In this thesis, I created a short film to immerse and connect, or reconnect, Oregonians to Outdoor School and its impact on youth. Outdoor School (ODS) is an experiential outdoor education program for 5th and 6th graders, that recently became funded statewide in Oregon through voters’ approval of Measure 99....
T cells are one of the key cells in the immune system. Although they are not the first line of defense against a pathogen, their functions can greatly enhance the phagocytosis and destruction of pathogens as well as the development of antibody responses. Furthermore, even when responding T cells have...
The United States depends on the electrical grid infrastructure for nearly every facet of its operation. Understanding how inclement weather affects the reliability of the grid and what the U.S. is doing to ensure its resiliency will be a key step moving forward into the 21st century as global climate...
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 proportion of professional staff on higher education campuses has significantly grown in recent decades. Despite this growth, the racial makeup of this employee population still does not reflect the increasing diversity of students in higher education. While higher education institutions pronounce their commitments to developing diversity, equity, and inclusion...
In the problem of testing the median using a random sample from a
certain distribution, and if no other parametric family is suggested,
the t-test is known to be the optimal procedure when this distribution
is normal. If the sample appears to be non-normal, one has the choice
either to...
The recent increase in the number of wireless devices has been driven by the growing markets of smart homes and the Internet of Things (IoT). Consequently, current research has focused on efficient utilization of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum to accommodate such an increase in wireless bandwidth. Alternatively, latest free-space...
Traditionally, networking protocol designs have placed much emphasis on point-to-point reliability and efficiency. With the recent rise of mobile and multimedia applications, other considerations such as power consumption and/or Quality of Service (QoS) are becoming increasingly important factors in designing network protocols. As such, we present a new flexible framework...
In this work, we study network coding technique, its relation to random matrices, and their applications to communication systems. The dissertation consists of three main contributions. First, we propose efficient algorithms for data synchronization via a broadcast channel using random network coding. Second, we study the resiliency of network coding...
Recent advances in computing, communication, and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have made our world more interconnected and data-rich than ever with the proliferation of smart devices and sensors. As a result, we are increasingly dependent on electronic devices and sensors to automate away life’s mundane parts. For example, in business...
In this thesis, convergence of time inhomogeneous Markov chains is studied using an adiabatic approach. The adiabatic framework considers slowly changing systems and the adiabatic time quantifies the time required for the change such that the final state of the system is close to some equilibrium state. This approach is...
A distributed system is a network of multiple autonomous computational nodes designed primarily for performance scalability and robustness. The performance of a distributed system depends critically on how tasks and resources are distributed among the nodes. Thus, a main thrust in distributed system research is to design schemes for distributing...
Since free riders in P2P network reduce the system's performance, how to maintain and encourage the nodes' cooperation is an important aspect of P2P related research. In this thesis, a P2P system is modeled based on two games: stag hunt game and snowdrift game. To relate the model to the...
We present a theoretical free-space optical (FSO) transmitter that utilizes a dynamically steered and shaped laser beam to communicate with a randomly moving receiver adorned with a retroreflector. The transmitter tracks the receiver's position by repeatedly scanning the field of view (FOV), measuring reflections from the retroreflector, and estimating the...
We consider the problem of wireless spectrum management in cognitive wireless networks that maximizes the revenue for a spectrum operator. Specifically, we study the problem on how a wireless spectrum operator can optimally allocate its limited spectrum to various classes users/devices who pay differently for their spectrum per unit time....
Packet loss, delay and time-varying bandwidth are three main problems facing multimedia streaming applications over the Internet. Existing techniques such as Media-aware network protocol, network adaptive source and channel coding, etc. have been proposed to either overcome or alleviate these drawbacks of the Internet. But these techniques either need specialized...
Modern communication systems often have the ability to transmit signals on multiple communication mediums (e.g., RF, visible light) or interfaces (e.g., MAC layer protocols) at the same time. While each channel has different characteristics, a centralized controller with channel condition information will be able to schedule the resource allocated to...
We investigate a number of techniques for increasing throughput and quality of media applications over wireless networks. A typical media communication application such as video streaming imposes strict requirements on the delay and throughout of its packets, which unfortunately, cannot be guaranteed by the underlying wireless network due inherently to...
Network coding is a transmission paradigm that is known to achieve better network throughput in certain multicast topologies; however, the practicality of network coding has been questioned due to its high computational complexity. One of the drawbacks of using network coding is the long decoding times, this is mainly due...
As the price of broadband access service becomes more affordable, the number of homes with WiFi and public WiFi hotspots in the US are projected to increase significantly in the next few years. However, limited capacity of existing WiFi networks fail to provide adequate bandwidth for densely populated areas. Therefore,...