Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Duty To Address Climate Change Litigation Risks For Australian Energy Companies—Policy And Governance Issues, Prafula Pearce

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy requires cooperation from all, including corporations, shareholders, and institutional investors. The purpose of this paper is to explore climate change litigation risks for Australian energy companies and investors from a policy and governance perspective. Companies are increasingly reporting their climate policies to satisfy their shareholders and investor demands. In addition, the government and judiciary are making laws and decisions to support the Paris Agreement. This paper explores whether company directors can and, in some cases, should be considering the impact of climate change litigation risks on their business, or else risk breaching …

Genotype-Specific Lesion Growth Rates In Stargardt Disease, Rachael C. Heath Jeffery, Jennifer A. Thompson, Johnny Lo, Tina M. Lamey, Terri L. Mclaren, Ian L. Mcallister, Ian J. Constable, John N. De Roach, Fred K. Chen

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Reported growth rates (GR) of atrophic lesions in Stargardt disease (STGD1) vary widely. In the present study, we report the longitudinal natural history of patients with confirmed bial-lelic ABCA4 mutations from five genotype groups: c.6079C > T, c.[2588G > C;5603A > T], c.3113C > T, c.5882G > A and c.5603A > T. Fundus autofluorescence (AF) 30◦ × 30◦ images were manually seg-mented for boundaries of definitely decreased autofluorescence (DDAF). The primary outcome was the effective radius GR across five genotype groups. The age of DDAF formation in each eye was calculated using the x-intercept of the DDAF effective radius against age. Discordance between age at DDAF …

Nano-Grating Assisted Light Absorption Enhancement For Msm-Pds Performance Improvement: An Updated Review, Narottam Das, Mohammad Nur-E-Alam, Alif Islam, Ain Zulaikha Maslihan Ain

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

The primary focus of this review article mainly emphasizes the light absorption enhancement for various nanostructured gratings assisted metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors (MSM-PDs) that are so far proposed and developed for the improvement of light capturing performance. The MSM-PDs are considered as one of the key elements in the optical and high-speed communication systems for applications such as faster optical fiber communication systems, sensor networks, high-speed chip-to-chip interconnects, and high-speed sampling. The light absorption enhancement makes the MSM-PDs an ideal candidate due to their excellent performances in detection, especially in satisfying the high-speed or high-performance device requirements. The nano-grating assisted MSM-PDs are …

Comparison Of Seasonal Foes And Fbes Occurrence Rates Derived From Global Digisonde Measurements, Dawn K. Merriman, Omar A. Nava, Eugene V. Dao, Daniel J. Emmons Ii

Faculty Publications

A global climatology of sporadic-E occurrence rates (ORs) based on ionosonde measurements is presented for the peak blanketing frequency, fbEs, and the ordinary mode peak frequency of the layer, foEs. ORs are calculated for a variety of sporadic-E frequency thresholds: no lower limit, 3, 5, and 7 MHz. Seasonal rates are calculated from 64 Digisonde sites during the period 2006–2020 using ionograms either manually or automatically scaled with ARTIST-5. Both foEs and fbEs ORs peak in the Northern Hemisphere during the boreal summer, with a decrease by roughly a factor of 2–3 in fbEs rates relative to foEs rates without …

Combined Amplification And Sound Therapy For Individuals With Tinnitus And Coexisting Hearing Loss: A Retrospective Cohort Study, Purushothaman Ganesan, Hansapani Rodrigo, Jason Schmiedge, Rob Reiter, Simham Swapna, Vinaya Manchaiah

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

BACKGROUND: The heterogeneity of tinnitus perception and its impact necessitates a tailor-made management approach in everyone. The current study examined the effects of residual inhibition in combined amplification and sound therapy in individuals with tinnitus and coexisting hearing loss.

METHODS: A retrospective analysis was performed on patients with tinnitus and coexisting hearing loss between 2016 and 2019. A total of 72 patients provided with combined amplification and sound therapy were divided into 3 groups based on residual inhibition: (i) complete residual inhibition, (ii) partial residual inhibition, and (iii) negative residual inhibition. Tinnitus severity was measured using the Tinnitus …

Chronostratigrapy Of Miocene Fluviolacustrine Deposits In Amargosa Valley, Levente Laisz

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Fluviolacustrine deposits of middle Miocene age occur on the western margins of the Amargosa Valley, in the central Basin and Range. These deposits contain the earliest pupfish (Cyprinodon) reported from the fossil record. National Park collections contain specimens of pupfish fossils, interpreted as possibly Pliocene; however the exact collection location and stratigraphic horizon was not known. Therefore, the geographic extent of the fossil locality and geologic age of these specimens were uncertain. Recently, these collection sites were relocated and additional sites were discovered. Ar-Ar dating of interbedded tuffs established the first appearance datum of pupfish at 14.79 Ma and extended …

Fabricating Nanophotonic Devices Using Nanofabrication Techniques, Scott Cummings

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Nanofabrication processes are widely used to make the integrated circuits and computer chips that are ubiquitous in today’s technology. These fabrication processes can also be applied to the creation of nanophotonic devices. The ways in which we apply these fabrication techniques in the field of photonics is often constrained by the technologies used for electronics manufacturing which presents an interesting engineering challenge. These limitations include availability and cost of certain fabrication equipment and techniques required to create state-of-the-art nanophotonic devices. Through work with the University of California Irvine nano-fabrication cleanroom, we designed and fabricated various integrated photonic components including grating …

Improving The Success Of Non-Traditional Students In An Introductory Computing Course, Christine F. Reilly, Laura M. Grabowski, Gustavo Dietrich

Computer Science Faculty Publications

This Work in Progress Research to Practice paper presents a redesign of an introduction to computing course at a public, minority serving institution in the United States with a majority of non-traditional students. The course redesign was motivated by the desire to improve the success of the students in this course and in the major. Active learning during class and required attendance were the major components of the course redesign. The course policies included flexibility for the occasional absences that are expected with non-traditional students. A comparison of student performance in the experimental and control sections indicated that the requirement …

Absolute Neutral Densities And Temperatures And Their Climatologies In The Middle Atmosphere Using An Optimal Estimation Method With Rayleigh-Scatter Lidar Observations Obtained At Utah State University, Jonathan L. Price

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The Earth’s atmosphere is comprised of layers which can be defined by their temperature characteristics. These layers are the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere. The region where life exists is in the troposphere, however the study of the layers above is important as changes in these regions can directly impact, or indicate significant changes in, weather in the troposphere. The mesosphere is the least well-known region because it is the most difficult to observe. One of the best tools for observing this region is the Rayleigh-scatter lidar. It is capable of remotely observing the entirety of the mesosphere with good …

Valley Bottom Inundation Patterns In Beaver-Modified Streams: A Potential Proxy For Hydrologic Inefficiency, Karen Bartelt

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

For centuries river management and land use actions in North America have caused widespread stream degradation where water now flows downstream with artificially high efficiency. When present, beaver dams slow the flow of water and decrease the efficiency of water conveyance through the landscape. These effects are often to the benefit of the function of natural physical processes and ecology of the stream. The benefits provided by beaver dams have been well studied at small scales, but the methods that these studies rely on are often expensive and time consuming and consequently not feasible to deploy at larger spatial scales …

Achieving A Sequenced, Relational Query Language With Log-Segmented Timestamps, M. A. Manazir Ahsan

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In a relational temporal database, typically each row of each table has a period timestamp to indicate the lifetime of that row. In order to evaluate a query in a temporal database, sequenced semantics comes into play. The semantics stipulates that the query must be evaluated simultaneously in each time instant using the data rows available at that point of time. Existing researches have proposed changes in the query evaluation engine to achieve sequenced semantics. In this paper we show a way to support sequenced semantics without modifying the query engine. We propose a noble construction log-segmented label to represent …

Gps-Denied Navigation Using Synthetic Aperture Radar Images And Neural Networks, Teresa White

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) often rely on GPS for navigation. GPS signals, however, are very low in power and easily jammed or otherwise disrupted. This paper presents a method for determining the navigation errors present at the beginning of a GPS-denied period utilizing data from a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) system. This is accomplished by comparing an online-generated SAR image with a reference image obtained a priori. The distortions relative to the reference image are learned and exploited with a convolutional neural network to recover the initial navigational errors, which can be used to recover the true flight trajectory throughout …

The Internal Charge Evolution Of Multilayered Materials Undergoing Mono-Energetic Electron Bombardment, Gregory Wilson

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The charging of multilayer materials as related to the charging of spacecraft is one of the primary concerns related to activities in the space environment. To understand how multilayer materials undergoing electron bombardment charge, an in-depth study of energy-dependent material properties must be undertaken. These properties include the electron penetration depth, secondary electron emission, charge transport and electrostatic discharge. By using energy dependent models of these properties, along with the geometry of the system, multilayer models can be developed to predict the time evolution of the internal charge distribution. Using these models, the net surface potential and the measurement of …

Characterizing Relational Values To Inform Message-Framing At The Boa Ogoi Historical Site, Cole G. Stocker

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In an increasingly polarized political climate–particularly in the U.S.– environmental issues such as climate change and its effects on the environment have become hot-button partisan talking points resulting in further division. This has led to research on ways to communicate science which does not further inflame political tensions, but rather reinforces and validates the audience’s values. Science communication research provides the foundation for my case study, which focuses on characterizing the environmental values and worldviews of land managers residing and working near the Boa Ogoi Historical Site in southern Idaho. The Northwest Band of Shoshone Nation (NWBSN) is in the …

Tractor Connections For Killing Tensors And Their Generalizations, Benjamin D. Shaw

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

We create new symbolic software tools for the analysis of Killing tensors. Central to our work is the construction of the tractor connection defined on the tractor bundle, which allows one to obtain information about the space of Killing tensors without solving the Killing equations–an approach termed the tractor approach. We give a new application of the tractor approach which allows one to more easily check explicitly for linear independence of a given set of Killing tensors. We develop software to implement such methods in the case of rank 2 Killing tensors; similarly, we develop software to implement analogous methods …

Intelligent Traffic Management: From Practical Stochastic Path Planning To Reinforcement Learning Based City-Wide Traffic Optimization, Kamilia Ahmadi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This research focuses on intelligent traffic management including stochastic path planning and city scale traffic optimization. Stochastic path planning focuses on finding paths when edge weights are not fixed and change depending on the time of day/week. Then we focus on minimizing the running time of the overall procedure at query time utilizing precomputation and approximation. The city graph is partitioned into smaller groups of nodes and represented by its exemplar. In query time, source and destination pairs are connected to their respective exemplars and the path between those exemplars is found. After this, we move toward minimizing the city …

On Predicting Omnidirectional Honey Bee Traffic Using Weather And Electromagnetic Radiation, Daniel G. Hornberger

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Honey bees are responsible for pollinating many important crops in the United States. However, honey bee populations have declined significantly since 1961. While some causes of this decline are known, others are not. By utilizing electronic bee hive monitoring (EBM) systems, bee keepers and researchers have an added resource in determining the causes of these declines so that the issues can be remedied. For nearly five months (May through October) during the 2020 honey bee foraging season in Logan, Utah, USA, we collected on-site weather and electromagnetic radiation (EMR) readings and videos of the hive entrances of six bee hives …

Predictive Models Of Post-Wildfire Debris Flow Volume And Grain Size Distribution In The Intermountain West, Sara Wall

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Post-fire debris flows represent the most erosive and potentially hazardous consequence associated with increasing wildfire severity. While an abundance of research has explored where they are likely to occur and their potential magnitude, investigations into understanding how they impact downstream resources are limited. Recent advancements are seeking to link predictive models together to be able to predict how erosion after wildfire may impact reservoirs and aquatic habitat downstream. However, there are two key missing pieces into our ability to examine watershed-scale impacts of post-fire erosion. These include having accurate predictions of how much sediment is likely to be deposited by …

On The Geometry Of The Moduli Space Of Certain Lattice Polarized K3 Surfaces And Their Picard-Fuchs Operators, Michael T. Schultz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

K3 surfaces have a long and rich study in mathematics, and more recently in physics via string theory. Often, K3 surfaces come in multiparameter families - the parameters describing these surfaces fit together to form their own geometric space, a so-called moduli space. In particular, the moduli spaces of K3 surfaces equipped with a lattice polarization can sometimes be constructed explicitly, which subsequently reveals important information about the original K3 surface.

In this work, we construct such families explicitly from certain rational elliptic surfaces via the so-called mixed-twist construction of Doran & Malmendier, which in turn produces the moduli …

Institute For Global Health And Development : Issue 1 - December 2021, Institute For Global Health And Development

IGHD Newsletters

• Climate Change and Environment Sustainability
• Agriculture, Food Security, and Nutrition
• Gender Equality and Women Empowerment
• Sustainable Development Goals

A Fine-Grained Attribute Based Data Retrieval With Proxy Re-Encryption Scheme For Data Outsourcing Systems, Hanshu Hong, Ximeng Liu, Zhixin Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute based encryption is suitable for data protection in data outsourcing systems such as cloud computing. However, the leveraging of encryption technique may retrain some routine operations over the encrypted data, particularly in the field of data retrieval. This paper presents an attribute based date retrieval with proxy re-encryption (ABDR-PRE) to provide both fine-grained access control and retrieval over the ciphertexts. The proposed scheme achieves fine-grained data access management by adopting KP-ABE mechanism, a delegator can generate the re-encryption key and search indexes for the ciphertexts to be shared over the target delegatee’s attributes. Throughout the process of data sharing, …

Hierarchical Control Of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Team In Real-Time Strategy (Rts) Games, Weigui Jair Zhou, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan, Darren Wee Sze Ong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Coordinated control of multi-agent teams is an important task in many real-time strategy (RTS) games. In most prior work, micromanagement is the commonly used strategy whereby individual agents operate independently and make their own combat decisions. On the other extreme, some employ a macromanagement strategy whereby all agents are controlled by a single decision model. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical command and control architecture, consisting of a single high-level and multiple low-level reinforcement learning agents operating in a dynamic environment. This hierarchical model enables the low-level unit agents to make individual decisions while taking commands from the high-level …

Automated Doubt Identification From Informal Reflections Through Hybrid Sentic Patterns And Machine Learning Approach, Siaw Ling Lo, Kar Way Tan, Eng Lieh Ouh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Do my students understand? The question that lingers in every instructor’s mind after each lesson. With the focus on learner-centered pedagogy, is it feasible to provide timely and relevant guidance to individual learners according to their levels of understanding? One of the options available is to collect reflections from learners after each lesson to extract relevant feedback so that doubts or questions can be addressed in a timely manner. In this paper, we derived a hybrid approach that leverages a novel Doubt Sentic Pattern Detection (SPD) algorithm and a machine learning model to automate the identification of doubts from students’ …

Data Fusion For Trust Evaluation, Zheng Yan, Qinghua Zheng, Laurence T. Yang, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Trust evaluation is a process to quantify trust by analyzing the data related to the factors that affect trust. It has been widely applied in many fields to facilitate decision making, system entity collaboration and security establishment. For example, in social networking, trust evaluation helps users make a social decision, reduce the risk of social interactions, and ensure the quality of a social networking environment. In digital communications, trust evaluation can be applied to detect malicious nodes, filter unwanted traffic and improve communication security. In e-commerce and cloud services, trust evaluation helps users selecting an appropriate product or service from …

Robust Bipoly-Matching For Multi-Granular Entities, Ween Jiann Lee, Maksim Tkachenko, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity matching across two data sources is a prevalent need in many domains, including e-commerce. Of interest is the scenario where entities have varying granularity, e.g., a coarse product category may match multiple finer categories. Previous work in one-to-many matching generally presumes the `one' necessarily comes from a designated source and the `many' from the other source. In contrast, we propose a novel formulation that allows concurrent one-to-many bidirectional matching in any direction. Beyond flexibility, we also seek matching that is more robust to noisy similarity values arising from diverse entity descriptions, by introducing receptivity and reclusivity notions. In addition …

On Analysing Student Resilience In Higher Education Programs Using A Data-Driven Approach, Audrey Tedja Widjaja, Ee Peng Lim, Aldy Gunawan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Analysing student resilience is important as research has shown that resilience is related to students’ academic performance and their persistence through academic setbacks. While questionnaires can be conducted to assess student resilience directly, they suffer from human recall errors and deliberate suppression of true responses. In this paper, we propose ACREA, ACademic REsilience Analytics framework which adopts a datadriven approach to analyse student resilient behavior with the use of student-course data. ACREA defines academic setbacks experienced by students and measures how well students overcome such setbacks using a quasi-experimental design. By applying ACREA on a real world student-course dataset, we …

Microservices Orchestration Vs. Choreography: A Decision Framework, Alan @ Ali Madjelisi Megargel, Christopher M. Poskitt, Shankararaman, Venky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Microservices-based applications consist of loosely coupled, independently deployable services that encapsulate units of functionality. To implement larger application processes, these microservices must communicate and collaborate. Typically, this follows one of two patterns: (1) choreography, in which communication is done via asynchronous message-passing; or (2) orchestration, in which a controller is used to synchronously manage the process flow. Choosing the right pattern requires the resolution of some trade-offs concerning coupling, chattiness, visibility, and design. To address this problem, we propose a decision framework for microservices collaboration patterns that helps solution architects to crystallize their goals, compare the key factors, and then …

Vireo @ Trecvid 2021 Ad-Hoc Video Search, Jiaxin Wu, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we summarize our submitted runs and results for Ad-hoc Video Search (AVS) task at TRECVid 2020

Integration Of Information Technology Certifications Into Undergraduate Computing Curriculum, Eng Lieh Ouh, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This innovative practice full paper describes our experiences of integrating information technology certifications into an undergraduate computing curriculum. As the technology landscape evolves, a common challenge for educators in computing programs is designing an industry-relevant curriculum. Over the years, industry practitioners have taken technology certifications to validate themselves against a base level of technical knowledge currently in demand in industry. Information technology (IT) certifications can also offer paths for academic computing programs to stay relevant to industry needs. However, identifying relevant IT certifications and integrating it into an academic curriculum requires a careful design approach as substantial efforts are needed …

Adadeep: A Usage-Driven, Automated Deep Model Compression Framework For Enabling Ubiquitous Intelligent Mobiles, Sicong Liu, Junzhao Du, Kaiming Nan, Zimu Zhou, Hui Liu, Zhangyang Wang, Yingyan Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent breakthroughs in deep neural networks (DNNs) have fueled a tremendously growing demand for bringing DNN-powered intelligence into mobile platforms. While the potential of deploying DNNs on resource-constrained platforms has been demonstrated by DNN compression techniques, the current practice suffers from two limitations: 1) merely stand-alone compression schemes are investigated even though each compression technique only suit for certain types of DNN layers; and 2) mostly compression techniques are optimized for DNNs’ inference accuracy, without explicitly considering other application-driven system performance (e.g., latency and energy cost) and the varying resource availability across platforms (e.g., storage and processing capability). To this …