My dissertation takes as its point of departure the commonly held premise that WWI forever changed the horizon of French literary production. While deemed indescribable, many authors did attempt to represent the battlefields and aftermath of WWI in literature. Distinct from previous heroic accounts of war, these descriptions had to...
Unstructured data like text is plentiful and possibly contains valuable insights leading to a better decision-making process. Manually obtaining these insights can be costly and time-consuming. Text mining, also known as Text analytics, is developed to derive meaningful information from textual data. It is widely applied in various domains such...
The goal of this thesis is to develop practical algorithms with sound theoretical properties for three different subfields of nonlinear optimization: (i) Optimization Algorithms for Supervised Machine Learning; (ii) Derivative-Free Optimization; and (iii) Distributed Optimization. As such, the thesis is divided into three main chapters.
The focus of Chapter 2...
The symbiotic relationships between ectomycorrhizal fungi (EcM) and host plants are vital for the survival and diversification of each group. Here we introduce the Suillus / Pinaceae model system to address evolutionary relationships between EcM fungi and host plants. Genus Suillus has higher host specificity than other groups of EcM...
Up to two thirds of individuals with chronic hemiparetic stroke suffer life-long residual impairments to their paretic hands, affecting their independence and quality of life. These impairments stem initially from losses of direct corticospinal projections that result in an increased reliance on indirect bulbospinal pathways. This reliance on the indirect...
Computational catalysis is a challenging discipline because of the complexity of catalytic particles and the large number of reaction pathways that may occur in a given reaction. This thesis addresses these challenges with two strategies. First, an appropriate molecular model is defined that captures adequate physical and chemical details while...
Between 1815 and 1830, the western Atlantic experienced a surge in maritime piracy. The United States was confronted with the ancient specter of hostis humani generis, the enemy of all, which threatened the safety and prosperity of the young maritime nation. Questions emerged: Who was responsible for policing international waters?...
A central question in neuroscience is how the brain plans movements. Here, I apply neural data analysis and machine learning methods to better understand both eye and arm movement planning, in particular focusing on naturalistic settings. First, I built encoding models to investigate the factors that led to neural activity...