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…

Seasonality is a characteristic and important feature of the birth rate, but hitherto largely undocumented for sub-Saharan Africa. The research we present in Chapter 2 helps close the gap by providing contemporary documentation of the seasonal patterns of births in…

Over the course of the twentieth century, how were real estate developers and architects involved in transforming their own professional practices and the built form of American cities? My dissertation uses historical, architectural, and urban analysis to show how real…

Malaria is the most important parasite species of humans, affecting more than 2.2 billion people, and causing hundreds of millions of clinical cases and around one million deaths every year. Since the 1940s, mass-produced, inexpensive drugs have been available that…

Detecting and characterizing extrasolar planets has become a very relevant field in Astrophysics. There are several methods to achieve this, but by far the most difficult and potentially most rewarding approach is direct imaging of the planets. Coronagraphs can be…

This dissertation sets a detailed, technical history of ideas of Dutch-born lens maker and natural philosopher Nicolas Hartsoeker (1656-1725). Hartsoeker's case exemplifies the kinds of intellectual journeys a university-educated man with technical skills undertook to navigate the chaos and uncertainty…

This dissertation maps the ethnographic and archaeological work of the Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Haan between 1947 and 1967, including van Eyck's writings, editorial work, and encounter with the sub-Saharan Dogon people, and Haan's expeditions and ethnographic…

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…