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When To Hold And When To Fold: Studies On The Topology Of Origami And Linkages, Mary Elizabeth Lee
When To Hold And When To Fold: Studies On The Topology Of Origami And Linkages, Mary Elizabeth Lee
Doctoral Dissertations
Linkages and mechanisms are pervasive in physics and engineering as models for a
variety of structures and systems, from jamming to biomechanics. With the increase
in physical realizations of discrete shape-changing materials, such as metamaterials,
programmable materials, and self-actuating structures, an increased understanding
of mechanisms and how they can be designed is crucial. At a basic level, linkages
or mechanisms can be understood to be rigid bars connected at pivots around which
they can rotate freely. We will have a particular focus on origami-like materials, an
extension to linkages with the added constraint of faces. Self-actuated versions typ-
ically start …
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Revenge Of The Nerds: Tech Masculinity And Digital Hegemony, Benjamin M. Latini
Doctoral Dissertations
Revenge of the Nerds provides a cultural history of the evolution of white nerd masculinities in American culture through interpretations of a wide variety of texts and representations using the methods of literary studies and American studies. The dissertation is organized around four overlapping stages of nerd masculinity based on changes in technology and their effects on culture, as well as white male nerds’ efforts to remain culturally relevant and gain the benefits of being close to hegemonic masculinity. The four nerd types are the computer nerd, the gamer, the gatekeeper nerd, and the maladaptive nerd which reflect the following …
Detection And Control Of Environmentally Transmissible Viruses, Anand R. Soorneedi
Detection And Control Of Environmentally Transmissible Viruses, Anand R. Soorneedi
Doctoral Dissertations
Viruses, owing to their ubiquitous nature and ability to infect almost every other species, have long been a subject of interest for scientists. Some of the virus species can be very deadly to humans and animals alike and can impose a huge economic and health burden across the world. The recent CoVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of timely detection for developing effective intervention strategies. Unfortunately, some of the virus species that cause significant health and economic impacts do not have robust and reliable detection methods due to several reasons. In some cases, despite having gold standard methods for detection of …
Reactive Chemistries For Protein Labeling, Degradation, And Stimuli Responsive Delivery, Myrat Kurbanov
Reactive Chemistries For Protein Labeling, Degradation, And Stimuli Responsive Delivery, Myrat Kurbanov
Doctoral Dissertations
Reactive chemistries for protein chemical modification play an instrumental role in chemical biology, proteomics, and therapeutics. Depending on the application, the selectivity of these modifications can range from precise modification of an amino acid sequence by genetic manipulation of protein expression machinery to a stochastic modification of lysine residues on the protein surface. Ligand-Directed (LD) chemistry is one of the few methods for targeted modification of endogenous proteins without genetic engineering. However, current LD strategies are limited by stringent amino acid selectivity. To bridge this gap, this thesis focuses on the development of highly reactive LD Triggerable Michael Acceptors (LD-TMAcs) …
Using Cover Crops And Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (Am) Fungi To Enhance The Sustainability Of Hardneck Garlic Production In The Northeast, Alexandra Smychkovich
Using Cover Crops And Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (Am) Fungi To Enhance The Sustainability Of Hardneck Garlic Production In The Northeast, Alexandra Smychkovich
Doctoral Dissertations
Sustainable intensification has been proposed as a necessary means to ensure global food security by increasing agricultural production while protecting the environment. This dissertation evaluated an alternative garlic production system in which two major components of sustainable agriculture, cover crops and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, were integrated into production via a relay cropping system. Garlic was relay cropped into three species of annual, fall planted cover crops, planted in monoculture and as a mixture, and inoculated with a commercially available AM fungi inoculant at the time of planting. The three cover crop species chosen for evaluation in the alternative system …
Towards Robust Long-Form Text Generation Systems, Kalpesh Krishna
Towards Robust Long-Form Text Generation Systems, Kalpesh Krishna
Doctoral Dissertations
Text generation is an important emerging AI technology that has seen significant research advances in recent years. Due to its closeness to how humans communicate, mastering text generation technology can unlock several important applications such as intelligent chat-bots, creative writing assistance, or newer applications like task-agnostic few-shot learning. Most recently, the rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has resulted in systems like ChatGPT, capable of generating fluent, coherent and human-like text. However, despite their remarkable capabilities, LLMs still suffer from several limitations, particularly when generating long-form text. In particular, (1) long-form generated text is filled with factual inconsistencies to …
Steel Deck Diaphragms: Characterizing The Hysteretic Behavior Of Light Gage Steel, Screw-Fastened, Support And Sidelap Connections And The Influence Of Support Connections On The Stability Behavior Of Panels, Divyansh Kapoor
Doctoral Dissertations
Steel deck diaphragms are planar structures that serve as critical components of a metal building’s lateral force-resisting system. These can be found in walls, floors, and roofs of metal buildings and aid with the lateral stability of the structure. The diaphragm design process involves the selection of materials, deck geometry, connections, and connection detailing across the steel panels. The American Iron and Steel Institute’s AISI S310 and Steel Deck Institutes DDM04 both provide design guidance on the selection and detailing of materials and fasteners for the applicable limit states of connections and stability of the panels. Both design codes provide …
Racial Biases In Parent-Teacher Ratings Of Childhood Adhd Symptoms: An Examination Of Prejudice And Stereotypes, Sungha Kang
Racial Biases In Parent-Teacher Ratings Of Childhood Adhd Symptoms: An Examination Of Prejudice And Stereotypes, Sungha Kang
Doctoral Dissertations
A robust body of literature has documented systematic parent-teacher discrepancies in ratings of children’s ADHD symptoms (inattentive, hyperactive, or impulsive behaviors) as a function of child race. Past research has suggested a potential role of teachers’ racial bias in higher ratings of Black children’s ADHD behaviors relative to Black parents’ ratings. The present study sought to better characterize these racial biases by examining implicit and explicit measures of racial prejudice and racial stereotypes, as well as Black parents’ perceptions of those biases as predictors of their ratings of Black children’s ADHD behaviors. Results suggested that white teachers’ explicit racial ADHD …
Understanding And Developing Safer Sanitation Agents And Strategies In Food Production Environments, Pragathi Kamarasu
Understanding And Developing Safer Sanitation Agents And Strategies In Food Production Environments, Pragathi Kamarasu
Doctoral Dissertations
Food is a primary resource for survival of human beings, and it is also one of the primary resources for spread of infectious diseases. When both these factors come together it does not only cause ill effects on our health but also causes a burden on the food and agricultural industry. Through the help of science, us researchers and scientists have always tried to reduce this burden. And I hope like a drop of water in the ocean in some way my research contributes towards this. According to WHO currently in 2023 there are about 1 in 10 people falling …
Chemical Modification And Evaluation Of Cells Towards Use As Delivery Tools, Bishnu Prasad Joshi
Chemical Modification And Evaluation Of Cells Towards Use As Delivery Tools, Bishnu Prasad Joshi
Doctoral Dissertations
CHEMICAL MODIFICATION AND EVALUATION OF CELLS TOWARDS USE AS DELIVERY TOOLS SEPTEMBER 2023 BISHNU PRASAD JOSHI M.S., SRI SATHYA SAI INSTITUTE OF HIGHER LEARNING Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Michelle E. Farkas Endogenous cells are being studied for use in various applications, such as next generation therapeutics and drug delivery vehicles. This is on account of their biocompatibility, amenable distribution profiles, and in many instances, recruitment to and localization of diseased tissues. Multiple cell types have been employed, including macrophages, stem cells, red blood cells, and T cells. Most examples of cell-based delivery utilize phagocytosed entities as …
Essays On Sales Force Turnover And Job Satisfaction, Hossein Hashemi Bahramani
Essays On Sales Force Turnover And Job Satisfaction, Hossein Hashemi Bahramani
Doctoral Dissertations
Salespeople are among the most valuable resources of a firm. The salesperson’s roles in value realization includes translating a firm’s offerings into financial and relational rewards, co-creating value with customers, and forming and maintaining business relationships. Thus, retaining salespeople and enhancing their job satisfaction are among the top priorities of managers and the focus of this dissertation. This dissertation presents three essays in sales management. Essay 1 provides a quantitative synthesis of turnover literature using meta-analytical methods. Using 129 samples of 36,436 salespeople, this study conceptualizes the antecedents of salesperson turnover into 30 unique groups and presents a bivariate meta-analysis …
Human-Centered Technologies For Inclusive Collection And Analysis Of Public-Generated Data, Mahmood Jasim
Human-Centered Technologies For Inclusive Collection And Analysis Of Public-Generated Data, Mahmood Jasim
Doctoral Dissertations
The meteoric rise in the popularity of public engagement platforms such as social media, customer review websites, and public input solicitation efforts strives for establishing an inclusive environment for the public to share their thoughts, ideas, opinions, and experiences. Many decisions made at a personal, local, or national scale are often fueled by data generated by the public. As such, inclusive collection, analysis, sensemaking, and utilization of pubic-generated data are crucial to support the exercise of successful decision-making processes. However, people often struggle to engage, participate, and share their opinions due to inaccessibility, the rigidity of traditional public engagement methods, …
Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer
Counterdirectionality In The Grammar: Reversals And Restitutions, Jyoti Iyer
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation is an exploration of counterdirectionality, a semantic notion encompassing various sorts of reversals, involving either movement along a path, or---more abstractly---the restoring of an object or a state of affairs to a prior condition. Counterdirectionality is a relationship between an asserted event and a presupposed event in a strict temporal ordering. Across languages, it is frequently expressed by presuppositional adverbs that mean BACK (as in English Ali flew back from New York, Bina hugged Ali back, The door swung back open). The distribution of BACK-adverbs tends to overlap in a systematic way with that of …
The Professionalization Of Collegiate Recreation And The Educational Pathways Of Its Practitioners: An Exploratory Study, Jason R. Incorvati
The Professionalization Of Collegiate Recreation And The Educational Pathways Of Its Practitioners: An Exploratory Study, Jason R. Incorvati
Doctoral Dissertations
ABSTRACT THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF COLLEGIATE RECREATION AND THE EDUCATIONAL PATHWAYS OF ITS PRACTITIONERS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY SEPTEMBER 2023 JASON R. INCORVATI, B.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST M.E.S.S., UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA Ph.D. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Ezekiel Kimball, Ph.D. The professionalization of collegiate recreation, like many fields, has led to attempts to standardize training, create shared language, come to an agreement amongst practitioners on what essential knowledge the work should be based upon, and have collective understanding as to how new members to the field should be socialized (e.g., Arminio, 2011; Duran & Allen, 2020; Wilensky, 1964). Professional associations …
Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge
Associative Plurals, Sherry Hucklebridge
Doctoral Dissertations
The goal of this dissertation is to present an analysis of associative plurals in Japanese, Turkish, and Armenian that captures their associative interpretation along with a series of cross-linguistically consistent behaviours that do not seem to stem directly from these special meanings. For associative plurals, group affiliation is established through spatio-temporal or conceptual contiguity rather than a shared description (Moravcsik 2003). Approaches to English-like additive plurality are unable to capture associative plurals because they predict a plurality based on similarity, where every element of a plural noun is either an element of the corresponding singular or a concatenation of those …
Investigating Brainstem Mechanisms Underlying Prepulse Inhibition Of Startle Impaired In Schizophrenia, Wanyun Huang
Investigating Brainstem Mechanisms Underlying Prepulse Inhibition Of Startle Impaired In Schizophrenia, Wanyun Huang
Doctoral Dissertations
Sensorimotor gating is a fundamental pre-attentive process, which can be operationally measured through prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the startle response. PPI describes the suppression of the startle response when a non-startling stimulus (“prepulse”) precedes the startling stimulus (“pulse”). As a hallmark of schizophrenia, PPI deficits are also found in other neuropsychiatric disorders and are associated with cognitive overload and attention impairments (Braff et al., 2001). However, currently-used dopaminergic antipsychotics exhibit inconsistent effects on PPI in affected individuals (Geyer et al., 2001; Frau et al., 2014; Lally et al., 2016). Therefore, it’s critical to investigate the precise cellular and synaptic mechanisms …
Quantifying And Enhancing The Security Of Federated Learning, Virat Vishnu Shejwalkar
Quantifying And Enhancing The Security Of Federated Learning, Virat Vishnu Shejwalkar
Doctoral Dissertations
Federated learning is an emerging distributed learning paradigm that allows multiple users to collaboratively train a joint machine learning model without having to share their private data with any third party. Due to many of its attractive properties, federated learning has received significant attention from academia as well as industry and now powers major applications, e.g., Google's Gboard and Assistant, Apple's Siri, Owkin's health diagnostics, etc. However, federated learning is yet to see widespread adoption due to a number of challenges. One such challenge is its susceptibility to poisoning by malicious users who aim to manipulate the joint machine learning …
Connecting And Developing Through Facebook: An Exploration Of Impact On College Women, Christine R. Sharry
Connecting And Developing Through Facebook: An Exploration Of Impact On College Women, Christine R. Sharry
Doctoral Dissertations
Social media continues to change global society, while providing the opportunity to access information, but also build and sustain relationships with others. These online tools have become a part of everyday life (Greenwood et al., 2016) and have an impact on the way people interact, connect, and learn from one another. College students today have been surrounded by social media since elementary school (Alquist, 2017). Therefore, college administrators and faculty need to understand the impact of these online tools on students’ learning and development to ensure their success. All foundational student development theories were created when digital environments were non-existent. …
Sources And Controls Of Carbon Dioxide In Inland Waters At Watershed, Regional, And Continental Scales, Brian Saccardi
Sources And Controls Of Carbon Dioxide In Inland Waters At Watershed, Regional, And Continental Scales, Brian Saccardi
Doctoral Dissertations
Inland waters are significant sources of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and estimates of emissions are similar in magnitude to those of the carbon dioxide sequestered by the net terrestrial sink. Currently, methods of estimating carbon dioxide emissions are based on statistical approaches and often do not consider landscape attributes such as human development, agriculture, or the hydrologic connectivity of the stream network. The following research addresses these issues in chapter 1 by developing and validating a reactive transport model at the watershed scale, then in chapter 2 by applying the reactive transport model at the continental scale across US …
Sociocultural And Familial Factors Associated With Symptom Experience At Midlife Among Women In Nagaland, India, Peteneinuo Rulu
Sociocultural And Familial Factors Associated With Symptom Experience At Midlife Among Women In Nagaland, India, Peteneinuo Rulu
Doctoral Dissertations
This cross-sectional study examines the sociocultural and familial factors that are associated with symptom experience at midlife among women in Nagaland. More specifically, the study examines the factors associated with symptoms at midlife, the relationship between symptoms at midlife, household stressors, ethnopolitical problems, and various measures of stress, and the buffering effects of social support against the negative effects of stress on symptoms at midlife. Data from 151 women aged 40-55 were collected from 4 regions in Nagaland, India. The most common symptoms reported during the past two weeks were headaches (72%), tiredness or lack of energy (67.5%), and hot …
An Investigation Of The Role Of Amygdalar Circuits In The Production Of Social Behavior, Joseph Fd Dwyer
An Investigation Of The Role Of Amygdalar Circuits In The Production Of Social Behavior, Joseph Fd Dwyer
Doctoral Dissertations
Adaptive social behaviors allow animals to survive, thrive, and successfully reproduce. These behaviors, including mating, parenting, affiliation, and aggression, can be stereotyped in response to specific stimuli but often display sex-specific, and interoceptive-dependent variations in their execution. A conserved set of brain regions collectively known as the social behavior network (SBN) interprets sensory information about social cues and generates an appropriate behavioral response. In this dissertation I present 5 chapters. Chapter 1 introduces historical research focusing on the neural circuits that drive social behavior and the potential impact of environmental factors on the activity of these circuits. Chapter 2 describes …
Mobile Intelligent Agents: Interplay Of Communications, Privacy, And Decision Making, Saeede Enayati
Mobile Intelligent Agents: Interplay Of Communications, Privacy, And Decision Making, Saeede Enayati
Doctoral Dissertations
The development of processors and sensor technologies and the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) have led to the growth of more capable and affordable mobile intelligent agents like unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which have numerous applications in areas such as construction, search and rescue operations, oil and gas, agriculture, etc. The use of AI and machine learning (ML) algorithms in UAVs has enabled real-time data-driven decision-making frameworks but poses numerous challenges including high-impact decision-making, security, energy management, communication, and automation, to name a few. In this dissertation, we propose solutions to some of these problems. First, we give our attention …
A Biochemical Approach To Characterize A Divergent Trypanosoma Brucei Mitochondrial Dna Polymerase, Polib, Stephanie B. Delzell
A Biochemical Approach To Characterize A Divergent Trypanosoma Brucei Mitochondrial Dna Polymerase, Polib, Stephanie B. Delzell
Doctoral Dissertations
Trypanosoma brucei is a single-celled parasitic protist that causes African sleeping sickness in people and nagana in cattle in sub-Saharan Africa. T. brucei and related trypanosomatid parasites contain an unusual catenated mitochondrial genome known as kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) composed of dozens of 23 kb maxicircles and thousands of 1 kb minicircles. The kDNA structure and replication mechanism are divergent from other eukaryotes and essential for parasite survival. POLIB is one of three Family A DNA polymerases that are independently essential to maintain the kDNA network, and has been implicated in minicircle replication. However, the division of labor among the paralogs, …
Alternative Power: The Politics Of Denmark's Renewable Energy Transition, Robert Darrow
Alternative Power: The Politics Of Denmark's Renewable Energy Transition, Robert Darrow
Doctoral Dissertations
Global climate change is one of the defining political challenges and opportunities of the current era. Experts widely agree that technical means already exist for making the necessary transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy; the obstacles to doing so are primarily political. Careful observers also recognize that this period of transition creates an opening for political innovation and development. How can the political will be generated to take action to prevent climate catastrophe? And what will the process of transitioning mean for the political systems that have been built on cheap and abundant oil? Political scientists have largely ignored …
I’Ve (Urn)Ed This: An Application And Criterion-Based Evaluation Of The Urnings Algorithm, Ted Daisher
I’Ve (Urn)Ed This: An Application And Criterion-Based Evaluation Of The Urnings Algorithm, Ted Daisher
Doctoral Dissertations
There is increased interest in personalized learning and making e-learning environments more adaptable. Some e-learning systems may use an Item Response Theory (IRT)-based assessment system. An important distinction between assessment and learning contexts is that learner proficiency is expected to remain constant across an assessment, while it is expected to change over time in a learning context. Constant learner proficiency during an assessment enables conventional approaches to estimating person and item parameters using IRT. These IRT-based systems could be abandoned for alternative approaches to modeling learners and system learning content, but assessments may provide more functions than adapting learning material …
Exploring The Associations Between Sexism, Physical Behaviors, And Psychosocial Correlates Of Physical Activity In Young Women, Melanna Cox
Doctoral Dissertations
Physical behaviors (PB), defined as physical activity (PA) and sedentary behavior (SB), tend to be less favorable in women than in men. Low self-efficacy (SE) and social support (SS), and gender norms hinder women’s PB. Benevolent sexism, a theory on gender norms, could explain the gender disparity. PURPOSE: To 1) assess the associations among benevolent sexism endorsement (BSEN), experiences with benevolent sexism (EBS), PB, SE, and SS, 2) evaluate if BSEN or SE mediate the relationship between EBS and PB, and 3) develop a questionnaire that measures a woman’s sexist experiences in PA. METHODS: Study 1: Women (N=186) completed a …
Search For Exotic Higgs Boson Decay To Multiple B-Quarks With The Atlas Detector At Lhc Using Machine Learning Methods, Yuan-Tang Chou
Search For Exotic Higgs Boson Decay To Multiple B-Quarks With The Atlas Detector At Lhc Using Machine Learning Methods, Yuan-Tang Chou
Doctoral Dissertations
The discovery of the Higgs boson has opened up new possibilities for investigating physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). New particles may interact with the SM through the Higgs boson, and deviations from SM predictions can indicate the presence of new physics. This dissertation focuses on the search for exotic Higgs decay, $H\rightarrow aa \rightarrow (b\bbar)(b\bbar)$ where a is a new scalar boson and focuses on the case where the Higgs boson is produced in association with a Z boson. The data were collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider at center-of-mass energy $\sqrt{s} =~13~\TeV$ from 2015 …
The Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Stigma In Higher Education: Investigating Barriers To Institutional Access And Social Inclusion, Hannah K. Chimowitz
The Collateral Consequences Of Criminal Stigma In Higher Education: Investigating Barriers To Institutional Access And Social Inclusion, Hannah K. Chimowitz
Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation explores the collateral consequences of criminal record stigma within the realm of higher education, an important institutional domain that is recognized as facilitating social mobility and providing opportunities for individuals with criminal histories. I develop an integrative theoretical framework and present two empirical studies. Study 1 investigates the relationship between criminal screening in undergraduate admissions applications and campus crime rates, as well as Black undergraduate enrollment rates. Using the Common Application's removal of criminal history questions as a natural experiment, I employ propensity score methods and estimate a series of latent growth curve models using structural equation modeling. …
Learning To See With Minimal Human Supervision, Zezhou Cheng
Learning To See With Minimal Human Supervision, Zezhou Cheng
Doctoral Dissertations
Deep learning has significantly advanced computer vision in the past decade, paving the way for practical applications such as facial recognition and autonomous driving. However, current techniques depend heavily on human supervision, limiting their broader deployment. This dissertation tackles this problem by introducing algorithms and theories to minimize human supervision in three key areas: data, annotations, and neural network architectures, in the context of various visual understanding tasks such as object detection, image restoration, and 3D generation. First, we present self-supervised learning algorithms to handle in-the-wild images and videos that traditionally require time-consuming manual curation and labeling. We demonstrate that …
Foundations Of Node Representation Learning, Sudhanshu Chanpuriya
Foundations Of Node Representation Learning, Sudhanshu Chanpuriya
Doctoral Dissertations
Low-dimensional node representations, also called node embeddings, are a cornerstone in the modeling and analysis of complex networks. In recent years, advances in deep learning have spurred development of novel neural network-inspired methods for learning node representations which have largely surpassed classical 'spectral' embeddings in performance. Yet little work asks the central questions of this thesis: Why do these novel deep methods outperform their classical predecessors, and what are their limitations? We pursue several paths to answering these questions. To further our understanding of deep embedding methods, we explore their relationship with spectral methods, which are better understood, and show …