Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Community Responses To Us Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs, Bethani Turley

Student Research Symposium

In 2023, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law designated 7 billion dollars to fund regional hydrogen hubs across the US with the goal of kickstarting a utility scale hydrogen economy for the US electric grid. A promising technology in the renewable energy transition, hydrogen can be made from a multitude of energy sources, often designated by colors: green hydrogen is made from solar and wind, pink hydrogen from nuclear, and blue hydrogen from natural gas. This presentation examines this new hydrogen economy through the case study of the Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub (ARCH2). ARCH2 is a blue hydrogen hub proposal by …

Threats From Climate Change Are Increasing For Natural World Heritage Sites, Martin Falk, Eva Hagsten

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference Sweden April 23, 2024

The aim of the paper is to analyse the occurrence and intensity of threats to Natural World Heritage Sites from climate change as assessed by IUCN experts. The data comes from the Conservation Outlook Assessment database, which covers 250 sites for three time periods (2014, 2017 and 2020). The threat of climate change is broadly defined and includes temperature extremes, rapidly disappearing glaciers, coral bleaching, droughts, desertification, rising temperatures and rising sea levels. Simultaneous probit and ordered models with individual site effects are used to analyse the occurrence and intensity of both a perceived actual and a potential threat.

The …

Türkiye's Sustainable Tourism Transformation: An Overview, Mustafa Sogut

GSTC Academic Symposium - In conjunction with the GSTC Global Conference Sweden April 23, 2024

Türkiye has initiated a paradigm shift in its tourism industry, marked by a collaboration with the Global Sustainable Tourism Council (GSTC), renowned for setting robust sustainability standards. The agreement, initiated in 2022, prioritizes sustainability commitment, commencing with formulating national program criteria and certification bodies training. The initial phase is targeted for completion by the end of 2023, with subsequent stages progressively implemented by 2025, ultimately aiming to meet all international standards by 2030.

This strategic move aims to position Turkey prominently in sustainable tourism, aligning with the goals of The Paris Agreement. Turkey has proactively steered its tourism industry towards …

Arkansas Soil Erosion And Conservation Methods In Ornamental Landscapes, Abby J. Cutsinger

ATU Research Symposium

This study will attempt to identify the best soil erosion mitigation methods for Arkansas ornamental landscape settings by comparing the strengths and weaknesses of known techniques. Since soil is not a renewable resource, we must apply conservation practices wherever possible, not just in agricultural settings. To determine the most effective erosion prevention techniques, this study will review soil studies conducted by the NRCS and NASA, as well as articles on best practices observed in ornamental landscape and agricultural industries. These are analyzed by comparing and contrasting techniques against known problems with Arkansas soil to determine which methods are most effective. …

Assessing The Spatial Variability Of Soil Physical Properties Under A Corn Field In Kentucky, Usa, Sai Neela Kesumala

Scholars Week

Analyzing soil physical properties is crucial for advancing sustainable and precision agricultural practices in today's world. Sustainable agriculture emphasizes responsible resource utilization and preservation. Precision agriculture utilizes technology, data, and targeted decision-making to optimize resource usage and minimize environmental impacts. Assessing soil property variability aids in efficient input application, irrigation adjustment, nutrient runoff reduction, and fertilizer management. This approach prioritizes soil conservation, boosts sustainability, and supports long-term agricultural productivity. This study aimed to evaluate the spatial distribution of specific soil physical properties across the four border rows, central corn field area, and sod area. Seventy-two soil samples were collected from …

Does Green Energy Really Matter For Environment And Economic Sustainability? Validating The Long-Standing Existing Empirics On Pakistan Economy, Syed Kafait Hussain Naqvi

CBER Conference

The empirical outcomes of the study validate the widespread concern of the literature on the existence of the “growth hypothesis” which supports, that there is a systematic positive causation running from green energy to economic sustainability. The study findings suggest that regulations in the energy sector can encourage the applications of green energy resources, particularly in the real sector of the economy, leading to reduced emissions.

Demand Analysis Of Energy Mix In District Kotli Azad Jammu And Kashmir, Pakistan, Syed Kafait Hussain Naqvi

CBER Conference

This study is an effort to empirically analyze the household’s demand for energy mix (electricity, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), kerosene, and firewood) in the District Kotli, AJK. The study estimates the demand elasticities (price and expenditure) by employing the Linear Approximate Almost Ideal Demand System (LA-AIDS) to 384 households sampled across District Kotli, AJK in 2017. The empirical estimations are carried out by using the Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR), keeping intact the adding-up, homogeneity and symmetry restrictions.

Resource Scarcity And Sustainability: Exploring The Water, Energy And Food Nexus, Madiha Hussaini, Riffat Mughal

CBER Conference

This paper focuses on understanding the significance, linkage, issues and prospects of food, water, and energy nexus in the context of Pakistan. It aims to facilitate in exploring measures and developing policies that can be adopted to ensure these essential resources’ management, usage and availability while meeting the sustainable development goals. The Pakistan’s data used for GLS was from 1991 to 2020. The results showed that the availability of freshwater withdrawals in Pakistan for agriculture irrigation, population, and agricultural land has a positive and significant impact on the Food Production Index.

Risk Management Meets Politics And The General Public: Is Risk Management Increasing Risk, Rodger Singley

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Optimal And Robust Control Problems Of Microalgae Cultivation, Mariana Rodriguez-Jara, Luis A. Ricardez-Sandoval, Carlos E. Ramirez-Castelan, Hector Puebla

Annual Symposium on Biomathematics and Ecology Education and Research

No abstract provided.

Complex Impacts Of Wars On Global Sustainable Development In A Metacoupled World, Qutu Jiang, Zhenci Xu, Yuanzheng Cui, Jianguo Liu

I-GUIDE Forum

Wars and armed conflicts have had profound impacts on local and global sustainable development in an interconnected world. However, evidence on the impacts of wars is fragmented and little attention has been paid to the impacts on the 17 UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a unifying framework for achieving global sustainable development. This perspective synthesizes the scattered information to provide a holistic analysis and highlight the applications of remote sensing in assessing the impacts of wars on global sustainable development in a metacoupling world. Wars have complex impacts on all 17 SDGs, which cascade beyond conflict zones and spillover to …

Curriculum Design Of Artificial Intelligence And Sustainability In Secondary School, Jinyi Cai, Mei-Po Kwan, Chunyu Hou, Dong Liu, Yeung Yam

I-GUIDE Forum

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing numerous sectors with its transformative power, while at the same time, there is an increasing sense of urgency to address sustainability challenges. Despite the significance of both areas, secondary school curriculums still lack comprehensive integration of AI and sustainability education. This paper presents a curriculum designed to bridge this gap. The curriculum integrates progressive objectives, computational thinking competencies and system thinking components across five modules—awareness, knowledge, interaction, empowerment and ethics—to cater to varying learner levels. System thinking components help students understand sustainability in a holistic manner. Computational thinking competencies aim to cultivate computational thinkers to guide …

Cross-Scale Urban Land Cover Mapping: Empowering Classification Through Transfer Learning And Deep Learning Integration, Zhe Wang, Chao Fan, Xian Min, Shoukun Sun, Xiaogang Ma, Xiang Que

I-GUIDE Forum

Urban land cover mapping is essential for effective urban planning and resource management. Thanks to its ability to extract intricate features from urban datasets, deep learning has emerged as a powerful technique for urban classification. The U-net architecture has achieved state-of-the-art land cover classification performance, highlighting its potential for mapping urban trees at different spatial scales. However, deep learning approaches often require large, labeled datasets, which are challenging to acquire for specific urban contexts. Transfer learning addresses this limitation by leveraging pre-trained deep learning models on extensive datasets and adapting them to smaller urban datasets with limited labeled samples. Transfer …

Waste Treatment Facility Location For Hotel Chains, Dolores R. Santos-Peñate, Rafael R. Suárez-Vega, Carmen Florido De La Nuez

ITSA 2022 Gran Canaria - 9th Biennial Conference: Corporate Entrepreneurship and Global Tourism Strategies After Covid 19

Tourism generates huge amounts of waste. About half of the waste generated by hotels is food and garden bio-waste. This bio-waste can be used to make compost and pellets. In turn, pellets can be used as an absorbent material in composters and as an energy source. We consider the problem of locating composting and pellet-making facilities so that the bio-waste generated by a chain of hotels can be managed at or close to the generation points. An optimization model is applied to locate the facilities and allocate the waste and products, and several scenarios are analysed. The study shows that, …

Session 5: Banking, Capital Markets, And The Crypto Revolution - A Look Back And Projection Of The Future Of Fintech, Joseph R. Cutler, Lawrence Kaplan, Youssef Sneifer, Jill Williamson

SITIE Symposiums

In Session Five of the SITIE 2023 Symposium: Enabling Innovation in Law and Society, Joseph M. Vincent moderated as the four panelists, Joseph R. Cutler, Lawrence Kaplan, Youssef Sneifer, and Jill Williamson, discussed banking, capital markets, and the crypto revolution by looking back and projecting the future of the financial technology (FinTech) industry. The discussion commenced with a conversation on banking deposits, then moved into a discussion on cryptocurrency companies and the challenges they have faced in recent years in the banking industry. The panelists further discussed artificial intelligence (AI) technology’s impact on FinTech, open banking, and challenges facing cryptocurrency …

Session 4: Fireside Virtual Chat With Bruce Jackson, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft, Bruce Jackson

SITIE Symposiums

Rhymes all have in common? Besides musical talent, they have all been represented by Bruce Jackson, one of the founding partners of the entertainment law firm, Jackson, Brown, Powell, and St. George. Jackson, a Brooklynite and longtime Microsoft attorney, is a force in the legal industry. Jackson started at Microsoft in the year 2000 as Corporate Counsel for the digital media division. Jackson now serves as Associate General Counsel and Managing Director for Strategic Partnerships out of the Office of the President for Microsoft. Jackson recently published his first book, Never Far From Home: My Journey from Brooklyn to Hip …

Session 3: Diversity Enhancing Intellectual Property, Jordi Goodman, Nina Srejovic

SITIE Symposiums

The field of intellectual property suffers from a lack of diversity. Women are underrepresented as credited inventors in the United States. Additionally, multi-gender inventor groups are underrepresented compared to all-male and, sometimes, even all-female groups. This representation has changed over time, with changes not always reflecting an increase in female representation. This is particularly true when studying gender-disparity as it exists in the field of computer programming and software patents. While women were well represented in computer programming at field’s inception, this changed after World War II because men lobbied to push women out of the field. Women have since …

Session 2: Diversity As Key To Innovation - Stem Education, Richard Tapia

SITIE Symposiums

Richard A. Tapia is a professor at Rice University, where he has taught since 1970. Tapi specializes in optimization theory and numerical analysis. It has been his lifelong work to help underrepresented minorities achieve academic success and success in life.

In this talk, Tapia emphasizes the importance of diversity in STEM fields and highlights the failures of the education system in supporting underrepresented minorities. Tapia opines that more efforts need to be made to bring domestic underrepresented minorities into STEM positions and to recognize the value they bring. Tapia believes that, to address the lack of minority representation in STEM …

Session 1b: Innovation In Legal Contracts And Deals - How Lexion Is Incorporating Ai Into Document Revision, Lexion

SITIE Symposiums

Here, Gaurav Oberoi (CEO and Founder, Lexion) & Jessica Nguyen (Chief Legal Officer, Lexion) discuss Lexion and how it will change the legal industry. Lexion seeks to revolutionize how companies manage the contracts that they use. It has begun to corner a particular market in the rapidly growing field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), helping in-house attorneys to improve their workflow by automatically analyzing documents. By using AI, the program can successfully remove what the CEO of Lexion refers to as “low value” work. This allows overworked in-house attorneys to not only do more work in a faster time frame, but …

Session 1a: Innovation In The Delivery Of Legal Services And Access To Justice, Vikktoria

SITIE Symposiums

In session one, Walid Romaya and Tabrez Ebrahim, co-founders of Vikktoria, discuss their company and its contributions to improving access to justice. With a dual focus on achieving a broader access to justice and in providing matchmaking services for legal professionals looking for a larger client base, Vikktoria aims to disrupt the legal services industry through its mobile app. Based in California, Vikktoria has begun to expand to various metro areas around the country and hopes to provide broader access to justice by giving those with little to no legal knowledge an easy way to find a local attorney, book …

Introduction, Steven Bender

SITIE Symposiums

No abstract provided.

Shop Less, Shop Better: Ethical And Sustainability Concerns Throughout The Fast Fashion Supply Chain, Natali Ann Hoeg

Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference (PURCC)

My capstone project is a series of short essays that describe how fast fashion is having negative impacts on local environments, communities, and supply chains. This research is a review of technical sources describing manufacturing of clothing and certification processes for alternative, sustainable textile production. Additionally, this review incorporates perspectives from journalists and documentarians, visiting and describing farms and factories that are involved with fast fashion production. This project was carried out over the course of a semester, as an independent study. The essays focus on the environmental and social impacts of fast fashion. Each of the six essays approaches …

263 - Housing And Integrating Bats Into The Suny Geneseo Campus Ecosystem., Hailey Cullen, Gabrielle Joseph

GREAT Day Posters

This presentation centers on research conducted on building a sustainable prototype design of a bat box. We focused on configuring the implementation of bat boxes around the SUNY Geneseo campus as well as the optimal materials to use in the building of this prototype. The primary species targeted in our research and design development is the big brown bat.

221 - Angkorian Temples In Mainland Southeast Asia: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand & Vietnam 9th - 15th Century, Sophuth Phon

GREAT Day Posters

The Angkorian Era of the Khmer Empire (9th - 15th AD) is notable for its construction of numerous temples of high architectural heritage value, yet those temples have not been studied in depth. The spatial distribution of those temples, and their various historical characteristics, are also yet to be analyzed or mapped out. The purpose of this project is to spatially map the temple and discern if locations correlate to the region’s geography. This project compiled primary data on 70 major Angkorian temples in mainland Southeast Asia using various sources but primarily Google Earth Pro and Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX). …

339 - Snowvember 2.0: Mapping Lake-Effect Snowfall In The Buffalo, New York Area During The November 2022 Extreme Snowfall Event, Gabrielle Puente

GREAT Day Posters

The City of Buffalo, New York is located in western New York State near two Great Lakes: Lake Ontario to the north, and Lake Erie to the west. The Great Lakes region that includes Buffalo experiences a weather phenomenon known as lake-effect snow, where surface buoyant instability and upward moisture movement from the Great Lakes can cause extreme snowfall in localized bands. The purpose of this project is to analyze the total amount of snowfall that occurred on a specific lake-effect snowfall even in November 2022, termed "Snowvember 2.0" (or November 2022 Great Lakes Winter Storm.) Snowfall data was obtained …

Comparative Analysis Of Implementing Solar Energy In South Carolina, Paige Huntzberry, Jo Whitney

Undergraduate Research Competition

Solar energy is becoming an increasingly popular method of providing energy to homes and businesses all over the world. Converting to solar energy is a huge step in reducing our carbon footprint, a driving force of global climate change. While this type of energy production provides an eco-friendly approach to power, requiring minimal maintenance and virtually no additional infrastructure, many are still opposed to the implementation due to financial reservations. The aim of this project is to design a solar array for installation on a building at the Medical University of South Carolina, providing a cost effective and practical approach …

Dual Ionic Liquid-Functionalized Cellulosic Materials: Thermal, Mechanical And Conductive Properties, Elizabeth Mcgrew, Kevin M. Miller Phd

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Cellulose, an inexpensive and renewable biomacromolecule, represents an intriguing synthetic foundation for new materials with task-specific properties. Here, we wish to report a synthetic route for functionalizing cellulose with a side chain containing two ionic liquid functional groups using azide-alkyne ‘click’ cyclization strategy, followed by quaternization of the two resulting heterocycles (1,2,3-triazole and imidazole). Through this functionalization strategy, the resulting cellulosic materials exhibited significant softening, with several glass transition (T_g) values observed below room temperature, indicating the amorphous nature of the materials, with the T_g dependent on both the length of the side chain and the …

Removal Of Selenium And Heavy Metals From Coal Combustion Residuals Wastewater Using Surface Modified Iron Based Media, Madan Tandukar, Alex Korff, Andrew Vincent, Chris Hardin

World of Coal Ash Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Uncovering The Mysteries Of Retention Ponds: Comparing The Abundance And Type Of Microplastics In Storm Water Ponds In London Ontario, Natalie Rose Minda

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

Microplastics are plastics <5 mm (Liu, 2019; Arthur et al., 2009). They are created in two ways: Intentionally or from the fragmentation of larger pieces of plastic (National Ocean Service, 2021). They can negatively impact human, wildlife and ecosystem health in many ways depending on the exposure, type, size, and shape of the microplastic (Campanale, 2020). Retention ponds are often created in neighborhoods to collect water in order to prevent flooding. They also often serve as habitat for wildlife. Sediment samples were collected in two ponds in London Ontario both dredged in 2016. Samples were processed in the lab and further analyzed under the microscope to isolate the microplastics. Results have not been determined yet, but the abundance and type of microplastic varies in both ponds. Plastic pollution in retention ponds should be considered more, as it poses a threat to human and ecosystem health.

A Qualitative Look Into Repair Practices, Jumana Labib

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

This research poster is based on a working research paper which moves beyond the traditional scope of repair and examines the Right to Repair movement from a smaller, more personal lens by detailing the 6 categorical impediments as dubbed by Dr. Alissa Centivany (design, law, economic/business strategy, material asymmetry, informational asymmetry, and social impediments) have continuously inhibited repair and affected repair practices, which has consequently had larger implications (environmental, economic, social, etc.) on ourselves, our objects, and our world. The poster builds upon my research from last year (see "The Right to Repair: (Re)building a better future"), this time pulling …