Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fixed-Point Proximity Minimization: A Theoretical Review And Numerical Study, Daniel Weddle, Jianfeng Guo

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

This study examines the relatively recent development of a “fixed-point proximity” approach to one type of minimization problem, considers its application to image denoising, and explores convergence and divergence of the iterative algorithm beyond a (previously supplied) theoretically guaranteed convergence bound on one of the parameters (𝜆). While reviewing the fixed-point proximity approach and its application to image denoising, we aim to communicate the concepts and details in a way that will facilitate understanding for undergraduates and for scholars from other subfields. In the latter portion of our study, the numerical experiment provides thought-provoking data on the effects that parameters …

Carbon Dioxide And Particulate Matter Concentration On Hampton Roads Air Quality, Gregory Hubbard

OUR Journal: ODU Undergraduate Research Journal

Hampton Roads has been a maritime crossroads for the last 400 years. Industrialization has impacted the coastal region for the last 250 years. The expansion of the Port of Virginia in 2019 has created dense traffic in the region resulting in impacts to air quality. Two waste products that affect humans are particulate matter and carbon dioxide. Both respective emissions can cause adverse effects on humans, such as asthma, some lung cancers, and other respiratory distress. Scientists and health practitioners are studying the effects of particulate matter on human health. Hampton Roads, in particular, because of its unique location on …

Development Of Quantitative Intensity-Based Single-Molecule Assays, Benjamin Croop

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Fluorescence microscopy has emerged as a popular and powerful tool within biology research, owing to its exceptional signal contrast, specificity, and the versatility of the various microscope designs. Fluorescence microscopy has been used to study samples across orders of magnitude in physical scale ranging from tissues to cells, down to single-molecules, and as such has led to breakthroughs and new knowledge in a wide variety of research areas. In particular, single-molecule techniques are somewhat unique in their ability to study biomolecules in their native state, which enables the visualization of short-lived interactions and rare events which can be highly relevant …

On The Information Content In Unresolved Imaging, Zhean Shen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Imaging is almost synonymous with optics. Imaging is the process of using light to form a tangible or visible representation, an imitation (imitari) of a material property. There are many situations, however, where one can only aspire to 'sense making' rather than forming an image per se. In other words, objects cannot be directly resolved by conventional intensity-based imaging, a situation commonly referred to as 'unresolved imaging'. However, there is still information retained in other properties of light, which can be exposed by other means. In this thesis I will discuss two typical situations: subwavelength and multiple scattering, which are …

Liquid Crystal Flat Optics For Near-Eye Displays, Tao Zhan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) displays, considered as the next-generation information platform, have shown great potential to revolutionize the way how we interact with each other and the digital world. Both AR and VR are disruptive technologies that can enable numerous applications in education, healthcare, design, training, entertainment, and engineering. Among all the building blocks of these emerging devices, near-eye displays (NEDs) play a critical role in the entire system, through which we can perceive the virtual world as the real one. However, the visual experience offered by existing NED technologies is still far from satisfying the human …

Analyzing The Blockchain Attack Surface: A Top-Down Approach, Muhammad Saad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Blockchains enable secure asset exchange in a distributed system, thereby facilitating innovative applications such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. Although the cryptographic constructs of blockchains are highly secure, however, their practical deployments are vulnerable to various attacks due to their application-specific policies, and their peer-to-peer (P2P) network intricacies. In this work, we take a top-down approach towards exploring those attacks, starting with the application-specific abuse of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies and concluding with the network conditions that violate the blockchain consistency. In the top-down approach, we first analyze the application-specific abuse of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies by uncovering (1) covert cryptocurrency mining in the …

Computational Study Of Target Gene Interactions - Enhancers And Micrornas, Amlan Talukder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Gene expression is an essential mechanism for physical and mental development of human. Aberrant regulation of gene expression creates abnormality in human body than can lead to complicated diseases. Gene expression can be regulated at any stage from the chromatin unfolding stage to post-translation stage of protein. In this study, we focused on two important factors of gene expression regulation that participate in the gene expression process at the transcription and the post-transcriptional stages; enhancer-promoter interactions and miRNA-mRNA interactions. The enhancer-promoter interactions are difficult to detect due to the large distance between the enhancer and promoter region and cell-specific activity …

Implication Of Manifold Assumption In Deep Learning Models For Computer Vision Applications, Marzieh Edraki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have become the main contributor in the field of machine learning (ML). Specifically in the computer vision (CV), there are applications like image and video classification, object detection and tracking, instance segmentation and visual question answering, image and video generation are some of the applications from many that DNNs have demonstrated magnificent progress. To achieve the best performance, the DNNs usually require a large number of labeled samples, and finding the optimal solution for such complex models with millions of parameters is a challenging task. It is known that, the data are not uniformly distributed …

A Mathematical Model For Predicting Animal Population Persistence On Fragmented Landscapes, Allyson Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The effects of roads, buildings, and cities on animal populations are widespread and, often times, disastrous. These structures fragment animals' homes, inhibiting their ability to obtain essential resources and to reproduce. The question arises then: Under what circumstances can an animal population persist in a fragmented landscape? To attempt to answer this question, we present a spatially explicit reaction-diffusion model with varying growth and diffusion rates that incorporates animal behavior at points where habitats are fragmented for four different habitats. The outcome of extinction or persistence of the animal population is determined by examining the effects of changing parameters on …

Simulating Ejecta Blown Off The Lunar Surface Due To Landing Spacecraft Using The Mercury N-Body Integrator, Isabel Rivera

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The experiences of the Apollo lunar landings revealed the danger lunar dust can pose to surrounding hardware, outposts, and orbiting spacecraft. Future lunar missions such as the Artemis program will require more information about the trajectories of ejecta blown by landers to protect orbiting spacecraft such as the Lunar Gateway. In this paper, we simulate lunar lander ejecta trajectories using the Mercury N-body integrator. We placed cones of test particles on the Moon at the North Pole, South Pole, and Equator with various ejection speeds and angles. The results show that particles ejected at speeds near the Moon's escape velocity …

Test Overfitting In Automated Program Repair: Measurements And Approaches Using Formal Methods, Amirfarhad Nilizadeh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Bugs exist in software systems; unfortunately, manually finding bugs and repairing them is complex, time-consuming, and expensive. Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques have promising results to make the debugging process automatic and dramatically decreasing the cost of developing a software system. Almost all developed APR tools use test suites to bug localization and evaluate generated candidate patches' correctness; thus, it is named dynamic APR. Test overfitting is one of the main challenges of dynamic APR tools, which is evident from several recent studies. Test overfitting means the repaired program is not correct based on the program's expected behavior while the …

Self-Governed Iot Networks: A Blockchain-Based Framework, Mehrdad Salimitari

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In the modern-day, IoT-enabled devices and sensors are growingly deployed in a variety of applications in consumer, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure spaces. Thus, decentralization of such networks for reducing the maintenance and repair costs is significantly gaining attention. In this dissertation, we investigate a variety of mathematical tools and technological advancements to design a secure, fully decentralized, and self-governed IoT network. On this path, the main challenge is ensuring the data integrity in IoT networks, securing the devices against a variety of attack scenarios, and preserving the privacy of the users. We begin by proposing a prospect theoretic method for …

Spatio-Temporal Representation For Reasoning With Action Genome, Kesar Tumkur Narasimhamurthy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Representing Spatio-temporal information in videos has proven to be a difficult task compared to action recognition in videos involving multiple actions. A single activity consists many smaller actions that can provide a better understanding of the activity. This paper tries to represent the varying information in a scene-graph format in order to answer temporal questions to obtain improved insights for the video, resulting in a directed temporal information graph. This project will use the Action Genome dataset, which is a variation of the charades dataset, to capture pairwise relationships in a graph. The model performs significantly better than the benchmark …

Fpga-Augmented Secure Crash-Consistent Non-Volatile Memory, Yu Zou

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Emerging byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) technology, although promising superior memory density and ultra-low energy consumption, poses unique challenges to achieving persistent data privacy and computing security, both of which are critically important to the embedded and IoT applications. Specifically, to successfully restore NVMs to their working states after unexpected system crashes or power failure, maintaining and recovering all the necessary security-related metadata can severely increase memory traffic, degrade runtime performance, exacerbate write endurance problem, and demand costly hardware changes to off-the-shelf processors. In this thesis, we summarize and expand upon two of our innovative works, ARES and HERMES, to design …

Development And Surface Science Investigations Of Epitaxial Thin Films Suitable For Elucidating Mechanisms Of Water Formation And Migration On The Moon, Bijoya Dhar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

The growth and characterization of epitaxial thin films see ubiquitous use in both research and applications spanning a number of scientific and industrial fields with overlapping interests in materials science. The central theme of this work centers on leveraging the structural control afforded through the ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) approaches to thin-film epitaxy to derive atomically specific structure-chemistry relationships of key importance to various interface-mediated reactions. The first project was aimed at developing gold (Au) and ceria (CeO2) thin films using advanced surface-science techniques. In that project, a thoroughly wetted Au film on Ta metal substrate has been identified. This model …

Evaluating Augmented Reality Tools For Physics Education, Corey Pittman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

While we are in the midst of a renaissance of interest in augmented reality (AR), there remain a small number of application domains that have seen significant development. One domain that often benefits from additional visualization capabilities is education, specifically physics and other sciences. This paper summarizes interviews with secondary school educators about their experience with AR and their most desired features. Three prototypes were created which were used to collect usability information from students and educators about their preferences for AR applications in their physics courses. Additionally, we introduce the concept of Environmental Integration, a novel method of defining …

Modeling And Analysis Of Covid-19 And Dynamical Systems In Biology And Physics, Vladimir Grbic

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In this paper, we study various examples of dynamical systems found in nature and extract the necessary concepts to build upon. Then, we develop and propose a new deterministic model for COVID-19 propagation. Our model should serve two purposes. First, we will approximate the infected and deceased individuals after a given time during the pandemic. Then, using a linearized subsystem describing infectious compartments about the disease- free equilibrium (DFE), we will determine the basic reproductive number (R0) by the next-generation matrix method.

Family Communication: Examining The Differing Perceptions Of Parents And Teens Regarding Online Safety Communication, Tara Rutkowski

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The opportunity for online engagement increases possible exposure to potentially risky behaviors for teens, which may have significant negative consequences (Hair et al., 2009). Effective family communication about online safety can help reduce the risky adolescent behavior and limit the consequences after it occurs. This paper contributes a theory of communication factors that positively influence teen and parent perception of communication about online safety and provides design implications based on those findings. Previous work identified gaps in family communication, however, this study seeks to empirically identify factors that would close the communication gap from the perspective of both teens and …

Transforming Agriculture In The Pilbara: Interpretation Of Airborne Electromagnetic (Aem) Data, Aaron C. Davis, Mike Donn, John A. Simons, Christopher Schelfhout Dr, Olga Barron

Natural resources commissioned reports

This report focusses on hydrogeophysical and geological interpretation of the inversion results of an airborne electromagnetic (AEM) survey conducted north of Newman, Western Australia, in October and November 2019. The interpretation of the inversions is regional in scale, although we pay specific attention to interpretation of the near-surface transported cover sequences north and west of the Fortescue River. Specifically, we attempt to locate aquifers and near-surface geological structures that are likely to provide good quality groundwater for future extraction and storage. Analysis of the electrical conductivity structure of the ground also provides an estimate of the depth of the groundwater …

Photoluminescence Properties Of Polycyclic Aromatic Sulfur Heterocycles And Their Sorption And Desorption Onto Microplastics., Sadia Arif

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Polycyclic aromatic sulfur heterocycles (PASHs) are sulfur analogues of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) commonly found in environmental samples exposed to oil contamination. The determination of PASHs in complex samples is far more difficult than PAHs because of the sulfur atom in the heterocyclic ring, which increases the total number of possible isomeric compounds. Since their toxicological properties vary considerably from isomer to isomer, the unambiguous determination of specific isomers in environmental samples is crucial for ecotoxicological purposes and human safety. GC-MS has been the primary analytical technique for the determination of PASHs in environmental samples. Unfortunately, as the number of …

Contextual Understanding Of Sequential Data Across Multiple Modalities, Sangwoo Cho

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In recent years, progress in computing and networking has made it possible to collect large volumes of data for various different applications in data mining and data analytics using machine learning methods. Data may come from different sources and in different shapes and forms depending on their inherent nature and the acquisition process. In this dissertation, we focus specifically on sequential data, which have been exponentially growing in recent years on platforms such as YouTube, social media, news agency sites, and other platforms. An important characteristic of sequential data is the inherent causal structure with latent patterns that can be …

Plasmonic Properties Of Nanopatterned Graphene, Muhammad Waqas Shabbir

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Graphene is an atomically thin two-dimensional material with carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. It has been successfully mechanically exfoliated from graphite and characterized in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester, UK. While suspended graphene holds the world record in mobility exceeding 100,000 cm2/Vs, which means that graphene could increase the operating frequency of electronic devices up to the THz regime. For example, imaging computer chips running at a few THz frequency, which would be about 1000 times faster than current chips. However, there are two main obstacles for using graphene in electronics …

2021 January - Tennessee Monthly Climate Report, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Report

No abstract provided.

Review On Carbon Dioxide Utilization For Cycloaddition Of Epoxides By Ionic Liquid-Modified Hybrid Catalysts: Effect Of Influential Parameters And Mechanisms Insight, Jimmy Nelson Appaturi, Rajabathar. Jothi Ramalingam, Muthu Kumaran Gnanamani, Govindasami Periyasami, Prabhakarn Arunachalam, Rohana Adnan, Farook Adam, Mohammed D. Wasmiah, Hamad A. Al‐Lohedan

Center for Applied Energy Research Faculty and Staff Publications

The storage, utilization, and control of the greenhouse (CO₂) gas is a topic of interest for researchers in academia and society. The present review article is dedicating to cover the overall role of ionic liquid-modified hybrid materials in cycloaddition reactions. Special emphasis is on the synthesis of various cyclic carbonate using ionic liquid-based modified catalysts. Catalytic activity studies have discussed with respect to process conditions and their effects on conversion and product selectivity for the reaction of cycloaddition of CO₂ with styrene oxide. The reaction temperature and the partial pressure of CO₂ have found to play …

2020 - Tennessee Annual Climate Summary, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Report

No abstract provided.

Compiled Dataset From The National Reservoir Research Program 1989 Dataset, Nicky M. Faucheux, Leandro E. Miranda

College of Forest Resources Publications and Scholarship

This dataset was compiled from the National Reservoir Research Program 1989 dataset. The NRRP dataset includes data from rotenone and creel studies at reservoirs throughout the continental US during the 1980s. We compiled the species level biomass data into total biomass for each of five trophic guilds (piscivores, detritivores, herbivores, invertivores, and planktivores). This compiled dataset was used to investigate the Cascading Reservoir Continuum Concept across 16 river basins in a study conducted by the 2020 Management of Impounded Rivers Class.

Forecasting The Prices Of Cryptocurrencies Using A Novel Parameter Optimization Of Varima Models, Alexander Barrett

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

This work is a comparative study of different univariate and multivariate time series predictive models as applied to Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, and other related financial time series data. ARIMA models, long regarded as the gold standard of univariate financial time series prediction due to both its flexibility and simplicity, are used a baseline for prediction. Given the highly correlative nature amongst different cryptocurrencies, this work aims to show the benefit of forecasting with multivariate time series models—primarily focusing on a novel parameter optimization of VARIMA models outlined in this paper.

These models are trained on 3 years of historical data, …

Applications Of Machine Learning To Facilitate Software Engineering And Scientific Computing, Natalie Best

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

The use of machine learning has risen in recent years, though many areas remain unexplored due to lack of data or lack of computational tools. This dissertation explores machine learning approaches in case studies involving image classification and natural language processing. In addition, a software library in the form of two-way bridge connecting deep learning models in Keras with ones available in the Fortran programming language is also presented.

In Chapter 2, we explore the applicability of transfer learning utilizing models pre-trained on non-software engineering data applied to the problem of classifying software unified modeling language diagrams where data is …

Fracking Florida, Emily Faulconer

Publications

• Traditional Hydraulic Fracturing
• Why Frack?
• Why it’s Controversial
• Acid Fracking
• What’s in the Wastewater?
• Ethylene Glycol
• 2-Butoxyethanol
• Benzene
• So Where Does the Wastewater Go?
• “Halliburton Loophole”
• Drilling in Florida
• Timeline of Events at Collier-Hogan Well
• Lease Termination & Permit Revocation
• Frack Fluid used at Collier-Hogan Well
• Groundwater Monitoring Wells
• FDEP Tested 142 Analytes
• House Bills 71 & 157: Fracturing Chemical Usage Disclosure Act
• Proposed Sabal Trail Pipeline
• Hands Across the Sand” Rally
• My $0.02

Unraveling A Trifecta Of Weak Non-Covalent Interactions: The Dissociation Energy Of The Anisole-Ammonia 1:1 Complex, John L. Loman, James T. Makuvaza, Damian L. Kokkin, Scott A. Reid

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

The anisole-ammonia 1:1 complex is a challenge for both experiment and theory. Early studies supported a non-planar structure, involving a trifecta of weak non-covalent interactions: N-H/O, N-H/π, and C-H/N. The calculated structure and binding energy of the complex proved remarkably sensitive to the level of theory employed. Here, we report the first experimental measurement of the ground state dissociation energy of the complex, and derive an excited (S₁) state dissociation energy that is in excellent agreement with the cutoff observed in the experimental excitation spectrum. Results are compared with previous predictions and new calculations based on benchmarked Density …