Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimizing Raman Spectral Collection For Quartz And Zircon Crystals For Elastic Geothermobarometry, Mayara F. Cizina

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Raman microspectroscopy is widely used to identify and characterize organic and inorganic compounds. In the geosciences, Raman microspectroscopy has been used to identify mineral and fluid inclusions in host crystals, as well as to calculate pressure-temperature (P-T) conditions using mineral inclusions in host crystals, such as quartz-in-garnet barometry (QuiG). For thermobarometric applications, the reproducibility of Raman peak position measurements is crucial to obtain accurate P-T estimates. In this study, we explored how to optimize Raman spectral collection of quartz and zircon inclusions and reference crystals by monitoring machine stability and by varying spectral parameters. We also monitored a reference Hg …

The Signal Of Modern To Holocene Drivers Of Complex Channel Response Of A Small Alluvial Stream, Scott D. Ducar

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Small alluvial streams (~100km² drainage area) are important for water resources and aquatic habitat. Small streams throughout the Western United States are impacted by anthropogenic land-use including urban development, mining, logging, beaver trapping, grazing, and farming. Land-use change can trigger a complex series of channel response (such as stream channel incision or channel migration) that vary spatially and temporally in the watershed. However, streams also respond to other external forcings, such as tectonically or climatically-driven changes in discharge or base-level, which make disentangling the drivers of channel response complicated. Therefore, it is important to place modern channel changes into …

Observed Defects Of Swiss Cheese Based On The Microbiome Contribution To The Production Of Organic Acids, Vannessa D. Campfield

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The United States Department of Agriculture downgrades on the order of 17% of all Swiss cheese produced in the United States due to defects. Many of these defects are related to improper eye formation, number, distribution, or size; leading to an industry loss of over $69 million per annum. The microbiome in Swiss-type cheeses plays a significant role in eye development due to production of organic acids and gaseous emissions contingent on bacterial abundance and phenotype. The relationship between bacteria and the organic acids they produce leading to Swiss cheese defects can be correlated using Next-generation sequencing and high-performance liquid …

Buried Soil Carbon Vulnerability To Decomposition With Landscape Disturbance, Abby Mcmurtry

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Buried layers of ancient soil organic carbon (SOC) can store significant amounts carbon (C). Persistence of this C is favored by burial, which disconnects the soil from atmospheric conditions and limits plant derived C inputs, thus reducing microbial activity. However, erosion exposes buried paleosols to modern surface conditions and results in influx of root-derived C through the processes of root exudation and root turnover. These C inputs stimulate microbial activity and leave paleosol C vulnerable to decomposition. Understanding turnover of ancient soil C is critical for predicting the response of this large C reservoir to environmental change and feedbacks to …

A Collection Of Fast Algorithms For Scalar And Vector-Valued Data On Irregular Domains: Spherical Harmonic Analysis, Divergence-Free/Curl-Free Radial Basis Functions, And Implicit Surface Reconstruction, Kathryn Primrose Drake

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses problems that arise in a diverse group of fields including cosmology, electromagnetism, and graphic design. While these topics may seem disparate, they share a commonality in their need for fast and accurate algorithms which can handle large datasets collected on irregular domains. An important issue in cosmology is the calculation of the angular power spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. CMB photons offer a direct insight into the early stages of the universe's development and give the strongest evidence for the Big Bang theory to date. The Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelation (HEALPix) grid is …

Analytic Solutions For Diffusion On Path Graphs And Its Application To The Modeling Of The Evolution Of Electrically Indiscernible Conformational States Of Lysenin, K. Summer Ware

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Memory is traditionally thought of as a biological function of the brain. In recent years, however, researchers have found that some stimuli-responsive molecules exhibit memory-like behavior manifested as history-dependent hysteresis in response to external excitations. One example is lysenin, a pore-forming toxin found naturally in the coelomic fluid of the common earthworm Eisenia fetida. When reconstituted into a bilayer lipid membrane, this unassuming toxin undergoes conformational changes in response to applied voltages. However, lysenin is able to "remember" past history by adjusting its conformational state based not only on the amplitude of the stimulus but also on its previous …

Unsupervised Structural Graph Node Representation Learning, Mikel Joaristi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning methods learn a numerical representation of the nodes in a graph. The generated representations encode meaningful information about the nodes' properties, making them a powerful tool for tasks in many areas of study, such as social sciences, biology or communication networks. These methods are particularly interesting because they facilitate the direct use of standard Machine Learning models on graphs. Graph representation learning methods can be divided into two main categories depending on the information they encode, methods preserving the nodes connectivity information, and methods preserving nodes' structural information. Connectivity-based methods focus on encoding relationships between nodes, …

Useable Coarse-Grained Models For Semiconducting Polymers And Thermosets, Michael Montgomery Henry

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This work aims to inform the formulation and processing of polymer mixtures through the use of models that have minimally sufficient complexity. Models with minimal complexity are easier to develop, understand, explain, and extend, all of which underpin model validation, verification, and reproducibility.

We develop simplified models for two different material systems, semiconducting polymers and thermosets. With the relatively low cost of predicting morphologies enabled by these models, we investigate structure-property-processing relationships in record system sizes and combinatorial parameter spaces. The insight from these models lays the foundation for improving the efficiency of organic solar cells and air travel.

The …

A 30-Year Agroclimatic Analysis Of The Snake River Valley American Viticultural Area - Descriptive And Predictive Methods, Charles L. Becker

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Climate change poses serious threats to global agriculture, however some localities and crops may benefit from increasing temperatures. Grape production in southern Idaho may be a beneficial example as vineyard acreage has increased over 300% since the designation of the Snake River American Viticultural Area (SRVAVA) in 2007. We perform a statistical characterization of agroclimate within the SRVAVA that centers around four primary objectives: utilization of a novel, 30-year high resolution climate dataset to provide insight and agrometrics unavailable at coarser resolutions, climatic implications of the unique topography within the SRVAVA, identification of statistical trends, and correlation of SRVAVA climate …

Automated Terminus Detection For Greenland's Peripheral Marine-Terminating Glaciers, Julia Liu

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Changes in the length of marine-terminating glaciers strongly influence the mass balance of glaciers, ice caps, and ice sheets. Currently, quantification of glacier length change through measurement of terminus position relies on time-consuming and subjective manual mapping techniques, limiting our ability to understand the dynamics controlling glacier terminus changes. I developed an automated method of mapping glacier terminus positions in satellite imagery using observations from a representative sample of Greenlands peripheral glaciers. The method is adapted from the 2D Wavelet Transform Modulus Maxima (WTMM) segmentation method, which has been used previously for image segmentation in biomedical and other applied science …

Geochemical Variability & Implications For Magma Transport At 14°N On The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Emma Elizabeth Mccully

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Observations of seafloor bathymetry and gravity surveys indicate that magma focuses in the center of slow spreading Mid-Ocean Ridge (MOR) segments, however; it is not well constrained how magma is generated, stored, and transported to the segment ends. There are two end-member models for magma transport: 1) a focused magma model wherein the magma upwells beneath the entire ridge axis, is focused and pools beneath the center of the segment, and is then transported towards the segment ends via lateral diking in the shallow crust and 2) a distributed magma model wherein magma vertically upwells and is erupted on the …

Using Terrestrial Laser Scanning To Characterize Peatland Microtopography And Assess Tree Growth Responses To Elevated Temperature And Co2, Jake D. Graham

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Northern peatlands are a major terrestrial carbon (C) store, with an annual sink of 0.1 Pg C yr^-1 and a total storage estimate of 547 Pg C. Northern peatlands are also major contributors of atmospheric methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The microtopography of peatlands helps modulate peatland carbon fluxes; however, there is a lack of quantitative characterizations of microtopography in the literature. The lack of formalized schemes to characterize microtopography makes comparisons between studies difficult. Further, many land surface models do not accurately simulate peatland C emissions, in part because they do not adequately represent peatland microtopography and hydrology. …

Snow Depth Distribution Patterns And Consistency From Airborne Lidar Time Series, Megan A. Mason

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Snow provides fresh meltwater to over a billion people worldwide. Snow dominated watersheds drive western US water supply and are increasingly important as demand depletes reservoir and groundwater recharge capabilities. This motivates our inter- and intra-annual investigation of snow distribution patterns, leveraging the most comprehensive airborne lidar survey (ALS) dataset for snow. Validation results for ALS from both the NASA SnowEx 2017 campaign in Grand Mesa, Colorado and the time series dataset from the Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada, in California, are presented. We then assess the consistency in the snow depth patterns for the entire basin (at …

A Sense Of Scale: Mapping Exotic Annual Grasses With Satellite Imagery Across A Landscape And Quantifying Their Biomass At A Plot Level With Structure-From-Motion In A Semi-Arid Ecosystem, Monica Vermillion

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The native vegetation communities in the sagebrush steppe, a semi-arid ecosystem type, are under threat from exotic annual grasses. Exotic annual grasses increase fire severity and frequency, decrease biodiversity, and reduce soil carbon storage amongst other ecosystem services. The invasion of exotic annual grasses is causing detrimental impacts to land use by eliminating forage for livestock and creating a huge economic cost from fire control and post-fire restoration. To combat invasion, land managers need to know what exotic annual grasses are present, where they are invading, and estimates of their biomass. Mapping exotic annual grasses is challenging because many areas …

Applications Of Continuous Snowpack Temperature Monitoring, Peter J. Youngblood

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Predicting metamorphism within seasonal snowpacks is critical for avalanche forecasting and runoff timing as it relates to water supply management. Snowpack temperature gradients play a key role in snow metamorphism, and their magnitude controls how snow strength changes; therefore, they are of interest to avalanche forecasters. Before major melt, the snowpack must warm to isothermal conditions at 0°C. Measuring this transition from warming to the ripening phase could help improve our current models for runoff timing. Measuring snowpack temperature gradients is currently a non-automated process that requires disturbance of the snow profile, and only gives a snapshot in time of …

Countermovement Jump Assessment For Monitoring Prolonged Fatigue In Collegiate Female Soccer Players, Jeffrey A. Wilkins

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Introduction: Females are 4 to 6 times more likely to sustain an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury than their male counterparts during running and cutting sports, such as soccer. This sex disparity is thought to result from altered lower limb neuromuscular control that females present when fatigued at the end of practice or games. Yet, current fatigue monitoring techniques typically vary in their reliability, applicability and efficiency. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to test the feasibility of the countermovement jump (CMJ) to quickly and reliably monitor fatigue in female soccer athletes. Methods: Twenty-two (age: 19.3 ± 1.1 yrs, …

Assessment Of Unmanned Aerial Systems (Uas) Surveys In Dryland Ecosystems: Estimates Of Fractional Photosynthetic Cover And Plant Functional Types, Anna V. Roser

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Drylands cover 41% of the global land surface and provide ecosystem services to 38% of the world’s population. Dryland ecosystems have already been degraded or threatened by the increased rates of wildfire and invasive annual grasses, as well as changes in precipitation patterns. We cannot protect, mitigate, or restore drylands without comprehensive vegetation surveys. To understand ecosystem processes, we need to know the composition of vegetation at the patch and plant scales. Field observations are limited in coverage, and are expensive and time intensive. Data from Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) will fill the niche between field data and medium scale …

Detecting Undisclosed Paid Editing In Wikipedia, Nikesh Joshi

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Wikipedia is a free and open-collaboration based online encyclopedia. The website has millions of pages that are maintained by thousands of volunteer editors. It is part of Wikipedia’s fundamental principles that pages are written with a neutral point of view and are maintained by volunteer editors for free with well-defined guidelines in order to avoid or disclose any conflict of interest. However, there have been several known incidents where editors intentionally violate such guidelines in order to get paid (or even extort money) for maintaining promotional spam articles without disclosing such information.

This thesis addresses for the first time the …

Improving Spellchecking For Children: Correction And Design, Brody Downs

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Children commonly use software applications such as search engines and word processors in the classroom environment. However, a major barrier to using these programs successfully is the ability of children to type and spell effectively. While many programs make use of spellcheckers to provide spelling corrections to their users, they are designed for more traditional users (i.e., adults) and have proven inadequate for children. The aims of this work is twofold: first, to address the types of spelling errors children make by researching, developing, and evaluating algorithms to generate and rank candidate spelling suggestions; and second, to evaluate the impact …

Mxenes As Flow Electrodes For Capacitive Deionization Of Wastewater, Naqsh E. Mansoor

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The energy-water nexus poses an integrated research challenge, while opening up an opportunity space for the development of energy efficient technologies for water remediation. Capacitive Deionization (CDI) is an upcoming reclamation technology that uses a small applied voltage applied across electrodes to electrophoretically remove dissolved ionic impurities from wastewater streams. Similar to a supercapacitor, the ions are stored in the electric double layer of the electrodes. Reversing the polarity of applied voltage enables recovery of the removed ionic impurities, allowing for recycling and reuse. Simultaneous materials recovery and water reclamation makes CDI energy efficient and resource conservative, with potential to …

Joint Inversion Of Gpr And Er Data, Diego Domenzain

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Imaging the subsurface can shed knowledge on important processes needed in a modern day human's life such as ground-water exploration, water resource monitoring, contaminant and hazard mitigation, geothermal energy exploration and carbon dioxide storage. As computing power expands, it is becoming ever more feasible to increase the physical complexity of Earth's exploration methods, and hence enhance our understanding of the subsurface.

We use non-invasive geophysical active source methods that rely on electromagnetic fields to probe the depths of the Earth. In particular, we use Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and Electrical resistivity (ER). Both methods are sensitive to electrical conductivity while …

Rayleigh-Wave Multicomponent Crosscorrelation-Based Estimation Of Phase Velocities And Ambient Seismic Source Distributions, Zongbo Xu

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

One uses seismic interferometry (SI) to recover Green’s functions (i.e. impulse response) from ambient seismic recordings and estimate surface-wave phase velocities to investigate subsurface structure. This method has been commonly used in the last 20 years because this method only utilizes ambient seismic recordings from seismic stations/sensors and does not rely on traditional seismic sources (e.g. earthquakes or active sources). SI assumes that the ambient seismic wavefield is isotropic, but this assumption is rarely met in practice. We demonstrate that, with linear-array spatial sampling of an anisotropic ambient seismic wavefield, SI provides a better estimate of Rayleigh-wave phase velocities than …

Complexity And Dynamics Of Semi-Arid Vegetation Structure, Function And Diversity Across Spatial Scales From Full Waveform Lidar, Ginikanda Yapa Mudiyanselage Nayani Thanuja Ilangakoon

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Semi-arid ecosystems cover approximately 40% of the earth’s terrestrial landscape and show high dynamicity in ecosystem structure and function. These ecosystems play a critical role in global carbon dynamics, productivity, and habitat quality. Semi-arid ecosystems experience a high degree of disturbance that can severely alter ecosystem services and processes. Understanding the structure-function relationships across spatial extents are critical in order to assess their demography, response to disturbance, and for conservation management. In this research, using state-of-the-art full waveform lidar (airborne and spaceborne) and field observations, I developed a framework to assess the complexity and dynamics of vegetation structure, function and …

The Directed Forest Complex Of Cayley Graphs, Kennedy Courtney

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Let Γ be a directed graph. The directed forest complex, DF(Γ), is a simplicial complex whose vertices are the edges of Γ and whose simplices are sets of edges that form a directed forest in Γ. We study the directed forest complex of Cayley graphs of finite groups. The homology of DF(Γ) contains information about the graph, Γ and about the group, G. The ultimate goal is to classify DF(Γ) up to homotopy, compute its homology, and interpret the findings in terms of properties of DF(Γ). In this thesis, we present progress made toward this goal.

Content Based Image Retrieval (Cbir) For Brand Logos, Enjal Parajuli

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the problem of automatically detecting the presence of logos in general images. Brand logos carry the goodwill of a company and are considered to be of high value in the corporate world, and thus automatically determining whether or not a logo is present in an image can be of interest for companies that wish to protect their brand. The problem of automated logo detection is inherently complex, but is further complicated through intentional obfuscation of logo images, for example by color shifting or other slight image modifications that leave the logo intact and easily recognizable by a …

Polyhedral+Dataflow Graphs, Eddie C. Davis

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This research presents an intermediate compiler representation that is designed for optimization, and emphasizes the temporary storage requirements and execution schedule of a given computation to guide optimization decisions. The representation is expressed as a dataflow graph that describes computational statements and data mappings within the polyhedral compilation model. The targeted applications include both the regular and irregular scientific domains.

The intermediate representation can be integrated into existing compiler infrastructures. A specification language implemented as a domain specific language in C++ describes the graph components and the transformations that can be applied. The visual representation allows users to reason about …

Do You Feel Me?: Learning Language From Humans With Robot Emotional Displays, David Mcneill

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

In working towards accomplishing a human-level acquisition and understanding of language, a robot must meet two requirements: the ability to learn words from interactions with its physical environment, and the ability to learn language from people in settings for language use, such as spoken dialogue. The second requirement poses a problem: If a robot is capable of asking a human teacher well-formed questions, it will lead the teacher to provide responses that are too advanced for a robot, which requires simple inputs and feedback to build word-level comprehension.

In a live interactive study, we tested the hypothesis that emotional displays …

Obtaining Real-World Benchmark Programs From Open-Source Repositories Through Abstract-Semantics Preserving Transformations, Maria Anne Rachel Paquin

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Benchmark programs are an integral part of program analysis research. Researchers use benchmark programs to evaluate existing techniques and test the feasibility of new approaches. The larger and more realistic the set of benchmarks, the more confident a researcher can be about the correctness and reproducibility of their results. However, obtaining an adequate set of benchmark programs has been a long-standing challenge in the program analysis community.

In this thesis, we present the APT tool, a framework we designed and implemented to automate the generation of realistic benchmark programs suitable for program analysis evaluations. Our tool targets intra-procedural analyses that …

Privacy-Preserving Protocol For Atomic Swap Between Blockchains, Kiran Gurung

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Atomic swap facilitates fair exchange of cryptocurrencies without the need for a trusted authority. It is regarded as one of the prominent technologies for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, helping to realize the idea of a decentralized blockchain introduced by Bitcoin. However, due to the heterogeneity of the cryptocurrency systems, developing efficient and privacy-preserving atomic swap protocols has proven challenging. In this thesis, we propose a generic framework for atomic swap, called PolySwap, that enables fair ex-change of assets between two heterogeneous sets of blockchains. Our construction 1) does not require a trusted third party, 2) preserves the anonymity of the swap …

Improving Scientist Productivity, Architecture Portability, And Performance In Parflow, Michael Burke

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Legacy scientific applications represent significant investments by universities, engineers, and researchers and contain valuable implementations of key scientific computations. Over time hardware architectures have changed. Adapting existing code to new architectures is time consuming, expensive, and increases code complexity. The increase in complexity negatively affects the scientific impact of the applications. There is an immediate need to reduce complexity. We propose using abstractions to manage and reduce code complexity, improving scientific impact of applications.

This thesis presents a set of abstractions targeting boundary conditions in iterative solvers. Many scientific applications represent physical phenomena as a set of partial differential equations …