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 antimicrobial effects of copper have been well established and may prove to be an effective means of reducing nosocomial or hospital-acquired infections. However, discussions surrounding the antimicrobial properties of copper-containing surfaces rarely address the effect of such materials on…

Conflicting reports have emerged as to whether entry of alpha-herpesvirus particles occurs by receptor-mediated membrane fusion or pH-dependent endocytosis, and whether the method of entry differs by cell type. At the other end of the virus replication cycle, it is…

Over the past several decades, abundant research has investigated the onset of gender role development in early childhood, suggesting that children as young as 3 possess substantial awareness of gender stereotypes and, by age 5, strong beliefs about the need…

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies,…

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…

The objective of this thesis project is to build a robot that can clearly demonstrate its
potential to solve standard jigsaw puzzles. This robot must be capable of picking up
and reorienting puzzle pieces to the precision required for completing…

Visual recognition remains one of the grand goals of artificial intelligence research. One major challenge is endowing machines with human ability to recognize tens of thousands of categories. Moving beyond previous work that is mostly focused on hundreds of categories,…

In this dissertation I examine the conceptions of opinion (<italic>doxa</italic>}), knowledge (<italic>gnosis</italic>), and understanding (<italic>episteme</italic>) that are presented by the character Socrates in Plato's <italic>Meno</italic> and <italic>Republic</italic>. A central claim I make, and one that sets my interpretation apart from…

With the advancement of technology, we are able to collect, store, and transmit an ever-increasing volume of data. However, our ability to extract useful patterns from this massive amount of data is still lagging behind. Machine learning and signal processing…