The evolution of disease resistance in plants occurs within a framework of interacting phenotypes, balancing natural selection for life-history traits along a continuum of fast-growing and poorly defended, or slow-growing and well-defended lifestyles. Plant populations connected by gene flow are physiologically limited to evolving along a single axis of the spectrum of the growth-defense trade-off, and strong local selection can purge phenotypic variance from a population or species, making it difficult to detect variation linked to the trade-off. Hybridization between two species that have evolved different growth-defense trade-off optima can reveal trade-offs hidden in either species by introducing phenotypic and genetic variance. Here, I investigated the phenotypic and genetic basis for variation of disease resistance in a set of naturally formed hybrid poplars. The focal species of this dissertation were the balsam poplar (Populus balsamifera), black balsam poplar (P. trichocarpa), narrowleaf cottonwood (P. angustifolia), and eastern cottonwood (P. deltoides). Vegetative cuttings of samples were collected from natural populations and clonally replicated in a common garden. Ecophysiology and stomata traits, and the severity of poplar leaf rust disease (Melampsora medusae) were collected. To overcome the methodological bottleneck of manually phenotyping stomata density for thousands of cuticle micrographs, I developed a publicly available tool to automatically identify and count stomata. To identify stomata, a deep con- volutional neural network was trained on over 4,000 cuticle images of over 700 plant species. The neural network had an accuracy of 94.2% when applied to new cuticle images and phenotyped hundreds of micrographs in a matter of minutes. To understand how disease severity, stomata, and ecophysiology traits changed as a result of hybridization, statistical models were fit that included the expected proportion of the genome from either parental species in a hybrid. These models in- dicated that the ratio of stomata on the upper surface of the leaf to the total number of stomata was strongly linked to disease, was highly heritable, and wass sensitive to hybridization. I further investigated the genomic basis of stomata-linked disease variation by performing an association genetic analysis that explicitly incorporated admixture. Positive selection in genes involved in guard cell regulation, immune sys- tem negative regulation, detoxification, lipid biosynthesis, and cell wall homeostasis were identified. Together, my dissertation incorporated advances in image-based phenotyping with evolutionary theory, directed at understanding how disease frequency changes when hybridization alters the genomes of a population.

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FundaÃÃo Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cientifico e TecnolÃgico / The present study analyzes the use of the imperative in the speech of Fortaleza, under the dome of Quantitative Sociolinguistics, using database NORPOFOR â Norma Oral do PortuguÃs Popular de Fortaleza, as a source of collection to the sample. The goal is to analyze the use of grammatical imperative in the speech of cearenseâs capital city, considering semantic and morphosyntactic motivation such as verbal conjugation, oblique pronouns position, polarity of sentence structure, semantic group and sentence verb as well as the ones of social nature like gender, education level and age range. Previous researches of Scherre (2007; 2005; 1999) and Cardoso (2009), which mention or directly work with data concerning Fortaleza, and Alves (2001), referring to JoÃo Pessoa, state of ParaÃba, indicate that subjunctive imperative finds in these speech communities a relatively significant percentage of use. The data of this research were put through GOLDVARB X software (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005), distributed among nine social and linguistic factor groups. The linguistic factor groups significantly selected by GOLDVARB X were verbal conjugation, polarity of the sentence structure and the oblique pronoun position, referring to the use of the subjunctive imperative variable. In general terms, the results revealed that imperative associated to indicative, with a 60% occurrence, was the most frequent form in the speech sample of Fortaleza. The subjunctive form showed 40% of use, opposing to our expectations, once we hoped that the imperative associated to this form should present higher frequency of use in the speech of the cearense capital. / O presente estudo analisa o uso do imperativo na fala de Fortaleza, à luz da SociolinguÃstica Quantitativa (WEINREICH; LABOV; HERZOG, 1968), utilizando como fonte de coleta para a amostra o banco de dados NORPOFOR â Norma Oral do PortuguÃs Popular de Fortaleza (ARAÃJO, 2011). O principal objetivo à analisar o uso do imperativo gramatical na fala da capital cearense, em que pesem motivaÃÃes semÃnticas e morfossintÃticas como conjugaÃÃo verbal, posiÃÃo do pronome oblÃquo Ãtono, polaridade da estrutura da oraÃÃo, grupo semÃntico e verbos da oraÃÃo, bem como motivaÃÃes de natureza social como sexo, escolaridade e faixa etÃria. Trabalhos anteriores como o de Scherre (2007; 2005; 1999) e Cardoso (2009) que citam ou trabalham diretamente com dados de Fortaleza, e Alves (2001), referente a JoÃo Pessoa â PB, indicam que o imperativo subjuntivo encontra nestas comunidades de fala um percentual de uso relativamente significativo. Os dados desta pesquisa foram submetidos ao programa Goldvarb X (SANKOFF; TAGLIAMONTE; SMITH, 2005), distribuÃdos entre nove grupos de fatores sociais e linguÃsticos. Os grupos de fatores linguÃsticos selecionados significativamente pelo GOLDVARB X foram conjugaÃÃo verbal, polaridade da estrutura da oraÃÃo e a posiÃÃo do pronome oblÃquo Ãtono quanto ao uso da variÃvel imperativo subjuntivo. Em termos gerais, os resultados demonstraram que o imperativo associado ao indicativo, com 60% das ocorrÃncias, foi a forma mais frequente na amostra de fala de Fortaleza. A forma do subjuntivo apresentou 40% de uso, contrariando nossa expectativa, uma vez que esperÃvamos que o imperativo associado a esta forma apresentasse maior frequÃncia de uso na fala da capital cearense.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Healthcare data visualization presents challenges due to its non-standard organizational structure and disparate record formats. Epidemiologists and clinicians currently lack the tools to discern patterns in large-scale data that would reveal valuable healthcare information at the granular level of individual patients and populations. Integrating geospatial and temporal healthcare data within a common visual context provides a twofold benefit: it allows clinicians to synthesize large-scale healthcare data to provide a context for local patient care decisions, and it better informs epidemiologists in making public health recommendations. Advanced implementations of the Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG), HyperText Markup Language version 5 (HTML5), and Cascading Style Sheets version 3 (CSS3) specifications in the latest versions of most major Web browsers brought hardware-accelerated graphics to the Web and opened the door for more intricate and interactive visualization techniques than have previously been possible. We developed a series of new geotemporal visualization techniques under a general healthcare data visualization framework in order to provide a real-time dashboard for analysis and exploration of complex healthcare data. This visualization framework, HealthTerrain, is a concept space constructed using text and data mining techniques, extracted concepts, and attributes associated with geographical locations. HealthTerrain's association graph serves two purposes. First, it is a powerful interactive visualization of the relationships among concept terms, allowing users to explore the concept space, discover correlations, and generate novel hypotheses. Second, it functions as a user interface, allowing selection of concept terms for further visual analysis. In addition to the association graph, concept terms can be compared across time and location using several new visualization techniques. A spatial-temporal choropleth map projection embeds rich textures to generate an integrated, two-dimensional visualization. Its key feature is a new offset contour method to visualize multidimensional and time-series data associated with different geographical regions. Additionally, a ring graph reveals patterns at the fine granularity of patient occurrences using a new radial coordinate-based time-series visualization technique.