Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Math 575: Mathematical Statistics I, Xin Dang

GMAS Course Syllabi

No abstract provided.

An Ai-Based Framework For Translating American Sign Language To English And Vice Versa, Vijayendra D. Avina, Md Amiruzzaman, Stefanie Amiruzzaman, Linh B. Ngo, M. Ali Akber Dewan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a framework to convert American Sign Language (ASL) to English and English to ASL. Within this framework, we use a deep learning model along with the rolling average prediction that captures image frames from videos and classifies the signs from the image frames. The classified frames are then used to construct ASL words and sentences to support people with hearing impairments. We also use the same deep learning model to capture signs from the people with deaf symptoms and convert them into ASL words and English sentences. Based on this framework, we developed a …

Understanding How To Diversify The Cybersecurity Workforce: A Qualitative Analysis, Maria Chaparro Osman, Maureen Namukasa, Cherrise Ficke, Isabella Piasecki, Tj Oconnor, Meredith Carroll

Aeronautics Faculty Publications

A robust cybersecurity workforce is critical for protection against a range of malicious attacks. However, it has been noted that there are many vacancies and a shortage of individuals entering the cybersecurity workforce. The workforce shortage has been partially attributed to the lack of diversity in the cybersecurity domain, with women, African Americans, and Hispanics remaining underrepresented in educational and professional settings. Using a qualitative approach, this work sought to investigate what led underrepresented minorities currently involved in cybersecurity to the industry, with the goal of determining methods to attract underrepresented minorities and diversify the workforce. A thematic analysis was …

The Coastal Monitor: Vol. 10 No. 2, John Tanacredi Ph.D.

The Coastal Monitor

Stephen J. Gould’s prophetic piece, “The Golden Rule: A Proper Scale for Our Environmental Crisis”, noted that, “Patience enjoys a long pedigree of favor”, which he elaborated, “usually involves a deep understanding of the fundamental principle… rarely grasped in daily life – the effects of scale.” Scientists observe changes incessantly, in dimensions and time, from microscopic conditions of cellular biology to the inconceivable distances of galaxies and their influences on Earth.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change And The Next American Migration, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Weather/Natural Disasters

Bibliography and photographs of a display of government documents from Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Scandium Triflate-Catalyzed Aromatic Aldehydic C-H Activation, Nicholas Griffin

Honors Projects

Herein described is a scandium triflate-catalyzed C-H activation of commercially available aromatic aldehydes achieved in low yields. The reaction occured in a one-pot synthesis over a two-hour duration and required minimal purification. Inclusion of a fluorine-tagged phenol allowed for reaction monitoring via ¹⁹FNMR.

Exploring Approaches To Engage K-12 Students In Learning Computational Thinking Using Collaborative Robots, Zoila Anuri Kanu

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Minority students are largely underrepresented in the STEM field. The goal for this project was to develop a program which promotes the inclusion of computation skills among students and help them work collaboratively with the use of human – robot interaction. Robots are such a strong tool that can be used to enhance computational thinking and engage students towards a technical field. Through workshops and readings about computational thinking we worked on building a block-based program that introduces the uses of robots as teaching tool for computational thinking.

Dei: Exploring Academic Reflections Using Natural Language Processing To Create A Roadmap Of Student Success And Foster Inclusive Engineering Education, Rajvir H. Vyas, Nidhi Raviprasad

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Every year, the College of Engineering (CENG) students and faculty reach out to admitted students through “Text-a-Thon” programs to answer their questions about being a student at Cal Poly. In order to improve CENG outreach efforts, we analyzed these text conversations to predict the likelihood of an admitted student accepting an offer of admission from Cal Poly. Through our research, we discovered key factors that play a role in a student committing to Cal Poly through data-based insights. Additionally, we successfully used a human-on-the-loop system to help create Machine Learning (ML) models that predict satisfaction of response by way of …

Ai For Search And Rescue - Locating A Missing Person, David Hernandez, Sai Rama Balakrishnan, Timmy Chin, Aditya Manikonda, Vasanth Pugalenthi

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

Building on the work done initially as a SURP 2021 project and continued through 2021-23, the focus for this summer project will be on the use of computer technology for locating a missing person. Over the last year, we developed the digital equivalents of about 30 paper-based S&R forms and the infrastructure to collect the respective information. In their current use, these paper forms are filled out by search teams, collected in a command post, and reviewed by search coordinators. This process is time-consuming, prone to errors and loss of information, and relies heavily on the experience, skills, and mental …

Trustguard: Containment Architecture, Michael Hu, Sophie Russ, Stephen Beard

College of Engineering Summer Undergraduate Research Program

All software security relies on proper execution at the hardware level. This research extends work on containment architectures, which ensure that any ill effects of malicious or buggy hardware are contained within the system. This is accomplished by a small, security hardware component, called the Sentry, validating communication before it leaves the system. This research assesses the advantages and disadvantages of using the CHISEL hardware language, from a security and verification standpoint. Further, this research investigates more efficient Merkle trees to optimization caching within the Sentry chip to improve performance and power utilization.

Cybersecurity Policy Rubric And Analysis For The State Of Maine Electrical Transmission Grid, Benjamin Plummer M.S.

All Student Scholarship

The State of Maine’s (SOM) electrical grid is aging. While there are public and private efforts to bring it up to date, gaps in cybersecurity policies and laws exist (NERC, n.d.; see also MPUC, n.d.; CISA, n.d.). This policy and law research may also apply to other states and the protection of their critical infrastructure. The researcher examined the grid’s controls, policies, and laws to determine the influence each exerts over the grid and where that influence presents vulnerabilities in security. The research focused on the controls, policies, and laws that play a role in protecting the grid. The researcher …

Sound Energy Could Change The World, Tyler Bugiel

Op-Eds from ENSC230 Energy and the Environment: Economics and Policies

The energy crisis is a problem that has been growing more concerning for many years, and yet there has not seemed to be a good solution to the problem. That being said, I think that there is a solution that has not been explored thoroughly enough, that solution being sound energy. Solar and wind are both energy systems that use natural resources and things that occur on a day to day basis to convert those things into energy, but sound has not been explored as much.

Extending The Reach Of The Point-To-Set Principle, J. H. Lutz, Neil Lutz, E. Mayordomo

Computer Science Faculty Works

The point-to-set principle of J. Lutz and N. Lutz (2018) has recently enabled the theory of computing to be used to answer open questions about fractal geometry in Euclidean spaces ℝⁿ. These are classical questions, meaning that their statements do not involve computation or related aspects of logic.

In this paper we extend the reach of the point-to-set principle from Euclidean spaces to arbitrary separable metric spaces X. We first extend two algorithmic dimensions—computability-theoretic versions of classical Hausdorff and packing dimensions that assign dimensions dim(x) and Dim(x) to individual points x ∈ X—to arbitrary separable …

Challenges Of Embedding Sustainability In Organizational Culture, Jyro B. Triviño

Leadership and Strategy Faculty Publications

Advocating for robust, aggressive, and advanced sustainability is a direction that is ideal yet challenging. It means not only decreasing additional harm to the environment but, at the same time, objectively using renewable energy flow. Embedding sustainability as part of organizational culture appears to be a daunting task. Not all enterprise managers comprehensively understand the phenomenon, which entails proper awareness of its benefits and consequences. This qualitative study focuses on Philippine business enterprises' ability to embed a regenerative sustainable culture. It includes salient insights from five Philippine medium-sized enterprise owners who were also acting as managers. It shows that the …

The Role Of Feedback Within Scrum For Engineering Department Operations, Massood Towhidnejad, Omar Ochoa, James J. Pembridge, Radu Babiceanu

Posters

The Scrum framework is built on the principles of inspection and adaptation. Feedback drives the inspection process, and the team adapts based on that feedback to optimize its performance and outcomes. Within engineering departments, Scrum requires departments to examine how and when feedback is obtained to ensure that the department is remaining agile. This poster illustrates the role of feedback within two Scrum teams, one focused on student success and the other focused on faculty rewards and incentives. The two cases emphasize the need for continuous introspection at team and department levels.

The Relationship Between Personality And Achievement-Related Factors, Olivia Yake, Sophie Grant, Kate Downey, Emma Bosman

Science University Research Symposium (SURS)

Previous research has demonstrated that an individual’s self-concept has an impact on their academic achievement (Steinmayr et al., 2019). Aspects of a person’s self-concept include their personality and feelings of imposter syndrome, fear of failure, and academic self-efficacy. Personality, specifically neuroticism and openness, has been used to predict individual’s academic motivations (Komarraju et al., 2009), as well as their academic achievement (Wang et al., 2023) and prevalence of imposter syndrome (Bernard et al., 2002). However, research has not elaborated on how specific aspects of personality influence one’s self-concept as expressed through imposter syndrome, fear of failure, and academic self-efficacy during …

Impact Of Media Consumption On Automatic Associations, Davis Eddleman, Taylor Allen, Wesley Gerndt, Amilya Bryant, Ninivet Ossa

Science University Research Symposium (SURS)

The concept of studying media’s effects on implicit and explicit bias has been studied many times in the field of psychology. Previous research has shown exposure to media coverage containing stereotypes of minorities increased implicit bias (Arendt & Northup, 2015; Dixon & Maddox, 2005; Arendt et al., 2015) and explicit bias (Arendt et al., 2015). This pool of research has previously focused on crime stories and right-wing political advertisements that contain stereotypical tropes of out-group minorities. In these studies, generally, there has been an effect such that priming stereotypes surrounding dark-skinned individuals, may activate automatic associative stereotypes, such as the …

A Colorful Tribute To Staerkel Planetarium, Erik Johnson

Natural Science Faculty

On October 1, 1987, the William M. Staerkel Planetarium was dedicated at Parkland College. Alongside the debut of the 50-foot wide dome, the Zeiss M1015 opto-mechanical star projector, dozens of slide projectors, and a 35-mm film projector, a stained glass art piece was installed in the lobby. The piece, called the solar window, was a gift from William and Mary Lou Staerkel in memory of their parents and a tribute to the faculty and staff of the college. The solar window was created by Arthur Stern and has brought light into the planetarium in several unique ways.

Vlti/Gravity Observations And Characterization Of The Brown Dwarf Companion Hd 72946 B, William O. Balmer, Laurent Pueyo, Tomas Stolker, Henrique Reggiani, A. L. Maire, S. Lacour, P. Mollière, M. Nowak, D. Sing, N. Pourré, S. Blunt, J. J. Wang, E. Rickman, J. Kammerer, Th Henning, K. Ward-Duong, R. Abuter, A. Amorim, R. Asensio-Torres, M. Benisty, J. P. Berger, H. Beust, A. Boccaletti, A. Bohn, M. Bonnefoy, H. Bonnet, G. Bourdarot, W. Brandner, F. Cantalloube, P. Caselli, B. Charnay, G. Chauvin

Astronomy: Faculty Publications

Tension remains between the observed and modeled properties of substellar objects, but objects in binary orbits, with known dynamical masses, can provide a way forward. HD 72946 B is a recently imaged brown dwarf companion to a nearby, solar-type star. We achieve ∼100 μas relative astrometry of HD 72946 B in the K band using VLTI/GRAVITY, unprecedented for a benchmark brown dwarf. We fit an ensemble of measurements of the orbit using orbitize! and derive a strong dynamical mass constraint M B = 69.5 ± 0.5 M Jup assuming a strong prior on the host star mass M A = …

Diversity Similarity Join For Big Data, Yasin N. Silva, Juan Martinez, Pedro Castro Cea, Humberto Razente, Maria Camila N. Barioni

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Similarity Join (SJ) has become one of the most popular and valuable data processing operators in analyzing large amounts of data. Various types of similarity join operators have been effectively used in multiple scenarios. However, these operators usually generate a large output size and many similar output pairs that represent almost the same information. In previous work, a new operator called Diversity Similarity Join (DSJ) has been proposed to address these issues. DSJ generates a smaller scale output and more meaningful and diverse result pairs. This operator, however, was proposed as a single node operator crucially limiting its scalability …

Beyond 365 Days: A Retrospective Evaluation Of Trekkers, Sarah Krichels Goan Mpp, Madison Burke

Publications

The Trekkers program in Rockland, ME is a non-profit outdoor-based mentoring program that has served young people in mid-coast Maine since 1994. Its unique long-term mentoring model supports students over six years that begins when they are in 7th grade and continues until they graduate high school. Trekkers’ model focuses on building social, emotional and intellectual resiliency in young people through one-to-one peer mentoring, as well as the use of expeditionary learning, community service and adventure-based education. Trekkers’ programs are designed to provide an ongoing supportive network for young people in the community by connecting them with caring adults while …

Early Ordovician Seamounts Preserved In The Canadian Cordillera: Implications For The Rift History Of Western Laurentia, Rose N. Cobbett, Luke P. Beranek, Stephen J. Piercey, James L. Crowley, Maurice Colpron

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The breakup of the supercontinent Rodinia and development of the western Laurentian rifted margin are in part recorded by Neoproterozoic to mid-Paleozoic igneous and sedimentary rock successions in the Canadian Cordillera. New bedrock mapping and volcanic facies analysis of Early Ordovician mafic rocks assigned to the Menzie Creek Formation in central Yukon allow reconstruction of the depositional environment during the volcanic eruptions, whole-rock geochemical data constrain the melting depth and crust-mantle source regions of the igneous rocks within the study area, and zircon U-Pb age studies provide determination of the precise timing of submarine eruptions. Menzie Creek Formation volcanic rocks …

Assessing Controls On Ice Dynamics At Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula, Using A Numerical Ice Flow Model, Rainey Aberle, Ellyn M. Enderlin, Hans-Peter Marshall, Michal Kopera, Tate G. Meehan

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Antarctic Peninsula's widespread glacier retreat and ice shelf collapse have been attributed to atmospheric and oceanic warming. Following the initial post-collapse period of retreat, several former tributary glaciers of the Larsen A and B ice shelves have been slowly re-advancing for more than a decade. Here, we use a flowline model of Crane Glacier to gauge the sensitivity of former tributary glaciers to future climate change following this period of long-term dynamic adjustment. The glacier's long-term geometry and speed changes are similar to those of other former Larsen A and B tributaries, suggesting that Crane Glacier is a reasonable …

Effects Of Changing Climate Extremes And Vegetation Phenology On Wildlife Associated With Grasslands In The Southwestern United States, Tyler G. Creech, Matthew A. Williamson, Steven E. Sesnie, Esther S. Rubin, Daniel R. Cayan, Erica Fleishman

Human-Environment Systems Research Center Faculty Publications and Presentations

Assessments of the potential responses of animal species to climate change often rely on correlations between long-term average temperature or precipitation and species' occurrence or abundance. Such assessments do not account for the potential predictive capacity of either climate extremes and variability or the indirect effects of climate as mediated by plant phenology. By contrast, we projected responses of wildlife in desert grasslands of the southwestern United States to future climate means, extremes, and variability and changes in the timing and magnitude of primary productivity. We used historical climate data and remotely sensed phenology metrics to develop predictive models of …

Community Complexity Of A Pollination Network: Analysis Of Plant-Pollinator Interactions In The Eastern Ecuadorian Cloud Forest, Anisa López-Ruiz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Global declines in pollinators and temporal/spatial mismatches between plants and pollinators threaten the integrity of plant-pollinator networks. Ecological network analysis provides a powerful framework for understanding the dynamics of plant-pollinator networks and measures of community complexity that can help inform areas of priority in conservation. This study observed a plant-pollinator network in a secondary forest close to the Río Zuñac Reserve in the eastern Ecuadorian cloud forest to identify assemblages of plants and pollinators and evaluate measures of community complexity, including specialization and nestedness. Flowering plants were identified and observed along a 1.2 km transect, and floral visitors to these …

Friends In High Places: Establishing Pollination Networks For The Páramos Of Central Ecuador, Emma Diaz

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Well-known for being a global biodiversity hotspot, the Andean Páramos hosts a unique array of floristic diversity seen nowhere else in the world (Luteyn, n.d.). With the resiliency of this ecosystem dependent on the successful reproduction of these plants, it is crucial to understand the pollination network which sustains them. Modern-day research has outlined networks in the Chilean, Venezuelan, and Argentinean Páramos, but one has yet to be defined for Ecuador, despite being the suspected home to nearly half of floristic diversity in the Páramos (Arroyo et al., 1985; Pelayo et al., 2021; Medan et al., 2023; Caranqui et al., …

Extent Of The 2023 Coral Bleaching Event In The Nargana Region Of Guna Yala, Panama, Brydon Deanna Hollander

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Coral reefs are diverse marine ecosystems that exist in tropical ecosystems all over the world. They provide a myriad of ecological services that are vital for marine organism biodiversity and human coastal communities. A major threat to coral reefs is a rise in sea surface temperature that causes coral bleaching. The effect of a coral bleaching event in Nargana, Guna Yala will be investigated to examine how the health status of coral reef ecosystems are being impacted. To guide these efforts, the extent of coral bleaching will be measured along with whether sea surface temperature (SST), human concentration, and El …

Variation Of Carbon Stock Of Boca Del Drago Mangrove Forests Based On Salinity And Seaward Proximity, Fiona Wyrtzen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Mangrove forests, at the intersection of land and sea, are considered one of the most important marine environments for their variety of ecosystem services and their ability to sequester large amounts of carbon in their biomass and adjacent soils. With a changing climate, many of the abiotic and biotic factors influencing mangroves will begin to shift, potentially impacting resilience, growth capacity, and distribution of mangroves worldwide. This study aimed to examine the influence of changing salinity on the carbon stock capacity for Rhizophora mangle and Laguncularia racemosa forests, and the distribution of biomass in each species relative to salinity in …

Assessing The Performance Of Agricultural Systems In The Inland And Coastal Regions Of Northern Portugal Using Indicators: Establishing The Foundation Towards Better Agricultural Practices, Genevieve Gehlken

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study conducts a comprehensive evaluation of agricultural systems in the distinct coastal and inland regions of Northern Portugal. Employing key indicators, including soil erosion, nitrogen surplus, irrigation practices, Agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and crop yield, the analysis reveals statistically significant disparities and unique challenges in each region. The coastal areas, marked by higher agricultural GDP, exhibit distinct economic dependencies on agriculture, while the inland regions face challenges related to water scarcity, soil erosion, and rural isolation. The looming threat of climate change adds complexity to these dynamics, further highlighting the need for region-specific, sustainable agricultural practices. In the …

The Truth Behind Avocado Expansion In The Algarve: A Synthesis Of Public, Environmental Associations, And Government Perspectives And Response, Mandy Ausman

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Avocado expansion has exponentially increased in the Algarve region of southern Portugal in recent years. The surge in expansion has provoked contention and discrepancy in the media regarding how and if avocado production can persist in the water-scarce region due to worsening drought conditions related to climate change coupled with the fruit’s significant water footprint. This paper aims to synthesize the arguments and response of the public, environmental associations, and government agencies to the expansion of avocado production in the water- scarce region of the Algarve, highlight the region’s current challenges of avocado expansion and water management regulation, and analyze …