Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Infosys Times, Vol. 8, No. 2, St. Cloud State University

The Infosys TIMES

• Semester Celebration
• Students Shine at WiCyS Conference
• International Security Conference
• Dr. Jieyu Wang
• Institute for the (ICCP)
• Semester Faculty Retreat
• Guest Speaker Series
• IS College Fair
• Graduate Updates
• Student Diaries
• Lunch and Learn Event
• CSAW 2023
• WiCyS SCSU Alumni Speaker

Assessing The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Project Management Methodologies, Adrian Leung

LMU/LLS Theses and Dissertations

This research paper explores the impact of COVID-19 and the shift to remote work on project management practices across multiple industries. Through interviews with project managers, the study finds that companies with pre-existing remote work policies were better equipped to handle the transition to remote work. In contrast, companies without pre-existing policies faced increased challenges in communication, team morale, and workload management. The study also highlights the struggle to maintain work-life balance, the importance of communication, and the need to address technical difficulties. Project managers emphasized the importance of accountability and maintaining productivity during remote work. Overall, the study finds …

Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A(H5n1) Virus Outbreak In New England Seals, United States, Wendy Puryear, Kaitlin Sawatzki, Nichola Hill, Alexa Foss, Jonathon J. Stone, Lynda Doughty, Dominique Walk, Katie Gilbert, Maureen Murray, Elena Cox, Priya Patel, Zak Mertz, Stephanie Ellis, Jennifer Taylor, Deborah Fauquier, Ainsley Smith, Robert A. Digiovanni, Adriana Van De Guchte, Ana Silvia Gonzalez-Reiche, Zain Khalil, Harm Van Bakel, Mia K. Torchetti, Kristina Lantz, Julianna B. Lenoch, Jonathan Runstadler

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

We report the spillover of highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) into marine mammals in the northeastern United States, coincident with H5N1 in sympatric wild birds. Our data indicate monitoring both wild coastal birds and marine mammals will be critical to determine pandemic potential of influenza A viruses.

Para Cima Y Pa’ Abajo: Building Bridges Between Hci Research In Latin America And In The Global North, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, Marisol Wong-Villacres, Karla A. Badillo-Urquiola, Mayra Donaji Barrera-Machuca, Franceli L. Cibrian, Marianela Ciolfi Felice, Carolina Fuentes, Laura Sanely Gaytán-Lugo, Vivian Genaro Motti, Monica Perusquía-Hernández, Oscar A. Lemus

Engineering Faculty Articles and Research

The Human-computer Interaction (HCI) community has the opportunity to foster the integration of research practices across the Global South and North to begin overcoming colonial relationships. In this paper, we focus on the case of Latin America (LATAM), where initiatives to increase the representation of HCI practitioners lack a consolidated understanding of the practices they employ, the factors that influence them, and the challenges that practitioners face. To address this knowledge gap, we employ a mixed-methods approach, comprising a survey (66 respondents) and in-depth interviews (19 interviewees). Our analyses characterize a set of research perspectives on how HCI is practiced …

Regularity Theory Of Quasilinear Ellipitic And Parabolic Equations In The Heisenberg Group, Luca Capogna, Giovanna Citti, Xiao Zhong

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

This note provides a succinct survey of the existing literature concerning the H¨older regularity for the gradient of weak solutions of PDEs of the form modeled on the p-Laplacian in a domain Ω in the Heisenberg group Hⁿ, with 1 ≤ p < ∞, and of its parabolic counterpart. We present some open problems and outline some of the difficulties they present.

Graduate, 2nd Place: Assessing The Knowledge, Attitude, And Everyday Life Practices Adopted Among Eastern Illinois University Students Towards Sustainability, Joel Holison

2023 Awards for Excellence in Student Research and Creative Activity - Documents

The concept of sustainable development gained attention and came into focus with the publication of the Brundtland Report (Brundtland, 1987). later the Education for Sustainability (EfS) initiative was presented in 1997 through the “Thessaloniki Declaration” as a carrier of the common and single message (Knapp, 2000). Sustainable development is the way a country pursues its economic development that does not jeopardize the opportunity for future generations to achieve their development (Brundtland, 1987). Deforestation, land destruction, soil degradation, air and water pollution, and other types of environmental deterioration are paid in the name of economic progress. This detriment may outweigh the …

Strengthening Collaboration Between Washington State And British Columbia, Ginny Broadhurst, Laurie D. Trautman

Border Policy Research Institute Publications

There are a variety of benefits that arise from collaboration across the Canada-US border. In some sectors, the value of collaboration is measurable. For example, travel or trade volumes can be equated with specific economic benefits. This is the case with tourism and supply chain networks. There are traceable benefits associated with cross-border business integration and the development of a shared ‘innovation ecosystem’. However, how does one measure the value of having good relations with neighbors? Or the benefits that result from developing more resilient environmental and economic conditions that are created by joint responses to shared natural disasters? The …

Exploring Protein Conformations And Functions Through Molecular Dynamics Simulations And Machine Learning, Hao Tian

Chemistry Theses and Dissertations

Proteins are essential biomacromolecules that perform a variety of critical functions in living organisms. The tertiary structure of a protein plays a crucial role in its biological activity as it determines how the protein interacts with other molecules. Consequently, understanding protein conformation and function is an important area of research with implications in medicine, biotechnology, and other fields.

The first part of this dissertation focuses on protein allostery, a process by which proteins transmit perturbations caused by binding at one site to a distal site, thereby regulating activity. With the development of computational methods like molecular dynamics simulations and machine …

Analysis Of Hawk Mountain Wind Speed To Raptor Count Trends From 1976 Through 2021, Dale E. Parson

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

This analysis of summer 2023 is a sequel to the summer 2022 Analysis of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Observation Data from 1976 through 2021, also available as a web page through end of 2024 here. A presentation of that and subsequent analysis presented at Kutztown University in November 2022 and to Hawk Mountain researchers in January 2023 is available as PDF slides here and also on the web through 2024 here. This work was funded by a Kutztown University Research Grant for spring 2022 through summer 2023. Analytical use of these data proceeded through a subset of projects in three courses …

Modeling Excited State Processes In Molecular Aggregates By Constructing An Adaptive Basis For The Hierarchy Of Pure States, Leonel Varvelo

Chemistry Theses and Dissertations

Simulating excitation energy transfer (EET) in molecular materials is of crucial importance for the development of and understanding of materials such as organic photovoltaics and photosynthetic systems and further development of novel materials. The Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS) is an exact framework for the time evolution of an open quantum system in which a hierarchy of stochastic wave functions are propagated in time. The adaptive HOPS (adHOPS) method achieves size-invariant scaling with the number of simulated molecules for sufficiently large aggregates by using an adaptive basis that moves with the excitation through the material. To demonstrate the power of …

Statistical Clustering Of Networks With Additional Information, Paul Atandoh

Dissertations

As the online market grows rapidly, many companies and researchers are interested in analyzing product review dataset which includes ratings and text review data. In the first project, we mainly focus on analyzing the text review data. In the current literature, it is common to use only text analysis tools to analyze review dataset. But in our work, we propose a method that utilizes both a text analysis method such as topic modeling and a statistical network model to build network among individuals and find interesting communities. We introduce a promising framework that incorporates topic modeling technique to define the …

Using Visual Imagery To Develop Multiplication Fact Strategies, Gina Kling

Dissertations

The learning of basic facts, or the sums and products of numbers 0–10 and their related differences and quotients, has always been a high priority for elementary school teachers. While memorization of basic facts has been a hallmark of elementary school, current recommendations focus on a more nuanced development of fluency with these facts. Fluency is characterized by the ability to demonstrate flexibility, accuracy, efficiency, and appropriate strategy use. Despite recommendations to focus on strategy use, there is insufficient information on instructional approaches that are effective for developing strategies, particularly for multiplication facts. Using visual imagery with dot patterns has …

Beyond News Values On Twitter: Predicting Factors That Drive User Engagement In News, Zhiyan Zhong

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

When deciding on what news stories to cover, traditional journalism determines news values by following several elements of newsworthiness, such as impact, timeliness, and prominence. However, these guidelines do not always seem to correspond with the success of content on social media. As people are increasingly turning to social media for news, our research aims to understand and predict factors that drive user engagement for news on social media. In this study, we analyze news content published on Twitter, and examine a diverse set of characteristics like metrics retrieved from the Twitter API and semantics by natural language processing, including …

An Examination Of The Current Knowledge Of Contaminants In Mangroves: Hawaii And Globally, Geoffrey Szafranski

Environmental Science and Management Professional Master's Project Reports

The geographic range of mangrove forests is shifting quickly as they expand poleward in response to climate change while simultaneously being removed from their native extent to clear space for anthropogenic land-uses. Mangrove forests are also known to be sinks for anthropogenic contamination. Yet contamination research is under-researched in mangrove ecosystems, specifically the environmental fate, effect on biodiversity, and risk to human populations from contamination in the context of these changing conditions requires further research. The goal of this thesis is to address this data gap through analysis of contamination in the literature and through an investigational survey of mangrove …

The Role Of Aquifer Storage And Recovery (Asr) In Water Resource Management, Katelyn Zimmerman

Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

No abstract provided.

Sustainable Development In Hazard Mitigation Planning, Brooke Morrell

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Community Gardens In Georgetown County, Aaron Osborn

Goal 3: Good Health and Well-Being

No abstract provided.

Rural Water Manager Challenges In New Mexico, Amy "Aj" Jones

Water Resources Professional Project Reports

New Mexico poses a valuable set of circumstances to study the challenges faced by drinking water systems. A general lack of resources for small systems, be it personnel and funding issues, lack of community engagement, lack or loss of institutional knowledge, ability to meet regulations, and aging managers were found to be very common and widespread. Rural water manager positions that are unsupported financially do not assist in alleviating rural poverty or draw the workforce. Therefore, the negative state demographic statistics are reinforced, further complicating rural water management rather than helping the issues. To look at drinking water management comprehensively, …

Securing Environmental Flows For The Rio Grande Silvery Minnow, Ashley Veihl

Water Resources Professional Project Reports

Since 1997, the Bureau of Reclamation (Bureau) has been leasing water to provide habitat for the now-endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow (Minnow). The majority of leased water comes from the San-Juan Chama project, a trans-basin water delivery system that was originally implemented to secure flows to the Rio Grande for municipal and agricultural use. Limitations on water storage within reservoirs incentivize contractors that are allocated more surface water than they can use to lease the extra quantity. It is through this water leasing market that the Bureau has established the largest environmental flow program in the state of New Mexico. …

An Empirical Study Of Locality-Sensitive Hashing To Approximate The Minimum Spanning Tree, Elizabeth Crocker

Computer Science Senior Theses

The minimum spanning tree is a problem with important applications but for which there are no known efficient algorithms for large data sets. Locality-sensitive hashing has been used to solve the near-neighbor problem and further applications in clustering, which indicates its potential for approximating the minimum spanning tree as well. An algorithm by Sariel Har-Peled, Piotr Indyk, and Rajeev Motwani utilizes locality-sensitive hashing to provide a c-approximation of the minimum spanning tree in O(dn^1+1/c log² n) time. In this thesis, we implement and test this algorithm. We determine that the algorithm is suited to provide a better-than-random approximation …

Sports Data Science Job Requirements, Cam E. Morse

Student Publications

Data science is an extremely fast growing field in which job opportunities are opening in every industry related to data science. Within the data science field is the sports data science industry which has it's own requirements and specificities that may not be present in other industries. In this paper, research is done using multiple job posting websites such as LinkedIn, Indeed, Sportstek jobs, and TeamworkOnline to explore the job descriptions of many different sports data science jobs. These job descriptions are then examined using Python coding to find the frequencies of specific data science skills in the various job …

The Role Of Citizen Science In Ecosystem Management: A Case Study Of The Middle Rio Grande Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program, Hannah Miller

Water Resources Professional Project Reports

Rapid advances in technology, especially smart phones, have changed citizen science around the world. Citizen science-generated data are growing exponentially, so there is increasing interest about what is happening with all this data. Some research suggests that governmental agencies are not using citizen science data to make ecosystem management decisions, although other studies contradict this finding. Regionally, the Middle Rio Grande bosque ecosystem extends for 162 miles along the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The Bosque Ecosystem Monitoring Program, or BEMP, was founded in 1996 following the efforts of the Bosque Initiative and the development of the Bosque Biological Management …

A Targeted Study On The Match Between Cybersecurity Higher Education Offerings And Workforce Needs, Diane Murphy, Nektaria Tryfona, Andrew M. Marshall

Virginia Journal of Science

The Cybersecurity Workforce Gap is a call to action on a two-fold problem: the worldwide shortage of qualified cybersecurity workers and the need to develop a growing highly-knowledgeable, agile, well-trained cybersecurity workforce. This paper presents a methodological approach to achieve this goal in the Northern Virginia area. The area is characterized by an abundance of cyber-related industries, government agencies, and large businesses with high demand of skilled cybersecurity workers; at the same time, academic institutions offer cutting edge education and training access to highly capable students. Central to this methodology is the collaboration between local academia and industry and it …

Defining Safe Training Datasets For Machine Learning Models Using Ontologies, Lynn C. Vonder Haar

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Machine Learning (ML) models have been gaining popularity in recent years in a wide variety of domains, including safety-critical domains. While ML models have shown high accuracy in their predictions, they are still considered black boxes, meaning that developers and users do not know how the models make their decisions. While this is simply a nuisance in some domains, in safetycritical domains, this makes ML models difficult to trust. To fully utilize ML models in safetycritical domains, there needs to be a method to improve trust in their safety and accuracy without human experts checking each decision. This research proposes …

Prevalence Of Sars-Cov-2 Antibodies In Liberty University Student Population, Emily Bonus

Senior Honors Theses

In 2020, the virus SARS-CoV-2 gained attention as it spread around the world. Its antibodies are poorly understood, and little research focuses on those with few COVID-19 complications yet large numbers of close contacts: university students. This longitudinal study recorded SARS-CoV-2 antibody presence in 107 undergraduate Liberty University students twice during early 2021. After extensive data cleaning and the application of various statistical tests and ANOVAs, the data seems to show that in the case of COVID-19 infections, SARS-CoV-2 IgM antibodies are immediately produced, and then IgG antibodies follow later. However, the COVID-19 vaccine causes the production of both IgM …

Ab-Initio Investigation Of 2d Materials For Gas Sensing, Energy Storage And Spintronic Applications, Saba Khan

Dissertations

The field of Two Dimensional (2D) materials has been extensively studied since their discovery in 2004, owing to their remarkable combination of properties. My thesis focuses on exploring novel 2D materials such as Graphene Nanoribbon (GNR), holey carbon nitride C₂N, and MXenes for energy storage, gas sensing, and spintronic applications, utilizing state-of-the-art techniques that combine Density Functional Theory (DFT) and Non-Equilibrium Greens Functions (NEGF) formalism; namely Vienna Ab-initio Simulation Package (VASP) and Atomistic Toolkit (ATK) package.
Firstly, on the side of gas sensing, the burning of fossil fuels raises the level of toxic gas and contributes to global …

Metal Oxide Based Materials For High Performance Supercapacitors, Hammad Mueen Arbi

Dissertations

Recent years have seen a healthy rise in the research and development of sustainable and renewable energy storage systems due to the pressing need to conserve natural resources and cut energy use. Due to the rapid growth in global population lately, there is a tremendous demand for energy to fulfill the ever-increasing needs. Innovative alternative energy sources and energy storage techniques are of tremendous interest for dealing with these current world issues. One promising solution for this is the recent research trend for achieving reliable and cost-effective high power and high energy density energy storage devices. On the basis of …

The Reproducing Kernel Method For Solving Integro-Differential And Volterra Integral Equations, Khulood Gamal Qaid

Theses

Integro-differential equations are a class of mathematical equations that involve both derivatives and integrals. They have applications in a wide range of fields, including physics, engineering, finance, and biology such as the spread of diseases, population dynamics, and the behavior of financial markets. The study of these equations requires advanced mathematical techniques, including functional analysis, approximation methods, and numerical analysis. They are a rich area of research with many open questions and challenges.
In this thesis, we will develop and implement the reproducing kernel method to solve a class of integro-differential and Volterra integral equations. We discuss both cases when …

Analyzing Syntactic Constructs Of Java Programs With Machine Learning, Francisco Ortin, Guillermo Facundo, Miguel Garcia

Department of Computer Science Publications

The massive number of open-source projects in public repositories has notably increased in the last years. Such repositories represent valuable information to be mined for different purposes, such as documenting recurrent syntactic constructs, analyzing the particular constructs used by experts and beginners, using them to teach programming and to detect bad programming practices, and building programming tools such as decompilers, Integrated Development Environments or Intelligent Tutoring Systems. An inherent problem of source code is that its syntactic information is represented with tree structures, while traditional machine learning algorithms use -dimensional datasets. Therefore, we present a feature engineering process to translate …

Investigating Chlorate In Water As A Cause Of Chlorate In Milk, Lorna Twomey, D. Gleeson, A. Furey

Physical Sciences Publications

The findings of this laboratory based experiment suggest that waters with increasing total chlorine levels will have increased chlorate levels and should that water come into contact with milk it has the potential to cause chlorate contamination of said milk. This study provides the information needed to design targeted field based experiments that are required to establish the trends and behaviours of chlorate in water when used as part of the cleaning process on dairy farms and its impact on milk residues and is requisite for the betterment of the dairy industry in terms of its understanding of contamination of …