Speech recognition in complex acoustic environments is dependent on myriad bottom-up (i.e., peripheral) and top-down (i.e., central) processes. While bottom-up processes remain fairly stable during childhood, the development of top-down processes persists into young adulthood. The immaturity of top-down processes places younger children at considerable risk for poorer speech recognition...
Optimization via simulation (OvS) is the practice of minimizing or maximizing the expected value of the output of a stochastic simulation model with respect to controllable decision variables. Stochastic simulation is a standard tool within operations research and is often required to model complex systems subject to uncertainty where it...
Proper partitioning of mitochondria and mtDNA is critical for cellular health. Investigations into mitochondrial inheritance, specifically how mtDNA inheritance is coupled with the inheritance mitochondrial compartment, are still in the early stages. We use budding yeast as a model polarized cell system to study a mitochondrial Myo2-adaptor protein, Mmr1, in...
The study and design of machines that are able to analyze the auditory scene and organize sound into parts that are perceptually meaningful to humans is referred to as machine hearing. Such machines are expected to distinguish between different sound categories (e.g., speech, music, background noise), focus on a sound...
Intelligence in humans is largely characterized by the ability to encode information into compressible representations to facilitate efficient communication for collaboration and learning. The goal of this thesis is to enable robots to both learn and act on compressible representations in real-time. I show how active exploration with respect to...
While optimization has received much attention in the machine learning community, most of them consider unconstrained supervised learning models such as neural networks and support vector machine. In this dissertation, we introduce a new class of optimization problems called scale invariant problems that include interesting unsupervised learning models such as...
This thesis focuses on applications of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for three aspects of sequential classification. In the first chapter, a novel method to generate synthetic minority data generation to improve imbalanced classification is discussed. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have been used in many different applications to generate realistic synthetic...
Two major areas of research in the field of manufacturing are miniaturization and 3D printing. The trend towards miniaturization stems from the desire and need for additional functionality and improved performance for products with ever-smaller footprints. Miniaturization opens manufacturing to new applications such as tissue engineering and surface texturing. Meanwhile,...
Social factors are a major contributor to deaths in the US. The literature suggests that socioeconomic status and other social and environmental factors influence an individual’s mortality. These factors encompass six domains that comprise factors such as poverty, unemployment, poor access to healthy food, limited access to health care, limited...
Social media and online forums provide spaces where people can gather beyond restrictions of geographic proximity. For some individuals with mental illness, these spaces are vital; providing outlets and communities where a multitude of experiences are accepted and understood, rather than judged against normative, often ableist standards. For nearly three...
Granular mixing has received less attention than fluid mixing due to the unique properties of granular materials and the complexity of their flow behaviors. Unlike fluid flows, where a continuum perspective accurately captures flow behavior, neither a continuum nor a discrete perspective by itself can describe the global behaviors of...
Bacteria often coordinate virulence factors to fine-tune the host response during infection. These coordinated events can include toxins counteracting or amplifying effects of another toxin or though regulating the stability of virulence factors to remove their function once it is no longer needed. Multifunctional autoprocessing repeats-in toxin (MARTX) toxins are...
Surface appearance represents the sense impression of the surface. In visual art, the artists try to use the appearance of their artworks to express their mental state and philosophy. Researchers in the cultural heritage community has been trying to use different analysis approaches to interpret artworks. In Computer Graphics and...
Esophageal hypervigilance, or the increased awareness and amplification of esophageal symptoms, is a psychological process known to drive symptom experience in individuals with gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). However, current understanding lacks a conceptual framework with known biomarkers and relationships to other psychophysiological variables. The aim of the current study is...
ABSTRACT On the Other Side of Babylon: Black Women and Epistemologies of Resistance in the Third World Women’s Alliance Assata Sankofa Kokayi This cultural and intellectual history analyzes the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), its relationship with decolonization struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and positionality as an anti-imperialist...
In the current state of robotics, the systems we create are heavily reliant on our consistent guidance, programming of tasks, and oracle information that allow them to operate in the world that we inhabit. What happens to our robotic systems when we are unable to perform as an oracle, creating...
Colloidal crystals are promising candidates for nanophotonic applications due to their strong interactions with light and the capability to tailor such interactions through crystal design and engineering. DNA-programmable assembly, in particular, allows for precise structural control down to the sub-nanometer length scale. In this thesis, ways of designing, synthesizing, and...
Peer review is a commonly used tool to manage large classes. It allows students to grade and provide feedback to each other based on rubrics provided by instructors. Peer review has been proved to be effective in improving students' learning outcomes by many research. During providing peer review, students are...
Self-assembly of colloidal particles at the nano- and microscale has been a powerful tool for producing structures with emergent properties in applications ranging from electro-mechanical systems to photonics and biomedical devices. Great success has been achieved in experiments, where a variety of exotic phases have been discovered and even reconfigurable...
We study modular forms, Jacobi forms, and hermitian formal Fourier-Jacobi series over imaginary quadratic fields. In the first section, we prove that the ring of classical Jacobi forms of a fixed genus g, varying index m and weight k is generated by theta functions. From this result we show that...