Demand Response (DR) is an approach that allows electricity users to actively participate in keeping supply-demand balance in power systems, or its future version, smart grid, in order to increase the system efficiency, lower consumers' electricity bills, and thus improve social welfare. To encourage users' participation in DR, a time-varying...
This integrated dissertation focuses on the relationship between family functioning (including marital conflict, family conflict, and parental depression), youth depression, and long-term functioning of adolescents who were treated for depression. This dissertation consists of three distinct studies: a meta-analytic study of the relationship between marital conflict and youth depression and...
Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of crystalline materials composed of metal nodes connected by organic linkers. Due to their high degree of synthetic tunability, MOFs have been considered for a wide range of applications, including many that rely on a change in oxidation state. While most MOFs are generally...
Theory of mind (ToM) reasoning is defined as the ability to reason about another’s internal states, such as beliefs, goals, and desires. It is a major aspect of human social interaction and is mastered by most typically developing children by age five. On the other hand, simulated agents generally lack...
In this dissertation, we study different machine learning algorithms including probabilistic, sparse and deep learning based models applied to multi-sensory datasets. In many machine learning problems, samples are collected from more than one source or modality. Also, various feature extraction methods can be used to provide more than one set...
Renewable energy technology, more so than ever before, is critical to the survival of humanity. For decades, concentrated efforts into designing and developing such novel devices resulted in the innovation of solar-driven photovoltaics that were competitive with nonrenewable alternatives. This thesis explores the dynamic behavior of alternative material candidates that...
Since its introduction as an artist’s pigment in the earth 20th century, titanium white has become one of the most common white pigments. The early formulations of titanium white contained anatase, which has been studied to facilitate degradation of oil paint under UV illumination. Around the 1940s production shifted to...
Children are known to be curious and persistent question-askers. The pervasiveness of voice interfaces represents an opportunity for children who are still learning to read and write to independently search the Internet by directing questions at conversational agents such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and the Google Assistant. However, little...
The work presented in this thesis is to describe the fabrication of the nano-composites of carbonaceous materials (e.g. graphene oxide) and metal oxides (e.g. Titanium dioxide TiO2) for two specific applications in the field of public health protection: 1.) removal of micropollutants (MPs) in the aqueous environment; 2.) antimicrobial coating.The...
The Controlled, Site-Isolated Synthesis of Polyelemental Nanostructures in Polymer Nanoreactors Pengcheng Chen Polyelemental nanoparticles are an attractive class of materials due to their potential applications, which span the fields of catalysis, plasmonics, electronics, magnetics, targeted drug delivery, and bio-imaging. However, conventional synthetic methods for such structures are limited, especially when...
The need for complex and sophisticated materials continues to grow as society becomes more advanced. For many chemists, the design of these materials begins by looking towards model molecular systems for the identification of desirable properties and functions. As such, restricting oneself to C, H, N, O, and the other...
The current view in neuroscience holds that the brain, together with its sensory and motor structures and the environment, form a closed-loop system – a sensorimotor loop – in which the brain receives information from the environment and converts it into a motor response while simultaneously making predictions about future...
As technology scales down, challenges in fabrication, thermal stress, and in-field degradation have put the reliability of processors at risk. Among different fault types, transient faults manifest themselves frequently due to high chip density, aggressive voltage scaling, and high clock frequency. Some dependable processor architectures have been proposed to counter...
Computational material engineering (CME) has increased the pace of material development many folds in recent years by taking advantage of computational tools such as using simulations as replacement to experiments, and building complicated processing-structure-property relationships using advanced machine learning tools. The importance of CME is underscored by new computation-based design...
Polymers with electrolyte groups or “polyelectrolytes” have been the subject of intense study for the past few decades due to characteristics such as anti-fouling and underwater adhesion. Because of their charged nature, however, polyanions and polycations will complex in aqueous solutions forming dense unprocessable precipitates. In an attempt to leverage...
Anxiety and depression are highly prevalent, recurrent, and major public health problems. Decades of research has uncovered associations between symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression and abnormal neural activation across executive control-, threat-, and reward-related networks. Recent studies have developed a hierarchical symptom structure of anxiety and depression termed the...
This thesis focuses on the development of a cochlear implant (CI) that uses photons to stimulate surviving auditory neurons in severe-to-profoundly deaf individuals. The benefit of optical over electrical stimulation is its spatial selectivity with the potential to create significantly more independent channels to encode acoustic information and likely enhances...
Conventional methods in industrial organization assume that firms are strategically sophisticated and set prices as best responses to their competitive environment. In the first two chapters of this dissertation, I use a detailed dataset of retail and wholesale prices from the newly legalized cannabis industry in Washington state to show...
The development of functional materials with rationally designed hierarchical structure is an interdisciplinary challenge. Looking to nature for inspiration, we use small molecules that
engage in directed self-assembly through carefully tuned intermolecular interactions to construct
materials that have structure at multiple length scales. In this work, supramolecular structures
formed using...
The purpose of this study was (1) to examine the impact that small ensemble free improvisation experiences had on dispositional empathy development when compared with other forms of collective music making; and (2) to examine the relationship between co-performing musicians’ empathy levels and their performance achievement in small ensembles using...
Each neuron in the primary motor cortex (M1) is like a musician in an orchestra, contributing to a larger harmony under the constraint of a “neural manifold”—a geometric score describing the correlated signals produced by the neural musicians that drive movement. Despite the widespread recognition of the importance of M1...
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is much more politically powerful than we might expect it to be. Despite both shockingly high rates of gun violence and deep, durable public support for stricter rules on gun ownership, the NRA regularly defeats or weakens the content of gun control legislation. Its influence...
Radiofrequency ablation is a minimally-invasive treatment method that aims to destroy undesired tissue by exposing it to alternating current in the 100 kHz to 800 kHz frequency range and heating it until it is destroyed via coagulative necrosis. Ablation treatment is gaining momentum especially in cancer research, where the undesired...
The dynamics of human joints are fundamental characteristic of the human motor system, and altered joint impedance can hinder mobility. Individuals with transtibial amputation typically experience slower and energetically costly gait, while individuals with chronic stroke experience persisting gait deficits arising from spasticity, hypertonia and paresis. Investigating joint impedance of...
Every music theorist has their own personal reasons for engaging in the craft of theorizing about music. Many discover that there is something special about a theoretic disposition which differs from other sorts of interactions with music. It is often this special something that draws musicians into the discipline: specifically,...
Recognizing the significance of social interactions in shaping human behavior and development, policies and programs often rely on peers and social relationships as mechanisms for inducing positive change. Yet, even in randomized control trials, social spillover can make an effective program appear ineffective, and measuring peer effects poses identification...
Interleukin 33 (IL-33) is a complex inflammatory cytokine with diverse functions. In the context of cancer development, depending on the model, the implementation and dosage, and the immune cells involved, IL-33 can elicit dramatically different outcomes. Recent studies, including our own, have explored definitive contributions of the adaptive immunity in...
NiTi shape memory alloy (SMA) has drawn a great deal of attention for its various applications in the medical field (orthodontics, cardiovascular stents technology, etc.) and in other engineering fields (aerospace, aircraft, automotive, etc.) as it shows shape memory effect, superelasticity and biocompatibility. The fatigue-related issues, however, are pronounced in...
When properly regulated, inflammation leads to the recruitment and activation of circulating leukocytes to maintain and restore tissue homeostasis. Although this process is critical for successful wound healing and the elimination of pathogens and infections, misdirected inflammation can exacerbate pathology and cause substantial morbidity and mortality. Inflammation a fundamental process...
Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a class of nanoporous materials with highly tunable pore shape and chemistry. They are synthesized in a "building block" approach to form crystalline porous materials, which have been explored for diverse applications including gas storage and separations. Given the enormous size of the MOF design space,...
A stroke occurs when blood flow in the brain is impaired and often causes damage to corticospinal tract projections that control the muscles of the upper-extremity. Due to this damage, 50-70% of stroke survivors experience long-term upper-extremity functional deficits(Faria-Fortini, Michaelsen, Cassiano, & Teixeira-Salmela, 2011). These deficits result from motor impairments...
This dissertation investigates long-term biographies of seventeen small medieval settlements in the region of Hegranes, Skagafjörður, North Iceland, placing their creation, development, and reuse in the context of coupled social and environmental change. The individuals and households who lived at the Hegranes sites were at the nexus of both kinds...
Interpenetrating polymer networks (IPNs) are multicomponent materials that enhance the compatibility of otherwise immiscible polymers by trapping the microstructure in a non-equilibrium state. By combining polymers with vastly different moduli, IPNs effectively disperse rigid polymers within a soft matrix, resulting in a reinforced elastomer. This approach significantly increases the modulus...
Large scale adoption of sustainable technologies for energy productionand storage can be greatly facilitated by scientific advances impacting efficiency, cost and availability. The study of materials is instrumental in both upgrading the performance of existing technologies and enabling the development of new ones, and ab-initio methods and machine learning represent...
Chronic stress is a significant risk factor for the development of numerous psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder (MDD). Individuals with MDD exhibit impairments in reward processing and decreased motivation to engage in previously-rewarding activities. Importantly, there is a large sex disparity in MDD diagnosis, such that it affects nearly...
This thesis investigates various aspects of productivity. In the first chapter I investigate the role of consumer demand in generating productivity dispersion. In particular, I study how differences in consumer preferences across the household income distribution generate dispersion in markups across the Indian manufacturing sector. I find that this consumer...
Christian artists use dramatic license and theatrical representation to mold idealized versions of the Bible into recreational spaces for popular consumption, such as immersive theaters, theme parks, and museums. For these Christian artists, the impulse to evangelize through theatrical representation overcomes deeply ingrained religious sentiments of antitheatricality and result in...
From energy to materials, hydrocarbon chemistry drives our world. Stemming from the petrochemical industry, our understanding of CxHy combinations has allowed society to flourish, and hydrocarbons will likely remain valuable species in our future even as we transition to greener carbon and hydrogen sources. Currently, one of the most efficient...
Data mining is multidisciplinary process involving computer science, artificial intelli- gence, and machine learning. The aim of data mining is discovering knowledge from a vast amount of data. This process consists of a set of stages forming a pipeline. This pipeline process consists of multiple steps: 1) Finding the right...
The high-temperature oxidation/reduction behaviors of iron and its oxides are important to a variety of energy conversion and storage technologies, such as the solid-oxide iron-air battery and chemical looping combustion. The useful lifetime of iron redox materials is limited, however, by structural degradation arising from (i) sintering, accelerated by phase...
High performance polymers and their composites have wide ranging application in advanced and emerging material systems. The macroscale performance of these advanced materials is often defined by interfaces that induce nanoscale changes in the microstructure or molecular conformations (termed the ‘interphase’) of the polymer. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) is an...
Hybrid pixel detectors, comprising of pixelated sensors coupled to readout integrated circuits (ROICs) with complex in-pixel processing, are essential for many of today’s scientific instruments and imaging systems. Large-area detectors are required in a variety of systems: from detectors for synchrotron beamlines to telescopes for astronomy, which range from a...
Efficient and sustainable utilization of global resources represents a grand but achievablechallenge. By leveraging biology, we can transform abundant, but recalcitrant resources like lignin
to products ranging from fuel to medicine to polymers. Efforts to do so are expansive, but
challenges remain, due in no small part to the difficulty...
Chapter 1: Despite the rapid growth of passive ownership over the past 30 years, there is no consensus on how or why passive ownership affects stock price informativeness. This paper provides a new answer to this question by examining how passive ownership changes investors' incentives to acquire information. I develop...
Engineering responses of soft materials at hierarchical time and length scales is of great interest to both fundamental science and technological applications. In recent years, the hybridization between emerging soft condense matters and conventional hard condense matters keeps enriching the materials library of humankind and opens another largely-uncharted venue for...
The nonlinear attributes of cochlear function are fascinating. Responses are compressed with surprisingly little distortion, different stimuli interact in competitive ways, and tones are created either with or without acoustic stimulation. Moreover, because of their dynamism, these nonlinear phenomena have provided an invaluable means for noninvasively probing and understanding cochlear...
Bioelectronic devices at the biotic/abiotic interface face a number of key challenges that include device degradation when exposed to biological fluid, their elicited immune response due to mechanical mismatch, and poor signal transduction. Organic electronic materials and their devices, such as organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) address these shortcomings. They can...
4D Flow MRI is a phase-contrast magnetic resonance imaging method that enables direct measurement of velocities in three orthogonal directions throughout the heartbeat. This permits direct quantification of hemodynamic parameters, including flow, mean velocity, peak velocity, and pulsatility, for individual cerebral vessels. Despite ongoing research into neurovascular applications of 4D...
Predicting pediatric spinal deformity (PSD) from X-ray images collected on the patient's initial visit is a challenging task. This research provides a bio-informed framework based on a mechanistic machine learning technique with dynamic patient-specific (PS) parameters to predict PSD. We provide a geometry-based bone growth model that can be utilized...
We consider constant scalar curvature K ̈ahler metrics on a smooth minimal model of general type in a neighborhood of the canonical class, which is the perturbation of the canonical class by a fixed K ̈ahler metric. We show that sequences of such metrics converge smoothly on compact subsets away...