Labeling videos is costly, time-consuming and tedious. These costs can escalate in applications such as medical diagnosis or autonomous driving where we need domain expertise for annotation. Few-shot action recognition aims to solve this problem by annotation-efficient learning mechanisms.
This thesis presents MetaUVFS as the first Unsupervised Meta-learning algorithm for...
This paper provides a literature review in order to capture the state of the Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) market, incorporating the most recent research from 2020 and 2021. SPACs are an alternative way to take a company public. Rather than going through the traditional IPO process to access public...
Exemplar-based style transfer techniques reimagine the content of a target image in the style of an exemplar image. Style transfer techniques that make use of patch-based synthesis copy sections of the exemplar to corresponding regions of the target, creating a new image in a patchwork manner. The artistic control one...
Bird and bat collisions with wind turbines are a problem that needs to be better quantified for its impact to be fully understood. This thesis documents portions of the design of a sensor patch module for use on wind turbines blades to detect impacts caused by birds and bats. This...
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are plant symbionts that associate with the vast majority of terrestrial plants species. The AMF colonizes the plant roots by penetrating the root cortical cells, where the fungi exchanges mineral nutrients with the host plant for photosynthates. This association exists as a complex system in which...
Messenger RNA (mRNA) therapy has massive potential to treat various genetic disorders by providing effective proteins to the diseased cells and tissues. Its therapeutic applications include protein replacement, genome editing, and immunotherapy. For successful mRNA treatment, mRNA must be delivered to the cytosol of target cells. One of the leading...
The effects of climate change on coastal communities along the United States Atlantic coast are becoming an increasing threat. The effectiveness and sustainability of traditional built protections that have been used to armor coasts against these threats has come into question as they require costly replacement and maintenance and are...
Given the many significant roles that bacteria play in modern food manufacturing, it is crucial that we have a fundamental understanding of how bacterial communities assemble and behave in the food manufacturing environment. The focus of this dissertation was to investigate both the spatial and temporal distributions of microbial communities...
Counselors are tasked with being knowledgeable about assessing and treating a broad range of mental health issues. There has been an overall rise in mental health symptoms in individuals during the current COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the increased use of online internet forums as part of help-seeking behaviors. Obsessive-Compulsive...
This thesis assessed the passive, natural circulation, design for a Bi-Ca-CaH2 cooled microreactor based on initial figures of merit. The values for the figures of merit selected for this thesis were: the maximum temperature in the core should not be more than 150 K above the average core outlet temperature,...
As coastal communities face increasing chronic and acute hazards, nature-based coastal engineering solutions have experienced a rapid growth in popularity and interest. Recent works on this topic have shown that “Green Infrastructure” may be effective at mitigating coastal hazards and therefore provide sustainable adaptation alternatives to traditional engineering solutions such...
Wave runup is an important physical process that affects nearshore sediment transport, coastal erosion, and flooding. Large and unexpected runup events can also be dangerous to beach goers. Extreme runup statistics are essential parameters used in engineering design of marine structures and in coastal management. Although the study of runup...
The global cryosphere, defined as the world’s ice and snow covered regions, is a crucial water source for society and ecosystem functions, as well as an important regulator of the earth’s energy budget. Melt from glaciers and seasonal snow cover provides water for more than a sixth of the world’s...
Sodium Cooled Fast Reactors (SFR) are complex and expensive due to high operating temperatures and neutron flux which pose technical challenges for these reactors. To overcome these challenges with SFRs, research and development of small scale and large-scale facilities are needed to bridge the gap in understanding. Scaling analyses develop...
Graphene and its derivatives are two-dimensional hexagonal lattices that possess desirable physicochemical properties leading to an ever-expanding list of industrial and biomedical uses. Graphene oxides (GOs) are becoming a popular graphene alternative and while there have been human safety studies, investigations of developmental toxicity are lacking. The use of distinct...
Ocean acidification disrupts marine and coastal ecosystems’ carbonate chemistry, directly and indirectly affecting communities that depend on critical marine organisms. Ocean acidification research typically seeks to understand natural system responses; yet there is insufficient research that examines community and institutional responses or, more generally, their vulnerability to ocean acidification. This...
Forest inventories are periodic resource assessments that can estimate items such as timber volume and value, tree growth rates, carbon sequestration, forest health status, wildlife habitat, fuel loading, and more. Traditional inventories require a large investment of resources and well-trained workforce. To date, most foresters and timber cruisers inventory forests...
The introduction of non-native species can negatively impact native species through reduced genetic fitness resulting from hybridization. The lack of spatiotemporal data of hybrids occurrences makes assessing hybridization risk difficult. Here, I developed a spatially-explicit GIS Hybridization Risk Model (HRM) between native ESA-listed Bull Trout and introduced Brook Trout by...
Hydrogen is the green fuel that can be produced from water through electrolysis and used via hydrogen fuel cells to generate electricity with zero carbon dioxide emission. The commercialization of electrolyzers and fuel cells is the critical step to achieving global carbon neutrality. However, it is severely hampered by the...
A wide variety of hydrodynamic theories are utilized to approximate a Wave Energy Converter’s (WEC) equation of motion. Numerous theories have been refined in order to improve numerical approximations of WEC dynamics. When incorporating refined hydrodynamic theories into numerical models, there are distinct impacts on WEC rigid body motions, cable...
Using data collected from cannabis growers and traditional farmers, and the “Good Farmer” approach, this research provides a comparative analysis of the occupational identities of cannabis cultivators and traditional farmers in Colorado and Oregon. Though both growers and farmers within the study suggested that cannabis cultivation differed from conventional agriculture,...
Radiation is part of our life. Most people may know a radioactive source is very dangerous. But there are very few situations people are exposed to uncontrolled radionuclides above background. A radioactive source can emit gamma rays which are the highest energy type in electromagnetic radiation.[2] Gamma rays are like...
Cherenkov detectors have been developed and used in several fields since the discovery of Cherenkov radiation. They do have several advantages compared with other detector types, such as low noise due to the low-energy threshold of Cherenkov radiation, and short decay constant (on the order of picoseconds). However, the light...
Kelps are large brown algae in the order Laminariales and are foundation species that form the basis of kelp forests. Present across a quarter of the world’s coastlines, kelp forests provide diverse services to coastal communities, as habitat for commercially and culturally important species, as a food source for humans...
Within the sagebrush steppe ecosystem, invasive annual grasses are of growing management concern as they outcompete native vegetation, change the fundamental nutrient cycling processes, decrease biodiversity, and increase frequency of wildfires. The most widely used and effective management tool to decrease invasive annual grass abundance, is the use of pre-emergent...
Testing the many potential chemoprevention agents from dietary sources in animal or human models is expensive and takes a long time. In vitro models can be useful for screening the right compounds to use in larger studies. We tested the MatTek™ EpiIntestinal™ small intestine epithelial 3D cell culture model for...
The overall goal of this study was to utilize apple pomace, the byproduct from juice processing, as a renewable source of fiber to create sustainable packaging using molded pulp technology. The goal was accomplished through two studies: 1) to modify apple pomace fibers for increasing relative cellulose composition and improving...
There has been tremendous growth in using data analytic and machine learning algorithms to make critical decisions, such as in the national power grid, healthcare operations, and autonomous vehicles. Employing data analytic for decision-making allows cyber attackers to manipulate the decisions of these algorithms through data falsification. Hence, the trustworthiness...
This project is intended to study the effectiveness of manmade vernal pools for creating habitat value, particularly within an urban setting. Natural vernal pool habitats are under threat across the United States as filling and development activities have led to permanent loss of habitat. Mitigation requirements or other restoration/creation activities...
Climate change impacts everyone’s food and water security. Increasing global temperatures accelerate the hydrologic cycle and consequently impact the water resources for billions of people worldwide. Countless models have been developed to represent various components of the hydrologic cycle at various spatial and temporal scales. These are often validated against...
This paper explores the perceptions of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) regarding benefits migration between Portland, OR and Vancouver, WA, specifically how perceptions might impact job performance and policy execution and delivery. To examine this question, interviews were conducted with SLBs in Oregon and Washington. From the interviews, themes concerning the role...
In biology, function and disease are closely intertwined, requiring the coordination of hundreds of intricate chemical reactions. Interdisciplinary cooperation between chemical and biological approaches is necessary to decipher the chemical links between physiological and pathological conditions. In this arena, the precision tools made possible with chemical biology can manipulate and...
The Hippo signaling pathway is an evolutionarily conserved regulator of cell growth, proliferation, and apoptosis. A key function of the pathway is to regulate the subcellular distribution and activity of Yorkie in Drosophila or Yes-associated protein (YAP) and transcription co-activator with PDZ-binding motif (TAZ) in mammals. The dysregulation of the...
With confirmation of non-nutritive sugar, erythritol, having insecticidal properties to Dipterans, this thesis research focuses on use of erythritol as a human-safe management tool for small berry and cherry pest, Drosophila suzukii, commonly referred to as spotted-wing drosophila. Drosophila suzukii is a destructive invasive fruit fly from Asia with an...
Fisheries managers often use models of population density to evaluate the status of stream-living fishes, but many of these models have low predictive performance for abundance and density. These models could incorporate several factors that can limit population density, particularly the effect of body size, envisioned by the theory of...
Forest plantations in the Pacific Northwest are highly productive and have been intensively managed to maximize tree growth with practices such as Forest Vegetation Management (FVM). Different FVM regimes have been shown to enhance forest establishment by reducing the competition between the planted seedlings and early-seral vegetation. To better understand...
Metallic glasses (MGs) have attracted tremendous attention because of their unique properties and potential applications in the future industry. However, it is still a mystery for people to understand the formation mechanism of the bulk MGs (BMGs). To produce BMGs, the specific composition of materials, sufficiently high cooling rate, etc.,...
Modern sensors are complex systems comprising multiple sub-systems such as transducers, analog and mixed-signal interface circuits, digital processing circuits, and packaging. Over the last few decades, innovations in these sub-systems combined with their increased integration in complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processes have led to the rapid growth in sensors for...
Deep learning has recently revolutionized robot perception in many canonical robotic applications, such as autonomous driving. However, a similar transformation has yet to occur in more harsh environments including underwater and underground. This is due in part to the difficulty in deploying robots in these environments, which lack large real...
In this dissertation, we derive and implement a new transport-diffusion hybrid algorithm for solving thermal radiative transfer (TRT) problems. Using the method of nonlinear elimination (NLEM), the TRT system of equations can be written in terms of a transport equation with the absence of scattering and a diffusion equation. The...
A central theme of ecology is determining factors that influence species distributions. Within aquatic ecology, species present in flowing waters are primarily influenced by the natural flow patterns of the stream (natural flow regime paradigm) while explanations of species present in standing waters are further divided by habitat type. To...
The unique capability of carbon-based ion-selective electrode (ISE) to perform highly sensitive anodic stripping voltammetry, while maintaining all the properties of an ISE, is demonstrated in terms of sensitivity, detection limit, response time and selectivity. Square wave anodic stripping voltammetry involves deposition and dissolution steps of metal ions, which means...
Some studies using regional climate models (RCMs) suggest a weakening of the climatological rain-shadow along the Cascade and Sierra Nevada mountains during the western US cool-season. To identify the possible mechanisms of rain-shadow weakening under warming, a new set of 30-year, high-resolution (6 km) pseudo-global warming (PGW) simulations were analyzed...
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 coastal region is home to many types of surface fronts that exist on a submesoscale (1-10 $km$). While in situ observations capture point or transect observations of frontal behavior subsurface, their complex spatial patterns can be well-captured using remote sensing techniques, which provide synoptic views of the ocean surface...
Routerless networks on chip (NoCs) were recently introduced as an alternative to traditional mesh-based scalable networks, promising improved performance and scalability with a large decrease in power and area usage by the elimination of routing on in-flight packets. Without mitigation, most network designs, including routerless, are susceptible to loss of...
The rapid pace of climate change is increasing tree mortality and highlighting the need to improve the mechanistic understanding of plant function under increased water stress. However, the processes that control soil moisture availability in steep mountainous terrain are poorly understood, as are the relative effects of atmospheric and soil...
There is a national interest in improving the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in institutions of higher education in the face of mounting difficulties. Reports by the National Academy of Sciences in 2018 and 2020 found that the dissemination and adoption of effective, timely change initiatives...
Autonomous vehicles bring great societal benefits but also potential impact and disruption to road safety, traffic congestion, and driving behaviors. One important technology that is indispensable to the success of such systems is vehicular networks. Vehicular networks provide the backbone for ensuring communication and connectivity among vehicles, all crucial to...
In areas such as spatial analysis and time series analysis, it is essential to understand and quantify spatial or temporal heterogeneity. In this dissertation, we focus on a spatially varying coefficient model, in which spatial heterogeneity is accommodated by allowing the regression coefficients to vary in a given spatial domain....
Human-safe Cobots are a popular replacement for industrial robots to automate manufacturing processes such like cutting and deburring that all involve accurate contour following across a workpiece surface while maintaining sufficient tool contact. Cobot arms are less expensive and human-safe but they have larger error motion in comparison when only...
As the number of nodes in high-performance computing (HPC) systems continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to design scalable interconnection network topologies. Prior work has shown promise in adding random shortcuts on top of an existing topology to reduce average hop count and network diameter, but has been limited...
The evolutionary arms race between predators and prey has led to a diverse set of interactions between species. Prey have developed an array of behaviors designed to reduce their risk of predation. Among those strategies, mobbing is a paradoxical behavior where prey actually approach predators, often in large multi-species flocks....
Understanding the spiritual worldview of clients is a core element of multicultural competency for mental health professionals. One spiritual and religious population is members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and related Latter-day Saint populations. The Book of Mormon is an important sacred text of this population....
Subtitles are an element used within film to further meaning and artistic subtext, intentional or not, within film. Using foreign language and the associated cultural artefacts, one may explore the subtext of that language and culture on screen. The language of Norwegian, the language used in the film, shares much...
Phytoplankton initiate the marine carbon cycle by fixing carbon dioxide into biologically available compounds. These abundant single celled organisms mediate carbon flux from the atmosphere to the deep ocean and are the base of the marine food web, supplying new carbon to higher trophic levels. Phytoplankton are highly diverse and...
Top-performing approaches to embodied AI tasks like point-goal navigation often rely on training agents via reinforcement learning over tens of millions (or even billions) of experiential steps – learning neural agents that map directly from visual observations to actions. In this work, we question whether these extreme training durations are...
Stony corals are the ecosystem engineers of the vital, dynamic, and complex marine ecosystem known as coral reefs. Globally, coral reefs are undergoing degradation from multiple anthropogenic stressors. Coral reef organism holobionts, or the host along with its microbial components, are key to reef ecosystem success and functioning. Marine microbes...
This study explores how multispecies social networks influence small farmers' perceptions of and responses to climate change across Oregon. Local food sovereignty and food system resilience depend on a robust local food system in which small farms play a critical role. To maintain their viability, small farmers must adapt to...
Sea otters fulfill a keystone role in several Northeastern Pacific nearshore ecosystems. However, their influence has been absent in Oregon coastal waters since their extirpation in the 19th and early 20th century. Interest has been growing for a translocation attempt to reintroduce sea otters to Oregon from one or more...
Agent-based models (ABM) are widely used in network data analysis, and due to their simple structures and sophisticated outcomes, they serve as good tools in understanding the dynamics in networks. In this thesis, we develop an agent-based dynamic network model, and show that it can replicate the expected degree distribution...
An Invasive Plant Management Plan developed for Big Sur Land Trust, a non-profit conservation organization located on California's Central Coast, to guide its vegetation management activities and serve as a decision-support tool. The effort included the creation of a digital field data collection tool through Survey123 Connect, survey and data...
Naked barley is a rich source of fiber and phytonutrients but is not widely consumed by humans. The author contends that increasing population-wide consumption of wholegrain naked-barley would accrue a net positive public health benefit by helping to increase total fiber and phytonutrient consumption. Many of the leading causes of...
Home-based counseling (HBC) occurs when counselors provide therapy services to individuals and families within the clients’ home environment. Since its inception in the 1980s, HBC has become a common practice within the counseling field. In 2014, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2014) named HBC one of the fastest-growing divisions...
In this work, a fully automated approach to synthesis Metal-Organic Frameworks is presented. We use graph to represent the structure of Metal-organic Frameworks and use graph grammars which are backbone rules and functional group rules to generate metal-organic framework. For a given parameter value of the user defined metal-organic framework,...
Nucleation in atomic layer deposition (ALD) determines how many cycles are required to initiate growth and to form a continuous film. Nucleation has been exploited for the formation of nanoparticles, catalysts, and for area-selective ALD. Although sometimes overlooked or misrepresented in ALD reports, nucleation is also critical for multicomponent ALD...
Forest managers are faced with balancing a multitude of management objectives including social, economic, and ecological drivers as well as the uncertainty of how forests will grow and react to climate change. One possible tool to balance these drivers and the uncertainty of climate change is an adaptive management framework...
The grand plan of carbon neutralization and COP26 in Glasgow require a quick shift of energy sources from conventional fossil fuel to a more renewable substitute such as wind, or solar energy. However, the intermittency of those renewable energy sources does not meet the demand of the energy, which requires...
An Invasive Plant Management Plan developed for Big Sur Land Trust, a non-profit conservation organization located on California's Central Coast, to guide its vegetation management activities and serve as a decision-support tool. The effort included the creation of a digital field data collection tool through Survey123 Connect, survey and data...
We live on an Urban Planet. The current unprecedented urbanization is accompanied by intensive land cover transition and demographic shifts from rural to urban livelihoods. Cities serve as cultural, economic, political centers that facilitate wealth creation and innovation of the society, sustaining human from multi-dimensions with large ecological footprints far...
The coast of Oregon is highly dynamic, with beach and dune morphodynamics constantly evolving in response to physical and ecological forcing at scales ranging from seconds to decades and meters to tens of kilometers. Evaluating spatial and temporal trends in shoreline evolution is paramount in understanding and eventually developing a...
Oregon strawberries are known for their high quality, intense flavor, sweetness, and rich red color. With optimal weather conditions, including rainy and mild seasons, Oregon has one of the best strawberry farming environments. Amongst the factors for a suitable strawberry farming environment, soil significantly influences strawberry growth and quality. The...
An increase in frequency and severity of hot, dry summers has been associated with a dramatic shift in the coniferous forests of western Oregon’s valleys, especially on the privately-owned properties along the low-elevation edges of these valleys. Various conifer species, including Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), are declining in these forests, leaving...
Large, alluvial rivers are naturally diverse, both in structural complexity and as drivers of landscape dynamics. Floodplains provide a mosaic of habitat types for aquatic, semi-aquatic, and terrestrial organisms and act as the framework for vital chemical processes to occur. In large part, this variety is due to the ability...
The production of carbon and export to deep ocean sediments is linked to carbon partitioning between the ocean and atmosphere and is a key driver of climate change over the glacial-interglacial transition. Yet conflicting reconstructions create barriers to understanding changes to the carbon system over this important climate transition. Production...
Cold soaking is a technique used during red winemaking to alter the aroma, flavor, and phenolic content of a wine. However, cold soaking does not come without risk, as this process can result in the production of spoilage compounds such as acetic acid and ethyl acetate if excessive growth of...
The increase in the demand for energy is estimated to be 28 TW by a year of 2050, which is twice of the energy produced in 2010, in response to the unprecedented growth of the global population. Current energy market is heavily relying on the fossil fuel, which brings the...
Despite near unanimous opinion on the consequences of climate change by scientific community, the rate at which carbon is emitted into the atmosphere continues to increase. The need for a clean and sustainable source of energy is therefore one of humankind's most urgent challenges. Solar energy is the most abundant...
Humans benefit from being in nature and recreating, however outdoor recreation can negatively impact wildlife, including species of conservation concern such as the Pacific marten (Martes caurina), which has been used as a focal species for demonstrating ecosystem integrity. Marten population densities decline following intensive forest management activities, but impacts...
The goal of this thesis is to ease the adoption of energy-efficient (EE) building strategies for affordable homes in the United States (US). Low-wage earning households spend nearly three times the proportion of their gross annual income on home energy bills resulting in higher energy burden for them when compared...
Wetlands are productive ecosystems providing many ecosystem services. Many regulatory agencies recognize the need to protect and preserve wetlands. However, some impacts may be unavoidable. Under those circumstances, compensatory wetland mitigation may be necessary to offset adverse impacts to wetlands. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the New York...
Autonomous agents that sense, decide, act, and coordinate effectively with each other are critical in many real-world domains such as autonomous driving, search and rescue missions, air traffic management, and underwater or deep space exploration. All such domains share a key difficulty: though high-level mission goals are clear to system...
Secondary metabolites (SMs) play an integral role in the life history of most fungal species. Fungal metabolomic studies provide insights into how fungi perform certain ecological functions, how they compete and interact with other organisms, and the breadth of fungal chemodiversity. Fungal SMs have also been utilized for a variety...
Wind turbines serve an increasing proportion of total energy generation, with expanded onshore and offshore installations proceeding worldwide. Continued construction, expansion, and operation of wind energy installations must be managed in conjunction with effects on local and migratory wildlife, specifically bird and bat species that may be affected by wind...
We present a method for deterministically solving the consistent temperature and frequency dependent phonon radiative transport problem. We use the single relaxation time (SRT) approximation in the Self-Adjoint Angular Flux (SAAF) form with discrete ordinates (S_N) angular discretization method and continuous finite element method (CFEM) for spatial discretization. Included are...
The early care and education workforce, including those who work in center- and home-based child care (HBCC) settings, is situated within outside systems of child care supports and resources. Some outside system components serve to support compliance with regulatory guidelines (e.g., child care licensing: health and safety protocols, minimum training...
The continuous improvement of construction operations requires a systematic approach of monitoring and making appropriate control actions. However, the lack of real-time information hinders this workflow and eventually compromises timely and effective decision-making. Project managers spend a great deal of time and effort to solve problems emerging from lack of...
Few river systems in the world are under equal or more stress than Southeast (SE) Asia’s Mekong River. Several factors threaten the Mekong as the riparian states of China, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam jockey for position within its geopolitical sphere. Climate change, globalization, industrialization, urbanization, economic growth,...
Riparian areas are targeted for restoration activities because of the important ecological functions these areas provide. Millions of dollars are spent on riparian restoration projects, yet little long-term monitoring data are collected to understand the growth and survival of the planted trees and shrubs after initial project establishment. With the...
The Klamath River Basin (KRB) is one of the most contested basins of the Western U.S. with respect to water. Multiple stakeholders, including Tribes, farmers, state and federal agencies, and environmental advocates, are in frequent conflict over water rights and water use. Removal of the four hydroelectric dams is one...
These course materials provide students with a theoretical and practical background in operational use of UAS for surveying and mapping. Instructors can use these modules for a standalone course or integrate select modules into their existing curricula, as desired. Specifically, these materials cover the following learning outcomes to enable students...
In-hand manipulations consist of dexterous motions that come easy to humans but still pose a challenge to robotic systems. It is difficult to control finger motions in long complicated sequences due to high DOFs and intricate contact interactions. For such complex motions, in-hand manipulations have generally been broken into a...
Pseudoloma neurophilia is the most common pathogen reported in zebrafish (Danio rerio) research facilities and is an important threat to the zebrafish model. This microsporidian parasite can cause clinical disease, but more importantly is a causative agent of non-protocol induced variation in research. Studies utilizing infected zebrafish, could potentially confound...