Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Tractor Connections For Killing Tensors And Their Generalizations, Benjamin D. Shaw

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We create new symbolic software tools for the analysis of Killing tensors. Central to our work is the construction of the tractor connection defined on the tractor bundle, which allows one to obtain information about the space of Killing tensors without solving the Killing equations–an approach termed the tractor approach. We give a new application of the tractor approach which allows one to more easily check explicitly for linear independence of a given set of Killing tensors. We develop software to implement such methods in the case of rank 2 Killing tensors; similarly, we develop software to implement analogous methods …

Geometrization Of Perfect Fluids, Scalar Fields, And (2+1)-Dimensional Electromagnetic Fields, Dionisios Sotirios Krongos

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Rainich equations provide a purely geometrical interpretation of matter in terms of the gravitational field it generates. All this takes place within the geometrical formulation of gravity provided by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Rainich-type conditions giving spacetime "goemetrizations" are reviewed and extended. Three types of matter are considered: perfect fluids, scalar fields, and electromagnetic fields.

Gps-Denied Navigation Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Images And Neural Networks, Teresa White

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) often rely on GPS for navigation. GPS signals, however, are very low in power and easily jammed or otherwise disrupted. This paper presents a method for determining the navigation errors present at the beginning of a GPS-denied period utilizing data from a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. This is accomplished by comparing an online-generated SAR image with a reference image obtained a priori. The distortions relative to the reference image are learned and exploited with a convolutional neural network to recover the initial navigational errors, which can be used to recover the true flight trajectory throughout …

Absolute Neutral Densities And Temperatures And Their Climatologies In The Middle Atmosphere Using An Optimal Estimation Method With Rayleigh-Scatter Lidar Observations Obtained At Utah State University, Jonathan L. Price

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Earth’s atmosphere is comprised of layers which can be defined by their temperature characteristics. These layers are the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere. The region where life exists is in the troposphere, however the study of the layers above is important as changes in these regions can directly impact, or indicate significant changes in, weather in the troposphere. The mesosphere is the least well-known region because it is the most difficult to observe. One of the best tools for observing this region is the Rayleigh-scatter lidar. It is capable of remotely observing the entirety of the mesosphere with good …

Characterizing Relational Values To Inform Message-Framing At The Boa Ogoi Historical Site, Cole G. Stocker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In an increasingly polarized political climate–particularly in the U.S.– environmental issues such as climate change and its effects on the environment have become hot-button partisan talking points resulting in further division. This has led to research on ways to communicate science which does not further inflame political tensions, but rather reinforces and validates the audience’s values. Science communication research provides the foundation for my case study, which focuses on characterizing the environmental values and worldviews of land managers residing and working near the Boa Ogoi Historical Site in southern Idaho. The Northwest Band of Shoshone Nation (NWBSN) is in the …

Intelligent Traffic Management: From Practical Stochastic Path Planning To Reinforcement Learning Based City-Wide Traffic Optimization, Kamilia Ahmadi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research focuses on intelligent traffic management including stochastic path planning and city scale traffic optimization. Stochastic path planning focuses on finding paths when edge weights are not fixed and change depending on the time of day/week. Then we focus on minimizing the running time of the overall procedure at query time utilizing precomputation and approximation. The city graph is partitioned into smaller groups of nodes and represented by its exemplar. In query time, source and destination pairs are connected to their respective exemplars and the path between those exemplars is found. After this, we move toward minimizing the city …

On The Geometry Of The Moduli Space Of Certain Lattice Polarized K3 Surfaces And Their Picard-Fuchs Operators, Michael T. Schultz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

K3 surfaces have a long and rich study in mathematics, and more recently in physics via string theory. Often, K3 surfaces come in multiparameter families - the parameters describing these surfaces fit together to form their own geometric space, a so-called moduli space. In particular, the moduli spaces of K3 surfaces equipped with a lattice polarization can sometimes be constructed explicitly, which subsequently reveals important information about the original K3 surface.

In this work, we construct such families explicitly from certain rational elliptic surfaces via the so-called mixed-twist construction of Doran & Malmendier, which in turn produces the moduli …

Valley Bottom Inundation Patterns In Beaver-Modified Streams: A Potential Proxy For Hydrologic Inefficiency, Karen Bartelt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For centuries river management and land use actions in North America have caused widespread stream degradation where water now flows downstream with artificially high efficiency. When present, beaver dams slow the flow of water and decrease the efficiency of water conveyance through the landscape. These effects are often to the benefit of the function of natural physical processes and ecology of the stream. The benefits provided by beaver dams have been well studied at small scales, but the methods that these studies rely on are often expensive and time consuming and consequently not feasible to deploy at larger spatial scales …

Transformation Groups And The Method Of Darboux, Brandon P. Ashley

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In the study of partial differential equations (PDE), one is often concerned as to whether or not explicit solutions can be obtained via various integration techniques. One such technique, known as the method of Darboux, has had particular success in solving nonlinear problems as demonstrated by the classical works of Goursat. Recently, Anderson, Fels, and Vassiliou provided a far-reaching generalization of Vessiot’s group-theoretic interpretation of the method of Darboux. This generalization allows for the characterization of Darboux integrable systems in terms of fundamental geometric invariants as well as the construction of Darboux integrable systems in general.

In this work, we …

Predictive Models Of Post-Wildfire Debris Flow Volume And Grain Size Distribution In The Intermountain West, Sara Wall

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Post-fire debris flows represent the most erosive and potentially hazardous consequence associated with increasing wildfire severity. While an abundance of research has explored where they are likely to occur and their potential magnitude, investigations into understanding how they impact downstream resources are limited. Recent advancements are seeking to link predictive models together to be able to predict how erosion after wildfire may impact reservoirs and aquatic habitat downstream. However, there are two key missing pieces into our ability to examine watershed-scale impacts of post-fire erosion. These include having accurate predictions of how much sediment is likely to be deposited by …

Lithological And Geochemical Characterization Of Ramp Sediments And A Depositional Model Of The Ordovicain Garden City Formation, Northeastern Utah, Kenneth W. Kehoe

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Ordovician Garden City Formation is a mostly marine limestone rock formation deposited in what is known today as the Northern Utah Basin in North America ~485.5 million years ago. Previous research on the Pogonip Group, a time equivalent rock formation located in the Ibex Basin south of the Northern Utah Basin, has identified nine cycles of sea-level fall and rise. However, these nine sea-level cycles have proven difficult to identify within the Garden City Formation due to the limited contrast between rock types within the rock formation. Previous research on the Garden City has approximated these sea-level cycles through …

On Predicting Omnidirectional Honey Bee Traffic Using Weather And Electromagnetic Radiation, Daniel G. Hornberger

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Honey bees are responsible for pollinating many important crops in the United States. However, honey bee populations have declined significantly since 1961. While some causes of this decline are known, others are not. By utilizing electronic bee hive monitoring (EBM) systems, bee keepers and researchers have an added resource in determining the causes of these declines so that the issues can be remedied. For nearly five months (May through October) during the 2020 honey bee foraging season in Logan, Utah, USA, we collected on-site weather and electromagnetic radiation (EMR) readings and videos of the hive entrances of six bee hives …

Essays Related To Water Transfer And Water Sharing: The Past And The Present, Arpita Nehra

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation explores the impacts of resource procurement on economic growth and urbanization in a county through a historical case study, moving on to discuss the welfare impacts of resource-sharing in two regions. The first two essays explore the impact of the Owens Valley water transfer in the 1900s on the urban sprawl and the economic growth of Los Angeles. The main contribution that the first two essays make is to present an empirical analysis on the impact of procurement of resources on the economy. The third essay examines the welfare impacts of a proposed water sharing and development project. …

The Internal Charge Evolution Of Multilayered Materials Undergoing Mono-Energetic Electron Bombardment, Gregory Wilson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The charging of multilayer materials as related to the charging of spacecraft is one of the primary concerns related to activities in the space environment. To understand how multilayer materials undergoing electron bombardment charge, an in-depth study of energy-dependent material properties must be undertaken. These properties include the electron penetration depth, secondary electron emission, charge transport and electrostatic discharge. By using energy dependent models of these properties, along with the geometry of the system, multilayer models can be developed to predict the time evolution of the internal charge distribution. Using these models, the net surface potential and the measurement of …

Achieving A Sequenced, Relational Query Language With Log-Segmented Timestamps, M. A. Manazir Ahsan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In a relational temporal database, typically each row of each table has a period timestamp to indicate the lifetime of that row. In order to evaluate a query in a temporal database, sequenced semantics comes into play. The semantics stipulates that the query must be evaluated simultaneously in each time instant using the data rows available at that point of time. Existing researches have proposed changes in the query evaluation engine to achieve sequenced semantics. In this paper we show a way to support sequenced semantics without modifying the query engine. We propose a noble construction log-segmented label to represent …

Logbert: Log Anomaly Detection Via Bert, Haixuan Guo

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

When systems break down, administrators usually check the produced logs to diagnose the failures. Nowadays, systems grow larger and more complicated. It is labor-intensive to manually detect abnormal behaviors in logs. Therefore, it is necessary to develop an automated anomaly detection on system logs. Automated anomaly detection not only identifies malicious patterns promptly but also requires no prior domain knowledge. Many existing log anomaly detection approaches apply natural language models such as Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to log analysis since both are based on sequential data. The proposed model, LogBERT, a BERT-based neural network, can capture the contextual information in …

An Empirical And Theoretical Investigation Of Random Reinforced Forests And Shallow Convolutional Neural Networks, Nikhil Ganta

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For many years, the global population of honey bees has been decreasing due to inconclusive reasons resulting in the syndrome Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). This syndrome has been plaguing bees and affecting commercial agriculture pollination since 1998. Many researchers have suggested that pesticides, in-hive chemicals, pathogens, etc., might be the causes of CCD. Researchers also believe that any changes in a beehive can disturb the bees, which may negatively affect their health. Honey bees are the most vital among all the animal pollinators contributing to approximately 30% of the world’s commercial pollination services. As they are of keystone importance to …

Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles To Quantify Erosion Control Measures On A Reclaimed Central Utah Coal Mine, Christopher R. Brown

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For certain landscape reclamation efforts surrounding, the Utah Division of Oil Gas and Mining (UDOGM) utilizes a surface roughing technique called “pocking”. The process of pocking establishes closely spaced gouges approximately 1.2 meters in diameter and 0.5 meters deep across a reclaimed landscape in order to reduce surface erosion and promote plant growth on steep terrain in arid regions. Pocks are designed as a series of micro watersheds that trap water to aid in plant establishment and reduces overland flow of water. Over time vegetation grows within the pocks as they infill with sediment. While this method is considered an …

Fixed Pattern Noise Non-Uniformity Correction Through K-Means Clustering, Andres Imperial

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Imagery obtained with poorly calibrated sensors is often corrupted with fixed pattern noise. Fixed pattern noise presents itself through a non-uniform distribution and therefore is hard to target in noise removal. Traditional noise removal techniques assume that the noise is uniformly distributed and subsequently produces inadequate corrections. Noise correction methods that target fixed pattern noise rely on dynamically identifying present noise and adjust correction values appropriately using nearby information or general assumptions about the image’s composition. If noise identification is not accurate, the correction values will also suffer from low accuracy. Inaccurate correction values can affect the imagery’s quality, and …

Comparative Study Of Machine Learning Models On Solar Flare Prediction Problem, Nikhil Sai Kurivella

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Solar flare events are explosions of energy and radiation from the Sun’s surface. These events occur due to the tangling and twisting of magnetic fields associated with sunspots. When Coronal Mass ejections accompany solar flares, solar storms could travel towards earth at very high speeds, disrupting all earthly technologies and posing radiation hazards to astronauts. For this reason, the prediction of solar flares has become a crucial aspect of forecasting space weather. Our thesis utilized the time-series data consisting of active solar region magnetic field parameters acquired from SDO that span more than eight years. The classification models take AR …

Multi-Proxy Approach To Robustly Capture Earthquake Temperature Rise At The Punchbowl Fault, California, Emma M. Armstrong

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Earthquakes produce heat along a fault surface from friction created as two blocks of rock move past each other. The amount of heat generated depends on a variety of factors, including rock type, stresses, and thickness of the fault zone. Identifying evidence for and quantifying this earthquake (coseismic) temperature rise are essential for identifying past earthquakes in the rock record. Indirect methods, such as textures and geochemical signatures that change with temperature, can serve as paleothermometers. Here we compare two paleothermometers, biomarkers and thermochronometry, from two transects across the Punchbowl fault (PF), California. The PF is an ancient fault strand …

A Phenological Model For A Southern Population Of Mountain Pine Beetle, Catherine E. Wangen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The mountain pine beetle (MPB, Dendroctonus ponderosae Hopkins) attacks living Pinus trees across a widespread area of western North America, causing significant ecological and economic damage. The ability to make accurate predictions of how MPB populations across this range will respond to temperatures, which affect MPB progress through life stages, is essential. Northern and southern populations of MPB are genetically different in response to temperature, requiring geographic-specific model parameters. There is not currently a predictive model for the southern MPB life cycle, despite concerns that those populations may be more susceptible to increased numbers of generations per year, which would …

Metaxmorph: Hierarchical Transformation Of Data With Metadata, Shubham Airan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research is about transforming data. Data comes in different shapes; it can be structured as a graph, a tree, a collection of tables, or some other shape. In this thesis, we focus on data structured as a tree, which is known as hierarchical data. The same data could be structured in many different tree shapes. Previously it was shown how to transform data from one tree shape, one hierarchy to another without losing any information. But sometimes the pieces of the hierarchy are annotated or associated with metadata, that is, with data about the data itself. The metadata can …

Wildland Fire Risk Perceptions And Mitigation Actions In The Western United States: A Systematic Literature Review And Two Empirical Case Studies, Lauren Nicole-Dupéy Larsen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Individuals are continuing to move into previously uninhabited, wildlands in the Western United States where fire danger is often high. This continued movement of people is a two-fold problem. First, individuals are moving into areas that have dense forestland and other flammable vegetation types where wildfires can easily ignite and spread. Second, individuals are starting more wildfires in these previously uninhabited areas (over 90% of wildfires across the country are caused by humans). Although wildfire is a complex topic, one thing is simple: As individuals continue to move into these wild, forested, and often mountainous areas, the risk of these …

Algorithms For Covering Barrier Points By Mobile Sensors With Line Constraint, Princy Jain

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In this thesis, we develop efficient algorithms for the problem of covering barrier points by mobile sensors. Each sensor is represented by a point in the plane with the same covering range r so that any point within distance r from the sensor can be covered by the sensor. Given a set B of m points (called “barrier points”) and a set S of n points (representing the “sensors”) in the plane, the problem is to move the sensors so that each barrier point is covered by at least one sensor and the maximum movement of all sensors is minimized. …

Breast Ultrasound Image Segmentation Based On Uncertainty Reduction And Context Information, Kuan Huang

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Breast cancer frequently occurs in women over the world. It was one of the most serious diseases and the second common cancer among women in 2019. The survival rate of stages 0 and 1 of breast cancer is closed to 100%. It is urgent to develop an approach that can detect breast cancer in the early stages. Breast ultrasound (BUS) imaging is low-cost, portable, and effective; therefore, it becomes the most crucial approach for breast cancer diagnosis. However, BUS images are of poor quality, low contrast, and uncertain. The computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system is developed for breast cancer to prevent …

Foliar Photodegradation In Pesticide Environmental Modeling, Sean M. Lyons

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The work described here was conducted to better understand how pesticides will behave following their application to crops or soil. This understanding will allow for better use of pesticides which will protect the environment and non-target organisms while remaining effective against pests. The Pesticide Dissipation form Agricultural Land (PeDAL) model was developed to simulate pesticide behavior following application and laboratory experiments focused on the photodegradation of select pesticides on alfalfa leaves were conducted to support this model.

Constraining Deformation Mechanisms Of Fault Damage Zones: A Case Study Of The Shallow San Andreas Fault At Elizabeth Lake, Southern California., Caroline Studnicky

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Earthquakes nucleate at depth and rupture along the fault plane up to the Earth’s surface releasing seismic energy as the fault propagates. This energy creates the shaking we feel on the surface. Some faults do not rupture and create shaking but deform slowly and smoothly accommodating fault slip over extended time periods. This process is referred to as aseismic slip or creep. Whether a fault ruptures or creeps depends on the properties of the rocks through which the fault plane extends. In order to model seismic hazards correctly, we need to characterize the composition, deformation structures, and alteration materials of …

Nitrogen Fertilizer Showed Little Effect On First- And Second-Year Corn Yield And Quality Following Alfalfa, Bailey Brent Shaffer

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Silage corn (Zea mays L.) following alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) is a common crop rotation in Utah and southern Idaho. This is done, in part, to take advantage of residual nitrogen (N) fixed by bacteria that work in symbiosis with the roots of alfalfa. After alfalfa is terminated, much of the N that was fixed by the plant is released into the soil and becomes available for use by the rotational crop. This reduces the amount of N fertilizer that growers need to apply. The Utah Fertilizer Guide currently recommends an N credit to a rotational crop following …

Plug-And-Play Sql, Shubham Swami

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We present an efficient model to retrieve data from a database by implementing plug-and-play queries using the query guards. The model is efficient in the sense that it saves time when writing a query and promotes query portability and reuse. A plug-and-play query is a freestanding query that can couple to any data socket and self determine whether it can be evaluated reliably on the data. We use hierarchies to improve SQL querying in a way that eliminates the need to write a view to construct virtual tables or a set of tables to run a query. The hierarchy is …