The major purpose of this research was to characterize partially degraded proteins
appearing in the ocular lens during aging and cataract, and to identify the responsible
proteolytic activities. This research is significant, because increased protein
degradation is associated with lens opacification and cataract. Determining the sites
where lens proteins become...
The vascular endothelium is a single cell layer that lines the lumen of the entire vasculature. It is the site of synthesis of nitric oxide (NO), a vasodilatory compound synthesized by endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS). NO causes intracellular calcium sequestration of the vascular smooth muscle cells, relaxing and dilating...
The climate of the Pacific Northwest is in flux, and existing forest ecosystems are stressed and poised to shift in fundamental ways, with or without human intervention. This dissertation probes the nature of forest responses to environmental change through investigations of morphology and genetics of three species of alder co-occurring...
Secure Computation is a powerful tool that enables a set of parties to jointly compute any function over their private inputs, without a trusted third party. Private Set Intersection is a specific case of two-party Secure Computation, where Alice (with private set X) and Bob (with private set Y) specifically...
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...
The predicted effects of climate change call for methods to assess the performance of agricultural systems across economic, environmental, and social dimensions over different spatial and temporal scales. For research and development to have an impact on system efficiency, potential impacts of climate change and adaptation strategies need to be...
Diverse scientific fields collect multiple time series data to investigate the dynamical behavior of complex systems: atmospheric and climate science, geophysics, neuroscience, epidemiology, ecology, and environmental science. Identifying patterns of mutual dependence among such data generates valuable knowledge that can be applied either for inferential or forecasting purposes. Vector autoregressive...
This dissertation seeks to contribute to a growing body of research on student outcomes by way of a public health perspective examining the intersection of education policy and adolescent mental health and well-being. The conceptual approach underpinning this project rests on the key theoretical assumption that education policy, shaped at...
Artificial Intelligence has gained resurgence in popularity through machine learning methods. This thesis investigates the current use of AI, the impact it will have on the economy and the ethical considerations for developing this technology. In the coming decade AI could increase global economic output over $10 Trillion. AI will...
The research explored in this thesis helps provide a better understanding of efforts that have been undertaken to more precisely calculate environmental impacts and human health risks, such as energy consumption, carbon footprint, and toxicity, to support environmental sustainability assessment of products. The work is comprised of two research objectives,...
This dissertation is separated into two parts according to the two major distinct research projects. In Part I, the full account of synthetic studies toward C10-functionalized lycopodium alkaloids is described. In Part II, the detailed discussion on the exploration of the Pummerer cyclization methodology and its application to the total...
A distributed system is a network of multiple autonomous computational nodes designed primarily for performance scalability and robustness. The performance of a distributed system depends critically on how tasks and resources are distributed among the nodes. Thus, a main thrust in distributed system research is to design schemes for distributing...
While safety improvements have been made in the construction industry, construction still experiences one of the highest numbers of fatalities annually compared to other industries in the United States with over 970 fatalities in 2016 alone. This number of fatalities drives researchers and safety managers to improve safety measures and...
Natural Language Comprehension is a challenging domain of Natural Language Processing. To improve a model’s language comprehension/understanding, one approach would be to enrich the structure of the model to enhance its capability in learning the latent rules of the language.
In this dissertation, we will first introduce several deep models...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
Bibliographia Bopyridarum is prepared and maintained by John Markham, Arch Cape, Oregon, USA. Any reports of errors or omissions are greatly appreciated. Please contact Dr. Markham with suggestions: jmarkham@seasurf.net This file is updated annually.
Transport phenomena specially the ones that occur in the various engineering disciplines such as tissue engineering and natural environment are often complex to analyze mostly due to the dynamic and geometric complexities; as such, they have been the subject of an active and intense area of research in past decades....
Over the decades, worker performance on construction projects has been a significant source of concern to be evaluated. Comprehensive studies have developed models for evaluating worker performance outside of the construction industry; however, minimal research has been conducted to evaluate worker performance in the construction industry. One of the reasons...
Microbial ecology has been transformed by metagenomics, the study of the genetic in-formation in entire communities of organisms. In the following we develop metagenomic tools arising from the classic Wasserstein metric as applied to questions regarding the diversity between microbial communities. We provide a novel proof of the characteriza-tion of...
This dissertation has two objectives. The first objective is to determine where best to situate the study of mentoring (i.e. the 'making of scientists') on the landscape of the history of science and science studies. This task is accomplished by establishing mentoring studies as a link between the robust body...