Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Machine Learning Approach To Revenue Generation Within The Professional Hair Care Industry, Alexander K. Sepenu, Linda Eliasen

SMU Data Science Review

The cosmetic and beauty industry continues to grow and evolve to satisfy its patrons. In the United States, the industry is heavily science-driven, innovative, and fast-paced, suggesting that to remain productive and profitable, companies must seek smart alternatives to their current modus operandi or risk losing out on this multi-billion-dollar industry to fierce competition. In this paper, the authors seek to utilize machine learning models such as clustering and regression to improve the efficiency of current sales and customer segmentation models to help HairCo (pseudonym for confidentiality), a professional hair products manufacturer, strategize their marketing and sales efforts for revenue …

Analysis Of The Electric Power Outage Data And Prediction Of Electric Power Outage For Major Metropolitan Areas In Texas Using Machine Learning And Time Series Methods, Renfeng Wang, Venkata Leela 'Mg' Vanga, Zachary B. Zaiken, Jonathan Bennett

SMU Data Science Review

With growing energy usage, power outages affect millions of households. This case study focuses on gathering power outage historical data, modifying the data to attach weather attributes, and gathering ERCOT energy market conditions for Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metropolitan areas of Texas. The transformed data is then analyzed using machine learning algorithms including, but not limited to, Regression, Random Forests and XGBoost to consider current weather and ERCOT features and predict power outage percentage for locations. The transformed data is also trained using time series models and serially correlated models including Autoregression and Vector Autoregression. This study also focuses on …

Web Page Multiclass Classification, Brian Gaither, Antonio Debouse, Catherine Huang

SMU Data Science Review

As the internet age evolves, the volume of content hosted on the Web is rapidly expanding. With this ever-expanding content, the capability to accurately categorize web pages is a current challenge to serve many use cases. This paper proposes a variation in the approach to text preprocessing pipeline whereby noun phrase extraction is performed first followed by lemmatization, contraction expansion, removing special characters, removing extra white space, lower casing, and removal of stop words. The first step of noun phrase extraction is aimed at reducing the set of terms to those that best describe what the web pages are about …

Anomaly Detection Methods To Improve Supply Chain Data Quality And Operations, Ana E. Glaser, Jake P. Harrison, David Josephs

SMU Data Science Review

Supply chain operations drive the planning, manufacture, and distribution of billions of semiconductors a year, spanning thousands of products across many supply chain configurations. The customizations span from wafer technology to die stacking and chip feature enablement. Data quality drives efficiency in these processes and anomalies in data can be very disruptive, and at times, consequential. Developing preventative measures that automate the detection of anomalies before they reach downstream execution systems would result in significant efficiency gain for the organization. The purpose of this research is to identify an effective, actionable, and computationally efficient approach to highlight anomalies in a …

Adjusting Community Survey Data Benchmarks For External Factors, Allen Miller, Nicole M. Norelli, Robert Slater, Mingyang N. Yu

SMU Data Science Review

Abstract. Using U.S. resident survey data from the National Community Survey in combination with public data from the U.S. Census and additional sources, a Voting Regressor Model was developed to establish fair benchmark values for city performance. These benchmarks were adjusted for characteristics the city cannot easily influence that contribute to confidence in local government, such as population size, demographics, and income. This adjustment allows for a more meaningful comparison and interpretation of survey results among individual cities. Methods explored for the benchmark adjustment included cluster analysis, anomaly detection, and a variety of regression techniques, including random forest, ridge, decision …

The Importance Of Understanding And Developing Identification Techniques In Wildlife Crime, Savannah Nguyen

D.U.Quark

Wildlife crime continues to grow annually and globally, impacting several species and ecosystems. New advancements of technologies and techniques can track criminals and aid the affected victims. Highlighting the complexity of conservation and the development of identification techniques helps tackle this widespread dilemma. New developing techniques in wildlife forensics can differentiate an animal between wild and poached to pave the way for further advancement in understanding wildlife crimes. Hence, though the wildlife forensics field is still new, emphasizing the need for intricate identification techniques can help save threatened species.

Sparse Spectral-Tau Method For The Two-Dimensional Helmholtz Problem Posed On A Rectangular Domain, Gabriella M. Dalton

Mathematics & Statistics ETDs

Within recent decades, spectral methods have become an important technique in numerical computing for solving partial differential equations. This is due to their superior accuracy when compared to finite difference and finite element methods. For such spectral approximations, the convergence rate is solely dependent on the smoothness of the solution yielding the potential to achieve spectral accuracy. We present an iterative approach for solving the two-dimensional Helmholtz problem posed on a rectangular domain subject to Dirichlet boundary conditions that is well-conditioned, low in memory, and of sub-quadratic complexity. The proposed approach spectrally approximates the partial differential equation by means of …

Investigation Of The Association Of Exposures To Fire-Related Hazards With Pulmonary Function Of Firefighters, David G. Goldfarb

Dissertations and Theses

Background. Firefighters are habitually exposed to hazardous toxicants which place them at an elevated risk for numerous adverse health outcomes. An example of this is the associations observed in other works between inhalation of combustion byproducts from urban structural fires and both acute and chronic pulmonary dysfunction. To-date, the characterization of firefighters’ exposures to dangerous chemicals in smoke from non-wildfire incidents, both directly through personal monitoring and indirectly from work-related records is scarce. Prior works investigating the association between routine firefighting and pulmonary function have relied on crude metrics such as years of service and numbers of responses to …

Empowering You: Environment, Water, Rivers And You, League Of Women Voters Of The Greater Dayton Area, David Bodary

Rivers Institute Publications

Host David Bodary talks about "Environment, Water, Rivers and You" with guest Leslie King, director of the Rivers Institute at the University of Dayton Fitz Center for Leadership in Community and University of Dayton junior Tessa O'Halloran, a River Steward.

Spotlight Report #6: Proffering Machine-Readable Personal Privacy Research Agreements: Pilot Project Findings For Ieee P7012 Wg, Noreen Y. Whysel, Lisa Levasseur

Publications and Research

What if people had the ability to assert their own legally binding permissions for data collection, use, sharing, and retention by the technologies they use? The IEEE P7012 has been working on an interoperability specification for machine-readable personal privacy terms to support this ability since 2018. The premise behind the work of IEEE P7012 is that people need technology that works on their behalf—i.e. software agents that assert the individual’s permissions and preferences in a machine-readable format.

Thanks to a grant from the IEEE Technical Activities Board Committee on Standards (TAB CoS), we were able to explore the attitudes of …

A Bayesian Latent Scale Model For Multivariate Longitudinal Data, Kruti Pandya

Dissertations and Theses

In order to understand the entire course of slow progressing diseases like Alzheimer's dementia or multiple sclerosis, it is essential to characterize long term disease dynamics from a healthy stage to a late disease stage. Cohort studies typically recruit subjects at different stages of the disease and then follow them for a relatively short period of time. In this dissertation, we propose a novel Bayesian nonlinear mixed effects model with latent time scale to characterize long term disease dynamics using the observed short term longitudinal data from cohort studies without relying on clinical diagnosis. This model can accommodate noisy longitudinal …

Methodologies For Quantum Circuit And Algorithm Design At Low And High Levels, Edison Tsai

Dissertations and Theses

Although the concept of quantum computing has existed for decades, the technology needed to successfully implement a quantum computing system has not yet reached the level of sophistication, reliability, and scalability necessary for commercial viability until very recently. Significant progress on this front was made in the past few years, with IBM planning to create a 1000-qubit chip by the end of 2023, and Google already claiming to have achieved quantum supremacy. Other major industry players such as Intel and Microsoft have also invested significant amounts of resources into quantum computing research.

Any viable computing system requires both hardware and …

Electrical And Mechanical Properties Of Polymer Nanocomposites, Nuwansiri N.K. Getangama

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis consists of three projects concerning the electrical and mechanical properties of polymer nanocomposites. We study the effect of nanoscale filler particles on the polymer dynamics at different length and time scales. In the first study, poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)-multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) nanocomposites with a MWCNT concentration ranging from 0 to 5 wt\% were prepared by both melt-mixing and twin-screw extrusion. Their electrical properties were studied over a wide range of frequency and temperature using a dielectric spectrometer. A percolation transition is observed at which the electrical conductivity of the nanocomposites increases by several orders of magnitude. The percolation …

Modeling Of Fluid Injection-Related Processes In Hydrocarbon Reservoirs In Alberta, Canada, Negar Nazari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In the last decade, with the development of horizontal drilling and multistage hydraulic fracturing technology, extraction of unconventional resources has significantly increased in western Canada. These industrial activities have been associated with the rise in the seismicity rate. This thesis aimed to improve the quality of the available geomechanical models of the injection-induced seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin, by incorporating detailed geoscience characterization for two unconventional reservoirs of the Duvernay Formation in the Fox Creek area and the Cardium Formation in West Pembina. Hydraulic fracturing has induced seismicity in the first area, but no induced seismicity has been …

Monofacial Vs Bifacial Solar Photovoltaic Systems In Snowy Environments, Koami Soulemane Hayibo, Aliaksei Petsiuk, Pierce Mayville, Laura Brown, Joshua M. Pearce

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

There has been a recent surge in interest in the more accurate snow loss estimates for solar photovoltaic (PV) systems as large-scale deployments move into northern latitudes. Preliminary results show bifacial modules may clear snow faster than monofacial PV. This study analyzes snow losses on these two types of systems using empirical hourly data including energy, solar irradiation and albedo, and open-source image processing methods from images of the arrays in a northern environment in the winter. Projection transformations based on reference anchor points and snowless ground truth images provide reliable masking and optical distortion correction with fixed surveillance cameras. …

Multiple Object Tracking For Marine Science, Nicholas A. Wachter

Computer Science and Software Engineering

As drone and computer vision technology has been improving, many fields of study have been quick to utilize it to improve the accuracy and ease of data collection. The combination of the two technologies is perfect for surveying large areas and identifying features of interest. Marine science utilizes these technologies for activities such as animal tracking and population counting. I am working with the Drones for Marine Science research group at Cal Poly who want to build a fleet of drones that will fly out over the ocean to identify and track various marine animals. My role will be to …

Biomass Estimation Of Marine Biofilms On Plastic Surfaces, Kian Banihashemi, Fernando Javier Gil

Biological Sciences

Plastics have become a major source of marine pollution, which threatens food safety and quality, human health, and marine ecosystems. Due to the drastic negative effects of plastics in a marine environment, alternative biodegradable plastics are being generated that are more eco-friendly and have less environmental impact. Though some of these plastics are known to biodegrade, the process of degradation for bioplastics has not been heavily studied in a marine environment. This pilot project sought to both quantify the process of biodegradation and compare across different methods for effectiveness of biomass estimation, which serves as an indicator of biodegradation. Plastics …

Developing A Miniature Smart Boat For Marine Research, Michael Isaac Eirinberg

Computer Engineering

This project examines the development of a smart boat which could serve as a possible marine research apparatus. The smart boat consists of a miniature vessel containing a low-cost microcontroller to live stream a camera feed, GPS telemetry, and compass data through its own WiFi access point. The smart boat also has the potential for autonomous navigation. My project captivated the interest of several members of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Marine Science Department faculty, who proposed a variety of fascinating and valuable smart boat applications.

New Mexico Acequias In Valencia: A Documentary Report, José A. Rivera Ph.D.

Researchers

In 2014 and 2019 the New Mexico Acequia Association attended events organized by the Water Tribunal of Valencia in Spain commemorating the fifth and tenth anniversaries when the acequias of Valencia and Murcia were listed by UNESCO as examples of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The documentary report provides the context for and significance of the two visits along with a series of photographs that tell the story for the benefit of the citizens of New Mexico.

Tracing Geochemical Sources And Health Risk Assessment Of Uranium In Groundwater Of Arid Zone Of India, P. Pandit, Atul Saini, Sabarathinam Chidambaram, Vinod Kumar, Banjarani Panda, A. L. Ramanathan, Netrananda Sahu, A. K. Singh, Rohit Mehra

Nebraska Water Center: Faculty Publications

Water quality degradation and metal contamination in groundwater are serious concerns in an arid region with scanty water resources. This study aimed at evaluating the source of uranium (U) and potential health risk assessment in groundwater of the arid region of western Rajasthan and northern Gujarat. The probable source of vanadium (V) and fluorine (F) was also identified. U and trace metal concentration, along with physicochemical characteristics were determined for 265 groundwater samples collected from groundwater of duricrusts and palaeochannels of western Rajasthan and northern Gujarat. The U concentration ranged between 0.6 and 260 μg L⁻¹ with a mean …

Exploring Changes In Quasar Spectral Energy Distributions Across C Iv Parameter Space, Angelica B. Rivera, Gordon T. Richards, Sarah C. Gallagher, Trevor V. Mccaffrey, Amy L. Rankine, Paul C. Hewett, Ohad Shemmer

Physics and Astronomy Publications

We examine the UV/X-ray properties of 1378 quasars in order to link empirical correlations to theoretical models of the physical mechanisms dominating quasars as a function of mass and accretion rate. The clarity of these correlations is improved when (1) using C iv broad emission line equivalent width (EQW) and blueshift (relative to systemic) values calculated from high signal-to-noise ratio reconstructions of optical/UV spectra and (2) removing quasars expected to be absorbed based on their UV/X-ray spectral slopes. In addition to using the traditional C iv parameter space measures of C iv EQW and blueshift, we define a “C iv …

Results Of The 2022 Vermont Farmer Conservation & Payment For Ecosystem Services Survey. Vermont Payment For Ecosystem Services Technical Research Report #3a, Alissa C. White

Reports and Policy Briefs

This survey was commissioned by the Vermont Soil Health and Payment for Ecosystem Services Working Group (VT PES Working Group) to gather farmer input on the development of payment for ecosystem services (PES) in Vermont for agriculture. In particular, the survey was intended to help set appropriate levels of compensation for participation in a soil health PES program, although additional information was gathered in the survey to inform the development of a new incentive program. The VT PES Working Group has explored the potential for a performance-based soil health PES program that would compensate farmers on the basis of environmental …

Blue Resilience: Is There A Need For An Alaskan Coastal Career Development Framework?, Jared Fuller

All Theses And Dissertations

Youth career outmigration has increased in Alaska’s coastal communities in the last few decades. The ocean and ocean-adjacent industries that comprise the blue economy make up the majority of the employment options in places have experienced declines within these regions which has been attributed to the outward movement of young people. The dynamic history of Alaska has had specific impacts with regards to Alaskan coastal communities, their ocean-resource economies, and thus, the potential for young people to find career paths within them. Potential economic-resource vulnerabilities could be mapped along with the complex systems to help build resilience within those communities. …

(R1881) Impatient Customers In Queueing System With Optional Vacation Policies And Power Saving Mode, Poonam Gupta, Rajni Gupta, Sangeeta Malik

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this manuscript, a queueing system with two optional vacation policies, power-saving mode under reneging and retention of reneged customers in both vacations is analyzed. If the server is free, it chooses either of the vacations, classical vacation or working vacation. During vacations, the customers may get impatient due to delays and may leave the system, but they are retained in the system with some convincing mechanisms. On vacation completion, if the system is empty, the server is turned off to facilitate better utilization of the resources. Some of the operating system characteristics are derived using the probability generating functions …

(R1892) On The Asymptotic Stability Of A Neutral System With Nonlinear Perturbations And Constant Delay, Melek Gözen

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this paper, we consider a nonlinear perturbed system of neutral delay integro-differential equations (NDIDEs). We prove two new theorems, Theorems 1 and 2, such that these theorems include sufficient conditions and are related to asymptotically stability of zero solution of the perturbed system of NDIDEs. The technique of the proofs depend upon the definitions of two new and more suitable Lyapunov- Krasovskiĭ functionals (LKFs). When we compared the results of this paper with those are found the literature related , our results improve and extend some classical results, and do new contributions to the topic of NDIDEs and literature.

(R1517) Asymptotical Stability Of Riemann-Liouville Fractional Neutral Systems With Multiple Time-Varying Delays, Erdal Korkmaz, Abdulhamit Ozdemir

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this manuscript, we investigate the asymptotical stability of solutions of Riemann-Liouville fractional neutral systems associated to multiple time-varying delays. Then, we use the linear matrix inequality (LMI) and the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method to obtain sufficient conditions for the asymptotical stability of solutions of the system when the given delays are time dependent and one of them is unbounded. Finally, we present some examples to indicate the efficacy of the consequences obtained.

(R1501) Rotational And Hall Current Effects On A Free Convection Mhd Flow With Radiation And Inclined Magnetic Field, U. S. Rajput, Naval Kishore Gupta

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

Rotational and Hall current effects on a free convection MHD flow with Radiation and inclined magnetic field are studied here. Electrically conducting, viscous, and incompressible fluid is taken. The flow is modelled with the help of partial differential equations. The analytical solutions for the velocity, concentration, and temperature are solved by the Laplace integral transform method. The outcomes acquired have been examined with the help of graphs drawn for different parameters like Hartmann number, Hall current parameter, inclination of magnetic field, angular velocity and radiation parameter, etc. The variation of the Nusselt number has been shown graphically. It is observed …

Analysis Of A Quantum Attack On The Blum-Micali Pseudorandom Number Generator, Tingfei Feng

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

In 2012, Guedes, Assis, and Lula proposed a quantum attack on a pseudorandom number generator named the Blum-Micali Pseudorandom number generator. They claimed that the quantum attack can outperform classical attacks super-polynomially. However, this paper shows that the quantum attack cannot get the correct seed and provides another corrected algorithm that is in exponential time but still faster than the classical attack. Since the original classical attacks are in exponential time, the Blum-Micali pseudorandom number generator would be still quantum resistant.

Nonoscillatory Solutions Of Higher-Order Fractional Differential Equations, Martin Bohner, Said R. Grace, Irena Jadlovská, Nurten Kılıç

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper deals with the asymptotic behavior of the nonoscillatory solutions of a certain forced fractional differential equations with positive and negative terms, involving the Caputo fractional derivative. The results obtained are new and generalize some known results appearing in the literature. Two examples are also provided to illustrate the results.

Analysis Of Ibnr Liabilities With Interevent Times Depending On Claim Counts, Daniel J. Geiger, Akim Adekpedjou

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We extend a recently proposed stochastic loss reserving model for liabilities from incurred but not reported (IBNR) micro-level claims. We propose viewing the number of claims from an event as a measure of catastrophic severity. This view covers catastrophes with arbitrarily many classes of magnitude. Our Markovian model allows the time between disasters to depend on the previous event's level of severity. Simultaneously, we let the discount rate vary in the same manner. First, we find the moments of IBNR liabilities in our model. Then, we permit a later time horizon for IBNR claims when considered jointly with incurred and …