Responsiveness -- the time it takes for a message recipient to respond to a message -- has long been of interest to scholars in the fields of computer-mediated communication and human-computer interaction. It has been hypothesized that responsiveness is used to signal emotional information, and many empirical studies have demonstrated...
Abstract The work presented in this dissertation addresses three broad areas of video signal processing: video transmission, motion estimation and error concealment. In the first category, focused on the source-side, we present two machine learning models for efficient content-aware resource allocation and packet prioritization for video transmission over shared/constrained, lossy...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is a highly malignant brain tumor that accounts for the most commonly diagnosed type of primary brain tumors in adults. It has a poor prognosis of only 15 months from the time of diagnosis. The gold standard therapy regimen consists of radiotherapy and the chemotherapeutic temozolomide. Both of...
This dissertation focuses on two topics: macroeconomic implications of consumer inertia, and sovereign debt. In Chapter 1, I explore the role of consumer inertia---persistence in households' consumption choices---as a driver of the rise in corporate profits and decline in the share of young firms in the US economy during the...
Microfluidic technologies enable multi-tissue culture and precise control of media exchange and therefore have significant potential to create more complex in vitro models of reproductive systems, including endocrine cycles. However, microfluidic technologies have largely been applied to gamete-level culture in reproductive biology, with very little progress in organ-level culture. Herein...
Pathogenic bacteria scavenge essential nutrients including metals, amino acids and peptides to survive within the hostile host environment. Bacteria utilize ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters, powered by the energy of ATP hydrolysis, to move substrates across cellular membranes. The substrate-binding protein (SBP) shuttles substrate in the periplasm and directs the substrate...
A functional democratic society rests on the premise that the mass public holds clear preferences for policies, candidates, and more. To arrive at these preferences, many citizens rely on their social identities, making political decisions based on what they see as benefitting the groups to which they belong. They may...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
Methylation of histone 3 lysine 4 (H3K4) catalyzed by the COMPASS family of lysine methyltransferases is universally associated with eukaryotic transcription. However, despite thousands of published studies examining the deposition, dynamics, and genomic positions of this chromatin modification, there is no clear consensus as to the molecular function or biological...
Oocyte meiosis is a specialized, but error prone, form of cell division that is poorly understood. Errors during meiosis often result in aneuploidy, or abnormal chromosome number, that impacts human health and fertility. Aneuploidy is the leading cause of miscarriages and birth defects, such as Down's syndrome in which cells...