Microsatellites or simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are highthroughput sequence based DNA markers that have been exploited as tools for measuring genetic distance and diversity in evolutionary studies, protection of intellectual property, genetic resource conservation management, cultivar identification and molecular breeding of crop plants. We isolated and sequenced 1095 clones from...
The goal of Inductive Learning is to produce general rules from a set of seen examples, which can then be applied to other unseen examples. ID3 is an inductive learning algorithm that can be used for the classification task. The input to the algorithm is a set of tuples of...
The goal of this research was to determine if controlled atmosphere (CA) storage could be used to extend the market period of fresh Pacific Northwest blueberries and to evaluate the effects different storage atmospheres have on fruit quality. Furthermore, this research also investigated heat and mass transfer characteristics during cooling...
Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are the most common DNA polymorphisms in plant and animal genomes. SNPs were identified in the allele sequences of up to 12 sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.) genotypes for a genome-wide sample of 81 loci originally mapped using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) markers. The RFLP loci...
Linear programming is a recent development in the field of Mathematics having its origin in the past seventy-five years. The purpose of this study was to identify several methods for solving linear programming problems. The algorithm for each of the methods is described in detail along with an analysis of...
Medium chain fatty acids (MCFAs) are important industrial feedstocks for
soaps, detergents and surfactants. Interspecific lines derived from Cuphea lanceolata
and Cup hea viscosissima are being domesticated as a temperate source of MCFAs.
These species also serve as model organisms for understanding the biosynthesis of
MCFAs in seeds. Various markers...
Several problems relating to linear programming modeling have
been identified: (1) model formulation, validation and explanation
are difficult and time consuming; (2) models must be frequently
updated and debugged; (3) flexibility is needed to specify the model
schema for a class of problems as a group; and (4) significant
differences...
New parallel algorithms for solving the decomposed linear programs are developed. Direct parallelization of the sequential algorithm results in very limited performance improvement using multiple processors. By redesigning the algorithm, we achieved more than 2*P times performance improvement over the sequential algorithm, where P is the number of processors used...
In the United States, falls are the leading cause of fractures and accidental death in the elderly; 70% of these fractures are women. Hispanic women account for a large population in the US, however data on falls and fractures for these women is lacking. The purpose of this systematic review...
Desktop widget engines have emerged as an alternative for completing simple tasks without the need for a full-blown application or constant user interaction. Widgets can simply display data in a compact and visually appealing manner (such as stock tickers, weather forecasts, and news notifications), or go so far as to...
Alteration of natural areas in attempts to support increasing human populations has been a crucial yet less publicized contributor to the fall of many of the world's greatest civilizations, since healthy ecosystems can help maintain stable societies and economies. Given this unhappy fact and the ancient relationship between people and...
Parallel solutions for two classes of linear programs are
presented. First we parallelized the two-phase revised simplex
algorithm and showed that it is possible to get linear improvement in
performance. The simplex algorithm is the best known algorithm for
solving linear programs, and we claim our result is the best...
Moisture loss from fresh fruits results in lost revenue to producers, storage/packing companies, distributors, and increased prices for the consumer. Improved methods of storage and handling are necessary to help prevent moisture loss and retard spoilage. A literature review was conducted to improve knowledge on past and current studies involving...
Variability in circuit performance due to process defects is a major concern in integrated circuit (IC) fabrication. Advanced IC manufacturing processes employ Chemical-Mechanical Polishing (CMP) for planarization of oxide and metal layers. CMP defects result in variations in the oxide and metal topographical profile. To reduce these topographical variations, electrically...
The development of amorphous metal alloys with high glass forming ability allows the fabrication of amorphous samples with thickness greater than 1mm, known as bulk metallic glasses(BMGs). Outstanding mechanical properties and ease in processing due to low melting points, low solidification shrinkage and higher supercooled liquid region make BMG a...
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...
With increasing transistor operating frequencies, interconnects and passive devices are becoming performance limiters in integrated circuit (IC) designs. To combat this, the interconnect layers above the active silicon are trending toward low-κ dielectrics and Cu metallization. The use of these new materials has popularized chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) to planarize...
Several methods for estimation of the potential
shelf-life of pasteurized fluid milk products were evaluated
for their efficacy in this investigation. These methods
were evaluated and compared to sensory, biochemical and
bacteriological indices through a series of experiments
conducted on different brands of commercially pasteurized
fluid milk. The methods evaluated...
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic human pathogen that infects immunocompromised individuals such as those suffering from burns or the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis. This organism utilizes a cell-cell communication mechanism known as quorum sensing (QS) to coordinate virulence gene expression and biofilm formation. It has three interconnected QS systems, namely...
Although machine learning systems are often effective in real-world applications, there are situations in which they can be even better when provided with some degree of end user feedback. This is especially true when the machine learning system needs to customize itself to the end user's preferences, such as in...
Most of today’s Internet of Things (IoT) applications assume that data will be moved offdevices into centralized cloud platforms. While existing IoT systems leverage cloud-based analytics for meaningful data reasoning, the assumption that data should always be moved off the devices is problematic. The amount of data to be moved...
Frailty is a clinical syndrome characterized by decreased resilience to stressors, resulting from dysregulation across multiple physiological systems. Frailty is prevalent in elders and is associated with a wide range of adverse outcomes including death, disability, hip fracture, and falls. In the absence of a gold standard, there is a...