionals champion the concept of conservation corridors between intact habitats. Conservation corridors, made up of protected land, serve as a connection for wildlife populations to intermix genetics and, subsequently, help reduce the risk of extinction. The ideal geographic location of corridors is generally determined through geographic information system modeling using biophysical conditions and theorized animal movement. However, the resulting corridors are often expansive and protecting entire corridors is …

Comparing Fence Modeling And Mapping Approaches To Support Wildlife Management And Research In Southwest Montana, Simon Albert Buzzard

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fences pose significant challenges to wildlife movement, but their effects are difficult to quantify because fence location and fence type data are lacking on a global scale. We developed a fence location and density model in southwest Montana, USA to provide data to researchers and managers, and test whether previous models could be applied to a new region and retain suitable levels of statistical accuracy. Our model used local expert opinion to inform how road, land cover, and ownership spatial layers interacted to predict fence locations. We validated the model against fence data collected on random 3.2 km road transects …

Using Satellite Observations Of Soil Moisture To Improve Modeling Of Terrestrial Water Cycles, Colin W. Brust

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Terrestrial evapotranspiration (ET) describes the flux of water from the Earth’s surface to the atmosphere, calculated as the sum of evaporation from soil and leaf surfaces, and transpiration through plant stomata. ET is the largest terrestrial water flux, returning over half of the precipitation that falls on land back to the atmosphere, annually. Additionally, ET plays a key role in Earth’s carbon, water, and energy cycles, linking them together via the movement of water and CO₂ through plant stomata. Because of its important role in these Earth system processes, it is essential that existing methods of measuring and modeling …

A Deep Learning Approach To Mapping Irrigation: U-Net Irrmapper, Thomas Henry Colligan Iv

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Accurate maps of irrigation are essential for understanding and managing water resources in light of a warming climate. We present a new method for mapping irrigation and apply it to the state of Montana over the years 2000-2019. The method is based on an ensemble of convolutional neural networks that only rely on raw Landsat surface reflectance data. The ensemble of networks method learns to mask clouds and ignore Landsat 7 scan-line failures without supervision, reducing the need for preprocessing data or feature engineering. Unlike other approaches to mapping irrigation, the method doesn't use other mapping products like the Cropland …

Water For Fish And Farms: An Examination Of Instream Flow Programs In Montana Using Spatially-Explicit Water Rights Data, Anna Leigh Crockett

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

The state-level institutions governing water use in the western United States have increasingly come under pressure and scrutiny related to their inability to navigate water use conflicts in recent decades. Rapid population growth and shifting public values towards leaving water instream for recreational and environmental purposes pose challenges to Montana water supplies which are predominantly allocated for irrigated agriculture. Additionally, while water scarcity and unpredictable availability are not new dilemmas in Montana, the rate at which climate change is driving shifts in the distribution, timing, and availability of water supplies is unprecedented. Current water policies may not be nimble enough …

Modeling Twitter Sentiment As A Function Of Particulate Matter 2.5 For Communities Impacted By Wildfire Across Montana And Idaho, Matthew Kelly

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Fine particulate matter (PM2.5) is a known pollutant with clinically detrimental physiological and behavioral effects. We consider Twitter sentiment as a potential indicator for well-being in communities impacted by wildfire-associated PM2.5 across Montana and Idaho spanning 5 years (2014-2018). From these geospatial air quality data and geo-tagged tweets, we trained county level models to examine the power of Twitter sentiment as a function of PM2.5. For all 24 counties sampled, we found between 1 and 8 affective dimensions where a positive �� 2 was detected with a significant F-statistic (�� < 0.05). Specifically, we show that sentiment for anticipation in the wildfire-prone county of Missoula, MT yielded respective training/test set �� 2 of 0.0958 and 0.0686 with a p-value for the F-statistic of 3.09E-07. These analyses support social media sentiment as a potential public health metric by showing one of the first observations of a relationship between PM2.5 and Twitter sentiment.

Attribution Of Soil Surface Temperature Sensitivity To Hydro-Climatic Drivers, Sarah Khalid, Marco Maneta

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Greenhouse gas emissions caused by human economic activity are altering the global hydrologic cycle and the energy exchanges at the land surface. In large portions of the western US there is evidence of reduced summertime precipitation and increased air temperatures and longwave irradiation. At local scales, these changes can translate into more frequent and intense extreme land surface temperature events during the summer, with potential impacts on wildfire activity, forest health, soil biochemical cycles, and thermal comfort for human populations. However, because increases in radiation and sensible heat (air temperature) inputs to the land surface are confounded with changes in …

Disaster Damage Categorization Applying Satellite Images And Machine Learning Algorithm, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour, Adrian Gheorghe

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Special information has a significant role in disaster management. Land cover mapping can detect short- and long-term changes and monitor the vulnerable habitats. It is an effective evaluation to be included in the disaster management system to protect the conservation areas. The critical visual and statistical information presented to the decision-makers can help in mitigation or adaption before crossing a threshold. This paper aims to contribute in the academic and the practice aspects by offering a potential solution to enhance the disaster data source effectiveness. The key research question that the authors try to answer in this paper is how …

Shipbuilding Supply Chain Framework And Digital Transformation: A Project Portfolios Risk Evaluation, Rafael Diaz, Katherine Smith, Rafael Landaeta, Antonio Padovano

VMASC Publications

Program portfolio managers in digital transformation programs have a need for knowledge that can guide decisions related to the alignment of program investments with the sustainability and strategic objectives of the organization. The purpose of this research is to illustrate the utility of a framework capable of clarifying the cost-benefit tradeoffs stemming from assessing digitalization program investment risks in the military shipbuilding sector. Our approach uses Artificial Neural Network to quantify benefits and risks per project while employing scenario analysis to quantify the effects of operational constraints. A Monte Carlo model is used to generate data samples that support the …

Multimodal Fusion Strategies For Outcome Prediction In Stroke, Esra Zihni, John D. Kelleher, Vince I. Madai, Ahmed Khalil, Ivana Galinovic, Jochen Fiebach, Michelle Livne, Dietmar Frey

Conference papers

Data driven methods are increasingly being adopted in the medical domain for clinical predictive modeling. Prediction of stroke outcome using machine learning could provide a decision support system for physicians to assist them in patient-oriented diagnosis and treatment. While patient-specific clinical parameters play an important role in outcome prediction, a multimodal fusion approach that integrates neuroimaging with clinical data has the potential to improve accuracy. This paper addresses two research questions: (a) does multimodal fusion aid in the prediction of stroke outcome, and (b) what fusion strategy is more suitable for the task at hand. The baselines for our experimental …

Synthesising Tabular Datasets Using Wasserstein Conditional Gans With Gradient Penalty (Wcgan-Gp), Manhar Singh Walia, Brendan Tierney, Susan Mckeever

Conference papers

Deep learning based methods based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have seen remarkable success in data synthesis of images and text. This study investigates the use of GANs for the generation of tabular mixed dataset. We apply Wasserstein Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (WCGAN-GP) to the task of generating tabular synthetic data that is indistinguishable from the real data, without incurring information leakage. The performance of WCGAN-GP is compared against both the ground truth datasets and SMOTE using three labelled real-world datasets from different domains. Our results for WCGAN-GP show that the synthetic data preserves distributions and relationships of the real …

A Framework For Validating And Testing Agent-Based Models: A Case Study From Infectious Diseases Modelling., Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

In this paper we present a framework for validating and testing an agent-based model that includes determining the appropriate number of runs to account for variation in model runs, validating the model and showing that the model can be used to learn about the system. To demonstrate the framework we use a case study of an agent-based model for the spread of infectious diseases.

A Guide To Ligo–Virgo Detector Noise And Extraction Of Transient Gravitational-Wave Signals, B. P. Abbott, R. Abbott, Teviet Creighton, Mario C. Diaz, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, Malik Rakhmanov, K. E. Ramirez, Satzhan Sitmukhambetov, Robert Stone, D. Tuyenbayev, W. H. Wang, A. K. Zadrozny

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration have cataloged eleven confidently detected gravitational-wave events during the first two observing runs of the advanced detector era. All eleven events were consistent with being from well-modeled mergers between compact stellar-mass objects: black holes or neutron stars. The data around the time of each of these events have been made publicly available through the gravitational-wave open science center. The entirety of the gravitational-wave strain data from the first and second observing runs have also now been made publicly available. There is considerable interest among the broad scientific community in understanding the data …

A Joint Fermi-Gbm And Ligo/Virgo Analysis Of Compact Binary Mergers From The First And Second Gravitational-Wave Observing Runs, R. Hamburg, C. Fletcher, E. Burns, A. Aich, G. Bissenbayeva, Teviet Creighton, Mario C. Diaz, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, Malik Rakhmanov, K. E. Ramirez, P. K. Roy, W. H. Wang, Adam Zadrozny

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present results from offline searches of Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) data for gamma-ray transients coincident with the compact binary coalescences observed by the gravitational-wave (GW) detectors Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo during their first and second observing runs. In particular, we perform follow-up for both confirmed events and low significance candidates reported in the LIGO/Virgo catalog GWTC-1. We search for temporal coincidences between these GW signals and GBM-triggered gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). We also use the GBM Untargeted and Targeted subthreshold searches to find coincident gamma-rays below the onboard triggering threshold. This work implements a refined statistical approach by …

The Quantization Of The Standard Triadic Cantor Distribution, Mrinal Kanti Roychowdhury

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The quantization scheme in probability theory deals with finding a best approximation of a given probability distribution by a probability distribution that is supported on finitely many points. For a given k ≥ 2, let {Sj : 1 ≤ j ≤ k} be a set of k contractive similarity mappings such that Sj(x) = 1 2k−1x + 2(j−1) 2k−1 for all x ∈ R, and let P = 1 k Pk j=1 P ◦ S−1 j . Then, P is a unique Borel probability measure on R such that P has support the Cantor set generated by the similarity mappings …