Global dementia diagnoses are steeply increasing. While advances in neuroimaging, neuropathology, and genetics research have improved our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases causing dementia, precise antemortem diagnosis, as well as sensitive and specific biomarkers that can facilitate a differential diagnosis and aid in participant recruitment in clinical trials, remains elusive. The...
This dissertation explores critiques of mass education alongside the rise of the research university as they appear in the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. More specifically, it traces the development of a theory of (un)learning that inserts distance into the pedagogical relation to produce a discretized educational...
Cancer is a complex and heterogeneous disease characterized by aberrant gene regulation. Gene regulation is fundamentally orchestrated by the 3D genome organization which involves chromatin looping, compartmentalization, and the formation of topologically associating domains (TADs). Structural variations (SVs), such as genomic rearrangements, deletions, inversions, and duplications, are commonly observed in...
This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
This thesis explores how beyond-the-Standard-Model physics interactions could lead to the detection of neutrino decay with lifetimes that are orders of magnitude smaller than a second. I mainly focused on right-handed neutrino fields, new heavy states, and non-zero daughter neutrino masses, assuming the neutrinos are Dirac fermions. An extensive description...
Clustering is a fundamental task in unsupervised learning, which aims to partition the data set into several clusters. It is widely used for data mining, image segmentation, and natural language processing. One of the most popular clustering methods is centroid-based clustering, including k-medians and k-means clustering. k-medians and k-means clustering...
This dissertation focuses on the study of the superionic state in multicomponent systems, where the smaller component exhibits delocalization and mobility while still maintaining system compactness through component attractions. Superionic behavior is widely observed in various systems and plays a crucial role in ceramic superionic conductors, which offer high ion...
One of the greatest challenges in heterogeneous catalysis is the rational design and development of new catalytic systems, due to synthetic limitations in the design of solid catalysts and inhomogeneity of chemical sites at solid surfaces. This obfuscates understanding of catalyst behavior and slows improvements of processes. One approach to...
Clean water supplies are required for industry and general life. However, water shortages dueto pollution and human activity are increasingly common, and new, more efficient, materials need
to be made to increase clean water supplies. To do this, fundamental information on the interaction
of water with ions at the atomic...
The functions of lubricants in moving interfaces are extensive; lubricants minimize friction, transfer heat, clean the rubbing surfaces, extract debris, and diminish wear. Rather than using separate lubricants for each of the functions, it is more desirable to make one lubricant serve multiple purposes, or a muti-functional lubricant. The goals...
Morality has been viewed as a core aspect of the self and even a basic psychological need. Strategies for regulating threats to moral self-views may therefore be distinct from regulating threats to other self-aspects. Consistent with research on the regulation of basic psychological needs, I hypothesized that threats to the...
The continuing increase in atmospheric CO2 to concentrations exceeding 400 ppm has attracted considerable attention from both scientists and policymakers. Industrial fossil fuel consumption generates a significant amount of CO2 emissions, and in particular, energy-intensive molecular separations that require thermal processes, such as distillation, drying, or evaporation, are responsible for...
Performing complex reasoning has been a long-standing challenge in artificial intelligence (AI).This thesis describes a class of AI systems designed to reason, extract knowledge, and answer
questions on various domains such as process understanding, elementary science, and math word
problems. Our approach differs from traditional logical reasoning systems since we...
Lignin is the largest store of renewable aromatic carbon. Due to its refractory nature, however, its chemical potential is not fully realized, rather, most lignin is treated as a waste, burned for low-value energy. Here, we propose a biorefinery where the treatment of wastewater by a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC)...
In shared workspaces users have real-time access to others’ actions, allowing greater access to potentially informative cues. However, there has been little exploration about what impact the ability to view each other’s work in real time has on group members’ perception of both each other and their understanding of the...
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the status quo of the telemobility landscape in the United States, forcing millions of Americans into lock down, significantly changing the way we work, travel, and spend our time and money for an extended period of time. After several months of adaptation, adoption, learning, and unlearning,...
Assistive robots have the potential to support motor recovery after an injury as well as to alleviate the burden of physical tasks for both impaired and able-bodied individuals. Over the last few decades assistive robots have become increasingly more capable. Many can now provide task-specific assistance and can be safe...
Directional freeze-casting is a porous materials fabrication technique that is used to create materials with complex, three-dimensional pore structures. Particle suspensions are solidified under a thermal gradient, promoting anisotropic growth of dendrites and incorporation of particles within interdendritic space. A fully-solidified directional freeze-cast structure is composed of dendrites that are...
This thesis investigates Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s undermining of soteriological poetics in his comedy Der Schwierige (“The Difficult Man”), with a focus on the complex interplay between meta-language (e.g., stage directions) and dramatic dialogue, normative and contingent speech (i.e., ‘ironic speech’). By challenging what I term the “soteriological agenda” of comedy...
This dissertation proves several results for first passage percolation on graphs of polynomial growth.The class of limit shapes for first passage percolation with stationary weights on Cayley
graphs of virtually nilpotent groups is characterized.
Then strict monotonicity theorems for independent first passage percolation on graphs of
polynomial growth and quasi-trees...