Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Evaluating Urban Parks Accessibility And Equity: A Case Study Of Hartford, Ct And New Haven, Ct, Natalie Roach, Mara Tu

Honors Scholar Theses

Public parks provide cities with environmental benefits, positive health effects, recreational opportunities, community building, educational spaces, and public amenities. However, certain populations have been systematically denied their fair share of these benefits because of unjust practices in the creation and maintenance of urban parks. With a lens of environmental justice, the goal of this research was to assess park quality and accessibility of two Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Haven, by gathering publicly available information as well as using GIS tools.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has an existing ParkScore rating system that evaluates the quality of a city’s …

Climate Change Preparedness In The Insurance Sector, Daniel Fischler

Honors Scholar Theses

Climate change is the inevitable consequence of human activity since the industrial revolution began centuries ago. Assuming humanity survives and adapts to this scenario, there will be significant impacts on the economy and business. Under these circumstances, the insurance sector in particular will face challenges as the frequency and severity of losses increase due to climate change related events. This paper aims to analyze various options for allowing insurance to maintain viability in this changing environment. The general issue for the future is premiums must be commensurate with climate change related risk in affected areas. As a result, certain coastal …

Assessing The Impact Of Vaccination And Behavior Change On Outbreaks Of Emerging Respiratory Diseases, Mohammed Hameed Alharbi

Mathematics Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to use mathematical models to evaluate the impact of characteristics of respiratory diseases like influenza and COVID-19 either alone or co-circulating and how might influenza vaccine affect this interplay. First, we assess the effects of matching and mismatching between vaccine strains and circulating strains during the Hajj. Then we evaluate the impact of the proportion of asymptomatic COVID- 19 infections on the magnitude of an epidemic under three different behavior change scenarios. Finally, we model the co-circulation of influenza and COVID-19 to investigate whether the influenza vaccine increases the combined disease burden of influenza …

Some Quadratic Quantum P³S With A Linear One-Dimensional Line Scheme, Ian Christopher Lim

Mathematics Dissertations

It is believed that quadratic Artin-Shelter regular (AS-regular) algebras of global dimension four (sometimes called quadratic quantum P3s can be classified using a geometry similar to that developed in the 1980’s by Artin, Tate, and Van den Bergh. Their geometry involved studying a scheme (later called the point scheme) that parametrizes the point modules over a graded algebra. The notion of line scheme (which parametrizes line modules) was introduced later by Shelton and Vancliff. It is known that “generic” quadratic quantum P3s have a finite point scheme and one-dimensional line scheme. A family of algebras with these properties is presented …

The Effects Of Differences In Vaccination Rates Across Socioeconomic Groups On The Size Of Measles Outbreaks, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

Vaccination rates are often presented at the level of a country or region. However, within those areas there might be geographic or demographic pockets that have higher or lower vaccination rates. We use an agent-based model designed to simulate the spread of measles in Irish towns to examine if the effectiveness of vaccination rates to reduce disease at a population level is sensitive to the uniformity of vaccinations across socioeconomic groups. We find that when vaccinations are not applied evenly across socioeconomic groups we see more outbreaks and outbreaks with larger magnitudes.

A Conductivity Analysis Of A Newly Synthesized Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Methyl Ether Hydroxide Electrolyte, Sarah Marie Peterson

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the synthesis and conductive properties of a Poly (ethylene glycol) methyl ether-based polymer electrolyte. The goal of the synthesis is to enhance the hydroxide ion conduction properties of the polymer with its cationic groups attached. The MePEG backbone contained seven ethylene glycol groups and was modified to substitute the hydroxide group in the MePEG with trimethylamine. In addition, the bromide added in the synthesis was exchanged for hydroxide ions to allow for the transportation of hydroxide ions in polymeric electrolytes that can be used in Anion Exchange Membrane Fuel Cells. The newly synthesized polymer was compared to …

Synthesis Of A Dd-Π-Aa Organic Dye For Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells, Hope Lovell

Honors Theses

This project investigates the synthesis of a DD-π-AA (dual donor/dual acceptor) organic dye as a potential sensitizer for dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs). The design of this dye was based off previous research that found dual donor/dual acceptor dyes exhibited promising results when used in a DSC. The donor groups, acceptor groups, and π-bridge were chosen for their stability, ability to absorb in the near-infrared (NIR) region, and intramolecular charge transfer (ICT) abilities.

While many components of the dye were synthesized, the final stages of the synthetic scheme were not completed due to the loss of time from COVID-19. Had the …

Capturing Climate Change: Investigating The Connections Between Environmental Science & Photography, Sophia Wilcox

Honors College

A powerful symbiotic relationship is the one between photography and the field of environmental science. They coexist together in such a way that the progress of one inherently allows for progress in the other. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and illuminate this specific link. From the earliest cameras, photography was able to capture small details that the eye wasn’t able to see. This ability gave scientists the opportunity to capture images of up-close cells, viruses, certain species, and more. As the popularity of caring for the environment increased, the technologies of science and photography grew alongside. The …

Data Driven Models Of Hemlock Woolly Adelgid Impacts And Biological Control, Hannah M. Thompson

Doctoral Dissertations

We present two models of the Adelges tsugae, the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect pest of Tsuga canadensis, eastern hemlock, in the eastern United States. An A. tsugae infestation often results in the death of T. canadensis within years, and has caused significant changes to hemlock forests. We construct two models composed of systems of ordinary differential equations with time dependent parameters to represent seasonality. The first model captures the coupled cycles in T. canadensis health and A. tsugae density. We use field data from Virginia to develop the model and to perform parameter estimation. The mechanisms …

On Decentralization Of Bitcoin: An Asset Perspective, Ling Cheng, Feida Zhu, Huiwen Liu, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in existing centralized financial systems, Bitcoin has always been championed by the crypto community as an example of the spirit of decentralization. While the decentralized nature of Bitcoin's Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm has often been discussed in great detail, no systematic study has so far been conducted to quantitatively measure the degree of decentralization of Bitcoin from an asset perspective -- How decentralized is Bitcoin as a financial asset? …

Dialogue State Tracking With Incremental Reasoning, Lizi Liao, Le Hong Long, Yunshan Ma, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tracking dialogue states to better interpret user goals and feed downstream policy learning is a bottleneck in dialogue management. Common practice has been to treat it as a problem of classifying dialogue content into a set of pre-defined slot-value pairs, or generating values for different slots given the dialogue history. Both have limitations on considering dependencies that occur on dialogues, and are lacking of reasoning capabilities. This paper proposes to track dialogue states gradually with reasoning over dialogue turns with the help of the back-end data. Empirical results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-theart methods in terms of joint …

Deeplight: Robust And Unobtrusive Real-Time Screen-Camera Communication For Real-World Displays, Vu Huy Tran, Gihan Jayatilaka, Ashwin Ashok, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper introduces a novel, holistic approach for robust Screen-Camera Communication (SCC), where video content on a screen is visually encoded in a human-imperceptible fashion and decoded by a camera capturing images of such screen content. We first show that state-of-the-art SCC techniques have two key limitations for in-the-wild deployment: (a) the decoding accuracy drops rapidly under even modest screen extraction errors from the captured images, and (b) they generate perceptible flickers on common refresh rate screens even with minimal modulation of pixel intensity. To overcome these challenges, we introduce DeepLight, a system that incorporates machine learning (ML) models in …

Characterization And Prediction Of Questions Without Accepted Answers On Stack Overflow, Mohamad Yazdaninia, David Lo, Ashkan Sami

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A fast and effective approach to obtain information regarding software development problems is to search them to find similar solved problems or post questions on community question answering (CQA) websites. Solving coding problems in a short time is important, so these CQAs have a considerable impact on the software development process. However, if developers do not get their expected answers, the websites will not be useful, and software development time will increase. Stack Overflow is the most popular CQA concerning programming problems. According to its rules, the only sign that shows a question poser has achieved the desired answer is …

Adaptive Operating Hours For Improved Performance Of Taxi Fleets, Rajiv Ranjan Kumar, Pradeep Varakantham, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Taxi fleets and car aggregation systems are an important component of the urban public transportation system. Taxis and cars in taxi fleets and car aggregation systems (e.g., Uber) are dependent on a large number of self-controlled and profit-driven taxi drivers, which introduces inefficiencies in the system. There are two ways in which taxi fleet performance can be optimized: (i) Operational decision making: improve assignment of taxis/cars to customers, while accounting for future demand; (ii) strategic decision making: optimize operating hours of (taxi and car) drivers. Existing research has primarily focused on the operational decisions in (i) and we focus on …

Molybdenite Re–Os, Titanite And Garnet U–Pb Dating Of The Magushan Skarn Cu–Mo Deposit, Xuancheng District, Middle–Lower Yangtze River Metallogenic Belt, Yue Li, Feng Yuan, Simon M. Jowitt, Fangyue Wang, Xiangling Li, Yufeng Deng, Yunyue Wang, Taofa Zhou

Geoscience Faculty Research

© 2020 Elsevier B.V. The Magushan skarn Cu–Mo deposit is a representative example of the skarn mineralization occurring within the Xuancheng ore district of the Middle–Lower Yangtze River Metallogenic Belt of eastern China. The precise age of an ore deposit is important for understanding the timing of mineralization relative to other geological events in a region and to fully place the formation of a mineral deposit within the geological context of other processes that occur within the study area. Here, we present new molybdenite Re–Os and titanite and andradite garnet U–Pb ages for the Magushan deposit and use these data …

A Matheuristic Algorithm For The Vehicle Routing Problem With Cross-Docking, Aldy Gunawan, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Pieter Vansteenwegen, Vincent F. Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies the integration of the vehicle routing problem with cross-docking (VRPCD). The aim is to find a set of routes to deliver products from a set of suppliers to a set of customers through a cross-dock facility, such that the operational and transportation costs are minimized, without violating the vehicle capacity and time horizon constraints. A two-phase matheuristic based on column generation is proposed. The first phase focuses on generating a set of feasible candidate routes in both pickup and delivery processes by implementing an adaptive large neighborhood search algorithm. A set of destroy and repair operators are …

New Applications For The Kinetic Exclusion Assay (Kinexa), Mark Harrison Smith

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the fundamental principles and applicability of the kinetic exclusion assay (KinExA), developed and marketed by Sapidyne Instruments of Boise, Idaho, since 1995. Chapter One reviews and consolidates the manufacturer’s guidance and many early papers that delineate the practical and theoretical aspects of the technology. In brief, KinExA is a two stage analytical system. In stage one, a number of solutions are prepared, whereby one of the partners is kept constant (the constant binding partner, or CBP), while the other (the titrant) is varied, usually in serial dilution. As the titrant is increased, the free CBP decreases, and …

Exploring The Beginnings Of Algebraic K-Theory, Sarah Schott

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

According to Atiyah, K-theory is that part of linear algebra that studies additive or abelian properties (e.g. the determinant). Because linear algebra, and its extensions to linear analysis, is ubiquitous in mathematics, K-theory has turned out to be useful and relevant in most branches of mathematics. Let R be a ring. One defines K₀(R) as the free abelian group whose basis are the finitely generated projective R-modules with the added relation P ⊕ Q = P + Q. The purpose of this thesis is to study simple settings of the K-theory for rings and …

Whey Protein Powder Analysis By Kjeldahl And Mid-Infrared Spectroscopy, Rose Saxton

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

There is an ever-expanding number of high protein dietary supplements marketed as beneficial to athletes, body builders, infant formulas, elder care, and animal feed. Consumers will pay more for products with high protein per serving data on their nutritional labels, making the accurate reporting of protein content critical to customer confidence. The Kjeldahl Method (KM) is the industry standard to quantitate dairy proteins, but the result is based on nitrogen content, which is an approximation of nitrogen attributable to protein in milk. Optical spectroscopy is commonly used for quality control measurements and has been identified as having the potential to …

Assessment Of Icesat-2 Level 3a Products For Snow Depth Estimation In Remote, Mountainous Watersheds, Colten Michael Elkin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Seasonal snowpack accounts for ~70% of the water supply in the western United States, and measuring snow accumulation and ablation remotely has long been a stated goal of NASA. The 2018 launch of ICESat-2, a spaceborne Lidar system, has offered unparalleled spatial and temporal coverage of mountainous terrain with the potential for unprecedented vertical accuracy. Data from ICESat-2 are used to measure seasonal snow depths using the level-3A ATL08 (land and canopy elevation) product for the Reynolds Creek Experimental Watershed in southwest Idaho and the ATL06 (land ice elevation) product for Wolverine Creek in the Kenai Mountains of Alaska. The …

Ensuring Consistency And Efficiency Of The Incremental Unit Network In A Distributed Architecture, Mir Tahsin Imtiaz

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

An incremental system takes advantage of upcoming data as early as possible. In other words, an incremental system processes received data incrementally. Incremental systems can be useful over non-incremental systems to build spoken dialog systems when we are looking for faster and more human-like behavior. For example, human-to-human conversations are incremental, as a listener does not wait for a speaker to finish speaking to begin understanding. Inspired by the fact that Robot-Ready Spoken Dialog Systems must be incremental and need to work distributedly, and IU framework "breaks" in a distributed architecture, I attempted to use the IU network to fulfill …

Using Remote Sensing Data Fusion Modeling To Track Seasonal Snow Cover In A Mountain Watershed, Allison N. Vincent

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Seasonal snowfall is the largest component of the water budget in many mountain headwater regions around the world. In addition to sustaining biological water needs in drier, lower elevation areas throughout the year, mountain snowpack also provides essential water inputs to the Critical Zone (CZ) - the outer layer of the Earth’s surface, which hosts a variety of biogeochemical processes responsible for transforming inorganic matter into forms usable for life. Water is a known driver of CZ activity, but uncertainty exists in its spatial and temporal interactions with CZ processes, particularly in the complex terrain of heterogeneous mountain areas. Increasing …

Assessing Soil-Related Terroir Factors In Sunnyslope District Vineyards Of Southwest Idaho, Rachael Nicole Haggen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Terroir is the set of factors including climate, soil, and management practices that influence the character of a wine. Of these factors, soil texture and chemistry is a major determinant in wine grape quality (van Leeuwen et al., 2009). Understanding the characteristics of the soil is key to making decisions that support the production of the highest possible quality grapes from the resources available. Few studies have been conducted in the Snake River Valley AVA (SRVAVA). This study seeks to build upon the data already available and provide analysis of vineyard-scale terroir in a leading grape growing district of the …

A Data Adaptive Model For Retail Sales Of Electricity, Johanna Marcelia

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

When fitting a model to a data set, the goal is to create a model that captures the trends present in the data. However, data often contains regions where the underlying model changes or exhibits shifts in certain parameters due to economic events. These locations in the data are known as changepoints, and ignoring them can result in high error and incorrect forecasts. By developing a specific cost function and optimizing using the genetic algorithm, we are able to locate and account for the changepoints in a given data set. We specifically apply this process to the retail sales of …

Zariski Geometries And Quantum Mechanics, Milan Zanussi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Model theory is the study of mathematical structures in terms of the logical relationships they define between their constituent objects. The logical relationships defined by these structures can be used to define topologies on the underlying sets. These topological structures will serve as a generalization of the notion of the Zariski topology from classical algebraic geometry. We will adapt properties and theorems from classical algebraic geometry to our topological structure setting. We will isolate a specific class of structures, called Zariski geometries, and demonstrate the main classification theorem of such structures. We will construct some Zariski structures where the classification …

Modelling The Filling Of Methane In Heterogenous Pore Networks, Samuel Bonnevie

Honors College

In the field of heterogeneous catalysis, there is great interest in the transport properties of ordered mesoporous materials such as SBA-15, but inverting quasi-elastic neutron scattering data for materials with a distribution of pore sizes such as SBA-15is an ill-posed problem. This project aimed to generate an idealized model of methane adsorption in the pores of SBA-15so that in the future, molecular dynamics simulations can be used to study diffusion.By sampling over a canonical ensemble using the Metropolis Monte Carlo Method and using Widom’s insertion method alongside Vaitheeswaran and Rasaiah’s insertion/removal method to calculate the chemical potential, isotherms comparable to …

Rift: A Mobile Application For Umaine, Michael Ciance

Honors College

COVID-19 affected schools and universities nationwide in 2020 and is still an ongoing threat to public safety. With many institutions converting to remote learning and distanced campuses, students and faculty face many challenges. The social climate and issues facing students and faculty is leading to stress, low morale, and overall poor moods. Universities are trying to accommodate as best as possible but what they do is not always enough. A sense of community surrounding schools can be damaged by the processes of social distancing and working from home. Students need a way to communicate what they believe to be important …

Enso Cycle Driven Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Temperature, Salinity, And Nitrate In In The California Current, Nathan Shunk

Honors College

Nitrate, temperature, and salinity conditions in the coastal upwelling regions of the California Current System vary on decadal timescales due to El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycles. This study examines the quarterly variations in these conditions over the period 1979 to 2018 for CalCOFI cross-shelf transect 80, located at Point Conception. The CalCOFI dataset was indexed by NOAA’s Multivariate ENSO Index version two, climatologies were formed over El Nino, La Nina, and neutral quarters and then anomalies were calculated from these climatologies. Variations are most predominantly visible in the upper 200m of the water column and can be seen both …

Visualization And Quantification Of The Laser-Induced Art Of Tio2 By Photoexcitation Of Adsorbed Dyes, Daniela (Labadini) Graf Stillfried Barreto

Graduate Masters Theses

Dye-pretreated anatase TiO2 films, commonly used as photoanodes in dye sensitized solar cells (DSSC), were utilized as a model system to investigate the laser-induced anatase to rutile phase transformation (ART), using N719 dye, N749 dye, D149 dye, and MC540 dye as photo-sensitizers. The visible lasers (532 and 785 nm) used for Raman spectroscopy were able to transform pure anatase into rutile at the laser spot when excitation of the dye sensitizer caused an electron injection from the excited state of the dye molecule into the conduction band of the TiO2. The three dyes with carboxylic acid anchor groups (N719, N749 …

Distributions And Habitat Associations Of Blue Point Pyrgulopsis And Blue Point Tryonia, Chenoa Janine Wilcox

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Springsnails and other crenophilic species are often of conservation concern due to endemism, narrow habitat requirements, and susceptibility to habitat degradation. Because there is a distinct lack of natural history information for many of these organisms, management of species that are of concern is often based on data from non-target species related to the species of interest. In this thesis, I provide background information regarding springsnails in western North America (Chapter 1), describe a study investigating the distribution and habitat associations of two springsnails endemic to a single spring (Chapter 2), and provide supplemental information on habitat characteristics associated with …