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Personalized Explanations of Robot Behavior for Human Users
Full text linkAI and robotic agents are becoming increasingly prevalent in sectors such as transportation, manufacturing, and disaster response. As these robots are integrated into existing workflows, it is important for their users to understand and anticipate their actions to ensure efficient human-robot collaboration. Most notably, explainable AI (XAI) has emerged as a solution for making robot behavior more transparent. However, a major challenge remains: each user has their own preconceptions of the robot, meaning that a single explanation method may not be effective for everyone. This thesis explores the role of personalized explanations in improving human users' ability to understand robot behavior. We design an algorithm, PPS, to model a user's knowledge about a robot to select informative explanations tailored to that user. We also introduce STOREE as a paradigm for users to personalize their lesson modality. Through our experiments, we find evidence that personalization increases user knowledge of robot behavior
Together, we can do so much: Investigating the role of emotional and instrumental social support in interpersonal emotion regulation among college students
Full text linkCollege students face numerous stressors, making effective emotion regulation crucial for their mental health and well-being. Social support, associated with greater well-being and favorable health outcomes, can provide adaptive strategies for emotion regulation, such as cognitive reappraisal. This study examines how emotional and instrumental social support relate to the tendency and effectiveness of interpersonal emotion regulation (IER) and how cognitive reappraisal and expressiv e suppression moderate these effects among college students. Results showcased that both emotional and instrumental support were significantly associated with IER frequency and efficacy, with instrumental support being more beneficial than initially hypothesized. While expressive suppression was negatively associated with overall IER use, neither cognitive reappraisal nor expressive suppression moderated the relationship between social support and IER. These findings highlight the need for context-specific investigations into who provides support and how different social relationships influence emotion regulation
strategies. Future research should explore targeted social support interventions that consider relationship dynamics and long-term mental health benefits
Hurricane Beryl: Community Response and Resilience
Full text linkTo understand Houston and Harris County residents' early recovery efforts following Hurricane Beryl and their sense of resiliency, a survey was sent to more than 5,000 members of the Greater Houston Community Panel in late July 2024, less than 3 weeks after the hurricane. Residents were asked about their experiences following the storm in terms of community members helping one another, becoming more prepared for future storms, and growing closer as a neighborhood. In addition, people were asked about their sense of resilience in the face of future natural disasters, and if the severe weather impacting the Houston region was making them consider moving. This snapshot details responses from that survey, highlighting the ways in which residents were recovering in the aftermath of the 2024 severe weather events impacting Houston
4.2 Synthetic Human Chromosomes – a call for global discussion
No full textThis entreaty was created as part of The Spirit of Asilomar and the Future of Biotechnology summit (February 23-26, 2025) in Pacific Grove, CA
Emancipating Agency: A Code of Conduct for Unwanted Inventory of Architecture
No full textSpeculative developments and aestheticized extractivist fantasies reflect an ecological disconnect and unsustainable growth. These abandoned structures—remnants of a world prioritizing consumption over sustainability and expansion over care—symbolize a fractured relationship between humanity and the natural environment.
This thesis examines these architectural failures as proving grounds for regenerative futures, centering on the Burj Al Babas, an abandoned luxury development in Mudurnu, Turkey. Conceived as a thermal resort of 732 faux-French castles, the Burj Al Babas epitomizes the commodification of land, architectural excess, and the unsustainability of speculative growth. A product of Turkey’s real estate-driven citizenship program, this failed project reveals the societal and ecological costs of short-term economic ambitions.
In response to this legacy, the Emancipating Agency emerges as a fictional ecological collective, transforming abandoned typologies into sites of experimentation and renewal. Guided by principles of degrowth, care, and material cycles, the Agency reimagines these remnants as proving grounds, where decayed structures are dismantled and repurposed into ecological interventions. The Burj Al Babas, once a grotesque symbol of speculative greed, becomes a site of care and collaboration, blending human and non-human systems to foster regeneration.
Through this narrative, the thesis envisions a methodology to confront failed developments, proposing that the unwanted inventory of Anthropocentric growth can be emancipated into new cycles of ecological possibility. The Burj Al Babas is not restored but liberated—its decay transformed into an opportunity for coexistence, experimentation, and renewal
Non-Hermitian Plasmonic-Photonic Hybrids: Advancing Sensing and Photocatalysis for Real-World Applications
No full textNon-Hermitian systems exhibit greater proximity to real-world applications owing to the incorporation of inherent losses. These systems also introduced the concept of exceptional points (EPs). Exceptional point (EP)-based optical sensors demonstrate exceptional sensitivity; however, they frequently exhibit poor detectivity owing to their acute susceptibility to perturbations including noise. In scenarios where the optical budget is constrained, such as mobile platform applications, high detectivity can be as critical as high sensitivity. In such instances, off-EP sensing is advantageous, as a modest reduction in sensitivity can result in a substantial improvement in detectivity.
In this study, we demonstrate that a passive parity-time symmetric plasmonic-photonic hybrid system achieves peak detectivity off-EP while maintaining high sensitivity, surpassing the sensitivities of equivalent fully plasmonic and fully photonic systems. Utilizing this plasmonic-photonic hybrid, we showed the high detectivity of off-EP sensing for anti-mouse IgG protein detection, achieving a sensitivity of 1.2 nm/nM with a minimum optical budget of 1.3 nJ. These findings suggest that non-Hermitian plasmonic-photonic hybrids represent an optimal class of nanophotonic sensors for practical applications.
Furthermore, we enhanced the system by replacing one mode in the non-Hermitian sensor with a quasi-bound state in the continuum (BIC) mode, which inherently exhibits a higher Q-factor. This modification results in improved sensitivity and detectivity. Additionally, we applied the concept of non-Hermitian mode coupling to reactor-antenna photocatalysts, demonstrating that the addition of a dielectric layer between the reactor and antenna significantly enhances both the total absorption and reactor absorption efficiency.
These findings underscore the significant potential of studying non-Hermitian systems and highlight innovative approaches to designing high-performance devices for real-world applications
Lightweight Physical-Layer Security Primitives for 5G-and-Beyond Wireless Communications
No full textThe development of 5G-and-beyond wireless communication represents a major transition toward faster, more intelligent, and more flexible connectivity. Compared with previous generations, 5G-and-beyond systems are designed not only for higher data rates and larger capacity, but also for lower latency, enhanced intelligence, and broader applicability. These capabilities enable a wide range of mission-critical applications, such as immersive AR/VR, intelligent transportation, remote robotic surgery, and drone-assisted communication, where communication quality is tightly coupled with safety, efficiency, or privacy. However, the open nature of wireless propagation also introduces significant security concerns. In particular, as wireless transceivers become more mobile, autonomous, and distributed, it becomes increasingly difficult to verify their identity and prevent eavesdropping. These concerns raise new requirements for the transmitter (TX), which must be able to identify itself as a legitimate source and prevent sensitive information from leaking to unintended receivers.
Traditionally, wireless security is achieved through digital cryptography. Although effective in many scenarios, cryptographic methods face four limitations when applied to future systems: (1) the added power and latency overhead becomes problematic for real-time bit-wise encryption, (2) key management becomes complex and power-hungry, and (3) physical signal leakage itself is not protected by encryption. To address these issues, physical-layer security (PLS) has gained increasing attention. By embedding security directly into the physical behavior of the TX, such as frequency, phase, amplitude, or time, PLS enables protection without relying on high-level cryptographic protocols. These techniques can be implemented with minimal latency, power, and area overhead, making them suitable for 5G-and-beyond systems where both performance and security are critical.
This thesis focuses on low-overhead, TX-based physical-layer security techniques that address two major security requirements: (1) identification of TX to the receiver, and (2) prevention of wireless eavesdropping. Three system-level designs are proposed, each implemented with custom application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) TXs and modules, and demonstrated through measurement.
The first TX design addresses the identification problem. We propose a physical-layer identification TX that incorporates a digital physically unclonable function (PUF) to control its spectral regrowth. This creates a unique RF fingerprint (RFF) for each TX, beyond what is achievable with intrinsic process variation alone. A 2.4-GHz prototype is implemented in GlobalFoundries 45-nm CMOS SOI process with 4.7 dBm output power and 36% efficiency. Measurement results show significant improvement in RFF stability, uniqueness, and dynamic range compared to prior work.
On top of it, we further enhance the identification performance with feature extraction and identification model. We develop a lightweight neural network that extracts PSD features from TX signals and performs device identification. The model is optimized for low-power implementation and works seamlessly with the proposed hardware. In measurement, 240 devices are identified with over 99% accuracy, and 40 devices at unseen distance achieve over 95%, demonstrating strong generalization and robustness under various conditions.
The second TX design focuses on preventing sidelobe eavesdropping. We present a mm-Wave antenna subset modulation (ASM) TX operating at 28 GHz. By randomly selecting antenna subsets at the symbol rate, the transmitted I/Q symbols are scrambled outside the main direction, preventing eavesdropping without degrading performance in the desired direction. The ASIC is integrated with on-board antennas and includes a high-speed on-chip true random number generator (TRNG) for secure and unpredictable antenna selection. The system supports 1.2-Gb/s 64-QAM communication with ±2° information beamwidth and maintains high EVM performance. This work highlights the great potential and practicality of integrating ASM technology into future radios.
In summary, this thesis proposes and demonstrates three low-overhead PLS techniques at the transmitter level, targeting future communication systems with tight constraints on power, latency, and security. These methods provide a practical and efficient way to enhance wireless security without relying on complicated cryptographic operations, and can serve as a complementary layer of protection in 5G-and-beyond wireless networks
Feeding the Future: Community, Horizontal Leadership and Direct Action Through Mutual Aid in Food Not Bombs Houston’s Movement for Change
No full textThrough ethnographic fieldwork and interviews (n=13), this study examines how Food Not Bombs Houston (FNBH) operates as a social movement through mutual aid. I explore how FNBH fosters community, deploys horizontal leadership, and engages in direct action to prefigure a better world. My findings demonstrate how FNBH’s food-sharing practices and mutual aid serve as a repertoire of contention, actively disrupting capitalist structures and resisting state control through spatial occupation. By fostering community resilience through a decentralized, non-hierarchical, consensus-based organizational model, FNBH embodies prefigurative politics—creating alternative systems of care outside of traditional non-profit structures and state control. This analysis challenges traditional social movement scholarship by demonstrating how mutual aid operates not just as a direct service but as a long-term form of resistance through everyday acts of solidarity
Problems of the Past? Temporal Distance from the Civil Rights Movement Undermines Majority Group Support for Workplace Diversity Policies
No full textResistance to policies aimed at reducing racial inequities in employment, particularly among demographic majority group members, represents a significant barrier to addressing racism in the workplace. Americans are divided on how much progress has been made toward racial equity since the Civil Rights Era and what should be done to further it. These divides often fall along racial lines, such that White Americans overestimate the amount of racial progress achieved in recent decades, relative to both reality and the perceptions of Black Americans. The current work investigates how beliefs that racial inequities in employment are primarily a problem of the distant, rather than more recent, past undermine majority group members’ support for workplace DEI policies. Bridging insights from construal-level theory and social identity theory, White Americans may be especially likely to distance themselves from past moments of racial reckoning—specifically, the Civil Rights Movement—because these events highlight intergroup transgressions committed by in-group members. Results from two studies (an online survey and an experiment) suggest that White Americans subjectively perceive the Civil Rights Movement as farther in the past than Black Americans. Further, among White respondents, greater temporal distance from the Civil Rights Movement indirectly affects support for diversity policies by facilitating overly optimistic perceptions of how much racial progress has been achieved since the Civil Rights Movement. The findings advance research on the cognitive underpinnings of majority group members’ attitudes toward diversity policies by highlighting the critical role of subjective temporality in racial attitudes. Together, these studies offer a novel lens for understanding majority group resistance to organizational diversity policy
Giving Peace a Chance: The Role of Third Parties in Promoting a Just and Lasting Peace
No full textThis dissertation examines how third-party behavior during conflict and in conflict resolution processes influences outcomes that foster conditions of just and lasting peace. The research is structured into three essays. The first essay adopts a gender perspective to investigate the role of women negotiators in advancing gender-centered agendas, reducing corruption perceptions, and enhancing public confidence in peace processes. Using a cross-national analysis and a survey experiment in Colombia, it highlights how formal women negotiators and civil society actors promote the inclusion of gender provisions in peace agreements and demonstrates that women’s majority participation significantly improves peace perceptions. The second essay evaluates the impact of United Nations Special Political Missions (SPMs) on women’s empowerment in conflict-affected societies. Through cross-national analysis, it finds that SPMs contribute to women’s empowerment but also identifies challenges posed by overlapping missions, such as peacekeeping operations (PKOs). The third essay, coauthored with T. Clifton Morgan, explores how the threat and imposition of economic sanctions influence post-conflict peace by facilitating rebel-to-party transitions. Focusing on the long-term consequences of sanctions, it theorizes about their signaling properties alongside their costs on target states. Overall, this dissertation contributes to scholarly discussions on sustainable and just peace, emphasizing the diverse roles of women in peace processes and the broader impacts of third-party interventions on peace outcomes