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Title: TWO ESSAYS ON CORPORATE FINANCE AND CAPITAL MARKET
Creator: Zhao, Tianyu
Date: 2019
Description: Two of the most important credit suppliers on the capital market of the United States are commercial banks and online peer-to-peer (P2P)...
Show moreTwo of the most important credit suppliers on the capital market of the United States are commercial banks and online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platforms. Relaxing restrictions on interstate banking and intrastate branching in banking industry bring more competitions and better efficiency in the banking industry, which provides a much lower cost for firms to raise external funds. We find bank deregulations decrease investment-cash flow sensitivity of firms, which explains the declining trend of investment-cash flow sensitivity since the late 1970s. With the development of internet and transaction technology, online P2P lending platforms become more and more important in the capital market. However, the borrowers on P2P platforms are private individuals with limited official information. We document that when borrower’s official information is limited, social capital, a factor contains region based soft information, plays an important role in effecting online P2P lending activities.
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Title: POWER PROFILING, ANALYSIS, LEARNING, AND MANAGEMENT FOR HIGH-PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Creator: Wallace, Sean
Date: 2017, 2017-05
Description: As the field of supercomputing continues its relentless push towards greater speeds and higher levels of parallelism the power consumption of...
Show moreAs the field of supercomputing continues its relentless push towards greater speeds and higher levels of parallelism the power consumption of these large scale systems is steadily transitioning from a burden to a serious problem. While the machines are highly scaleable, the buildings, power supplies, etc. are not. Even the most power efficient systems today consume one to two megawatts per peata op/s. Multiplying that by 1,000 to reach the next generation of supercomputer (i.e., exascale) and the power necessary just to turn the machine on is simply impractical. Thus, power has become a primary design constraint for future supercomputing system designs. As such, it has become a matter of paramount importance to understand exactly how current generation systems utilize power and what implications this has on future systems. As the saying goes, you can't manage what you don't measure. This work addresses several large hurdles in fully understanding the power consumption of current systems and making actionable decisions based on this understanding. First, by leveraging environmental data collected from runs of real leadership class applications we analyze power consumption and temperature as it pertains to scale on a production IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer. Then, through development of a new power monitoring library, MonEQ, we quantitatively studied how power is consumed in major portions of the system (e.g., CPU, memory, etc.) through profiling of microbenchmarks. Expanding on this, we then studied how scale and network topology affect power consumption for several well-known benchmarks. Wanting to increase the effectiveness of our power monitoring library, we extended it to work with many of the most common classes of hardware available in today's HPC landscape. In doing so, we provided an in-depth analysis of what data is obtainable, what the process of obtaining it is like, and how data from different systems compares. Next, utilizing the knowledge gained from these experiences, we developed a new scheduling approach which utilizing power data can effectively keep a production system's power consumption under a user-specified power cap without modification to the applications running on the system. Finally, we extend this scheduling approach to be applicable to more than just one objective. In doing so, the scheduler can now optimize on multiple criteria instead of simply considering system utilization.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 2017
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Title: UNDERSTANDING REACTION MECHANISMS AND CONTROLLING REACTIVE SURFACE SPECIES DURING ATOMIC LAYER DEPOSITION OF METAL CHALCOGENIDES
Creator: Weimer, Matthew S.
Date: 2016, 2016-07
Description: Atomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin film growth technique that relies on self-limiting reactions between vapor precursors and a surface....
Show moreAtomic layer deposition (ALD) is a thin film growth technique that relies on self-limiting reactions between vapor precursors and a surface. Significant progress has been made in the scope of materials grown by ALD, enabled by precursor development and investigation of surface reaction mechanisms; progress is still necessary. This dissertation has two portions. The first is the development of organometallic compounds to engender new material growth by ALD. Second is the development of X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) tools and techniques for observations of the metal coordination environment during ALD. One material that can be difficult to make is doped materials. Composition of a doped material determines the film properties. One example is vanadium doped indium sulfide. This material was purposed as an intermediate bandgap solar absorbing material which can absorb multiple ranges of light. Two new precursors were developed for the growth of indium sulfide and vanadium sulfide. The indium sulfide material grown has shown superior film photocurrent qualities and doping of vanadium into indium sulfide with fine control over atomic placement was achieved. Films were grown that showed secondary absorptions which aligned with theoretical calculations. The flexibility of the V(III) precursor is shown by a short study on the control of the difficult vanadium-oxygen system in the deposition of stoichiometric oxides. To illustrate how XAS can be used in conjunction with other techniques tin dioxide growth from a stannylene precursor and hydrogen peroxide was studied. From ex situ XAS measurements nucleation, growth and termination reaction mechanism were discovered. Next, a mobile ALD reactor allowed for in situ XAS measurements to be performed on “flat” substrates for the first time. Specifically, the local coordination environment and surface reactions were followed while erbium was doped into alumina and coordination environment of manganese was investigated in the growth of manganese-doped zinc oxide, with the ability to probe in-plane versus out-of-plane bonds. These unique in situ XAS experiments allow for greater understand of metal and non-metal precursors as they interact with surfaces. This enhanced understanding enables new precursor development which leads to better control over surface chemistry and new materials.
Ph.D. in Chemistry, July 2016
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Title: DISTRIBUTED VIDEO CODING FOR RESOURCE CONSTRAINED VIDEO APPLICATIONS
Creator: Liu, Wenhui
Date: 2014, 2014-05
Description: Video coding technology has played a key role in the explosion of current multimedia society with increasing resolution and quality. Such big...
Show moreVideo coding technology has played a key role in the explosion of current multimedia society with increasing resolution and quality. Such big success is largely built on the conventional video coding paradigm where motion estimation and compensation are performed at the encoder. This asymmetry in complexity is well-suited for the applications where the video sequence is encoded once and decoded many times. However, some new emerging applications such as wireless video surveillance, wireless PC cameras and multimedia sensor networks require a low complexity encoding, while possibly a ording a high complexity decoding. Therefore, a challenging problem emerges with the new type of visual communication system is how to achieve low complexity encoding video compression while maintaining good coding e ciency. Distributed video coding (DVC) provides low complexity encoding solutions for video communication with limited computational power or energy constraints. In DVC, the source video information is independently encoded at lightweight encoders. At the decoder, all the received bitstreams are jointly exploited their statistical dependencies between them. In such a way, motion estimation and its computational complexity is shifted from the encoder to the decoder. However, DVC also has its own restrictions. The low coding e ciency remains a challenging issue for DVC compare to the conventional video coding. Although DVC is robust to channel loss due to its intrinsic feature of independent encoders and joint decoder, the error resiliency for medium to large transmission errors is weak. In this dissertation, previously proposed low-complexity DVC (LC-DVC) architecture is rstly introduced. After that, a continued work is presented to further improve quality of SI. The proposed method is called spatio-temporal joint bilateral upsampling (STJBU) based SI generation, where geometric closeness of pixels and their photometric similarity is exploited to reduce the noise while preserving the edge xiv information. Moreover, a distributed multiple description coding (DMDC) scheme is proposed by combining the multiple description (MD) coding into LC-DVC to improve its error resiliency. All the proposed schemes are well described and the ratedistortion analyses are presented in this dissertation. All these features have made the LC-DVC a great solution for resource constraints applications.
PH.D in Electrical Engineering, May 2014
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Title: THE RELATIONSHIPS OF BIOLOGICAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL, AND SOCIAL FACTORS TO PERCEIVED SEIZURE SEVERITY IN INDIVIDUALS WITH TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY
Creator: Fong, Wing Man
Date: 2012-12-17, 2012-12
Description: Epilepsy is a chronic neurological condition that can cause negative consequences in all areas of life for people with the condition. Research...
Show moreEpilepsy is a chronic neurological condition that can cause negative consequences in all areas of life for people with the condition. Research evidence has led to the goal of treatment to gradually shift from targeting only reducing the frequency of seizures to decreasing individual’s perception of seizure severity. While several studies have suggested that psychological and social factors, in addition to epilepsy-related biological factors, can also impact seizure severity perception, this area has received much less attention in relation to individuals’ perception of seizure severity. Therefore, this study examined individuals’ perception of seizure severity using a biopsychosocial framework which takes into account biological, psychological, and social factors to develop a comprehensive understanding about the perception of seizure severity. 57 individuals from a neurology clinic at a tertiary medical center with a primary diagnosis of localization-related temporal lobe epilepsy participated in this study. They were interviewed for demographic information and were assessed using Quality of Life in Epilepsy-89, Beck Depression Inventory, Stressful Life Events Scale, and Liverpool Seizure Severity Scale. A Multiple regression analysis indicated that the number of antiepileptic drugs, perceived memory function, the number of stressful life events, and social support were all significant predictors of perceived seizure severity. The current findings supported a biopsychosocial approach in understanding the perception of seizure severity among people with epilepsy. Clinical implications of these findings are discussed.
M.S. in Psychology, December 2012
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Title: POWER ANALYSIS AND CONTROL OPTIMIZATION OF A HIGH GAIN RESONANT DC-DC CONVERTER
Creator: Wu, Haowen
Date: 2017, 2017-05
Description: Applications of DC-DC converter require a high power, high efficiency performance, especially for automotive applications and renewable energy...
Show moreApplications of DC-DC converter require a high power, high efficiency performance, especially for automotive applications and renewable energy applications. A desired converter should have a fast response, stable output in different conditions. This thesis studies a novel high gain DC-DC resonant converter and its control. Based on the circuit analysis and operation evaluation, feed-forward and feedback control methods are proposed in order to achieve stability under variety of changes. Moreover, circuit topology is investigated in response to the efficiency improvement. Simulations in PSIM, PLECS and MATLAB Simulink have been carried out to validate the controller design and topology development. The simulation results are in consistence to the theoretical analysis. The overall high efficiency at nominal operating point is further increased.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering, May 2017
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Title: A METHODOLOGY FOR MAJOR BUS ROUTE RESCHEDULING TO IMPROVE TRANSIT PERFORMANCE
Creator: Lu, Xi
Date: 2012-08-01, 2012-07
Description: In a period of growing transit operating deficits, increasing attention and concern is being directed at both the decreasing levels of...
Show moreIn a period of growing transit operating deficits, increasing attention and concern is being directed at both the decreasing levels of productivity of transit systems in general and the broad differences in measured service performance compiled for various transit systems. The purpose of this study is an assist public transit managers by providing them with a mathematical technique to analyze the efficiency with which serviced is produced and the effectiveness with which it is consumed. By providing the analysis model which not requires an extensive amount of data, the operator can have tool for decision-making of profit and market growth. Thus, transit managers will be able to access the performance of the agency and areas where improvements can be realistically achieved. Using the urban operation of the Chicago Transit Authority, a transit performance model is developed to analysis efficiency and effectiveness of the city's bus system. As the system exists, there are 144 bus routes start and end, frequency of dispatching buses and ridership changes from Weekdays and Weekend, peak hour and off-peak hour. In many of these routes, vehicles are used inefficiently and ineffectively, only a few passengers carried in some routes in off-peak hour, yet in other routes through the Central Business District (CBD) area, there are always not enough buses in peak hour. Also, some routes cannot provide enough on-time arrival service and some special group like elderly and handicapped cannot receive enough service in certain area. The goal of case research is to determine to understand the transit performance of Chicago Transit Authority and to select the optimal improvement projects to maximize the performance in term of economy and social equity.
M.S. in Civil Engineering, July 2012
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Title: Structural Uncertainty Analysis of Nuclear Reactor Core Load Pads
Creator: Wozniak, Nicholas
Date: 2019
Description: In fast spectrum nuclear reactors, reactivity is directly related to the capability of the reactor to sustain a fission chain reaction for...
Show moreIn fast spectrum nuclear reactors, reactivity is directly related to the capability of the reactor to sustain a fission chain reaction for power production. Historically, mechanical/structural analysis and design have been driven primarily by deterministic methods. However, reactivity is extremely sensitive to the location of the fuel within the reactor; which is subject to uncertainties. This makes deterministic models unstable and can allow manufacturing errors to contribute to uncertainties in analysis, resulting in potential safety concerns and incorrect reactor lifetime prediction. One potential means to address this challenge is the use of stochastic analysis. A framework is presented which introduces uncertainty analysis through the use of Monte Carlo Simulation. Latin Hypercube Sampling is used to reduce the number of sample runs and the computational effort and storage space requirements for the results. Geometric parameters such as the gaps at the load pad contact points, the location of the above core load pad (ACLP), and even temperature gradient profiles, that are important to the design of nuclear reactors are varied, and their effects on the overall performance are studied through sensitivity analysis. The main focus was to quantify the effects of the variation of these parameters directly on the variation of the contact forces and deformations of the fuel assemblies which house and control the movement of the fuel. Based on the results of the sensitivity study, this study found that the ACLP location has the largest effect on contact forces. And as such, any uncertainty in this parameter results in a rather large variation in the intensity of the contact force. Furthermore, specific recommendations are given to help control these variations as well as for further investigations on other parameters that may be significant to the design of fuel assemblies.
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Title: SITUATING FANS' SOCIAL MEDIA PRACTICES IN THE CONTEXT OF FAN STUDIES
Creator: Rao, Xi
Date: 2015, 2015-05
Description: This paper explores how TV fans use social media. By revtewmg academic perspectives on fandom ofTV shows and social media in past several...
Show moreThis paper explores how TV fans use social media. By revtewmg academic perspectives on fandom ofTV shows and social media in past several decades, this paper discusses the way that audiences react to TV shows using the affordance of social media. At the begirming, this article traces the image, activities, and meaning of fandom. Fans were portrayed as deviant creatures until the late 80s. This image was clarified when people looked into fans and their creative works. Scholars realized that fans productively generated creative products based on the given materials, which reflected the social experience of the creators. Therefore, fandom was soon understood as a way of fans to resist the dominant culture in the society. Later on, social media offer fans an immediate, widespread platform to contribute to the TV conversation. With this platform, normal fans show up. Different from productive fandom, median fans are less active in making new meanings of the TV program. Interestingly, a large number of TV audiences are using social media during the broadcast, participating in the discussion of shows. This evidences the convergence of the traditional media, TV, and the new media, social media. It is also found that comments of TV viewers on social media in turn, influence the content of the TV show. Rather than merely spectators, fans are a part of the TV production. As a special case, gender is discussed from the perspective of fandom. Female composers dominant the fan-writing world. Study the producers and products of fan fiction may provide valuable insights into gender dilemmas in the real world. At the end of this essay, 1 summarize how social media atTect the participation of TV fans and discuss remaining questions worthy of future research. Since fandom becomes ubiquitous in the social media age, it is possible to explore fandom as a way to better understand our daily life.
M.S. in Information Architecture, May 2015
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Title: TRANSMISSION RESERVE DESIGN IN ELECTRICITY MARKETS CONSIDERING RAMPING CONSTRAINTS AND LOAD UNCERTAINTY
Creator: Xiao, Xuli
Date: 2016, 2016-12
Description: With increasing penetration of renewable energy, uncertainty challenges ISOs to keep power balance in real-time. As ramping issues draw public...
Show moreWith increasing penetration of renewable energy, uncertainty challenges ISOs to keep power balance in real-time. As ramping issues draw public attention, many ISOs have instituted flexible ramping products to ensure ramping reserve at generation side. However, not all the ramping reserves are deliverable when a transmission line is already congested. In the real-time market, if an uncertain load estimation is known at peak time t+10mins previously, SCUC/SCED is able to spare transmission reserve by changing the dispatch at time t with additional uncertain load constraints at t. To spare transmission reserve under uncertainty, this research proposes an uncertain load estimation to generate an estimated uncertain load and uncertainty constraints at t+10 in SCUC/SCED: with the help of a stochastic optimization model, uncertainties are quantified as a random actual load y and utilized in a modified stochastic model for undeliverable ramping reserve issues; once the optimal total system generation x is obtained, treated as an estimated uncertain load, uncertainty constraints are added at t+10mins in SCUC/SCED to obtain a secure dispatch at t. Therefore, transmission ramping reserve is ensured by a change in dispatch at t. Numerical results show that this design enhances the economy and scalability of power systems. In addition, scalability analysis proves it works for any scale of power systems with multiple local peak loads.
M.S. in Electrical Engineering, December 2016
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Title: IN-PACKAGE DECONTAMINATION OF SALMONELLA MONTEVIDEO ON BLACK PEPPER USING PULSED LIGHT TECHNOLOGY
Creator: Xu, Xinran
Date: 2016, 2016-07
Description: This study evaluated the efficacy of three pulsed light systems (1.8, 3 and 100 Hz) for inactivation of Salmonella Montevideo on the surface...
Show moreThis study evaluated the efficacy of three pulsed light systems (1.8, 3 and 100 Hz) for inactivation of Salmonella Montevideo on the surface of black pepper. The impact of frequency, treatment time and distance from the lamp on the rate of inactivation was studied. A reduction of 4.21 1og10 CFU/g was achieved with a 35 s treatment at 16.6-cm from lamp at 1.8 Hz. Similarly, reductions of 4.72 CFU/g and 4.70 CFU/g were obtained at 14.1-cm after 35 s treatment at 3 Hz and 100 Hz, respectively. Temperature measurement of packed and unpacked black pepper indicated that packaging material absorbed a small amount of energy. Measurement of surface and internal temperature suggested that temperature below the surface increased far less than surface temperature. For instance, temperature on the surface of the black pepper can go up to 200 °C as measured by the infrared camera within 30 to 40 s treatment. However, the temperature at 1 mm below the surface was up to 100 °C depending upon the distance from the lamp. The color of the black pepper did not change after pulsed light treatment (p>0.05). These results suggest that pulsed light can potentially be used to inactivate pathogens on black pepper surface without adversely affecting its quality.
M.S. in Food Safety and Technology, July 2016
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Title: Functionalized Polyoxovanadates: Synthesis, Characterization and Properties
Creator: Zheng, Yujuan
Date: 2012-04-30, 2011-12
Description: The compound [NaVIV6O6{(OCH2CH2)2NCH2CH2OH}6]Cl.H20, designated C0 in this report, an Anderson type structure, contains a single nitrogen atom...
Show moreThe compound [NaVIV6O6{(OCH2CH2)2NCH2CH2OH}6]Cl.H20, designated C0 in this report, an Anderson type structure, contains a single nitrogen atom in place of a single oxygen atom in each of the six vanadium-oxygen octahedra. Attached to each nitrogen are two alkoxide arms (-O-C-C-) which terminate on separate oxygen atoms of the octahedra. A third ethoxy group (-CH2-CH2-OH) dangles freely from each nitrogen atom. The functionalized cationic core [NaVIV6O6{(OCH2CH2)2NCH2CH2OH}6]+ is generated in situ and is cationic with a charge of +1. Chloride is the counteranion. Each vanadium addenda atom is the +4 oxidation state, and the six unpaired electrons result in interesting magnetic properties. C0 is obtained by reaction of a vanadium oxide source triethanolamine. The purpose of the research described here was to adapt the synthetic protocol associated with triethanolamine to other similar ligands. Ligand choice was motivated by the broader goal of this research group to form (extended) hybrid electronic and magnetic materials by chemically bonding POM cores to chemically interesting ligands, such as dyes or other POM cores. In this regard, the original triethanolamine derivative has a number of shortcomings; chief among them is the inaccessibility of the alcoholic functional group chemistry---due to its low pH---that otherwise might have been used to form linkages through the dangling alkoxy arms. Additionally, linkages containing paraffinic carbon (-C-C-), which is not a good conduit of electronic interaction, are chemically undesirable where the synthetic goal is hybrid structures with interesting electronic and magnetic properties. The results associated with the three ligands, diethanolamine, N,N'-Bis(2-hydroxyethyl)ethylenediamine, and N,N-Bis(2-hydroxyethy) ethylenediamine, are described herein. Diethanolamine was chosen because---based on a structural comparison to triethanolamine---it was expected to produce a structure having a hydrogen atom in place of the dangling ethoxy arms, which was indeed the result. We considered this structure highly desirable becasue of the potential lability of the hydrogen atom (-N-H), which would allow us to functionalist the core directly. The resulting compounds are characterized by single-crystal X-ray diffraction, elemental analysis, mass spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, FT-IR and UV-Vis spectroscopy, maganometric titration, temperature-dependent magnetic susceptibility measurements, and cyclic voltammetry. The results of the cyclicvoltammetric investigation are consistent with the labile hydrogen atom (-N-H).
M.S. in Chemistry, December 2011
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Title: MEASUREMENT OF 013 IN THE DOUBLE CHOOZ EXPERIMENT
Creator: Yang, Guang
Date: 2016, 2016-12
Description: Neutrino oscillation has been established for over a decade. The mixing angle 013 is one of the parameters that is most difficult to measure...
Show moreNeutrino oscillation has been established for over a decade. The mixing angle 013 is one of the parameters that is most difficult to measure due to its small value. Currently, reactor antineutrino experiments provide the best knowledge of 013, using the electron antineutrino disappearance phenomenon. The most compelling advantage is the high intensity of the reactor antineutrino rate. The Double Chooz experiment, located on the border of France and Belgium, is such an experiment, which aims to have one of the most precise 013 measurements in the world. Dou- ble Chooz has a single-detector phase and a double-detector phase. For the single- detector phase, the limit of the 013 sensitivity comes mostly from the reactor flux. However, the uncertainty on the reactor flux is highly suppressed in the double- detector phase. Oscillation analyses for the two phases have different strategies but need similar inputs, including background estimation, detection systematics evalua- tion, energy reconstruction and so on. The Double Chooz detectors are filled with gadolinium (Gd) doped liquid scintillator and use the inverse beta decay (IBD) sig- nal so that for each phase, there are two independent 013 measurements based on different neutron capturer (Gd or hydrogen). Multiple oscillation analyses are per- formed to provide the best 013 results. In addition to the 013 measurement, Double Chooz is also an excellent playground" to do diverse physics research. For example, a 252Cf calibration source study has been done to understand the spontaneous decay of this radioactive source. Further, Double Chooz also has the ability to do a sterile neutrino search in a certain mass region. Moreover, some new physics ideas can be tested in Double Chooz. In this thesis, the detailed methods to provide precise 013 measurement will be described and the other physics topics will be introduced.
Ph.D. in Pyhsics, December 2016
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Title: RELIABILITY AND ENERGY ANALYSIS FOR EXTREME SCALE SYSTEMS
Creator: Yu, Li
Date: 2015, 2015-12
Description: Reliability and energy are two of the top major concerns in the development of today's supercomputers. To build a powerful machine while at...
Show moreReliability and energy are two of the top major concerns in the development of today's supercomputers. To build a powerful machine while at the same time satisfying reliability requirement and energy constraint, HPC scientists continue to seek a better understanding of system and component behaviors. Toward this end, modern systems are deployed with various monitoring and logging tools to track reliability and energy data during system operations. Since these data contain important information about system reliability and energy, they are valuable resources for understanding system behaviors. However, as system scale and complexity continue to grow, the process of collecting system data to extracting meaningful knowledge out of overwhelming reliability and energy data faces a number of key challenges. To address these challenges, my work consists of three parts, including data preprocessing, data analysis and advanced modeling.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, December 2015
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Title: Load Redistribution Attacks and Protection Strategy Design in Electric Power Systems
Creator: Yuan, Yanling
Date: 2012-04-27, 2012-05
Description: Electric power systems have evolved over the past century to the largest and the most complex cyber-physical systems. With the development of...
Show moreElectric power systems have evolved over the past century to the largest and the most complex cyber-physical systems. With the development of Smart Grid, cyber security has become an area of growing concern. False data injection attack has recently attracted wide research interest. This thesis develops the concept of load redistribution attack, a special type of false data injection attack. The physical and economic impact of load redistribution (LR) attacks is quantitatively analyzed in this thesis. Since LR attacks can successfully bypass bad data detection and manipulate the state estimation outcome, security constrained economic dispatch (SCED) based on the false state estimation would lead the system into a non-optimal or insecure operation state. Based on the consequence analysis, two different attacking goals are differentiated from the adversary’s perspective, i.e., immediate attacking goal and delayed attacking goal. For the immediate attacking goal, a max-min attacker-defender model is proposed to identify the most damaging immediate LR attack. Two different algorithms are used to solve this bi-level optimization problem. For the delayed attacking goal, a tri-level model is proposed to identity the most damaging delayed LR attack. This thesis studies the economic impact of LR attacks on power market operation. A convex model is proposed under the mechanism of virtual bidding to compute the optimal injection of LR attack, which gains the most profit from the attackers’ perspective. The quantitative analysis of LR attacks provides an in-depth insight on effective attack prevention with limited protection resource budget. This thesis proposes a new protection strategy, which intends to mitigate the most damaging effect of LR attacks on power system operation. The criterion of determining effective protections against the most damaging LR attack, considering the existence of stochastic measurement errors, is deduced.
Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, May 2012
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Title: STRUCTURAL CHARACTERIZATION OF THE FLIGHT MUSCLE OF MANDUCA SEXTA
Creator: Cheng, Yu-shu
Date: 2013-04-22, 2013-05
Description: There are several properties of the flight muscle Manduca sexta that are interesting. In its physiological characteristics, like mammalian...
Show moreThere are several properties of the flight muscle Manduca sexta that are interesting. In its physiological characteristics, like mammalian skeletal and cardiac striated muscle, it is a synchronous muscle. However, it is much more similar structurally to the more widely known asynchronous insect flight muscles of Drosophila and Lethocerus. The goal of the thesis is to study the structural characteristics and perform mechanical studies of dorsal and ventral muscle of Manduca flight muscle. In pursuit of this goal, a secondary purpose was to develop better storage conditions for skinned insect muscle which can maintain muscle structure and function. Maximum active force as a function of time in storage was compared for storing at 4℃ without glycerol and storing at -80℃ with 75% glycerol. The maximum force values were almost the same during days 0-4. However, the muscle stored at -80℃ with 75% glycerol gave higher active force in high calcium (pCa 4.5) solution over a longer time in storage than muscle stored at 4℃. Both ventral and dorsal muscles can deliver 40-50% of original active force for up to 21 days in storage. X-ray diffraction experiments were done to compare the response of chemically skinned Manduca flight muscle to temperature and to the induction of rigor. The lattice spacing (d10) decreased and intensity ratio I20/I10 increased when the temperature of the relaxing solution bathing the solution increased from 10℃ to 40℃. Lattice spacing (d10) decreased, but the I20/I10 intensity ratio increased slightly while concentration of dextran increased from 1% to 6%. Six percent dextran was insufficient to restore the in vivo lattice spacing.
M.S. in Molecular Biochemistry and Biophysics, May 2013
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Title: EFFECT OF NOVEL SANITIZERS IN COMBINATION WITH HIGH-POWER-ULTRASOUND ON MNV-ION ROMAINE LETTUCE
Creator: Zeng, Jin
Date: 2016, 2016-05
Description: Human norovirus is a leading cause of foodborne outbreaks around the world especially in fresh-cut products like romaine lettuce. Traditional...
Show moreHuman norovirus is a leading cause of foodborne outbreaks around the world especially in fresh-cut products like romaine lettuce. Traditional sanitizers such as sodium hypochlorite have been used in food industry to prevent contamination; however there are certain issues such as residuals and toxicity. Novel organic sanitizers have been developed and most of them have been proved not effective on human norovirus. High- Power-Ultrasound (HPU) has a potential to improve effectiveness of sanitizers for washing of fresh-cut produce. As a novel technology, HPU is a non-thermal processing that can enhance inactivating microorganisms in food. In the present study, we have systematically investigated the effect of sanitizers, Chico-wash, ProduceShield, Tsunami 100, EatCleaner and chlorine on human norovirus surrogate and the effect of HPU to enhance viral inactivation. For washing study, romaine lettuce leaves were cut into 5x5 cm2 pieces and spotinoculated with approximately 7 log PFU/ml of MNV-1. The leaves were washed for 60s, 90s, and 120s using various sanitizer concentrations. After washing, leaves were transferred into a stomach bag that contained 20ml of Dulbecco's modified eagle medium (DMEM) or phosphate buffer solution (PBS) containing 0.5M sodium thiosulfate to neutralize the sanitizers. Viruses were extracted by stomaching and recovered from the samples and quantified by viral plaque assay. Water wash without sanitizer was used as a negative control. For water wash, 1.1± 0.1 log PFU/g, 1.3 ± 0.1 log PFU/g and 1.3 ± 0.1 log PFU/g reduction were observed respectively under 60s, 90s and 120s washing.For 20% Chico-wash, under three different time intervals, MNV-1 reductions of 1.2 ± 0.1 log PFU/g, 1.1± 0.1 log PFU/g and 1.2 ± 0.2 log10 PFU/g were observed respectively. While for ProduceShield, at 20% concentration level, 1.5 log PFU/g, 1.6 log PFU/g and 1.6 log PFU/g reduction were observed respectively. For Tsunami 100, leaves were washed for 60s at different concentrations of 20, 40, 60, 80 and 100 ppm, the reduction of MNV-1 was 2.1 ± 0.2, 2.9 ± 0.3, 3.2 ± 0.3, 3.7 ± 0.2 and 3.7 ± 0.2 log PFU/g, respectively, on the surface of lettuce leaves. In HPU study, a high power ultrasound was introduced into washing step in combination with Tsunami 100 at concentrations of 20, 40, 60, 80, 100 ppm. The reduction of MNV-1 was 2.7 ± 0.3, 2.9 ± 0.5, 3.3 ± 0.7, 3.6 ± 0.7 and 3.8 ± 0.5 log10 PFU/g, respectively. For EatCleaner, lettuce leaves were washed for 60s and the reduction of MNV-1 was 1.9 ± 0.1 log10 PFU/g.The results suggest that Chico-wash and ProduceShield were not effective on removing MNV-1 from romaine lettuce while EatCleaner was effective. Tsunami 100 was effective on MNV-1. One-way ANOVA shows that introducing HPU could enhance MNV-1 inactivation at low Tsunami 100 concentration.
M.S. in Food Safety and Technology, May 2016
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Title: AN ADAPTIVE RESCALING SCHEME FOR COMPUTING HELE-SHAW PROBLEMS
Creator: Zhao, Meng
Date: 2017, 2017-07
Description: In this thesis, we develop efficient adaptive rescaling schemes to investigate interface instabilities associated with moving interface...
Show moreIn this thesis, we develop efficient adaptive rescaling schemes to investigate interface instabilities associated with moving interface problems. The idea of rescaling is to map the current time-space onto a new time-space frame such that the interfaces evolve at a chosen speed in the new frame. We couple the rescaling idea with boundary integral method to demonstrate the efficiency of the rescaling idea, though it can be applied to Cartesian-grid based method in general. As an example, we use the Hele-Shaw problem to examine the efficiency of the rescaling scheme. First, we apply the rescaling scheme to a slowly expanding interface. In the new frame, the evolution is dramatically accelerated, while the underlying physics remains unchanged. In particular, at long times numerical results reveal that there exist nonlinear, stable, self-similarly evolving morphologies. The rescaling idea can also be used to simulate the fast shrinking interface, e.g. the Hele-Shaw problem with a time dependent gap. In this case, the rescaling scheme slows down the interface evolution in the new frame to remove the severe time step constraint that makes the long-time simulations prohibitive. Finally, we study an analytical solution to the stability of the interface of the Hele-Shaw problem, assuming a small surface tension under a time dependent flux Q(t). Following [116, 109], we find the motions of daughter singularity ζd and simple singularity ζ0 do not depend on the flux Q(t). We also find a criterion to identify the relation between ζ0 and ζd.
Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics, July 2017
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Title: COOPERATIVE BATCH SCHEDULING FOR HPC SYSTEMS
Creator: Yang, Xu
Date: 2017, 2017-05
Description: The batch scheduler is an important system software serving as the interface between users and HPC systems. Users submit their jobs via batch...
Show moreThe batch scheduler is an important system software serving as the interface between users and HPC systems. Users submit their jobs via batch scheduling portal and the batch scheduler makes scheduling decision for each job based on its request for system resources and system availability. Jobs submitted to HPC systems are usually parallel applications and their lifecycle consists of multiple running phases, such as computation, communication and input/output data. Thus, the running of such parallel applications could involve various system resources, such as power, network bandwidth, I/O bandwidth, storage, etc. And most of these system resources are shared among concurrently running jobs. However, Today's batch schedulers do not take the contention and interference between jobs over these resources into consideration for making scheduling decisions, which has been identified as one of the major culprits for both the system and application performance variability. In this work, we propose a cooperative batch scheduling framework for HPC systems. The motivation of our work is to take important factors about jobs and the system, such as job power, job communication characteristics and network topology, for making orchestrated scheduling decisions to reduce the contention between concurrently running jobs and to alleviate the performance variability. Our contributions are the design and implementation of several coordinated scheduling models and algorithms for addressing some chronic issues in HPC systems. The proposed models and algorithms in this work have been evaluated by the means of simulation using workload traces and application communication traces collected from production HPC systems. Preliminary experimental results show that our models and algorithms can effectively improve the application and the system overall performance, HPC facilities' operation cost, and alleviate the performance variability caused by job interference.
Ph.D. in Computer Science, May 2017
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Title: A HARDWARE-IN-THE-LOOP SOFTWARE-DEFINED NETWORKING TESTING AND EVALUATION FRAMEWORK
Creator: Yang, Qi
Date: 2017, 2017-05
Description: The transformation of innovative research ideas to production systems is highly dependent on the capability of performing realistic and...
Show moreThe transformation of innovative research ideas to production systems is highly dependent on the capability of performing realistic and reproducible network experiments. Simulation testbeds o↵er scalability, reproducibility but lack fidelity due to model abstraction and simplification, while physical testbeds o↵er high fidelity but lack reproducibility and often technically challenging and economically infeasible to perform large-scale experiments. In this work, we present a hybrid testbed consisting of container-based network emulation and physical devices to advocate high fidelity and reproducible networking experiments. In particular, the testbed integrates network emulators (Mininet) [5], a distributed control environment (ONOS) [1], physical switches (Pica8) and end-hosts (Raspberry Pi and commodity servers). The testbed (1) o↵ers functional fidelity through unmodified code execution on an emulated network, (2) supports large-scale network experiments using lightweight OS-level virtualization techniques and capable of running across distributed physical machines, (3) provides the topology flexibility, and (4) enhances the repeatability and reproducibility of network experiments. We validate the fidelity of the hybrid testbed through extensive experiments under di↵erent network conditions (e.g., varying topology and traffic pattern), and compare the results with the benchmark data collected on physical devices.
M.S. in Computer Science, May 2017
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