Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment For Parts, Ground, And Msc Poultry Product Including Intervention Analysis And Exploration Of Enterobacteriaceae As An Indicator Organism In Poultry Processing, Leigh Ann Parette

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Samples collected at five different large bird poultry processing facilities over a period of 7 months from prescald to post debone locations were enumerated for Enterobacteriaceae, Salmonella spp., and Campylobacter spp. and the results were used to create Quantitative Microbial Risk Analyses (QMRA) models for parts, ground, and mechanically separated chicken (MSC) products. Sensitivity analyses indicated the points in the process at which reductions would be most advantageous to the endpoint and simulation models were run to test reductions required to meet the current USDA performance standards.

These data were analyzed to determine the reductions from one node (location) to …

Multi-Base Chains For Faster Elliptic Curve Cryptography, Saud Al Musa

Theses and Dissertations

This research addresses a multi-base number system (MBNS) for faster elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The emphasis is on speeding up the main operation of ECC: scalar multiplication (tP). Mainly, it addresses the two issues of using the MBNS with ECC: deriving optimized formulas and choosing fast methods. To address the first issue, this research studies the optimized formulas (e.g., 3P, 5P) in different elliptic curve coordinate systems over prime and binary fields. For elliptic curves over prime fields, affine Weierstrass, Jacobian Weierstrass, and standard twisted Edwards coordinate systems are reviewed. For binary elliptic curves, affine, Lambda-projective, and twisted mu4-normal coordinate …

Adaptive Parallelism For Coupled, Multithreaded Message-Passing Programs, Samuel K. Gutiérrez

Computer Science ETDs

Hybrid parallel programming models that combine message passing (MP) and shared- memory multithreading (MT) are becoming more popular, especially with applications requiring higher degrees of parallelism and scalability. Consequently, coupled parallel programs, those built via the integration of independently developed and optimized software libraries linked into a single application, increasingly comprise message-passing libraries with differing preferred degrees of threading, resulting in thread-level heterogeneity. Retroactively matching threading levels between independently developed and maintained libraries is difficult, and the challenge is exacerbated because contemporary middleware services provide only static scheduling policies over entire program executions, necessitating suboptimal, over-subscribed or under-subscribed, configurations. In …

Optimizing The Plasmonic Enhancement Of Light In Metallic Nanogap Structures For Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy, Stephen Joseph Bauman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Technology based on the interaction between light and matter has entered something of a renaissance over the past few decades due to improved control over the creation of nanoscale patterns. Tunable nanofabrication has benefitted optical sensing, by which light is used to detect the presence or quantity of various substances. Through methods such as Raman spectroscopy, the optical spectra of solid, liquid, or gaseous samples act as fingerprints which help identify a single type of molecule amongst a background of potentially many other chemicals. This technique therefore offers great benefit to applications such as biomedical sensors, airport security, industrial waste …

Assessment Of Soil Properties And Vegetation In A Mounded Native Tallgrass Prairie With An Aquic And Udic Soil Moisture Regime In The Ozark Highlands Region Of Northwest Arkansas, Tyler Joseph Durre

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Native tallgrass prairies were once considered to be the dominant pre-settlement vegetation type in the eastern third of the Great Plains, but are now designated as America’s most endangered ecosystem due to conversion to agricultural land. Prairie mounds are unique soil features still present in remnant native tallgrass prairies across the United States. The main objective was to determine the effects of soil moisture regime (i.e., aquic and udic), mound position, (i.e., mound summit, backslope, toeslope, inter-mound), soil depth (i.e., 10-cm intervals from 0 to 90 cm), and their interactions on soil physical, chemical, and hydraulic properties in a mounded …

Synthesis Of Dicamba Glucosides For The Study Of Environmental Dicamba Drift Effects On Soybeans, Holly Wallace

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The most popular herbicide used for weed control has been glyphosate for many years in the Midwestern United States. Plants have begun to develop a resistance to glyphosate due to over use of the herbicide. This herbicide resistance has pushed farmers to turn to alternative herbicides such as dicamba and 2,4-D. Recently agrochemical companies have developed genetically modified crops that are resistant to herbicides such as dicamba. These modified crops allow farmers to spray their fields with dicamba without fear of crop damage. Farmers of non-genetically modified crops, however, suffer damage and loss of yield from herbicide drift effects of …

Umphlett Qci Dec 2018, Natalie A. Umphlett

HPRCC Personnel Publications

Highlights for the Basin

Temperature and Precipitation Anomalies

Mountain Snowpack

Water Resources and Drought

Agriculture

Temperature

Precipitation

Sediment Transport Model Including Short-Lived Radioisotopes: Model Description And Idealized Test Cases, Justin J. Birchler,, Courtney K. Harris, Christopher R Sherwood, Tara A. Kniskern

VIMS Articles

Geochronologies derived from sediment cores in coastal locations are often used to infer event bed characteristics such as deposit thicknesses and accumulation rates. Such studies commonly use naturally occurring, short-lived radioisotopes, such as Beryllium-7 (Be-7) and Thorium-234 (Th-234), to study depositional and post-depositional processes. These radioisotope activities, however, are not generally represented in sediment transport models that characterize coastal flood and storm deposition with grain size patterns and deposit thicknesses. We modified the Community Sediment Transport Modeling System (CSTMS) to account for reactive tracers and used this capability to represent the behavior of these short-lived radioisotopes on the sediment bed. …

Waddle - Always-Canonical Intermediate Representation, Eric Drew Fritz

Theses and Dissertations

Program transformations that are able to rely on the presence of canonical properties of the program undergoing optimization can be written to be more robust and efficient than an equivalent but generalized transformation that also handles non-canonical programs. If a canonical property is required but broken earlier in an earlier transformation, it must be rebuilt (often from scratch). This additional work can be a dominating factor in compilation time when many transformations are applied over large programs. This dissertation introduces a methodology for constructing program transformations so that the program remains in an always-canonical form as the program is mutated, …

Multidecadal Variability In Climate Models And Observations, Alex Carl Oser

Theses and Dissertations

Climate change attribution and prediction using state-of-the-art models continue to garner an ever-growing focus amongst both the scientific community and public alike. Recent analyses showing discrepancies in the structure of modeled and observed decadal climate variability (DCV), therefore, have engendered efforts to not only diagnose the dynamics underpinning observed DCV, but also to characterize the behavior of DCV within climate models. In this thesis, we employ Multichannel Singular Spectrum Analysis (M-SSA) to show that while the DCV signal in observations is best described as a coherent oscillation with complex propagation across the globe, modeled DCV lacks this structure altogether. Specifically, …

Cost-Effective Load Scheduling For Hybrid Renewable Energy Systems, Avinash Shashikala Rajendra

Theses and Dissertations

Hybrid renewable energy systems offer great promise for the future. However, some lingering concerns regarding stability and cost efficiency still exist. If a private party installs the system and maintains full control, the party may itself alleviate some of these problems by wisely optimizing the benefits offered by the system. One of the ways to do so is to develop a schedule for their load such that the cost incurred is minimized; this is done by maximally utilizing the renewable sources of energy before using the backup options of more conventional energy sources. Creating such a schedule involves considering several …

3d Shape Descriptor-Based Facial Landmark Detection: A Machine Learning Approach, Reihaneh Rostami

Theses and Dissertations

Facial landmark detection on 3D human faces has had numerous applications in the literature

such as establishing point-to-point correspondence between 3D face models which is itself a

key step for a wide range of applications like 3D face detection and authentication, matching,

reconstruction, and retrieval, to name a few.

Two groups of approaches, namely knowledge-driven and data-driven approaches, have been

employed for facial landmarking in the literature. Knowledge-driven techniques are the

traditional approaches that have been widely used to locate landmarks on human faces. In

these approaches, a user with sucient knowledge and experience usually denes features to

be extracted …

Shorter And Improved Access To The Key Tetracyclic Core Of Sarpagine-Macroline-Ajmaline Indole Alkaloids: The Total Synthesis Of Alkaloids Macrocarpines A-G, Talcarpine, N(4)-Methyl-N(4),21-Secotalpinine, Deoxyperaksine, Dihydroperaksine, Talpinine, O-Acetyltalpinine, And N(4)-Methyltalpinine, Md Toufiqur Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

Extension of the asymmetric Pictet-Spengler (P-S) reaction to bulkier Nb-alkylated tryptophan derivatives resulted in a shorter and improved stereospecific access to the key bicyclo[3.3.1]nonane framework of bioactive C-19 methyl substituted sarpagine/macro-line/ajmaline indole alkaloids with excellent diastereoselectivity via internal asymmetric induction. The asymmetric Pictet-Spengler/Dieckmann protocol with bulky Nb-alkyl substituted systems enabled a more direct and two-step shorter route to this key architecture. Complete stereocontrol of the C-19 methyl function in either the α- or β-configuration was achieved which would enable one to gain rapid access to the crucial intermediates for the total synthesis of any member of this group of seventy …

Mobility-Driven Ble Transmit-Power Adaptation For Participatory Data Muling, Chung-Kyun Han, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper analyzes a human-centric framework, called SmartABLE, for easy retrieval of the sensor values from pervasively deployed smart objects in a campus-like environment. In this framework, smartphones carried by campus occupants act as data mules, opportunistically retrieving data from nearby BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) equipped smart object sensors and relaying them to a backend repository. We focus specifically on dynamically varying the transmission power of the deployed BLE beacons, so as to extend their operational lifetime without sacrificing the frequency of sensor data retrieval. We propose a memetic algorithm-based power adaptation strategy that can handle deployments of thousands of …

Credit Assignment For Collective Multiagent Rl With Global Rewards, Duc Thien Nguyen, Akshat Kumar, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Scaling decision theoretic planning to large multiagent systems is challenging due to uncertainty and partial observability in the environment. We focus on a multiagent planning model subclass, relevant to urban settings, where agent interactions are dependent on their collective influence'' on each other, rather than their identities. Unlike previous work, we address a general setting where system reward is not decomposable among agents. We develop collective actor-critic RL approaches for this setting, and address the problem of multiagent credit assignment, and computing low variance policy gradient estimates that result in faster convergence to high quality solutions. We also develop difference …

Perflearner: Learning From Bug Reports To Understand And Generate Performance Test Frames, Xue Han, Tingting Yu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software performance is important for ensuring the quality of software products. Performance bugs, defined as programming errors that cause significant performance degradation, can lead to slow systems and poor user experience. While there has been some research on automated performance testing such as test case generation, the main idea is to select workload values to increase the program execution times. These techniques often assume the initial test cases have the right combination of input parameters and focus on evolving values of certain input parameters. However, such an assumption may not hold for highly configurable real-word applications, in which the combinations …

Applying Design Thinking To Student Outreach Projects: Experiences From An Information Systems School, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Alan Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As countries turn into Smart Nations, Infocom Technology plays a key role in enhancing their competitiveness through high skilled workforces. Reaching to younger generations and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities. Many high quality students from junior colleges either don’t choose IS programs or choose IS programs as their last option during the application process. A School of Information Systems (SIS) from a large metropolitan university decided to implement an innovative outreach program to attract high quality high school aka Junior College (JC) students. JC …

Privacy-Preserving Remote User Authentication With K-Times Untraceability, Yangguang Tian, Yingjiu Li, Binanda Sengupta, Robert H. Deng, Albert Ching, Weiwei Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Remote user authentication has found numerous real-world applications, especially in a user-server model. In this work, we introduce the notion of anonymous remote user authentication with k-times untraceability (k-RUA) for a given parameter k, where authorized users authenticate themselves to an authority (typically a server) in an anonymous and k-times untraceable manner. We define the formal security models for a generic k-RUA construction that guarantees user authenticity, anonymity and user privacy. We provide a concrete instantiation of k-RUA having the following properties: (1) a third party cannot impersonate an authorized user by producing valid transcripts for the user while conversing …

Sybmatch: Sybil Detection For Privacy-Preserving Task Matching In Crowdsourcing, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Kan Yang, Yinghui Zhang, Xiaohua Jia, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past decade has witnessed the rise of crowdsourcing, and privacy in crowdsourcing has also gained rising concern in the meantime. In this paper, we focus on the privacy leaks and sybil attacks during the task matching, and propose a privacy-preserving task matching scheme, called SybMatch. The SybMatch scheme can simultaneously protect the privacy of publishers and subscribers against semi-honest crowdsourcing service provider, and meanwhile support the sybil detection against greedy subscribers and efficient user revocation. Detailed security analysis and thorough performance evaluation show that the SybMatch scheme is secure and efficient.

Automatically `Verifying’ Discrete-Time Complex Systems Through Learning, Abstraction And Refinement, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun, Shengchao Qin, Cyrille Jegourel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Precisely modeling complex systems like cyber-physical systems is challenging, which often render model-based system verification techniques like model checking infeasible. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method called LAR to automatically ‘verify’ such complex systems through a combination of learning, abstraction and refinement from a set of system log traces. We assume that log traces and sampling frequency are adequate to capture ‘enough’ behaviour of the system. Given a safety property and the concrete system log traces as input, LAR automatically learns and refines system models, and produces two kinds of outputs. One is a counterexample with a bounded …

Co-Location Resistant Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to increasing number of avenues for conducting cross-virtual machine (VM) side-channel attacks, the security of public IaaS cloud data centers is a growing concern. These attacks allow an adversary to steal private information from a target user whose VM instance is co-located with that of the adversary. To reduce the probability of malicious co-location, we propose a novel VM placement algorithm called “Previously Co-Located Users First”. We perform a theoretical and empirical analysis of our proposed algorithm to evaluate its resource efficiency and security. Our results, obtained using real-world cloud traces containing millions of VM requests and thousands of …

Deep Air Learning: Interpolation, Prediction, And Feature Analysis Of Fine-Grained Air Quality, Zhongang Qi, Tianchun Wang, Guojie Song, Weisong Hu, Xi Li, Zhongfei Mark Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The interpolation, prediction, and feature analysis of fine-gained air quality are three important topics in the area of urban air computing. The solutions to these topics can provide extremely useful information to support air pollution control, and consequently generate great societal and technical impacts. Most of the existing work solves the three problems separately by different models. In this paper, we propose a general and effective approach to solve the three problems in one model called the Deep Air Learning (DAL). The main idea of DAL lies in embedding feature selection and semi-supervised learning in different layers of the deep …

Effectiveness Of Physical Robot Versus Robot Simulator In Teaching Introductory Programming, Oka Kurniawan, Norman Tiong Seng Lee, Subhajit Datta, Nachamma Sockalingam, Pey Lin Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study reports the use of a physical robot and robot simulator in an introductory programming course in a university and measures students' programming background conceptual learning gain and learning experience. One group used physical robots in their lessons to complete programming assignments, while the other group used robot simulators. We are interested in finding out if there is any difference in the learning gain and experiences between those that use physical robots as compared to robot simulators. Our results suggest that there is no significant difference in terms of students' learning between the two approaches. However, the control group …

Data Center Holistic Demand Response Algorithm To Smooth Microgrid Tie-Line Power Fluctuation, Ting Yang, Yingjie Zhao, Haibo Pen, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid development of cloud computing, artificial intelligence technologies and big data applications, data centers have become widely deployed. High density IT equipment in data centers consumes a lot of electrical power, and makes data center a hungry monster of energy consumption. To solve this problem, renewable energy is increasingly integrated into data center power provisioning systems. Compared to the traditional power supply methods, renewable energy has its unique characteristics, such as intermittency and randomness. When renewable energy supplies power to the data center industrial park, this kind of power supply not only has negative effects on the normal …

Associated Dataset: Ocean Circulation Causes Strong Variability In The Mid-Atlantic Bight Nitrogen Budget, Marjorie A.M. Friedrichs, Pierre St-Laurent

Data

The dataset includes model outputs used in the associated publication (Friedrichs et al.), which used the United States Eastern Continental Shelf (USECoS) biogeochemical model embedded in the Regional-Ocean-Modeling-System (ROMS) to examine the impact of the oceanic circulation on the nitrogen budget of the Mid-Atlantic Bight (MAB). The model simulation covers the period 2004 to 2008 and is fully described in the associated publication. The model simulation highlights that the horizontal along-shelf and across-shelf fluxes dominate the spatiotemporal variability of net community production (NCP) in the MAB. The highest NCP is found in a year when inorganic nitrogen entering from across …

Capillary-Tube Package Devices For The Quantitative Performance Evaluation Of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometers And Pulse Sequences, Lingyu Chi, Ming Huang, Annalise R. Pfaff, Jie Huang, Rex E. Gerald Ii, Klaus Woelk

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

With the increased sensitivity of modern nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometers, the minimum amount needed for chemical-shift referencing of NMR spectra has decreased to a point where a few microliters can be sufficient to observe a reference signal. The reduction in the amount of required reference material is the basis for the NMR Capillary-tube Package (CapPack) platform that utilizes capillary tubes with inner diameters smaller than 150 µm as NMR-tube inserts for external reference standards. It is shown how commercially available electrophoresis capillary tubes with outer diameters of 360 µm are filled with reference liquids or solutions and then permanently …

A Structural And Stratigraphic Study Of The A-2 Carbonate In Southwest Michigan And Reservoir Characterization Of An A-2 Carbonate Gas Storage Field, Clayton Joupperi

Masters Theses

The Overisel and Salem gas storage fields of southwest Michigan annually store 34 Bcf of natural working gas in the upper dolomitized portion of the Silurian A-2 Carbonate. Porosity and permeability in these fields is thought to be enhanced by fracturing and dolomitization associated with the dissolution and collapse of underlying salt units. This study utilizes wire-line logs from 383 wells to explore the structural and stratigraphic controls on the deposition and diagenesis of the A-2 Carbonate in southwest Michigan. Core and thin sections from 4 wells serve as the primary data for investigating the depositional and diagenetic history of …

The Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper: Remote Sensing Of The Nighttime Oh Layer During The Deepwave Campaign, Pattilyn Mclaughlin

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Advanced Mesospheric Temperature Mapper [AMTM] is a remote sensing instrument developed at Utah State University to map temperature structures in the hydroxyl airglow emission at ~87 km. These maps can then be used to quantify wave field characteristics and to observe general climatology trends. Two recent campaigns that it has been involved with are the DEEPWAVE campaign in Lauder, New Zealand and the Super Soaker campaign in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Deep Propagating Gravity Wave Experiment, “DEEPWAVE” was an international measurement and modeling program intended to characterize the generation and propagation of a broad range of atmospheric gravity waves with …

Towards Scalable Characterization Of Noisy, Intermediate-Scale Quantum Information Processors, Travis Luke Scholten

Physics & Astronomy ETDs

In recent years, quantum information processors (QIPs) have grown from one or two qubits to tens of qubits. As a result, characterizing QIPs – measuring how well they work, and how they fail – has become much more challenging. The obstacles to characterizing today’s QIPs will grow even more difficult as QIPs grow from tens of qubits to hundreds, and enter what has been called the “noisy, intermediate-scale quantum” (NISQ) era. This thesis develops methods based on advanced statistics and machine learning algorithms to address the difficulties of “quantum character- ization, validation, and verification” (QCVV) of NISQ processors. In the …

Assessing Ground Penetrating Radar's Ability To Image Subsurface Characteristics Of Icy Debris Fans In Alaska And New Zealand, Robert W. Jacob, Jeffrey M. Trop, R. Craig Kochel

Faculty Journal Articles

Icy debris fans have recently been described as fan shaped depositional landforms associated with (or formed during) deglaciation, however, the subsurface characteristics remain essentially undocumented. We used ground penetrating radar (GPR) to non-invasively investigate the subsurface characteristics of icy debris fans (IDFs) at McCarthy Glacier, Alaska, USA and at La Perouse Glacier, South Island of New Zealand. IDFs are largely unexplored paraglacial landforms in deglaciating alpine regions at the mouths of bedrock catchments between valley glaciers and icecaps. IDFs receive deposits of mainly ice and minor lithic material through different mass-flow processes, chiefly ice avalanche and to a lesser extent …