Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Impacts Of Climate Change In Vulnerable Communities In Sindh, Pakistan: Voices From The Community, Kiren Khan, Mumraiz Khan, Tahira Parveen, Sabahat Hussain

Climate and Environmental Changes

Pakistan ranks among the ten countries worst affected by climate change in the world, and within the country the province of Sindh is one of the hardest-hit regions. Changing trends in temperature and precipitation have increased the frequency and severity of hazards such as flooding, droughts, and heatwaves, among a host of other environmental stresses. The present qualitative study was conducted to scope out the specific ways in which the impacts of climate change are gendered among rural communities in Sindh that have the highest exposure to hazards arising from climate change. The study probed the perceptions and experiences of …

Ultra-Low Frequency Waves At Middle Latitudes During Substorms: Observations And Modeling, Mergen Alimaganbetov

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

This doctoral dissertation presents the results of investigation of the Ultra-Low Frequency (ULF) waves at middle latitudes during substorms. The dissertation consists of two major parts, observations and simulations. The research in this dissertation proposes that the main role in the generation of ULF waves at middle latitudes during substorm belongs to the plasmapause.

The first part of the dissertation presents results of the data analysis of 84 intense substorm events as well as an overview of space observation programs such as CRRES, Van Allen Probes and DMSP. Data used in this study are from the ACE satellite taken measurements …

Eargate: Gait-Based User Identification With In-Ear Microphones, Andrea Ferlini, Dong Ma, Cecilia Mascolo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human gait is a widely used biometric trait for user identification and recognition. Given the wide-spreading, steady diffusion of earworn wearables (Earables) as the new frontier of wearable devices, we investigate the feasibility of earable-based gait identification. Specifically, we look at gait-based identification from the sounds induced by walking and propagated through the musculoskeletal system in the body. Our system, EarGate, leverages an in-ear facing microphone which exploits the earable’s occlusion effect to reliably detect the user’s gait from inside the ear canal, without impairing the general usage of earphones. With data collected from 31 subjects, we show that EarGate …

An Exploratory Study Of Social Support Systems To Help Older Adults In Managing Mobile Safety, Tamir Mendel, Debin Gao, David Lo, Eran Toch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Older adults face increased safety challenges, such as targeted online fraud and phishing, contributing to the growing technological divide between them and younger adults. Social support from family and friends is often the primary way older adults receive help, but it may also lead to reliance on others. We have conducted an exploratory study to investigate older adults' attitudes and experiences related to mobile social support technologies for mobile safety. We interviewed 18 older adults about their existing support and used the think-aloud method to gather data about a prototype for providing social support during mobile safety challenges. Our findings …

Iowa Waste Reduction Center Newsletter, October 2021, University Of Northern Iowa. Iowa Waste Reduction Center.

Iowa Waste Reduction Center Newsletter

Inside this Issue:

--- A Successful IRA Conference
--- Saving Scraps: A Culinary Competition
--- Calendar
--- Welcome Jordan Burrows!
--- Industry News

Development-Induced Displacement In Kiryandongo District: A Case Study Of The Karuma Hydroelectric Power Plant, Remington Fritz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This paper assesses the effects of the development induced displacement due to the Karuma Hydroelectric Power Plant on the Awoo village and surrounding areas in Karuma Town. Recently, Uganda has pursued several large-scale development projects that have repeatedly displaced people. Despite having strong displacement and resettlement framework, there is a continued pattern of failing to implement such framework, threatening the livelihood and well-being of those displaced.

Interview with key informants from several government agencies, such as the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development the National Environmental Management Authority and Ugandan Generation Electricity Company Ltd have illustrated the political framework and …

An Eventful Past Predicting A Bizarre Future: Assessing The Influence Of Ocean Circulation On Key Fish Species In Icelandic Waters. An Analysis Of Past Circulation Records In Order To Predict The State Of Demersal Fish Stocks In Future Climate Scenarios, Matthew Engfer

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Feedback-driven changes in North Atlantic Ocean circulation are affecting marine ecosystems off the coast of Iceland and are predicted to have differing outcomes by 2100. In this study, data reflecting Icelandic fish stock distributions was compiled on a map with oceanographic temperature and depth in order to observe patterns of population changes with changes in ocean currents. After evaluating past temperature effects on demersal fish stocks, future habitat predictions were estimated in weaker ocean circulation scenarios. A number of assumptions were made in order to pinpoint a correlation between ocean temperature and fish habitat. Iceland’s unique location and climate offers …

Letters To A Glacier; An Experiment And Critique Of M. Jackson’S Glacier-Ruins Narrative, Lily Fife Schaeufele

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” —Ursula K. Le Guin

Letters to a Glacier; The Buoy Project Isafjordur is an ongoing invitation to the people of Isafjordur to write a letter to a specific glacier in Iceland onto a collection of discarded buoys gathered from the Isafjorudur and Bolungarvik junk yards. Over a period of two days on November 9th and 10th, I actively invited customers in the local cafe Heimabyggð to …

A Phenological Analysis Of Páramo Vegetation Along An Altitudinal Gradient: The Influence Of Camelids On Andean Flora In The Páramo Of Chimborazo, Ecuador, Tessa Seifried

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study hopes to reveal the mechanisms behind camelid-plant interactions in the Chimborazo province of Ecuador, which is known for having a large population of domesticated alpacas (Vicugna pacos), along with wild vicuñas (Vicugna vicugna) that were reintroduced into the area 30 years ago. These camelid species, especially vicuñas, are understudied within Ecuador in regards to their effects on plant composition, diversity, and spatial phenology. To gain a better insight into this topic, three sites were chosen: a site inhabited by only vicuña, a site inhabited by only alpaca, and a site inhabited by both species. The vicuña site sat …

Science Is For Everybody: A Resource For Understanding Glaciers, Climate, And Modeling, Emma Watson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Climate change threatens the existence of glaciers worldwide. In order to properly interact with these changing systems, we must first understand them. Glacial models provide an excellent way to do this; however, the language and mathematical concepts used in their creation is generally inaccessible to a common audience. This project presents an online resource for a general audience to interact with climate science, glaciology, and glacial modeling. Long term goals for the project include the incorporation of a glacial model of Drangajökull, Vestfirðir, NW Iceland. As such, focus for the project includes a literature review of glaciers, Drangajökull in particular, …

Expanding Temperature Sensing For The Orion Bms 2, Samuel J. Parker

University Honors Theses

Formula SAE (FSAE) is an annual collegiate design competition that takes place across the globe. Portland State University’s team, Viking Motorsports, was committed to designing an Electric Vehicle (EV) for the 2021 FSAE competition. The team designed a completely custom lithium-ion cell battery that is managed by an Orion BMS 2 battery management system. The FSAE rulebook requires a robust temperature monitoring system for any EV power supply. The Orion BMS 2 can only directly collect data from eight temperature sensors, which is not enough to meet FSAE regulation. However, the BMS can be configured to monitor many more sensors …

An Evaluation Of The Organic Carbon Content Found In Fucus Vesiculosus And Ascophyllum Nodosum From Skutulsfjörður And Eyjafjörður, Iceland, Sylvie Alexander

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

In response to global warming and changing climate, carbon sequestration through macroalgal cultivation has emerged as a possible climate change mitigation technique. Macroalgal cultivation’s relationship to carbon sequestration however is still not well understood. It is imperative to understand macroalgae’s connection to carbon sequestration to evaluate if macroalgal cultivation can help combat climate change. There is a gap in literature regarding the carbon content of Icelandic macroalgae and therefore the contribution of Icelandic macroalgae to national and global carbon sequestration estimates. This paper aims to address this knowledge gap by evaluating organic carbon content of Fucus vesiculosus and Ascophyllum nodosum …

Greenhouse Gas Inventory Of Transportation And Driving Habits At Gettysburg College, Flavia Soctto D'Antuono, Megan G. Wojnar

Student Publications

By tracking the overall emissions put out by a college campus, mitigation strategies can be researched to lower total emissions. This study utilized a survey for both the student body and faculty and staff members at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This survey allowed this study to answer three research questions; what is the total number of Scope 3 emissions at Gettysburg College, how do these findings compare to findings from 2009 and the 2016 STARS report for Gettysburg College, and if any potential mitigation strategies are welcomed by the campus community. This study examined five major driving related emission …

Field Study Of Potential Relocation Sites For The Adams County Farmers’ Market, Patrick J. Canty, Michael S. Iodice

Student Publications

Farmers markets are an essential part of a community's culture and provide a vital service to all of its members. Currently, the Adam’s County Farmers Market is at a crossroads, as the lease it has on its current location is up and they must consider where they will go next. The purpose of this study is to assist the market in finding the best location in Gettysburg by analyzing the potential sites and providing a numerical score to compare each site. Four potential locations were used in this study: Constitution Lot, Lutheran Seminary, Recreation Park and the Existing site location. …

Synthesis And Pharmacological Studies Of Ph-Sensitive, Allosteric, And Bivalent Ligands As Modulators Of Gpcrs, Ricardo Rosas Jr.

Dissertations (1934 -)

G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are cell surface receptors that transduce extracellular signals into intracellular effector pathways via heterotrimeric G protein dependent and independent pathways. GPCRs are involved in numerous physiological processes and are implicated in pathological signaling for numerous diseases. Described herein are novel approaches towards the modulation of two specific Class A GPCRs: protease activated receptor 1 (PAR1) and the mu opioid receptor (MOR). Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to GPCRs, which includes structures, signaling, and putative heteromer formation. Chapters 2 and 5 provide background information on PARs and the MOR, respectively. Diverse approaches towards the modulation of …

Uncovering Patterns In Reviewers' Feedback To Scene Description Authors, Rosiana Natalie, Jolene Kar Inn Loh, Huei Suen Tan, Joshua Shi-Hao Tseng, Hernisa Kacorri, Kotaro Hara

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Audio descriptions (ADs) can increase access to videos for blind people. Researchers have explored different mechanisms for generating ADs, with some of the most recent studies involving paid novices; to improve the quality of their ADs, novices receive feedback from reviewers. However, reviewer feedback is not instantaneous. To explore the potential for real-time feedback through automation, in this paper, we analyze 1,120 comments that 40 sighted novices received from a sighted or a blind reviewer. We find that feedback patterns tend to fall under four themes: (i) Quality; commenting on different AD quality variables, (ii) Speech Act; the utterance or …

Sylpeniot: Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption For Data Privacy Applications In Iot Environments, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Jongkil Kim, Yangwai Chow, Dongxi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy preserving mechanisms are essential for protecting data in IoT environments. This is particularly challenging as IoT environments often contain heterogeneous resource-constrained devices. One method for protecting privacy is to encrypt data with a pattern or metadata. To prevent information leakage, an evaluation using the pattern must be performed before the data can be retrieved. However, the computational costs associated with typical privacy preserving mechanisms can be costly. This makes such methods ill-suited for resource-constrained devices, as the high energy consumption will quickly drain the battery. This work solves this challenging problem by proposing SyLPEnIoT – Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption …

Weakly-Supervised Video Anomaly Detection With Contrastive Learning Of Long And Short-Range Temporal Features, Yu Tian, Guansong Pang, Yuanhong Chen, Rajvinder Singh, Johan W. Verjans, Gustavo Carneiro

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Anomaly detection with weakly supervised video-level labels is typically formulated as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, in which we aim to identify snippets containing abnormal events, with each video represented as a bag of video snippets. Although current methods show effective detection performance, their recognition of the positive instances, i.e., rare abnormal snippets in the abnormal videos, is largely biased by the dominant negative instances, especially when the abnormal events are subtle anomalies that exhibit only small differences compared with normal events. This issue is exacerbated in many methods that ignore important video temporal dependencies. To address this issue, …

Constrained Contrastive Distribution Learning For Unsupervised Anomaly Detection And Localisation In Medical Images, Yu Tian, Guansong Pang, Fengbei Liu, Yuanhong Chen, Seon Ho Shin, Johan W. Verjans, Rajvinder Singh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) learns one-class classifiers exclusively with normal (i.e., healthy) images to detect any abnormal (i.e., unhealthy) samples that do not conform to the expected normal patterns. UAD has two main advantages over its fully supervised counterpart. Firstly, it is able to directly leverage large datasets available from health screening programs that contain mostly normal image samples, avoiding the costly manual labelling of abnormal samples and the subsequent issues involved in training with extremely class-imbalanced data. Further, UAD approaches can potentially detect and localise any type of lesions that deviate from the normal patterns. One significant challenge faced …

Learning To Adversarially Blur Visual Object Tracking, Qing Guo, Ziyi Cheng, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motion blur caused by the moving of the object or camera during the exposure can be a key challenge for visual object tracking, affecting tracking accuracy significantly. In this work, we explore the robustness of visual object trackers against motion blur from a new angle, i.e., adversarial blur attack (ABA). Our main objective is to online transfer input frames to their natural motion-blurred counterparts while misleading the state-of-the-art trackers during the tracking process. To this end, we first design the motion blur synthesizing method for visual tracking based on the generation principle of motion blur, considering the motion information and …

Missing Data Imputation For Solar Yield Prediction Using Temporal Multi-Modal Variational Auto-Encoder, Meng Shen, Huaizheng Zhang, Yixin Cao, Fan Yang, Yonggang Wen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The accurate and robust prediction of short-term solar power generation is significant for the management of modern smart grids, where solar power has become a major energy source due to its green and economical nature. However, the solar yield prediction can be difficult to conduct in the real world where hardware and network issues can make the sensors unreachable. Such data missing problem is so prevalent that it degrades the performance of deployed prediction models and even fails the model execution. In this paper, we propose a novel temporal multi-modal variational auto-encoder (TMMVAE) model, to enhance the robustness of short-term …

Causal Attention For Unbiased Visual Recognition, Tan Wang, Chang Zhou, Qianru Sun, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attention module does not always help deep models learn causal features that are robust in any confounding context, e.g., a foreground object feature is invariant to different backgrounds. This is because the confounders trick the attention to capture spurious correlations that benefit the prediction when the training and testing data are IID (identical & independent distribution); while harm the prediction when the data are OOD (out-of-distribution). The sole fundamental solution to learn causal attention is by causal intervention, which requires additional annotations of the confounders, e.g., a “dog” model is learned within “grass+dog” and “road+dog” respectively, so the “grass” and …

Disentangling Hate In Online Memes, Ka Wei, Roy Lee, Rui Cao, Ziqing Fan, Jing Jiang, Wen Haw Chong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hateful and offensive content detection has been extensively explored in a single modality such as text. However, such toxic information could also be communicated via multimodal content such as online memes. Therefore, detecting multimodal hateful content has recently garnered much attention in academic and industry research communities. This paper aims to contribute to this emerging research topic by proposing DisMultiHate, which is a novel framework that performed the classification of multimodal hateful content. Specifically, DisMultiHate is designed to disentangle target entities in multimodal memes to improve the hateful content classification and explainability. We conduct extensive experiments on two publicly available …

Measuring Data Collection Diligence For Community Healthcare, Galawala Ramesha Samurdhi Karunasena, M. S. Ambiya, Arunesh Sinha, R. Nagar, S. Dalal, Abdullah. H., D. Thakkar, D. Narayanan, M. Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data analytics has tremendous potential to provide targeted benefit in low-resource communities, however the availability of highquality public health data is a significant challenge in developing countries primarily due to non-diligent data collection by community health workers (CHWs). Our use of the word non-diligence here is to emphasize that poor data collection is often not a deliberate action by CHW but arises due to a myriad of factors, sometime beyond the control of the CHW. In this work, we define and test a data collection diligence score. This challenging unlabeled data problem is handled by building upon domain expert’s guidance …

Multi-Modal Recommender Systems: Hands-On Exploration, Quoc Tuan Truong, Aghiles Salah, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems typically learn from user-item preference data such as ratings and clicks. This information is sparse in nature, i.e., observed user-item preferences often represent less than 5% of possible interactions. One promising direction to alleviate data sparsity is to leverage auxiliary information that may encode additional clues on how users consume items. Examples of such data (referred to as modalities) are social networks, item’s descriptive text, product images. The objective of this tutorial is to offer a comprehensive review of recent advances to represent, transform and incorporate the different modalities into recommendation models. Moreover, through practical hands-on sessions, we …

On The Usability (In)Security Of In-App Browsing Interfaces In Mobile Apps, Zicheng Zhang, Daoyuan Wu, Lixiang Li, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the frequent encountering of web URLs in various application scenarios (e.g., chatting and email reading), many mobile apps build their in-app browsing interfaces (IABIs) to provide a seamless user experience. Although this achieves user-friendliness by avoiding the constant switching between the subject app and the system built-in browser apps, we find that IABIs, if not well designed or customized, could result in usability security risks. In this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on the usability (in)security of in-app browsing interfaces in both Android and iOS apps. Specifically, we collect a dataset of 25 high-profile mobile apps …

Integrated Discourse Analysis & Learning Skills Framework For Class Conversations, Devyn Wei Hung Tan, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Constructive interactions through discussion forums allow students to open their horizons and thought processes to acquire more knowledge and develop skills. Thus, discussion forums play an important role in supporting learning. Additionally, the discussion forum provides the content for creating a knowledge repository. It contains discussion threads related to key course topics that are debated by the students. One approach to understanding the student learning experience is through the analysis of the discussion threads. This research proposes the application of discourse analysis and collaborative learning frameworks to discussion forums to gain further insights into the student’s learning in a classroom. …

Latent Class Analysis For Identifying Subclasses Of Depression Using Jmp Pro 16, Karishma Yadav, Fei Fei Sue-Ann Seet, Tin Seong Kam, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

According to WHO, “Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide and is a major contributor to the overall global burden of disease”. A major stumbling block in the care of depressed patients remains the accurate diagnosis of the severity of depression. Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), a 9-question instrument is widely used for diagnosing and determining the severity of depression. However, the popularly used 5-Category of depression severity based on the sum of responses to the 9 questions was overly subjective. In view of this limitation, our paper aims to demonstrate how Latent Class Analysis of JMP Pro can be …

Transporting Causal Mechanisms For Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Zhongqi Yue, Qianru Sun, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) literature adopts the covariate shift and conditional shift assumptions, which essentially encourage models to learn common features across domains. However, due to the lack of supervision in the target domain, they suffer from the semantic loss: the feature will inevitably lose nondiscriminative semantics in source domain, which is however discriminative in target domain. We use a causal view—transportability theory [41]—to identify that such loss is in fact a confounding effect, which can only be removed by causal intervention. However, the theoretical solution provided by transportability is far from practical for UDA, because it requires the …

Prediction Of Synthetic Lethal Interactions In Human Cancers Using Multi-View Graph Auto-Encoder, Zhifeng Hao, Di Wu, Yuan Fang, Min Wu, Ruichu Cai, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Synthetic lethality (SL) is a very important concept for the development of targeted anticancer drugs. However, experimental methods for SL detection often suffer from various issues like high cost and low consistency across cell lines. Hence, computational methods for predicting novel SLs have recently emerged as complements for wet-lab experiments. In addition, SL data can be represented as a graph where nodes are genes and edges are the SL interactions. It is thus motivated to design advanced graph-based machine learning algorithms for SL prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel SL prediction method using Multi-view Graph Auto-Encoder (SLMGAE). We …