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Articles 1 - 11 of 11

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Adapting To Extreme Heat: Social, Atmospheric, And Infrastructure Impacts Of Air Conditioning In Megacities - The Case Of New York City, Harold Gamarro Jan 2020

Adapting To Extreme Heat: Social, Atmospheric, And Infrastructure Impacts Of Air Conditioning In Megacities - The Case Of New York City, Harold Gamarro

Dissertations and Theses

Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and intense in most large cities. Built-up surfaces also limit cooling mechanisms, leading to warmer conditions in cities, a phenomenon called the Urban Heat Island (UHI). This presents major challenges to reduce adverse health effects of hot weather, particularly in vulnerable populations like the elderly and low-income communities. Here we explore the overall impacts of increasing air conditioning (AC) system adoption in residences as an adaptive measure to reduce human health risks under heat waves, with New York City (NYC) as a case study. This study uses AC adoption data from the 2017 …


Ecosystem Health In Guánica Bay And La Parguera, Puerto Rico: Remote Sensing Of Ocean Color And Metal Analysis Of Coral Tissue And Surficial Sediments, Jahnelle Howe Jan 2020

Ecosystem Health In Guánica Bay And La Parguera, Puerto Rico: Remote Sensing Of Ocean Color And Metal Analysis Of Coral Tissue And Surficial Sediments, Jahnelle Howe

Dissertations and Theses

Guánica Bay is an estuary located in southwest Puerto Rico, with a coral reef ecosystem at its periphery. This ecosystem is affected by sediments, nutrients, and contaminants from the watershed through the Bay and into the offshore water. This project evaluates Guánica Bay and La Parguera coastal areas through remote sensing and chemical analysis to assess coastal ecosystem health. The concentration of metals in two coral species and their associated surface sediments was were analyzed by X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Direct Mercury Analyzer (DMA- 80). Ocean color remote sensing was used to estimate nutrient inputs and phytoplankton biomass through chlorophyll- …


Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref Jan 2020

Mechanisms Of Value-Biased Prioritization In Fast Sensorimotor Decision Making, Kivilcim Afacan-Seref

Dissertations and Theses

In dynamic environments, split-second sensorimotor decisions must be prioritized according to potential payoffs to maximize overall rewards. The impact of relative value on deliberative perceptual judgments has been examined extensively, but relatively little is known about value-biasing mechanisms in the common situation where physical evidence is strong but the time to act is severely limited. This research examines the behavioral and electrophysiological indices of how value biases split-second perceptual decisions and the possible mechanisms underlying the process. In prominent decision models, a noisy but statistically stationary representation of sensory evidence is integrated over time to an action-triggering bound, and value-biases …


Edge Device Speaker Verification, Thomas P. Duffy Jan 2020

Edge Device Speaker Verification, Thomas P. Duffy

Dissertations and Theses

The continued shrinking of processors and other physical hardware in concert with development of embeddable machine learning frameworks has enabled new use cases placing machine learning directly in the “wild”. The problem of speaker verification, for a long time, has been deployed to perform inference on systems with significant computations resources. More recently, these systems have been built for smaller, cheaper devices which can be placed in people's homes or other edge locations. Here, we aim to demonstrate that a reasonably accurate, generalizable, text-independent speaker verification system can be built, trained, and, ultimately, deployed onto a microcontroller with as a …


Ftir Analysis Of Bacteria Biomass-Mineral Interactions In Soils, Finola Fung-Khee Jan 2020

Ftir Analysis Of Bacteria Biomass-Mineral Interactions In Soils, Finola Fung-Khee

Dissertations and Theses

Soil organic carbon (SOC) accounts for 70% of the carbon on Earth. It is therefore a key player in global carbon cycling and climate change (Smith et al., 2008). Soil organic matter (SOM) is an important component of organic matter in soils (SOC), and results from biogeochemical process involving net primary producers, soil biomass and soil mineralogy (Horwath and Kuzyakov, 2018). In this study, the interplay between soil bacterial biomass and reactive clay minerals in soils was investigated. The purpose of the research was to shed light into the stabilization of SOC in a bacterial biomass-soil/clay matrix. Soils characterized as …


Macro - And Microstructure Evaluation And Field Applications Of Concrete With Recycled Glass Pozzolan, Marija Krstic Jan 2020

Macro - And Microstructure Evaluation And Field Applications Of Concrete With Recycled Glass Pozzolan, Marija Krstic

Dissertations and Theses

Concrete is the most used material in the world, second only to water. Conventional concrete is produced with Portland cement (PC). The production of cement is an energy intensive operation that has raised significant environmental concerns, since one ton of cement generates an equal ton of CO2. In the USA about 90 million tons of cement are used annually, with 3 million tons used in New York. Most contemporary concrete applications for buildings and infrastructure use high-performance concrete (HPC) mixtures which are produced by replacing a percentage of cement with supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs), consisting mainly of fly-ash …


Multimodal Data Integration For Real-Time Indoor Navigation Using A Smartphone, Yaohua Chang Jan 2020

Multimodal Data Integration For Real-Time Indoor Navigation Using A Smartphone, Yaohua Chang

Dissertations and Theses

We propose an integrated solution of indoor navigation using a smartphone, especially for assisting people with special needs, such as the blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals. The system consists of three components: hybrid modeling, real-time navigation, and client-server architecture. In the hybrid modeling component, the hybrid model of a building is created region by region and is organized in a graph structure with nodes as destinations and landmarks, and edges as traversal paths between nodes. A Wi-Fi/cellular-data connectivity map, a beacon signal strength map, a 3D visual model (with destinations and landmarks annotated) are collected while a modeler walks …


Sugar-Derived Oleogels In Cosmetics And Food Applications: A Case Study Of Trehalose- And Mannitol-Based Gelators, Polina Tsupko Jan 2020

Sugar-Derived Oleogels In Cosmetics And Food Applications: A Case Study Of Trehalose- And Mannitol-Based Gelators, Polina Tsupko

Dissertations and Theses

Gels represent an indispensable part of our everyday lives with direct applications in food, medicine, cosmetics and other industries. Amphiphilic molecules have been shown to act as low molecular weight gelators (LMWGs) and are becoming the main focus of several research groups. Their ability to self-assemble into various morphologies from micelles to bilayer sheets, and remain stable due to noncovalent forces responsible for the formation of the 3D network—Self-Assembled Fibrillar Network (SAFiNs)—is in the core of their ability to produce molecular gels. Those amphiphilic molecules capable of adsorbing at the interface and behaving as surface active agents are known as …


Tropical Cyclone Hazards In Relation To Propagation Speed, Jiehao Huang Jan 2020

Tropical Cyclone Hazards In Relation To Propagation Speed, Jiehao Huang

Dissertations and Theses

As the population and infrastructure along the US East Coast increase, it becomes increasingly important to study the characteristics of tropical cyclones that can impact the coast. A recent study shows that the propagation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed over the past 60 years, which can lead to greater accumulation of precipitation and greater storm surge impacts. The study presented herein is meant to examine and analyze the relationships that exist between the propagation speed of tropical cyclones, their surface wind strength, displacement angles, and cyclone averaged winds. This analysis is focused on tropical cyclones spanning from 1950-2015 in …


Toward Closing The Urban Surface Energy Balance Using Satellite Remote Sensing, Joshua Hrisko Jan 2020

Toward Closing The Urban Surface Energy Balance Using Satellite Remote Sensing, Joshua Hrisko

Dissertations and Theses

The energy exchanges at the Earth’s surface are responsible for many of the processes that govern weather, climate, human health, and energy use. This exchange, commonly known as the surface energy balance (SEB), determines the near-surface thermodynamic state by partitioning the available energy into surface fluxes. The net all-wave radiation is often the primary energy source, while the heat storage and sensible and latent heat fluxes account for the majority of energy distributed elsewhere. While the SEB of various natural environments(trees, crops, soils) has been well-observed and modeled, the urban surface energy balance remains elusive. This is due to the …


V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha Jan 2020

V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha

Dissertations and Theses

In underground, underwater and indoor environments, a robot has to rely solely on its on-board sensors to sense and understand its surroundings. This is the main reason why SLAM gained the popularity it has today. In recent years, we have seen excellent improvement on accuracy of localization using cameras and combinations of different sensors, especially camera-IMU (VIO) fusion. Incorporating more sensors leads to improvement of accuracy,but also robustness of SLAM. However, while testing SLAM in our ground robots, we have seen a decrease in performance quality when using the same algorithms on flying vehicles.We have an additional sensor for ground …