This dissertation examines how one pervasive state institution¬—schools—shapes the political behavior of young people along the lines of race and ethnicity. I make four primary claims. First, I show that the content of traditional civic education courses privileges the political experiences of white political actors. Second, I argue that this...
The task of classification has been increasingly attracting attention from researchers in recent years. The objective is to assign labels given attributes of samples. The classification task is practical in real-world applications and is widely explored in fields such as computer vision, natural language processing and information retrieval. The recent...
This dissertation investigates a number of models and algorithms in the context of optimization under uncertainty. The focus is on risk-averse optimization, where risk aversion is modeled via stochastic dominance, utility theory, and distributionally robust optimization. We first investigate an investment model with fixed contribution rates, optimize asset-allocation decisions in...
The three dimensional structure of a protein determines its biological function. How a protein folds, however, has been the central research problem for decades. The intermediates on the folding paths, which the protein can assume transiently, are of particular interest as they not only reveal the structural dynamics of a...
The transportation infrastructure privatization is an essential solution to the public fund's shortage of transportation investments. In the privatization practices, the private firms build, operate, and own the transportation infrastructure under a limited term. Due to the private sector's involvement, the efficiency of the transportation service is determined not only...
Raman spectroscopy is an analytical technique that utilizes inelastic scattering of light to obtain structural information of analyte molecules. The weak intrinsic process of Raman scattering, however, can be greatly enhanced when molecules are placed on or near a surface of noble metal with nanostructures. Discovered over 40 years, surface-enhanced...
The recently increasing precision in experimental measurements of observables in collider physics has demanded for a matching precision in the theoretical expectations for such observables. In Quantum ChromoDynamics, the fundamental underlying theory for collider physics, theoretical predictions are expressed under the form of perturbative series, where the expansion parameter is...
Fluid injection is one of the major triggering factors of infrastructure collapse and geo-hazards, among which some of the most recurrent ones are rainfall-induced landslides. Such events exhibit complicated spatiotemporal patterns, spanning from slow deformation to extremely rapid movements influencing large regions. To prevent the occurrence of catastrophic failures and...
In my dissertation, I investigate how formal and informal structures within the board can affect key board outcomes. While each chapter introduces a relatively under-recognized player in the governance space—compensation consultants (Chapter 1), multi-committee directors (Chapter 2), and executive chairmen (Chapter 3)—the main theme connecting all three centers on the...
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...