Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Discrete Hypergeometric Legendre Polynomials, Tom Cuchta

Mathematics Faculty Research

A discrete analog of the Legendre polynomials defined by discrete hypergeometric series is investigated. The resulting polynomials have qualitatively similar properties to classical Legendre polynomials. We derive their difference equations, recurrence relations, and generating function.

Deep Learning Applications In Medical Bioinformatics, Ziad Omar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

After a patient’s breast cancer diagnosis, identifying breast cancer lymph node metastases is one of the most important and critical factor that is directly related to the patient’s survival. The traditional way to examine the existence of cancer cells in the breast lymph nodes is through a lymph node procedure, biopsy. The procedure process is time-consuming for the patient and the provider, costly, and lacks accuracy as not every lymph node is examined. The intent of this study is to develop an artificial neural network (ANNs) that would map genetic biomarkers to breast lymph node classes using ANNs. The neural …

Improved Glove Word Embedding Using Linear Weighting Scheme For Word Similarity Tasks, Qinglan Lu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the trends in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the use of word embedding. Its aim is to build a low dimensional vector representation of words from text corpora. Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe) and Sikp-Gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS) are two representative word embedding methods. Existing papers have different conclusions on the performance of these two methods. This thesis focuses on GloVe and studies its commonalities and differences with SGNS.

Word co-occurrence is the cornerstone of all word embedding algorithms. One difference between GloVe and SGNS is the definition of co-occurrence. The weight of co-occurring words tapers …

Gamification Platform For Social Engineering Training And Awareness, Rui Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Almost every type of cybersecurity incident leverages one or more social engineering attacks. Nowadays social engineering attack is considered one of the most significant threats to individuals and organizations. It is an attacking technique that manipulates and deceives users to access or gain privileged information. Cybersecurity training is an effective defense method to enhance people's awareness of social engineering attacks, especially training through game playing or educational games. However, fewer tools can customize social engineering simulations based on user's characteristics and needs. Some social engineering training tools are lack motivation, engagement, and interaction.

Gamification is the use of game elements …

Reaction Wheels Fault Isolation Onboard 3-Axis Controlled Satellite Using Enhanced Random Forest With Multidomain Features, Mofiyinoluwa Oluwatobi Folami

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the increasing number of satellite launches throughout the years, it is only natural that an interest in the safety and monitoring of these systems would increase as well. However, as a system becomes more complex it becomes difficult to generate a high-fidelity model that accurately describes all the system components. With such constraints using data-driven approaches becomes a more feasible option. One of the most commonly used actuators in spacecraft is known as the reaction wheel. If these reaction wheels are not maintained or monitored, it could result in mission failure and unwarranted costs. That is why fault detection …

Mining Twitter Sequences Of Product Opinions With Multi-Word Aspect Terms, Vinay Kiran Manjunath

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Social media platforms have opened doors to users' opinions and perceptions. The text remains the most popular means of contact on social media, despite different means of communication (audio/video and images). Twitter is one such microblogging platform that allows people to express their thoughts within 280 characters per message. The freedom of expression has made it difficult to understand the polarity (Positive, Negative, or Neutral) of the tweets/posts. Given a corpus of microblog texts (e.g., "the new iPhone battery life is good, but camera quality is bad"), mining aspects (e.g., battery life, camera quality) and opinions (e.g., good, bad) of …

Giplot: An R Package For Visualizing The Summary Statistics Of A Quantitative Variable, Siddhanta Phuyal, Mamunur Rashid, Jyotirmoy Sarkar

Student Research

A GI plot is a graphical tool that pictorially represents the five-number summary, the mean, the standard deviation, the sample size, and flags potential outliers that are c standard deviations away from the mean together with their frequencies. The GI plot was developed by Sarkar and Rashid (2021) as a companion to the boxplot. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the GIplot package and introduce the main functionality of the package using several examples.

The Influence Of Bottom Type And Water Column Stratification On Reef Fish Community Structure At Gray’S Reef National Marine Sanctuary, Bridget Campbell

Honors Theses

Understanding the physical and oceanographic differences across reef habitats can help researchers assess how those differences influence fish distribution and community structure, which leads to a better understanding of what a healthy reef system looks like. The traditional methods used to assess fish communities on temperate reefs are limited and often focus solely on either the reef structure or water column conditions alone. An assessment of both data sets yields a more complete understanding of the ecosystem as a whole. In this study, Gray’s Reef National Marine Sanctuary (GRNMS) was surveyed both inside and outside a Marine Protected Area (MPA) …

A Unified Framework Of Deep Learning-Based Facial Expression Recognition System For Diversified Applications, Sanoar Hossain, Saiyed Umer, Vijayan K. Asari, Ranjeet Kumar Rout

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This work proposes a facial expression recognition system for a diversified field of appli- cations. The purpose of the proposed system is to predict the type of expressions in a human face region. The implementation of the proposed method is fragmented into three components. In the first component, from the given input image, a tree-structured part model has been applied that predicts some landmark points on the input image to detect facial regions. The detected face region was normalized to its fixed size and then down-sampled to its varying sizes such that the advantages, due to the effect of multi-resolution …

Toi-431/Hip 26013: A Super-Earth And A Sub-Neptune Transiting A Bright, Early K Dwarf, With A Third Rv Planet, A. Osborn, D. J. Armstrong, B. Cale, R. Brahm, R. A. Wittenmyer, F. Dai, I. J. M. Crossfield, E. M. Bryant, V. Adibekyan, R. Cloutier, K. A. Collins, E. Delgado Mena, M. Fridlund, C. Hellier, S. B. Howell, G. W. King, J. Lillo-Box, J. Otegi, S. Sousa, K. G. Stassun, E. C. Matthews, C. Ziegler, G. Ricker, R. Vanderspek, D. W. Latham, S. Seager, J. N. Winn, J. M. Jenkins, J. S. Acton, B. C. Addison, D. R. Anderson, S. Ballard, D. Barrado, S. C. C. Barros, N. Batalha, D. Bayliss, T. Barclay, B. Benneke, J. Berberian Jr., F. Bouchy, B. P. Bowler, C. Briceño, C. J. Burke, M. R. Burleigh, S. L. Casewell, D. Ciardi, K. I. Collins, B. F. Cooke, O. D. S. Demangeon, R. F. Díaz, C. Dorn, D. Dragomir, C. Dressing, X. Dumusque, N. Espinoza, P. Figueira, B. Fulton, E. Furlan, E. Gaidos, C. Geneser, S. Gill, M. R. Road, E. J. Gonzales, V. Gorjian, M. N. Günther, R. Helled, B. A. Henderson, T. Henning, A. Hogan, S. Hojjatpanah, J. Horner, A. W. Howard, S. Hoyer, D. Huber, H. Isaacson, J. S. Jenkins, Eric L.N. Jensen, A. Jordán, A. R. Kane, R. C. Kidwell Jr., J. Kielkopf, N. Law, M. Lendl, M. Lund, R. A. Matson, A. W. Mann, J. Mccormac, M. W. Mengel, F. Y. Morales, L. D. Nielsen, J. Okumura, H. P. Osborn, E. A. Petigura, P. Plavchan, D. Pollacco, E. V. Quintana, L. Raynard, P. Robertson, M. E. Rose, A. Roy, M. Reefe, A. Santerne, N. C. Santos, P. Sarkis, J. Schlieder, R. P. Schwarz, N. J. Scott, A. Shporer, A. M. S. Smith, C. Stibbard, C. Stockdale, P. A. Strøm, J. D. Twicken, T.-G. Tan, A. Tanner, J. Teske, R. H. Tilbrook, C. G. Tinney, S. Udry, J. N. Villaseñor, J. I. Vines, S. X. Wang, L. M. Weiss, R. G. West, P. J. Wheatley, D. J. Wright, H. Zhang, F. Zohrabi

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

We present the bright (V_mag = 9.12), multiplanet system TOI-431, characterized with photometry and radial velocities (RVs). We estimate the stellar rotation period to be 30.5 ± 0.7 d using archival photometry and RVs. Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) objects of Interest (TOI)-431 b is a super-Earth with a period of 0.49 d, a radius of 1.28 ± 0.04 R_⊕, a mass of 3.07 ± 0.35 M_⊕, and a density of 8.0 ± 1.0 g cm⁻³; TOI-431 d is a sub-Neptune with a period of 12.46 d, a radius of 3.29 ± 0.09 …

2021 Assessment Of The Status Of The West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource, David V. Fairclough, Sybrand Alex Hesp, Ainslie Denham, Emily A. Fisher, Rachel Marks, Karina L. Ryan, Elaine Lek, Rhys Allen, Brett M. Crisafulli

Fisheries research reports

A recovery program for the West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource was introduced between late 2007 and early 2010, based on the maintenance of retained catches of demersal species (overall suite and each indicator species) by both the commercial and recreational sectors below 50% of the catches reported in 2005/06 (original catch recovery benchmarks).

Catch reductions were aimed at reducing exploitation levels (F, long-term fishing mortality of the key indicator species’ stocks) to below the threshold reference point (F = M, the natural mortality rate), which would then allow stocks to recover to above the …

The Coastal Monitor: Vol. 7 No. 3, John Tanacredi Ph.D.

The Coastal Monitor

Where has all the pollution gone? No hazardous toxic algal blooms? Incredible summer estuarine water quality! No fish kills. Banner years in recreational fisheries for Stripers and Blues and incredible numbers of Humpback whales! No going to restaurants, so greater at home use of water and septic systems! Since March 2020, drier years than most, thus reducing runoff with fertilizers and organic pesticides, resulting in reduced water contamination. So maybe, just maybe, this COVID- 19 period which has altered our collective lives forever, has also resulted in a grand experiment on what has been hiding in plain sight? That is, …

Bellingham's Housing Ecosystem, Malene Garcia

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

The goal of my project was to understand what puts people at risk of becoming unhoused and what solutions are the most effective in combating and preventing houselessness.

To figure this out, I used Bellingham as a case study. I did research on homelessness in general, and then used that to guide my research specific to Bellingham. I focused on the causes of houselessness, the demographics of those experiencing houselessness, and the challenges that they face. Then, I researched solutions. To supplement this research, and get different perspectives specific to Bellingham, I interviewed people working in three different organizations: The …

What's In That Scat: An Analysis Of Canada Lynx Diet And Distribution In The North Cascades Ecosystem, Antonia Parrish

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

This research provides critical information on the diet and distribution of the elusive North Cascades lynx population. Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) are considered threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act and are the focus of protection efforts by the state of Washington as a result of climate change, heightened competition, and human interference. I analyzed the diet and distribution of both lynx and coyote (Canis latrans) in the North Cascades to determine whether there was an overlap of prey and habitat that could constrain lynx restoration. During the summer of 2020, the hiking trails in the North Cascades National Park …

Bivalve Monitoring At Weaverling Spit, Nathalie Wagler

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A service learning project with the Samish Indian Nation to provide materials for increased volunteer training protocol for their bivalve monitoring research. This project is an extrapolation on my College of the Environment capstone project, where I analyzed data collected by Anacortes High School students on the quantity, species, and size of bivalves on Weaverling Spit, land owned by the Samish Indian Nation in Anacortes, WA. Students annually visit Weaverling Spit and follow a protocol to collect this data on bivalves, which hold cultural, economical, and ecological significance to the Samish Indian Nation. While the students are trained on bivalve …

Trade Bait: Season 3, Ben Bagley

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

A 5-episode podcast series dissecting the use of statistics in the NFL and NFL Media

Assessment Of Heavy Metals In Sharks From The Arabian Gulf Waters, The United Arab Emirates, Noor Alali

Theses

Metals occur naturally in the environment however anthropogenic activities have contributed to their increase in the marine ecosystem. As elements have the ability to bioaccumulate, biomagnify and transfer between biological compartments throughout the food web, they pose a great threat to living biota. The characteristics of the Arabian Gulf make it a harsh environment for marine species especially when multiple stressors are acting together. Rhizoprionodon acutus (milk shark) and Carcharhinus sorrah (spot-tail shark) are essential compartments of the Arabian Gulf ecosystem. As they are found up in the food chain and considered a predator species they are under the threat …

The Red Palm Weevil In The Uae: Morphological Diversity And Rnai-Mediated Gene Silencing Of Two Cuticle-Related Genes, Safa Hashem Mohammed Musaed

Theses

Red Palm Weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), threatens palm trees worldwide. A better understanding of this insect can help with designing an adequate management strategy. This study aimed to a better understand the morphological diversity of RPW and examined RNAi-mediated gene silencing of two cuticle-related genes, vestigial (vg) gene, and Laccase (Lac2) gene by injecting the last larval stage with double-stranded RNA (dsRNA). For the morphological diversity study, adults of RPW were collected and classified by their prothoracic spots. Additional morphological characters were measured such as Pronotum Length (PL), Pronotum Width (PW), Elytra Length (EL), Elytra Width (EW), and …

Manufacturing: The Qualitative Study Of A Transition To A Green Facility, Brandon David Staves

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This qualitative study focused on answering three core questions: How have facilities reduce pollutions in regards to the quality of air, water, land, light and noise? Which Types of pollution reduction projects are more or less successful to implement? What types of pollution are facilities focusing on and why? The results of the 15 companies surveyed show a variety of projects that facilities have used to reduce pollution, it also shows that cost is a major factor in the unsuccessful projects, and that facilities are actively focused on reducing Air, Land, and Water pollution. While the data shows a variety …

A Network-Based Approach For Computational Drug Repurposing On Cancer Data, Ann Reba, Thomas Alexander

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we are interested in finding the best drugs that can be repurposed for the disease and able to find the adverse effects such drugs that are FDA-Approved. Developing an effective drug can be a time-consuming and expensive crucible method. Network-based machine learning methods are used for predicting a given drug for A that can be used for B. It aims at finding new indications for already existing drugs and therefore increases the available therapeutic choices at a fraction of the cost of new drug development. The perturbation gene expression data corresponding to the MCF7 cell line was …

Using Desmos Activitybuilder For Dynamic Proof Building, Eryn M. Maher, Ha Nguyen

College of Science and Mathematics Faculty Presentations

We will demonstrate a Desmos Activity used to support proof building for middle grades Geometry concepts. Desmos ActivityBuilder is a user-friendly interactive tool designed for teaching mathematics that integrates scientific calculators, graphing abilities, virtual manipulatives, media, and more. Participants will create a task in Desmos ActivityBuilder to use in their classroom, copying and editing a dynamic proof-building task.

Introduction To Discrete Mathematics: An Oer For Ma-471, Mathieu Sassolas

Open Educational Resources

The first objective of this book is to define and discuss the meaning of truth in mathematics. We explore logics, both propositional and first-order , and the construction of proofs, both formally and human-targeted. Using the proof tools, this book then explores some very fundamental definitions of mathematics through set theory. This theory is then put in practice in several applications. The particular (but quite widespread) case of equivalence and order relations is studied with detail. Then we introduces sequences and proofs by induction, followed by number theory. Finally, a small introduction to combinatorics is …

Why Daubechies Wavelets Are So Successful, Solymar Ayala Cortez, Laxman Bokati, Aaron Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many applications, including analysis of seismic signals, Daubechies wavelets perform much better than other families of wavelets. In this paper, we provide a possible theoretical explanation for the empirical success of Daubechies wavelets. Specifically, we show that these wavelets are optimal with respect to any optimality criterion that satisfies the natural properties of scale- and shift-invariance.

While, In General, Uncertainty Quantification (Uq) Is Np-Hard, Many Practical Uq Problems Can Be Made Feasible, Anderson Gray, Scott Ferson, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In general, many general mathematical formulations of uncertainty quantification problems are NP-hard, meaning that (unless it turned out that P = NP) no feasible algorithm is possible that would always solve these problems. In this paper, we argue that if we restrict ourselves to practical problems, then the correspondingly restricted problems become feasible -- namely, they can be solved by using linear programming techniques.

Developing Covalent-Organic Frameworks For Protecting Against Radiation, Megan J. Francis

Senior Theses

This research focuses on the development of lightweight, thermostable dual-function materials for secondary radiation protection and sensing by the integration of hydrogen-rich aliphatic chains inside the porous matrix of covalent-organic frameworks (COFs). The main aims of this project are the synthesis of organic linkers for forming a robust porous COF, synthesizing the porous COF through a condensation reaction, the development of hydrogen-rich aliphatic chains, and integration of aliphatic chains into COFs through click chemistry. This manuscript outlines the methodology and development of a novel self-assembled crystalline, porous material engineered to combine the functions of a shield and sensitive dosimeter. The …

Odu Scientist Tapped To Edit National Climate Assessment, Amber Kennedy

News Items

No abstract provided.

Analyzing Alternative Modes Of Transportation & Carbon Footprint In Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Sean M. Gallagher, Paul C. Krakoviak

Student Publications

As millions of students embark on their journey of college, many use different forms of transportation in and around their respective areas. The aim of this study incorporates the analysis of various forms of transportation, as well as each transportation method's marginal greenhouse gas emissions and marginal cost per mile in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Data was collected by testing each mode of transportation on a short trip to the local Walmart. The results show that the two modes of transportation that contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions were biking and walking. The results for other modes of transportation that constitute …

A Large-Scale Benchmark For Food Image Segmentation, Xiongwei Wu, Xin Fu, Ying Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food image segmentation is a critical and indispensible task for developing health-related applications such as estimating food calories and nutrients. Existing food image segmentation models are underperforming due to two reasons: (1) there is a lack of high quality food image datasets with fine-grained ingredient labels and pixel-wise location masks—the existing datasets either carry coarse ingredient labels or are small in size; and (2) the complex appearance of food makes it difficult to localize and recognize ingredients in food images, e.g., the ingredients may overlap one another in the same image, and the identical ingredient may appear distinctly in different …

An Opportunistic Survey Reveals An Unexpected Coronavirus Diversity Hotspot In North America, Hon S. Ip, Kathryn M. Griffin, Jeffrey D. Messer, Megan E. Winzeler, Susan A. Shriner, Mary Lea Killian, Mia Kim Torchetti, Thomas J. Deliberto, Brian R. Amman, Caitlin M. Cossaboom, R. Reid Harvey, Natalie M. Wendling, Hannah Rettler, Dean Taylor, Jonathan S. Towner, Casey Barton Behravesh, David S. Blehert

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

In summer 2020, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detected on mink farms in Utah. An interagency One Health response was initiated to assess the extent of the outbreak and included sampling animals from on or near affected mink farms and testing them for SARS-CoV-2 and non-SARS coronaviruses. Among the 365 animals sampled, including domestic cats, mink, rodents, raccoons, and skunks, 261 (72%) of the animals harbored at least one coronavirus. Among the samples that could be further characterized, 127 alphacoronaviruses and 88 betacoronaviruses (including 74 detections of SARS-CoV-2 in mink) were identified. Moreover, at least 10% (n …

Variations, Validations, Degradations, And Noninvasive Determination Of Pregnancy Using Fecal Steroid Metabolites In Free-Ranging Pronghorn, Cole A. Bleke, Eric M. Gese, Susannah S. French

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

Pregnancy status is a key parameter used to assess reproductive performance of a species as it represents a starting point for measuring vital rates. Vital rates allow managers to determine trends in populations such as neonate survival and recruitment; two important factors in ungulate population growth rates. Techniques to determine pregnancy have generally involved capture and restraint of the animal to obtain blood samples for determining serum hormone levels. Non-invasive pregnancy assessment, via feces, eliminates any hazards between handler and animal, as well as removes handling-induced physiological biases. Using noninvasive fecal sampling, we conducted hormone validations, investigated pregnancy rates, and …