Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Measuring The Properties Of Rod-Shaped Bacteria By Single-Entity Electrochemistry, Ashley Tubbs

Theses and Dissertations

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a significant and escalating threat to hospitals around the world, necessitating the development of rapid and sensitive detection methods. Single-entity electrochemistry has emerged as a promising approach for detecting and identifying such bacteria, and monitoring the efficacy of antibiotics in real-time. Herein, we employ the translational diffusion equation for circular cylinders to predict the collision frequency of rod-shaped bacteria, informing our experimental setup. Our work demonstrates that lab-fabricated Pt ultramicroelectrodes can sensitively detect bacteria at femtomolar concentrations under migration-controlled conditions. Further, we present a method implemented in MatLab to automate the analysis of step-like signals observed in …

Adaptable And Trustworthy Machine Learning For Human Activity Recognition From Bioelectric Signals, Morgan S. Stuart

Theses and Dissertations

Enabling machines to learn measures of human activity from bioelectric signals has many applications in human-machine interaction and healthcare. However, labeled activity recognition datasets are costly to collect and highly varied, which challenges machine learning techniques that rely on large datasets. Furthermore, activity recognition in practice needs to account for user trust - models are motivated to enable interpretability, usability, and information privacy. The objective of this dissertation is to improve adaptability and trustworthiness of machine learning models for human activity recognition from bioelectric signals. We improve adaptability by developing pretraining techniques that initialize models for later specialization to unseen …

Large Language Models, Prompting, And Synthetic Data Generation For Continual Named Entity Recognition, Charles I. Cutler

Theses and Dissertations

With the ever-growing amount of textual data, the task of Named Entity Recognition (NER) is vital to Natural Language Processing (NLP), a field which focuses on enabling computers to understand and manipulate human language. NER enables the extraction of information from unstructured text. Accurate information extraction is crucial for applications ranging from information retrieval to systems for question-answering. To ensure that NER models are robust to changes in data distributions and capable of recognizing new entity types, one may consider expanding the capabilities of an existing model. Continual learning is a paradigm within machine learning. It studies the objective of …

Asymmetric Cuh-Catalyzed Reductive Coupling Of Allenamides With Carbonyl And Imine Electrophiles, Stephen Collins

Theses and Dissertations

The carbon scaffold of many drugs and natural products contain multiple stereogenic centers bearing heteroatoms. As a result of this, chemists have long sought methods to efficiently install these multi-heteroatom functionalities. Reductive coupling reactions have been extensively studied over the past decades, and the allylation of carbonyls via the reductive coupling approach has been a key method for generating chiral allylic alcohols. This work utilizes inexpensive Cu for the asymmetric reductive coupling of allenamides with carbonyls or imines to simultaneously install two heteroatoms (either oxygen and nitrogen or nitrogen and nitrogen, respectively) onto the product. These molecules have a polarity …

Factors Associated With Acoustic Bat Presence During Spring Emergence In The Appalachian Mountains Of Western Virginia, Emily Kirk Pody

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Studies of threats that bats face during hibernation have increased in response to white-nose syndrome (WNS), a fungal disease that has ravaged North American bat populations. However, impacts of WNS on bat ecology during spring emergence, when bats are potentially recovering from infection and allocating resources for reproduction, is relatively understudied. As more bat species become listed at the federal and state level, the need to understand the factors associated with spring emergence is critical for improving conservation guidelines and habitat management practices. Acoustic monitoring is an efficient method for monitoring bat presence for prolonged periods of time, giving biologists …

The Measure Of Efficiency And Effectiveness When Using Artificial Intelligence (Ai) In Radiology, Jordan Watts

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Introduction: The use of artificial intelligence in radiology has helped radiologists identify patterns and abnormalities in medical images to diagnose and treat patients. Deep learning and machine learning algorithms have been used to assist physicians in detecting features that are not noticeable to the human eye. The FDA has approved almost 400 AI algorithms for radiology and estimated that the market for AI in medical imaging would grow from $21.48 billion in 2018 to $264.85 billion in 2028.

Purpose of the Study: The purpose of this research was to evaluate the use of artificial intelligence in radiology to determine its …

Mathematical Modeling And Analysis Of Inflammation And Tissue Repair: Lung Inflammation And Wound Healing In Corals Under Stress, Quintessa Hay

Theses and Dissertations

A variety of insults, including tissue injury and/or exposure to pathogen, elicit an immune response in many organisms. An improperly regulated immune response can result in deleterious effects to the organism. Here we present models for lung injury in young and old mice and models for wound healing in coral reefs.

It is well known that the immune response becomes less effective in older individuals. This is of particular interest in pulmonary insults such as ventilator induced lung injury (VILI) or lung infection. We extended a mathematical model for the inflammatory response to VILI and used experimental data to select …

Subsurface Mapping Of Intra-Arbuckle Shale In North-West Kansas Using Well Log Data, Cole M. Denny

Master's Theses

The aim of this research was to enhance knowledge of Intra-Arbuckle Shale (IAS) distribution and structure through new maps, cross sections, and well log correlations. Understanding the shale(s) ultimately advances the discernment of complex Arbuckle reservoirs that are critical to the Kansas petroleum industry. IAS has been intercepted by oil wells throughout Kansas, but this study focuses on their presence in portions of Ellis, Rooks, Graham, and Trego counties. To study the distribution and structure of IAS, data from micro-resistivity and gamma ray well logs were collected from more than three hundred Arbuckle oil and gas wells. On each well …

When Brain Meets Artificial Intelligence, Lu Zhang

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations

When we review the history of development of artificial intelligence (AI), we will find that brain science plays a pivotal role in fostering breakthroughs in AI, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs). Today, AI has made remarkable strides, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), surpassing expectations and achieving human-level performance in certain tasks. Nonetheless, an insurmountable gap remains between AI and human intelligence. It is urgent to establish a bridge between brain science and AI, promoting their mutual enhancement and collaborations. This involve establishing connections from brain science to AI (brain-inspired AI), and reversely, from AI to …

Factors That Influence Small Mammal Long Bone Morphology: An Analysis Of The Femora, Tibiae, And Humeri Of The Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus Carolinensis), Tyler Everette Blake

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The goal of this study is to examine the effect of urbanization and latitude on bone morphology, specifically limb length and bone density among gray squirrels endemic to the eastern United States. This study’s hypotheses are as follows: gray squirrels occupying lower latitudes will have larger body sizes and longer limbs relative to body size than those at higher latitudes following Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules. Further, squirrels in urban habitats will have greater bone density than those in rural habitats. Results show moderate correlation between body mass and respective proxies and latitude following Bergmann’s rule. Weak correlations were found between …

The Comparison Of Different Wetland Fish Assemblages Over Time, Robert Edward Adelstein

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Wetlands provide essential ecosystem services. Historically, we have drained and filled 73% of wetlands for agricultural use throughout the United States from the 1780s to the 1980s (Dahl, 1990). A nationwide focus on restoring wetlands has since occurred. Literature on restored/mitigated wetlands is rife with examples that do and do not support the same ecosystem services as natural wetlands (Langston, 1997; Meil, 2014). Restoration of wetlands occurred at the Green Bottom Wildlife Management Area (GBWMA) over several decades. Various sections of the wetland were classified by age, water depth, and vegetation. One hypothesis was that differences in fish assemblage would …

An Analysis Of Corporate Social Responsibility And Real Earnings Management, Rachel Brassine

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Real earnings management (REM) is costly in the form of intense loan restrictions, increased interest expense, and public scrutiny. Nevertheless, companies still practice REM. Based on agency and stakeholder theories, this research predicts that as a company’s CSR score increases, REM will decrease, and this association will become more negative when a critical mass of females on the board of directors exists and when a board-level CSR committee is present. This study also predicts that when a company offers an executive incentive plan based on CSR metrics, REM will decrease, and the relationship will become more negative with a critical …

Impact Of Solar Radiation On Perchlorate Formation In The Atmosphere: Evidence From Ice Core Measurements, Bishnu Kunwar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Perchlorate, which derives from both anthropogenic and natural sources in the current environment, poses a substantial health hazard to humans as it competes with iodine uptake in the thyroid gland. Consequently, there has been considerable concern about minimizing human exposure to environmental perchlorate by restricting its release from man-made sources. However, the absence of a clear understanding regarding the respective contributions of man-made and natural sources has hindered widespread regulation efforts. A 300-year (1700–2007) Summit, Greenland ice core record from a previous study showed relatively stable perchlorate concentrations in Greenland snow prior to 1980, with some elevated perchlorate levels associated …

Portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry For Sensing Salinity And Sodicity In Glacial Northern Great Plains Soils With Machine Learning Models, Adam Devlin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Saline and sodic soils are an increasing concern across the Northern Great Plains (NGP) due to factors of climate change and land management that are drawing geologically derived salts to the land surface. Traditional laboratory assessments, such as electrical conductivity (EC) and sodium adsorption ratio (SAR), are time and resource consumptive. Portable X-ray fluorescence (PXRF) may be a viable proximal sensing alternative, as it is able to provide elemental data in minutes, in situ or ex situ, and can directly quantify salinity-associated elements like Ca, Mg, and S. PXRF paired with predictive models has proven useful for a range of …

Contrastive Learning, With Application To Forensic Identification Of Source, Cole Ryan Patten

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Forensic identification of source problems often fall under the category of verification problems, where recent advances in deep learning have been made by contrastive learning methods. Many forensic identification of source problems deal with a scarcity of data, an issue addressed by few-shot learning. In this work, we make specific what makes a neural network a contrastive network. We then consider the use of contrastive neural networks for few-shot learning classification problems and compare them to other statistical and deep learning methods. Our findings indicate similar performance between models trained by contrastive loss and models trained by cross-entropy loss. We …

Effects Of Low-Cost, Low-Tech Tools For Riparian Restoration On Prairie Streams In Western South Dakota, James Andrew Joseph Bolyard

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Despite making up less than two percent of the overall landscape in the arid and semi-arid western US, riparian areas are a crucial resource for agriculture, livestock, and wildlife. However, many have impaired function and reduced riparian cover. Low-Cost, Low-Tech Tools (LCLTT) are a subset of Process-Based Restoration (PBR) used for riparian restoration that were chosen for their cost-effectiveness and minimal technical requirements. LCLTT has been tested in mountainous areas of the western US but only recently implemented in the Northern Great Plains (NGP). Given their novelty as an approach toward restoration for the region, professional restoration and landowner communities …

The Hutton Project: Long-Term Agricultural Impacts On Soil Loss And Carbon Dynamics In Eastern South Dakota, Eli Halverson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Long-term and intensified agricultural land management has resulted in increased rates of soil erosion and has altered much of the carbon cycle at regional and global scales. Anthropogenic degradation of soil resources is a barrier to sustainable production, soil functioning, and ecosystem services. It is difficult to quantify the scope of pedogenic changes due to the lack of legacy data and short temporal scales. This study utilized decades to century-old soil information to quantify historical soil erosion losses and changes in soil carbon pools of eastern South Dakota soils. The results show that soils in the region have been significantly …

Rado Numbers For Two Systems Of Linear Equations, Anthony Glackin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For any positive integer n and any equation E of either the form x1+x2+· · ·+xn = x0 or x1 + x2 + n = x0, the two-color Rado number R2(E) is the least integer such that any 2-coloring of the natural numbers 1 through R2(E) will contain a monochromatic solution to E. Let Ek be a system of k equations of the aforementioned form, where Ei represents the ith equation in Ek and the set I = {1, 2, . . . , k} is the set of indices of these equations. This thesis shows that the two-color Rado …

Species Distribution Modeling Of Aquilegia Brevistyla (Ranunculaceae): A Critically Imperiled Black Hills Disjunct Species, Eric Daniel Puetz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unchecked human activity is contributing to rising levels of greenhouse gas emissions, changes in land use, altered disturbance/fire regimes, spread of invasive species, and loss of biological diversity and related breakdown of ecosystem services. Additionally, climatic shifts may lead to phenological mismatches between species and their environments if these changes outpace a species’ ability to adapt or migrate to a more suitable habitat. Isolated mountain populations are particularly threatened by unpredictable climatic conditions, as they may have limited migration corridors and often lower levels of genetic diversity to move or adapt, respectively. As these negative feedbacks compound on the landscape, …

Properties Of Skew-Polynomial Rings And Skew-Cyclic Codes, Kathryn Hechtel

Theses and Dissertations--Mathematics

A skew-polynomial ring is a polynomial ring over a field, with one indeterminate x, where one must apply an automorphism to commute coefficients with x. It was first introduced by Ore in 1933 and since the 1980s has been used to study skew-cyclic codes. In this thesis, we present some properties of skew-polynomial rings and some new constructions of skew-cyclic codes. The dimension of a skew-cyclic code depends on the degree of its generating skew polynomial. However, due to the skew-multiplication rule, the degree of a skew polynomial can be smaller than its number of roots and hence tricky to …

Dirichlet Problems In Perforated Domains, Robert Righi

Theses and Dissertations--Mathematics

We establish W^1,p estimates for solutions u_ε to the Laplace equation with Dirichlet boundary conditions in a bounded C¹ domain Ω_{ε, η} perforated by small holes in ℝ^d. The bounding constants will depend explicitly on epsilon and eta, where epsilon is the order of the minimal distance between holes, and eta denotes the ratio between the size of the holes and epsilon. The proof relies on a large-scale L^p estimate for ∇u_ε, whose proof is divided into two main parts. First, we show that solutions of an intermediate problem for a …

External Support Structures In Fused Deposition Modeling 3d Printing, Adam Mystkowski

Undergraduate Honors Theses

3D Printing, sometimes also referred to as Additive Manufacturing, is a technology that has garnered a lot of attention in the past several years. While the technology has attracted a significant community of hobbyists, the benefits of the technology have also been recognized in manufacturing. While there are many different types of 3D Printing techniques, the most common type is Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), mainly due to its relatively low cost compared to other types. However, the technique also present a significant limitation: it tends to struggle with models that have overhanging parts. When a layer is extruded by an …

Robust Interventions In Network Epidemiology, Erik Weis

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Which individual should we vaccinate to minimize the spread of a disease? Designing optimal interventions of this kind can be formalized as an optimization problem on networks, in which we have to select a budgeted number of dynamically important nodes to receive treatment that optimizes a dynamical outcome. Describing this optimization problem requires specifying the network, a model of the dynamics, and an objective for the outcome of the dynamics. In real-world contexts, these inputs are vulnerable to misspecification---the network and dynamics must be inferred from data, and the decision-maker must operationalize some (potentially abstract) goal into a mathematical objective …

Organic Fouling Mitigation In Forward Osmosis Technology Through The Use Of Oscilatting Alternating Current Electric Fields, Logan Werner

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Forward osmosis (FO) is the term given to osmosis in water filtration applications. FO has many advantages to conventional membrane filtration processes. The lack of external pressure needed to force solvent through the membrane is dramatically decreased in FO, resulting in a lower cost of operation compared to reverse osmosis. Lower external pressures also result in decreased fouling on the membrane surface and improved permeate flux. Fouling is one of the foremost challenges within the membrane filtration industry and is one of the biggest contributors to operating costs. While FO results in less fouling than RO, fouling remains a major …

Role Of Relative Humidity In New Particle Formation From Ozonlysis Of Atmospheric Volatile Organic Compounds, Christopher Snyder

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The impact of relative humidity (RH) on organic new particle formation (NPF) from ozonolysis of biogenic volatile organic compounds (BVOCs) remains an area of active debate. Previous reports provide contradictory results indicating both depression and enhancement of NPF under conditions of moderate RH, while others ignore the potential impact. Only several reports have suggested that the effect may depend on absolute mixing ratio of the precursor volatile organic compound (VOC, ppbv). However, before any experiments could be completed, development of new methods was necessary to overcome the limitation of sampling ultrafine nanoparticles (<50 nm aerodynamic diameter) with aerosol mass spectrometry. This dissertation includes a report on a new Particle Growth Apparatus (PaGA) that artificially grows particles from as small as 17 nm to over 110nm. Considerable effort was made to identify the most suitable growth matrix (squalane) and optimize particle growth for reproducibility and sensitivity.

The PaGA was then utilized in the …

Edge Colored And Edge Ordered Graphs, Per Gustin Wagenius

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

In this work, the current state of the field of edge-colored graphs is surveyed. Anew concept of unshrinkable edge colorings is introduced which is useful for rainbow subgraph problems and interesting in its own right. This concept is analyzed in some depth. Building upon the linear edge ordering described in a recent work from Gerbner, Methuku, Nagy, Pálvölgyi, Tardos, and Vizer, edge-ordering graphs with the cyclic group is introduced and some results are given on this and a related counting problem.

Student Performance In Modern Physics In An Active, Partially-Flipped Classroom, Scott Yarbrough

Physics Dissertations

The effectiveness of the flipped classroom and hybrid-flipped (partially flipped, partially lecture-based) method of instruction has been extensively studied for high school and introductory undergraduate physics courses, and it has been shown to increase student understanding and performance. However, few studies have been done for upper-level undergraduate courses, and even fewer have been done for virtual courses. In Spring 2021 and Fall 2023, a fully virtual, hybrid-flipped Modern Physics course was taught, primarily to a class of primarily juniors and seniors, with some sophomores. All were STEM majors. The same course, with a similar enrolment and demographic of students, was …

Cross-Layer Design Of Highly Scalable And Energy-Efficient Ai Accelerator Systems Using Photonic Integrated Circuits, Sairam Sri Vatsavai

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has experienced remarkable success in recent years, solving complex computational problems across various domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, and pattern recognition. Much of this success can be attributed to the advancements in deep learning algorithms and models, particularly Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). In recent times, deep ANNs have achieved unprecedented levels of accuracy, surpassing human capabilities in some cases. However, these deep ANN models come at a significant computational cost, with billions to trillions of parameters. Recent trends indicate that the number of parameters per ANN model will continue to grow exponentially in the foreseeable …

Development Of A Collaborative Research Platform For Efficient Data Management And Visualization Of Qubit Control, Devanshu Brahmbhatt

Computer Science and Engineering Theses

This thesis introduces QubiCSV, a pioneering open-source platform for quantum computing field. With an emphasis on collaborative research, QubiCSV addresses the critical need for specialized data management and visualization tools in qubit control. The platform is crafted to overcome the challenges posed by the high costs and complexities associated with quantum experimental setups. It emphasizes efficient utilization of resources through shared ideas, data, and implementation strategies. One of the primary obstacles in quantum computing research has been the ineffective management of extensive calibration data and the inability to visualize complex quantum experiment outcomes effectively. QubiCSV fills this gap by offering …

Critical Convergence: Mapping The Boundaries Of How Faculty Interrogate Whiteness In The Geoscience Educational Landscape, James E. Hobbs

Educational Leadership & Policy Studies Dissertations

This study examined the role of faculty members in interrogating whiteness within geoscience education. The dominant reliance on whiteness as the primary way of knowing in geoscience education has long perpetuated a singular perspective that serves as a mechanism for reinforcing existing power structures rooted in white supremacy. Drawing on tenets from Critical whiteness Studies, Curriculum Theory, and Transformative Learning Theory, this research investigated U.S. higher education faculty members' strategies and challenges in disrupting whiteness within the geoscience curriculum.

Through critical qualitative narrative inquiry, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with geoscience faculty members across multiple institutions across the United …