Materials science has been central to human advancement since time immemorial. There has always been curiosity around studying the processes required to extract materials, examine their structure, and ultimately tailor their properties to meet human needs. Over the last few centuries, the ability to tailor material properties was driven by...
To be tempted is to be conflicted, but the conflict is not one of oscillation between two good options. Rather, it is normally easy to act on temptation and difficult to act against it. But this is puzzling, because unless temptation is a force that acts on us, it’s not...
Object Detection is a core computer vision problem and can facilitate many image understanding problems. Object Detection has witnessed significant progress in the past decade especially after deep learning is successfully applied to this field. Most of the detection models focus on generalizing the trained model to unseen samples of...
Engineering heat transport in materials is essential for thermal management in a wide range of technologies, from batteries to thermoelectrics. Materials host a wide spectrum of heat-carrying phonons, which vary in their frequency, spatial extent, and degree of plane-wave character. This diversity in phonon properties leads to complex behavior, especially...
In this dissertation, we aim to develop efficient algorithms with theoretical guarantees for several data-driven decision making problems. Specifically, we study the data-driven deci- sion making from three different perspectives: statistical learning, nonconvex optimization, and control of stochastic system. This dissertation contains three parts. In the first part, we study...
Nanocarriers as structures with at least one dimension in the nanometer scale are capable of loading small molecule therapeutics that would otherwise have poor bioavailability, non- specific uptake, and off target effects. Polymeric nanocarriers can be modified to tune their chemical and biological behavior to better suit the intended application....
The dissertation builds on my current research to demonstrate the connection between affect and learning through machine learning and qualitative analysis of interactions where players use a complex systems game. The project is threefold: First, I developed a thinking and learning intervention, the agent-based modeling simulation Ant Adaptation. I showed...
The textbook proceeds with an introduction to theory and concept building, moves to an explanation of causal inference (how do we 'know' whether something is causal?), and then provides a quick introduction to data and hypothesis testing. Following that, each chapter is devoted to a particular research method used within...
Circadian rhythms — physiological, behavioral, and metabolic oscillations with an approximate 24-h period — are controlled by an evolutionarily conserved set of core clock genes operating at the transcriptional and protein level. Entrainable by Zeitgebers (external environmental stimuli such as light, temperature, and food) that modulate time-of-day specific functions, the...