Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Origin Of The Mega-Streamlined Morphology In Ne Africa And Arabia: Remote Sensing And Field-Based Investigations, Mohamed Samy Mohamed Elhebery

Dissertations

Mega-streamlined landforms on Earth and Mars have been attributed to aeolian, glaciogenic, fluvial, and tectonic processes. Identifying the forces that shaped these landforms is paramount for understanding landscape evolution and constraining paleo-climate models and ice sheet reconstructions. Exhumed Late Ordovician glacial deposits and landscape of the North Gondwana are reported here for the first time from SE Egypt. Using field and remote sensing (Advanced Land Observing Satellite [ALOS], Phased Array L-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (PALSAR) radar, multispectral Landsat TM datasets, and digital elevation models (DEMs) I mapped the distribution of the Late Ordovician glacial features (i.e. deposits and landforms) in …

On Phishing: Proposing A Host-Based Multi-Layer Passive/Active Anti-Phishing Approach Combating Counterfeit Websites, Wesam Harbi Fadheel

Dissertations

Phishing is the starting point of most cyberattacks, mainly categorized as Email, Websites, Social Networks, Phone calls (Vishing), and SMS messaging (Smishing). Phishing refers to an attempt to collect sensitive data, typically in the form of usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, bank account information, etc., or other crucial facts, intending to use or sell the information obtained. Similar to how a fisherman uses bait to catch a fish, an attacker will pose as a trustworthy source to attract and deceive the victim.

This study explores the efficacy of host-side APT (Anti-Phishing Techniques) based onWebsite features like Lexical, Host-Based, or Content-Based …

Simulating Strongly Coupled Many-Body Systems With Quantum Algorithms, Manqoba Qedindaba Hlatshwayo

Dissertations

The complexity of the nuclear many-body problem is a severe obstacle to finding a general and accurate numerical approach needed to simulate medium-mass and heavy nuclei. Even with the advent of exascale classical computing, the impediment of exponential growth of the Hilbert space renders the problem intractable for most classical calculations. In the last few years, quantum algorithms have become an attractive alternative for practitioners because quantum computers are more efficient in simulating quantum physics than classical computers. While a fully fault-tolerant universal quantum computer will not be realized soon, this dissertation explores quantum algorithms for simulating nuclear physics suitable …

Functional Generalized Linear Mixed Models, Harmony Luce

Dissertations

With the advancements in data collection technologies, researchers in various fields such as epidemiology, chemometrics, and environmental science face the challenges of obtaining useful information from more detailed, complex, and intricately-structured data. Since the existing methods often are not suitable for such data, new statistical methods are developed to accommodate the complicated data structures.

As a part of such efforts, this dissertation proposes Functional Generalized Linear Mixed Model (FGLMM), which extends classical generalized linear mixed models to include functional covariates. Functional Data Analysis (FDA) is a rapidly developing area of statistics for data which can be naturally viewed as smooth …

Nonparametric Tests For Replicated Latin Squares, Joseph Yang

Dissertations

Two classes of nonparametric procedures for a replicated Latin square design that test for both general and increasing alternatives are developed. The two classes of procedures are similar in the sense that both transform the data so that existing well-known tests for randomized complete block designs can be utilized. On the other hand, the two classes differ in the way that the data is transformed - one class essentially aggregates the data while the other class aligns the data. Within these contexts, the exact distributions and asymptotic distributions are discussed, when applicable. The exact distributions are easily computed using the …

Learning Finite Mixture Of Ising Graphical Models, Chong Gu

Dissertations

The Ising model is valuable in examining complex interactions within a system, but its estimation is challenging. In this work, we proposed penalized likelihood procedures to infer conditional dependence structure when observed data come from heterogeneous resources in high-dimensional setting. The proposed method can be efficiently implemented by taking advantage of coordinate-ascent, minorization–maximization principles and EM algorithm. A BIC-type criterion will be utilized for the selection of the tuning parameter in the penalized likelihood approaches. The effectiveness of the proposed method is supported by simulation studies and a real-world example.

Evaluating The Performance Of Estimators In Sem And Irt With Ordinal Variables, Bo Klauth

Dissertations

In conducting confirmatory factor analysis with ordered response items, the literature suggests that when the number of responses is five and item skewness (IS) is approximately normal, researchers can employ maximum likelihood with robust standard errors (MLR). However, MLR can yield biased factor loadings (FL) and FL standard errors (FLSE) when the variables are ordinal. Other estimators are available. Unweighted least squares and weighted least squares with adjusted mean and variance (ULSMV and WLSMV) are known as the estimators for CFA with ordinal variables (CFA-OV). Another estimator, marginal maximum likelihood (MML), is used in the item response theory (IRT), specifically …

Socially Aware Natural Language Processing With Commonsense Reasoning And Fairness In Intelligent Systems, Sirwe Saeedi

Dissertations

Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to deliver ever more user-friendly consumer applications, recent mishaps involving fake information and biased treatment serve as vivid reminders of the pitfalls of AI. AI can harbor latent biases and flaws that can cause harm in diverse and unexpected ways. It is crucial to understand the reasons for, mechanisms behind, and circumstances under which AI can fail. For instance, a lack of commonsense reasoning can lead to biased or unfair decisions made by Machine Learning (ML) systems. For example, if an ML system is trained on data that is biased or unrepresentative of the real …

Using Visual Imagery To Develop Multiplication Fact Strategies, Gina Kling

Dissertations

The learning of basic facts, or the sums and products of numbers 0–10 and their related differences and quotients, has always been a high priority for elementary school teachers. While memorization of basic facts has been a hallmark of elementary school, current recommendations focus on a more nuanced development of fluency with these facts. Fluency is characterized by the ability to demonstrate flexibility, accuracy, efficiency, and appropriate strategy use. Despite recommendations to focus on strategy use, there is insufficient information on instructional approaches that are effective for developing strategies, particularly for multiplication facts. Using visual imagery with dot patterns has …

Zonality In Graphs, Andrew Bowling

Dissertations

Graph labeling and coloring are among the most popular areas of graph theory due to both the mathematical beauty of these subjects as well as their fascinating applications. While the topic of labeling vertices and edges of graphs has existed for over a century, it was not until 1966 when Alexander Rosa introduced a labeling, later called a graceful labeling, that brought the area of graph labeling to the forefront in graph theory. The subject of graph colorings, on the other hand, goes back to 1852 when the young British mathematician Francis Guthrie observed that the countries in a map …

Irregular Domination In Graphs, Caryn Mays

Dissertations

Domination in graphs has been a popular area of study due in large degree to its applications to modern society as well as the mathematical beauty of the topic. While this area evidently began with the work of Claude Berge in 1958 and Oystein Ore in 1962, domination did not become an active area of research until 1977 with the appearance of a survey paper by Ernest Cockayne and Stephen Hedetniemi. Since then, a large number of variations of domination have surfaced and provided numerous applications to different areas of science and real-life problems. Among these variations are domination parameters …

High-Dimensional Variable Selection Via Knockoffs Using Gradient Boosting, Amr Essam Mohamed

Dissertations

As data continue to grow rapidly in size and complexity, efficient and effective statistical methods are needed to detect the important variables/features. Variable selection is one of the most crucial problems in statistical applications. This problem arises when one wants to model the relationship between the response and the predictors. The goal is to reduce the number of variables to a minimal set of explanatory variables that are truly associated with the response of interest to improve the model accuracy. Effectively choosing the true influential variables and controlling the False Discovery Rate (FDR) without sacrificing power has been a challenge …

Statistical Clustering Of Networks With Additional Information, Paul Atandoh

Dissertations

As the online market grows rapidly, many companies and researchers are interested in analyzing product review dataset which includes ratings and text review data. In the first project, we mainly focus on analyzing the text review data. In the current literature, it is common to use only text analysis tools to analyze review dataset. But in our work, we propose a method that utilizes both a text analysis method such as topic modeling and a statistical network model to build network among individuals and find interesting communities. We introduce a promising framework that incorporates topic modeling technique to define the …

Remote Sensing Application For Landslide Detection: Monitoring Along Eastern Lake Michigan (Miami Park, Mi), Guzalay Sataer

Dissertations

I assessed the nature and spatial and temporal patterns of deformation over the Miami Park bluffs on the eastern margin of Lake Michigan and investigated the factors controlling its observed deformation. Our approach involved the following steps: (1) extracting bluff deformation rates (velocities along the line of sight of the satellite) using a stack of Sentinel-1A radar imagery in ascending acquisition geometry acquired between 2017 and 2021 and applying the Intermittent Small Baseline Subset (ISBAS) InSAR time series analysis method; (2) generating high-resolution (5 cm) elevation models and orthophotos from temporal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) surveys acquired in 2017, 2019, …

A Framework For Assessing The 4th Rank Dispersivity Tensor Under Anisotropic Axial Symmetries, Xiang Fan

Dissertations

Multi-dimensional expansion of the advection-dispersion equation necessitated the representation of dispersivity as a 4th rank tensor. This tensorial form of dispersivity has 81 terms in three-dimensions with a maximum of 36 independent terms that may be used to describe Fickian spreading of a dissolved contaminant plume according to intrinsic properties of a porous medium. The complexity of the 4th rank tensor has led to the common practice of simplifying the tensor to only 2 or 3 independent terms by assuming isotropic conditions, although isotropic porous media are uncommon in nature as many natural geologic systems exhibit pronounced anisotropy. A broad …

Studying The Synthesis Of 196Hg At Astrophysically Relevant Energies Through The Measurement Of Capture Reaction Cross-Sections Of (P, Γ) (P, N) And (P, Α) Reactions, Khushi Bhatt

Dissertations

Understanding the origin of all the chemical elements is an important question for the nuclear-astrophysics community. There are many unanswered questions like: What astrophysical events are responsible for the synthesis of what particular chemical elements? How many different elements were made in total? What is the abundance of each synthesized element? etc. Currently, scientists are largely depending upon theory and simulations to define nuclear and astrophysical reaction. This makes it critical to have accurate experimental nuclear physics data to input in astrophysical theoretical models. However, out of more than 20000 reactions involved in these calculations, only a very few are …

Evidence For An Early Saginaw Lobe Ice Retreat And Drainage Adjustments Across Southern Michigan, Usa, Nathan Erber

Dissertations

The Saginaw lobe of the Laurentide Ice Sheet (LIS), flowed out of Saginaw Bay, across Lower Michigan and into northern Indiana. As it retreated, the Saginaw lobe deposited the Sturgis moraine, a recessional moraine of the lobe in southern Michigan. Positioned to the west and east of the Saginaw lobe were the Lake Michigan and Huron-Erie lobes, respectively. These lobes retreated across the region asynchronously, with the Saginaw lobe retreating first. The asynchronous behavior of the lobes allowed for the Lake Michigan and Huron-Erie lobes to overprint and alter landscapes once occupied by the Saginaw lobe ice.

The Kalamazoo moraine, …

Time-Dependent Photoionization Modeling Of Warm Absorbers In Active Galactic Nuclei, Dev Raj Sadaula

Dissertations

Warm absorber spectra are bound-bound and bound-free absorption features, seen in the X-ray and UV spectra from many active galactic nuclei (AGN). The widths and centroid energies of these features indicate they occur in outflowing gas moving with hundreds to thousands of km/s. Depending upon the energy and momentum of the outflow, it can affect the gas within the host galaxy. Thus, warm absorbers’ mass and energy budgets are of great interest. Estimates for these properties depend on models that connect the absorption features' observed strengths with the density, composition, and ionization state of the absorbing gas. Such models assume …

Probing The Equation Of State Of Neutron Stars With Heavy Ion Collisions, Om Bhadra Khanal

Dissertations

The equation of state (EOS) is a fundamental property of nuclear matter, important for studying the structure of systems as diverse as the atomic nucleus and the neutron star. Nuclear reactions, especially heavy-ion collisions in the laboratories, can produce the nuclear matter similar to those contained in neutron stars. The density and the momentum dependence of the EOS of asymmetric nuclear matter, especially the symmetry energy term, is widely unconstrained. Finding appropriate constrains, especially at higher densities of the nuclear matter, requires the development of new devices, new experimental measurements as well as advances in theoretical understanding of nuclear collisions …

Mixture Of Functional Graphical Models, Qihai Liu

Dissertations

With the development of data collection technologies that use powerful monitoring devices and computational tools, many scientific fields are now obtaining more detailed and more complicatedly structured data, e.g., functional data. This leads to increasing challenges of extracting information from the large complex data. Making use of these data to gain insight into complex phenomena requires characterizing the relationships among a large number of functional variables. Functional data analysis (FDA) is a rapidly developing area of statistics for data which can be naturally viewed as a smooth curve or function. It is a method that changes the frame of data …

Analysis Of The Zebrafish Olfactory System Using Immunohistochemistry And Enhanced Techniques Of Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry (Desi-Ms), Tara Lynn Maser

Dissertations

Desorption electrospray ionization (DESI-MS) is an ambient ionization technique where the sample is analyzed directly from a surface with very minimal sample preparation under ambient conditions and follows ESI-like ionization mechanisms. DESI-MS has proven powerful in analyzing or imaging lipids and other small molecules directly from biological samples and even allows for subsequent histological staining and analyses. However, DESI-MS is less widely used for protein analysis due to a lack of sensitivity and the complex diversity of proteins in biological samples.

A major goal of this research has been to obtain new neurobiological knowledge by combining histology and mass spectrometry …

Mid To Late Neogene (5.9-3.7 Ma) Epeirogenic Uplift And Associated Ultramafic Volcanism, Canterbury Basin, New Zealand, Katherine Anne Dvorak

Dissertations

Cored marine sediments from Canterbury Basin Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 317 shelf sites U1351, U1353, and upper slope Site U1352 have been resampled with emphasis on benthic foraminifera from the Late Eocene to Late Pliocene. These new data coupled with paleo water-depth and age data from the nearby Clipper-1 petroleum exploration well, are used to develop a 1-dimensional basin subsidence model for the Canterbury Basin. Our model indicates there was widespread epeirogenic uplift of 890  350m, in the mid-Neogene (5.9-3.7 million years ago), which took place during concomitant ultramafic volcanism. Close association of uplift and volcanism could …

A Remote Sensing And Machine Learning-Based Approach To Forecast The Onset Of Harmful Algal Bloom (Red Tides), Moein Izadi

Dissertations

In the last few decades, harmful algal blooms (HABs, also known as “red tides”) have become one of the most detrimental natural phenomena all around the world especially in Florida’s coastal areas due to local environmental factors and global warming in a larger scale. Karenia brevis produces toxins that have harmful effects on humans, fisheries, and ecosystems. In this study, I developed and compared the efficiency of state-of-the-art machine learning models (e.g., XGBoost, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machine) in predicting the occurrence of HABs. In the proposed models, the K. brevis abundance is used as the target, and 10 …

Experimental Insights Into The Origin Of Microcrystalline Calcites, Mohammed Hashim

Dissertations

A significant proportion of modern marine calcium carbonate sediments is dominated by metastable aragonite and high Mg calcite that either dissolves or stabilizes to low-Mg-calcite (calcite) or dolomite during diagenesis. Sediment dissolution and stabilization have implications for the CaCO3 budget in the ocean and carbon burial rates. Yet, the diagenetic conditions that promote each process and their relative importance are poorly understood. Further, stabilization most commonly produces calcite microcrystals that exhibit various textures and host micropores. Despite their ubiquity in the rock record, the controls on microcrystal textures remain unclear. Here, laboratory experiments were used to investigate aragonite-to-calcite stabilization as …

Management Of Data Brokers In Support Of Smart Community Applications, Shadha Tabatabai

Dissertations

The widespread use of smart devices has led to the Internet of Things (IoT) revolution. Big data generated by billions of devices must be analyzed to make better decisions. However, this introduces security, communication, and processing problems. To solve these problems, we develop algorithms to enhance the work of brokers. We focus our efforts on three problems.

In the first problem, brokers are used in the cloud along with Software Defined Network (SDN) switches. We formulate minimizing brokers’ load difference within a reconfiguration budget with the constraint of indivisible topics as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem. We show that …

Unsupervised Learning With Word Embeddings Captures Quiescent Knowledge From Covid-19 And Materials Science Literature, Tasnim H. Gharaibeh

Dissertations

Millions of scientific papers are produced each year and the scientific literature is continuing to grow at a head-spinning speed. Thus, massive scientific knowledge exists in solid text, but all these publications make it difficult, if not impossible, for researchers to keep in up to date with discoveries, even within a narrow scientific area. This massive amount of information also makes it difficult to find implicit and hidden connections, relationships, and dependencies within the information that may guide the direction of future research or lead to valuable new insights. So, there is a need for algorithms or models that can …

Irregular Orbital Domination In Graphs, Peter E. Broe

Dissertations

In recent decades, domination in graphs has become a popular area of study due in large degree to its applications to modern society and the mathematical beauty of the topic. While this area evidently began with the work of Claude Berge in 1958 and of Oystein Ore in 1962, domination did not become an active area of research until 1977 with the appearance of a survey paper by Ernest Cockayne and Stephen Hedetniemi. Since then a large number of variations of domination have surfaced and provided numerous applications to different areas of science and real-life problems. Among these variations are …

Mechanisms And Applications Of Improved Protein Analysis By Desorption Electrospray Ionization Mass Spectrometry (Desi-Ms), Roshan Javanshad

Dissertations

Electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) is a soft ionization technique that allows detection of macromolecules, such as intact proteins, by the formation of multiply charged ions from solutions. Desorption electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (DESI-MS) is an ambient ionization technique that directly samples analyte from a surface during ESI-MS analysis. Although DESI-MS is highly accomplished at the analyses of metabolites, lipids, and other small molecules, it is far more limited when it comes to protein analysis. While most of the field in ambient ionization MS has moved towards primarily applications, our approach has been to explore the use of DESI-MS and …

Lxr Acts As A Differentiator In The Regulation Of Fas And G6pdh Gene Expression Under Insulin Resistant Conditions, Jaafar Hachem

Dissertations

Diabetes is a chronic disease that effects 10 percent of the world’s population and causes more than 1.5 million deaths a year and billions of dollars in associated health care cost. It can lead to very serious complications such as renal failure, liver cirrhosis, heart attack, and vision loss. The most common type of diabetes is type 2 diabetes. Type 2 diabetes arises when blood glucose levels remain chronically high due to insulin resistance. The reason for this elevation is due to the failure of insulin to allow tissues to uptake glucose causing problems in subsequent metabolic pathways. Over the …

Development Of Sensor, Sensory System And Signal Processing Algorithm For Intelligent Sensing Applications, Xingzhe Zhang

Dissertations

Sensors have been receiving significant attention in the last decade and the demand for sensory systems has increased in recent years due to the rapid growth in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Sensors can improve people’s awareness by providing them with real-time information on the environment and their immediate health conditions. This dissertation presents the fulfilment of three main projects and focuses on the development of a sensor, a sensory system, and a sensor signal recognition system for AI applications by employing printed electronics, analog circuit design, and digital signal processing techniques.

In the first project, a multi-channel stethograph …