Global annual average temperatures are rising, creating extreme heat events or heatwaves that are increasing in frequency, length, and severity. The world will endure more of these events as climate change worsens and heat-related mortality and morbidity will increase due to warming conditions. At the center of heatwaves are urban...
In 2021, Oregon’s legislature passed House Bill 2021 with relative ease. House Bill 2021 is a mandate for the state’s two largest utilities to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation on a decreasing scale, reaching 100% below baseline levels by 2040. This ambitious piece of legislation, meant to reduce the...
Using summertime housing transactions data of 3,309 parcels from multiple years in Eugene-Springfield, OR, we present a hedonic price model to estimate the influence of the urban heat island (UHI) effect on housing prices in this metropolitan area. By taking advantage of the inherent random nature of summertime weather observations,...
The role of science in marine policy, and environmental policy in general, is a debated topic. Currently, there is an increasing desire for transparent and participatory democracy that involves more input from local residents and other non-experts. These demands often conflict with the increasing complexity of problems and the real...
This dissertation explores and analyzes the performance of several Bayesian anytime inference algorithms for dynamic influence diagrams. These algorithms are compared on the On-Line Maintenance Agent testbed, a software artifact permitting comparison of dynamic reasoning algorithms used by an agent on a variety of simulated maintenance and monitoring tasks. Analysis...
Knowledge workers are struggling in the information flood. There is a growing interest in intelligent desktop environments that help knowledge workers organize their daily life. Intelligent desktop environments allow the desktop user to define a set of “activities” that characterize the user’s desktop work. These environments then attempt to identify...
This research explores the hypothesis that methods from decision theory and machine learning can be combined to provide practical solutions to current manufacturing control problems. This hypothesis is explored by developing an integrated approach to solving one manufacturing problem - the optimization of die-level functional test.
An integrated circuit (IC)...
The regulation of monooxygenase enzymes has been demonstrated in bacteria that grow on methane and long chain-length alkanes (>C10). Less is known about monooxygenase regulation in short chain alkane oxidizing bacteria that grow on intermediate chain-length alkanes C2-C10. This dissertation focuses on the regulation of butane monooxygenase (BMO) expression and...