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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Building An Ins-1 Cdna Library For A Genome-Wide Crispr-Cas9 Screen, Idongesit Ekpo Aug 2020

Building An Ins-1 Cdna Library For A Genome-Wide Crispr-Cas9 Screen, Idongesit Ekpo

Undergraduate Honors Theses

By the year 2040, an estimated 642 million people are expected to have diabetes globally. Diabetes results from an elevation of metabolic stressors, such as glucotoxicity, lipotoxicity, oxidative stress and apoptosis. In type 2 diabetes, these stressful conditions contribute to the malfunction and loss of functional insulin-producing β-cells. Current treatment methods for diabetes include insulin therapy, islet transplant and anti-diabetes medication. These treatments are not curative and ignore other factors that contribute to the pathogenesis of diabetes beyond insulin resistance and islet β-cell failure. Previous research on β-cells has focused on ways to replace functional β-cell mass, trigger β-cell proliferation, …


Using Group Affinity To Predict Community Formation In Social Networks, Joseph Leung Jun 2020

Using Group Affinity To Predict Community Formation In Social Networks, Joseph Leung

Undergraduate Honors Theses

A well-studied topic in network theory is detecting the communities found in real-world networks. Community detection is a technique to better understand the way in which small dense substructures appear in these networks. Such substructures can often tell important information about groups that form in such systems. A prominent feature of many networks is that they evolve over time, forming and dissolving new edges between different nodes that appear. In this thesis, we consider how we can use the community structure of a network at a certain point in time to predict the state of a network’s communities at some …


An Actuarial Approach To Personal Injury Protection Severity, Jason Colgrove Mar 2020

An Actuarial Approach To Personal Injury Protection Severity, Jason Colgrove

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Insurance companies examine the risk of financial losses for their policyholders as a way to accurately price insurance policies. Within the automobile insurance sector, the frequency of crashes and the associated liabilities started to increase in late 2013 when it had been on the decline for close to a decade. The purpose of this research focuses on the possible correlated variables that could lead to a better understanding of this change. To embark on this task, we teamed up with the Society of Actuaries, Casualty Actuarial Society, and the American Property Casualty Insurance Association to obtain data regarding frequency, severity, …


Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow Dynamics In Inhomogeneous Interstellar Media, Jacob Fields Mar 2020

Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow Dynamics In Inhomogeneous Interstellar Media, Jacob Fields

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous electromagnetic phenomena in the universe, but much remains unknown about them. Many models invoked to explain their highly variable light curves are based on complicated dynamics and interactions involving the GRB progenitor but assume simple circumstellar environments. Many long GRBs, however, show late time optical and x-ray flares that may be an indication of a much richer environment. Relativistic hydrodynamics simulations are used to study a family of initial data with a relativistic blast wave encountering a dense circumstellar shell of matter, similar to what an aging star expelling the outer layers of …


An Analysis Of Opiate Prescription For Chronic Degenerative Disease And Other Pain Syndromes, Catherine Sawyer Mar 2020

An Analysis Of Opiate Prescription For Chronic Degenerative Disease And Other Pain Syndromes, Catherine Sawyer

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Utilizing the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS) database, this thesis explores patterns of opiate prescribing during time period from 1993 to 2016, which includes the time period when the opiate crisis was recognized in the United States and efforts begun to combat it. We analyze these patterns particularly as they relate to patients who were prescribed opiates and who were simultaneously suffering from various chronic conditions, and interactions between prescription of opiates and diagnosis of chronic conditions. We examine which demographic groups were most likely to receive opiates, and considered opiate prescription trends among patients with any pain diagnosis …


Using Logical Specifications For Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, Kolby Nottingham Mar 2020

Using Logical Specifications For Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, Kolby Nottingham

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) paradigm, the relative importance of environment objectives is often unknown prior to training, so agents must learn to specialize their behavior to optimize different combinations of environment objectives that are specified post-training. These are typically linear combinations, so the agent is effectively parameterized by a weight vector that describes how to balance competing environment objectives. However, we show that behaviors can be successfully specified and learned by much more expressive non-linear logical specifications. We test our agent in several environments with various objectives and show that it can generalize to many never-before-seen specifications.


Machine Learning For Effective Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis, Brennon Brimhall Mar 2020

Machine Learning For Effective Parkinson's Disease Diagnosis, Brennon Brimhall

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Parkinson’s Disease is a degenerative neurological condition that affects approximately 10 million people globally. Because there is currently no cure, there is a strong motivation for research into improved and automated diagnostic procedures. Using Random Forests, a computer can effectively learn to diagnose Parkinson’s disease in a patient with high accuracy (94%), precision (95%), and recall (91%) across the data of over 2800 patients. Using similar techniques, I further determine that the most predictive medical tests relate to tremors observed in patients.