Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

1-D Crustal Seismic Velocity Models For West-Central And Western Montana, Courtenay Duzet

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In seismically active areas with infrequent, large-magnitude earthquakes, high-quality seismic data are critical for determining high-resolution, accurate seismic velocity models. Here, we present a new local-scale seismic velocity model for the crust in west-central Montana as well as a new regional-scale seismic velocity model for the crust and upper mantle across broader western Montana. The new models are constrained by phase arrivals from several passive seismic networks, including the University of Montana Seismic Network (UMSN), the Montana Regional Seismic Network (MRSN), the Advanced National Seismic System (ANSS), temporary deployments by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and the USArray Transportable …

Catch My Drift? Perceptions And Experiences Of Pesticide Contamination Of Organic Crops In Montana, Sarah Rodgers

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Pesticide drift and inadvertent contamination pose particular risks to organic production. Some organic producers have lost their crops, certification, and/or organic markets because of contamination events. Through this thesis research, I explain the perceptions and experiences that certified organic farmers in Montana have about drift and inadvertent pesticide contamination. I conducted semi-structured interviews with eleven certified organic farmers from various regions of Montana. Along with one-on-one interviews with organic farmers, interviews with industry and regulatory officials were conducted to better understand the policies and procedures that control what happens when drift occurs at the state level. Industry and regulatory official …

Combined Effects Of Temperature And Heavy Metals On The Performance Of The Giant Salmonfly., James Frakes, Amanda Andreas, Benjamin P. Colman, Aurthur Woods

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In many freshwater ecosystems, communities of aquatic insects are facing the combined stresses of warmer waters due to climate change and increased exposure to heavy metal toxicants. Although each stressor may threaten aquatic insects independently, they also likely interact in important ways to affect insect physiology and performance. Here we investigate this potential interaction using two populations of aquatic nymphs of the giant salmonfly, Pteronarcys californica, collected from adjacent rivers in Montana: naïve individuals from Rock Creek, a relatively pristine stream, and individuals from the Upper Clark Fork River, which has a history of heavy metal pollution and higher …

Determining Spatial Controls On Snow Isotopic Signature And Tracing The Snowmelt Pulse As It Moves Through Two Montane Catchments, Jenna K. Rolle

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In this study, we investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in water across two mountainous catchments in west-central Montana to trace the input of snow to local soil, bedrock aquifers, and streams. Snowpack and snowmelt samples were collected throughout the winter season at ten sites selected to encompass a range of elevation, aspect, slope angle and hillslope position. Soil and bedrock wells at five of the ten sites were sampled after the initial snowmelt pulse and stream samples were collected weekly at the outlets of both catchments to trace the timing and partitioning …

Machine Learning In Requirements Elicitation: A Literature Review, Cheligeer Cheligeer, Jingwei Huang, Guosong Wu, Nadia Bhuiyan, Yuan Xu, Yong Zeng

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

A growing trend in requirements elicitation is the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the cumbersome requirement handling process. This literature review summarizes and analyzes studies that incorporate ML and natural language processing (NLP) into demand elicitation. We answer the following research questions: (1) What requirement elicitation activities are supported by ML? (2) What data sources are used to build ML-based requirement solutions? (3) What technologies, algorithms, and tools are used to build ML-based requirement elicitation? (4) How to construct an ML-based requirements elicitation method? (5) What are the available tools to support ML-based requirements elicitation methodology? Keywords …

Exploring Blockchain Adoption Supply Chains: Opportunities And Challenges, Adrian V. Gheorghe, Omer F. Keskin, Farinaz Sabz Ali Pour

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In modern supply chains, acquisition often occurs with the involvement of a network of organizations. The resilience, efficiency, and effectiveness of supply networks are crucial for the viability of acquisition. Disruptions in the supply chain require adequate communication infrastructure to ensure resilience. However, supply networks do not have a shared information technology infrastructure that ensures effective communication. Therefore decision-makers seek new methodologies for supply chain management resilience. Blockchain technology offers new decentralization and service delegation methods that can transform supply chains and result in a more flexible, efficient, and effective supply chain. This report presents a framework for the application …

Precursors Of Email Response To Cybersecurity Scenarios: Factor Exploration And Scale Development, Miguel A. Toro-Jarrin, Pilar Pazos-Lago, Miguel Padilla

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

In the last decade, information security research has further expanded to include human factors as key elements of the organization's cybersecurity infrastructure. Numerous factors from several theories have been explored to explain and predict the multitude of information security-related behaviors in organizations. Lately, there has been a call for the study of specific cybersecurity behaviors in contextualized scenarios that reflect specific and realistic situations of a potential cyber-attack. This paper focuses on precursors of email response in situations that can be the origin of cybersecurity incidents in organizations (i.e., phishing attacks, ransomware, etc.). This study explores participants' intentions to follow …

A Literature Review On Combining Heuristics And Exact Algorithms In Combinatorial Optimization, Hesamoddin Tahami, Hengameh Fakhravar

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

There are several approaches for solving hard optimization problems. Mathematical programming techniques such as (integer) linear programming-based methods and metaheuristic approaches are two extremely effective streams for combinatorial problems. Different research streams, more or less in isolation from one another, created these two. Only several years ago, many scholars noticed the advantages and enormous potential of building hybrids of combining mathematical programming methodologies and metaheuristics. In reality, many problems can be solved much better by exploiting synergies between these approaches than by “pure” classical algorithms. The key question is how to integrate mathematical programming methods and metaheuristics to achieve such …

Humans And The Core Partition: An Agent-Based Modeling Experiment, Andrew J. Collins, Sheida Etemadidavan

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Although strategic coalition formation is traditionally modeled using cooperative game theory, behavioral game theorists have repeatedly shown that outcomes predicted by game theory are different from those generated by actual human behavior. To further explore these differences, in a cooperative game theory context, we experiment to compare the outcomes resulting from human participants’ behavior to those generated by a cooperative game theory solution mechanism called the core partition. Our experiment uses an interactive simulation of a glove game, a particular type of cooperative game, to collect the participant’s decision choices and their resultant outcomes. Two different glove games are considered, …

A Probabilistic Perspective Of Human-Machine Interaction, Mustafa Canan, Mustafa Demir, Samuel Kovacic

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Human-machine interaction (HMI) has become an essential part of the daily routine in organizations. Although the machines are designed with state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence applications, they are limited in their ability to mimic human behavior. The human-human interaction occurs between two or more humans; when a machine replaces a human, the interaction dynamics are not the same. The results indicate that a machine that interacts with a human can increase the mental uncertainty that a human experiences. Developments in decision sciences indicate that using quantum probability theory (QPT) improves the understanding of human decision-making than merely using classical probability theory (CPT). …

The Other Legacy Of Qasim Amin: The View From 1908, Hoda Yousef

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

U.S. Public Opinion Of Reproductive Control Options For Free-Roaming Horses On Western Public Lands, S. Nicole Frey, Jeffrey L. Beck, John Derek Scasta, Loretta Singletary

Human–Wildlife Interactions

Free-roaming horses (Equus ferus caballus; horses) inhabit public rangelands located primarily in 10 western U.S. states. Recent horse population increases are impacting rangeland ecosystems, native wildlife species and their habitats, and exacerbating conflicts with domestic livestock grazing. While contraceptives and physical sterilization are promising options to manage horse herd levels, public opinion concerning the use of fertility control is not well understood. To better inform policymakers, we completed a rigorous study of a random sample of public land stakeholders across the United States (n = 3,500) in 2020 using a Likert scale online survey to assess their …

Jacobi's Four Squares Theorem, Arman Yagci

Honors Papers

Jacobi’s Four Squares Theorem is a celebrated result of number theory that provides a formula for the number of ways a positive integer n can be written as a sum of four integral squares. In this paper, we prove this theorem using the theory of modular forms.

Measurement Of B (Bs →Dsx) With Bs Semileptonic Tagging, B. Wang, K. Kinoshita, H. Aihara, D. M. Asner, T. Aushev, R. Ayad, V. Babu, I. Badhrees, A. M. Bakich, P. Behera, C. Beleño, J. Bennett, M. Bessner, V. Bhardwaj, T. Bilka, J. Biswal, A. Bobrov, G. Bonvicini, A. Bozek

Faculty and Student Publications

We report the first direct measurement of the inclusive branching fraction B(Bs→DsX) via Bs tagging in e+e-→ (5S) events. Tagging is accomplished through a partial reconstruction of semileptonic decays Bs→DsXℓν, where X denotes unreconstructed additional hadrons or photons and ℓ is an electron or muon. With 121.4 fb-1 of data collected at the (5S) resonance by the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e- collider, we obtain B(Bs→DsX)=(60.2±5.8±2.3)%, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic.

Search For The Decay Bs0 →Ηη, B. Bhuyan, K. J. Nath, J. Borah, I. Adachi, H. Aihara, S. Al Said, D. M. Asner, H. Atmacan, V. Aulchenko, T. Aushev, R. Ayad, V. Babu, I. Badhrees, A. M. Bakich, P. Behera, J. Bennett, V. Bhardwaj, T. Bilka, J. Biswal

Faculty and Student Publications

We report results from a search for the decay Bs0→ηη using 121.4 fb-1 of data collected at the (5S) resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy e+e- collider. We do not observe any signal and set an upper limit on the branching fraction of 14.3×10-5 at 90% confidence level. This result represents a significant improvement over the previous most stringent limit.

Logarithmic Algorithms For Fair Division Problems, Alexandr Grebennikov, Xenia Isaeva, Andrei V. Malyutin, Mikhail Mikhailov, Oleg R. Musin

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

We study the algorithmic complexity of fair division problems with a focus on minimizing the number of queries needed to find an approximate solution with desired accuracy. We show for several classes of fair division problems that under certain natural conditions on sets of preferences, a logarithmic number of queries with respect to accuracy is sufficient.

Computer Aided Design: Targeting The Pac1r For Novel Therapeutics And Investigating Biologically Relevant Materials, Kyle Thomas Mckay

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Computer aided drug design, a collection of computational methodologies including structure and ligand based drug design, has emerged as an efficient and accurate way to expedite the drug discovery process. Structure based drug design — methods which rely on the 3-dimensional structural information of biological targets — are of particular interest to chemists. Unfortunately, structural information can be difficult to obtain, and this can limit the usefulness of these methodologies. New methodologies and workflows, which are less reliant on difficult to obtain structural information are needed to fill in the gaps and push the drug development process forward. The first …

Revealing The Direct And Indirect Effects Of Climate Change On Soil Nutrient Dynamics And Forage Resources In Mountain Ecosystems, Kenna Elizabeth Rewcastle

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Modern climate change is already altering the structure and function ofecosystems around the world in nontrivial ways. Mountain ecosystems in particular will continue to experience a greater magnitude and rate of climatic warming than the global average, threatening the stability of key ecosystem processes like nutrient cycling as well as the supply of benefits from ecosystem services provided by mountains. While significant advancements have been made to address the direct effects of rising temperatures on nutrient cycling dynamics, our understanding of the synergies between the direct effects of warming and the indirect effects of climate change, mediated by the response …

Development Of [3,3]-Sigmatropic Rearrangements Of Zwitterionic And Cationic Intermediates Formed By Intramolecular Cyclization Of Tertiary Allylic Amines Tethered To Heterocumulenes, Joseph Pisano

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Guanidines are ubiquitous in nature and serve as useful building blocks in biologically active natural products as well as non-nucleophilic bases and organocatalysts. There is thus a need for methods for the synthesis of guanidine compounds as well as isoelectronic groups such as isothioureas. The 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement represents a powerful reaction by which to synthesize highly substituted guanidines.

The scope of the zwitterionic 1,3-diaza-Claisen rearrangement has been further investigated through the introduction of a two-carbon tether. Electron-deficient carbodiimides can be synthesized through desulfurization of isothioureas, which undergo intramolecular cyclization through a tethered tertiary amine bearing an allylic group to afford …

Soil Invertebrates In Agriculture: Assessing Ecosystem Services, Biodiversity Impacts, And Farmer Perceptions, Eva Kinnebrew

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Harmonizing biological diversity and crop production is a major goal towards building more sustainable food systems. Soil invertebrates are diverse and abundant organisms in agriculture, but relatively little is known about their benefits or how agricultural management impacts them. In this dissertation, I dig into the complex interactions between agricultural land use and soil invertebrate biodiversity to better inform farmer decision-making. I find that soil invertebrate communities have major potential contributions to agroecosystems (Chapter 2) and are shaped heavily by agricultural land use (Chapters 3, 4), but remain too uncertain to contribute to farmers’ management choices (Chapter 5). First, I …

Building A Learning Healthcare System: A Path To Optimizing Big Health Data To Inform Clinical Care Decisions, Danne Charlotte Emily Elbers

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The explosive growth of data and computing power of the last decades has had large impacts on a myriad of domains, not in the least on one of society’s most complex systems: healthcare. In this work, a version of the resulting Learning Healthcare System (LHS) is explored and elements of it have been implemented and are in use at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs today. After an overview of what a LHS is and what it could be once executed in its full form, the chapters will describe in detail some of the individual elements and how they address cogs …

Studies On The Tempered Fractional Natural Decomposition Method, Nazek Ahmad Obeidat

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In Fractional Calculus (FC), the notion of fractional derivatives and integrals arise from convolutions with a power law, which, when multiplied by an exponential factor, one obtains tempered fractional derivatives and integrals.

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop theories and applications of a new technique in FC called the Tempered Fractional Natural Transform Method (TFNTM). This method can be used to solve a myriad of problems in linear and nonlinear ordinary and partial differential equations.

We present convergence analysis, give error estimates, and provide exact solutions, with graphical illustrations, to many well-known problems in tempered fractional differential equation, …

Disentangling The Separate And Intersecting Pathways Of Carbon And Nitrogen Response To Overlapping Drivers, Manya Ruckhaus

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Anthropogenic activities have drastically altered atmospheric composition — leading to unprecedented disturbances that might push ecosystems across thresholds where important ecosystem services, such as clean water and healthy soils are at risk. Such disturbances include increased heavy precipitation, rain on snow events, and longer-term shifts in rain composition and precipitation amount. Catchment response to such perturbations is widely variable, indicating that specific catchment characteristics may govern the resistance and resilience of the system. Forested catchments in the northeastern, U.S. have reported increasing dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentrations in streams, and links to shifts in drivers—such as precipitation chemistry, season, and …

Examining The Relationship Between The Ereendavaa Metamorphic Core Complex And Duch Gol Basin In Northeast Mongolia In The Context Of The Mongol-Okhotsk Suture, Gavin Pirrie

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The Mongol-Okhotsk suture is integral in understanding the closure of the Mongol-Okhotsk Ocean, an ocean basin that once separated the Siberian craton from terranes of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt in southern Mongolia. However, the timing of closure and exact location of the suture are poorly known. This study examines two areas in northeastern Mongolia adjacent to the suture, the Ereendavaa Metamorphic Core Complex (EMCC) and the Duch Gol Basin, to aid in this understanding. The EMCC is an Early Cretaceous metamorphic core complex with an associated top-to-the-NW extensional detachment fault. Two sets of mineral lineations have previously been documented …

A Holistic Approach To River Restoration Design And Conservation Planning On The Reach And Basin Scales Using Hydraulic Modeling And Multi-Objective Optimization Tools, Lindsay Courtney Worley

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Flooding events around the world cost billions (USD) in damages each year. For decades, engineers have combated flood related damages by implementing flood mitigation controls such as channelization, levees or berms, and armoring. Recent advances in the study of river dynamics, however, have challenged the efficacy of these traditional flood mitigation techniques and pose that these structures are disconnecting channels from their floodplains, increasing flow rates, and contributing to more erosion. The effects of climate change combined with future predictions of increased storm frequency and intensity make it necessary to revise flood hazard mitigation strategies. A more nature-based alternative to …

Monitoring Of Suspended Sediment Mineralogy In Tropical Rivers: Effects Of Flowrate, Time, And Lithology, Trevor Joseph Mackowiak

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

As a result of climate change, tropical storms will become more frequent and intense. Resulting changes in river flow dynamics have the potential to change the composition of suspended sediments in crucial tropical river ecosystems, possibly affecting their resiliency. This thesis investigates how changes river discharge and bedrock lithology affected the physiochemical nature of river suspended sediments over a typical year. Suspended sediment samples (n=73) on filter membranes and sediment grab samples (n=18) were collected from the riverbed and riverbank from three watersheds of differing lithology in the Luquillo Mountains, PR (R. Mameyes, R. Icacos, and Q. Sonadora). Suspended sediment …

Pymoocfd - A Multi-Objective Optimization Framework For Cfd, George Martin Cunningham Love

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Modern computational resource have solidified the use of computer modeling as an integral part of the engineering design process. This is particularly impressive when it comes to high-dimensional models such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models. CFD models are now capable of producing results with a level of confidence that would previously have required physical experimentation. Simultaneously, the development of machine learning techniques and algorithms has increased exponentially in recent years. This acceleration is also due to the widespread availability of modern computational resources. Thus far, the cross-over between these fields has been mostly focused on computer models with low …

Drones, Virtual Reality, And Modeling: Communicating Catastrophic Dam Failure, H. R. Spero, I. Vazquez-Lopez, K. Miller, R. Joshaghani, S. Cutchin, J. Enterkine

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Dam failures occur worldwide and can be economically and ecologically devastating. Communicating the scale of these risks to the general public and decision-makers is imperative. Two-dimensional (2D) dam failure hydraulic models inform owners and floodplain managers of flood regimes but have limitations when shared with non-specialists. This study addresses these limitations by constructing a 3D Virtual Reality (VR) environment to display the 1976 Teton Dam disaster case study using a pipeline composed of (1) 2D hydraulic model data (extrapolated into 3D), (2) a 3D reconstructed dam, and (3) a terrain model processed from UAS (Uncrewed Airborne System) imagery using Structure …

Automatic Transformation Of Natural To Unified Modeling Language: A Systematic Review, Sharif Ahmed, Arif Ahmed, Nasir U. Eisty

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Context: Processing Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) manually takes a much longer time for requirement analysts in software engineering. Researchers have been working on making an automatic approach to ease this task. Most of the existing approaches require some intervention from an analyst or are challenging to use. Some automatic and semi-automatic approaches were developed based on heuristic rules or machine learning algorithms. However, there are various constraints to the existing approaches to UML generation, such as restrictions on ambiguity, length or structure, anaphora, incompleteness, atomicity of input text, requirements of domain ontology, etc. Objective: This study aims to better understand …

Measuring Fairness In Ranked Results: An Analytical And Empirical Comparison, Amifa Raj, Michael D. Ekstrand

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Information access systems, such as search and recommender systems, often use ranked lists to present results believed to be relevant to the user's information need. Evaluating these lists for their fairness along with other traditional metrics provides a more complete understanding of an information access system's behavior beyond accuracy or utility constructs. To measure the (un)fairness of rankings, particularly with respect to the protected group(s) of producers or providers, several metrics have been proposed in the last several years. However, an empirical and comparative analyses of these metrics showing the applicability to specific scenario or real data, conceptual similarities, and …