Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Dgm-Fd: A Finite Difference Scheme Based On The Discontinuous Galerkin Method, Anne Marguerite Fernando

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

Accurate and efficient numerical wave propagation is important in many areas of study such as computational aero-acoustics (CAA). While dissipation and dispersion errors influence the accuracy of a method, efficiency can be assessed by convergence rates and effective adaptability to different mesh structures. Finite difference and finite element methods are commonly used numerical schemes in CAA. Finite difference methods have the advantages of ease of use as well as high order convergence, but often require a uniform grid, and stable boundary closure can be non-trivial. Finite element methods adapt well to different mesh structures but can become difficult to implement …

Synthesis And Evaluation Of Vegetable (Soybean) Oil Based Epoxy Resin For Beverage Can Coating And Enzymatic Synthesis And Characterization Of Tailored N&C End Protected Oligopeptides, Ying Gao

Doctoral Dissertations

"Research described in this dissertation covers two topics. Part-I is related to the development of a soybean oil based epoxy resin and its application in beverage can coatings. Interior surfaces of beverage can are invariably coated with polymer coating. The most commonly used coatings at present are derived from bisphenol A (BPA) based epoxy reins. However, due to perceived endocrine disrupting nature of BPA and consequential adverse effects on humans and wildlife concerns for the use of BPA based coatings and its leaching into beverages have been expressed. The research in the first part describes the synthesis and evaluation of …

Lsuhsc Facilities Biweekly Update: January 2008, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates: 2008

LSUHSC Facilities Biweekly Updates from January 4 and 18, 2008.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Lsuhsc Facilities Daily Update: January 2008, Lsuhsc Property And Facilities Management

LSUHSC Facilities Daily Updates: 2008

LSUHSC Dailly Facilities Updates from January 2008.

These updates describe damage and a timeline of repairs at the LSU Health Sciences Center - New Orleans campus due to Hurricane Katrina which made landfall August 29, 2005.

Toward A New Social Contract: A Tripartite Mixed-Methods Analysis Of Social Sustainability At Three Land-Grant Universities, Lyndsay Josephine Agans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increasingly, colleges and universities in the United States are adapting toward a model of behavior that incorporates issues of sustainability. This adaptation in universities and in society has implications on the organizational and nation-state level, the very core of which may serve to reshape the social contract between the two. In addition to supplying a strong counter-hegemonic argument that alters the competitive economic agenda-setting paradigm, this study serves as a tripartite comparative case study analysis of university adaptation toward social sustainability. By employing a social capital lens to understanding social sustainability in higher education, this study seeks to examine the …

A Hidden Markov Model For Alphabet-Soup Word Recognition, Shaolei Feng, Nicholas Howe, R. Manmatha

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

Recent work on the “alphabet soup” paradigm has demonstrated effective segmentation-free character-based recognition of cursive handwritten historical text documents. The approach first uses a joint boosting technique to detect potential characters - the alphabet soup. A second stage uses a dynamic programming algorithm to recover the correct sequence of characters. Despite experimental success, the ad hoc dynamic programming method previously lacked theoretical justification. This paper puts the method on a sounder footing by recasting the dynamic programming as inference on an ensemble of hidden Markov models (HMMs). Although some work has questioned the use of score outputs from classifiers like …

On-Line Distributed Traffic Grooming, R. Jordan Crouser, Brian Rice, Adrian Sampson, Ran Libeskind-Hadas

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

This paper addresses the problem of on-line traffic grooming in WDM paths. Each request consists of a source node, a destination node, and the desired bandwidth for the connection. Connections may be multi-hop, permitting the use of multiple lightpaths. We describe a new distributed on-line algorithm for this problem that is provably wide-sense non-blocking under cer- tain assumptions. Moreover, we use simulations to demonstrate that the algorithm is extremely effective even when some of these assumptions are relaxed.

Edge-Unfolding Nested Polyhedral Bands, Greg Aloupis, Erik D. Demaine, Stefan Langerman, Pat Morin, Joseph O'Rourke, Ileana Streinu, Godfried Toussaint

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

A band is the intersection of the surface of a convex polyhedron with the space between two parallel planes, as long as this space does not contain any vertices of the polyhedron. The intersection of the planes and the polyhedron produces two convex polygons. If one of these polygons contains the other in the projection orthogonal to the parallel planes, then the band is nested. We prove that all nested bands can be unfolded, by cutting along exactly one edge and folding continuously to place all faces of the band into a plane, without intersection. © 2007 Elsevier B.V.

Corn Futures: Consumer Politics, Health, And Climate Change, Jedediah Purdy, James Salzman

Faculty Scholarship

The Mexicans have long been known as the Corn People, but that label perhaps provides a better fit for modern day Americans. The simple seeds of corn play a fundamental role unprecedented in the history of human agriculture. Corn now underpins two major sectors, arguably the two most important sectors, of our modern economy - food supply and energy supply. How we choose to consume this seed has far-ranging consequences for pressing issues as far apart as climate change and diabetes, energy policy and immigration, tropical deforestation and food riots.

Scalable Concurrent Hash Tables Via Relativistic Programming, Josh Triplett

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Existing approaches to concurrent programming often fail to account for synchronization costs on modern shared-memory multipro- cessor architectures. A new approach to concurrent programming, known as relativistic programming, can reduce or in some cases eliminate synchronization overhead on such architectures. This approach avoids the costs of inter-processor communication and memory access by permitting processors to operate from a relativistic view of memory provided by their own caches, rather than from an absolute reference frame of memory as seen by all processors. This research shows how relativistic programming techniques can provide the perceived advantages of optimistic synchronization without the useless parallelism …

Reconstructing Images As Piecewise Smooth Functions, Ralf Juengling

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Leclerc’s approach to image reconstruction consists of finding the shortest description of the data (an image) as a model (reconstruction) plus noise [5]. The approach poses two design problems: 1. Define an appropriate description language for image models and noise, 2. Derive an objective function and conceive an optimization algorithm that finds good local minima. Leclerc proposed to model images as piecewise low order polynomials and to describe models in terms of region boundaries (discontinuity set) and polynomial coefficients.

In this report I describe Leclerc’s methodology, and, adopting his image model and description language, derive an objective function within this …

Biogenic Macroporosity And Lts Lattice Boltzmann Method Permeability In The Karst Biscayne Aquifer, Kevin J. Cunningham, Michael C. Sukop, Haibo Huang, Pedro F. Alvarez, H. Allen Curran, Michael A. Wacker, Lee J. Florea, Robert A. Renken, Joann F. Dixon

Geosciences: Faculty Publications

We focus on two major problems in the study of paleokarst of the Biscayne aquifer in southeastem Florida: ( 1 ), current conceptual models of karst aquifers do not adequately characterize much of the eogenetic rnacropore system within the carbonate rocks of the Biscayne aquifer, and (2) standard laboratory core-analysis rnethods cannol be used lo accurately measure the permeability of highly macroporous carbonate core samples.

Symmetrical Dinucleosides, Yousef Ahmadibeni, Keykavous Parang

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

The authors have reported the utility of 1 for the preparation of sulfonamides (J. Org. Chem. 2006, 71, 7915). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first report of the synthesis of 5¢,5¢-dinucleoside 5¢,5¢-phosphodiesters by using polymer-bound phosphitylating reagents.

Chinese Neutrosophy And Taoist Natural Philosophy, Florentin Smarandache, Jiang Zhengjie

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Cultural Advantages In China: Tale Of Six Cities, Florentin Smarandache, Fu Yuhua, Victor Christianto

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Nowadays, plenty of factories from Europe and other developed countries have been relocated to this country, considering its tremendous economic scale and rapid growth rate during the past three decades. But most of what happens inside the China nowadays is deeply hidden from the outside world (“the foreigners” as China people would call). This fact is partly because most reports on China were written by the so‐called fly‐high experts who are busy completing their reports despite a busy schedule. Very few books or reports were written by people inside, or at least “foreigners” who spent a few years in China. …

Book Review: Challenges To Digital Forensic Evidence, Gary C. Kessler

Publications

This document is Dr. Kessler's review of Challenges to Digital Forensic Evidence, by Fred Cohen. Fred Cohen & Associates, 2008. ISBN 1-878109-41-3

Columbia University/Vireo-Cityu/Irit Trecvid2008 High-Level Feature Extraction And Interactive Video Search, Shih-Fu Chang, Junfeng He, Yu-Gang Jiang, Elie El Khoury, Chong-Wah Ngo, Akira Yanagawa, Eric Zavesky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this report, we present overview and comparative analysis of our HLF detection system, which achieves the top performance among all type-A submissions in 2008. We also describe preliminary evaluation of our video search system, CuZero, in the interactive search task.

Concept Detection: Convergence To Local Features And Opportunities Beyond, Shih-Fu Chang, Junfeng He, Yu-Gang Jiang, Elie El Khoury, Chong-Wah Ngo, Akira Yanagawa, Eric Zavesky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Document Selection For Extracting Entity And Relationship Instances Of Terrorist Events, Zhen Sun, Ee Peng Lim, Kuiyu Chang, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Rohan Kumar Gunaratna

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this chapter, we study the problem of selecting documents so as to extract terrorist event information from a collection of documents. We represent an event by its entity and relation instances. Very often, these entity and relation instances have to be extracted from multiple documents. We therefore define an information extraction (IE) task as selecting documents and extracting from which entity and relation instances relevant to a user-specified event (aka domain specific event entity and relation extraction). We adopt domain specific IE patterns to extract potentially relevant entity and relation instances from documents, and develop a number of document …

The Oil Drilling Model And Iterative Deepening Genetic Annealing Algorithm For The Traveling Salesman Problem, Hoong Chuin Lau, Fei Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this work, we liken the solving of combinatorial optimization problems under a prescribed computational budget as hunting for oil in an unexplored ground. Using this generic model, we instantiate an iterative deepening genetic annealing (IDGA) algorithm, which is a variant of memetic algorithms. Computational results on the traveling salesman problem show that IDGA is more effective than standard genetic algorithms or simulated annealing algorithms or a straightforward hybrid of them. Our model is readily applicable to solve other combinatorial optimization problems.

Collective Outsourcing To Market (Com): A Market-Based Framework For Information Supply Chain Outsourcing, Fang Fang, Zhiling Guo, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses the importance of and a solution to separating the information flow from the physical product flow in a supply chain. Motivated by the inefficient demand forecast caused by information asymmetry and lack of an incentive among supply chain partners to share valuable information, we propose a radically new framework called collective outsourcing to market (COM) to address many information supply chain design challenges. To validate the COM framework, we consider a supply chain with one manufacturer and multiple downstream retailers. Retailers privately acquire demand forecast information that they do not have incentive to share horizontally with other …

Critical Infrastructure Protection And The Domain Name Service (Dns) System, Mark Edward Snyder

Masters Theses

"Components of the critical infrastructure of any system are natural targets for attack. Any inherent weakness of such components can potentially expose the entire system to vulnerability. The Domain Name System (DNS) is one component of the proper functioning of the Internet. Although DNS is a relatively simple, isolated component, it serves as a straightforward example for the study of distributed systems in general, and as such, we have explored properties of DNS to examine how enterprise-scale, critical infrastructure components are vulnerable to attack, what protections are afforded to defenders of such components, the inherent weaknesses of such systems, and …

Polymer Reinforced Aerogels And Composites A. Polyimide Crosslinked Aerogels B. Silica-Polymethylmethacrylate Composites, Vishal U. Patil

Masters Theses

"Crosslinking of aerogels is a promising approach to combine the advantages of inorganic and polymeric materials. In the present study, two types of polyimide-silica hybrid aerogels, APTES-BTDA-MDA (mol ratio: 2:2:1) and APTES-BTDA-MDA (mol ratio: 2:3:2), were synthesized using a sol-gel process followed by heating in order to imidize the polyamic acid that is formed quickly and is covalently bonded to silica. The hybrid aerogels were made using 3-aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES) endcapped polyamic acids and tetramethoxysilane (TMOS) as precursors. Polyimide crosslinked aerogels were characterized by TGA, SEM, FT-IR, BET, solid state NMR and gas pycnometry. These hybrid aerogels exhibit high thermal stability …

Improved Constrained Global Optimization For Estimating Molecular Structure From Atomic Distances, Terri Marie Grant

Mathematics & Statistics Theses & Dissertations

Determination of molecular structure is commonly posed as a nonlinear optimization problem. The objective functions rely on a vast amount of structural data. As a result, the objective functions are most often nonconvex, nonsmooth, and possess many local minima. Furthermore, introduction of additional structural data into the objective function creates barriers in finding the global minimum, causes additional computational issues associated with evaluating the function, and makes physical constraint enforcement intractable. To combat the computational problems associated with standard nonlinear optimization formulations, Williams et al. (2001) proposed an atom-based optimization, referred to as GNOMAD, which complements a simple interatomic distance …

Nutrient And Carbon Dynamics In The Chesapeake Bay Outflow Plume And Their Effect On The Coastal Ocean Environment, Katherine C. Filippino

OES Theses and Dissertations

Seasonally resolved nutrient and carbon fluxes from estuaries to the coastal ocean are poorly constrained. Nutrient and carbon cycling in highly productive regions like the Chesapeake Bay outflow plume and surrounding coastal environments greatly affect our global understanding of carbon cycling. The overall questions for the research described in this dissertation stem from the need to close global carbon budgets, and obtain a fundamental understanding of nutrient dynamics in a coastal region heavily influenced by seasonality and human impacts.

Within the framework of physical characteristics of the outflow plume and through the characterization of nutrient concentrations, primary productivity rates, and …

Massive Spatiotemporal Watershed Hydrological Storm Event Response Model (Mhserm) With Time-Lapsed Nexrad Radar Feed, Changqing Song

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Correctly and efficiently estimating hydrological responses corresponding to a specific storm event at the streams in a watershed is the main goal of any sound water resource management strategy. Methods for calculating a stream flow hydrograph at the selected streams typically require a great deal of spatial and temporal watershed data such as geomorphological data, soil survey, landcover, precipitation data, and stream network information to name a few. However, extracting and preprocessing such data for estimation and analysis is a hugely time-consuming task, especially for a watershed with hundreds of streams and lakes and complicated landcover and soil characteristics. To …

Catalytic Wet Air Oxidation Of Mono Azo Dye Orange Ii: Catalyst Selection, Reaction Kinetics, And Modeling, Pinar Ozdural

Civil & Environmental Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wastewaters generated as byproducts of dyeing processes are not treatable with conventional methods. It has been estimated that among the 900,000 tons of different dyes produced annually in the world, approximately 10–15% are lost in wastewater streams during manufacturing and processing operations. Once in rivers and streams, dyes cause major problems, such as reducing light penetration, or displaying toxic effects on aquatic life. Therefore, it is essential that dyes are removed from wastewaters before being discharged into the environment.

This study focuses on the catalytic wet air oxidation (CWAO) of Orange II, a mono azo dye used in large amounts …

Rapid Prototyping For Virtual Environments, Emre Baydogan

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Development of Virtual Environment (VE) applications is challenging where application developers are required to have expertise in the target VE technologies along with the problem domain expertise. New VE technologies impose a significant learning curve to even the most experienced VE developer. The proposed solution relies on synthesis to automate the migration of a VE application to a new unfamiliar VE platform/technology. To solve the problem, the Common Scene Definition Framework (CSDF) is developed, that serves as a superset/model representation of the target virtual world. Input modules are developed to populate the framework with the capabilities of the virtual world …

Carlos Cisneros: His Life, Career, & Contributions, Susan Kelly, Jerold Widdison

Water Matters!

State Senator Carlos Cisneros links New Mexico’s past, present and future.

Fine-Grained Reputation-Based Routing In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, Alma Cemerlic

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

Ad hoc networks are very helpful in situations when no fixed network infrastructure is available. They are especially important in emergency situations such as natural disasters and military conflicts. Most developed wireless ad hoc routing protocols are designed to discover and maintain an active path from source to destination with an assumption that every node is friendly and cooperative. However, it is possible that the participating nodes are selfish or malicious. A mechanism to evaluate reputation for each node is essential for the reliability and security of routing protocol in ad hoc networks. We propose a fine-grained reputation system for …