Plasma etching of polymers is an important process in the fabrication of
integrated circuits, printed circuit boards and other emerging technologies. High rates
can be obtained using oxygen diluted with a fluorine-containing gas, most commonly
CF₄. In this thesis, two less studied fluorinated gases, NF₃ and SF₆ are investigated.
Polyphenylene...
In the future, Earth will be warmer, precipitation events will be more extreme, global mean sea level will rise, and many arid and semiarid regions will be drier. Human modifications of landscapes will also occur at an accelerated rate as developed areas increase in size and population density. We now...
Top-performing approaches to embodied AI tasks like point-goal navigation often rely on training agents via reinforcement learning over tens of millions (or even billions) of experiential steps – learning neural agents that map directly from visual observations to actions. In this work, we question whether these extreme training durations are...
Labeling videos is costly, time-consuming and tedious. These costs can escalate in applications such as medical diagnosis or autonomous driving where we need domain expertise for annotation. Few-shot action recognition aims to solve this problem by annotation-efficient learning mechanisms.
This thesis presents MetaUVFS as the first Unsupervised Meta-learning algorithm for...
This research analyzes the relations of ethnic refugee communities and particularly their
businesses to gentrification and community vitality in a neighborhood in Portland,
Oregon. The data indicates that gentrification is not a linear process of displacement of
African Americans by Whites seeking affordable housing and new frontiers, but rather is...
Landslides are a natural hazard that have major societal, economic, and
environmental impacts. The understanding of landslides begins with the observation that
they are a spatial problem. Spatial relationships have historically been explored with
maps, and landslides are no different. Such maps range in focus from inventory maps,
which identify...
Data centers (DCs) have been witnessing unprecedented growth in size, number and complexity in recent years. They consist of tens of thousands of servers interconnected by fast network switches, hosting and enabling numerous applications with various traffic characteristics and requirements. As a result, DC networks have been presented with several...
Debris flows have typically been viewed as two-phase mixtures of sediment and water, but in forested mountain landscapes, wood can represent a sizable fraction of total flow volume. The effects of this third phase on flow behavior are poorly understood. To evaluate whether wood can have a significant effect on...
Pleistocene drainage basin integration led to progressive excavation of
Tertiary-Quaternary sedimentary basins along the Yellow River in the northeastern Tibetan
Plateau. Cosmogenic burial dating of ancestral river deposits and basin fill from two key
watershed divides confirms a fluvial connection between basins at 0.5–1.2 Ma, prior to excavation
by the...