Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

An Itpa Enzyme With Improved Substrate Selectivity, Nicholas E. Burgis, Kandise Vanwormer, Devin Robbins, Jonathan Smith

Chemistry and Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Recent clinical data have identified infant patients with lethal ITPA deficiencies. ITPA is known to modulate ITP concentrations in cells and has a critical function in neural development which is not understood. Polymorphism of the ITPA gene affects outcomes for both ribavirin and thiopurine based therapies and nearly one third of the human population is thought to harbor ITPA polymorphism. In a previous site-directed mutagenesis alanine screen of the ITPA substrate selectivity pocket, we identified the ITPA mutant, E22A, as a gain-of function mutant with enhanced ITP hydrolysis activity. Here we report a rational enzyme engineering experiment to investigate the …

Integral Representations Over Finite Limits For Quantum Amplitudes, Jack C. Straton

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We extend previous research to derive three additional M-1-dimensional integral representations over the interval [0,1]" The prior version covered the interval [0,∞]" role="presentation position: relative;">[0,∞][0,∞]. This extension applies to products of M Slater orbitals, since they (and wave functions derived from them) appear in quantum transition amplitudes. It enables the magnitudes of coordinate vector differences (square roots of polynomials) |x1−x2|=x12−2x1x2cosθ+_x22" to be shifted from disjoint products of functions into a single quadratic form, allowing for the completion of its square. The M-1-dimensional integral representations of M Slater orbitals that both this extension and the prior version introduce …

The Fourier–Legendre Series Of Bessel Functions Of The First Kind And The Summed Series Involving 1F2 Hypergeometric Functions That Arise From Them, Jack C. Straton

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Bessel function of the first kind JN^(kx) is expanded in a Fourier–Legendre series, as is the modified Bessel function of the first kind IN^(kx). The purpose of these expansions in Legendre polynomials was not an attempt to rival established numerical methods for calculating Bessel functions but to provide a form for JN^(kx) useful for analytical work in the area of strong laser fields, where analytical integration over scattering angles is essential. Despite their primary purpose, one can easily truncate the series at 21 terms to provide 33-digit accuracy that matches the IEEE extended precision in …

Retardation Effects In Atom-Wall Interactions, T. Das, C. A. Ullrich, Ulrich D. Jentschura

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

The onset of retardation effects in atom-wall interactions is studied. It is shown that the transition range from the 1/z3 short-range (van der Waals) interaction to the 1/z4 long-range (Casimir) retarded interaction critically depends on the atomic properties and on the dielectric function of the material. For simple non-alkali-metal atoms (e.g., ground-state hydrogen and ground-state helium) interacting with typical dielectric materials such as intrinsic silicon, the transition to the retarded regime is shown to proceed at a distance of about 10 nm (200 Bohr radii). This is much shorter than typical characteristic absorption wavelengths of solids. Larger transition regimes are …

Long Term Sustainable Use Of Demersal Gillnet And Demersal Longline In Western Australia’S Temperate Shark Fisheries - Fisheries Research Report 340, Matias Braccini, Jack Parker, Daniela Waltrick, Maddison Watt, Nick Blay, Clinton Syers

Fisheries research reports

The Temperate Demersal Gillnet and Demersal Longline Fisheries (TDGDLF) are one of the main commercial shark fisheries in Australia. Most fishers in the TDGDLF use demersal gillnets to target sharks with scalefish taken in smaller amounts. Demersal longlines are also permitted but are not widely used. Demersal gillnets are size selective, but they do not necessarily discriminate among species, catching target and non-target species.

The Western Australian Fishing Industry Council (WAFIC) received funding as part of the Australian Government’s Our Marine Parks Grants Program to undertake research on the TDGDLF. This project was administered under the direction of a steering …

College Of Natural Sciences 2023 Year-End Publication, College Of Natural Sciences

College of Natural Sciences Newsletters and Reports

Page 1 Dean's Message
Page 3 Department Highlights
Page 4 One Day for State
Page 5 Noble Prize Winner Speaks on Campus
Page 6-7 Faculty Excellence
Page 8-9 Student Excellence
Page 10 Outreach Program
Page 10 Events and Traditions
Page 11 Connections Abroad
Page 12 Student Spotlight
Page 13 Alumni Spotlight
Page 14 First Ever Drone Day
Page 15 Grand Opening of POET Bioproducts Center
Page 16 Work Anniversaries

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Artificial Intelligence For The Electron Ion Collider (Ai4eic), C. Allaire, ..., Cristiano Fanelli, James Giroux, Joey Niestroy, Justin R. Stevens, Patrick Stone, L. Suarez, K. Suresh, Eric Walter, Et Al.

Arts & Sciences Articles

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a state-of-the-art facility for studying the strong force, is expected to begin commissioning its first experiments in 2028. This is an opportune time for artificial intelligence (AI) to be included from the start at this facility and in all phases that lead up to the experiments. The second annual workshop organized by the AI4EIC working group, which recently took place, centered on exploring all current and prospective application areas of AI for the EIC. This workshop is not only beneficial for the EIC, but also provides valuable insights for the newly established ePIC collaboration at EIC. …

2024 February 1 - Tennessee Weekly Drought Summary, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Weekly Drought Summaries

No abstract provided.

Watershed, Lake, And Food Web Factors Influence Diazotrophic Cyanobacteria In Mountain Lakes, Lara Jansen, Daniel Sobota, Yangdong Pan, Angela Strecker

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Cyanobacterial blooms can occur in freshwater ecosystems largely isolated from development and not experiencing extensive cultural eutrophication. For example, remote mountain lakes can experience intense blooms of diazotrophic (nitrogen-fixing) cyanobacteria caused by factors acting at different spatial and temporal scales. In this study, we examined how cross-scale interactions among watershed, lake, and food web characteristics influence diazotrophic cyanobacteria biovolume in mountain lakes. We quantified diazotrophic cyanobacteria biovolume, zooplankton abundance, and physico-chemical variables for 29 lakes in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, USA, in summer 2019. Watershed characteristics were compiled from historical datasets available for the region. Diazotrophic cyanobacteria biovolume ranged …

Southern Maine, New Hampshire, And Northern Massachusetts Continental Shelf Geophysical Database: 2022 Field Campaign – Grain Size Data, Station Summaries, And Seafloor Photographs, Larry G. Ward, Rachel C. Morrison, Michael Bogonko

Data Catalog

Presented in this data report are the geophysical data collected during a major field campaign in 2022, with the purpose of obtaining ground truth for the expansion and improvement of high-resolution surficial geology maps of the western Gulf of Maine (WGOM) and for the description of reference sites developed for future evaluations of acoustic systems (Ward et al., 2021a; 2021b). Data from the UNH Ocean Engineering 972 Hydrographic Field Course classes in 2021 and 2022 are also included. This expansion of the geophysical database is being used to verify seafloor classifications in previously mapped areas that lack sufficient data, and …

New Discoveries On Protein Recruitment And Regulation During The Early Stages Of The Dna Damage Response Pathways, Kelly Waters, Donald E. Spratt

Chemistry

Maintaining genomic stability and properly repairing damaged DNA is essential to staying healthy and preserving cellular homeostasis. The five major pathways involved in repairing eukaryotic DNA include base excision repair (BER), nucleotide excision repair (NER), mismatch repair (MMR), non-homologous end joining (NHEJ), and homologous recombination (HR). When these pathways do not properly repair damaged DNA, genomic stability is compromised and can contribute to diseases such as cancer. It is essential that the causes of DNA damage and the consequent repair pathways are fully understood, yet the initial recruitment and regulation of DNA damage response proteins remains unclear. In this review, …

Characterizing Linearizable Qaps By The Level-1 Reformulation-Linearization Technique, Lucas Waddell, Warren Adams

Faculty Journal Articles

The quadratic assignment problem (QAP) is an extremely challenging NP-hard combinatorial optimization program. Due to its difficulty, a research emphasis has been to identify special cases that are polynomially solvable. Included within this emphasis are instances which are linearizable; that is, which can be rewritten as a linear assignment problem having the property that the objective function value is preserved at all feasible solutions. Various known sufficient conditions for identifying linearizable instances have been explained in terms of the continuous relaxation of a weakened version of the level-1 reformulation-linearization-technique (RLT) form that does not enforce nonnegativity on a subset …

Agricultural Groundcover Update January 2024, Justin Laycock

Natural resources published reports

Summary

• About 94% of the grainbelt had adequate (more than 50%) vegetative groundcover to prevent wind erosion in January 2024.
• In the northern half of the grainbelt, a larger-than-average area has 51–60% groundcover, which is expected to decrease to below 50% over the coming months.
• Just under 6% of the grainbelt (855,000 ha) had less than 50% groundcover, which is inadequate to prevent wind erosion. West Midlands Ag Soil Zone had the highest risk of wind erosion and 14.5% of this farmland had inadequate groundcover.
• Less than 0.5% of the grainbelt had a high to very high risk of wind …

Investigating The Mass Mortality Induced Factors Of Pearl Oyster (Pinctada Radiata) At Abu Dhabi Pearls Farm, Uae, Hamad Ahmed Almansoori

Theses

The aquaculture of shellfish plays a crucial role in enhancing maritime environments by mitigating algal blooms and improving water quality through the filtration of organic matter, nutrients, and bacteria. This study investigated the environmental factors influencing oyster (Pinctada radiata) mortalities through a comprehensive analysis of water quality in Al Mirfa and Al Mughirah farming sites of Abu Dhabi (UAE), from February 2021 to February 2022. To reach such understanding of the main factors led to mass mortalities of cultivated oysters, different monthly sampling and both chemical and biological analyses of the farm water, sediments as well as for both living …

Geothermal Play Fairway Analysis, Part 1: Example From The Snake River Plain, Idaho, John W. Shervais, Jacob Deangelo, Jonathan M. Glen, Dennis L. Nielson, Sabodh Garg, Patrick Dobson, Erika Gasperikova, Eric Sonnenthal, Lee M. Liberty, Dennis L. Newell, Drew Siler, James P. Evans

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Snake River Plain (SRP) volcanic province overlies the track of the Yellowstone hotspot, a thermal anomaly that extends deep into the mantle. Most of the area is underlain by a basaltic volcanic province that overlies a mid-crustal intrusive complex, which in turn provides the long-term heat flux needed to sustain geothermal systems. Previous studies have identified several known geothermal resource areas within the SRP. For the geothermal study presented herein, our goals were to: (1) adapt the methodology of Play Fairway Analysis (PFA) for geothermal exploration to create a formal basis for its application to geothermal systems, (2) assemble …

Zircon And The Role Of Magmatic Petrogenesis In The Formation Of Felsic-Hosted Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide (Vms) Deposits: A Case Study From The Mid-Paleozoic Yukon-Tanana Terrane, Northern Canadian Cordillera, Matthew J. Manor, Stephen J. Piercey, Corey J. Wall

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Magmatism is a critical component in sustaining hydrothermal convection and metal transport during the formation of volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits. Previous studies of magmatic petrogenesis in VMS systems have demonstrated that ore-related volcanic rocks have distinct whole-rock geochemical and isotopic signatures (i.e., high HFSE, REE, Th, εHf-Nd, zircon saturation T) relative to barren volcanic rocks, which supports models of elevated crustal heat flow during periods of ore deposition; however, the petrologic characteristics and intrinsic parameters (e.g., T, fO₂) related to these magmatic events in VMS districts remain poorly understood. Arc–back-arc assemblages from the mid-Paleozoic Yukon-Tanana terrane …

Dataset Of Arabic Spam And Ham Tweets, Sanaa Kaddoura, Safaa Henno

All Works

This data article provides a dataset of 132421 posts and their corresponding information collected from Twitter social media. The data has two classes, ham or spam, where ham indicates non-spam clean tweets. The main target of this dataset is to study a way to classify whether a post is a spam or not automatically. The data is in Arabic language only, which makes the data essential to the researchers in Arabic natural language processing (NLP) due to the lack of resources in this language. The data is made publicly available to allow researchers to use it as a benchmark for …

Foodmask: Real-Time Food Instance Counting, Segmentation And Recognition, Huu-Thanh Nguyen, Yu Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wing-Kwong Chan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food computing has long been studied and deployed to several applications. Understanding a food image at the instance level, including recognition, counting and segmentation, is essential to quantifying nutrition and calorie consumption. Nevertheless, existing techniques are limited to either category-specific instance detection, which does not reflect precisely the instance size at the pixel level, or category-agnostic instance segmentation, which is insufficient for dish recognition. This paper presents a compact and fast multi-task network, namely FoodMask, for clustering-based food instance counting, segmentation and recognition. The network learns a semantic space simultaneously encoding food category distribution and instance height at pixel basis. …

Using Natural Language Processing And Patient Journey Clustering For Temporal Phenotyping Of Antimicrobial Therapies For Cat Bite Abscesses, Brian Hur, Karin M. Verspoor, Timothy Baldwin, Laura Y. Hardefeldt, Caitlin Pfeiffer, Caroline Mansfield, Riati Scarborough, James R. Gilkerson

Natural Language Processing Faculty Publications

Background: Temporal phenotyping of patient journeys, which capture the common sequence patterns of interventions in the treatment of a specific condition, is useful to support understanding of antimicrobial usage in veterinary patients. Identifying and describing these phenotypes can inform antimicrobial stewardship programs designed to fight antimicrobial resistance, a major health crisis affecting both humans and animals, in which veterinarians have an important role to play. Objective: This research proposes a framework for extracting temporal phenotypes of patient journeys from clinical practice data through the application of natural language processing (NLP) and unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques, using cat bite abscesses …

Conic Challenge: Pushing The Frontiers Of Nuclear Detection, Segmentation, Classification And Counting, Simon Graham, Quoc Dang Vu, Mostafa Jahanifar, Martin Weigert, Uwe Schmidt, Wenhua Zhang, Jun Zhang, Sen Yang, Jinxi Xiang, Xiyue Wang, Josef Lorenz Rumberger, Elias Baumann, Peter Hirsch, Lihao Liu, Chenyang Hong, Angelica I. Aviles-Rivero, Ayushi Jain, Heeyoung Ahn, Yiyu Hong, Hussam Azzuni, Min Xu

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

Nuclear detection, segmentation and morphometric profiling are essential in helping us further understand the relationship between histology and patient outcome. To drive innovation in this area, we setup a community-wide challenge using the largest available dataset of its kind to assess nuclear segmentation and cellular composition. Our challenge, named CoNIC, stimulated the development of reproducible algorithms for cellular recognition with real-time result inspection on public leaderboards. We conducted an extensive post-challenge analysis based on the top-performing models using 1,658 whole-slide images of colon tissue. With around 700 million detected nuclei per model, associated features were used for dysplasia grading and …

Developing A Success Model Of A Social Student Relationship Management System, Wasef Mater, Monther Aldwairi, Nasim Matar, Waleed Al-Rahmi

All Works

Social media's significance in higher education has increased due to its capacity to enhance participation, communication, teamwork, and information sharing. Important notifications, updates, and reminders can be promptly received by all members of the university community, assuring that information is shared with everyone. The objective of this study is to develop a model for a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in higher education that is based on social media and intends to increase student satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. It blends the idea of trust with Delone Mclean success model. Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to evaluate the …

2024 February - Tennessee Monthly Climate Report, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Report

No abstract provided.

Reverse Multi-Choice Dialogue Commonsense Inference With Graph-Of-Thought, Li Zheng, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Bobo Li, Lizi Liao, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the proliferation of dialogic data across the Internet, the Dialogue Commonsense Multi-choice Question Answering (DC-MCQ) task has emerged as a response to the challenge of comprehending user queries and intentions. Although prevailing methodologies exhibit effectiveness in addressing single-choice questions, they encounter difficulties in handling multi-choice queries due to the heightened intricacy and informational density. In this paper, inspired by the human cognitive process of progressively excluding options, we propose a three-step Reverse Exclusion Graph-of-Thought (ReX-GoT) framework, including Option Exclusion, Error Analysis, and Combine Information. Specifically, our ReX-GoT mimics human reasoning by gradually excluding irrelevant options and learning the reasons …

Imitate The Good And Avoid The Bad: An Incremental Approach To Safe Reinforcement Learning, Minh Huy Hoang, Mai Anh Tien, Pradeep Varakantham

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A popular framework for enforcing safe actions in Reinforcement Learning (RL) is Constrained RL, where trajectory based constraints on expected cost (or other cost measures) are employed to enforce safety and more importantly these constraints are enforced while maximizing expected reward. Most recent approaches for solving Constrained RL convert the trajectory based cost constraint into a surrogate problem that can be solved using minor modifications to RL methods. A key drawback with such approaches is an over or underestimation of the cost constraint at each state. Therefore, we provide an approach that does not modify the trajectory based cost constraint …

Simple Image-Level Classification Improves Open-Vocabulary Object Detection, Ruohuan Fang, Guansong Pang, Xiao Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection (OVOD) aims to detect novel objects beyond a given set of base categories on which the detection model is trained. Recent OVOD methods focus on adapting the image-level pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, to a region-level object detection task via, eg., region-level knowledge distillation, regional prompt learning, or region-text pre-training, to expand the detection vocabulary. These methods have demonstrated remarkable performance in recognizing regional visual concepts, but they are weak in exploiting the VLMs' powerful global scene understanding ability learned from the billion-scale image-level text descriptions. This limits their capability in detecting hard objects of …

Glop: Learning Global Partition And Local Construction For Solving Large-Scale Routing Problems In Real-Time, Haoran Ye, Jiarui Wang, Helan Liang, Zhiguang Cao, Yong Li, Fanzhang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent end-to-end neural solvers have shown promise for small-scale routing problems but suffered from limited real-time scaling-up performance. This paper proposes GLOP (Global and Local Optimization Policies), a unified hierarchical framework that efficiently scales toward large-scale routing problems. GLOP partitions large routing problems into Travelling Salesman Problems (TSPs) and TSPs into Shortest Hamiltonian Path Problems. For the first time, we hybridize non-autoregressive neural heuristics for coarse-grained problem partitions and autoregressive neural heuristics for fine-grained route constructions, leveraging the scalability of the former and the meticulousness of the latter. Experimental results show that GLOP achieves competitive and state-of-the-art real-time performance …

Mitigating Fine-Grained Hallucination By Fine-Tuning Large Vision-Language Models With Caption Rewrites, Lei Wang, Jiabang He, Shenshen Li, Ning Liu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. To comprehend and execute diverse human instructions over image data, instruction-tuned large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been introduced. However, LVLMs may suffer from different types of object hallucinations. Nevertheless, LVLMs are evaluated for coarse-grained object hallucinations only (i.e., generated objects non-existent in the input image). The fine-grained object attributes and behaviors non-existent in the image may still be generated but not measured by the current evaluation methods. In this paper, we thus focus on reducing fine-grained hallucinations of LVLMs. We propose ReCaption, a framework that consists …

Detecting Outdated Code Element References In Software Repository Documentation, Wen Siang Tan, Markus Wagner, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is that developers are unaware of when their source code modifications render the documentation obsolete. Ensuring that the documentation is always in sync with the source code takes considerable effort, especially for large codebases. To address this situation, we propose an approach that can automatically detect code element references that survive in the documentation after all source code instances have been deleted. In this work, we …

Hackles: Simulating And Visually Representing The Anxiety Of Walking Alone, Sydney Pratte, Anthony Tang, Shannon Hoover, Lora Oehlberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we compare the designs of two fashion-tech garments that communicate the anxiety felt when walking alone. While the two garments share a common vision, they are designed to be worn in two radically different settings and to communicate to different audiences: one directly communicates an empathetic experience to its wearer; the other a model wears at a runway show and must share its story to a general audience. We used Research Through Design (RtD) methods to design both fashion-tech garments. Then, we recorded and analyzed the design process for both garments via an annotated portfolio to compare …