Human alterations of landscapes take many forms, one of which is anthropogenic pollution. Mercury (Hg) is a complex contaminant because its uptake into the food web is not driven entirely by loading to the system; methylation is necessary to make Hg bioavailable and toxic to fish and wildlife. Because methylation...
This dissertation describes patterns in epiphytic macrolichen community composition along a nitrogen deposition gradient in the Yosemite region of the Sierra Nevada in California. This region is part of the largest federal air quality Class 1 designated air-shed in the western United States, covering the entire crest of the Sierra...
With women comprising nearly 50% of HIV/AIDS infections globally, the development of new woman-initiated HIV prevention methods has become a public health imperative. To date, the female condom and the diaphragm are the only woman-initiated prevention methods available on the consumer market. Recent research has focused on two HIV/AIDS prevention...
This research examines two questions: 1) What stories do Christian teacher educators tell about their own White racial identity development? and 2) Is there an impact of studying White racial identity development on the praxis of Christian teacher educators? If so, in what ways? The researcher began the project with...
Corals have multiple roles in maintaining ocean health and are some of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. The coral animal is host to a multitude of taxa, including symbiotic dinoflagellate algae, fungi, bacteria, protists, and viruses. Environmental stressors and disease agents can perturb the delicate balance of the coral host...
The publicly subsidized Federal Crop Insurance Program has expanded rapidly in recent decades in the United States. With the reform in the 2014 Farm Bill, the Federal Crop Insurance Program has become the most important component of U.S. farm policies. The primary goal of the program is to provide risk...
The thesis focuses on activity recognition from sensor data, which has spurred a great deal of interest due to its impact on health care and security. Previous work on activity recognition from multivariate time series data has mainly applied supervised learning techniques which require a high degree of annotation effort...
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...
In supervised learning, label information can be provided at different levels of granularity. For small datasets, it is possible to acquire a label for each data instance. However, in the big-data regime, this fine granularity approach is prohibitively costly. For example, in semi-supervised learning, only a limited number of samples...