Agricultural systems are inherently complex; understanding these systems requires knowledge of climatology, plant physiology, soil physics, economics, and the human psychology of the farmers themselves. Decision support tools strive to leverage existing data to help guide stakeholders towards the best policies and practices for their situation. Quantitative crop simulation models...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
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...
Machine learning models for natural language processing have traditionally relied on large numbers of discrete features, built up from atomic categories such as word forms and part-of-speech labels, which are considered completely distinct from each other. Recently however, the advent of dense feature representations coupled with deep learning techniques has...
Deep learning has greatly improved visual recognition in recent years. However, recent research has shown that there exist many adversarial examples that can negatively impact the performance of such an architecture. Different from previous perspectives that focus on improving the classifiers to detect the adversarial examples, this work focuses on...
Sustainable product design is becoming an important component of the development of consumer products. Currently there are limited design resources to aid in the creation of environmentally sustainable products. The purpose of this research is to theorize a new method for integrating sustainable design knowledge into the early design phase...
Forecasting of ocean waves over a short duration on the order of tens of seconds was approached with the optimization of wave energy conversion in mind. This study outlines the development of an artificial neural network model, specifically the Nonlinear Autoregressive Network with Exogenous Input (NARX), to predict a wave-by-wave...
Direct red Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Turbine hybrid plants have the potential to dramatically increase power plant efficiency, decrease emissions, and provide fast response to transient loads. The US Department of Energy's (DOE) Hybrid Performance Project is an experimental hybrid SOFC plant, built at the National
Energy Technology Laboratory...
In 2004 the National Toxicology Program published an article describing their intent to pursue toxicology testing and risk assessment practices solely reliant on high throughput in vitro datasets and in silico modeling for dose-response assessments. Support and contributions form regulatory agencies and a significant portion of the life sciences community...
The brain has long attracted the interest of researchers. Some tasks, such as pattern
recognition and optimization, have proven to be exceptionally difficult for conventional
computing systems to perform, but are executed by the brain almost effortlessly. Due to
the large number of neurons and interconnections, it has proven impossible...