3D volume segmentation is a fundamental process in many scientific and medical applications. Producing accurate segmentations, in an efficient way, is challenging, in part due to low imaging data quality (e.g., noise and low image resolution), and ambiguity in the data that can only be resolved with higher-level knowledge of...
Collaboration is tricky, but often beneficial in the context of numerous software related activities, from learning core concepts, to the design and implementation of large software products. The growth of online classes, from small structured seminars to massive open online courses (MOOCs), and the isolation and impoverished learning experience some...
Society faces many complex management problems, particularly in the area of shared public resources such as ecosystems. Existing decision making processes are often guided by personal experience and political ideology rather than state-of-the-art scientific understanding. This dissertation envisions a future in which multiple stakeholders are provided with computational tools for...
Social interactions are a ubiquitous part of our lives, and the creation of online social communities has been a natural extension of this phenomena. Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development efforts are prime examples of how communities can be leveraged in software development, where groups are formed around communities...
Adult development and social experiences are intertwined, which has implications for social policy, health, and well-being across the lifespan. This dissertation explores the benefit and risk that close social partners bring to adults' lives, and the efficacy and consequences of engaging social resources to maintain well-being in the face of...
This thesis addresses a fundamental computer vision problem, that of action recognition. The goal of action recognition is to recognize a class of human actions in a given video. Action recognition has a wide range of applications, including automated surveillance, sports video analysis, internet-based searches etc. The main challenge is...
Realistic (ideally photorealistic) real-time rendering has remained an elusive goal in computer graphics. While photorealistic rendering has certainly been achieved at the expense of tremendous computational resources and corresponding rendering times; real-time rendering typically must accept a great number of compromises to achieve adequate performance, such as aliasing artifacts, the...
Protein-protein interactions underlie all biological processes and are a field of study that has wide implications throughout many other fields including medicine, genetics, biology, and ecology. Proteins are the building blocks and primary actors of life. They work together to accomplish virtually every task within a cell, including, metabolism, signal...
Object recognition is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Recognition is
required by many applications. This thesis presents a distance based approach to
recognize objects. We are interested in objects that belong to very similar classes,
where each class has large variations. This problem is called fine-grained object
recognition. Given...
This thesis presents an efficient computational voxelization approach that utilizes the graphics pipeline. Our approach is hybrid in that it performs a precise gap-free computational voxelization, employs fixed-function components of the GPU, and utilizes the stages of the graphics pipeline to improve parallelism. This approach makes use of the latest...