Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Author Correction: A Global-Scale Expert Assessment Of Drivers And Risks Associated With Pollinator Decline (Nature Ecology & Evolution, (2021), 5, 10, (1453-1461), 10.1038/S41559-021-01534-9), Lynn V. Dicks, Tom D. Breeze, Hien T. Ngo, Deepa Senapathi, Jiandong An, Marcelo A. Aizen, Parthiba Basu, Damayanti Buchori, Leonardo Galetto, Lucas A. Garibaldi, Barbara Gemmill-Herren, Brad G. Howlett, Vera L. Imperatriz-Fonseca, Steven D. Johnson, Anikó Kovács-Hostyánszki, Yong Jung Kwon, H. Michael G. Lattorff, Thingreipi Lungharwo, Colleen L. Seymour, Adam J. Vanbergen, Simon G. Potts

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

In the version of this article initially published, the author name Colleen L. Seymour was incorrectly written as Coleen L. Seymour. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

Evaluating Models For Lithospheric Loss And Intraplate Volcanism Beneath The Central Appalachian Mountains, Maureen D. Long, Lara S. Wagner, Scott D. King, Rob L. Evans, Sarah E. Mazza, Joseph S. Byrnes, Elizabeth A. Johnson, Eric Kirby, Maximiliano J. Bezada, Esteban Gazel, Scott R. Miller, John C. Aragon, Shangxin Liu

Geosciences: Faculty Publications

The eastern margin of North America has been shaped by a series of tectonic events including the Paleozoic Appalachian Orogeny and the breakup of Pangea during the Mesozoic. For the past ∼200 Ma, eastern North America has been a passive continental margin; however, there is evidence in the Central Appalachian Mountains for post-rifting modification of lithospheric structure. This evidence includes two co-located pulses of magmatism that post-date the rifting event (at 152 and 47 Ma) along with low seismic velocities, high seismic attenuation, and high electrical conductivity in the upper mantle. Here, we synthesize and evaluate constraints on the lithospheric …

Tectonic Transport Directions, Shear Senses And Deformation Temperatures Indicated By Quartz C‐Axis Fabrics And Microstructures In A Nw‐Se Transect Across The Moine And Sgurr Beag Thrust Sheets, Caledonian Orogen Of Northern Scotland, Richard D. Law, J. Ryan Thigpen, Sarah E. Mazza, Calvin A. Mako, Maarten Krabbendam, Brandon M. Spencer, Kyle T. Ashley, Robin A. Strachan, Ella F. Davis

Geosciences: Faculty Publications

Moine metasedimentary rocks of northern Scotland are characterized by arcuate map patterns of mineral lineations that swing progressively clockwise from orogen‐perpendicular E‐trend-ing lineations in greenschist facies mylonites above the Moine thrust on the foreland edge of the Caledonian Orogen, to S‐trending lineations at higher structural levels and metamorphic grades in the hinterland. Quartz c‐axis fabrics measured on a west to east coast transect demonstrate that the lineations developed parallel to the maximum principal extension direction and therefore track the local tectonic transport direction. Microstructures and c‐axis fabrics document a progressive change from top to the N shearing in the hinterland …

Temporal Rainfall Trend Analysis In Different Agro-Ecological Regions Of Southern Africa, W. Mupangwa, R. Makanza, L. Chipindu, M. Moeletsi, S. Mkuhlani, F. Liben, I. Nyagumbo, M. Mutenje

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Rainfall is a major driver of food production in rainfed smallholder farming systems. This study was conducted to assess linear trends in (i) different daily rainfall amounts (<5, 5–10, 11–20, 21–40 and >40 mm∙day-1), and (ii) monthly and seasonal rainfall amounts. Drought was determined using the rainfall variability index. Daily rainfall data were derived from 18 meteorological stations in southern Africa. Daily rainfall was dominated by <5 mm∙day-1 followed by 5–10 mm∙day-1. Three locations experienced increasing linear trends of <5 mm∙day-1 amounts and two others in sub-humid region had increases in the >40 mm day-1 category. Semi-arid location experienced increasing trends in <5 and 5–10 mm∙day-1 events. A significant linear trend in seasonal rainfall occurred at two locations with decreasing rainfall (1.24 and 3 mm∙season-1). A 3 mm∙season-1 decrease in seasonal rainfall was experienced under semi-arid conditions. There were no apparent linear trends in monthly and seasonal rainfall at 15 of the 18 locations studied. Drought frequencies varied with location and were 50% or higher during the November–March growing season. Rainfall trends were location and agro-ecology specific, but most of the locations studied did not experience significant changes between the 1900s and 2000s.

Effect Of Moisture Stress On The Development Of False Codling Moth Thaumatotibia Leucotreta (Lepidoptera: Tortricidae) On Two Tomato Varieties, Esther Museo Patrick, Irene Koomen, Shepard Ndlela, John Mwibanda Wesonga

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

False codling moth Thaumatotibia leucotreta (Meyrick) is a pest native to sub-Saharan Africa infesting over 100 plant species including tomato. Its survival and performance are influenced by changes in precipitation and stress-related biochemical changes in the host plant. Water availability for agricultural production continues to decline due to climate change affecting drought-sensitive crops like tomatoes. Little is known on host plant–insect interactions of T. leucotreta and tomato as influenced by moisture stress. Hence, our study tested the impact of different water holding capacities (WHC) (40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, and 90%) of plant growing media on the growth of Anna F1 …

Functional Land Cover Scale For Three Insect Pests With Contrasting Dispersal Strategies In A Fragmented Coffee-Based Landscape In Central Kenya, Gladys Mosomtai, Abdelmutalab G.A. Azrag, Régis Babin, Elfatih M. Abdel-Rahman, John Odindi, Onisimo Mutanga, Henri E.Z. Tonnang, Tobias Landmann, Guillaume David

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

In the Eastern Africa highlands, the gradual transformation of natural ecosystems to smallholding coffee-based agrosystems has resulted in more fragmented landscapes. Major pests of coffee find appropriate living conditions leading to high infestation rates and the need for smallholder farmers to implement pest control measures. This study aims to understand the influence of landscapes on the ecology of three major coffee pests: the coffee berry borer (CBB), Hypothenemus hampei, and the Antestia bugs Antestiopsis thunbergii (ABT) and A. facetoides (ABF). The study was conducted on a typical smallholder coffee-based landscape in central Kenya. The pest abundance was assessed monthly for …

Developing Covalent-Organic Frameworks For Protecting Against Radiation, Megan J. Francis

Senior Theses

This research focuses on the development of lightweight, thermostable dual-function materials for secondary radiation protection and sensing by the integration of hydrogen-rich aliphatic chains inside the porous matrix of covalent-organic frameworks (COFs). The main aims of this project are the synthesis of organic linkers for forming a robust porous COF, synthesizing the porous COF through a condensation reaction, the development of hydrogen-rich aliphatic chains, and integration of aliphatic chains into COFs through click chemistry. This manuscript outlines the methodology and development of a novel self-assembled crystalline, porous material engineered to combine the functions of a shield and sensitive dosimeter. The …

Smart Contract Development: Challenges And Opportunities, Weiqin Zou, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Xin Xia, Yang Feng, Zhenyu Chen, Baowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there …

Exploring The Relationship Between Mandatory Helmet Use Regulations And Adult Cyclists’ Behavior In California Using Hybrid Machine Learning Models, Fatemeh Davoudi Kakhki, Maria Chierichetti

Mineta Transportation Institute

In California, bike fatalities increased by 8.1% from 2015 to 2016. Even though the benefits of wearing helmets in protecting cyclists against trauma in cycling crash has been determined, the use of helmets is still limited, and there is opposition against mandatory helmet use, particularly for adults. Therefore, exploring perceptions of adult cyclists regarding mandatory helmet use is a key element in understanding cyclists’ behavior, and determining the impact of mandatory helmet use on their cycling rate. The goal of this research is to identify sociodemographic characteristics and cycling behaviors that are associated with the use and non-use of bicycle …

Magnetic Field Perturbations To A Soft X-Ray-Activated Fe (Ii) Molecular Spin State Transition, Guanhua Hao, Alpha T. N’Diaye, Thilini K. Ekanayaka, Ashley S. Dale, Xuanyuan Jiang, Esha Mishra, Corbyn Mellinger, Saeed Yazdani, John W. Freeland, Jian Zhang, Ruihua Cheng, Xiaoshan Xu, Peter Dowben

Peter Dowben Publications

The X-ray-induced spin crossover transition of an Fe (II) molecular thin film in the presence and absence of a magnetic field has been investigated. The thermal activation energy barrier in the soft X-ray activation of the spin crossover transition for [Fe{H₂B(pz)₂ }₂ (bipy)] molecular thin films is reduced in the presence of an applied magnetic field, as measured through X-ray absorption spectroscopy at various temperatures. The influence of a 1.8 T magnetic field is sufficient to cause deviations from the expected exponential spin state transition behavior which is measured in the field free case. We find …

The Occurrence And Control Of Waterborne Viruses In Drinking Water Treatment: A Review, Li Chen, Yang Deng, Shengkun Dong, Hong Wang, Pan Li, Huaiyu Zhang, Wenhai Chu

Department of Earth and Environmental Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

As the coronavirus disease 2019 continues to spread globally, its culprit, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 has been brought under scrutiny. In addition to inhalation transmission, the possible fecal-oral viral transmission via water/wastewater has also been brought under the spotlight, necessitating a timely global review on the current knowledge about waterborne viruses in drinking water treatment system – the very barrier that intercepts waterborne pathogens to terminal water users. In this article we reviewed the occurrence, concentration methods, and control strategies, also, treatment performance on waterborne viruses during drinking water treatment were summarized. Additionally, we emphasized the potential …

Preparation And Pharmacokinetic Characterization Of An Anti-Virulence Compound Nanosuspensions, Nan Wang, Feng Qi, Xiaolong He, Honglan Shi, David W. Anderson, Hao Li, Hongmin Sun

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

Antibiotic resistance has become a worldwide public health threat due to the rapid evolu-tion and spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. CCG-211790 is a novel anti-virulence compound that does not kill bacteria but could ameliorate human diseases by inhibiting expression of virulence factors, thereby applying less selection pressure for antibiotic resistance. However, its potential clinical use is restricted because of its poor aqueous solubility, resulting in formulation challenges. Nanosuspension technology is an effective way to circumvent this problem. Nanosuspensions of CCG-211790 with two different particle sizes, NanoA (315 ± 6 nm) and NanoB (915 ± 24 nm), were prepared using an antisolvent …

Route Tapestries: Navigating 360° Virtual Tour Videos Using Slit-Scan Visualizations, Jiannan Li, Jiahe Lyu, Maurício Sousa, Ravin Balakrishnan, Anthony Tang, Tovi Grossman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An increasingly popular way of experiencing remote places is by viewing 360° virtual tour videos, which show the surrounding view while traveling through an environment. However, finding particular locations in these videos can be difficult because current interfaces rely on distorted frame previews for navigation. To alleviate this usability issue, we propose Route Tapestries, continuous orthographic-perspective projection of scenes along camera routes. We first introduce an algorithm for automatically constructing Route Tapestries from a 360° video, inspired by the slit-scan photography technique. We then present a desktop video player interface using a Route Tapestry timeline for navigation. An online evaluation …

Holoboard: A Large-Format Immersive Teaching Board Based On Pseudo Holographics, Jiangtao Gong, Teng Han, Siling Guo, Jiannan Li, Siyu Zha, Liuxin Zhang, Feng Tian, Qianying Wang, Yong Rui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present HoloBoard, an interactive large-format pseduo-holographic display system for lecture based classes. With its unique properties of immersive visual display and transparent screen, we designed and implemented a rich set of novel interaction techniques like immersive presentation, role-play, and lecturing behind the scene that are potentially valuable for lecturing in class. We conducted a controlled experimental study to compare a HoloBoard class with a normal class through measuring students’ learning outcomes and three dimensions of engagement (i.e., behavioral, emotional, and cognitive engagement). We used pre-/post- knowledge tests and multimodal learning analytics to measure students’ learning outcomes …

Links Do Matter: Understanding The Drivers Of Developer Interactions In Software Ecosystems, Subhajit Datta, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studies of collaborating individuals engaged in collective enterprises usually focus on the individuals, rather than the links supporting their interaction. Accordingly, large scale software development ecosystems have also been examined primarily in terms of developer engagement. We posit that communication links between developers play a central role in the sustenance and effectiveness of such ecosystems. In this paper, we investigate whether and how developer attributes relate to the importance of the communication channels between them. We present a technique using 2nd order Markov models to extract features of interest of the links and apply the technique on data from a …

Target-Guided Emotion-Aware Chat Machine, Wei Wei, Jiayi Liu, Xianling Mao, Guibing Guo, Feida Zhu, Pan Zhou, Yuchong Hu, Shanshan Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The consistency of a response to a given post at the semantic level and emotional level is essential for a dialogue system to deliver humanlike interactions. However, this challenge is not well addressed in the literature, since most of the approaches neglect the emotional information conveyed by a post while generating responses. This article addresses this problem and proposes a unified end-to-end neural architecture, which is capable of simultaneously encoding the semantics and the emotions in a post and leveraging target information to generate more intelligent responses with appropriately expressed emotions. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate that the proposed …

Revocable Policy-Based Chameleon Hash, Shengmin Xu, Jianting Ning, Jinhua Ma, Guowen Xu, Jiaming Yuan, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Policy-based chameleon hash (PCH) is a cryptographic building block which finds increasing practical applications. Given a message and an access policy, for any chameleon hash generated by a PCH scheme, a chameleon trapdoor holder whose rewriting privileges satisfy the access policy can amend the underlying message without affecting the hash value. In practice, it is necessary to revoke the rewriting privileges of a trapdoor holder due to various reasons, such as change of positions, compromise of credentials, or malicious behaviours. In this paper, we introduce the notion of revocable PCH (RPCH) and formally define its security. We instantiate a concrete …

Assessing Generalizability Of Codebert, Xin Zhou, Donggyun Han, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pre-trained models like BERT have achieved strong improvements on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, showing their great generalizability. The success of pre-trained models in NLP inspires pre-trained models for programming language. Recently, CodeBERT, a model for both natural language (NL) and programming language (PL), pre-trained on code search dataset, is proposed. Although promising, CodeBERT has not been evaluated beyond its pre-trained dataset for NL-PL tasks. Also, it has only been shown effective on two tasks that are close in nature to its pre-trained data. This raises two questions: Can CodeBERT generalize beyond its pre-trained data? Can it generalize to …

Design And Supervision Model Of Group Projects For Active Learning, Yi Meng Lau, Kyong Jin Shim, Swapna Gottipati

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research paper presents a group project framework for a second-year programming course, which was conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The framework offers well defined stages of the group project which allow students to work on their choice of a real-world problem, integrate their learnings from previous courses, and present a working solution. In the group project, students actively participate, reflect, and contribute to achieving the goals set in the learning objectives of the course. Our framework incorporates key features from Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory (1984) and principles of active learning from Barnes (1989) to achieve active and experiential learning …

Learning To Adversarially Blur Visual Object Tracking, Qing Guo, Ziyi Cheng, Felix Juefei-Xu, Lei Ma, Xiaofei Xie, Yang Liu, Jianjun Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motion blur caused by the moving of the object or camera during the exposure can be a key challenge for visual object tracking, affecting tracking accuracy significantly. In this work, we explore the robustness of visual object trackers against motion blur from a new angle, i.e., adversarial blur attack (ABA). Our main objective is to online transfer input frames to their natural motion-blurred counterparts while misleading the state-of-the-art trackers during the tracking process. To this end, we first design the motion blur synthesizing method for visual tracking based on the generation principle of motion blur, considering the motion information and …

Bv-Person: A Large-Scale Dataset For Bird-View Person Re-Identification, Cheng Yan, Guansong Pang, Lei Wang, Jile Jiao, Xuetao Feng, Chunhua Shen, Jingjing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Person Re-IDentification (ReID) aims at re-identifying persons from non-overlapping cameras. Existing person ReID studies focus on horizontal-view ReID tasks, in which the person images are captured by the cameras from a (nearly) horizontal view. In this work we introduce a new ReID task, bird-view person ReID, which aims at searching for a person in a gallery of horizontal-view images with the query images taken from a bird's-eye view, i.e., an elevated view of an object from above. The task is important because there are a large number of video surveillance cameras capturing persons from such an elevated view at public …

Privacy-Preserving Voluntary-Tallying Leader Election For Internet Of Things, Tong Wu, Guomin Yang, Liehuang Zhu, Yulin Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) is commonly deployed with devices of limited power and computation capability. A centralized IoT architecture provides a simplified management for IoT system but brings redundancy by the unnecessary data traffic with a data center. A decentralized IoT reduces the cost on data traffic and is resilient to the single-point-of failure. The blockchain technique has attracted a large amount of research, which is redeemed as a perspective of decentralized IoT system infrastructure. It also brings new privacy challenges for that the blockchain is a public ledger of all digital events executed and shared among all participants. …

Sylpeniot: Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption For Data Privacy Applications In Iot Environments, Tran Viet Xuan Phuong, Willy Susilo, Guomin Yang, Jongkil Kim, Yangwai Chow, Dongxi Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy preserving mechanisms are essential for protecting data in IoT environments. This is particularly challenging as IoT environments often contain heterogeneous resource-constrained devices. One method for protecting privacy is to encrypt data with a pattern or metadata. To prevent information leakage, an evaluation using the pattern must be performed before the data can be retrieved. However, the computational costs associated with typical privacy preserving mechanisms can be costly. This makes such methods ill-suited for resource-constrained devices, as the high energy consumption will quickly drain the battery. This work solves this challenging problem by proposing SyLPEnIoT – Symmetric Lightweight Predicate Encryption …

Self-Regulation For Semantic Segmentation, Dong Zhang, Hanwang Zhang, Jinhui Tang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Qianru Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we seek reasons for the two major failure cases in Semantic Segmentation (SS): 1) missing small objects or minor object parts, and 2) mislabeling minor parts of large objects as wrong classes. We have an interesting finding that Failure-1 is due to the underuse of detailed features and Failure-2 is due to the underuse of visual contexts. To help the model learn a better trade-off, we introduce several Self-Regulation (SR) losses for training SS neural networks. By “self”, we mean that the losses are from the model per se without using any additional data or supervision. By …

Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search, Aoming Liu, Zehao Huang, Zhiwu Huang, Huang, Naiyan Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Data augmentation has been an indispensable tool to improve the performance of deep neural networks, however the augmentation can hardly transfer among different tasks and datasets. Consequently, a recent trend is to adopt AutoML technique to learn proper augmentation policy without extensive hand-crafted tuning. In this paper, we propose an efficient differentiable search algorithm called Direct Differentiable Augmentation Search (DDAS). It exploits meta-learning with one-step gradient update and continuous relaxation to the expected training loss for efficient search. Our DDAS can achieve efficient augmentation search without relying on approximations such as Gumbel-Softmax or second order gradient approximation. To further reduce …

The Morphology And Evolution Of Transverse Aeolian Ridges On Mars, Timothy Paul Nagle-Mcnaughton

Earth and Planetary Sciences ETDs

Transverse aeolian ridges (TARs) are enigmatic and largely relict bedforms on the surface of Mars. TARs are sparsely distributed but common on Mars, but their history, preservation, and past role in the sediment cycle is not well understood. First described in 2003, and detailed extensively in 2008, our study of TARs has been narrowly focused in the last decade, with more and more research noting their presence, but little investigation of the features themselves. Recent work has mostly focused on identifying Terran analogues for TARs, but TARs remain largely a unique Martian feature. In this manuscript, I clarify and refine …

Enhancing Charge Carrier Mobility In Colloidal Quantum Dots For Technological Applications, Fiaz Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Colloidal quantum dots (QD) are promising semiconducting materials to engineer photovoltaic and optoelectronic devices due to tunable size-dependent absorption and emission properties. These materials are important as they don’t need complicated equipment and huge setup investment for industrial applications. If formulated into a kind of stable nano-ink, these QDs can be incorporated into devices using the most economical processing technologies, spray or roll to roll printing. More importantly, these are compatible with thin-film stacked devices and circuitry that can be formed on heat-sensitive and flexible substrates to make flexible wearable devices and sensors that are difficult to achieve with crystalline-based …

Polymeric Sorbents For Solid-Phase Extraction (Spe) Of Polar Analytes And Carbon Dioxide Capture, Ishwor Karki

Theses and Dissertations

The main topics of this dissertation are: 1) the study of hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) polymer monoliths for solid-phase extraction (SPE) applications, 2) molecularly imprinted polymers (MIPs) for capturing the CO2 gas and 3) the application of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) calculations to examine the origins of non-covalent interactions.

HLB polymers are popular sorbent materials in separation science. The Divinylbenzene-co-N-vinylpyrrolidone (DVB-co-NVP) polymer is one of the most widely used general-purpose HLB polymers. Despite the popularity of HLB polymer stationary phases, the studies of the adsorption properties of DVB-co-NVP have only been reported over a narrow …

Bayesian Calibration Of The Icrp Zirconium Biokinetic Model And Use Of Canned Priors For The Evaluation Of Bioassay, Thomas Raymond Labone

Theses and Dissertations

The International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) publishes biokinetic models that relate measurements of radioactive material in the body and excreta (bioassay) to the amount of the material taken into the body (intake). Given the intake and the biokinetic model, radiation dose to organs and tissues can be calculated. The ICRP approximates the biokinetics of radioactive materials in the body with compartmental models expressed mathematically as a system of ordinary differential equations, for which they provide point estimates of the rate constants. Inaccurate estimates of intake and radiation dose can result in cases where the biokinetics of an individual differ …

Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks: Synthesis And Applications Of Novel Polybenzimidazole (Pbi) Membranes, Laura Ann Murdock

Theses and Dissertations

Polybenzimidazoles (PBIs) represent a class of performance polymers that display exceptional thermal and oxidative stability. For almost thirty years, PBI membranes have been investigated as promising candidates for next-generation alternative energy devices, including high temperature polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (HT-PEMFCs) and vanadium redox flow batteries (VRBs). Issues with the production of PBI membranes arise from their inherent low solubility in organic solvents. Thus, conventional approaches typically yield membranes that have limited molecular weight and generate significant waste in preparation, due to the large quantity of solvent required to dissolve PBIs for membrane casting.

Presented herein is the development of …