Digital Commons Network^™

Feature Learning For Optimal Control With B-Spline Representations, Vinay Kenny, Sixiong You, Chaoying Pei, Ran Dai

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The paper develops a feature learning-based method to solve optimal control problems using B-splines to approximate the optimal solutions. The feature learning-based optimal control method can quickly generate near-optimal trajectories for general optimal control problems subject to system dynamics and constraints. The steps in the proposed method are as follows: Firstly, by representing the state and control variables with B-spline functions, the optimal control problem is converted into an approximate nonlinear programming (NLP) problem, where parameters of the B-splines are identified as features of the optimal solution. Secondly, for a specific problem with designated inputs, a dataset of the optimal …

A Fast Awe-Augmented Wideband Discontinuous Galerkin Frequency-Domain Method In Solving Electromagnetic Wave Equations, Shi Min Liu, Li (Lijun) Jun Jiang, Ping Li

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this research, a discontinuous Galerkin frequency-domain (DGFD) method is proposed to solve the electromagnetic wave equations. Different to the explicit time-domain analysis, the electric-field and magnetic-field in frequency-domain wave equations are coupled together implicitly, thus the established matrix equation is globally coupled, which is computational expensive if solving it directly. To address this issue, a Block-diagonal preconditioner and a restriction operator are applied to the matrix equation, which splits the global matrix into a number of small local matrix systems pertinent to each subdomain. Then, a direct solver can be employed to solve them with a FETI-like procedure. Besides, …

Forecasting Nodal Price Difference Between Day-Ahead And Real-Time Electricity Markets Using Long-Short Term Memory And Sequence-To-Sequence Networks, Ronit Das, Rui Bo, Haotian Chen, Waqas Ur Rehman, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Price forecasting is at the center of decision making in electricity markets. Much research has been done in forecasting energy prices for a single market while little research has been reported on forecasting price difference between markets, which presents higher volatility and yet plays a critical role in applications such as virtual trading. To this end, this paper takes the first attempt at it and employs novel deep learning architecture with Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) units and Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) architecture to forecast nodal price difference between day-ahead and real-time markets. In addition to value prediction, these deep learning architectures …

Toward A Student-Ready Cybersecurity Program: Findings From A Survey Of Stem-Students, Lora Pitman, Brian K. Payne, Tancy Vandecar-Burdin, Lenora Thorbjornsen

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

As the number of available cybersecurity jobs continues to grow, colleges strive to offer to their cybersecurity students an environment which will make them sufficiently prepared to enter the workforce after graduation. This paper explores the academic and professional needs of STEM-students in various higher education institutions across Virginia and how cybersecurity programs can cater to these needs. It also seeks to propose an evidence-based approach for improving the existing cybersecurity programs so that they can become more inclusive and student-ready. A survey of 251 college students in four higher-education institutions in Virginia showed that while there are common patterns …

Editorial, Michael E. Whitman, Herbert J. Mattord, Hossain Shahriar

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

Since 2016, it has been the mission of the Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research, and Practice (JCERP) to be a premier outlet for high-quality information security and cybersecurity-related articles of interest to teaching faculty and students. This is the 13^th edition of the (JCERP) and, as ever, we are seeking authors who produce high-quality research and practice-oriented articles focused on the development and delivery of information security and cybersecurity curriculum, innovation in applied scholarship, and industry best practices in information security and cybersecurity in the enterprise for double-blind review and publication. The journal invites submissions on Information Security, Cybersecurity, …

The Impact Of A Gencyber Camp On In-Service Teachers’ Tpack, Kevin M. Thomas, Jessica Ivy, Kristin Cook, Robert R. Kelley

Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of a GenCyber camp curriculum on teachers’ technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPACK). The camp was designed to engage participants in developing the knowledge and skills to incorporate GenCyber Cybersecurity First Principles and GenCyber Cybersecurity Concepts (GenCyber, 2019) into their curriculums. Participants (37 middle and high school teachers from a variety of disciplines) attended one of two weeklong camps held at a Midwestern liberal arts university. Using the TPACK Self-Reflection and TPACK Self-Assessment Surveys, pre- and post-camp data were collected from participants. Findings indicate that participants demonstrated an increase in …

Detection Of Epilepsy Using Machine Learning, Balamurugan Murugesan

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Epilepsy is a complex neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. An electroencephalogram (EEG) is typically used in the diagnosis of Epilepsy. Normally, EEGs are reviewed and analyzed by trained neurologists, but this can be time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we propose combining multiple classifiers in a multi-level fashion using stacked generalization to develop an effective solution for the detection of epilepsy using EEG data. Different classifiers such as Random Forest (RF), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), and XGBoost (XGB) were tested. The method was evaluated using Children’s Hospital Boston and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (CHB-MIT) dataset. The experimental results demonstrated …

Cover-Copy-Compare As A Math Fact Fluency Intervention For Students In An Alternative Special Education Program, Raelynn J. Lamminen

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Cover-Copy-Compare (CCC) has been identified as an empirically supported and socially valid intervention for promoting math fact fluency across instructional settings. However, limited research has investigated the effectiveness of CCC as a math fact fluency intervention within the setting IV environment with even fewer studies including behavioral measures as a dependent variable. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of CCC as a math fact fluency intervention with four 4th-6th grade students within the setting IV environment with math fluency deficits. Using a multiple baseline across participants design, baseline levels of digits correct per minute (DCPM) and on-task behavior were compared …

Changing Selection And Epistasis On Drivers Over Tumorigenesis In Primary And Metastatic Prostate Cancer, Alexander Yang

Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library

Background: Many attempts have been made to characterize and describe the driver genes and mutations responsible for prostate cancer tumorigenesis. We have quantified the cancer effect size—a direct measurement of the survival advantage a mutation confers—for 2699 primary and metastatic prostate tumor samples. Our measure of cancer effect treats tumorigenesis as an evolutionary process, subject to positive and negative selective pressures. We have applied this metric in a stage-specific manner to elucidate which mutations are selected for as prostate cancer develops.Methods: We analyzed 2699 prostate cancer tumor exomes, genomes, and panel sequences (1648 primary tumors and 1051 metastatic samples). The …

One Too Many Sticks For The Trademark Bundle? The Unintended Consequences Of Luxury Brands’ Push For A Post-First Sale Authentication Right, Betina A. Baumgarten

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

The unprecedented and exponential growth of resale is both a rose and a thorn to the luxury market. Some fashion brands construe resale as an opportunity to diversify and expand their client base; while others, who firmly subscribe to a luxury philosophy grounded in exclusivity, believe resale threatens everything from their brand allure to their very existence. Indeed, when Chanel declared that “[o]nly Chanel itself can know what is genuine Chanel,” it opened Pandora’s box by providing far more than a peek into its litigation strategy. Chanel’s declaration all but declared war on the secondary resale market in not only …

On Ramsey And Gallai-Ramsey Numbers Of Some Classes Of Graphs, Qinghong Zhao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 1930, Frank Ramsey showed that one will find a monochromatic clique of a specified size in any edge coloring of a sufficiently large complete graph. This result is commonly known as Ramsey's theorem. The role of Ramsey number is to quantify some specific problems related to Ramsey's theorem. Given a graph H, the Ramsey number R_2(H) is the minimum integer p such that every 2-edge-coloring of the complete graph K_p contains a monochromatic copy of H. Ramsey numbers have been a hot topic in graph theory for decades due to their intrinsic beauty, wide applicability and overwhelming difficulty. Let …

Almostaqbal: Envisioning A Better Arab Future, Mohamed Gameel, Muhammad Alaraby, Firas Al-Atraqchi

Faculty Journal Articles

An excerpt from the American University in Cairo’s blue-ribbon report, “AlMostaqbal: Envisioning a Better Arab Future”.

A2k4d’S Webinar Series: Women & The Future Of Work: The Urgency Of Inclusion, Naglaa Rizq

Faculty Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Chapter 14: 2022: North America, Christopher J. Lemieux, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change

Geography and Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Golem In The Machine: Ferpa, Dirty Data, And Digital Distortion In The Education Record, Najarian R. Peters

Washington and Lee Law Review

Like its counterpart in the criminal justice system, dirty data—data that is inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading—in K-12 education records creates and catalyzes catastrophic life events. The presence of this data in any record suggests a lack of data integrity. The systemic problem of dirty data in education records means the data stewards of those records have failed to meet the data integrity requirements embedded in the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). FERPA was designed to protect students and their education records from the negative impact of erroneous information rendered from the “private scribblings” of educators. The legislative history …

Data Breach Notification Laws And The Quantum Decryption Problem, Phillip Harmon

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the United States, state data breach notification laws protect citizens by forcing businesses to notify those citizens when their personal information has been compromised. These laws almost universally include an exception for encrypted personal data. Modern encryption methods make encrypted data largely useless, and the notification laws aim to encourage good encryption practices.

This Note challenges the wisdom of laws that place blind faith in the continued infallibility of encryption. For decades, Shor’s algorithm has promised polynomial-time factoring once a sufficiently powerful quantum computer can be built. Competing laboratories around the world steadily continue to march toward this end. …

(Re)Empowering The Community: A Case Study Of Namibia's Legal Evolution Of Wildlife Governance, Stefan Carpenter

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Article will introduce the theoretical foundation of the CBC [Community-Based Conservation] approach. It will then use Namibia as a case study to both: (a) illustrate the sort of historical, political, and economic drivers that motivate the adoption of CBC across the global south, and (b) highlight the existence of potential structural weaknesses present in even the most lauded CBC programs. Finally, this Article will present some of the common theoretical and results-based criticisms of CBC and discuss broader lessons that can be drawn from the Namibian experience. The analyses in this Article draw from academic literature, Namibia’s statutes and …

New Strategies For Groundwater Litigation In Texas, Amy Hardberger

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

This Article evaluates the evolution of the understanding of groundwater rights since the Day decision and assesses the relative power of property rights in groundwater that have emerged and what can be done to equalize resulting inequities. Part I reviews the current state of groundwater ownership rights and includes a brief history of litigation that led to that point. Part II explains the authority and obligations of groundwater conservation districts, which create a regulatory overlay on the common law vested rights through permitting rules and the statewide planning process. Part III summarizes the history of constitutional challenges litigated after the …

Discussing Whether Congress Should Implement A National Uniform Non-Competition Agreement And Why Non-Competition Agreements Discourage Dynamism Particularly In Florida, Tiffany Guerrero

Nova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Heuristic Algorithms For Transmission Switching To Reduce Load Shedding, Tanveer Hussain

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Avian Use Of Cover Crops In The Corn Belt, Megan Figura

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The tallgrass prairie of North America has changed drastically since colonial settlement, with up to 99% of this region converted for agriculture and other land-uses. Concurrent with grassland conversion, grassland birds have experienced the most extreme, consistent, and widespread population declines of any avian guild. Agricultural lands in the U.S. Midwest were able to provide adequate habitat for several bird species until the 1950’s; however, altered and intensified management practices have degraded much of remaining suitable habitat and undermined ecosystem functions. Consequently, many grassland birds have been identified as Species of Greatest Conservation Need (SGCN) in many State Wildlife Action …

Pathogen Prevalence In Domestic Sheep In Western Nebraska: Implications For Bighorn Sheep Conservation And Coexistence On A Multi-Use Landscape, Kaytlin Bohr

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis) and domestic sheep (Ovis aries) are members of the same genus and thus share multiple pathogens that can be spread between them. One specific respiratory pathogen of concern is Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae (M. ovipneumoniae), which has been linked to pneumonia epizootics in bighorn sheep that are often characterized by all age die offs upon initial exposure followed by years of low lamb recruitment. Domestic sheep have been identified as one carrier of M. ovipneumoniae with transmission between sheep species occurring when there is close contact on the landscape. To prevent this cross-species transmission, importance has been placed …

To Study The Factors Influencing The Sampling Variability On Microbiological Analysis Of Milk And Whey, Ratul Kalita

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sampling and analysis are integral parts of dairy processing in quality control, process monitoring and control, and meeting regulatory standards. Accurate sampling is vital to avoid erroneous analysis results and interpretation. The sampling process depends on the appropriateness of sample collection, transportation, storage, and analysis conditions. The bacterial heterogeneity and cluster formation, structural heterogeneity of food, sample unit and size, frequency, and sampling methods, are also crucial in sampling. We aimed to evaluate the influence of sample volume, sampling frequency, and sampling methods in experimental processing lines of whole milk, skim milk, and whey. To standardize the experimental protocols, a …

Estimation And Consequences Of Asymmetric Dispersal On The Genetics Of Coastal Marine Organisms In 1-D Habitats, Kyle Teller

Doctoral Dissertations

Estimation and Consequences of Asymmetric Dispersal on the Genetics of Coastal Marine Organisms in 1-D Habitats

Many natural populations have a dispersal that is biased in one direction (asymmetric dispersal), due to physical factors in the environment such as currents in the ocean that transport larvae or winds that carry seeds. These physical factors create a preferred direction for offspring to be carried (the “downstream” direction). When there is asymmetric dispersal there are two parameters that define the dispersal distance, the mean downstream distance, and the standard deviation of dispersal distances. This present research analyzes the effects of the mean …

Efficient Numerical Optimization For Parallel Dynamic Optimal Power Flow Simulation Using Network Geometry, Rylee Sundermann

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this work, we present a parallel method for accelerating the multi-period dynamic optimal power flow (DOPF). Our approach involves a distributed-memory parallelization of DOPF time-steps, use of a newly developed parallel primal-dual interior point method, and an iterative Krylov subspace linear solver with a block-Jacobi preconditioning scheme. The parallel primal-dual interior point method has been implemented and distributed in the open-source PETSc library and is currently available. We present the formulation of the DOPF problem, the developed primal dual interior point method solver, the parallel implementation, and results on various multi-core machines. We demonstrate the effectiveness our proposed block-Jacobi …

Acer 2019-2020 Annual Report, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ACER Annual Reports

No abstract provided.

Nh125 Sensitizes Staphylococcus Aureus To Cell Wall-Targeting Antibiotics Through The Inhibition Of The Vras Sensor Histidine Kinase, Shrijan Bhattarai, Lane Marsh, Kelsey Knight, Liaqat Ali, Antonio Gomez, Allison Sunderhaus, May H. Abdelaziz

Pharmacy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Staphylococcus aureus utilizes the two-component regulatory system VraSR to receive and relay environmental stress signals, and it is implicated in the development of bacterial resistance to several antibiotics through the upregulation of cell wall synthesis. VraS inhibition was shown to extend or restore the efficacy of several clinically used antibiotics. In this work, we study the enzymatic activity of the VraS intracellular domain (GST-VraS) to determine the kinetic parameters of the ATPase reaction and characterize the inhibition of NH125 under in vitro and microbiological settings. The rate of the autophosphorylation reaction was determined at different GST-VraS concentrations (0.95 to 9.49 …

Sex Sounds: Vectors Of Difference In Electronic Music, Daniele Shlomit Sofer

Books and Book Chapters by University of Dayton Faculty

In Sex Sounds, Daniele Shlomit Sofer investigates the repeated focus on sexual themes in electronic music since the 1950s. Debunking electronic music's origin myth—that it emerged in France and Germany, invented by Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen, respectively—Sofer defines electronic music more inclusively to mean any music with an electronic component, drawing connections between academic institutions, radio studios, experimental music practice, hip-hop production, and histories of independent and commercial popular music. Through a broad array of detailed case studies—examining music that ranges from Schaeffer's musique concrète to a video workshop by Annie Sprinkle—Sofer offers a groundbreaking look at the …

Drivers Of Environmental Degradation In Turkey: Designing An Sdg Framework Through Advanced Quantile Approaches, Tomiwa Sunday Adebayo, Ephraim Bonah Agyekum, Salah Kamel, Hossam Zawbaa, Mehmet Altuntaş

Articles

Turkey is a laggard in terms of the achievement of its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and one of the primary issues it faces is environmental deterioration. Therefore, a policy-level reorientation may be needed to address this relevant issue. From this standpoint, this research assesses the impact of renewable energy (RE) use and financial development on the emissions of CO2 as well as the role of urbanization and agriculture, utilizing a dataset stretching between 1985 and 2019. By applying the innovative quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) and non-parametric Granger causality in quantiles techniques, the study assesses the ways in which the quantiles of …

Adopting Scenario-Based Approach To Solve Optimal Reactive Power Dispatch Problem With Integration Of Wind And Solar Energy Using Improved Marine Predator Algorithm, Noor Habib Khan, Raheela Jamal, Mohamed Ebeed, Salah Kamel, Hamed Zeinoddini-Meymand, Hossam Zawbaa

Articles

The penetration of renewable energy resources into electric power networks has been increased considerably to reduce the dependence of conventional energy resources, reducing the generation cost and greenhouse emissions. The wind and photovoltaic (PV) based systems are the most applied technologies in electrical systems compared to other technologies of renewable energy resources. However, there are some complications and challenges to incorporating these resources due to their stochastic nature, intermittency, and variability of output powers. Therefore, solving the optimal reactive power dispatch (ORPD) problem with considering the uncertainties of renewable energy resources is a challenging task. Application of the Marine Predators …