Tensor mathematics provides a powerful language to visualize and analyze physical phenomena. In the last three decades, tensors have been used in various application areas. The visualization and analysis of tensors fields have seen much advance, both in 2D and 3D. However, the physical interpretations of the topological analysis are...
In the eastern Qilian Shan, a flight of fluvial terraces developed along the Jinta River valley are deformed across the Nanying anticline. Four individual fluvial terraces are preserved at different elevations above the river, and higher terrace treads are draped by systematically thicker aeolian loess. Optically stimulated luminescence dating of...
The ability to create reproducible cryptographically secure keys from temporal environments (e.g., images) has the potential to be a contributor to effective cryptographic mechanisms. Due to the noisy nature of these environments, achieving this goal in a user friendly fashion is a very challenging task, especially since there exists a...
An important problem in computer graphics is to determine where contour lines and ridges appear in a surface constructed from a triangle mesh. In this presentation we will investigate a new answer to this problem – the horizon measure. The horizon measure determines the likelihood of contour lines to appear...
Back pain is the leading cause of disability worldwide, entailing a significant socioeconomic impact. A primary source of back pain can be attributed to intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration allowing nerve ingrowth, facet joint arthritis, disc bulging, and osteophyte formations that press on nearby nerve roots or the spinal cord. While...
In this dissertation, we propose Ideal Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (Ideal TPE), as a special case of format-preserving encryption, to balance image privacy and usability concerns in a cloud environment. We first introduce a concrete construction for Ideal TPE, that provably leaks nothing about the plaintext (unencrypted) image beyond its thumbnail. We...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var. lupulus) is a diploid, dioecious plant with an extensive history of cultivation and use in brewing, as a textile, and for its therapeutic properties. Hop is prized for its ability to produce a variety of aromatic and flavor compounds, as well as compounds with anti-microbial...
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....