The settlement history of a remote area in the Coast Range of Oregon, from the 1870s to the 1930s, is examined through factors that may have influenced the success or failure, and length of residence of the homesteaders and later residents. Despite the rugged and isolated location, a small community...
The settlement history of a remote area in the Coast Range of Oregon, from the 1870s to the 1930s, is examined through factors that may have influenced the success or failure, and length of residence of the homesteaders and later residents. Despite the rugged and isolated location, a small community...
Red Light Ladies presents a perspective on prostitution in North America, within the context of the western mining frontier. A biographical profile of the frontier
prostitutor is presented, along with an archaeological model of settlement patterns and material culture. Settlement patterns and demographic changes in the prostitutor
population are hypothetically...
This thesis consists of three studies to better understand the environmental sustainability potential for algal-based biofuels. Initially, a comparison of recent life cycle assessments (LCA) of theoretical full-scale algal biofuel facilities was developed. These studies include varying boundaries and scope, functional units, and technology maturity assumptions. The comparison converted results...
Although deep reinforcement learning agents have produced impressive results in many domains, their decision making is difficult to explain to humans. To address this problem, past work has mainly focused on explaining why an action was chosen in a given state. A different type of explanation that is useful is...
Heterogeneous catalysis modulates the rate and selectivity of reaction processes by
stabilizing a series of intermediate states on solid surfaces, facilitating the production
of many commodity chemicals modern society relies upon. Conventional, thermal
catalytic processes—conducted at elevated temperatures and pressures—source
thermal, mechanical, and chemical potential energy from carbon-hydrogen bonds—
combustion...
Recognizing human actions in videos is a long-standing problem in computer vision with a wide range of applications including video surveillance, content retrieval, and sports analysis. This thesis focuses on addressing efficiency and robustness of video classification in unconstrained real-world settings. The thesis work can be broadly divided into four...
Gene regulation is a complex mechanism that controls the spatial and temporal expression of genes in a living cell. My dissertation studies focus on two problems. First, tissue-specific gene expression prediction from DNA sequence and chromatin state, and second, the accurate discovery of small over-represented regulatory circuits in gene regulatory...
Currently the production of biofuel from algae is not economically competitive with petroleum fuel. However, co-production of high-value products may be able to justify the cost of large-scale algae cultivation. The basic goal of this study is to develop a techno-economic analysis (TEA) and Life-cycle assessment (LCA) for the production...
Hand detection is a fundamental step for many hand-related computer vision tasks, such as gesture recognition, hand pose estimation, hand sign language translation, and so on. However, robustly detecting hands is a challenging task because of drastic changes in appearance based on finger articulation and changes in lighting conditions, camera...