Blood clot contraction plays an important role in prevention of bleeding and in thrombotic disorders. We will unveil and quantify the structural mechanisms of clot contraction at the level of single platelets. In contrast to other cell–matrix systems in which cells migrate along fibers, we will demonstrate that the “hand-over-hand” longitudinal pulling causes shortening and...
Climate change threatens the persistence of native plants across California, and strategies are needed to facilitate resilience and conserve the most vulnerable species. Conserving species under climate change is complicated, however, because the state’s native flora are threatened by other global changes, including altered disturbance regimes, land use change, and invasive species. We developed an...
Prof. Joseph Cummins Department of Economics, UCR Abstract: Early life growth faltering due to nutritional deficiencies and disease environment currently affects the health, productivity and lifespan of hundreds of millions of adults worldwide, with another 150 million children currently experiencing stunted growth. In this talk, I survey methods for estimating the effects of various individual-...
In this talk, I'll first present a broad overview of several established fields in physical and quantum optics that are ripe for data science and machine learning applications. Secondly, I'll present some metadata related to different fields of optics in a mini science-technology-and-society study. I'll end by speaking about my current research, which presents novel...
The mammalian ENCODE (ENCyclopedia of DNA Elements) project funded by the NIH has sought to define the features and elements of chromatin, genes, RNAs and proteins that determine phenotype. Most ENCODE modules have focused on chromatin and DNA elements that regulate transcriptional activity. There has not been a plant “ENCODE” project. Yet the regulation of...
Methane is a greenhouse gas, and the second most important contributor to human-caused climate change. It is also an important target for climate mitigation policy in the state of California. However, the methane budget is poorly known, especially at scales that are most relevant for mitigation policy and planning. New observations of methane emissions, such...
Engineered proteins are at the heart of biotechnology and the biopharmaceutical industry. The research community now has several tools available to develop novel protein structures and functions. Computational methods can link fully designed structures back to sequence, and directed evolution can create enzymes that catalyze reactions not found in biology. However, these approaches rely on...
The current cosmological paradigm posits that at early times the distribution of matter in our universe had the statistics of a Gaussian process, and evolved primarily via gravitational collapse into the highly non-linear structures we see today. Both the numerical simulations and the observational catalogues produce big data that challenges the computational scaling of our...
Assessing the function of late-stage cortical processing regions, such as prefrontal cortex, is notoriously challenging. Yet it is these areas that are hypothesized to subserve complex higher-order processes including self-evaluation of decisional uncertainty and even perceptual awareness. How can we measure the degree to which late-stage cortical processing areas have access to the representational content...
Vegetation maps are a valuable resource for those interested in vegetation status and change. A map is a static baseline, but distributions frozen in time provide guidance on relationships between species and topography, geologic substrate, surface hydrology, and climate; vegetation maps in time-series can be used to document vegetation change. This atlas comprises maps of...
In this talk, I present an overview of spatial data science research occurring at the newly formed UCR Center for Geospatial Sciences. I first examine the broader context of geospatial data science and its intersection with the open source and open science movements. Next, I provide an overview of the open source Python Spatial Analysis...
Knowledge of chromosome-length haplotypes will not only advance our understanding of the relationship between DNA and phenotypes, but will also promote a variety of important genetic applications. The current diploid-based phasing methods are costly and only produce haplotype fragments, whereas the alternatives based on analysis of haploid gametes, which are still in their early development...
The usefulness of two-class statistical classifiers is limited when one or both of the conditional miss-classification rates are unacceptably high. Incorporating a neutral zone region into the classifier provides a mechanism to refer ambiguous cases to follow-up where additional information might be obtained to clarify the classification decision. Through the use of the neutral zone...
Plants show a remarkable ability to survive in diverse environments. Our work seeks to identify the genetic basis of plant adaptation through computational analysis of whole genome sequences isolated from thousands of individuals. I will discuss the unequal retention of genetic variation in the genomes of plant populations, the potential for ancestral variation to facilitate...
The process of galaxy formation and evolution involves a number of interesting and complicated physical processes. However, we have only limited information on the real galaxies we would like to compare to our theories: often just the shape, size, and amount of light given off in a few different color filters. This data set behaves...
While the amount of data that we store and consume is consistently growing, the similar trend is visible in the scale of the modern machine learning (ML) algorithms. Fueled by big data, these algorithms use many parameters to capture the intricate latent structure in the data. Hence, data continues to fuel the success of machine...
Neural recordings in behaving animals has revealed the types of sensory and motor information represented by cortical neurons. However, we do not know the functional organization of the neural circuits that generate these representations. Neural circuits with different structures produce different activity dynamics. Therefore, analyses of the dynamics of neural activity may provide insights into...
Quasars, light sources powered by black holes, are amongst the brightest objects in the universe, and are used as searchlights to illuminate the contents of the universe between earth and the quasar. Historically features in these quasars were detected by visually inspecting the spectra! However, astronomers now have surveys containing 10^5 quasars, which makes this...
While autonomous systems that perform solo missions can yield significant benefits, greater efficiency and operational capability will be realized from teams of autonomous systems operating in a coordinated fashion. Potential applications for networked multiple autonomous systems include environmental monitoring, search and rescue, space-based interferometers, hazardous material handling, and combat, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems. Networked multi-agent...