Social media is a vital source of information during any major event, especially natural disasters. However, with the exponential increase in volume of social media data, so comes the increase in conversational data that does not provide valuable information, especially in the context of disaster events, thus, diminishing peoples’ ability to find the information that they need in order to organize relief efforts, find help, and potentially save lives. This project focuses on the development of a Bayesian approach to the classification of tweets (posts on Twitter) during Hurricane Sandy in order to distinguish “informational” from “conversational” tweets. We designed an effective set of features and used them as input to Naïve Bayes classifiers. In comparison to a “bag of words” approach, the new feature set provides similar results in the classification of tweets. However, the designed feature set contains only 9 features compared with more than 3000 features for “bag of words.” When the feature set is combined with “bag of words”, accuracy achieves 85.2914%. If integrated into disaster‐related systems, our approach can serve as a boon to any person or organization seeking to extract useful information in the midst of a natural disaster.

Alzheimer’s Diseases (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by progressive neuronal loss leading to cognitive decline. Although there is yet to be a cure nor a way to reverse the neuronal damage, there are current treatments to amend some of the cognitive symptoms associated with AD. Acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (AChEi) are the primary agents of choice and have had profound implications throughout the past decades. AChEi such as donepezil, rivastigmine, and galantamine mediates and increases cholinergic activities in the central nervous system (CNS), and have been shown to improve and preserve cognition in AD patients. Beyond the current drugs on the market, investigational discoveries continue to explore the potential of safer and more efficacious AChEi agents for the treatment of AD. There have been quite a few challenges, given the high failure rates. Yet, these very trials and studies have been a fundamental step towards better understanding the treatments of AD and have provided some insight on the potential to surpass what is currently available.

Desalination of brackish water and sea water has become increasingly implemented worldwide to combat drinking water shortages. This is especially true in remote regions where access to both fresh water and the nation’s electricity grid are missing. Renewable energy-powered reverse osmosis desalination plants seek to deliver potable water by utilizing standalone energy sources such as solar or wind, to power intermittently operated water filtration. The intermittent nature of operation, however, introduces enhanced fouling of the membrane surface due to a favorable environment for foulants to collect and grow. Thus, membrane coatings have been developed to reduce fouling occurrence. Described herein are the efforts to construct a reverse osmosis system to mimic remote plants, as well as the investigation of anti-fouling membranes under intermittent operations. A lab-scale reverse osmosis (RO) system is developed to allow testing and monitoring of water treatment processes. Multiple sensors used to measure water quality and permeate flow were incorporated inline to gather data in real time. Cross-flow RO cells utilizing flat sheet membranes enable simple sample preparation and analysis. Membrane coating technology used to improve treatment performance through enhanced antifouling properties was studied. Several coating possibilities were considered for criteria such as: cost, antifouling & anti-scaling properties, and water output quality. Polydopamine is a previously studied membrane coating, although thus far research has only extended to salt rejection of NaCl. There is a lack of research surrounding various membrane coatings when subject to real water sources, which contain a variety of salts and organic material. Additionally, intermittent operation has not been investigated. In this research, the coatings are tested under these conditions to determine their efficacy in reducing and delaying onset of membrane fouling.

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