The conservation community has long recognized the critical role that agricultural landowners play in efforts to improve fish and wildlife habitat in order to recover threatened and endangered species. In many rural areas dominated by agricultural working landscapes, government agencies like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) struggle to...
Multiagent approaches are well suited to designing autonomous solutions for systems that feature complex interactions between many individuals such as in autonomous traffic systems and multi-robot exploration systems. However, creating autonomous agents that function effectively in these systems is a challenging task. In these complex environments, agents need informative reward...
We do not know how to align a very intelligent AI agent's behavior with human interests. I investigate whether—absent a full solution to this AI alignment problem—we can build smart {\ai} agents which have limited impact on the world, and which do not autonomously seek power. In this thesis, I...
Autonomous agents that sense, decide, act, and coordinate effectively with each other are critical in many real-world domains such as autonomous driving, search and rescue missions, air traffic management, and underwater or deep space exploration. All such domains share a key difficulty: though high-level mission goals are clear to system...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
In 2017, the cost of congestion in the United States was around 305 billion dollars, and city-dwellers, on average, lost 1400 dollars while sitting 42 hours in traffic jams. Aiming for better mobility and more efficient utilization of the transportation network, emerging connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV) technologies and their...
The overall focus of this thesis is on the distribution of specific lipids and membrane proteins of the external and internal membranes of plant cells, in the context of the roles that those lipids and proteins may play in microbe-plant interactions. The work includes the development of several new tools,...
Potentially relevant literature for the years 1990-1999 was identified by (a) conducting keyword searches of computerized bibliographic databases, especially CAB Abstracts and Aquatic Sciences and Fisheries Abstracts, (b) reading through the tables of contents of a few especially relevant journals, (c) searching the internet for pertinent bibliographies, and (d) to...
This work is inspired by problems in natural resource management centered on the challenge of invasive species. Computing optimal management policies for maintaining ecosystem sustainable is challenging. Many ecosystem management problems can be formulated as MDP (Markov Decision Process) planning problems. In a simulator-defined MDP, the Markovian dynamics and rewards...
We have recently reported that cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) and novel chimeric peptides containing CPP (referred as
B peptide) and muscle-targeting peptide (referred as MSP) motifs significantly improve the systemic exon-skipping activity
of morpholino phosphorodiamidate oligomers (PMOs) in dystrophin-deficient mdx mice. In the present study, the general
mechanistic significance of the...
Full Text:
Exon-skipping Efficiency
Yin, H., Boisguerin, P., Moulton, H. M., Betts, C., Seow, Y., Boutilier, J