This paper discusses opportunities for developments in spatial clustering methods to help leverage broad scale community science data for building species distribution models (SDMs). SDMs are critical tools that inform the science and policy needed to mitigate the impacts of climate change on biodiversity. Community science data span spatial and...
The Pacific Coast Groundfish Fishery harvests a diverse and large grouping of fishes, but it did not become heavily fished until around WWII. This makes the groundfish fishery a comparatively young fishery. Despite its youth, it is one of the largest and most lucrative fisheries in Oregon—with a current harvest...
Developing accurate predictive distribution models requires adequately representing relevant spatial and temporal scales, as these scales are ultimately reflective of the relationships between distributions and influential environmental conditions. In this research, we considered both spatial and temporal scale and the influence each has on predicting broad-scale distributions of two disparate...
In bioacoustics, automatic animal voice detection and recognition from audio recordings is an emerging topic for animal preservation. Our research focuses on bird bioacoustics, where the goal is to segment bird syllables from the recording and predict the bird species for the syllables. Traditional methods for this task addresses the...
The ability to create reproducible cryptographically secure keys from temporal environments (e.g., images) has the potential to be a contributor to effective cryptographic mechanisms. Due to the noisy nature of these environments, achieving this goal in a user friendly fashion is a very challenging task, especially since there exists a...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var lupulus) is a plant of great cultural significance, used as a medicinal herb for thousands of years, and for flavor and as a preservative in brewing beer. Studies of the medicinal effects of the unique compounds produced by hop have led to interest from the...
Following thermal neutron induced fission, supervised machine learning and temporal gamma-ray spectroscopy methods were used to identify differences in the delayed gamma-ray spectra of Pu-239 and U-235. The temporal gamma-ray spectroscopy method takes advantage of the time-dependent decay of fission products. Employing Spearman's rank-order correlation coefficient and without prior knowledge...
This study investigates the use of predictive mapping techniques as well as geotechnical criteria in developing a multiregional soil liquefaction model and subsequent maps. The maps were produced using National Cooperative Soil Survey data, in the gSSURGO format, combined with soil liquefaction data gathered from studies, articles, and traditional seismic...
This thesis addresses a basic problem in computer vision, that of semantic labeling of images. Our work is aimed at object detection in biological images for evolutionary biology research. In particular, our goal is to detect nematocysts in Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images. This biological domain presents challenges for existing...
Robots are being utilized in ever more complex tasks and environments to help humans with difficult or dangerous tasks. However, robotic grasping is still in its infancy and is one of the limiting factors which prevent the deployment of robots in the home and other assisted living scenarios. Traditional methods...
Easy-first, a search-based structured prediction approach, has been applied to many NLP tasks including dependency parsing and coreference resolution. This approach employs a learned greedy policy (action scoring function) to make easy decisions first, which constrains the remaining decisions and makes them easier. This thesis studies the problem of learning...
Semi-supervised clustering aims to improve clustering performance by considering user supervision in the form of pairwise constraints. In this paper, we study the active learning problem of selecting pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints for semisupervised clustering. We consider active learning in an iterative manner where in each iteration queries are...
Object categorization is one of the fundamental topics in computer vision research. Most current work in object categorization aims to discriminate among generic object classes with gross differences. However, many applications require much finer distinctions. This thesis focuses on the design, evaluation and analysis of learning algorithms for fine- grained...
The study of physical activity is important in improving people’s health as it can help people understand the relationship between physical activity and health. Accelerometers, due to its small size, low cost, convenience and its ability to provide objective information about the frequency, intensity, and duration of physical activity, has...
Coordination is essential to achieving good performance in cooperative multiagent systems. To date, most work has focused on either implicit or explicit coordination mechanisms, while relatively little work has focused on the benefits of combining these two approaches. In this work we demonstrate that combining explicit and implicit mechanisms can...
Machine learning encompasses probabilistic and statistical techniques that can build models from large quantities of extensional information (examples) with minimal dependence on intensional information (domain knowledge). This focus of machine learning is reflected in the never-ending quest for "off-the-shelf" classifiers. To generalize to unseen data, however, we must make use...
This study explores the use of predictive mapping techniques in developing Landtype Association (LTA) maps for use in natural resource management. These maps are produced for the USDA Forest Service on a regional basis at a 1:100,000 scale. The goal of this study is to develop and test a method...
The results of a machine learning from user behavior can be thought of as a program, and like all programs, it may need to be debugged. Providing ways for the user to debug it matters because without the ability to fix errors, users may find that the learned program’s errors...
The problem of document classification has been widely studied in machine learning and data mining. In document classification, most of the popular algorithms are based on the bag-of-words representation. Due to the high dimensionality of the bag-of-words representation, significant research has been conducted to reduce the dimensionality via different approaches....
Many applications in surveillance, monitoring, scientific discovery, and data cleaning require the identification of anomalies. Although many methods have been developed to identify statistically significant anomalies, a more difficult task is to identify anomalies that are both interesting and statistically significant. Category detection is an emerging area of machine learning...