Spatial Analytics for Efficient and Equitable Public Transportation
Assessing the performance of public transportation services has long been an important yet challenging issue for transportation agencies and researchers. However, the performance evaluation of transportation services is complicated by an array of quantitative measures available to assess the goals and the diversity in the goals themselves, which usually include improving operational efficiency and providing...
Leveraging big datasets to understand how ecological communities respond to global change
Simultaneous ongoing changes to earth's ecosystems, including climate change and species invasions, are reshuffling ecological communities in space and time. Spatially, species distributions are shifting, often in species-specific ways, leading to novel communities. Changing climate is also altering species’ phenologies – i.e., the seasonal timing of life cycle events such as flowering, bird migration, or...
Modeling Data Using Regression: Testing Conjectures Strongly
Too often, exploratory approaches to data analysis are used, even in situations in which confirmatory methods could be used. The contrast between exploratory and confirmatory approaches to analyses will be emphasized, and several examples will be presented that illustrate the advantages of confirmatory methods — particularly the avoidance of Type II errors when confirmatory methods...
Combined Multi-scale Modeling and Experimental Study of Roles of Cell-Matrix Interactions
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...
Plant species persistence in the face of climate change
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...
Scientific Data: a Chemical Engineer’s Perspective
https://jwulab.engr.ucr.edu/home/abouttheprofessor
Estimating the determinants of child growth faltering: notes on measurement, models and microdata
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-...
Some optics-related data science and machine learning problems
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...
P-ENCODE: Resolving plant gene activity in space over time
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...
How methane emissions can be better counted and mitigated with “big” data
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...