Natural gas is likely to become one of the main sources of carbon-based chemicals in the next century due to rapidly increasing natural gas production levels. This has created new incentives to find materials that are active and selective towards alkane partial oxidation reactions that are relevant for natural gas...
Deformation in materials with a hierarchical microstructure is expected to be complex because of the interaction between the units that form such a microstructure. The complexity of deformation would be even higher when additional inelastic deformation modes are active in such materials, apart from traditional elastic and plastic deformation modes....
Future large-scale quantum networks will likely require more efficient on-chip devices for quantum key distribution (QKD) systems that can exploit CMOS manufacturing techniques. QKD systems on chip have been produced in a number of material platforms including silicon, indium phosphide, and a range of hybrid structures. Advanced industrial silicon-electronics manufacturing...
While the entire silicon industry has been blooming under Moore’s Law for decades, conventional digital implementation is approaching the “stall” of Moore’s Law due to many physical design limitations. Technology innovation now is going to take a different direction. Given the increasing demand for emerging applications' computational capacity, it is...
In this document, I demonstrate that: 1) Linear basis functions cannot outperform nonlinear ones to represent hand kinematics 2) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA on the dimensionality reduction of hand kinematics, 3) Nonlinear autoencoders outperform PCA in human gait representation and recurrent nonlinear autoencoders can seamlessly express the temporal dynamics, 4)...
Polymer nanocomposites are a class of advanced materials comprised of soft polymer matrix and nano-filler inclusions. While it has been found qualitatively that enhancements of material properties could be achieved by dispersing inorganic nano-particles into organic polymer matrix, the intrinsic governing principles of such composite has not been thoroughly studied...
Movement and sensing fundamentally works in a synergistic manner. Animal's sensory organs --- be they independently movable like eyes or requiring whole body movement as in the case of electroreceptors --- are actively manipulated throughout stimulus-driven active sensing behaviors. Though these sensing-related motions have been individually reported and analyzed across...
Recent development on optogenetic methods offers reliable path to modulate cell activities with high level spatiotemporal precision. Application of this technology in behavior studies significantly improves our understanding in the neural principle that underpin animal behaviors, including ourselves. Full exploitation of optogenetic method in neuroscience behavior studies relies on...
In the face of a changing climate caused by anthropomorphic release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, major governments have committed to the reduction of CO2 and other emissions over time, requiring increased reliance on forms of carbon-free renewable energy. The inherent intermittency of renewable electricity sources creates a...
Following the discovery of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys, attempts have been undertaken to optimize their thermoelectric performance because understanding of the properties of this system had been limited due to its novelty. In this thesis, the thermoelectric performance of n-type Mg3Sb2−Mg3Bi2 alloys was systematically investigated and significantly improved. Thorough experimental characterization...