Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Semi-Supervised Spatial-Temporal Feature Learning On Anomaly-Based Network Intrusion Detection, Huy Mai

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Due to a rapid increase in network traffic, it is growing more imperative to have systems that detect attacks that are both known and unknown to networks. Anomaly-based detection methods utilize deep learning techniques, including semi-supervised learning, in order to effectively detect these attacks. Semi-supervision is advantageous as it doesn't fully depend on the labelling of network traffic data points, which may be a daunting task especially considering the amount of traffic data collected. Even though deep learning models such as the convolutional neural network have been integrated into a number of proposed network intrusion detection systems in recent years, …

A Simulation Framework For Traffic Safety With Connected Vehicles And V2x Technologies, Md Abu Sayed

Theses and Dissertations

With the advancement in automobile technologies, existing research shows that connected vehicle (CV) technologies can provide better traffic safety through Surrogate Safety Measure (SSM). CV technologies involves two network systems: traffic network and wireless communication network. We found that the research in the wireless communication network for CV did not interact properly with the research in SSM in transportation network, and vice versa. Though various SSM has been proposed in previous studies, a few of them have been tested in simulation software in limited extent. On the other hand, A large body of researchers proposed various communication architecture for CV …

Bottom-Up Understanding Of Informal Settlements: Perspectives Of Urban Slum Dwellers In Nima, Ghana., Bernard Apeku

Theses and Dissertations

More than a quarter of the world’s population lives in informal settlements which house a rapidly growing proportion of the inhabitants of cities in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Accra, Ghana, and in the Global South more generally. However, scholars have shown that the urban planning and urban redevelopment strategies that affect these settlements are top-down in character with minimal resident participation. These prevailing planning and redevelopment strategies are based on the outsiders’ perceptions of informal neighborhoods, rendering them quite inefficient. Therefore, to develop workable policies and strategies that will improve the living condition of informal urban settlers, it is important …

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 …

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 …

Food Hubs And Rebuilding Missing Middle Market Structure In Agriculture: The Social In Supply Chain Development, Stephen Luoni

Community Design Center Faculty Publications and Presentations

Tens of millions of Americans became food insecure during the COVID-19 pandemic as independent farmers dumped millions of tons of food due to economic lockdowns. Yet contract growers looped into vertically integrated monopoly supply chains escaped system breakdowns. Food provisioning is often seen as polarized between local scale and continental/ global market scale. Food supply and consumption are functions more of market structure than scale. Farmers reliant on direct sales to local restaurants, schools, universities, and hospitals saw their markets evaporate overnight. This Food Away from Home market constitutes 54 percent of food consumed nationally yet is vulnerable since direct-to-consumer …

Monitoring White-Tailed Deer Abundance And Habitat Selection In The Albany Pine Bush Preserve Using Unmanned Aerial Systems, Christopher Plummer

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) have seen recent advancements in technology that gave rise to their increasing use in recreational and commercial application, including wildlife conservation. Adaptive management is a must for wildlife conservation, with the goal of learning from management decisions to improve future management strategies, especially in the face of growing human related stressors such as climate change and habitat loss. Monitoring is a critical step for adaptive management, as it allows the manger to learn about the ecology of the natural system and quantify the impacts of management strategies. Species and habitats are frequently monitored for wildlife conservation …

More Kawaii Than A Real-Person Live Streamer: Understanding How The Otaku Community Engages With And Perceives Virtual Youtubers, Zhicong Lu, Chenxinran Shen, Jiannan Li, Hong Shen, Daniel Wigdor

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Live streaming has become increasingly popular, with most streamers presenting their real-life appearance. However, Virtual YouTubers (VTubers), virtual 2D or 3D avatars that are voiced by humans, are emerging as live streamers and attracting a growing viewership in East Asia. Although prior research has found that many viewers seek real-life interpersonal interactions with real-person streamers, it is currently unknown what makes VTuber live streams engaging or how they are perceived differently than real-person streamers. We conducted an interview study to understand how viewers engage with VTubers and perceive the identities of the voice actors behind the avatars (i.e., Nakanohito). The …

Tripdecoder: Study Travel Time Attributes And Route Preferences Of Metro Systems From Smart Card Data, Xiancai Tian, Baihua Zheng, Yazhe Wang, Hsao-Ting Huang, Chih-Cheng Hung

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we target at recovering the exact routes taken by commuters inside a metro system that are not captured by an Automated Fare Collection (AFC) system and hence remain unknown. We strategically propose two inference tasks to handle the recovering, one to infer the travel time of each travel link that contributes to the total duration of any trip inside a metro network and the other to infer the route preferences based on historical trip records and the travel time of each travel link inferred in the previous inference task. As these two inference tasks have interrelationship, most …

A Smarter Way To Manage Mass Transit In A Smart City: Rail Network Management At Singapore’S Land Transport Authority, Steven M. Miller, Thomas H. Davenport

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is no widely agreed upon definition of a supposed “Smart City.” Yet, when you see city employees — in this case city-state employees — working in what are obviously smarter ways, “you know it when you see it.” One such example of a smarter way to work in a smart city setting is the way that employees of the Land Transport Authority (LTA) in Singapore are using a new generation of data driven, AI-enabled support systems to manage the city’s urban rail network. We spoke to LTA officers Kong Wai, Ho (Director of Integrated Operations and Planning) and Chris …

Association Between Stream Impairment By Mercury And Superfund Sites In The Conterminous Usa, Karessa L. Manning

Masters Theses

Mercury is a natural element that can cause harm to the brain, heart, kidneys, lungs, and immune system, especially to fetuses developing in the womb. Many natural and anthropogenic factors contribute to mercury in the environment, such as geologic deposits, landfills, gold and silver mining operations, cement production, and atmospheric deposition. Mercury has been identified as a contaminant of concern at many National Priority List (NPL) sites, however, studies on contamination at NPL sites are often only conducted on a local level. This study was to analyze the potential connection between mercury-contaminated NPL sites and the presence of mercury impaired …

Kaleidoscope Of Urban Evapotranspiration: Exploring The Science And Modeling Approaches, Rubab Saher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Urban evapotranspiration is a complex physical process. It depends on various critical drivers, including the land surface temperature (LST), surface albedo, landscape types, and building orientations. All of these factors create difficulties in the estimation of evapotranspiration (ET) by changing the microclimate conditions. The literature has oversimplified microclimate conditions by considering temperature difference as the only variable defining climate. The physical process depends on land-use changes, building proximities, and landscape types. This study devised three objectives to understand the microclimate effects on ET.

In the first objective, land-use change effects on LST, surface albedo, and ET were analyzed over a …

Estimation Of Spatial Change In Cropland Area And Evaluation Of Irrigation Performance In Imperial Valley Using Remotely Sensed Data, Usha Poudel

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The Imperial Valley (IV) in the US is an extensively irrigated agricultural region, which includes multiple crops changing on an annual and semiannual basis. The valley is facing grave concerns about water management due to its semi-arid environment, water intensive crops, and limited water supply. A simple, inexpensive, and repeatable method to detect changes in cropping patterns may assist irrigation managers to understand crop diversification and associated consumptive use. In addition, a spatial assessment of existing water irrigation system performance and productivity is crucial to benchmark and improve current water management strategies. This thesis estimates the spatial pattern of change …

“Garden-Magic”: Conceptions Of Nature In Edith Wharton’S Fiction, Jonathan Malks

Undergraduate Honors Theses

I situate Edith Wharton’s guiding idea of “garden-magic” at the center of my thesis because Wharton’s fiction shows how a garden space could naturalize otherwise inadmissible behaviors within upper-class society while helping a character tie such behavior to a greater possibility for escape. To this end, Wharton situates gardens as idealized touchstones within the built environment of New York City, spaces where characters believe they can reach self-actualization within a version of nature that is man-made. Actualization, in this sense, stems from a character’s imaginative escape that is enabled by a perception of the garden as a kind of natural …

How Risk-Related Statistics, As Reported In News And Social Media, Are Linked To The Use Of The Public Transit System, Prashiddhi Pokhrel

Thinking Matters Symposium

Due to the pandemic, people have started relying more on televisions, news, social media, and other news outlets for guidance. Moreover, with the increasing amount of news, data, and information there is also an increase in the amount of misleading statistics. People’s opinions and decisions significantly depend on the data, statistics, and information that they are exposed to, as well as their sources. For this project, we want to look at how information and its sources are affecting the decision made by the general public for the usage of the Portland Transit System. It is very important to know why …

Consumer Food Waste Behaviors In Relation To Open Date Label Misinterpretation, Daniel Hutchings, Elisabeth Seliga, Anya O'Meara, Anna Blank

Thinking Matters Symposium

In the United States, the legal framework for product date labeling is minimal and varies across states. Manufacturers have the discretion to use any date label that they deem appropriate, and this lack of uniformity leaves room for misinterpretation by both retailers and consumers. Previous studies have examined consumer misinterpretation of date labels and how this lack of knowledge correlates to food waste behaviors. This study was aimed at understanding how consumers apply their knowledge about date labels to make decisions about purchasing and discarding food. The research was conducted via an intercept survey outside of a grocery store to …

Multifidelity Prediction In Wildfire Spread Simulation: Modeling, Uncertainty Quantification And Sensitivity Analysis, Mario Miguel Valero, Lluís Jofre, Ricardo Torres

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Wildfire behavior predictions typically suffer from significant uncertainty. However, wildfire modeling uncertainties remain largely unquantified in the literature, mainly due to computing constraints. New multifidelity techniques provide a promising opportunity to overcome these limitations. Therefore, this paper explores the applicability of multifidelity approaches to wildland fire spread prediction problems. Using a canonical simulation scenario, we assessed the performance of control variates Monte-Carlo (MC) and multilevel MC strategies, achieving speedups of up to 100x in comparison to a standard MC method. This improvement was leveraged to quantify aleatoric uncertainties and analyze the sensitivity of the fire rate of spread (RoS) to …

Anatomy Of A Conspiracy Theory: Law, Politics, And Science Denialism In The Era Of Covid-19, Brie Sherwin

Texas A&M Law Review

With COVID-19, we are facing the most serious public health threat of our lifetime. Now, more than ever, we need experts and sound scientific advice to guide critical decision-making during the pandemic. With conspiracy theories and other similar rhetorical weapons being used to discredit our scientific experts, we face a myriad of misinformation, mistruths, and all-out attacks on our experts, breeding distrust between the public and the policymakers leading the fight against the pandemic. As President Trump took office, scientists were routinely denigrated and isolated. Furthermore, science denialism has permeated its way up to the highest levels of government, resulting …

Outline - Coyote Population Dynamics, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

The purpose of this lesson is to encourage students to begin thinking about the interactions between animals in an environment and the ways in which those interactions affect each animal. Students will learn about predator/prey dynamics and ecosystem biodiversity through the lens of coyotes and other city predators, primarily cats, by learning about their diets and movement patterns. They will then be asked to consider the impacts of humans and feral cat colonies on urban environments. Students will learn through discussion and interactive activities before presenting their findings via a management plan presentation.

Powerpoint - Coyote Population Dynamics, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Note-Taking Graphic Organizer, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Student Diet And Activity Tracker Worksheet, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Outline - Coyote Traits, Adaptations & Behavior, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

The purpose of this lesson is to facilitate student acquisition of background knowledge on topics related to Canid speciation and evolution. This will focus on unique physical and behavioral characteristics of coyotes from other Canids as well as those adaptations that have allowed them to become so widely distributed through North America, though not quite as well distributed as dogs, which will also be a focus of this lesson. Students will research and present their findings via a Project Based Learning (PBL) poster.

Powerpoint - Coyote Traits, Adaptations & Behavior, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Note-Taking Graphic Organizer, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Outline - Coyote Biodiversity, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

The purpose of this lesson is to facilitate student acquisition of background knowledge on topics related to human and coyote impacts on biodiversity. This will focus on how humans impact biodiversity in urban areas, how coyotes fit into the urban food web, and how the two species interact with one another. Students will research and present their findings via a Project Based Learning (PBL) poster.

Note-Taking Graphic Organizer, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Outline - Coyote Wildlife Management, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

The purpose of this lesson is to facilitate student acquisition of knowledge on topics related to human and coyote interactions. This will focus on how humans and coyotes interact in urban areas and ways in which scientists can mitigate conflicts between the two species. Students will research and present their findings via a PowerPoint presentation.

Powerpoint - Coyote Wildlife Management, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.

Note-Taking Graphic Organizer, Center For Urban Resilience

Module 12: Urban Wildlife

No abstract provided.