Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Analytic Solution Of 1d Diffusion-Convection Equation With Varying Boundary Conditions, Małgorzata B. Glinowiecka-Cox

University Honors Theses

A diffusion-convection equation is a partial differential equation featuring two important physical processes. In this paper, we establish the theory of solving a 1D diffusion-convection equation, subject to homogeneous Dirichlet, Robin, or Neumann boundary conditions and a general initial condition. Firstly, we transform the diffusion-convection equation into a pure diffusion equation. Secondly, using a separation of variables technique, we obtain a general solution formula for each boundary type case, subject to transformed boundary and initial conditions. While eigenvalues in the cases of Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions can be constructed easily, the Robin boundary condition necessitates solving a transcendental algebraic …

Error Propagation And Algorithmic Design Of Contour Integral Eigensolvers With Applications To Fiber Optics, Benjamin Quanah Parker

Dissertations and Theses

In this work, the finite element method and the FEAST eigensolver are used to explore applications in fiber optics. The present interest is in computing eigenfunctions u and propagation constants β satisfing [sic] the Helmholtz equation Δu + k²n²u = β²u. Here, k is the freespace wavenumber and n is a spatially varying coefficient function representing the refractive index of the underlying medium. Such a problem arises when attempting to compute confinement losses in optical fibers that guide laser light. In practice, this requires the computation of functions u referred to as …

From Mdp To Alphazero, David Robert Sewell

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper I will explain the AlphaGo family of algorithms starting from first principles and requiring little previous knowledge from the reader. The focus will be upon one of the more recent versions AlphaZero but I hope to explain the core principles that allowed these algorithms to be so successful. I will generally refer to AlphaZero as theses [sic] core set of principles and will make it clear when I am referring to a specific algorithm of the AlphaGo family. AlphaZero in short combines Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with Deep learning and self-play. We will see how these …

Simulating Dislocation Densities With Finite Element Analysis, Ja'nya Breeden, Dow Drake, Saurabh Puri

REU Final Reports

A one-dimensional set of nonlinear time-dependent partial differential equations developed by Acharya (2010) is studied to observe how differing levels of applied strain affect dislocation walls. The framework of this model consists of a convective and diffusive term which is used to develop a linear system of equations to test two methods of the finite element method. The linear system of partial differential equations is used to determine whether the standard or Discontinuous Galerkin method will be used. The Discontinuous Galerkin method is implemented to discretize the continuum model and the results of simulations involving zero and non-zero applied strain …

Client Access Feature Engineering For The Homeless Community Of The City Of Portland, Oswaldo Ceballos Jr

altREU Projects

Given the severity of homeless in many cities across the country, the project at hand attempts to assist a service provider organization called Central City Concern (CCC) with their mission of providing services to the community of Portland. These services include housing, recovery, health care, and jobs. With many different types of services available through the works of CCC, there exists an abundance of information and data pertaining to the individuals that interact with the CCC service system. The goal of this project is to perform an exploratory analysis and feature engineer the existing datasets CCC has collected over the …

Universal Biological Motions For Educational Robot Theatre And Games, Rajesh Venkatachalapathy, Martin Zwick, Adam Slowik, Kai Brooks, Mikhail Mayers, Roman Minko, Tyler Hull, Bliss Brass, Marek Perkowski

Systems Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Paper presents a concept that is new to robotics education and social robotics. It is based on theatrical games, in motions for social robots and animatronic robots. Presented here motion model is based on Drift Differential Model from biology and Fokker-Planck equations. This model is used in various areas of science to describe many types of motion. The model was successfully verified on various simulated mobile robots and a motion game of three robots called "Mouse and Cheese."

Exploring The Potential Of Sparse Coding For Machine Learning, Sheng Yang Lundquist

Dissertations and Theses

While deep learning has proven to be successful for various tasks in the field of computer vision, there are several limitations of deep-learning models when compared to human performance. Specifically, human vision is largely robust to noise and distortions, whereas deep learning performance tends to be brittle to modifications of test images, including being susceptible to adversarial examples. Additionally, deep-learning methods typically require very large collections of training examples for good performance on a task, whereas humans can learn to perform the same task with a much smaller number of training examples.

In this dissertation, I investigate whether the use …

Analyzing Network Topology For Ddos Mitigation Using The Abelian Sandpile Model, Bhavana Panchumarthi, Monroe Ame Stephenson

altREU Projects

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is a cyber attack, which is capable of triggering a cascading failure in the victim network. While DDoS attacks come in different forms, their general goal is to make a network's service unavailable to its users. A common, but risky, countermeasure is to blackhole or null route the source, or the attacked destination. When a server becomes a blackhole, or referred to as the sink in the paper, the data that is assigned to it "disappears" or gets deleted. Our research shows how mathematical modeling can propose an alternative blackholing strategy that could improve …

Exploring Food Deserts And Environmental Impacts On Health In Chicago And Oregon, Sivasomasundari Arunarasu, Paulina Grzybowicz

altREU Projects

Food deserts are defined as, “an impoverished area where residents lack access to healthy foods”. This lack of access can be due to a combination of socioeconomic, geographic, and food-related variables, and has been proven to impact the health of residents in the area. In this project, several statistical and machine learning techniques are used to model the impact of food desserts and various other factors on health outcomes, including diabetes and obesity rates, in both the different neighborhoods in the City of Chicago and the various counties in the state of Oregon. The models are then used to determine …

Combating Covid On College Campuses: The Impact Of Structural Changes On Viral Transmissions, Jared Knofczynski, Aria Killebrew Bruehl, Ben Warner, Ryne Shelton

altREU Projects

One of the most significant issues in the COVID-19 pandemic is the reopening of schools while minimizing the transmission of coronavirus. Opportunities for evaluating the effectiveness of policies that might be utilized at such institutions are limited, as the necessary empirical data has not been gathered yet. Agent-based modeling, where various entities within an environment are simulated as agents, offers an opportunity to examine the effectiveness of various policies in a way that drastically minimizes the health and economic risks involved. Agent-based modeling is common within biology, ecology and other fields; and has seen some use within the coronavirus literature. …

An Essay On Proof, Conviction, And Explanation: Multiple Representation Systems In Combinatorics, Elise Nicole Lockwood, John Caughman, Keith Weber

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

There is a longstanding conversation in the mathematics education literature about proofs that explain versus proofs that only convince. In this essay, we offer a characterization of explanatory proofs with three goals in mind. We first propose a theory of explanatory proofs for mathematics education in terms of representation systems. Then, we illustrate these ideas in terms of combinatorial proofs, focusing on binomial identities. Finally, we leverage our theory to explain audience-dependent and audience-invariant aspects of explanatory proof. Throughout, we use the context of combinatorics to emphasize points and to offer examples of proofs that can be explanatory or only …

A Mass Conserving Mixed Stress Formulation For Stokes Flow With Weakly Imposed Stress Symmetry, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Philip L. Lederer, Joachim Schoeberl

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We introduce a new discretization of a mixed formulation of the incompressible Stokes equations that includes symmetric viscous stresses. The method is built upon a mass conserving mixed formulation that we recently studied. The improvement in this work is a new method that directly approximates the viscous fluid stress $\sigma$, enforcing its symmetry weakly. The finite element space in which the stress is approximated consists of matrix-valued functions having continuous “normal-tangential” components across element interfaces. Stability is achieved by adding certain matrix bubbles that were introduced earlier in the literature on finite elements for linear elasticity. Like the earlier work, …

A Primer On Laplacian Dynamics In Directed Graphs, J. J. P. Veerman, R. Lyons

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We analyze the asymptotic behavior of general first order Laplacian processes on digraphs. The most important ones of these are diffusion and consensus with both continuous and discrete time. We treat diffusion and consensus as dual processes. This is the first complete exposition of this material in a single work.

Diffusion And Consensus On Weakly Connected Directed Graphs, J. J. P. Veerman, Ewan Kummel

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Let G be a weakly connected directed graph with asymmetric graph Laplacian L. Consensus and diffusion are dual dynamical processes defined on G by x˙=−Lx for consensus and p˙=−pL for diffusion. We consider both these processes as well their discrete time analogues. We define a basis of row vectors {γ¯i}ki=1 of the left null-space of L and a basis of column vectors {γi}ki=1 of the right null-space of L in terms of the partition of G into strongly connected components. This allows for complete characterization of the asymptotic behavior of both diffusion and consensus --- discrete and continuous --- in …

Trefftz Finite Elements On Curvilinear Polygons, Akash Anand, Jeffrey S. Ovall, Samuel E. Reynolds, Steffen Weisser

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a Trefftz-type finite element method on meshes consisting of curvilinear polygons. Local basis functions are computed using integral equation techniques that allow for the efficient and accurate evaluation of quantities needed in the formation of local stiffness matrices. To define our local finite element spaces in the presence of curved edges, we must also properly define what it means for a function defined on a curved edge to be "polynomial" of a given degree on that edge. We consider two natural choices, before settling on the one that yields the inclusion of complete polynomial spaces in our local …

Navigating Around Convex Sets, J. J. P. Veerman

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We review some basic results of convex analysis and geometry in Rn in the context of formulating a differential equation to track the distance between an observer flying outside a convex set K and K itself.

Traffic Signal Consensus Control, Gerardo Lafferriere

TREC Final Reports

We introduce a model for traffic signal management based on network consensus control principles. The underlying principle in a consensus approach is that traffic signal cycles are adjusted in a distributed way so as to achieve desirable ratios of queue lengths throughout the street network. This approach tends to reduce traffic congestion due to queue saturation at any particular city block and it appears less susceptible to congestion due to unexpected traffic loads on the street grid. We developed simulation tools based on the MATLAB computing environment to analyze the use of the mathematical consensus approach to manage the signal …

A Decentralized Network Consensus Control Approach For Urban Traffic Signal Optimization, Gerardo Lafferriere

TREC Project Briefs

Automobile traffic congestion in urban areas is a worsening problem that comes with significant economic and social costs. This report offers a new approach to urban congestion management through traffic signal control.

Spectral Discretization Errors In Filtered Subspace Iteration, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Luka Grubišić, Jeffrey S. Ovall

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We consider filtered subspace iteration for approximating a cluster of eigenvalues (and its associated eigenspace) of a (possibly unbounded) selfadjoint operator in a Hilbert space. The algorithm is motivated by a quadrature approximation of an operator-valued contour integral of the resolvent. Resolvents on infinite dimensional spaces are discretized in computable finite-dimensional spaces before the algorithm is applied. This study focuses on how such discretizations result in errors in the eigenspace approximations computed by the algorithm. The computed eigenspace is then used to obtain approximations of the eigenvalue cluster. Bounds for the Hausdorff distance between the computed and exact eigenvalue clusters …

Latent Space Models For Temporal Networks, Jasper Alt

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

In many contexts we may expect the structure of networks to be derived from some kind of abstract distance between actors. We refer to this phenomenon as homophily: like nodes connect to like. For example, people with similar beliefs may be more likely to form social relations.

We formalize this notion by positioning the nodes in a latent space representing the possible values of the homophilous attributes. Realistically, we should expect latent attributes like beliefs to change over time in some nontrivial way, and the structures of temporal networks to evolve accordingly. We introduce a model of latent space dynamics …

Stability Conditions For Coupled Oscillators In Linear Arrays, Pablo Enrique Baldivieso Blanco, J.J.P. Veerman

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we give necessary conditions for stability of flocks in R. We focus on linear arrays with decentralized agents, where each agent interacts with only a few its neighbors. We obtain explicit expressions for necessary conditions for asymptotic stability in the case that the systems consists of a periodic arrangement of two or three different types of agents, i.e. configurations as follows: ...2-1-2-1 or ...3-2-1-3-2-1. Previous literature indicated that the (necessary) condition for stability in the case of a single agent (...1-1-1) held that the first moment of certain coefficients governing the interactions between agents has to be …

The Auxiliary Space Preconditioner For The De Rham Complex, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Martin Neumüller, Panayot S. Vassilevski

Portland Institute for Computational Science Publications

We generalize the construction and analysis of auxiliary space preconditioners to the n-dimensional finite element subcomplex of the de Rham complex. These preconditioners are based on a generalization of a decomposition of Sobolev space functions into a regular part and a potential. A discrete version is easily established using the tools of finite element exterior calculus. We then discuss the four-dimensional de Rham complex in detail. By identifying forms in four dimensions (4D) with simple proxies, form operations are written out in terms of familiar algebraic operations on matrices, vectors, and scalars. This provides the basis for our implementation of …

Spacetime Numerical Techniques For The Wave And Schrödinger Equations, Paulina Ester Sepùlveda Salas

Dissertations and Theses

The most common tool for solving spacetime problems using finite elements is based on semidiscretization: discretizing in space by a finite element method and then advancing in time by a numerical scheme. Contrary to this standard procedure, in this dissertation we consider formulations where time is another coordinate of the domain. Therefore, spacetime problems can be studied as boundary value problems, where initial conditions are considered as part of the spacetime boundary conditions.

When seeking solutions to these problems, it is natural to ask what are the correct spaces of functions to choose, to obtain wellposedness. This motivates the study …

Derivation Of The Hellinger-Reissner Variational Form Of The Linear Elasticity Equations, And A Finite Element Discretization, Bram Fouts

REU Final Reports

In this paper we are going to derive the linear elasticity equations in the Strong Form to the Hellinger Reissner Form. We find a suitable solution to solve our stress tensor. Then we will use finite element discretization from. We will run tests on a unit cube and multiple other shapes, which are described at the end. We view the different magnitudes of the displacement vector of each shape.

Variational Geometric Approach To Generalized Differential And Conjugate Calculi In Convex Analysis, Boris S. Mordukhovich, Nguyen Mau Nam, R. Blake Rector, T. Tran

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper develops a geometric approach of variational analysis for the case of convex objects considered in locally convex topological spaces and also in Banach space settings. Besides deriving in this way new results of convex calculus, we present an overview of some known achievements with their unified and simplified proofs based on the developed geometric variational schemes. Key words. Convex and variational analysis, Fenchel conjugates, normals and subgradients, coderivatives, convex calculus, optimal value functions.

Filtered Subspace Iteration For Selfadjoint Operators, Jay Gopalakrishnan, Luka Grubišić, Jeffrey S. Ovall

Portland Institute for Computational Science Publications

We consider the problem of computing a cluster of eigenvalues (and its associated eigenspace) of a (possibly unbounded) selfadjoint operator in a Hilbert space. A rational function of the operator is constructed such that the eigenspace of interest is its dominant eigenspace, and a subspace iteration procedure is used to approximate this eigenspace. The computed space is then used to obtain approximations of the eigenvalues of interest. An eigenvalue and eigenspace convergence analysis that considers both iteration error and dis- cretization error is provided. A realization of the proposed approach for a model second-order elliptic operator is based on a …

Computational Algorithms For Improved Representation Of The Model Error Covariance In Weak-Constraint 4d-Var, Jeremy A. Shaw

Dissertations and Theses

Four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4D-Var) provides an estimate to the state of a dynamical system through the minimization of a cost functional that measures the distance to a prior state (background) estimate and observations over a time window. The analysis fit to each information input component is determined by the specification of the error covariance matrices in the data assimilation system (DAS). Weak-constraint 4D-Var (w4D-Var) provides a theoretical framework to account for modeling errors in the analysis scheme. In addition to the specification of the background error covariance matrix, the w4D-Var formulation requires information on the model error statistics and …

Equators Have At Most Countable Many Singularities With Bounded Total Angle, Pilar Herreros, Mario Ponce, J.J.P. Veerman

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

For distinct points p and q in a two-dimensional Riemannian manifold, one defines their mediatrix Lpq as the set of equidistant points to p and q. It is known that mediatrices have a cell decomposition consisting of a finite number of branch points connected by Lipschitz curves. In the case of a topological sphere, mediatrices are called equators and it can benoticed that there are no branching points, thus an equator is a topological circle with possibly many Lipschitz singularities. This paper establishes that mediatrices have the radial …

Computational Methods For Asynchronous Basins, Ian H. Dinwoodie

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

For a Boolean network we consider asynchronous updates and define the exclusive asynchronous basin of attraction for any steady state or cyclic attractor. An algorithm based on commutative algebra is presented to compute the exclusive basin. Finally its use for targeting desirable attractors by selective intervention on network nodes is illustrated with two examples, one cell signalling network and one sensor network measuring human mobility.

Transients In The Synchronization Of Asymmetrically Coupled Oscillator Arrays, Carlos E. Cantos, David K. Hammond, J.J.P. Veerman

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We consider the transient behavior of a large linear array of coupled linear damped harmonic oscillators following perturbation of a single element. Our work is motivated by modeling the behavior of flocks of autonomous vehicles. We first state a number of conjectures that allow us to derive an explicit characterization of the transients, within a certain parameter regime Ω. As corollaries we show that minimizing the transients requires considering non-symmetric coupling, and that within Ω the computed linear growth in N of the transients is independent of (reasonable) boundary conditions.