Carbonates constitute Earth's largest carbon (C) reservoir, with most shallow marine deposition occurring on the low-latitude carbonate platforms covering ~800,000 km2. The Yucatán Platform situated between the Western Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico basins, is one of the largest present-day carbonate platforms. As with post-Paleozoic carbonates generally, it is readily...
Speech recognition in complex acoustic environments is dependent on myriad bottom-up (i.e., peripheral) and top-down (i.e., central) processes. While bottom-up processes remain fairly stable during childhood, the development of top-down processes persists into young adulthood. The immaturity of top-down processes places younger children at considerable risk for poorer speech recognition...
Optimization via simulation (OvS) is the practice of minimizing or maximizing the expected value of the output of a stochastic simulation model with respect to controllable decision variables. Stochastic simulation is a standard tool within operations research and is often required to model complex systems subject to uncertainty where it...
Proper partitioning of mitochondria and mtDNA is critical for cellular health. Investigations into mitochondrial inheritance, specifically how mtDNA inheritance is coupled with the inheritance mitochondrial compartment, are still in the early stages. We use budding yeast as a model polarized cell system to study a mitochondrial Myo2-adaptor protein, Mmr1, in...
The study and design of machines that are able to analyze the auditory scene and organize sound into parts that are perceptually meaningful to humans is referred to as machine hearing. Such machines are expected to distinguish between different sound categories (e.g., speech, music, background noise), focus on a sound...
Intelligence in humans is largely characterized by the ability to encode information into compressible representations to facilitate efficient communication for collaboration and learning. The goal of this thesis is to enable robots to both learn and act on compressible representations in real-time. I show how active exploration with respect to...
While optimization has received much attention in the machine learning community, most of them consider unconstrained supervised learning models such as neural networks and support vector machine. In this dissertation, we introduce a new class of optimization problems called scale invariant problems that include interesting unsupervised learning models such as...
This thesis focuses on applications of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for three aspects of sequential classification. In the first chapter, a novel method to generate synthetic minority data generation to improve imbalanced classification is discussed. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been used in many different applications to generate realistic synthetic...
Two major areas of research in the field of manufacturing are miniaturization and 3D printing. The trend towards miniaturization stems from the desire and need for additional functionality and improved performance for products with ever-smaller footprints. Miniaturization opens manufacturing to new applications such as tissue engineering and surface texturing. Meanwhile,...
Social factors are a major contributor to deaths in the US. The literature suggests that socioeconomic status and other social and environmental factors influence an individual’s mortality. These factors encompass six domains that comprise factors such as poverty, unemployment, poor access to healthy food, limited access to health care, limited...