Food waste (FW), brewery waste (BW), and fats, oils, and greases (FOG), are prevalent waste streams in municipalities across the country, particularly in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Anaerobic digestion (AD), the microbial-mediated transformation of organic waste into methane-rich biogas, offers a sustainable, energy-generating, waste management solution for these wastes. Anaerobic...
In recent years, non-renewable and non-biodegradable plastic packaging forms the majority of landfilled waste. These products, mainly made from Polyethylene Tetraphlatate (PET) and other polyolefins, have excellent durability and barrier properties, but take hundreds of years to degrade.
Much focus has been put on developing environmentally friendly alternatives to polyolefins...
Mountain search and rescue is a vital form of emergency response to assist people in austere environments (e.g., extreme terrain, poor weather). Volunteer mountain search and rescue teams in the United States have begun adopting consumer- grade unmanned aerial vehicles to assist a variety of tasks (e.g., search, resource delivery);...
Combustion emissions produced from burning real transportation fuels have many environmental impacts. However, detailed chemistry across multiple phases, time scales, and thermodynamic conditions make predicting combustion emissions challenging. Detailed modeling of the gas phase alone is prohibitively expensive, due to the large size and stiffness of the kinetic models. The...
The Northern Rubber Boa (Charina bottae) is a small, secretive boa native to the Pacific Northwest. Despite this being possibly the highest latitude boas and one of only two boas native to the continental U.S., it has received surprisingly little attention. Most of the research on the natural history of...
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...
Through a desk-top analysis, this research shows that South African women have gained and utilize specialized skills, behaviors, and adaptations through their daily activities which are useful when applied to water resource management. Further, South African women are shown to build and draw on social capital as a way to...
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...
The Goose Lake Basin, situated on the border of Oregon and California, USA, faces significant challenges from drought, wildfire, and other environmental stressors. This region hosts numerous endemic fish species such as the Goose Lake redband trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss newberri), Goose Lake lamprey (Entosphenus sp.), Goose Lake tui chub (Siphateles...
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...