Wearable-based human activity recognition is well-studied in the machine learning and pervasive computing community. A large corpus of studies focused on using wearable sensors to recognize health-related behaviors that involve high periodicity in the sensed signal, such as sitting, walking, and running. Other activities that occur less frequently throughout the...
In the face of a changing climate caused by anthropomorphic release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, major governments have committed to the reduction of CO2 and other emissions over time, requiring increased reliance on forms of carbon-free renewable energy. The inherent intermittency of renewable electricity sources creates a...
Heat shock factor 1 (HSF1) is well known for its role in the heat shock response (HSR), where it drives a transcriptional program comprising heat shock protein (HSP) genes, and in tumorigenesis, where it drives a program comprising HSPs and many noncanonical target genes that support malignancy. Here, we find...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Ashley Wong) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Oil paintings are complex works of art, even on the molecular level. Drying oils cure into a solid film through autoxidation and polymerization reactions and then degrade, leading to changes in material properties and film stability. This chemistry can be captured in a computational model and used by researchers in...
Asymmetric relationships between creators and consumers in peer-produced knowledge repositories produce inequitable knowledge representation--or knowledge gaps. These gaps result in unequal access to information, and downstream technologies that leverage peer-produced data perpetuate these inequities. Effective knowledge gap identification represents a necessary first step towards equitable knowledge representation. However, while prior...
Urban Air Taxi (UAT) is the use case of passenger-carrying Urban Air Mobility (UAM) at its mature state, and it offers a ubiquitous on-demand (or nearly on-demand) per-seat service that moves passengers in urban or suburban areas using groundbreaking aircraft. However, the absence of a dominant electric vertical take-off and...
The goal of this thesis is to develop an experimental setup to evaluate and analyze the effect of crack-parallel stress on the fracture response of materials. In standard fracture test configurations, the crack-parallel normal stress is negligible. However, a new type of experiment, briefly named the gap test, revealed that...
Chapter 1. Undergraduate Gender Diversity and Direction of Scientific Research (with Francesca Truffa) Can diversity lead to greater research focus on populations underrepresented in science? Diverse researchers can bring new questions and perspectives, but exposure to diversity may also inspire scientists, regardless of demographic identity, to pursue new topics. This...
Rocky exoplanets are indicated to be common in the galaxy. Future instruments including the {\it James Webb Space Telescope} (JWST), high resolution ground-based spectrographs, and direct imaging missions for under consideration by the 2020 Decadal Survey on Astronomy and Astrophysics are poised to unlock the atmospheres of habitable zone planets...