Today’s romance fiction landscape is drastically different than the early 1980s when its community of readers and writers formalized in the Romance Writers of America and Romantic Times fan magazine. Then, romance fiction was understood to focus on “the interaction between male and female.” Today, romance depicts a variety of...
Flexible sheet metal forming processes possess significant potential in today’s industrial goods market with the advent of the next generation manufacturing paradigm, which put stresses on products customization and cost efficiency. However, due to the unique tooling configurations and forming mechanisms adopted in different flexible sheet metal forming processes, there...
In this dissertation, we aim to develop algorithms that achieve optimality with provable complexity guarantees under various settings in reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, in Markov decision processes (MDPs), we study single-agent and multi-agent online RL, respectively, and offline RL under the presence of unobserved confounders. Single-agent online RL. We design...
New capabilities in x-ray microscopy have been enabled by rapid advances in synchrotronlight sources and in high performance computing. We present here conceptual and computational
advances in two areas of x-ray microscopy. One involves ptychography, where computation is
used to obtain images from diffraction patterns as a finite coherent illumination...
Granular materials are ubiquitous in nature and play a prominent role in countless technologies. The mechanical responses of multiphase granular material can vary significantly, when imposed to differential loading rates, depending on confinement, loading type and pore fluid properties. In this thesis, a versatile modelling platform is developed for delineating...
Meiosis is a specialized form of cell division that occurs to generate sperm and eggs with unique sets of paternal or maternal DNA; this process shuffles genetic information to promote the amazing variation that we observe in living organisms. In order to carry out two rounds of DNA separation with...
This thesis presents a new self-assembling robotic system that diverges from traditional approaches by enabling robots to build structures not constrained to a lattice and formed based on environmental conditions, rather than on a priori blueprints. Robot self-assembly is a class of behavior in swarm robotics in which many robots...
The provision of social services is becoming increasingly complex as human service agencies, nonprofits, and government agencies recognize the importance of wraparound care. A wraparound approach to social service provision acknowledges the importance of providing comprehensive services that meet various individual, family, and community needs. This approach is enacted through...
In recent years, machine learning on graphs (or networks) has gone from a niche topic with only a few active researchers worldwide, to a heavily invested field with novel use cases for dealing with relationships and/or interactions within complex systems in the natural and social sciences. Traditionally, choosing the right...
Aristotle says that true assertions in practical philosophy are true “for the most part.” I argue an assertion is true “for the most part” if it refers to the hypothetical realization of a substance’s essential capacities under some set of impediments. The removal of impediments to the full realization of...