We developed a tool that migrates the database schema and the data from one database to another. As DBMSs store the same data by using slightly different data types, one cannot simply copy all the tables and data from the source DBMS to the target DBMS. When our tool, db2db,...
One of the motives of China's Economic Reform is to bring Western
management techniques to China to further economic development. The miraculous
success of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Shenzhen, Guangdong has attracted
many foreign investors who gladly bring their management expertise. This thesis looks
at small, medium and...
Previously, it has not been possible to obtain a concentrated ripe Bartlett pear essence. From studies of Bartlett pear aroma characteristics, it was found that methyl and ethyl decadienoates are the components contributing to the characteristic ripe Bartlett pear aroma. It was also found that only perfume-like aroma products, lacking...
This thesis presents a novel design for a rheometer style viscometer by implementing high temperature and inert atmospheric requirements on the device. The goals of this device are to measure the viscosity of high temperature molten salts, which are corrosive and extremely hydroscopic. It also aims to be able to...
Urban green space is associated with multiple physical and mental health outcomes. Several benefits of green space, such as stress reduction and attention restoration, are dependent on visual perception of green space exposures. However, traditional green space exposure measures do not capture street-level exposures. In this project, we apply deep...
County governments in the United States play important roles in the tax collection and public service provisions. Thus, a better understanding of the local government finances is closely related to the welfares of residents. In this dissertation, I provide two essays: in the first essay, I examine the fiscal impacts...
The production of barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) haploids by crossing with
H. bulbosum is a widely used tool in breeding and genetics. Certain barley
genotypes have low seed set in this interspecific cross, a phenomenon known
as partial incompatibility. Haploid production efficiency and gamete sampling
are important issues with the...
Machine learning has enabled significant advancements in diverse fields, yet, with a few exceptions, has had limited impact on computer architecture. Recent work, however, has begun to explore broader application to design, optimization, and simulation. Notably, machine-learning-based strategies often surpass prior state-of-the-art analytical, heuristic, and human-expert approaches. This thesis first...
Machine learning applied to computer architecture has rapidly transitioned from a theoretical novelty to being a driving force behind design, control, and simulation in practically all components. These machine-learning-based methodologies are further notable for their scalability to increasingly complex design challenges, which has allowed these methodologies to surpass the prior...
The Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly explored in varies of fields including designing and optimizing computer systems. Recent research, such as optimizing memory/cache prefetching by ML training or predicting traffic pattern in throughput processors, also exhibits a promising future of introducing ML into computer system design and optimization. Throughput...
Djang et al. [1998] introduced a new model of types for declarative visual programming languages (VPLs). Implicit static typing is used in their type model, in order to eliminate the programming mechanisms associated with type declarations, provide immediate visual feedback with respect to type errors and guarantee type safe programs....
The purpose of the present study was to determine consumer perceptions of apparel products in Internet shopping. According to the existing literature, four categories of perceptions play primary roles for apparel shopping consumer decisions: apparel appearance, apparel comfort, fabric characteristics, and apparel fit. The present study aimed to observe how...
The current study investigates gender differences in behavioral regulation in four societies: the United States, Taiwan, South Korea, and China. Directly assessed individual behavioral regulation(Head–Toes–Knees–Shoulders, HTKS), teacher-rated classroom behavioral regulation (Child Behavior Rating Scale, CBRS) and a battery of school readiness assessments (mathematics, vocabulary, and early literacy) were used with...
In recent years, RF (Radio Frequency) device fingerprinting using deep learning has emerged as a method of identifying devices solely by their RF transmissions. Conventional approaches to this type of device fingerprinting are not portable to different domains. That is, if a model for this purpose is trained on data...
This study sought to explore the relationship between spatial scale and canopy
chemistry through the use of remotely sensed videography data and total nitrogen content
of potato petioles. A range of broad band spectral indices were employed along with
standard red and green wavelengths to define an optimum scale or...
Traditional bus-based interconnects are simple and easy to implement, but the scalability is greatly limited. While router-based networks-on-chip (NoCs) offer superior scalability, they also incur significant power and area overhead due to complex router structures. In this thesis, a new class of on-chip networks, referred to as Routerless (RL) NoCs,...
Remote health monitoring tools have significant potential to revolutionize the current healthcare paradigm. Such tools could improve efficiencies in healthcare by alerting patients and doctors to abnormal health conditions in real time, shortening the time to diagnose and treat ailments. To meet these needs, we pursue the development of fabric-based...
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-...
Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a genetic inborn metabolic disorder which inhibits the functional production of the enzyme phenylalanine hydroxylase (PAH). It currently affects one in 15,000 Americans and is the most common amino acid metabolism error found in newborns. Individuals affected with PKU are incapable of metabolizing the amino acid, phenylalanine...
Personal health monitoring tools, a subset of point-of care-diagnostics, enable more frequent testing of chronic health conditions outside of a clinic setting and can inform personalized therapy or support telehealth diagnostic capabilities. While there is evidence that regular monitoring of chronic conditions can lead to better health outcomes and lower...
Paper-based assays for HIV diagnosis are cheap, portable, and require little to no skilled training, electricity, or expensive equipment to perform successfully. However, there is a need for tests with lower limits of detection (LOD) for diagnosing infection at the earliest stages. Effective labeling to increase signal-to-noise ratio is critical...
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...
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Dr. Elain Fu
Abstract
Monitoring phenylalanine (Phe) levels in the blood of individuals
Crowdsourcing is a popular paradigm to address the high demands for labeled data in big data deluge. It aims to produce accurate labels by effectively integrating noisy, non-expert labeling from crowdsourced workers (annotators). The machine learning community has been studying effective crowdsourcing methods for many years, and many models and...
We consider the problem of computing the cannonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) for large-scale dense tensors. This work is a combination of alternating least squares and fiber sampling. Data sparsity can be leveraged to handle large tensor CPD, but this route is not feasible for dense data. Inspired by stochastic optimization's...
The children's apparel industry is a fast-growing
industry in the United States. It is important to determine
what factors are considered as the most important when
parents purchase their pre-school children's clothing. To
gain a better understanding of parent-consumers' purchasing
behavior of pre-school children's apparel, this study
focused on parent-consumers'...
Fast fashion is a term used to describe trendy apparel created with a short cycle time and planned obsolescence. Consumers view such items as disposable due to poor garment quality and low price points. Although consumers are aware of the environmental impact of apparel consumption, the popularity of fast fashion...
Solar cells, also known as photovoltaic devices, are a class of renewable energy systems that can convert photons into electrons without the carbon dioxide emission. Short-wavelength, high-energy photons in the ultraviolet (UV) range can't be efficiently utilized by most solar cells because of the spectral mismatch. Luminescent downshifting is a...
The objectives of this project were to investigate the critical factors impacting the physicochemical and antibacterial properties of β-chitosan based films derived from jumbo squid (Dosidicus gigas) pens, and to evaluate the feasibility of improving water solubility of β-chitosan through Maillard reaction. The studies examined the effect of molecular weight...
This dissertation consists of three essays that evaluate various types of health care policies from the social welfare perspective. Chapter 1 introduces the main ideas and framework of this dissertation. Chapter 2 evaluates the new co-payment policy, enacted on July 15, 2005 under Taiwan’s National Health Insurance (NHI). We show...
A second-order nonlinear diffraction theory is developed for a
large diameter circular cylinder under the action of surface gravity
waves of finite amplitude in water of-finite depth. Boundary value
problems are derived by using a perturbation expansion and the
solutions for the diffracted waves are given in terms of Fredholm...
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men in the United States. There are an estimated 115,024 incident cases so far in 2017. Risk factors for prostate cancer include age, black race, and family history of prostate cancer. In addition, healthful diet and lifestyle may affect risk of prostate...
Extensive studies have been undertaken on the transient stability of large interconnected
power systems with flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices installed.
Varieties of control methodologies have been proposed to stabilize the postfault system
which would otherwise eventually lose stability without a proper control. Generally speaking,
regular transient stability is...
To better understand the extreme local amplification of tsunami, the experimental investigation on counter-propagating solitary wave collisions over a horizontal bottom was conducted using the optical measurement techniques: Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), and Laser Induced Fluoresce (LIF). Head-on collisions and oblique collisions of equal-amplitude as well as unequal-amplitude waves were...
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,...
A low pressure halide transport chemical vapor deposition (HTCVD) system to grow ZnS:Mn electroluminescent phosphors is characterized. Reactor parameters such as gas composition, gas flow rate, and source and substrate temperature are investigated. Crystal structure is investigated using x-ray diffraction, electron spin resonance, and transmission electron microscopy. Chemical characterization includes...
Simultaneous speech translation (SimulST) is widely useful in many cross-lingual communication scenarios, including multinational conferences and international traveling. Since text-based simultaneous machine translation (SimulMT) has achieved great success in recent years. The conventional cascaded approach for SimulST uses a pipeline of streaming ASR followed by simultaneous MT but suffers from...
Hibiscus and lilacs (Syringa spp.) are economically important nursery crops in the US that accounted for 4.5 million units ($30 million) and 2 million units ($20 million), respectively (USDA, 2016). To maintain and expand the market share of ornamental plants such as lilacs and Hibiscus, novel performance, floral ornamental value,...
Taiwan has undergone significant social change, particularly in the last forty years, due to economic and industrial growth. Career development intervention is increasingly urgent in helping students face upcoming challenges. This study investigates the implementation and perceived helpfulness of career development interventions in Taiwanese comprehensive high schools. A total of...
From the 1920's through 1951 several severe fires occurred in the predominantly conifer forest ecosystems of the northern Oregon Coast Range. Of the 211,151 ha. of mapped area, 57 percent was burned. The effects of frequent fires with high severity on forest ecosystems over time at the landscape level is...
The ever-increasing environmental degradation in China is leading people to pay more attention to environmental protection. Although Chinese government has made progress in dealing with environmental problems, the environment still gets worse. Thus, ordinary people began to take part in environmental issues, and make contributions to environmental protection. With increased...
A general analytical framework was established to investigate the scale-related variabilities in remote
sensing. The variabilities were studied first by investigating canopy structure, canopy interaction with
light, relation between spectral reflectance and plant phenological parameters. The variabilities
simulated by the plant model were compared with the actual spectral data acquired...
The harmonic problem in power systems is gaining more attention as incidences correlated with harmonics increase. Conventional passive filtering techniques for harmonic mitigation have inherent problems, and purely active filters have the disadvantages of higher costs and ratings. Hybrid active filters inherit the efficiency of passive filters and the improved...
Popular botanical dietary supplements marketed for management of menopausal symptoms, including hops (Humulus lupulus L.), red clover (Trifolium pratense) and licorice (Glycyrrhiza uralensis), were evaluated for their potential to alter CYP-mediated drug metabolism clinically and pre-clinically. Both hops and red clover had been reported to inhibit certain cytochrome P450 (CYP)...
Summer brooding often requires some form of air modification in
addition to maximizing ventilation rate to prevent animal heat stress
and possible death due to hyperthermia. A rockbed thermal storage
module was designed and constructed to provide sensibly cooled air
for a broiler space under summer brooding conditions. A mathematical...
Analysis, visualization, and design of vector fields on surfaces have a wide variety of major applications in both scientific visualization and computer graphics. On the one hand, analysis and visualization of vector fields provide critical insights to the flow data produced from simulation or experiments of various engineering processes. On...
PCR-based codon-specific random mutagenesis and site-specific mutagenesis were performed to construct a library of 18 amino acid changes at Arg276 in the conserved leucine-loop of the core catalytic domain of human uracil-DNA glycosylase (UNG). Each Arg276 mutant was then overproduced in E. coli cells and purified to apparent homogeneity by...
High spatiotemporal resolution satellite imagery is useful for natural resource management and monitoring for land-use and land-cover change and ecosystem dynamics. However, acquisitions from a single satellite can be limited, due to trade-offs in either spatial or temporal resolution. The spatial and temporal adaptive reflectance fusion model (STARFM) and the...
The government in Taiwan has recently instituted a comprehensive program to give fishermen the incentive to reduce fishing effort voluntarily. In this study, we conducted a survey to investigate fishermen's behavior and used the ANOVA analysis and the Probit model to identify factors that affect fishermen's willingness to accept the...