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This thesis investigates geomagnetic survey methodology in support of the development of a geophysical navigation system for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). Traditional AUV navigation methods are susceptible to cumulative errors and often rely on external infrastructure, limiting their effectiveness in complex underwater environments. This research leverages geomagnetic field anomalies as an additional navigational reference to these traditional systems, particularly in the absence of Global Positioning System (GPS) and acoustics navigation systems. Geomagnetic surveys were conducted over known shipwreck sites off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to validate the system's ability to detect and map magnetic anomalies. Data from these surveys were processed to develop high-resolution geomagnetic contour maps, which were then analyzed for accuracy, reliability, and modeling in identifying geomagnetic features.

An interdisciplinary study of the life and work of Jim Harrison. Through the lens of cultural and intellectual history, this dissertation places Harrison within the canon of American literature, from Emerson and Thoreau through Hemingway and Kerouac, and argues that the fundamental thread connecting these writers is their response to industrialization, suburbanization, and consumerism that undermine Americans’ connection to nature and limits an authentic experience with the world. In his novels, novellas, and essays Jim Harrison explores the meaning of the well-lived life, reflecting on the importance of cultivating both a life of the hands and of the mind, of action and contemplation, of nature and literature.

This study examined the effectiveness of a magnetic shark deterrent, the SharkBanz® Zeppelin, and quantified the magnetic field it produces. A shark entering the magnetic field induces an electric field that is detectable by electroreceptors. This novel stimulus may deter sharks away from hooked fish. The magnitude declined rapidly with distance and reached the ambient geomagnetic field at 36-39 cm away. Zeppelin devices and non-magnetic controls were deployed with baited remote underwater video systems, and the responses of sharks were recorded. There was a significant difference between the number of sharks deterred between the Zeppelin and control. The Zeppelin deterred sharks on 22% of their approaches in the effective range, whereas the control deterred them on 2.6% of their approaches. Although the device may be effective at deterring sharks and act as a mitigation strategy for shark depredation, tests with live fish that provide more sensory stimuli are needed.

Intervention packages combing behavioral interventions (e.g., time delay, physical prompting, or prompt fading) and Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) systems have proven to be effective in developing communication skills for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) (Charlop-Christy et al., 2002; Greenberg et al., 2014). However, both preservice and in-service speech language pathologists have limited exposure to the benefits of using behavioral interventions to teach non-vocal functional communication skills (King et al., 2014; Muharib et al., 2019). This study used a multiple probe design across participants design to examine the effects of an online training package to teach speech-language pathologists (SLP) to use a behavioral intervention that combines backward chaining and AAC systems to increase non-vocal requesting of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Two preservice SLPs completed three self-guided video modules on backward chaining and augmentative and alternative communication, engaged in role plays with an adult confederate, and participated in live feedback sessions. Once completed, preservice SLPs learned to use a backward chaining procedure with a communication board to teach children with ASD non-vocal requesting. Results showed that the online training package was effective in increasing the knowledge and skills of the preservice SLPs in using backward chaining to support AAC use and increase the child’s non-vocal requesting.

My research centers around French West Indian hip hop music (also called rap) and identity, from its emergence in the 1980s to its evolution in the ensuing years against the backdrop of the Caribbean Francophone literary traditions, as another musical expression of oraliture. By oraliture, we understand a set of unwritten and oral creations representing an era or a community. The dissertation aims to study the appropriation of hip hop music by local artists in the French West Indies (F.W.I.), in particular focusing on the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, because of their geographic, social, political, and cultural settings. Given that these islands have a long-standing tradition of story-telling set to rhythmical patterns, this work analyzes the ways in which ipop Kreyol lyrics highlight the dynamics of the area, paying attention to the aesthetics, the semiotics, and the performance.
Considering hip hop music as part of an oral literature framework allows us to address the questions of identity prevalent in the F.W.I. given their relationship to metropolitan France, the Caribbean, and the U.S.. Caribbean theorists have proposed notions of transculturation, poetics of relation, creolization, and Tout-Monde, among others, to understand fluid identity concepts. The use of Creole in rhythmical patterns found in rap lyrics is at the crossroads of identity building in the F.W.I.. Hip hop music lyrics, a cultural product entrenched in the islands’ oral literary traditions, become a useful means to study the development of a unique French West Indian cultural voice, both on the islands and in the diaspora.

The security of the current public-key cryptographic schemes, based on integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems, is expected to be totally broken with the development of quantum computers utilizing Shor’s algorithm. As a result, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) initiated the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process in 2016, inviting researchers to submit candidate algorithms that are both resistant to quantum attacks and efficient for real world applications. Researchers have since studied various aspects of the candidate algorithms, such as their security against quantum attacks and efficient implementation on different platforms.
In this thesis, we investigate the practical aspects of Post-Quantum Cryptography and contribute to several topics. First, we focus on the knapsack problem and its security under classical and quantum attacks. Second, we improve the secure biometric template generation algorithm NTT-Sec, proposing an enhanced version, NTT-Sec-R, and providing an in-depth design and security analysis. Third, we work on optimizing implementations of the post-quantum secure signature scheme LESS and polynomial inversion algorithms for code-based schemes. Finally, we analyze a proposed countermeasure for the exposure model of SIKE, the isogeny-based scheme that is a candidate in NIST’s Round 4.

In the modern data landscape, vast amounts of unlabeled data are continuously generated, necessitating development of robust unsupervised techniques for handling unlabeled data. This is the case for fraud detection and healthcare sectors analyses, where data is often significantly imbalanced. This dissertation focuses on novel techniques for handling imbalanced data, with specific emphasis on a novel unsupervised class labeling technique for unlabeled fraud detection datasets and unlabeled cognitive datasets. Traditional supervised machine learning relies on labeled data, which is often expensive and difficult to create, particularly in domains requiring expert input. Additionally, such datasets suffer from challenges associated with class imbalance, where one class has significantly fewer examples than another, complicating model training and significantly reducing performance. The primary objectives of this dissertation include developing a novel unsupervised cleaning method, and an innovative unsupervised class labeling method. We validate and evaluate our methods across various datasets, which include two Medicare fraud detection datasets, a credit card fraud detection dataset, and three datasets used for detecting cognitive decline.
Our unique approach involves using an unsupervised autoencoder to learn from dataset features and synthesize labels. Primarily targeting imbalanced datasets, but still effective for balanced datasets, our method calculates an error metric for each instance. This metric is used to distinguish between fraudulent and legitimate cases, allowing us to assign a binary class label. To further improve label generation, we integrate an unsupervised feature selection method that ranks and identifies the most important features without using class labels.

After an unexpected displacement of Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) from Little Bahama Bank (LBB) to Great Bahama Bank (GBB) in 2013, the LBB immigrant and GBB resident spotted dolphins were observed socially merging and initiating courtship despite previous segregation on GBB post-displacement. This project assessed the genetic integration between them. Through microsatellite analyses and genetic differentiation, reciprocal gene flow appears to be occurring between the two communities. One male was confidently assigned paternity and six males were selected as the most likely candidate males of calves. Three mottled males were designated as the most likely candidate males of calves, indicating that younger males may be reproductively successful.

Due to technological advancement, energy consumption and demand have been increasing significantly, primarily satisfied by fossil fuel utilization. The dependence on fossil fuels results in substantial greenhouse gas emissions, with CO₂ being the principal factor in global warming. Carbon capture technologies are employed to mitigate the escalated CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere. Among various carbon capture methods, amine scrubbing is widely utilized because of its high CO2 capture efficiency and ease of adaptability to the existing power plants. This method, however, presents drawbacks, including increased toxicity, corrosiveness, and substantial freshwater use. To overcome these shortcomings and simultaneously develop an environmentally sustainable carbon capture solution, this study aims to evaluate the CO2 capture performance of seawater associated with polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) polymer-coated nickel nanoparticles (NiNPs) catalysts. Using high-speed bubble-based microfluidics, we investigated time-dependent size variations of CO2 bubbles in a flow-focusing microchannel, which is directly related to transient CO₂ dissolution into the surrounding solution. We hypothesize that the higher surface-to-volume ratio of polymer-coated NiNPs could provide a higher CO2 capture rate and solubility under the same environmental conditions. To test this hypothesis and to find the maximum performance of carbon capture, we synthesized polymer-coated NiNPs with different sizes of 5 nm, 10 nm, and 20 nm. The results showed that 5 nm polymer-coated NiNPs attained a CO₂ dissolution rate of 77% while it is 71% and 43% at 10 nm and 20 nm NPs, respectively. This indicates that our hypothesis is proven to be valid, suggesting that the smaller NPs catalyze CO2 capture effectively with using the same amount of material, which could be a game changer for future CO2 reduction technologies. This unique strategy promotes the future improvement of NiNPs as catalysts for CO2 capture from saltwater.

There is increasing reliance on STEM higher education as a source of innovation, and on faculty as knowledge producers. Simultaneously, universities are systemically changing internal structures to increase equity and inclusivity to attract and retain more STEM women. Women remain underrepresented in specific STEM disciplines and are missing from upper faculty ranks. The research corpus on STEM women lacks studies on women on tenure tracks, and on the relationships among climate, fit, and job satisfaction, and the extent to which job satisfaction aids retention of STEM women. Also sparse is research on leadership’s roles in women’s advancement and retention at the departmental level. The purpose of this study was to understand how the climate within a STEM college contributed to the professional development and sense of belonging of women faculty at a research institution with a National Science Foundation (NSF) ADVANCE grant. This study also explored leadership’s role in fostering a climate of support toward women’s advancement. NSF ADVANCE funds institutions working toward systemic change, but even with an ADVANCE grant, it can be difficult to make climate changes in academic departments where women are historically underrepresented. Thus, we don’t know, a priori, what we might find in such a setting. Gendering organization theory guided this study. Two overarching questions were formulated to address the problems associated with low numbers of women in STEM departments. The methodology utilized a qualitative single instrumental case. The sampling plan included leaders, faculty, and documents; and data sources included interviews and document review.