Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Categorizing “Muck” In The Indian River Lagoon, Florida, Based On Chemical, Physical And Biological Characteristics, Katherine Mae Beckett

Theses and Dissertations

During the past six decades, the thickness and areal extent of muck sediments have continually increased in the Indian River Lagoon (IRL), Florida. These sediments are anoxic, store and release nutrients, and destroy natural benthic habitats. The main objective of this research was to develop guidelines that help prioritize sites for muck removal based on the following: (1) biological abundance and diversity, (2) muck thickness, and (3) the physical and chemical composition of muck. Thinner muck deposits (20-40 cm), collected during two seasons at eight locations in the lagoon and adjacent creeks, had greater variability in sediment composition and ~5 …

Artificial Quantum Many-Body States In Complex Oxide Heterostructures At Two-Dimensional Limit, Xiaoran Liu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As the representative family of complex oxides, transition metal oxides, where the lattice,

charge, orbital and spin degrees of freedom are tightly coupled, have been at the forefront

of condensed matter physics for decades. With the advancement of state-of-the-art heteroepitaxial deposition techniques, it has been recognized that combining these oxides on the atomic scale, the interfacial region offers great opportunities to discover emergent phenomena and tune materials' functionality. However, there still lacks general guiding principles for experimentalists, following which one can design and fabricate artificial systems on demand. The main theme of this dissertation is to devise and propose some …

Automatic Assessment Of Environmental Hazards For Fall Prevention Using Smart-Cameras, Jeffrey Kutchka

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As technology advances in the field of Computer Vision, new applications will emerge. One device that has emerged is the smart-camera, a camera attached to an embedded system that can perform routines a regular camera could not, such as object or event detection. In this thesis we describe a smart-camera system we designed, implemented, and evaluated for fall prevention monitoring of at-risk people while in bed, whether it be for a hospital patient, nursing home resident, or at home elderly resident. The camera will give a nurse or caregiver environmental awareness of the at-risk person and notify them when that …

Soil And Plant Property Differences Among High-Yield Soybean Areas In Arkansas, Taylor Cass Adams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Continued achievement of soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] yields greater than 6719 kg ha-1 (100 bu ac-1) will depend on decreasing the yield gap, which is contingent on gathering more information regarding the soil physical, chemical, and microbiological environment and the main plant factors contributing to high-yield soybean. Therefore, understanding the main factor differences between high- and average-yield areas may provide insight for making management decisions to increase yields. The objectives of this study were i) to evaluate the effects of region and soil depth on soil property differences between high- and average-soybean-yielding areas, ii) to determine which soil properties …

Migration Ecology Of American Woodcock (Scolopax Minor), Joseph Daniel Moore

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Improving the understanding of American woodcock (Scolopax minor) migration ecology has been identified as a priority information need for woodcock management. Developments in remote tracking technology and analytical techniques present an opportunity to gain insight into woodcock migratory connectivity and migration phenology and to evaluate the degree in which the current two-region (Eastern and Central) basis for woodcock management represents migratory movements. To analyze woodcock migration using band return records, I excluded observations that took place during the migratory period. Using this dataset, 17.9% of records showed crossover between management regions, higher than the < 5% crossover found in studies including non-migratory band returns. During autumn migration, woodcock from the Central Region largely migrated to destinations within the Central Region, whereas woodcock from the Eastern Region migrated to destinations across their wintering range, mixing with individuals from the Central Region. Between 2013 and 2016, I deployed 75 satellite transmitters on woodcock. I tracked the migration paths of 61 woodcock and documented 88 woodcock migrations. Average migration duration was longer during spring migration (53 days) than during autumn migration (31 days) because woodcock made a higher number of close-together migratory stopovers, not because woodcock stayed at individual stopovers longer during spring migration. Woodcock captured in the Central Management Region used 2 primary migrations routes: a Western Route and a Central Route. The Western Route ran north-south, connecting the breeding and wintering grounds of the Central Management Region. The hourglass-shaped Central Route connected an area on the wintering grounds reaching from Texas to Florida, to sites throughout northeastern North America. Woodcock following the Central Route funneled between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi Alluvial Valley in western Tennessee during both autumn and spring migration. A higher than anticipated percentage (36%, n = 12) of marked woodcock captured in Texas and Louisiana and monitored during spring migration migrated to breeding-period sites in the Eastern Management Region, raising questions about the biological basis of managing woodcock as separate populations. The supplementary material includes woodcock capture information (Appendix I), information on individual stopovers (Appendix II), and migration maps for individual woodcock (Appendix III).

Role Of The Inner Shell Architecture On The Various Blinking States And Decay Dynamics Of Core-Shell And Core-Multishell Quantum Dots, Pooja Bajwa

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (quantum dots, QDs) have received much attention in recent years due to their uniquely size-tunable properties leading to a number of promising applications. Some of their most popular applications include their use as fluorescent probes in biology, as electro-optical components and in photovoltaic devices. CdSe-based QDs are particularly important because of their ease of synthesis, high photoluminescence quantum yields (PL QYs) across the whole visible spectrum and their photostabilty. Shelling of core QDs is usually carried out to improve their optical properties, minimize outer environmental effects on their properties, and avoid toxic element exposure to the environment. …

Just In Time Assembly (Jita) - A Run Time Interpretation Approach For Achieving Productivity Of Creating Custom Accelerators In Fpgas, Sen Ma

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The reconfigurable computing community has yet to be successful in allowing programmers to access FPGAs through traditional software development flows. Existing barriers that prevent programmers from using FPGAs include: 1) knowledge of hardware programming models, 2) the need to work within the vendor specific CAD tools and hardware synthesis. This thesis presents a series of published papers that explore different aspects of a new approach being developed to remove the barriers and enable programmers to compile accelerators on next generation reconfigurable manycore architectures. The approach is entitled Just In Time Assembly (JITA) of hardware accelerators. The approach has been defined …

Measuring Nonlinear Properties Of Graphene Thin Films Using Z-Scan Technique, Thekrayat Hassan Al Abdulaal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The nonlinear studies of two-dimensional (2D) nanomaterials, specifically graphene, are very significant since graphene is finding its usefulness in handling the enormous heat in nanoscale high-density power electronics. Graphene has emerged to be a promising nanomaterial as an excellent heat spreader due to its high thermal conductivity. However, the experimental nonlinear study of graphene materials and their application in developing future optoelectronic devices demands for more developed research.

The research objective is first to build a precise, and sensitive technique to investigate and understand the thermal nonlinear properties, including nonlinear refractive index (n2), nonlinear absorption coefficient (β), and thermo-optic coefficient …

Bioorthogonal Reactions: Synthesis And Evaluation Of Different Ligands In Copper Catalyzed Azide-Alkyne1,3-Dipolar Cycloaddition (Cuaac), Zainab Abdullah Almansaf

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Copper CatalyzedAzide-Alkyne1,3-Dipolar Cycloaddition (CuAAC) reaction has unique features that qualify it to be one of the best click reactions. Its applications have been shown in different aspects and for multiple purposes. The oxidative degradation of biological systems (labile proteins and live cells) is, however, generally recognized as the major problem when using this reaction in living systems. Reactive oxidation species can be easily produced in the presence of copper(II), ascorbate and air, and this is the main cause of toxicity. However, the uses of ligands have shown a major impact on reducing copper toxicity, protecting Cu(I) from the redox …

Sedimentary Petrology Of The Hartshorne Formation, Southeastern Arkoma Basin, Arkansas, Ruizhe Yin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Pennsylvanian Hartshorne Sandstone crops out in an east trending belt across central Arkansas immediately north of the Ouachita orogenic belt and south of the Boston Mountains. The unit, composed of massive to cross bedded sandstone ranging to 150m in thickness, was deposited by a west-flowing river system that extended from central Arkansas to southeastern Oklahoma. The source of the sediment has been extensively discussed but not completely established. The object of this thesis is to constrain the source area and terrain based on thin section mineralogy and texture. Thin sections were prepared from outcrops in the Arkoma Basin and …

Cover Crop Establishment And Potential Benefits To Arkansas Farmers, Ashley Elizabeth Humphreys

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Soybean farmers in Arkansas need best management practices (BMPs) that maximize the benefits of using cover crops including planting date and fertilization recommendations. An evaluation of cover crop species, planting dates, seeding rates, fertilizer rates, and N accumulation aids in providing these BMPs. The first objective of this research is to assess the effect of planting date on biomass production, as well as looking at the interaction of seeding rate or fertilizer rate for legumes or non-legumes, respectively, using Austrian winter pea (Pisum sativum), cereal rye (Secale cereale), black oats (Avena strigosa), wheat (Triticum aestivum), and tillage radish (Raphanus sativus). …

Impact Of Isp, Bpr, And Customization On Erp Performance In Manufacturing Smes Of Korea, Soon-Goo Hong, Keng Siau, Jong-Weon Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Purpose: This paper aims to assess how enterprise resource planning (ERP) performance of Korean small and medium enterprises in manufacturing differs according to different levels of business process reengineering (BPR), information strategic planning (ISP) and ERP customization. Design/methodology/approach: A questionnaire survey was carried out in this research. Responses from 96 small and medium manufacturing companies that have adopted ERP systems were analyzed. Findings: The results of this study suggest that ISP and BPR implementation are positively correlated to ERP performance. Originality/value: While consulting and customization costs have positive impacts on ERP performance, the level of customization does not influence performance. …

Validating Social Media Data For Automatic Persona Generation, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using personas during interactive design has considerable potential for product and content development. Unfortunately, personas have typically been a fairly static technique. In this research, we validate an approach for creating personas in real time, based on analysis of actual social media data in an effort to automate the generation of personas. We validate that social media data can be implemented as an approach for automating generating personas in real time using actual YouTube social media data from a global media corporation that produces online digital content. Using the organization's YouTube channel, we collect demographic data, customer interactions, and topical …

Zero++: Harnessing The Power Of Zero Appearances To Detect Anomalies In Large-Scale Data Sets, Guansong Pang, Kai Ming Ting, David Albrecht, Huidong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper introduces a new unsupervised anomaly detector called ZERO++ which employs the number of zero appearances in subspaces to detect anomalies in categorical data. It is unique in that it works in regions of subspaces that are not occupied by data; whereas existing methods work in regions occupied by data. ZERO++ examines only a small number of low dimensional subspaces to successfully identify anomalies. Unlike existing frequencybased algorithms, ZERO++ does not involve subspace pattern searching. We show that ZERO++ is better than or comparable with the state-of-the-art anomaly detection methods over a wide range of real-world categorical and numeric …

Unsupervised Feature Selection For Outlier Detection By Modelling Hierarchical Value-Feature Couplings, Guansong Pang, Longbing Cao, Ling Chen, Huan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Proper feature selection for unsupervised outlier detection can improve detection performance but is very challenging due to complex feature interactions, the mixture of relevant features with noisy/redundant features in imbalanced data, and the unavailability of class labels. Little work has been done on this challenge. This paper proposes a novel Coupled Unsupervised Feature Selection framework (CUFS for short) to filter out noisy or redundant features for subsequent outlier detection in categorical data. CUFS quantifies the outlierness (or relevance) of features by learning and integrating both the feature value couplings and feature couplings. Such value-to-feature couplings capture intrinsic data characteristics and …

Iterated Random Oracle: A Universal Approach For Finding Loss In Security Reduction, Fuchun Guo, Willy Susilo, Yi Mu, Rongmao Chen, Jianchang Lai, Guomin Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The indistinguishability security of a public-key cryptosystem can be reduced to a computational hard assumption in the random oracle model, where the solution to a computational hard problem is hidden in one of the adversary’s queries to the random oracle. Usually, there is a finding loss in finding the correct solution from the query set, especially when the decisional variant of the computational problem is also hard. The problem of finding loss must be addressed towards tight(er) reductions under this type. In EUROCRYPT 2008, Cash, Kiltz and Shoup proposed a novel approach using a trapdoor test that can solve the …

Orienteering Problem: A Survey Of Recent Variants, Solution Approaches And Applications, Aldy Gunawan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Pieter Vansteenwegen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Orienteering Problem (OP) has received a lot of attention in the past few decades. The OP is a routing problem in which the goal is to determine a subset of nodes to visit, and in which order, so that the total collected score is maximized and a given time budget is not exceeded. A number of typical variants has been studied, such as the Team OP, the (Team) OP with Time Windows and the Time Dependent OP. Recently, a number of new variants of the OP was introduced, such as the Stochastic OP, the Generalized OP, the Arc OP, …

D-Watch: Embracing "Bad" Multipaths For Device-Free Localization With Cots Rfid Devices, Ju Wang, Jie Xiong, Hongbo Jiang, Xiaojiang Chen, Dingyi Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Device-free localization, which does not require any device attached to the target is playing a critical role in many applications such as intrusion detection, elderly monitoring, etc. This paper introduces D-Watch, a device-free system built on top of low cost commodity-off-the-shelf (COTS) RFID hardware. Unlike previous works which consider multipaths detrimental, D-Watch leverages the "bad" multipaths to provide a decimeter level localization accuracy without offline training. D-Watch harnesses the angle-of-arrival (AoA) information from the RFID tags' backscatter signals. The key intuition is that whenever a target blocks a signal's propagation path, the signal power experiences a drop which can be …

‘Tweetboard’ – A Case Study Of Developing A Micro-Blogging Platform For Higher Education, Shao Cheh Joyce Hsu, Gan, Benjamin, Jin Lee, Shu Hui Sheryl Lim, Xie Yan Jeremy Lim, Thomas Menkhoff, Si Xian Sherman Tan, Charles Jason Woodard, Qiu Cheng Yap

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper reports experiences made at an Asian university in developing a social media platform based on Twitter in the context of a final year capstone project where information systems management students get an opportunity to solve ‘a real-world problem for a real client’. In this case study, the challenge was provided by a faculty member’s request for an interactive social media application which engages less outspoken students in class via a social medium they are familiar with: Twitter. We reconstruct the project’s evolution; describe the main features of the application called ‘TweetBoard’ and share lessons learned in developing a …

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption With Partially Hidden Access Structure And Its Application To Privacy-Preserving Electronic Medical Record System In Cloud Environment, Lixian Liu, Junzuo Lai, Robert H. Deng, Yingjiu Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the development of cloud computing, more and more sensitive data are uploaded to cloud by companies or individuals, which brings forth new challenges for outsourced data security and privacy. Ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) provides fine-grained access control of encrypted data in the cloud; in a CP-ABE scheme, an access structure, also referred to as ciphertext-policy, is sent along with a ciphertext explicitly, and anyone who obtains a ciphertext can know the access structure associated with the ciphertext. In certain applications, access structures contain very sensitive information and must be protected from everyone except the users whose private key attributes …

Domain Identification For Intention Posts On Online Social Media, Thai Le Luong, Quoc Tuan Truong, Hai-Trieu Dang, Xuan Hieu Phan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Today, more and more Internet users are willing to share their feeling, activities, and even their intention about what they plan to do on online social media. We can easily see posts like "I plan to buy an apartment this year", or "We are looking for a tour for 3 people to Nha Trang" on online forums or social networks. Recognizing those user intents on online social media is really useful for targeted advertising. However fully understanding user intents is a complicated and challenging process which includes three major stages: user intent filtering, intent domain identification, and intent parsing and …

Attacking Android Smartphone Systems Without Permissions, Mon Kywe Su, Yingjiu Li, Kunal Petal, Michael Grace

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Android requires third-party applications to request for permissions when they access critical mobile resources, such as users' personal information and system operations. In this paper, we present the attacks that can be launched without permissions. We first perform call graph analysis, component analysis and data-flow analysis on various parts of Android framework to retrieve unprotected APIs. Unprotected APIs provide a way of accessing resources without any permissions. We then exploit selected unprotected APIs and launch a number of attacks on Android phones. We discover that without requesting for any permissions, an attacker can access to device ID, phone service state, …

Lexicon Knowledge Extraction With Sentiment Polarity Computation, Zhaoxia Wang, Vincent Joo Chuan Tong, Pingcheng Ruan, Fang Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Sentiment analysis is one of the most popular natural language processing techniques. It aims to identify the sentiment polarity (positive, negative, neutral or mixed) within a given text. The proper lexicon knowledge is very important for the lexicon-based sentiment analysis methods since they hinge on using the polarity of the lexical item to determine a text's sentiment polarity. However, it is quite common that some lexical items appear positive in the text of one domain but appear negative in another. In this paper, we propose an innovative knowledge building algorithm to extract sentiment lexicon knowledge through computing their polarity value …

Metroeye: Smart Tracking Your Metro Rips Underground, Weixi Gu, Ming Jin, Zimu Zhou, Costas J. Spanos, Lin Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Metro has become the first choice of traveling for tourists and citizens in metropolis due to its efficiency and convenience. Yet passengers have to rely on metro broadcasts to know their locations because popular localization services (e.g. GPS and wireless localization technologies) are often inaccessible underground. To this end, we propose MetroEye, an intelligent smartphone-based tracking system for metro passengers underground. MetroEye leverages low-power sensors embedded in modern smartphones to record ambient contextual features, and infers the state of passengers (Stop, Running, and Interchange) during an entire metro trip using a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model. MetroEye further provides arrival …

Extending The Reach Of Directional Dark Matter Experiments Through Novel Detector Technologies, Nguyen S. Phan

Physics & Astronomy ETDs

Dark matter is believed to comprise over 80% of the matter in the Universe. Its composition could be in the form of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are predicted by extensions of the Standard Model, namely supersymmetric theories. Even though hints of its existence were detected in astronomical observations over eighty years ago, its detection through means other than the gravitational influence on observable luminous matter still eludes us.

Currently, there are many ongoing direct detection experiments, that aim to measure the signals left by the elastic scattering of WIMPs with nuclei in the detector target material. The detection …

Channel Sediment And Mining-Lead Storage In Flat River Creek, Old Lead Belt, Missouri, Ralph Joseph Hill

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Historical mining for lead (Pb) in the Old Lead Belt District introduced large volumes of tailings into nearby streams resulting in the large-scale contamination of channel bed and bar deposits in Big River which drains the southeastern Missouri Ozarks. Tailings pile sites have been remediated so that present contamination sources to the river are primarily from the remobilization of Pb stored in channel and floodplain deposits. This study examined the channel geomorphology and sediment geochemistry of Flat River Creek (FRC), a major tributary to the Big River which drains an area that includes three of the six major mines in …

Supplement: The Rate Of Binary Black Hole Mergers Inferred From Advanced Ligo Observations Surrounding Gw150914, B. P. Abbott, R. Abbott, T. D. Abbott, M. R. Abernathy, Mario C. Diaz, Soma Mukherjee, Volker Quetschke, Malik Rakhmanov

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Publications

This article provides supplemental information for a Letter reporting the rate of (BBH) coalescences inferred from 16 days of coincident Advanced LIGO observations surrounding the transient (GW) signal GW150914. In that work we reported various rate estimates whose 90% confidence intervals fell in the range 2-600 Gpc-3yr-1. Here we give details on our method and computations, including information about our search pipelines, a derivation of our likelihood function for the analysis, a description of the astrophysical search trigger distribution expected from merging BBHs, details on our computational methods, a description of the effects and our model for calibration uncertainty, and …

Cross-Spectral Biometric Performance Analysis On High-Resolution Face Images, Praveen Kumar Pandian Shanmuganathan

Theses and Dissertations

Biometrics is increasingly being used to authenticate the identity of individuals in critical use case devices like smart phones, laptops, and several other access-control systems in our day-to-day lives. Additionally, biometrics is also used in forensic and security sensitive areas to detect and identify suspects involved in bombings, robberies, and several police investigations. In each of these critical scenarios, the high-quality full-frontal face images of the subjects are not accurately captured as those subjects do not intend to register their identity to the Closed-Circuit Cameras. Hence in such cases, identification of the suspects becomes difficult even though we have the …

Chemical Forms Of Nitrogen In Runoff From Diverse Florida Watersheds, Jessica Emily Voelker

Theses and Dissertations

Watershed use along the Indian River Lagoon (IRL) on the central east coast of Florida has changed drastically during the past century, bringing with it declining water quality, eutrophication, hypoxia and fish kills. The decline of the lagoon has been directly linked to nutrient overloading; however, the sources and chemical forms of nutrients to the IRL are still not well constrained. This study was designed to determine how watershed land use impacts concentrations and fluxes of the various forms of dissolved nitrogen to the IRL. Five tributaries to the IRL were sampled monthly from July 2015 – September 2016. Storm …

The Tolerance Of Benthic Infauna To Fine-Grained Organic Rich Sediments In A Shallow Subtropical Estuary, Daniel Christopher Hope

Theses and Dissertations

Fine-grained organic-rich sediments (FGORS) from anthropogenic impacts are a growing concern for bays and estuaries around the world. This study explores the relationships between infaunal community diversity and species’ abundances with FGORS in the Indian River Lagoon and its tributaries. To examine these potential relationships, infauna were collected monthly using a Petit Ponar grab at 16 stations in the central Indian River Lagoon from October 2015 to August 2016. Abundant taxa in these sediments include polychaete worms (e.g., the polychaete Nereis succinea), molluscs (e.g., clam Parastarte triquetra), and arthropods (e.g., the tanaid Leptochelia dubia) with densities as high as 5.3x10⁴ …