Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Global Change, Global Trade, And The Next Wave Of Plant Invasions, Bethany A. Bradley, Dana M. Blumenthal, Regan Early, Edwin D. Grosholz, Joshua J. Lawler, Luke P. Miller, Cascade J.B. Sorte, Carla M. D'Antonio, Jeffrey M. Diez, Jeffrey S. Dukes, Ines Ibanez, Julian D. Olden

Faculty Publications, Biological Sciences

Many non-native plants in the US have become problematic invaders of native and managed ecosystems, but a new generation of invasive species may be at our doorstep. Here, we review trends in the horticultural trade and invasion patterns of previously introduced species and show that novel species introductions from emerging horticultural trade partners are likely to rapidly increase invasion risk. At the same time, climate change and water restrictions are increasing demand for new types of species adapted to warm and dry environments. This confluence of forces could expose the US to a range of new invasive species, including many …

Thermodynamics And Phase Transitions For The Heisenberg Model On The Pinwheel Distorted Kagome Lattice, Ehsan Khatami, Rajiv Singh, Marcos Rigol

Faculty Publications

We study the Heisenberg model on the pinwheel distorted kagome lattice as observed in the material Rb2Cu3SnF12. Experimentally relevant thermodynamic properties at finite temperatures are computed utilizing numerical linked-cluster expansions. We also develop a Lanczos-based, zero-temperature, numerical linked-cluster expansion to study the approach of the pinwheel distorted lattice to the uniform kagome-lattice Heisenberg model. We find strong evidence for a phase transition before the uniform limit is reached, implying that the ground state of the kagome-lattice Heisenberg model is likely not pinwheel dimerized and is stable to finite pinwheel-dimerizing perturbations.

Thermodynamics Of Strongly Interacting Fermions In Two-Dimensional Optical Lattices, Ehsan Khatami, Marcos Rigol

Faculty Publications

We study finite-temperature properties of strongly correlated fermions in two-dimensional optical lattices by means of numerical linked cluster expansions, a computational technique that allows one to obtain exact results in the thermodynamic limit. We focus our analysis on the strongly interacting regime, where the on-site repulsion is of the order of or greater than the band width. We compute the equation of state, double occupancy, entropy, uniform susceptibility, and spin correlations for temperatures that are similar to or below the ones achieved in current optical lattice experiments. We provide a quantitative analysis of adiabatic cooling of trapped fermions in two …

Chemical Activity In Yba2cu3o7 − Δ Across The Normal To Superconducting Phase Transition, Juana Vivó Acrivos

Faculty Publications, Chemistry

The Gibbs free enthalpy, chemical activity across the transition temperature to superconductivity, Tc in YBa2Cu3O7 − δ is obtained from reciprocally enhanced X-Ray absorbance, XAS and diffraction, XRD data near the Ba L3,2 edges' energy Ea, and orientations in the X-ray beam for preferred Miller indexed [HKL] planes' scattering, that are enhanced near Tc. The standard enthalpy and entropy for the formation of mixed normal metal/superconducting domains above Tc, determined individually across the two Ba L3,2 edges, to better than a percent accuracy: ΔH≠≥ = − 220 meV, and ΔS≠≥ = − 2 meV/K when 121 ≥ T ≥ 92 …

Chemical Activity In Yba2cu3o7 − Δ Across The Normal To Superconducting Phase Transition, Juana Vivó Acrivos

Juana Vivó Acrivos

The Gibbs free enthalpy, chemical activity across the transition temperature to superconductivity, Tc in YBa2Cu3O7 − δ is obtained from reciprocally enhanced X-Ray absorbance, XAS and diffraction, XRD data near the Ba L3,2 edges' energy Ea, and orientations in the X-ray beam for preferred Miller indexed [HKL] planes' scattering, that are enhanced near Tc. The standard enthalpy and entropy for the formation of mixed normal metal/superconducting domains above Tc, determined individually across the two Ba L3,2 edges, to better than a percent accuracy: ΔH≠≥ = − 220 meV, and ΔS≠≥ = − 2 meV/K when 121 ≥ T ≥ 92 …

Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Of Post-Starburst Quasars, S. Cales, M. Brotherton, Zhaohui Shang, Vardha Bennert, Gabriela Canalizo, R. Stoll, R. Ganguly, D. Berk, Cassandra Paul, A. Diamond-Stanic

Faculty Publications

We present images of 29 post-starburst quasars (PSQs) from a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Wide Field Channel Snapshot program. These broadlined active galactic nuclei (AGNs) possess the spectral signatures of massive (Mburst ∼ 1010 M⊙), moderate-aged stellar populations (hundreds of Myr). Thus, their composite nature provides insight into the AGN–starburst connection. We measure quasar-to-host galaxy light contributions via semi-automated two-dimensional light profile fits of point-spread-function-subtracted images. We examine the host morphologies and model the separate bulge and disk components. The HST/ACS-F606W images reveal an equal number of spiral (13/29) and early-type (13/29) hosts, with the …

Actibot: A Botnet To Evade Active Detection, Xinjun Zhang

Master's Projects

In recent years, botnets have emerged as a serious threat on the Internet. Botnets are commonly used for exploits such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, identity theft, spam, and click fraud. The immense size of botnets, some consisting of hundreds of thousands of compromised computers, increases the speed and severity of attacks. Unlike passive behavior anomaly detection techniques, active botnet detection aims to collect evidence actively, in order to reduce detection time and increase accuracy. In this project, we develop and analyze a botnet that we call ActiBot, which can evade some types of active detection mechanisms. Future …

Association Mining In Database Machine, Jindou Jiao

Master's Projects

Association rule is wildly used in most of the data mining technologies. Apriori algorithm is the fundamental association rule mining algorithm. FP-growth tree algorithm improves the performance by reduce the generation of the frequent item sets. Simplex algorithm is a advanced FP-growth algorithm by using bitmap structure with the simplex concept in geometry. The bitmap structure implementation is particular designed for storing the data in database machines to support parallel computing the association rule mining.

Clustering Of Twitter Technology Tweets And The Impact Of Stopwords On Clusters, Surya Bhagvat

Master's Projects

Year of 2010 could be termed as the year in which Twitter became completely mainstream. Twitter, which started as a means of communicating with friends, became much more than its beginning. Now Twitter is used by companies to promote their new products, used by movie industry to promote movies. A lot of advertising and branding is now tied to Twitter and most importantly any breaking news that happens, the first place one goes and tries to find is to search it on Twitter. Be it the Mumbai attacks that happened in 2008, or the minor earthquakes that happened in Bay …

Enhancing Productivity Of Recruitment Process Using Data Mining & Text Mining Tools, Charul Saxena

Master's Projects

Digital communication has significantly reduced the time it takes to send a résumé, but the recruiter’s work has become more complicated because with this technological advancement they get more résumés for each job opening. It becomes almost impossible to physically scan each résumé that meets their organization’s job requirement. The filtering and search techniques provide hundreds of résumés that can fulfill the desired criteria. Most approaches focus on either parsing the résumé to get information or propose some filtering methods. Moreover, résumés vary in format and style, making it difficult to maintain a structural repository which would contain all the …

A Genetic Algorithm Scheduling Approach For Virtual Machine Resources In A Cloud Computing Environment, Shailesh Sawant

Master's Projects

In the present cloud computing environment, the scheduling approaches for VM (Virtual Machine) resources only focus on the current state of the entire system. Most often they fail to consider the system variation and historical behavioral data which causes system load imbalance. To present a better approach for solving the problem of VM resource scheduling in a cloud computing environment, this project demonstrates a genetic algorithm based VM resource scheduling strategy that focuses on system load balancing. The genetic algorithm approach computes the impact in advance, that it will have on the system after the new VM resource is deployed …

Discovering Knowledge Structure In The Web, Siddharth Ramu

Master's Projects

Association Rule Mining is a widely used method for finding interesting relationships from large data sets. The challenge here is how to swiftly and accurately discover association rules from large data sets. To achieve this, this paper will (1) build a data warehouse system that simulates the secondary storage and represents a database by bit patterns, and (2) implement a new geometric algorithm to find association rules, called Maximal Simplex Algorithm. The data warehouse consists of very long bit columns. Each column is an item or an attribute value pair and a row represents a transaction or a tuple in …

Augmented-Life Phone Organizer, Chao-Hsin Shih

Master's Projects

Augmented-Life Phone Organizer (ALPO) is a geo-based mobile application for users to search for businesses and make corresponding actions such as calling, navigating, or viewing comments about the business. Users can take image notes and attach them to a virtual wall, so others can view the image at the same GPS coordinates later. Users can also view all business images and augmented notes superimposed on the real world through a mobile device screen and camera. We have measured application usability and feature practicality by conducting function tests on three users, and the results are encouraging.

Url Recommender Using Parallel Processing, Ravi Kishore Penta

Master's Projects

The main purpose of this project is to section similar news and articles from a vast variety of news articles. Let’s say, you want to read about latest news related to particular topic like sports. Usually, user goes to a particular website and goes through some news but he won’t be able to cover all the news coverage in a single website. So, he would be going through some other news website to checking it out and this continues. Also, some news websites might be containing some old news and the user might be going through that. To solve this, …

Jdpet: Java Dynamic Programming Educational Tool, Aaron Lemoine

Master's Projects

There exist many different algorithm types for solving problems, one of which is dynamic programming. To assist students to learn about dynamic programming algorithms, JDPET was developed. JDPET is an interactive, visual, problem solving tool that allows students to solve several different problems and learn how dynamic programming can be applied to solve these problems. JDPET also provides students with detailed feedback on the problems they attempt to solve.

Graph Technique For Metamorphic Virus Detection, Neha Runwal

Master's Projects

Current anti-virus techniques include signature based detection, anomaly based detection, and machine learning based virus detection. Signature detection is the most widely used approach. Metamorphic malware changes its internal structure with each infection. Metamorphism provides one of the strong known methods for evading malware detection. In this project, we consider metamorphic virus detection based on a directed graph obtained from executable files. We compare our detection results with a previously developed and highly successful technique based on hidden Markov models.

X10 Vs Java: Concurrency Constructs And Performance, Anh Trinh

Master's Projects

To avoid overheating the chip, chip designers have switched to multi-cores. While multicore CPUs reserve instruction-level parallelism features that help existing applications run as if they were running under single core, applications do not reach speeds two or four times faster. Instead of relying on compiler and hardware to figure out parallelism in source code, software developers now must control parallelism explicitly in their programs. Many programming languages and libraries, such as Java, C# .NET, and OpenMP, are trying to help programmers by providing rich concurrency API. X10 is the new experimental language from IBM Research, which has been under …

Efficient Attacks On Homophonic Substitution Ciphers, Amrapali Dhavare

Master's Projects

Substitution ciphers are one of the earliest types of ciphers. Examples of classic substitution ciphers include the well-known simple substitution and the less well-known homophonic substitution. Although simple substitution ciphers are indeed simple - both in terms of their use and attacks; the homophonic substitution ciphers are far more challenging to break. Even with modern computing technology, homophonic substitution ciphers remain a significant challenge. This project focuses on designing, implementing, and testing an efficient attack on homophonic substitution ciphers. We use an iterative approach that generalizes the fastest known attack on simple substitution ciphers and also employs a heuristic search …

A Machine Learning And Compiler-Based Approach To Automatically Parallelize Serial Programs Using Openmp, Nam Quang Lam

Master's Projects

Single core designs and architectures have reached their limits due to heat and power walls. In order to continue to increase hardware performance, hardware industries have moved forward to multi-core designs and implementations which introduces a new paradigm in parallel computing. As a result, software programmers must be able to explicitly write or produce parallel programs to fully exploit the potential computing power of parallel processing in the underlying multi-core architectures. Since the hardware solution directly exposes parallelism to software designers, different approaches have been investigated to help the programmers to implement software parallelism at different levels. One of the …

N-Grams Assisted Long Web Search Query Optimization, Jehann Kersi Irani

Master's Projects

Commercial search engines do not return optimal search results when the query is a long or multi-topic one [1]. Long queries are used extensively. While the creator of the long query would most likely use natural language to describe the query, it contains extra information. This information dilutes the results of a web search, and hence decreases the performance as well as quality of the results returned. Kumaran et al. [22] showed that shorter queries extracted from longer user generated queries are more effective for ad-hoc retrieval. Hence reducing these queries by removing extra terms, the quality of the search …

Data Mining And Data Warehouse ------ Maximal Simplex Method, Madhuri Gollu

Master's Projects

Association Rule Mining is a widely used method for finding interesting relationships from large data sets. The challenge here is how to swiftly and accurately discover association rules from large data sets. To achieve this, this paper will (1) build a data warehouse system that simulates the secondary storage and represents a database by bit patterns, and (2) implement a new geometric algorithm to find association rules, called Maximal Simplex Algorithm. The data warehouse consists of very long bit columns. Each column is an item or an attribute value pair and a row represents a transaction or a tuple in …

Generation Of Forests On Terrain With Dynamic Lighting And Shadowing, Jonathan Ben-David

Master's Projects

The purpose of this research project is to exhibit an efficient method of creating dynamic lighting and shadowing for the generation of forests on terrain. In this research project, I use textures which contain images of trees from a bird’s eye view in order to create a high scale forest. Furthermore, by manipulating the transparency and color of the textures according to the algorithmic calculations of light and shadow on terrain, I provide the functionality of dynamic lighting and shadowing. Finally, by analyzing the OpenGL pipeline, I design my code in order to allow efficient rendering of the forest.

Interface Design For Graphics Editor On Multi- Touch Point Systems, Srujitha Mullapudi

Master's Projects

The main objective of the project is to use the touch sensitive device capability of the iPad to give a better user experience and functionalities for the artists. In this project, I have explored different interactions that can give a better experience for artist when compared to traditional computer-mouse interaction. In the traditional Computer-mouse interaction it is very difficult for the user to draw smooth curves, without having to use built-in functions for drawing curves. In this application the user can use the touch panel to do free drawing, the user can basically feel the device as a object for …

Ec2lab: Saas Using Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute, Manisha Gaikwad

Master's Projects

The cloud computing is gaining popularity as it provides an infinite pool of hardware and software resources on demand. The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer provides the physical resources, and relieves the users from the tedious as well as time consuming task of procuring and setting the server as well as the storage. This project harnesses the capability of the Amazon IaaS layer. The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application which is built on top of Amazon IaaS layer, helps the users to easily handle and connect with Amazon's Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances.

University Scholar Series: Monika Kress, Monika Kress

University Scholar Series

Meteorites and the Origin of Habitable Worlds

On November 30, 2011, Dr. Monika Kress spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Gerry Selter at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Monika Kress is an Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy at SJSU and also a member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory. In this seminar, she presents the theory of solar system formation, focusing on meteorites. Dr. Kress also describes a first-hand account of how meteorites are recovered from the most fertile meteorite-hunting ground on Earth: Antarctica

Meso-Circulation Associated With Summer Convection Over The Central Antilles, Mark Jury, Sen Chiao

Faculty Publications, Meteorology and Climate Science

The mesoscale structure of the circulation and convection over central Caribbean Antilles islands in midsummer is analyzed. Afternoon thunderstorms are frequent over islands such as Hispaniola and Jamaica as confluent trade winds circulate over heated mountainous topography. Observational data from a rain gauge network, profiles from aircraft and radiosonde, satellite estimates of rainfall, and mesoscale reanalysis fields are studied with a focus on July 2007. A statistical decomposition of 3-hourly high-resolution satellite rainfall reveals an “island mode” with afternoon convection. Trade winds pass over the mountains of Hispaniola and Jamaica with a Froude number <1, leading to a long meandering wake. The Weather Research and Forecasting model is used to simulate climatic conditions during July 2007. The model correctly locates areas of diurnal rainfall that develop because of island heat fluxes, confluent sea breezes, and mountain wakes.

Scanned Wireless Network Setup Fake Access Point & Its Detection, Saurabh Vishal

Master's Projects

This thesis addresses the topic of development and advancement of the wireless technology. Report described about network monitoring and security issues with advancement in the increase of network bandwidth and user requirements to access the internet. This report mainly focuses on how war driving affects the security of end user. How it can solve problem for infected users who are accessing the internet. The technique is used in wireless environment where all kinds of wireless devices can access internet and can use network resources with high security and better performance. Research on this topic reveals that passive monitoring technique can …

Riverland 2.0: Blending Of Multiple User-Defined Slopes In A Procedurally Modeled Terrain, Jeffrey Jensen

Master's Projects

This writing project attempts to improve on and add features to the current program called RiverLand originally designed and implemented by Dr. Soon Tee Teoh. I discuss the original methods used by RiverLand to create procedurally generated terrain. I then explore the weaknesses of the original RiverLand which include having only linear ridges and undesirable medial axis cells. I then tackle the problem of recurring patterns when texturizing a surface with very few textures. I propose how to solve these problems and explain the methods used to accomplish this. I discuss the user interfaces that were designed to accommodate the …

Rumbling In The Benthos: Acoustic Ecology Of The California Mantis Shrimp Hemisquilla Californiensis, E. Staaterman, C. Clark, A. Gallagher, M. Devries, T. Claverie, S. Patek

Faculty Publications, Biological Sciences

Although much research has focused on acoustic mapping and exploration of the benthic environment, little is known about the acoustic ecology of benthic organisms, particularly benthic crustaceans. Through the use of a coupled audio–video system, a hydrophone array, and an autonomous recording unit, we tested several hypotheses about the field acoustics of a benthic marine crustacean, Hemisquilla califor­niensis. Living in muddy burrows in southern California, these large mantis shrimp produce low frequency ‘rumbles’ through muscle vibrations. First, we tested whether acoustic signals are similar in the field and in the laboratory, and discovered that field-produced rumbles are more acoustically and …

Algorithms Analysis System: Recurrences, Anchit Sharma

Master's Projects

Algorithms which are recursive have running times which can be described by

recurrence equations or recurrences. These equations determine the overall running time complexity of the algorithm. This project intends to create a mechanism for

• auto generating recurrence equations of the form T(n) = a(T(n)/b) + f(n)

• creating a computational method for solving them and generating running times

  i.e. O (f(n)) or Ω (f(n)).

• presenting students with a way to verify their manually computed answers with

  the solution generation by the project

• generating grading and feedback for their solution

  The exercises will utilize the ‘Substitution Method’ and the ‘Master Method’ …

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