Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Situational Awareness/Triage Tool For Use In A Chemical, Biological, Radiological Nuclear Explosive (Cbrne) Environment, John N. Scarlett, Heather L. Gallup, David A. Smith

AFIT Patents

A method of managing patient care and emergency response following a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear Explosive (CBRNE) attack and maintaining compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The method including identifying each patient with a unique patient identifier, the identifier based upon the geospatial location of the patient, the geospatial location including at least the latitude and longitude of the patient when first treated, the unique patient identifier being part of patient data. Providing a collection point of patient data to form a patient data database where in the patient location data may be used to …

Bayesian Dictionary Learning For Single And Coupled Feature Spaces, Li He

Doctoral Dissertations

Over-complete bases offer the flexibility to represent much wider range of signals with more elementary basis atoms than signal dimension. The use of over-complete dictionaries for sparse representation has been a new trend recently and has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications such as denoise, image super-resolution, inpaiting, compression, blind source separation and linear unmixing. This dissertation studies the dictionary learning for single or coupled feature spaces and its application in image restoration tasks. A Bayesian strategy using a beta process prior is applied to solve both problems.

Firstly, we illustrate how to generalize the existing beta …

Wind Turbine Controls For Farm And Offshore Operation, Zhongzhou Yang

Theses and Dissertations

Development of advanced control techniques is a critical measure for reducing the cost of energy for wind power generation, in terms of both enhancing energy capture and reducing fatigue load. There are two remarkable trends for wind energy. First, more and more large wind farms are developed in order to reduce the unit-power cost in installation, operation, maintenance and transmission. Second, offshore wind energy has received significant attention when the scarcity of land resource has appeared to be a major bottleneck for next level of wind penetration, especially for Europe and Asia. This dissertation study investigates on several wind turbine …

Minerva 2013, The Honors College

Minerva

This issue of Minerva includes an article on the opening of Charlie's Terrace in honor of former Honors Dean, Charlie Slavin; a discussion on community engagement in the Honors curriculum and community; an article on the student recipients of the Rezendes Travel Scholarship; and several articles catching up with Honors alumni.

Extracting The Structure And Conformations Of Biological Entities From Large Datasets, Ali Dashti

Theses and Dissertations

In biology, structure determines function, which often proceeds via changes in conformation. Efficient means for determining structure exist, but mapping conformations continue to present a serious challenge. Single-particles approaches, such as cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and emerging "diffract & destroy" X-ray techniques are, in principle, ideally positioned to overcome these challenges. But the algorithmic ability to extract information from large heterogeneous datasets consisting of "unsorted" snapshots - each emanating from an unknown orientation of an object in an unknown conformation - remains elusive.

It is the objective of this thesis to describe and validate a powerful suite of manifold-based algorithms …

Research: South Dakota State University, Winter 2013, Christie Delfanian, Matt Landwehr

Research: South Dakota State University

CONTENTS:

South Dakota expertise integral part of Landsat [Page] 1
West Nile: Researchers help public health officials combat West Nile virus [page] 2
Health care: arteries, corticosteroids, concussions, and preemies [Page] 4
Oilseeds [Page] 6
Undergraduate Research [Page] 8
Organ donation key to helping Native Americans on dialysis [Page] 10
Researchers meet challenge of increased competition: 2012 measurements [Page] 11

Scheduling For A Small Satellite For Remote Sensed Data Collection, Donovan Torgerson, Christoffer Korvalnd, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

Small satellites, such as CubeSats, serve as excellent platforms for the collection of data that can be supplied to a geographic information system. To serve this need, they require a robust and lightweight task scheduler due to their limited onboard power production capabilities as well as internal space restrictions. Because of these constraints, schedules must be optimized; however, the scheduling optimization process must be performed using limited processing (CPU) power.

Several considerations must be taken into account in order to make a scheduler for these systems. This poster highlights requirements such as inter-dependency of onboard systems, and limited windows of …

Roofsat: Teaching Students Skills For Software Development For Gis Data Collection And Other Activities, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh, Donovan Torgerson, Christoffer Korvald

Jeremy Straub

Small Spacecraft provide an excellent platform for the collection of geospatial data. In order to enable the low-cost creation of small remote sensing space-craft in a university environment, a training pathway for students is required. The Realistic Operational Ob-ject for Facilitating Software Assessment and Testing (RoofSat) serves to provide students with experience developing software for a small satellite platform typi-cal of those used for remote sensing missions. It al-lows software to be tested with hardware that re-sponds in a similar manner to that found on the satel-lite for a fraction of the cost of development. This poster details the goals …

Openorbiter Ground Station Software, Alexander Lewis, Jacob Huhn, Jeremy Straub, Travis Desell, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

OpenOrbiter is a student project at the University of North Dakota to design and build a low cost1 and open-hardware / open-source software CubeSat2. The Ground Station is the user interface for operators of the satellite. The ground station software must manage spacecraft communications, track its orbital location , manage task assignment, provide security and retrieve the data from the spacecraft. This will be presented via a graphical user interface that allows a user to easily perform these tasks.

Testing And Integration Team Project Management, Tyler Leben, Jeremy Straub, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

The Testing and Integration Team plays an integral role in the development of the open source CubeSat known as Open Orbiter. Like any project, the Testing Team’s project can benefit from structure and management to effectively utilize it’s time and resources. CSCI 297 teaches the skills needed to turn a good idea into successful endeavor. By applying skills such as effective planning, setting milestones, dealing with changes and supervising to an actual project, Open Orbiter has transformed from a pipe dream to a real, obtainable goal. Doing this has turned learning about project management into more that just power points …

Openorbiter Payload Software, Tim Whitney, Kyle Goehner, Jeremy Straub, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

The Payload Software team is responsible for developing the image processing and task decomposition systems on the Open Orbiter satellite1. The image processing software performs operations to enhance the quality of the images collected by the onboard camera, specifically, mosaicking, which takes multiple images and stitches them together to make a larger image and super resolution, which takes multiple low resolution images of the same area to produce a higher resolution image2,3,4. The task decomposition part of the system decomposes tasks defined by the user into jobs that then get sent to the operating system to be performed. This system …

Project Management For The Openorbiter Operating Software Team, Kelton Karboviak, Dayln Limesand, Michael Hlas, Eric Berg, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

OpenOrbiter is producing a 1-U CubeSat spacecraft1 to facilitate the construction of low-cost2 spacecraft by others in the future. The Operating Software team is in charge of designing and creating the software that controls most of the CubeSat’s operations such as image capturing, storage management, and temperature sensing. The project management deliverables that we have worked on as a team are the Project Definition, Work Breakdown Structure, and the Project Schedule. The Project Definition defines exactly what our project team will be developing including, but not limited to, what the team is in charge of developing, what its not in …

Ground Station Software Team Project Management, Zach Maguire, Marshall Mattingly, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Scott Kerlin

Jeremy Straub

In CSCI 297 class we partake in learning the roles of software team leads and developers. With hands on activities that get us involved in what a real manager of a software team may do such as: defining a project, planning a project, developing a work breakdown structure, estimating the work, developing a project schedule, etc. This work is performed in the context of the OpenOrbiter project which seeks to build a low-cost spacecraft1 that can be produced with a parts budget of approxi-mately $5,0002 by schools worldwide. The ground station software team’s purpose within Open Orbiter project is to …

Software For Openorbiter, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Scott Kerlin, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

The software development effort for the OpenOrbiter project consists of four teams: operating software development, payload software development, ground station software development and testing. These teams are designing and developing the software required to create a turn-key spacecraft design1 which can be produced at a price point of under USD $5,000 by faculty, students and researchers world-wide2. Through this process, students are gaining valuable real-world experience3,4 in areas of indicated interest5. Each team is headed by a team lead who is responsible for conducting weekly meetings and organizing the activities of the team. During the Fall, 2013 semester, team leads …

Payload Software Design And Development For A Remote Sensing Small Spacecraft, Kyle Goehner, Christoffer Korvald, Jeremy Straub, Ronald Marsh

Jeremy Straub

Scheduling for a Small Satellite for Remote Sensed Data Collection

Characterization Techniques And Electrolyte Separator Performance Investigation For All Vanadium Redox Flow Battery, Zhijiang Tang

Doctoral Dissertations

The all-vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) is an excellent prospect for large scale energy storage in an electricity grid level application. High battery performance has lately been achieved by using a novel cell configuration with advanced materials. However, more work is still required to better understand the reaction kinetics and transport behaviors in the battery to guide battery system optimization and new battery material development. The first part of my work is the characterization of the battery systems with flow-through or flow-by cell configurations. The configuration difference between two cell structures exhibit significantly different polarization behavior. The battery output can …

Broadcasting With Prediction And Selective Forwarding In Vehicular Networks, Jainjun Yang, Zongming Fei

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Broadcasting in vehicular networks has attracted great interest in research community and industry. Broadcasting on disseminating information to individual vehicle beyond the transmission range is based on inter-vehicle communication systems. It is crucial to broadcast messages to other vehicles as fast as possible because the messages in vehicle communication systems are often emergency messages such as accident warning or alarm. In many current approaches, the message initiator or sender selects the node among its neighbors that is farthest away from it in the broadcasting direction and then assigns the node to rebroadcast the message once the node gets out of …

A Simple Integration Of Social Relationship And Text Data For Identifying Potential Customers In Microblogging, Guansong Pang, Shengyi Jiang, Dongyi Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Identifying potential customers among a huge number of users in microblogging is a fundamental problem for microblog marketing. One challenge in potential customer detection in microblogging is how to generate an accurate characteristic description for users, i.e., user profile generation. Intuitively, the preference of a user’s friends (i.e., the person followed by the user in microblogging) is of great importance to capture the characteristic of the user. Also, a user’s self-defined tags are often concise and accurate carriers for the user’s interests. In this paper, for identifying potential customers in microblogging, we propose a method to generate user profiles via …

Assessing Trichloromethane Formation And Control In Algal-Stimulated Waters Amended With Nitrogen And Phosphorus, Clinton Mash

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) enrichments can stimulate algal growth in drinking water sources, which can cause increased production of disinfection byproduct (DBP) precursors. However, the effect of systematic N and P enrichments on DBP formation and control has not been adequately studied. In this work, we enriched samples from a drinking water source - sampled on April 5, May 30, and August 19, 2013 - with N and P to stimulate algal growth at N:P ratios covering almost five orders of magnitude (0.2-4,429). To simulate DBP-precursor removal processes at drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs), the samples were treated with …

Assessing The Impact Of Chlorine Residual On Trihalomethane And Haloacetonitrile Formation Under Chlorination And Chloramination Disinfection Regimes, Thien Duc Do

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A disinfection byproduct (DBP) formation potential (FP) test can be used to indirectly measure the concentration of DBP precursors in natural waters, permitting assessment of various DBP-related treatment processes and control strategies. While these tests require a 7-day chlorine residual (CR) between 3-5 mg L^-1 as Cl², it is not well known if this recommended residual corresponds to the true DBPFP (i.e., the maximum concentrations) for trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetonitriles (HANs). In this study, THMs and HANs were quantified as a function of CR under three common disinfection regimes: (1) free chlorine at pH 7.0 (FC7), (2) …

Attitudes And Behaviors In Online Communities: Empirical Studies Of The Effects Of Social, Community, And Individual Characteristics, Richard Kumi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online communities and communities of practice bring people together to promote and support shared goals and exchange information. Personal interactions are important to many of these communities and one of the important outcomes of personal interactions in online communities and communities of practice is user-generated content. The three essays in the current study examines behavior motivation in online communities and communities of practice to understand how Social and personal psychological factors, and user-generated influence attitudes, intentions and behaviors in online communities.

The first essay addresses two research questions. First, how does Social capital influence exchange and combination behaviors in online …

A Solar-Powered And Multi-Tiered Mesh Node For A Portable In Situ Emergency Response System, Adam Matthews

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The aftermath of a natural disaster is typically characterized by lack of a reliable medium for dissemination of information to survivors. Current state-of-the-art emergency response systems rely on satellite radio-enabled devices, but survivors, unlike first responders, do not have access to such devices. To mitigate this problem, we present PERPETUU a solar-powered portable GIS microserver. The microserver node can be deployed in a disaster scene, and can serve maps to survivors viewable on browsers of off-the-shelf mobile systems. A key innovation in the design of the PERPETUU node is a multi-tiered hardware architecture-the system combines a low-power micro-controller, a medium-power …

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake E. Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel J. Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …

Dynamic Queue Management For Hospital Emergency Room Services, Kar Way Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The emergency room (ER) – or emergency department (ED) – is often seen as a place with long waiting times and a lack of doctors to serve the patients. However, it is one of the most important departments in a hospital, and must efficiently serve patients with critical medical needs. In the existing literature, addressing the issue of long waiting times in an ED often takes the form of single-faceted queue-management strategies that are either from a demand perspective or from a supply perspective. From the demand perspective, there is work on queue design such as priority queues, or queue …

Structural Characterization Of Super-Acid Oligomerized Fatty Esters., Esam Allehyani

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Fatty acid methyl esters can be oligomerized with very strong acid catalysts - superacids such as tetrafluoroboric or triflic acid with formation of dimer and trimer fatty acids at much lower temperature, such as 80-90 °C, than what is used presently. Insight into the reaction of polymerization of fatty esters/ acids can be obtained by structural characterization. This would determine the properties of the oligomeric products and their ability to substitute currently used materials. It was presumed that dimer fatty, trimer fatty acid esters, and oligomeric fatty acid esters are produced by polymerization of fatty acid methyl esters by a …

Efficient Routing For Wireless Mesh Networks Using A Backup Path, Amir Esmailpour, Nidal Nasser, Jehad Al Dallal

Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science Faculty Publications

Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) has a proven record in providing viable solutions for some of the fundamental issues in wireless networks such as capacity and range limitations. WMN infrastructure includes clusters of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) connected through a fixed backbone of mesh routers. The mesh network can be constrained severely due to various reasons, which could result in performance degradation such as a drop in throughput or long delays. Solutions to this problem often focus on multipath or multichannel extensions to the existing ad- hoc routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel solution by introducing an alternative …

Nonlinear Adaptive Diffusion Models For Image Denoising, Ajay Kumar Mandava

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Most of digital image applications demand on high image quality. Unfortunately, images often are degraded by noise during the formation, transmission, and recording processes. Hence, image denoising is an essential processing step preceding visual and automated analyses. Image denoising methods can reduce image contrast, create block or ring artifacts in the process of denoising. In this dissertation, we develop high performance non-linear diffusion based image denoising methods, capable to preserve edges and maintain high visual quality. This is attained by different approaches: First, a nonlinear diffusion is presented with robust M-estimators as diffusivity functions. Secondly, the knowledge of textons derived …

Synergy Of The Developed 6d Bim Framework And Conception Of The Nd Bim Framework And Nd Bim Process Ontology, Shawn Edward O'Keeffe

Dissertations

The author developed a unified nD framework and process ontology for Building Information Modeling (BIM). The research includes a framework developed for 6D BIM, nD BIM, and nD ontology that defines the domain and sub-domain constructs for future nD BIM dimensions. The nD ontology defines the relationships of kinds within any new proposed dimensional domain for BIM. The developed nD BIM framework and ontology takes into account the current 2D-5D BIM dimensions. There is a synergy between the 6D and nD framework that allows the nD framework and ontology to be utilized as a unified template for future dimensional development. …

A Viscous Flow Analog To Prandtl’S Optimized Lifting Line Theory Utilizing Rotating Biquadratic Bodies Of Revolution, Mark Nathaniel Callender

Doctoral Dissertations

Prandtl’s lifting line theory expanded the Kutta-Joukowski theorem to calculate the lift and induced drag of finite wings. The circulation distribution about a real wing was represented by a superposition of infinitesimal vortex filaments. From this theory, the optimum distribution of circulation was determined to be elliptical. A consequence of this theory led to the prediction that the elliptical chord distribution on a real fixed wing would provide the elliptical circulation distribution. The author applied the same line of reasoning to lift-producing rotating cylinders in order to determine the cylindrical geometry that would theoretically produce an elliptical circulation distribution. The …

Extraction And Classification Of Drug-Drug Interaction From Biomedical Text Using A Two-Stage Classifier, Majid Rastegar-Mojarad

Theses and Dissertations

One of the critical causes of medical errors is Drug-Drug interaction (DDI), which occurs when one drug increases or decreases the effect of another drug. We propose a machine learning system to extract and classify drug-drug interactions from the biomedical literature, using the annotated corpus from the DDIExtraction-2013 shared task challenge. Our approach applies a two-stage classifier to handle the highly unbalanced class distribution in the corpus. The first stage is designed for binary classification of drug pairs as interacting or non-interacting, and the second stage for further classification of interacting pairs into one of four interacting types: advise, effect, …