The dominant narrative of Asian Americans in higher education is one of high achievement, success, and wellness. Dominant voices of white supremacy have primarily constructed this narrative. Asian Americans are regarded as the model minority or the dichotomous “model” while simultaneously maintaining “minority” status. This study centers on seven Asian...
RNAs play important roles in multiple cellular processes, and many of their functions rely on folding to specific structures. To maintain their functions, secondary structures of RNA homologs are conserved across evolution. These conserved structures provide critical targets for diagnostics and therapeutics. Thus, there is a need for developing fast...
Fingered robot hands are complicated systems made of three essential system components: its morphology, its actuation, and its software control. These system components are tightly coupled to each other. Due to this, it is hard to benchmark robot hand performance in a way to understand the contributions of the individual...
Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of...
Most of the concrete in the world is produced using hydraulic cement (ordinary portland cement, OPC) and siliceous or alumino-siliceous supplementary cementitious materials (SCM). Due to the shift in focus toward environmental sustainability within the construction industry, alkali-activated cementitious systems (AAC) have gained significant attention to reduce the carbon footprint...
Learning latent space representations of high-dimensional world states has been at the core of recent rapid growth in reinforcement learning(RL). At the same time, RL algo- rithms have suffered from ignored uncertainties in the predicted estimates of model-free or model-based methods. In our work, we investigate both of these aspects...
Hydrogen is of great interest as a fuel, as its oxidation produces benign water (without CO₂ emissions), its gaseous form can be transported in existing pipe infrastructure, and it can be obtained via renewable electricity from water. However, current hydrogen production is mainly produced from fossil fuels (e.g. methane), exacerbating...
This dissertation presents novel, field-activated smart material systems for the actuation and control of autonomous robots. Smart materials, a type of material whose properties can be changed with an external stimuli, represent a promising direction to expand upon existing robotic control and actuation methods, particularly in the sub-fields of soft...