Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Time-Lapse Active Source Seismic Characterization Of A Leaky Co2 Reservoir: Little Grand Wash Fault, Utah, Stephen Slivicki

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) approach requires economical methods to monitor reservoir CO₂ flow paths through time. I explore the use of an inexpensive surface seismic approach to monitor the time-varying response of a leaky CO₂ reservoir. My site is located in east central Utah, where the Little Grand Wash fault provides a natural analogue for a failed sequestration site. This fault and related anticlinal trap provides a conduit to collect and deliver CO₂ from shallow reservoir depths to the atmosphere. Elevated soil CO₂ flux measurements, outgassing at the Crystal Geyser, and travertine deposits provide …

Machine-Learning Reveals Aftershock Locations For Three Idaho Earthquake Sequences, Spencer F. Wilbur

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

I explore spatial and temporal aftershock patterns related to three instrumentally recorded earthquakes in Idaho -- the Sulphur Peak, the Challis, and the Stanley earthquakes. These three M > 5 earthquakes border the eastern Snake River Plain and lie within the Intermountain Seismic Belt and Centennial Tectonic Belt. Using machine learning for event detection and phase picking from local and regional seismic networks, I generate new aftershock catalogs. I locate more aftershocks than in the USGS catalog due to lower signal-to-noise detections. Using my phase picks, I locate aftershocks using a range of velocity models and select a catalog that represents …

Evaluation Of Energy Release From Wildfires Across The Elevation Gradient, Isabelle Rose Butler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wildfires are an integral process in vegetative terrestrial land which shape ecosystem functions. A warming climate, however, has increased the size and severity of fires with significant ecosystem and societal implications. Furthermore, warming has changed characteristics of wildfires enabling a median upslope advance of 252 m in high-elevation forest fires from 1984 to 2017, allowing wildfires to burn in areas that were previously too wet to burn frequently. This exposed an additional 81,500 square kilometers (11%) of western US montane forests to fires.

In this thesis, I test the hypothesis that wildfires burn more intensely in high-elevation mesic forests than …

Improving Children's Authentication Practices With Respect To Graphical Authentication Mechanism, Dhanush Kumar Ratakonda

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

A variety of authentication mechanisms are used for online applications to protect user’s data. Prior literature identifies that adults and children often utilize weak authentication practices and our own initial research corroborates that children often create weak usernames and passwords. One reason children adopt weak authentication practices is due to difficulties in remembering their usernames and passwords. Existing literature suggests that people are better at remembering graphical information than text and words. In this dissertation, my research goal is to improve the usability and security of children’s authentication mechanisms. My research includes designing, developing, and evaluating a new graphical …

Automated Detection Of Sockpuppet Accounts In Wikipedia, Mostofa Najmus Sakib

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wikipedia is a free Internet-based encyclopedia that is built and maintained via the open-source collaboration of a community of volunteers. Wikipedia’s purpose is to benefit readers by acting as a widely accessible and free encyclopedia, a comprehensive written synopsis that contains information on all discovered branches of knowledge. The website has millions of pages that are maintained by thousands of volunteer editors. Unfortunately, given its open-editing format, Wikipedia is highly vulnerable to malicious activity, including vandalism, spam, undisclosed paid editing, etc.

Malicious users often use sockpuppet accounts to circumvent a block or a ban imposed by Wikipedia administrators on the …

Regression Analysis Of Resilience And Covid-19 In Idaho Counties, Ishrat Zaman

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Global pandemic Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has serious harmful effects on our day-to-day lives. To overcome challenges such as this, critical preparedness, readiness, and response actions are required. This thesis uses estimates of community resilience available through the CRE Tool, published by the US Census Bureau, and COVID19 cases published by John Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center for Idaho counties. Simple linear regression analysis was performed to identify a correlation between COVID-19 cases and deaths in Idaho counties and measures of their resilience. Understanding this correlation could lead to better estimation and prediction of the effect of disasters in Idaho’s counties. …

Relationships Between Covid-19 Infection Rates, Healthcare Access, Socioeconomic Status, And Cultural Diversity, Marghece P. J. Barnes

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on racial and ethnic minority groups, with high infection rates throughout those communities. There are a complex set of factors that account for COVID-19 disparities. Focusing on infection and death rates alone without also examining health equity, underestimates the true impact of the pandemic. To gain a more clear understanding of COVID-19’s impact in these communities, we analyzed the relationship between state COVID-19 infection rates with social determinants of health: cultural diversity, health care access, and socioeconomic status. Our approach to identifying this relationship was to estimate infection rates by fitting John …

Robust Inference In Wireless Sensor Networks, Santosh Paudel

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a systematic approach to obtain robust statistical inference schemes in unreliable networks. Statistical inference offers mechanisms for deducing the statistical properties of unknown parameters from the data. In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), sensor outputs are transmitted across a wireless communication network to the fusion center (FC) for final decision-making. The sensor data are not always reliable. Some factors may cause anomaly in network operations, such as malfunction, corruption, or compromised due to some unknown source of contamination or adversarial attacks.

Two standard component failure models are adopted in this study to describe the system vulnerability: the probabilistic …

Multivariate Analysis Of The 2021 Boise Drought In The Context Of Natural Human Systems, Jesus Martinez-Osario

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Droughts generally refer to lack of sufficient water to supply specific needs, and has several categories including meteorological, hydrologic, agricultural and socioeconomic droughts [22]. Drought is triggered by the lack of or reduced precipitation, but other factors including low soil moisture, groundwater depletion, insufficient snowpack, reduced surface storage, increased evaporation, and contaminated surface water also contribute to various drought categories [12, 27].

Droughts impact many functional aspects of a community including agricultural production, recreation, access to clean drinking water, and the health of local ecosystems. Arid and semi-arid regions such as Idaho are specifically vulnerable to drought [12]. According to …

Structure Aware Smart Encoding And Decoding Of Information In Dna, Shoshanna Llewellyn

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Our increasingly information driven world is growing the demand for new storage technologies. Current estimates place the total storage demands exceeding the supply of usable silicon by 2040 [1]. DNA is an attractive technology due to its incredible density, almost negligible energy requirements, and data retention measured in centuries [1]. DNA does, however, come with new challenges. It is an organic compound with complex internal interactions which complicate the design and synthesis of DNA sequences for the purpose of data storage. In this work we demonstrate a new encoding-decoding process that accounts for some of the challenges in encoding and …

Open-Source Workflows For Reproducible Molecular Simulation, Jenny W. Fothergill

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We apply molecular simulation to predict the equilibrium structure of organic molecular aggregates and how these structures determine material properties, with a focus on software engineering practices for ensuring correctness. Because simulations are implemented in software, there is potential for authentic scientific reproducibility in such work: An entire experimental apparatus (codebase) can be given to another investigator who should be able to use the same processes to find the same answers. Yet in practice, there are many barriers which stand in the way of reproducible molecular simulations that we address through automation, generalization, and software packaging. Collaboration on and application …

Towards Making Transformer-Based Language Models Learn How Children Learn, Yousra Mahdy

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Transformer-based Language Models (LMs), learn contextual meanings for words using a huge amount of unlabeled text data. These models show outstanding performance on various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, what the LMs learn is far from what the meaning is for humans, partly due to the fact that humans can differentiate between concrete and abstract words, but language models make no distinction. Concrete words are words that have a physical representation in the world such as “chair”, while abstract words are ideas such as “democracy”. The process of learning word meanings starts from early childhood when children acquire their …

Long-Term Trends In Extreme Environmental Events With Changepoint Detection, Mintaek Lee

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines long-term trends in extreme environmental events with considerations for changepoints and autocorrelation. Due to changes in measurement location, observer, instrument, sampling protocol, local ecosystem, etc., many environmental time series often contain inhomogeneous changes in their distributions. If ignored in the modeling process, these inhomogeneities could produce misleading estimation of the long-term trends in these environmental extremes. Because documentations for these changepoint-inducing events could be incomplete or missing in many cases, those changepoints need to be estimated from the data. Here, we use a genetic algorithm to estimate the number and times of changepoints in the environmental extremes …

Ontology-Based Formal Approach For Safety And Security Verification Of Industrial Control Systems, Ramesh Neupane

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Control logics, as part of the Industrial Control Systems (ICS), are used to control the physical processes of the critical infrastructures such as power plants, water, and gas distribution, etc. Most commonly, the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) manages these processes through actuators based on information received from sensor readings. Any safety issues or cyberattacks on these systems may have catastrophic consequences on human lives and the environment. In an effort to improve the resilience and security of control logics, this thesis provides algorithms and tools to formally define the safety and security requirements w.r.t. the physical processes, and the industrial …

Ranchers' And Federal Land Managers' Perceptions Of Rangeland Management Across An Environmental Gradient, Calandria Puntenney

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Managing semi-arid rangelands to meet social-ecological goals requires monitoring of key ecological indicators that will inform management responses. These goals and monitoring objectives are in turn grounded in land managers’ understandings, or “mental models,” of how the rangeland system operates. Rangeland managers’ mental models are often highly place-specific, which can enable management actions to be matched to local conditions. In the western United States, ranchers and federal agency resource specialists, like those in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), are two of the primary groups involved in rangeland management. We compared ranchers’ and BLM agency specialists’ rangeland mental models in …

Deviating From The Plan: Assessing The Impact Of Forest Management Delays On Ecosystem Function, Kathryn Joyce Murenbeeld

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Forests are under increasing stress due to changes in disturbance regimes, such as wildfire and pest or disease outbreaks, an increase in more severe and prolonged drought, and changes in land use. These stressors are already having an observable impact on forests in the western United States. Many forests within the western US are managed by the US Forest Service. Forest management is important as a tool for increasing a forest's ability to withstand or recover from these stresses. Additionally, because of the forest’s influence on interactions between the land surface and the atmosphere, forest management has implications for future …

Computational Approaches To Understanding Subduction Zone Geodynamics, Surface Heat Flow, And The Metamorphic Rock Record, Buchanan C. Kerswell

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Pressure-temperature (PT) estimates from exhumed high-pressure (HP) metamorphic rocks and global surface heat flow observations evidently encode information about subduction zone thermal structure and the nature of mechanical and chemical processing of subducted materials along the interface between converging plates. Previous work demonstrates the possibility of decoding such geodynamic information by comparing numerical geodynamic models with empirical observations of surface heat flow and the metamorphic rock record. However, ambiguous interpretations can arise from this line of inquiry with respect to thermal gradients, plate coupling, and detachment and recovery of subducted materials. This dissertation applies a variety of computational techniques to …

Design And Synthesis Of Thiazole-Based Small Molecules To Inhibit The Inflammatory Cytokine Oncostatin M, Samuel Randall

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The body’s innate ability to produce an inflammatory response due to tissue irritation or damage is essential for growth and survival. The inflammatory response can be triggered by numerous stimuli, including physical trauma, inhalation of dangerous debris (such as silica and asbestos), tobacco/alcohol consumption, microbiota, diet, and other lifestyle stressors. In a well-orchestrated inflammatory response, the circulatory system increases blood flow and capillary permeability in the inflamed area to deliver nutrients, white blood cells, and inflammatory mediating molecules. However, a dysregulated inflammatory response can lead to chronic inflammation. Emerging evidence continues to frame oncostatin M (OSM) as a pro-inflammatory cytokine …

Characterization And Mitigation Of False Information On The Web, Anu Shrestha

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Social media and Web sources have made information available, accessible, and shareable any time and anywhere nearly without friction. This information can be truthful, falsified, or can only be the opinion of the writer as users in such platforms are both information creators and consumers. In any case, it has the power to affect the decision of an individual, the beliefs of the society, activities, and the economy of the whole country. Thus, it is imperative to identify false information and mitigate the effects of false information that are ubiquitous across the Web and social media. Therefore, the main goal …

Waring Rank And Apolarity Of Some Symmetric Polynomials, Max Brian Sullivan

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

We examine lower bounds for the Waring rank for certain types of symmetric polynomials. The first are Schur polynomials, a symmetric polynomial indexed by integer partitions. We prove some results about the Waring rank of certain types of Schur polynomials, based on their integer partition. We also make some observations about the Waring rank in general for Schur polynomials, based on the shape of their Semistandard Young Tableaux. The second type of polynomials we refer to as a Power of a Fermat-type polynomial, or a PFT polynomial. This is a Fermat type (or power sum) polynomial over n variables with …

The Matrix Sortability Problem, Seth Cleaver

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Sorting is such a fundamental component of achieving efficiency that a significant body of mathematics is dedicated to the investigation of sorting. Any modern textbook on algorithms contains chapters on sorting.

One approach to arranging a disorganized list of items into an organized list is to successively identify two blocks of contiguous items, and swap the two blocks. In a fundamental paper D.A. Christie showed that a special version of block swapping, in recent times called context directed swapping and abbreviated cds, is the most efficient among block swapping strategies to achieve an organized list of items. The cds …

Security Analysis Of Lightweight Cryptographic Primitives, William Unger

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Symmetric key cryptographic primitives are essential to encrypt data and protect communication between parties. Due to resource constraints, some modern devices are not capable of executing traditional cryptographic algorithms. This fact necessitates new lightweight cryptographic algorithms. Current research into lightweight cryptology is vast, in part due to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) lightweight cryptographic standardization process.

There is not much research into the vulnerability to a power analysis attack created by the choice of parameters of lightweight symmetric ciphers. This dissertation develops and demonstrates white box and black box cryptanalysis models for power analysis attacks on lightweight …

Mechanochemical Synthesis Of Functional Layered Materials, Samuel Vladimir Pedersen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

As society continues to create new digital content, the telecommunications industry is seeking new technologies to enable higher bandwidth and lower costs to keep pace with the growing demand. Two-dimensional black phosphorus is proposed as a replacement for III-V compound semiconductors as the optically active material in next-generation silicon photonics as it can enable device scaling with lower power consumption. Therefore, the primary motivation of this dissertation was to investigate BP synthesis and chemical doping using an industrially scalable process, high energy ball milling. Initially, the work focused on understanding the ball mill conversion kinetics of red to black phosphorus, …

Sinusoidal Projection For 360° Image Compression And Triangular Discrete Cosine Transform Impact In The Jpeg Pipeline, Iker Vazquez Lopez

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The equirectangular projection is commonly used to store and transmit 360' images. However, using the equirectangular projection to store and transmit 360° images is not efficient due to its natural topographic redundancy. To generate the 360° image, captured pixels that form a spherical point cloud in the 3D space are projected onto a 2D plane using the equirectangular projection; generating redundant pixels in the process. These extra pixels in the image add extra memory requirements that have low impact in the final image quality. This dissertation presents results of research into the compression of 360° spherical imagery. It examines and …

Fair And Efficient Consensus Protocols For Secure Blockchain Applications, Golam Dastoger Bashar

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In blockchain technology, consensus protocols serve as mechanisms to reach agreements among a distributed network of nodes. In this work, we propose three novel protocols for permissioned, healthcare, and supply chain blockchain.

(1) Proof of Queue (PoQ), for private blockchains, combines the lottery strategy of PoET with a specialized round-robin algorithm where each node has an equal chance to become a leader with equal access. PoQ is relatively scalable without any collision. Like PoET, PoQ uses Intel SGX, a Trusted Execution Environment, to generate a secure random waiting time to choose a leader and fairly distribute the leadership role to …

Training Wheels For Web Search: Multi-Perspective Learning To Rank To Support Children's Information Seeking In The Classroom, Garrett Allen

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Bicycle design has not changed for a long time, as they are well-crafted for those that possess the skills to ride, i.e., adults. Those learning to ride, however, often need additional support in the form of training wheels. Searching for information on the Web is much like riding a bicycle, where modern search engines (the bicycle) are optimized for general use and adult users, but lack the functionality to support non-traditional audiences and environments. In this thesis, we introduce a set of training wheels in the form of a learning to rank model as augmentation for standard search engines to …

Dreams Of Molecular Beams: Indium Gallium Arsenide Tensile-Strained Quantum Dots And Advances Towards Dynamic Quantum Dots (Moleculare Radiorum Somnia: Indii Gallii Arsenicus Tensa Quanta Puncta Et Ad Dinamicae Quantae Puntae Progressus), Kevin Daniel Vallejo

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Through the operation of a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) machine, I worked on developing the homoepitaxy of high quality InAs with a (111)A crystallographic orientation. By tuning substrate temperature, we obtained a transition from a 2D island growth mode to step- ow growth. Optimized MBE parameters (substrate temperature = 500 °C, growth rate = 0.12 ML/s and V/III ratio ⩾ 40) lead to growth of extremely smooth InAs(111)A films, free from hillocks and other 3D surface imperfections. We see a correlation between InAs surface smoothness and optical quality, as measured by photoluminescence spectroscopy. This work establishes InAs(111)A as a platform …

Fire Effects On Soil Properties: Amending Post-Fire Soils With Native Microbial Communities And Biochar To Improve Sagebrush Performance, Sabrina Marie Schuler

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Within the sagebrush steppe, fire has been shown to affect biogeochemical properties and the microbial community composition in soils. However, there is uncertainty about the magnitude and direction of these effects, since they vary by sites that differ in abiotic and biotic conditions. Moreover, differences in post-fire management strategies are likely to mediate the effect of fire on soil properties, thus further compounding this uncertainty. Any changes in soil biogeochemical properties following fire can prevent successful restoration of Artemisia tridentata sp. wyomingensis (sagebrush), leading to variable outcomes of restoration success in the sagebrush steppe. Previous research has shown that addition …

Exploring Hydrologic Responses To Different Wildfire Spatial Patterns Through The Lens Of Computational Modeling, Luke M. Telfer

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Severe wildfire disturbances are becoming increasingly common in high-elevation forests of the western United States. These fires alter watershed hydrologic processes, threatening critical downstream water resources and aquatic ecosystems. However, watershed-scale postfire hydrologic responses and water balance changes are highly uncertain. While postfire effects on individual processes such as runoff, infiltration, evapotranspiration, and snow dynamics are relatively well known, the role of wildfire spatial patterns in governing hydrologic connectivity and interactions between water balance components is poorly understood due to challenges associated with measuring and comparing fires at large scales. This thesis aims to examine pattern-related postfire interactions between various …

Bioactivity Assessment Of Veratrum Californicum Alkaloids, Madison Dirks

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The native Idaho plant Veratrum californicum is known to contain steroidal alkaloids that function as inhibitors of hedgehog signaling, a pathway utilized for the growth and differentiation of cells as well as proper tissue development. Veratrum californicum was originally noticed when pregnant ewes consumed the plant and later gave birth to lambs with craniofacial mutations such as a cyclopean eyes. These malformations were caused by the plant’s steroidal alkaloid cyclopamine blocking the hedgehog signaling pathway. This same pathway is used by more than 20 types of cancer for multiplication of cells. Additional alkaloids have been found in Veratrum californicum, …