Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a conceptual framework in cryptography. It allows distrusting parties engage in a protocol to perform a computational task while still maintain some secure properties. Most existing approaches are required to interpret functions as a boolean circuit. With the recent state-of-art circuit garbling scheme, the performance...
The First Gulf War that took place in Kuwait in 1991 resulted in one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of mankind. Extreme pollution affected the soil, waters, and the air in Kuwait. In this research I try to look into how the Kuwaiti government reacted to those...
Italian ryegrass (Lolium perenne spp. multiflorum) is a common weed management problem in turfgrasses, cereals and non-crop areas in the United States. In Oregon, the number of populations with multiple-resistance continues to increase. To manage these resistant populations, the resistance patterns must be determined. In this study, five Italian ryegrass...
Complex information environments are often organized as hierarchies. However, computational models of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) have almost entirely ignored this fact. Models and tools for predicting programmer navigations have ignored people’s foraging behavior across hierarchies —called hierarchical foraging. Without modeling hierarchical foraging, our ability to build tools to support...
Optimization of reservoir operation is involves various competing objectives for a scarce resource (water). To find the optimal operation of reservoirs, it is essential to consider multiple objectives simultaneously. There are various sources of uncertainty associated with the reservoir operation problem that should be considered as well.
The overarching goal...
The advent of deep learning models leads to a substantial improvement in a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving state-of-art performances without any hand-crafted features. However, training deep models requires a massive amount of labeled data. Labeling new data as a new task or domain emerges consumes time and efforts...
This thesis describes an investigation of the molecular basis of the substrate specificity and catalytic mechanism of a unique pseudoglycosyltransferase (PsGT) enzyme, VldE. PsGTs are a newly discovered group of glycosyltransferase (GT)-like proteins that catalyze the transfer of a pseudosugar to an acceptor molecule via a C-N bond formation. This...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
An age-wave is upon us where many older adults are reaching retirement. Technically experienced older adults have skills that could be directly applied to free/open source software (FOSS) communities, such as project management, programming, and/or knowledge of a rapidly growing end-user population. FOSS is a widely popular, low-cost way to...
Private set intersection (PSI) allows two parties, who each hold a set of items, to compute the intersection of those sets without revealing anything about other items. Recent advances in PSI have significantly improved its performance for the case of semi-honest security, making semi-honest PSI a practical alternative to insecure...