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Where the Soul Belongs: The Search for a Meaningful Life Through Han Funerary Art — With a Focus on the Mawangdui T-Shaped Painting and Jinqueshan Han Tomb Silk Painting
No full textPerceptions of life and death are deeply embedded in the artistic expressions of a society, shaped by its cultural, philosophical and social environment. This study explores how funerary paintings from the early Han dynasty - the Mawangdui T-shaped painting and the Jinqueshan Han tomb silk painting - reflect evolving views of life and the afterlife under changing social conditions. While both paintings derive from the funerary traditions of Chu culture and Daoist beliefs in immortality, their differences highlight a significant shift: the Mawangdui T-Shaped Painting emphasizes ascent to the heavenly world through nature worship and ancestral connections, while the Jinqueshan Painting focuses on the continuation of earthly pleasures, in line with Confucian ideals of social order and personal fulfillment. By analyzing these changes in artistic representation, this study reveals how Han dynasty society moved from collective, mythical conceptions of the afterlife to a more individual-centered perspective influenced by Confucianism. This shift reflects broader societal changes - from valuing ancestral heritage to recognizing individual lives as meaningful in the present world. Building on this historical study, the findings also inform the accompanying visual thesis, which draws inspiration from Han funerary paintings to reimagine the search for meaning in life. Through a contemporary artistic approach, the project explores how ancient beliefs about the afterlife can still inspire reflections on personal fulfillment and self-identity today
Enhancing security and healthcare through continuous monitoring on wearable devices
No full textWearable and mobile devices are becoming deeply embedded in daily life, supporting a growing range of tasks - from communication and entertainment to health monitoring and productivity. As people increasingly rely on these devices, it is essential to ensure both the protection of the sensitive data they store and the ability to derive meaningful insights that enhance users’ well-being. This dissertation investigates how wearable and mobile devices can be leveraged to provide robust and user-friendly solutions through continuous monitoring across two critical domains: security and mental health. The foundation of this dissertation is the development of a security infrastructure, as safeguarding personal and sensitive data is essential for building user trust. Behavioral biometrics are explored as authentication mechanisms for wearable devices due to their unobtrusive nature and ease of collection on these devices, compared to traditional passwords or physiological biometrics. This work defines the swing phase, an interpretable structure in gait cycles derived from accelerometer signals, and proposes a lightweight user authentication model based on features extracted from this structure. It then extends to behavioral biometric-based continuous authentication, which offers ongoing and unobtrusive protection. As single-modality systems often suffer from limited accuracy and vulnerability to adversarial attacks and real-world disturbances, this dissertation introduces SSPRA, a robust multimodal continuous authentication framework. SSPRA models the authentication process as a Markov process and employs a two-level fusion strategy combined with two temporally modeled state transition machines to integrate multiple behavioral biometrics. It demonstrates not only high adversarial attack detection accuracy but also consistent reliability across four simulated real-world scenarios, effectively addressing key challenges such as adversarial attacks, modality dropout, and data interruptions. Building on this security foundation, the dissertation then explores how wearable devices can improve healthcare. As public awareness of mental health’s impact on overall well-being continues to grow, wearable mental health monitoring has become one of the most widely adopted features in daily life. The dissertation first introduces WearStreM, a multimodal stress monitoring framework that adapts SSPRA’s two-level fusion strategy and incorporates a novel multi-state transition mechanism to detect and track episodic stress in real time. A new set of temporal evaluation metrics is also proposed to assess both detection accuracy and responsiveness, supporting more comprehensive and realistic evaluation for practical deployment. Experimental results from both lab-controlled and real-world driving settings validate the model’s ability to detect entire stress episodes and promptly respond to stress changes. To complement stress monitoring and provide a broader perspective on mental health detection and management, the dissertation also explores the recognition of negative emotional states. It presents DSTER, the first transformer-based emotion recognition model using keystroke dynamics. DSTER employs a dual-stream architecture to achieve robust detection of negative emotions and demonstrates strong generalizability across five emotional states and diverse user populations. This approach offers a non-intrusive and privacy-preserving solution to support mental health monitoring and enhance human-computer interaction. By advancing both security and mental health monitoring through continuous, practical, and unobtrusive systems, this dissertation demonstrates the potential of wearable and mobile devices not merely as passive tools, but as intelligent, supportive technologies that promote a more secure, health-aware, and connected way of living
Anhydrous Ammonia as a Hydrogen Carrier Fuel for Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
No full textIn the years since humans realized that our actions could have profoundly harsh effects on the environment, we have been searching for ways to minimize our impacts, while also maintaining the same standard of living. One of the actions with such effects is power generation using fossil fuels, which has long been the largest source of energy. While efforts should be made to improve the efficiency of these power generation plants, we should also work to identify alternative opportunities for power generation without the use of fossil fuels. Some of these opportunities include hydroelectric, photovoltaic, wind, nuclear, and the combustion of alternative fuels. The last of these options, combustion of alternative fuels, is where this work will be focused. The alternative fuel which has caught the most attention is undoubtedly hydrogen gas. This is largely due to its high gravimetric energy density, making it a comparable alternative to fossil fuels. However, hydrogen has a much lower volumetric energy density, and has issues with transportation, synthesis, and storage. The use of ammonia as a hydrogen carrier has the potential to overcome some of the issues with hydrogen, while also helping to decarbonize our power generation grid. The work discussed here will look at ammonia as a fuel for use in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC). The use of SOFCs in place of standard combustion processes is highly beneficial due to the absence of moving parts in the combustion reaction. They are purely electrochemical devices and can operate at lower temperatures. Ammonia has been explored by some groups as a fuel for SOFCs, but has yielded relatively low power generation. The work presented here improves upon the previous works through the use of alternative SOFC constructions, evaluate the exhaust generated, and determine the optimal conditions for power generation
On Uses for and Constructions of Differential Graded Algebras
No full textThis thesis is comprised of two projects (in reverse chronological order) with the unifying theme of differential graded (dg) algebras. The first is a collaborative effort with Hugh Geller and Desiree Martin, in which we completely classify the trees and cycles whose edge ideals are minimally resolved by dg algebras. To do this, we pull from discrete Morse theory and homological algebra to give descriptions of the dg algebra structures at play. We also use a pruning technique due to Boocher to give a combinatorial obstruction to the existence of dg algebra structure on minimal free resolutions of edge ideals of graphs containing certain forbidden induced subgraphs. The second project is an individual work, where I use dg algebra structure to construct the minimal free resolution of the module of derivations \Der_{R \mid \Bbbk} on an determinantal ring . I follow a method of Iyengar, which requires the construction of explicit dg algebra and dg module structures. The result of this construction is a relative bar resolution, and the structures and maps involved show that this resolution is minimal, i.e., \Der_{R \mid \Bbbk} is a Golod -module
DAOIST CULTURE IN WUDANG SHAN: ENCHANTED HERITAGE, NEO-TRADITIONALISM, AND SECULAR SPIRITUALITY
No full textThis dissertation is a study of communities engaged with traditional Daoist culture (chuantong daojia wenhua 传统道家文化) in Wudang shan, Hubei, PRC. It seeks to explain the convergence of domestic and global populations for engagements with the Daoist environments, institutions, practices, and social communities on and around the famous Daoist mountain in a burgeoning marketplace of Daoist cultivation. Drawing upon primarily ethnographic data from two years in the area between 2018 and 2021, it examines how Wudang\u27s Daoist culture fits into the context of a broader traditional cultural revival (chuantong wenhua fuxing 传统文化复兴) in China and a global nostalgic orientation that imputes value into the past for the uses of the present moment. Feeling a loss or lack in their lives, middle class and entrepreneurial individuals sought alternatives to their empty, taxing, and inauthentic lives by turning to traditional Daoism as a path back into a lost authenticity, meaning, well-being, and potential spiritual enchantment. The four chapters of this dissertation address different aspects of this nostalgic neo-traditionalism: 1) the presentation of Wudang as an enchanted place giving birth to and born of Daoist traditions; 2) the interactions with and incorporations into lineage as a way of rooting the self in tradition; 3) the articulations of cultivation as a secular spiritual path to authenticity; and 4) the quests after Daoism as a therapeutic alternative culture of slow-paced interpersonal authenticity. In doing so, it examines a neglected part of Daoism’s shifting presence in post-Mao China aimed at a middle class lay public of modern consumers seeking therapeutic health practices and holistic well-being. It also adds to our understanding of Chinese secularism and global spirituality by looking at Daoist cultural institutions offering cultivation as a path to moral, physical, and spiritual growth
