Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Active Learning Strategy For Covid-19 Annotated Dataset, Amril Nazir, Ricky Maulana Fajri

All Works

The efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 plays a key role in preventing its spread. Recently, many artificial intelligence techniques, such as the deep neural network approach, have been implemented to help efficient diagnosis of COVID-19. However, the accurate performance of deep learning depends on the tuning of many hyperparameters and a large amount of labeled data. This COVID-19 data bottleneck also leads to insufficient human resources for data labeling, which presents a challenging obstacle. In this paper, a novel discriminative batch-mode active learning (DS3) is proposed to allow faster and more effective COVID-19 data annotation. The framework specifically designed to suit …

Automatic Fall Risk Detection Based On Imbalanced Data, Yen-Hung Liu, Patrick C. K. Hung, Farkhund Iqbal, Benjamin C. M. Fung

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In recent years, the declining birthrate and aging population have gradually brought countries into an ageing society. Regarding accidents that occur amongst the elderly, falls are an essential problem that quickly causes indirect physical loss. In this paper, we propose a pose estimation-based fall detection algorithm to detect fall risks. We use body ratio, acceleration and deflection as key features instead of using the body keypoints coordinates. Since fall data is rare in real-world situations, we train and evaluate our approach in a highly imbalanced data setting. We assess not only different imbalanced data handling methods but also different machine …

Asymptotic Properties Of The Potentials For Greedy Energy Sequences On The Unit Circle, Ryan Edward Mccleary

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In this work, we analyze the asymptotic behavior of the minimum values of Riesz s-potentials generated by greedy s-energy sequences on the unit circle. The analysis is broken into the cases 0 < s < 1, s = 1, and s > 1, since the behavior of the minimum values of the Riesz s-potential undergoes a sharp transition at s = 1. For 0 < s < 1, the first-order behavior is already known. We obtain first-order asymptotic results for 0 < s < 1. We also prove first-order and second-order asymptotic formulas for s = 1 and investigate the first-order behavior for s > 1.

Reviving Mozart With Intelligence Duplication, Jacob E. Galajda

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Deep learning has been applied to many problems that are too complex to solve through an algorithm. Most of these problems have not required the specific expertise of a certain individual or group; most applied networks learn information that is shared across humans intuitively. Deep learning has encountered very few problems that would require the expertise of a certain individual or group to solve, and there has yet to be a defined class of networks capable of achieving this. Such networks could duplicate the intelligence of a person relative to a specific task, such as their writing style or music …

Multi-Branch Gabor Wavelet Layers For Pedestrian Attribute Recognition, Imran N. Junejo

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CCBYNCND Surveillance cameras are everywhere, keeping an eye on pedestrians as they navigate through a scene. With this context, our paper addresses the problem of pedestrian attribute recognition (PAR). This problem entails recognizing attributes such as age-group, clothing style, accessories, footwear style etc. This is a multi-label problem and challenging even for human observers. The problem has rightly attracted attention recently from the computer vision community. In this paper, we adopt trainable Gabor wavelets (TGW) layers and use it with a convolution neural network (CNN). Whereas other researchers are using fixed Gabor filters with the CNN, the proposed layers are …

Adversarial Reconstruction Loss For Domain Generalization, Bekkouch Imad Eddine Ibrahim, Dragos Constantin Nicolae, Adil Khan, S. M. Ahsan Kazmi, Asad Masood Khattak, Bulat Ibragimov

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The biggest fear when deploying machine learning models to the real world is their ability to handle the new data. This problem is significant especially in medicine, where models trained on rich high-quality data extracted from large hospitals do not scale to small regional hospitals. One of the clinical challenges addressed in this work is magnetic resonance image generalization for improved visualization and diagnosis of hip abnormalities such as femoroacetabular impingement and dysplasia. Domain Generalization (DG) is a field in machine learning that tries to solve the model’s dependency on the training data by leveraging many related but different data …

An Adaptive Protection Of Flooding Attacks Model For Complex Network Environments, Bashar Ahmad Khalaf, Salama A. Mostafa, Aida Mustapha, Mazin Abed Mohammed, Moamin A. Mahmoud, Bander Ali Saleh Al-Rimy, Shukor Abd Razak, Mohamed Elhoseny, Adam Marks

All Works

Currently, online organizational resources and assets are potential targets of several types of attack, the most common being flooding attacks. We consider the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) as the most dangerous type of flooding attack that could target those resources. The DDoS attack consumes network available resources such as bandwidth, processing power, and memory, thereby limiting or withholding accessibility to users. The Flash Crowd (FC) is quite similar to the DDoS attack whereby many legitimate users concurrently access a particular service, the number of which results in the denial of service. Researchers have proposed many different models to eliminate …

Opposition-Based Quantum Bat Algorithm To Eliminate Lower-Order Harmonics Of Multilevel Inverters, Jahedul Islam, Sheikh Tanzim Meraj, Ammar Masaoud, Md Apel Mahmud, Amril Nazir, Muhammad Ashad Kabir, Md Moinul Hossain, Farhan Mumtaz

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Selective harmonic elimination (SHE) technique is used in power inverters to eliminate specific lower-order harmonics by determining optimum switching angles that are used to generate Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) signals for multilevel inverter (MLI) switches. Various optimization algorithms have been developed to determine the optimum switching angles. However, these techniques are still trapped in local optima. This study proposes an opposition-based quantum bat algorithm (OQBA) to determine these optimum switching angles. This algorithm is formulated by utilizing habitual characteristics of bats. It has advanced learning ability that can effectively remove lower-order harmonics from the output voltage of MLI. It can …

Detection Of Freezing Of Gait Using Unsupervised Convolutional Denoising Autoencoder, Mohd Halim Mohd Noor, Amril Nazir, Mohd Nadhir Ab Wahab, Jodene Ooi Yen Ling

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At the advanced stage of Parkinson’s disease, patients may suffer from ‘freezing of gait’ episodes: a debilitating condition wherein a patient’s “feet feel as though they are glued to the floor”. The objective, continuous monitoring of the gait of Parkinson’s disease patients with wearable devices has led to the development of many freezing of gait detection models involving the automatic cueing of a rhythmic auditory stimulus to shorten or prevent episodes. The use of thresholding and manually extracted features or feature engineering returned promising results. However, these approaches are subjective, time-consuming, and prone to error. Furthermore, their performance varied when …

Understanding The Effect Of Climate And Hydrometeorological Extremes On Natural And Human-Induced Hydrosystems, Jeongwoo Hwang

Dissertations and Theses

The contemporary hydrosystems of the United States involve a complex combination of natural and modified basins in the presence of changing climate and anthropogenic impacts. An enhanced understanding of the interdependence between climate forcings, human-induced interventions, and water balance in both natural and modified basins are essential for developing reliable and resilient hydrosystems and for better water resources management. In response, this dissertation focuses on investigating the hydroclimatology of natural and modified basins across the contiguous United States. It has three research objectives: (1) to explain flow alterations due to anthropogenic activities, especially dam operations, in modified basins and understand …

Investigating The Effect Of Electrolyte Concentration And Charging Protocol On Materials Utilization In Rechargeable Zinc Manganese Dioxide Batteries, Snehal H. Kolhekar

Dissertations and Theses

Achieving a highly cyclable, high energy density battery with MnO₂ cathodes encounters many obstacles. Chief among these is the inability of the widely-used γ-MnO₂ polymorph to retain its structural integrity when cycled to near full one-electron discharge capacity, which is about 280mAh/g for commercially available electrolytic manganese dioxide (EMD). In this one-electron range, discharge occurs by proton insertion producing Mn⁺³ which then reverts to γ-MnO₂ on charging. In the first part of the thesis, we investigate the root cause of failure of MnO₂ cathodes under deep cycling in the one-electron discharge range and establish a …

Long Term Nutrient And Chlorophyll A Dynamics Across Long Island Sound And Impacts On Dissolved Oxygen Conditions Within The Western Sound (1991-2019), Sherry Perreira

Dissertations and Theses

Nitrogen overload, eutrophication, and hypoxia have been challenging and persistent water quality problems in Long Island Sound (LIS) over the past decades with major impacts on commercial industries, ecology, and recreational activities in the region. Recognizing these problems, the EPA enforced three phases of the Clean Water Act (CWA) to reduce nitrogen loads in an effort to improve this important estuary. This study examines how nitrogen (NH₃, NO_x & TDN), chlorophyll a (CHLA), and dissolved oxygen (DO) concentrations changed in LIS over the past 30 years, in response to water quality regulations as well as changes in …

Polarization Sensitive Imaging Techniques Using Quantum Entangled Qubits, Vitaly Sukharenko

Dissertations and Theses

The aim of this research is to study imaging techniques using quantum entangled qubits. These techniques extract information about the quantum state of two entangled qubits and corelate the degree of entanglement to each pixel. Imaging information of the underlying structure or material is decoded using the reconstruction of the quantum density matrix along with the calculated entanglement and concurrence levels between the two qubits. Reconstruction of a quantum state and quantum state tomography are of increasing importance in quantum information science. Quantum state tomography is used to describe entanglement of trapped ions [1] and photons [2]. Number of experiments …

Adsorption Kinetics And Phase Behavior Of Particles Adsorbed At An Interface, Shaghayegh Darjani

Dissertations and Theses

The ability to predict the adsorption dynamic, phase behavior, and surface pressure of a monolayer of adsorbed particles in two-dimensional systems are key aspects of many current research areas. Examples include phase transitions in amphiphilic monolayers, emulsion stability due to particle adsorption at interfaces, and melting at an interface.

In this thesis, a new approach for deriving the equation of state for a two-dimensional lattice gas is proposed, based on arguments similar to those used in the derivation of the Langmuir-Szyszkowski equation of state for localized adsorption. This work aims to predict the adsorption kinetics and phase behavior of a …

A New Mathematical Theory For The Dynamics Of Large Tumor Populations, A Potential Mechanism For Cancer Dormancy & Recurrence And Experimental Observation Of Melanoma Progression In Zebrafish, Adeyinka A. Lesi

Dissertations and Theses

Cancer, a family of over a hundred disease varieties, results in 600,000 deaths in the U.S. alone. Yet, improvements in imaging technology to detect disease earlier, pharmaceutical developments to shrink or eliminate tumors, and modeling of biological interactions to guide treatment have prevented millions of deaths. Cancer patients with initially similar disease can experience vastly different outcomes, including sustained recovery, refractory disease or, remarkably, recurrence years after apparently successful treatment. The current understanding of such recurrences is that they depend on the random occurrence of critical mutations. Clearly, these biological changes appear to be sufficient for recurrence, but are they …

Multi-Level Resource Sharing Framework Using Collaborative Fog Environment For Smart Cities, Tariq Qayyum, Zouheir Trabelsi, Asad Waqar Malik, Kadhim Hayawi

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No abstract provided.

Pattern-Based Downscaling Of Snowpack Variability In The Western United States, Nicolas Gauthier, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, Bethany Coulthard

Geoscience Faculty Research

The decline in snowpack across the western United States is one of the most pressing threats posed by climate change to regional economies and livelihoods. Earth system models are important tools for exploring past and future snowpack variability, yet their coarse spatial resolutions distort local topography and bias spatial patterns of accumulation and ablation. Here, we explore pattern-based statistical downscaling for spatially-continuous interannual snowpack estimates. We find that a few leading patterns capture the majority of snowpack variability across the western US in observations, reanalyses, and free-running simulations. Pattern-based downscaling methods yield accurate, high resolution maps that correct mean and …

Scaup Depredation On Arkansas Baitfish And Sportfish Aquaculture, Stephen A. Clements, Brian S. Dorr, J. Brian Davis, Luke A. Roy, Carole R. Engle, Katie C. Hanson-Dorr, Anita M. Kelly

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Lesser scaup (Aythya affinis) and greater scaup (A. marila), hereafter scaup, consume a variety of aquatic invertebrates, plants, and occasionally small fish. Scaup have foraged on commercial aquaculture farms in the southern United States for decades. However, the types, abundance, and rate of fish exploitation by scaup on baitfish and sportfish farms are not well documented. Thus, information is needed to understand how fish and other foods influence scaup use of aquatic resources, and any potential economic effects of depredation of fish. From November–March in winters 2016–2017 and 2017–2018, we conducted 1,458 pond surveys to estimate …

Sars-Cov-2 Exposure In Wild White-Tailed Deer (Odocoileus Virginianus), Jeffrey C. Chandler, Sarah N. Bevins, Jeremy W. Ellis, Timothy J. Linder, Rachel M. Tell, Melinda Jenkins-Moore, J. Jeffrey Root, Julianna B. Lenoch, Suelee Robbe-Austerman, Thomas J. Deliberto, Tom Gidlewski, Mia Kim Torchetti, Susan A. Shriner

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Widespread human SARS-CoV-2 infections combined with human–wildlife interactions create the potential for reverse zoonosis from humans to wildlife. We targeted white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for serosurveillance based on evidence these deer have angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 receptors with high affinity for SARS-CoV-2, are permissive to infection, exhibit sustained viral shedding, can transmit to conspecifics, exhibit social behavior, and can be abundant near urban centers. We evaluated 624 prepandemic and postpandemic serum samples from wild deer from four US states for SARS-CoV-2 exposure. Antibodies were detected in 152 samples (40%) from 2021 using a surrogate virus neutralization test. A subset of samples …

Impact Of Covid-19 On The Us And Texas Economy: A General Equilibrium Approach, Lirong Liu, Steven S. Shwiff, Stephanie A. Shwiff, Maryfrances Miller

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 on the US and Texas economy using a computable general equilibrium model, REMI PI+. We consider three scenarios based on economic forecasts from various sources, including the University of Michigan’s RSQE (Research Seminar in Quantitative Economics), IMF, and the Wi orld Bank. We report a GDP loss of $106 million (a 6% decline) with 1.2 million jobs lost (6.6%) in Texas in 2020. At the national level, GDP loss is $996 billion (a 5% decline) with 11.5 million jobs lost (5.5%) in the same year. By 2026, the aggregate total GDP loss in …

Using Object-Based Image Analysis To Detect Laughing Gull Nests, Benjamin F. Martini, Douglas A. Miller

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Remote sensing has long been used to study wildlife; however, manual methods of detecting wildlife in aerial imagery are often time-consuming and prone to human error, and newer computer vision techniques have not yet been extensively applied to wildlife surveys. We used the object-based image analysis (OBIA) software eCognition to detect laughing gull (Leucophaeus atricilla) nests in Jamaica Bay as part of an ongoing monitoring effort at the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Our technique uses a combination of high resolution 4-band aerial imagery captured via manned aircraft with a multispectral UltraCam Falcon M2 camera, LiDAR point cloud data, and …

Allometric Regression Of Snake Body Length From Head Image Measurements, Shane R. Siers

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

As in many fields of wildlife research and management, camera devices and photogrammetry have become an integral part of the toolkit for exploring otherwise‐unseen aspects of the biology, behavior, and control of the invasive brown treesnake (Boiga irregularis) on Guam. Because brown treesnakes are cryptic and nocturnal, and nearly all aspects of their ecology are influenced by snake size, methods are needed to estimate snake size from images captured by infrared wildlife cameras. Unfortunately, it is difficult to capture images of an entire snake’s length at a controlled distance from a simple camera setup. Here, I describe the …

Environmental Dna For Conservation, Antoinette J. Piaggio

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Biodiversity must be documented before it can be conserved. However, it may be difficult to document species with few individuals (Thompson, 2013; Goldberg et al., 2016), thus it requires a multitude of tools to detect species that occur in low numbers or are elusive (see the various chapters in this volume). One tool that has become useful for conservation efforts utilizes environmental DNA, which is DNA shed into the environment by organisms (eDNA; Taberlet et al., 2018). Typically this involves taking environmental samples such as soil, water, air, or using biological surrogates for sampling biodiversity (e.g. leeches, sponges, carrion flies, …

A Novel Technique To Improve Capture Success Of Common Ravens, Lindsey R. Perry, Terrah M. Owens, Zachary T. Slick, Jimmy Taylor, Jonathan B. Dinkins

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Traditional trapping techniques for common ravens (Corvus corax; raven) require significant effort, often produce low capture rates, and cannot be used in some situations. We designed a 3-m noose pole to secure ravens from nocturnal roost locations while using a strobe spotlight to temporarily disorient them. We collected measures of trapping efficiency and contrasted them with padded leghold traps also used in the study. We effectively implemented our noose pole method in July and August of 2018, 2019, and 2020 in the Baker and Cow Lakes sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) Priority Areas of Conservation in eastern Oregon, USA, which yielded trapping …

Evidence For Continental-Scale Dispersal Of Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria By Landfill-Foraging Gulls, Christina A. Ahlstrom, Mariëlle L. Van Toor, Hanna Woksepp, Jeffrey C. Chandler, John A. Reed, Andrew B. Reeves, Jonas Waldenström, Alan B. Franklin, David C. Douglas, Jonas Bonnedahl, Andrew M. Ramey

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Anthropogenic inputs into the environment may serve as sources of antimicrobial resistant bacteria and alter the ecology and population dynamics of synanthropic wild animals by providing supplemental forage. In this study, we used a combination of phenotypic and genomic approaches to characterize antimicrobial resistant indicator bacteria, animal telemetry to describe host movement patterns, and a novel modeling approach to combine information fromthese diverse data streams to investigate the acquisition and long-distance dispersal of antimicrobial resistant bacteria by landfill-foraging gulls. Our results provide evidence that gulls acquire antimicrobial resistant bacteria from anthropogenic sources, which they may subsequently disperse across and between …

Evaluating Potential Effects Of Solar Power Facilities On Wildlife From An Animal Behavior Perspective, Rachel Y. Chock, Barbara Clucas, Elizabeth K. Peterson, Bradley Blackwell, Daniel T. Blumstein, Kathleen Church, Esteban Fernández-Juricic, Gabriel Francescoli, Alison L. Greggor, Paul Kemp, Gabriela M. Pinho, Peter M. Sanzenbacher, Bruce A. Schulte, Pauline Toni

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Solar power is a renewable energy source with great potential to help meet increasing global energy demands and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. However, research is scarce on how solar facilities affect wildlife. With input from professionals in ecology, conservation, and energy, we conducted a research-prioritization process and identified key questions needed to better understand impacts of solar facilities on wildlife. We focused on animal behavior, which can be used to identify population responses before mortality or other fitness consequences are documented. Behavioral studies can also offer approaches to understand the mechanisms leading to negative interactions (e.g., collision, singeing, …

Principal Economic Effects Of Cormorant Predation On Catfish Farms, Carole R. Engle, Terrel W. Christie, Brian S. Dorr, Ganesh Kumar, Luke A. Roy, Anita M. Kelly

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Substantial economic losses of farmed catfish to fish-eating birds such as the double-crested cormorant, Phalacrocorax auritus, continue to be reported on U.S. catfish farms. An economic analysis was conducted of the on-farm effects of both the increased expenditures to scare fish-eating birds from catfish farms and of the value of the catfish that were consumed by cormorants. A survey was conducted of U.S. catfish farmers in the Delta region of Mississippi and Arkansas, to obtain farm-level data on expenditures to scare birds. Estimations of the lost revenue from catfish consumed by cormorants were developed from a concurrent study on …

Understanding Tolerance For An Invasive Species: An Investigation Of Hunter Acceptance Capacity For Wild Pigs (Sus Scrofa) In Texas, Hailey E. Mclean, Tara L. Teel, Alan Bright, Lauren M. Jaebker, John M. Tomecek, Maureen G. Frank, Rachael L. Connally, Stephanie A. Shwiff, Keith M. Carlisle

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Invasive species and their establishment in new areas have significant impacts on the ecological, economic, and social well-being of our planet. Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are one of the world’s most formidable invasive species, particularly in the United States. They cause significant damage to agriculture and ecosystems, and can transmit diseases to livestock, wildlife, and people. There is an inherent social dimension to the issue of wild pigs due in part to the fact that people hunt them. Hunting contributes to both the control and spread of this species. The objectives of this study were to: 1) determine hunters’ overall …

Avian Influenza A Viruses Reassort And Diversify Differently In Mallards And Mammals, Ketaki Ganti, Anish Bagga, Juliana Dasilva, Samuel S. Shepard, John R. Barnes, Susan A. Shriner, Katia Koelle, Anice C. Lowen

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Reassortment among co-infecting influenza A viruses (IAVs) is an important source of viral diversity and can facilitate expansion into novel host species. Indeed, reassortment played a key role in the evolution of the last three pandemic IAVs. Observed patterns of reassortment within a coinfected host are likely to be shaped by several factors, including viral load, the extent of viral mixing within the host and the stringency of selection. These factors in turn are expected to vary among the diverse host species that IAV infects. To investigate host differences in IAV reassortment, here we examined reassortment of two distinct avian …

Evaluation Of A Warfarin Bait For Controlling Invasive Wild Pigs (Sus Scrofa), James C. Beasley, Lindsay M. Clontz, Allison Rakowski, Nathan P. Snow, Kurt C. Vercauteren

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

BACKGROUND: Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) cause widespread environmental and economic damage, and as a result are subjected to extensive control. Current management strategies have proven insufficient, and there is growing interest in use of toxicants to control invasive populations of this species. In 2017 a low-dose warfarin bait was federally approved for use in controlling wild pigs in the United States. However, no states have allowed use of this bait due to unanswered questions regarding welfare concerns, field efficacy, and non-target impacts.

RESULTS: All captive wild pigs fed 0.005% warfarin baits in no choice feeding trials succumbed in an average …