Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Phlc Environmental Education Improvement Project, Quinn Kimball, Rachel Summers, Liam Doherty-Herwitz

Environmental Engagement in the Community (ENVR 319): Student Projects

Environmental Engagement in the Community projects, fall 2021

A poster titled PHLC Environmental Education Improvement Project for client Prairie Hill Learning Center (Hunter Armstrong).

Improving The Southern Heights Food Forest, Shawnna Lofland, Anne Kluthe, Favian Mendez

Environmental Engagement in the Community (ENVR 319): Student Projects

Environmental Engagement in the Community projects, fall 2021

A poster titled Improving the Southern Heights Food Forest for client Southern Heights Food Forest.

Association Between The Beta Band Neural Response And The Behavioral Performance In Aphasic And Neurologically Intact Individuals, Yilun Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

The complex motor act of speech requires integrating linguistic and sensorimotor processes. Sensorimotor interaction mainly supports speech production in the form of state feedback control architecture. While speaking, subjects react to perturbations in the pitch of voice auditory feedback by changing their tone in the opposite direction to pitch-shift stimuli to compensate for the perceived pitch shift. Aphasia is a communication impairment affecting patients’ speaking, understanding, reading, and writing. The present study aims to examine the association between brain neural activity and the ability for speech auditory feedback error correction in both post-stroke aphasia and neurologically intact individuals. There are …

Transporting Causal Mechanisms For Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Zhongqi Yue, Qianru Sun, Xian-Sheng Hua, Hanwang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) literature adopts the covariate shift and conditional shift assumptions, which essentially encourage models to learn common features across domains. However, due to the lack of supervision in the target domain, they suffer from the semantic loss: the feature will inevitably lose nondiscriminative semantics in source domain, which is however discriminative in target domain. We use a causal view—transportability theory [41]—to identify that such loss is in fact a confounding effect, which can only be removed by causal intervention. However, the theoretical solution provided by transportability is far from practical for UDA, because it requires the …

A Large-Scale Benchmark For Food Image Segmentation, Xiongwei Wu, Xin Fu, Ying Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food image segmentation is a critical and indispensible task for developing health-related applications such as estimating food calories and nutrients. Existing food image segmentation models are underperforming due to two reasons: (1) there is a lack of high quality food image datasets with fine-grained ingredient labels and pixel-wise location masks—the existing datasets either carry coarse ingredient labels or are small in size; and (2) the complex appearance of food makes it difficult to localize and recognize ingredients in food images, e.g., the ingredients may overlap one another in the same image, and the identical ingredient may appear distinctly in different …

Multi-Modal Recommender Systems: Hands-On Exploration, Quoc Tuan Truong, Aghiles Salah, Hady W. Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems typically learn from user-item preference data such as ratings and clicks. This information is sparse in nature, i.e., observed user-item preferences often represent less than 5% of possible interactions. One promising direction to alleviate data sparsity is to leverage auxiliary information that may encode additional clues on how users consume items. Examples of such data (referred to as modalities) are social networks, item’s descriptive text, product images. The objective of this tutorial is to offer a comprehensive review of recent advances to represent, transform and incorporate the different modalities into recommendation models. Moreover, through practical hands-on sessions, we …

An Exploratory Study Of Social Support Systems To Help Older Adults In Managing Mobile Safety, Tamir Mendel, Debin Gao, David Lo, Eran Toch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Older adults face increased safety challenges, such as targeted online fraud and phishing, contributing to the growing technological divide between them and younger adults. Social support from family and friends is often the primary way older adults receive help, but it may also lead to reliance on others. We have conducted an exploratory study to investigate older adults' attitudes and experiences related to mobile social support technologies for mobile safety. We interviewed 18 older adults about their existing support and used the think-aloud method to gather data about a prototype for providing social support during mobile safety challenges. Our findings …

Prediction Of Synthetic Lethal Interactions In Human Cancers Using Multi-View Graph Auto-Encoder, Zhifeng Hao, Di Wu, Yuan Fang, Min Wu, Ruichu Cai, Xiaoli Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Synthetic lethality (SL) is a very important concept for the development of targeted anticancer drugs. However, experimental methods for SL detection often suffer from various issues like high cost and low consistency across cell lines. Hence, computational methods for predicting novel SLs have recently emerged as complements for wet-lab experiments. In addition, SL data can be represented as a graph where nodes are genes and edges are the SL interactions. It is thus motivated to design advanced graph-based machine learning algorithms for SL prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel SL prediction method using Multi-view Graph Auto-Encoder (SLMGAE). We …

Condensing A Sequence To One Informative Frame For Video Recognition, Qiu. Zhaofan, Ting Yao, Yan Shu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video is complex due to large variations in motion and rich content in fine-grained visual details. Abstracting useful information from such information-intensive media requires exhaustive computing resources. This paper studies a two-step alternative that first condenses the video sequence to an informative" frame" and then exploits off-the-shelf image recognition system on the synthetic frame. A valid question is how to define" useful information" and then distill it from a video sequence down to one synthetic frame. This paper presents a novel Informative Frame Synthesis (IFS) architecture that incorporates three objective tasks, ie, appearance reconstruction, video categorization, motion estimation, and two …

Solarslam: Battery-Free Loop Closure For Indoor Localisation, Bo Wei, Weitao Xu, Chengwen Luo, Guillaume Zoppi, Dong Ma, Sen Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose SolarSLAM, a batteryfree loop closure method for indoor localisation. Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) based indoor localisation method has been widely used due to its ubiquity in mobile devices, such as mobile phones, smartwatches and wearable bands. However, it suffers from the unavoidable long term drift. To mitigate the localisation error, many loop closure solutions have been proposed using sophisticated sensors, such as cameras, laser, etc. Despite achieving high-precision localisation performance, these sensors consume a huge amount of energy. Different from those solutions, the proposed SolarSLAM takes advantage of an energy harvesting solar cell as a …

Characterization Of A Novel Fe-S Cluster Transfer Pathway Between Grx4 And Sufa In Escherichia Coli, Enis Sanchez

Theses and Dissertations

Biogenesis of iron-sulfur (Fe-S) clusters is an essential process in living organisms due to the critical role of Fe-S cluster proteins in a myriad of cellular functions. During the assembly of Fe-S clusters, multi-protein complexes are used to drive the mobilization and protection of reactive sulfur and iron intermediates, regulate assembly of various Fe-S clusters on an ATPase-dependent, multi-protein scaffold, and target nascent clusters to their downstream protein targets. In each of the Fe-S cluster biogenesis steps, specific protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are required for proper function of the assembly pathway. The target pathway is the sulfur formation (Suf) pathway for …

Investigating The Chemistry Of Harmful Algal Blooms And Microbial Communities In The Natural Environment, Samuel Patrick Putnam

Theses and Dissertations

Cyanobacteria has existed on the planet for over 3 billion years, and as technology, science, and industry have allowed us to shape our world, these changes have caused a proliferation of biomass. Higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, warmer temperatures, and rapid increases in the nutrient cycle have created excellent growing conditions for cyanobacteria, making them endemic in fresh waters throughout the world. The work in this dissertation was directed towards the secondary metabolites produced by cyanobacteria and other surrounding microbes and understanding their concentrations and release in natural systems. Analytical methods were developed for the extraction and quantification …

Marginally Interpretable Models And Multilevel Models For Quantile Regression With Random-Effects, Nahid Sultana Sumi

Theses and Dissertations

The quantile regression model is an active area of statistical research that has received a lot of attention. This complements the most widely used statistical tool, that is, mean regression analysis. Quantile regression analysis It has become more flexible because of its properties that include no assumption on the distribution of the response variable, equivalent to monotone transformations, and robustness to outliers. However, regression analysis offers methodological challenges if the observations are not independent. Cluster, multilevel, and repeated measures (longitudinal data) designs introduce such dependence. The correlation between observations on the same units or clusters should be accounted for to …

Shedding Light On The Coupling Dynamics In Hybrid Nanostructures, Saba Arash

Theses and Dissertations

Here we present all-optical investigations of two hybrid nanostructures. In the first hybrid system, we study Janus-type nanofibers consisting of two hemi-cylinders of ferroelectric barium titanate and ferrimagnetic cobalt ferrite. Using the magnetic field-dependent polarization-resolved second harmonic generation technique, we observe a strong magnetoelectric coupling between the two ferroic constituents at room temperature. Corroborating these results by X-ray diffraction, we can also extract repeatable memory-dependent behaviors in these biphasic nanofibers. In the second hybrid system, we study the interaction between the semiconductor indium/gallium arsenide quantum dots and surface plasmon supporting silver structures in the weak coupling regime. When quantum dots …

Spectrumsdt: A Program For Parallel Calculation Of Coupled Rotational-Vibrational Energies And Lifetimes Of Bound States And Scattering Resonances In Triatomic Systems, Igor Gayday, Alexander Teplukhin, Jonathan Moussa, Dmitri Babikov

Chemistry Faculty Research and Publications

We present SpectrumSDT – a program for calculations of energies and lifetimes of bound rotational-vibrational states below and scattering resonances above the dissociation threshold on a global potential energy surface of a triatomic system, which may include stable molecules, weekly-bound van-der-Waals complexes, and unbound atom + diatom scattering systems. Large-amplitude vibrational motion is treated explicitly using hyper-spherical coordinates. Three options for the rotational-vibrational interaction are supported: uncoupled (symmetric top rotor), partially coupled (to include interaction between several nearest states only) and full-coupled (vibrating asymmetric-top rotor). In addition to energies and lifetimes, SpectrumSDT is able to integrate ro-vibrational wave functions over …

Temperature Characterization Of Unipolar-Doped Electroluminescence In Vertical Gan/Aln Heterostructures, Weidong Zhang, Tyler A. Growden, Paul R. Berger, David F. Storm, David J. Meyer, Elliott R. Brown

Physics Faculty Publications

An electroluminescence (EL) phenomenon in unipolar-doped GaN/AlN/GaN double-barrier heterostructures—without any p-type contacts—was investigated from 4.2 K to 300 K. In the range of 200–300 K, the extracted peak photon energies agree with the Monemar formula. In the range of 30 to 200 K, the photon energies are consistent with A-exciton emission. At 4.2 K, the exciton type likely transforms into B-exciton. These studies confirm that the EL emission comes from a cross-bandgap (or band-to-band) electron-hole radiative recombination and is excitonic. The excitons are formed by the holes generated through interband tunneling and the electrons injected into the GaN emitter region …

(2021 Revision) Chapter 6: Essential Aspects Of Physical Design And Implementation Of Relational Databases, Tatiana Malyuta, Ashwin Satyanarayana

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Appendix: Essential Aspects Of Physical Design And Implementation Of Relational Databases, Tatiana Malyuta, Ashwin Satyanarayana

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Employees Breaking Bad With Technology: An Exploratory Analysis Of Human Factors That Drive Cyberspace Insider Threats, Marcus L. Green

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As implementation of computer systems has continued to grow in business contexts, employee-driven cyberspace infractions have also grown in number. Employee cyberspace behaviors have continued to have detrimental effects on company computer systems. Actions that violate company cybersecurity policies can be either malicious or unmalicious. Solutions, by and large, have been electronic and centered on hardware and software. Those proposing solutions have begun to shift their focus to human risk vulnerabilities.

This study was novel in that its focus was identification of individual, cultural, and technological risk factors that drive cyberspace insider threat activities. Identifying factors that reduce insider threat …

Holly Creek Formation Of The Trinity Group, Southwest Arkansas, Usa, Celina A. Suarez, Joseph Frederickson, Richard L. Cifelli, Jeffrey G. Pittman, Randall L. Nydam, Rebecca K. Hunt-Foster, Kirsty Morgan

Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

We present a previously discovered but undescribed late Early Cretaceous vertebrate fauna from the Holly Creek Formation of the Trinity Group in Arkansas. The site from the ancient Gulf Coast is dominated by semi-aquatic forms and preserves a diverse aquatic, semi-aquatic, and terrestrial fauna. Fishes include fresh- to brackish-water chondrichthyans and a variety of actinopterygians, including semionotids, an amiid, and a new pycnodontiform, Anomoeodus caddoi sp. nov. Semi-aquatic taxa include lissamphibians, the solemydid turtle Naomichelys, a trionychid turtle, and coelognathosuchian crocodyliforms. Among terrestrial forms are several members of Dinosauria and one or more squamates, one of which, Sciroseps pawhuskai …

Supporting Renewable Energy Market Growth Through The Circular Integration Of End-Of-Use And End-Of-Life Photovoltaics, Erika Marsillac

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Energy demand continues to grow with the world’s burgeoning population. Meeting energy needs through renewable sources allows for market growth with limited environmental impact, but sourcing constraints can limit production, creating industrial and environmental problems. The exploitation of end-of-use and end-of-life photovoltaic (PV) options that are traditionally treated as waste offers a valuable opportunity to support renewable energy market growth with fewer sourcing constraints and minimal environmental impacts, but this circular investment has not yet been broadly implemented, nor is broad guidance widely available to aid its implementation. From a business perspective, this paper discusses the technical issues, assesses the …

Development Of A Cyberinfrastructure For Assessment Of The Lower Rio Grande Valley North And Central Watersheds Characteristics, Linda Navarro, Ahmed Mahmoud, Andrew Ernest, Abdoul Oubeidillah, Jessica Johnstone, Ivan Rene Santos Chavez, Christopher Fuller

Biological and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Lower Laguna Madre (LLM) is designated as an impaired waterway for high concentrations of bacteria and low dissolved oxygen. The main freshwater sources to the LLM flow from the North and Central waterways which are composed of three main waterways: Hidalgo/Willacy Main Drain (HWMD), Raymondville Drain (RVD), and International Boundary & Water Commission North Floodway (IBWCNF) that are not fully characterized. The objective of this study is to perform a watershed characterization to determine the potential pollution sources of each watershed. The watershed characterization was achieved by developing a cyberinfrastructure, and it collects a wide inventory of data to identify …

Fisheries Science Update - West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource - October 2021, Department Of Primary Industries And Regional Development, Western Australia

Fisheries Science Updates

The West Coast Demersal Scalefish Resource (WCDSR) is halfway into a 20-year recovery plan following a period of overfishing in the 1990s and 2000s.

This latest assessment provides an important “health check” on the recovery status.

The recovery plan is based on maintaining recreational (including charter) and commercial sector’s total fishing mortality below catch limits and protecting key spawning aggregations to recover the WCDSR by 2030.

The Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD) tracks recovery progress by undertaking weight of evidence stock assessments of WCDSR indicator species dhufish and pink snapper every 3-5 years.

The latest science shows …

Estimation Of Odds Ratio In 2 X 2 Contingency Tables With Small Cell Counts, Guohao Zhu

Dissertations

This study is focusing on properties of estimators of odds ratio or its logarithm in case of 2x2 tables with small counts. The odds ratio represents the odds that an outcome of interest will occur given a particular exposure, compared to the odds of the outcome occurring in the absence of that exposure. Both parameters are often used to quantify the strength of association of two binary variables and are common measurements reported in case-control, cohort, and cross-sectional studies.

Because of their wide applicability, both parameters, odds ratio, and its logarithm, have been intensively studied in the literature. However, most …

A Comparative Study On Feature Extraction And Classification/Clustering Of Fake News And Conspiracy Theories From Twitter Data, Deb Shana

Theses and Dissertations

Fake news and conspiracy theories have become largely abundant in the expanding world of social media. They predominantly affect the beliefs and thoughts of the public, resulting in chaos. They have always existed throughout the last few decades. They have been linked to prejudice, revolutions and genocide across history. They have also been known to have propelled people to reject mainstream medicines to an extent where some diseases are recurring in some parts of the world. They impose a serious impact since they are capable of spreading very fast Thus, it is very important to find suitable ways to detect …

Impacts Of Climate Change In Vulnerable Communities In Sindh, Pakistan: Voices From The Community, Kiren Khan, Mumraiz Khan, Tahira Parveen, Sabahat Hussain

Climate and Environmental Changes

Pakistan ranks among the ten countries worst affected by climate change in the world, and within the country the province of Sindh is one of the hardest-hit regions. Changing trends in temperature and precipitation have increased the frequency and severity of hazards such as flooding, droughts, and heatwaves, among a host of other environmental stresses. The present qualitative study was conducted to scope out the specific ways in which the impacts of climate change are gendered among rural communities in Sindh that have the highest exposure to hazards arising from climate change. The study probed the perceptions and experiences of …

Enhancing The Weather: Governance Of Weather Modification Activities Of The United States, Manon Simon

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

In the context of climate change, weather modification by cloud seeding, and in particular, precipitation enhancement techniques, has gained a renewed attention from governments. In the United States, several states run weather modification programs to secure freshwater resources and increase both crop and hydroelectricity production. Weather modification techniques were developed post–World War II, and so were the legal arrangements that govern them. Since then, weather modification law has undergone little to no reform. California and Texas are two active users of cloud-seeding technologies but employ very different governance frameworks. This Article assesses the effectiveness of weather modification governance in these …

The Classification Of Basket Neural Cells In The Mammalian Neocortex, Sreya Pudi

Senior Theses

Basket neuronal cells of the mammalian neocortex have been classically categorized into two or more groups. Originally, it was thought that the large and small types are the naturally occurring groups that emerge from reasons that relate to neurobiological function and anatomical position. Later, a study based on anatomical and physiological features of these neurons introduced a third type, the net basket cell which is intermediate in size as compared to the large and small types. In this study, multivariate analysis was used to test the hypothesis that the large and small types are morphologically distinct groups. The results of …

A Deep Learning Improved Numerical Method For The Simulation Of Rogue Waves Of Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation, Rui-Qi Wang, Liming Ling, Delu Zeng, Bao-Feng Feng

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Modulation instability (MI) is a pervasive phenomenon in nonlinear science. It is inevitable for simulating rogue wave or breather solutions of the focusing nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) and other application problems with MI involved. Due to MI, the small perturbation on the boundary can lead to large and non-negligible errors for the simulation of initial-boundary problems. To deal with this challenging problem, we propose a method to modify the boundary problem through a deep learning algorithm so that the long time simulation for the rogue wave or breather solutions to the NLSE can be performed with a superior numerical errors. …

An Opportunistic Survey Reveals An Unexpected Coronavirus Diversity Hotspot In North America, Hon S. Ip, Kathryn M. Griffin, Jeffrey D. Messer, Megan E. Winzeler, Susan A. Shriner, Mary Lea Killian, Mia Kim Torchetti, Thomas J. Deliberto, Brian R. Amman, Caitlin M. Cossaboom, R. Reid Harvey, Natalie M. Wendling, Hannah Rettler, Dean Taylor, Jonathan S. Towner, Casey Barton Behravesh, David S. Blehert

United States Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services: Staff Publications

In summer 2020, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was detected on mink farms in Utah. An interagency One Health response was initiated to assess the extent of the outbreak and included sampling animals from on or near affected mink farms and testing them for SARS-CoV-2 and non-SARS coronaviruses. Among the 365 animals sampled, including domestic cats, mink, rodents, raccoons, and skunks, 261 (72%) of the animals harbored at least one coronavirus. Among the samples that could be further characterized, 127 alphacoronaviruses and 88 betacoronaviruses (including 74 detections of SARS-CoV-2 in mink) were identified. Moreover, at least 10% (n …