Learning to recognize objects is a fundamental and essential step in human perception and understanding of the world. Accordingly, research of object discovery across diverse modalities plays a pivotal role in the context of computer vision. This field not only contributes significantly to enhancing our understanding of visual information but...
This dissertation investigates the microbial diversity and factors influencing the assembly of microbial communities in kombucha production, using a combination of 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, 16S and ITS rRNA metabarcoding, and traditional culture-based microbiological methods. It also explores the diversity of kombucha starter cultures through shotgun sequencing and metabarcoding...
Chlamydia trachomatis is an obligate intracellular bacterium that causes diseases of the eye and urogenital tract in humans. It is the cause of the sexual transmitted infection (STI) chlamydia, the most prevalent STI worldwide, and the ocular disease trachoma, the leading cause of infectious blindness. To date there is no...
Back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, entailing a significant socioeconomic impact. A primary source of back pain can be attributed to intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration allowing nerve ingrowth, facet joint arthritis, disc bulging, and osteophyte formations that press on nearby nerve roots or the spinal cord. While...
The variety of natural disasters provide different sets of characteristics and properties with unique challenges. One significant difference between hazard types is prewarning lead time, the amount of time individuals have from a potential warning to the disaster occurring. Rapid onset disasters may not provide an official warning about a...
Ph.D. candidate Qi Wei's thesis consists of two projects: Chemotherapy Project: a study based on the research paper "Predicting chemotherapy response of various cancer types using a variational auto-encoder approach" submitted to the bioRxiv preprint archive and accepted by the BMC bioinformatics; and Wound Monitor Project: implementing and assessing analytics...
Fluid-structure interaction (FSI) has been of significant research interest worldwide over the past several decades because of its variety of applications in both offshore and coastal engineering. Researchers analyzing FSI systems rely heavily on experimental tests in model scale in laboratories or large-scale sea trials. However, these tests are often...
Clostridium perfringens is a spore-forming anaerobic organism that is commonly present in fresh meat and poultry. The organism's spores can survive a range of food processing methods. C. perfringens type F isolates are the causative agents of C. perfringens type F food poisoning (FP) and non-food borne (NFB) human gastrointestinal...
This dissertation addresses few-shot object segmentation in images. The goal of segmentation is to label every image pixel with a class of the object occupying that pixel, where the class may represent a semantic object category or instance. In few-shot segmentation, training and test datasets have different classes. Every new...
Xanthohumol, a prenylated flavonoid found in hops and beer, possesses a long-standing reputation to improve health. Xanthohumol’s cytotoxicity to a wide variety of cancer cell lines is well-established. Herein we provide further insight into the cytotoxicity of not only xanthohumol, but also its non-estrogenic derivatives, to a number of colonic...