Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Active Galactic Nuclei - The Arrhythmic Beat Of A Galactic Heart, Henry James Best V

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) are generally believed to be supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies which are actively accreting material from the host galaxy. Through this process, they emit radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum both as a smooth continuum and emission lines. However, there is a great variety of the signals we observe–some faint, some bright, some variable and others steady. The wide array of signals produced by AGN is believed to encode both the geometry and the physics surrounding these SMBHs, making them a valuable target for understanding the high gravity limit, their feedback mechanisms to …

Structural, Electronic And Magnetic Properties Of Vanadium Doped Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (Tmds), Qudsia Ashraf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Magnetic semiconductors are a prerequisite for spintronic devices but their ferromagnetism disappears at room-temperature hindering application in room temperature electronic devices. Enormous research has been conducted on the room-temperature ferromagnetic order in monolayer form of bulk van der Waals materials but the few layer system has not been extensively explored.

Doping is an effective approach to modulate the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of two-dimensional (2D) Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) and expand their application. The effect of vanadium dopant on structural, electronic and magnetic properties of Tungsten Diselenide (WSe₂) was studied by X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS), Atomic Force …

Interplay Of Magnetic Impurities And Superconductivity In Topological Materials, Didier Ndengeyintwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The interplay of superconductivity and magnetism has been a long-standing topic of interest since the discovery of superconductivity. In recent years it has been shown that topological superconductivity, which has promising applications such as in topological quantum computing, could result from such interplay. Motivated by the later results I study the effect of magnetic impurities in superconducting doped topological insulators, such as Iron based topological superconductors. I show that topological character of parent materials could lead to modifications in the structure of magnetic impurity induced in-gap states. Moreover, the superconductivity induced interaction between magnetic impurities in doped topological insulator would …

From Stars To Moons: Investigating Stellar Rotations, Planetary Interactions, And Exoplanetary Prospects, Rosario Cecilio-Flores-Elie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The thesis is divided into two key sections. The first chapter presents the results of analyzing TESS light curves for 99 targets within the Carina-Near moving group. By deriving rotational periods, this analysis supports stellar age estimation, contributing to the broader efforts of the Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen project in determining age parameters for 89 newly identified systems, including ultracool dwarf companions. These findings enhance our understanding of stellar rotation and evolution, offering new insights into the development of secondary co-moving objects like brown dwarfs.

The second chapter investigates planet-moon interactions within our solar system by examining mass ratios, …

44ti/44sc Generator Development And Radiolabeling Optimization For Medical Applications, Christine E. Schmidt-Kennelty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in scandium-44 (⁴⁴Sc) for medical applications due to its favorable decay properties. With a relatively short half-life of 3.97 hours and high positron branching ratio of 94.3%, ⁴⁴Sc is an ideal candidate for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. However, producing ⁴⁴Sc without an on-site cyclotron limits access, as its short half-life makes it impractical to ship to more remote locations.

To address this issue, ⁴⁴Ti/⁴⁴Sc generators have become a focal point of research, providing an onsite source of⁴⁴Sc. Despite their potential, current …

Design And Characterization Of De Novo Photoactivated Charge Separating Proteins, Paul M. Molinaro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Light activate charge separation can provide high energy electrons for a variety of chemical processes. Reaction center proteins serve as a scaffold for small molecules that serve as “hopping” sites for electrons. Previous reaction center designs are four helix bundles that bind at minimum two metalloporphyrin’s: a zinc porphyrin serves as a light activated electron donor, mimicking chlorophyl, and a heme molecule serving as the acceptor. The efficiency of these designs is hampered by the enhanced relaxation of the singlet excited state of zinc porphyrin molecules due to spin-orbit coupling with the paramagnetic heme acceptor. The optimal design would contain …

Shear Viscosity Of Quasi One-Dimensional Bec Tubes And Entanglement Negativity Conditions, Camilla Polvara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shear Viscosity of Quasi One-dimensional BEC Tubes

We consider layered Bose-Einstein condensates interacting via contact intra-condensate interacions and dipolar inter-condensate potentials, both of which dominate intercondensate tunneling (which we neglect for simplicity). For this system, we compute the normal modes, we study its localization properties by numerically computing the inverse participation ratio, and we compute the inter-tube shear viscosity.

Entanglement Negativity Conditions

This project explores bounds on entanglement negativity using operator inequalities, building on the results of [1]. We are looking for a way to quantify entanglement, as an alternative to calculating the full negativity, which would otherwise require the …

Advancing Affective Computing: Emotion Recognition And Tracking Across Diverse Contexts (Varied Environments), Shao Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Affective Computing (AC) is an interdisciplinary field that recognizes, interprets, and processes human emotions. Emotions are complex, involving consciousness, physical sensations, and behavioral expressions, and are significant in various domains like mental health, human-computer interaction, and social security. Real-world applications of AC include monitoring drivers’ emotional states to improve road safety and understanding the emotions expressed by artists in visual arts. Traditional methods relying on facial expressions often fall short due to the nuanced nature of emotions, which vary across individuals, cultures, and contexts. Accurate AC systems require sophisticated, multimodal models to handle these variations and external factors like noise …

Twisted Alexander Polynomials And Ptolemy Varieties Of Knots And Surface Bundles, Michael R. Marinelli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The first focus of this dissertation is to compute Ptolemy varieties for triangulations of two infinite families of manifolds. Given an ideal triangulation of a cusped manifold, one can compute the Ptolemy variety and using it, obtain parabolic representations of the fundamental group. We compute certain obstruction classes for these manifolds, which are necessary to obtain the discrete faithful representation. This leads to our second focus of the dissertation, the twisted Alexander polynomial. The twisted Alexander polynomial (TAP) is a variation of the classical Alexander polynomial twisted by a representation of the fundamental group into a linear group. It was …

Categorical Chain Conditions For Étale Groupoid Algebras, Sunil Philip

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Let R be a unital commutative ring and G an ample groupoid. Using the topology of the groupoid G, Steinberg defined an étale groupoid algebra RG. These étale groupoid algebras generalize various algebras, including group algebras, commutative algebras over a field generated by idempotents, traditional groupoid algebras, Leavitt path algebras, higher-rank graph algebras, and inverse semigroup algebras. Steinberg later characterized the classical chain conditions for étale groupoid algebras. In this work, we characterize categorically noetherian and artinian, locally noetherian and artinian, and semisimple étale groupoid algebras, thereby generalizing existing results for Leavitt path algebras and introducing new results for inverse …

La Vida: Towards A Motivated Goal Reasoning Agent, Ursula Addison

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

An autonomous agent deployed to operate over extended horizons in uncertain environments will encounter situations for which it was not designed. A class of these situations involves an invalidation of agent goals and limited guidance in establishing a new set of goals to pursue. An agent will benefit from some mechanism that will allow it to pursue new goals under these circumstances such that the goals are broadly useful in its environment and take advantage of its existing skills while aligning with societal norms. We propose augmenting a goal reasoning agent, i.e., an agent that can deliberate on and self-select …

Advanced Predictive Analytics On Financial Donations To Nonprofit Organizations, Fhamida Keya

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Non-profit organizations rely on donation contributions to carry out their social driven agenda. In the context of fundraising and donor management, it is crucial to uncover complex insights about donor behavior for optimizing strategies and enhancing donor engagement. This project employed advanced analytical techniques on the dataset Donations Received by City Agencies sourced from NYC Open Data by implementing predictive modeling, clustering segmentation, and time series analysis and forecasting. The project will attempt to uncover patterns in donation behavior, identify factors that influence donation amounts, and segment out donor profiles all of which can be leveraged to optimize strategy decisions, …

Who Are You Rooting For? T20 Cricket World Cup 2024, Usa & Wi, Purvesh Desai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The T20 Cricket World Cup '24 played in USA & WI will bring immense excitement to the cricket lovers around the world and have a question to themselves “Who shall I Root for?” How do people or fans support their favorite teams and on what criteria do they pick these teams will discuss in here.

Patriotism, tradition, and favorite individual players, are the main reasons for the fans to choose their and support the team. Nation is the biggest pride of an individual and many people choose their pride over everything. People celebrate when the home team plays on the …

On Deformation Rings Of Residual Galois Representations With Three Jordan–Hölder Factors, Xiaoyu Huang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this paper, we study Fontaine-Laffaille, self-dual deformations of a mod p non-semisimple Galois representation of dimension n with its Jordan–Hölder factors being three mutually non-isomorphic absolutely irreducible representations. We show that under some conditions regarding the orders of certain Selmer groups, the universal deformation ring is a discrete valuation ring. Given enough information on the Hecke algebra, we also prove an R = T theorem in the general context. We then apply our results to abelian surfaces with cyclic rational isogenies and certain 6-dimensional representations arising from automorphic forms congruent to Ikeda lifts. Assuming the Bloch-Kato conjecture, our result …

Synthesis Of C-Di- And C-Tri- Saccharides From Glycosyl Crotylating Agents, Steven Truong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The involvement of carbohydrates in a plethora of fundamental biological pathways, including disease related processes, has created a demand for molecular probes for elucidating these mechanisms. Accordingly, synthesis of tailored and diverse carbohydrate-like molecules, commonly referred to as glycomimetics, is a very active area of research. Among the more popular classes of glycomimetics are C-glycosides, analogues in which the anomeric carbon of a parent sugar is attached to a carbon substituent. C-glycosides have attracted attention in the medicinal chemistry community as there are several naturally occurring examples with interesting pharmacologically activity. C-glycosides are also of interest because in …

Pulsey: Stellar Pulsation Models In Python, Andrew Ayala

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The era of the Kepler/K2 and TESS space-telescope missions has inundated the astrophysics community with photometric data for millions of stars with continuous observation and very high cadence. This data confirms that nearly every observed stellar source exhibits an oscillating luminosity, with stellar pulsation being the driving mechanism behind a large fraction of the cause. The result has been an explosion in the field of asteroseismology, where the recorded luminosity variations, or "light curves", of pulsating stars to probe their interior structures. By modeling observed light curves, we can constrain values of the physical stellar parameters producing them. The brightness …

Generative A.I.-Assisted Organic Chemistry Tutoring, Ji Kim

Open Educational Resources

By utilizing tools like ChatGPT, the project aims to provide detailed explanations, answer student questions, and assist with problem-solving, thereby creating a more interactive and personalized learning experience. This approach will help students grasp complex topics more effectively and improve their overall performance in chemistry.

Investigation Of The Prevalence Of Fentanyl Analogs In A Drug Testing Population Using Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry (Lc-Ms-Ms), Ivan Cordova

Student Theses

This study serves to determine the prevalence of novel fentanyl analogs that are present within a drug testing population in New York State. Samples were analyzed using liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) to qualitatively determine the presence of various possible fentanyl analogs. The sample preparation of this assay consisted of a simple dilute and shoot. This method of sample preparation can be quicker, eliminating sample preparation times as well as being less financially strenuous to clinical laboratories as it eliminates the need for various solvents and solid/liquid phase cartridges. The assay was aimed to see if analytes can be …

Reless: A Framework For Assessing Safety In Deep Learning Systems, Nan Jia, Anita Raja, Raffi T. Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Traditionally, software refactoring helps to improve a system's internal structure and enhance its non-functional features, such as reliability and run-time performance, while preserving external behavior including original program semantics. However, in the context of learning-enabled software systems (LESS), e.g., Machine Learning (ML) systems, it is unclear which portions of a software's semantics require preservation at the development phase. This is mainly because (a) the behavior of the LESS is not defined until run-time; and (b) the inherently iterative and non-deterministic nature of ML algorithms. Consequently, there is a knowledge gap in what refactoring truly means in the context of LESS …

Mapping Urban Tree Canopy Using Publicly Available Satellite Data, Rosemary Mcguinness

Theses and Dissertations

This project addresses the need for accessible, cost-effective tools for quantifying spatial and temporal changes in tree canopy cover in urban areas. Urban tree canopy provides a wide range of ecosystem services, including lowering air temperatures, reducing pollution, and mitigating stormwater runoff. Cities around the world have placed the expansion of their urban forests at the center of their sustainability goals. Consistent and timely data on urban tree canopy is essential for urban greening initiatives to succeed. Existing methods of accessing information about urban tree canopy are highly technical, costly, and labor-intensive, while the freely available source of tree canopy …

Optimizing The Protein Yield Of The Collagen Mimetic Peptide: Col108, Fahmida Akter

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The fibril-forming collagen mimetic peptide Col108, produced in E. Coli, has shown potential for innovative biomaterial applications. However, further research is constrained by its limited yield. My study aims to enhance the experimental parameters and has successfully pinpointed rifampicin as an efficient method to boost the production of Col108.

Effortless Mindfulness Toolkit: Easy Meditation Scripts To Begin Each Class., Brett Whysel

Open Educational Resources

The Effortless Mindfulness in the Classroom Toolkit is an open educational resource designed to create happier classrooms, boost student engagement, and foster a sense of community through brief, effective mindfulness exercises. This comprehensive toolkit provides educators with everything they need to seamlessly integrate mindfulness practices into their teaching routines, regardless of prior experience. The toolkit includes introductory slides, 15 ready-to-use meditation scripts, and accompanying audio recordings, covering a variety of mindfulness techniques such as focused breathing, body scans, and loving-kindness meditations. Each meditation is paired with a reflective prompt to deepen student engagement and reinforce the benefits of mindfulness. Additionally, …

Querymate: A Custom Llm Powered By Llamacpp, Pegah Khosravi

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Enhanced Rate Capability And Capacity Of Lib Full Cells Achieved Through Aerosol Jet Printing, Rodrigo Rodriguez, L. Jay Deiner, Bang-Hung S. Tsao, Joseph P. Fellner

Publications and Research

Thick lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes (31 mg cm−2) with rationally engineered pore structure and tortuosity were manufactured with an aerosol jet (AJ) printer. Cathode pore structuring was tuned by controlling the rate at which the printed ink dried. Slow-drying prints yielded smoother cathodes while fast-drying prints resulted in mesoscale structuring with substantial surface roughness. X-ray tomography further revealed that the rapid drying of AJ printed LFP cathodes produced low-tortuosity pore channels which were preserved after calendering. Full cells comprised of AJ print optimized LFP cathodes, with 30 mg cm−2 active material loadings, and capacity-matched, AJ printed lithium titanate anodes were …

Case Study: Abandoned Mines Reclamation And Extrapolation Technique In Gis, Yuri Gorokhovich

Open Educational Resources

The goal of this exercise is to integrate vector/raster data for the input in the model that will predict locations of possible mine reclamation projects in USA. The original publication is: Gorokhovich Y., A. Voros, M. Reid, E. Mignone. 2003. Prioritizing Abandoned Coal Mine Reclamation Projects Within Contiguous United States Using Geographic Information System Extrapolation. Environmental Management, October 2, vol. 32, issue 4. 527-534.

Mathematical Methods For Economics And Business Syllabus, Marian Melnyk

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus outlines an online asynchronous course introducing essential mathematical tools and techniques in economics. It spans 24 sessions covering Functions, Differentiation, Limits, Integration, and Multivariable Functions, grounded in college algebra and calculus. The course utilizes Open Educational Resources (OER) for all materials, available in text and video formats on Blackboard. Continuous assessment, including quizzes, homework, two 1-hour tests, and a final exam, ensures consistent progress. Weekly online office hours provide additional support. The primary objective is to equip students with the mathematical skills necessary for economic analysis and problem-solving.

Attribute-Based Fine-Grained Access Control Using Verifiable Credentials, Srinivasa Dumpa

Student Theses

In the era of digital transformation, ensuring secure and privacy-preserving access control mechanisms is of paramount importance. Traditional identity-based access control systems often fall short in providing granular control and user autonomy over digital identities. This thesis presents a novel approach to access control by leveraging the power of verifiable credentials and attribute-based access control. The proposed system introduces a decentralized and user-centric framework that enables fine-grained access control based on specific attributes encapsulated within verifiable credentials. These tamper-evident digital credentials, stored in a user's digital wallet, contain a rich set of attributes that can be selectively disclosed to grant …

Cloud Computation & Beyond, Yassine Chahid, Patrick Slattery

Publications and Research

This research aims to explore the advancements in cloud computing and their potential influences on other technologies, and which advancements in computer networking facilitate them. These technologies are rapidly progressing in power and complexity, thereby altering how institutions and the public access information. Cloud computing provides a service that enables hardware with limited capabilities to overcome the limitations of on-device components. Due to its reliance on device connections, networking technology serves as the backbone of its operation. The research method encompasses reviewing various publications to understand how networking infrastructure facilitates cloud solutions, and how improvements in relevant hardware can expand …

Proceedings Of The Cuny Games Conference 10.0, Robert O. Duncan, Grace Axler-Diperte, Joe Bisz, Christina Boyle, Devorah Kletenik, Carolyn Stallard

Publications and Research

The ten-year anniversary (!) of the CUNY Games Conference combines workshops, idea exchanges, interactive participant presentations, playtesting, and playing tabletop games into a two-day hybrid event to promote and discuss game-based learning. The conference focuses on creative pedagogy, such as playful learning activities or games, that teachers can use in the classroom every day. Day 1 featured interactive presentations by attendees, informal idea exchange sessions, and workshops by the conference organizers. Day 2 featured select presentations and workshops, poster sessions, playtesting and game modding, and casual play of tabletop games.

Bi-Harmonic Maps' Existence And P-Balanced Energy And Connections To Harmonic Maps, Lina Wu

Publications and Research

We discover a bi-harmonic map’ existence, its energy growth, and its connections to a harmonic map. First, we prove the existence of a nontrivial bi-harmonic map in a unit sphere. Second, we investigate the p-balanced energy growth of biharmonic maps. As the most important energy technical breakthroughs, we propose an innovative energy algorithm called p-balanced energy technique to break the constraints of the existing L^q-energy technique in detecting L^q-energy growth towards boundlessness. The disadvantage of the finite L^q -energy technique in the L ^q spaces is not effective in dealing with infinite L^q- energy in Non-L^q spaces. Third, we study …