What I am currently up to is listed below (reverse-chronological).
We are starting a new startup called iSciLabs. The goal is to create an organic community of humans. A community of scientists who are deeply concerned with culture and creativity. We will be working on data-related and/or other mathematical projects. The company will be growing slowly and carefully so that we do not sacrifice human side in favor of capital!
We recently wrote a paper for Cycles’ Dewey Award (cycles.org/deweyaward2021/#step_1). We talk about extracting information from noisy data and how sparsity (sparse data collection and representation) is an importat part of it. A GitLab repository that includes the codes is also available that you can play with online; gitlab.com/iFinMath/cycles-discovery.
I think every undergraduate or new graduate student show go through bootcamps/short practices like this to see different concepts quickly and how these concepts can be used in practice.
My first paper (as a postdoc) is submitted!!! The risk for insufficient chill accumulation: a climate change perspective for apple and cherry production in the United States is available on bioRxiv and Research Gate. What it is about? Fruit trees need to go through a good amount of coldness in the winter to produce high quality and quantity fruit. Climate change is affecting winters, and consequently trees!
I wrote a survey paper about recent advances in Opinion Dynamics and it got accepted in `. I hope it is useful for people who are getting started to work in the field, by providing them a big picture about what has already been done, i.e. what is the border between known and unknown.
I am currently working on classification of satellite images of farms/orchards to detect double-cropped lands. Next (starting soon) would be exploring rots in onions using topologican data analysis. I will work on these two projects simultaneously.
My latest paper, From classical to modern opinion dynamics, is accepted in International Journal of Modern Physics C.
Getting closer to images and analysis—you have to get close to what you like, immerse yourself in it—. I am currently learning and getting my hands dirty with remote sensing stuff. We are looking into satellite images to distinguish an apple field from a pear one or else—classification or as they like to call it crop-mapping—, or detect whether a field is being used for double cropping. So much potential here.
Other than getting my daily dose of mathematics and data science related readings, in my postdoc position I work with the historical/observed and modeled/future data of climate. I will list different aspects of climate change challenges and my projects below:
Pests’/insects’ life cycle is ruled by the so called Degree Days (which is some sort of accumulation of heat over time). Let’s say if there are 1000 eggs of a given insect, and 200F degrees of temperature is accumulated in one week, then the eggs start to come into life. By global warming, the 200F degrees will be accumulated in 6 days rather than a week. Hence, in one week, we will have a more population of the insect flying around! That needs to be dealt with, otherwise they will eat our fruit! And also, historically, there were 2 generations of a given insect, in this case codling moth, over one calendar year and in the future there will be more of them. The pest is just one aspect of it, carry on reading!
Have you ever wondered why some of the fruits you see at Safeway are ugly looking or damaged? There are different reasons for it which I will combine two of them in this part. One is called sunburn in which the fruit cannot tolerate either the high temperature or, the damage could be done just via radiation.
The other way that the fruit could get damaged is via coldness. When you want to protect yourself against diseases you inject some vaccine. The same idea exist in the fruits. When the temperature around the fruit, hanging on tree, changes, the fruit automatically adjusts the level of sugar existing in it. That prevents the damage the cold may cause. It prevents being frozen. However, it is a process. The temperature needs to change slowly. Otherwise, the fruit cannot adopt and will die!Some fruit trees need to get cold enough in the winter to be able to produce delicious fruit in the summer. Global warming is making it harder for the trees to get enough of cold over the winter season. So, again, we need to know where we can grow our apples, how much of it will we have, etc.
I think that is enough to get you excited!
Publications
Google Scholar is not friendly to me! So, here are all the resources that track my articles; Google Scholar, Research Gate, NASA Ads, and Semantic Scholar. The list of my publications along with the works citing them is here. (I have a reason to keep this file here for the time being.)
Published
[4] Data-driven Operation of the Resilient Electric Grid: A Case of COVID-19. The Journal of Engineering (Open Access. August 9, 2021). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1049/tje2.12065
[3] Recent advances in opinion propagation dynamics: A 2020 Survey (PDF). The European Physical Journal Plus (June 15, 2020). Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.05286. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-020-00541-2
[2] From classical to modern opinion dynamics (PDF). International Journal of Modern Physics C (March 26, 2020). Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.12089. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1142/S0129183120501016.
[1] An energy-based interaction model for population opinion dynamics with topic coupling (PDF). International Journal of Modern Physics C. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1142/S0129183118501152
Submitted
[1] Climate change and chill accumulation: implications for tree fruit production in cold-winter regions
In Progress
[2] Estimating crop-intensity in the Pacific northwest using Sentinel-2 imegary.
[1] Codling moth pest pressures in WA State apples: management implications under a changing climate.