Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fine-Grained Lower Bounds For Problems On Strings And Graphs, Gary Thomas Hoppenworth

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The motivation of this thesis is to present new lower bounds for important computational problems on strings and graphs, conditioned on plausible conjectures in theoretical computer science. These lower bounds, called conditional lower bounds, are a topic of immense interest in the field of fine-grained complexity, which aims to develop a better understanding of the hardness of problems that can be solved in polynomial time. In this thesis, we give new conditional lower bounds for four interesting computational problems: the median and center string edit distance problems, the pattern matching on labeled graphs problem, and the subtree isomorphism problem. These …

Simulating Systematic Errors In Exoplanetary Transits For The James Webb Space Telescope, David C. Wright Iii

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a next-generation space telescope that will be capable of making transformative observations of planetary transits. As its launch date grows ever closer, it becomes imperative that astronomers have access to accurate simulations of JWST observations in order to best plan observations and devise data analysis pipelines. Unfortunately, available simulation tools do not provide the most accurate or realistic simulations, including noise and systematic errors. In this thesis, I present an open-source time-domain simulator of planetary transits that is capable of accurately modeling these effects in observations made by JWST.

Examination Of Corporate Investments In Privacy: An Event Study, Joseph Michael Squillace

CCE Theses and Dissertations

The primary objective of any corporate entity is generating as much wealth as possible. Investing financially in technology domains has historically been a successful strategy for generating increased corporate and shareholder wealth. However, investments in Information Technology (IT), Information Systems (IS) and Information Security (InfoSec) to specifically generate increased wealth must be implemented carefully.

Shareholders reacting to corporate investments perceive financial value from individual investments. The investment’s perceived value is then reflected in the corporation’s updated stock market value. IS, IT, and InfoSec investments perceived to possess positive financial value, indicating strong potential for increased wealth, are rewarded by shareholders …

Feature Selection On Permissions, Intents And Apis For Android Malware Detection, Fred Guyton

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Malicious applications pose an enormous security threat to mobile computing devices. Currently 85% of all smartphones run Android, Google’s open-source operating system, making that platform the primary threat vector for malware attacks. Android is a platform that hosts roughly 99% of known malware to date, and is the focus of most research efforts in mobile malware detection due to its open source nature. One of the main tools used in this effort is supervised machine learning. While a decade of work has made a lot of progress in detection accuracy, there is an obstacle that each stream of research is …

The Construction And Internal Validation Of A Model For The Effective Collaboration Of Distributed Agile Teams, Ernesto Custodio

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Agile approaches to software development have increased steadily over the past decade. Agile processes emphasize iterative and collaborative discovery of requirements and solutions executed by self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Software development using distributed teams, including distributed sub-teams, fully dispersed teams, and partially dispersed teams, has also increased due to benefits such as access to global talent and faster delivery, among others.

However, most Agile approaches, models, and frameworks only address the needs of colocated teams. Distributed teams come with unique challenges when it comes to effective collaboration. The goal was to construct and validate internally a model for the effective collaboration …

Enterprise Social Network Systems Implementation Model For Knowledge Sharing Among Supply Chain It Professionals, Edgardo Luis Velez-Mandes

CCE Theses and Dissertations

With the increased use of social network technologies in organizational environments, there is a need to understand how these technologies facilitate organizational knowledge management, particularly knowledge sharing. Prior research has focused on the relationship between knowledge management and enterprise social networking systems (ESNS), but little research has been conducted relating to how organizations implement and use ESNS for knowledge sharing. The goal was to construct and validate internally a model that offers guidance for the successful implementation and use of ESNS for knowledge sharing and building successful virtual communities of practice (vCoPs) among IT supply chain professionals in a healthcare …

The Empirical Study Of The Factors That Influence Threat Avoidance Behavior In Ransomware Security Incidents, Heriberto Aurelio Acosta Maestre

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Ransomware security incidents have become one of the biggest threats to general computer users who are oblivious to the ease of infection, severity, and cost of the damage it causes. University networks and their students are susceptible to ransomware security incidents. College students have vast technical skills and knowledge, however they risk ransomware security incidents because of their lack of mitigating actions to the threats and the belief that it would not happen to them. Interaction with peers may play a part in college students’ perception of the threats and behavior to secure their computers. Identifying what influences students’ threat …

A Framework For Artificial Intelligence Applications In The Healthcare Revenue Management Cycle, Leonard J. Pounds

CCE Theses and Dissertations

There is a lack of understanding of specific risks and benefits associated with AI/RPA implementations in healthcare revenue cycle settings. Healthcare companies are confronted with stricter regulations and billing requirements, underpayments, and more significant delays in receiving payments. Despite the continued interest of practitioners, revenue cycle management has not received much attention in research. Revenue cycle management is defined as the process of identifying, collecting, and managing the practice’s revenue from payers based on the services provided.This dissertation provided contributions to both areas, as mentioned above. To accomplish this, a semi-structured interview was distributed to healthcare executives. The semi-structured interview …

Human Errors In Data Breaches: An Exploratory Configurational Analysis, Gabriel A. Cornejo

CCE Theses and Dissertations

Information Systems (IS) are critical for employee productivity and organizational success. Data breaches are on the rise—with thousands of data breaches accounting for billions of records breached and annual global cybersecurity costs projected to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025. A data breach is the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information—and can be achieved intentionally or unintentionally. Significant causes of data breaches are hacking and human error; in some estimates, human error accounted for about a quarter of all data breaches in 2018. Furthermore, the significance of human error on data breaches is largely underrepresented, as hackers often capitalize on organizational users’ …

Enhancing Negative-Ion Native Mass Spectrometry With Field-Assisted Capillary Vibrating Sharp-Edge Spray Ionization (Cvssi), Kushani Udeshika Attanayake

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Although the birth of native mass spectrometry (native MS) occurred only several years after the development of electrospray ionization (ESI), it is yet considered an emerging technique for MS-based studies. This stems in part from challenges associated with efficient ionization of biopolymers. Although steady gains in ion production for native structure characterization have been secured primarily with the use of nanoelectrospray ionization (nESI), under negative polarity, the ionization efficiency can be extensively reduced due to an effect called “corona discharge”. The corona discharge occurs at the tip of ESI emitters because of free electron acceleration in the high-field region produced …

Equilibrium And Non-Equilibrium Ultrafast Carrier Transport And Dynamics In Chalcopyrite Semiconductors, Rishmali Thanuja Sooriyagoda

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Chalcopyrite crystals in the II-IV-V₂ family have received significant interest due to their high nonlinearity, composition-tunable bandgaps, wide transparency windows, and high damage threshold. These semiconductors have been explored for electromagnetic (EM) screening, spintronic and photovoltaic applications, making them good optical and optoelectronic materials. This thesis uses terahertz spectroscopy to understand optical, electronic, and vibrational dynamical processes in CdGeP₂, ZnGeP₂ and CdSiP₂ chalcopyrite semiconductors.

We have employed Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy to investigate temperature-dependent ground-state properties of bulk chalcopyrite crystals that can be related to electronic transport and electron-lattice interactions. The complex spectra provide refraction and …

On P-Adic Modules With Isomorphic Endomorphism Algebras, Brendan Goldsmith, Noel White

Articles

We investigate pairs of modules over the ring of p-adic integers having isomorphic endomorphism algebras. In many cases this forces the modules to be isomorphic but there are two exceptional situations where isomorphism does not follow.

Preventing Occupational Respiratory Disease From Exposures In Office Building : Case Study Covid-19, Panupant Phapant

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The COVID‐19 pandemic has affected human life in every possible way, and, alongside this, the need has been felt that office buildings and workplaces must have protective and preventive layers against COVID‐19 transmission so that a smooth transition from ‘work from home’ to work from office’ is possible. The present study reviews international agency regulations, country regulations, updated journal articles, etc., to critically understand lessons learned from COVID‐19 and evaluate the expected changes in sustainability requirements of office buildings and workplaces. The built environment, control environment, and regulatory environment around office buildings and workplaces have been put under test on …

Radial Singular Solutions To Semilinear Partial Differential Equations, Marcelo A. Almora Rios

HMC Senior Theses

We show the existence of countably many non-degenerate continua of singular radial solutions to a p-subcritical, p-Laplacian Dirichlet problem on the unit ball in R^N. This result generalizes those for the 2-Laplacian to any value p and extends recent work on the p-Laplacian by considering solutions both radial and singular.

The Complexity Of Symmetry, Matthew Lemay

HMC Senior Theses

One of the main goals of theoretical computer science is to prove limits on how efficiently certain Boolean functions can be computed. The study of the algebraic complexity of polynomials provides an indirect approach to exploring these questions, which may prove fruitful since much is known about polynomials already from the field of algebra. This paper explores current research in establishing lower bounds on invariant rings and polynomial families. It explains the construction of an invariant ring for whom a succinct encoding would imply that NP is in P/poly. It then states a theorem about the circuit complexity partial …

The Slice Rank Polynomial Method, Thomas C. Martinez

HMC Senior Theses

Suppose you wanted to bound the maximum size of a set in which every k-tuple of elements satisfied a specific condition. How would you go about this? Introduced in 2016 by Terence Tao, the slice rank polynomial method is a recently developed approach to solving problems in extremal combinatorics using linear algebraic tools. We provide the necessary background to understand this method, as well as some applications. Finally, we investigate a generalization of the slice rank, the partition rank introduced by Eric Naslund in 2020, along with various discussions on the intuition behind the slice rank polynomial method and …

Tiling Representations Of Zeckendorf Decompositions, John Lentfer

HMC Senior Theses

Zeckendorf’s theorem states that every positive integer can be decomposed uniquely into a sum of non-consecutive Fibonacci numbers (where f₁ = 1 and f₂ = 2). Previous work by Grabner and Tichy (1990) and Miller and Wang (2012) has found a generalization of Zeckendorf’s theorem to a larger class of recurrent sequences, called Positive Linear Recurrence Sequences (PLRS’s). We apply well-known tiling interpretations of recurrence sequences from Benjamin and Quinn (2003) to PLRS’s. We exploit that tiling interpretation to create a new tiling interpretation specific to PLRS’s that captures the behavior of the generalized Zeckendorf’s theorem.

On The Tropicalization Of Lines Onto Tropical Quadrics, Natasha Crepeau

HMC Senior Theses

Tropical geometry uses the minimum and addition operations to consider tropical versions of the curves, surfaces, and more generally the zero set of polynomials, called varieties, that are the objects of study in classical algebraic geometry. One known result in classical geometry is that smooth quadric surfaces in three-dimensional projective space, $\mathbb{P}^3$, are doubly ruled, and those rulings form a disjoint union of conics in $\mathbb{P}^5$. We wish to see if the same result holds for smooth tropical quadrics. We use the Fundamental Theorem of Tropical Algebraic Geometry to outline an approach to studying how lines lift onto a tropical …

Going Meta On The Minimum Circuit Size Problem: How Hard Is It To Show How Hard Showing Hardness Is?, Zoë Bell

HMC Senior Theses

The Minimum Circuit Size Problem (MCSP) is a problem with a long history in computational complexity theory which has recently experienced a resurgence in attention. MCSP takes as input the description of a Boolean function f as a truth table as well as a size parameter s, and outputs whether there is a circuit that computes f of size ≤ s. It is of great interest whether MCSP is NP-complete, but there have been shown to be many technical obstacles to proving that it is. Most of these results come in the following form: If MCSP is NP-complete …

On Rank-Two And Affine Cluster Algebras, Feiyang Lin

HMC Senior Theses

Motivated by existing results about the Kronecker cluster algebra, this thesis is concerned with two families of cluster algebras, which are two different ways of generalizing the Kronecker case: rank-two cluster algebras, and cluster algebras of type A_n,1. Regarding rank-two cluster algebras, our main result is a conjectural bijection that would prove the equivalence of two combinatorial formulas for cluster variables of rank-two skew-symmetric cluster algebras. We identify a technical result that implies the bijection and make partial progress towards its proof. We then shift gears to study certain power series which arise as limits of ratios of …

Towards Tropical Psi Classes, Jawahar Madan

HMC Senior Theses

To help the interested reader get their initial bearings, I present a survey of prerequisite topics for understanding the budding field of tropical Gromov-Witten theory. These include the language and methods of enumerative geometry, an introduction to tropical geometry and its relation to classical geometry, an exposition of toric varieties and their correspondence to polyhedral fans, an intuitive picture of bundles and Euler classes, and finally an introduction to the moduli spaces of n-pointed stable rational curves and their tropical counterparts.

Exploring Winning Strategies For The Game Of Cycles, Kailee Lin

HMC Senior Theses

This report details my adventures exploring the Game of Cycles in search of winning strategies. I started by studying combinatorial game theory with hopes to use the Sprague-Grundy Theorem and the structure of Nimbers to gain insight for the Game of Cycles. In the second semester, I pivoted to studying specific types of boards instead. In this thesis I show that variations of the mirror-reverse strategy developed by Alvarado et al. in the original Game of Cycles paper can be used to win on additional game boards with special structure, such as lollipops, steering wheel locks, and 3-spoke trees. Additionally …

Modelling The Transition From Homogeneous To Columnar States In Locust Hopper Bands, Miguel Velez

HMC Senior Theses

Many biological systems form structured swarms, for instance in locusts, whose swarms are known as hopper bands. There is growing interest in applying mathematical models to understand the emergence and dynamics of these biological and social systems. We model the locusts of a hopper band as point particles interacting through repulsive and attractive social "forces" on a one dimensional periodic domain. The primary goal of this work is to modify this well studied modelling framework to be more biological by restricting repulsion to act locally between near neighbors, while attraction acts globally between all individuals. This is a biologically motivated …

On The Inverse Hull Of A One-Sided Shift Of Finite Type, Aria Beaupre

HMC Senior Theses

Let S be the semigroup constructed from a one-sided shift of finite type. In this thesis, we will provide the construction of H(S), the inverse hull of S, explore the properties of H(S), and begin to characterize the structure of H(S). We will also focus on a kind of one-sided shift of finite type, Markov shifts, and prove an invariant on isomorphic inverse hulls of Markov shifts.

Fractals, Fractional Derivatives, And Newton-Like Methods, Eleanor Byrnes

HMC Senior Theses

Inspired by the fractals generated by the discretizations of the Continuous Newton Method and the notion of a fractional derivative, we ask what it would mean if such a fractional derivative were to replace the derivatives in Newton's Method. This work, largely experimental in nature, examines these new iterative methods by generating their Julia sets, computing their fractal dimension, and in certain tractable cases examining the behaviors using tools from dynamical systems.

Temporal Coherent Control Of Resonant Two-Photon Double Ionization Of The Hydrogen Molecule Via Doubly Excited States, Jean Marcel Ngoko Djiokap, Anthony F. Starace

Anthony F. Starace Publications

We use time-delayed, counter-rotating, circularly polarized few-cycle attosecond nonoverlapping pulses to study the temporal coherent control of the resonant process of two-photon double ionization (TPDI) of hydrogen molecule via doubly excited states for pulse propagation direction along ˆk either parallel or perpendicular to the molecular axis ˆR. For ˆk ‖ ˆR and a pulse carrier frequency of 36 eV resonantly populating the Q₂ 1∏ ⁺ _u (1) doubly excited state as well as other 1∏ ⁺ _u doubly excited states, we find that the indirect ionization pathway through these doubly excited states changes the character of the kinematical vortex-shaped …

Recapture: A Virtual Reality Interactive Narrative Experience Concerning Perspectives And Self-Reflection, Indira Avendano

Honors Undergraduate Theses

This project presents a virtual reality (VR) Interactive Narrative aiming to leave users reflecting on the perspectives one chooses to view life through. The narrative is driven by interactions designed using the concept of procedural rhetoric, which explores how rules and mechanics in games can persuade people about an idea, and Shin's cognitive model, which presents a dynamic view of immersion in VR. The persuasive nature of procedural rhetoric in combination with immersion techniques such as tangible interfaces and first-person elements of VR can effectively work together to immerse users into a compelling narrative experience with an intended emotional response …

Molten Regolith Electrolysis Processing For Lunar Isru: Financial And Physics Analysis Of Spacex Starship Transportation, Cheyenne Harper

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The purpose of the following research is to explore molten regolith electrolysis (MRE) methodology for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) of Highlands lunar regolith, to be explored during the initial Artemis missions. An analysis of potential commercial launch providers for MRE-equipment based on technology-readiness level (TRL), payload mass support, and $ USD/kg payload price is provided. SpaceX is ultimately proposed as a launch provider of MRE equipment following multi-factorial analysis, with the SpaceX Starship human landing system (HLS) variant proposed for supporting MRE payload. Finally, customers of regolith-derived oxygen, aluminum, and silicon are distinguished to form the business case for operating …

You Can't Lose A Game If You Don't Play The Game: Exploring The Ethics Of Gamification In Education, Dympna O'Sullivan, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Damian Gordon, Andrea Curley, Brendan Tierney, Emma Murphy, Michael Collins, Anna Becevel

Articles

Gamification has been hailed as a meaningful solution to the perennial challenge of sustaining student attention in class. It uses facets of gameplay in an educational context, including things such as points, leaderboards and badges. These are clearly efforts to make the student experience more entertaining and engaging, but nonetheless, they are also clearly digital nudges and attempts to change the students’ behaviours and attitudes to a specific set of concepts, and in which case they must, and should, be subject to the same ethical scrutiny as any other form of persuasion technique, as they may be unintentionally eroding the …

Best Cybersecurity Practices For Companies, Post Van Buren, Mary Riley

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

Imagine this scenario: you are a small business owner, and you’ve just been informed of a network security breach. In your Zoom meeting with the IT Department, you learned the details: network activity logs revealed aberrant behavior after hours. Threat actors accessed systems containing sensitive information and downloaded copies of key files containing company trade secrets, market strategies, and customer data – all within a matter of minutes. Immediately, you review the consequences of the breach in your mind: reputational harm, monetary loss, and potential lawsuits. You ask the IT professional about the root cause of the breach. Was it …