The human brain shows great flexibility to adjust itself to dynamically ever-changing environment. Despite more than 100 years of cognitive brain research, the dynamical aspect of cognitive process has remained poorly understood compared to the static aspect of that. This dissertation concerns the dynamic character and functional significance of periodically...
Eukaryotic gene transcription is a coordinated process involving the participation of a large number of proteins. Sequence-specific DNA-binding transcription factors function as activators or repressors of transcription and frequently recruit transcriptional coregulators that lack specific DNA-binding activity. These multi-protein complexes with intrinsic chromatin-modifying and chromatin-remodeling activities have emerged as key...
We use transverse sound spectroscopy to probe excited states of the Cooper pairs in the B-phase of superfluid 3He. In particular we study those excited states with non-zero energy at zero momentum, the so called gapped, or exciton, modes. This includes precise measurements of the imaginary squashing mode energies as...
Both individual and institutional investors face a number of constraints in their consumption and investment decisions. We look at well-motivated constraints on the consumption process as well as liquidity constraints and study their impact on optimal consumption and investment policies under a dynamic discrete time setting.
The use of composites is increasing as they afford scientists and engineers the ability to combine the advantageous properties of each constituent phase, e.g. metal ductility and ceramic stiffness. With respect to materials design, biomimetics is garnering increasing attention due to the complex, yet efficient, natural microstructures. One such biomimetic,...
My primary interest is in markets as aggregators of information. To study this I create a benchmark market-microstructure model of sequential trading on posted prices. I have a competitive market maker and rational profit-maximizing traders with different tastes over a single asset and heterogeneous information over its value. The differences...
A dynamic model of the rolling process that includes the material strain-hardening and work roll flattening effects was developed based on homogeneous deformation theory. By coupling this new dynamic rolling process model with a structural model for a mill stand, a single-stand chatter model expressed through a state-space representation was...
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 how individuals choose college majors. The choice of college major is treated as one made under uncertainty. Understanding any decision under uncertainty requires one to study how expectations and preferences are used to make the choice. However, since observed choices may be consistent with many combinations of...
The automobile coating industry is undergoing reformation driven by environmental regulations that demand low content of volatile organic compounds. Traditional solvent-borne acrylic resins
consisting of high molecular weight polymers that are produced at low temperatures (< 80 C) need high levels of organic solvent (70%) to be processed as coatings....