University Of California , Santa Barbara Research Articles

SegEIR-Net: A Robust Histopathology Image Analysis Framework for Accurate Breast Cancer Classification.

Breast Cancer (BC) is a significant threat affecting women globally. An accurate and reliable disease classification method is required to get an early diagnosis. However, existing approaches lack accurate and robust classification. This study aims to design a model to classify BC Histopathology images accurately by leveraging segmentation techniques. This work proposes a combined segmentation and classification approach for classifying BC using histopathology images to address these issues. Chan-Vese algorithm is used for segmentation to accurately delineate regions of interest within the histopathology images, followed by the proposed SegEIR-Net (Segmentation using EfficientNet, InceptionNet, and ResNet) for classification. Bilateral Filtering is also employed for noise reduction. The proposed model uses three significant networks, ResNet, InceptionNet, and EfficientNet, concatenates the outputs from each block followed by Dense and Dropout layers. The model is trained on the breakHis dataset for four different magnifications and tested on BACH (BreAst Cancer Histology) and UCSB (University of California, Santa Barbara) datasets. SegEIR-Net performs better than the existing State-of-the-Art (SOTA) methods in terms of accuracy on all three datasets, proving the robustness of the proposed model. The accuracy achieved on breakHis dataset are 98.66%, 98.39%, 97.52%, 95.22% on different magnifications, and 93.33% and 96.55% on BACH and UCSB datasets. These performance results indicate the robustness of the proposed SegEIR-Net framework in accurately classifying BC from histopathology images.

Continuous entanglement distribution from an AlGaAs-on-insulator microcomb for quantum communications

Using an aluminum gallium arsenide microring resonator, we demonstrate a bright quantum optical microcomb with >300 nm (>40 THz) bandwidth and more than 20 sets of time–energy entangled modes, enabling spectral demultiplexing with simple, off-the-shelf commercial telecom components. We report high-rate continuous entanglement distribution for two sets of entangled-photon pair frequency modes exhibiting up to 20 GHz/mW2 pair generation rate. As an illustrative example of entanglement distribution, we perform a continuous-wave time-bin quantum key distribution protocol with 8 kbps sifted key rates while maintaining less than 10% error rate and sufficient two-photon visibility to ensure security of the channel. When the >20 frequency modes are multiplexed, we estimate >100 kbps entanglement-based key rates or the creation of a multi-user quantum communications network. The entire system requires less than 110 µW of on-chip optical power, demonstrating an efficient source of entangled frequency modes for quantum communications. As a proof of principle, a quantum key is distributed across 12 km of deployed fiber on the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) campus and used to encrypt a 21 kB image with <9% error.

The Long UC Santa Barbara Chicana/o/x Movement

Most social movement scholars assume that the African American Civil Rights and Chicana/o/x Movements lasted no more than ten years. Framing these movements as “short,” rather than “long,” minimizes their complex, radical roots, reinforcing popular misconceptions that they had narrow goals, such as color-blindness. In this article, I utilize a case study approach to examine the long Chicana/o/x Movement on one specific campus—the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). The movement on that campus began with the historic El Plan de Santa Barbara Conference in April 1969, and it continued into the 1990s with a ten-day hunger strike. It persisted into the late 2010s when Chicanx/Latinx students mobilized to preserve their beloved “home away from home,” El Centro Arnulfo Casillas.

Viruses Don't Discriminate, But People Do: Teaching Writing for Health Professionals in the Context of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matte

Teachers of writing are not therapists. This much I know. That seems obvious, but it’s not so obvious in times like these. Nor was it obvious when I co-wrote an article on teaching in times of trauma in 2016. I wrote about teaching writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) during the remaining two weeks of the 2014 spring quarter after Elliot Rodger murdered six students before killing himself. My co-author wrote about teaching in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Both of these events, though caused by different forces, revealed underlying issues of misogyny and racism. Both events caused major crises for teachers and students alike; after all, “[t]raumatic events that threaten life, health, body integrity, and the lives of others are ubiquitous and have life-altering impacts for a substantial portion of individuals” (Gerhart, Canetti, Hobfall, 2015, p. 4). We concluded that, while we are not therapists, we felt a responsibility to address challenges and inequalities in our classes when unforeseen traumatic events were happening in our communities, and to give students agency in that process.

NurturingThe Arts of Ghana, 1972–1977

<h3>ABSTRACT:</h3> My direct engagement with arts in Ghana occurred during four days in 1967, when I stayed with Roy and Sophie Sieber in Legon. In 1972, I spent six months researching festivals and arts of personal adornment, among other forms. In 1973, after my return to University of California, Santa-Barbara (UCSB), I held a seminar on Ghanaian art, which led to seven students traveling to Ghana for fieldwork in summer, 1974. Observing his exceptional research among the Fante, I invited one of the students, Doran Ross, to collaborate on what became a traveling exhibition and book, <i>The Arts of Ghana</i>, organized by the Museum of Cultural History, UCLA in 1977. Ross and I returned for more research the following two summers and one fall. We identified objects to display from European and American collections and divided up topics to write about for the book, which addressed the arts of the entire nation, a somewhat risky venture by two rather inexperienced scholars.

Significant light absorption of brown carbon during the 2020 California wildfires

In this study, the contribution of brown carbon (BrC) to the absorption aerosol optical depth (AAOD) during the August to October 2020 California wildfires in Fresno, Monterey, and the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was investigated using Aerosol Robotic Network (AERONET) column measurements with Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) fire pixel counts. There was an approximate three to five times increase in AAOD and fine-mode aerosols during intensive wildfires in August–October 2020 compared to the wildfires in the previous 18 years (2002–2019). Substantial daily variation in the contribution of BrC to AAOD was correlated with the fire pixel counts (correlation coefficients of 0.63, 0.40, and 0.57 at Fresno, Monterey, and UCSB, respectively). This variation was influenced by regional topography, atmospheric conditions, and distance from the fire. Between August and October 2020, the average contribution of BrC to AAOD at 440 nm due to wildfires was 35.3 ± 5.6, 35.1 ± 6.8, and 40.6 ± 9.5% at Fresno, Monterey, and UCSB, respectively. This was approximately twice as high as for those sites without a direct wildfire influence. The BrC contribution with direct wildfire influence over the period of January–December 2020 at Fresno, Monterey, and UCSB (32.8 ± 7.5, 31.6 ± 7.9, and 40.0 ± 3.5%, respectively) and from 2002 to 2019 (30.7 ± 8.3, 28.5 ± 4.8, and 35.7 ± 14.6%, respectively) was approximately 20% greater than other BrC sources including vehicles, fossil fuel combustion, and residential heating.

Clyde Woods: The People’s Prof!

When I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black studies and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He told me I would be okay, and he made sure to knock me upside the head when I was not paying attention. He also debated with me about the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. He was not too fond of them. From the day I met him in 2009 to the night I said goodbye in 2011, Clyde was an important part of my intellectual development, and he continues to be part of the organic intellectual I am continuously becoming.

Diet alters how opaleyes cope with heat

When the water gets hot, cold-blooded (ectothermic) animals have three choices: move on somewhere else, wait a few generations for their descendants to come to terms with the new situation, or modify their own physiology quickly to cope in the warm conditions, a process known as acclimation. As option one isn't always viable and option two is more long term, most ectotherms must do their best to get on with life; but those changes usually comes at a price. ‘To undergo a successful acclimation response, ectotherms require energy and nutritional building blocks obtained from their diet’, says Emily Hardison from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA. So how much of an impact does an ectothermic fish's diet have on its ability to weather warm water? Knowing that some ectotherms naturally change their diet as the temperature rises, Hardison and PI Erika Eliason, also at UCSB, wondered whether a switch from a carnivorous diet to a brine shrimp and seaweed diet for omnivorous opaleyes (Girella nigricans) – which supplement their carnivorous diet with algae in warmer water – might affect their ability to cope in hotter conditions.Collecting young opaleyes from the Santa Barbara Harbor, USA, in spring 2019, Hardison provided the animals with a new home in the lab where she kept half of the fish in comfortable 12°C water, while the remaining had a warmer existence at 20°C. Then, she divided the cool fish into two additional groups, one fed a diet of brine shrimp with seaweed and the other fed brine shrimp alone, and repeated the process with the warm water fish. After keeping the four groups of fish in their respective situations for 3 weeks, Hardison and Eliason, with Krista Kraskura, Jacey Van Wert and Tina Nguyen (all from UCSB), then tested the fish's fitness and physiology to find out how well their carnivorous and omnivorous diets had helped them to prepare for life in warm water.Not surprisingly, the hearts of the warm water fish coped better with high temperatures than the hearts of fish from the cooler conditions, but the fish didn't seem to benefit from the more varied diet. The carnivores were just as fit as the omnivores and they were both able to sprint at the same high speeds when chased around the tank. If anything, the hearts of the fish from hot water that had supplemented their diet with seaweed didn't fare as well as the hearts of the fish that only feasted on brine shrimp. In addition, the resting metabolic rate of the algae-supplemented fish was higher, probably because their digestive systems had to work harder to digest the more diverse diet. But, even though the change in diet didn't seem to benefit any of the physiological qualities that Hardison and colleagues had monitored, that doesn't mean that other aspects of the animals’ physiology – such as their gut flora and swimming ability – do not benefit from an alteration in diet as the temperature rises. And, the ability to switch diet as it gets hotter may allow more adaptable animals to survive situations that would be more risky for less versatile diners, if, for example, the food supply suddenly changed thanks to a predator moving in or a particular prey species dying off.One thing is sure, the diet an ectothermic animal consumes definitely impacts their physiology – with specific physical traits reacting to temperature changes in subtly different ways depending on the diet – making diet a key component that physiologists must take into account when investigating how individual ectothermic species react and adapt to our increasingly changing climate.

Structural Barriers to Accessing the Campus Assault Resources and Education (CARE) Offices at the University of California (UC) Campuses.

In order to continue pushing college campuses to the forefront of survivor-centered practice and student-centered care, it is imperative that the barriers students experience in accessing campus sexual violence resource centers be documented and addressed. This research evaluates student and staff perceptions of barriers to accessing the Campus Assault Resources and Education (CARE) offices on three University of California (UC) campuses. Data were collected by researchers from UC Speaks Up, a cross-campus research initiative at UC Los Angeles (UCLA), UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), and UC San Diego (UCSD) aimed at understanding factors that both contribute to and prevent sexual violence among college students. This analysis only included data that yielded insights into CARE's accessibility. Thematic analysis of 63 interviews and 27 focus group discussions was conducted using Dedoose. The following six thematic codes emerged from the data: (1) awareness of office, (2) confidentiality of services, (3) physical accessibility, (4) accessibility for vulnerable and marginalized groups, (5) utilization experiences, and (6) limited institutional support. To increase the accessibility of sexual violence resource centers in higher education, this study indicates that universities and campus sexual violence resource centers should (1) encourage survivor-centered cross-campus collaborations between sexual violence resource centers and other campus entries, (2) add more trainings that are tailored to the needs of vulnerable and marginalized communities, (3) increase the resource's campus-wide office exposure through multiple prevention education opportunities, and (4) better fund sexual violence resource centers. Implications for future research are discussed to maximize this study's public health impact.

Design and Social Change: An Architectural History of the University of California, Santa Barbara

ABSTRACT The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), campus as it stands today appears as an architectural mash-up of midcentury modern institutional buildings, both low rise and high rise; a smattering of World War II–era wooden buildings; 1970s-style double wide trailers; and new science buildings built by a who's who of internationally famous architects. In this case study, the author shows how the UCSB campus's architectural history mirrors the post–World War II boom in educational facilities throughout California and the social, cultural, and architectural history of the region as a whole. The key to discovering this history is archival research, both at the University Archives at the UCSB Library, as well as at the architecture-specific Architecture and Design Collection at the Art, Design &amp; Architecture Museum on campus. In this case study, the author explains how the architectural history can be traced through the archival records to more fully understand the history of the campus.

An SVM approach towards breast cancer classification from H&E-stained histopathology images based on integrated features.

Breast cancer is one among the most frequent reasons of women's death worldwide. Nowadays, healthcare informatics is mainly focussing on the classification of breast cancer images, due to the lethal nature of this cancer. There are chances of inter- and intra-observer variability that may lead to misdiagnosis in the detection of cancer. This study proposed an automatic breast cancer classification system that uses support vector machine (SVM) classifier based on integrated features (texture, geometrical, and color). The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) dataset and BreakHis dataset, which are available in public domain, were used. A classification comparison module which involves SVM, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random forest (RF), and artificial neural network (ANN) was also proposed to determine the classifier that best suits for the application of breast cancer detection from histopathology images. The performance of these classifiers was analyzed against metrics like accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, balanced accuracy, and F-score. Results showed that among the classifiers, the SVM classifier performed better with a test accuracy of approximately 90% on both the datasets. Additionally, the significance of the proposed integrated SVM model was statistically analyzed against other classifier models.

The Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project: A transformative open access monograph initiative

The open access (OA) movement was taking libraries by storm, and scholarly communication librarianship was trending in 2009 when I was the coordinator of the Humanities Collection Group (Huma) at the University of California-Santa Barbara (UCSB). All of the buzz centered on STEM journals and commercial publishers. The Huma librarians—subject librarians for the humanities—were curious about how the OA movement and scholarly communication issues impacted the humanities.

Enhancement and segmentation of histopathological images of cancer using dynamic stochastic resonance

Pathologists face difficulty in cell image detection as uneven dye causes the low contrast and inhomogeneity. The proposed discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based dynamic stochastic resonance (DSR) technique enhances the histopathological images of cancer. Further, the DSR-based Otsu's thresholding processed image helps in the better segmentation of histopathological images of four types of cancer cells, i.e., breast, cervix, ovarian and prostate cancer. The comparison of segmentation results were performed on the University of California, Santabarbara (UCSB) available breast cancer datasets for analysis. The algorithm has been applied to total 22 breast cancer images including benign and malignant and compared with region of interest (ROI) segmented ground truth images to validate the performance of proposed DSR-based Otsu's thresholding. DSR-based Otsu's segmentation obtained better results with 0.776 average correlation, 0.979 average normalised probabilistic rand (NPR) index, 0.011 average global consistency error (GCE), and 0.185 average variation of information (VI). These indices are higher than the other conventional segmentation methods and have the advantage to identify the target objects in low contrast images.

Enhancement and segmentation of histopathological images of cancer using dynamic stochastic resonance

Pathologists face difficulty in cell image detection as uneven dye causes the low contrast and inhomogeneity. The proposed discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based dynamic stochastic resonance (DSR) technique enhances the histopathological images of cancer. Further, the DSR-based Otsu's thresholding processed image helps in the better segmentation of histopathological images of four types of cancer cells, i.e., breast, cervix, ovarian and prostate cancer. The comparison of segmentation results were performed on the University of California, Santabarbara (UCSB) available breast cancer datasets for analysis. The algorithm has been applied to total 22 breast cancer images including benign and malignant and compared with region of interest (ROI) segmented ground truth images to validate the performance of proposed DSR-based Otsu's thresholding. DSR-based Otsu's segmentation obtained better results with 0.776 average correlation, 0.979 average normalised probabilistic rand (NPR) index, 0.011 average global consistency error (GCE), and 0.185 average variation of information (VI). These indices are higher than the other conventional segmentation methods and have the advantage to identify the target objects in low contrast images.

The ScholarLed Consortium

ScholarLed, a consortium of five not-for-profit, scholar-led OA book publishers, was founded in 2018 in order to develop powerful, practical ways for small-scale, scholar-led Open Access presses to grow and flourish in a publishing landscape that is changing rapidly. We comprise Mattering Press, meson press, Open Book Publishers, Open Humanities Press, and punctum books: five publishers with different business models and publishing practices, but with a shared commitment to making high-quality research available OA without levying Book Processing Charges (BPCs).&#x0D; We have approached this task with the philosophy of ‘scaling small’; in other words, rather than seeking to grow our reach by any one of us becoming exponentially larger, we want to create systems that allow a large number of diverse, small-scale scholarly publishing initiatives to operate collaboratively, and so to foster a robust, inclusive and community-managed publishing ecosystem in partnership with all actors in the scholarly publishing ecosystem (including scholars, libraries, and funders). Collectively the ScholarLed presses have now published over 500 books, and expect to publish over 80 new titles in the coming year. What would the publishing landscape look like if, rather than 5 presses, we were 25, 50, or 100 in number?&#x0D; Accordingly, in our first year we became key partners in the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, which we developed along with organisations including Coventry University; Loughborough University Library; University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Library; Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB); Jisc Collections; and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). In June of this year, this project successfully secured funding of £2.2 million from Research England to build the necessary open infrastructure over the next three years to transform open access book publishing, by moving away from a model of competing commercial service operations to a more horizontal and cooperative, knowledge-sharing approach.&#x0D; In this presentation, we will discuss the ‘scaling small’ philosophy that underlies ScholarLed, and how this chimes with growing international movements such as the Invest in Open Infrastructure initiative. We will also explore how this impacts the COPIM project and our firm conviction that, in order for open access publishing initiatives to thrive, we have to develop more robust definitions of ‘open’ that go beyond releasing content from behind paywalls. COPIM will pilot a range of interventions, from developing open, transparent, sustainable, and community-governed infrastructures for the curation, dissemination, discovery, and long-term preservation of open content and open data, to helping publishers transition away from a BPC-based business model, to following the best practices for integrating open content into institutional library, digital learning, and repository systems. COPIM prepares the ground for OA publishing to thrive, increasing its strength and heterogeneity within a robust, inclusive and community-managed publishing ecosystem: Scaling Small.&#x0D; Keywords: scholar-led; community-driven; open access publishing.

High-Performance Photonic Integrated Circuits on Silicon

Heterogeneous integration of III–V semiconductor photonics combined with silicon foundry technology enables low-cost, high-performance photonic integrated circuits. Highly reliable lasers using epitaxial deposition of quantum dot lasers, with >100 years at 35 C have been demonstrated at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and can be manufactured at wafer scale. Reduction in the linewidth enhancement factor allows isolator-free operation. This technology enables cost-effective photonic integrated circuits for applications such as microwave photonics and data communications. Optical frequency synthesis with ∼1.5 Hz accuracy is demonstrated using heterogeneous integration. Silicon photonics applications that will benefit from future heterogeneous integration are also demonstrated, including high dynamic range microwave photonic links and optical switching technology that scales to hyperscale datacenters with hundreds of thousands of servers.

Electrons and Holes as Catalysts in Organic Electrosynthesis

AbstractInvited for this month's cover picture is Robert Francke from the University of Rostock (Germany) and R. Daniel Little from the University of California Santa Barbara (USA). The cover picture highlights the catalytic effect of heterogeneous electron transfers on chemical reactions of organic molecules (“electrochemical catalysis”). A comparison is shown between the typical energy profile of a thermally induced reaction and the corresponding electrochemically catalyzed transformation using the example of the Newman‐Kwart rearrangement. Read the full text of the Minireview at 10.1002/celc.201900432.

Katalin Barta

Katalin Barta

The Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS): Facilitating Interdisciplinary and International collaborations

The Center for Information Technology and Society (CITS) at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) is a multidisciplinary center with affiliated faculty from 16 departments spanning the Social Sciences, Humanities, Education, and Engineering. The Center’s overarching goal is to discover and apply integrated knowledge from these diverse perspectives to understand and guide the development, use, and effects of information technologies in contemporary society. To achieve our goals, CI...

Donor/Acceptor Type Polymer Semiconductor Applicable for Organic Thin-Film Transistors without Surface Modification on Printed Silver Electrodes

<Introduction> Organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) devices have attracted much attention in viewpoint of printed-electronics that realizes inexpensive, large-area and flexible devices in the near future. Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation (MCC) has investigated organic semiconductor (OSC) for more than a decade, and focuses recently on development of donor/acceptor (DA) type polymer semiconductors[1-4]. Improvement of OTFT device mobility by novel OSC materials is still one of the biggest issues in the development phase. However, their additional features that can make device fabrication process simpler are also an important industrialization standpoint in material selection. In this paper, we present DA type polymer semiconductor that enables uncomplicated device fabrication process without self-assembled monolayer (SAM) modification on printed silver electrode surface. <Experiments> Top-gate, bottom-contact devices were fabricated as follows. Silver source and drain (S/D) electrodes were patterned by ink-jet printing on Parylene underlayer on a glass substrate. After preparation of bank structure by a dispenser system using solution of amorphous fluoropolymer, semiconducting layer (MCC’s OSC; MOP-01) was printed into an area defined by the bank by a dispenser equipment using its dilute mesitylene solution. Parylene polymer dielectric (thickness: 300 nm) was then deposited on the surface under vaccum. Finally silver gate electrode was patterned by ink-jet printing on the polymer dielectric. Channel length and channel width of the devices are 30-40 μm and 1000 μm, respectively. During the fabrication process described above, three kinds of the silver S/D electrode surface were prepared with or without SAM modification. The SAM molecule introduced at the electrode surface is either pentafluorobenzenethiol (PFBT) commonly used for p-type OSC or 4-methylbenzenethiol (4MBT) normally used for n-type OSC. Silver S/D electrodes without SAM modification were also prepared for comparison. <Results and Discussion> Transfer characteristics of the fabricated OTFT were measured by semiconductor parameter analyzer. The OTFTs exhibited a field-effect mobility of 0.4 cm2/Vs with 4MBT SAM, 0.5 cm2/Vs without SAM, and 0.6 cm2/Vs with PFBT SAM in a saturation region (VDS = -10V) as an average with an on/off current ratio of about 106. The mobility difference is quite small regardless of the presence or absence of the SAM and its species. In addition, mobility among several devices was adequately uniform in each case. According to these findings, we were able to fabricate complementary organic inverter circuits successfully with fewer process steps by combining MOP-1 and n-type OSC (TU-3, Future Ink corporation) where only 4MBT was utilized as an electrode surface modifier[5]. The inverter circuit realized low power operation with excellent performance. <Acknowledgments> T.M. would like to thank all the collaborators in Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials (MC-CAM) in University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This work was partially supported by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST, the center of Innovation Program). <References> L. Ying et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2011, 133, 18538–18541.H.-R. Tseng et al., Adv. Mater., 2014, 26, 2993–2998.M. Wang et al., Chem. Commun., 2016, 52, 3207-3210.M. Wang et al., J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2017, 139, 17624–17631.Y. Takeda et al., the 65th JSAP Spring Meeting, 2018, 18p-D102-17.