Cotton production in China has developed rapidly during the last 60 years. Using only 15% of the world’s cotton land, China currently has produced 30% of the world's cotton. Such a great achievement is largely attributed to adoption of intensive farming technologies and cultural practices, including seedling transplanting, plastic mulching, double cropping, plant pruning, and super-high plant d...

We report a simplified reflection mode Fabry-Perot interferometry method for determination of electro-optic (EO) coefficients of poled polymer thin films. Rather than fitting the detailed shape of the Fabry-Perot resonance curve, our simplification involves a technique to experimentally determine the voltage-induced shift in the angular position of the resonance minimum. Rigorous analysis based...

I will describe some of our efforts to describe the electronic structure of two-dimensional materials (including graphene and the transition metal chalcogenides) using localized atomic orbitals, going from a purely first-principles perspective, where localized orbitals are used as a basis set for Density Functional Theory calculations with favorable scaling (compared to standard plane wave calc...

In order to address the performance complexity of the various constituent materials of (dense-column) latticed concrete-gypsum composite panels and the difficulty in the determination of the various elastic constants, this paper presented a detailed structural analysis of the (dense-column) latticed concrete-gypsum composite panel and proposed a feasible technical solution to simplified calcula...

We describe two experiments on signaling and detecting uncertainty in audiovisual speech by adults and children. In the first study, utterances from adult speakers and child speakers (aged 7-8) were elicitated and annotated with a set of six audiovisual features. It was found that when adult speakers are uncertain about their answer they are more likely to produce filled pauses, delays, high in...