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...
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...
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...
In the past two decades, the advancement in data collection and storage have led to the accumulation of complex datasets. Consequently, various industries have sought data-driven solutions to predict and detect anomalies. Temporal patterns have emerged as potential features in prediction models that could improve the performance of the identification...
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...
Deep learning is now being utilized widely in applications where sensitive data is being used for model training, for example, in health care. In this scenario, any data leakage will cause privacy concerns to whose data records are used to train the model. An attacker can actively cause privacy leakage...
The focus of this thesis is to design, characterize, and apply novel computational methods and molecular systems to interrogate heterogeneous human gut microbiome-related phenomena. In Chapter 2, I design, implement, and characterize a method for embedding co-occurrence patterns derived from massive 16s amplicon datasets. I use this method to 1....
This thesis focuses on the fundamental behavior of CLT floor-to-wall connections during a fire.
Cross-laminated timber (CLT) panelized structures rely on floor-to-wall connections for the load path and stability of the structure. Additionally, the fire performance of these connections is critical to prevent horizontal or vertical fire spread within these...
Many home users nowadays use various smart devices to improve the efficiency and convenience of their home environments. Trigger-action platforms such as “If-This-Then-That” (IFTTT) enable end users to connect different smart devices and services using simple apps to control these devices and automate the tasks (e.g., if the camera detects...