Two of the most powerful ways in which humans have altered ecosystems are by increasing productivity and changing the densities of important consumers. The bottom-up effects of productivity and the top-down effects of consumers have been identified as primary determinants of biological diversity, though the links between them remain unclear....
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...
N-ary relationships, which relate N entities where N is not necessarily two, are omnipresent in real life. In this thesis, we develop a visualization technique for N-ary relationships.
First, we propose a visual metaphor that utilizes vertices and polygons to represent entities and N-ary relationships. Based on this visual metaphor,...
Increasing threats of terrorism and contraband smuggling have led to a growing interest in millimeter wave/ THz security sensors. Recently, systems combining active and passive sensing into one unit have been proposed where the active mode provides information on range and reflectivity, and the passive mode complements the active by...
Rice is an important crop that feeds almost half the world population. As climate change models predict floods, drought and extreme temperatures in rice production areas, the need to better understand the genetic basis of adaptation and tolerance to abiotic and biotic stresses is vital to sustain our food supply....
John Archibald Wheeler (09 July 1911- ) is a familiar name to physicists and historians of physics alike. Among his many contributions to the corpus of knowledge, in 1939 John Wheeler and Niels Bohr co-authored the first paper on the generalized mechanism of nuclear fission. Beyond that seminal work, Wheeler...
This dissertation focuses on the predator-prey relationship between two species of avian predators, Caspian terns (Hydroprogne caspia) and double-crested cormorants (Phalacrocorax auritus), and one of their important prey types, juvenile salmonids (Oncorhynchus spp.), in the Columbia River estuary of Oregon and Washington states during the period 1998 – 2007. I...
Climate change has the potential to accelerate many forms of human migration and mobility, yet almost all of the key migration outcomes of interest are determined predominantly by governance, or the norms, laws, and institutions involved in the coordination of human society. These outcomes include the decision whether or not...