Category: Incubator Project

• Monitoring Freshwater Vulnerability to Climate Change and Human Activity

  

  Project Lead: Catherine Kuhn, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences  eScience Liaisons: Amanda Tan and Rob Fatland Rivers, lakes and streams are considered sentinels of environmental change. Deforestation, urbanization, and nutrient runoff are increasingly recognized as drivers of change for freshwaters, yet most research analyzing the impact of these forcings occurs at the watershed scale.…

• Detecting Small Particles in Low-Contrast Images to Aid in Particle Tracking

  

  Project Lead: Alicia Clark, Mechanical Engineering eScience Liaisons: Bernease Herman and Valentina Staneva Ultrasound (US) is a safe and non-invasive imaging method commonly used in healthcare and clinical applications due to its high spatial and temporal resolution. However, there are areas of the body where low contrast makes it difficult to obtain high quality images needed…

• 3D Visualization of Prostate Cancer Using Light-Sheet Microscopy

  

  Project Lead: Dr. Nicholas Reder, Pathology eScience Liaison: Ariel Rokem Advances in microscopic imaging enable visualization of heretofore unseen 3D microanatomical features, which have the potential to transform cancer diagnostics. These novel imaging techniques have led to improved diagnostics in kidney biopsies, brain structure, and embryonic development. Light-sheet microscopy and tissue clarification techniques are a particularly…

• Cloud-Enabled Tools for the Analysis of Subsea HD Camera Data

  

  Project Lead: Aaron Marburg, Applied Physics Laboratory eScience Liaisons: Bernease Herman and Valentina Staneva The publicly available data generated by CamHD have enormous scientific potential, with the capacity to support a wide range of geological, biological, hydrological, and oceanographic investigations using image analysis methods. However, the large size of the video archive and the lack of…

• Applying Machine Learning to the Analysis of the Large-Scale Structure of Turbulence

  

  Project Lead: Owen Williams, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics eScience Liaison: Jake VanderPlas Turbulent flows dominate many flows of engineering interest, regulating mixing, heat transfer and drag on vehicles. While hard to concisely define, turbulence is noisy, stochastic, and contains eddies of a wide range of scales that combine to create a chaotic set of movements that…

• Damage Speaks: Acoustical Monitoring Framework for Structures Subjected to Earthquakes

  

  Project Lead: Travis Thonstad, Civil & Environmental Engineering, University of Washington Project Collaborators: Marc O. Eberhard; John F. Stanton, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington; Islam Mantawy; David H. Sanders, Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno eScience Liaison: Valentina Staneva Currently, the assessment of the integrity and safety of structures subjected to earthquakes relies on a…

• AralDIF: A Cloud-based Dynamic Information Framework for the Aral Sea Basin

  

  Project Lead: Amanda Tan, Department of Oceanography, University of Washington  eScience Liaisons: Rob Fatland, Anthony Arendt A dynamic information framework (DIF) is a decision support structure centered on earth system science models and data resources used to address policy challenges in water resources caused by population growth, socio-economic development and climate change, particularly in developing nations. This decision…

• Improved Stimulation Protocols for Sight Restoration Technologies

  

  Project Leads: Ione Fine, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington; and Geoffrey M. Boynton, Professor of Psychology, University of Washington eScience Liaison: Ariel Rokem Our goal is to develop a neurophysiologically inspired algorithm for improved electrical stimulation protocols in patients implanted with electronic prostheses. By 2020 roughly 200 million people will suffer from retinal diseases. Electronic prostheses,…

• Target Detection for Advanced Environmental Monitoring of Marine Renewable Energy

  

  Project Lead: Emma Cotter, Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington Project Collaborators: Brian Polagye, Paul Murphy  eScience Liaison: Bernease Herman It is necessary to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the environmental effects of marine renewable energy for the industry to advance. The Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP) is an instrumentation platform for that combines sonar, cameras, and hydrophones in a centrally…

• Methods for Characterizing Human Centromeres

  

  Project Lead: Siva Kasinathan, UW School of Medicine  eScience Liaisons: Andrew Fiore-Gartland, Bryna Hazelton Despite an explosion in DNA sequencing technology, many genome projects, including the Human Genome Project, remain fundamentally unfinished. Gaps in genome assemblies occur in regions composed of repeated sequences. Human centromeres, which are loci that ensure proper partitioning of genetic material at each cell…