Digital Commons Network^™

Growth And Development, From: Forages: The Science Of Grassland Agriculture, Volume Ii, Robert B. Mitchell, Daren Redfearn, Kenneth J. Moore

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

The growth and development of forage plants is an amazing process. In some annual grasses such as cereal rye, plants can go from the late vegetative stage to fully-flowered in less than two weeks. Conversely, some perennial grasses like indiangrass can go from the vegetative stage to the elongation stage, then enter a quiescent phase for several weeks until adequate moisture is available which then moves plants into the flowering stages to complete the seed production process. Understanding the developmental morphology of forage plants is important for making good management decisions. Many such decisions involve timing the initiation or termination …

Deep Guidance Network For Biomedical Image Segmentation, Pengshuai Yin, Rui Yuan, Yiming Cheng, Qingyao Wu

College of Natural and Applied Sciences

Segmentation of 2D images is a fundamental problem for biomedical image analysis. The most widely used architecture for biomedical image segmentation is U-Net. U-Net introduces skip-connections to restore the spatial information loss caused by down-sampling operations. However, for some tasks such as the retinal vessel segmentation, the loss information of structure can not be fully recovered since the vessels is merely a curve line that can not be detected after several convolutions. In this paper, we introduce a deep guidance network to segment the biomedical image. Our proposed network consists of a guided image filter module to restore the structure …

First-Semester Organic Chemistry During Covid-19: Prioritizing Group Work, Flexibility, And Student Engagement, Leslie A. Nickerson, Kevin M. Shea

Chemistry: Faculty Publications

Our first-semester organic chemistry class focused on structured group work to enable active learning in class. When Smith College switched to online learning after spring break, the class was adapted to fit into an online learning model while retaining active learning. Using feedback from students, we implemented two tracks, one focused on independent work and one focused on group work. Using Zoom’s breakout rooms, we were able to simulate the full class and small group experiences of our in-person class with the help of student learning assistants to facilitate group learning. Slack was introduced for class questions and communications. Student …

“You Don’T Wanna Teach Little Kids About Climate Change”: Beliefs And Barriers To Sustainability Education In Early Childhood, Julia L. Ginsburg, Shannon Audley

Education and Child Study: Faculty Publications

To support a sustainable planet, preschools need to engage young children with sustainability education. In the United States of America (USA), nature-based preschool programs are likely to promote environmental science and nature education, given their outdoor curricula, but very little is known about how these programs might also cultivate sustainability education. The purpose of the present study was to investigate nature-based preschool teachers’ craft knowledge (Grimmett & MacKinnon, 1992) about sustainability education within curricula as they presently exist. We interviewed 22 early childhood educators and administrators across nine early childhood nature-based education centers in the Northeastern United States. Following Davis' …

The Power Of Children’S Voices: Potentials For Teacher Education, Beth D. Tolley, Cristina Valencia Mazzanti

Education and Child Study: Faculty Publications

Research literature documents a richness of innovations and projects advocating school-university partnerships that facilitate robust clinical practice. In the context of this focus on clinical work and school-university partnerships there are many possibilities to explore the way children may participate in these partnerships as contributors and experts; particularly, when we acknowledge that their role has predominantly been that of the benefactors of partnership efforts. Children have often been seen as the targets and recipients of the combined efforts of pre-service and in-service teacher collaborations with a focus on student achievement and social/emotion growth. In response to the call for innovative …

The Igneous Rock Intrusion Beneath Ambon And Seram Islands, Eastern Indonesia, Basedon The Integration Of Gravity And Magnetic Inversion: Its Implications For Geothermalenergy Resources, Richard Lewerissa, Sismanto Sismanto, Ari Setiawan, Subagyo Pramumijoyo

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

Ambon and Seram islands in eastern Indonesia are located in the convergence zone of three major plates, causing this area to have many geothermal manifestations on the surface. A subsurface geological study on Ambon and Seram has been conducted based on the integration of gravity and magnetic inversion modeling to determine the intrusion of igneous rock as a potential source of geothermal energy. The gravity and magnetic inversion utilized gravity and magnetic anomaly data from the World Gravity Map (WGM) and the Earth Magnetic Anomaly Grid (EMAG), as well as the CRUST 1.0 global earth crust model, as the constraints. …

Depositional Environment And Sequence Stratigraphy Of The Khoshyeilagh Formation Inbojnourd And Jajarm (Ne Iran), Fatemeh Jafarbeigloo, Mahmoud Reza Majidifard, Bahaeddin Hamdi, Afshin Asghari, Mehran Arian

Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences

In this study, depositional environment and sequence stratigraphy of the Khoshyeilagh Formation has been investigated in three stratigraphic sections including Pelmis, Robat-e Qarehbil, and Kuhe Ozon in the northeast of Iran. The thickness of the Khoshyeilagh Formation in these sections are 182, 260, and 463 m, respectively. Based on the facies analysis of the Khoshyeilagh Formation, 3 clastic facies, 11 carbonate facies, and 1 hybrid facies were identified. The vertical and lateral changes of the Khoshyeilagh Formation show a shoreface marine depositional environment that begins with alluvial sediments and continues by marine sedimentation. According to these changes, a homoclinal ramp …

Improving The Value Of The Coconut With Biotechnology, Fabian M. Dayrit, Quang Nguyen

Chemistry Faculty Publications

The fruit of the coconut tree is perhaps the most useful plant resource in the tropics. All parts of the coconut fruit have traditional uses that have been developed commercially in recent times (Foale 2003, Dayrit and Dayrit 2013). Due to its widespread household use, trade and industry statistics on coconut products reflect only part of the actual importance of the coconut. Today, coconut-based products have gone beyond the tropics and are consumed in many temperate countries and global regions such as Australia, China, Europe, North America, and the Middle East (Costello 2018). Coconut milk is the basic ingredient of …

Feasibility Of Cyclodextrin-Potassium Ion Assemblies Synthesis And Its Application In Loading Bio-Active Molecules, Yomkippur Perez, Gilbert U. Yu

Chemistry Faculty Publications

In the study, colorless cubic crystals of “green” cyclodextrin (CD)-based assemblies were synthesized and their potential to load bio-active molecules such as drugs and, separately, enzymes were investigated. Busulfan (Bu), an anti-cancer drug widely used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), was used as a test drug while trypsin and lipase were used as model enzymes. These porous CD-K+ ion assemblies were prepared by dissolving alkali metal salts and γ-CD in water followed by vapor diffusion in varying solvents for several days. Crystals were activated via dichloromethane dispersion and in vacuo drying. Slow vapor diffusion with ethanol was found to …

Fabrication Of A 3d Printed Porous Junction For Ag|Agcl|Gel-Kcl Reference Electrode, Sarah May Sibug-Torres, Lance P. Go, Erwin Enriquez

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Fused filament fabrication (FFF) is a 3D printing method that is attracting increased interest in the development of miniaturized electrochemical sensor systems due to its versatility, low cost, reproducibility, and capability for rapid prototyping. A key component of miniaturized electrochemical systems is the reference electrode (RE). However, reports of the fabrication of a true 3D-printed RE that exhibits stability to variations in the sample matrix remain limited. In this work, we report the development and characterization of a 3D-printed Ag|AgCl|gel-KCl reference electrode (3D-RE). The RE was constructed using a Ag|AgCl wire and agar-KCl layer housed in a watertight 3D-printed acrylonitrile …

Biodegradability Of Single And Mixed Surfactant Formulations, Jarrent R. Tayag, Ronaldo M. Fabicon

Chemistry Faculty Publications

Even though detergent surfactants are mandated to be biodegradable, the environmental fate of these surfactants when mixed together in bodies of water is still not established. The study aimed to determine the biodegradability of NaLAS/CTAB surfactant combinations by measuring the amount of evolved CO2 which was measured using the OECD 301b procedure. The 90/10 and 10/90 NaLAS/CTAB systems showed a decline in biodegradation behaviors which were recorded as 55.88% and 40.12% biodegradation, respectively, after a 28-day monitoring period. Conductivity results revealed changes in the availability of ions in the system. An inflection point was observed at a CTAB concentration of …

Global Energy Poverty: The Relevance Of Faith And Reason, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

The challenge of energy poverty (EP) primarily confronts the least developed countries (LDCs) of the world, located in Africa and Asia, but is also prevalent within segments of more advanced developing countries in Asia. This article will first delineate the nature of global energy poverty that results in the premature deaths of millions of people and leads to pervasive sickness among many more millions. The article will next sketch the legal and political responses to this problem that have generally applied principles of sustainable development (SD) and the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2015 adopted by the General Assembly …

New York State Economic Status Of Regions And Development Programs, Michael J. Wasylenko

Center for Policy Research

No abstract provided.

Contingency Fuel Reduction In Brazil, Diogo Youssef, Fabiano Gomes De Oliveira, Joao Centeno, Luciano Figueiredo, Leila Halawi

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

This project reviews the minimum fuel regulations for commercial passenger flights in different countries and intends to scientifically support a change in the existing contingency fuel requirement regulation in Brazil. This change represents fuel savings for Brazilian air operations, and it deploys into a competitive advantage for Brazilian airlines compared to foreign air operators.

Discussion: The objective of this project is to provide the Brazilian civil aviation regulators with the necessary data to justify the reduction of the contingency fuel values from the current 10% to 5%. This project bases the analysis on the historical data of fuel planning and …

Efficiency Analysis Of A Congested Brazilian Airport Applying Slots Optimization Control: Congonhas Airport Case, Mariana Franco B. Mendes, Rafael Roco De Araujo, Ana Paula Beck Da Silva Etges, Massoud Bazargan

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

The current slot allocation mechanism in Brazil, based on the International Air Transport Association (IATA) rules, and its supplementary local regulation The National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC), displays a few issues and limitations (e.g. slot misuse, allocation inefficiencies). Such issues are particularly present in the case of busy airports that works near their maximum capacity for major parts of the day. This inefficiency problem is generated because of the complexity of slot allocation added to the limited decision support available for the Brazilian system. This study focuses on the implementation of an optimal slot model, based on IATA regulations with …

Development Of A Sensor Suite For Atmospheric Boundary Layer Measurement With A Small Multirotor Unmanned Aerial System, Kevin A. Adkins, Christopher J. Swinford, Peter D. Wambolt, Gordon Bease

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) are increasingly being used to conduct atmospheric research. Because of the dynamic nature and inhomogeneity of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL), the ability of instrumented sUAS to make on-demand 3-dimensional high-resolution spatial measurements of atmospheric parameters makes them particularly suited to ABL investigations. Both fixed-wing and multirotor sUAS have been used for ABL investigations. Most investigations to date have included in-situ measurement of thermodynamic quantities such as temperature, pressure and humidity. When wind has been measured, a variety of strategies have been used. Two of the most popular techniques have been deducing wind from inertial …

An Invitation To Linear Algebra (2nd Edition), David N. Pham, Jonathon Funk, Wenjian Liu

Open Educational Resources

This is an OER textbook on linear algebra.

Conference Program 2020, Sotl Commons Conference

SoTL Commons Conference

Conference Program

Image Instance Segmentation: Using The Cirsy System To Identify Small Objects In Low Resolution Images, Orghomisan William Omatsone

Dissertations

The CIRSY system (or Chick Instance Recognition System) is am image processing system developed as part of this research to detect images of chicks in highly-populated images that uses the leading algorithm in instance segmentation tasks, called the Mask R-CNN. It extends on the Faster R-CNN framework used in object detection tasks, and this extension adds a branch to predict the mask of an object along with the bounding box prediction. Mask R-CNN has proven to be effective ininstance segmentation and object de-tection tasks after outperforming all existing models on evaluation of the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO) …

Machine Learning Assisted Gait Analysis For The Determination Of Handedness In Able-Bodied People, Hugh Gallagher

Dissertations

This study has investigated the potential application of machine learning for video analysis, with a view to creating a system which can determine a person’s hand laterality (handedness) from the way that they walk (their gait). To this end, the convolutional neural network model VGG16 underwent transfer learning in order to classify videos under two ‘activities’: “walking left-handed” and “walking right-handed”. This saw varying degrees of success across five transfer learning trained models: Everything – the entire dataset; FiftyFifty – the dataset with enough right-handed samples removed to produce a set with parity between activities; Female – only the female …

An Examination Of The Smote And Other Smote-Based Techniques That Use Synthetic Data To Oversample The Minority Class In The Context Of Credit-Card Fraud Classification, Eduardo Parkinson De Castro

Dissertations

This research project seeks to investigate some of the different sampling techniques that generate and use synthetic data to oversample the minority class as a means of handling the imbalanced distribution between non-fraudulent (majority class) and fraudulent (minority class) classes in a credit-card fraud dataset. The purpose of the research project is to assess the effectiveness of these techniques in the context of fraud detection which is a highly imbalanced and cost-sensitive dataset. Machine learning tasks that require learning from datasets that are highly unbalanced have difficulty learning since many of the traditional learning algorithms are not designed to cope …

Transformer Neural Networks For Automated Story Generation, Kemal Araz

Dissertations

Towards the last two-decade Artificial Intelligence (AI) proved its use on tasks such as image recognition, natural language processing, automated driving. As discussed in the Moore’s law the computational power increased rapidly over the few decades (Moore, 1965) and made it possible to use the techniques which were computationally expensive. These techniques include Deep Learning (DL) changed the field of AI and outperformed other models in a lot of fields some of which mentioned above. However, in natural language generation especially for creative tasks that needs the artificial intelligent models to have not only a precise understanding of the given …

Identifying Online Sexual Predators Using Support Vector Machine, Yifan Li

Dissertations

A two-stage classification model is built in the research for online sexual predator identification. The first stage identifies the suspicious conversations that have predator participants. The second stage identifies the predators in suspicious conversations. Support vector machines are used with word and character n-grams, combined with behavioural features of the authors to train the final classifier. The unbalanced dataset is downsampled to test the performance of re-balancing an unbalanced dataset. An age group classification model is also constructed to test the feasibility of extracting the age profile of the authors, which can be used as features for classifier training. The …

Classification Of Animal Sound Using Convolutional Neural Network, Neha Singh

Dissertations

Recently, labeling of acoustic events has emerged as an active topic covering a wide range of applications. High-level semantic inference can be conducted based on main audioeffects to facilitate various content-based applications for analysis, efficient recovery and content management. This paper proposes a flexible Convolutional neural network-based framework for animal audio classification. The work takes inspiration from various deep neural network developed for multimedia classification recently. The model is driven by the ideology of identifying the animal sound in the audio file by forcing the network to pay attention to core audio effect present in the audio to generate Mel-spectrogram. …

Finetuning Pre-Trained Language Models For Sentiment Classification Of Covid19 Tweets, Arjun Dussa

Dissertations

It is a common practice in today’s world for the public to use different micro-blogging and social networking platforms, predominantly Twitter, to share opinions, ideas, news, and information about many things in life. Twitter is also becoming a popular channel for information sharing during pandemic outbreaks and disaster events. The world has been suffering from economic crises ever since COVID-19 cases started to increase rapidly since January 2020. The virus has killed more than 800 thousand people ever since the discovery as per the statistics from Worldometer [1] which is the authorized tracking website. So many researchers around the globe …

Investigating The Predictability Of A Chaotic Time-Series Data Using Reservoir Computing, Deep-Learning And Machine- Learning On The Short-, Medium- And Long-Term Pricing Of Bitcoin And Ethereum., Molly Kenny

Dissertations

This study will investigate the predictability of a Chaotic time-series data using Reservoir computing (Echo State Network), Deep-Learning(LSTM) and Machine- Learning(Linear, Bayesian, ElasticNetCV , Random Forest, XGBoost Regression and a machine learning Neural Network) on the short (1-day out prediction), medium (5-day out prediction) and long-term (30-day out prediction) pricing of Bitcoin and Ethereum Using a range of machine learning tools, to perform feature selection by permutation importance to select technical indicators on the individual cryptocurrencies, to ensure the datasets are the best for predictions per cryptocurrency while reducing noise within the models. The predictability of these two chaotic time-series …

A Blockchain Simulator For Evaluating Consensus Algorithms In Diverse Networking Environments, Peter Foytik, Sachin Shetty, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat, Eranga Herath, Deepak Tosh, Laurent Njilla

VMASC Publications

The massive scale, heterogeneity and distributed nature of Internet-of-Things (IoT) presents challenges in realizing a practical and effective security solution. Blockchain empowered platforms and technologies have been proposed to address aspects of this challenge. In order to realize a practical Blockchain deployment for IoT, there is a need for a testing and evaluation platform to evaluate performance and security of Blockchain applications and systems. In this paper, we present a Blockchain simulator that evaluates the consensus algorithms in a realistic and configurable network environment. Though, there are several Blockchain evaluation platforms, they are either wedded to a specific consensus protocol …

Measuring Decentrality In Blockchain Based Systems, Sarada Prasad Gochhayat, Sachin Shetty, Ravi Mukkamala, Peter Foytik, Georges A. Kamhoua, Laurent Njilla

VMASC Publications

Blockchain promises to provide a distributed and decentralized means of trust among untrusted users. However, in recent years, a shift from decentrality to centrality has been observed in the most accepted Blockchain system, i.e., Bitcoin. This shift has motivated researchers to identify the cause of decentrality, quantify decentrality and analyze the impact of decentrality. In this work, we take a holistic approach to identify and quantify decentrality in Blockchain based systems. First, we identify the emergence of centrality in three layers of Blockchain based systems, namely governance layer, network layer and storage layer. Then, we quantify decentrality in these layers …

Quantum Supremacy, Network Security & The Legal Risk Management Framework: Resiliency For National Security Systems, Salah E. Ali

SMU Science and Technology Law Review

No abstract provided.

Development Of Integrated Water Resources Planning Model For Dublin Using Weap21, Mohammed Yassin

Doctoral

Population growth, urbanisation, and climate change are predicted to impose huge pressure on water resource systems of many cities around the world including Dublin. Integrated water resources management is seen as a viable approach to address these challenges. This approach examines the water resources system in a more interconnected manner, focusing on reducing water demands, reducing reliance on fresh water supplies, reducing discharges into receiving water bodies, and creating water supply assets from storm water and wastewater. The role of mathematical modelling in designing an integrated water resources management plan is paramount as it provides a tool whereby performances of …