Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Distribution And Population Structure Of Corallivorous Drupella Snails In The Coral Reefs Of Kenting In Taiwan, Chih-Jui Tan, Dun-Ru Kang, Li-Lian Liu

Journal of Marine Science and Technology

The corallivorous Drupella snails are common predators of living hard corals in the Indo-Pacific Ocean, and they can significantly threaten coral reef ecosystems when outbreaks occur. In Taiwan, a Drupella outbreak, which resulted in the dramatic decline of Acropora and Montipora corals, was reported in Penghu in 2002 – 2009. However, the Drupella species involved was not identified, and no further research has been conducted. To obtain current knowledge on the predation pressure of corallivorous snails on hard corals, we investigated benthic communities and the distribution and population structure of Drupella snails in the coral reefs of Kenting, Taiwan. The …

Flexible Attenuation Fields: Tomographic Reconstruction From Heterogeneous Datasets, Clifford S. Parker

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Traditional reconstruction methods for X-ray computed tomography (CT) are highly constrained in the variety of input datasets they admit. Many of the imaging settings -- the incident energy, field-of-view, effective resolution -- remain fixed across projection images, and the only real variance is in the detector's position and orientation with respect to the scene. In contrast, methods for 3D reconstruction of natural scenes are extremely flexible to the geometric and photometric properties of the input datasets, readily accepting and benefiting from images captured under varying lighting conditions, with different cameras, and at disparate points in time and space. Extending CT …

Self-Exciting Point Processes In Real Estate, Ian Fraser

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis introduces a novel approach to analyzing residential property sales through the lens of stochastic processes by employing point processes. Herein, property sales are treated as point patterns, using self-exciting point process models and a variety of statistical tools to uncover underlying patterns in the data. Key findings include the identification and explanation of clustering in both space and time, and the efficacy of a temporal Hawkes process with a sinusoidal background in predicting home sale occurrences. The temporal analysis starts by employing the state of art techniques for time series data like regression, autoregressive, and autoregressive integrated moving …

Recoloring In Hereditary Graph Classes: Structure And Decomposition, Manoj Belavadi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

In this thesis we study reconfiguration problems in graph theory. A reconfiguration problem is generally defined on the solution space of a problem for which a configuration can be defined as a feasible solution, for example, a coloring of a graph. In Chapters 1 through 4 we study the reconfiguration of vertex colorings. The reconfiguration graph of the k-colorings, denoted R_k(G), is the graph whose vertices are the k-colorings of G and two colorings are adjacent in R_k(G) if they differ on exactly one vertex. The basic question investigated here …

Fr1: Comics, Cyborgs, And “In Between” Identities, Ella Lehavi

Scripps Senior Theses

As a queer Jew who grew up surrounded by immigrant cultures and communities, I find myself in a liminal space between my identities and the dominant culture of my country– one where my perspective on gender and my cultural experiences aren’t fully understood by the world I exist in. Comics and cartoons are an explorational platform for concepts of reality and identity; they are one of very few spaces where I see my identities explored with so much depth and care.

Cartoons and comics exist in between realistic depictions and abstraction. This makes them a great place to express all …

Bayesian Inference In Reinforcement Learning Neural Networks During A Markov Decision Processes?, Katherine Graham

Scripps Senior Theses

The predictive mind theory proposes that brains work in a way that makes predictions about future stimuli to process information efficiently and accurately. Bayesian brain theory suggests that the brain utilizes Bayesian probability models to make predictions, while the free-energy minimization hypothesis proposes that these predictions are made to minimize energy or uncertainty, ensuring accurate perceptions. Vertechi et al. (2020) explored animal participants’ utilization of stimulus-bound strategy versus inference-based strategy to solve a Markov decision process with a 2-state environment, one of which is always active. These sites have a certain probability of switching to a different site and the …

Stream Pedagogy Dataset, Martha L. Carlson Mazur

Environmental Studies Faculty Datasets

This is the dataset for Carlson Mazur, Waters, and Combs. (2024). Developing community partnerships to supplement water-quality data in support of urban watershed management.

Statistically Principled Deep Learning For Sar Image Segmentation, Cassandra Goldberg

Honors Projects

This project explores novel approaches for Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) image segmentation that integrate established statistical properties of SAR into deep learning models. First, Perlin Noise and Generalized Gamma distribution sampling methods were utilized to generate a synthetic dataset that effectively captures the statistical attributes of SAR data. Subsequently, deep learning segmentation architectures were developed that utilize average pooling and 1x1 convolutions to perform statistical moment computations. Finally, supervised and unsupervised disparity-based losses were incorporated into model training. The experimental outcomes yielded promising results: the synthetic dataset effectively trained deep learning models for real SAR data segmentation, the statistically-informed architectures …

Regional Price Index 2023, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Statistics

The 2023 Regional Price Index (RPI) is the eleventh State Government Index contrasting the cost of a common basket of goods and services at a number of regional locations to the Perth metropolitan region. The RPI is used as the basis for the construction of the public sector district allowance, and by the private sector when considering remuneration packages for remotely located staff.

The RPI provides an insight into differences in regional consumer costs. The 2023 RPI basket of 185 goods and services was priced in 39 regional centres around Western Australia.

The 2023 RPI results show that, overall, prices …

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

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Report

No abstract provided.

2023 - Tennessee Annual Climate Summary, Tennessee Climate Office, East Tennessee State University

Tennessee Climate Office Monthly Report

No abstract provided.

River Response To Removal Of A Small Dam And Replacement With A Roughened Channel, Chandler Sabin

All Master's Theses

Relatively few studies have analyzed how the removal of small dams and re-engineering of the channel affect river channel processes. The low-head Nelson Dam was built in 1920 on the Naches River in central Washington, causing two miles of aggraded sediments. This resulted in upstream flooding and excessive downstream incision that led to ineffective irrigation diversions, and hindered fish spawning. Nelson Dam was removed in 2021 and replaced with a graded, roughened, nature-like channel and a newly engineered diversion that was completed in 2023. The research presented here quantifies the effects of the Nelson Dam removal and channel redesign on …

Gnss Radio Propagation Through Trapped Atmospheric Lee Waves In The San Bernardino Valley, Ca, Logan Grey

All Master's Theses

Atmospheric lee waves, also known as mountain waves, are a type of gravity wave that form as air that is forced over a mountain creates turbulence downstream. Trapped, or stationary, lee waves located directly over a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver on Earth’s surface appear to lead to anomalies in the receiver’s position estimate, usually skewed toward the neighboring mountain range. The exact mechanism by which trapped lee waves might cause these anomalies is not known, and so my research aims to understand this. GNSS station P612 located in the lee of the San Bernardino Mountains in southern California …

Virtual Reality & Pilot Training: Existing Technologies, Challenges & Opportunities, Tim Marron M.S., Niall Dungan Bsc, Captain, Brian Mac Namee Phd, Anna Donnla O'Hagan Phd

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

The introduction of virtual reality (VR) to flying training has recently gained much attention, with numerous VR companies, such as Loft Dynamics and VRpilot, looking to enhance the training process. Such a considerable change to how pilots are trained is a subject that warrants careful consideration. Examining the effect that VR has on learning in other areas gives us an idea of how VR can be suitably applied to flying training. Some of the benefits offered by VR include increased safety, decreased costs, and increased environmental sustainability. Nevertheless, some challenges ahead for developers to consider are negative transfer of learning, …

Application Of Density Altitude Climatology To General Aviation Impacts, Thomas A. Guinn Ph.D., Daniel J. Halperin Ph.D., Sarah Strazzo Ph.D.

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

Density altitude (DA) plays a key role in flight safety because it helps pilots anticipate poor aircraft performance when temperatures are warmer than standard. In this study, a 30-year climatology of DA for the conterminous United States was created using the fifth-generation European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts atmospheric reanalysis of the global climate (ERA5) dataset was applied to four separate DA-based, aircraft-performance, rules-of-thumb for general aviation (GA) flight. The goal was to demonstrate a technique to create educational visualization tools showing the variation of operational flight impacts with both month and location. Four such parameters were chosen to show …

Adaptable And Trustworthy Machine Learning For Human Activity Recognition From Bioelectric Signals, Morgan S. Stuart

Theses and Dissertations

Enabling machines to learn measures of human activity from bioelectric signals has many applications in human-machine interaction and healthcare. However, labeled activity recognition datasets are costly to collect and highly varied, which challenges machine learning techniques that rely on large datasets. Furthermore, activity recognition in practice needs to account for user trust - models are motivated to enable interpretability, usability, and information privacy. The objective of this dissertation is to improve adaptability and trustworthiness of machine learning models for human activity recognition from bioelectric signals. We improve adaptability by developing pretraining techniques that initialize models for later specialization to unseen …

Large Language Models, Prompting, And Synthetic Data Generation For Continual Named Entity Recognition, Charles I. Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

With the ever-growing amount of textual data, the task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) is vital to Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field which focuses on enabling computers to understand and manipulate human language. NER enables the extraction of information from unstructured text. Accurate information extraction is crucial for applications ranging from information retrieval to systems for question-answering. To ensure that NER models are robust to changes in data distributions and capable of recognizing new entity types, one may consider expanding the capabilities of an existing model. Continual learning is a paradigm within machine learning. It studies the objective of …

Why Is Grant Lake A Reservoir? A Brief Geological And Human History, From The Pleistocene To The Present, Robert B. Marks

Eastern Sierra History Journal

Drawing on a range of archival resources and illustrative material, Prof. Marks probes why and how Grant Lake in the Eastern Sierra of California became a reservoir. The process is long and involved, and has much to do with a remote and ancient lake ultimately being developed to serve the water needs of the distant city of Los Angeles.

Asymmetric Cuh-Catalyzed Reductive Coupling Of Allenamides With Carbonyl And Imine Electrophiles, Stephen Collins

Theses and Dissertations

The carbon scaffold of many drugs and natural products contain multiple stereogenic centers bearing heteroatoms. As a result of this, chemists have long sought methods to efficiently install these multi-heteroatom functionalities. Reductive coupling reactions have been extensively studied over the past decades, and the allylation of carbonyls via the reductive coupling approach has been a key method for generating chiral allylic alcohols. This work utilizes inexpensive Cu for the asymmetric reductive coupling of allenamides with carbonyls or imines to simultaneously install two heteroatoms (either oxygen and nitrogen or nitrogen and nitrogen, respectively) onto the product. These molecules have a polarity …

Paley Graphs, Prime Graphs, And Crossword Puzzles, Robert D. Jacobs Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

In this paper, we will talk about many different mathematical concepts. We will prove theorems about Paley graphs, prime graphs, and crossword puzzles. It will be very fun.

The results in the section about Paley graphs include structure theorems about the subgraph induced by the quadratic residues, the subgraph induced by the non-residues and a few related subgraphs. The main is to better understand the “independence structure” of the Paley graph itself. No good upper bound on the independence number of Paley graphs is known. Theorems about these subgraphs, and various counts aim at future improvement of upper bounds for …

Bayesian Estimation Of Hierarchical Linear Models From Incomplete Data: Cluster-Level Non-Linear Effects And Small Sample Sizes, Dongho Shin

Theses and Dissertations

We consider Bayesian estimation of a hierarchical linear model (HLM) from small sample sizes. The continuous response Y and covariates C are partially observed and assumed missing at random. With C having linear effects, the HLM may be efficiently estimated by available methods. When C includes cluster-level covariates having interactive or other nonlinear effects given small sample sizes, however, maximum likelihood estimation is suboptimal, and existing Gibbs samplers are based on a Bayesian joint distribution compatible with the HLM, but impute missing values of C by a Metropolis algorithm via a proposal density having a constant variance while the target …

Mathematical Modeling And Analysis Of Inflammation And Tissue Repair: Lung Inflammation And Wound Healing In Corals Under Stress, Quintessa Hay

Theses and Dissertations

A variety of insults, including tissue injury and/or exposure to pathogen, elicit an immune response in many organisms. An improperly regulated immune response can result in deleterious effects to the organism. Here we present models for lung injury in young and old mice and models for wound healing in coral reefs.

It is well known that the immune response becomes less effective in older individuals. This is of particular interest in pulmonary insults such as ventilator induced lung injury (VILI) or lung infection. We extended a mathematical model for the inflammatory response to VILI and used experimental data to select …

Measuring The Properties Of Rod-Shaped Bacteria By Single-Entity Electrochemistry, Ashley Tubbs

Theses and Dissertations

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a significant and escalating threat to hospitals around the world, necessitating the development of rapid and sensitive detection methods. Single-entity electrochemistry has emerged as a promising approach for detecting and identifying such bacteria, and monitoring the efficacy of antibiotics in real-time. Herein, we employ the translational diffusion equation for circular cylinders to predict the collision frequency of rod-shaped bacteria, informing our experimental setup. Our work demonstrates that lab-fabricated Pt ultramicroelectrodes can sensitively detect bacteria at femtomolar concentrations under migration-controlled conditions. Further, we present a method implemented in MatLab to automate the analysis of step-like signals observed in …

Machine Learning - Hail Awareness Spatial Analysis Toolkit (Hasat), Haoruo Fu M.S., Joseph P. Hupy Ph.D., Chien-Tsung Lu Ph.D., Zhenglei Ji M.S.

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

The National Airspace System (NAS) is a sophisticated network of air traffic control, navigation, and communication systems that play a critical role in ensuring the safe and efficient flow of air traffic across the United States. However, the occurrence of severe weather conditions, particularly hailstorms, poses a significant threat to flight safety within the NAS. To mitigate the risks associated with hail, aviation organizations have implemented a range of safety measures. This study utilized Esri’s ArcGIS as a mapping software to conduct a geospatial analysis of the impact of severe weather, particularly hail, on the NAS. The Hail Awareness Spatial …

Low-Resource Automatic Speech Recognition Domain Adaptation – A Case-Study In Aviation Maintenance, Nadine Amin M.S., Tracy L. Yother Ph.D., Julia Rayz Ph.D.

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

With timeliness and efficiency being critical in the aviation maintenance industry, the need has been growing for smart technological solutions that optimize and streamline the different underlying tasks (Bergkvist & Sabbagh, 2021). One such task is the technical documentation of the performed maintenance operations (Chandola et al., 2022). Instead of manual documentation, voice tools that transcribe spoken logbook entries allow technicians to document their work right away in a hands-free and time efficient manner. However, an accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) model requires large training corpora (Siyaev & Jo, 2021a), which are lacking in the domain of aviation maintenance. In …

Graph Coloring Reconfiguration, Reem Mahmoud

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfiguration is the concept of moving between different solutions to a problem by transforming one solution into another using some prescribed transformation rule (move). Given two solutions s₁ and s₂ of a problem, reconfiguration asks whether there exists a sequence of moves which transforms s₁ into s₂. Reconfiguration is an area of research with many contributions towards various fields such as mathematics and computer science.
The k-coloring reconfiguration problem asks whether there exists a sequence of moves which transforms one k-coloring of a graph G into another. A move in this case is a type …

How Can A Cloud Computing It Framework Be Created And Applied Effectively In The Online Printing Industry?, Stefan Meissner

Dissertations

This research aims to design a cloud computing IT framework for the online printing industry based on a detailed literature review, the development of proof of concepts (PoC), and the conduction of a focus group. The framework can be adopted by the online printing industry or by vendors of print-specific applications to optimize their products for the online printing industry. The author has been working in the online printing process optimization and automation since 2007. During this time, he got deep insight into many industry-specific applications, their architectural design, and their challenges being used in the context of online printing. …

Microstructural, Mineralogical, And Chemical Characterization Of The Handys Bend And Flax Creek Meteorites, Kentucky: Relevance For The Iron Meteorite Record, Ethan S.L. Davis

Theses and Dissertations--Earth and Environmental Sciences

Iron meteorites remain the only material view into planetary cores. Despite their scientific relevance, iron meteorites are relatively rare. In June 2021 and March 2022, the Kentucky Geological Survey received requests to identify two metallic specimens discovered in central Kentucky. The specimens were given the provisional names Handys Bend (3175.2 g) and Flax Creek (286.2 g). The goal of this project is to confirm meteoritic origin, characterize their structures and chemistry, assign genetic classifications, and examine potential relations to previous discoveries. Petrography was conducted using scanning electron microscopy. Mineral phases were examined using X-Ray diffraction crystallography. Chemical compositions were determined …

Blockchain For Computational Integrity And Privacy, Rahul Raj

Theses and Dissertations

This study proposes a blockchain based system that utilizes fully homomorphic encryption to provide security of data in use as well as computational integrity. This is achieved by leveraging the attributes of blockchain which provides availability and data integrity combined with homomorphic encryption that provides confidentiality. The proposed system is designed to perform statistical operations, including mean, median and variance, on encrypted data, thus providing confidentiality of data while in use. The computations are performed on the smart contract, residing on the blockchain which provides computational integrity. The results indicate that it is possible to perform fully homomorphic computations on …

Next-Generation High-Performance Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Light Engines, Zhiyong Yang

Graduate Thesis and Dissertation 2023-2024

The immersive virtual reality (VR) and the optical see-through augmented reality (AR) are expected to revolutionize human lives in work, education, entertainment, healthcare, spatial computing, and digital twins, just to name a few. Next-generation VR/AR devices should exhibit a wide field-of-view (FoV), crisp image without screen-door effect, high dynamic range, compact form factor and lightweight, and low power consumption. Such demanding requirements pose a significant challenge to traditional direct-view display panels. To address these technical challenges, novel approaches need to be proposed. This dissertation is devoted to developing next-generation high-performance display light engines toward high resolution density, high optical efficiency, …