This dissertation reorients political theory to the concepts of use and utility for a more critical and emancipatory perspective on contemporary communal life. The reorientation entails a recovery of Aristotle’s and Marx’s overlapping approaches to use, whose contemporary reception indexes the surprising alignment of critical political theory with economics. That...
Semiconductor nanocrystals possess unique photophysical properties that make them desirable for many optoelectronic applications such as photovoltaics, LEDs, and quantum computing. When the size of a semiconductor is reduced to below the excitonic Bohr radius of the material, its carriers becomes quantum confined resulting in drastic changes to optical, electronic,...
Nanomaterials offer unique properties not seen in their macroscopic kin. They can be used in printed electronics, as catalysts, and so much more. However, their diminutive size complicates materials processing techniques. They can easily aggregate become no longer useful. A solution to this is to use a polymeric surfactant such...
The field of robot design mostly focuses on careful construction of complex control and planning algorithms (e.g., tuning neural network weights) which bear sole responsibility for improving task performance, while the robot’s body is often assumed to be part of the environment. In nature, however, biological organisms co-evolve both their...
One of the most pressing open questions in star formation is the role of magnetic fields relative to turbulence and gravity, and how these three processes set the stellar initial mass function and star formation efficiency. In this work, we present the state of BLAST-TNG (the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter...
Critical pedagogies offer a particular orientation towards education that understands the process of learning as inherently political. These frameworks demand explicit political attention by teachers to support student development of practices needed to create a liberatory world. Recent work evidences the positive impact critical pedagogies have on students academically, civically,...
T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is an aggressive disease, affecting children and adults. Chemotherapy regimens show high response rates but have debilitating effects and carry risk of relapse. Until now, no targeted therapy has been approved. In addition, 40% of patients will relapse and their treatment options are limited because...
Language models are the foundation of many natural language tasks such as machine translation, speech recognition, and dialogue systems. Modeling the probability distributions of text accurately helps capture the structures of language and extract valuable information contained in various corpora. In recent years, many advanced models have achieved state-of-the-art performance...
The logistics of policy implementation can lead to a delay from when the actual change in behavior occurs, leading to a shift in a time series. Using change point analysis allows for the data to determine where a change in mean, or other parameters, occurred. But when policy is implemented...
We live in an increasingly computational world; one that, in the near term, may require everyone to be computationally literate. Computer science (CS) education has greatly increased its reach in the last two decades with an increasing number of students having access to formal computer science classroom experiences in the...