Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Smartphone Based Object Detection For Shark Spotting, Darrick W. Oliver

Master's Theses

Given concern over shark attacks in coastal regions, the recent use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has increased to ensure the safety of beachgoers. However, much of city officials' process remains manual, with drone operation and review of footage still playing a significant role. In pursuit of a more automated solution, researchers have turned to the usage of neural networks to perform detection of sharks and other marine life. For on-device solutions, this has historically required assembling individual hardware components to form an embedded system to utilize the machine learning model. This means that the camera, neural processing …

Decades Of Eelgrass Meadow Dynamics Across The Northeast Pacific Support Seascape-Scale Conservation, S. H. Munsch, Ryan K. Walter, B. L. Sanderson, L. Reshitnyk, J. K. O'Leary, P. M. Kiffney, M. Hessing-Lewis, T. G. Gerwing, C. A. Endris, W. B. Chesney, K. M. Beheshti, F. L. Beaty

Physics

Eelgrass meadows provide vital nearshore habitats and ecosystem services, but they have declined from human stressors and conservation efforts are now widespread. Dynamic ecosystems like eelgrass meadows naturally rearrange as disturbance and recruitment unfold across seascapes. However, some decisions that protect eelgrass only consider extant meadows, thus ignoring the potential for change. Here, we report decades of eelgrass dynamics observed across the northeast Pacific. Our observations support conservation expanded to the seascape scale, which includes potentially inhabitable areas along with extant meadows. We found that total seascape meadow area changed over time, and changes within seascapes were often asynchronous. Some …

Signatures Of Feedback In The Spectacular Extended Emission Region Of Ngc 5972, Thomas Harvey, W. Peter Maksym, William Keel, Michael Koss, Vardha N. Bennert, S. Drew Chojnowski, Ezequiel Treister, Carolina Finlez, Chris J. Lintott, Alexei Moiseev, Brooke D. Simmons, Lia F. Sartori, Megan Urry

Physics

We present Chandra X-ray Observatory observations and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph spectra of NGC 5972, one of the 19 ‘Voorwerpjes’ galaxies. This galaxy contains an extended emission-line region (EELR) and an arcsecond scale nuclear bubble. NGC 5972 is a faded active galactic nucleus (AGN), with EELR luminosity suggesting a 2.1 dex decrease in L_bol in the last ∼5 ×10⁴ yr. We investigate the role of AGN feedback in exciting the EELR and bubble given the long-term variability and potential accretion state changes. We detect broad-band (0.3–8 keV) X-ray emission in the near-nuclear regions, coincident with the [O III …

Exploring Approaches To Engage K-12 Students In Learning Computational Thinking Using Collaborative Robots, Zoila Anuri Kanu

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Minority students are largely underrepresented in the STEM field. The goal for this project was to develop a program which promotes the inclusion of computation skills among students and help them work collaboratively with the use of human – robot interaction. Robots are such a strong tool that can be used to enhance computational thinking and engage students towards a technical field. Through workshops and readings about computational thinking we worked on building a block-based program that introduces the uses of robots as teaching tool for computational thinking.

Dei: Exploring Academic Reflections Using Natural Language Processing To Create A Roadmap Of Student Success And Foster Inclusive Engineering Education, Rajvir H. Vyas, Nidhi Raviprasad

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Every year, the College of Engineering (CENG) students and faculty reach out to admitted students through “Text-a-Thon” programs to answer their questions about being a student at Cal Poly. In order to improve CENG outreach efforts, we analyzed these text conversations to predict the likelihood of an admitted student accepting an offer of admission from Cal Poly. Through our research, we discovered key factors that play a role in a student committing to Cal Poly through data-based insights. Additionally, we successfully used a human-on-the-loop system to help create Machine Learning (ML) models that predict satisfaction of response by way of …

Ai For Search And Rescue - Locating A Missing Person, David Hernandez, Sai Rama Balakrishnan, Timmy Chin, Aditya Manikonda, Vasanth Pugalenthi

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Building on the work done initially as a SURP 2021 project and continued through 2021-23, the focus for this summer project will be on the use of computer technology for locating a missing person. Over the last year, we developed the digital equivalents of about 30 paper-based S&R forms and the infrastructure to collect the respective information. In their current use, these paper forms are filled out by search teams, collected in a command post, and reviewed by search coordinators. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors and loss of information, and relies heavily on the experience, skills, and mental …

Trustguard: Containment Architecture, Michael Hu, Sophie Russ, Stephen Beard

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

All software security relies on proper execution at the hardware level. This research extends work on containment architectures, which ensure that any ill effects of malicious or buggy hardware are contained within the system. This is accomplished by a small, security hardware component, called the Sentry, validating communication before it leaves the system. This research assesses the advantages and disadvantages of using the CHISEL hardware language, from a security and verification standpoint. Further, this research investigates more efficient Merkle trees to optimization caching within the Sentry chip to improve performance and power utilization.

Improving Semantic Document Classification Accuracy By Integrating Human-Crafted Knowledge, Zachary Weinfeld, Lubomir Stanchev

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Document classification is a pivotal task in various domains, warranting the development of robust algorithms. Among these, the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm, introduced by Google, has proven to perform well when fine-tuned for the task at hand. Leveraging transformer architecture, BERT demonstrates stellar language understanding capabilities. However, the integration of BERT with a range of techniques has shown potential for further enhancing classification accuracy. This work investigates several techniques that leverage semantic understanding to improve the performance of document classification models trained with BERT. Specifically, we explore three methods. First, we will balance corpuses afflicted by imbalanced …

Machine Learning Prediction Of Hea Properties, Nicholas J. Beaver, Nathaniel Melisso, Travis Murphy

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

High-entropy alloys (HEA) are a very new development in the field of metallurgical materials. They are made up of multiple principle atoms unlike traditional alloys, which contributes to their high configurational entropy. The microstructure and properties of HEAs are are not well predicted with the models developed for more common engineering alloys, and there is not enough data available on HEAs to fully represent the complex behavior of these alloys. To that end, we explore how the use of machine learning models can be used to model the complex, high dimensional behavior in the HEA composition space. Based on our …

Ethics And Social Justice For Ai In Data Science, Arya Ramchander, Kylene Nicole Landenberger

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

The advances of AI raise several critical questions about human values and ethics, highlighting the need for researchers and developers to consider the ethical implications and the risks of neglecting them. In the past few years, student researchers have developed an AI model that allows users to test their surveys for possible breaches of subject confidentiality. This allows the users to gauge the ethicality of their proposal. This summer, we have expanded on this research and launched an interactive model for students and researches to assess their current work for ethical and social justice implications. Using Langchain and Figma, we …

Development Of User Interface And Testing Harness, Jacob Amezquita, William Albertini

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

No abstract provided.

Integrating Human Expert Knowledge With Openai And Chatgpt: A Secure And Privacy-Enabled Knowledge Acquisition Approach, Ben Phillips

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to produce accurate results and preserve user privacy for use cases involving domain-specific knowledge. A privacy-preserving approach for leveraging LLM capabilities on domain-specific knowledge could greatly expand the use cases of LLMs in a variety of disciplines and industries. This project explores a method for acquiring domain-specific knowledge for use with GPT3 while protecting sensitive user information with ML-based text-sanitization.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions And Fire Behavior Impacts Following California Fuel Treatments, Lindsay M. Senechal

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

Fuel treatments are being increasingly applied across California landscapes as communities struggle to recover from wildfire disasters nationwide. Increased funding for treatments stems from grants under CARB’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and funding requires reports accounting the yielded benefits from these fuel treatments. Using data from real-world local scale fuel treatments, I used the forest simulation model FVSFEE and fire behavior software IFTDSS to quantify GHG emission benefits and fire behavior impacts 70 years after treatment. Results suggest that fuel treatments do not yield significant GHG benefits, and fire behavior impacts (conditional flame length) are minimal but overall show slight …

Establishing A Monitoring Framework To Evaluate Impacts Of Grazing Exclusion And Inform Restoration At Santa Rita Ranch, Annie Booth, Annie Booth

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

Santa Rita Ranch is a 1,750-acre cattle ranch in Templeton, California, that was privately owned and continuously grazed for the past 70 years. In 2021, The Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo (LCSLO) acquired the property, and in the winter of 2022, they built a fence that bisects the ranch, excluding the cattle from 800 acres to preserve the riparian habitat. The LCSLO is currently defining the ecological baseline for the ranch to inform future management decisions. Given that cattle grazing has many environmental tradeoffs, they wanted to establish a long-term monitoring study to understand how relieving the pressures of …

Pumping-Induced Drawdown Of Streams In Proximity To Agricultural Wells, Sara Alina Sternberg

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

In the context of unprecedented drought and aquifer overdraft in California, understanding surface water and groundwater connectivity have become increasingly important. While there is a clear understanding of how wells induce drawdown in aquifers (Theis, 1935; Hantush, 1965), secondary effects on local streams have not fully been considered. Current mathematical models targeting aquifer drawdown do not address stream drawdown response in aquifer-stream systems with strong connectivity; instead, they assume the stream to be a constant head boundary. In the drought-stricken and summer-dry climate of California, streams often run dry for months out of the year, which is currently not reflected …

The Methods Of Communication And Education Used To Train Forest And Fire Personnel Through The Swanton Pacific Ranch, Christine Brittney Johnson

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

California does not have a cohesive curriculum for educating and training forest and fire professionals. The Swanton Pacific Ranch Fuels Management Training Program is Cal Fire affiliated and provides online and in person training to assist in equipping fire and forest professionals throughout California with the necessary skills to be successful fire and forest practitioners and managers. An exit survey was offered to all workshop participants after the Swanton workshop concluded. The survey was answered by 331 Swanton workshop participants to assess the effectiveness of the training program, the educational practices used to teach participants, and what factors of a …

Environmental Controls On Soil Organic Matter Fractions In Post-Fire Landscapes, Alexis Heuer

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

In the past few decades, the world’s climate is being altered by anthropogenic forces such as the increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions due to fossil fuel combustion (Paraschiv and Paraschiv, 2020). In California, the impacts of increased CO2 concentrations have created longer fire seasons, warmer temperatures, and increased lightning strikes which allow for wildfires to become more frequent, severe, and larger in scale (Westerling et al., 2006). Wildfires of this magnitude result in acceleration of landscape scale processes such as erosion and aggregation which in turn affects soil organic matter (SOM), the basis of soil health (Gonz´alez-P´erez et al., …

Fire Effects On Soil Organic Matter In The Creek Fire, Gracie E. Doolin

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

Wildfires have increased in frequency and severity over the past few decades due to the increased concertation of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic influence. Soil carbon (C) sequestration has been identified as a climate change mitigation strategy; however, the influx of large-scale wildfires has accelerated landscape processes such as erosion, reducing soil aggradation, and soil C and nitrogen (N) protection. This trend is highlighted by the Creek Fire that occurred in September 2020 and burned 379,895 acres in the Sierra National Forest. This research is designed to close the knowledge gap regarding the impact of burn severity on soil organic matter …

Identifying The Stream Depletion Paradox By Monitoring A Stream’S Response To Aquifer Pumping From Neighboring Wells, James Klueber

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

Current groundwater models utilize a constant head (Dirichlet) boundary condition which assumes stream stage is fixed and does not experience any drawdown in the event of pumping from an interconnected aquifer despite the presence of stream depletion. Therefore, constant head boundary implies that streams and lakes in a groundwater model behave as an infinite supply of water when aquifer pumping occurs. This study aimed to determine if a stream located in the California Central Coast experiences drawdown and depletion when pumping occurs within an aquifer-stream system. This was achieved by measuring stream stage, aquifer water levels, stream discharge, and the …

Assessing Environmental Impact Of The Built Environment By Adopting Life Cycle Design: Using Swanton Pacific Ranch As A Case Study, Hope E. Springer

Master of Science in Environmental Sciences and Management Projects

To combat the carbon emissions contributed to the atmosphere by the built environment, it is imperative that low-embodied-carbon materials choices be prioritized throughout the building design process. To achieve this, this professional project creates an Excel-based, open source, and user-friendly tool for the construction sector to make design decisions that prioritize the sustainability of structures, as one such tool does not currently exist. The use of OpenLCA software and the EcoInvent34 database are utilized to calculate the environmental impact of 25 different building materials, as well as energy and electricity consumption. Swanton Pacific Ranch (SPR) in Santa Cruz County is …

Factors Affecting California Grassland Biodiversity: Two Case Studies, Nora Bales

Master's Theses

Biodiversity loss over the last century has been significant and is projected to increase. Biodiversity loss is accelerating due to climate change and habitat loss and degradation. Biodiversity supports key ecosystem services including pollination services, climate regulation, and water filtration. Biodiversity conservation is a top priority for land managers and researchers, however many ecological studies with practical applications lack a thorough understanding of the soil environment in their study system. We conducted two case studies integrating soil and plant data to answer management questions. The first case study investigated the relationship between a threatened plant, Hooveria purpurea var. purpurea and …

Functional Nanocomposite Coatings For Use In Food Packaging, Camden N. Webb

Master's Theses

Plastics are a class of materials known for their cost and property advantages, increasing significantly in their usage worldwide. Unfortunately, these benefits come with an increasingly concerning environmental impact. A combination of inadequate disposal options and combinations of materials have led to environmental disasters that will impact generations. One of the worst areas for plastic waste is food packaging. Plastic as a material generally excels at durability and longevity, but as food packaging, it outlives its intended purpose by several orders of magnitude. This leads to plastic food packaging materials sitting in landfill or leading to the environment for hundreds …

Phase Distribution Of Nickel, Chromium, And Cobalt In Seawater At Olivine-Enriched Beaches: Implications For Carbon Capture By Enhanced Silicate Weathering, Nathaniel J. Padrnos

Master's Theses

The application of olivine to coastal areas is a proposed method of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere for climate change mitigation. Olivine is abundant and dissolves relatively fast, but it contains trace amounts of nickel (Ni), chromium (Cr), and cobalt (Co) which may be toxic to marine biota in cases of widespread coastal olivine spreading. Prior studies have suggested that Ni concentrations in marine sediments and/or the overlying water column due to olivine dissolution could be a limiting factor for its carbon capture potential. Therefore, it is critical to understand and model the processes affecting trace metal bioavailability after …

The Seoul National University Agn Monitoring Project. Iv. Hα Reverberation Mapping Of Six Agns And The Hα Size–Luminosity Relation, Hojin Cho, Jong-Hak Woo, Shu Wang, Donghoon Son, Jaejin Shin, Suvendu Rakshit, Aaron J. Barth, Vardha N. Bennert, Elena Gallo, Edmund Hodges-Kluck, Tommaso Treu, Hyun-Ji Bae, Wanjin Cho, Adi Foord, Jaehyuk Geum, Yashashree Jadhav, Yiseul Jeon, Kyle M. Kabasares, Daeun Kang, Wonseok Kang, Changseok Kim, Donghwa Kim, Minjin Kim, Taewoo Kim, Huynh Anh N. Lee, Matthew A. Malkan, Amit Kumar Mandal, Daeseong Park, Hyun-Il Sung, Vivian U, Peter R. Williams

Physics

The broad-line region (BLR) size–luminosity relation has paramount importance for estimating the mass of black holes in active galactic nuclei (AGNs). Traditionally, the size of the Hβ BLR is often estimated from the optical continuum luminosity at 5100 Å, while the size of the Hα BLR and its correlation with the luminosity is much less constrained. As a part of the Seoul National University AGN Monitoring Project, which provides 6 yr photometric and spectroscopic monitoring data, we present our measurements of the Hα lags of high-luminosity AGNs. Combined with the measurements for 42 AGNs from the literature, …

Effects Of Basin-Scale Climate Modes And Upwelling On Nearshore Marine Heatwaves And Cold Spells In The California Current, Michael Dalsin, Ryan K. Walter, Piero L. F. Mazzini

Physics

Marine heatwaves and cold spells (MHWs/MCSs) have been observed to be increasing globally in frequency and intensity based on satellite remote sensing and continue to pose a major threat to marine ecosystems worldwide. Despite this, there are limited in-situ based observational studies in the very shallow nearshore region, particularly in Eastern Boundary Current Upwelling Systems (EBUS). We analyzed a unique dataset collected in shallow waters along central California spanning more than four decades (1978–2020) and assessed links with basin-scale climate modes [Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and El Niño (MEI)] and regional-scale wind-driven upwelling. We found no significant increase/decrease in MHW/MCS …

Optimization Of Flagellar Locomotion In The Low Reynolds Number Regime, Aidan M. Trodden, Aidan M. Trodden

Physics

This report investigates the computational and theoretical techniques - modeled by E. Lauga and C. Eloy - used to optimize the shape of an activated flagellum for enhanced cell motility. Cell motility is ubiquitous and has a large affect on biological systems such as marine life ecosystems, reproduction, and infection. The physical principles governing flagellar propulsion are explored using computational fluid dynamics simulations, mathematical modeling, and the sequential quadratic programming (SQP) optimization algorithm. Through iterative refinement, we can identify optimized flagellar shapes that would minimize the energetic cost dependent on a single dimensionless sperm numbers (Sp). The computation of the …

Learning The Game: Implementations Of Convolutional Networks In Automated Strategy Identification, Cameron Klig

Master's Theses

Games can be used to represent a wide variety of real world problems, giving rise to many applications of game theory. Various computational methods have been proposed for identifying game strategies, including optimized tree search algorithms, game-specific heuristics, and artificial intelligence. In the last decade, systems like AlphaGo and AlphaZero have significantly exceeded the performance of the best human players in Chess, Go, and other games. The most effective game engines to date employ convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to evaluate game boards, extract features, and predict the optimal next move. These engines are trained on billions of simulated games, wherein …

Representations From Group Actions On Words And Matrices, Joel T. Anderson

Master's Theses

We provide a combinatorial interpretation of the frequency of any irreducible representation of Sn in representations of Sn arising from group actions on words. Recognizing that representations arising from group actions naturally split across orbits yields combinatorial interpretations of the irreducible decompositions of representations from similar group actions. The generalization from group actions on words to group actions on matrices gives rise to representations that prove to be much less transparent. We share the progress made thus far on the open problem of determining the irreducible decomposition of certain representations of Sm × Sn arising from group actions on matrices.

Predicting Location And Training Effectiveness (Plate), Erik Rolf Bruenner

Master's Theses

Abstract Predicting Location and Training Effectiveness (PLATE)
Erik Bruenner

Physical activity and exercise have been shown to have an enormous impact on many areas of human health and can reduce the risk of many chronic diseases. In order to better understand how exercise may affect the body, current kinesiology studies are designed to track human movements over large intervals of time. Procedures used in these studies provide a way for researchers to quantify an individual’s activity level over time, along with tracking various types of activities that individuals may engage in. Movement data of research subjects is often collected through …

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Detecting Coherent Transport Structures In Ocean Surface Flows, Leah Hoogstra

Master's Theses

Ocean surface transport plays a critical role in marine ecosystems, influencing the complex spatiotemporal patterns of both marine species and pollutants. The theory of Lagrangian coherent structures (LCSs) aims to identify fundamental patterns within time-dependent, nonlinear fluid flows. LCSs are material surfaces that act as dividing lines which fluid does not cross for a relevant period of time. LCS theory is still under active development, and there are multiple proposed ways to mathematically determine an LCS. Each proposed mathematical definition aims to capture the same physical properties, and some capture those properties more successfully and consistently than others. Here we …