Steroid hormones, such as estrogen, are produced in one tissue and carried through the blood stream to target tissues in which they bind to highly specific nuclear receptors and trigger changes in gene expression and metabolism. Industrial chemicals, such as bisphenol A and many agricultural chemicals, including permethrin and fervalerate, are known to have estrogenic potential and therefore are estrogen mimics. Widely used agricultural chemicals, Enable (fungicide) and Diazinon (insecticide), were evaluated to examine their toxicity and estrogenicity. MCF-7 cells, an estrogen-dependent human breast cancer line, were utilized for this purpose. MCF-7 cells were treated with 0.033-3.3 ppb (ng/ml) of Enable and 0.3-67 ppm of Diazinon and gene expression was compared to that in untreated cells. Microarray analysis showed down-regulation of eight genes and up-regulation of thirty four genes in cells treated with 3.3 ppb of Enable, compared to untreated cells. Similarly, in cells treated with 67 ppm of Diazinon, there were three genes down-regulated and twenty seven genes up-regulated. For both chemicals, specific genes were selected for special consideration. RT-PCR confirmed results obtained from analysis of the microarray. These studies were designed to provide base-line data on gene expression-altering capacity of specific chemicals and will allow assessment of the deleterious effects caused by exposure to the aforementioned chemicals.

A real-time self-shadowing technique is described. State of the art shadowing techniques that utilize modern hardware often require multiple rendering passes and introduce rendering artifacts. Combining separate ideas from earlier techniques which project geometry onto a plane and project imagery onto an object results in a new real-time technique for self-shadowing. This technique allows an artist to construct occluder textures and assign them to shadow planes for a self-shadowed model. Utilizing a graphics processing unit (GPU), a vertex program computes shadowing coordinates in real-time, while a fragment program applies the shading and shadowing in a single rendering pass. The methodology used to create shadow planes and write the vertex and fragment programs is given, as well as the relation to the previous work. This work includes implementing this technique, applying it to a small set of test models, describing the types of models for which the technique is well suited, as well as those for which it is not well suited, and comparing the technique’s performance and image quality to other state of the art shadowing techniques. This technique performs as well as other real-time techniques and can reduce rendering artifacts in certain circumstances.

System-on-a-Chip (SoC) has been applied in numerous varieties of consumer electronics, especially in mobile device. The user interface of mobile device changes from traditional 2D graphic interface into the complicated 3D graphic interface. The fully computation of 3D graphics on SoC aims for low power dissipation that must be the key factor of SoC development. This thesis proposes a software tool suite for performance monitoring and verification. The performance monitoring contains real-time monitoring, static counter analysis, and hardware sub-module record. And the verification tool includes scenes capturing, scenes comparison, and error ratio analysis. After proposing the software tool suite, we can do: (1) find out the errors between hardware and software; (2) analyze the accuracy of hardware computation; (3) Real-time monitoring hardware vertex, pixel, and memory read/write counts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Florida, 2001. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 148 p.; also contains graphics. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-147).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70) and index.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-79).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 57-59).

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 63 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-63).

published_or_final_version / Civil Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

Modeling and interactive rendering of urban environments are difficult as it is telling the story of simulating our real and complex world. Urban environment contains various buildings with different kinds of materials and different shapes, modeling such objects with conventional triangle mesh are not reasonable. It's not difficult to create the models, but to store and transmit the enormous data caused by the mesh models. Such amount of data is also very difficult to be put into computer memory for realtime rendering. Besides, roads and trees are also important parts of an urban environment. It is obvious that they share almost the same complexity of modeling and rendering with buildings due to similar problems. Therefore realtime interactive rendering with good visualization quality is very difficult to achieve. In this thesis, we are going to introduce various techniques for different objects in an urban environment to overcome mentioned problems. The first part of this thesis introduces a compact representation of urban building models called Non-uniform Texture, NUT for short. The representation is able to model a building with memory footprint more than two orders of magnitude smaller than that of its mesh counterpart, while impressive details and rendering performance are preserved. The second part introduces a compact representation of urban roads. The representation is also very efficient in data storage and memory consumption. Combing with NUT, the representation also offers great visual quality. The third part introduces an efficient rendering pipeline of trees. The pipeline requires no details to be stored to achieve data efficiency. The pipeline uses almost all functionality of mainstream GPU to provide stunning visual and rendering performance. The final part of this thesis introduces a robust computation of up vector, to solve the problem of camera rotation during video capture. With all the mentioned features, we are going to produce a living urban environment within one system. / published_or_final_version / Computer Science / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy