Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons^™

Data Mining By Grid Computing In The Search For Extrasolar Planets, Oisin Creaner [Thesis]

Doctoral

A system is presented here to provide improved precision in ensemble differential photometry. This is achieved by using the power of grid computing to analyse astronomical catalogues. This produces new catalogues of optimised pointings for each star, which maximise the number and quality of reference stars available. Astronomical phenomena such as exoplanet transits and small-scale structure within quasars may be observed by means of millimagnitude photometric variability on the timescale of minutes to hours. Because of atmospheric distortion, ground-based observations of these phenomena require the use of differential photometry whereby the target is compared with one or more reference stars. …

Triple Non-Negative Matrix Factorization Technique For Sentiment Analysis And Topic Modeling, Alexander A. Waggoner

CMC Senior Theses

Topic modeling refers to the process of algorithmically sorting documents into categories based on some common relationship between the documents. This common relationship between the documents is considered the “topic” of the documents. Sentiment analysis refers to the process of algorithmically sorting a document into a positive or negative category depending whether this document expresses a positive or negative opinion on its respective topic. In this paper, I consider the open problem of document classification into a topic category, as well as a sentiment category. This has a direct application to the retail industry where companies may want to scour …

Rationalizing The Band Gap Tunability Of Semiconductors Via Electronic Structure Calculations, Matthew N. Srnec

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The polymorphs of titanium dioxide and various diamond-like semiconductor materials are promising candidates in photovoltaic solar cell applications. Several of these polymorphs have been studied with experimental and computational methods, which often aim at tuning the electronic structure, particularly the band gap value of the crystalline solid. Prior studies report that the addition of a substituent into the structure of titanium dioxide decreases its band gap value, but the reasons for this are unknown. Possible explanations for the change in band gap involve the substituent atom's crystal radius, electronegativity, and ionization energy. Understanding the cause of these changes will provide …

A Physics-Based Approach To Modeling Wildland Fire Spread Through Porous Fuel Beds, Tingting Tang

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Wildfires are becoming increasingly erratic nowadays at least in part because of climate change. CFD (computational fluid dynamics)-based models with the potential of simulating extreme behaviors are gaining increasing attention as a means to predict such behavior in order to aid firefighting efforts. This dissertation describes a wildfire model based on the current understanding of wildfire physics. The model includes physics of turbulence, inhomogeneous porous fuel beds, heat release, ignition, and firebrands. A discrete dynamical system for flow in porous media is derived and incorporated into the subgrid-scale model for synthetic-velocity large-eddy simulation (LES), and a general porosity-permeability model is …

Simulating Foodborne Pathogens In Poultry Production And Processing To Defend Against Intentional Contamination, S. Lankford, D. R. Thompson, S. C. Ricke

Journal of the Arkansas Academy of Science

There is a lack of data in recent history of food terrorism attacks, and as such, it is difficult to predict its impact. The food supply industry is one of the most vulnerable industries for terrorist threats while the poultry industry is one of the largest food industries in the United States. A small food terrorism attack against a single poultry processing center has the potential to affect a much larger human population than its immediate consumers. In this work, the spread of foodborne pathogens is simulated in a poultry production and processing system to defend against intentional contamination. An …

End-To-End Molecular Communication Channels In Cell Metabolism: An Information Theoretic Study, Zahmeeth Sayed Sakkaff, Jennie L. Catlett, Mikaela Cashman, Massimiliano Pierobon, Nicole R. Buan, Myra B. Cohen, Christine A. Kelley

Department of Biochemistry: Faculty Publications

The opportunity to control and fine-tune the behavior of biological cells is a fascinating possibility for many diverse disciplines, ranging from medicine and ecology, to chemical industry and space exploration. While synthetic biology is providing novel tools to reprogram cell behavior from their genetic code, many challenges need to be solved before it can become a true engineering discipline, such as reliability, safety assurance, reproducibility and stability. This paper aims to understand the limits in the controllability of the behavior of a natural (non-engineered) biological cell. In particular, the focus is on cell metabolism, and its natural regulation mechanisms, and …

Implementation Of Cuda Accelerated Bayesian Network Learning, Joseph Haddad

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Bayesian networks can be used to analyze and find relationships among genetic profiles. Unfortunately, Bayesian network learning is an NP­-hard algorithm and thus takes a significant amount of time to generate an output. There has been research in this area in attempts to make this algorithm quicker, such as utilizing consensus networks. Consensus networks are aggregations of many “cheaper” Bayesian networks that are used to formulate a bigger picture. These “cheaper” networks have their search­ spaces restricted, and thus more are required to extract the relationships among the data points.

To accomplish this, I implemented Bayesian network learning in C++, …

Data Analytics In Performance Of Kick-Out Distribution And Effectiveness In Senior Championship Football In Ireland, Roisin Donnelly, Darragh Daly

Journal Articles

n recent years, data analytics has been a growing phenomenon in many fields, including sport, and there has been an increased focus on how technology will impact the work of coaching andperformance professionals. This paper provides a reflection of the use of data analytics within the Gaelic Athletic Association’s (GAA) football coaching practice in Ireland, and evaluates for coaches how to enhance kick- out distribution and effectiveness. Specifically, the study aimed to dissect and analyse kick- out strategies to assess from a coaching perspective, the impact on distribution andeffectiveness. The research is a …

Hybrid Parallelization Of The Nasa Gemini Electromagnetic Modeling Tool, Buxton L. Johnson Sr.

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Understanding, predicting, and controlling electromagnetic field interactions on and between complex RF platforms requires high fidelity computational electromagnetic (CEM) simulation. The primary CEM tool within NASA is GEMINI, an integral equation based method-of-moments (MoM) code for frequency domain electromagnetic modeling. However, GEMINI is currently limited in the size and complexity of problems that can be effectively handled. To extend GEMINI’S CEM capabilities beyond those currently available, primary research is devoted to integrating the MFDlib library developed at the University of Kentucky with GEMINI for efficient filling, factorization, and solution of large electromagnetic problems formulated using integral equation methods. A secondary …

Modeling Volatility Of Financial Time Series Using Arc Length, Benjamin H. Hoerlein

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores how arc length can be modeled and used to measure the risk involved with a financial time series. Having arc length as a measure of volatility can help an investor in sorting which stocks are safer/riskier to invest in. A Gamma autoregressive model of order one(GAR(1)) is proposed to model arc length series. Kernel regression based bias correction is studied when model parameters are estimated using method of moment procedure. As an application, a model-based clustering involving thirty different stocks is presented using k-means++ and hierarchical clustering techniques.

Anomaly Detection In Rfid Networks, Alaa Alkadi

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Available security standards for RFID networks (e.g. ISO/IEC 29167) are designed to secure individual tag-reader sessions and do not protect against active attacks that could also compromise the system as a whole (e.g. tag cloning or replay attacks). Proper traffic characterization models of the communication within an RFID network can lead to better understanding of operation under “normal” system state conditions and can consequently help identify security breaches not addressed by current standards. This study of RFID traffic characterization considers two piecewise-constant data smoothing techniques, namely Bayesian blocks and Knuth’s algorithms, over time-tagged events and compares them in the context …

Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Of Social Media With Emotion Sensing, Zhaoxia Wang, Chee Seng Chong, Landy Lan, Yinping Yang, Beng-Seng Ho, Joo Chuan Tong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media is arguably the richest source of human generated text input. Opinions, feedbacks and critiques provided by internet users reflect attitudes and sentiments towards certain topics, products, or services. The sheer volume of such information makes it effectively impossible for any group of persons to read through. Thus, social media sentiment analysis has become an important area of work to make sense of the social media talk. However, most existing sentiment analysis techniques focus only on the aggregate level, classifying sentiments broadly into positive, neutral or negative, and lack the capabilities to perform fine-grained sentiment analysis. This paper describes …

The Habits Of Highly Effective Researchers: An Empirical Study, Subhajit Datta, Partha Basuchowdhuri, Surajit Acharya, Subhashis Majumder

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Interest in the habits of influential individuals cuts across domains. As researchers, we are intrigued why few attain significant eminence in their fields, whereas many operate in obscurity. An empirical examination of this question has been made possible by the recent availability of large scale publication data. In this paper, we use information from the AMiner Paper Citation and Author Collaboration Networks to discern factors that relate to the impact of influential researchers across five domains in the computing discipline. We propose and apply a novel algorithm to identify influential vertices in co-authorship networks built from total corpora of 1,00,000+papers …

Computational Fluid Dynamics In A Terminal Alveolated Bronchiole Duct With Expanding Walls: Proof-Of-Concept In Openfoam, Jeremy Myers

Theses and Dissertations

Mathematical Biology has found recent success applying Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to model airflow in the human lung. Detailed modeling of flow patterns in the alveoli, where the oxygen-carbon dioxide gas exchange occurs, has provided data that is useful in treating illnesses and designing drug-delivery systems. Unfortunately, many CFD software packages have high licensing fees that are out of reach for independent researchers. This thesis uses three open-source software packages, Gmsh, OpenFOAM, and ParaView, to design a mesh, create a simulation, and visualize the results of an idealized terminal alveolar sac model. This model successfully demonstrates that OpenFOAM can be …

Network Analytics For The Mirna Regulome And Mirna-Disease Interactions, Joseph Jayakar Nalluri

Theses and Dissertations

miRNAs are non-coding RNAs of approx. 22 nucleotides in length that inhibit gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. By virtue of this gene regulation mechanism, miRNAs play a critical role in several biological processes and patho-physiological conditions, including cancers. miRNA behavior is a result of a multi-level complex interaction network involving miRNA-mRNA, TF-miRNA-gene, and miRNA-chemical interactions; hence the precise patterns through which a miRNA regulates a certain disease(s) are still elusive. Herein, I have developed an integrative genomics methods/pipeline to (i) build a miRNA regulomics and data analytics repository, (ii) create/model these interactions into networks and use optimization techniques, motif …

Concept-Based Interactive Search System, Yi-Jie Lu, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Hao Zhang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Our successful multimedia event detection system at TREC-VID 2015 showed its strength on handling complex concepts in a query. The system was based on a large number of pre-trained concept detectors for textual-to-visual relation. In this paper, we enhance the system by enabling human-in-the-loop. In order to facilitate a user to quickly find an information need, we incorporate concept screening, video reranking by highlighted concepts, relevance feedback and color sketch to refine a coarse retrieval result. The aim is to eventually come up with a system suitable for both Ad-hoc Video Search and Known-Item Search. In addition, as the increasing …