Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute
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Towards robust-safe control of multi-rotor UAVs
No full textUnmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are heavily used in domains ranging from military applications to commercial and civilian use. With their increase in integration into numerous sectors, robust and safe controls of UAVs become critical. This dissertation presents a control algorithm to estimate the non-linear dynamics of a system for robust control of different multi-copters in uncertain conditions using model-free control (MFC). In addition, to maintain the flight envelope and perform safe maneuvers, a reference governor is used. By testing MFC (iPID) in simulations and real-life tests on a classical quad-copter and Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) drone, we show iPID reduces the position tracking error in high wind situations while stabilizing the drone close to the given set-point and eliminates oscillation when compared to classical PID. For safe controls, a reference governor is used as a constraining controller. Reference Governor is applied to ensure safe maneuvers by limiting the tilt angles of the drone by modifying the position set-point to the controller. The reference governor was shown to have effectively constrained the tilt angles within given limits.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
The engineering of biomolecular systems for chemoselective surface grafting and innovative aptamer biosensing
No full textThis dissertation addresses challenges across biomolecular engineering, encompassing materials science, surface chemistry, biosensing, enzyme inhibition, and DNA nanotechnology. The core aim is to advance medical applications through innovative biomolecular engineering. First is an exploration of chemoselective methods for molecule grafting with DOPA-derived species. It begins with a novel surface functionalization method, merging catechol polymerization and copper-catalyzed alkyne−azide cycloaddition. This technique offers exceptional speed, chemoselectivity, and microvolume coating capability, applicable from preventing bacterial adhesion to tissue engineering. The subsequent chapter expands on this work to describe a bioorthogonal surface functionalization method using tyrosinase-catalyzed catecholamine polymerization and tetrazine ligation, eliminating the need for transition metals. Successful surface grafting of diverse molecules demonstrates its potential for biomedical applications, and demonstrates the value of the method for chemoselective biomolecule grafting.
The dissertation then advances further into molecular diagnostics with a systematic methodology for split aptamer biosensors designed for chemical modification-free miRNA detection. This modular split aptamer platform exhibits single-nucleotide specificity and sensitivity in complex biological environments.
Finally, the dissertation describes preliminary work in two fields. First is the exploration of synthetic polymers as potential enzyme inhibitors, investigated through the inhibition of RNase A. Significant progress is made in assay development, automated synthesis, and data analysis, contributing to the broader goal of developing these inhibitors. Finally, work is done to expand the scope of DNA nanotechnology through nucleic acid sensors that can be generally integrated into existing DNA nanotechnology, proposing novel mechanisms for dynamic DNA nanotechnologies to interface with diverse biological systems. The study begins to elucidate essential design principles and describes an efficient testing method, offering valuable insights for future work toward achieving this goal.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Optimization of drug therapy to minimize and prevent organ toxicity
No full textThe key processes affecting drug disposition are absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME). These drive the safety and efficacy of the drug and are potentially altered in the various disease states. An effective and safe regimen is contingent on adequate exposure and elimination. The normal ADME conditions are altered in disease states. Additionally, inflammation can be caused by acute and chronic diseases of an infectious nature such as COVID-19 and even metabolic conditions such as obesity. Significant changes in drug transporter and metabolism expression levels are caused by the resulting inflammation, altering the exposure and safety profiles of drugs by affecting ADME. The extent of altered drug accumulation due to underlying disease condition is quite common and is extremely challenging to measure in certain major organs such as the brain or kidney. Thereby adding to the complications faced by patients with underlying conditions. Consequently, the current dissertation is focused on bringing forth these dosing related issues in patients suffering from major diseases. Specifically, we study the impact of cancer, combination therapy on organs, and inflammation caused by COVID-19 and obesity. We utilize PBPK modeling, mitochondrial stress measure, and gene expression for these studies respectively. Chapter 1 of the dissertation is the introduction, which provides detailed background and lays the foundations for understanding the subsequent research topics presented here . Carboplatin, which is chemotherapeutic agent used to ovarian, head, neck and brain cancer, is the focus of chapter 2. Specifically, to attain an improved understanding of the deep tissue concentrations in patients, which are hard to measure, we develop a whole-body PBPK model of carboplatin. This model helps in understanding the drug accumulation over a prolonged period of time. Next, we compare combination therapy of piperacillin, tazobactam and vancomycin to piperacillin-tazobactam combination therapy and corresponding monotherapies in terms of cell viability and mitochondrial health of HK-2 cells subjected to these therapies. We additionally show the utility of melatonin to mitigate deleterious effects of these therapies on HK-2 cells. Finally, chapter 4 and 5 provide further detailed insight into the need for assessing basal patient conditions by factoring in their comorbidities for preventing drug-drug interactions due to altered drug transporters and metabolism. We separately focus on inflammation and changes in drug metabolism and transporters caused by COVID-19 and obesity in these chapters. These studies are performed in mice and rats respectively. Overall, we endeavor through the work detailed in this dissertation to provide translational quantitative approaches to explain and provide a better basis for individualized drug regimen to patients with comorbidities using pre-clinical data, cell level and animal model studies.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Child, nation, and emotion: analyzing children as rhetorical tools in political campaigns
No full textThis study analyzes nine races in the 2022 U.S. Senatorial campaigns to investigate child-centered rhetoric in political campaign discourse. The study uses a two-phased methodological approach to investigate how, when, why, and by whom child-centered emotional appeals are used in political campaigns, and what these appeals can teach us about the ways collective ideas about children are utilized by politicians as discursive tools. Phase one involves a content analysis of candidates’ use of child-centered emotional appeals, the issues/topics that are most frequently attached to these appeals, and the emotions these appeals are meant to trigger in their base. Data was collected from local and national news on the candidates as well as from candidates’ campaign websites, Twitter feeds, and Facebook pages. Phase two of the study deploys a critical discourse analysis (CDA) which more closely investigates a trend identified through the content analysis: Republican concerns regarding “indoctrination” in public education. This study finds that candidates deploy rhetorics of childhood in a variety of topic areas, with education, the economy, public safety, COVID-related issues, and gun legislation top among them. This study also finds that Republicans were far more likely to deploy negative emotional appeals (i.e., anger/disgust and fright/anxiety) when invoking children than their Democratic counterparts. Finally, this study contends that the discursive history of “indoctrination,” paired with the symbolic vulnerabilities of “the child,” created a ripe rhetorical space for Republicans in these nine Senate races to capitalize on a broader cultural agenda through the premise of “protecting children.” The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the continuing urgency of demystifying child-centered political speech, contending that we are continuing to put children at risk by allowing these discourses to grow.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Malleable instruments: gender and its uses in nineteenth century U.S. literature
No full textThis dissertation investigates the cultural processes through which nineteenth century Americans created and used ideas about gender through literature. Malleable Instruments: Gender and its Uses in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature demonstrates how nineteenth century writers deployed gender as a rhetorical tool that they used to further their political goals. I put the emergent field of trans studies in conversation with literary study of the long nineteenth century in the U.S. to demonstrate how gender was contested in a period that American centers of power currently stabilize as a source of transhistorical gender.The first half of the project examines gender produced through narrative, ranging from trans characters in romances of Indigenous dispossession like Hope Leslie and The Last of the Mohicans to eugenic arguments for binary gender in Jack London’s turn of the century fiction. The second half zooms out to the material contexts of literature to consider archives of publication and circulation as themselves sites of gender production, attending to the fluid gender theories hidden within Margaret Fuller’s publishing records as well as administrative documents from Black Philadelphian women’s literary societies which theorize gender as mutable. I conclude with Anna Julia Cooper, whose essays promote dissident gender production as a tool of Black cultural liberation, revealing the importance of early Black feminist thinking to ideas which would become trans studies. The dual methodologies of textual analysis and archival study read gender as both an idea and a practice, visible conceptually in literary discourse and materially in archives.
Previous scholarship often frames literature of the period as either describing the gender norms of its environment or prescribing gendered behavior for its readers. However, I demonstrate that literature in fact inscribes gender, inventing gender systems anew as a means to negotiate with colonial, racial, and gendered structures of power. I demonstrate that Black feminist theory and trans studies are indispensable to rethinking nineteenth century American gender. This work uses trans studies analytics to challenge traditional analyses of gender in nineteenth century literature, advancing an alternative that reconsiders literary gender as a flexible, politically-motivated rhetorical tool rather than as a stable and ahistorical social reality. By centering questions about the function of gender within literature, I show how gender is mobilized through literature in response to structures of gendered, colonial, and racialized power.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Large language models for data driven applications
No full textThis dissertation presents a series of innovative approaches leveraging deep learning and Large Language Models to address challenges in various steps in the pipeline of real-world data driven applications.
Firstly, we explore the enhancement of locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) for entity blocking through a neuralization approach. Entity blocking is an important data pre-processing step that finds similar data records that might refer to the same real-world entity. We train deep neural networks to act as hashing functions for complex metrics, which surpasses the limitations of generic similarity metrics in traditional LSH-based methods. Our novel methodology, embodied in NLSHBlock (Neural-LSH Block), leverages pre-trained language models fine-tuned with a novel LSH-based loss function. NLSHBlock achieves significant performance improvements in entity blocking tasks and can boost the performance of later steps in the data processing pipeline.
Further, we introduce Sudowoodo, a multi-purpose data integration framework based on contrastive representation learning and large language models, which offers a unified solution for data integration tasks like Entity Matching. Entity matching is a process that determines if a pair of data records represent the same real-world entity and plays an essential role in plenty of applications. To tackle the common issue of insufficient number of high-quality labeled data, Sudowoodo utilizes similarity-aware data representations learned without labels and enables effective fine-tuning in the semi-supervised learning setting where only a small amount of labeled data is available. Besides, Sudowoodo also applies to other data integration tasks such as data cleaning and semantic type detection.
Finally, we propose a Generate-and-Retrieve with Reasoning (GTR) framework for recommender systems, inspired by generative large language models. Entity recommendation is usually the last step in a data driven application pipeline. Our proposed framework views recommendation tasks as a process of instruction following by generative large language models, employing natural language instructions to express and decipher user preferences and intentions. GTR innovates by directly generating item names, employing state-of-the-art retrieval models for item alignment, and enhancing model performance through reasoning distillation.
Through rigorous experimentation on diverse real-world datasets, we validate the effectiveness of these approaches, setting new benchmarks in their respective domains. The findings of this dissertation not only advance the state of the art in crucial steps of industrial application pipelines including entity blocking, entity matching, and entity recommendation systems, but also open promising avenues for the application of deep learning and large language models in complex data integration and recommendation tasks, fostering improved accuracy, efficiency, and user interaction.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
"Socialist stronghold": the Socialist party, labor, and the making of U.S. politics from the gilded age to the New deal, 1890-1947
No full textOrganized socialists, from the Gilded Age and up until the New Deal, played pivotal roles in shaping American Political Development. At the core of the industrial economy—Pennsylvania—the Socialist Party (SP) drove nearly four decades of mass politics. There, SP organizers and elected officials were savvier about building power in the context of U.S. federalism than most scholars of U.S. labor and the state have recognized. This dissertation demonstrates how they contested and shaped key processes of political development by wielding local and state level institutions of authority, through electoral, labor, and mass movement organizing. Further, it opens a new view onto the forces that limited the SP’s durability, especially during the 1930s when the New Deal transformed U.S. statecraft and absorbed much of the previously independent political structures that party organizers and members had spent decades building.
Drawing on a wide range of sources, from traditional archives to oral histories to corporate espionage, this dissertation weaves together a fresh account of class formation situated in and sometimes against processes of statebuilding. It traces the arc of labor radicals’ shifts from the Gilded Age to the New Deal Era as organized socialists confronted structural changes in industrial production and new dynamics of gender, ethnicity, and race.
The dissertation opens with a social history of Reading, the key site for SP power in Pennsylvania. Chapter two demonstrates how Reading’s SP organizers, in particular James Maurer, led a dramatic statewide fight to unite a multi-ethnic working-class force around a call to abolish the country’s first State Police agency, which was infamous for brutal strikebreaking. This early abolition effort lost by a small margin, but it transformed the Progressive Era labor movement in ways that scholars of labor and policing have yet to appreciate. Abolitionist mobilizing galvanized a diverse array of working-class men and women into an anti-State Police coalition, which succeeded in flipping the Pennsylvania Federation of Labor (PFL) and transforming it into an engine of social reform.
Chapter three uncovers the PFL’s major victories, which anticipated and experimented with social policies that would come to define the New Deal’s social democratic impulse, including the first major state-level old age pension law—later, a model for Social Security. Chapter four explores the continuities of socialists’ anti-police politics with broader currents of anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, and labor radicalism from the mid-1910s through the strike wave of 1919-20 and the 1920s development of the workers’ education movement that followed World War I.
As chapters five and six show, in the interwar years, often thought of as a time of retreat, the SP worked closely with women hosiery workers to lay the groundwork for a major Depression-era revival of SP electoral prospects and working-class power. In the course of a major, and almost entirely unstudied, 1933 hosiery strike, SP organizers established the first secret-ballot union representation election in the U.S., setting the national precedent for collective bargaining under the New Deal. Chapter seven shows how, even as SP leaders swept municipal elections in the mid-1930s, the New Deal Democratic Party narrowed the SP’s room for maneuver as municipal SP officials found themselves yoked to the Democratic national administration. Despite setting the table for the New Deal, the SP’s distinctive political community unraveled as national statebuilding and Democratic competitors ultimately subsumed its municipal-level power.
Socialist Stronghold reveals how calls for social transformation and demands for change—from combating police violence to building welfare programs, to resisting war, to fighting for workers’ rights, to socialist governance at the local and state level—shaped U.S. politics in ways that reverberate up to the present. It is not only a history of a single organization but a window onto the larger relationship between working-class radicalism and political change in U.S. history.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Twisting femininity. Women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union, 1917-1991
No full textThis dissertation explores the history of women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union. Situated at the intersection of gender history and the histories of Soviet sports and the international Cold War, the dissertation shows the crucial role gymnastics held for evolving Soviet conceptions of womanhood both domestically and on the global stage. Women’s gymnastics was promoted in the early phase of Soviet rule as a mass movement, for collectivizing and emancipating aims. Mass displays of male and female gymnasts from all union republics parading in lockstep on Moscow’s Red Square served the goal of showcasing Soviet society’s unity and readiness for a coming war. Communist sports activists undertook particular efforts to implement the gymnastic movement in the Eastern and Southern peripheries of the Soviet state, part of their larger campaign to promote female emancipation and fight cultural “backwardness”. The catastrophic human losses of World War II engendered a conservative turn in Soviet gender politics, leading to the forming of a gender-specific, distinctly “women’s” gymnastic movement. Agility, grace, and external beauty became central concerns in the performance and assessment of a sport dominated by high-level male experts. Women’s gymnastics in the Soviet Union was strongly affected by the USSR’s entry into the international sports arena in the late 1940s. As international sports contests became part and parcel of the cultural Cold War, Soviet sports officials began to focus on small groups of elite gymnasts who would win medals to showcase the supremacy of the Soviet system. The desire to form the strongest gymnastic nation in the world often conflicted with ideas about Soviet womanhood which state officials simultaneously promoted for both domestic and international audiences.
The 1970s were a golden age of Soviet women’s gymnastics. Athletes like Olga Korbut and Nelli Kim performed stunning technical feats while exuding feminine grace and became global celebrities. Their trips abroad were central for Soviet cultural diplomacy and the politics of Détente. Soviet women’s gymnastics turned into a global brand, prompting athletes and state leaders from many other nations to emulate the Soviet model.
Soviet women’s gymnastics almost immediately lost its brand status with Korbut’s and Kim’s retirement from the athletic stage. During Perestroika, the discipline became a target of media criticism. Reports featured young female athletes who were literally and figuratively mutilated by their coaches. These girls turned into emblems of the inhumanity of the Soviet order as a whole. Over the course of Soviet history, the gymnastic discipline thus evolved from a symbol of women’s liberation to one of women’s subjugation.
The dissertation contributes to existing histories of Soviet womanhood. It presents the process of Soviet, initially progressive, gender policies’ ossification not as a straightforward regression, but as a zigzag path filled with paradoxes and contradictions. The dissertation also complicates existing narratives about Soviet sports as a top-down process as it shows how coaches and sports experts exercised their own agency and were able to influence the course of women’s gymnastics. The dissertation challenges prevailing views of the cultural Cold War, according to which it was always the West that influenced the East, and not vice versa.
The dissertation rests on a variegated source basis which includes archival documents from post-Soviet states, publications in sports newspapers and magazines, both local and central, visual coverage of gymnastic competitions, and oral history interviews with former Soviet athletes and coaches.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Simulating a frustrated Ising system using a programmable quantum computer
No full textQuantum spin systems that exhibit geometric frustration have highly degenerate ground states that can be lifted in the presence of thermal and quantum fluctuations. A well- known example of this is the antiferromagnetic Ising model on the Kagome lattice. This differs from the same model on the triangular lattice, in that the triangular lattice orders at zero temperature under a small transverse field, whereas the Kagome lattice does not. In this work, we simulate this model on a D-Wave quantum computer. We first embed this model on the D-Wave Advantage2 Prototype, whose qubits are arranged according to the Zephyr graph; our embedding of the Kagome lattice consists of 231 sites and periodic boundary conditions in one direction. We then use calibration techniques to further improve the embedding. Preliminary forward annealing experiments show a 1/3 average magnetization plateau, which is characteristic of a spin ice. We then use an anneal-pause quench annealing schedule in order to sample the ensemble of states of the model in the presence of finite transverse field. Our results from this experiment show a departure from the spin ice state under finite transverse field.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference
An integrated lunar breccia clast classification scheme
No full textBreccias are the most common rock type found on the lunar surface, and make up the majority (~95%) of known lunar meteorite samples (Korotev & Irving, 2021). Breccias are a complex assemblage of lithified aggregates of clastic debris and melt that formed via impacts on the lunar surface (including impact gardening), a process that causes the mixing, melting, and sintering of material from the upper lunar crust and regolith into heterogeneous rock (Arai et al., 2008; Heiken et al., 1991). A clast’s lithology and chemical composition provide direct constraints on the petrogenesis of the rock fragment. The lack of a unified classification scheme for clasts within lunar breccias, however, makes the comparison of clast lithologies between different breccias challenging. An internally consistent classification scheme would allow observations of new samples to be directly comparable. This would lead to more uniform comparisons between clasts, their components, and allow stronger interpretations of their petrogenesis and direct comparisons of the geologic settings that these breccias record. The goal of this study is to develop such a scheme for clasts within lunar breccias for the broader community. Such comparisons can already be made, but with an internally consistent classification of clasts, the comparisons would be more robust, and results would be comparable between different researchers. The proposed classification scheme presented here was built by integrating and streamlining published lunar rock classification schemes into a single scheme that is specialized for identifying clasts within lunar breccias. This classification scheme was verified by applying it to three lunar breccia meteorite samples.M.S.Includes bibliographical reference