 Hello everyone, I'm Ginny Steele, I'm the Norman and Armina Powell University Librarian at UCLA and delighted to be with you today. It's great to have everybody here, and we have some wonderful speakers this afternoon so I'm so happy that you'll have the opportunity to hear from them. As we get started, I wanted to note that as an academic institution, we in the UCLA library, understand our responsibility to acknowledge the Gabrielino Tongva peoples as the traditional land caretakers of Tovongar. And consistent with UCLA's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, we believe that understanding the historical and current experiences of indigenous peoples will help inform the work we do. So again, thank you for coming today. I just wanted to give you a few quick updates on what's happening in the library. As you know, the last 16 months have been a time of quite a bit of change for us. During the pandemic, we started and for the first roughly year of the pandemic, all of our library buildings were closed. But we transitioned almost all of our services to be remotely available. And we've seen an increase in use of those services. In some cases, a 500 or 600% increase in use of our website and of the many digital resources that we make available. Starting in April, we reopened some study space in the Young Research Library and also in the Biomedical Library. And then in May, we opened the reading room in library special collections for use. The plan at this point, barring unforeseen circumstances, is to reopen all of our libraries in September, right after Labor Day. So of course that all depends on what happens with the pandemic, but we're very hopeful and we're really eager to get back to campus and see students, see faculty, see everyone who works there, and be together as people. There's a discussion going on about the concept of flex work because we now know that it's possible for people to be extremely productive by working remotely. And so we're engaged in conversations with everyone who works in the library to figure out how we can make it possible for people to be able to work remotely. Some of the time or possibly even all of the time, although recognizing that there are people who will need to be on campus because their jobs require them to be physically present in the libraries. So lots going on, lots for us to think about. But today, what we're thinking about is our library prizes. This is something we do every year and we're really pleased that we're able to continue this program, even during the pandemic. So we gave our prizes out last spring and spring of 2020 and we've also given our prizes out this year in 2021. And this is the way that we honor a few of the amazing students at UCLA, and these particular students are ones who have distinguished themselves with their passion for learning and pursuing knowledge. So each of the students we recognize today has demonstrated remarkable intellectual curiosity, as well as the skills and capacities to conduct meaningful research. The projects they have produced are compelling thought provoking and inspiring to their faculty, librarians and peers. We believe strongly that these students accomplishments deserve a broad audience, and we know their research efforts will be compelling to graduate schools and future employers. We are really grateful for the opportunity to showcase and celebrate their achievements today. So just a little bit about the library prizes. The inspiration for the UCLA library prize for undergraduate research comes from Ruth Simon, who's a UCLA alumna, former UCLA campus council, and passionate supporter of books and libraries. Ruth has generously endowed the awards being that we have presented to these students to inspire and reward the work they do and their excellence in library research. So congratulations to all our winners. And I think there we go, there's the list of all of our winners so wonderful to see and fascinating work. So today we do have a few of the prize winners who are going to talk about the projects they did. So I will just turn the floor over to first to Anisha Chandra, who was sharing her project the role of diet and exercise in the gut microbiota and metabolism. And just wanted to note that health policy and management professor William McCarthy was the faculty sponsor for this project. So, Anisha over to you. Thank you, Jenny. Hi everyone, thank you for being here and I'm going to be talking about the role of diet and exercise in the gut microbiota and metabolism. Next slide. So first just to put some things in context, the gut microbiota consists of trillions of microbes in our large intestines and they impact us more than we may realize. About 99% of microbes are beneficial or harmless and there has been plenty of research connecting them to metabolic diseases like obesity. Given that the obesity rate in America is 42%, understanding the gut microbiota can help develop interventions to address it. Next slide. So one of the reasons why the gut microbiota is so important is because it fulfills important functions for the hosts like producing metabolites which are products of metabolism. One such metabolite is short chain fatty acids, which I will be referring to throughout this presentation short chain fatty acids are produced when the dietary fiber we ingest is degraded into monolingual saccharides and then fermented by our gut bacteria into short chain fatty acids. These short chain fatty acids then act on different organs in the body and affect microbial diversity satiety immunity and other things. There's also been the discovery of short chain fatty acid receptors across a range of cell and tissue types. So that's another reason why there's a lot of interest in short chain fatty acids right now. Next slide. So the reason I focus on diet and exercise is because they are two of the major factors that influence the composition and diversity of the gut microbiota as seen in the top of this figure. The composition of the gut microbiota then in turn affects the permeability of the gut barrier as we move down the figure and the metabolites that the gut microbes produce. These metabolites may include short chain fatty acids and gut hormones among others and they act on major organs to influence metabolite. Next slide. So I want to clarify that all of my research comes back to the idea that a more diverse gut microbiota is a healthier microbiota because different bacteria have different abilities and fulfill different functions for the host. The host gut microbiota is less diverse, it is more at risk of dysbiosis which is in imbalance in gut microbes. As shown in the figure on the right, a diet or exercise intervention may or may not be effective for the host due to the composition of their gut microbiota. The gut microbiota of non responders, which is in the bottom half of the figure, the host does not have the diversity of microbes necessary to respond effectively to a generally beneficial activity like exercise. Next slide. The diet and exercise have long been established as contributors to human health of course, but less is known about the way they interact. It is a common misconception that exercise is not as important if one is eating a healthy diet, but the relationship goes both ways. Currently there is a lack of studies that take both diet and exercise into account. The fact on a non dysbiotic gut or healthy gut in other terms has basically not been studied. So some questions that remain include what is the difference between consuming a fiber diverse diet and exercising frequently versus just doing one or the other. And the mechanisms by which exercise improves that the gut microbiota also requires further exploration. Next slide. The analysis of existing human and animal research. My research will discuss how either diet or exercise effect short chain fatty acid production microbial diversity and gut barrier integrity. And then I'll talk about the individual effects diet and exercise have on these factors to discuss what their combined effect maybe. So we've already discussed short chain fatty acid production. So now we'll move on to microbial diversity. Next slide. So the explanation as to why a fiber diverse diet improves microbial diversity is pretty simple, because more diverse sources of fiber provide food for a greater variety of microbes. A more complex question is distinguishing between high quantities of fiber and high quantities of diverse fibers. In existing literature, Zalital best demonstrates the need to eat not only fiber rich foods but also fiber diverse diet. In this study diabetes patients receive either a fiber rich and fiber diverse diet, or a control diet, but the treatment group showed consistent improvements in several parameters, including butyric acid as shown in the figure, which is a precursor to one of the short chain fatty acids I mentioned. This implies that the fiber diverse diet allows short chain fatty acid producing bacteria to thrive more. Next slide. On the other hand, the mechanism by which exercise increases got diversity is less well known, but the association has been established. The figure on the left shows that the gut microbiota of professional rugby athletes had a higher diversity of got microbes. And then the figure on the right shows that the peak oxygen uptake or BL2 max, which is a value that indicates fitness levels correlated with higher microbial diversity that could not be accounted for by the diet. Next slide. So now we're going to move on to discussing gut barrier integrity. And one reason why it's important to have a strong gut barrier is that it prevents oxygen from entering the gut, which is good because most beneficial got microbes are anaerobic meaning they survive without oxygen, and this includes short chain fatty acid producing microbes. But in this figure it shows the case of diet induced obesity, where changes to the gut microbiota may result in down regulating the proteins responsible for this stuff barrier. This allows stuff like oxygen and lipopolysaccharides to leak into the gut and facilitates the expansion of harmful microbes. Next slide. And then this figure on the right demonstrates that diet rich in microbiota accessible carbohydrates which on the figure is termed hf mac. This is basically just fiber. This prevented the degradation of the gut barrier in diet induced obese mice. And with regards to exercise there have only been associations made again between exercise and gut barrier function, but one possible explanation is that during exercise, since oxygen is directed elsewhere in the body towards the muscles. This promotes an anaerobic environment in the gut, allowing short chain fatty acid producers to thrive. So now we've talked about how diet and exercise exert similar effects on the gut microbiota, and as for how diet effects exercise the literature implies that a fiber rich and fiber diverse diet enhances the effectiveness of exercise. Consuming a variety of fibers feeds the anaerobes of the gut, allowing for increased production of short chain fatty acids, which help preserve the gut barrier. Exercise is more effective if the gut barrier is strong as oxygen is more efficiently distributed to the muscles rather than leaking into the gut where it is not wanted. This figure on this slide here further highlights the relationship between diet and exercise as mice fed high fat diet. When they were supplemented with any of the three short chain fatty acids they had higher energy expenditure, despite no changes in activity levels. No supports the notion of a plant based diet as plant based foods are rich in fiber. Next slide. As for how exercise effects diet here are a couple of hypotheses. The first is that exercise alters taste sensitivity, which has been shown in human studies though these studies are a little dated at this point. Exercise individuals have been shown to have less hunger and increased taste sensitivity to sweet foods in particular, which basically means that sweet foods taste sweeter after exercise than they did before exercise. And this may be related to a separate theory called sensory specific satiety, which basically just mean that as food is consumed preference for that food declines, which I'm sure we have all experienced to some extent before. So increased taste sensitivity may lead to preference declining quicker, because individuals may redirect their hunger to foods with different tastes. And as we know redirecting our hunger to diversity of foods would also support microbial diversity. And finally, we have all also probably experienced preference for water after exercise. So this may extend to include cravings for water bearing foods, which include fiber rich fruits and vegetables and next slide. We've also shown that exercise impacts appetite control parameters like hormones. And while the mechanism for this is still unclear, both studies in mice and humans have shown that reduced hunger hormones and increased satiety hormones are there after exercise. Next slide. The bottom line here after looking at all these different factors is that eating a fiber rich fiber diverse and minimally processed diet and staying active produces short chain fatty acids, which allow for a diverse gut microbiota with a strong gut barrier short chain fatty acids exert various beneficial metabolic effects on the host, and diet and exercise in general may also have effects on satiety taste sensitivity and more. Next slide. So what I use for my research was a variety of sources from human clinical trials animal experiments bench research reviews books and web articles and I accessed most. I mostly use papers and I asked them access them from the various databases all while connected to UCLA VPN. And when I did not have access to a particular paper I checked it out from the UCLA library. Next slide. And finally, I would just like to thank my mentor Dr William, Karthi from the Fielding School of Public Health and the UCLA library for all of its donors and for making this event and the library prize possible. And thank you all for listening and I will be passing it back to Jenny. Thank you so much, Anisha. It's really great to have the opportunity to hear about your project. Our next project that we're going to hear about is from JW Clark, whose project was titled voicing the fox bullpying bodies and the zoo politics of listening and musicology professor Benjamin court was the faculty sponsor, JW. Thank you Jenny. Next slide please. In her 1992 ethnography of a fox sunning community in New Jersey's pine barrens anthropologist Mary Hufford writes quote the fox, neither holy dog nor holy cat mediates the oppositions and embodies male and female nature and culture home and abroad sociable and food and not food, insider and outsider concrete and abstract. As a cat like dog and the margins of society, the fox, the fox also threatens the reality that rests on such a read upon distinctions and quote. The updated account signals a pervasive historical trend that reaches much wider than the mid Atlantic foxes have long occupied a liminal space in the Western cultural imaginary favorites of storytellers folklore and mythology, yet often vilified doing part to their uncomfortable proximity to humanness, particularly in behavior and appearance. As suggested by the binary suffered supplies humans have particular trouble apprehending those they perceive as charming but a thief, as a luring but a stinky past and paradoxically under and the percentage regimes as an animal that is intelligent. Next slide. In a specific meaning species specific approach to representational analysis. My project gives close attention to how red foxes are those we usually call both this focus have been constituted through sound and Western cultural contexts. And I structure this project in this way for a number of reasons. First, I hope to resist defaulting to the animal as an essentialized category. We've mounted on representations of the animal, particularly in humanistic approaches, often subsumed vast varieties of species life under a catch all umbrella term, generalizing to a point where other animals simply become a homogenized other. This tendency is the same that prompted Jack Terry and his famous lectures on the subject to replace the animal with learning more signaling through his wordplay, neither species nor gender nor an individual, but an irreducible living multiplicity of mortals contained in that common label of alterity. And so in order to do justice to species difference I actively refute the violent of facing anthropocentrism that draws the line between the human and the animal. The work also stems from an implicit conviction that as my advisor remarked in one of our discussions on the topic that foxes are people. Historically foxes have garnered equal parts admiration and disgust from humans sentiments which only become amplified as we translate them into various human media. For critical proximity to humanness that we afford red foxes in our mythologies and perhaps to a greater extent our cultural commodities is starkly contrasted with their historical categorization as pests, as well as the existence of the fur farming industry that takes so many of their lives. Although we might even want to ask our pests not construed as liminal figures themselves, situated as they are between constructions of civilization and wilderness, both in scare quotes there. And crucially my interest in red foxes mirrors aspects of anthropologists and at things motivation for studying the matutake mushroom as it exists within globalized commodity chains. And so just as things matutake flourishes under what are usually regarded as destructive anthropogenic interventions, red foxes have proved time and again their pension for resilience despite the habit capitalism continues to wreak on global ecologies. In terms of distribution encompassing practically the entire northern hemisphere, if I have not only in biomes considered perhaps relatively distant from direct human contact, such as forests, although we might even want to push on what what constitutes something that is distant from human contact in this day and age, but also in bustling urban centers filled by humans as well. And so here I want to ask what lessons can we learn from those who themselves have learned to live in the midst of degraded precarious neoliberal mechas. And so with with red foxes at the center of my inquiry, I give primary attention in this project to three cultural sites where in acts of what I call voicing occur. Next slide. My deployment of the term voicing here denotes not only a fluid process in action, but also remains intentionally fuzzy and multivalent in its usage voicing can and often does take many disparate forms, only some of which involve musical behavior of the traditional sort. And so sites of voicing, or to borrow language from voice of the scholars need to I'd sign in Catherine myself performances of claims to voice need only entail a projection of voice by a perceived subject on to some sort of perceived object. In other words, a site of voicing maybe really any case where the voice heard does not emanate directly from the individual group as being spoken for is on this case it's humans doing speaking for other animals. Next slide. And so I begin by locating the red fox in the early 20th century European musical imaginary, showing how Lea Shana checks 1924 opera the cunning little vixen situates its titular Fox within a decisively folkloric tradition, the recourse of representational strategies reliant on stereotypes derived from Esopian and later renardian traditions of the animal fable. So I contend that sound in the cunning little vixen functions as a tool to signal not only species difference, but differences in moral status by analyzing how you know check articulates Fox particulates rather foxiness and the lack thereof during the opera's act one finale. As a stereotypical fox in the henhouse scene, the act one finale is a notable at least three ways that kind of triangulate. So first, you know check confers a different degree of personhood upon the cock in the hands, then through the vocal lines and signing profiles. Second, you know checks textual characterization of the vixen relies heavily on preconceived notions of foxiness, both drawn from naturalistic observation and from folkloric characterizations. And third, the scene and the opera as a whole more generally capitalizes on a collective perception that the presence of other animals in a musical work indexes non seriousness. And so around the turn of the century we get this really pervasive association between the child and the animal is kind of discrete categories in all sorts of media which is something that continues to the present day if you look at it the proliferation of non human characters and children's media it's it's pretty obvious so that's something I'm interested in kind of tracking. Next slide. Today, interpret Mary Hufford's 1992 ethnography of a New Jersey Fox chase through linguistic anthropologist and ethnic musicologist Steven Feld's theorizations of a customology. A customology which, which more or less makes up the foundations of modern sound studies advocates that we listen to histories of listening and posits the sonic as a relational side of knowledge production, attending to the complex webs of multi interspecies and often accompany practices of listening and storytelling. And so for Feld, a customology is quote grounded in the basic assumption that life is shared with others in relation with numerous sources of action that are various the human non human living non living organic or technological and quote, and so it kind of seeks to collapse these boundaries while also kind of respecting their discreteness and their difference. So by identifying the ways in which pine barons fox hunting articulates a relational politics evaluation predicated on species membership. I show how assessments of non human locality operate within the logics of the chase. And additionally highlighting contradictions inherent in epistemologies of the hunt, where in the well being of foxes is prioritized even as a, even as they are relentlessly pursued for sport. So what might be the implications of giving voice to those caught up in the violent human tradition of fox hunting, be they canine human or otherwise. And then further how might these seemingly reverential anthropomorphisms obscure perhaps more insidious hierarchies of trans species power. Next slide. And, and finally by way of conclusion I pivot a little bit to social media ethnography to discuss a 2011 viral YouTube video taken of kevy, a red fox rescued from a fur farm. Kevy sings a pretty song the video depicts kevy vocalizing while lying on the floor of a room in the home of her human caretaker. While the chirps and trills kevy voices are presumably meant to be in the service of inter specific communication. So, so fox fox communication user comments display and overwhelming interpretation of this behavior as singing. So I've seen these interpretations as a paradoxical bestow of personhood qua the otherworldly singing voice and then positioning the clip next to a recent explosion and popularity of internet videos and in other content teaching rescue foxes. I draw attention to a tendency and popular discourse that often consistent the evangelization and exoticization of those they presume to speak for. Next slide. And so, so as a whole this project is is more or less an argument that these instances of voicing that I highlight some musical representation, socio nature cultural traditions of hunting listening and storytelling and anthropomorphic appeals to personhood via those who co construct public internet through this course that all of these things are necessarily so political in the manner of a beyond the Dwayne uses the originally deridian term to refer to the exclusion of certain bodies from quote the political community of humans. And so by drawing attention to the act of giving voice to red foxes specifically and other animals more animals more generally. I mean to throw into relief actions that presume to speak for those whose voices are denied or eclipsed by so politics of exclusion. The seemingly disparate sites of performance together in conversation enables us to think more critically about the extent to which we continually silence and replace the voices of other animals with our own and provides us with the conceptual foundations to listen to certain histories of interspecific violence, both epistemic and corporeal. And so following Steven Feld I propose we need to listen to histories of listening to the ways we avoid other forms of life in order to grapple with persistent structures of human exceptionalism. And that dynamics of power always accompany implications of the non human voice. Ultimately, listening listening is an active mode of construction and creation, just as our listening is always political and into a degree always political entangled as it is with embedded assumptions about that and those to which we listen, to our histories of listening and histories of voicing is to necessarily engage with an unsettled traditions of naturalized thought involved in our relating to and relating with others. Next slide. Some acknowledgments and thank you so much and I'll turn it back over to Jenny. Thank you so much, JW really again, a very interesting project that you did. So our next speaker is tomorrow urban, who will present on her project machine learning detection of coronal holes and atmospheric and ocean science professor Jacob Bortnick was the faculty sponsor for this one tomorrow over to you. Hi, my name is Jenny, and thank you to the UCLA library for putting this on. So hi my name is tomorrow be presenting on a project I've been working on for the past year and a half, looking at modeling and detecting solar chronicles. Next slide please. So our coronal holes and why did we care about them is kind of a big overarching thing to understand in order to put this project into context, but solar coronal holes are regions of cold low density plasma and the solar corona, and the solar corona is basically just the outermost layer of the sun. It's irrelevant to our lives because they are areas of open magnetic field lines and from these areas of open field lines we see a fast acceleration of the solar wind. And these energetic particles can interact with earth, with earth's magnetosphere and create some of the large scale solar storms we see in the northern. Magnetically active regions are also other magnetically dynamic regions on the solar surface. And these in contrast to the dark low density solar chronal holes active regions are actually bright areas of magnetically dynamic plasma. And these are the areas where large scale solar solar storms kind of begin, such as solar flares and coronal mass ejections. The impacts of solar storms can greatly impact our lives here on earth, solar particles and plasma can interact with earth's outer atmosphere and induce perturbations in our magnetic fields and this can cause breakdowns in our power grids and infiltrate and kind of mess with telecommunication systems both space and ground based. Next slide please. In this project I use solar disk images which is basically an image of the solar corona taken at one instance in time and these images have inherent issues with them that need to be corrected for before you can really do anything with this data. These sort of corrections have been done previously in different computer science languages that are kind of now obsolete and so this project really wanted to work on kind of modernizing the system and creating a community oriented package that could be used by the solar physics community. So the two main corrections that I had to correct for in my solar disk images were limb darkening and intensity variation across instruments. So limb darkening basically occurs when the outer limb of the sun gets darker because of our distance from the outside of the sense of the sphere and we need to ensure that our intensity variation is pretty much constant across the solar disk. So the first correction we do is to account for the center to limit intensity variations. And that's this first plot in the top right. And we can see that between our original line of sight disk image and our corrected image there's kind of a difference in terms of the intensity on the outer limb. The next intensity correction we work on is known as inner instrument intensity transformations and this is basically looking to account for intensity variations between instruments. So we want to map a bunch of solar data onto the full sun surface rather than just a solar desk but actually get a 360 view of the whole sun. We need to use data from multiple different instruments. And because these instruments have kind of been in space for varying amounts of times. They have different resolutions they have different number of CCDs which means they can detect different intensities of lights. There's kind of intensity differences between these instruments that we see when we build the full sun map. So it's super important that we normalize these to a reference instrument to ensure that our final full sun maps don't look kind of weird and we don't see the cutoffs between data from different instruments. And so that was the second correction that I come for. Next slide please. So once we are account for all of these necessary corrections to our data we're able to move on to the actual more scientific part of this project which is how do we detect the solar regions we care about. And so because detection of solar regions is super fuzzy and kind of not really a prominently solved problem in solar physics. I decided that machine learning was a good way to go about improving our detection methods and also moving implicit biases that the user the coder has when building this type of detection scheme. And so machine learning is useful because it allows you to tell the machine what to do or your computer, rather than you making threshold detection without you making these threshold detections that kind of lead to this implicit user bias. And so the first machine learning algorithm I built was a supervised machine learning model known as the convolutional neural network. And so supervised machine learning model basically maps training examples on using an input output pattern. And this means that we feed this algorithm, both unlabeled data or what's seen on the left the solar disk images as well as labeled data or previously thresholded chronal hold detections and the model is going to work on figuring out how can we map this solar disk image to this detection do it a bunch of times until the models optimize and then apply it to new data. And so this is great because we can compare prediction to a desired output, kind of plot the error and determine when our model has converged. And additionally, we validate this model using data has never seen before known as validation data. Next slide please. So we're doing this we're able to merge all of our detections, as well as data from a bunch of different instruments and create kind of a full map of the sun so this is a full map of the sun meaning that if you imagine the sun is like a globe. And you kind of put a slice in the globe and then rolled it out this is basically what you'd get but now we're doing it on the sun. In doing this we're able to create a full sun detection of kernel holes we do see some like remnants of the mapping in some of these active regions but overall the big chronal whole structures and features that we care about are detected well. Next slide please. So while supervised machine learning provides like a great result in terms of our detections. It does have some user biases because I had to put in previously detected coronal whole maps. And this was based off of what I thought was a coronal hole, and since there is no textbook definition of a coronal hole I kind of wanted to look at okay what are other ways that we can do this detection such that we've removed my personal definition or someone else's personal definition of what this feature really is. So unsupervised machine learning is perfect for this type of problem because it requires no labeled data from the user. So unsupervised ML algorithms basically take a bunch of unlabeled data, and it sorts them based upon the algorithm that you write or the algorithm of your choosing, and it sorts the data such that the data in one cluster is very similar to the other data in its cluster but very different from the data from other clusters. The algorithm I used is a pretty commonly used machine learning algorithm it's known as canyons, and it basically just labels unlabeled data. And so this is cool because it allows us to detect both coronal holes in active regions just something we haven't been able to do before. And the basic idea of the algorithm is about it, iteratively, iteratively assigned a bunch of observations or to a certain number of clusters which is kind of what you see here in the figure. And this is optimized based off a bunch of user specified hyperparameters so these were parameters that I decided on to kind of optimize my model. And so some of these parameters included what data do we input for clustering how do we normalize this data, how do we wait it kind of to get the results that we want and that we expect. And so, criminal holes in active regions are normally identified using what's known as intensity thresholding so we basically say anything that's darker than this is a criminal hole anything that's brighter than this is an active region. And so using that philosophy, the first thing we kind of want to look for in terms of clustering is clustering by intensity. We also want to ensure that our detection is spatially continuous so this means that rather than having blogs here and here we're able to connect them into like a actually coherent detection. And so because of this, my model clustered both using spatial data and intensity data which were those full sun disc images that I showed previously. And in addition to needing to cluster by pieces of data, we also wanted to look at how are we going to normalize this and wait this data. And based off a bunch of optimization trials that I ran, kind of trying to remove myself from the equation and see what the, what algorithms can come up with. I determined that it worked a lot better if we waited the intensity data a little bit more strongly and normalize both intensity and spatial data on the same scale. Next slide please. Thanks. So here is a final full sun map with overlaid criminal hole detections in red and active region detections in blue. In comparison to the supervised machine learning algorithm on this did a lot better and we ran a bunch of trials and tracked a lot of area components and criminal holes. And we ran a bunch of criminal holes per like synchronic timestamp, and kind of concluded that overall this was much better method of detecting both criminal holes and active regions. And this is super useful because it's really user independent so anybody can go in and use this algorithm and detect the same criminal holes as I would, whereas before what I was using kind of was very dependent upon threshold intensity values that you chose. This sort of map and these detections are super useful for building robust model the sun and improving our understanding of how the solo corona evolves over time and how this can affect life here on earth. And moving forward, I will most likely this fall be continuing to work on this project and looking at how we can create sort of prediction capabilities to determine where you will find criminal holes maybe tomorrow or in the next week or so, and continuing to use machine learning to do so. Next slide please. So that's really all I had I want to thank the UCLA library again for providing access to all these resources in such an easy way to find, and also funding from NASA and the United States Air Force for this project. And thank you. I'll pass it back to Jimmy. Thank you so much tomorrow. Another really fascinating presentation. I have one more today, and I know it will be equally intriguing so I will like now introduce Kristen Tam, who will present her project that's entitled stimulating and I trust enforcement to expand the regenerative agriculture movement. Law professor William Boyd was the faculty sponsor for this. Over to you, Kristen. Thank you, Jenny. Hello, everyone. Have you ever played the game called anti monopoly. Maybe if you. Well, I'm assuming most of you have not. Nonetheless, even heard of this game. That's because building a monopoly is seen as the prize goal for our society. Building a monopoly is where you're able to make the most profit and even bully out other competitors, allowing you to set the prices that you want, where you can dominate the marketplace. Although this is a board game analogy corporate monopolies and conglomerates can freely out compete smaller businesses and rule the market. This issue has directly occurred in the agricultural industry causing many small farmers to be put out of business. That is where anti trust laws come in. My name is Kristen Tam and I'm a rising third year undergraduate from San Francisco studying environmental science. Last year I authored a legal research paper called stimulating anti trust enforcement to expand the regenerative agriculture movement that was recently published in the UCLA undergraduate law journal. Growing up in a city far removed from where my food comes from has intrigued me in discovering how these processes work after learning about how destructive our current monoculture industrial farming industry is on the planetary and societal health. I knew there had to be a better way to grow food in a way that's profitable and in harmony with nature systems with agriculture contributing to 10.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. The way that we manage land and farms switch please can either contribute to carbon emissions or act as a carbon capture switch. In comparison to industrial agriculture regenerative farming practices, which I learned about are more closed looped and includes no till planting cover crops and applying compost food scraps and animal manure. As a natural fertilizer creating a closed loop cycle where our outputs become farming's inputs. This helps to reduce our reliance on chemical fertilizers and farms in a way that's more natural switch. After learning about the benefits of regenerative agriculture I wanted to research ways that we can use our legal system to support more regenerative farming. In doing preliminary research I stumbled upon a research paper by Iowa's former lieutenant governor on how the courts have interpreted antitrust laws to favor agriculture conglomerates. Those led to the collapse of a lot of rural for arming livelihoods and thus led me to be interested in looking at if antitrust laws aren't protecting small farmers and competition as they're intended to. I had the hypothesis that they weren't protecting regenerative farmers either who I predicted are more likely to operate on smaller scales switch. To answer my questions I started with investigating the level of consolidation in the agricultural sector, using USDA data to track what types of practices farmers of different sizes implemented. For this I found that the United States has lost almost 500,000 farms from 1975 to 2018, while the average size of farms has increased over 50 acres, the size equivalent to 66 football fields. This has shown a trend of consolidation in the farming industry. In regards to farming practices switch in 2017 32.7% of small farms the green bar used compost or organic fertilizers which I define as regenerative fertilizers, while only 27.3% of medium farms the pink bar, and only 21% of large farms the yellow one used regenerative fertilizers. This showcases that small farmers are more likely to employ more regenerative practices. So to summarize, as the average size of the American farm is increasing and the number of farms is decreasing. This gives rise to dominant agricultural conglomerates and these corporations are more likely to out compete smaller farmers who are the ones more likely to employ regenerative practices, therefore hindering the growth of regenerative farming as my research is titled. Not only did I want to showcase this linkage, but I wanted to determine tangible flaws in our legal system that need to be addressed to truly identify pathways for remediation switch. This led me to create the question, what is causing the lack of antitrust enforcement in the US specifically what legal tools exist that are not being implemented switch. So I was bursting with excitement and interest to jump into my first legal research project, I found myself sitting in front of my computer not sure where to start. Thankfully, the undergraduate law journal brought in Caitlin Hunter from the UCLA law library to introduce us to the resources. Our library could provide us access to. So Lexis Nexus, a legal research database, books such as American legal writing to provide guidance on how to write a sound legal paper, and her help are what Caitlin Hunter provided us. I took advantage of all of these resources and set up a meeting with Dr. Hunter to talk out my ideas and receive feedback from her. In the meeting I walked away more confident about finding a focus on what I was researching, what information I needed to find where I could find it. And I was grateful for Dr. Hunter's materials and feedback that she shared. Now, I'm sure you've been itching to learn about what antitrust laws really are. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, they are policies created to promote fair competition and protect consumers by striking down monopolies and preventing the undue concentration of market power in the hands of very few corporations for an industry. The Clayton Act Antitrust Act is a landmark piece of antitrust legislation that where competitors can challenge a proposed merger if they prove that the merger would constitute antitrust injury. The key language of this legislation is in defining antitrust injury, which includes acts that may substantially lessen competition. And with any policies, as with any policies, the language can be interpreted in different ways. In this case, the courts and regulatory agencies, the Department of Justice DOJ, and the Federal Trade Commission, the FDC, have showed a trend of requiring more proof of burden before preventing mergers from forming. Next. The first prong I analyzed was decreased investigations into mergers by the federal regulatory agencies switch. I found that despite an increase in merger requests across the decades investigations by the DOJ and FDC have decreased. 125.3 cases per year were investigated from 1970 to 1979, while this decreased to 95.1 cases per year from 1980 to 1989. And finally, most recently, from 2010 to 2019, there were only 69.8 cases per year observed. So after seeing such a clear rise of non-precautionary attitudes towards antitrust enforcement in the federal agencies, I was curious to discover what led to this shift. Next. This led me to investigate the courts and their decision making processes. There has been a trend of a lack of enforcement from the courts while deciding rulings on antitrust cases. For example, in Cargill v Montfort, the Supreme Court ruled that switch, the threat of loss of profits due to possible price competition does not constitute antitrust harm. However, the purpose of the Clayton Act, as I mentioned earlier, is to prevent antitrust injury that may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly. This means that mergers should be able to be struck down without requiring initial proof of ongoing established harm to the plaintiff. Therefore, my research found additional adverse impacts of consolidation on the market. Sorry, in addition. In 1991, small farms defined as farms whose income is less than 350,000 took in 46% of agricultural profit. While in 2015, small farms only took in 25% of agricultural profit. Large farms who make more than one million, as presented at the top, held 31% of the gross cash farm income in 1991. While in 2015, their share increased to 51%. Therefore, we can see how consolidation in the agriculture sector has been occurring. And it has also had adverse impacts on farmers and consumers as well switch 71% of poultry growers live below the poverty line switch. And from 1976 to 2006 post merger prices so the prices made after firms merged together on average increased by 4.3%. These patterns demonstrate a disconnect between the current market conditions and the purpose to increase competition of the Clayton Act switch. Therefore, my research argues that the courts should set a new judicial standard that allows the threat of loss of profits due to possible price competition to constitute as antitrust injury and should be struck down were brought to court. They should instead default to precautionary measures and strike down mergers that have the capacity to acquire an undue percentage of the market share switch. So my research highlights how consolidated corporate power can have my rate damaging effects both on the markets and the planet. We have a responsibility to curtail the dominance of large corporations through the legal framework in place and enforcement agencies responsible to carry out this work. So my legal research can be used to spur information, reformation in our court legal and enforcement systems to stimulate competition and protect our food systems and environment for generations to come. I want to thank my editor Olivia Bilsky's managing editors editors from the undergraduate law journal as well as the help and resources provided by UCLA's library and the library prize. Thank you again for listening. Please don't hesitate to reach out with questions or comments and I hope to continue legal and policy analysis research around what programs are best supporting regenerative farming practices. And for the states I've lived in this past year, including California, Hawaii, Idaho, and now Nebraska so look out for that next spring. Thank you, Jenny back to you. Thank you so much, Kristen. Again, another really interesting presentation and project, lots to think about. So we've had the opportunity to hear from four of our prize winners about the work they did. I now want to invite everybody who's here to submit any questions through the Q&A function that's on your should be on your window, either at the top or the bottom. There's just a little button labeled Q&A so please go ahead and submit any questions. And while we're waiting for questions, I do have one for each of our speakers today, which is to ask, which libraries, did you use, if you came to our physical libraries, and what resources did you find to be the most helpful. So maybe we'll go in reverse order and see if maybe Kristen, would you be willing to go first. Unfortunately, I was not around Los Angeles this past year so I was only able to use the online databases that UCLA provided including access through VPN to Lexisnexus slash nexus uni for the legal research databases and court cases that I was analyzing as well as the help of Caitlin Hunter from the law library as I mentioned. That's great. Yeah, thank you. Yes, certainly being in a pandemic year you did not have access to our, to come in and use the materials in the libraries. Did you take advantage of any of the services that we ramped up the mail service or any digitization services. Kristen, I do not believe that I did. Okay, I'm just curious so it's, it's not a trick question. Yeah. So, let me ask the same question of tomorrow. I actually go to BioMed like quite literally all the time. So I'm very glad that's open because it's pretty close to my apartment. But before COVID I would always get Powell, and then in terms of online resources. I think I mainly use like the search database to find like peer reviewed articles that I needed because that links really nicely to NASA's like online database. And through the UCLA VPN you can access that so that was quite nice. Didn't order anything because everything I needed could be found online. So that was convenient, but I think that covers it. Thank you. JW, how about you? In terms of physical locations I think materials from music and arts as well as YRL were probably my most frequented places. But the way I guess the way my project was structured it was more theoretical. I didn't really rely on like archival materials. My monographs was basically most of my material were full books, and then kind of tracing the bibliographies and kind of trying to triangulate like networks of thought going on because it is drawing from, since I'm looking at like representation and a kind of a bunch of different disciplines coming to the fore that are kind of disparate in their intellectual histories. So there's a lot of just finding a monograph, and then kind of going through the bibliography and kind of working backwards from there and kind of trying to reconstruct all these kinds of networks basically. Yeah, so in terms of that, the basic kind of database search function was really helpful. And I did request a lot of materials, particularly books once the document delivery stuff started rolling out which was fantastic. Great. Great. Thanks. And it sounds as though you must have spent a fair amount of time on YouTube too, looking at Fox videos. Oh yeah, so much time scrolling through comments. Yeah, it was a good time. Did you use any sort of text mining or anything to get a sense of of the comments to analyze them. I didn't actually that's something I may look into if I continue down this line, the way I was, I was looking at it I was kind of going really granular and only looking at like one specific instance. And I think with with a heavy video that I was looking at mostly it was, I was just kind of focusing on that video. I had this kind of knowledge of, I talked more about the kind of landscape it's situated within in terms of this, not Renaissance but just explosion in this kind of Fox content. And so I was aware of that and kind of situating it within that but in terms of actually going into to comments and text and just on that one video so luckily, I was able to actually get through all of them without any kind of tool but yeah forward to go forward on that kind of route I would definitely use something like that. Thank you. And Anisha, how about you. Yeah, so most of the resources I use for online, I was not around in person. So you need any physical resources but yeah I access everything through follows connected to CLA VPN and then I requested some materials online. When they weren't available to me from the library. Great. Thank you. Well, we are almost out of time so I do want to just take a moment to thank Anisha, JW Tamar and Kristen for your really fascinating projects and your presentations today it's really exciting to be able to hear about them and, and I would like to hear your voice, talking about the work you did. And it sounds as though there's lots more that you are probably thinking about already, and thinking about maybe next steps to continue some of the project so, so we'll be watching to see what happens. I also want to thank everybody who came today. It's a great turnout and wonderful that you can share with us are our happiness to have our library, some of our library prize winners talk about their work so thank you so much for coming. I hope you will come to other events virtual and once we're back in person, our in person events at the library so thank you again have a great afternoon and please take care everybody and be safe. Bye bye.