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Transport And Optical Properties Of Low-Dimensional Complex Systems, Andrii Iurov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the last five years of my research work, I, my research was mainly concerned with certain crucial tunneling, transport and optical properties of novel low-dimensional graphitic and carbon-based materials as well as topological insulators. Both single-electron and many-body problems were addressed. We investigated the Dirac electrons transmission through a potential barrier in the presence of circularly polarized light. An anomalous photon-assisted enhanced transmission is predicted and explained in a comparison with the well-known Klein paradox. It is demonstrated that the perfect transmission for nearly-head-on collision in an infinite graphene is suppressed in gapped dressed states of electrons, which is …

The Interaction Between Arsenic And Struvite During Coprecipitation And Adsorption Processes, Ning Ma

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The formation of struvite, MgNH4PO4*6H2O (MAP), from wastes is one of the methods that can be used to recover P from wastes efficiently. However, since there are usually toxic components in the wastes, like arsenic (As), the possibility of having toxic contaminants in MAP is a big concern. So, the interaction between As and MAP during coprecipitation (CPT) and adsorption (ADS) processes were studied at pH 8-11. MAP precipitated without As at pH 8-11 was also characterized.

During CPT process, the MAP was precipitated from a MgCl2-(NH4)2HPO4-NaCl-H2O system spiked with As at an initial pH (pHi) of 8-11. The batch …

The Influence Of Advanced Cognitive Ability On The Development Of Psychological Defenses And In Understanding And Managing Affect: A Study Of Latency-Aged Gifted Students, Kahlila Ife Robinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study examines the influence of advanced cognitive ability on the development of psychological defenses and in understanding and managing affect, using the lens of Emotional Intelligence (EI). Theories of psychological defense maturity state that defense mechanisms are influenced both by the cognitive level of the individual and by the cognitive complexity of the defense itself (Cramer, 1999; Cramer, 2009). Individuals with exceptional cognitive ability may therefore show a corresponding "match" with complex defense use. In addition to defense use, how well one is able to identify, understand, manage and use emotion to facilitate thought, abilities often labelled Emotional …

All At One Point: The New Physics Of Italo Calvino And Jorge Luis Borges, Mark Thomas Rinaldi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This work of comparative literary criticism focuses on the presence of mathematical and scientific concepts and imagery in the works of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, beginning with an historical overview of scientific philosophy and an introduction to the most significant scientific concepts of the last several centuries, before shifting to deep, scientifically-driven analyses of numerous individual fictions, and finally concluding with a meditation on the unexpectedly fictive aspects of science and mathematics. The close readings of these authors' fictions are contextualized with thorough explanations of the potential literary implications of theories from physics, mathematics, neuroscience and chaos theory. …

Water Conservation To Reduce Wet Weather Pollution Loads To The Gowanus Canal, Brooklyn, Ny, Suzanne Carol Stempel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public participation plays an important role in wet weather pollution management. However, the effects of participation programs on local water quality are often difficult to quantify. This project aims to quantify the potential effects of a community based, non-structural, BMP aimed at controlling inputs to combined sewage systems by encouraging residents to reduce their water use during rain events. A household could participate by reducing the amount of water they use for flushing toilets, washing dishes, taking showers, etc. during rain events; thereby reducing stress on the system during the time of highest demand. The Gowanus Canal sewershed in Brooklyn, …

Randomized Search Of Graphs In Log Space And Probabilistic Computation, Wen-Ju Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reingold has shown that L = SL, that s-t connectivity in a poly-mixing digraph is complete for promise-RL, and that s-t connectivity for a poly-mixing out-regular digraph with known stationary distribution is in L. Several properties that bound the mixing times of random walks on digraphs have been identified, including the digraph conductance and the digraph spectral expansion. However, rapidly mixing digraphs can still have exponential cover time, thus it is important to specifically identify structural properties of digraphs that effect cover times. We examine the complexity of random walks on a basic parameterized family of unbalanced digraphs called Strong …

Second Quantum State Transition In Gaas/Algaas Resonant Bragg Structure Probed By Modulation Reflectance Spectroscopy, Yuechao Chen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Modulation spectroscopy, ever since its introduction by B.O. Seraphin in 1964, has been considered and widely used as a sensitive experiment technique for studying and characterizing the properties of varieties of semiconductor materials. Compared to general optical reflectance spectrum which measures the absolute reflection, the modulation spectroscopy evaluates the interpretation of the changes in the optical response from the sample caused by a periodic physical perturbation applied to the sample, such as temperature, electric fields, hydrostatic pressure, uniaxial stress, etc.Those modulation spectroscopies with an external electric field perturbation are known as electroreflectance spectroscopy, which provides sharp and derivative-like spectral features …

Carbon And Nitrogen Dynamics From Slow Pools Of Soil Organic Matter In A Temperate Forest: Pyrogenic Organic Matter And And Root Litter, Fernanda Dos Santos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Soil organic matter (SOM) is the dominant reservoir of organic carbon (OC) in terrestrial ecosystems, storing approximately three times the size of the C pool in the atmosphere. In temperate forests, a major fraction of the SOM consists of slowly decaying soil organic C (SOC) pools. While slowly cycling C pools constitute a large reservoir of stable C in soils, the dominant environmental factors controlling this C pool remain unresolved. This research investigates two significant, but poorly characterized slowly decaying C pools: fine root litter (< 2mm) and thermally altered plant biomass (pyrogenic organic matter, PyOM). Specifically, I used compound-specific stable isotope analysis (¹³C and ¹⁵N) as my main methodological approach to examine the (1) …

Synthesis Of Biologically Important C-Glycosides From Simple C-Glycosyl Alkenes, Ahmad Sabri Altiti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

C-Glycosides are carbohydrate analogues in which the glycosidic oxygen is replaced with a methylene substituent. Because of their stability under acidic hydrolysis or enzymatic cleavage, they are widely used as mimetics of their parent O-glycosides in medicinal chemistry. This thesis describes the development of new synthetic methods for C-glycosides, which center on the use of readily available, simple C-allyl glycosides as precursors. C- glycosides of three structurally distinct and pharmacologically interesting carbohydrates, the immunostimulatory glycolipid C-KRN700, the insulin mimetic glycoinositol β-galactosamine-(1→4)-3-O-methyl-D-chiro-inositiol (INS-2), and α-mannose-(1→6)-D-myo-inositiol, a subunit of the cell wall in Mycobacterium tuberculosis, will be used as test cases for …

Component Trees For The Exploration Of Macromolecular Structures In Biology, Lucas Oliveira

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Understanding the three-dimensional structure of a macromolecular complex is essential for understanding its function. A component tree is a topological and geometric image descriptor that captures information regarding the structure of an image based on the connected components determined by different grayness thresholds. This dissertation presents a novel interactive framework for visual exploration of component trees of the density maps of macromolecular complexes, with the purpose of improved understanding of their structure. The interactive exploration of component trees together with a robust simplification methodology provide new insights in the study of macromolecular structures. An underlying mathematical theory is introduced and …

The Theology Of History In Saint Bonaventure, Josette Khoury

Loyola Papers

This paper explores the theology of history as articulated by the great Franciscan theologian who presents a unique and compelling vision where history is seen as a journey guided by divine providence, culminating in the fulfillment of God's plan for creation. The author’s reflection is enriched by her own personal experiences, particularly of her friendship with Lucia, whom she met while working as a missionary in Brazil. Reflecting on the rich drama of expressio and impressio, or God’s revelation and human reception, she emphasizes humility as the essential condition or disposition to properly receive revelation.

Systematic Comparison Of Cross-Lingual Projection Techniques For Low-Density Nlp Under Strict Resource Constraints, Joshua Waxman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The field of low-density NLP is often approached from an engineering perspective, and evaluations are typically haphazard - considering different architectures, given different languages, and different available resources - without a systematic comparison. The resulting architectures are then tested on the unique corpus and language for which this approach has been designed. This makes it difficult to truly evaluate which approach is truly the "best," or which approaches are best for a given language.

In this dissertation, several state-of-the-art architectures and approaches to low-density language Part-Of-Speech Tagging are reimplemented; all of these techniques exploit a relationship between a high-density (HD) …

Synthesis, Fabrication And Characterization Of Magnetic And Dielectric Nanoparticles And Nanocomposite Films, Xiaohua Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Materials science is an interdisciplinary field investigating the structure-property relationship in solid-state materials scientifically and technologically. Nanoscience is concerned with the distinctive properties that matter exhibits when confined to physical dimensions on the order of 10^-9 meters. At these length scales, behaviors of particles or elaborate structures are often governed by the rules of quantum mechanics in addition to the physical properties associated with the bulk material.

The work reported here seeks to employ nanocystals, binary nanocomposites and thin films of materials, to build versatile, functional systems and devices. With a focus on dielectric, ferroelectric, and magnetoelectric performance, a …

Confucius, Yamaha, Or Mozart? Cultural Capital And Upward Mobility Among Children Of Chinese Immigrants, Wei-Ting Lu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the determinants of upward mobility among children of Chinese immigrants. While most studies emphasize ethnic cultural capital as a primary determinant of Chinese upward mobility, this study proposes three new concepts to illuminate understudied processes promoting mobility. Specifically, this study argues that Chinese immigrants' interactions with classical music schools in the Chinese community help generate globalized cultural capital (resources from immigrants' participation in transnational networks), navigational capital (the ability to connect social networks together to facilitate community navigation through higher-status educational institutions) and aspirational capital (the ability of parents to acknowledge the barriers to upward mobility). These …

Oxocarbenium Ion And Alkene Metathesis Strategies For The Synthesis Of Complex Cyclohexanes, Clayton Errol Mattis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Highly oxygenated cyclohexanes comprise the structures of a number of pharmacologically interesting molecules, including potently bioactive natural products and carbapyranosides. The latter, which are unnatural analogues of carbohydrates in which the ring oxygen of the parent sugar is replaced with a methylene group, have attracted interest as hydrolytically stable mimetics of their parent O-glycosides. This research reports the development of two general methodologies for the synthesis of highly oxygenated cyclohexanes: (1) Oxocarbenium Ion Cyclization (OCC) and (2) Ring Closing Metathasis (RCM).

Chapter one gives a review of the literature on the synthesis for highly oxygenated cyclohexanes.

Previous results from this …

Additive Nonparametric Regression In The Presence Of Endogenous Regressors, Deniz Ozabaci, Daniel J. Henderson, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article we consider nonparametric estimation of a structural equation model under full additivity constraint. We propose estimators for both the conditional mean and gradient which are consistent, asymptotically normal, oracle efficient, and free from the curse of dimensionality. Monte Carlo simulations support the asymptotic developments. We employ a partially linear extension of our model to study the relationship between child care and cognitive outcomes. Some of our (average) results are consistent with the literature (e.g., negative returns to child care when mothers have higher levels of education). However, as our estimators allow for heterogeneity both across and within …

Entity Linking On Microblogs With Spatial And Temporal Signals, Yuan Fang, Ming-Wei Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microblogs present an excellent opportunity for monitoring and analyzing world happenings. Given that words are often ambiguous, entity linking becomes a crucial step towards understanding microblogs. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of entity linking on microblogs. We first observe that spatiotemporal (i.e., spatial and temporal) signals play a key role, but they are not utilized in existing approaches. Thus, we propose a novel entity linking framework that incorporates spatiotemporal signals through a weakly supervised process. Using entity annotations1 on real-world data, our experiments show that the spatiotemporal model improves F1 by more than 10 points over existing systems. …

Action Classification By Exploring Directional Co-Occurrence Of Weighted Stips, Mengyuan Liu, Hong Liu, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human action recognition is challenging mainly due to intro-variety, inter-ambiguity and clutter backgrounds in real videos. Bag-of-visual words model utilizes spatio-temporal interest points(STIPs), and represents action by the distribution of points which ignores visual context among points. To add more contextual information, we propose a method by encoding spatio-temporal distribution of weighted pairwise points. First, STIPs are extracted from an action sequence and clustered into visual words. Then, each word is weighted in both temporal and spatial domains to capture the relationships with other words. Finally, the directional relationships between co-occurrence pairwise words are used to encode visual contexts. We …

Strategic Sourcing In The Presence Of Uncertain Supply And Retail Competition, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper develops an analytical model to evaluate competing retail firms’ sourcing strategies in the presence of supply uncertainty. We consider a common supplier that sells its uncertain supply to two downstream retail firms engaging in price competition in a horizontally differentiated product market. The focal firm has a dual-sourcing option, while the rival firm can only source from the common supplier. We assess the system-wide effects of supply uncertainty on the focal firm's incentive to pursue the dual-sourcing strategy. We find that the focal firm's dual-sourcing strategy can create a win-win situation that leads to increased retail prices and …

Hippi Care Hospital: Towards Proactive Business Processes In Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan, Venky Shankaraman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It was 2.35 am on a Saturday morning. Wiki Lim, process specialist from the Process Innovation Centre (PIC) of Hippi Care Hospital (HCH), desperately doodling on her notepad for ideas to improve service delivery at HCH’s Emergency Department (ED). HCH has committed to the public that its ED would meet the service quality criterion of serving 90% of A3 and A4 patients, non-emergency patients with moderate to mild symptoms, within 90 minutes of their arrival at the ED. The ED was not able to meet this performance goal and Dr. Edward Kim, the head of the ED at HCH, had …

Multi-Agent Orienteering Problem With Time-Dependent Capacity Constraints, Cen Chen, Shih-Fen Cheng, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we formulate and study the Multi-agent Orienteering Problem with Time-dependent Capacity Constraints (MOPTCC). MOPTCC is similar to the classical orienteering problem at single-agent level: given a limited time budget, an agent travels around the network and collects rewards by visiting different nodes, with the objective of maximizing the sum of his collected rewards. The most important feature we introduce in MOPTCC is the inclusion of multiple competing agents. All agents in MOPTCC are assumed to be self-interested, and they interact with each other when arrive at certain nodes simultaneously. As all nodes are capacitated, if a particular …

Partisan Sharing: Facebook Evidence And Societal Consequences, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people seek out information that supports their views and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on our society. Few researchers have recently found counter evidence of selective exposure in social media: users are exposed to politically diverse articles. No work has looked at what happens after exposure, particularly how individuals react to such exposure, though. Users might well be exposed to diverse articles but share only the partisan ones. To test this, we study partisan sharing on Facebook: the tendency for users to predominantly share like-minded news …

Lossy Trapdoor Relation And Its Applications To Lossy Encryption And Adaptive Trapdoor Relation, Haiyang Xue, Xianhui Lu, Bao Li, Yamin Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Peikert and Waters proposed the notion of lossy trapdoor function in STOC 2008. In this paper, we propose a relaxation of lossy trapdoor function, called lossy trapdoor relation. Unlike the lossy trapdoor function, lossy trapdoor relation does not require completely recovering the input but a public computable injective map of it. Interestingly, the lossy trapdoor relation maintains the application of lossy trapdoor function on the lossy encryption. Moreover, motivated by the construction of adaptive trapdoor relation proposed by Wee (Crypto 2010), we introduce all-but-one verifiable lossy trapdoor relation which is in fact a relaxation of all-but-one lossy trapdoor function. – …

A Multi-Dimensional Image Quality Prediction Model For User-Generated Images In Social Networks, You Yang, Xu Wang, Tao Guan, Jialie Shen, Li Yu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User-generated images (UGIs) are currently proliferating within social networks. These images contain multi-dimensional data, including the image itself, text and the social links of the owner. UGIs can be utilized for self-presentation, news dissemination and other purposes, and the quality of the image should be able to reveal these social functionalities. However, it is challenging to predict UGI quality utilizing existing models, such as image quality assessment, recommender systems or others, because these models have difficulties processing multi-dimensional data simultaneously. To address this problem, we propose a multi-dimensional image quality prediction model for UGIs in social networks. In this model, …

Auction With Rolling Horizon For Urban Consolidation Centre, Chen Wang, Stephanus Daniel Handoko, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A number of cities around the world have adopted urban consolidation centres (UCCs) to address some challenges of their last-mile deliveries. At the UCC, goods are consolidated based on their destinations prior to their deliveries into the city centre. In many examples, the UCC owns a fleet of eco-friendly vehicles to carry out the deliveries. A carrier/shipper who buys the UCC’s service hence no longer needs to enter the city centre in which time-window and vehicle-type restrictions may apply. As a result, it becomes possible to retain the use of large trucks for the economies of scale outside the city …

Dynamic Inference Of Change Contracts, Tien-Duy B. Le, Jooyong Yi, David Lo, Ferdian Thung, Abhik Roychoudhury

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software evolves and thus developers frequently make changes to systems that are logged in version control systems. These changes are often poorly documented -- often commit logs are empty or only contain minimal information. Thus, it is often a challenge to understand why certain changes are made especially if they were introduced many months or even years ago. Understanding these changes is important when pertinent questions are raised during future bug fixing or software evolution efforts. Thus, there is a need for an automated approach that can help developers better document changes with little or minimal effort. To address this …

Competition Between Software-As-A-Service Vendors, Dan Ma, Robert John Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a model of software-as-a-service (SaaS) in a competitive marketplace that brings clarity to the choices that competing vendors must make for pricing and quality strategy. We focus on several features of SaaS competition, including differences in vendor offerings, incomplete information on application functionality, the potential lock-in risk of SaaS clients, and their cost of learning about what it will take to make the vendors’ software work well. Clients can sample the fit costs of adoption, but can switch to another vendor. We obtained several findings through the use of a game-theoretic model. First, a client’s switching cost is …

Time-Series Data Mining In Transportation: A Case Study On Singapore Public Train Commuter Travel Patterns, Roy Ka Wei Lee, Tin Seong Kam

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The adoption of smart cards technologies and automated data collection systems (ADCS) in transportation domain had provided public transport planners opportunities to amass a huge and continuously increasing amount of time-series data about the behaviors and travel patterns of commuters. However the explosive growth of temporal related databases has far outpaced the transport planners’ ability to interpret these data using conventional statistical techniques, creating an urgent need for new techniques to support the analyst in transforming the data into actionable information and knowledge. This research study thus explores and discusses the potential use of time-series data mining, a relatively new …

Attribute-Based Signing Right Delegation, Weiwei Liu, Yi Mu, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based signature and proxy signature are both very useful in many real-world applications. In this paper, we combine the special features of both signatures and propose an attribute-based proxy signature scheme, where the original signer, who possesses a set of attributes, can delegate his/her signing right to a designated proxy signer. By verifying the signature, a verifier can be convinced that the signature is generated by the proxy signer who has obtained the delegation from a legitimate signer whose attributes satisfy a predicate. However, the verifier cannot tell from the signature who is the original signer. We provide the formal …

Designing An Immersive And Entertaining Pervasive Gameplay Experience With Spheros As Game And Interface Elements, Brennan Jones, Kody Dillman, Setareh Aghel Manesh, Ehud Sharlin, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Sphero is a robotic remote-controlled ball capable of rolling around on its own in any direction at multiple speeds. Numerous games have been designed for the Sphero for smartphones and tablets. However, most of these games provide an interface for controlling the Sphero that is far from natural. These games also do not put a strong focus on the physical environment around the Sphero. This work discusses a control scheme used to control a Sphero with another Sphero, and a pervasive game leveraging this scheme that emphasizes physical properties of the environment to create an immersive experience.