Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Active Learning Augmented Folded Gaussian Model For Anomaly Detection In Smart Transportation, Venkata Praveen Kumar Madhavarapu, Prithwiraj Roy, Shameek Bhattacharjee, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Smart transportation networks have become instrumental in smart city applications with the potential to enhance road safety, improve the traffic management system and driving experience. A Traffic Message Channel (TMC) is an IoT device that records the data collected from the vehicles and forwards it to the Roadside Units (RSUs). This data is further processed and shared with the vehicles to inquire the fastest route and incidents that can cause significant delays. The failure of the TMC sensors can have adverse effects on the transportation network. In this paper, we propose a Gaussian distribution-based trust scoring model to identify anomalous …

An Exploration Of Voting With Partial Orders, Mason Acevedo

HMC Senior Theses

In this thesis, we discuss existing ideas and voting systems in social choice theory. Specifically, we focus on the Kemeny rule and the Borda count. Then, we begin trying to understand generalizations of these voting systems in a setting where voters can submit partial rankings on their ballot, instead of complete rankings.

Leveraging Developmental Psychology To Evaluate Artificial Intelligence, David S. Moore, Lisa M. Oakes, Victoria L. Romero, Koleen C. Mccrink

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems do not exhibit human-like common sense. The principles and practices of experimental psychology – specifically, work on infant cognition – can be used to develop and test AIs, providing insight into the building blocks of common sense. Here, we describe how the evaluation team for DARPA’s Machine Common Sense program is applying conceptual content, experimental design techniques, and analysis tools used in the field of infant cognitive development to the field of AI evaluation.

Impact Of Introductory Physics For The Life Sciences In A Senior Biology Capstone Course, Benjamin D. Geller , '01, Jack Rubien , '20, Sara Hiebert Burch, Catherine Hirshfeld Crouch

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

A goal of introductory physics for life sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we conducted a longitudinal study of the impact of IPLS on student work in later biology and chemistry courses. We report here on one part of that study, a comparison of written responses by students with different physics backgrounds on a diffusion task administered in a senior biology capstone course. We observed differences in student reasoning that were found to be associated with prior or …

Distributed Decision Making For V2v Charge Sharing In Intelligent Transportation Systems, Punyasha Chatterjee, Pratham Majumder, Arpita Debnath, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Electric vehicles (EVs) have emerged in the intelligent transportation system (ITS) to meet the increasing environmental concerns. To facilitate on-demand requirement of EV charging, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) charge transfer can be employed. However, most of the existing approaches to V2V charge sharing are centralized or semi-centralized, incurring huge message overhead, long waiting time, and infrastructural cost. In this paper, we propose novel distributed heuristic algorithms for V2V charge sharing based on the multi-criteria decision-making policy. The problem is mapped to an alias classical problem (i.e., optimum matching in weighted bipartite graphs), where the goal is to maximize the matching cardinality while …

Web-Based Platform For Analysis Of Rna Folding From High Throughput Chemical Probing Data, Christopher Jurich, Amir Brivanlou, Silvi Rouskin, Joseph D. Yesselman

Department of Chemistry: Faculty Publications

RNA structures play critical roles in regulating gene expression across all domains of life and viruses. Chemical probing methods coupled with massively parallel sequencing have revolutionized the RNA structure field by enabling the assessment of many structures in their native, physiological context. Previously, we developed Dimethyl-Sulfate-based Mutational Profiling and Sequencing (DMS-MaPseq), which uses DMS to label the Watson-Crick face of open and accessible adenine and cytosine bases in the RNA. We used this approach to determine the genome-wide structures of HIV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 in infected cells, which permitted uncovering new biology and identifying therapeutic targets. Due to the simplicity and …

Topological Hierarchies And Decomposition: From Clustering To Persistence, Kyle A. Brown

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Hierarchical clustering is a class of algorithms commonly used in exploratory data analysis (EDA) and supervised learning. However, they suffer from some drawbacks, including the difficulty of interpreting the resulting dendrogram, arbitrariness in the choice of cut to obtain a flat clustering, and the lack of an obvious way of comparing individual clusters. In this dissertation, we develop the notion of a topological hierarchy on recursively-defined subsets of a metric space. We look to the field of topological data analysis (TDA) for the mathematical background to associate topological structures such as simplicial complexes and maps of covers to clusters in …

The Pandemic’S Effects On The Use Of Personal Listening Devices And Prevalence Of Hearing Damage In College Students, Morgan Fink

Senior Honors Projects

Personal listening devices (PLDs), such as earbuds and headphones, are prevalent in today’s society, and overuse of these devices can cause hearing damage. Since the pandemic caused lockdowns and online classes, college students have presumably had more time to be indoors and to use PLDs, leading to a higher risk or developing hearing damage. Previous studies have explored the PLD use and the prevalence of hearing damage in college students, but this study investigates whether the coronavirus pandemic has affected college students’ PLD listening habits and whether these changes are related to the students’ disclosure of suspected symptoms of hearing …

Exploring The Complex Relationship Between Engineering Students Math Experiences And Identity Formation, Jill Davishahl, Joseph Brobst, Elizabeth Litzler, Andrew Klein, Sura Alqudah

Division of Research and Economic Development Faculty & Staff Publications

This paper shares the experiences of a group of S-STEM scholarship students as they progressed through their first year of undergraduate mathematics education including a math placement exam, a math focused bridge program, and calculus course(s). In addition, connections between student experiences and their math identity development were investigated with the goal of better understanding math identity formation. The authors used a mixed-methods approach to explore the math-related experiences of 12 students over the first year of participation in an NSF-funded S-STEM program. Data includes answers to select survey questions and transcripts of student focus groups. First, each student case …

On The Finiteness Of Quantum K-Theory Of A Homogeneous Space, D. Anderson, Linda Chen, H.-H. Tseng

Mathematics & Statistics Faculty Works

We show that the product in the quantum K-ring of a generalized flag manifold G/P involves only finitely many powers of the Novikov variables. In contrast to previous approaches to this finiteness question, we exploit the finite difference module structure of quantum K-theory. At the core of the proof is a bound on the asymptotic growth of the J-function, which in turn comes from an analysis of the singularities of the zastava spaces studied in geometric representation theory. An appendix by H. Iritani establishes the equivalence between finiteness and a quadratic growth condition on certain shift operators.

The Impacts Of The Molecular Education And Research Consortium In Undergraduate Computational Chemistry On The Careers Of Women In Computational Chemistry, Kelly Anderson, Sarah Arradondo, K Aurelia Ball, Chrystal D. Bruce, Maria A. Gomez, Kedan He, Heidi Hendrickson, Lindsey Madison, Ashley Ringer Mcdonald, Maria C. Nagan, Carol Parish, Caitlin E. Scott, Patricia Soto, Aime'e Tomlinson, Mychel Varner

2022 Faculty Bibliography

The Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry (MERCURY) has supported a diverse group of faculty and students for over 20 years by providing computational resources as well as networking opportunities and professional support. The consortium comprises 38 faculty (42% women) at 34 different institutions, who have trained nearly 900 undergraduate students, more than two-thirds of whom identify as women and one-quarter identify as students of color. MERCURY provides a model for the support necessary for faculty to achieve professional advancement and career satisfaction. The range of experiences and expertise of the consortium members provides excellent networking opportunities …

A New Universal Polarization Resolving Software Package For Solar Coronal And Heliospheric Observations, Bryce M. Walbridge, Matthew J. West, J. Marcus Hughes, Dan Seaton, Chris Lowder

Summer Research

No abstract provided.

On The Polytopal Generalization Of Sperner’S Lemma, Amit Harlev

HMC Senior Theses

We introduce and prove Sperner’s lemma, the well known combinatorial analogue of the Brouwer fixed point theorem, and then attempt to gain a better understanding of the polytopal generalization of Sperner’s lemma conjectured in Atanassov (1996) and proven in De Loera et al. (2002). After explaining the polytopal generalization and providing examples, we present a new, simpler proof of a slightly weaker result that helps us better understand the result and why it is correct. Some ideas for how to generalize this proof to the complete result are discussed. In the last two chapters we provide a brief introduction to …

S-Glutathionylation Of Chicken Breast Extract, Isabella Fransisco

Senior Honors Projects

The purpose of this experiment was to analyze chicken breast fractions through affinity chromatography for protein modifications by glutathione disulfide (GSSG). The fractions were incubated with different concentrations of GSSG to determine potential modified proteins. There were proteins modified with GSSG at 33 kDa in fraction I, at 16 kDa, 36 kDa, and 44kDa in fraction II, and at 36 kDa in fraction III for the concentration dependent reactions. In the time dependent reaction for fraction II, there were two major proteins at 65 kDa and 176 kDa that were modified by GSSG. Lastly, we suggest that the major modified …

Liability For Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Medicine, W. Nicholson Price, Sara Gerke, I. Glenn Cohen

Law & Economics Working Papers

While artificial intelligence has substantial potential to improve medical practice, errors will certainly occur, sometimes resulting in injury. Who will be liable? Questions of liability for AI-related injury raise not only immediate concerns for potentially liable parties, but also broader systemic questions about how AI will be developed and adopted. The landscape of liability is complex, involving health-care providers and institutions and the developers of AI systems. In this chapter, we consider these three principal loci of liability: individual health-care providers, focused on physicians; institutions, focused on hospitals; and developers.

Electroencephalogram Classification Of Brain States Using Deep Learning Approach, Hrishitva Patel

Computer Science Faculty Scholarship

The oldest diagnostic method in the field of neurology is electroencephalography (EEG). To grasp the information contained in EEG signals, numerous deep machine learning architectures have been developed recently. In brain computer interface (BCI) systems, classification is crucial. Many recent studies have effectively employed deep learning algorithms to learn features and classify various sorts of data. A systematic review of EEG classification using deep learning was conducted in this research, resulting in 90 studies being discovered from the Web of Science and PubMed databases. Researchers looked at a variety of factors in these studies, including the task type, EEG pre-processing …

Development Of Scent Detection And Categorization Algorithm Using Gas Chromatography And Machine Learning, Alex Driehaus

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

There are many looking to connect human senses to quantifiable data. Scents are categorized by their descriptions into scent families. These include citrus, floral, and woody. Similar descriptors designate similar families, while different descriptors correlate with different families. Dravnieks compiled an Atlas of chemical descriptors [1]. Such descriptors are cinnamon, fruity, and cadaverous. By analyzing the applicability of these descriptors, the chemicals will be sorted into their scent families.

Gas chromatography generates sample-specific signals of voltage over time. Chromatograms of known scents will serve as a basis for a convolutional neural network. This algorithm will be trained on these signals …

Kentuckians' Perception Of The Environment And Use Of Outdoor Public Spaces, Grace Herrmann

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

Understanding how people perceive the environment and built public outdoor spaces is valuable in determining the direction of future development in the state. Further, understanding the emotions relating to the environment, both the natural and built public environments is instrumental in guiding future planning. This project aimed to understand Kentuckians’ perception of the environment and their use of public outdoor spaces such as parks, farmer markets, bike lanes, and walking paths through the use of a digital survey. Respondents to this survey are Kentuckians over the age of 18. The digital survey was split into four sections. The first section …

Soil Project, Gabriella Hopkins

Natural Sciences Student Research Presentations

What are soil-borne diseases?

- Soil-borne diseases are diseases that can infect plants, animals, and human via soil.

- There are multiple different pathogens that contaminate soil and cause disease including bacteria, fungi, and helminths (parasitic worms). Most of these lay dormant (inactive) in the soil until they come in contact with a host.

- A host such as an animal can become infected by inhaling dormant spores or eggs in the case of helminths or by the pathogen coming in contact with an open wound. These situations are also the case for humans, but humans can also become infected …

Soil Health And The Effects Of Nanoparticles, Elijah Mock

Natural Sciences Student Research Presentations

I researched the effects of soil on human health. Specifically, I was interested in nanoparticles that reside in soil and how they affect humans as well as crops that are planted in the soil. This topic is relevant because nanoparticles can be used to deliver drugs for doctors, create specific properties for material scientists, sensors for the military, and in a plethora of other fields (“What Are Nanoparticles? Definition, Size, Uses and Properties.”).

Leveraging Spanning Tree To Detect Colluding Attackers In Federated Learning, Priyesh Ranjan, Federico Coro, Ashish Gupta, Sajal K. Das

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Federated learning distributes model training among multiple clients who, driven by privacy concerns, perform training using their local data and only share model weights for iterative aggregation on the server. In this work, we explore the threat of collusion attacks from multiple malicious clients who pose targeted attacks (e.g., label flipping) in a federated learning configuration. By leveraging client weights and the correlation among them, we develop a graph-based algorithm to detect malicious clients. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our algorithm in presence of varying number of attackers on a classification task using a well-known Fashion-MNIST dataset.

Root Phenotyping Of Peptide-Treated Glycine Max, Salem Jackson, Fiona Goggin

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Plant elicitor peptides (Peps) – endogenous chains of amino acids involved in natural plant defense – have been shown to decrease damage from herbivores and pathogens by inducing an immune response, increasing the emission of volatile organic compounds (VOCS), transcripts, and metabolites. Exogenous treatment of soybean seeds with plant elicitor peptide GmPep3 has been shown to induce these broad-spectrum defenses and offers a new method for increasing crop yield. However, the effects of GmPep3 on indicators of soybean health – root characteristics, growth stages, etc. – have not been fully realized. Using the root-phenotyping platform RhizoVision Explorer, several root traits …

Experiment 1.07: Torque, Diego Castano

Physics Lab Experiments with Simulated Data for Remote Delivery

A mechanical balance is used to study the role of torque in states of static equilibrium.

Proteome Database, Mariana Rius, Jackie L. Collier, Joshua Rest

SoMAS Research Data

No abstract provided.

Search Under Uncertainty Should Be Randomized: A Lesson From The 2021 Nobel Prize In Medicine, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In many real-life situations, we know that one of several objects has the desired property, but we do not know which one. To find the desired object, we need to test these objects one by one. In situations when we have no additional information, there is no reason to prefer any testing order and thus, a usual recommendation is to test them in any order. This is usually interpreted as ordering the objects in the increasing value of some seemingly unrelated quantity. A possible drawback of this approach is that it may turn out that the selected quantity is correlated …

A Kinetic Analysis Of Bleaching Synthetic Indigo In Solution, Emily Fry

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Indigo's ability to dye a wide variety of fabric types gives it a prominent place in the textile industry. As a vat dye, indigo must be reduced to leuco-indigo to dissolve in water and dye fabric. It is common practice in the textile industry to bleach indigo-dyed denim to alter the final appearance of the garment. This research aims to determine the kinetic order of this bleaching process, using hydrogen peroxide as a bleaching agent for synthetic indigo. Vat solutions of synthetic indigo were made using fructose as the reducing agent and sodium hydroxide to create a reducing environment. Four …

Prevalence Of Caffeine Dependency And Daytime Fatigue Amongst Undergraduate Students, Benjamin P. Brown, Josie Nicholson, Willa Stauffer, Elise M. Crause, Katie Young

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

Caffeine is considered a legal drug with a main function of acting as a stimulant. The recommended daily dose of caffeine is up to 400 mg, however, most college students consume on average 800 mg per day (Mcllavian et al., 2013). Amongst American college students, caffeine is considered one of five most commonly consumed drugs, being compared with alcohol, marijuana, opioids, and sedatives (American Addictions Center, 2019). Within this population, there is a lack of knowledge regarding the adverse effects of caffeine and its potential impact of alertness versus sleepiness. Existing literature on this topic has shown that caffeine can …

Experiment 1.01: Measurement, Diego Castano, Victor Castro

Physics Lab Experiments with Simulated Data for Remote Delivery

Introduction to measurement/data analysis; measurements of an aluminum cylinder and cuboid are used to determine their densities.

Topics In Moufang Loops, Riley Britten

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We will begin by discussing power graphs of Moufang loops. We are able to show that as in groups the directed power graph of a Moufang loop is uniquely determined by the undirected power graph. In the process of proving this result we define the generalized octonion loops, a variety of Moufang loops which behave analogously to the generalized quaternion groups. We proceed to investigate para-F quasigroups, a variety of quasigroups which we show are antilinear over Moufang loops. We briefly depart from the context of Moufang loops to discuss solvability in general loops. We then prove some results on …

Application Of An Organizational Evaluation Capacity Assessment In A Multinational Ngo: A Case Study To Support Applied Practice, Ryan James Smyth

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As evaluation capacity building (ECB) has rapidly emerged as a practice in human service organizations and as a field of academic inquiry, attention has focused on methods of evaluation capacity building while assessment of organizational evaluation capacity (EC) has lagged behind. To examine the practice of organizational evaluation capacity assessment, this dissertation presents two separate but related studies. In sub-study 1, I present a qualitative evidence synthesis of the research theorizing organizational evaluation capacity models. In sub-study 2, I support the implementation of one of the tools from the evidence-synthesis at a multinational human service organization. I use a concurrent …