## ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.

In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.

Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.

Subject
Date Range
2010 2019

## Recent Submissions

In this thesis, I investigate the C*-algebras and related constructions that arise from combinatorial structures such as directed graphs and their generalizations. I give a complete characterization of the C*-correspondences associated to directed graphs as well as results about obstructions to a similar characterization of these objects for generalizations of directed graphs. Viewing the higher-dimensional analogues of directed graphs through the lens of product systems, I give a rigorous proof that topological k-graphs are essentially product systems over N^k of topological graphs. I introduce a "compactly aligned" condition for such product systems of graphs and show that this coincides with ...

Contributors
Patani, Nura, Kaliszewski, Steven, Quigg, John, et al.
Created Date
2011

In 1968, phycologist M.R. Droop published his famous discovery on the functional relationship between growth rate and internal nutrient status of algae in chemostat culture. The simple notion that growth is directly dependent on intracellular nutrient concentration is useful for understanding the dynamics in many ecological systems. The cell quota in particular lends itself to ecological stoichiometry, which is a powerful framework for mathematical ecology. Three models are developed based on the cell quota principal in order to demonstrate its applications beyond chemostat culture. First, a data-driven model is derived for neutral lipid synthesis in green microalgae with respect to ...

Contributors
Packer, Aaron, Kuang, Yang, Nagy, John, et al.
Created Date
2014

In Iwasawa theory, one studies how an arithmetic or geometric object grows as its field of definition varies over certain sequences of number fields. For example, let $F/\mathbb{Q}$ be a finite extension of fields, and let $E:y^2 = x^3 + Ax + B$ with $A,B \in F$ be an elliptic curve. If $F = F_0 \subseteq F_1 \subseteq F_2 \subseteq \cdots F_\infty = \bigcup_{i=0}^\infty F_i$, one may be interested in properties like the ranks and torsion subgroups of the increasing family of curves $E(F_0) \subseteq E(F_1) \subseteq \cdots \subseteq E(F_\infty)$. The main technique for studying this sequence of curves when ...

Contributors
Franks, Chase Leroyce, Childress, Nancy, Barcelo, Helene, et al.
Created Date
2011

Every graph can be colored with one more color than its maximum degree. A well-known theorem of Brooks gives the precise conditions under which a graph can be colored with maximum degree colors. It is natural to ask for the required conditions on a graph to color with one less color than the maximum degree; in 1977 Borodin and Kostochka conjectured a solution for graphs with maximum degree at least 9: as long as the graph doesn't contain a maximum-degree-sized clique, it can be colored with one fewer than the maximum degree colors. This study attacks the conjecture on multiple ...

Contributors
Rabern, Landon, Kierstead, Henry, Colbourn, Charles, et al.
Created Date
2013

Compressive sensing theory allows to sense and reconstruct signals/images with lower sampling rate than Nyquist rate. Applications in resource constrained environment stand to benefit from this theory, opening up many possibilities for new applications at the same time. The traditional inference pipeline for computer vision sequence reconstructing the image from compressive measurements. However,the reconstruction process is a computationally expensive step that also provides poor results at high compression rate. There have been several successful attempts to perform inference tasks directly on compressive measurements such as activity recognition. In this thesis, I am interested to tackle a more challenging vision problem ...

Contributors
Huang, Li-chi, Turaga, Pavan, Yang, Yezhou, et al.
Created Date
2017

This study is a narrative inquiry into teachers' and instructional coaches' experiences of new curriculum policy implementation at the classroom and district levels. This study took place during the initial year of implementation of the third grade Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM). Interviews were conducted with individuals directly involved in policy implementation at the classroom level, including several teachers and the school's instructional coach. Observations of the teachers' instruction and professional practice were also conducted. As an embedded researcher, I used this data to create a series of fictionalized narratives of the initial policy implementation experience. My analysis ...

Contributors
Frankiewicz, Megan, Powers, Jeanne, Fischman, Gustavo, et al.
Created Date
2015

Modern software and hardware systems are composed of a large number of components. Often different components of a system interact with each other in unforeseen and undesired ways to cause failures. Covering arrays are a useful mathematical tool for testing all possible t-way interactions among the components of a system. The two major issues concerning covering arrays are explicit construction of a covering array, and exact or approximate determination of the covering array number---the minimum size of a covering array. Although these problems have been investigated extensively for the last couple of decades, in this thesis we present significant improvements ...

Contributors
Sarkar, Kaushik, Colbourn, Charles J., Czygrinow, Andrzej, et al.
Created Date
2016

The Kuramoto model is an archetypal model for studying synchronization in groups of nonidentical oscillators where oscillators are imbued with their own frequency and coupled with other oscillators though a network of interactions. As the coupling strength increases, there is a bifurcation to complete synchronization where all oscillators move with the same frequency and show a collective rhythm. Kuramoto-like dynamics are considered a relevant model for instabilities of the AC-power grid which operates in synchrony under standard conditions but exhibits, in a state of failure, segmentation of the grid into desynchronized clusters. In this dissertation the minimum coupling strength required ...

Contributors
Gilg, Brady, Armbruster, Dieter, Mittelmann, Hans, et al.
Created Date
2018

This dissertation contains three main results. First, a generalization of Ionescu's theorem is proven. Ionescu's theorem describes an unexpected connection between graph C*-algebras and fractal geometry. In this work, this theorem is extended from ordinary directed graphs to higher-rank graphs. Second, a characterization is given of the Cuntz-Pimsner algebra associated to a tensor product of C*-correspondences. This is a generalization of a result by Kumjian about graphs algebras. This second result is applied to several important special cases of Cuntz-Pimsner algebras including topological graph algebras, crossed products by the integers and crossed products by completely positive maps. The result has ...

Contributors
Morgan, Adam, Kaliszewski, Steven, Quigg, John, et al.
Created Date
2016

Robotic technology is advancing to the point where it will soon be feasible to deploy massive populations, or swarms, of low-cost autonomous robots to collectively perform tasks over large domains and time scales. Many of these tasks will require the robots to allocate themselves around the boundaries of regions or features of interest and achieve target objectives that derive from their resulting spatial configurations, such as forming a connected communication network or acquiring sensor data around the entire boundary. We refer to this spatial allocation problem as boundary coverage. Possible swarm tasks that will involve boundary coverage include cooperative load ...

Contributors
Peruvemba Kumar, Ganesh, Berman, Spring M, Fainekos, Georgios, et al.
Created Date
2016