Publications

Exploiting multiple feedstocks, under new policies and accounting rules, to balance biofuel production, food security, and greenhouse-gas reduction.

Modern datasets and models are notoriously difficult to explore and analyze due to their inherent high dimensionality and massive numbers of samples. Existing visualization methods which employ dimensionality reduction to two or three dimensions are often inefficient and/or ineffective for these datasets. This paper introduces t-SNE-CUDA, a GPU-accelerated implementation of t-distributed Symmetric Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) for visualizing datasets and models. t-SNE-CUDA significantly outperforms current implementations with 50-700x speedups on the CIFAR-10 and MNIST datasets. These speedups enable, for the first time, visualization of the neural network activations on the entire ImageNet dataset - a feat that was previously computationally intractable. We also demonstrate visualization performance in the NLP domain by visualizing the GloVe embedding vectors. From these visualizations, we can draw interesting conclusions about using the L2 metric in these embedding spaces. t-SNE-CUDA is publicly available athttps://github.com/CannyLab/tsne-cuda

Our results confirm previous epidemiological observations that short sleep time is associated with overweight in children and adolescents. A core aspect of the association between short sleep duration and overweight may be attributed to reduced REM sleep. Further studies are needed to investigate possible mechanisms underpinning the association between diminished REM sleep and endocrine and metabolic changes that may contribute to obesity.

This paper describes an "environmentally friendly", water-castable, water-developable photoresist system. The chemically amplified negative-tone resist system consists of three water-soluble components: a polymer, poly(methyl acrylamidoglycolate methyl ether), [poly(MAGME)]; a photoacid generator, (2,4-dihydroxyphenyl)dimethylsulfonium triflate, and a cross-linker, 1,4-butanediol. In the three-component resist system, the acid generated by photolysis of the photoacid generator catalyzes the cross-linking of poly(MAGME) in the exposed regions during postexposure baking, thus rendering the exposed regions insoluble in water. Negative-tone relief images are obtained by developing with pure water. The resist is able to resolve 1 μm line/space features (1:1 aspect ratio) with a deep-UV exposure dose of 100 mJ/cm2 (dose to print). The resist can be used to generate etched copper relief images on printed circuit boards using aqueous sodium persulfate as the etchant. The mechanism of cross-linking has been investigated by model compound studies using 13C NMR.

Summary Lignocellulosic biomass is utilized as a renewable feedstock in various agro‐industrial activities. Lignin is an aromatic, hydrophobic and mildly branched polymer integrally associated with polysaccharides within the biomass, which negatively affects their extraction and hydrolysis during industrial processing. Engineering the monomer composition of lignins offers an attractive option towards new lignins with reduced recalcitrance. The presented work describes a new strategy developed in Arabidopsis for the overproduction of rare lignin monomers to reduce lignin polymerization degree (DP). Biosynthesis of these ‘DP reducers’ is achieved by expressing a bacterial hydroxycinnamoyl‐CoA hydratase‐lyase (HCHL) in lignifying tissues of Arabidopsis inflorescence stems. HCHL cleaves the propanoid side‐chain of hydroxycinnamoyl‐CoA lignin precursors to produce the corresponding hydroxybenzaldehydes so that plant stems expressing HCHL accumulate in their cell wall higher amounts of hydroxybenzaldehyde and hydroxybenzoate derivatives. Engineered plants with intermediate HCHL activity levels show no reduction in total lignin, sugar content or biomass yield compared with wild‐type plants. However, cell wall characterization of extract‐free stems by thioacidolysis and by 2D‐NMR revealed an increased amount of unusual C 6 C 1 lignin monomers most likely linked with lignin as end‐groups. Moreover the analysis of lignin isolated from these plants using size‐exclusion chromatography revealed a reduced molecular weight. Furthermore, these engineered lines show saccharification improvement of pretreated stem cell walls. Therefore, we conclude that enhancing the biosynthesis and incorporation of C 6 C 1 monomers (‘DP reducers’) into lignin polymers represents a promising strategy to reduce lignin DP and to decrease cell wall recalcitrance to enzymatic hydrolysis.

The current Internet architecture relies on congestion avoidance mechanisms implemented in the transport layer protocols, like TCP, to provide good service under heavy load. If routers distribute bandwidth fairly, the Internet would be more robust and could accommodate more diversity of end hosts. Most of the mechanisms proposed to accomplish this can be grouped into two general categories. The first category, which includes fair queueing (FQ) and its many variants, uses packet scheduling algorithms that are more difficult to implement compared to FIFO queueing. The algorithms in the second category, active queue management schemes with enhancements for fairness (e.g., FRED, SFB), are based on FIFO queueing. They are easy to implement and are much fairer than the original RED design, but they do not provide max-min fairness among a large population of flows. A router mechanism, AFD (approximate fair dropping), has been proposed to achieve approximately max-min fair bandwidth allocations with relatively low complexity. We propose an implementation of AFD which can mimic the performance of the original design with much less state.

Abstract not Available.