Problems in interpersonal functioning are a major concern. In adults, interpersonal dysfunction is often investigated as it relates to personality disorders (PDs). In fact, researchers have argued that a core of interpersonal dysfunction is what defines personality disorders (Hopwood, Wright, Ansell, & Pincus, 2013). This is perhaps most evident for...
This dissertation explains the heterogeneous effects of armed conflict on sub-national governance in the North Caucasus. While acknowledging the role of inherited institutions, my multimethod investigation shows how they were strategically transformed during the breakup of the Soviet Union, creating unintended consequences and the basis for governance today. My main...
Nonlinear systems with many interacting components often exhibit behaviors that cannot be anticipated, even in principle, by only knowing the properties of the constituent parts and thereby emerge as a result of interactions between the parts. Examples of such systems range from power grids and financial markets to food networks...
Proteins are known to have diverse biomedical functions and excellent catalytic performance; however, they are also fragile outside living cells, challenging their use in industrial applications. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly porous crystalline materials that consist of metal cluster nodes and organic linkers. With their rigid structures, MOFs can effectively...
Noble metal nanoparticles (NPs) have shown promise as imaging agents, drug delivery platforms, and plasmonic sensors. Anisotropic gold NPs, such as gold nanostars, have particularly received attention due to their shape-dependent optical and spectral properties. With their 3D anisotropic structure with branches protruding into different directions and high surface areas,...
Drying oils have been used as a binding medium for oil paints since the 15th century. These oil paints transition from a liquid-like paste to a solid-like film as a result of crosslinks forming between the oil molecules. These reactions have been extensively studied chemically, but other material properties are...
Levels of the several different human apolipoprotein B mRNA-editing enzyme catalytic polypeptide-like 3 (APOBEC3; A3) cytidine deaminases vary across different cell types. While levels of nuclear-localized A3s are low or non-existent in primary cells, a nuclear A3 is often upregulated in cancer cells. Increased chromosomal mutagenesis due to nuclear A3...
The literature has established glucokinase (GCK) to be the principal hexokinase (HK) in the liver, operating as a glucose sensor to regulate glucose metabolism and lipid homeostasis. We have recently proposed Hexokinase Domain Containing-1 (HKDC1) to be a novel 5th HK with expression in the liver. Here, we reveal HKDC1...
Supervised learning model is one of the most fundamental machine learning models. It can provide powerful capability of prediction by learning complex patterns hidden in many, sometimes thousands, predictors. It can also be used as a building block of other machine learning tasks, like unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. Such...
Nanocarriers are drug delivery vehicles that have at least one dimension at the nanoscale (10-9 m). Engineering the nanocarrier surface is a strategy for targeting drug delivery to specific cell types to enhance efficacy and minimize side effects. A useful analogy is to consider how the chassis of an automotive...
Identifying key molecular mechanisms and targets for therapeutic development in sporadic neurodegenerative diseases has been challenging. Therefore, in-depth investigation of genetic forms of disease can provide valuable insight into pathogenic disease mechanisms. The discovery of genetic forms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) has highlighted the importance of the autophagy/lysosomal and mitochondrial/oxidative...
Pollution-intensive industrial manufacturing processes threaten the health of ecosystems and societies through toxic waste streams and energy intensive processes that lead to greenhouse gas emissions. Biological systems present more sustainable routes to many useful industrial chemicals by using enzymes at low temperatures, but the time and effort required to optimized...
Vertebrate brains evolved to facilitate a diverse array of behaviors and internal cognitive processes. Theories of neural function have proposed that neural computation is organized within populations or ensembles of neurons. Here, we identify ensembles of neurons in the striatum, the main input nucleus of the basal ganglia, in which...
Recent progress in the field of nanomaterials has enabled significant advances in optoelectronic devices such as solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photocatalysts, and sensors. Nanoparticles feature superior optical and electronic properties that arise from quantum confinement and therefore cannot be attained used bulk materials. However, further developments in the field of...
Nanomaterials are increasingly incorporated in modern day life, from the biogenic viruses that cause pandemics and the mineral crystallites embedded alongside collagen in our bones, to the anthropogenic nanomaterials that are small but powerful components of sunscreen and paint, swimming pool algaecides and wound dressings, cancer treatments, bicycle frames, and...
Selecting the best material to deliver optimum performance in real-world applications is one of the most significant challenges in engineering. Hundreds of thousands of computationally-predicted, but experimentally unexplored materials exist today in the public inorganic material databases as candidates for consideration. This thesis discusses three projects in the domain of...
Vaccines, such as those against smallpox virus, polio virus, and yellow fever virus, have saved millions of lives. However, many infectious diseases, such as HIV-1, still lack a preventive vaccine. In addition, various vaccines, such as those against Influenza and SARS-CoV-2 require boosters and may not confer 100% lifelong protection...
Integrated Computational Materials Engineering (ICME) has emerged as a transformative paradigm that enables the co-design of products, materials, and their manufacturing processes. A gamut of computational tools, such as manufacturing process simulations and multiscale materials analyses, have been developed henceforth by their respective research communities. However, it remains challenging to...
The Escherichia coli ribosome is a molecular machine capable of sequence-defined polymerization of -amino acids into proteins, a feat unmatched by any other current synthetic catalyst. It is complex in its structure, comprised of 3 RNA parts (the 5S, 16S, and 23S ribosomal RNAs) and 54 ribosomal proteins (r-proteins). Efforts...
Public memory studies in rhetoric have typically neglected how we use shared memories to form, maintain, and pass down social norms through the objects we encounter and the practices we participate in during our everyday lives. This is especially true for children’s toys, because they are understood as essential objects...
“American Sediments” is a study of Black, white, and Indigenous literatures and complementary visual culture centered on the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, in texts written after Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—still the archetypal version of the Mississippi, but inevitably unaligned with historical changes, cultural diversities, and economic shifts...
Religious buildings have always faced the threat of fire, but an unusual number of church fires occurred in northern France during the 12th century. Despite this prevalence, a sustained study on medieval church fires -- including how and why they started, how people responded when they occurred, theological reckonings with...
Metallic conductivity and broken inversion symmetry were long thought to be contraindicated properties, under the assumption that long-range Coulombic interactions (screened by free charge carriers) were necessary for coordinated polar displacements. Within the past decade, the discovery of polar metals has prompted a rethinking of the relationship between metallicity and...
Recent studies have begun to examine white matter connectivity aberrations in psychiatric populations, such as major depressive disorder. Several studies have found reduced white matter integrity (WMI) in depressed samples, though the location of this reduction is not clear. Incorporating symptom measures of depression severity and rumination may allow for...
Human biologists remain invested in the prospect of developing a ‘biocultural synthesis.’ The primary concerns identified in major touchstones of this effort include the presentation of biological function in terms of social relations, understanding the role that humans play in constructing their own environments for development and evolution, and linking...
Thermoelectric materials have attracted widespread attention in recent decades because of their ability to directly convert thermal energy into electrical energy. Given that waste heat is the primary source of lost energy in the world, the implications of developing better thermoelectric materials are both immediate and far-reaching. Admittedly, large progress...
Cyclic loading, from earthquake, has caused the instability and failure of slopes composed of sensitive clays. During the 1964 9.2 moment magnitude (M) earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska, several slopes comprised of Bootlegger Cove Formation (BCF) clays failed during the strong seismic motion. Some researchers have proposed the use of residual...
New neurons are continuously produced in the subgranular zone of the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus throughout life. These newborn dentate granule cells (DGCs) undergo a stereotyped process of morphological and functional maturation during the first few weeks after differentiation that recapitulates some aspects of postnatal neuronal development. The inhibitory...
This dissertation leverages methodologies from computer science to understand sources of complexity in economic theory. Chapter 1 considers time complexity: how much time is needed to make a decision. Chapters 2 and 3 consider informational complexity: how much and what kind of data is needed to make a decision. I...
Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) are two devastating neurodegenerative diseases that affect 100,000s of people globally. They have a severe adverse impact on society, yet there are currently no early diagnostic tools or disease-modifying therapies available. Despite their clinical heterogeneity, evidence points to these diseases being on...
Sub-wavelength matter’s interaction with far-field light is highly relevant for both fundamental scientific research, as well as many commercial, medical, and defense applications. For example, quantum computation depends on single identical photons produced by quantum dots characterized by far-field sources. Exoplanet detection uses cameras on Earth comprised of micron sized...
This research questions how institutional logics shape and change through the event sequencing of institutional reforms. Literature reviewed on sequences of social events underspecifies the enchainment of events, i.e., the set of social processes that both links events and also renders the sequence meaningful beyond summing its individual events. My...
Superconducting-circuit based platforms are strong contenders in the race to build a quantum computer.While the transmon has had extraordinary success as the leading superconducting qubit modality, there are reasons to believe that other types of qubits could possess relative benefits in terms of noise immunity, anharmonicity, or extensibility. In this...
This work is composed of two separate projects that contribute to the field’s understanding of Neisseria gonorrhoeae genetics and physiology. First, I showed that N. gonorrhoeae mounts a substantial transcriptional program in response to hydrogen peroxide (HP), a prominent reactive oxygen species (ROS) encountered during infection. We measured which strain...
“Coalitional Aesthetics” argues that leftist literary works of the 1930s enacted bonds of solidarity across racial, linguistic, and geographic divides, modeling alternative, non-hierarchical modes of social cohesion. Building on Gramsci’s concept of the coalitional, coalitional aesthetics refers to a set of formal characteristics that insist on the specificity of the...
Black women performers have made, and continue to make, contributions to the U.S.-avant-garde performance canon and Black performance traditions that go largely unaccounted for in academic studies. Research has shown that across temporalities, Black women performers have mobilized experimental avant-garde aesthetics to disrupt and refuse essentialized notions of Blackness in...
The continued existence and use of chemical warfare agents (CWAs) have necessitated the development of materials which can safely and efficiently decontaminate these toxic chemicals in an environmentally benign fashion. Among the most prevalent CWAs, nerve agents (sarin, VX) and blistering agents (sulfur mustard [HD]) are considered the most toxic...
Dual-phase (DP) steels have been widely applied in automobile industry, and are famous for continuous yielding in their corresponding stress-strain curves. The appearance of yield-point phenomena, or discontinuous yielding, is considered undesirable for DP steels. Herein, we take advantage of the undesirable appearance of yield-point phenomena in DP steels as...
This dissertation examines the role of the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg, created in 1817, in shaping the practice of colonial agriculture in the Netherlands East Indies. It explores how Buitenzorg and its surrounding highland environs were an ideal place for botanical investigations and agricultural experimentation. The initial task of the...
Providing quality transit service to travelers is a constant challenge for transit agencies. The advent of fully-autonomous vehicles (AVs) and their inclusion in mobility service fleets may allow transit agencies to offer better service or reduce their own capital and operational costs. This study focuses on the problem of allocating...
Biological tubes are essential for animal survival, and their functions are highly dependent on tube shape. Analyzing the contributions of cell shape and organization to the morphogenesis of small tubes has been hampered by the limitations of existing programs in quantifying cell geometry on highly curved tubular surfaces and calculating...
This dissertation focuses on quantifying protein folding stability determinants and presenting initial experiments that can guide the development of a novel assay that identifies cell-penetrating miniproteins. First, despite over a century of scholarship on protein folding stability, applying this knowledge to design proteins computationally remains limited. Usually, protein designers generate...
The presence of unwanted biofilms on surfaces is a great concern for industrial, naval, and healthcare fields, and many other settings. To better inhibit, remove, or harness the properties of biofilms, an explanation of how specific structural or chemical features of biofilm matrix components leads to enhanced adhesion and persistence...
Two-dimensional (2D) covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a class of crystalline polymer networks that polymerize and crystallize into layered structures, characterized by their atomically precise structure, permanent porosity and high modularity. Imine-linked COFs are one of the most important and promising classes of macromolecular sheets, which form by the condensation...
Liquid 3He is the paradigm system for studying exotic quantum mechanical phenomena observed in nature. The normal state of 3He is a strongly-correlated Fermi liquid with strong ferromagnetic spin fluctuations. However, as we cool 3He down to T = 0K, we find something fascinating and unexpected. This exotic fluid remains...
Temperature affects all biological processes, from the rate of cellular growth and metabolism to the stability of proteins that make up the machinery of life itself. Thus, all organisms must have the capacity to detect and respond to external temperature. Thermosensation endows animals with the ability to sense and respond...
Stroke affects millions of people each year and although modern medicine has improved chances of survival after stroke, it has not yet been able to affect a change in repairing damaged neural tissue leaving one to two-thirds of survivors with chronic disability in their affected upper-extremity; specifically, hemiparesis, hypertonicity, loss...
Flowing granular mixtures with species differing in some property, such as size, shape or density of the grains, tend to segregate (de-mix) during flow. Since flowing granular materials are common in industry, and since segregation is often unwanted and costly, understanding and mitigating segregation is an important concern in industrial...
This thesis describes the synthesis and photophysical characterization of low-dimensionalmaterials—including thin-film semiconductors, colloidal quantum dots, and molecules—with the
broader motivation of integrating them into mixed-dimensional heterostructures with novel
responses to external stimuli. Due to their high surface area to volume ratio and incomplete
dielectric screening, mixed-dimensional heterostructures have high sensitivity...
This dissertation is a history of religious conservatism between 1880 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Its main argument is that conservative religion in America, rather than being defined by fundamentalism, theological disputes, or cultural antipathy towards pluralism, was an outgrowth of a profound faith in capitalism...
This dissertation studies three markets with regulated prices. I focus on how these regulations shape the behavior of firms along non-price dimensions. Chapter 1 studies the effects of community rating regulations in the US individual health insurance exchange market. In this market, the Affordable Care Act established community rating areas...
In the absence of any significant federal policy to mitigate climate change, many (though not all) U.S. states have stepped in to fill the void. But the policies these states have adopted vary considerably in their quality. For example, California’s economy-wide greenhouse gas policy was significantly stronger than Massachusetts’, which...
Coordinated movement relies on the precise and controlled activation of populations of motor units, which convert the commands of the nervous system into muscle forces. Motor unit firing patterns are often nonlinear and generated through the response to a combination of ionotropic excitatory and inhibitory commands, as well as metabotropic...
Gaussian process provides a principled and flexible approach for modeling the response surface or the latent function in many areas, including machine learning, statistics and computer experiment. In literature, Gaussian process models have already demonstrated their effectiveness and usefulness in a variety of applications. In this dissertation, we mainly focus...
The dissertation project considers the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges from a sustained consideration of different forms of difficult racial and sexual intimacies. The artists whose work is engaged throughout the project, Leasho Johnson, Ajamu X, and NIC Kay recognize that to be Black is to always...
Fat represents an important source of energy for ovarian cancer (OC) cells and is supplied either through import from the tumor milieu or via de novo lipogenesis. During fast tumor growth, when nutrients are scarce, lipogenesis becomes the primary source of fatty acids. Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD), a rate-limiting enzyme in...
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, progressive disease associated with physical, financial, and psychological burdens. Depression and anxiety, common comorbidities, are associated with poor outcomes including worse disease course, higher disability, decreased health related quality of life and reduced medication adherence. Prevention of psychological comorbidities and promotion of well-being...
Label-free assays, and particularly those based on the combination of mass spectroscopy with surface chemistries, enable high-throughput experiments of a broad range of reactions. However, these methods can still require the incorporation of functional groups that allow immobilization of reactants and products to surfaces prior to analysis. In this thesis,...
This dissertation examines caregiving contexts in early childhood. Specifically, I look at how caregiving contexts are related to or influenced by other caregiving contexts and broader social contexts. The dissertation is composed of an introductory chapter that provides a theoretical overview and summary of the dissertation followed by two additional...
The analytical paradigm in philosophy has as a pillar an analysis of the sentence as a basic entity. New sentences may be built from old sentences recursively through the application of logical constants, recently including intensional operators. Models are built on how these logical constants interact with each other, and...
The cuprate superconductor HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4+\delta}$ (Hg1201) has one of the simplest physical structures of the cuprates making it an ideal candidate for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. Here we discuss our NMR experiments aimed at studying the mixed state of two under-doped single crystal Hg1201 samples at high magnetic fields.
Flexible sheet metal forming processes possess significant potential in today’s industrial goods market with the advent of the next generation manufacturing paradigm, which put stresses on products customization and cost efficiency. However, due to the unique tooling configurations and forming mechanisms adopted in different flexible sheet metal forming processes, there...
Soft materials such as colloids and polymers often exhibit a variety of mesoscopic structures that are governed merely by weak physical interactions. Due to these intermediate structures, they can be easily taken out of thermal equilibrium by introducing external stimuli such as a shear flow and electromagnetic fields. This thesis...
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system tumor, characterized by resistance to therapeutic intervention, inevitable recurrence, and ultimately patient death. The dismal prognosis is due in part to underlying molecular factors that promote an intratumoral cellular state heterogeneity and protect tumor cells from cell death pathways....
This dissertation considers a rich and diverse material record pertaining to the dynamic between art and the relic treasury in the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire from c. 1100 into the sixteenth century. Across this broad period and region—and even well beyond—real and imagined collections of relics...
In this dissertation, we aim to develop algorithms that achieve optimality with provable complexity guarantees under various settings in reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in Markov decision processes (MDPs), we study single-agent and multi-agent online RL, respectively, and offline RL under the presence of unobserved confounders. Single-agent online RL. We design...
Increasingly high global energy consumption demands effective approaches to high energy efficiency and, at the same time, paths to reduced release of carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas behind global climate change. Friction reduction is a vital aspect towards making energy systems more efficient and one of the most crucial...
Chapter 1. Caste, Bureaucracy, and the Limits to Political Affirmative Action. The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been...
While Li-ion batteries are currently the preferred energy storage technology, multivalent alternatives such as Mg should be considered. Magnesium metal has a high volumetric capacity and has been shown to cycle with no dendrite formation. However, the highly charged Mg2+ ion cannot easily diffuse into the oxide cathodes favored in...
A unifying concept across many fields, ranging from chemistry to architecture, is the bottom-up construction of sophisticated structures from simple building blocks. Materials with long-range order allow for consistent, predictable performance throughout the resulting structure. My research focuses on building highly ordered porous materials from atomic level building blocks based...
Nanoparticles (NPs) are emerging as attractive drug carriers in therapeutic and diagnostic applications. The physiochemical properties of NPs, such as particle size, shape, and surface chemistry, play important roles in the functions of engineered nanoconstructs−NP cores with surface ligands. Recent work has screened these properties by monitoring cellular uptake and/or...
This project traces the efforts by Scottish Protestants to achieve complete religious uniformity in the decades following the Reformation. Discontented with outward conformity, the via media that long characterized our understanding of religious reform in England, Scotland’s ministers sought to work genuine conversions among those who resisted the new order....
The viscoelastic properties of microbial biofilms have attracted great interests in recent years due to the ubiquity of biofilms and their wide range of industrial and municipal applications causing tremendous societal impacts. Biofilms are predominantly architected by extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) matrices composed of bacterial cells and biopolymers secreted by...
One of the grand challenges in science is development of soft materials that mimic living organisms to optimize the way we use energy, translate or morph reversibly or sense their envi- ronment and respond in a useful fashion. Using the insights from studying biological structures, we hope to design soft...
This dissertation presents novel advancements in the field of continuous nonlinear optimization, focusing on the development of efficient second-order methods for second-order conic programs (SOCPs) and continuous nonlinear two-stage optimization problems. The primary focus is on the theory and computations of Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) methods, which are widely used...
Recently, a myriad of applications take advantage of deep learning methods to solve regression/classification problems. Although deep neural networks have shown powerful learning capability, many deep learning applications suffer from the extremely time-consuming training of the neural networks. In order to reduce the training time, researchers usually consider parallel training...
My dissertation identifies the causes of inequality traps - i.e., high and persistent levels of economic inequality - in Latin America and explains how and why some countries manage to escape such traps and embark on paths of diminishing inequality. I argue that the Redistributive State Power shapes the main...
In this dissertation I study the effects of mortgage leverage policies. These policies have become widely used in recent years, both as a macroprudential tool and to protect consumers, yet their effects are still not well understood. In Chapter 1, I show that mortgage leverage rules implemented under the Dodd-Frank...
New capabilities in x-ray microscopy have been enabled by rapid advances in synchrotronlight sources and in high performance computing. We present here conceptual and computational
advances in two areas of x-ray microscopy. One involves ptychography, where computation is
used to obtain images from diffraction patterns as a finite coherent illumination...
Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance for many applications. In this dissertation, leveraging the capabilities of neural networks for modeling the non-linearity exists in the data, we propose several models that can project data into a low dimensional, discriminative, and smooth manifold. The suggested models can transfer knowledge from...
From the early usage of metallic thin films as mirrors tracing back to 2900 BC, to the modern thin film photonic circuits as a mature optical processing platform, and to the growing class of atomically-thin two-dimensional (2D) materials with diverse and tailorable properties, thin film materials have played an important...
This dissertation studies three distinct problems in econometrics. Chapter 1 proposes an adaptive randomization procedure for two-stage randomized controlled trials. The method uses data from a first-wave experiment in order to determine how to stratify in a second wave of the experiment, where the objective is to minimize the variance...
This dissertation reports on a 16-week ethnographic study of politicized caring within a museum-based tinkering program for high school students called the FabYouth program. Drawing on a data set that includes 16 field notes, 785.83 minutes (about 13.1 hours) of ethnographic audio-video recordings, 280 photographs, and ten student interviews, I...
The building blocks of life are proteins. These incredible nanostructures are responsible for forming the diverse infrastructure of living systems and for performing countless biological functions. In Nature, these materials and systems achieve structural complexity and function through highly regulated and controlled assembly of protein building blocks, driven by specific...
Since the dawn of mankind, humans have used materials and tools to dominate the world. As our understanding of the fields physics, chemistry and engineering is growing, we are able to artificially create advanced materials with engineered responses. Next step would be to create ‘ smart’ or intelligent materials capable...
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...
Recent progress in semiconductor synthesis and photophysics has revealed a host of new materials with exciting properties for applications in optoelectronic devices such as sensors, photovoltaics, solid state lighting, and more. One of the most significant recent additions to the field is the class of hybrid and inorganic materials that...
Realizing electromagnetic metamaterials which operate in the optical regime requires creating precise arrangements of sub-100 nm building blocks. As such, fabricating these materials using conventional lithographic methods is extremely costly. On the other hand, bottom-up assembly of nanoparticles into crystalline superlattices offers opportunities to explore the scalable fabrication of 2-...
Bacterial infections (BI) are a frequent, expensive, and life-threatening condition for critically ill patients. For patients with serious BI, minimizing the time between admission to the
intensive care unit (ICU) and administration of appropriate antibiotic therapy is crucial to
improve prognosis. However, the current gold-standard for identifying the appropriate
antimicrobials...
This dissertation examines the effects of phase transfers with thiol ligands on the optical properties of quantum dots (QDs) in water by investigating two systems: i) dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA)-capped PbS QDs and ii) thiolated DNA-capped core/shell CdSe/CdS QDs. QDs are bright, monodisperse, and tunable hydrophobic nanoparticles with high photoluminescence (PL)...
Since the invitation of ARPANet in 1969, network protocols and communication systems have continued to emerge. Especially in the past decade, the prosperity of mobile internet and cloud computing has resulted in a large number of network protocols and communication systems, which have become critical infrastructure for our society. Availability...
In the first part of the thesis we,given a dg-Lie algebra $\g$, a commutative
dg-algebra $A$ and a twisting cochain $\mu$ in
$A \otimes \g$, we construct a map
from the functor of curved deformations of $\g$ to the
functor of curved deformations of the twisted tensor product
$A \otimes_\mu...
Although flowing granular materials have been formally studied for over two hundred years, their behavior is still poorly understood relative to fluids, solids, and gases. Sheared granular materials with differing particle properties (e.g., size, density, shape) segregate (de-mix) due to percolation (small particles fall between large ones) and buoyancy (light...
In this dissertation I leverage new data from the global music recording industry to study the social foundations of creativity and the relationship between product novelty, gender, and commercial success. In Chapter 1, I investigate how different kinds of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Using data...
The role of mesoscale structure on the properties of functional materials is poorly understood as the influence of mesoscale structure is both complicated and material specific. Thus there is not only a lack of a general understanding of how structure influences emergent properties but also a lack of a general...
Security and robustness are two critical problems in modern computing system. In this disserta- tion, we study these two problems in both hardware system and learning system.Firstly, we discuss the robustness problem in hardware system. Modern microprocessors suffer from significant on-chip variation at the advanced technology nodes. The development of...
The objective of this dissertation is to examine the mutually constitutive relationship between historiography, collective memory, and cultural narratives in the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in present-day France and Algeria. Taking the turn of the twenty-first century as its point of departure, this study analyzes modern...
Processing of sensory information in the brain is a pervasive and fundamental phenomenon across animal species and is involved in both "hard-wired" innate responses as well as learned and adaptive behaviors. Here, I show that the avoidance of hot temperature, a simple innate behavior, contains unexpected plasticity and complex processing...
Public-facing data-driven technologies such as social media platforms and search engines rely on data producers, such as users and crowd workers, to be feasible and financially sustainable. Recently, it became clear that the goals of these data-driven technologies do not always align with those of the public, causing public backlashes...
Respiratory-swallow coordination is implicated as an essential component of safe and efficient swallowing, yet current evidence is incomplete regarding its relevance to swallowing impairment, assessment and treatment. Three studies were conducted that: 1) characterized and confirmed the optimal respiratory-swallowing coordination patterns in healthy adults, 2) identified linkages between deviations in...