While general object detection has seen tremendous progress, localization of elliptical
objects has received little attention in the literature. Our motivating application is the …

When assessing the strength of sawn lumber for use in engineering applications, the sizes
and locations of knots are an important consideration. Knots are the most common visual …

In this thesis, we consider two combinatorial problems arising in phylogenetics and
computational forestry. We develop sequential Monte Carlo based inference methods to …