Motion planning is a cornerstone of autonomous robots, enabling robots to safely and efficiently perform tasks such as package delivery, infrastructure inspection, and manipulation. However, as the field of robotics matures, robotic systems are being developed that (1) are challenging to analytically model, (2) require computationally expensive model-based controllers, and...
One of the pervasive problems arising in our modern, digital world surrounds data breaches where an adversary, through zero-day exploitations, phishing, or old-fashioned social engineering attacks, gains access to a service’s data stores. Our society increasingly relies on these cloud-based services for everything from our taxes to personal communication. As...
Falling Into Place: Relational Perspectives on the US Creative Residency Field is an Environmental Arts & Humanities thesis built around a research project called Creative Residencies and Expanded Senses of Community: Interviews With Artists & Residency Leaders. It’s an extended meditation on arts residencies via research, interviews, and experiential learning,...
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...
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....
The Ni-les’tun tidal wetland restoration project in the Coquille River Estuary in southern Oregon is one of the largest and most well-studied tidal restoration projects on the Pacific Northwest coast. However, ecological data on restoration effectiveness and ecosystem change following restoration are relatively rare for projects more than a few...
Latinx youth in the US experience stark inequities in sexual and reproductive health, including rates of unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. One promising way to reduce these inequities is to provide culturally centered, comprehensive sexual health education. However, such curricula are rarely offered to Latinx youth, in part because...