Paper microfluidic devices are capable of processing fluids using capillary flow in materials that are lower cost than the standard materials used in microfluidics. Due to the low cost of their fabrication and minimal requirements for instrumentation, paper microfluidic devices are ideal for use in low-resource settings. They have the...
Remote health monitoring tools have significant potential to revolutionize the current healthcare paradigm. Such tools could improve efficiencies in healthcare by alerting patients and doctors to abnormal health conditions in real time, shortening the time to diagnose and treat ailments. To meet these needs, we pursue the development of fabric-based...
Transmit beamforming is an important technique employed to improve efficiency and signal quality in wireless communication systems by steering signals towards their in- tended users. It often arises jointly with the antenna selection problem due to various reasons, such as limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains and energy/resource effi-...
The types and rates of label noise in real-world data sets present a challenge to machine learning projects. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to address this issue. Our method combines a noise modelling technique for correcting label noise across the entire data set with a robust loss...
Crowdsourcing is a popular paradigm to address the high demands for labeled data in big data deluge. It aims to produce accurate labels by effectively integrating noisy, non-expert labeling from crowdsourced workers (annotators). The machine learning community has been studying effective crowdsourcing methods for many years, and many models and...
Personal health monitoring tools, a subset of point-of care-diagnostics, enable more frequent testing of chronic health conditions outside of a clinic setting and can inform personalized therapy or support telehealth diagnostic capabilities. While there is evidence that regular monitoring of chronic conditions can lead to better health outcomes and lower...
We consider the problem of computing the cannonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) for large-scale dense tensors. This work is a combination of alternating least squares and fiber sampling. Data sparsity can be leveraged to handle large tensor CPD, but this route is not feasible for dense data. Inspired by stochastic optimization's...
Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a genetic inborn metabolic disorder which inhibits the functional production of the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH). It currently affects one in 15,000 Americans and is the most common amino acid metabolism error found in newborns. Individuals affected with PKU are incapable of metabolizing the amino acid, phenylalanine...
The anticonvulsant drug carbamazepine (CBZ) is a commonly prescribed drug that is used to treat patients with neurological disorders including epilepsy and bi-polar disorder. CBZ has a narrow range of efficacy: Below the therapeutic dose, seizures and other conditions are not controlled, and above the recommended window, patients experience side...
Paper-based assays for HIV diagnosis are cheap, portable, and require little to no skilled training, electricity, or expensive equipment to perform successfully. However, there is a need for tests with lower limits of detection (LOD) for diagnosing infection at the earliest stages. Effective labeling to increase signal-to-noise ratio is critical...
Paper-based microfluidic assays, like the common pregnancy test, allow for rapid screening at the point- of-care at low cost and with no instrumentation. Fabric has many similar properties to paper, but is more flexible and durable, making it a promising option for use in a variety of diagnostic and screening...
This thesis is a study of the problem of calculating the least-squares estimates of the parameters in a linear regression model
when the parameter space is restricted to integer points within a
given polyhedron. General observations are made about estimation
of integer-valued parameters, and an integer-quadratic programming
algorithm is given...
A complete procedure of minimizing input logic in designing
both completely and incompletely specified synchronous, finite state
sequential networks is presented in detail. This procedure consists
of three important steps: 1) state simplification, 2) state assignment
and 3) input logic realization. Two new ideas are presented
in the procedure of...
With the increased demand for high-quality products, reliable and robust process monitoring has become a key capability for modern manufacturing systems. Through sensors installed in the machinery, the real-time information was measured to assess the state of the processes. The measured data can be used to infer the mechanical, material,...
A radiation model was developed for retrieving cloud visible optical depth,
droplet effective radius, and cloud top emission temperature using AVHRR satellite
observations at 0.63, 3.7, and 11 μm. The model was used to determine the sensitivity
of the retrieved properties to various approximations often employed in such retrievals.
Droplet...
To determine the effect of bud pollination, compared to pollination
of open flowers and crossing, on field characteristics of broccoli progenies,
an experiment was conducted in 1974 and 1975 at Corvallis, Oregon.
Single plants of 55 broccoli lines were pollinated, using four methods,
i.e. bud pollination (BP), open flower pollination...
Prior to cell cleavage, cytokinetic proteins are recruited into the nascent actomyosin contractile ring. Interactions between spindle microtubules and the cell cortex play a critical role in this recruitment. However, direct evidence for physical interaction between microtubules and the cortex has been lacking. Here we reveal the physical connection between...
We developed a tool that migrates the database schema and the data from one database to another. As DBMSs store the same data by using slightly different data types, one cannot simply copy all the tables and data from the source DBMS to the target DBMS. When our tool, db2db,...
Wine volatile composition is one of the most important components of wine quality, and it is greatly affected by multiple factors, including grape variety, viticultural practices, and winemaking procedures. Pre-fermentation cold soak is one of the winemaking techniques widely undertaken by winemakers to modify their red wine quality. Imposing a...
Adenovirus initiates strand-displacement DNA replication from
origins located in identical inverted terminal repetitions (ITRs).
Panhandle structures, formed by base-pairing between ITRs on the
displaced strands, have been proposed as replication intermediates for
complementary strand synthesis. Plasmid molecules containing a single
adenovirus terminal sequence and specially arranged inverted repeat
sequences were...
The code reuse problem is a common software engineering problem in scientific computing. As a prevailing programming language in many scientific fields, Fortran does not provide support to address this problem. One particular reason is that Fortran lacks the support for generic programming. By applying program-generation techniques, we developed two...
In the past ten years, renewed research interest has shown the benefits of internal curing by incorporating saturated lightweight fine aggregate (LWFA) in high performance concrete (HPC). As a result, the technology of internal curing has steadily progressed from laboratory studies to field applications. To determine the optimum LWFA content,...
Several procedures for isolating ribosomes from the fat body
of female cockroaches are described and evaluated. The addition
of deoxycholate or Triton X-100 to the homogenizing medium rather
than to the postmitochondrial supernatant was an important factor
in improving the yield of ribosomes.
The fat body ribosomes were characterized and...
The accurate determination of cloud cover amount is important for characterizing the role of cloud feedbacks in the climate system. Clouds have a large influence on the climate system through their effect on the earth's radiation budget. As indicated by the NASA Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), the change in...
In the field of civil infrastructure, bridge desks are typically constructed using high performance concrete (HPC). Concrete bridge decks demand qualities such as low permeability, high abrasion resistance, superior durability, and long design life. Over decades of field and laboratory experience, many HPC bridge decks have been found to be...
This dissertation addresses object recognition in challenging settings, where distinct object classes are visually very similar (e.g., species of birds and insects) and/or access to training examples of object classes is limited (e.g., due to the associated high costs of data annotation). In this dissertation, we present a variety of...
There has been serious interest in hydrogen as a source of energy in the United States due to its capability of delivering a sustainable, carbon-free energy future. Currently, most hydrogen in the United States is produced via the steam methane reforming of natural gas, which converts methane to hydrogen through...
Djang et al. [1998] introduced a new model of types for declarative visual programming languages (VPLs). Implicit static typing is used in their type model, in order to eliminate the programming mechanisms associated with type declarations, provide immediate visual feedback with respect to type errors and guarantee type safe programs....
Observations of temperature, winds, and atmospheric trace gases suggest that the transition from troposphere to stratosphere occurs in a layer, rather than at a sharp ‘‘tropopause.’’ In the tropics, this layer is often called the ‘‘tropical tropopause layer’’ (TTL). We present an overview of observations in the TTL and discuss...
The production of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) haploids by crossing with
H. bulbosum is a widely used tool in breeding and genetics. Certain barley
genotypes have low seed set in this interspecific cross, a phenomenon known
as partial incompatibility. Haploid production efficiency and gamete sampling
are important issues with the...
Efficient time-series analysis can impact multiple application domains such as motif discovery in gene analysis or music data, extracting spectro-temporal patterns in acoustic scene analysis, or annotating and classifying electrical bio-signals (such as ECG, EEG, and EMG) for medical applications.
Time-series analysis involves a variety of tasks.
To predict future...
The development of simple, rapid, and sensitive methods for thiophenol detection is of great importance in various fields, including environmental monitoring and food quality. Here, we present a novel approach for the colorimetric detection of thiophenols using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) as the sensing platform. AuNPs aggregate in the presence of...
The majority of people suffer from back pain at some point in their lives. Back pain is the leading cause of disability globally, ahead of 290 other conditions1. Over one million people in the United States receive spine surgery annually2. This thesis looked at five standard surgical procedures performed on...
Studies using International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP) data have reported decreases in cloud optical depth with increasing temperature, thereby suggesting a positive feedback in cloud optical depth as climate warms. The negative cloud optical depth and temperature relationships are questioned because ISCCP employs threshold assumptions to identify cloudy pixels...
In this thesis, we introduce a novel Explanation Neural Network (XNN) to explain the predictions made by a deep network. The XNN works by embedding a high-dimensional activation vector of a deep network layer non-linearly into a low-dimensional explanation space while retaining faithfulness i.e., the original deep learning predictions can...
New capabilities in wireless network security are now possible through deep learning, which can identify and leverage patterns in radio frequency (RF) data. One area of deep learning, known as open set detection, is focused on detecting data instances from new devices encountered during deployment that were not previously seen...
Microfluidic devices have enabled lab-on-a-chip (LOC) systems that allow for complex sample analysis and preparation in a compact form factor. One technology that may benefit from a microfluidic approach and further miniaturization is flow cytometry. Flow cytometry is an analysis technique for enumerating and characterizing populations of cells; this is...
Inkjet-printed p-type copper(I) iodide-based TFTs were successfully fabricated. As-printed copper(I) halide semiconductor films, such as CuI, CuBrI, and CuClI, were used as p-type active channel layers for TFTs. The entire process of the TFTs fabrication was maintained under 150 °C, which is compatible with flexible plastic substrates and transparent glass...
In histopathological image analysis, image classification as well as pattern detection play a crucial role in the diagnosis and treatment process since the goal is to not only differentiate cancer types but also identify cancerous manifestations. Fully supervised learning strategies tend to address these problems using manually annotated cancerous regions...
High spatiotemporal resolution satellite imagery is useful for natural resource management and monitoring for land-use and land-cover change and ecosystem dynamics. However, acquisitions from a single satellite can be limited, due to trade-offs in either spatial or temporal resolution. The spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM) and the...
Accurate information of power network parameters is essential for performing various power system monitoring and control tasks including state estimation, economic dispatch, and contingency analysis. In this paper, we present a novel approach of power network parameter correction wherein we exploit the sparse nature of parameter errors. Parameter error correction...
Motivation: Many robots such as legged robots and prosthetic hands/arms are designed to interact with uncertain and time-varying environments to accomplish their tasks.
Observations on humans and animals during their daily tasks suggest that they adapt their leg compliance while traversing with different velocities on different grounds and adjust their...
We do not know how to align a very intelligent AI agent's behavior with human interests. I investigate whether—absent a full solution to this AI alignment problem—we can build smart {\ai} agents which have limited impact on the world, and which do not autonomously seek power. In this thesis, I...
Ecological domains seeking to understand the environment and the behavior of species have received little attention in machine learning (ML), despite the fact that environmental changes have a significant impact on humans as well as ecosystems. Some ecological problems can be formulated similarly to other common ML applications, but there...
Impedance measurements are increasingly demanded in modern CMOS sensing systems as impedance is the most common electrical signal obtained from sensors, delivering physical, chemical and biomedical quantity changes. Impedance sensing for wide interested frequency, broad dynamic range, and various sensor interfaces has numerous challenges, especially targeted in CMOS miniaturization with...
Sepsis is an inflammatory reaction occurring throughout the human body to infections caused by bacteria, fungi, and or other forms of pathogens. It is essential to find an alternative treatment method for sepsis, to lessen the dependence on antibiotics. Hemoperfusion is an absorbent device that removes select targets from blood,...
Analytical techniques are utilized in a wide variety of applications. Traditionally, analytical measurements are achieved by trained personnel in a laboratory setting using expensive scientific instruments, which limits their applicability in resource-limited areas and point-of-care applications. Therefore, the concept of enabling these laboratory-based qualitative and quantitative assays in microfluidic device...
The concept of reducing laboratory operations into microfluidic devices has been an attractive area of research for several decades. Due to several advantages of porous-media microfluidic devices including low mass, portability, power-free fluid transport, and the ability to store dried reagents in the porous structures, these devices show great promise...