University of Illinois at Chicago
University of Illinois at Chicago: UIC INDIGO (INtellectual property in DIGital form available online in an Open environment)Not a member yet
21439 research outputs found
Sort by
Exploring eBPF Capabilities with Hardware Acceleration on FPGAs for High-Performance Networking
No full textAs networked systems increasingly demand lower latency and higher throughput, driven by trends such as cloud computing, real-time analytics, and high-frequency trading, FPGA-based solutions offer a powerful way to offload and accelerate data processing. Their reconfigurability, parallelism, and fine-grained control make them well-suited not only for meeting performance needs but also for being modified to ensure compatibility with new releases. This thesis investigates how to combine high-level programming models with low-level FPGA architectures to enable efficient, scalable, and maintainable network offload from CPUs to SmartNICs. Specifically, it explores the integration of OpenNIC, an open-source FPGA-based SmartNIC platform for AMD-Xilinx Alveo boards, with Nanotube, a suite of compiler passes, libraries, and Application programming interfaces to facilitate the execution of eBPF/XDP—the de facto standard for Linux kernel programming—and similar networking code directly on an FPGA in a seamless and flexible way. The primary objective is to design a unified programming model that simplifies the deployment of high-performance packet processing applications across software and hardware. This required developing an infrastructure that ranges from operating systems to network hardware while optimizing both latency and throughput. This integration presented significant challenges, including maintaining data consistency, ensuring correctness across different bus implementations, and sustaining stable, high-frequency data flow. These difficulties stem from the low-level nature of FPGA design, where timing constraints and coordination between different interfaces must be carefully managed to ensure reliability and correctness. To evaluate the solution, a set of representative XDP applications was tested both in simulation and on two FPGA boards, configured as sender and receiver. The experiments showed a maximum improvement of 404× in latency (measured in clock cycles) and throughput exceeding 100 Gbps. Although performance varied by application, these results underscore the potential of this unified framework for accelerating real-world applications. Finally, I present potential future directions to extend Nanotube’s capabilities, aiming to enhance multi-interface compatibility, improve metadata handling, and increase flexibility for high-performance networking across diverse use cases. This research exclusively used machine-generated datasets, with no human subjects involved
There Is No Name for What We Must Become: Autonomous Social Movement in Southern Illinois
No full textThis dissertation explores how people living in a small city in the rural Southern Illinois have attempted to respond to their city’s decline. Rural America has been in an ongoing crisis for the past half century as jobs become increasingly scarce and young people move to urban areas in ever greater numbers. As the economy and population have declined, as with many other smaller cities in the United States, there has been a tendency to increase funding of police to manage the social fallout of forty years of neoliberal policy which has left people in rural Illinois without jobs or social services to provide where the economy has failed. I studied an organization called the Carbondale Spring, which sought to defund the police and to reallocate these funds to create a variety of ecological and social programs. Specifically, they sought to create a food autonomy program, a renewable energy fund, a team of care workers to replace functions currently performed by the police, and to create workers cooperatives. In doing so, Carbondale Spring members attempted to grapple with their city’s (and the broader region’s) declining fortune, and to pose a locally rooted alternative to the dominant neoliberal order. While ultimately unsuccessful, members were able to use their program to collectively think through the problems facing their town and to pose solutions to these problems. In the process, members rethought basic assumptions of their lives and the possibilities for how society could function – and how human society should respond to climate change. Theoretically, the various initiatives of the Carbondale Spring offer a window to think through eco-socialist and ecological Marxist theories, which view the climate crisis as inextricably linked to the social crisis caused by inequalities baked into the capitalist system. Members of the Carbondale Spring developed an evolving plan for transforming their town according to a vision which I call, following Cornelius Castoriadus, the “autonomous political imaginary.” In attempting to realize their plans, the various initiatives hit a series of limits and difficulties stemming from a variety of political, economic, and cultural factors. In particular, I explore how the initiatives at times reproduced individualized market logics similar to those promoted by neoliberal social policy. At the same time, by exploring these limits, the Carbondale Spring offers us a chance to explore the cultural logics of ecological self-governance, and the dissertation attempts to draw these lessons out in pursuit of an eco-socialist politics rooted in social scientific inquiry
Autonomous Navigation and Simultaneous 3D Mapping with a UGV in an Open-Ended Environment
No full textThe focus of this research is the development of an advanced autonomous navigation system that integrates Detectron2's Panoptic FPN model with multi-sensor fusion and simultaneous 3D mapping capabilities for the Clearpath Husky A200 unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) operating in complex outdoor environments. By combining panoptic segmentation for comprehensive scene understanding with the ROS2 Navigation Stack (Nav2) and RTAB-Map for real-time 3D mapping, a robust perception, mapping, and path planning framework is developed. This framework enables simultaneous localization, mapping, and terrain-aware obstacle avoidance capabilities that surpass traditional 2D LiDAR-based approaches. The system utilizes sensor fusion between the SICK LMS-111 2D LiDAR and Intel RealSense D435i RGB-D camera, where both instance objects and stuff classes detected by the Panoptic FPN model are classified and converted to laser scan format for seamless integration with the navigation costmap while concurrently building detailed 3D environmental maps. The implementation addresses critical limitations in outdoor robotic navigation where traditional systems fail to detect terrain obstacles such as grass, earth, and vegetation. Experimental validation in both Gazebo Fortress simulation and real-world outdoor environments demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed panoptic segmentation-based system with concurrent 3D mapping in achieving collision-free navigation through complex scenarios. The framework successfully operates at 8-10 FPS on the NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin platform, showing significant improvements in obstacle detection accuracy (92%), navigation reliability, and environmental understanding compared to traditional LiDAR-only approaches
Effects of Exposure to Environmental Pollutants on Markers of Adiposity and Inflammation
No full textThere is growing concern over the role of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the global obesity epidemic, particularly given their potential to disrupt lipid metabolism and promote inflammation. This dissertation included 2,264 adults aged 45–74 years from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL) and examined the prospective associations of POPs with change in adiposity measures, as well as cross-sectional and prospective associations with inflammation. Additionally, we explored whether inflammation mediates the relationship between POPs and adiposity. To complement findings from the general population, we evaluated cross-sectional associations between polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and inflammatory markers in 217 participants from the La Salle Electrical Utilities Company Morbidity Study, including both former workers and nearby residents with high occupational and environmental exposure.
In HCHS/SOL, we observed sex-specific associations between POPs and adiposity. In women, PCBs were positively associated with change in waist circumference (WC), while in men, organochlorine pesticides (OCPs) were more strongly associated with change in body mass index (BMI) and WC. In both sexes, β-hexachlorocyclohexane (β-HCH) was positively associated with change in BMI and WC. Effect modification analyses further indicated that associations between specific OCPs and adiposity were present only among postmenopausal women.
We also examined associations between POPs and inflammatory markers, including high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), gamma-glutamyl transferase (GGT), white blood cell count (WBCC), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and monocyte-to-lymphocyte ratio (MLR). Results were inconsistent and varied by sex, chemical class, and specific marker. There was no evidence that inflammation mediated the association between POPs and adiposity.
In the La Salle cohort, we observed positive associations between PCB groupings and C-reactive protein (CRP) in women. Among men, PCB groupings and occupational exposures (job score and quarters worked) were positively associated with MLR, and job score was negatively associated with WBCC.
Our findings support sex-specific associations between POPs and adiposity and suggest that POP exposure may influence inflammation in a dose-dependent manner. Future research should explore a broader range of inflammatory markers and the modifying role of lifestyle factors such as physical activity
The Tissue Specific Role of Endosome Associated Protein SNX27 in Colonic Inflammation and Tumorigenesis
No full textSNX27, member of the sorting nexin (SNX) family, carries a unique PDZ domain and mediates recycling of endocytosed transmembrane proteins. SNX27 is critical for neurodevelopment and whole body knockout in mice has been found to be embryonically lethal. Although SNX27 is variably expressed in different tissues, its role specifically in the intestines and the development of intestinal disorders remains to be unexplored. Epithelial barrier integrity, regulated by junction proteins, is critical for the maintenance of intestinal tissue homeostasis. Weakening of the intestinal barrier thus promotes susceptibility towards intestinal disorders, such as IBD and CRC. Many junction proteins carry a PDZ-binding motif, however their interactions with SNX27 and its impact on the intestinal epithelial barrier integrity and pathophysiology of intestinal disorders has not been previously investigated. Reanalysis of publicly available datasets revealed significantly lower SNX27 expression in IBD and CRC patients. We generated novel mouse models of SNX27 conditional deletion from intestinal epithelial cells (SNX27ΔIEC), Paneth cells (SNX27ΔPC), and myeloid cells (SNX27ΔLyz) to investigate the tissue-specific roles of SNX27 in intestinal physiology. We then challenged these mice with DSS-induced colitis and AOM/DSS-induced CRC to study the initiation and progression of intestinal disorders. Loss of intestinal epithelial SNX27 resulted in poor differentiation of secretory Paneth and goblet cells, narrowing of the protective mucin layer, increased epithelial apoptosis, and downregulation of crucial epithelial junction proteins (ꞵ-catenin, E-cadherin, ZO-1, and claudin10). Thus, SNX27ΔIEC mice exhibited poor barrier integrity, leakier guts, increased mucosal inflammation, and greater susceptibility towards chemically induced colitis and CRC. While conditional deletion of SNX27 from Paneth cells also increased sensitivity to DSS, SNX27ΔLyz mice contrastingly exhibited less severity towards colitis and delayed onset of CRC. Not only did SNX27ΔLyz mice develop significantly fewer colonic tumors than SNX27ΔIEC mice, the percentage survival rate was also drastically higher in SNX27ΔLyz vs SNX27ΔIEC mice. Overall, this dissertation investigates the tissue-specific roles of SNX27 in intestinal physiology. Our results indicate a previously unknown role of SNX27 in regulating intestinal tissue homeostasis and responses towards inflammation and tumorigenesis. Thus, a thorough understanding of SNX27-driven mechanisms in IBD and CRC will provide insights into new therapeutic strategies
Autonomous Dynamic Grasping with a Robotic Arm: Real-Time Motion Prediction and Adaptive Control
No full textDynamic grasping of moving objects represents one of the most challenging and actively researched areas in robotic manipulation. Unlike static grasping, this task requires the integration of perception, prediction, and control in real-time. Typical approaches involve tracking the target’s position in real-time using vision-based systems, estimating its velocity, and generating tailored Cartesian-space trajectories to ensure the robot’s end-effector coincides with the object's position at the precise time required for successful grasping.
The presented work addresses the development, optimization, and hardware implementation of a novel control algorithm for dynamic grasping. The research utilizes the ROS 2 framework alongside the WidowX 250 S robotic arm, which features six degrees of freedom. This configuration allows for autonomous grasping of objects in motion while dynamically adapting to alterations in their trajectory, which are not necessarily restricted in space.
To achieve this objective, a motion capture system continuously monitors the target's position relative to the manipulator, streaming real-time data to the robot's controller, which estimates the relative velocity. Based on these estimates and predefined constraints, the controller intelligently determines the optimal timing to initiate the grasp sequence, predicting the target's trajectory and evaluating its transit in the dynamically computed reachable workspace of the robotic arm, determined at runtime using an efficient analytic inverse kinematics function tailored to the robot. Additionally, an advanced adaptive trajectory planner generates detailed trajectories, including position, orientation, velocity, and acceleration for the robot's end-effector, in under a millisecond. These trajectories are then relayed to the motor controllers, ensuring precise and coordinated motion.
Finally, experimental validation confirms that the developed adaptive dynamic grasping algorithm performs as expected, demonstrating high repeatability and accuracy, effectively showcasing its robustness in real-world scenarios
The “Identity Biennial” & the Politics of the Interstice
No full textThe 1993 Whitney Biennial of American Art, known as “The Identity Biennial,” earned its moniker for the role it played in the late-century culture wars, multiculturalism, and renewed debates on the quincentenary of Columbus’ 1492 “discovery” of America. Yet, artworks like Willie Varela’s film A Lost Man (1992) and Miguel Gandert’s photo series Tierra O Muerte (1988) remain under-examined despite representing strategic formal challenges to these very late-century debates and notions of culture and identity. Drawing on insights and methods from art history, critical museology, and Latin American and Latinx studies, the case studies reveal two formal approaches of the interstice: graphic and disjunctive image transitions and partitions and borderlines. For Varela, editing plays a crucial role in the film’s insistence on the presence of a particular individual struggling with and within a world of others. Varela uses the freeze image, negative shot, and the abstract transition to order and hold together the narrative structure, modeling the contingency and negotiation of inner and outer relationality of Varela’s Chicano personal cinema. For Gandert, the empty spaces and borderlines separating each picture in the series become a hinge between individuals that figures the space of historical action. The work does this through the photo essay format, gazes, and borders of the photograph, offering a model of intersubjective relationality that unfolds in time and is characterized by the vulnerability and reciprocity of Gandert’s window-cum-mirror philosophy. Varela and Gandert deployed art’s interstitial spaces to suture form and content as an index of the embodied individual-collective relationship and as a model of interdependency. By doing so, their artistic strategies made a number of interventions. They revealed the construction, dynamics, and distribution of power within self and group formation, thereby interrupting modern and postmodern conceptions of the self-other relationship and its gazes as inherently hierarchical or conflated. Their strategies challenged the absolutism of culture war rhetoric between schools of traditionalism and progressivism while problematizing reductive, liberal multicultural representations of identity. Significantly, their interventions facilitated productive conversations in the art and intellectual debates of the 1990s and offer lessons about the benefits and drawbacks of identity politics for our day
Evaluating Impact of Endothelial Cells on Drug Response of Lung Cancer Spheroids Using Microfluidic Chip
No full textDrug resistance continues to be a major limitation in the clinical management of non-small cell
lung cancer (NSCLC). While most of the existing research has focused on genetic mutations of
tumor cells, increasing attention is being paid to the surrounding tumor microenvironment (TME)
as a key factor in therapeutic response. In particular, the presence of stromal cells such as
endothelial, fibroblast, and immune cells can alter cancer cell behavior by releasing soluble
factors or through direct physical contact. However, the exact role in this context remains largely
unclear. The objective of this work is to better understand and quantify how stromal cells, and in
particular endothelial cells, impact drug resistance in NSCLC spheroids. To achieve this, we used
both conventional in vitro systems and a microfluidic platform. The standard in vitro model
developed in previous work was used for spheroid generation and as a baseline for comparative
analysis. However, it is based on conventional culture format (such as polystirene 24-well plates)
which limits control over cell positioning and interactions. Conversely, the microfluidic chip
enables co-culture of multiple 2D and 3D cell types within confined microenvironments, which
offers enhanced spatial control for drug response studies. In this work, NSCLC spheroids were
either cultured either with endothelial cell supernatant or in direct contact (the so called tangled
culture) with endothelial cells. This dual approach allowed us to investigate the impact of both
paracrine and juxtacrine interactions. By comparing these two approaches, we aimed to
determine whether endothelial-mediated drug resistance is primarily driven by secreted signaling
molecules or by more complex cell-cell interactions. Fluorescence imaging and quantitative
analysis were used to assess spheroid viability and size after treatment with targeted therapies.
These data provide insights into how endothelial cells and their secreted factors may protect
tumor cells from drug-induced cytotoxicity. Ultimately, this work aims to quantify the role of
endothelial cells within the TME and compare their impact to other previously studied
components
An Ethnographic Look at Inclusive Dance and Dancers with Intellectual Disabilities
No full textProfessional dance companies in the US rarely have dancers with intellectual disability (ID). Dancers with ID face stigma due to their intellectual capacity. However, dancers with ID contribute in many ways to disability culture and disability aesthetics in their dance companies. This dissertation is a critical performance ethnography about two inclusive dance companies, South Africa’s FLATFOOT Downie Dance Company, and Finland’s Kaaos Dance Company. In-person observation of the dance companies results in a nuanced understanding of how people with ID create dance. Ethnographic fieldwork makes visible the relationship of the inclusive company’s social, pedagogical, and political culture to the artistic expression of the individual dancer with ID. Drawn from Patricia Hill Collins’ theory of the “outsider within,” I argue that the complex role of the researcher and the marginalized position of these dancers become visible through the methodological frame of the “insider without.” The complex position of dancers with ID positions them as insiders in their companies, yet with inadequate training and education and unequal pay.
Interviews with one dancer with ID from each company, Siiri and Charles, explore their artistic processes and experiences within the company, fostering their artistry, and enriching the company culture. The experience of these processes creates meaning about disability that can influence representations of disability dance and change ableist thinking more broadly. The key themes vary by site. In South Africa, I explore access in pedagogy, choreography, and performance and examine the role body politics have played in building a community and performing one’s sense of belonging. In Finland, I focus on access and inaccessibility in rehearsal, the role of listening and sharing in improvisation, and the marginalized experiences of people with ID in relation to communication. Finally, examining dancers with ID through the framework of the “insider without,” provides a greater understanding of how Siiri and Charles function in their company and how society and the disability dance community view people with ID. Siri’s and Charles’s creative choices and performances politically position them, as dancers and as individuals, to oppose society’s presumptions of their limitations
The Hyper-Criminalization of the Latinx Community
No full textThis dissertation research study aims to identify the different types of hyper-criminalization found in the Latinx community. This in-depth qualitative research study consisted of eighteen interviews with residents of Little Village, a Latinx neighborhood, located on the West Side of Chicago. The study explored two main research questions: What forms of hyper-criminalization exist in Little Village, Chicago? How does hyper-criminalization impact the Latinx community? This case study relied on Victor Rios’ theory of hyper-criminalization. Rios (2016) defines hyper-criminalization as the “process by which an individual’s everyday behaviors and styles become ubiquitously treated as deviant, risky, threatening, or criminal, across social contexts” (Rios, xiv). The results of this research study show that there are 3 main ways in which Little Village residents are hyper-criminalized: by the police, by technology, and, least conventionally, by family and community members. The Latinx community is impacted in many ways by hyper-criminalization, both directly and as collateral damage. Their safety is compromised because they do not trust the police, which is the direct outcome of their negative interactions with the police over the course of their lives
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Open Research Online? Become a CORE Member to access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard! 👇