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University of Massachusetts Amherst

Doctoral Dissertations

2015

Articles 61 - 72 of 72

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Design, Syntheses And Study Of Bodipy-Based Materials For Use As Electron Transporters In Organic Electronics, Ambata Poe Mar 2015

Design, Syntheses And Study Of Bodipy-Based Materials For Use As Electron Transporters In Organic Electronics, Ambata Poe

Doctoral Dissertations

Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are desirable for the harvesting of solar energy. They provide distinct advantages over their inorganic counterparts, especially the high absorption coefficients of organic materials and their ability to be processed using inexpensive solution methods. This allows for potential development of lightweight and flexible devices for portable electronics. One of the drawbacks of organic photovoltaics is the low power conversion efficiency of the devices. Efforts to improve the efficiency often take place through molecular design of the electron rich donor material to improve light absorption of the active layer. However, significantly less effort has been put into modifying …

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X-Band Dual Polarization Phased-Array Radar For Meteorological Applications, Krzysztof Orzel Mar 2015

X-Band Dual Polarization Phased-Array Radar For Meteorological Applications, Krzysztof Orzel

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation details the development and operation of a novel dual-polarized Phase-Tilt Weather Radar (PTWR) designed for meteorological applications. The use of radar has a well-documented history in detection and classification of weather phenomena, but due to the limited mechanical scanning speed, its usage for severe weather observations remains far from ideal. The PTWR utilizes phased-array technology and provides unique capabilities such as smart scanning, fast scan update, and tracking. This technology is considered a candidate for a replacement and consolidation of the current US weather and surveillance radar networks. The dissertation can be divided into three parts. First, the …

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Learning With Joint Inference And Latent Linguistic Structure In Graphical Models, Jason Narad Mar 2015

Learning With Joint Inference And Latent Linguistic Structure In Graphical Models, Jason Narad

Doctoral Dissertations

Constructing end-to-end NLP systems requires the processing of many types of linguistic information prior to solving the desired end task. A common approach to this problem is to construct a pipeline, one component for each task, with each system's output becoming input for the next. This approach poses two problems. First, errors propagate, and, much like the childhood game of "telephone", combining systems in this manner can lead to unintelligible outcomes. Second, each component task requires annotated training data to act as supervision for training the model. These annotations are often expensive and time-consuming to produce, may differ from each …

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Functional Nanostructures From Nanoparticle Building Blocks, Jimmy Lawrence Mar 2015

Functional Nanostructures From Nanoparticle Building Blocks, Jimmy Lawrence

Doctoral Dissertations

Advances in the synthetic strategies of engineered nanomaterials, multifunctional molecules and polymers have opened pathways for the development of functional nanomaterials having unique optoelectronic, mechanical, and biological properties. By designing the chemistry of surface ligands, the organic interface of nanoparticles, one can further the versatility and utilization of engineered nanomaterials, opening pathways for breakthroughs in sensing, catalysis, and delivery using nanomaterials. This thesis describes the synthesis and characterization of small molecule and polymer ligand functionalized inorganic nanoparticles (e.g., metal, semiconducting). Embedding specific chemical functionality into the ligand periphery of nanoparticles enables the resulting functional nanoparticles to react selectively …

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Effectiveness Of Cloud Services For Scientific And Vod Applications, Dilip Kumar Krishnappa Mar 2015

Effectiveness Of Cloud Services For Scientific And Vod Applications, Dilip Kumar Krishnappa

Doctoral Dissertations

Cloud platforms have emerged as the primary data warehouse for a variety of applications, such as DropBox, iCloud, Google Music, etc. These applications allow users to store data in the cloud and access it from anywhere in the world. Commercial clouds are also well suited for providing high-end servers for rent to execute applications that require computation resources sporadically. Cloud users only pay for the time they actually use the hardware and the amount of data that is transmitted to and from the cloud, which has the potential to be more cost effective than purchasing, hosting, and maintaining dedicated hardware. …

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Stimuli-Responsive Supramolecular Assembly, Disassembly And Implications, Jing Guo Mar 2015

Stimuli-Responsive Supramolecular Assembly, Disassembly And Implications, Jing Guo

Doctoral Dissertations

Stimuli-responsive systems have attracted wide interest due to their applications in a variety of areas such as drug delivery and sensing. Stimuli-responsive systems that are triggered by secondary biological changes have been studied extensively. Primary biological changes, such as protein imbalances and enzymatic activity, are intrinsic to certain types of diseases, and thus have drawn increasing attention in triggering stimuli-responsive systems in areas such as drug delivery. This thesis first provides a concept of increasing stimuli-responsive selectivity by designing a system that only responds in the concurrent presence of two complementary primary biological stimuli, protein and enzyme. A dendritic assembly …

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Model-Based Guidance For Human-Intensive Processes, Stefan Christov Mar 2015

Model-Based Guidance For Human-Intensive Processes, Stefan Christov

Doctoral Dissertations

Human-intensive processes (HIPs), such as medical processes involving coordination among doctors, nurses, and other medical staff, often play a critical role in society. Despite considerable work and progress in error reduction, human errors are still a major concern for many HIPs. To address this problem of human errors in HIPs, this thesis investigates two approaches for online process guidance, i.e., for guiding process performers while a process is being executed. Both approaches rely on monitoring a process execution and base the guidance they provide on a detailed formal process model that captures the recommended ways to perform the corresponding HIP. …

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Aggregation And Interfacial Behavior Of Charged Surfactants In Ionic Liquids, Lang Chen Mar 2015

Aggregation And Interfacial Behavior Of Charged Surfactants In Ionic Liquids, Lang Chen

Doctoral Dissertations

Room-temperature ionic liquids (ILs) exhibit a unique set of properties, leading to opportunities for numerous applications such as green solvents, batteries and lubricants. Their properties can be greatly tuned and controlled by addition of surfactants. It is therefore critical to obtain a better understanding of the aggregation and interfacial behavior of surfactants within ILs. Firstly, the phase diagram and aggregation isotherms of surfactants in several distinct ILs were investigated by solubility and tensiometry. A connection between solubility of the surfactant and the physical properties of the underlying ionic liquid was established. We found that the interfacial energy was crucial in …

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Learning Parameterized Skills, Bruno Castro Da Silva Mar 2015

Learning Parameterized Skills, Bruno Castro Da Silva

Doctoral Dissertations

One of the defining characteristics of human intelligence is the ability to acquire and refine skills. Skills are behaviors for solving problems that an agent encounters often—sometimes in different contexts and situations—throughout its lifetime. Identifying important problems that recur and retaining their solutions as skills allows agents to more rapidly solve novel problems by adjusting and combining their existing skills. In this thesis we introduce a general framework for learning reusable parameterized skills. Reusable skills are parameterized procedures that—given a description of a problem to be solved—produce appropriate behaviors or policies. They can be sequentially and hierarchically combined with other …

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Combinatorics Of Equivariant Cohomology: Flags And Regular Nilpotent Hessenberg Varieties, Elizabeth J. Drellich Mar 2015

Combinatorics Of Equivariant Cohomology: Flags And Regular Nilpotent Hessenberg Varieties, Elizabeth J. Drellich

Doctoral Dissertations

The field of Schubert Calculus deals with computations in the cohomology rings of certain algebraic varieties, including flag varieties and Schubert varieties. In the equivariant setting, GKM theory turns multiplication in the cohomology ring of certain varieties into a combinatorial computation. This dissertation uses combinatorial tools, including Billey’s formula, to do Schubert calculus computations in several varieties. First we address do computations in the equivariant cohomology of full and partial flag varieties, the classical spaces in Schubert calculus. We then do computations in the equivariant cohomology of a family of non-classical spaces: regular nilpotent Hessenberg varieties. The final chapter gives …

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Developing Fluorescent Sensors For The Bioimaging Of Chelatable Iron(Iii) Ions, Ziya Aydin Mar 2015

Developing Fluorescent Sensors For The Bioimaging Of Chelatable Iron(Iii) Ions, Ziya Aydin

Doctoral Dissertations

Iron is an essential element for the body and plays important roles in many metabolic processes. A transient labile iron pool (LIP) has been proposed to play key roles in cellular iron trafficking and metabolism. However, free iron ions (Fe3+ and Fe2+) in this pool are toxic and damaging to cells due to their involvement in the production of oxygen radicals. The damages may lead to aging and various diseases including stroke, cancer, and several neurological disorders like Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and atherosclerosis. Determination of free iron ions in cells may contribute to a better understanding …

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Reconstructing Geometric Structures From Combinatorial And Metric Information, Md Ashraful Alam Mar 2015

Reconstructing Geometric Structures From Combinatorial And Metric Information, Md Ashraful Alam

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, we address three reconstruction problems. First, we address the problem of reconstructing a Delaunay triangulation from a maximal planar graph. A maximal planar graph G is Delaunay realizable if there exists a realization of G as a Delaunay triangulation on the plane. Several classes of graphs with particular graph-theoretic properties are known to be Delaunay realizable. One such class of graphs is outerplanar graph. In this dissertation, we present a new proof that an outerplanar graph is Delaunay realizable. Given a convex polyhedron P and a point s on the surface (the source), the ridge tree or …

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