Task-oriented conversational systems are becoming increasingly popular, as shown by the rise of conversational recommendation systems across multiple platforms (e.g., Google Home, Alexa, and Siri) and domains (e.g., local establishments, e-commerce, books, music, and movies). However, users are still largely limited in what preferences they can express and how, as...
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
Aging is the greatest known risk factor for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD); however, the molecular mechanisms underlying aging and how it can initiate and or exacerbate AD, is still unknown. Epigenetic regulation has been widely accepted to play an essential role in aging or AD-related processes; however, whether dysregulations of histone...
The retina detects light, processes the visual signal, and sends a complex set of parallel information channels to the brain via a functionally diverse set of retinal ganglion cells types. This manuscript examines these retinal ganglion cell types, the visual features they encode, and the computational mechanisms leading to their...
Human olfactory function is important for a myriad of behaviors, including food seeking, social cognition, memory, emotional regulation, and detecting environmental threats. In animal models, particularly dense olfactory inputs have been shown to target orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in multimodal sensory integration, reward coding, and flexibly guiding our...
We establish the criterion for chaos in three-planet systems, for systems similar to those discovered by the Kepler spacecraft. Our main results are as follows: (i) The simplest criterion, which is based on overlapping mean motion resonances (MMRs), only agrees with numerical simulations at a very crude level. (ii) Much...
Very few studies have examined school racial climate in racially diverse school contexts. School racial climate refers to “perceptions of interracial interactions and the socialization around race and culture in a school” (Byrd, 2017, p. 700). The association between interracial peer interactions, psychological well-being, and academic outcomes is well documented,...
We consider data-driven approaches for universal texture modeling via generative adversarial networks and inversion methods. We investigate the properties of the learned representation spaces and demonstrate that a strong link between texture analysis and synthesis is the key to successful texture modeling. First, we visit the problem of texture synthesis...
Findings in both humans and animal models have associated the hippocampal theta oscillation with hippocampal memory function. In animal models, previous research supports that the theta oscillation contributes to memory via phase-dependent changes in hippocampal network connectivity, wherein memory encoding versus retrieval are optimized at different phases of the theta...
Atomistic methods offer a powerful set of tools in the study of materials systems, as they allow materials scientists to ask questions with a high degree of specificity. They are well suited for studying and designing energy materials, critical due to the climate crisis, in part due to their ability...
Amyloid beta oligomers (AβOs) are a key instigator of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The work presented in this thesis includes three disease-modifying approaches to disrupt pathological AβO-related mechanisms in AD: (1) inhibiting AβO buildup, (2) blocking AβO-induced tau phosphorylation, and (3) neutralizing AβOs. These three approaches were tested in...
This dissertation is a review of three projects I worked on during my time in the Computational Photography Lab at Northwestern University. First, a source separation problem for the X-Ray Fluorescence images of painted works of art is addressed through the incorporation of Hyperspectral Reflectance data. Following this, a discussion...
Deduplication, also referred to as "entity resolution", is a common and crucial pre-processing step in the construction of social networks. Traditional deduplication methods compare the attributes (such as name and age) of potential matching pairs to estimate a match probability for a pair. Recently research has used clustering techniques for...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Virtual reality (VR) have attracted growing attention within the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry in recent years. Integration of BIM and VR technology can develop workflow efficiency through enhanced common understanding and prepare students in architecture and engineering programs to become leaders of the...
# Brazil bus transportation data and US domestic air transportation network data:
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Temporal network transportation data with monthly resolution.
The Brazilian inter-cities bus data was collected from the Brazilian National Land Transportation Agency ([ANTT]( https://antt.gov.br.)). The dataset contains all inter-cities bus transportation from January 2005 to December 2014 with monthly...
Cell state transitions are often triggered by large changes in the
concentrations of transcription factors and therefore large differences
in their stoichiometric ratios. Whether cells can elicit transitions using
modest changes in the ratios of co-expressed factors is unclear. Here,
we investigate how cells in the Drosophila eye resolve state...
Dunsky weaves historical background and data with the everyday narratives of Palestinian farmers, scientists, professors, writers, entrepreneurs, cultural initiators, and artists in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi calls the book “meticulously reported” and an “uplifting but gritty book.”
Situated within motherhood studies, this edited volume is at the interdisciplinary intersection of literature, life writing, gender, (im)migration, refugee, and cultural studies. Contributors examine literary fiction, memoirs, and children’s literature. The borders that displaced mothers face are examined through frameworks of postcolonialism, nationalism, feminism, and diaspora studies.
Mahmud’s Bangali language monograph, Bangali Musolman Proshno, argues that the national historical narrative of Bengali Muslims has racialized and Orientalized the entire population of peasant Muslims (150 million people, or about 80 percent of the country’s population). This has served to protect the power of the ruling elite since the...
This edited volume presences a nuanced look at a range of issues affecting motives to migrate and outcomes of integration, demonstrating that equitable migration can only be realized by paying attention to how migrants interact with institutional mechanisms and social processes. Michigan State Professor Steven Gold calls the book a...
Wright offers an edited translation of the collected Arabic speeches of the contemporary Senegalese Imam Shaykh al-Tijani Cissé (b. 1955), consistently ranked one of the top twenty-five “most influential” Muslims in the world by the Royal Jordanian Institute’s annual report. Subjects include religious moderation (wasatiyya), etiquette (adab), gnosis (maʿrifa), the...
This study examines refugee women's ICT and digital media usage during the Covid-19 pandemic. It aims to ascertain how women in refugee accommodation centres in Hamburg, Germany overcome information precarity due to limited or no internet access when public life primarily moved to the digital world. The discussion in this...
This article explores how young Qatari audiences perceive authenticity in Turkish television dramas. The concepts of authenticity and realism are used as analytical tools to examine empirical findings from twenty focus group discussions with students, in 2016 and 2017. The results reveal that young Qataris see Turkish serials as offering...
This roundtable session initially took place as part of the international conference “Childhood, Youth, and Identity in South Asia,” organized by the Department of History, Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, and the Centre for Publishing, Ambedkar University Delhi, India, on January 6–7, 2020.
La crisis climática y la emergencia medioambiental auguran un futuro de incertidumbre para el planeta. Las directivas europeas y nacionales educativas establecen los marcos de actuación y los compromisos que cada agente debe asumir para alcanzar el nuevo paradigma sostenible basado en la Economía Circular. La escuela, como institución de...
Turkish television series are a global sensation, and concurrently, targets of bans, boycotts, and protests. In Russia, Turkish series are countered with Russian television productions, promoted as disclosing truths about Turkey that are absent in Turkish series. A multimodal discourse analysis of East/West and Eastern Wives from a critical geopolitics...
About a century ago, women in the US and western Europe looked to ‘Turkish pantaloons’ (shalwar) for freedom and were shamed, harassed, and even arrested for wearing them. Meanwhile, people of all genders in Turkey and Bulgaria moved freely in shalwar until modern nation-building projects imposed Western restrictive dress that...
ABSTRACT
Purpose
The authors assess the effectiveness of campaigns designed to increase the sport activities of migrant workers in Qatar, host nation of the FIFA Men’s World Cup Qatar 2022TM.
Design
The authors used the integrative model of behavioral prediction (IM) as a guide and conducted ethnographic interviews with migrant...
Drawing from the terror management theory (TMT) and evolutionary perspectives of Life-History Strategy, a between-subject online experiment examined the interaction effects of pre-existing death anxiety, fear-inducing media content (coronavirus threat vs. gun violence threat vs. low threat mental disorder), and intrasexual competition for mates on online dating intentions and social...
Why do people give and help others in face of their own mortality salience? The existential struggle with the awareness of death impacts the gamut of human cognition, emotion, and behavior. This multi-method research (∑N = 1,219) explains the psychosocial impact of COVID-19-related mortality salience on altruism. Drawing from terror...
Drawing from social learning theory and the mobile advertising literature on key performance indicators (KPIs), two experiments examined the influence of peer users' conversion in mobile social commerce. Experiment 1 (N = 211, between-subjects [high vs. low number of “sold items”]) tested the effects of peer users' conversion, operationalized as...
In this study, we examine how and the degree to which Experiential Media (EM) are utilized to promote travel, sports, and, more broadly, cultural tourism in EM contents produced in the buildup to the 22nd FIFA World Cup to be hosted by Qatar in 2022, the first Arab nation to...
Advancements in experiential media (EM) technologies, particularly virtual reality (VR), a subset of EM, can transform the ways public relations (PR) professions tell stories about a brand, organization, or mega-events. In the context of sports, PR content productions utilize various qualities of EM to offer immersive at-home, arena-like experiences for...
Instagram not only offers an arena for the fulfillment of basic human desires but also cultivates new types of multifaceted desires and consumptions in Web 2.0 environments. This study aims to examine a wide variety of dispositional, psychological, and attitudinal predictors of Instagram consumption and selfie-and-groupfie cultures. Three cross-sectional surveys...
What factors drive consumers to use artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots? The current study examined the associations among AI-powered chatbots’ anthropomorphism (human-likeness, animacy, and intelligence), social presence, imagery processing, psychological ownership, and continuance intention in the context of Human-AI-Interaction. Results from a path analysis using LISREL 8.54 show that consumers’ perceived...
Emerging digital entertainment media in the Global South are anchored in nation-state configurations, benefit from supranational affordances, and aspire to global operations. Drawing on Sassen’s “third spaces,” the article focuses on the case of Shahid, a Middle East-based video streaming platform and a hybrid media venture that operates at the...
This study examines selection bias on social media during the 2019 Lebanon protests. Based on the theoretical concepts of selective avoidance and selective sharing, the survey of a nationally representative probability sample found selective avoidance to occur across all social media. Among the various protest-related activities, sharing news was the...
Abstract
Purpose
This study examines the use of social media by individuals during protests in China (Hong Kong), Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon.
Method
Surveys in the four countries assess the relationship between people’s attitudes toward the protests and their selection bias on social media, manifested through selective sharing and selective...
Although the technical and psychological accuracy of the polygraph has been contested almost since the device’s inception, it continues to enjoy substantial popularity within law enforcement and federal agencies throughout North America. This paper excavates the sexual politics of the polygraph focused on two key arenas where the polygraph has...
In periods of political unrest, media habits change significantly, allowing for new patterns of selectivity. This study's main contribution lies in its application of selective exposure theory and its comparison of people's media uses in five Global South polities that witnessed widespread protests in 2019: Chile, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq,...
Self-determination is a central concept for political philosophers. For example, many have appealed to this concept to defend a right of states to restrict immigration. Because it is deeply embedded in our political structures, the principle possesses a kind of default authority and does not usually call for an elaborate...
Characterization is the musical creation of fictional characters, and it is particularly important for creating multi-dimensional, nuanced characters in opera. However, how do composers characterize roles if the opera does not feature a traditionally linear plot or story? Does opera need a narrative to create characterization? Some may view narrative...
Existing scholarship studying personal definitions of ‘having sex’ overwhelmingly relies on a strict gender binary and the conformity of bodies to cisgender norms. The current study aims to expand upon existing scholarship by asking transgender and non-binary college students how they define ‘having sex’, and what factors influence their definition....
State borders allocate access to basic goods, opportunities, rights, and protections along lines of nationality, race, and gender. However, the discriminatory effects of state borders rarely appear as an issue in the self-understanding of liberal-democratic societies and their political theorizing. In this paper, I explore how the category of nationality...
For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development:...
Ideas of African cultural or racial distinction, most notably Négritude, largely have been dismissed as marginal to “ordinary” Africans, or the vast majority who did not have the opportunity to study in Paris or London and meet with ideologues of Black nationalism from the diaspora. Sub-Saharan African Muslims earlier responded...
The Tijaniyya has witnessed a lively debate concerning the classic Sufi requirement of a living guide to give spiritual training (tarbiya) to aspirants. Prominent Tijani scholars across the Sahara—modern-day Morocco, Mauritania, and Senegal—have apparently staked different positions on this issue from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. The discourse has...
Developed by Omocat and released in December 2020, OMORI is a surreal psychological horror role-playing game. The game follows the titular protagonist Omori as it examines such sensitive topics as suicide, grief, death, and depression. Such traumatic events are triggered in several planes of existence—White Space, Headspace, and Black Space—leading...
"This volume responds to the challenges posed by the rapid developments in satellite TV and digital technologies, addressing media ethics from a global perspective to discuss how we can understand journalism practice in its cultural contexts. An international team of contributors draw upon global and non-Western traditions to discuss the...
A tour d'horizon exploring how the world's best-loved game is affecting people, societies, and governments across the region. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book examines the complex questions raised by the phenomenon of football as a significant cultural force in the Middle East, as well as its linkages to broader...
"Exploring the concept of individual and collective transformation as the underlying driver for media pedagogy, this book offers valuable insights and practical strategies for implementing transformative media pedagogies across learning environments and civic ecosystems. Each chapter takes the form of critical and reflective writing on specific processes and practices that...
"In October 2019, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Lebanon to protest austerity measures in what became known as the 'thawra.' These were the largest mass protests seen in the country's modern history. The Lebanon Uprising of 2019 puts the revolution in its historical and regional context and...
The predominant, categorical system used to classify and diagnose psychiatric disorders suffers from several critical scientific limitations, including extensive comorbidity, unreliability, and disorder heterogeneity. As such, clinical psychological scientists are increasingly moving away from this traditional, categorical system, and toward empirically-based, dimensional, and transdiagnostic alternatives such as the Hierarchical Taxonomy...
In the Maximum-a-Posteriori (MAP) Inference problem, for any given probability distribution, the goal is to find the point in the support of that distribution with the highest probability. Potts models and Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are probabilistic models that were introduced in the context of statistical physics several decades ago....
Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a masterwork of biology, and its development was a key part of the transformation from monocellular to multicellular life. With an ECM, cells acquired the ability to cooperatively build a dynamic support network that facilitated their movement, specialization, and communication. This ECM is a hierarchical...
Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, causing devastating disabilities in both motor and non-motor domains following the degeneration of dopamine (DA) producing neurons of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc). Current treatments are highly limited in efficacy, and no established treatments currently exist to alter disease...
With the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technology, it has become much easier to extract gene expression data and to discover gene-disease associations more efficiently. Longitudinal gene expression data offer more insight into expression patterns for distinct patient groups compared to cross-sectional data. For instance, patients diagnosed with subclinical acute rejections...
This dissertation comprises three distinct essays in mechanism design and economic theory. The first chapter studies the welfare implications of consumer data ownership and voluntary disclosure. I formalize this setting within a model of mechanism design with evidence and construct the seller's optimal mechanism. Perhaps surprisingly, I find that allowing...
As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
Motivated by rhythms in the brain, we investigate the synchronization of noisy and all-to-all pulse-coupled oscillators. We consider a case where the oscillatory excursions are of varying amplitude and where only sufficiently large excursions result in the output pulses that drive the interactions between the oscillators. In the regime of...
This dissertation aims to understand the contribution of schools to reducing bullying behaviors and, in turn, to examine the benefits for students of attending a school that effectively reduces bullying. In doing so, this dissertation contributes to the literature on bullying by a) locating the school as a key environment...
Understanding the characteristics of interfaces between materials and solvent media such as structure, chemistry, and charge remains crucial to determining the properties and performance of numerous systems and technologies. This thesis focuses specifically on characterizing the interactions of water at oxide interfaces. A large collection of questions remains unanswered about...
In the Western Common Law tradition, legal decisions constrain and guide future cases involving the same legal issues. Although the legal academy disagrees about the specific nature of such precedential reasoning, including about the role of analogy in legal reasoning, there is ample evidence from cognitive science that analogical learning...
Genetic studies have found variants in the protein-degrading autophagy-lysosomal pathway (ALP) to be among the most common risk factors for developing Parkinson’s disease (PD). Macroautophagy (MA) is the arm of this pathway which delivers cytosolic components to lysosomes for degradation and is essential for neuronal health. The defining pathological protein...
Christian artists use dramatic license and theatrical representation to mold idealized versions of the Bible into recreational spaces for popular consumption, such as immersive theaters, theme parks, and museums. For these Christian artists, the impulse to evangelize through theatrical representation overcomes deeply ingrained religious sentiments of antitheatricality and result in...
Efficient and sustainable utilization of global resources represents a grand but achievablechallenge. By leveraging biology, we can transform abundant, but recalcitrant resources like lignin
to products ranging from fuel to medicine to polymers. Efforts to do so are expansive, but
challenges remain, due in no small part to the difficulty...
Solid acid fuel cells confer unique advantages over nearby technologies, such as polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFCs) or solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), due to the solid acid electrolyte – a solid-state, anhydrous, intermediate-temperature proton conductor.Despite these encouraging unique properties, solid acid fuel cells have performed unfavorably in comparison...
Situated at the intersection of literary, religious, and economic studies, this dissertation examines how late medieval writers used commercial practice to invent new modes of penitential piety. Challenging scholarship that characterizes the relationship between church and commerce as exclusively antagonistic or corrosive, I argue that the convergence of these two...
Many estimation and inference procedures rely on asymptotic approximations for quantities that are unknown to researchers. While often convenient, such approximations can be poor in practice, even when the number of observations is ostensibly large. One response is to eschew asymptotics in favor of finite sample bounds. While remarkable progress...
Light is a powerful tool for manipulating and probing magnetic states in solid state systems. In particular, optically-induced spin orientation, the ability to orient spin with polarized light, has been extensively utilized in low-dimensional III-V and II-VI semiconductors to pioneer spintronic research. Even though traditional semiconductors have found a wide...
As of 2020, there are currently 5.8 million people in the United States suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a debilitating and progressive neurodegenerative disorder. Of these nearly six million people, two-thirds are women. While it has been suggested that women’s longer lifespan accounts for this disparity, the overall lifetime risk...
This dissertation examines how racially, ethnically, and sexually minoritized women embodied and contested competing images of national identity between World War II and the Cold War. I challenge dominant narratives of modern dance, which overlook gender politics as women left the art form and white men gained prominence in it...
Cultural appropriation is a topic well-discussed in public discourse and theorized in the philosophical literature, however, it remains vastly understudied in psychology. Existing conversations center on whether cultural appropriation even exists, how it is defined, and if there are psychological and social impacts of being appropriated. No research to date...
Conventionally cross-linked polymers, which comprise the vast majority of commercial thermosets, cannot be decross-linked after curing or flow upon heating. Therefore, they cannot be effectively recycled into high-value products at end-of-life. Their lack of recyclability is due to the permanent cross-links, which restrict the flow of the chains in the...
This dissertation is a review of three projects I worked on during my time in the Computational Photography Lab at Northwestern University. First, a source separation problem for the X-Ray Fluorescence images of painted works of art is addressed through the incorporation of Hyperspectral Reflectance data. Following this, a discussion...
Visual localization is a critical capability for autonomous systems, enabling them to accuratelyestimate their position and orientation within an environment using visual data. This thesis focuses
on achieving a robust and reliable visual localization on both local and global level to enhance
localization performance in a wide range of environments....