Lucas Xie
Contemporary Maoism studies reside at a compromising juncture: canonized, depoliticized forms underpinned Chinese academia, and overly cultural-historical scholarships from without, tacitly dismissed Mao’s critical kernel and its normative relevance to our days. Between this in- and out-side, emerges an epistemic gap, a parallax, from which a theoretical vacuum can be excavated, reinvented, creatively recontextualized, namely Mao’s thought as critical speculation, intervention and engagement with philosophy. This project aims at providing a horizon – and inquiring its very conceivability – whereby this gap appears as potential sites of genesis to various […]
Youyou Xu
Human decision processes often succumb to overconfidence: feeling excessively certain.This study aims to bridge psychology and computer science, and uncover the factors that drive overconfidence in both humans and machines. I identify a cohesive set of quantitative heuristics that impact confidence judgments in both humans and machines while also distinguishing factors that apply exclusively to either of them. If successful, the study’s findings might yield insights that help to better calibrate human confidence and improve uncertainty quantification for ensemble and neural network models in computer vision and image processing.
Grayce Yang
Autophagy is a crucial cellular mechanism that maintains homeostasis by forming an organelle known as an autophagosome. This double-membraned structure, originating from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), encapsulates and degrades cellular components, facilitating cellular survival under stress conditions such as organelle dysfunction and protein aggregation. Impairments in this process are associated with neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.This project aims to explore the role of the ATG13/101 subcomplex in initiating autophagy, with a particular focus on its membrane-binding function, which is critical for autophagosome formation.Through detailed analysis, we seek to understand […]
Megan Yao
As the world is awash with a global wave of women’s rights crises, it has become more crucial than ever for us modern-day feminists to retrospect upon our predecessors’ endeavors, among whom are the First Wave Feminists. When studying the First Wave, textual materials are the most integral of any intellectual discussions. However, current research is largely limited to the individual literary works, while the feminist journals – the main medium through which the most active feminists collectively worded their activism – is profusely under-studied. My project seeks to answer […]
Kevin Yao
Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) is one of the most common diseases among American adults. As one of the essential organs to maintain life, deprived renal functions lead to disruptions of homeostasis and fatal failures of the body. The prevalence of CKD is associated closely with the lack of renal regeneration capacity in the adult human body. However, recent study has shown that this inability of regeneration is not innate but an acquired process in mammals like humans. Many newborn mammals are reported to have full renal regeneration capacity while such […]
Roger Yu
Secular chaos has been identified as a factor destabilizing celestial bodies such as Mercury, and the creation of hot Jupiters in extrasolar systems. “Secular” refers to the orbit-averaged motion of a planet – we study the motions of bodies not as point masses, but as interactions between massive elliptical wires. Secular theory dates back to the 18th century, but only in the modern era has it been realized that it can lead to chaos. This project aims to investigate secular chaos within an N-body planetary system. While 2-planet systems have […]
Yuqi Tian
How do we form imaginations of a city? How do we consider technological production through questions of place and space? What does literature tell us about the function of geo-locating methods and virtualities in our everyday life? My project examines Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities through theories in literary cartography, urban geography, and new media and asks how we can imagine urban futures with the incorporation of mobile phones and digital mapping technologies. Calvino’s book provides various ways in which a city and its experience can be, but he also reconsiders […]
Mario Varo
Deportation is a significant concern in areas of the United States with sizable amounts of low-income immigrant communities, such as the San Francisco Bay Area. Masses of detained migrants do not have access to legal representation, which previous studies have linked to lower removal rates. In an effort to address this issue, pro bono legal representation plays a vital role for low-income migrants by providing them with free or reduced-cost legal assistance. While there is substantial literature on Pro Bono initiatives in other metropolitan areas, this research seeks to assess […]
Reyansh Sathishkumar
A major goal of neuroscience is understanding how the anatomical structures of the brain support and affect function, and how these structures have evolved over time and influence cognition. The cerebral cortex is organized into complex folding patterns of sulci (grooves) and gyri (ridges), which can pinpoint functional areas. For many years, researchers have been manually labelling sulci and gyri. However, as more evolutionarily new and variable sulci are defined, there are higher chances of inconsistencies in labelling criteria and labels between labs. Manual labelling of sulci is also tedious […]
Ailani Sato-Lim
Buddhism has occupied the popular imagination in American society since the late 1800s. Yet in the crossover to the West, the discourse on Buddhist thought has been molded to suit modern US audiences, manifesting in a depiction of Buddhism as scientific, rational, and atheistic. Further, many metaphors from Christianity, Western science, and Romanticism were imposed onto English-language interpretations of Buddhist works. My project will use cognitive linguistics to examine the interaction of conceptual metaphors between Buddhist and Western discourse that occurred in the assimilation of Buddhism in the US. How […]