Please join us for an Archaeology/Biological Anthropology Lunch Talk on May 13th at noon in SocSci1, Rm 261. Visiting PhD scholar Letícia Soto da Costa will present “Between Forest and City: Stable Isotope Evidence for Anthropogenic Impacts on the Dietary Ecology of the Vulnerable Wied’s Marmosets in Brazil.”
Artificial intelligence is moving beyond passive perception toward systems that can understand, interact with, and generate the world. This dissertation studies generalist embodied world models that connect language, vision, action, and 3D scene representations. It explores how multimodal systems can ground human instructions in physical environments, reason over long-horizon tasks, generate coherent text-and-visual content, and […]
Research on fault-tolerance protocols for approximate Byzantine agreement (ABA) has largely focused on ensuring that distributed processes remain consistent despite fewer than 1/3 faulty processes. Yet in many real systems, […]
Pattern counting is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many domains. For a fixed small pattern H, we are given a large graph G and we are asked to count the number of subgraphs or homomorphisms (edge-preserving maps) of H in G. For practical applications where the input graph can be very […]
Sequencing technologies have revolutionized our understanding of biology, yet many existing methods require fragmentation of DNA or RNA, fundamentally limiting our ability to study these molecules in their native, intact […]
Religion has historically been a profound force for global mobilization, shaping geopolitics, economies, and geography. Similarly, contemporary interactive media, with video games at the forefront, has moved beyond mere entertainment […]
Centromeric DNA is critical for accurate chromosome segregation and genome stability, but due to its repetitive nature, it was only recently fully included in a human reference. Rapid evolution and […]
Health and wellness content creators play an important role in shaping how people receive and engage with health information on social media. Beyond delivering information, they also convey care, build […]
Every year, tens of thousands of tons of plaster-based materials are used in restoration and conservation applications, many of which are derived from non-renewable sources and discarded at the end […]
This work addresses improvements in branch prediction mechanism to support high perfor- mance processors. The state of the art aims to balance the prediction latency and prediction accuracy using multi level correcting predictors . Prior published work focusses on scalar designs and prediction accuracy improvement for hard to predict branches employing tailor made, non generic […]
Autonomous Cyber Operations (ACO) agents promise effective security automation with minimal human intervention, yet their deployment raises three interconnected challenges: agents must be realistic (reproducing diverse attacker sophistication), secure (preventing autonomy from becoming an attack surface), and feasible (safely replicating human behavior at full autonomy). We argue that these three properties are requirements for ACO […]
Workplace concern reporting infrastructure, including human resources (HR) portals, grievance procedures, and whistleblower hotlines, is the formal channel through which employees in most organizations raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. Yet existing research consistently finds that these systems fail the employees they are meant to protect: reports stall, concerns get filtered, retaliation occurs, and […]
Play is often seen as a form of entertainment, leisure, or childhood development. However, it also acts as a meaningful experience that shapes how people connect with others and interact […]
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are rapidly becoming general-purpose AI systems, yet their capabilities are advancing faster than our ability to evaluate, improve, and validate their reliability in realistic use. […]
Modern system software increasingly needs runtime extensibility: userspace applications need safe ways to expose domain-specific extension points, GPU resource management needs workload-specific memory and scheduling policies, and kernel eBPF JIT […]
Modern datacenter CPUs lose 25–66% of execution cycles to instruction-delivery stalls. This bottleneck persists, despite the recent trend towards accelerators and GPUs, as there is continuing demand by applications that only execute on CPUs. Two workload classes dominate today’s datacenter execution cycles: hyperscale server software (databases, build systems, and content stores), whose large instruction footprints […]
Autonomous systems, such as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and drones, are increasingly deployed across a wider array of contexts for both civilian and military use. As these systems become more common, […]
A central goal on the path toward general AI is to build systems capable of deliberative reasoning before action. Such systems should inspect what they know, identify what they need, seek or construct useful information, and revise their reasoning through intermediate cognitive states. This dissertation studies this goal through the lens of Inner Monologue (IM), […]
This dissertation investigates how to make modern AI systems safer as they grow more capable. It addresses two central sources of risk: malicious misuse, in which adversarial users coerce models into harmful behavior, and internal misalignment, in which models themselves pursue goals that diverge from human intent through deception, sandbagging, or other covert behaviors. The […]
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is the workhorse measurement behind lithium-ion battery diagnostics, biosensing, and corrosion science — yet no integrated circuit has ever delivered the complete capability of a benchtop analyzer on a single die. This dissertation presents ISoC, the first universal Impedance Spectroscopy instrument-on-chip. Designed in SkyWater 130 nm CMOS process, ISoC supports all […]