Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Cancel Culture: Who Or What Will Be Next?, Christine Trumper

Honors Projects in Data Science

This paper utilizes Data Science and Applied Statistic techniques, to perform an analytical dive into Cancel Culture as it is referenced and used on Twitter. The research focuses on analyzing how Cancel Culture has affected the sentiment of Twitter, specifically how it impacts prominent topics in the media that have occurred between February 2021 to September 2021. The development of a topic and sentiment analysis will be based on 1,302,844 Tweets collected using Twitter’s API. Cancel Culture became popularized on social media in the past few years and there is little concrete information regarding its process and the demographics it …

Identifying Factors That Lead To Injury In The Nfl, Matthew Toner

Honors Projects in Data Science

This study hypothesizes that injury-causing factors can be identified through training machine learning models with NFL injury data. The machine learning process entailed web scraping, pre-processing, cleaning, modeling, and analyzing NFL injury data to identify these factors. The features used to model injuries included the following: games played, games started, weight, height, age, year, years of experience, starting position, and team. The four models used to model NFL injuries were Logistic Regression, Decision Trees, Random Forests, and Gradient Boosted Trees. The model with the best performance was the Gradient Boosted Trees model, with an F1 score of 0.508. In addition, …

Binary Transition Metal Oxides@Reduced Graphene Oxide@Polyaniline As Bifunctional Electrode Materials For Energy Conversion And Storage, Jonghyun Choi

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

The world’s increasing consumption of energy has led researchers to focus on research and development for high performance-energy devices. Development of materials used in energy devices is currently focused on improving the performance and stability of devices. Composite materials are well known as an effective way to improve the performance of an energy device. A composite is a combination of two or more materials with different properties, and such combinations can be of great help in advancing the performance of a composite material by adding the advantages or compensating for the disadvantages of each material.

In this study, ternary composite …

Twitter's Role In An Increasingly Polarized Political Climate; A Look Into The 2020 Us Elections, Leanne Kendall

Honors Projects in Data Science

Amidst politically strained times, one might wonder what has cause such an exaggerated gap between the views of democrats and republicans. For years, research has suggested the US’s voting population is becoming increasingly politically polarized, with one of the causes being social media. This study's purpose is to understand more about the role that social media plays in the polarization of parties in the US. The study is comprised of the analysis of over 3,000,000 tweets from 9/22/2020 through 11/10/2020 that mention or are written by senate and presidential candidates. Natural language processing, network graphing, and sentiment analyses were utilized …

Social Media Discussion On Covid-19 Impact On Mental Health In The Us, Uk, And India, Weixiao Sun

Honors Projects in Data Science

Discovered in December 2019, Coronavirus (Covid-19) is an infectious disease that has spread rapidly around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020. The pandemic has increased the occurrence of mental health problems including depression, stress, and anxiety. This research used real-life Tweets collected related to Covid-19 from March 2020 until October 2021. The objective is to analyze Tweets from the US, UK, and India to discover what topics people are discussing about Covid-19's impact on mental health. The theme for the US was related to government and politics, some dominant users in the …

Carbon Storage And Methane Production From Interdunal Wetlands In Saugatuck Harbor Natural Area, Grace Behrens

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Wetlands have a dual impact on the climate: a cooling effect caused by organic matter accumulation in anoxic sediments (removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere); and a warming effect caused by methane emissions from these sediments. In this study, we analyzed the relative importance of both processes in interdunal wetlands in the Saugatuck Harbor Natural Area (SHNA). The SHNA wetlands are a unique ecosystem, dependent on high water levels in Lake Michigan. Thus, carbon accumulation in the wetlands may be ephemeral as the lake level falls. Our goal in this study was to evaluate the extent of carbon accumulation in …

Terrestrial Trash Taphonomy: Characterizing Roadside Litter As Potential Sources Of Plastic In Waterways, Kailey M. Hoving, Kelly J. Gotham

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

We collected and characterized roadside litter from 300 m transects along 4 streets in Holland, Michigan that included stream crossings or storm drain inlets. Opposite sides of 3 roads were collected as separate sampling sites, and 4 of these were resampled after ~30 days, yielding 11 different collections. Litter was unevenly distributed within single transects, with some concentrations of litter (e.g., car parts, styrofoam) apparently resulting from single, localized releases of material. Despite such idiosyncratic occurrences, factor analysis of collected items placed associated sites (opposite sides of roads and resampled sites) in non-overlapping domains. Of 11,223 items analyzed, 83.2% were …

Constructing Digital Elevation Models From Lake Michigan Dune Imagery, Blake Harlow, Jack Krebsbach

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Lake Michigan dune complexes evolve as winds and waves move the sand, causing major topographic changes over time. The Hope College Dune Group has been using remote sensing data from drone imagery to model various aspects of these dunes. In order to better understand the dune dynamics, a digital terrain model (DTM) is desired. A DTM is an elevation map of the dune’s bare ground surface which excludes ground obstructions such as trees and bushes. We have attempted to use traditional methods that have been developed for processing LIDAR data in order to construct these DTMs from our drone imagery, …

Presence Or Absence Of Microcystins Within The Lake Macatawa Watershed, Keiley M. Hoving, Garrett E. Peck

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Cyanobacteria, commonly known as blue-green algae, are freshwater aquatic microorganisms that are important indicators of climate change. They also release microcystins: toxins that can cause sickness, organ failure, or even death in plants, animals and humans. Studies have monitored microcystin presence and concentration in large-scale Cyanobacterial blooms, such as in Lake Erie, but often omit smaller scale instances. This project determines whether or not microcystins are present in the Lake Macatawa Watershed and identifies important conditional factors associated with microcystin presence to conclude if harmful algal blooms like those of Lake Erie are plausible locally. Six sample locations along the …

Machine Learning Applications Using Scikit-Learn And Tensorflow, Trevor Palmatier, Kenneth Munyuza

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Machine learning (ML) is a powerful tool with vast applications in pattern-recognition and identification tasks. Our goal was to explore different applications of machine learning and develop a working understanding of the processes required for the effective application of ML models to problem-solving. Using SciKit-Learn for traditional ML models and TensorFlow for neural networks, existing techniques were explored for two major categories of ML tasks: Regression and Classification modeling. This knowledge was then applied in a biomedical engineering pilot research study (in collaboration with Dr. Brooke Odle, Engineering) analyzing manual patient-handling tasks using data from inertial measuring units (IMUs) and …

Connecting Chemical Composition And Methane Production In A West Michigan Peatland, Rachel Shaw, Grace Behrens, Lauren Bryan, Alexis Koehl, Christian Lundy

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

The future net radiative forcing of peatlands will depend in large part on changes in methane emissions. However, current climate models lack a mechanistic representation of methane production. We conducted an anaerobic incubation experiment using peat from various depths in five cores collected from a West Michigan peatland in order to connect methane production to observable differences in the chemical composition of peat and peat pore water. We hypothesized that less decomposed peat may have a larger supply of fermentable sugars that can thus produce more methane than more decomposed peat. C:N, hydrolyzable amino acids, and neutral sugars were analyzed …

Automatic Alignment Of Remote Imagery For Use In Sand Dune Modeling, Heleyna Tucker, Theodore Lockett, Blake Harlow, Jackson Krebsbach

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

The Hope College Dune Group has been studying West Michigan sand dunes for over twenty years. The group’s interests include observing the mechanisms and effects of sand transport, as well as learning how sand movement and resident dune vegetation affect one another. One of the fundamental tasks of this group is to use machine learning algorithms to create accurate ground-surface and vegetation models from drone imagery in an automated way. A key step in this process is the identification of various types of surface coverage–such as sand, live grass, trees, and other vegetation–automatically from images. An eventual goal of this …

Carbon-Carbon Bond Activation: Optimization Of Decarbonylation-Exchange Reactions Of Diortho-Fluoro Pyridyl Ketone With Boronic Acids, Therese A. Joffre, Luke J. Shoemaker, Eric A. Salisbury, Erik J. Schoonover, Jacob P. Vanderroest

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Rhodium-catalyzed decarbonylation reactions have been shown to occur readily with a variety of substituted pyridyl ketones. However, the 2,6-diortho-fluoro pyridyl ketone does not undergo decarbonylation on its own. When testing the unreactive ketone, a reaction was found with boronic acids that leads to an aryl ring exchange and subsequent decarbonylation. This decarbonylation-exchange reaction was further optimized by evaluating three promising sets of experimental conditions. The 2,6-diortho-fluoro ketone was reacted with a series of boronic acids to assess the scope of this transformation using these sets of experimental conditions.

Algoraph But In C++, Adam James Czeranko, Andres Louis Solorzano

21st Annual Celebration of Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity (2022)

Given a configuration of “pebbles” on a graph G, a pebbling move removes two pebbles from a source vertex and one pebble is added to an adjacent vertex. A vertex is reachable if there is a sequence of pebbling moves that places one pebble on that vertex; a graph is solvable if every vertex is reachable. The pebbling number of graph G is the smallest integer π(G), such that any configuration that uses π(G) pebbles is solvable. A graph satisfies the two-pebbling property if for any configuration of more than 2π(G) - q pebbles, where q is the number of …

Self-Supervised Video Object Segmentation Via Cutout Prediction And Tagging, Jyoti Kini, Fahad Shahbaz Khan, Salman Khan, Mubarak Shah

Computer Vision Faculty Publications

We propose a novel self-supervised Video Object Segmentation (VOS) approach that strives to achieve better object-background discriminability for accurate object segmentation. Distinct from previous self-supervised VOS methods, our approach is based on a discriminative learning loss formulation that takes into account both object and background information to ensure object-background discriminability, rather than using only object appearance. The discriminative learning loss comprises cutout-based reconstruction (cutout region represents part of a frame, whose pixels are replaced with some constant values) and tag prediction loss terms. The cutout-based reconstruction term utilizes a simple cutout scheme to learn the pixel-wise correspondence between the current …

2022 Residential Metals Abatement Program (Rmap) Field Sampling Plan (Fsp) – Indoor Dust – Group 4 Monroe Head Start, Former Hawthorne School, Margaret Leary Elementary, And Ramsay Elementary, Elsie King, Christopher Berg, Thomas J. Beckman

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Three-Heartbeat Multilead Ecg Recognition Method For Arrhythmia Classification, Liang-Hung Wang, Yan-Ting Yu, Wei Liu, Lu Xu, Chao-Xin Xie, Tao Yang, I-Chun Kuo, Xin-Kang Wang, Jie Gao, Patricia Angela R. Abu

Department of Information Systems & Computer Science Faculty Publications

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is the primary basis for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. However, the amount of ECG data of patients makes manual interpretation time-consuming and onerous. Therefore, the intelligent ECG recognition technology is an important means to decrease the shortage of medical resources. This study proposes a novel classification method for arrhythmia that uses for the very first time a three-heartbeat multi-lead (THML) ECG data in which each fragment contains three complete heartbeat processes of multiple ECG leads. The THML ECG data pre-processing method is formulated which makes use of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database as training samples. Four arrhythmia classification …

Data-Driven Design And Analysis Of Next Generation Mobile Networks For Anomaly Detection And Signal Classification With Fast, Robust And Light Machine Learning, Muhammed Furkan Küçük

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on machine (and deep) learning applications (including clustering,anomaly detection and signal classification) for self-organizing and next generation mobile networks in wireless communications. Specifically, this dissertation document will address the three different topics.

First, in the study titled “Performance analysis of neural network topologies and hyperparameters for deep clustering”, we explore the relationship between the clustering performance and network complexity. Deep learning found its initial footing in supervised applications such as image and voice recognition successes of which were followed by deep generative models across similar domains. In recent years, researchers have proposed creative learning representations to utilize …

Vampires And Other Diseases: Stochastic Infection Dynamics Of Small Populations, Marijn Jaarsma

Honors Projects in Science and Technology

Mathematical models are powerful tools often applied in the field of epidemiology. The type and shape of the model will differ between different types of diseases. In this study, stochastic dynamical models are applied to the entertaining example of vampires, and the results of this analysis are compared to real-life diseases with small populations of infected. The data used comes from pop-culture depictions of vampires in literature, television shows, movies, and fan pages associated with these depictions. The aim of this study is to serve as an educational tool for modeling diseases with small populations to predict and control the …

Superfluidity Of Dipolar Excitons In A Double Layer Of Α -T3 With A Mass Term, Oleg L. Berman, Godfrey Gumbs, Gabriel P. Martins, Paula Fekete

Publications and Research

We predict Bose-Einstein condensation and superfluidity of dipolar excitons, formed by electron-hole pairs in spatially separated gapped hexagonal α − T3 (GHAT3) layers. In the α − T3 model, the AB-honeycomb lattice structure is supplemented with C atoms located at the centers of the hexagons in the lattice. We considered the α − T3 model in the presence of a mass term which opens a gap in the energy-dispersive spectrum. The gap opening mass term, caused by a weak magnetic field, plays the role of Zeeman splitting at low magnetic fields for this pseudospin-1 system. The band structure of GHAT3 …

The Development Of Dipyrrin Platforms For Oxygen Reduction, Myles Steed

Student Symposium

A redox-active ligand scaffold, dipyrrin, was synthesized in the interest of activating oxygen. The synthesis of the scaffold was modified from previous pathways. The original pathway used a Negishi-coupling followed by condensation with a benzaldehyde using pyrrole and di-tert-butyl anisole before being demethylated using either boron tribromide or a thiolate. The modified synthesis constructs the scaffold with a Negishi-coupling followed by a condensation with a benzaldehyde using pyrrole and a silyl protected di-methyl-phenol before being deprotected using triethylamine trihydrofluoride. The new pathway provides the opportunity limit toxic reagents and improve the overall efficiency of the synthesis. The dipyrrin scaffold was …

Animal Care Observation Internship, Chandler Carr

Student Symposium

Zoos contain a wide variety of animals that each have idiosyncratic behavioral patterns, personalities and preferences. Unlike scientific literature, which tends to focus on the population, zoos take the wants and needs of individuals as priority. It would, thus, be beneficial for the zoo to have a detailed account of individual behavior throughout the day so the zoo knows how best to care for individuals. However, it is very likely that a few zookeepers watch over several animals at a time and have tasks to perform throughout the day. Watching and documenting specific behaviors at a specific time is a …

Debe Ser Dirigida: Theories Of Community Organizing For Research Management In The Context Of Rural Ecuador, Meghan Edwards

Student Symposium

This research analysis and literature review discusses the factors that mobilize individuals to take an active role in community-led resource management. After reviewing major contemporary theories of resource management such as Elinor Ostrom's polycentric theory, CPR theories, and Arnstein's ladder, the essay then applies these theories to the context of the Quijos Valley in Ecuador, where the author conducted informal interviews with community members both involved and not-involved in managing fragile soil ecosystems. The literature review considers the idea that individuals are more likely to take an active role in research management when there are strong community bonds, and highlights …

Can Rigorous Metaphorical Thinking Improve Learning Outcomes?, Arian Dovald

Campus Research Day

Theoretical metaphors are a novel way of analyzing theories in physics. Thinking of physical models as theoretical metaphors clarifies the role of language in scientific modeling. They show how theories make connections between concepts, language, and math. I propose a study to measure the effect on learning outcomes of explicit instruction on theoretical metaphors.

Performance Comparison Of The Filesystem And Embedded Key-Value Databases, Jesse Hines, Nicholas Cunningham

Campus Research Day

A common scenario when developing local applications is storing many records and then retrieving them by ID. A developer can simply save the records as files or use an embedded database. Large numbers of files can slow down filesystems, but developers may want to avoid a dependency on an embedded database if it offers little benefit for their use case. We will compare the performance for the insert, update, get and delete operations and the space efficiency of storing records as files vs. using key-value embedded databases including RocksDB, LevelDB, Berkley DB, and SQLite.

*Interactive Earthquake Visualization With Open Data, Matous Hybl

Campus Research Day

Because earthquakes claim thousands of lives and billions of dollars yearly, there is a great need to recognize patterns in seismic data. While some tools for analysis exist, most geological software is expensive and open earthquake visualizations are limited. In this project, we provide accessible earthquake visualizations aimed to encourage geologists, and science enthusiasts in general, to explore open data using accessible, yet powerful, tools.

Chattanooga Crime Over Time: An Analysis Of Police Incident Open Data, Logan Bateman

Campus Research Day

The police and citizens of Chattanooga may want to know where the most crime occurs, what time of day is crime or police incidents most likely to occur over time. This information can help them understand the crime hotspots in the area. This research work presents a dashboard built upon open data in attempt to bring understanding and insights to the police and citizens about police incidents from the city of Chattanooga over the past five years.

Investigation Of Sulphide-Poor Gold Mineralization At The Deep A Zone, Kiena Complex, Québec, Stephanie A. Kobylinski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The Kiena Complex is located halfway between Malartic and Val d’Or in Québec, within the Abitibi Greenstone belt in the Superior Province. This study examined mineralization at the Kiena Complex using detailed core logging, geochemical analysis of wall rock, petrography, EPMA, and gold deportment studies. The analysis and interpretations indicate that the unique sulphide-poor gold-rich quartz veins of the Deep A Zone at the Kiena Complex contain 500 μm²) are located at the contact of quartz and corroded albite grains, and fine gold grains (5-500 μm²) are hosted within the corroded albite.

Flexible Modelling Of Time-Dependent Covariate Effects With Correlated Competing Risks: Application To Hereditary Breast And Ovarian Cancer Families, Seungwoo Lee

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis aims to develop a flexible approach for modelling time-dependent covariate effects on event risk using B-splines in the presence of correlated competing risks. The performance of the proposed model was evaluated via simulation in terms of the bias and precision of the estimation of the parameters and penetrance functions. In addition, we extended the concordance index to account for time-dependent effects and competing events simultaneously and demonstrated its inference procedures. We applied our proposed methods to data rising from the BRCA1 mutation families from the breast cancer family registry to evaluate the time-dependent effects of mammographic screening and …

A Weighted Probability Measure For Objects In Euclidean Space, Alessandro Xello

Mathematics Colloquium Series

Since we were little kids, we developed our own sense dimension as a measure of some kind of extent. Whether it be length, width, or height, we intuitively understand how these features fit in the three-dimensional world we live in, and how to measure it. Nevertheless, mathematicians have found themselves dealing with objects, like fractals, and spaces, like R4 , that challenge our intuitive and self-developed definition of measure, to the point that it is not sufficient anymore. Lebesgue measure and Harsdorf measure for example are ways of assigning a measure to objects that belong to n-dimensional Euclidean spaces, in …