Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Poset Ramsey Numbers For Boolean Lattices, Joshua Cain Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

For each positive integer n, let Qn denote the Boolean lattice of dimension n. For posets P, P', define the poset Ramsey number R(P,P') to be the least N such that for any red/blue coloring of the elements of Q_N, there exists either a subposet isomorphic to P with all elements red, or a subposet isomorphic to P' with all elements blue.

Axenovich and Walzer introduced this concept in Order (2017), where they proved R(Q₂, Q_n) ≤ 2n + 2 and R(Q …

Measurement Of |Vcb| Using The Semileptonic Decay Λb → Λcμνμ, Scott Edward Ely

Dissertations - ALL

A preliminary measurement of the quark-mixing parameter |Vcb| using the exclusive decay Λ0b→ Λ+c μ−νμ is presented. A sample of Λb semileptonic decays is provided by √s = 13TeV proton-proton collisions collected by the LHCb detector in 2017. Λ0b → Λ+c μ−νμX decays are identified from muon tracks, combined with a Λc baryon. The ground state Λ0b → Λ+c μ−νμ is isolated by a fit to the Λb corrected mass spectrum. The raw yield NRaw(Λ0b → Λ+c μ−νμ) is corrected, and the semileptonic width ΓMeas. (Λ0b → Λ+c μ−νμ) is obtained. Lattice QCD calculations predict ΓTh.(Λ0b → Λ+c μ−νμ)/|Vcb|2. A …

A New Class Of Antibiotic That Prevents Drug Tolerance, Persistence, And Resistance By Controlling Emergence Of Phenotypes., Pankaj Dinkar Patil

Dissertations - ALL

The fight against bacterial infections and innovations in antibiotic therapy has never halted throughout human history. However, bacteria have evolved smartly and resistance against practically all conventional antibiotics has been developed. Furthermore, bacteria can form biofilms, which are surface-attached multicellular colonies. Biofilms shield bacteria against antibiotics and makes it harder to entirely eradicate infections . Under antibiotics stress, bacteria evolve into different phenotypes like hyper motile, hyper adherent and hyper virulent which are tolerant and persistent to antibiotic treatment. The use of antibiotic therapy to combat such resilient bacterial phenotypes is extremely tough. As a result, the scientific community is …

Patterns Of Dissolved Methane In Groundwater And Its Contribution To Emissions Inventories, Amanda E. Campbell

Dissertations - ALL

The Marcellus Shale is the largest shale gas play in the U.S. production of natural gas using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) and production is prevalent throughout the play except in New York (NY), where it is currently banned. High concentrations of methane, the main component of natural gas, in groundwater, as well as its presence in the atmosphere, can have negative consequences. In this dissertation, three aspects of this issue are explored: 1) how and why naturally-occurring methane concentrations vary through time; 2) how elevated naturally-occurring methane concentrations in domestic water wells can be predicted from commonly observed well characteristics; …

From Soils To Streams: Connecting Terrestrial Carbon Transformation, Chemical Weathering, And Solute Export Across Hydrological Regimes, Alejandro Flores, Katie Murenbeeld

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Soil biota generates carbon that exports vertically to the atmosphere (CO₂) and transports laterally to streams and rivers (dissolved organic and inorganic carbon, DOC and DIC). These processes, together with chemical weathering, vary with flow paths across hydrological regimes; yet an integrated understanding of these interactive processes is still lacking. Here we ask: How and to what extent do subsurface carbon transformation, chemical weathering, and solute export differ across hydrological and subsurface structure regimes? We address this question using a hillslope reactive transport model calibrated using soil CO₂ and water chemistry data from Fitch, a temperate forest …

Assessing Impact Of Unconventional Oil And Gas Development On Groundwater Quality In The Northern Appalachian Region With Mixed Land Uses, Favour C. Epuna

Theses - ALL

Over the past decade, the rapid growth of unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) has raised public concerns about its potential impact on groundwater quality. High methane and salt levels in groundwater have been the most widely cited UOGD-related impairments. The attribution of these contaminants to UOGD is usually complex, especially in regions with mixed land uses. Here, we compiled a large hydrogeochemistry dataset containing 13 geochemical analytes for 17,794 groundwater samples from the rural northern Appalachia, i.e., 19 counties located on the boundary between Pennsylvania (PA; UOGD is permitted) and New York (NY; UOGD is banned). With this dataset, …

The Prevalence And Impact Of Adolescent Hospitalization To Adult Psychiatric Units., Samantha Mcrae, Jordan Edwards, Kathy N Speechley, Javeed Sukhera, Guangyong Zou, Kelly K. Anderson

Epidemiology and Biostatistics Publications

BACKGROUND: With increasing psychiatric hospitalizations among adolescents and constrained hospital resources, there are times when youth are hospitalized in adult inpatient psychiatry units. Evidence on the prevalence of this practice and associated impacts is lacking.

AIMS: We sought to explore the prevalence, determinants, and outcomes related to the hospitalization of adolescents aged 12-17 years on adult inpatient psychiatry units in Ontario.

METHODS: Using health administrative data, we constructed a cohort of adolescents with an inpatient psychiatric admission in Ontario (2007-2011). We classified adolescents as having an admission to an adult psychiatry unit or to other inpatient units. Multivariable regression models …

Snerf: Stylized Neural Implicit Representations For 3d Scenes, Thu Nguyen-Phuoc, Feng Liu, Lei Xiao

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper presents a stylized novel view synthesis method. Applying state-of-the-art stylization methods to novel views frame by frame often causes jittering artifacts due to the lack of cross-view consistency. Therefore, this paper investigates 3D scene stylization that provides a strong inductive bias for consistent novel view synthesis. Specifically, we adopt the emerging neural radiance fields (NeRF) as our choice of 3D scene representation for their capability to render high-quality novel views for a variety of scenes. However, as rendering a novel view from a NeRF requires a large number of samples, training a stylized NeRF requires a large amount …

Transit Timing Variations For Au Microscopii B And C, J. M. Wittrock, S. Dreizler, M. A. Reefe, B. M. Morris, P. P. Plavchan, P. J. Lowrance, B.-O. Demory, J. G. Ingalls, E. A. Gilbert, T. Barclay, B. L. Cale, K. A. Collins, K. I. Collins, I. J. M. Crossfield, D. Dragomir, J. D. Eastman, M. El Mufti, D. Feliz, J. Gagné, E. Gaidos, P. Gao, C. S. Geneser, L. Hebb, C. E. Henze, K. D. Horne, J. M. Jenkins, Eric L.N. Jensen, S. R. Kane, L. Kaye, E. Martioli, T. A. Monsue, E. Pallé, E. V. Quintana, D. J. Radford, V. Roccatagliata, J. E. Schlieder, R. P. Schwarz, A. Shporer, K. G. Stassun, C. Stockdale, T.-G. Tan, A. M. Tanner, A. Vanderburg, L. D. Vega, S. Wang

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

We explore the transit timing variations (TTVs) of the young (22 Myr) nearby AU Mic planetary system. For AU Mic b, we introduce three Spitzer (4.5 μm) transits, five TESS transits, 11 LCO transits, one PEST transit, one Brierfield transit, and two transit timing measurements from Rossiter–McLaughlin observations; for AU Mic c, we introduce three TESS transits. We present two independent TTV analyses. First, we use EXOFASTv2 to jointly model the Spitzer and ground-based transits and obtain the midpoint transit times. We then construct an O − C diagram and model the TTVs with Exo-Striker. Second, we reproduce our …

Biological Hydrogen Gas Production From Food Waste As A Sustainable Fuel For Future Transportation, Pitiporn Asvapathanagul, Leanne Deocampo, Nicholas Banuelos

Mineta Transportation Institute

In the global search for the right alternative energy sources for a more sustainable future, hydrogen production has stood out as a strong contender. Hydrogen gas (H2) is well-known as one of the cleanest and most sustainable energy sources, one that mainly yields only water vapor as a byproduct. Additionally, H2 generates triple the amount of energy compared to hydrocarbon fuels. H2 can be synthesized from several technologies, but currently only 1% of H2 production is generated from biomass. Biological H2 production generated from anaerobic digestion is a fraction of the 1%. This study aims to enhance biological H2 production …

A Low-Cost Virtual Coach For 2d Video-Based Compensation Assessment Of Upper Extremity Rehabilitation Exercises, Ana Rita Coias, Min Hun Lee, Alexandre Bernardino

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background: The increasing demands concerning stroke rehabilitation and in-home exercise promotion grew the need for affordable and accessible assistive systems to promote patients' compliance in therapy. These assistive systems require quantitative methods to assess patients' quality of movement and provide feedback on their performance. However, state-of-the-art quantitative assessment approaches require expensive motion-capture devices, which might be a barrier to the development of low-cost systems.Methods: In this work, we develop a low-cost virtual coach (VC) that requires only a laptop with a webcam to monitor three upper extremity rehabilitation exercises and provide real-time visual and audio feedback on compensatory motion patterns …

Search For Z′ →Μ+Μ- In The Lμ-Lτ Gauge-Symmetric Model At Belle, T. Czank, I. Jaegle, A. Ishikawa, I. Adachi, K. Adamczyk, H. Aihara, D. M. Asner, T. Aushev, R. Ayad, V. Babu, S. Bahinipati, P. Behera, J. Bennett, F. Bernlochner, M. Bessner, V. Bhardwaj, B. Bhuyan, T. Bilka, J. Biswal

Faculty and Student Publications

We search for a new gauge boson Z′ that couples only to heavy leptons and their corresponding neutrinos in the process e+e-→Z′(→μ+μ-)μ+μ-, using a 643 fb-1 data sample collected by the Belle experiment at or near the ϒ(1S,2S,3S,4S,5S) resonances at the KEKB collider. While previous searches for Z′ performed a data-based estimation of the initial state radiation effect, our search for the Z′ is the first to include effects due to initial state radiation in the signal simulated samples that were used in estimating the detection efficiency. No signal is observed in the Z′ mass range of 0.212-10 GeV/c2, and …

Membrane Elasticity Modulated By Cholesterol In Model Of Porcine Eye Lens-Lipid Membrane, Nawal K. Khadka, Max-Florian Mortimer, Mason Marosvari, Raju Timsina, Laxman Mainali

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Experimental evidence shows that the eye lens loses its elasticity dramatically with age. It has also been reported that the cholesterol (Chol) content in the eye lens fiber cell plasma membrane increases significantly with age. High Chol content leads to the formation of cholesterol bilayer domains (CBDs) in the lens membrane. The role of high Chol associated with lens elasticity is unclear. The purpose of this research is to investigate the membrane elasticity of the model of porcine lens-lipid (MPLL) membrane with increasing Chol content to elucidate the role of high Chol in lens membrane elasticity. In this study, we …

Action-Sufficient State Representation Learning For Control With Structural Constraints, Biwei Huang, Chaochao Lu, Liu Leqi, Josã© Miguel Hernã¡Ndez-Lobato, Clark Glymour, Bernhard Schã¶Lkopf, Kun Zhang

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Perceived signals in real-world scenarios are usually high-dimensional and noisy, and finding and using their representation that contains essential and sufficient information required by downstream decision-making tasks will help improve computational efficiency and generalization ability in the tasks. In this paper, we focus on partially observable environments and propose to learn a minimal set of state representations that capture sufficient information for decision-making, termed Action-Sufficient state Representations (ASRs). We build a generative environment model for the structural relationships among variables in the system and present a principled way to characterize ASRs based on structural constraints and the goal of maximizing …

Gradient-Free Method For Heavily Constrained Nonconvex Optimization, Wanli Shi, Hongchang Gao, Bin Gu

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Zeroth-order (ZO) method has been shown to be a powerful method for solving the optimization problem where explicit expression of the gradients is difficult or infeasible to obtain. Recently, due to the practical value of the constrained problems, a lot of ZO Frank-Wolfe or projected ZO methods have been proposed. However, in many applications, we may have a very large number of nonconvex white/black-box constraints, which makes the existing zeroth-order methods extremely inefficient (or even not working) since they need to inquire function value of all the constraints and project the solution to the complicated feasible set. In this paper, …

Identification Of Linear Non-Gaussian Latent Hierarchical Structure, Feng Xie, Biwei Huang, Zhengming Chen, Yangbo He, Zhi Geng, Kun Zhang

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

Traditional causal discovery methods mainly focus on estimating causal relations among measured variables, but in many real-world problems, such as questionnaire-based psychometric studies, measured variables are generated by latent variables that are causally related. Accordingly, this paper investigates the problem of discovering the hidden causal variables and estimating the causal structure, including both the causal relations among latent variables and those between latent and measured variables. We relax the frequently-used measurement assumption and allow the children of latent variables to be latent as well, and hence deal with a specific type of latent hierarchical causal structure. In particular, we define …

Monotonic Bit-Invariant Permutation-Invariant Metrics On The Set Of All Infinite Binary Sequences, Irina Padilla, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In a computer, all the information about an object is described by a sequence of 0s and 1s. At any given moment of time, we only have partial information, but as we perform more measurements and observations, we get longer and longer sequence that provides a more and more accurate description of the object. In the limit, we get a perfect description by an infinite binary sequence. If the objects are similar, measurement results are similar, so the resulting binary sequences are similar. Thus, to gauge similarity of two objects, a reasonable idea is to define an appropriate metric on …

Towards Improving System Performance In Large Scale Multi-Agent Systems With Selfish Agents, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Intelligent agents are becoming increasingly prevalent in a wide variety of domains including but not limited to transportation, safety and security. To better utilize the intelligence, there has been increasing focus on frameworks and methods for coordinating these intelligent agents. This thesis is specifically targeted at providing solution approaches for improving large scale multi-agent systems with selfish intelligent agents. In such systems, the performance of an agent depends on not just his/her own efforts, but also on other agent’s decisions. The complexity of interactions among multiple agents, coupled with the large scale nature of the problem domains and the uncertainties …

Sdq: Stochastic Differentiable Quantization With Mixed Precision, Xijie Huang, Zhiqiang Shen, Shichao Li, Zechun Liu, Xianghong Hu, Jeffry Wicaksana, Eric Xing, Kwang Ting Cheng

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

In order to deploy deep models in a computationally efficient manner, model quantization approaches have been frequently used. In addition, as new hardware that supports mixed bitwidth arithmetic operations, recent research on mixed precision quantization (MPQ) begins to fully leverage the capacity of representation by searching optimized bitwidths for different layers and modules in a network. However, previous studies mainly search the MPQ strategy in a costly scheme using reinforcement learning, neural architecture search, etc., or simply utilize partial prior knowledge for bitwidth assignment, which might be biased on locality of information and is sub-optimal. In this work, we present …

An Ontological Approach For Recommending A Feature Selection Algorithm, Aparna Nayak, Bojan Bozic, Luca Longo

Conference papers

Feature selection plays an important role in machine learning or data mining problems. Removing irrelevant features increases model accuracy and reduces the computational cost. However, selecting important features is not a simple task as one feature selection algorithm does not perform well on all the datasets that are of interest. This paper tries to address the recommendation of a feature selection algorithm based on dataset characteristics and quality. The research uses three types of dataset characteristics along with data quality metrics. The main contribution of the work is the utilization of Semantic Web techniques to develop a novel system that …

The Impact Of Cross-Border Environmental Media And Advocacy At The Skagit River Headwaters, Derek Moscato

Border Policy Research Institute Publications

The regional media of Cascadia has directed significant media attention toward the Skagit River watershed since 2018 as a result of a controversial mining proposal at the international border dividing British Columbia and Washington State. At the center of this con-troversy sits the so-called “Donut Hole” located at the headwaters of the Skagit watershed. As a result of concerns about impacts to wildlife and the surrounding North Cascades ecosystem, opposition to the project was substantial, led by environmental advocates and Indigenous community leaders. In turn, they harnessed extensive media coverage and advocacy to facilitate a larger regional dialogue about the …

Mgard+: Optimizing Multilevel Methods For Error-Bounded Scientific Data Reduction, Xin Liang, Ben Whitney, Jieyang Chen, Lipeng Wan, Qing Liu, Dingwen Tao, James Kress, David Pugmire, Matthew Wolf, Norbert Podhorszki, Scott Klasky

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Nowadays, data reduction is becoming increasingly important in dealing with the large amounts of scientific data. Existing multilevel compression algorithms offer a promising way to manage scientific data at scale but may suffer from relatively low performance and reduction quality. In this paper, we propose MGARD+, a multilevel data reduction and refactoring framework drawing on previous multilevel methods, to achieve high-performance data decomposition and high-quality error-bounded lossy compression. Our contributions are four-fold: 1) We propose to leverage a level-wise coefficient quantization method, which uses different error tolerances to quantize the multilevel coefficients. 2) We propose an adaptive decomposition method which …

A Gis Suitability Model Evaluating Habitat Characteristics Influencing Beaver (Castor Canadensis) Lodge Site Selection And Lodge Occupancy In Central Adirondacks, New York, Amanda K. Jacobs

Theses - ALL

The North American beaver (Castor canadensis) represents a quintessential example of an "ecosystem engineer." Yet the species' landscape-scale impacts on hydrology, geomorphology, and ecosystem ecology are not uniformly distributed through landscapes or time. Understanding beaver lodge site selection and lodge fidelity through time can help to predict where the greatest effects of beaver activity may occur. In this research project, I seek to understand the relationships between beaver habitat suitability, the habitat variables that currently define suitable areas, and lodge occupancy over time. Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to model habitat suitability, I use hydrologic, vegetative, and physiographic variables to …

Analysis Of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary Observation Data From 1976 Through 2021, Dale E. Parson

Computer Science and Information Technology Faculty

The primary objective is to correlate climate change data to changes in raptor observations at the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in northern Berks County, Pennsylvania. Additional objectives include uncovering trends in climate observations at Hawk Mountain's North Lookout and the Allentown Airport throughout the observation period, and to examine trends in raptor observation properties independent of climate changes.

Reply To Response By Fbi Laboratory Filed In Illinois V. Winfield And Affidavit By Biederman Et Al. (2022) Filed In Us V. Kaevon Sutton (2018 Cf1 009709), Susan Vanderplas, Kori Khan, Heike Hofmann, Alicia Carriquiry

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

1 Preliminaries

1.1 Scope

The aim of this document is to respond to issues raised in Federal Bureau of Investigation¹ and Alex Biedermann, Bruce Budowle & Christophe Champod.²

1.2 Conflict of Interest

We are statisticians employed at public institutions of higher education (Iowa State University and University of Nebraska, Lincoln) and have not been paid for our time or expertise when preparing either this response or the original affidavit.³ We provide this information as a public service and as scientists and researchers in this area.

1.3 Organization

The rest of the document precedes as follows: we begin …

Valuation Of Soil Health Ecosystem Services. Vermont Payment For Ecosystem Services Technical Research Report #5, Benjamin Timothy Dube, Alissa C. White, Taylor H. Ricketts, Heather M. Darby

UVM Extension Faculty Publications

In this report, we present estimates for ecosystem services from soil health using two approaches for four different services. One approach generates estimates based on soil-health practices, and the other approach is based on improvements in soil-health indicators. For soil- health practices, such as adopting best-management practices on annual corn, we utilize a set of off-the shelf empirical models widely used to estimate ecological functions on farm landscapes. For soil-health indicators, we make estimates by linking these tools with soil data and statistical models describing how soil-health parameters influence the interaction of soils with water and their environment. We provide …

Relaxed Wythoff Has All Beatty Solutions, Jon Kay, Geremías Polanco

Mathematics Sciences: Faculty Publications

We find conditions under which the P-positions of three subtraction games arise as pairs of complementary Beatty sequences. The first game is due to Fraenkel and the second is an extension of the first game to non-monotone settings. We show that the P-positions of the second game can be inferred from the recurrence of Fraenkel's paper if a certain inequality is satisfied. This inequality is shown to be necessary if the P-positions are known to be pairs of complementary Beatty sequences, and the family of irrationals for which this inequality holds is explicitly given. We highlight several games in the …

Tropical Cyclone Storm Surge Detection In Slash Pine Radial Growth Along The Northern Gulf Of Mexico Coastline, Alyssa C. Crowell

Master's Theses

My thesis examines the ecological impact of tropical cyclone (TCs) storm surge on coastal slash pine (Pinus elliottii var. elliottii Engelm) communities along the Gulf of Mexico in the southern United States (U.S.). Previous research has shown slash pine radial growth trends can be examined to identify long and short-term growth changes associated with TC passage, providing insight into overall stand health and resiliency through time. However, this previous research encompasses just one site in Mississippi. My thesis expands the spatial footprint of TC-surge impact on slash pine radial growth with the addition of three new sites.

I examined …

Radar Simulator Output Used For Tracking Isolated Convections, Mariko Oue, Mariko Oue

SoMAS Research Data

No abstract provided.

Studying Redox Conditions Of Devonian And Neoproterozoic Oceans Using I/Ca Proxy From Bulk Carbonate Rocks, Ruliang He

Dissertations - ALL

Iodine is an important trace element in biogeochemical and redox reactions. It has a nearly consistent concentration of ~0.46 μmol/L in the seawater and the inorganic speciation (IO3− and I−) of iodine is primarily controlled by redox conditions in water columns. Iodate (IO3−), not iodide (I−), is the only species that can be incorporated into carbonate minerals. Therefore, I/Ca ratio from carbonate rocks can be used to constrain the redox condition in the water column over a range of time scale. This dissertation contains three chapters that utilizes I/Ca ratio from bulk carbonate rocks to reconstruct ocean redox changes during …