Providing quality transit service to travelers is a constant challenge for transit agencies. The advent of fully-autonomous vehicles (AVs) and their inclusion in mobility service fleets may allow transit agencies to offer better service or reduce their own capital and operational costs. This study focuses on the problem of allocating...
Biological tubes are essential for animal survival, and their functions are highly dependent on tube shape. Analyzing the contributions of cell shape and organization to the morphogenesis of small tubes has been hampered by the limitations of existing programs in quantifying cell geometry on highly curved tubular surfaces and calculating...
This dissertation focuses on quantifying protein folding stability determinants and presenting initial experiments that can guide the development of a novel assay that identifies cell-penetrating miniproteins. First, despite over a century of scholarship on protein folding stability, applying this knowledge to design proteins computationally remains limited. Usually, protein designers generate...
The presence of unwanted biofilms on surfaces is a great concern for industrial, naval, and healthcare fields, and many other settings. To better inhibit, remove, or harness the properties of biofilms, an explanation of how specific structural or chemical features of biofilm matrix components leads to enhanced adhesion and persistence...
Two-dimensional (2D) covalent organic frameworks (COFs) are a class of crystalline polymer networks that polymerize and crystallize into layered structures, characterized by their atomically precise structure, permanent porosity and high modularity. Imine-linked COFs are one of the most important and promising classes of macromolecular sheets, which form by the condensation...
Liquid 3He is the paradigm system for studying exotic quantum mechanical phenomena observed in nature. The normal state of 3He is a strongly-correlated Fermi liquid with strong ferromagnetic spin fluctuations. However, as we cool 3He down to T = 0K, we find something fascinating and unexpected. This exotic fluid remains...
Temperature affects all biological processes, from the rate of cellular growth and metabolism to the stability of proteins that make up the machinery of life itself. Thus, all organisms must have the capacity to detect and respond to external temperature. Thermosensation endows animals with the ability to sense and respond...
Stroke affects millions of people each year and although modern medicine has improved chances of survival after stroke, it has not yet been able to affect a change in repairing damaged neural tissue leaving one to two-thirds of survivors with chronic disability in their affected upper-extremity; specifically, hemiparesis, hypertonicity, loss...
Flowing granular mixtures with species differing in some property, such as size, shape or density of the grains, tend to segregate (de-mix) during flow. Since flowing granular materials are common in industry, and since segregation is often unwanted and costly, understanding and mitigating segregation is an important concern in industrial...
This thesis describes the synthesis and photophysical characterization of low-dimensionalmaterials—including thin-film semiconductors, colloidal quantum dots, and molecules—with the
broader motivation of integrating them into mixed-dimensional heterostructures with novel
responses to external stimuli. Due to their high surface area to volume ratio and incomplete
dielectric screening, mixed-dimensional heterostructures have high sensitivity...
This dissertation is a history of religious conservatism between 1880 and the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. Its main argument is that conservative religion in America, rather than being defined by fundamentalism, theological disputes, or cultural antipathy towards pluralism, was an outgrowth of a profound faith in capitalism...
This dissertation studies three markets with regulated prices. I focus on how these regulations shape the behavior of firms along non-price dimensions. Chapter 1 studies the effects of community rating regulations in the US individual health insurance exchange market. In this market, the Affordable Care Act established community rating areas...
In the absence of any significant federal policy to mitigate climate change, many (though not all) U.S. states have stepped in to fill the void. But the policies these states have adopted vary considerably in their quality. For example, California’s economy-wide greenhouse gas policy was significantly stronger than Massachusetts’, which...
Coordinated movement relies on the precise and controlled activation of populations of motor units, which convert the commands of the nervous system into muscle forces. Motor unit firing patterns are often nonlinear and generated through the response to a combination of ionotropic excitatory and inhibitory commands, as well as metabotropic...
Gaussian process provides a principled and flexible approach for modeling the response surface or the latent function in many areas, including machine learning, statistics and computer experiment. In literature, Gaussian process models have already demonstrated their effectiveness and usefulness in a variety of applications. In this dissertation, we mainly focus...
The dissertation project considers the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges from a sustained consideration of different forms of difficult racial and sexual intimacies. The artists whose work is engaged throughout the project, Leasho Johnson, Ajamu X, and NIC Kay recognize that to be Black is to always...
Fat represents an important source of energy for ovarian cancer (OC) cells and is supplied either through import from the tumor milieu or via de novo lipogenesis. During fast tumor growth, when nutrients are scarce, lipogenesis becomes the primary source of fatty acids. Stearoyl-CoA desaturase (SCD), a rate-limiting enzyme in...
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, progressive disease associated with physical, financial, and psychological burdens. Depression and anxiety, common comorbidities, are associated with poor outcomes including worse disease course, higher disability, decreased health related quality of life and reduced medication adherence. Prevention of psychological comorbidities and promotion of well-being...
Label-free assays, and particularly those based on the combination of mass spectroscopy with surface chemistries, enable high-throughput experiments of a broad range of reactions. However, these methods can still require the incorporation of functional groups that allow immobilization of reactants and products to surfaces prior to analysis. In this thesis,...
This dissertation examines caregiving contexts in early childhood. Specifically, I look at how caregiving contexts are related to or influenced by other caregiving contexts and broader social contexts. The dissertation is composed of an introductory chapter that provides a theoretical overview and summary of the dissertation followed by two additional...
The analytical paradigm in philosophy has as a pillar an analysis of the sentence as a basic entity. New sentences may be built from old sentences recursively through the application of logical constants, recently including intensional operators. Models are built on how these logical constants interact with each other, and...
The cuprate superconductor HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4+\delta}$ (Hg1201) has one of the simplest physical structures of the cuprates making it an ideal candidate for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) measurements. Here we discuss our NMR experiments aimed at studying the mixed state of two under-doped single crystal Hg1201 samples at high magnetic fields.
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...
Soft materials such as colloids and polymers often exhibit a variety of mesoscopic structures that are governed merely by weak physical interactions. Due to these intermediate structures, they can be easily taken out of thermal equilibrium by introducing external stimuli such as a shear flow and electromagnetic fields. This thesis...
Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most prevalent primary central nervous system tumor, characterized by resistance to therapeutic intervention, inevitable recurrence, and ultimately patient death. The dismal prognosis is due in part to underlying molecular factors that promote an intratumoral cellular state heterogeneity and protect tumor cells from cell death pathways....
This dissertation considers a rich and diverse material record pertaining to the dynamic between art and the relic treasury in the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire from c. 1100 into the sixteenth century. Across this broad period and region—and even well beyond—real and imagined collections of relics...
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...
Increasingly high global energy consumption demands effective approaches to high energy efficiency and, at the same time, paths to reduced release of carbon dioxide, a primary greenhouse gas behind global climate change. Friction reduction is a vital aspect towards making energy systems more efficient and one of the most crucial...
Chapter 1. Caste, Bureaucracy, and the Limits to Political Affirmative Action. The aim of political affirmative action policies is to ensure that disadvantaged groups are represented in their governments and, in turn, that laws preferred by this group are more likely to be instituted. Often, however, they have not been...
While Li-ion batteries are currently the preferred energy storage technology, multivalent alternatives such as Mg should be considered. Magnesium metal has a high volumetric capacity and has been shown to cycle with no dendrite formation. However, the highly charged Mg2+ ion cannot easily diffuse into the oxide cathodes favored in...
A unifying concept across many fields, ranging from chemistry to architecture, is the bottom-up construction of sophisticated structures from simple building blocks. Materials with long-range order allow for consistent, predictable performance throughout the resulting structure. My research focuses on building highly ordered porous materials from atomic level building blocks based...
Nanoparticles (NPs) are emerging as attractive drug carriers in therapeutic and diagnostic applications. The physiochemical properties of NPs, such as particle size, shape, and surface chemistry, play important roles in the functions of engineered nanoconstructs−NP cores with surface ligands. Recent work has screened these properties by monitoring cellular uptake and/or...
This project traces the efforts by Scottish Protestants to achieve complete religious uniformity in the decades following the Reformation. Discontented with outward conformity, the via media that long characterized our understanding of religious reform in England, Scotland’s ministers sought to work genuine conversions among those who resisted the new order....
The viscoelastic properties of microbial biofilms have attracted great interests in recent years due to the ubiquity of biofilms and their wide range of industrial and municipal applications causing tremendous societal impacts. Biofilms are predominantly architected by extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) matrices composed of bacterial cells and biopolymers secreted by...
One of the grand challenges in science is development of soft materials that mimic living organisms to optimize the way we use energy, translate or morph reversibly or sense their envi- ronment and respond in a useful fashion. Using the insights from studying biological structures, we hope to design soft...
This dissertation presents novel advancements in the field of continuous nonlinear optimization, focusing on the development of efficient second-order methods for second-order conic programs (SOCPs) and continuous nonlinear two-stage optimization problems. The primary focus is on the theory and computations of Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) methods, which are widely used...
Recently, a myriad of applications take advantage of deep learning methods to solve regression/classification problems. Although deep neural networks have shown powerful learning capability, many deep learning applications suffer from the extremely time-consuming training of the neural networks. In order to reduce the training time, researchers usually consider parallel training...
My dissertation identifies the causes of inequality traps - i.e., high and persistent levels of economic inequality - in Latin America and explains how and why some countries manage to escape such traps and embark on paths of diminishing inequality. I argue that the Redistributive State Power shapes the main...
In this dissertation I study the effects of mortgage leverage policies. These policies have become widely used in recent years, both as a macroprudential tool and to protect consumers, yet their effects are still not well understood. In Chapter 1, I show that mortgage leverage rules implemented under the Dodd-Frank...
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...
Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance for many applications. In this dissertation, leveraging the capabilities of neural networks for modeling the non-linearity exists in the data, we propose several models that can project data into a low dimensional, discriminative, and smooth manifold. The suggested models can transfer knowledge from...
From the early usage of metallic thin films as mirrors tracing back to 2900 BC, to the modern thin film photonic circuits as a mature optical processing platform, and to the growing class of atomically-thin two-dimensional (2D) materials with diverse and tailorable properties, thin film materials have played an important...
This dissertation studies three distinct problems in econometrics. Chapter 1 proposes an adaptive randomization procedure for two-stage randomized controlled trials. The method uses data from a first-wave experiment in order to determine how to stratify in a second wave of the experiment, where the objective is to minimize the variance...
This dissertation reports on a 16-week ethnographic study of politicized caring within a museum-based tinkering program for high school students called the FabYouth program. Drawing on a data set that includes 16 field notes, 785.83 minutes (about 13.1 hours) of ethnographic audio-video recordings, 280 photographs, and ten student interviews, I...
The building blocks of life are proteins. These incredible nanostructures are responsible for forming the diverse infrastructure of living systems and for performing countless biological functions. In Nature, these materials and systems achieve structural complexity and function through highly regulated and controlled assembly of protein building blocks, driven by specific...
Since the dawn of mankind, humans have used materials and tools to dominate the world. As our understanding of the fields physics, chemistry and engineering is growing, we are able to artificially create advanced materials with engineered responses. Next step would be to create ‘ smart’ or intelligent materials capable...
Human olfactory function is important for a myriad of behaviors, including food seeking, social cognition, memory, emotional regulation, and detecting environmental threats. In animal models, particularly dense olfactory inputs have been shown to target orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a region involved in multimodal sensory integration, reward coding, and flexibly guiding our...
Recent progress in semiconductor synthesis and photophysics has revealed a host of new materials with exciting properties for applications in optoelectronic devices such as sensors, photovoltaics, solid state lighting, and more. One of the most significant recent additions to the field is the class of hybrid and inorganic materials that...
Realizing electromagnetic metamaterials which operate in the optical regime requires creating precise arrangements of sub-100 nm building blocks. As such, fabricating these materials using conventional lithographic methods is extremely costly. On the other hand, bottom-up assembly of nanoparticles into crystalline superlattices offers opportunities to explore the scalable fabrication of 2-...
Bacterial infections (BI) are a frequent, expensive, and life-threatening condition for critically ill patients. For patients with serious BI, minimizing the time between admission to the
intensive care unit (ICU) and administration of appropriate antibiotic therapy is crucial to
improve prognosis. However, the current gold-standard for identifying the appropriate
antimicrobials...
This dissertation examines the effects of phase transfers with thiol ligands on the optical properties of quantum dots (QDs) in water by investigating two systems: i) dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA)-capped PbS QDs and ii) thiolated DNA-capped core/shell CdSe/CdS QDs. QDs are bright, monodisperse, and tunable hydrophobic nanoparticles with high photoluminescence (PL)...
Since the invitation of ARPANet in 1969, network protocols and communication systems have continued to emerge. Especially in the past decade, the prosperity of mobile internet and cloud computing has resulted in a large number of network protocols and communication systems, which have become critical infrastructure for our society. Availability...
In the first part of the thesis we,given a dg-Lie algebra $\g$, a commutative
dg-algebra $A$ and a twisting cochain $\mu$ in
$A \otimes \g$, we construct a map
from the functor of curved deformations of $\g$ to the
functor of curved deformations of the twisted tensor product
$A \otimes_\mu...
Although flowing granular materials have been formally studied for over two hundred years, their behavior is still poorly understood relative to fluids, solids, and gases. Sheared granular materials with differing particle properties (e.g., size, density, shape) segregate (de-mix) due to percolation (small particles fall between large ones) and buoyancy (light...
In this dissertation I leverage new data from the global music recording industry to study the social foundations of creativity and the relationship between product novelty, gender, and commercial success. In Chapter 1, I investigate how different kinds of social connection influence the creation of novel cultural products. Using data...
The role of mesoscale structure on the properties of functional materials is poorly understood as the influence of mesoscale structure is both complicated and material specific. Thus there is not only a lack of a general understanding of how structure influences emergent properties but also a lack of a general...
Security and robustness are two critical problems in modern computing system. In this disserta- tion, we study these two problems in both hardware system and learning system.Firstly, we discuss the robustness problem in hardware system. Modern microprocessors suffer from significant on-chip variation at the advanced technology nodes. The development of...
The objective of this dissertation is to examine the mutually constitutive relationship between historiography, collective memory, and cultural narratives in the representation of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962) in present-day France and Algeria. Taking the turn of the twenty-first century as its point of departure, this study analyzes modern...
Processing of sensory information in the brain is a pervasive and fundamental phenomenon across animal species and is involved in both "hard-wired" innate responses as well as learned and adaptive behaviors. Here, I show that the avoidance of hot temperature, a simple innate behavior, contains unexpected plasticity and complex processing...
Public-facing data-driven technologies such as social media platforms and search engines rely on data producers, such as users and crowd workers, to be feasible and financially sustainable. Recently, it became clear that the goals of these data-driven technologies do not always align with those of the public, causing public backlashes...
Respiratory-swallow coordination is implicated as an essential component of safe and efficient swallowing, yet current evidence is incomplete regarding its relevance to swallowing impairment, assessment and treatment. Three studies were conducted that: 1) characterized and confirmed the optimal respiratory-swallowing coordination patterns in healthy adults, 2) identified linkages between deviations in...
The cerebellum is involved in sensorimotor processing and motor control in the brain. What has been found across many species for many behaviors is cerebellar Purkinje (Pkj) cells and cerebellar nuclear (CbN) cells show activity that is related to and predictive of movements. Less is known about how patterns of...
Decisions in naturalistic environments usually feature delayed and uncertain outcomes that can only be reached after a sequence of actions are performed. For example, canonical stalking and pursuit strategies used by terrestrial predators often involve stages of concealment, pauses where the predator remains motionless, and high speed chase sequences. The...
Herein, we present an overview of our studies of the morphology, dynamics, and formation of heterogeneous soft matter systems via the emerging technique of liquid phase transmission electron microscopy (LPTEM). This particular subset of materials, more commonly referred to as emulsions, is tremendously commercially and biologically relevant, encompassing applications in...
Deterministic models are used to explain and predict the dynamics of ecosystems featuring cyclic competition schemes. The models are systems of reaction-diffusion partialdifferential equations that account for species mobility via Fickian diffusion and interspecies interactions according to the competition scheme. Length and temporal scales are
chosen to be appropriate for...
The focus on this thesis is on the dynamics of colloidal particles in an applied electric field in a uniform bulk fluid and on a fluid-fluid interface. In a bulk fluid, the dynamics of an isolated particle, one pair, and a cluster of particles under an applied nonuniform electric field...
It is widely understood that people’s perceptions of themselves and tasks influence their engagement and effort. Further, these relationships are often viewed as the purview of the individual. In contrast, research on human development has documented the influences of participation in multiple (often overlapping) contexts on individual development. Processes of...
The investigation of ceria-related materials has a long history since 1920s. The first publication on web of science traces back to 1928. Ever since that, more studies come out and surge starting from 1987. This material has attracted extensive attention due to its wide applications in electrochemical devices, catalysis, and...
In my dissertation, Knowing How to Feel: mapping affective epistemologies of ignorance through numbness, I examine the ways by which numbness contributes to harmful “epistemic resilience,” or the phenomenon whereby systems of meaning remain stable despite counter evidence or attempts to alter them (Dotson 2014). I am most importantly concerned...
This dissertation explores how items encountered in the comprehension of language are stored in memory and subsequently accessed. Processing and comprehending language frequently requires the retrieval of items in memory so that a current linguistic element can be assigned an interpretation. For example, in a sentence such as "Miles loved...
This dissertation is on daily policing dynamics in China, centering around one core question: why coercive institutions can be extremely efficient for some issues but nearly dysfunctional for others in authoritarian regimes. The police may enforce the law relentlessly in some cases, even if there is no clear harm, but...
In Chapter 1, we construct a test for hypotheses about the effect of a recent policy change, when a single unit is treated and there are several control units, with time series observations of each available before and after the policy change. The goal is to incorporate information provided by...
Protein homeostasis, or proteostasis, is essential for preserving all cellular functions and involves a balance of protein synthesis, folding, trafficking, and degradation. A collapse in proteostasis is a common feature of many neurodegenerative disorders that are characterized by the accumulation of insoluble protein aggregates in the brain. Parkinson’s disease (PD)...
Neuroblastoma is one of the most common childhood cancers with one of the lowest survival rates, accounting for 15% of childhood cancer mortality. Approximately 15% of patients do not respond to initial treatment, and about half of children treated for high-risk neuroblastoma will relapse following remission. Ionizing radiation has long...
Agency is a broad orientation aimed to advance the self and one’s own abilities, whereas communion is a broad orientation aimed to interact with others and connect to people in a larger social context. In Chapter 1, I introduce a new framework to conceptualize the constructs of agency and communion....
Models of recursive preferences are commonly associated with a preference for early resolution of uncertainty, often regarded as an important economic channel in applications. This dissertation provides a different understanding of recursive preferences based on attitudes toward correlation, and in particular aversion to intertemporally correlated risks. Part 1 provides a...
Many human diseases are chronic and ultimately fatal because they damage organs and tissues beyond the body’s normal repair mechanisms. Therefore, there is significant medical interest in developing pharmaceuticals that enhance the body’s natural injury repair mechanisms and engineering organs in the lab for transplantation. However, comparatively little is known...
This dissertation examines the interactional mechanisms that undergird exercises of regulatory authority in expert work settings. In the first chapter, I argue that, in the aftermath of a crisis (in this case, induced by a major regulatory event), organizational actors face environments of high uncertainty which challenge rational models of...
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...
Amyloid beta oligomers (AβOs) are a key instigator of neurodegeneration in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The work presented in this thesis includes three disease-modifying approaches to disrupt pathological AβO-related mechanisms in AD: (1) inhibiting AβO buildup, (2) blocking AβO-induced tau phosphorylation, and (3) neutralizing AβOs. These three approaches were tested in...
This dissertation studies interactions between a non-Bayesian decision maker (DM) and a sophisticated information provider who wants to influence the DM. In the essay ``Strategic Justifications," an auditor receives a justification from a self-interested expert who wants to convince the auditor that she acted in good faith for her clients....
Technology that processes text, audio and video, as well as location data, has revolutionized many industries by enabling innovative operations for customer retention. To retain transactions for a platform and viewers for advertisers, this dissertation leverages novel digital tools to analyze consumer behavior, proposes original economic frameworks to guide platform...
The emerging paradigm of quantum information science (QIS) vows to transform a wide range of fields, such as computation, communication, and sensing. The fundamental unit at the core of any QIS system is a quantum bit, or qubit. Rather than be restricted to one of two classical states (0 or...
During the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods, Black authors were concerned with white antipathy towards the political aspirations of African Americans. For many of these authors, sonic figures of resonance, vibration, and musicality served as the key sensory modalities through which the nexus of American anti-Blackness and civil politics could be...
Evolutionary theory predicts that reproduction entails energetic costs that detract from somatic maintenance, accelerating biological aging. In women, such ‘costs of reproduction’ (CoR) are thought to arise predominantly during pregnancy and lactation, while in men the physiological effects of the steroid hormone testosterone (T) are believed to be a major...
Zinc, an essential trace element that serves as an enzyme cofactor and can also be stored as a divalent ion in cellular vesicles, is emerging as an important mediator of signaling pathways required for biological functions such as growth, development, and reproduction. Zinc mediates cell signaling by acting both as...
As the global population grows, consumption of water, energy, and food will also increase, placing stresses on these sectors, raising the importance of the Water-Energy-Food Nexus (WEFN). However, operation of WEFN systems are currently not sustainable. It is thus crucial to design WEFN systems to be sustainable from local to...
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...
Eukaryotic genomes are organized into chromatin, which acts to regulate access to the organism’s genetic material. A large and diverse class of proteins, known as chromatin modifiers and remodelers, are responsible for regulating the composition and structure of chromatin by monitoring nucleosomes. Chromatin remodelers are involved in multiple cellular processes,...
The rise and racial gap in maternal mortality and morbidity in the US growing public health crisis. The US maternal mortality rate is double that of peer countries such as the UK and Canada. Even more striking, Black women are 243% more likely to die from childbirth-related causes. According to...
Deep neural networks have achieved remarkable success in the past decade on tasks that were out of reach prior to the era of deep learning. Amongst the myriad reasons for these successes are powerful computational resources, large datasets, new optimization algorithms, and modern architecture designs. Most of the reasons are...
Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) display unique characteristics compared to their macro-counterparts that are dependent on shape, size, and attached surface molecules. Methods have been developed to precisely control both size and shape of AuNPs for specific applications. The biocompatibility, plasmonic properties, and ease of functionalization with thiolated molecules, make gold nanoparticles...
We consider data-driven approaches for universal texture modeling via generative adversarial networks and inversion methods. We investigate the properties of the learned representation spaces and demonstrate that a strong link between texture analysis and synthesis is the key to successful texture modeling. First, we visit the problem of texture synthesis...
The product of hexokinase (HK) enzymes, glucose-6-phosphate, can be metabolized through glycolysis or directed to alternative pathways, such as the pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) to generate anabolic intermediates. HK1 contains an N-terminal domain that permits mitochondrial binding, but its physiologic significance remains unclear. We generated mice lacking the HK1 mitochondrial-binding...
In recent years, the social sciences have been ensnared in a crisis in which many research findings cannot be replicated (Ioannidis, 2005; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Camerer et al., 2016; Makel & Plucker, 2014). This crisis has been attributed to a variety of problems including lack of transparency about research...
Convolutional neural networks have become a staple in computer vision and image processing tasks. The capacity for these networks to perform visual pattern recognition in a data-driven fashion has prompted explosive growth in a myriad of applications. That said, despite their popularity, there are still facets of these networks that...
The language Esterel has found success in many safety-critical applications, from aircraft landing gear to digital signal processors. Its unique combination of powerful control operations, deterministic concurrency, and real time execution bounds are indispensable to programmer in these kinds of safety-critical domains. However these features lead to an interesting facet...
From colonial practices designed to civilize indigenous communities, to counter-terrorism initiatives aimed at de-radicalizing dissidents in the wake of the War on Terror, to controversies over blasphemy and religious harm cases in international law, religious passions have been cast as a specter of unreason, treason, and radicalization. These assumptions sustain...
This dissertation consists of three essays on corporate governance. In the first essay of the dissertation (“The Effects of Succession Planning on CEO Succession Events: Implications for Both Focal and Competing Firms”), I examine whether and how both focal and competing firms are affected by sudden CEO deaths. By using...
This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes...