The dissertation examines aesthetic, scientific and occult evocations of fluids such as air at the turn of the 20th century. Eighteenth century experimental philosophy postulated so-called "imponderable fluids" understood as instances of a subtle matter that fills empty space. The…

The limitations common to linear imaging techniques were formalized succinctly by Ernst Abbe in 1873. In his theory, each Fourier component of a signal propagates independently from the source to the detector, and the corresponding feature can be detected only…

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,…

This dissertation is about family history and the constitution of the social among the Abenaki, an aboriginal people often associated with the Odanak reserve in southern Quebec. It is an ethnography of belonging among a people whose status as aboriginal…

This dissertation, based on roughly eighteen months of fieldwork in two laboratories at Princeton University, examines how practitioners of synthetic biology orient themselves vis-à-vis organic systems, by both engaging with and displacing biological knowledge. It also explores experimental methods in…

Despite the many assumptions that usually surround the importance of science education for scientific practice, scholarship on the history of subject has been scattered and usually undertaken en route to other pursuits. In this research, I aim to bring to…

This dissertation investigates the relation between Mies van der Rohe and cinema. Its purpose is to elucidate, both historically and theoretically, the association between the architect Mies and the pioneers of abstract film Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling during the…

Similarity search systems are designed to help









people to organize multimedia non-text data and find valuable









information. The multimedia data intrinsically has…

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,…

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…