Abstract Landslides due to catastrophic weather events, especially heavy rainfall, have risen significantly over the last several decades, causing significant damage and affecting health livelihoods of millions people. Using tree roots bio-engineer shallow slopes has been proven be a cost-effective, sustainable measure thus gained increasing popularity. As slope failure often occurs under preci...

In this study, we develop binary polypropylene (PP) composites with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) nanoplatelets and ternary hybrids reinforced with hBN and nanohydroxyapatite (nHA). Filler hybridization is a sound approach to make novel nanocomposites with useful biological and mechanical properties. Tensile test, osteoblastic cell culture and dimethyl thiazolyl diphenyl tetrazolium (MTT) assay...

Many popular Bayesian nonparametric priors can be characterized in terms of exchangeable species sampling sequences. However, in some applications, exchangeability may not be appropriate. We introduce a novel and probabilistically coherent family of non-exchangeable species sampling sequences characterized by a tractable predictive probability function with weights driven by a sequence of indep...

A recommender system utilizes in general an information filtering technique called collaborative filtering. To improve prediction quality, collaborative filtering needs reinforcements such as utilizing useful attributes of the items as well as a more refined neighbor selection. In this paper we present that the recommender systems that utilizing the attributes of the items in collaborative filt...

We describe our current efforts towards creating a reinforcement learner that learns both from reinforcements provided by its environment and from human-generated advice. Our research involves two complementary components: (a) mapping advice expressed in English to a formal advice language and (b) using advice expressed in a formal notation in a reinforcement learner. We use a subtask of the ch...