Engineering design is a systematic process of identifying needs and their translation into functional systems. This is a cyclic process that alternates between the acquisition of data and the synthesis of said data to inform design decisions. Conventionally, data from physical experiments are used to explore the efficacy of alternative...
The gender imbalance in computer science is getting worse, with computer science being the only Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) field in which women’s representation has steadily declined throughout the past few decades. Rectifying this gender imbalance is an urgent need, both because of fundamental issues of equity and...
This dissertation starts with the question of what the global resurgence of authoritarianism means for the welfare states affected by it. The inadequacies of the dominant partisan and institutionalist paradigms within the welfare state literature suggest, however, that a new paradigm for understanding welfare state development is necessary to answer...
Though they lived a century apart and wrote in starkly disparate historical, cultural, and literary contexts, Russian poets Aleksandr Pushkin and Vladimir Mayakovsky were both victims of the posthumous processes of bureaucratization and monumentalization at the hands of the Soviet regime. Their biographies, politics, and poetry were sanitized and manipulated...
Dynamic covalent chemistry (DCC) combines the strength and directionality of covalent bonds with the reversibility of supramolecular interactions. The formation and stability of these bonds are typically regulated by parameters such as temperature, pH, concentration, catalyst loading and light. Light is an exceptionally powerful stimulus because it can be applied...
Stimulus generalization is a critical mechanism for facilitating behavioral flexibility. Generalization allows the brain to reduce computational demands that would otherwise be necessary to create unique representations for each and every encounter while allowing the ability to deal with the complexity of real-world situations. Stimulus generalization is a fundamental cognitive...
With the rapid advancement of machine learning techniques (in particular deep neural networks), computer vision applications have shown great promises in a variety of domains for intelligent cyber-physical systems (CPSs), such as autonomous driving, medical imaging, and vision-based robotic systems. However, while many vision applications provide great on-paper performance, their...
Crystalline and Framework materials make up a broad class of structures which are known for their precise and regular nature. Because these materials have predictable structures and compositions to their networks, they are widely used for several applications including electronics, optics, and catalysis. While these materials are of particular interest,...
This dissertation interrogates the quality of sincerity as it appears throughout John Locke’s work on religious toleration and Christian theology. Sincerity, and the framework it provides, offers a means to draw together his political and theological works, as well as to appreciate both his radical potentialities and conservative impulses. The...
Part I:Current approaches to synthesize π-conjugated polymers are dominated by thermally driven, transition-metal-mediated reactions. Herein we7 show that electron-deficient Grignard monomers readily polymerize under visible-light irradiation at room temperature in the absence of a catalyst. The product distribution can be tuned by the wavelength of irradiation based on the absorption...