Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Towards The Determination Of Estrone And 17Β-Estradiol In Dairy Cattle Waste Using Solid Phase And Stir Bar Sorptive Extractions With Liquid Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry And Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, Pallavi Ragi

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Steroidal hormones are naturally produced as a part of many physiological processes and are excreted in the urine and feces of animals and humans. Farm animals in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are routinely implanted with synthetic and natural hormones to enhance growth and production, contributing significantly to environmental steroid hormone contamination. Every year around 49 tons of estrogens are generated by livestock waste in the United States alone. Due to rainfall and runoff, these steroid hormones reach the environment when animal waste is applied as manure. Studies show that estrogens and other steroidal hormones present in the surface waters …

Generation & Kinetic Studies Of Porphyrin Chromium-Oxo Intermediates, Iyanu Olumide Ojo

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Recent emerging applications of chromium porphyrin complexes are generating increasing interest in oxidation chemistry and catalysis. Its recent application as metal-organic frames in spintronic devices supports the rich electronic system of chromium metal. Through the past decades, first-row transition metalloporphyrins have served as biomimetic oxidation catalysts and models of cytochrome P450 enzymes. However, the oxygen atom transfer mechanism of chromium porphyrin complexes, most especially in sulfide oxidation reactions, has been scarcely investigated.

In this study, high-valent chromium-oxo porphyrin species, namely Cr^IV-oxo and Cr^V-oxo species, with electron-donating tetramesitylporphyrin(TMP) ligand were successfully generated and characterized with UV-vis, ESI-MS, …

Factors Influencing Tree Growth In A Bottomland Hardwood Along The Green River In Kentucky, Caleb Miller

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

In bottomland hardwood forests, large fluctuations in moisture availability can lead to stress from both flooded and drought conditions. These forests can have a complex species composition with different water use and drought strategies. The bottomlands in which these species co-occur can have a complex spatial distribution of alluvial sediments due to the meandering and migration of river or stream channels, which may impact the hydrology, nutrient dynamics, and productivity. At Western Kentucky University's Green River Preserve, approximately 9 ha of bottomland hardwood forest were planted in 2006. Although these hardwoods have received equal amounts of sunlight, rainfall, and wind, …

Data And Algorithmic Modeling Approaches To Count Data, Andraya Hack

Honors College Theses

Various techniques are used to create predictions based on count data. This type of data takes the form of a non-negative integers such as the number of claims an insurance policy holder may make. These predictions can allow people to prepare for likely outcomes. Thus, it is important to know how accurate the predictions are. Traditional statistical approaches for predicting count data include Poisson regression as well as negative binomial regression. Both methods also have a zero-inflated version that can be used when the data has an overabundance of zeros. Another procedure is to use computer algorithms, also known as …

Impact Of A Cattle Crossing On Water Quality Along A Tributary Of The Muddy Fork Of The Illinois River, Northwest Arkansas, Nicholas Valentini

Animal Science Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cattle are known to have an effect on water quality in various bodies of water. Studying how cattle impact water quality along various streams and tributaries is important to understanding how certain water parameters may be affected at the individual farm level. It is known that unrestricted access to a cattle crossing has been shown to increase the occurrence of downstream pollutants such as E. coli, ammonium, total kjeldahl nitrogen, total suspended solids, total phosphorus, and turbidity. However, many studies focus on large-scale operations and neglect the individual farm level. In this study, samples were collected twice for each …

Rodent Dental Microwear Texture Analysis As A Proxy For Fine-Scale Paleoenvironment Reconstruction, Jenny H. E. Burgman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) of fossil fauna has become a valuable tool for dietary inference and paleoenvironment reconstruction. Most of this work has utilized larger taxa with larger home ranges. These studies may result in broader-scale habitat inferences that could mask the details of complex mosaic habitats. Rodent DMTA offers an opportunity to work at finer spatial scales because most species have smaller home ranges. Rodents are also keystone species within their ecosystems, abundant, ubiquitous, and found in many fossil deposits. These attributes make them excellent proxies for environmental reconstructions. However, the application of DMTA to rodents remains relatively …

Temporal Changes In Surface Water Availability: Patterns Of Seasonal Shift On Water Stress In The Conterminous Us Under A Changing Climate, Quinn Montana

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The argument could be made that there is nothing more valuable on the planet than water. Our lives depend upon it. Climate change is already having an impact on the United States (US) and water stress will be one of the problems we increasingly face in coming decades. Regional research has shown that one or another part of the conterminous US (CONUS) is expected to experience an annual deficit or a surplus in runoff. Further studies have looked at changing patterns over the CONUS as a whole. Other research has focused on a particular season. This work addresses a gap …

Inter-Cell Slicing Resource Partitioning Via Coordinated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning, Tianlun Hu, Qi Liao, Qiang Liu, Dan Wellington, Georg Carle

School of Computing: Faculty Publications

Network slicing enables the operator to configure virtual network instances for diverse services with specific requirements. To achieve the slice-aware radio resource scheduling, dynamic slicing resource partitioning is needed to orchestrate multi-cell slice resources and mitigate inter-cell interference. It is, however, challenging to derive the analytical solutions due to the complex inter-cell interdependencies, interslice resource constraints, and service-specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that improves the max-min slice performance while maintaining the constraints of resource capacity. We design two coordination schemes to allow distributed agents to coordinate and mitigate inter-cell interference. The …

Land And Water Resources For Irrigated Agriculture In The Pilbara, Paul Galloway, John A. Simons, Karen Holmes, Dennis Van Gool

Resource management technical reports

This report documents the procedures used to identify suitable locations for irrigation development in the Pilbara region. It is the first study to investigate the potential for irrigated agriculture across the Pilbara. We used a desktop analysis to ascertain water availability and spatial data modelling to determine the potential of the land and soil resource to support irrigated agriculture. This study was part of the Pilbara Hinterland Agricultural Development Initiative (PHADI).

We used existing rangeland land inventory information augmented with digital spatial environmental data, in a process known as map disaggregation, to create soil and landform maps that had a …

What About Generic "And"- And "Or"-Operations: From Levels Of Certainty (Philosophical-Physical-Mathematical) To A Natural Interpretation Of Quantum-Like Negative Degrees Of Certainty, Miroslav Svitek, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy techniques -- techniques designed to convert imprecise human knowledge into precise computer-understandable terms -- have many successful applications. Traditional applications of fuzzy techniques use only important general features of human reasoning and, to make an implement more efficient, ignore subtle details, details which are not important for the corresponding application. But from the more fundamental viewpoint, it is desirable to understand, in all the detail, how people actually reason. In this paper, we use general ideas of fuzzy approach to answer this question. Interestingly -- and somewhat unexpectedly -- the resulting analysis leads to a natural explanation of existence …

How Can The Opposite To A True Theory Be Also True? A Similar Talmudic Discussion Helps Make This Famous Bohr's Statement Logically Consistent, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In his famous saying, the Nobelist physicist Niels Bohr claimed that the sign of a deep theory is that while this theory is true, its opposite is also true. While this statement makes heuristic sense, it does not seem to make sense from a logical viewpoint, since, in logic, the opposite to true is false. In this paper, we show how a similar Talmudic discussion can help come up with an interpretation in which Bohr's statement becomes logically consistent.

In The Absence Of Information, The Only Reasonable Negotiation Scheme Is Offering A Certain Percentage Of The Original Request: A Proof, Miroslav Svitek, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In the case of complete information, a reasonable solution to a negotiation process is Nash's bargaining solution, in which we maximize the product of all agents' utility gains. This is the only solution that does not depend on the order in which we list the agents, and does not change if we use a different scale for describing each agent's utility. In this paper, we apply similar invariance criteria to a situation when practically all information is absent, and all we know is the smallest and largest possible gains. We show that in this situation, the only invariant negotiation strategy …

Why Some Theoretically Possible Representations Of Natural Numbers Were Historically Used And Some Were Not: An Algorithm-Based Explanation, Christian Servin, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Historically, people have used many ways to represent natural numbers: from the original "unary" arithmetic, where each number is represented as a sequence of, e.g., cuts (4 is IIII) to modern decimal and binary systems. However, with all this variety, some seemingly reasonable ways of representing natural numbers were never used. For example, it may seem reasonable to represent numbers as products -- e.g., as products of prime numbers -- such a representation was never used in history. So why some theoretically possible representations of natural numbers were historically used and some were not? In this paper, we propose an …

An Afm Approach Applied In A Study Of Α-Crystallin Membrane Association: New Insights Into Lens Hardening And Presbyopia Development, Nawal K. Khadka, Raju Timsina, Laxman Mainali

Physics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The lens of the eye loses elasticity with age, while α-crystallin association with the lens membrane increases with age. It is unclear whether there is any correlation between α-crystallin association with the lens membrane and loss in lens elasticity. This research investigated α-crystallin membrane association using atomic force microscopy (AFM) for the first time to study topographical images and mechanical properties (breakthrough force and membrane area compressibility modulus (K_A), as measures of elasticity) of the membrane. α-Crystallin extracted from the bovine lens cortex was incubated with a supported lipid membrane (SLM) prepared on a flat mica surface. The …

A Possible Alignment Between The Orbits Of Planetary Systems And Their Visual Binary Companions, S. Christian, A. Vanderburg, J. Becker, D. A. Yahalomi, L. Pearce, G. Zhou, K. A. Collins, A. L. Kraus, K. G. Stassun, Z. De Beurs, G. R. Ricker, R. K. Vanderspek, D. W. Latham, J. N. Winn, S. Seager, J. M. Jenkins, L. Abe, K. Agabi, P. J. Amado, D. Baker, K. Barkaoui, Z. Benkhaldoun, P. Benni, J. Berberian, P. Berlind, A. Bieryla, E. Esparza-Borges, M. Bowen, P. Brown, L. A. Buchhave, C. J. Burke, M. Buttu, C. Cadieux, D. A. Caldwell, D. Charbonneau, N. Chazov, S. Chimaladinne, K. I. Collins, D. Combs, D. M. Conti, N. Crouzet, J. P. De Leon, S. Deljookorani, B. Diamond, R. Doyon, D. Dragomir, G. Dransfield, Z. Essack, P. Evans, A. Fukui, T. Gan, G. A. Esquerdo, M. Gillon, E. Girardin, P. Guerra, T. Guillot, E. K. K. Habich, A. Henriksen, N. Hoch, K. I. Isogai, E. Jehin, Eric L.N. Jensen, M. C. Johnson, J. H. Livingston, J. F. Kielkopf, K. Kim, K. Kawauchi, V. Krushinsky, V. Kunzle, D. Laloum, D. Leger, P. Lewin, F. Mallia, B. Massey, M. Mori, K. K. Mcleod, D. Mékarnia, I. Mireles, N. Mishevskiy, M. Tamura, F. Murgas, N. Narita, R. Naves, P. Nelson, H. P. Osborn, E. Palle, H. Parviainen, P. Plavchan, F. J. Pozuelos, M. Rabus, H. M. Relles, C. Rodríguez López, S. N. Quinn, F.-X. Schmider, J. E. Schlieder, R. P. Schwarz, A. Shporer, L. Sibbald, G. Srdoc, C. Stibbards, H. Stickler, O. Suarez, C. Stockdale, T.-G. Tan, Y. Terada, A. Triaud, R. Tronsgaard, W. C. Waalkes, G. Wang, N. Watanabe, M.-S. Wenceslas, G. Wingham, J. Wittrock, C. Ziegler

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

Astronomers do not have a complete picture of the effects of wide-binary companions (semimajor axes greater than 100 au) on the formation and evolution of exoplanets. We investigate these effects using new data from Gaia Early Data Release 3 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite mission to characterize wide-binary systems with transiting exoplanets. We identify a sample of 67 systems of transiting exoplanet candidates (with well-determined, edge-on orbital inclinations) that reside in wide visual binary systems. We derive limits on orbital parameters for the wide-binary systems and measure the minimum difference in orbital inclination between the binary and planet orbits. …

Human Behavior Modeling In Long Videos: Drowsiness Detection And Action Segmentation, Reza Ghoddoosian

Computer Science and Engineering Dissertations - Archive

"In this thesis we focus on two instances of human behavior modeling in long untrimmed videos: drowsiness detection, and action segmentation. In the first section, we focus on drowsiness detection. Specifically, we introduce a large and public real-life dataset and a baseline temporal model to classify drowsiness into three stages of alert, low vigilant, or drowsy. In the second section, we study action segmentation in instructional videos under weak supervision. In order to save time and cost, weakly supervised methods are trained based on only video-level action sequences as opposed to a fully supervised method which is trained using frame-level …

Learning Topology Preserving Embeddings For Speeding Up Nearest Neighbor Retrieval, Mason Lary

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Given a database of objects and a query object, it’s possible to gather a number of the closest neighbors to the query object. This operation is important to a number of diverse fields such as computer vision, content- based information retrieval, and chemistry. However, distance measures used to determine neighbors can cause queries to be computationally expensive, either because the distance measure is complex or because it is nonmetric and prevents efficient indexing methods. This work presents novel methods of triplet mining that enable neural networks using triplet loss to learn the manifold that data resides in. These neural networks …

Distraction Detection And Intention Recognition For Gesture-Controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Operation, Debayan Datta

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Gesture Control as a way to replace more conventional remote-control operations has been pursued for a significant period of time with different levels of success. The use of gestures to control different types of human interfaces is today predominantly seen in the multimedia sector. People perform easy and intuitive gestures to control their televisions, to interact with multimedia, and to play games. Also, much research has been carried out to experiment with human interfaces to numerous augmented and virtual reality devices and tasks. The results of these experiments were so exciting that researchers started to expand the use of gestures …

Detection And Classification Of Object Presence And Characteristics In A Water Container Using High Frequency Ultrasound, Mehul Vishal Sadh

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Detection and characterization of soluble, diffuse, and solid objects and their characteristics in water has important implications in various applications, including water quality assessment and incontinence monitoring for health applications. In particular in the latter task, it is essential to be able to non-intrusively detect the appearance, presence, and consistency of materials in the water without the need for special purpose instruments or a special purpose setting. Rather, it would be important that sensing could be performed int he context of existing toilet systems. To achieve this, this work investigates the potential use of high frequency sonar sensors retrofitted to …

A Combinatorial Approach To Fairness Testing Of Machine Learning Models, Ankita Ramjibhai Patel

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Machine Learning (ML) models could exhibit biased behavior, or algorithmic discrimination, resulting in unfair or discriminatory outcomes. The bias in the ML model could emanate from various factors such as the training dataset, the choice of the ML algorithm, or the hyperparameters used to train the ML model. In addition to evaluating the model’s correctness, it is essential to test ML models for fair and unbiased behavior. In this thesis, we present a combinatorial testing-based approach to perform fairness testing of ML models. Our approach is model agnostic and evaluates fairness violations of a pre-trained ML model in a two-step …

“Strict Moderation?” The Impact Of Increased Moderation On Parler Content And User Behavior, Nihal Kumarswamy

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

Social media platforms have brought people from different backgrounds, ethnicity, race, gender, etc together to form a platform to share ideas and opinions and discuss news events among other social events. Unfortunately, these platforms have also been a safe haven for abusive users who harass, bully other users or spread misinformation and disinformation. Social media platforms have a huge incentive to police these abusive users and keep them in check to allow other genuine users to use their platform. Social media platforms employ several different content moderation techniques to perform this task. These techniques vary across platforms, for example, Parler …

A Non-Contact Based System To Measure Spo2 And Systolic/Diastolic Blood Pressure Using Rgb-Nir Camera, Divya Saxena

Computer Science and Engineering Theses - Archive

In recent times, people have increasingly self-assessed their health using different devices on their bodies that monitor physiological attributes such as their oxygen level and blood pressure (BP) to monitor their health. One of the most popular health concerns that became prominent during the COVID-19 pandemic was the blood oxygen saturation (SPO2) level. It became increasingly important to monitor SPO2 in patients, time and again to determine whether the right amount of oxygen is in the blood. Low oxygen levels usually indicate there may be an issue with oxygen circulation or supply and thus informs diagnostic and treatment decisions such …

Performance Of Density Estimators In Additive Measurement Error Models Based On Right Censored Data, Hrishabh Khakurel

Mathematics Dissertations - Archive

In the deconvolution problem for right censored data, one is interested in estimating the density of a contaminated variable X when X satisfies Z= X+ E, where E is a measurement error with a known distribution, and the observable variable Z is right-censored. Zhu, Sun, Khakurel, and Wang (2021) applied the Inverse Probability of Censoring Weighted Average method and derived the estimators of the unknown density of X. In this study, we evaluate the performance of the density estimators both in theory and in simulation. We derive the theoretical upper bounds for Mean Squared Error (MSE) of the estimator and …

Visualcommunity: A Platform For Archiving And Studying Communities, Suphanut Jamonnak, Deepshikha Bhati, Md Amiruzzaman, Ye Zhao, Xinyue Ye, Andrew Curtis

Computer Science Faculty Publications

VisualCommunity is a platform designed to support community or neighborhood scale research. The platform integrates mobile, AI, visualization techniques, along with tools to help domain researchers, practitioners, and students collecting and working with spatialized video and geo-narratives. These data, which provide granular spatialized imagery and associated context gained through expert commentary have previously provided value in understanding various community-scale challenges. This paper further enhances this work AI-based image processing and speech transcription tools available in VisualCommunity, allowing for the easy exploration of the acquired semantic and visual information about the area under investigation. In this paper we describe the specific …

3-Uniform 4-Path Decompositions Of Complete 3-Uniform Hypergraphs, Rachel Mccann

Mathematical Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

The complete 3-uniform hypergraph of order v is denoted as K_v and consists of vertex set V with size v and edge set E, containing all 3-element subsets of V. We consider a 3-uniform hypergraph P₇, a path with vertex set {v₁, v₂, v₃, v₄, v₅, v₆, v₇} and edge set {{v₁, v₂, v₃}, {v₂, v₃, v₄}, {v₄, v₅, v₆}, {v₅, v_{6 …}

Assessing The Influence Of Health Policy And Population Mobility On Covid-19 Spread In Arkansas, Tayden Barretto

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The outbreak of COVID-19 has created a major crisis across the world since its start in 2019, and its influence on every realm of society is undeniable. Globally, more than 500 million cases have been recorded since March 2020, with almost 6 million deaths. In the wake of this crisis, many governments and health organizations have taken steps and precautions to mitigate its spread. These steps involve public mandates of information, reducing frequency of personal contact, and use of masks to minimize the risk of transmission. Current access to mobility data released from Google detailing population movements has provided a …

Implementing The Cms+ Sports Rankings Algorithm In A Javafx Environment, Luke Welch

Industrial Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Every year, sports teams and athletes get cut from championship opportunities because of their rank. While this reality is easier to swallow if a team or athlete is distant from the cut, it is much harder when they are right on the edge. Many times, it leaves fans and athletes wondering, “Why wasn’t I ranked higher? What factors when into the ranking? Are the rankings based on opinion alone?” These are fair questions that deserve an answer. Many times, sports rankings are derived from opinion polls. Other times, they are derived from a combination of opinion polls and measured performance. …

Structure Of Number Theoretic Graphs, Lee Trent

Mathematical Sciences Technical Reports (MSTR)

The tools of graph theory can be used to investigate the structure
imposed on the integers by various relations. Here we investigate two
kinds of graphs. The first, a square product graph, takes for its vertices
the integers 1 through n, and draws edges between numbers whose product
is a square. The second, a square product graph, has the same vertex set,
and draws edges between numbers whose sum is a square.
We investigate the structure of these graphs. For square product
graphs, we provide a rather complete characterization of their structure as
a union of disjoint complete graphs. For …

Halodash: The Deep And Shallow History Of Aquatic Life's Passages Between Marine And Freshwater Habitats, Eric T. Schultz, Lisa Park Boush

EEB Articles

This series of papers highlights research into how biological exchanges between salty and freshwater habitats have transformed the biosphere. Life in the ocean and in freshwaters have long been intertwined; multiple major branches of the tree of life originated in the oceans and then adapted to and diversified in freshwaters. Similar exchanges continue to this day, including some species that continually migrate between marine and fresh waters. The series addresses key themes of transitions, transformations, and current threats with a series of questions: When did major colonizations of fresh waters happen? What physiographic changes facilitated transitions? What organismal characteristics facilitate …

How Flow Regime Affects Predator-Prey Relationships Of Stream Darter And Shiner Species, Anna E. Richardson

Biological Sciences Undergraduate Honors Theses

Analysis of the interactions between abiotic and biotic factors of environments and ecosystems is a highly valued area of research. This study focuses on the interactions between the biotic component of predation and foraging of certain stream fish species and the abiotic component of the flow regime that those species reside in. Gut content analysis followed by statistical calculations in the form of t-tests and chi -quared tests were performed on two fish species who both inhabited a stream with a groundwater flashy flow regime as well as a stream with a runoff flashy flow regime. The research showed that …