The idea of the unity of audition and vision has been a topic of interest since the time of ancient Greece. Investigation of this idea has continued to grow in many areas, especially in psychology, music, visual art, and computer science, most notably since the invention of the world's earliest...
The semiconductor-based Quantum Cascade Laser (QCL) offers several key advantages over gas lasers, solid-state lasers, and other semiconductor-based mid-infrared lasers. While the QCL has historically operated best in the λ ~ 7-9 μm range using InP-based materials, a major challenge has been to achieve a high-power, room-temperature continuous-wave (CW) operation...
The overall objective of this thesis is to develop a package of high-resolution, non-invasive experimental and numerical approaches to observe in situ pore-scale geometry modification due to colloid deposition, and quantitatively predict its effects on the large-scale transport properties of the porous medium. High-energy synchrotron-based X-ray difference micro-tomography (XDMT) was...
Funding risky Research and Development (R&D) and New Product Development (NPD) projects is crucial for the long term health of any large company. Such funding decisions are multiobjective and are undertaken with sparse data. Therefore prescriptive or algorithmic solutions are not adopted by practitioners. Descriptive solutions that provide managerial insights...
Visual object tracking, i.e. consistently inferring the motion of a desired target from image sequences, is a must-have component to bridge low-level image processing techniques and high-level video content analysis. This has been an active and fruitful research topic in the computer vision community for decades due to both its...
This dissertation analyzes the transformation of fantasy sports from a deviant, outside-the-mainstream fan culture to a billion-dollar industry that comprises almost 20 million North American participants. Fantasy sports are games in which participants adopt the simultaneous roles of owner, general manager, and coach of their own teams of real athletes...
Inactivation of tumor suppressors genes, which encode regulatory proteins critical for maintaining normal cellular function, is a common occurrence in cancer. Ikaros is a hematopoietic-specific zinc finger protein that functions as a differentiation regulator and has properties of a tumor suppressor. Ikaros functions to regulate gene expression as a component...
A comprehensive understanding of how image processing occurs in the primary visual cortex (V1) requires learning what aspects of neuronal responses are driven by strong feed-forward input from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), and what aspects arise due to the densely recurrent network operating within the cortex itself. From an...
The first chapter of this dissertation investigates the pricing of systematic variance risk in the equity options market. Cross sectional tests on synthetic variance swap returns reveal no evidence of a negative market variance risk premium. Furthermore, we show that a class of linear factor models cannot simultaneously explain index...
This work investigates children's early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., 'big', 'long'), maximum standard absolute (e.g.,...