Transitioning energy systems from a reliance on fossil fuels to low carbon energy sources is an essential solution for climate change mitigation. However, the industrial sector, which is directly responsible for more than a quarter of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, continues to use fossil fuels for energy and feedstocks....
This dissertation aims to develop innovative analytical methods that integrate engineering, marketing, and social science disciplines to incorporate heterogeneous consumer preferences into product design using network-based customer preference modeling. Both companies and designers frequently face difficulties in understanding and addressing customer preferences, which can result in product failure and loss...
Nanomaterials present an exciting landscape of innovation at length scales below 100 nm, wherein controllable synthesis and materials metrology have led to tunable structure-property relationships and next-generation products. The disruptive field of nanotechnology is poised to capitalize upon the exotic chemistry and physics of these nanomaterials to enable more efficient...
In this document, I demonstrate that: 1) Linear basis functions cannot outperform nonlinear ones to represent hand kinematics 2) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA on the dimensionality reduction of hand kinematics, 3) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA in human gait representation and recurrent nonlinear autoencoders can seamlessly express the temporal dynamics, 4)...
In the face of a changing climate caused by anthropomorphic release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, major governments have committed to the reduction of CO2 and other emissions over time, requiring increased reliance on forms of carbon-free renewable energy. The inherent intermittency of renewable electricity sources creates a...
The goal of this thesis is to develop an experimental setup to evaluate and analyze the effect of crack-parallel stress on the fracture response of materials. In standard fracture test configurations, the crack-parallel normal stress is negligible. However, a new type of experiment, briefly named the gap test, revealed that...
The successful isolation of graphene marked the advent of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Their atomically thin structures enable unprecedented electrical, optical, and mechanical properties, which have triggered significant research interests in the past decade. For instance, they are promising candidates for the fabrication of flexible electronics, biological sensors, battery electrodes, and...
Future large-scale quantum networks will likely require more efficient on-chip devices for quantum key distribution (QKD) systems that can exploit CMOS manufacturing techniques. QKD systems on chip have been produced in a number of material platforms including silicon, indium phosphide, and a range of hybrid structures. Advanced industrial silicon-electronics manufacturing...
Next generation cellular networks are expected to support a massive data traffic volume and satisfy a vast number of users that have latency-critical quality-of-service expectations. Towards serving this demand, it is envisaged that the interference management problem will be the main bottleneck due to the likeliness of a heavily interfering...
Over the past decade, wearables have become pervasive in our lives. Healthcare wearables like a smartwatch continuously monitor personal health status and provide personalized feedback to motivate progress towards medically recommended goals. While present set of on-body electronics empowers users to visualize health status outside of clinic spaces, its traditionally...
Recent development on optogenetic methods offers reliable path to modulate cell activities with high level spatiotemporal precision. Application of this technology in behavior studies significantly improves our understanding in the neural principle that underpin animal behaviors, including ourselves. Full exploitation of optogenetic method in neuroscience behavior studies relies on...
Since their discovery, polymeric and protein-based materials are key to technological innovation and are indispensable in our lives. However, these natural and man-made soft materials usually have complex and hierarchical structures, with basic functional units in submicron scale. Therefore, a major challenge in understanding and designing these materials lies...
In this dissertation I explore the applications and test the limitations of surface haptics technology in producing tactile experiences akin to those encountered in the real world. The goal of this work is to build intuition around physical aspects of touch that contribute to perception of tactile textures in...
Movement and sensing fundamentally works in a synergistic manner. Animal's sensory organs --- be they independently movable like eyes or requiring whole body movement as in the case of electroreceptors --- are actively manipulated throughout stimulus-driven active sensing behaviors. Though these sensing-related motions have been individually reported and analyzed across...
Following the discovery of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys, attempts have been undertaken to optimize their thermoelectric performance because understanding of the properties of this system had been limited due to its novelty. In this thesis, the thermoelectric performance of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys was systematically investigated and significantly improved. Thorough experimental characterization...
While the entire silicon industry has been blooming under Moore’s Law for decades, conventional digital implementation is approaching the “stall” of Moore’s Law due to many physical design limitations. Technology innovation now is going to take a different direction. Given the increasing demand for emerging applications' computational capacity, it is...
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
Central nervous system (CNS) regeneration is one of the most challenging regenerative medicine targets in mammals due to the natural inhibitory mechanisms that occur in response to injury. In the case of spinal cord injury (SCI), the initial inflammatory response protects damaged tissue, but over time creates a hostile microenvironment...
Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TDMCs) are one of many families of two-dimensional (2D) beyond graphene, that started to gain more attention due to the need for miniaturization and their unique electrical, mechanical, and optical properties. Some members of TMDCs, such as MoS2, has direct band gap in its monolayer form, making...
Natural gas is likely to become one of the main sources of carbon-based chemicals in the next century due to rapidly increasing natural gas production levels. This has created new incentives to find materials that are active and selective towards alkane partial oxidation reactions that are relevant for natural gas...