Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Comprehensive Review Of Polymer And Polymer Gel Treatments For Natural Gas-Related Conformance Control, Ali Al Brahim, Baojun Bai, Thomas P. Schuman

Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Conformance problems often exist in natural gas-related activities, resulting in excessive water production from natural gas production wells and/or excessive natural gas production from oil production wells. Several mechanical and chemical solutions were reported in the literature to mitigate the conformance problems. Among the chemical solutions, two classes of materials, namely polymer gels and water-soluble polymers, have been mostly reported. These systems have been mainly reviewed in several studies for their applications as water shutoff treatments for oil production wells. Natural gas production wells exhibit different characteristics and have different properties which could impact the performance of the chemical solutions. …

Metaformer Is Actually What You Need For Vision, Weihao Yu, Mi Luo, Pan Zhou, Chenyang Si, Yichen Zhou, Xinchao Wang, Jiashi Feng, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transformers have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. A common belief is their attention-based token mixer module contributes most to their competence. However, recent works show the attention-based module in transformers can be replaced by spatial MLPs and the resulted models still perform quite well. Based on this observation, we hypothesize that the general architecture of the transformers, instead of the specific token mixer module, is more essential to the model's performance. To verify this, we deliberately replace the attention module in transformers with an embarrassingly simple spatial pooling operator to conduct only basic token mixing. Surprisingly, we observe …

Equilibrium And Dynamic Surface Tension Behavior In Colloidal Unimolecular Polymers (Cup), Ashish Zore, Peng Geng, Michael R. Van De Mark

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Studies of the interfacial behavior of pure aqueous nanoparticles have been limited due tothe difficulty of making contaminant-free nanoparticles while also providing narrow size distribu-tion. Colloidal unimolecular polymers (CUPs) are a new type of single-chain nanoparticle with a particle size ranging from 3 to 9 nm, which can be produced free of surfactants and volatile organic contents (VOCs). CUP particles of different sizes and surface charges were made. The surface tension behavior of these CUP particles in water was studied using a maximum bubble pressure tensiometer. The equilibrium surface tension decreased with increasing concentration and the number of charges present …

Equilibrium And Dynamic Surface Tension Behavior In Colloidal Unimolecular Polymers (Cup), Ashish Zore, Peng Geng, Michael R. Van De Mark

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Studies of the interfacial behavior of pure aqueous nanoparticles have been limited due tothe difficulty of making contaminant-free nanoparticles while also providing narrow size distribu-tion. Colloidal unimolecular polymers (CUPs) are a new type of single-chain nanoparticle with a particle size ranging from 3 to 9 nm, which can be produced free of surfactants and volatile organic contents (VOCs). CUP particles of different sizes and surface charges were made. The surface tension behavior of these CUP particles in water was studied using a maximum bubble pressure tensiometer. The equilibrium surface tension decreased with increasing concentration and the number of charges present …

State-To-State Rate Coefficients For Hcs+In Rotationally Inelastic Collisions With H2at Low Temperatures, Otoniel Denis-Alpizar, Ernesto Quintas-Sánchez, Richard Dawes

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

HCS⁺ ions have been detected in several regions of the interstellar medium (ISM), but an accurate determination of the chemical-physical conditions in the molecular clouds where this molecule is observed requires detailed knowledge of the collisional rate coefficients with the most common colliders in those environments. In this work, we study the dynamics of rotationally inelastic collisions of HCS⁺ + H₂ at low temperature, and report, for the first time, a set of rate coefficients for this system. We used a recently developed potential energy surface for the HCS⁺-H₂ van der Waals complex and …

Monolithic Ontological Methodology (Mom): An Effective Software Project Management Approach, Kamal Uddin Sarker, Aziz Deraman, Raza Hasan, Ali Abbas, Babar Shah, Abrar Ullah

All Works

Due to rapid changes in software applications, especially incorporating the demands of self-regulating technologies becomes a major challenge in software projects. This research focuses on technological, managerial, and procedural challenges, which are believed to be the most significant factors contributing to projects failure. To address these issues, this study proposes Monolithic Ontological Methodology (MOM) which addresses the weakness in the existing benchmark methodologies including PRINCE2, Extreme Programming, and Scrum in terms of project management, quality control, and stakeholder involvement. The MOM consists of seven phases and each phase has the required number of iterations until it is approved by management. …

An Overview Of Technologies Deployed In Gcc Countries To Combat Covid-19, Samia Loucif, Murad Al-Rajab, Reem Salem, Nadine Akkila

All Works

Since December 2019, COVID-19 and all of its variants continue to ravage the planet with consequent negative impact that has completely changed our lives within a short period of time after the outbreak of the Virus. On March 11, 2020, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization. Since then, a group of new COVID-19 variants has emerged posing a greater danger to humanity. By the start of August 2021, the reported COVID-19 related death toll across the globe has rocketed to 4,233,139. To deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, countries across the world have rushed to develop …

The Smart In Smart Cities: A Framework For Image Classification Using Deep Learning, Rabiah Al-Qudah, Yaser Khamayseh, Monther Aldwairi, Sarfraz Khan

All Works

The need for a smart city is more pressing today due to the recent pandemic, lockouts, climate changes, population growth, and limitations on availability/access to natural resources. However, these challenges can be better faced with the utilization of new technologies. The zoning design of smart cities can mitigate these challenges. It identifies the main components of a new smart city and then proposes a general framework for designing a smart city that tackles these elements. Then, we propose a technology-driven model to support this framework. A mapping between the proposed general framework and the proposed technology model is then introduced. …

Investigating The Mechanisms Driving Mercury Reduction And Emissions In Soil, Hamil Patel

Student Theses

The water-induced emission of mercury from soil has been studied, but a complete understanding of the mechanisms driving mercury reduction and emission in soil has not been reached. The current understanding is an immediate expulsion of soil gaseous mercury upon water treatment and an upward transport of dissolved soil ionic mercury as the water evaporates. We analyzed emissions from several types of samples using various methods to further our understanding on the mechanisms involved. Light-induced emissions from aqueous samples of humic acid (HA) spiked with mercury (II) chloride (HgCl₂) showed that at higher concentrations of HA, less mercury …

National Climate Data Graphical Plotting Software Review, Melissa Barnes

University Honors Theses

This is a review of an undergraduate Computer Science Capstone project. The paper discusses the development process, what software tools were used, the challenges faced during the development process, and what the software does. The software described in this paper is a python program that utilizes United States county-scoped climate and drought data from the National Climate Data Center to create visualizations and mathematical calculations. The software has an interactive user interface that displays various graphs, heat maps and calculated values. Elevation and population data estimates for populated areas in most counties is also provided. Users may select any set …

Dynamical Systems And Matching Symmetry In Beta-Expansions, Karl Zieber

Master's Theses

Symbolic dynamics, and in particular β-expansions, are a ubiquitous tool in studying more complicated dynamical systems. Applications include number theory, fractals, information theory, and data storage.

In this thesis we will explore the basics of dynamical systems with a special focus on topological dynamics. We then examine symbolic dynamics and β-transformations through the lens of sequence spaces. We discuss observations from recent literature about how matching (the property that the itinerary of 0 and 1 coincide after some number of iterations) is linked to when T_β,⍺ generates a subshift of finite type. We prove the set of ⍺ in …

Wildfire Risk Assessment Using Convolutional Neural Networks And Modis Climate Data, Sean F. Nesbit

Master's Theses

Wildfires burn millions of acres of land each year leading to the destruction of homes and wildland ecosystems while costing governments billions in funding. As climate change intensifies drought volatility across the Western United States, wildfires are likely to become increasingly severe. Wildfire risk assessment and hazard maps are currently employed by fire services, but can often be outdated. This paper introduces an image-based dataset using climate and wildfire data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). The dataset consists of 32 climate and topographical layers captured across 0.1 deg by 0.1 deg tiled regions in California and Nevada between …

A Network Analysis Of Covid-19 In The United States, Joseph C. Mcguire

Master's Theses

Through methods in network theory and time-series analysis, we will analyze the spread of COVID-19 in the United States by determining trends in state-by-state daily cases through a network construction. Previous researchers have found frameworks for approximating the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and identifying potential rises in cases by a network construction based on correlation of cases between regions [1]. Applying this network construction we determine how this network and its structure act as a predictor for overall COVID-19 cases in the United States by preforming a trend analysis on a variety of network statistics and US COVID-19 cases.

An Introduction To Fröberg's Conjecture, Caroline Semmens

Master's Theses

The goal of this thesis is to make Fröberg's conjecture more accessible to the average math graduate student by building up the necessary background material to understand specific examples where Fröberg's conjecture is true.

Out-Of-Core Gpu Path Tracing On Large Instanced Scenes Via Geometry Streaming, Jeremy Berchtold

Master's Theses

We present a technique for out-of-core GPU path tracing of arbitrarily large scenes that is compatible with hardware-accelerated ray-tracing. Our technique improves upon previous works by subdividing the scene spatially into streamable chunks that are loaded using a priority system that maximizes ray throughput and minimizes GPU memory usage. This allows for arbitrarily large scaling of scene complexity. Our system required under 19 minutes to render a solid color version of Disney's Moana Island scene (39.3 million instances, 261.1 million unique quads, and 82.4 billion instanced quads at a resolution of 1024x429 and 1024spp on an RTX 5000 (24GB memory …

Effects Of Experimental Scale On The Adsorption Of Two Pharmaceutical Drugs Detected In Municipal Wastewater Effluent, Michael Moore

Master's Theses

Pharmaceutical drugs are being produced and consumed in increasing quantities every year and are poorly treated by conventional wastewater treatment processes, leading to increasing detection of such compounds in surface water, groundwater, and municipal drinking water. Soil aquifer treatment (SAT) is a promising method for treating these emerging compounds through combined adsorption and degradation of target compounds in soil. This thesis examines the consistency of results from typical studies like adsorption isotherms and soil columns utilized in analysis of SAT performance, across varying experimental scales. The adsorption behavior of two pharmaceuticals was investigated as a function of experimental scale and …

Where Is The Author: The Copyright Protection For Ai-Generated Works, Chieh Huang

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

The two groups of the human-or-machine questions, whether AI-generated works are copyrightable and whether AI-generated works have human authors, are revisiting the current copyright law with the emergence of AI-generated works. These revisiting questions reveal that the current authorship requirement fails to provide a clear and operable standard on evaluating a human contributor’s intellectual labor for creative output. Such a defect of the current authorship requirement has to be fixed to respond to the technological change of artificial intelligence and the burgeoning prevalence of AI- or advanced computer program-generated works.

This dissertation’s main goal is to fix the flaw …

The Estuarine Ecological Knowledge Network Makes Progress: International Project Sites And Potential Ways Forward, Grant S. Mccall, Anthony Akpan, Doru Banaduc, Diego F. Figueroa, Nelson Fontoura, Robert Hitchcock, Sherman Horn, Devashish Kar, Thong Tran

School of Earth, Environmental, & Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

The Estuarine Ecological Knowledge Network (EEKN) brings together scientists and coastal fishing communities in seeking new ways forward for Earth's major river deltas and estuaries, including the Mississippi (United States), Rio Grande (United States), Danube (Romania/Ukraine), Ganges (India/Bangladesh), Niger (Nigeria), and Mekong (Vietnam) river deltas, and the Patos Lagoon (Brazil). Such environments are universally understood as crucial for the biological productivity of oceans and they are home to hundreds of millions of human inhabitants, many of whom directly depend on that marine richness in terms of the operation of their socioeconomic systems. As human-induced climate change and its consequences for …

Statistical Modeling Of Longitudinal Medical Cost Data, Shikun Wang

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Projecting the future cancer care cost is critical in health economics research and policy making. An indispensable step is to estimate cost trajectories from an incident cohort of cancer patients using longitudinal medical cost data, accounting for terminal events such as death, and right censoring due to loss of follow-up. Since the cost of cancer care and survival are correlated, a scientifically meaningful quantity for inference in this context is the mean cost trajectory conditional on survival. Many standard approaches for longitudinal and survival analysis are not valid for the problem. The research for my Ph.D. dissertation consists of three …

Leveraging Single Cell Technologies For The Characterization And Treatment Of Refractory Pancreatic Cancer, Maria Monberg

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

Heterogeneity is a hallmark of cancer, and the advent of multimodal single-cell technologies has helped uncover heterogeneity in a high-throughput manner in different cancers across varied contexts at an unprecedented resolution. In an effort to improve precision medicine approaches in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a highly lethal malignancy with a mere 11% 5-year survival rate, this dissertation focuses on first questioning the assumptions of the most basic models used to study PDAC via multimodal single-cell characterization methods at multiple levels of biological organization (scCNVseq and snATACseq for DNA assays, scRNAseq for transcriptomics, and paired protein assays such as multiplexed immunofluorescence …

Unique Signed Minimal Wiring Diagrams And The Stanley-Reisner Correspondence, Vanessa Newsome-Slade

Master's Theses

Biological systems are commonly represented using networks consisting of interactions between various elements in the system. Reverse engineering, a method of mathematical modeling, is used to recover how the elements in the biological network are connected. These connections are encoded using wiring diagrams, which are directed graphs that describe how elements in a network affect one another. A signed wiring diagram provides additional information about the interactions between elements relating to activation and inhibition. Due to cost concerns, it is optimal to gain insight into biological networks with as few experiments and data as possible. Minimal wiring diagrams identify the …

Van Kampen Diagrams And Small Cancellation Theory, Kelsey N. Lowrey

Master's Theses

Given a presentation of G, the word problem asks whether there exists an algorithm to determine which words in the free group, F(A), represent the identity in G. In this thesis, we study small cancellation theory, developed by Lyndon, Schupp, and Greendlinger in the mid-1960s, which contributed to the resurgence of geometric group theory. We investigate the connection between Van Kampen diagrams and the small cancellation hypotheses. Groups that have a presentation satisfying the small cancellation hypotheses C'(1/6), or C'(1/4) and T(4) have a nice solution to the word problem known as Dehn’s Algorithm.

Effect Of Monetary Policy Rate On Market Interest Rates In Nigeria: A Threshold And Nardl Approach, Oluwafemi E. Awopegba, Joseph O. Afolabi, Lydia T. Adeoye, Godwin O. Akpokodje

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study examines the effect of monetary policy rate (MPR) on market interest rates in Nigeria. For parsimony, we develop two indexes called the short-term interest rate (SINT) and Lending interest rate (LINT) to represent deposit and lending rates respectively. The nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) and threshold regression models are adopted. The study uses monthly data from 2002:M1 to 2019:M12. The results of the threshold regression model indicate that the degree of the effect of MPR on SINT and LINT above the estimated threshold of 11 and 13 percent respectively is greater and significant than if MPR were to …

Social Dimension Of Inclusive Growth In Ecowas: Implication For Poverty Reduction, Toriola K. Anu, Goerge O. Emmanuel, Ajayi O. Felix

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study investigates the implication of the social dimension of inclusive growth on poverty reduction in Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) countries. It specifically examines how social indices of inclusive growth comprising of income inequality, education, and health outcomes affect poverty reduction. The study uses a panel dataset of the six (6) lower-middle income countries in ECOWAS which was analysed via panel Difference Generalised Method of Moment (D-GMM). The results show that GDP per capita exerts significant negative effect on poverty while inequality, education and health outcomes do not show significant effect on poverty. Although, the estimates of …

Effect Of Fdi Inflows On Employment Generation In Selected Ecowas Countries: Heterogeneous Panel Analysis, Timothy A. Aderemi, Olawunmi Omitogun, Bukonla G. Osisanwo

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

The aim of this study is to examine the effect of FDI on employment in ECOWAS sub region between 1990 and 2019. The study utilizes a panel autoregressive distributed lag model to analyse the short run and long run relationship between FDI and employment across ECOWAS sub region. In the short run, the impact of FDI on employment is negative and statistically not significant. Meanwhile, in the long run FDI has a positive and statistically significant impact on employment rate. This implies that FDI has the capacity to generate employment in countries in ECOWAS sub region. Therefore, this study recommends …

Impact Of Covid-19 Pandemic On The Nigeria Stock Market: A Sectoral Stock Prices Analysis, Peter A. Adekunle, Yakubu A. Bello, Udochukwu G. Nwachukwu

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on sectoral stock prices in Nigeria stock market using daily data covering from February 28, 2020 to June 26, 2020. Applying the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test, the study finds that COVID-19 pandemic had adverse impact on the stock market indices in the short run. Furthermore, the study documents negative response of sectoral stock prices to the pandemic while the stock prices of the banking sub-sector are the worst hit. Compared to the consumer goods, and industrial subsector indices, the speed of adjustment to long run equilibrium is faster for …

Scenario Acceleration Through Automated Modelling: A Method And System For Creating Traceable Quantitative Future Scenarios Based On Fcm System Modeling And Natural Language Processing, Christopher W.H. Davis

Dissertations and Theses

Scenario planning is used extensively in strategic planning because it helps leaders broaden their perspectives and make better decisions by presenting possible futures in story form. Some of the benefits of using scenarios include breaking away from groupthink, creating better products, acceleration of organization learning and reducing bias. Product development teams, particularly for digital products, are gaining more autonomy in organizations and tend to manage risk by undergoing very short development iterations on their products while leaning on their consumers for feedback -- a process known as agile development. This method tends to limit the perspective of the team and …

Phishing For Fun, Madeline Moran, Anna Hart, Loretta Stalans, Eric Chan-Tin, Shelia Kennison

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Perform a phishing experiment to see how many people fall victim. This study was approved by the Loyola IRB

A Labeled Dataset For Investigating Cyberbullying Content Patterns In Instagram, Mara Hamlett, Grace Powell, Yasin N. Silva, Deborah Hall

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

As online communication continues to become more prevalent, instances of cyberbullying have also become more common, particularly on social media sites. Previous research in this area has studied cyberbullying outcomes, predictors of cyberbullying victimization/perpetration, and computational detection models that rely on labeled datasets to identify the underlying patterns. However, there is a dearth of work examining the content of what is said when cyberbullying occurs and most of the available datasets include only basic labels (cyberbullying or not). This paper presents an annotated Instagram dataset with detailed labels about key cyberbullying properties, such as the content type, purpose, directionality, and …

A Bidirectional Formulation For Walk On Spheres, Yang Qi

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Poisson’s equations and Laplace’s equations are important linear partial differential equations (PDEs)
widely used in many applications. Conventional methods for solving PDEs numerically often need to
discretize the space first, making them less efficient for complex shapes. The random walk on spheres
method (WoS) is a grid-free Monte-Carlo method for solving PDEs that does not need to discrete the
space. We draw analogies between WoS and classical rendering algorithms, and find that the WoS
algorithm is conceptually identical to forward path tracing.
We show that solving the Poisson’s equation is equivalent to solving the Green’s function for every
pair of …