Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Monarch Science Observer, Volume 18, College Of Sciences, Old Dominion University

College of Sciences Newsletter

Spring 2024, issue of Monarch Science Observer, ODU Colleges of Sciences Newsletter.

Monarch Science Observer, Volume 17, College Of Sciences, Old Dominion University

College of Sciences Newsletter

Fall 2023, issue of Monarch Science Observer, ODU Colleges of Sciences Newsletter.

Monarch Science Observer, Volume 16, College Of Sciences, Old Dominion University

College of Sciences Newsletter

Spring 2023, issue of Monarch Science Observer, ODU Colleges of Sciences Newsletter.

Unmasking Deception In Vanets: A Decentralized Approach To Verifying Truth In Motion, Susan Zehra, Syed R. Rizvi, Steven Olariu

College of Sciences Posters

VANET, which stands for "Vehicular Ad Hoc Network," is a wireless network that allows vehicles to communicate with each other and with infrastructure, such as Roadside Units (RSUs), with the aim of enhancing road safety and improving the overall driving experience through real-time exchange of information and data. VANET has various applications, including traffic management, road safety alerts, and navigation. However, the security of VANET can be compromised if a malicious user alters the content of messages transmitted, which can harm both individual vehicles and the overall trust in VANET technology. Ensuring the correctness of messages is crucial for the …

Architecture Of Heptagonal Metallo-Macrocycles Via Embedding Metal Nodes Into Its Rigid Backbone, A.M.Shashika D. Wijerathna, He Zhao, Qiangqiang Dong, Qixia Bai, Zhiyuan Jiang, Jie Yuan, Jun Wang, Mingzhao Chen, Markus Zirnheld, Rockwell T. Li, Yuan Zhang, Yiming Li, Pingshan Wang

College of Sciences Posters

Metal-organic macrocycles have received increasing attention not only due to their versatile applications such as molecular recognition, compounds encapsulation, anti-bacteria and others, but also for their important role in the study of structure-property relationship at nano scale. However, most of the constructions utilize benzene ring as the backbone, which restricts the ligand arm angle in the range of 60, 120 and 180 degrees. Thus, the topologies of most metallo-macrocycles are limited as triangles and hexagons, and explorations of using other backbones with large angles and the construction of metallo-macrocycles with more than six edges are very rare.

In this study, …

Robots Still Outnumber Humans In Web Archives In 2019, But Less Than In 2012, Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Kritika Garg, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

College of Sciences Posters

To identify robots and human users in web archives, we conducted a study using the access logs from the Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine in 2012 (IA2012), 2015 (IA2015), and 2019 (IA2019), and the Portuguese Web Archive (PT) in 2019 (PT2019). We identified user sessions in the access logs and classified them as human or robot based on their browsing behavior. In 2013, AlNoamany et al. [1] studied the user access patterns using IA access logs from 2012. They established four web archive user access patterns: single-page access (Dip), access to the same page at multiple archive times (Dive), access …

Adhd Prediction Through Analysis Of Eye Movements With Graph Convolution Network, Gavindya Jayawardena, Sampath Jayarathna, Yi He

College of Sciences Posters

Processing speech with background noise requires appropriate parsing of the distorted auditory signal, fundamental language abilities as well as higher signal-to-noise ratio. Adolescents with ADHD have difficulty processing speech with background noise due to reduced inhibitory control and working memory capacity. In this study we utilize Audiovisual Speech-In-Noise performance and eye-tracking measures of young adults with ADHD compared to age-matched controls, and generate graphs for ADHD evaluation using the eye-tracking data. We form graphs utilizing the eight eye-tracking features (fixation count, average, total, and standard deviation of fixation duration, max and min saccade peak velocity, min, average, and standard deviation …

Evaluation Of Scalable Quantum And Classical Machine Learning For Particle Tracking Classification In Nuclear Physics, Polykarpos Thomadakis, Emmanuel Billias, Nikos Chrisochoides

The Graduate School Posters

Future particle accelerators will exceed by far the current data size (10¹⁵) per experiment, and high- luminosity program(s) will produce more than 300 times as much data. Classical Machine Learning (ML) likely will benefit from new tools based on quantum computing. Particle track reconstruction is the most computationally intensive process in nuclear physics experiments. A combinatorial approach exhaustively tests track measurements (“hits”), represented as images, to identify those that form an actual particle trajectory, which is then used to reconstruct track parameters necessary for the physics experiment. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) could improve this process in multiple ways, …

Copula-Based Models For Bivariate And Multivariate Zero-Inflated Count Time Series Data, Dimuthu Fernando, Norou Diawara

College of Sciences Posters

Count time series data have multiple applications. The applications can be found in areas of finance, climate, public health and crime data analyses. In some scenarios, count time series come as multivariate vectors that exhibit not only serial dependence within each time series but also with cross correlation among the series. When considering these observed counts, analysis presents crucial challenges when a value, say zero, occurs more often than usual. There is presence of zero-inflation in the data.

In this presentation, we mainly focus on modeling bivariate zero-inflated count time series model based on a joint distribution of the two …

Ml-Based Surrogates And Emulators, Tareq Alghamdi, Yaohang Li, Nobuo Sato

College of Sciences Posters

No abstract provided.

A Bootstrap Test For Informative Intra-Cluster Group Sizes In Clustered Data, Hasika K. Wickrama Senevirathne, Sandipan Dutta

College of Sciences Posters

Clustered data are frequently observed in various domains of scientific and social studies. In a typical clustered data, units within a cluster are correlated while units between different clusters are independent. An example of such clustered data can be found in dental studies where individuals are treated as clusters and the teeth in an individual are the units within a cluster. While analyzing such clustered data, it has been observed that the number of units present in a cluster can be informative in terms of being associated with the outcome from that cluster. Specifically, when the aim is to compare …

A Novel Parking Management In Smart City Vehicular Datacenters, Syed Rizvi, Susan Zehra, Steven Olariu

College of Sciences Posters

Researchers have shown that most vehicles spend the majority of their time parked in parking garages, lots, or driveways. During this time, their computing resources are unused and untapped. This has led to substantial interest in Vehicular Cloud, an area of research in which each vehicle acts as a computation node. The main difference between traditional cloud computing and vehicular cloud computing is the availability of nodes. In traditional clouds, nodes are available 24/7, while in vehicular clouds, nodes (vehicles) are only available while parked in parking lots. This creates a dynamic environment as vehicles enter and exit parking garages …

Analysis Of Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction Methods, Maytha Alshammari, Jing He

College of Sciences Posters

Protein structure prediction produces atomic models of three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence. Understanding the function mechanism of proteins requires knowledge of three-dimensional structures. When developing new enzymes and drugs, it's essential to understand the structure of the target protein. In this study, we analyze models predicted using two ab initio protein structure prediction methods, trRosetta and Quark. A set of thirty protein chains was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the methods. The thirty chains were collected from Protein Data Bank (June – November, 2020). The length and the relative position of the predicted secondary …

Scalable Quantum Edge Detection Method For D-Nisq Imaging Simulations: Use Cases From Nuclear Physics And Medical Image Computing, Emmanuel Billias, Nikos Chrisochoides

The Graduate School Posters

Edge Detection is one of the computationally intensive modules in image analysis. It is used to find important landmarks by identifying a significant change (or “edge”) between pixels and voxels. We present a hybrid Quantum Edge Detection method by improving three aspects of an existing widely referenced implementation, which for our use cases generates incomprehensible results for the type and size of images we are required to process. Our contributions are in the pre- and post-processing (i.e., classical phase) and a quantum edge detection circuit: (1) we use space- filling curves to eliminate image artifacts introduced by the image decomposition, …

Hydrodynamics And Sediment Transport In The Tidally Influenced James River, Ollie Gilchrest, Rip Hale

The Graduate School Posters

The tidally influenced James River is an important economic, ecologic, and cultural resource for VA residents. Tidal rivers have been historically understudied, however they are critical transition zones, the dynamics of which have implications for freshwater supply and sediment trapping. Globally, estimates suggest that >30% of fluvial sediment is trapped in the tidal zone, the location and dynamics of which are actively changing due to sea level rise and saltwater encroachment. In addition, analysis of historical water levels on the James River has shown a decrease in the tidal range since 1940. The present study combines >1-year’s worth of hydrographic …

Exploring Human Perception While Reading Fake And Real News Articles, Yasasi Abeysinghe, Gavindya Jayawardana, Autumn Woodson, Efe Bozkir, Enkelejda Kasneci, Andrew Duchowski, Sampath Jayarathna

College of Sciences Posters

With the increased spread of misinformation on online platforms and the popularity of AI-generated text, there is a critical need to detect human perception regarding the truthfulness of news. Users’ believability in a news item influences the reading and sharing of that news. Hence, in order to reduce the spread of fake news online, it is important to understand how users' engagement with fake and real news and users' perceived believability impact their behavioral and physiological factors. In this work, we study human eye movements based on the truthfulness of news and their perceived believability. Using the publicly available FakeNewsPerception …

Metaenhance: Metadata Quality Improvement For Electronic Theses And Dissertations, Muntabir H. Choudhury, Lamia Salsabil, Himarsha R. Jayanetti, Jian Wu

College of Sciences Posters

Metadata quality is crucial for digital objects to be discovered through digital library interfaces. Although DL systems have adopted Dublin Core to standardize metadata formats (e.g., ETD-MS v1.1¹), the metadata of digital objects may contain incomplete, inconsistent, and incorrect values [1]. Most existing frameworks to improve metadata quality rely on crowdsourced correction approaches, e.g., [2]. Such methods are usually slow and biased toward documents that are more discoverable by users. Artificial intelligence (AI) based methods can be adopted to overcome this limit by automatically detecting, correcting, and canonicalizing the metadata, featuring quick and unbiased responses to document metadata. …

X-Disetrac: Distributed Eye-Tracking With Extended Realities, Bhanuka Mahanama, Sampath Jayarathna

College of Sciences Posters

Humans use heterogeneous collaboration mediums such as in-person, online, and extended realities for day-to-day activities. Identifying patterns in viewpoints and pupillary responses (a.k.a eye-tracking data) provide informative cues on individual and collective behavior during collaborative tasks. Despite the increasing ubiquity of these different mediums, the aggregation and analysis of eye-tracking data in heterogeneous collaborative environments remain unexplored. Our study proposes X-DisETrac: Extended Distributed Eye Tracking, a versatile framework for eye tracking in heterogeneous environments. Our approach tackles the complexity by establishing a platform-agnostic communication protocol encompassing three data streams to simplify data aggregation and …

Organic Matter Content And Grain Size Analysis In Seagrass Sediments, Adriana Amrhein, Rip Hale

College of Sciences Posters

Anthropogenic stresses including increased water temperatures, decreased water quality, sea level rise, ocean acidification and sediment biogeochemical processes have caused a significant loss in seagrass meadow acreage. Seagrass meadows provide coastal protection from storms and recently have been emphasized for their importance in sequestering and storing “Blue Carbon” from the atmosphere and ocean. Seagrass meadows can trap this blue carbon in their sediment as organic carbon, and it can be stored for hundreds to thousands of years. Restoration efforts of seagrass meadows in the Virginia coast started in the 1990s and effects of increasing seagrass density can be observed in …

Dust Deposition To The Bermuda Region: A Comparison Of Estimates Using Seasonally-Resolved Measurements Of Aluminum In Water-Column, Aerosol, And Rain Samples, Tara Williams, Peter Sedwick, Bettina Sohst, Joe Resing, Kristen Buck, Salvatore Caprara, Rod Johnson, Dan Ohnemus, Ben Twining, Alessandro Tagliabue

College of Sciences Posters

Dust deposition is a major source of bioactive trace elements to the surface ocean, yet this flux remains difficult to constrain. Previously, time-averaged dust flux has been estimated using surface ocean dissolved aluminum (DAl) concentrations, assumed values for aerosol aluminum solubility (%Al_S), and the residence time of DAl in the surface mixed layer (SML). We apply this method to estimate dust deposition in the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) region using water-column DAl data from cruises in 2019, which is compared with direct flux estimates from contemporaneous measurements of aluminum in aerosols and rain collected on Bermuda. Seasonal …

Monarch Science Observer, Volume 15, College Of Sciences, Old Dominion University

College of Sciences Newsletter

Fall 2022, issue of Monarch Science Observer, ODU Colleges of Sciences Newsletter.

The Message Design Of Raiders Of The Lost Ark On The Atari 2600 & A Fan’S Map, Quick Start, And Strategy Guide, Miguel Ramlatchan, William I. Ramlatchan

Distance Learning Faculty & Staff Books

The message design and human performance technology in video games, especially early video games have always been fascinating to me. From an instructional design perspective, the capabilities of the technology of the classic game consoles required a careful balance of achievable objectives, cognitive task analysis, guided problem solving, and message design. Raiders on the Atari is an excellent example of this balance. It is an epic adventure game, spanning 13+ distinct areas, with an inventory of items, where those hard to find items had to be used by the player to solve problems during their quest (and who would have …

Circulation, Volume 27, No. 2, Center For Coastal Physical Oceanography, Old Dominion University

CCPO Circulation

Spring 2022 issue of CCPO Circulation featuring the article "Looking Back While Moving Forward," by Sönke Dangendorf.

Active Polar Liquid Crystal Channel Flows: Analyzing The Roles Of Nematic Strength And Activation Parameter, Lacey Schenk, Ruhai Zhou

College of Sciences Posters

Suspensions of active polar liquid crystalline polymers (APLC) exhibit complex phenomena such as spontaneous flows, pattern formations and defects. Using the Kinetic Model, which couples the Smoluchowski Equation and the Navier-Stokes Equations, we conduct numerical simulations of APLC in a microfluidic channel to investigate the competitive effect among different material constants, such as the nematic concentration (the strength of the potential for nematic order) and active strength (the individual nano-rods strength of their individual movement) with and without a pressure gradient. Both Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions on the mathematical model are employed. Steady states, including isotropic and nematic states, …

A Machine Learning Approach To Denoising Particle Detector Observations In Nuclear Physics, Polykarpos Thomadakis, Angelos Angelopoulos, Gagik Gavalian, Nikos Chrisochoides

College of Sciences Posters

With the evolution in detector technologies and electronic components used in the Nuclear Physics field, experimental setups become larger and more complex. Faster electronics enable particle accelerator experiments to run with higher beam intensity, providing more interactions per time and more particles per interaction. However, the increased beam intensities present a challenge to particle detectors because of the higher amount of noise and uncorrelated signals. Higher noise levels lead to a more challenging particle reconstruction process by increasing the number of combinatorics to analyze and background signals to eliminate. On the other hand, increasing the beam intensity can provide physics …

Clostridioides Difficile Spore Production In Response To Antibiotic And Immune Stress, Adenrele Oludiran, Erin B. Purcell

College of Sciences Posters

Clostridioides (Clostridium) difficile, an anaerobic, spore-forming Gram-positive pathogenic bacterium, is a major cause of hospital-acquired infections and can persist as surface-attached biofilms for protection from antibiotic and immune stress. C. difficile can form biofilms as a single species or with other anaerobic intestinal bacteria. The environmental signals that cause individual cells to secrete toxins, form biofilms, or develop into spores that can spread the infection to new patients are unknown. In these studies, we investigate bacterial responses to different stress. Antimicrobial host-defense peptides (HDPs) produced by animal immune systems are promising candidates to develop novel therapies for bacterial infection …

Medical Devices And Cybersecurity, Hilary Finch

School of Cybersecurity Posters

I begin by looking at the role of cybersecurity in the medical world. The healthcare industry adopted information technology quite quickly. While the advancement was obviously beneficial and necessary to keep up with an ever-growing demand, the healthcare industry did not place any kind of pointed focus on the security of their IT department, or the sensitive information housed therein.

When rapid advancements of technology outpaced the gradual advancement of hospital cybersecurity, security concerns became a difficult issue to control. There is a serious need for more advancements in hospital security. Each interconnected medical device has its own unique security …

Lattice Optics Optimization For Recirculatory Energy Recovery Linacs With Multi-Objective Optimization, Isurumali Neththikumara, Todd Satogata, Alex Bogacz, Ryan Bodenstein, Arthur Vandenhoeke

College of Sciences Posters

Beamline optics design for recirculatory linear accelerators requires special attention to suppress beam instabilities arising due to collective effects. The impact of these collective effects becomes more pronounced with the addition of energy recovery (ER) capability. Jefferson Lab’s multi-pass, multi-GeV ER proposal for the CEBAF accelerator, ER@CEBAF, is a 10- pass ER demonstration with low beam current. Tighter control of the beam parameters at lower energies is necessary to avoid beam break-up (BBU) instabilities, even with a small beam current. Optics optimizations require balancing both beta excursions at high-energy passes and overfocusing at low-energy passes. Here, we discuss an optics …

A Spatially And Temporally Second Order Method For Solving Parabolic Interface Problems, Kumudu Gamage, Yan Peng

College of Sciences Posters

Parabolic interface problems have many applications in physics and biology, such as hyperthermia treatment of cancer, underground water flow, and food engineering. Here we present an algorithm for solving two-dimensional parabolic interface problems where the coefficient and the forcing term have a discontinuity across the interface. The Crank-Nicolson scheme is used for time discretization, and the direct immersed interface method is used for spatial discretization. The proposed method is second order in both space and time for both solution and gradients in maximum norm.

Empirically Adjusted Weighted Ordered P-Values Method, Wimarsha Jayanetti, Sinjini Sikdar, N. Rao Chaganty

College of Sciences Posters

Recent advancements in high-throughput technologies have enabled simultaneous inference of thousands of genes. With the abundance of public databases, it is now possible to rapidly access the results of several genomic studies, each of which includes the significance testing results of a large number of genes. Researchers frequently aggregate genomic data from multiple studies in the form of a meta-analysis. Most traditional meta-analysis methods aim at combining summary results to find signals in at least one of the studies. However, often the goal is to identify genes that are differentially expressed in a consistent pattern across multiple studies. Recently, a …