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INTERPRETABLE MACHINE VISION INTELLIGENCE METHODS FOR BIOPHARMACEUTICAL AND AGRICULTURAL MANUFACTURING AUTOMATION
No full textWithin the context of mission critical applications, there is growing concern in the trustworthiness and reliability of Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven automation techniques. In fact, the manufacturing sector is missing adaptable and interpretable AI driven systems that work synergistically with human intelligence and cognition. Thus, the development of such systems will be explored in both biopharmaceutical and seafood industries. (Biopharmaceutical Industry) As of 2016, 5 of the top 10 drugs were manufactured inside of a bioreactor and amounted to 75 billion dollars in annual sales. This market share has only grown since, but there are several upstream/downstream quality issues that stem from the current lack of a continuous control system. The development of a contactless and interpretable sensor to replace current invasive probes will enable adaptive multiplex sensing of critical material attributes (CMAs) and critical product attributes (CPAs) alike for precise real-time control of bioreactor environment to suit even the most delicate cells. On the other hand, (Seafood Industry) robots that can replicate human hand movements with surgical precision have the potential to alleviate manufacturing labor shortages, enhance rehabilitation technologies, and revolutionize procedures in operating rooms. Lump meat extraction from Maryland Blue Crabs represents a class of dexterous human tasks that are difficult to simulate, slow down or tele-operate . Thus, crab picking may be used as an excellent test bed for the development of a precise and interpretable surgical trajectory automation system. Both projects lead to the development of interpretable automation methods for both cell bioprocess cultivation and crab picking surgical motions. Unlike opaque machine learning models, interpretable models foster a trusting and collaborative relationship between the human practitioner and AI enabled machine. So, the developed methods can be extended to other high-stake tasks that directly impact human health and cost of living
Advancing Visual Assets: Taming Deep Priors for Editing and Enhancement
No full textVisual data, including images and videos, are valuable assets with broad commercial, artistic, and personal significance. As digital content consumption continues to grow, there is an increasing demand for methods that can enhance visual quality, improve adaptability across different formats, and enable efficient content editing. However, achieving these enhancements manually is both labor-intensive and technically challenging. Recent advances in deep learning have introduced powerful generative models (e.g., GANs, diffusion models) and human-aligned visual representations (e.g., VGG, DINO-v2) that offer promising capabilities for improving visual assets. Yet, directly applying these models to real-world editing and enhancement tasks often introduces artifacts and inconsistencies, such as temporal flickering in videos, limited generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and misalignment between high-level priors and low-level structures. This thesis explores strategies to “tame” these deep priors, converting their potential into more controllable and reliable tools for visual asset enhancement.
This dissertation presents four key contributions in editing and enhancement, each demonstrating how to adapt deep priors for improving visual content usability, quality, and consistency. First, we develop VideoGigaGAN, a large-scale video super-resolution model that extends an image super-resolution model to video, enhancing both spatial resolution and temporal coherence.
Second, we introduce a video editing framework that enforces temporal consistency by optimizing latent codes and the generator itself, reducing flickering artifacts in edited videos.
Third, we propose a method to improve generative priors for OOD data using a volumetric decomposition approach, enabling high-fidelity image reconstructions while maintaining editability.
Finally, we explore image retargeting by leveraging perceptual priors to intelligently adapt content to different aspect ratios without compromising visual coherence.
By addressing these challenges, this thesis contributes to the broader goal of harnessing deep priors for real-world visual asset enhancement. The proposed approaches demonstrate that by adapting and refining generative priors, we can develop more reliable, high-quality, and scalable solutions for visual editing tasks. These contributions have potential applications in media production, content creation, digital art, and real-time video processing, paving the way for future research in deep learning-driven visual content adaptation
ESSAYS ON SHARING ECONOMY AND REGULATION
No full textThe rapid expansion of the sharing economy has created both economic opportunities and regulatory challenges. As policymakers increasingly implement regulations to balance the interests of diverse stakeholders, understanding the outcome of regulatory enforcement becomes crucial. This dissertation examines the efficacy and efficiency of short-term rental regulations through three complementary studies. The first chapter investigates how short-term rental regulations affect housing markets. The second chapter analyzes the impact of Chicago’s short-term rental ordinance on individual hosts, professional hosts, local residents, and hotels. The third chapter explores the distributional impact of New York City’s stringent short-term rental regulations on different stakeholders.
Chapter 1. Equilibrium Effect of Short-term Rental Regulations on the Housing MarketThe growth of the short-term rental (STR) market has ignited policy debates about regulating STR. Despite the growing trend for enforcing STR regulations, it remains unclear whether these STR regulations, with the intention to address the affordable housing crisis, achieve their goals. This chapter examines the effectiveness of STR regulations in addressing rental housing affordability concerns and offers policy recommendations in terms of effective STR policies that can encourage the conversion from the STR market back to the long-term rental market. By comparing cities with and without STR regulations, I find that property owners frequently convert their listings to mid-term rentals (MTR) rather than returning properties to the LTR market after the regulation enforcement. Through difference-in-differences analyses across cities and within Chicago’s neighborhoods, I find that while STR regulations produce modest reductions in rental prices for some property types, their overall impact on housing affordability remains limited. To evaluate alternative regulatory approaches, I develop a structural model of property allocation decisions across the LTR, STR, and MTR markets. Counterfactual simulations reveal that tax- based interventions targeting only STR generate substantial MTR conversions, undermining the effectiveness of STR policies. In contrast, imposing fixed fees on all temporary rentals that affect both STR and MTR can increase LTR supply more efficiently.
Chapter 2. The Effects of Short-Term Rental Regulation: Insights from Chicago (with Ginger Jin and Liad Wagman)We provide an in-depth study of short-term rental (STR) regulation in Chicago. While many municipalities choose between outright bans or laissez-faire strategies concerning STR activities, Chicago pioneered a middle-ground ordinance, enabling the market to exist with limitations and registrations, and imposing a new tax. We show that compared to three control cities, the number of active Airbnb listings in Chicago declined 16.4% in the two years after the ordinance, but this effect is only significant after the city began receiving detailed data feeds from STR platforms. We further demonstrate (i) localized reductions in burglaries near buildings that prohibit STR listings as part of a new capability of the ordinance, (ii) Airbnb revenues declined more in zip codes with above-median hotel revenues, and (iii) Chicago’s middle ground approach generated different and nuanced effects on different STR stakeholders, including the city itself in terms of its STR tax revenues.
Chapter 3. Heterogeneous Impact of New York City Local Law 18, (with Ginger Jin and Liad Wagman)Effective September 2023, New York City’s Short-Term Rental Registration Law, also known as Local Law 18 (LL18), aims to discourage short-term rental (STR) listings and in- crease the supply of long-term rentals (LTR) for local residents. This chapter analyzes the impact of LL18 on both STR hosts and the LTR market. Our preliminary results indicate that the STR regulation has disproportionally affected the house-sharing market in low-income regions. After LL18, Airbnb listings in census tracts with below-median household income are 6.9% less likely to remain as active STR listings than those in above-median-income census tracts. However, listings in lower-income communities are more likely to transit from STR to mid-term rentals (MTR) after the law is enforced. These findings suggest that both proponents and critics of NYC STR regulation may have overstated certain impacts of LL18 while overlooking MTR as an alternative to simultaneously skirt LL18 and stay out of the LTR market. While the anticipated benefits for housing affordability have not been observed in the short term, comprehensive economic consequences for different stakeholders require further analysis
ASSESING THE ASSOCIATION OF NUTRITION EDUCATION ON FOOD SECURITY, DIETARY DIVERSITY, AND DIET QUALITY IN HOUSEHOLDS WITH LOW-INCOME
No full textFood insecurity continues to disproportionately affect households with low-income, compromising dietary quality and long-term health. The Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program (EFNEP) seeks to address these disparities through culturally tailored, evidence-based nutrition education. This quasi-experimental longitudinal study assessed the impact of nutrition education delivered through EFNEP on dietary diversity, diet quality, and food security among low-income adults in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Participants (n=86) were divided into control (n=43) and intervention groups (n=43). The intervention group received EFNEP’s structured curriculum focused on dietary behaviors, food resource management, and nutrition education. Data were collected at baseline, post (6-week exit), and 6-month follow-up using 24-hour dietary recalls and EFNEP Adult Behavior Questionnaires. Dietary quality was assessed using the Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2015), and dietary diversity was evaluated via the Minimum Dietary Diversity Score for Women (MDD-W), adapted for all participants.
Results indicated that the intervention group showed improvements across all outcome domains, including increased HEI and MDD-W scores, enhanced food security, and better food resource management and preparation skills. These gains were sustained at the 6-month follow-up, suggesting benefits of nutrition education participation. In contrast, the control group demonstrated either stagnation or decline in key metrics.
This study provides evidence that community-based nutrition education programs like EFNEP can lead to sustained improvements in dietary practices and food security among underserved populations. The findings support expanding and integrating such programs into broader public health strategies to promote nutritional equity and long-term health outcomes
Near-Field Magnetic Microwave Microscope Studies of Vortex Dynamics in Superconductors
No full textSuperconductors host vortices when exposed to a magnetic field exceeding their first critical field . Understanding the dynamics of vortices is crucial for optimizing the performance of various applications of superconductors, including superconducting radio-frequency (SRF) cavities and superconducting digital and quantum circuits. In this thesis, a near-field magnetic microwave microscope is employed to locally stimulate superconductors with an intense rf magnetic field and measure the local nonlinear microwave response. Under the microscope probe, two distinct vortex-related phenomena are observed: the nucleation of rf vortices and the motion of pre-existing trapped vortices. To interpret the measured response, toy models of superconductors with local defects are introduced and analyzed using Time-Dependent Ginzburg-Landau (TDGL) simulations of probe/sample interactions.
This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first part investigates the nucleation of single/few rf vortices associated with surface defects by studying the third-harmonic response produced by the superconductor under intense stimulus at frequency . Seven Nb/Cu films, grown under different deposition conditions by collaborators at CERN, are measured. Their surface defect properties related to rf vortex nucleation are compared. The second part explores the dynamics of trapped vortices under oscillating magnetic fields by studying the second-harmonic response . A superconducting Nb film with an antidot flux pinning array is measured. The results show that this measurement technique provides access to vortex dynamics at the micron scale, including depinning events of a small number of trapped vortices and spatially-resolved pinning properties. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of microwave superconductivity and vortex-induced nonlinearities, shedding light on the fundamental interactions between rf fields, magnetic vortices, and defects in superconductors. Furthermore, they offer new insights into the design and optimization of superconducting devices for microwave applications
EXPLORING CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES RELATED TO PLANT-BASED DIETARY PATTERNS IN COMMUNITY-DWELLING OLDER ADULTS WITH HYPERTENSION
No full textSome of the most pressing global crises faced by society are the rise in chronic diseases and climate change. Plant-based diets (PBDs) have become an important part of the sustainability discussion affecting all four 4 domains: nutrition and health, environment, economics, and society. Due to this, it has been offered as one possible solution to the burden of noncommunicable diseases, environmental concerns, and potential economic stressors. Additionally, the growing older adult population presents further challenges. Although research on PBDs and health has grown in recent decades, studies on older adults, particularly those with chronic conditions, remain scarce despite the potential impact.
Broadly, this research focuses on PBDs in hypertensive older adults as a substudy under the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension-Plus (DASH-Plus) initiative. The DASH-Plus was developed in partnership with the University of Maryland Extension (UME) system and is a community-based program to help hypertensive, community-dwelling, older adults manage their blood pressure (BP). Using a quasi-experimental design, eight intervention senior centers and eight corresponding control sites were recruited in Maryland and participated in the study. Data was collected at three time points: baseline (week 0), intermediate (week 9), and final (week 24) at participating sites. A total of 212 participants were enrolled in the study.
First, baseline data from the DASH-Plus study was used to examine psychosocial factors and demographic characteristics associated with a healthy PBD consumption among hypertensive older adults (≥60 y), and factors that potentially influence the likelihood of adopting a plant-based dietary pattern in the future were identified. This was followed by assessing readiness to consume a PBD. Using longitudinal data collected at three time points, we evaluated the DASH-Plus program’s impact on participants’ readiness levels and associated psychosocial factors. We focused particularly on perceived barriers and benefits, as these factors serve as critical variables affecting an individual’s decisional balance within the Transtheoretical model (TTM) and represent key constructs in the Health Belief Model (HBM) when discussing dietary behavior changes. In addition, specific perceived benefits and barriers pertaining to this population were identified. Finally, the changes in consumption of healthy plant-based foods were evaluated to assess the effectiveness of the DASH-Plus program in shifting older adults toward a healthy PBD.
Through these investigations, our cross-sectional analysis of baseline data revealed that older adults who lived with family members (spouse/partner and/or children), were in a higher stage of change (action/maintenance stages) to consume a PBD, had fewer perceived barriers, maintained better hypertensive, self-care practices (medication adherence, low-salt diet, physical activity, and smoking), and had fewer chronic conditions were more likely to consume a PBD. When readiness to consume a PBD was more closely examined to understand behavior changes resulting from the DASH-Plus program, perceived barriers and perceived benefits to consuming a PBD were found to be key determinants. The DASH-Plus program effectively elevated PBD readiness at 9 weeks, but these effects diminished at 24 weeks. Similarly, when changes in PBD intake were examined, there were significant increases in plant-based food consumption at 9 weeks, but these were also not sustained at 24 weeks. Increased self-care, higher education levels, lower number of medical conditions, and less PBD barriers were found to be key predictors influencing PBD consumption.
While the DASH-Plus program effectively increased both PBD readiness and consumption in the short term, these effects declined by the 24-week follow-up. The intervention demonstrated the potential to influence dietary shifts toward more plant-based eating patterns among older adults; however, these findings underscore the need for further research to explore strategies for maintaining these changes over the long term. Possible strategies could involve increasing the duration of the intervention, the frequency of sessions, total didactic hours, adding booster sessions, and other supportive measures. Future studies should also consider targeting key factors related to PBD adoption, including reducing perceived barriers, providing education tailored to various educational levels, and offering additional social support for older adults living alone or with non-family members. These approaches may help older adults with chronic diseases successfully incorporate more healthy plant-based foods into their diets
Monthly and Annual Water Budgets of Interstate Watersheds in the Delmarva Peninsula
No full textWith climate change expected to change the hydrosphere globally, it is becoming more important for communities to manage water supplies. Water budgets can help these communities by keeping track of the inputs and outputs of water in a watershed. This study uses two datasets that combine models and observations to develop monthly and annual water budgets for watersheds of interstate Chesapeake Bay tributaries in the Delmarva Peninsula. CONUS404 is a novel dataset that reports hydroclimatic variables on a fine spatiotemporal resolution, while TerraClimate is a similar modeled dataset but is less comprehensive in its modeling and less refined in its temporal resolution. Analysis of these water budgets and their derived datasets leads to several findings. The modeled datasets are consistent with the general trends in stream gage discharge data but do not replicate the observed data recorded at the gages. The monthly and annual water budgets show that the water budget is balanced using TerraClimate data, but there is a nearly systematic bias for water budgets using CONUS404. Mann-Kendall testing of annual precipitation time series lends credence to an increasing trend in TerraClimate precipitation across all watersheds, indicating the presence of nonstationarities. However, testing of CONUS404 precipitation is less conclusive. Water years were split into terciles—dry years, average years, and wet years—based on precipitation, and analysis of water budget components based on these terciles reveals an inverse relationship between the distribution of water leaving the watershed as evapotranspiration and runoff. In dry years, a larger fraction of the incoming precipitation goes towards evapotranspiration as outflow, but in wet years, the fraction going to evapotranspiration decreases while the fraction going to runoff increases. Water storage is depleted in dry years, while wet years tend to experience an increase in storage. Further, Markov chain analysis was conducted on the annual precipitation terciles, revealing a slight tendency in TerraClimate terciles to be followed by their respective types, though results are less certain for CONUS404. Water years were also split into terciles based on the change in water storage, ΔS. Markov chain analysis of these terciles shows that years experiencing a high depletion of water storage are generally followed by a year with high replenishment of water storage and vice versa. Both reanalysis datasets may not be suitable for water budget studies in the Delmarva Peninsula due to the region’s unique geology. The relatively simple subsurface models used in both TerraClimate and CONUS404 likely fail to replicate the peninsula’s hydrogeology
ASSESSING PERSONALITY, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY, AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGY RELATIONSHIPS: A WITHIN-SUBJECTS META-ANALYTIC APPROACH
No full textBackground. Emerging transdiagnostic frameworks now provide compelling classifications to characterize the core structure of latent systems underlying both psychopathology and neurophysiology measures indexing cognitive-affective systems. For psychopathology, a primary transdiagnostic model is the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP), which describes a broad internalizing factor (INT; characterizing comorbidity between fear and distress disorders), externalizing factor (EXT; aggression, disinhibition, and substance use), and general psychopathology factor (p-factor; indexing the shared variance between INT and EXT). To frame cognitive domains, the proposed work will utilize the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), a transdiagnostic framework for indexing brain systems underlying cognitive-affective processing. A specific focus will be on positive valence (PV), negative valence (NV), and cognitive processes (COG) domains by utilizing the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and neurobiological EEG measures. Based on previous work in the lab and field, we expect all measures of psychopathology to relate similarly to the RDoC measures: increased NV, and decreased COG and PV. The project aimed to review this relationship in more traditional self-report measure only analyses, as well as through a novel within-subjects meta-analytic approach to, importantly, incorporate neural markers as an objective measure beyond the self-report measures. Methods. The project will utilize an archival dataset. The participants completed a self-report questionnaire battery and underwent a multi-task protocol of cognitive-affective tasks while EEG data was collected. Regression analyses were conducted with the collected self-report measures. A correlation table of the self-report measures correlated with the neural measures was used as the base data table with which meta-analyses (t-tests, regressions, and general linear models) were conducted.
Results. Although p-factor related to the RDoC measures as expected, there were distinctions in the INT and EXT relationships. Of note, the regression results were consistent across both self-report and meta-analytic approaches.
Discussion. The establishment of these relationships advances the goals of both transdiagnostic models by relating psychopathology (HiTOP) to cognitive processes (RDoC). The novel meta-analytic approach valuably adds objective neurophysiological measure information to the self-report data. Although not without its considerations, the meta-analytic approach can add to current analytical approaches, and future studies could aim to replicate and improve upon this methodology
EXPERT VOICES: THE ROLE OF SCIENCE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CALVERT CLIFFS NUCLEAR POWER PLANT
No full textThe development and construction of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant was a watershed moment in both science and environmental history. Scientists’ authority, and scientific knowledge, was both an important and contested part of the development of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant. The role of science in public policy, the environmental movement, and society changed, throughout the development of the power plant, as it failed to provide the answers to ethical questions about environmental degradation and conservation the age of nuclear energy
COMPETING VISIONS IN GHQ: NEW DEALERS, ANTI-COMMUNISTS, AND THE POLITICAL STRUGGLES IN OCCUPIED JAPAN
No full textThe history of the American Occupation of Japan has been the subject of countless studies. Within these studies, the story of the Occupation’s initial period of reform led by New Dealers
under MacArthur followed by a “reverse course” brought on by the Cold War and changing
attitudes in Washington is commonly told and retold. However, one side of the story which has
received comparatively little focus is the internal conflicts in General Headquarters (GHQ)
between the New Dealers and the anti-Communists. Numerous studies, memoirs, and reports
mention a split between the two sides which got so severe that there was an attempted purge of
New Dealers reminiscent of the McCarthyite attacks back in the U.S. In this thesis, I aim to
understand the motivations and actions of the Americans who were part of the machinery of the
occupation of Japan and relate both to the political environment of America in the early Cold
War. To do so, I examine the ideological origins and nature of the internal persecution in GHQ
and tie my finding into the developments in the U.S. after WWII. With my findings, I argue that
the Americans in the Occupation fought with each other to carry out policies designed to bring
about their competing visions for an ideal postwar society in not only Japan, but the United
States. By analyzing these ideological struggles in a framework that accounts for the postwar
political shift occurring in America, we gain a greater understanding of the ideological forces
which pushed Americans to focus more on national security and fighting communism than on
social reform