The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018, has observed that the trend of the world’s marine fish stocks has been overexploited, depleted, and has exhibited decreasing trend within the fraction of biologically sustainable levels. While these situations are an alarming...
In this thesis, I present the variational database management system, a formal framework and its implementation for representing variation in relational databases and managing variational information needs. A variational database is intended to support any kind of variation in a database. Specific kinds of variation in databases have already been...
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a conceptual framework in cryptography. It allows distrusting parties engage in a protocol to perform a computational task while still maintain some secure properties. Most existing approaches are required to interpret functions as a boolean circuit. With the recent state-of-art circuit garbling scheme, the performance...
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...
The purpose of this research was to examine the Iranian
culture and society, and its relationship to some Western
countries in order to understand the basis for the conflict
between Western and Iranian educational values.
Specifically, the objectives of this study were to
describe:
(1) the historical development of Iranian...
The First Gulf War that took place in Kuwait in 1991 resulted in one of the worst environmental disasters in the history of mankind. Extreme pollution affected the soil, waters, and the air in Kuwait. In this research I try to look into how the Kuwaiti government reacted to those...
Italian ryegrass (Lolium perenne spp. multiflorum) is a common weed management problem in turfgrasses, cereals and non-crop areas in the United States. In Oregon, the number of populations with multiple-resistance continues to increase. To manage these resistant populations, the resistance patterns must be determined. In this study, five Italian ryegrass...
A series of trials was conducted with Polypay (P), Coopworth
(CP), Hampshire (H), and crossbred ewes over a two year period at three
locations to assess the effects of ewe body condition and pre-lambing
supplementation on ewe productivity. Supplementation trials were
conducted at all three locations in Year 1 using...
Using intersectional, matricentric feminist of color approaches, this study interrogates the particularities of Afghan immigrants' mothering experiences—as one of the hidden facets of their lived experience—in the United States from a life-course perspective. Using a combination of feminist oral historical approaches, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, this thesis explores the...
Complex information environments are often organized as hierarchies. However, computational models of Information Foraging Theory (IFT) have almost entirely ignored this fact. Models and tools for predicting programmer navigations have ignored people’s foraging behavior across hierarchies —called hierarchical foraging. Without modeling hierarchical foraging, our ability to build tools to support...
Optimization of reservoir operation is involves various competing objectives for a scarce resource (water). To find the optimal operation of reservoirs, it is essential to consider multiple objectives simultaneously. There are various sources of uncertainty associated with the reservoir operation problem that should be considered as well.
The overarching goal...
Modular construction is increasingly seen as an efficient construction method in terms of time, cost, and energy. The full realization of these advantages partly relies on the efficiency of the production process inside the modular factories, which currently rely on tedious manual monitoring methods or expensive automated techniques. As a...
The advent of deep learning models leads to a substantial improvement in a wide range of NLP tasks, achieving state-of-art performances without any hand-crafted features. However, training deep models requires a massive amount of labeled data. Labeling new data as a new task or domain emerges consumes time and efforts...
This thesis describes an investigation of the molecular basis of the substrate specificity and catalytic mechanism of a unique pseudoglycosyltransferase (PsGT) enzyme, VldE. PsGTs are a newly discovered group of glycosyltransferase (GT)-like proteins that catalyze the transfer of a pseudosugar to an acceptor molecule via a C-N bond formation. This...
In this thesis, we introduce a novel Explanation Neural Network (XNN) to explain the predictions made by a deep network. The XNN works by embedding a high-dimensional activation vector of a deep network layer non-linearly into a low-dimensional explanation space while retaining faithfulness i.e., the original deep learning predictions can...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
An age-wave is upon us where many older adults are reaching retirement. Technically experienced older adults have skills that could be directly applied to free/open source software (FOSS) communities, such as project management, programming, and/or knowledge of a rapidly growing end-user population. FOSS is a widely popular, low-cost way to...
Private set intersection (PSI) allows two parties, who each hold a set of items, to compute the intersection of those sets without revealing anything about other items. Recent advances in PSI have significantly improved its performance for the case of semi-honest security, making semi-honest PSI a practical alternative to insecure...
Human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (CAMP/LL-37) is a cationic antimicrobial peptide that is widely expressed by myeloid and epithelial cells at the human-environment interface. It possesses broad spectrum antimicrobial capacity against bacteria, fungi and viruses. In addition to its direct antimicrobial activity, CAMP/LL-37 also attracts and recruits monocytes, neutrophils and other...
Power can be defined as the ability to influence the processes, decisions, and outcomes of an activity in favor of the will of a strong actor and its allies. Strategic actions in situations where there is asymmetric power can change the result of decisions. In this research, I will examine...
Private matching (PM) is a key cryptographic primitive in secure computation that allows several parties to jointly compute some functions depending on their private inputs. Indeed, this primitive has many practical applications. For instance, in online advertising, two companies may wish to find their common customers for a joint marketing...
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm brought an ever-increasing dependence on low-power devices to collect sensor data and transmit that information to the cloud, placing greater demand on connectivity and lifespan. In response, rapid worldwide innovation demonstrates the trade-offs in processing, communication, and energy consumption with diverse approaches to low-power...
The scarcity of wireless spectrum resources and the overwhelming demand for wireless broadband resources have prompted industry, government agencies and academia within the wireless communities to develop and come up with effective solutions that can make additional spectrum available for broadband data. As part of these ongoing efforts, cognitive radio...
Increased variability of rainfall and flow from climate change has the potential to stress existing transboundary water sharing agreements and make meeting the needs of all riparians difficult. Water treaties have been theorized as valuable tools for mitigating conflict in times of climate stress, but the relationship between the design...
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....
This dissertation addresses few-shot object segmentation in images. The goal of segmentation is to label every image pixel with a class of the object occupying that pixel, where the class may represent a semantic object category or instance. In few-shot segmentation, training and test datasets have different classes. Every new...
A globally integrated carbon observation and analysis
system is needed to improve the fundamental understanding
of the global carbon cycle, to improve our ability to
project future changes, and to verify the effectiveness of policies
aiming to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase
carbon sequestration. Building an integrated carbon observation...
Purple tomatoes (Lycopersicon esculemtum) were bred by incorporating
genes that result in anthocyanin production in the skin of fruits. These genes
originally came from related wild species as no naturally occurring genes encoding
fruit anthocyanin expression are known within the cultivated species. By
combining Aft or Abg with atv or...
Over time, Open Source Software (OSS) has become indispensable in the creation and upkeep of software products, serving as the fundamental building block for widely used solutions in our daily lives, including applications that enable communication, entertainment, and productivity. A sustainable OSS ecosystem is one that attracts and retains a...