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...
This paper studies the joint importance of dissemination and the structure of firms’ information networks in the pricing of value relevant financial information. I first document that disruptions to the dissemination of information on Twitter.com cause the market to react less to earnings news. Using ten staggered Twitter outages, which...
A fundamental materials science question is “why and how will this material form?” The experimental,computation, and time resources necessary to answer this question consume significant resources due to the
predominantly trial-and-error based approaches common in materials research. This dissertation reintroduces
a number of fundamental thermodynamics-based tools for the study of...
Earth’s mantle has a two-layer structure comprising an upper and a lower mantle, separated by a global seismic discontinuity at 660 km depth. The mantle transition zone (MTZ), which extends from the seismic discontinuity at 410 km depth to the base of the upper mantle plays a crucial role in...
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 studies presented in this dissertation integrate stable calcium (Ca) and radiogenic and stable strontium (Sr) isotope geochemistry to understand how the Earth system responds to significant perturbations in the global carbon cycle. The primary focus is on the effects of massive releases of volcanic CO2 for ocean carbonate geochemistry...
This project studies the formal experimentations with color in postwar cinema as a paradigm for exploring larger theoretical and political questions relating to postwar aesthetics. Borrowing from an understudied concept of Gilles Deleuze’s theory, “the color-image,” my first chapter shifts the conversation away from reading color as strictly symbolic or...
T cells and cancer cells have many common features, including their need to proliferate and their metabolic requirements. In particular, glucose metabolism is highly upregulated in both cancer cells and T cells to support proliferation and other cellular functions. The first step of glycolysis is catalyzed by Hexokinase, which exists...
Over the past four decades, the rate of incarceration for women has risen significantly. Black women are disproportionately represented among incarcerated women. Formerly incarcerated women and men face similar barriers upon release from incarceration, such as obtaining stable and gainful employment, securing safe and affordable housing, and reconnecting with children...
The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a masterwork of biology, and its development was a key part of the transformation from monocellular to multicellular life. With an ECM, cells acquired the ability to cooperatively build a dynamic support network that facilitated their movement, specialization, and communication. This ECM is a hierarchical...
Subchalcogenides are rare compounds that have both metal-metal and metal-chalcogenide (sulfur, selenium, tellurium) interactions. Unlike conventional semiconductors, the metals do not obey the so-called 8-N octet rule for oxidation states, often resulting in low or zero valent metal atoms. The presence of both metal-metal and metal-chalcogenide bonding can also lead...
Deformation in materials with a hierarchical microstructure is expected to be complex because of the interaction between the units that form such a microstructure. The complexity of deformation would be even higher when additional inelastic deformation modes are active in such materials, apart from traditional elastic and plastic deformation modes....
Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down...
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...
Since Infrared radiation was discovered in 1800s, the research and applications on the infrared regime have been continually developed. The infrared detectors are the key technology in these applications and have been successfully used for medical imaging, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), free-space optical communication, target tracking and object identification...
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...
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...
Super-resolution (SR) has become one of the most critical problems in image and video processing. In Chapter 2 of this thesis, a detailed review of existing Deep Learning (DL) techniques for addressing the SR task, with an emphasis on how DL and analytical techniques can be combined, is provided. Chapter...
Recent developments in deep learning have led to breakthroughs in rendering novel views from sparse input views of a scene.While the accuracy of these algorithms has improved dramatically, it has come at a huge computational cost.
While developments in graphics hardware have ameliorated some of the computational burdens, deep learning-based...
In the adult hippocampus of many mammalian species, populations of newborn dentate granule cells (DGCs) are continuously generated and undergo subsequent activity-dependent neuronal maturation and incorporation into the preexisting hippocampal circuitry. Increasing evidence has demonstrated that these young adult-born DGCs (abDGCs) participate in numerous cognitive and affective processes such as...