Contemporary spiritual tourism impacts many stakeholders including environmental ecosystems, tourists, tourist operators, and community members. Increasingly, in the era of the Anthropocene, there is a need for ethical guidance to inform spiritual tourism so as to mitigate social injustice and environmental degradation. This research project investigates the potential for the...
Yeast culture supplementation has been used to improve the health and performance of dairy cows for the last 25 years. To evaluate the effect of a Saccharomyces cerevisiae fermentation product (Diamond V Original XP™) on the health and production of peripartal Holstein cows, two research studies were conducted.
The first...
Efficient time-series analysis can impact multiple application domains such as motif discovery in gene analysis or music data, extracting spectro-temporal patterns in acoustic scene analysis, or annotating and classifying electrical bio-signals (such as ECG, EEG, and EMG) for medical applications.
Time-series analysis involves a variety of tasks.
To predict future...
Microbial ecology has been transformed by metagenomics, the study of the genetic in-formation in entire communities of organisms. In the following we develop metagenomic tools arising from the classic Wasserstein metric as applied to questions regarding the diversity between microbial communities. We provide a novel proof of the characteriza-tion of...
Learning to recognize objects is a fundamental and essential step in human perception and understanding of the world. Accordingly, research of object discovery across diverse modalities plays a pivotal role in the context of computer vision. This field not only contributes significantly to enhancing our understanding of visual information but...
This thesis consists of two major components. The first part is concerned with video object instance segmentation (VOS), which is the task of assigning per-pixel labels perframe of a video sequence to indicate foreground object instance membership, given the first frame ground truth mask. VOS has myriad applications, from video...
Air traffic flow management over the U.S. airpsace is a difficult problem. Current management approaches lead to hundreds of thousands of hours of delay, costing billions of dollars annually. Weather and airport conditions may instigate this delay, but routing decisions balancing delay with congestion contribute significantly to the propagation of...
In this report, two studies are presented that utilize computations to predict and elucidate the reaction mechanisms of two different copper catalyzed reactions. Each study provides insight into the various chemical transformations, as well as the how and why behind regioselectivity and isotopic selectivity. The importance of this research is...
Enabled by a rich ecosystem of Machine Learning (ML) libraries, programming using learned models, i.e., Software-2.0, has gained substantial adoption. However, we do not know what challenges developers encounter when they use ML libraries. With this knowledge gap, researchers miss opportunities to contribute to new research directions, tool builders do...