The Ambrosia Lake West Site is a former uranium recovery facility located north of Grants, New Mexico. It currently serves as a uranium mill tailings site undergoing reclamation and decommissioning. High velocity winds are common in the area, causing soil erosion via aeolian processes. Strong winds may carry soil for...
Intensifications in seasonal temperature variation, attributed to increased greenhouse gas concentrations, are having an adverse effect on the forest composition of the northeastern United States. New York’s temperate broadleaf forests are undergoing alterations including a decline of the native sugar maple (Acer saccharum), as the species’ population begins to decrease...
Analysis of observations on sequential events over time is common in real life. Sequential measurements over time describing the behavior of systems are usually called time series data, which have been collected in a wide range of disciplines. Over the years there have been multiple research areas in studying stochastic...
Systems biology is a powerful approach which considers and sheds light on all of the puzzle pieces which make up complex biological processes, and is an effective alternative to unraveling these processes using traditional molecular approaches alone. It is a natural companion approach for computational biology, which leverages the power...
In this dissertation I will demonstrate a novel application of self-exciting point process models to mass shooting data. I will also introduce two adaptations to the traditional nonparametric Hawkes process modeling framework. One such modification allows for the estimation of the additional productivity introduced by an event that is not...
These datasets were used in the prospective meta-analysis of northern spotted owl reproductive rates over 25 years across 11 study areas located throughout the range of the owl. A multi-state occupancy file was created by collapsing site-specific information on owl reproductive status into bimonthly (2 per month) survey occasions. These...
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 use of board games for teaching introductory computer science is a promising recent avenue of research. The goal is to introduce computing concepts through their use in the implementations of simple games, thereby keeping students engaged through their learning process. However, there is a gap between students' algorithmic descriptions...
Despite climate change requiring the cutback of fossil fuel consumption, the world continues to increase its energy demands each year. To meet the ambitious goals outlined during the Paris Agreement in 2015, which set a goal to limit global warming to 1.5°C [1], changes in energy production methods are necessary....
Reinforcement learning has emerged as a popular tool for solving control tasks, with multiple works focusing on the complex and dynamic task of locomotion. However, the naive application of reinforcement learning to this problem often produces maladaptive policies that exploit the model or reward function. This results in behavior that...
Programming is integrated across the workflow of multiple domains where end-user programmers, those who need to program as a means to an end, regularly need to code. In the modern setting of collaborative development, end-user programmers have to interpret the intentions behind existing code to contribute and build solutions to...
"What’s wrong with this AI?" Explainable AI (XAI) researchers are moving beyond explaining an AI’s actions, to helping users detect an AI’s failures. However this detection may not be enough—for actionability, we often need to pinpoint which part failed. We investigate how AAR/AI, a structured assessment process, supports users with...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var. lupulus) is a diploid, dioecious plant with an extensive history of cultivation and use in brewing, as a textile, and for its therapeutic properties. Hop is prized for its ability to produce a variety of aromatic and flavor compounds, as well as compounds with anti-microbial...
From 1914-1918 the world experienced humanity’s ultimate affirmation of malice on scales scant seen in the centuries before. The Great War wrought terror on an industrial scale, throwing men headlong unto landscapes rent low by fire and steel. Our collective unconscious image of the war does well to demonstrate this....
In this dissertation I explore the Arms representation and activities for teaching quantum mechanics invented at Oregon State University. In the Arms representation students embody quantum states. The Arms activities are presented as an exemplar of the unique physics classroom culture of the upper-division Paradigms in Physics program. In the...
Breast cancer is the leading cancer in women with an estimated 13% of women in the United States developing a form of invasive breast cancer in her lifetime. The survival rate is estimated to be 85%, but the American Cancer Society estimates that early detection of breast cancer in the...
Severe wildfires are increasing in the western United States, impacting vegetation structure, and in turn, forest regeneration conditions. These wildfires are also raising a substantial amount of scientific and management concern regarding the resilience of forested ecosystems, or the ability of the ecosystem to return to a pre-fire condition. This...
Climate model simulations and paleoclimate proxies are two tools that enable an understanding of the climate history of the Earth. When utilized together, they form a powerful paradigm for understanding past changes. Proxies are the only physical link to the past conditions on Earth, and models “fill in the gaps”...
Beginning with the inception of American art history as a formal discipline in the 1940s, the dominant mode of interpreting nineteenth-century American landscape painting has been to view aspects of the landscape as symbols for grand cultural, religious, national, and moral narratives. While this method of interpretation highlights some key...
Robotic Bipedal locomotion holds the potential for efficient, robust traversal of difficult terrain. The difficulty lies in the dynamics of locomotion which complicate control and motion planning. Bipedal locomotion dynamics are dimensionally large problems, extremely nonlinear, and operate on the limits of actuator capabilities, which limit the performance of generic...
Iterative algorithms are simple yet efficient in solving large-scale optimization problems in practice. With a surge in the amount of data in past decades, these methods have become increasingly important in many application areas including matrix/tensor recovery, deep learning, data mining, and reinforcement learning. To optimize or improve iterative algorithms,...
Conservation banking is a market-based instrument and conservation tool designed to provide compensatory mitigation for impacts to endangered species. These banks provide both ecological and economic benefits, however their ability to continue providing these benefits is threatened by climate change. The motivational factors behind the decisions to establish a conservation...
The practice of modern silviculture on U.S. public lands has been stymied by a legacy of litigation and policy changes since the late 20th century. Forestry in the 1980s was focused on physical science strategies and failed to consider the social complexities of multi-use forest management. Emblematic of the challenges...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
Multi-robot teams offer promising solutions for many long term deployments in remote and dangerous domains, such as extraterrestrial or underseas exploration. However, long term deployments present many problems preventing robot teams from operating effectively. Learning over long time scales is makes it difficult to assign credit to robots' actions, as...
When changes are made to programs - to enhance their functionality, to improve performance, to migrate from one language or machine to another, or to convert a serial program to parallel form - there is no easy way to verify that the changes maintain program correctness. Checking the final result...
Most designers of object-based languages adopt a reference model of variables without explicit justification, despite its wide ranging consequences. This paper argues that the traditional container model of variables is more efficient than the reference model, nearly as flexible, and more appropriate to parallel and distributed systems. The topics addressed...
Until now, most hypertext systems have been implemented on large scale computers. With improvements in microprocessors and development of graphical user interfaces, personal computers can run systems that previously needed the power of a mainframe. The low costs and widespread use of PCs will enable many people to use hypertext...
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
The Columbia River Gillnetter is the pilot of the Lower Columbia River commercial fishing industry, keeping fishermen and the public in touch with today's important issues.
Excavation of pit feature 110 (F110) at the Cooper’s Ferry site (10IH73) in central Idaho provides a unique snapshot of the domestic lifeways associated with the Western Stemmed Tradition (WST). Analysis was conducted of the F110 assemblage to better understand the function F110 served. The contents of F110 include Canis...
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation drew public ire during the 1980s and 1990s when activist groups forced the declassification of 19,000 documents and discovered proof of accidental and intentional releases of radioactive materials into the environment. These releases had been kept from the public. Although many locals had for decades wondered...