To significantly improve the early detection of cervical precancers and cancers, LightTouch™ is under development by SpectRx Inc.. LightTouch™ identifies cancers and precancers quickly by using a spectrometer to analyze light reflected from the cervix. Data from the spectrometer is then used to create an image of the cervix that highlights the location and severity of disease. Our research is conducted to find the appropriate models that can be used to generate map-like image showing disease tissue from normal and further diagnose the cervical cancerous conditions. Through large work of explanatory variable search and reduction, logistic regression and Partial Least Square Regression successfully applied to our modeling process. These models were validated by 60/40 cross validation and 10 folder cross validation. Further examination of model performance, such as AUC, sensitivity and specificity, threshold had been conducted.

Product management as an organizational system has a long history of practice, which predates most modern academic management research. Its activities span the external environment of the firm, while simultaneously spanning across internal functional specialties of the organization. Thus product management obtains, codifies, simplifies and stores external information making it available to a responsive organization, which uses it to establish competitive advantage and ultimately superior performance. Building on the resource based view of the firm and boundary theory, these spanning activities, which are heterogeneously dispersed across firms, are considered organizational capabilities. Drawing upon the extant product management literature, this research uses product management as a proxy for boundary spanning capabilities of the firm. These capabilities are then empirically measured against two well established firm capabilities; market orientation and firm-level innovativeness. This research addresses a gap in the literature by establishing product management as a set of firm-level capabilities, distinct from the well established constructs of market orientation and innovativeness. Results indicate that external product management capability, defined as channel bonding activities, fully mediates the market orientation – firm performance relationship, while firm level innovativeness continues to have a small mediating effect on performance. Internal product management capabilities, defined as market and technical integration are shown to negatively moderate the external product management capability - firm performance relationship. Theoretical implications include establishing a link between boundary theory and the resource based view of the firm. Practical implications include the strong relationship between external spanning capabilities and firm performance and the dampening effect of cross-functional integration on firm performance. This empirical link between product management boundary spanning practices and how firms ultimately perform could assist practitioners in allocating resources and managing the relationship between the marketing and technological factions of the organization. Most importantly this research establishes the hereto untested link between product management capability and firm performance.

The continuous growth in power system electric grid by adding new substations lead to construct many new transmission lines, transformers, control devices, and circuit breakers to connect the capacity (generators) to the demand (loads). These components will have a very heavy influence on the performance of the electric grid. The renewable technical solutions for these issues can be found by robust algorithms which can give us a full picture of the current state of the electrical network by monitoring the behavior of phase and voltage magnitude. In this thesis, the major idea is to implement several algorithms including weighted least square, extend kalman filter, and interior point method in three different electrical networks including IEEE 14, 30, and 118 to compare the performance of these algorithms which is represented by the behavior of phases and magnitude voltages as well as minimize the residual of the balance load flow real time measurements to distinguish which one is more robust. Also to have a particular understanding of the comparison between unconstraint and constraint algorithms.

In phylogenetic analysis, an important issue is to construct the confidence region for gene trees from DNA sequences. Usually estimation of the trees is the initial step. Maximum likelihood methods are widely applied but few tests are based on distance methods. In this thesis, we propose a new test based on balanced minimum evolution. We first examine the normality assumption of pairwise distance estimates under various model misspeci cations and also examine their variances, MSEs and squared biases. Then we compare the BME method with the WLS method in true tree reconstruction under different variance structures and model pairs. Finally, we develop a new test for finding a confidence region for the tree based on the BME method and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulation.

An experiment was conducted to obtain a hepatic gene expression dataset from postpubertal dairy heifers that could be fit to a computational model capable of predicting future lactation performance values. The initial animal experiment was conducted to characterize the hepatic transcriptional response to 24-hour total feed withdrawal in one-hundred and two postpubertal Holstein dairy heifers using an 8329-gene oligonucleotide microarray in a randomized block design. Plasma concentration of non-esterified fatty acids was significantly higher, while levels of beta-hydroxybutyrate, triacylglycerol, and glucose were significantly lower with the 24-hour total feed withdrawal. In total, 505 differentially expressed genes were identified and microarray results were confirmed by real-time PCR. Upregulation of key gluconeogenic genes occurred despite diminished dietary substrate and lower hepatic glucose synthesis. Downregulation of ketogenic genes was contrary to the non-ruminant response to feed withdrawal, but was consistent with a lower ruminal supply of short-chain fatty acids as precursors. Following the microarray experiment, the first series of regression analyses was employed to identify relationships between gene expression signal and lactation performance measurements taken over the first lactation of 81 of the subjects from the original study. Regression models were evaluated using mean square prediction error (MSPE) and concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) analysis. The strongest validated stepwise regression models were constructed for milk protein percentage (r = 0.04) and lactation persistency (r = 0.09). To determine if another type of regression analysis would better predict lactation performance, partial least squares (PLS) regression analysis was then applied. Selection of gene expression data was based on an assessment of the linear dependence of all genes in normalized datasets for 81 subjects against 18 dairy herd index (DHI) variables using Pearson correlation analysis. Results were distributed into two lists based on correlation coefficient. Each gene expression dataset was used to construct PLS models for the purpose of predicting lactation performance. The strongest predictive models were generated for protein percentage (r = 0.46), 305-d milk yield (r = 0.44), and 305-d protein yield (r = 0.47). These results demonstrate the suitability of using hepatic gene expression in young animals to quantitatively predict future lactation performance. / Ontario Centre for Agricultural Genomics, NSERC Canada, and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA)

I identified suitable locations for highway wildlife crossing mitigations across the TransCanada Highway (TCH) in the area of Mount Revelstoke and Glacier National Park (MRGNP), British Columbia. Highways fragment natural landscapes leading to habitat loss, reduced ecosystem connectivity and direct wildlife mortality though motor vehicle collisions. Grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) are vulnerable to the effects of habitat and population fragmentation. Highway wildlife crossing mitigations improve ecosystem connectivity by increasing the permeability of transportation corridors to wildlife. I identified high-quality habitat patches using a resource selection function (RSF) based on 1,703 radio telemetry locations from 59 grizzly bears. Least-cost path analysis (LCP) among habitat patches identified 6 linkage zones across the TCH. Electric circuit theory was used to generate current maps that classify linkage zones as high-volume crossing areas or tenuous linkages. Linkage zones occurred where high-quality habitat aligned with physical features conducive to cross-valley wildlife dispersal.

No description available.

Parameterised analytical models that describe the trimmed inflight behaviour of classical aircraft have been studied and are widely accepted by the flight dynamics community. Therefore, the primary role of aircraft parameter estimation is to quantify the parameter values which make up the models and define the physical relationship of the air vehicle with respect to its local environment. Nevertheless, a priori empirical predictions dependent on aircraft design parameters also exist, and these provide a useful means of generating preliminary values predicting the aircraft behaviour at the design stage. However, at present the only feasible means that exist to actually prove and validate these parameter values remains to extract them through physical experimentation either in a wind-tunnel or from a flight test. With the advancement of UAVs, and in particular smaller UAVs (less than 1m span) the ability to fly the full scale vehicle and generate flight test data presents an exciting opportunity. Furthermore, UAV testing lends itself well to the ability to perform rapid prototyping with the use of COTS equipment. Real-time system identification was first used to monitor highly unstable aircraft behaviour in non-linear flight regimes, while expanding the operational flight envelope. Recent development has focused on creating self-healing control systems, such as adaptive re-configurable control laws to provide robustness against airframe damage, control surface failures or inflight icing. In the case of UAVs real-time identification, would facilitate rapid prototyping especially in low-cost projects with their constrained development time. In a small UAV scenario, flight trials could potentialy be focused towards dynamic model validation, with the prior verification step done using the simulation environment. Furthermore, the ability to check the estimated derivatives while the aircraft is flying would enable detection of poor data readings due to deficient excitation manoeuvres or atmospheric turbulence. Subsequently, appropriate action could then be taken while all the equipment and personnel are in place. This thesis describes the development of algorithms in order to perform online system identification for UAVs which require minimal analyst intervention. Issues pertinent to UAV applications were: the type of excitation manoeuvers needed and the necessary instrumentation required to record air-data. Throughout the research, algorithm development was undertaken using an in-house Simulink© model of the Aerosonde UAV which provided a rapid and flexible means of generating simulated data for analysis. In addition, the algorithms were further tested with real flight test data that was acquired from the Cranfield University Jestream-31 aircraft G-NFLA during its routine operation as a flying classroom. Two estimation methods were principally considered, the maximum likelihood and least squares estimators, with the aforementioned found to be best suited to the proposed requirements. In time-domain analysis reconstruction of the velocity state derivatives ˙W and ˙V needed for the SPPO and DR modes respectively, provided more statistically reliable parameter estimates without the need of a α- or β- vane. By formulating the least squares method in the frequency domain, data issues regarding the removal of bias and trim offsets could be more easily addressed while obtaining timely and reliable parameter estimates. Finally, the importance of using an appropriate input to excite the UAV dynamics allowing the vehicle to show its characteristics must be stressed.

State estimation is widely used as a tool to evaluate the real time power system prevailing conditions. State estimation algorithms could suffer divergence under stressed system conditions. This dissertation first investigates impacts of variations of load levels and topology errors on the convergence property of the commonly used weighted least square (WLS) state estimator. The influence of topology errors on the condition number of the gain matrix in the state estimator is also analyzed. The minimum singular value of gain matrix is proposed to measure the distance between the operating point and state estimation divergence. To study the impact of the load increment on the convergence property of WLS state estimator, two types of load increment are utilized: one is the load increment of all load buses, and the other is a single load increment. In addition, phasor measurement unit (PMU) measurements are applied in state estimation to verify if they could solve the divergence problem and improve state estimation accuracy. The dissertation investigates the impacts of variations of line power flow increment and topology errors on convergence property of the WLS state estimator. A simple 3-bus system and the IEEE 118-bus system are used as the test cases to verify the common rule. Furthermore, the simulation results show that adding PMU measurements could generally improve the robustness of state estimation. Two new approaches for improving the robustness of the state estimation with PMU measurements are proposed. One is the equality-constrained state estimation with PMU measurements, and the other is Hachtel's matrix state estimation with PMU measurements approach. The dissertation also proposed a new heuristic approach for optimal placement of phasor measurement units (PMUs) in power system for improving state estimation accuracy. In the problem of adding PMU measurements into the estimator, two methods are investigated. Method I is to mix PMU measurements with conventional measurements in the estimator, and method II is to add PMU measurements through a post-processing step. These two methods can achieve very similar state estimation results, but method II is a more time-efficient approach which does not modify the existing state estimation software.

Background subtraction is the technique of segmenting moving foreground objects from stationary or dynamic background scenes. Background subtraction is a critical step in many computer vision applications including video surveillance, tracking, gesture recognition etc. This thesis addresses the challenges associated with the background subtraction systems due to the sudden illumination changes happening in an indoor environment. Most of the existing techniques adapt to gradual illumination changes, but fail to cope with the sudden illumination changes. Here, we introduce a Global change reactive background subtraction to model these changes as a regression function of spatial image coordinates. The regression model is learned from highly probable background regions and the background model is compensated for the illumination changes by the model parameters estimated. Experiments were performed in the indoor environment to show the effectiveness of our approach in modeling the sudden illumination changes by a higher order regression polynomial. The results of non-linear SVM regression were also presented to show the robustness of our regression model.