Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Optimization Of Detergent-Mediated Reconstitution Of Influenza A M2 Protein Into Proteoliposomes, Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch, Margaret H. Bost , '17, Tae H. Kim , '14, Bryan M. Green , '16, Douglas Stuart Arbuckle , '17, Carl H. Grossman, Kathleen P. Howard

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

We report the optimization of detergent-mediated reconstitution of an integral membrane-bound protein, full-length influenza M2 protein, by direct insertion into detergent-saturated liposomes. Detergent-mediated reconstitution is an important method for preparing proteoliposomes for studying membrane proteins, and must be optimized for each combination of protein and membrane constituents used. The purpose of the reconstitution was to prepare samples for site-directed spin-labeling electron paramagnetic resonance (SDSL-EPR) studies. Our goals in optimizing the protocol were to minimize the amount of detergent used, reduce overall proteoliposome preparation time, and confirm the removal of all detergent. The liposomes were comprised of (1-palmitoyl-2-oleyl-sn-glycero-phosphocholine (POPC) and 1-palmitoyl-2-oleyl-sn-glycero-3-[phospho-rac-(1-glycerol)] …

Deepsign: A Deep-Learning Architecture For Sign Language, Jai Amrish Shah

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Sign languages are used by deaf people for communication. In sign languages, humans use hand gestures, body, facial expressions and movements to convey meaning. Humans can easily learn and understand sign languages, but automatic sign language recognition for machines is a challenging task. Using recent advances in the field of deep-learning, we introduce a fully automated deep-learning architecture for isolated sign language recognition. Our architecture tries to address three problems: 1) Satisfactory accuracy with limited data samples 2) Reducing chances of over-fitting when the data is limited 3) Automating recognition of isolated signs. Our architecture uses deep convolutional encoder-decoder architecture …

Classification Of Clinical Narratives Using Convolutional Neural Network, Nikit Rajiv Lonari

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Patient safety is a key aspect for good consumer care. When an individual is hospitalized or receives medication the family wants the patient safety to be above all factors. For instance, a drug can do both either cure the disease or perhaps, give rise to an adverse event. A drug administered for an indicated condition has substantial power to reduce or cure a disease and further to prevent it from happening again in the future but at the risk of side effects. At present, there are several methods in patient safety and in particular in the area of signal detection …

Towards End-To-End Semi-Supervised Deep Learning For Drug Discovery, Xiaoyu Zhang

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Observing the recent progress in Deep Learning, the employment of AI is surging to accelerate drug discovery and cut R&D costs in the last few years. However, the success of deep learning is attributed to large-scale clean high-quality labeled data, which is generally unavailable in drug discovery practices. In this thesis, we address this issue by proposing an end-to-end deep learning framework in a semi supervised learning fashion. That is said, the proposed deep learning approach can utilize both labeled and unlabeled data. While labeled data is of very limited availability, the amount of available unlabeled data is generally huge. …

Dwrelu : Double Weighted Rectifier Linear Unit An Activation Function With Trainable Scaling Parameter, Bhaskar Chandra Trivedi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Deep Neural Network have become very popular for computer vision application in recent years. At the same time, it remains important to understand the different implementation choices that need to be made when designing a neural network and to thoroughly investigate existing and novel alternatives for those choices. One of those choices is the activation function. The ReLU activation function is a widely used activation function. It discards all the values below zero and keeps the ones greater than zero. Variations such as Leaky ReLU and Parametric ReLU do not discard values, so that gradiants are nonzero for the entire …

Health Monitoring Of Atlas Data Center Clusters And Failure Analysis, Meenakshi Balasubramanian

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Monitoring the health of data center clusters is an integral part of any industrial facility. ATLAS is one of the High Energy Physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. ATLAS DDM (Distributed Data Management) is a system that manages data transfer, staging, deletions and experimental data on the LHC grid. Currently, the DDM system relies on Rucio software, with Cloud based object storage and No-SQL solutions. It is a cumbersome process in the current system, to fetch and analyze the transfer, staging and deletion metrics of a specific site for any regional center. In this thesis, a …

Monitoring Of Swt2 Data Clusters For The Atlas Experiment, Antara Ray

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Monitoring of the South West Tier 2 RSEs is done by CERN with the help of Rucio. The challenge faced by the team monitoring the servers at the University of Texas site was that the monitoring data is pictorially represented and provided to them in GIF format. In this work we focus on creating an interactive site that will not only monitor the data at the local RSEs but also create a platform to analyze the data storage systems. It turn it will also create alerts whenever during monitoring an aberration from expected behavior is noticed either in the storage …

Topological And Feature Based Identification Of Hole Boundaries In Point Cloud Data And Differentiation Between Surface And Physical Holes, Aaqif Muhtasim

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

With the advent of autonomous agents becoming prominent in everyday lives, the importance of processing the surroundings into understandable features becomes more and more important. 3D point clouds play a major role in the perception of such agents and thus having the ability to correctly decipher features from point clouds is crucial to the planning of actions that the agent would need to undertake. This thesis analyzes holes found in point clouds. Based on two approaches that center around topological data analysis and local point set features respectively. It studies how each of the methods works and how a combination …

Generating An Adaptive Path Using Rrt Sampling And Potential Functions With Directional Nearest Neighbors, Sandeep Chahal

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Planning algorithms have attained omnipresent successes in several fields including robotics, animation, manufacturing, drug design, computational biology and aerospace applications. Path Planning is an essential component for autonomous robots. The problem involves searching the configuration space and constructing a desired collision-free path that connects two states (the start and the goal) for a robot to gradually navigate from one state to another. In global path planners, the complete path is computed prior to the robot set off. Sampling based planning like Rapidly Expanding Random Trees (RRT) and Probabilistic Road Maps (PRM) used for single or multi-query planning has gained popularity …

Text Mining On Twitter Data To Evaluate Sentiment, Srijanee Niyogi

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Social media platforms have been a major part of our daily lives. But with the freedom of expression there is no way one can check whether the posts/tweets/expressions are classified on which polarity. Since Twitter is one of the biggest social platforms for microblogging, hence the experiment was done on this platform. There are several topics that are popular over the internet like sports, politics, finance, technology are chosen as the source of the experiment. These tweets were collected over a span of time for more than 2 months via a cron job. Every tweet can be divided into three …

The Monadnock Volume 60, December 2018, Clark University Geographical Society

The Monadnock (Clark Geographical Society)

Volume 60 of The Monadnock. The Monadnock was the alumni magazine of the Clark University Geographical Society (1927-1985) (2014-present).

Retinex-Based Visibility Enhancement System For Inclement Weather With Tracking And Distance Estimation Capabilities, Marwan S. Alluhaidan

Dissertations

Road conditions affected by weather are well known to have an impact on the number of vehicle accidents and fatalities, due to low- to no-visibility conditions. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, there are more than 1,259,000 crashes each year. On average, 6,000 people are killed and more than 445,000 people are injured annually due to severe weather conditions. These accidents could be significantly reduced if real-time visibility enhancement systems were made available. However, eliminating the impact of weather conditions on visibility is still lacking and beyond our control. The time has come to develop technology that is capable …

Radiative Double Electron Capture (Rdec) By Fully-Stripped Fluorine Ions In Collisions With Nitrogen, Nuwan Sisira Kumara

Dissertations

Radiative double electron capture (RDEC) by highly-stripped ions in collisions with atomic targets is a fundamental process that can be used to study electron-electron correlation, the interaction between two electrons, in the vicinity of the Coulomb field of a bare ion. In this process two electrons from the target are captured to bound states of the projectile with the simultaneous emission of a single photon. RDEC is closely related to the well-known one-step atomic process of radiative electron capture (REC), in which a target electron is captured to the projectile and a photon is simultaneously emitted. REC and RDEC can …

Comparison Mining From Text, Maksim Tkachenko

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online product reviews are important factors of consumers' purchase decisions. They invade more and more spheres of our life, we have reviews on books, electronics, groceries, entertainments, restaurants, travel experiences, etc. More than 90 percent of consumers read online reviews before they purchase products as reported by various consumers surveys. This observation suggests that product review information enhances consumer experience and helps them to make better-informed purchase decisions. There is an enormous amount of online reviews posted on e-commerce platforms, such as Amazon, Apple, Yelp, TripAdvisor. They vary in information and may be written with different experiences and preferences.

If …

Building A Versatile Deduplication System, Zhichao Yan

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the development of the Internet and information technology, a large amount of unstructured data is generated and stored in various storage systems. In particular, data reduction techniques such as compression and deduplication have become an effective way to address the combined challenges of explosive growth in data volume but lagging network bandwidth growth to increase the space and bandwidth efficiency of various storage systems. However, we have found that existing deduplication systems cannot effectively process compressed data and image data because existing deduplication systems only analyze the hash value of the bitstream to detect redundant data. At the same …

Message From The Vice President Of Research, The Mcnair Team

McNair Scholars Research Journal

No abstract provided.

Online Bioanalytical Mass Spectrometry Methods For Analysis Of Small And Large Biomolecules Using One- And Two-Dimensional Liquid Chromatography, Yehia Zakaria Baghdady

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

In recent years, the innovation in biomarkers and biotherapeutics has increased the demand for state-of-the-art analytical platforms to achieve reliable and accurate discoveries and quantitative analysis methods. The challenges in their determinations are not limited to the large number of small and large biomolecules but also involve the great heterogeneity in chemical properties and abundance of those analytes. Liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry have advanced significantly to be the most common platform for analyzing biological samples. However, there are still many unmet challenges that that require application of novel bioanalytical methods to fill many gaps in online sample preparation, chromatographic …

Fundamental Studies On Ultrafast Separations And Development Of Geopolymer Based Base-Stable Stationary Phase Media, Rasangi Madhumali Wimalasinghe K.K.D.G.

Chemistry & Biochemistry Dissertations - Archive

This thesis consists of two sections. In the first section fundamentals of ultrafast separations is discussed. Ultrafast chromatography is an emerging area of separation science due to its applicability in high-throughput separations and purifications. State of the art superficially porous particles packed short and ultrashort columns are utilized to obtain the amenable speed and chromatographic efficiency required in ultrafast chromatography. Modifications to state of the art HPLC and UHPLC instrumentation required in cases where ultrafast separations are needed. Sub-second liquid chromatographic separations and ultrafast separations of biomolecules and complex mixtures are demonstrated. Fundamentals behind the analytical chromatographic column packing are …

Defending Neural Networks Against Adversarial Examples, Armon Barton

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Deep learning is becoming a technology central to the safety of cars, the security of networks, and the correct functioning of many other types of systems. Unfortunately, attackers can create adversarial examples, small perturbations to inputs that trick deep neural networks into making a misclassification. Researchers have explored various defenses against this attack, but many of them have been broken. The most robust approaches are Adversarial Training and its extension, Adversarial Logit Pairing, but Adversarial Training requires generating and training on adversarial examples from any possible attack. This is not only expensive, but it is inherently vulnerable to novel attack …

Large-Scale Deep Learning With Application In Medical Imaging And Bio-Informatics, Zheng Xu

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

With the recent advancement of the deep learning technology in the artificial intelligence area, nowadays people's lives have been drastically changed. However, the success of deep learning technology mostly relies on large-scale high-quality data-sets. The complexity of deeper model and larger scale datasets have brought us significant challenges. Inspired by this trend, in this dissertation, we focus on developing efficient and effective large-scale deep learning techniques in solving real-world problems, like cell detection in hyper-resolution medical image or drug screening from millions of compound candidates. With respect to the hyper-resolution medical imaging cell detection problem, the challenges are mainly the …

Innate Immunity, The Hepatic Extracellular Matrix, And Liver Injury: Mathematical Modeling Of Metastatic Potential And Tumor Development In Alcoholic Liver Disease., Shanice V. Hudson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The overarching goals of the current work are to fill key gaps in the current understanding of alcohol consumption and the risk of metastasis to the liver. Considering the evidence this research group has compiled confirming that the hepatic matrisome responds dynamically to injury, an altered extracellular matrix (ECM) profile appears to be a key feature of pre-fibrotic inflammatory injury in the liver. This group has demonstrated that the hepatic ECM responds dynamically to alcohol exposure, in particular, sensitizing the liver to LPS-induced inflammatory damage. Although the study of alcohol in its role as a contributing factor to oncogenesis and …

Investigating The Unique Reactivity Of Novel Hx (X=Cl, Br) Reagents With Alkenes And Alkynes., Rene E. Ebule

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The addition of hydrogen halides to carbon-carbon unsaturated systems is a classic synthetic transformation that gives rise to a variety of halogenated products as well as building blocks.¹ The different routes to achieve hydrohalogenation make use of the hydrogen halides either in the gaseous form² or in solution³, or their surrogates⁴. Only second to dihalogens, hydrogen halides are the most atom efficient source of halogenation. However, hydrogen halides are reactive gases at ambient temperature, posing a major challenge in their application. Handling gaseous hydrogen halide reagents requires expert knowledge and specialized equipment. We have …

A Transfer Learning Approach For Sentiment Classification., Omar Abdelwahab

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The idea of developing machine learning systems or Artificial Intelligence agents that would learn from different tasks and be able to accumulate that knowledge with time so that it functions successfully on a new task that it has not seen before is an idea and a research area that is still being explored. In this work, we will lay out an algorithm that allows a machine learning system or an AI agent to learn from k different domains then uses some or no data from the new task for the system to perform strongly on that new task. In order …

Improving Accuracy Of The Edgebox Approach, Kamna Yadav

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Object region detection plays a vital role in many domains ranging from self-driving cars to lane detection, which heavily involves the task of object detection. Improving the performance of object region detection approaches is of great importance and therefore is an active ongoing research in Computer Vision. Traditional sliding window paradigm has been widely used to identify hundreds of thousands of windows (covering different scales, angles, and aspect ratios for objects) before the classification step. However, it is not only computationally expensive but also produces relatively low accuracy in terms of the classifier output by providing many negative samples. Object …

An Examination Of What Motivates Utah Residents To Adopt The Practice Of Rainwater Harvesting, D. Wayne Honaker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Although most of the earth is covered in water, a very limited amount of that water is fresh water, which is essential to our survival. Therefore, it is imperative that we do all that is possible to conserve and protect our extremely limited water resources, especially in arid regions such as the American West. While there are many ways and means to protecting and preserving our water resources, this thesis focuses on the strategy of rainwater harvesting (RWH) as it is done throughout the state of Utah. RWH is defined as taking the precipitation that falls on our built structures …

Larval Food Limitation In A Speyeria Butterfly (Nymphalidae): How Many Butterflies Can Be Supported?, Ryan I. Hill, Cassidi E. Rush, John Mayberry

College of the Pacific Faculty Articles

For herbivorous insects the importance of larval food plants is obvious, yet the role of host abundance and density in conservation are relatively understudied. Populations of Speyeria butterflies across North America have declined and Speyeria adiaste is an imperiled species endemic to the southern California Coast Ranges. In this paper, we study the link between the food plant Viola purpurea quercetorum and abundance of its herbivore Speyeria adiaste clemencei to better understand the butterfly’s decline and aid in restoration of this and other Speyeria species. To assess the degree to which the larval food plant limits adult abundance of S. …

Assessing Ground Penetrating Radar's Ability To Image Subsurface Characteristics Of Icy Debris Fans In Alaska And New Zealand, Robert W. Jacob, Jeffrey M. Trop, R. Craig Kochel

Faculty Journal Articles

Icy debris fans have recently been described as fan shaped depositional landforms associated with (or formed during) deglaciation, however, the subsurface characteristics remain essentially undocumented. We used ground penetrating radar (GPR) to non-invasively investigate the subsurface characteristics of icy debris fans (IDFs) at McCarthy Glacier, Alaska, USA and at La Perouse Glacier, South Island of New Zealand. IDFs are largely unexplored paraglacial landforms in deglaciating alpine regions at the mouths of bedrock catchments between valley glaciers and icecaps. IDFs receive deposits of mainly ice and minor lithic material through different mass-flow processes, chiefly ice avalanche and to a lesser extent …

Correction: Spatio-Temporal Variability Of Processes Across Antarctic Ice-Bed-Ocean Interfaces (Nature Communications Doi: 10.1038/S41467-018-04583-0), Florence Colleoni, Laura De Santis, Christine S. Siddoway, Andrea Bergamasco, Nicholas R. Golledge, Gerrit Lohmann, Sandra Passchier, Martin J. Siegert

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The original version of this Article contained an error in the spelling of the author Florence Colleoni, which was incorrectly given as Florence Colloni. This has been corrected in both the PDF and HTML versions of the Article.

Shelter Cove, Ca Fishing Community Sustainability Plan, Lisa Wise Consulting, Inc., Humboldt State University

Local Reports and Publications

The Shelter Cove Fishing Community Sustainability Plan (FCSP) is the product of a strong collaborative partnership among the fishing community, Humboldt State University, civic leaders, elected officials, and local business owners and operators. The project was funded by a generous grant from Saltonstall-Kennedy Grant Program, awarded in September of 2016.

The FCSP is a powerful example of the Shelter Cove fishing community’s capacity to establish key partnerships, identify opportunities and constraints, procure funding and engage in strategic planning. The FCSP culminates with a list of Recommendations which reflect the highest priorities needs aimed at the success and resilience of the …

Geological And Environmental Sciences - 2018

Geological and Environmental Sciences News

• Greetings from the Chair
• Faculty Updates
• Welcome to Dinosaur Park - New modules and upcoming additions to the park
• Hydrogeology Field Course
• CoreKids
• Field Course in Marquette
• Advisory Council
• Alumni Achievement Award
• MGRRE (Michigan Geological Repository for Research and Education)
• Michigan Geological Survey
• Student updates - SEG, AAPG, Geology club, Welcome new graduate students
• Department Achievements - Grants, Donors, Awards, and Publications