The major purpose of this study was to determine if there were differences between well-trained pre- adolesents and untrained, but normally active counterparts in physical working capacity , body composition and blood lipids. The study hypotheses were that the trained subjects would have a lower mean body fat percentage, lower...
Various natural language processing (NLP) tasks necessitate deep models that are fast, efficient, and small based on their ultimate application at the edge or elsewhere. While significant investigation has furthered the efficiency and reduced the size of these models, reducing their downstream latency without significant trade-offs remains a difficult task....
We developed a hybrid cellular automata (CA) modelling approach to explore the dynamics of a key predator–prey interaction in a marine system; our study is motivated by the quest for better understanding of the scale and heterogeneity-related effects on the arrowtooth flounder (Atheresthes stomias) and walleye pollock (Theragra chalcogramma) dynamics...
For many organisms, the reconstruction of source-sink dynamics is hampered by limited knowledge of the spatial
assemblage of either the source or sink components or lack of information on the strength of the linkage for any source-sink
pair. In the case of marine species with a pelagic dispersal phase, these...
For many organisms, the reconstruction of source-sink dynamics is hampered by limited knowledge of the spatial
assemblage of either the source or sink components or lack of information on the strength of the linkage for any source-sink
pair. In the case of marine species with a pelagic dispersal phase, these...
For many organisms, the reconstruction of source-sink dynamics is hampered by limited knowledge of the spatial
assemblage of either the source or sink components or lack of information on the strength of the linkage for any source-sink
pair. In the case of marine species with a pelagic dispersal phase, these...
We examined the relationships between large wood (LW) export and precipitation patterns and intensity by analyzing the data on the annual volume of LW removed from 42 reservoirs and the daily precipitation at or near the reservoir sites. We also calculated the effective precipitation by considering the antecedent precipitation. Both...
The magnitude of global AIS data exceeds the capability of conventional in-browser graphic rendering technologies like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Canvas. Normal practices of rendering AIS data in browser will either suffer from low frame rates or will have to limit the total number of visual elements. In this...
The first objective of this paper is to prove the existence and uniqueness of global solutions for
a Kirchhoff-type wave equation with
nonlinear dissipation of the form Kuⁿ + 𝑀(|𝐴¹/²𝑢|²)𝐴𝑢 + 𝑔(𝑢')=0 under suitable
assumptions on 𝐾, 𝐴, 𝑀(⋅), and 𝑔(⋅). Next, we under some growth conditions on the nonlinear...
Predatorprey interactions are a primary structuring force vital to the resilience of marine communities and sustainability of the worlds oceans. Human influences on marine ecosystems mediate changes in species interactions. This generality is evinced by the cascading effects of overharvesting top predators on the structure and function of marine ecosystems....
Knowledge of the shear stress on a fault during slip is necessary
for a physically-based understanding of earthquakes. Borehole
temperature measurements inside the fault zone immediately after
an earthquake can record the energy dissipated by this stress. In the
first Wenchuan Earthquake Fault Zone Scientific Drilling Project
hole (Sichuan province,...
As one of the most popular data types, the point cloud is widely used in various appli- cations, including computer vision, computer graphics and robotics. The capability to directly measure 3D point clouds is invaluable in those applications as depth information could remove a lot of the segmentation ambiguities in...
Parmelina quercina is a well-studied foliose macro-lichen found on rocks and trees in the Northern Hemisphere. Recent studies support multiple species within P. quercina based on material from Europe, North America and western Asia. The identities of Parmelina quercina s.lat. reported from eastern Asia and Alaska remain unknown. We compared...
Clostridium perfringens type A is the causative agent of a variety of histotoxic and enteric diseases. The ability of C. perfringens spores to germinate in vivo might be due to the presence of nutrient germinants in the host tissue and blood. In the current study, we investigated the ability of...
Morphological and chemical studies of Hypogymnia from the Himalayas revealed one new species, three species new to the region, and a previously unrecognized synonym. Hypogymnia crystallina, distinguished by its rimmed holes in the lobe axils, a pruinose disc, POL+ epihymenium, and distinctive chemistry (zeorin, hypoprotocetraric acid, usnic acid and atranorin)...
Vaccinia virus (VV), the prototype member of the orthopoxvirus family, is
a large virus of complex morphology which contains a 191 Kbp double-stranded
DNA genome whose expression is tightly regulated in a temporal
fashion during viral replication. The regulation of gene expression can be
exerted at various of levels, including...
The Bcl-2 family of proteins regulate cell survival and are targets for cancer therapy. This protein family has also been implicated in chemotherapeutic resistance, the cause of approximately 90% of treatment failure in advanced cancer. We analyzed the expression and the role of the Bcl-2 proteins in chemotherapy resistant breast...
Mud volcanoes (MVs) are considered as important methane (CH₄) sources for the
atmosphere; gas is not only released from macroseepage, i.e., from craters and visible gas bubbling
manifestations, but also from invisible and pervasive exhalation from the ground, named miniseepage.
CH₄ flux related to miniseepage was measured only in a...
The first goal of this study was to understand the role of calpains in skeletal muscle
protein degradation in cultured cells. We have developed a genetic approach to inhibit
endogenous calpain activity through over-expressing dominant negative m-calpain (DN),
antisense m-calpain (AS) and calpastatin inhibitory domain (CID). We observed that,
under...
Clostridium perfringens is an anaerobic, gram-positive, rod-shaped, spore-forming bacterium that leads to a broad range of diseases in humans and animals [23, 27, 50]. Among seven C. perfringens types (type A-G), type F is known to be the most common bacteria that is responsible for causing human food-borne disease outbreaks...
In the field of construction safety, many researchers have worked to create assessment tools. These tools focus on different aspects of construction safety, such as assessing safety climate, safety culture, etc. Although research indicates that the majority of incidents are caused by unsafe behaviors and acts, there are no comprehensive...
The enterotoxin-producing Clostridium perfringens type A isolates are responsible for the third most common foodborne illness in the United States and can also cause non-foodborne human gastrointestinal (GI) diseases such as antibiotic- associated and sporadic diarrheas. Three important factors contribute to the ability of C. perfringens to cause GI diseases,...
The cytoplasmic isozyme of malate dehydrogenase (s-MDH) has been isolated from brine shrimp nauplii to a state of high purity with a protocol involving ammonium sulfate fractionation and chromatography on DEAE-cellulose, followed by sequential passes over cellulose phosphate columns at pH 5.8 then 5.0. The purified enzyme is free of...
Internal dosimetry is challenging and relies on estimates using MIRD or ICRP biokinetic models. To address this, we looked at gene expression analysis in whole blood from radiotherapy patients. Patients with relapsed or refractory neuroblastoma who received ¹³¹I-mIBG at UCSF were used to correlate internal ionizing radiation (IR) dose with...
Physical activity is important for health. However, there is a lack of literature related to the physical activity levels of adults living in urban villagers, which is a vulnerable population in China. The aim of this study is to compare the physical activity and sedentary behavior engagements between urban villagers...
Cyanobacterial harmful algae blooms (cyanoHABs) are a growing concern worldwide due to damage of ecosystems and threats to human health. Previous research indicates that plant humics from aquatic and wetland vascular plants are effective inhibitors of cyanobacterial metabolism and growth and may be useful as control agents for mitigating cyanoHABs....
Ferrites have been used for various high frequency applications as bulk
materials. These applications, however, are limited to large dimension devices. In
this thesis, thin film ferrites were deposited from a low temperature solution-based
deposition process that is suitable for micro-scale high frequency applications. The
low temperature nature of this...
Clostridium perfringens type A isolates producing enterotoxin (CPE) are an
important cause of both food poisoning (FP) and non food borne gastrointestinal
diseases (NFBGID) in both humans and animals. C. perfringens type A food
poisoning is caused by isolates carrying the CPE encoding gene (cpe) on the
chromosome while the...
Clostridium perfringens is a spore-forming pathogenic bacterium that causes a variety of diseases in human and animals. C. perfringens type A isolates produce enterotoxin (CPE) causing food poisoning (FP) and non-food-borne (NFB) gastrointestinal (GI) diseases including antibiotic-associated diarrhea and sporadic diarrhea. C. perfringens type A food poisoning currently ranks as...
In this comprehensive thesis, we present a series of experiments and findings that highlight the
critical importance of TDC Voltage Sensors in the hardware security domain. Our research begins
by introducing a novel self-calibrating module, demonstrating its efficiency through preliminary
calibration tests. We then delve into the Peak-to-Peak tests, which...
Clostridium perfringens type A strains are one of the main causative agents of gastrointestinal (GI) diseases in human and can cause both food poisoning (FP) and non-food-borne (NFB) diseases. Several factors contribute to the pathogenesis of C. perfringens type A strains including the wide presence of C. perfringens spores with...
Transmit beamforming is an important technique employed to improve efficiency and signal quality in wireless communication systems by steering signals towards their in- tended users. It often arises jointly with the antenna selection problem due to various reasons, such as limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains and energy/resource effi-...
This Thesis aims to determine whether we can improve the accuracy, resolution, and speed of calculations for common power system problems using simple computational models that scale well to machine learning and high performance computing solutions. The second chapter of this Thesis implements more precise aging and degradation models for...
Background: Recent mapping of eukaryotic transcriptomes and spliceomes using massively parallel RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) has revealed that the extent of alternative splicing has been considerably underestimated. Evidence also suggests that many pre-mRNAs undergo unproductive alternative splicing resulting in incorporation of in-frame premature termination codons (PTCs). The destinies and potential functions...
C. perfringens is a Gram-positive, spore-forming, anaerobic pathogenic
bacterium capable of causing a wide variety of diseases in both humans and animals.
However, the two most common illnesses in humans are C. perfringens type A food
poisoning (FP) and non-food-borne (NFB) gastrointestinal (GI) illnesses . These two
major diseases are...
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...
Billions of pounds of bisphenol A (BPA) are produced annually around the globe for the manufacture of numerous consumer products, including polycarbonate food and water containers, the protective resin linings of food cans, thermal printing paper, and dental fillings. BPA exposure during nervous system development has been associated with learning...
Clostridium perfringens is a pathogenic anaerobic bacterium able to produce more than 17 toxins, allowing C. perfringins to cause a wide variety of diseases in humans and animals. Beside toxins production, C. perfringens able to form a highly resistance spores can survive in the environments for years. These spores are...
Background:
Abscisic acid (ABA) regulates various developmental processes and stress responses over both short (i.e. hours or days) and longer (i.e. months or seasons) time frames. To elucidate the transcriptional regulation of early responses of grapevine (Vitis vinifera) responding to ABA, different organs of grape (berries, shoot tips, leaves, roots...
Passive components, including spiral inductors and transformers, fabricated on silicon-based substrates are placing an increasing demand on radio-frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) design. Performance of the RFIC suffers from several non-ideal effects that must be taken into account in order to create a successful design. In particular, monolithic transformers can be...
Peroxiredoxins (Prxs) make up an ancient family of enzymes that are the predominant peroxidases for nearly all organisms and play essential roles in reducing hydrogen peroxide, organic hydroperoxides, and peroxynitrite. Even between distantly related organisms, the core protein fold and key catalytic residues related to its cysteine-based catalytic mechanism have...
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...
In recent years, unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS) have become increasingly affordable and straightforward to incorporate in monitoring applications of forested ecosystems. This shift has facilitated interest in using these tools to monitor aspects of forest ecosystems including vegetation health, forest structure and composition, and potential habitat provided by these systems....
C. perfringens is a spore-forming, gram-positive, anaerobic pathogenic bacterium capable of causing a wide variety of diseases in both humans and animals. However, the two most common illnesses in humans are C. perfringens type A food poisoning (FP) and non-food-borne (NFB) gastrointestinal (GI) illnesses. Interestingly, these two major diseases are...
Monitoring phenylalanine (Phe) levels in the blood of individuals with phenylketonuria (PKU) is a critical component of therapy. Existing tests for PKU require high-resource laboratories, which are not available to many populations and cannot provide the real-time feedback required for effective therapy monitoring. It would be ideal to develop an...
Clostridium perfringens type A isolates, an anaerobic enterotoxigenic spore forming bacterium, are the third leading cause of food-borne disease in the United States. Factors that contribute to the virulence of C. perfringens include the ability of the bacterium to form heat resistant spores and to produce an enterotoxin (CPE). Although...
The critical contribution of this dissertation is to provide a better
understanding of the fundamental Chemical Bath Deposition (CBD) growth
kinetic and mechanism for the well known II-VI semiconductor CdS using the
newly developed continuous flow microreactor. This continuous flow microreactor
provides the temporal resolution to control the homogeneous reaction...
This paper addresses the high model complexity and overconfident frame labeling of state-of-the-art (SOTA) action segmenters. Their complexity is typically justified by the need to sequentially refine action segmentation through multiple stages of a deep architecture. However, this multistage refinement does not take into account uncertainty of frame labeling predicted...
Data centers (DCs) have been witnessing unprecedented growth in size, number and complexity in recent years. They consist of tens of thousands of servers interconnected by fast network switches, hosting and enabling numerous applications with various traffic characteristics and requirements. As a result, DC networks have been presented with several...
We study joint nonlinear state estimation with multi-period measurement vectors that are potentially corrupted by sparse gross errors. The identifiability-aware approach is proposed to leverage common characteristics of fundamentally identifiable gross errors to enhance error correction performance. First, we derive a necessary rank condition that the sparsity pattern of any...
This dissertation addresses object recognition in challenging settings, where distinct object classes are visually very similar (e.g., species of birds and insects) and/or access to training examples of object classes is limited (e.g., due to the associated high costs of data annotation). In this dissertation, we present a variety of...
Known as the fourth industrial revolution, digitization is an ongoing trend in all fields, in which various industries are integrating information technologies to support and improve their businesses. Nuclear technology industries have also increased their interest in data-driven methods by leveraging the potential of pattern recognition to identify anomalies and...
A challenge for municipal authorities of growing urban areas is to provide larger and faster transportation and utility networks that are safe and resilient to significant disruptions after an earthquake event and other disasters. Urban regions, like the San Francisco Bay or the Los Angeles area, are situated in seismically...
The rising global trend to reduce dependence on fossil fuels has provided significant motivation toward the development of alternative energy conversion methods and new technologies to improve their efficiency. Recently, oscillating energy harvesters have shown promise as highly efficient and scalable turbines, which can be implemented in areas where traditional...
The engineering community is increasingly moving towards the design of seismic force-resisting systems that limit post-earthquake damage and reduce downtime to increase urban resiliency. For example, structural spines can be used to provide an elastic load path to impose a more uniform drift distribution with building height, thereby reducing the...
Using plant fibers as a potential renewable material to substitute for glass fibers in fiber-reinforced polymer composites has been growing since the late 1990s. Due to high demand, there has been a shift towards ‘green concept’ material in many applications. Numerous secondary plant fibers have been explored as a source...
Atmospheric pressure plasma is non-thermal at millimeter to micrometer separations. It represents an alternative low exergy initiator of many chemical reactions. In many instances heat, light or sound are not efficient providers of the necessary energy to overcome chemical activation barriers. The focus of this research is applying dc nonthermal...
We are witnessing the rise of the data-driven science paradigm, in which massive amounts of data - much of it collected as a side-effect of ordinary human activity - can be analyzed to make sense of the data and to make useful predictions. To fully realize the promise of this...
Machine learning systems are generally trained offline using ground truth data that has been labeled by experts. However, these batch training methods are not a good fit for many applications, especially in the cases where complete ground truth data is not available for offline training. In addition, batch methods do...
Oxidative stress is defined as an imbalance that favors the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) over an organism's antioxidant defense. ROS have the ability to damage, either directly or indirectly, biomolecules including DNA, proteins, carbohydrates, and lipids. Various pathological conditions and environmental and chronic diseases have been associated with...
Although fish are a nutritious food source, they also are the main source of methylmercury exposure in U.S. populations. This research examined the risks from methylmercury and benefits from omega-3 fatty acids and selenium from fish consumption. The first study provided the first region-specific quantitative risk/benefit analysis for nine commonly...
A techno-economic analysis (TEA) was performed to evaluate the technology, cost, and resource use for algal biofuel production based on today’s economics and technology. The basic goal of this study is to develop a model to calculate the mass and energy balances and costs to produce 10 million gal of...
Since the early 1980s, satellite imagery has been commonly used to detect change
in wetlands. The overall objective of this study is to utilize remote sensing and
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to determine the extent of change of
the wetland area and of other land use and land cover...
Clostridium perfringens is the causative agent of a wide variety of diseases in animals and humans. C. perfringens can produce more than 15 toxins. However, individual strains produce a subset of these toxins. Although a small percentage of C. perfringens isolates (mostly belonging to type A) produce C. perfringens enterotoxin...
Current detection methods for bacterial contamination rely on structure based detection of proteins and nucleic acids. While these methods are easy to use and reliable, they cannot evaluate the toxicity of a sample and the potential to cause disease. Previously, erythrophore cells derived from Betta splendens had been suggested as...
In forest trees from temperate and boreal regions, cold acclimation is an important
adaptive trait that involves changes in gene expression and physiology. Genecological, quantitative genetic, and QTL studies have been used to study the genetics of cold acclimation in Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb.) Franco), but the genes responsible for...
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...
In the field of machine learning, clustering and classification are two fundamental tasks. Traditionally, clustering is an unsupervised method, where no supervision about the data is available for learning; classification is a supervised task, where fully-labeled data are collected for training a classifier. In some scenarios, however, we may not...
The aerodynamic performance of an oscillating pitching and plunging foil operating in the energy harvesting mode is investigated. Experiments are conducted in a closed-loop recirculating wind tunnel at Reynolds numbers of 24,000 to 48,000, and reduced frequencies (k = fc/u) of 0.042 to 0.083. Foil kinematics are varied through the...
The immune system has been identified as a very sensitive target for the toxic effects of 2,3,7,S-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD). Exposure to TCDD has been shown to disrupt the generation of both cell-mediated and humoral T cell-dependent immunity in laboratory animals; however, the mechanism remains unknown. In this dissertation, the hypothesis is...
The marked increase in surface-to-volume ratio associated with microscale devices for hemodialysis leads to problems with hemocompatibility and blood flow distribution that are more challenging to manage than those encountered at the conventional scale. In this work, stable surface modifications with pendant polyethylene oxide (PEO) chains were produced on polycarbonate...
In weak supervision learning, label information can be provided at different levels of granularity. For example, in multi-instance multi-label learning, samples are organized into bags and labels for each class are provided at the bag level. For small datasets, this approach offers means of reducing the labeling efforts. However, in...
There is growing commercial interest in the use of multiagent systems in real world applications. Some examples include inventory management in warehouses, smart homes, planetary exploration, search and rescue, air-traffic management and autonomous transportation systems. However, multiagent coordination is an extremely challenging problem. First, information relevant for coordination is often...
The ubiquity of high quality video and proliferation of mobile devices has contributed to an unprecedented rise in video consumption. HTTP, in conjunction with adaptive streaming, has become the de facto mechanism for delivering the vast majority of video as it readily caters to heterogeneous networks and devices. This dissertation...
Electron transport and relaxation may be substantially different in low-dimensional
systems compared to that observed in bulk material. In the present work, Monte Carlo
models are used for the solution to the Boltzmann transport equation, with scattering
rates calculated quantum mechanically for superlattice and quantum wells. Carrier
relaxation following optical...
The ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) phenomenon serves as a sensitive probe of the effective internal fields in a magnetic material. FMR spectroscopy has consequently become a well-established technique, extensively employed in assessing material properties such as magnetic anisotropy, Landé g-factor, damping parameter, and the magnetoelastic constants of magnetic materials. Determining these...
Peroxiredoxin (Prx) enzymes catalyze the reduction of hydrogen peroxide, peroxynitrous acid, and organic peroxides, and are extremely efficient peroxidases, with k[subscript cat]/K[subscript M] on the order of 10⁷ - 10⁸ M⁻¹ s⁻¹. Besides their role in oxidative stress defense, evidence has accumulated that some eukaryotes, including humans, use Prxs as...
Skeletal muscles provide several functions, including, yet not limited to, voluntary body movement and locomotion, posture and body position, and soft tissue support. Skeletal muscles also play a role in metabolism, requiring energy to facilitate contraction. Each skeletal muscle serves a different purpose despite seeming to perform the same task....
Traditional approaches to streaming H.264 video over a network typically rely on a single method of transport (i.e., reliable or unreliable) and/or use static values for parameters that can have a significant negative impact on the perceptual quality of the received video. This dissertation presents a dynamic method for wireless...
Clostridium perfringens is a Gram-positive, anaerobic, spore-forming bacterium that can produce as many as 17 different toxins and are responsible to cause a wide array of gastrointestinal (GI) and histotoxic diseases in humans and animals. As individual strains produce a subset of these toxins, C. perfringens strains can be classified...
The objective of this dissertation is to enhance the monitoring of forest ecosystems through the utilization of remotely sensed data to address the exigencies posed by the Anthropocene. On a global scale, rising temperatures and fluctuating precipitation patterns have strained forests and produced shifts in natural disturbance regimes. Additionally, the...
An automated on-line ion exchange trace enrichment system has
been developed to improve the detection limits of flame atomic
absorption (AA) spectrophotometry in the determination of trace
metals in natural waters. The sample solution is passed through a
column of Chelex-100 chelating resin by a carrier buffer stream
delivered from...
Mechanical design is often based on formal methodologies such as Quality Function Deployment. Techniques to quantitatively account for attractability, sensory perception, and affective design have been successfully incorporated into these methods and are receiving growing acceptance across many industries. Although the adoption of these methods marks a large improvement for...
Assessing AI systems is difficult. Humans rely on AI systems in increasing ways, both visible and invisible, meaning a variety of stakeholders need a variety of assessment tools (e.g., a professional auditor, a developer, and an end user all have different needs). We posit that it is possible to provide...
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,...
Timber engineering is currently in the midst of a significant evolution due to the rise of mass timber products, like cross-laminated timber (CLT). Increasing numbers of structural engineers are facing the challenge of designing lateral-force-resisting systems (LFRS) for multistory CLT structures. LFRS solutions such as steel frames, concrete cores, or...
Many applications in computer graphics and geometry processing rely on the ability to
locally orient 2D and 3D entities on a surface, or inside a volume, such as the sinusoidal
kernels in Gabor noise, the color and geometry textures in pattern synthesis, and the
finite elements in remeshing. In these...
We studied the problem of resource allocation in large scale distributed applications such as Online Social Networks (OSN) and Cloud Computing. In such settings, resource allocation schemes need to efficient as well as adaptive to the time-varying environments. The abstract resource allocation problem concerns with how to optimally use resources...
The compressive behavior of continuous fiber composites is not as well
understood as their tensile behavior because research and industrial applications have until
recently focused on the latter. Furthermore, most theoretical and experimental studies on
the compression of composites have examined the case of unidirectional specimens with
fibers along the...
As the semiconductor industry works to integrate increasingly more "non-CMOS" devices onto CMOS ICs, compact model development has become an important step in the circuit/system verification tool flow. This research focuses on the two- and three-dimensional modeling of the physical phenomena that occur in nanoscale magnetic devices. This includes the...
To ensure the safety of the nation’s bridges, the National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS) require all bridges to undergo routine load rating analyses to assess their structural capacity. Accurate geometric information for each structure is necessary for load rating analyses. This information is typically ascertained from as-built plans. Still, when...