Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Multi-Scale Mapping Of Australia’S Terrestrial And Blue Carbon Stocks And Their Continental And Bioregional Drivers, Lewis Walden, Oscar Serrano, Mingxi Zhang, Zefang Shen, James Z. Sippo, Lauren T. Bennett, Damien T. Maher, Catherine E. Lovelock, Peter I. Macreadie, Connor Gorham, Anna Lafratta, Paul S. Lavery, Luke Mosley, Gloria M. S. Reithmaier, Jeffrey J. Kelleway, Sabine Dittmann, Fernanda Adame, Carlos M. Duarte, John B. Gallagher, Pawel Waryszak, Paul Carnell, Sabine Kasel, Nina Hinko-Najera, Rakib Hassan, Madeline Goddard, Alice R. Jones, Raphael A. Viscarra Rossel

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The soil in terrestrial and coastal blue carbon ecosystems is an important carbon sink. National carbon inventories require accurate assessments of soil carbon in these ecosystems to aid conservation, preservation, and nature-based climate change mitigation strategies. Here we harmonise measurements from Australia’s terrestrial and blue carbon ecosystems and apply multi-scale machine learning to derive spatially explicit estimates of soil carbon stocks and the environmental drivers of variation. We find that climate and vegetation are the primary drivers of variation at the continental scale, while ecosystem type, terrain, clay content, mineralogy and nutrients drive subregional variations. We estimate that in the …

Twitter Policing, Hemanth Kumar Medisetty

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Police departments are frequently utilizing social media platforms to actively interact with the public. Social media offers an opportunity to share information, facilitate communication, and foster stronger connections between police departments and the communities they serve. In this context sentiment analysis of social media data has become a tool, for identifying sentiments and tracking emerging trends.

This project utilizes sentiment analysis to examine the social media interactions with particular data obtained from the Twitter (X). Initially, the project gathers social media data, from twitter mentioned accounts on Twitter utilizing web scraping techniques. Afterwards, we perform a thorough sentiment analysis using …

Predictive Model For Cfpb Consumer Complaints, Vyshnavi Nalluri

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Within the dynamic and highly competitive financial industry, the timely and efficient resolution of customer complaints stands as a central challenge, particularly in the intricate domain of mortgage services. The traditional processes for handling these complaints have long been recognized as laborious and resource-intensive, a situation that financial institutions, including the esteemed Wells Fargo, are keen to improve.

Currently, the industry largely relies on basic data analytics for identifying trends in customer complaints. However, this approach has its limitations, especially when dealing with complaints within the mortgage services domain. In response to this challenge, this research advocates the adoption of …

On The Effect Of Emotion Identification From Limited Translated Text Samples Using Computational Intelligence, Madiha Tahir, Zahid Halim, Muhmmad Waqas, Shanshan Tu

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Emotion identification from text data has recently gained focus of the research community. This has multiple utilities in an assortment of domains. Many times, the original text is written in a different language and the end-user translates it to her native language using online utilities. Therefore, this paper presents a framework to detect emotions on translated text data in four different languages. The source language is English, whereas the four target languages include Chinese, French, German, and Spanish. Computational intelligence (CI) techniques are applied to extract features, dimensionality reduction, and classification of data into five basic classes of emotions. Results …

Explainable Artificial Intelligence: Approaching It From The Lowest Level, Ralf P. Riedel

Theses and Dissertations

The increasing complexity of artificial intelligence models has given rise to extensive work toward understanding the inner workings of neural networks. Much of that work, however, has focused on manipulating input data feeding the network to assess their affects on network output or pruning model components after the often-extensive time-consuming training. It is postulated in this study that understanding of neural network can benefit from model structure simplification. In turn, it is shown that model simplification can benefit from investigating network node, the most fundamental unit of neural networks, evolving trends during training. Whereas studies on simplification of model structure …

Wonderstone And Its Connection To Liesegang, Microbes, And Beyond, Haden S. Mandery

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In the western and southwestern United States, the term wonderstone is used to describe volcanic, volcaniclastic, and sedimentary rocks with variegated banding produced by iron oxide mineralization or staining. This iron oxide mineralization is typically described as Liesegang banding. In this paper I will (1) test if the banding in wonderstone follows the spacing and width laws characteristic of Liesegang, (2) identify the source of iron that ultimately precipitated in the bands, and (3) examine the role that microbes played in the formation of the mineralization in these rocks. I conclude that the iron oxide mineralization is not Liesegang banding. …

Key Communication Technologies, Applications, Protocols And Future Guides For Iot-Assisted Smart Grid Systems: A Review, Md Ohirul Qays, Iftekhar Ahmad, Ahmed Abu-Siada, Md Liton Hossain, Farhana Yasmin

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Towards addressing the concerns of conventional power systems including reliability and security, establishing modern Smart Grids (SGs) has been given much attention by the global electric utility applications during the last few years. One of the key advantageous of SGs is its ability for two-way communication and bi-directional power flow that facilitates the inclusion of distributed energy resources, real time monitoring and self-healing systems. As such, the SG employs a large number of digital devices that are installed at various locations to enrich the observability and controllability of the system. This calls for the necessity of employing Internet of Things …

Review Classification Using Natural Language Processing And Deep Learning, Brian Nazareth

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Sentiment Analysis is an ongoing research in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In this project, I will evaluate my testing against an Amazon Reviews Dataset, which contains more than 100 thousand reviews from customers. This project classifies the reviews using three methods – using a sentiment score by comparing the words of the reviews based on every positive and negative word that appears in the text with the Opinion Lexicon dataset, by considering the text’s variating sentiment polarity scores with a Python library called TextBlob, and with the help of neural network training. I have created a neural …

Predicting New Crescent Moon Visibility Applying Machine Learning Algorithms, Murad Al-Rajab, Samia Loucif, Yazan Al Risheh

All Works

The world's population is projected to grow 32% in the coming years, and the number of Muslims is expected to grow by 70%—from 1.8 billion in 2015 to about 3 billion in 2060. Hijri is the Islamic calendar, also known as the lunar Hijri calendar, which consists of 12 lunar months, and it is tied to the Moon phases where a new crescent Moon marks the beginning of each month. Muslims use the Hijri calendar to determine important dates and religious events such as Ramadan, Haj, Muharram, etc. Till today, there is no consensus on deciding on the beginning of …

Boosting The Item-Based Collaborative Filtering Model With Novel Similarity Measures, Hassan I. Abdalla, Ali A. Amer, Yasmeen A. Amer, Loc Nguyen, Basheer Al-Maqaleh

All Works

Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most widely employed methodologies for recommender systems, has drawn undeniable attention due to its effectiveness and simplicity. Nevertheless, a few papers have been published on the CF-based item-based model using similarity measures than the user-based model due to the model's complexity and the time required to build it. Additionally, the substantial shortcomings in the user-based measurements when the item-based model is taken into account motivated us to create stronger models in this work. Not to mention that the common trickiest challenge is dealing with the cold-start problem, in which users' history of item-buying behavior …

Role Of Authentication Factors In Fin-Tech Mobile Transaction Security, Habib Ullah Khan, Muhammad Sohail, Shah Nazir, Tariq Hussain, Babar Shah, Farman Ali

All Works

Fin-Tech is the merging of finance and technology, to be considered a key term for technology-based financial operations and money transactions as far as Fin-Tech is concerned. In the massive field of business, mobile money transaction security is a great challenge for researchers. The user authentication schemes restrict the ability to enforce the authentication before the account can access and operate. Although authentication factors provide greater security than a simple static password, financial transactions have potential drawbacks because cybercrime expands the opportunities for fraudsters. The most common enterprise challenge is mobile-based user authentication during transactions, which addresses the security issues …

The Psychological Science Accelerator's Covid-19 Rapid-Response Dataset, Erin M. Buchanan, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures for each experimental study, a general questionnaire examining health prevention behaviors and COVID-19 experience, geographical and cultural context characterization, and demographic information for each participant. Each participant started the study with the same general questions and then was randomized to complete either one longer experiment or two shorter experiments. Data were provided by 73,223 participants with …

Evaluating Digital Creativity Support For Children: A Systematic Literature Review, Marte Hoff Hagen, Daniela Soares Cruzes, Letizia Jaccheri, Jerry Alan Fails

Computer Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Creativity, the process of creating something new and valuable, benefits children by improving their skills and development, encouraging interaction and engagement, and enabling the generation and expression of novel ideas. In recent years, interactive digital tools have emerged to support the user’s creativity in the open-ended creation of new artifacts. However, the question of evaluating the creativity happening in the interplay between children, digital tools, and products is still open. This systematic literature review investigated the evaluations of digital creativity support tools for children and identified 81 peer-reviewed relevant articles from the last 10 years. This research contributes to practitioners …

Analyzing The Impacts Of Beaver Dam And Beaver Dam Analog Complexes To Stream Ecology Within The Intermountain West, J. Marshall Wolf

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Streams, rivers, and their floodplains throughout the world are impaired due to human modifications. Recent research has demonstrated that restoration projects prioritizing the proper functioning of ecosystems have better restoration outcomes than projects which focus on restoring form alone. Throughout North America, beaver-mediated restoration is becoming a leading method for improving the functioning of stream ecosystems that are in a degraded state. In areas where beaver are absent or the habitat is too degraded to currently permit their dam building, man-made beaver dam analogs (BDAs) are being used to restore stream habitat with an eye to future beaver recolonization. However, …

Characterization Of The Long-Distance Dispersal Kernel Of White-Tailed Deer And Evaluating Its Impact On Chronic Wasting Disease Spread In Wisconsin, Mennatallah Gouda

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a fatal, untreatable neurodegenerative disease that infects deer and related species. It is highly contagious and caused by abnormal malfunction and assembly of normal cellular proteins into aggregation-prone proteins. The Centers for Disease Control and prevention report that the prevalence of CWD in free-ranging deer in the US is still relatively low. However, in several states the infection rates exceed 1 deer in 10. Deer may uptake CWD from direct interaction with infected individuals or from the environment. Infected individuals shed CWD into the environment through feces, urine, saliva or carcasses, and long-distance dispersal of …

An Exposition Of The Curvature Of Warped Product Manifolds, Angelina Bisson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The field of differential geometry is brimming with compelling objects, among which are warped products. These objects hold a prominent place in differential geometry and have been widely studied, as is evident in the literature. Warped products are topologically the same as the Cartesian product of two manifolds, but with distances in one of the factors in skewed. Our goal is to introduce warped product manifolds and to compute their curvature at any point. We follow recent literature and present a previously known result that classifies all flat warped products to find that there are flat examples of warped products …

Deep Learning With Effective Hierarchical Attention Mechanisms In Perception Of Autonomous Vehicles, Qiuxiao Chen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Autonomous vehicles need to gather and understand information from their surroundings to drive safely. Just like how we look around and understand what's happening on the road, these vehicles need to see and make sense of dynamic objects like other cars, pedestrians, and cyclists, and static objects like crosswalks, road barriers, and stop lines.

In this dissertation, we aim to figure out better ways for computers to understand their surroundings in the 3D object detection task and map segmentation task. The 3D object detection task automatically spots objects in 3D (like cars or cyclists) and the map segmentation task automatically …

Computational Study About Noncovalent Bonding Systems Involving Halogen, Chalcogen And Pnicogen Bonds, Jia Lu

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

First terms used in this thesis are introduced and defined as follows. In the periodic table, the elements in the 17^th column are named halogen including fluorine (F), chlorine (Cl), bromine (Br) and iodine (I). The elements in the 16^th column are named chalcogen including oxygen (O), sulfur (S), selenium (Se) and tellurium (Te). The elements in the 15^th column are named pnicogen including nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), arsenic (As) and antimony (Sb).

After hydrogen bonds (B-H⋅⋅⋅B) are well studied and understood by scientists and researchers, halogen bonds (R-X⋅⋅⋅B) have drawn attention due to the similarities in …

Inundated Vegetation Response To Ongoing Restoration And Its Impacts On Fish Community Structure, Emmanuel J. May

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

Shallow lake ecosystems and their associated wetland habitats globally are subject to non-native species introductions, nutrient loading, and water level fluctuations, each of which can decrease vegetated habitat availability, exposing vulnerable native aquatic species to predation. Managers are frequently tasked with mitigating native species declines by restoring vegetation considered crucial for their survival. However, restoring vegetation can be challenging in the presence of multiple stressors, requiring managers to assess the relative importance of the different stressors limiting vegetation recovery.

Utah Lake is a large shallow lake subject to multiple stressors and has shifted from a mesotrophic lake with abundant aquatic …

Population Demography Of A Glacial-Relict Stream Fish Mediated Via Anthropogenic Alteration, Joseph M. Spooner

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Northern Pearl Dace Margariscus nachtriebi are a small-bodied glacial-relict fish species of greatest conservation need (SGCN) found throughout Canada and the northern United Sates. Their distribution within the Nebraska Sandhills Ecoregion is isolated from the northern core distribution of the species following the last glaciation period approximately 18,000 years ago. Headwater streams within the Nebraska Sandhills Ecoregion are predominately groundwater fed and provide the cool water temperatures needed to support Northern Pearl Dace and other glacial-relict SGCN. Headwater streams within the Nebraska Sandhills Ecoregion have been geomorphically altered through anthropogenic processes such as channelization whereby habitat homogenization has occurred. Evidence …