Cultivating Citizens: Ecology and Nationality in U.S. Immigrant Literature explores how and why American ecosystems became objects of appreciation, intervention, and attachment within immigration literature published during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Fictional and nonfictional stories about US-bound immigrants represented naturalization and nationality as materializing through interactions within human/nonhuman assemblageswhat we...
Migrant illegality gives way to irregular livelihoods in Spain and around the world. Studies on migrant illegality have generally focused on its political, legal and economic production and the social impact of a states specific biopolitics. While invaluably important, there remains the need to better understand the modes of life...
Machine learning and symbolic reasoning have been two main approaches to build intelligent systems. Symbolic reasoning has been used in many applications by making use of expressive symbolic representations to encode prior knowledge, conduct complex reasoning and provide explanations. Recently, machine learning has enabled various successful applications by learning from...
Stringent demands in the sheet forming industry related to rapid and customized part realization coupled with rigorous requirements on geometric accuracy and product properties have outpaced the capabilities of traditional forming processes. As an emerging novel technology, Double-Sided Incremental Forming (DSIF) offers much higher flexibility with the complete elimination of...
Many phenomena that occur in the nanoscale, such as the self-assembly of charged amphiphiles, the metal extraction for recovering rare earth elements and nuclear waste as well as water purification, are driven by the electrostatic forces. Although current simulation techniques can handle the long-range Coulomb potential efficiently, the inhomogeneity in...
The dissertation consists of three separate essays that lie at the interface of social network analytics and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Essay 1 and Essay 2 cover completed research, while the research covered in Essay 3 is at a more preliminary stage.', 'Essay 1: Starting Cold: The Power of Social...
In polymer nanocomposites (PNCs), the physical and chemical interactions at the polymer matrix-filler interface lead to local variations in polymer properties, creating a substantial interphaseregion in the vicinity of the interface. Quantifying the significance of the interphase effect in the presence of substrates or nanoparticles is of essential importance in...
Biology is entering the exciting world of big data. Modern high-throughput experimental techniques often produce large datasets that aim to capture complex relationships often found in biological systems. While these larger data sets contain vast amounts of useful information, the answers are often locked behind a wall of numbers. As...
In the last decade, global mobile data traffic increased by more than a hundred fold times while maintaining essentially the same monthly charge to the average mobile user. Cisco predicts that overall mobile data traffic will continue to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent between...
The overall goal of my thesis is to enhance our quantitative understanding of the biophysical properties of DNA a long polynucleotide chain, present in every living cell, that embodies the genetic information. The existence of DNA has been known to us for over a century, however, our understanding of its...