Human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide (CAMP/LL-37) is a cationic antimicrobial peptide that is widely expressed by myeloid and epithelial cells at the human-environment interface. It possesses broad spectrum antimicrobial capacity against bacteria, fungi and viruses. In addition to its direct antimicrobial activity, CAMP/LL-37 also attracts and recruits monocytes, neutrophils and other...
In this thesis, we introduce a novel Explanation Neural Network (XNN) to explain the predictions made by a deep network. The XNN works by embedding a high-dimensional activation vector of a deep network layer non-linearly into a low-dimensional explanation space while retaining faithfulness i.e., the original deep learning predictions can...
In this thesis, I present the variational database management system, a formal framework and its implementation for representing variation in relational databases and managing variational information needs. A variational database is intended to support any kind of variation in a database. Specific kinds of variation in databases have already been...
Power can be defined as the ability to influence the processes, decisions, and outcomes of an activity in favor of the will of a strong actor and its allies. Strategic actions in situations where there is asymmetric power can change the result of decisions. In this research, I will examine...
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a conceptual framework in cryptography. It allows distrusting parties engage in a protocol to perform a computational task while still maintain some secure properties. Most existing approaches are required to interpret functions as a boolean circuit. With the recent state-of-art circuit garbling scheme, the performance...
This dissertation addresses few-shot object segmentation in images. The goal of segmentation is to label every image pixel with a class of the object occupying that pixel, where the class may represent a semantic object category or instance. In few-shot segmentation, training and test datasets have different classes. Every new...
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in the State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2018, has observed that the trend of the world’s marine fish stocks has been overexploited, depleted, and has exhibited decreasing trend within the fraction of biologically sustainable levels. While these situations are an alarming...
This thesis focuses on the problem of object tracking. Given a video, the general objective of tracking is to track the location over time of one or more targets in the image sequence. This is a very challenging task as algorithms need to deal with problems such as appearance variations,...
Using intersectional, matricentric feminist of color approaches, this study interrogates the particularities of Afghan immigrants' mothering experiences—as one of the hidden facets of their lived experience—in the United States from a life-course perspective. Using a combination of feminist oral historical approaches, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, this thesis explores the...