This dissertation focuses on the specific strategies by which authors of the travel writing genre seize narrative agency. Throughout its centuries-long history, the genre of travel writing has offered multiple generations of authors a means by which to convey observations…

International organizations and governments throughout the developing world have long provided agricultural extension services to farmers with the hopes of raising agricultural productivity and reducing rural poverty. These programs train farmers in modern agronomic techniques through instruction and demonstration, sometimes…

The United States is struggling to provide health care in the face of ever increasing demand. As medical students continue their decades long march toward specialization, questions of how to provide generalist care become quickly intertwined with that of who…

In this thesis we develop and test methods for numerically evolving hydrodynamics coupled to the Einstein field equations, and then apply them to several problems in gravitational physics and astrophysics. The hydrodynamics scheme utilizes high-resolution shock-capturing techniques with flux corrections…

Single-particle reconstruction of vitrified samples (cryogenic electron microscopy, or









cryo-EM) provides structural information for a large variety of biological molecules,









ranging from…

Machine learning is the science of discovering knowledge from data and making decisions based on this learnt structure. It has grown into a broad discipline that has established many statistical and computational learning principles. We are surrounded by the applications…

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan forced a revolution in military thinking that brought
stability operations to the forefront while coloring the military as one-part warrior, onepart
reluctant architect of peace. Despite years of experience in stability operations of
this…

The goal of this project was two-fold: first, to improve the performance of machine learning
algorithms for the diagnosis of pediatric tuberculosis, and second, to use machine learning algorithms
to better understand the problem of diagnosis. We constructed and examined…

The aim of this thesis is to develop methods for variable selection and statistical prediction for high dimensional statistical problems. Along with proposing new and innovative procedures, this thesis also focuses on the theoretical properties of the proposed methods and…

This paper discusses the motivation, design, implementation, and evaluation of a
new electronic beat sequencing system called HMM Beats. HMM Beats is inspired
by recent work in machine learning on user drum beat prediction. HMM Beats is
an interactive system…