working paper

Impacts of Motor Vehicle Operation on Water Quality in the United States - Clean-up Costs and Policies

Publication Date

January 1, 2007

Abstract

This paper investigates the costs of controlling some of the environmental impacts of motor vehicle transportation on groundwater and on surface waters. We estimate that annualized costs of cleaning-up leaking underground storage tanks range from $0.8 billion to $2.1 billion per year over ten years. Annualized costs of controlling highway runoff from principal arterials in the US are much larger: they range from $2.9 billion to $15.6 billion per year over 20 years (1.6% to 8.3% of annualized highway transportation expenditures.) Some causes of non-point source pollution were unintentionally created by regulations or could be addressed by simple design changes of motor vehicles. A review of applicable measures suggests that effective policies should combine economic incentives, information campaigns, and enforcement, coupled with preventive environmental measures. In general, preventing water pollution from motor vehicles would be much cheaper than cleaning it up.

conference paper

Bridging the Binary Analysis Gap: A Cross-Compiler Dataset and Neural Framework for Industrial Control Systems

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2

Publication Date

August 3, 2025

Author(s)

Yonatan G. Achamyeleh, Shih-Yuan Yu, Gustavo Q. Araya, Mohammad Al Faruque

Areas of Expertise

Abstract

Industrial Control Systems (ICS) rely heavily on Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) to manage critical infrastructure, yet analyzing PLC executables remains challenging due to diverse proprietary compilers and limited access to source code.To bridge this gap, we introduce PLC-BEAD, a comprehensive dataset containing 2431 compiled binaries from 700+ PLC programs across four major industrial compilers (CoDeSys, GEB, OpenPLC-V2, OpenPLC-V3). This novel dataset uniquely pairs each binary with its original Structured Text source code and standardized functionality labels, enabling both binary-level and source-level analysis. We demonstrate the dataset’s utility through PLCEmbed, a transformer-based framework for binary code analysis that achieves 93% accuracy in compiler provenance identification and 42% accuracy in fine-grained functionality classification across 22 industrial control categories. Through comprehensive ablation studies, we analyze how compiler optimization levels, code patterns, and class distributions influence model performance. We provide detailed documentation of the dataset creation process, labeling taxonomy, and benchmark protocols to ensure reproducibility. Both PLC-BEAD and PLCEmbed are released as open-source resources to foster research in PLC security, reverse engineering, and ICS forensics, establishing new baselines for data-driven approaches to industrial cybersecurity.

Suggested Citation
Yonatan G. Achamyeleh, Shih-Yuan Yu, Gustavo Q. Araya and Mohammad A. Al Faruque (2025) “Bridging the Binary Analysis Gap: A Cross-Compiler Dataset and Neural Framework for Industrial Control Systems”, in Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining V.2. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery (KDD '25), pp. 5260–5269. Available at: 10.1145/3711896.3737373.

Phd Dissertation

Diffusion and Management of Disruptive Technology in Cities: The Case of Drones

Abstract

While the industry of civilian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones has seen rapid expansion in the past decade, few studies have systematically examined the dynamics between this disruptive technology and various aspects of cities. Employing quantitative methods, this dissertation explores 1) the diffusion and adoption patterns of civilian drones; 2) how cities manage the challenges of increasing drone activities; and 3) the supply-side opportunities and constraints associated with the deployment of Urban Air Mobility (UAM) in built-out metropolitan areas. The results of the first county level study might suggest (Chapter 2) that the digital divide has magnified the uneven and nonlinear diffusion of drones across time and space. Furthermore, the strength of state-level interventions correlates with the intensity of local drone adoption, even though the regulatory effects are different among drone user groups. People living in neighborhoods with a higher adoption rate of drones are on average younger, more affluent, and Whiter. An extension of the first study at the zip code level (Chapter 3) has retested the key results and provided additional insights into the spatial dependence effects that affect the drone adoption patterns. Furthermore, the results of the second study (Chapter 4) indicate that local drone policy adoption among communities of color trails behind that of other communities. Although drone policy adoption at the local level has been shaped by both motivation and capacity factors, the desire to protect public facilities appears to motivate localities to adopt regulatory measures. In particular, policy adoption is influenced by what nearby cities do, suggesting that strategic interaction is at play among local governments. In the third study (Chapter 5), I evaluate the supply-side opportunities and constraints associated with UAM adoption through a systematic scenario analysis. The results of the third study indicate that current supply-side infrastructure opportunities in Southern California, like helipads and elevated parking structures, are widely available to accommodate the regional deployment of UAM service although current spatial constraints can significantly limit the location choice of UAM landing sites (vertiports) for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. Moreover, the low-income and young populations tend to live relatively farther away from the supply-side opportunities compared to the general population. The third study also proposes a network of UAM stations in Southern California based on the joint considerations of available infrastructure and home-workplace commuting flows.

Suggested Citation
XIANGYU LI (2022) Diffusion and Management of Disruptive Technology in Cities: The Case of Drones. PhD Dissertation. UC Irvine. Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/20t4w3kj#main.

journal article preprint

Used Oil Policies to Protect the Environment: An Overview of Canadian Experiences

Abstract

We examine some consequences of dumping used oil in the environment and review some policies to foster used oil recycling. We then contrast policies adopted in the Canadian Prairie Provinces for managing used oil, used oil filters, and containers, with those put in place in the rest of Canada. Our analysis proposes that public-private partnerships relying on economic instruments and public education can be more effective for recycling used oil than public agencies relying mostly on regulations.

research report

CARMEN Project 5: Resilience and Validation of GNSS PNT Solutions

Publication Date

November 20, 2023

Author(s)

Todd Humphreys, Qi Alfred Chen, Umit Ozguner, Charles Toth

Areas of Expertise

Suggested Citation
Todd Humphreys, Qi Alfred Chen, Umit Ozguner and Charles Toth (2023) CARMEN Project 5: Resilience and Validation of GNSS PNT Solutions. Final Report. CARMEN UTC. Available at: 10.5281/ZENODO.10246488.

Phd Dissertation

Electronic waste management in California : consumer attitudes toward recycling, advanced recycling fees, "green" electronics, and willingness to pay for e-waste recycling

Publication Date

June 30, 2006

Author(s)

Areas of Expertise

Suggested Citation
Hilary Nixon (2006) Electronic waste management in California : consumer attitudes toward recycling, advanced recycling fees, "green" electronics, and willingness to pay for e-waste recycling. PhD Dissertation. UC Irvine. Available at: https://uci.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01CDL_IRV_INST/17uq3m8/alma991034707529704701.