Annie Cheng
Labor poetry in China emerged from the growing exploitation of migrant workers in the post-reform era. Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, a worker-turned-poet has gained attention through her writing of female migrant workers’ gendered experience of the highly mechanized, desexualizing process of industrial production. While her work has received critical attention from feminist and eco-critical angles, it has often been read within a narrow factory setting. This project aims at filling the gap through close-reading Zheng’s work via an ecofeminist synthesis, which relates the oppression of women to that of nature. I […]
Cleo Cottrell
Ground penetrating radar (GPR) and electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) are two geophysical instruments used for minimally invasive survey projects. This research will focus on applying these instruments in an archaeological context, specifically to investigate the detection abilities of GPR and ERT in identifying faunal remains and bone beds in California. While the use of GPR to locate marked and unmarked graves has been documented, there is a lack of literature surrounding ERT use on bone beds and the use of both instruments in detecting faunal remains. To test these capabilities, […]
Jorge Diaz Chao
We are building a novel platform that introduces a new dimension to asynchronous learning—like YouTube did upon launch—by empowering users with no coding experience to democratize their knowledge on tasks involving coordinated motor skills through Augmented Reality (AR) scenarios. Our work involves designing a user interface capable of inferring motor and linguistic cues from demonstrations and explanations, and writing an algorithm that synthesizes probabilistic code, namely Scenic, that models motion primitives to build complex behaviors. To do so, we employ tools such as symbolic learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) […]
Isadora Duskin-Feinberg
Dance historian Marion Kant exclaimed, “Ask any young woman on her way to a [ballet] performance…what most clearly symbolizes ballet and she will probably answer – the skirt and the pointe shoe. She will not quote sentences from the story and may recall only a few names of the characters…Has ballet no message?” The wider public focuses little on the messages of Ballet, such as academic research focusing mostly on the science of ballet. My research focus for this project will be comparing and contrasting the messages/depictions of ballet created […]
Benjamin Eisley
In the past few years, neural networks have gone from obscure to ubiquitous. This technology is shockingly versatile, but conceptually ill-understood: there is a large gap between practice and theory, and much has yet to even be conjectured. For example, scientists are baffled by the overfitting paradox. Overfitting is usually a problem when programmers model a complex system such as the brain. Programmers must base their model on finitely many examples of that system’s behavior. Traditionally, programs that perfectly replicate these examples forget the underlying system. Surprisingly, large neural networks […]
Nir Elber
One goal of arithmetic geometry is to enumerate the points on geometric surfaces with rational coordinates. Over the past century, it has been profitable to study the geometry of the surface directly. For example, a “cohomology theory” is a way to assign a sequence of geometric invariants to the surface; it turns out that one can use cohomology in order to count points. Given a surface, there tend to be many reasonable cohomology theories. This project is interested in the symmetries of a cohomology theory. Given a cohomology theory, it […]
Agamjot Bal
My project focuses on the production of recombinant NS1 of DENV1-4 and ZIKV strains from Nicaragua. These proteins will be used to investigate whether the antibody profile against NS1 is associated with DENV2 infection outcome in samples from the Nicaraguan Pediatric Dengue Cohort Study. Creating NS1 in this way will allow for proper protein folding, capture of the protein during purification, and assistance with coupling to microspheres for the Luminex analysis. This will provide further insights into NS1’s role in dengue infections and possibly open new avenues for in-house protein […]
Josh Barua
The emergence of unique semantic subdivisions of concepts across languages is a natural byproduct of cultural, geographic, and historical factors. One example of concept variation is the choice between “boli” and “pluma” when translating “pen” in Spanish. While both loosely translate to pen, boli typically refers to a ballpoint pen whereas pluma refers to a fountain pen (or even a quill in historical contexts). For non-native speakers, learning these subtle lexical rules that govern which translation to use can prove challenging without expert help. For my research project, we aim […]
Nishita Belur
In patients with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), repeated activation of dopaminergic neurons facilitates associative learning, as patients associate reward-predictive contexts with reward delivery, in this case, drug administration. AUD is difficult to treat because of the possibility of relapse, which can be modeled as reacquisition of a previously extinguished behavior in a reward learning context. Our focus is the “savings effect”, in which some “original memory” is “saved”, making reacquisition much faster than initial acquisition. The dominant model of reward learning, the Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning model, relies on prospective […]
Brynn Brady
The molecular basis of evolutionary change in morphology is not well understood. Although progress has been made linking genes to morphological phenotypes through genetic knockouts, little is known about how genetic variation underlies observed morphological differences between organisms in nature. Recent studies propose that changes in non-coding genomic regions that regulate transcription called enhancers explain most evolved morphological variation. My research will test the hypothesis that changes in an intronic enhancer of a known developmental gene, Bmp6, underlie evolved changes in tooth patterning in fish. I will perform genomic knock-in […]