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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Indoor Scene Localization To Fight Sex Trafficking In Hotels, Abigail Stylianou
Indoor Scene Localization To Fight Sex Trafficking In Hotels, Abigail Stylianou
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Images are key to fighting sex trafficking. They are: (a) used to advertise for sex services,(b) shared among criminal networks, and (c) connect a person in an image to the place where the image was taken. This work explores the ability to link images to indoor places in order to support the investigation and prosecution of sex trafficking. We propose and develop a framework that includes a database of open-source information available on the Internet, a crowd-sourcing approach to gathering additional images, and explore a variety of matching approaches based both on hand-tuned features such as SIFT and learned features …
Bayesian Networks To Assess The Newborn Stool Microbiome, William E. Bennett Jr.
Bayesian Networks To Assess The Newborn Stool Microbiome, William E. Bennett Jr.
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
In human stool, a large population of bacterial genes and transcripts from hundreds of genera coexist with host genes and transcripts. Assessments of the metagenome and transcriptome are particularly challenging, since there is a great deal of sequence overlap among related species and related genes. We sequenced the total RNA content from stool samples in a neonate using previously-described methods. We then performed stepwise alignment of different populations of RNA sequence reads to different indices, including ribosomal databases, the human genome, and all sequenced bacterial genomes. Each pool of RNA at each alignment step was subjected to compression to assess …
Revelation Of Yin-Yang Balance In Microbial Cell Factories By Data Mining, Flux Modeling, And Metabolic Engineering, Gang Wu
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
The long-held assumption of never-ending rapid growth in biotechnology and especially in synthetic biology has been recently questioned, due to lack of substantial return of investment. One of the main reasons for failures in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering is the metabolic burdens that result in resource losses. Metabolic burden is defined as the portion of a host cells resources either energy molecules (e.g., NADH, NADPH and ATP) or carbon building blocks (e.g., amino acids) that is used to maintain the engineered components (e.g., pathways). As a result, the effectiveness of synthetic biology tools heavily dependents on cell capability to …
Visualization Of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Dingwen Li
Visualization Of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks, Dingwen Li
McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations
Deep learning has achieved great accuracy in large scale image classification and scene recognition tasks, especially after the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model was introduced. Although a CNN often demonstrates very good classification results, it is usually unclear how or why a classification result is achieved. The objective of this thesis is to explore several existing visualization approaches which offer intuitive visual results. The thesis focuses on three visualization approaches: (1) image masking which highlights the region of image with high influence on the classification, (2) Taylor decomposition back-propagation which generates a per pixel heat map that describes each pixel's …