Metric spaces (X, d) are ubiquitous objects in mathematics and computer science that are able to capture pairwise distance relationships d(x, y) between points x, y ∈ X. Because of this, it is natural to ask what useful generalizations there are of metric spaces for capturing “k-wise distance relationships” d(x1,...
There is a growing need for individualized instructional designs in 4-year institutions due to: 1) growing undergraduate enrollment trends across the U.S., 2) broader diversity in students backgrounds, and 3) the growing prevalence of asynchronous remote learning. With the growth in computer technology in education, tools such as adaptive intelligent...
Autonomous robotic agents are on their way to becoming in-home personal assistants, construction assistants, and warehouse workers. The degree of autonomy of such systems is reflected by the manner in which we specify goals to them; the abstraction of low-level commands to high-level goals goes hand-in-hand with increased autonomy. In...
The utility of high-throughput, computational screening has become an invaluable asset to the field of materials science. In the hierarchy of computational methods, the most accurate methods are often the most computationally expensive. However, as both the efficiency and fidelity of numerical techniques advance, high-quality screening of large materials datasets...
A secret sharing scheme allows a dealer to distribute a secret with a set of parties, such that only a certain subset of parties can collaborate and learn the shared secret. Traditional secret sharing schemes have been used as building blocks in various subdomains of cryptography. Recently, two new extensions...
One of the pervasive problems arising in our modern, digital world surrounds data breaches where an adversary, through zero-day exploitations, phishing, or old-fashioned social engineering attacks, gains access to a service’s data stores. Our society increasingly relies on these cloud-based services for everything from our taxes to personal communication. As...
In this dissertation, I examine emerging economic issues which intersect outdoor recreation, environmental quality, public land use, and public health advisories. First, I explore the potential impacts of social media on visitation to public land. Social media, and in particular Instagram, has been suggested by journalist and land managers as...
This dissertation delves into understanding, characterizing, and addressing dataset shift in deep learning, a pervasive issue for deployed machine learning systems. Integral aspects of the problem are examined: We start with the use of counterfactual explanations in order to characterize the behavior of deep reinforcement learning agents in visual input...
Secure Computation is a powerful tool that enables a set of parties to jointly compute any function over their private inputs, without a trusted third party. Private Set Intersection is a specific case of two-party Secure Computation, where Alice (with private set X) and Bob (with private set Y) specifically...
The Polycomb Repressive Complex 2 (PRC2) catalyzes genome transcription repression through the methylation of lysine residue 27 in the amino terminal region of histone 3 (H3K27me1/2/3) [2], [7]. PRC2 is made up of three highly conserved core subunits: Kmt6, Eed, and Suz12. Accurate distribution of PRC2 is essential for proper...