XQuery Summer Institute: Advancing XML-Based Scholarship from Representation to Discovery

The XQuery Summer Institute at Vanderbilt University will be aimed at archivists, librarians, professors, and students who have experience marking up texts in XML, but do not yet know how to work computationally with those documents. Our institute aspires to recruit twelve members of the digital humanities community to a two week institute in June 2014. The faculty of the institute will teach participants to work productively with their XML-encoded texts using XQuery, a programming language designed specifically for XML. With XQuery, scholars can learn a single language to ingest their texts into an XML database, ask questions of them, connect them with other sources of information, and publish them on the web. Participants will go beyond using XML for representation to querying XML for discovery

Hydrocarbon emissions from a modern commercial airliner

We report selected carbon species emission indices (EIs) for a Rolls Royce RB211-535-E4 turbofan engine that were acquired during the NASA EXperiment to Characterize Aircraft Volatile Aerosol and Trace-species Emissions (EXCAVATE). Conducted during winter 2002, the mission focused upon characterizing the exhaust constituents of the NASA Boeing 757 aircraft during ground-based operation. Carbon species concentrations were determined by chromatographic analyses of whole air samples collected 10 m behind the engine exit plane as engine power was varied from ground idle to about 60% of maximum rated thrust. Ambient air samples were also collected and analyzed to facilitate correction of calculated EIs for background concentrations. Results are consistent with previous observations and indicate that, on a relative basis, turbine engines emit considerable amounts of light hydrocarbon species at idle, but significantly lesser amounts at higher engine powers. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Integrating Multiple Data Views for Improved Malware Analysis

Malicious software (malware) has become a prominent fixture in computing. There have been many methods developed over the years to combat the spread of malware, but these methods have inevitably been met with countermeasures. For instance, signature-based malware detection gave rise to polymorphic viruses. This arms race\u27 will undoubtedly continue for the foreseeable future as the incentives to develop novel malware continue to outweigh the costs. In this dissertation, I describe analysis frameworks for three important problems related to malware: classification, clustering, and phylogenetic reconstruction. The important component of my methods is that they all take into account multiple views of malware. Typically, analysis has been performed in either the static domain (e.g. the byte information of the executable) or the dynamic domain (e.g. system call traces). This dissertation develops frameworks that can easily incorporate well-studied views from both domains, as well as any new views that may become popular in the future. The only restriction that must be met is that a positive semidefinite similarity (kernel) matrix must be defined on the view, a restriction that is easily met in practice. While the classification problem can be solved with well known multiple kernel learning techniques, the clustering and phylogenetic problems required the development of novel machine learning methods, which I present in this dissertation. It is important to note that although these methods were developed in the context of the malware problem, they are applicable to a wide variety of domains

Aerosols from biomass burning over the tropical South Atlantic region: Distributions and impacts

The NASA Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE) Transport and Atmospheric Chemistry Near the Equator-Atlantic (TRACE A) expedition was conducted September 21 through October 26, 1992, to investigate factors responsible for creating the seasonal South Atlantic tropospheric ozone maximum. During these flights, fine aerosol (0.1-3.0 μm) number densities were observed to be enhanced roughly tenfold over remote regions of the tropical South Atlantic and greater over adjacent continental areas, relative to northern hemisphere observations and to measurements recorded in the same area during Ac wet season. Chemical and meteorological analyses as well as visual observations indicate that the primary source of these enhancements was biomass burning occurring within grassland regions of north central Brazil and southeastern Africa. These fires exhibited fine aerosol (N) emission ratios relative to CO (dN/dCO) of 22.5 ± 9.7 and 23.6 ± 15.1 cm-3 parts per billion by volume (ppbv)-1 over Brazil and Africa, respectively. Convection coupled with counterclockwise flow around the South Atlantic subtropical anticyclone subsequently distributed these aerosols throughout the remote South Atlantic troposphere. We calculate that dilute smoke from biomass burning produced an average tenfold enhancement in optical depth over the continental regions as well as a 50% increase in this parameter over the middle South Atlantic Ocean; these changes correspond to an estimated net cooling of up to 25 W m-2 and 2.4 W m-2 during clear-sky conditions over savannas and ocean respectively. Over the ocean our analyses suggest that modification of CCN concentrations within the persistent eastern Atlantic marine stratocumulus clouds by entrainment of subsiding haze layers could significantly increase cloud albedo resulting in an additional surface radiative cooling potentially greater in magnitude than that caused by direct extinction of solar radiation by the aerosol particles themselves