Nicole Mizrahi
The Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) mass extinction (~66 million years ago) is hypothesized to have been caused by environmental effects of the Chicxulub asteroid impact and/or Deccan Traps flood volcanism in India. Both potentially caused major climatic change through increased sulfate aerosol production, which would have caused significant global cooling and/or acid rain. Sulfur released by each of these events has a distinguishable isotopic composition. To characterize changes to the sulfur cycle across the K-Pg boundary and investigate the role each catastrophic event played in the extinction, I will measure sulfur abundance […]
Hunter Martin
One of the principal probes of cosmology is weak gravitational lensing whereby gravitational effects of mass bend the path of light. This causes small but correlated distortions in the images of distant galaxies which we can measure and then use to study the distribution of matter over cosmological distances and time scales. However, one of the fundamental assumptions of this method is that galaxy shapes (which we can model as ellipses) are randomly oriented in the universe, and that these distortions serve to align them. But what happens when the […]
Joshua Lin
Over the summer, we propose to investigate the root multiplicities of (generalized) Kac-Moody Algebras. Our plan is to create an open-source computer package that allows for the computation of root multiplicities of Kac-Moody algebras, building upon the existing tools available to computational mathematicians, for instance, the popular library sage-math. Once we have developed and verified this package against known tables of root multiplicities, we aim to start investigating the root multiplicities of simple graphs, and attempt to address some outstanding conjectures on the distributions of root multiplicities. A greater understanding […]
Chris Randall
Over the summer, we propose to investigate the root multiplicities of (generalized) Kac-Moody Algebras. Our plan is to create an open-source computer package that allows for the computation of root multiplicities of Kac-Moody algebras, building upon the existing tools available to computational mathematicians, for instance, the popular library sage-math. Once we have developed and verified this package against known tables of root multiplicities, we aim to start investigating the root multiplicities of simple graphs, and attempt to address some outstanding conjectures on the distributions of root multiplicities. A greater understanding […]
Zitong Yang
The explosively growing size of data in cyberspace with low-value density creates a pressing need for data processing, information extracting, and knowledge refinement. Many applications thus appear, such as personalized recommendation and pinpointing advertisement, by exploring hidden value behind massive amounts of data. More concretely, my project considers the problem of learning a complete (orthogonal) dictionary from sparsely generated sample signals. Unlike conventional methods that minimize one norm to exploit sparsity and learn the dictionary one column at a time, we propose an alternative sparse promoting operator to learn the […]
Shreya Kareti
My project focuses on the French colonial presence in South Asia, focusing on the coastal town of Pondicherry, which was established as a French trading post (factory) in 1674 and relinquished to the Indian government only in 1954. Studies on French India are notably sparse in comparison with the significant scholarly attention that has been paid to British India and to French colonial holdings elsewhere. Because of this, I aim to complicate the narrative of a monolithic colonialism in India. I contend that the architecture and urban form of a […]
Palveen Sekhon
One crucial topic in ecology is understanding how animals respond to environmental pressures. My research aims to study the behavioral ecology of animal defenses in an evolutionary biology framework. Specifically, this project focuses on voluntary release of legs by arachnids. Although beneficial in the short term, this behavior can carry important negative consequences in the locomotion, physiology, and behavior of animals. Daddy long-legs are ideal for this research because of their unique morphology and behavior. Their accessibility also offers the possibility of performing extensive fieldwork and laboratory experiments in the […]
Seth Zhao
Privacy is one of the central issues of our time. All things being equal, we assume that most people prefer privacy; it is a foundational right enshrined in the penumbras of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 9th, and 14th amendments of the U.S. constitution as well as in several state constitutions (including those of California, Massachusetts, and Washington) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite our appreciation of privacy, police officers wear body cameras, customer loyalty programs track purchases, and the Transportation Safety Administration performs full body scans. This […]
Juan Flores
My project seeks to address how gang policing perpetuates divisions in fragmented communities, while jointly producing and reproducing criminality through the labeling of individuals as gang members. Gang policing claims to respond to conflict and rivalries between gangs, but how does this policing itself produce and perpetuate these divisions within the community? My argument will build on other scholarship but fill in the gap of how law enforcement, specifically gang police, continues to divide communities and their members. That there is no official definition of what it is to be […]
Noah Stevenson
Theoretical and experimental evidence suggests harnessing quantum mechanics to execute algorithms on qubit-based quantum hardware may allow for computation exponentially more powerful than is possible with classical computers. Characterizing how qubit states evolve in time is imperative for benchmarking quantum hardware; however, this has been difficult due to the inability to fully measure a quantum state without disrupting it. A solution is weak measurement, which recent work has improved for a single qubit by leveraging the data-processing power of a recurrent neural network (RNN). The time-evolution of qubits exchanging information […]