Grassland recovery from degradation is increasingly occurring worldwide. Diverse managements have been considered as effective ways to restore degraded grassland, but it remains unclear how semi-arid grasslands respond to long-term grazing exclusion and fenced mowing. Here, a study was conducted under open grazing, grazing exclusion and fenced mowing in a...
The motivation for undertaking this research was to increase the understanding of processing colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals and thin films metallic glasses to enable their wider application in future devices. This research covered two unique materials, lead selenide (PbSe) nanocrystals and thin film metallic glass alloy of zirconium copper aluminum nickel...
Existing pressure sensitive adhesives (PSAs) are mostly based on petrochemicals. In this study, a novel PSA based on a renewable material, methyl oleate, was prepared and characterized. Methyl oleate was first epoxidized to form epoxidized methyl oleate that was subsequently hydrolyzed and acidified to form epoxidized oleic acid (EOA) which...
Most of existing commercial unsaturated polyester (UPE) resins are typically composed of a UPE and a high amount of highly volatile, flammable, and toxic styrene. The emission of hazardous styrene in the handling of the UPE resins and the preparation and use of fiber-reinforced UPE composites poses severe hazards to...
Deep learning is now being utilized widely in applications where sensitive data is being used for model training, for example, in health care. In this scenario, any data leakage will cause privacy concerns to whose data records are used to train the model. An attacker can actively cause privacy leakage...
Bimetallic catalysis is a promising way to tune the catalytic properties of heterogeneous catalysts. In particular, bimetallic catalysts are extensively used to enhance the selectivity of monometallic catalysts in a variety of contexts, from oxidation catalysis to oxygenate coupling. In this work, we investigate PdxCuy/SiO2 and PdxAgy/SiO2 catalysts in the...
The outsourcing of data storage and related infrastructure to third-party services in the cloud is a trend that has gained considerable momentum in the last decade due to the savings it affords companies in both capital and operational costs. Although encryption can alleviate some of the privacy concerns associated with...
A secret sharing scheme allows a dealer to distribute a secret with a set of parties, such that only a certain subset of parties can collaborate and learn the shared secret. Traditional secret sharing schemes have been used as building blocks in various subdomains of cryptography. Recently, two new extensions...
Deep learning is becoming the latest trend in sensitive applications, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance. As these new applications emerge, adversaries are circumventing them.
Further, there have been concerns about the possibility of bias and discrimination in predictive applications.
In order to address these issues, we propose an...