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Comics as Confrontation : A Case for Breaking Silence around Sexual Abuse in Comics
No full textIn this essay I will provide an overview of the socio-cultural and legal attitude towards sexual violence in India, as evidence of the need for bringing survivor’s narratives out into public view. I will look closely at Indian comic artist Shromona Das’s Naming and Shaming (2018) , American artist Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998), and my own comic Feral (2025), to elucidate the ways in which comics are a potent medium for survivors to confront, not only our own memories by stringing together a sequential narrative, but also the audience, with the visualization of a lived experience that needs urgent acknowledgement. After a lifetime in a culture of not being believed, this essay is an effort to rationalize my decision to break my silence about the violations that have been inflicted on me, in the comics format, in my own work
Deep Abyss: Repository of Echoes
No full textDeep Abyss: Repository of Echoes explores memory, trauma, and healing through an immersive, multi-sensory installation combining sound, video, and tactile elements. Focusing on sensory experience and embodied resonance, the work invites viewers to deeply engage with fragmented memories and emotional narratives. Layered soundscapes that include natural ambient sounds, human breathing, and traditional Korean instruments such as the haegeum and gayageum, guide audiences through an emotional journey between reality and memory, certainty and ambiguity.
Blurred video of slow, enigmatic movements reflects emotional shifts and the ambiguous nature of memory, enhanced by tactile elements of layered Korean traditional paper, hanji. This tactile dimension symbolizes the accumulation of emotional and temporal weight, prompting contemplation of grief, resilience, and the ethics of witnessing. Ultimately, this thesis aims to redefine memorial spaces, creating a reflective environment where sorrow, remembrance, and healing coexist
The Impact of Benefits Cliffs and Asset Limits on Low-Wage Workers: New Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey
Get PDFOver 40 million workers in the United States receive public benefits. Many face a challenge: They would like to earn higher wages, take on more hours, or accept better jobs, but doing so can push them over benefit-program limits, causing them to lose eligibility or experience reductions in the benefits they need to make ends meet. This is also an issue for employers, whose ability to attract and retain talent is affected when the workforce’s employment decisions are driven by concerns about public benefit eligibility. Drawing on data from the Workforce Economic Inclusion and Mobility (WEIM) survey administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,511 U.S. workers earning less than 250% of the federal poverty line, this brief presents new evidence on the rates at which low-wage workers are affected by benefits cliffs and the actions they take to stay on those benefits. It also examines the programs that low-wage workers were trying to stay on when they took these actions
Multi-Layer Support for Component-Based Cyber-Physical Systems Applications
No full textComponent-based design is a paradigm meant to aid in development of software applications by modularizing different functionalities of a system. This building-block approach is used extensively in cyber–physical and robotic systems. Common and established solutions to specific problems, such as perception nodes, state estimators, and motion planners, can be developed, verified, and reused as off-the-shelf modules. These modules may be integrated atop today’s heterogeneous hardware platforms, where an application can be distributed across GPUs, FPGAs, and CPU cores. When heterogeneous computational devices share the workload of a collection of components, the very act of integration may inject timing uncertainty. For example, data often must traverse different memory domains, incurring copies that may violate real-time budgets. Furthermore, the Robot Operating System (ROS)2, the de facto middleware for robotics, has a scheduler that departs from established real-time practice, and work has only recently begun on establishing timing guarantees for it. This dissertation builds a vertical solution that restores predictability without sacrificing modularity. The work is organized into 3 layers: memory management of hardware-accelerated devices, a real-time scheduler for ROS2, and a control/scheduling co-design study. Collectively, these contributions demonstrate that the promises of component-based design—modularity, compositional verification, and rapid development—can survive in the age of hardware acceleration, while still meeting cyber-physical constraints on timing and other properties end-to-end. By coupling memory-domain awareness with analyzable scheduling and timing-aware control, this work charts a practical path toward predictable, high-performance CPS and robotic systems
Multimodal Representation Learning for Geospatial Soundscape Mapping
No full textSound is one of the fundamental senses that helps us reason about our environment. There exists an intricate relationship between the visual appearance of a location and the distribution of sounds present there. We propose leveraging this relationship to formulate the task of soundscape mapping—predicting the most probable distribution of sounds that could be perceived at a given geographic location, as observed in its overhead imagery. To support research on this task, we curated a comprehensive dataset, GeoSound, which consists of geotagged audio recordings from various sources, paired with both low- and high-resolution overhead imagery. We approach the soundscape mapping problem from the perspective of multimodal representation learning and have developed a series of frameworks—GeoCLAP, PSM, and Sat2Sound—to address this task. For each framework, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a shared multimodal representation space in generating soundscape maps for any geographic area using only overhead imagery and audio or textual queries. During the development of these frameworks, we progressively incorporated several desirable capabilities, including temporal conditioning, multi-scale mapping, uncertainty quantification, and fine-grained soundscape prediction. We believe that the introduction of this novel task—together with our dataset and proposed methodologies—will encourage research toward creating high-resolution, global-scale soundscape maps with minimal effort, while also enabling location-conditioned soundscape synthesis for immersive virtual exploration
Brief for Tax Law Professors as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners in Learning Resources (No. 24-1287) and Respondents in V.O.S. Selection (No. 25-250)
No full textThe Constitution gives Congress, and not the President, the authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” The Constitution also mandates that revenue measures begin in the House of Representatives, requires that such measures be geographically uniform, and prohibits the states from imposing import duties without congressional consent. Read together with Article I’s vesting of “all legislative Powers” in Congress and the familiar requirements of bicameralism and presentment, these provisions reflect a recurring constitutional commitment: Tariffs are national and legislative—and thus to be determined by a representative Congress.
History bolsters these textual commitments. State conflict over import duties was perhaps the defining policy controversy under the Articles of Confederation. At the nation’s Founding, the former colonies had just fought the Revolutionary War motivated in part by “taxation without representation.” Everyone understood that duties on imports would need to serve as the country’s primary source of revenue for decades to come—but state conflict rendered that option unavailable to the federal government. The lack of a federal impost crippled national finance and spurred the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
The Framers’ solution to this problem was to place control over import duties in the hands of a representative Congress, which could appropriately weigh the powerful and divergent interests at stake. In exchange, the states gave up their concurrent tariff authority—a fact that distinguishes tariffs from taxes writ large and weighs heavily against unbounded delegations to the President. The Framers and ratifiers believed that Congress, and not the President, was the appropriate institution for balancing interests in a new federal power that the states themselves would no longer possess. Indeed, in no less an authority than The Federalist No. 10, James Madison listed the proper treatment of foreign goods as his go-to example of a factional interest that would be refined by “passing [it] through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.” That “chosen body” was Congress, not the President.
Post-ratification practice confirms this structural understanding. Starting just days after the very first Congress achieved a quorum, early Congresses enacted repeated, extensive, and detailed tariff schedules—delegating only limited administrative details to the Executive Branch. The Executive’s role—which the Executive Branch itself understood—was confined to fact-finding and execution within these congressional boundaries.
Attaching a “foreign affairs” label to the tariffs at issue here makes no difference. Tariffs certainly carry diplomatic consequences. But that is nothing new. The founding generation understood it when they assigned the tariff authority to a representative Congress. The states understood it when they ceded their tariff authority in reliance on that power being wielded by a representative Congress. And the early Congresses understood it when they enacted extensive and detailed tariff legislation shot through with foreign affairs purpose and consequence.
The legislative delegation at issue in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—if read to encompass the sweeping tariffs at issue here—cannot be squared with the Constitution’s textual allocation of authority, the original understanding of the tariff power, and post-ratification practice. This Court, moreover, has never upheld the boundless presidential authority that the Government now claims to draw from IEEPA. It should not break with more than two centuries of practice and understanding to do so for the first time here
If Father was Mother: Gendering Leadership in the Film Conclave
No full textAn exploration of Roman Catholic gender roles and their related real-life discourses via the 2024 film Conclave, based on the novel by Robert Harri
Humanoid Localization and Fault Tolerant Control via Nested Control Barrier Functions
No full textWe address localization drift and sensor faults in humanoid robots controlled by safety-critical CLF–CBF-based controllers. The Unitree G1’s internal odometry exhibits significant drift during walking, which degrades obstacle-avoidance performance and can invalidate formal safety guarantees when combined with faulty sensors. To obtain drift-free state estimates, we design an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) that fuses IMU and joint encoder measurements with the built-in odometer in a discrete-time single-integrator model of the robot’s center-of-mass motion. On top of this estimator, we develop a nested Control Barrier Function (CBF)–based fault-tolerant control architecture. A bank of observers generates residuals for multiple fault hypotheses (nominal and biased sensors). For each hypothesis we construct a CBF defining a corresponding safe set and use observer error bounds to select an active fault mode. The control input is then synthesized from a quadratic program enforcing the CBF constraint for the selected mode, thereby tightening safety margins when more severe faults are suspected. Simulation studies with position bias faults on different state channels show that the EKF significantly reduces localization error and that the nested-CBF fault-tolerant controller maintains collision avoidance and set invariance even in the presence of persistent sensor biases
Reflections on Translating Law and Economic Models for Lawyers and Law Professors
No full textWritten as part of a keynote address for the 20th Annual Asian Law and Economics Conference, these remarks reflect on the way lawyers, judges, and law professors without economic training view and use law and economic models. After revisiting notably successes of classic results from the tort model – results that have penetrated the legal profession – it turns to the translation of more recent models of lawyer argumentation and precedent. Throughout, the point is to demonstrate how model insights can be used to help argue cases and distinguish precedent
Dark Patterns in the Opt-Out Process and Compliance with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)
No full textTo protect consumer privacy, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) mandates that businesses provide consumers with a straightforward way to opt out of the sale and sharing of their personal information. However, the control that businesses enjoy over the opt-out process allows them to impose hurdles on consumers aiming to opt out, including by employing dark patterns. Motivated by the enactment of the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), which strengthens the CCPA and explicitly forbids certain dark patterns in the opt-out process, we investigate how dark patterns are used in opt-out processes and assess their compliance with CCPA regulations. Our research reveals that websites employ a variety of dark patterns. Some of these patterns are explicitly prohibited under the CCPA; others evidently take advantage of legal loopholes. Despite the initial efforts to restrict dark patterns by policymakers, there is more work to be done