Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

National Security & Climate Change, Madison Mortensen

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

Certain scientific subjects are often divisive or technical, which makes those topics difficult to discuss with audiences outside the scientific sphere. One way of getting around this obstacle is to cater scientific communication to different target audiences to cut through any audience biases. In order to accomplish that, a communicator needs to understand the relationship between audiences' worldviews, and what they know, feel, and do regarding the subject at hand, and then how that relationship influences the types of media audiences trust and to which they respond positively. The following study investigates the worldviews of a military audience with respect …

(2,3)-Cordial Digraphs, Jonathan Mousley, Manuel Santana

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

This presentation is about graphs (the vertex-edge kind, not the y = f(x) kind). A graph is a mathematical object that represents objects and some relationship among them; the objects are represented by vertices and the relationships are represented by the edges. Graphs have applications in just about every field imaginable, including artificial intelligence, social network theory, and parallel computing theory. A directed graph is a type of graph used to represent relationships that are one-sided or not symmetric. We discuss a graph labeling scheme on directed graphs introduced by LeRoy Beasley called a (2,3)-cordial labeling. In …

Synthesizing Octahedral Polyomavirus Capsids For Cryogenic Electron Microscopy, Miles Robertson

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

Polyomavirus capsids are polymorphic under different chemical conditions. These capsids have been synthesized artificially using purified VP1, the primary building block of the capsid. Five VP1 proteins come together and form a highly stable structure called a pentamer, and these pentamers can form capsids (Figure 1). Depending on chemical conditions, the capsids can form three distinct sizes: T=7, octahedral and icosahedral (Figure 2). Only one form is found in infectious virions, and its structure has been well studied. However, no high-resolution structure of the octahedral capsid currently exists. The goal of this research is to solve the structure of the …

Dogs In The Home Improve The Quality Of Life Of The People Living Inside, Tanner Stevenson

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

This poster explores how dogs improve the quality of life of the people they interact with. Regardless of underlying issues that the human faces, every dog helps to improve the situation of that human. From service animals helping to improve the quality of life of their owners in other ways than what meets the eye, to dogs improving the chance of allergy immunity for children, dogs impact the lives of humans for good. This project explores the way that studies have proven the worth of the dog in the home.

Enabling Mars Farms Through Microbial Remediation Of Wastewater, Tyler Wallentine

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

This research evaluates the capacity of photoheterotrophic purple non-sulfur bacteria to utilize wastewater organics to grow and produce nitrogen-rich biomass. Inhibitory components of wastewater are determined. A scaled up production system is designed and utilized to culture bacteria in wastewater. The application of this technology in the production of agriculturally viable amounts of nitrogen-rich biomass is evaluated in the context of a Mars mission and enabling agriculture in a barren environment.

Isolation And Purification Of Bacterial Species From Rhizosphere Of Native Plant Ceanothus Velutinus (Snowbrush), Katherine Webb, Hayden Johns

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

Due to the ever-changing climate, plants face stressors that limit their growth. Therefore it is vital to find new ways to protect plants from biotic and abiotic stressors such as pathogen infection, drought, heavy metal poisoning, and salinity. With an increasing population, limiting the effects of stress on plant growth and development for agriculture is vital. One approach to this is focusing on beneficial plant-microbe interaction, such as plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR). These bacteria are found in the rhizosphere- the soil that is attached to the roots of a plant. Various PGPRs share a symbiotic relationship with plants and help …

Lsomp: Large Scale Ordinance Mining Portal, Xu Du, Matthew Kowalski, Aparna S. Varde, Boxiang Dong

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We propose a novel scalable Web portal called LSOMP (Large Scale Ordinance Mining Portal) to analyze ordinances and their tweets (of the order of thousands and millions). It entails commonsense knowledge (CSK) and natural language processing (NLP), disseminating ordinance-tweet mining results via interactive graphics and Question Answering (QA).

A Comparison Of The Efficacy Of Methane-Oxidizing Alternative Daily Landfill Covers And Policy Recommendations For Landfill Regulatory Agencies, Eric Lara

Master's Projects and Capstones

Methane (CH4) is a potent greenhouse gas (GHG) that has 28-36 times the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) over a 100-year timespan. Recent remote sensing research conducted by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Scientific Aviation has indicated that the working face of landfills are sectors of much higher methane emissions than previously considered. A working face location, which is the area of the landfill where daily waste is deposited, lacks the engineering controls present on the rest of the landfill. Controls such as gas collection and extraction wells and substantial covers to ensure surface integrity for methane leaks are …

The Age And Origin Of Precambrian Orthogneiss Of The Grouse Creek Block, Northern Utah And Southern Idaho, Skadi Kobe

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

New geochronologic and isotopic analyses from the Grouse Creek block (GC) provide insight into the assembly of western Laurentia during the late Archean to Paleoproterozoic and establish the influence of the GC in the evolution of Yellowstone-Snake River Plain hotspot magmatism in the central Snake River Plain. The GC is primarily exposed in the Albion-Raft River-Grouse Creek metamorphic core complex of northern Utah and southern Idaho and includes a complex assemblage of orthogneiss, schist, amphibolite, and metasediments intruded by Oligocene plutons and overlain by Cenozoic sedimentary units. Many investigations of the GC have focused on the structural evolution of the …

Isolation Of Halotolerant Bacteria From The Rhizosphere Of Ceanothus Velutinus May Lead To Contributions In Plant Health In Saline Conditions, Jacob Davis

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

The recent rise in the average global temperature has been a driving force over the past few years for rising soil salinity. This presents an especially hostile environment to many plant species that may not have previously been exposed to these conditions. The rhizosphere, which is a layer of soil attached to the roots of a plant, contains microorganisms that contribute to the plants' abiotic and biotic stress resistance. These microorganisms are known as Plant Growth Promoting Rhizobacteria (PGPR). These can play a key role in contributing to plant stress resistance. Some native plants have shown a strong ability to …

Galactic Sources In Gamma-Ray Diffuse Emission, Melissa Rasmussen

Fall Student Research Symposium 2020

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected hundreds of Galactic gamma-ray sources, most of them pulsars. But the Galaxy contains tens of thousands of such sources which are still undetected due to their low flux, or because of conflation of the foreground with sources. Characterizing the general properties of detected sources would allow us to estimate the contribution to the diffuse Galactic emission from these undetected sources and in turn it would help the detection of new sources and even searches for dark matter. We present updates on our long-term effort to characterize the general properties of Galactic gamma-ray …

2d-Att: Causal Inference For Mobile Game Organic Installs With 2-Dimensional Attentional Neural Network, Boxiang Dong, Hui Bill Li, Yang Ryan Wang, Rami Safadi

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the mobile gaming industry, organic installs refer to downloads that cannot be attributed to any advertising channel and thus do not introduce upfront user acquisition (UA) cost. Understanding the causal factors on organic installs is of vital importance for a game's ecosystem, as such knowledge can help bring in more organic users, who tend to be more loyal and active. A major challenge in discovering the causal effects is the potential temporal lag between an UA operation and the growth in organic installs. In this paper, we solve the problem by using a deep attentional neural network to analyze …

Item-Based Collaborative Filtering And Association Rules For A Baseline Recommender In E-Commerce, Jessica Lourenco, Aparna S. Varde

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

In the ever-growing data-driven world today, data increases in many forms, e.g. e-commerce sites uploading new products, streaming services adding TV shows and movies, and music platforms uploading new songs. It would be highly infeasible for end users to quickly browse all this data. Hence recommender systems can benefit end users (individuals as well as companies) in efficiently finding suitable products. Rather than making end users search through a vast array of items, recommender systems can suggest suitable items to users based on popularity of the items and the respective users' buying behavior. Accordingly, in this paper we explore two …

Transfer Learning For Decision Support In Covid-19 Detection From A Few Images In Big Data, Divydharshini Karthikeyan, Aparna S. Varde, Weitian Wang

Department of Computer Science Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) has spread rapidly amongst countries all around the globe. Compared to the rise in cases, there are few Covid-19 testing kits available. Due to the lack of testing kits for the public, it is useful to implement an automated AI-based E-health decision support system as a potential alternative method for Covid-19 detection. As per medical examinations, the symptoms of Covid-19 could be somewhat analogous to those of pneumonia, though certainly not identical. Considering the enormous number of cases of Covid-19 and pneumonia, and the complexity of the related images stored, the data pertaining to this problem …

Instrumentation And Application Of Image-Charge Detection Of Electrospray-Charged Microparticles And Microdroplets, Jiuzhi Gao

Theses and Dissertations

Image-charge detection is emerging as an important tool to analyze heavy and heterogeneous samples because of its unique advantages in measuring highly charged microparticles. Conventional image-charge detection instruments include at least three fundamental components: an ionization source, an aerodynamic particle delivery system, and an image-charge detector. Here I report research efforts that investigated the mechanisms of image-charge detection and proposed some instrumental developments of these components to suit specific research purposes. In Chapter 2, I report an investigation of the electrospray ionization (ESI) mechanism based on an observation that a certain portion of charged particles generated with an ESI source …

Policy Changes Impact In Deforestation Of The Brazilian Amazon, Iara Silva Jaques

Master's Projects and Capstones

Since discovered and inhabited, the Brazilian Amazon has been explored and impacted negatively by human activities. The conversion of forest to pastureland and farmland, as well as mining activities, road opening, wood and ore extraction and fire are historically the main causes of environmental damages and forest loss in the region. This project overviewed the latest changes in environmental policy and practices towards environmental protection conducted by the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, since he took office in 2019, and analyzed the progress of deforestation in the recent years under the new federal administration. Geographic Information System analysis were used to …

Synthesis Of Structurally Diverse Molecular Scaffolds Enabled By Protected Oxyallyl Cations, Joshua Andrew Malone

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on the synthesis of diverse molecular scaffolds through the use of protected oxyallyl cation intermediates. Chapter One provides background on the generation and applications of oxyallyl and silyloxyallyl cations, while focusing on the direct nucleophilic capture of theses intermediates to generate functionalized ketones and silylenolates. Chapter Two depicts our approach to generate six-membered silyloxyallyl cations through the use of mild Brønsted acid activation. Regioselective nucleophilic capture of these intermediates successfully produced diverse a,a’-substituted silylenol ethers enabled by polar solvent and residual water.

Chapter three details strategies to generate 1,4-dicarbonyl compounds, focusing on the capture of cationic intermediates …

Distributed De Novo Assembler For Large-Scale Long-Read Datasets, Sayan Goswami, Kisung Lee, Seung Jong Park

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Third-generation DNA sequencing technologies such as single-molecule real-time sequencing (SMRT) and nanopore sequencing have the potential to fill the gaps in the existing genome databases since the raw sequences produced by these machines are much longer than those of previous generations and therefore result in more contiguous assemblies. However, these long reads have a high error rate, which makes the assembly process computationally challenging. Moreover, since existing long-read assemblers are designed to run on a single machine, they either take days to complete or run out of memory on even moderate-sized datasets. In this paper, we present a distributed long-read …

Understanding The Role Of Atom Trapping In The Evolution Of Hydrocarbon Transformation Catalyst Morphology, Griffin Alexander Canning

Chemistry and Chemical Biology ETDs

Converting alkanes to other, more chemically and economically valuable molecules requires catalysts that can survive elevated temperatures and highly reducing environments. These environments can cause many metal-nanoparticle based catalysts to sinter rapidly, causing a loss of activity. They must also tolerate the coke formation, as well, since coke can restrict access to active sites by gas phase molecules, thus lowering catalytic activity. While there are routes to improve both the sinter and coke resistance of catalysts, an alternative strategy is to develop a protocol for regenerating the activity of the catalyst in question when coke formation or sintering becomes problematic. …

Addendum For The Article Radio Graceful Labelling Of Graphs, Laxman Saha, Alamgir Rahaman Basunia

Theory & Applications of Graphs

Additional references listed for the article: Saha, Laxman and Basunia, Alamgir Rahaman (2020) "Radio Graceful Labelling of Graphs," Theory and Applications of Graphs: Vol. 7: Iss. 1, Article 7. DOI: 10.20429/tag.2020.070107

A - Separately Subharmonic Functions., Sevdiyor Akramovich Imomkulov, S.M. Abdikodirov, R. Sharipov

Central Asian Problems of Modern Science and Education

In this work we give a definition of a -separately subharmonic function

Approximate Solution Of An Initial-Boundary Value Problem For An Nonhomogeneous Second-Order Differential Equation Of Mixed Type With Two Degenerate Lines, Yashin Komilovich Khudayberganov

Central Asian Problems of Modern Science and Education

This work is devoted to the study of an approximate solution of the initial-boundary value problem for the second order mixed type nonhomogeneous differential equation with two degenerate lines. Similar equations have many different applications, for example, boundary value problems for mixed type equations are applicable in various fields of the natural sciences: in problems of laser physics, in magneto hydrodynamics, in the theory of infinitesimal bindings of surfaces, in the theory of shells, in predicting the groundwater level, in plasma modeling, and in mathematical biology. In this paper, based on the idea of A.N. Tikhonov, the conditional correctness of …

Cartesian Product Of Regular Parabolic Manifolds., Alimardon Atamuratov

Central Asian Problems of Modern Science and Education

We consider the regular parabolic manifold X and polynomials on it. It is proved regularity of Cartesian product of regular parabolic manifolds and described polynomials.

Leveraging Image Analysis To Compute 3d Plant Phenotypes Based On Voxel-Grid Plant Reconstruction, Sruti Das Choudhury, Srikanth Maturu, Ashok Samal, Vincent Stoerger, Tala Awada

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

High throughput image-based plant phenotyping facilitates the extraction of morphological and biophysical traits of a large number of plants non-invasively in a relatively short time. It facilitates the computation of advanced phenotypes by considering the plant as a single object (holistic phenotypes) or its components, i.e., leaves and the stem (component phenotypes). The architectural complexity of plants increases over time due to variations in self-occlusions and phyllotaxy, i.e., arrangements of leaves around the stem. One of the central challenges to computing phenotypes from 2-dimensional (2D) single view images of plants, especially at the advanced vegetative stage in presence of self-occluding …

The Local Stability Of A Modified Multi-Strain Sir Model For Emerging Viral Strains, Miguel Fudolig, Reka Howard

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

We study a novel multi-strain SIR epidemic model with selective immunity by vaccination. A newer strain is made to emerge in the population when a preexisting strain has reached equilbrium. We assume that this newer strain does not exhibit cross-immunity with the original strain, hence those who are vaccinated and recovered from the original strain become susceptible to the newer strain. Recent events involving the COVID-19 virus shows that it is possible for a viral strain to emerge from a population at a time when the influenza virus, a well-known virus with a vaccine readily available, is active in a …

Usu Professor David Rosenberg Spearheads Asce Efforts To Encourage Research Reproducibility, Utah Water Research Laboratory

News

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently announced a new program with the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management that will recognize and reward authors who make their research results more reproducible. As an associate editor at ASCE and Professor in civil and environmental engineering at USU and the Utah Water Research Laboratory (UWRL) at USU, Dr. David Rosenberg was instrumental in creating this new program. He has been studying the importance of reproducibility in research results and advocating for the concept for years.

Methods For Generative Adversarial Output Enhancement, Michael B. Brodie

Theses and Dissertations

Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) learn to synthesize novel samples for a given data distribution. While GANs can train on diverse data of various modalities, the most successful use cases to date apply GANs to computer vision tasks. Despite significant advances in training algorithms and network architectures, GANs still struggle to consistently generate high-quality outputs after training. We present a series of papers that improve GAN output inference qualitatively and quantitatively. The first chapter, Alpha Model Domination, addresses a related subfield of Multiple Choice Learning, which -- like GANs -- aims to generate diverse sets of outputs. The next chapter, CoachGAN, …

On Improving The Memorability Of System-Assigned Recognition-Based Passwords, Mahdi Nasrullah Al-Ameen, Sonali T. Marne, Kanis Fatema, Matthew Wright, Shannon Scielzo

Computer Science Faculty and Staff Publications

User-chosen passwords reflecting common strategies and patterns ease memorization but offer uncertain and often weak security, while system-assigned passwords provide higher security guarantee but suffer from poor memorability. We thus examine the technique to enhance password memorability that incorporates a scientific understanding of long-term memory. In particular, we examine the efficacy of providing users with verbal cues—real-life facts corresponding to system-assigned keywords. We also explore the usability gain of including images related to the keywords along with verbal cues. In our multi-session lab study with 52 participants, textual recognition-based scheme offering verbal cues had a significantly higher login success …

From Forests To Fish: Mercury In Mountain Lake Food Webs Influenced By Factors At Multiple Scales, Ariana M. Chiapella, Collin A. Eagles-Smith, Angela L. Strecker

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Mountain lakes, while seemingly pristine, have been subjected to historical fish stocking practices and exposure to atmospherically deposited contaminants like mercury. Mercury bioaccumulation in these ecosystems varies widely due to strong environmental gradients, and there are complex, hierarchical factors that affect mercury transport and loading, methylmercury production, and food web biomagnification. We sought to assess how representative variables associated with watershed, lake, and food web-scale processes—specifically, catchment tree cover, lake benthic primary production, and fish diet, respectively—are associated with mercury concentrations in mountain lake fish. Mean fish mercury concentrations varied threefold between lakes, with nearshore tree cover and fish diet …

Structures And Characteristics Of Macromolecular Interactions In Gas Phase Using Fourier-Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry, Jiewen Shen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates non-covalent macromolecular chemistry using Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FTICR-MS) based techniques. The included studies reveal the impact of molecular structure on conformation and binding energetics. Supramolecules that might be too heavy to be dissociated in single collision-induced dissociation (CID) were dissociated using sustained off-resonance collision induced dissociation (SORI-CID) techniques. Relative binding energies and thresholds were evaluated for various macromolecular host-guest systems. Besides the non-covalent binding energies, conformation characterization was undertaken by a novel method to determine collision cross sectional areas using FTICR (CRAFTI, and multi-CRAFTI), initially developed by the Dearden lab. The systems chosen …