This dissertation examined the association between HAP and respiratory health, both using simple proxy metrics, such as cooking fuel types, and actual measurements, such as household and personal measures of PM2.5 and BC. We found that simple proxy metrics can predict a portion of HAP levels, and associations with respiratory...
Kappa-casein glycomacropeptide (CMP), a 64-amino-acid peptide, is released from kappa-casein after rennet treatment and is one of the major peptides in whey protein isolate (WPI). CMP has anti-inflammatory and antibacterial activities. CMP has two major amino acid sequences with different modifications including glycosylation, phosphorylation and oxidation. However, no previous work...
Pesticides benefit agriculture by increasing crop yield, quality, and security. However, pesticides may inadvertently harm bees, which are valuable as pollinators. Thus, candidate pesticides in development pipelines must be assessed for toxicity to bees.
Leveraging a data set of 382 molecules with toxicity labels from honey bee exposure experiments, we...
The need for less toxic quantum dots (QDs) has led to a significant number of investigations related to copper indium sulfide (CIS) QDs. Lower toxicity and broad band absorbance width makes CIS QDs appealing for light emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, sensors, bio-imaging, solar cells, and computing. The optical and electronic...
In weak supervision learning, label information can be provided at different levels of granularity. For example, in multi-instance multi-label learning, samples are organized into bags and labels for each class are provided at the bag level. For small datasets, this approach offers means of reducing the labeling efforts. However, in...
The dissertation focuses on the engineering of light-matter interaction using plasmonic nanoparticles and metamaterials to achieve enhanced luminescence and based on which to improve the performance of biosensing and light-emitting technologies. We designed and fabricated a spectrum of nanostructures to exhibit particular dispersion relations capable of controlling the spontaneous emission...
Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is widely useful in many cross-lingual communication scenarios, including multinational conferences and international traveling. Since text-based simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) has achieved great success in recent years. The conventional cascaded approach for SimulST uses a pipeline of streaming ASR followed by simultaneous MT but suffers from...
A mechanistic based critical heat flux (CHF) correlation has been developed derived from a mass, momentum, and energy balance at a nucleation site for water. The trigger mechanism for the CHF condition is postulated to be related to the maximum boiling frequency on a heated surface. It is observed that...
In the field of machine learning, clustering and classification are two fundamental tasks. Traditionally, clustering is an unsupervised method, where no supervision about the data is available for learning; classification is a supervised task, where fully-labeled data are collected for training a classifier. In some scenarios, however, we may not...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...