Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Knowledge Discovery On The Integrative Analysis Of Electrical And Mechanical Dyssynchrony To Improve Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy, Zhuo He

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is a standard method of treating heart failure by coordinating the function of the left and right ventricles. However, up to 40% of CRT recipients do not experience clinical symptoms or cardiac function improvements. The main reasons for CRT non-response include: (1) suboptimal patient selection based on electrical dyssynchrony measured by electrocardiogram (ECG) in current guidelines; (2) mechanical dyssynchrony has been shown to be effective but has not been fully explored; and (3) inappropriate placement of the CRT left ventricular (LV) lead in a significant number of patients.

In terms of mechanical dyssynchrony, we utilize an …

Exploring Different Mediums For Teaching Programming And Cybersecurity In Primary And Secondary Schools, Andrew R. Youngstrom

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Cybersecurity and programming are becoming more and more prominent in today’s world. It is beneficial to begin teaching these topics to students at a younger age. Additionally, we see students in primary and secondary schools struggling to maintain focus in class as attention spans shrink. This paper looks at different drone models to see if any of them could be sufficient solutions to be implemented into primary and secondary schools to teach cybersecurity and programming topics to students. Besides teaching capabilities, drones must also be affordable for institutions and simple enough to construct, configure, and operate so that a teacher …

An Ambiguous Technique For Nonvisual Text Entry, Dylan C. Gaines

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Text entry is a common daily task for many people, but it can be a challenge for people with visual impairments when using virtual touchscreen keyboards that lack physical key boundaries. In this thesis, we investigate using a small number of gestures to select from groups of characters to remove most or all dependence on touch locations. We leverage a predictive language model to select the most likely characters from the selected groups once a user completes each word.

Using a preliminary interface with six groups of characters based on a Qwerty keyboard, we find that users are able to …

Mealybug Vectors: A Review Of Their Transmission Of Plant Viruses And Their Management Strategies, Abdul Razak Ahmed, Samuel Obeng Apori, Abdul Aziz Karim

Articles

Mealybugs cause mechanical damage and diseases to plants. Through their feeding activities, they reduce the yield, quality and productivity of crops. This review discusses mealybug vectors of plant viruses, the economic losses they cause, mealybug species and their hosts. Among the numerous mealybug species, Planococcus species are the most effective vector of plant viruses, transmitting many Ampeloviruses. Diverse methods for the control and regulation of mealybugs are also discussed. Physical, cultural and biological control methods are labor-intensive but environmentally friendly compared to chemical methods. However, chlorpyrifos are one the active ingredients of insecticides effective against several mealybug species. Using plant …

Structural And Functional Modulation Of Metal-Organic Supercontainers (Moscs) And Their Applications In Supramolecular Catalysis, Shrijana Dc

Dissertations and Theses

Metal-organic supercontainers (MOSCs), a breakthrough development in our laboratory since 2012, have emerged as promising enzyme mimics, showcasing their prowess in encapsulating guest molecules and catalyzing confined chemical reactions. The intrigue surrounding MOSCs stems from their extraordinary traits, encompassing multiple binding domains, high stability, large surface area, tunable pore size, and structural modularity. Primarily comprising sulfonylcalix[4]arenes, divalent metal ions, and carboxylate linkers, MOSCs' quintessential architecture comprises both endo- and exo- nano-cavities, amenable to guest interaction, with geometry and functionality manipulation achievable through precise precursor selection. Nonetheless, early MOSC models exhibit limited reactivity, often necessitating more potent nucleophiles or electrophiles. This …

Design Of Block Copolymer With Tunable Hydrophobic/Hydrophilic/Fluorophilic Interactions, Tatiane De Fatima Dutra

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Block copolymers (BCP) with balanced interactions and their resultant bulk-phase self-assembly have become increasingly important in advancing nanotechnology, separation, and energy applications. However, a few reports have addressed the synthesis challenge and bulk-phase self-assembly of such triblock copolymers. This thesis presents a facile route for preparing triblock copolymer via controlled radical and organocatalytic ring-opening polymerization that allows precise control over the incorporation of individual moieties in resultant polymer, responsible for balanced hydrophilic, hydrophobic/lipophilic, and fluorophilic interactions. Synthesized polymer with suggested self-assembled 2D lamellar nanostructure exhibits high-temperature stability. The long-term goal of this work is to selectively use this polymer class …

Object Detection And Image Categorization By Transferring Commonsense Knowledge With Premises And Quantifiers, Irina Chernyavsky

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Domestic, or household robots, are autonomous robots designed to make our home-life easier by performing chores and mundane tasks such as cleaning, or cooking. Currently domestic robots are specialized to complete a specific task and, therefore, are confined by factors such as mobility, size, and complexity. With the fast development of computer vision and robotics, the need for more compact, advanced and multi-task robots has emerged. Therefore, the robot needs to be multi-functional, able to discern the environment and the tasks. The aim of this paper is to categorize images in domestic robots as relevant to the culinary, laundry, vacuum …

Road Salt-Induced Salinization Of The Upper Paulins Kill River In Newton, New Jersey, Kristine Emily Rogers

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Road salt application is a primary factor leading to the salinization of freshwater rivers and streams throughout the Northeastern United States and globally. Rising salinization within fresh water bodies is problematic because it can modify community structure and detritus processing within freshwater ecosystems, induce mortality among macroinvertebrates and other aquatic life, and mobilize metals that can pose harm to human health. Road salts also threaten surface and underground drinking water supplies, kill riparian vegetation, and corrode infrastructure, such as bridges and roads. This research examines 4 1⁄2 years of continuous water quality monitoring data collected from two sensor stations along …

A New Credit Scoring Model To Reduce Potential Predatory Lending: A Design Science Approach, Anna Zakowska

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This research examines the potential impact of implementing a novel credit scoring model that integrates attributes beyond the traditional FICO model. It aims to address issues related to predatory lending and the financial exclusion affecting individuals often categorized as 'credit invisible,' 'credit unscorable,' 'unbanked,' and 'underbanked.' These individuals typically face difficulties in establishing or repairing a credit history, which poses a challenge for financial institutions in accurately evaluating their creditworthiness. This gap in the credit assessment process often opens doors to unfair lending practices. To tackle this problem, a systematically designed, built, tested, and evaluated innovative credit scoring model was …

Strategies To Secure Water For Great Salt Lake, Lisa W. Welsh, Joanna Endter-Wada, Karin M. Kettenring

Environment and Society Faculty Publications

Great Salt Lake is the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere (Wilsey et al. 2017) and plays an important role in Utah’s economy, environment, and ecology (Baxter and Butler 2020; Great Salt Lake Advisory Committee 2021). It has a long history of commercial and recreational activities including mineral production, brine shrimp harvesting, waterfowl hunting, boating, and sightseeing (Utah Department of Natural Resources 2013a, 2013b). The Great Salt Lake ecosystem supports over 10 million birds representing 338 species and acts as an important stopover for migratory birds between North and South America (Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program; Wilsey et al. …

Finally, It Seems To Be Working – The Evolving Valuation Effect Of The European Union’S Emissions Trading System, Benjamin Lynch, Martha O'Hagan-Luff

Articles

This research examines the market reaction to the publication of firm-specific environmental news for participating firms in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) during its third phase. Our sample of 123 publicly listed participating firms, located in 21 European countries, accounted for 45.43% of emissions in the EU ETS in 2020. Using an event study methodology during the period 2014–2021, we find that positive news was rewarded with increased returns for publication events related to the latter years of the phase (2017–2020) while it had an insignificant impact for earlier year (2013–2016). This indicates that the EU ETS …

Learning Networks With Attention Layers For Team Recommendation, Sagar Kaw

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Team Formation Problem aims to identify a group of experts who possess the required skills to complete a common goal. Graph-based approaches have been commonly used to solve this problem, but recently, researchers have started exploring this problem from the perspective of social information retrieval and applying neural architectures to recommend teams of experts. However, the learning process of these architectures is faced with several challenges. This includes the inability to handle network modifications after the training process is over as well as the time complexity of the learning process is high, which is proportional to the size of …

Ecuadorian Gravel Pack Spring Water Intakes, Derek Ten Pas, Julie Wildschut, Robert Hoeksema, Bruce Rydbeck, Chris Visscher

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This paper describes the basic design concept to design and build a type of spring water intake. The spring protection method bears similarity to a gravel pack well albeit constructed horizontally rather than the vertical construction of a gravel pack well. The design approach includes:

• collection of spring water subterranean using the aquifer and surrounding soil to filter the water supply,
• use of gravel pack to retain the surrounding aquifer materials and soil structure in place while providing an easy flow path for water to enter a slotted collector pipe and flow to a receiving tank without impounding spring water, …

Advanced Thermoluminescence Spectroscopy As A Research Tool For Semiconductor And Photonic Materials: A Review And Perspective, Farida Selim

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications

Thermoluminescence (TL) or thermally stimulated luminescence (TSL) spectroscopy is based on liberating charge carriers from traps in the bandgap by providing enough thermal energy to overcome the potential barrier of the traps. It provides a powerful tool to measure the positions of the localized states/traps in the bandgap. Despite that, its applications in semiconductors are very limited. Herein, the basics of TL spectroscopy and the recent advances in the technique with focus on cryogenic thermally stimulated photoemission spectroscopy (C-TSPS) which extends TL measurements to cryogenic regime and allows the detection of very low concentrations of shallow and deep localized states …

Mechanistic Study Of The Conductance And Enhanced Single-Molecule Detection In A Polymer-Electrolyte Nanopore, Fabio Marcuccio, Dimitrios Soulias, Chalmers C.C. Chau, Sheena E. Radford, Eric Hewitt, Paolo Actis, Martin Andrew Edwards

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

Solid-state nanopores have been widely employed in the detection of biomolecules, but low signal-to-noise ratios still represent a major obstacle in the discrimination of nucleic acid and protein sequences substantially smaller than the nanopore diameter. The addition of 50% poly(ethylene) glycol (PEG) to the external solution is a simple way to enhance the detection of such biomolecules. Here, we demonstrate with finite-element modeling and experiments that the addition of PEG to the external solution introduces a strong imbalance in the transport properties of cations and anions, drastically affecting the current response of the nanopore. We further show that the strong …

Facile Synthesis Of Nite2-Co2Te2@Rgo Nanocomposite For High-Performance Hybrid Supercapacitor, Maziar Farshadnia, Ali A. Ensafi, Kimia Zarean Mousaabadi, Behzad Rezaei, Muslum Demir

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications and Presentations

The design of bimetallic tellurides that exhibit excellent electrochemical properties remains a huge challenge for high-performance supercapacitors. In the present study, tellurium is consolidated on CoNi₂@rGO for the first time, to synthesize NiTe₂-Co₂Te₂@rGO nanocomposite by using a facile hydrothermal method. As-prepared NiTe₂-Co₂Te₂@rGO nanocomposite was characterized by EDS, TEM, FESEM, Raman, BET, XRD, and XPS techniques to prove the structural transformation. Upon the electrochemical characterization, NiTe₂-Co₂Te₂@rGO has notably presented numerous active sites and enhanced contact sites with the electrolyte solution during …

Meningioma Brain Tumor Detection And Classifcation Using Hybrid Cnn Method And Ridgelet Transform, B.V Prakash, A. Rajiv Kanna, N. Santhiyakumari, S. Kumarganesh, D. Siva Sundhara Raja, J. Jasmine Hephzipah, K. Martin Sagayam, Marc Pomplun, Helen Dang

Faculty Works: MCS (1984-2023)

The detection of meningioma tumors is the most crucial task compared with other tumors because of their lower pixel intensity. Modern medical platforms require a fully automated system for meningioma detection. Hence, this study proposes a novel and highly efficient hybrid Convolutional neural network (HCNN) classifier to distinguish meningioma brain images from non-meningioma brain images. The HCNN classification technique consists of the Ridgelet transform, feature computations, classifier module, and segmentation algorithm. Pixel stability during the decomposition process was improved by the Ridgelet transform, and the features were computed from the coefficient of the Ridgelet. These features were classified using the …

The Kappa Opioid Receptor: Candidate Pharmacotherapeutic Target For Multiple Sclerosis, Brian Reed, Surya Dutta

Faculty Works: BCES (1999-2023)

Multiple sclerosis (MS) afflicts millions of people worldwide. While multiple therapeutics have recently been developed and approved as treatment agents, they are not 100% effective. Recent developments investigating the endogenous opioid system involvement in MS has revealed that agonists of the kappa opioid receptor (KOR) have beneficial effects in both animal models of MS (and demyelinating disorders more generally) as well as in vitro models of remyelination. Several groups have contributed to this development. We summarize here the findings of these published studies, with comparisons of the effects and discussion of similarities and differences. The effects of KOR agonists involve …

Modulating Photochemical Properties To Enhance The Stability Of Electronically Dimmable Eye Protection Devices, Sruthy Baburaj, Jayachandran Parthiban, Sarvar Aminovich Rakhimov, Rasheedah Johnson, Ludmila Sukhomlinova, Paul Luchette, Steffen Jockusch, Malcolm D. E. Forbes, Jayaraman Sivaguru

Chemistry Faculty Publications

The study evaluates compatibility of stabilizers with dye doped liquid crystal (LC) scaffolds that are used in electronically dimmable materials. The photodegradation of the materials was investigated and suitable stabilizers were evaluated to slow the degradation process. Various types of benzotriazole-based stabilizers were evaluated for stabilizing the liquid crystals. Based on spin trapping experiments, radicals generated upon UV exposure is likely responsible for the degradation of the system. The radical generation is competitively inhibited by the addition of stabilizers.

Abbreviations: LC, liquid crystal; STB, stabilizers.

Dynamic Distributed Energy Resources For Expansion Of Ontario’S Greenhouse Sector, Lysandra Naom

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The vegetable greenhouse sector is rapidly growing and adopting technology advances like supplemental lighting. Supplemental lighting has a dynamic impact on the demand and consumption of a greenhouse’s electricity load. There is uncertainty on the rate of adaptation of technologies and the impact this could have on the power consumption of the sector. Without electricity availability, the sectors innovation and expansion can come to a halt. This research focused on investigating greenhouse electrical load models and lighting trends to forecast demand on electricity grids and discover potential for Distributed Energy Resource (DER) applications.

This thesis presents a series of studies …

Constructing Adversarial Examples In Question-Answering Systems, Vishakha Gautam

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Being an NLP pre-training model built with transformer and attention mechanism, BERT has proven to be highly efficient in developing various applications like text classification, machine translation, question-answering systems etc. Despite the recent advancement, however, the generalizability of the models remains a challenging issue. In this thesis, we study the generalizability issues of the prediction models in the question-answering systems, particularly for the unanswerable examples. To gain the insight about where the models do not generalize well, we are interested in constructing adversarial examples that are challenging for the model to predict correctly. The adversarial examples are obtained by pairing …

The Green Revolution In California: The Real Costs And Benefits Of Changing Electricity Production, Joseph James Hoffman

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In recent years democratic societies have added concern for the environment to the perennial problems of inequality, economic growth, and law and order. What is often called the Green Revolution has focused on the effect of industrial growth on the health of the individuals living in that society and on the effects on climate. In the United States, the State that was the first to see this problem and the first to make changes to deal with it, was California, where geographical factors ensured that the effects of industrial change on the air were much more severe than anywhere else …

Quantization For A Set Of Discrete Distributions On The Set Of Natural Numbers, Juan Gomez, Haily Martinez, Mrinal Kanti Roychowdhury, Alexis Salazar, Daniel J. Vallez

School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The quantization scheme in probability theory deals with finding a best approximation of a given probability distribution by a probability distribution that is supported on finitely many points. In this paper, first we state and prove a theorem, and then give a conjecture. We verify the conjecture by a few examples. Assuming that the conjecture is true, for a set of discrete distributions on the set of natural numbers we have calculated the optimal sets of n-means and the nth quantization errors for all positive integers n. In addition, the quantization dimension is also calculated.

Gwtc-2.1: Deep Extended Catalog Of Compact Binary Coalescences Observed By Ligo And Virgo During The First Half Of The Third Observing Run, R. Abbott, T. D. Abbott, F. Acernese, K. Ackley, Teviet Creighton, Mario C. Diaz, F. Llamas, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, W. H. Wang

Physics and Astronomy Faculty Publications and Presentations

The second Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog reported on 39 compact binary coalescences observed by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors between 1 April 2019 15:00 UTC and 1 October 2019 15:00 UTC. We present GWTC-2.1, which reports on a deeper list of candidate events observed over the same period. We analyze the final version of the strain data over this period with improved calibration and better subtraction of excess noise, which has been publicly released. We employ three matched-filter search pipelines for candidate identification, and estimate the astrophysical probability for each candidate event. While GWTC-2 used a false alarm rate …

Occohannock On The Bay Living Shoreline Project, C. Scott Hardaway Jr., Donna A. Milligan

Reports

Presentation report on Occohannock on the Bay (Camp Occohannock) Living Shoreline restoration project.

Project Purpose:

Demonstrate living shorelines as cost-effective, hybrid green-gray infrastructure approach for protecting local communities from coastal hazards while enhancing coastal resilience and ecosystem health.

Project awarded ASBPA Best Restored Shore Award for 2023

Statistical Modeling: Regression, Survival Analysis, And Time Series Analysis, Lawrence Leemis

Open Education Resources (OER)

Statistical Modeling provides an introduction to regression, survival analysis, and time series analysis for students who have completed calculus-based courses in probability and mathematical statistics. The book uses the R language to fit statistical models, conduct Monte Carlo simulation experiments and generate graphics. Over 300 exercises at the end of the chapters makes this an appropriate text for a class in statistical modeling.

Part 1: Regression
Chapter 1: Simple Linear Regression
Chapter 2: Inference in Simple Linear Regression
Chapter 3: Topics in Regression

Part II: Survival Analysis
Chapter 4: Probability Models in Survival Analysis
Chapter 5: Statistical Methods in Survival …