Upcoming Doctoral Dissertations

"The Arrange–Act–Assert (AAA) pattern is a widely recommended structure for unit tests and is believed to improve readability, maintainability, and debugging efficiency. Despite its popularity across educational, industrial, and open-source communities, several gaps remain. First, there is no large-scale, automated method for reliably identifying AAA structures in real-world test suites. Second, the prevalence, characteristics, and root causes of deviations from the AAA pattern have not been systematically studied in either open-source or industrial contexts." Read more

"Parallelization of code is increasingly important to high performance. One such enabler of parallelization is commutativity. However, code fragments may not always commute. One approach is to use conditional commutativity, where code fragments commute under some precondition called the commutativity condition." Read more

"Applications typically use only a subset of the system calls provided by an operating system. Removing unused system calls - known as system call debloating - reduces the kernel’s attack surface and limits attacker capabilities, thwarting privilege escalation attacks. Recent approaches automate the identification of system calls required by an application and block the rest. Some also enforce phase-specific system call policies, particularly for server applications. However, these methods often require source code access, depend on users to identify phase transitions (e.g., from initialization to serving clients), or fail to account for dynamically loaded libraries." Read more

"Offshore wind farms play a pivotal role in the renewable energy sector, yet the stability of their monopile foundations is challenged by scour and sloping seabed conditions. While most monopile designs assume a flat seabed, real-world installations often occur on submarine slopes where complex soil-structure interactions significantly influence lateral behavior. Scour, caused by sediment erosion around the pile, further reduces lateral capacity and threatens structural integrity. " Read more

"The recent rapid development of AI-driven applications has propelled cloud computing into the spotlight due to its capacity to enable users to utilize the cloud infrastructure from service providers. However, conventional cloud services raise several privacy concerns. One primary concern is that these AI applications necessitate transmitting sensitive user data to the cloud servers for processing, creating risks to data privacy. Moreover, the rise of distributed training paradigms such as federated learning highlights the attacks from malicious training participants." Read more

"Objects perceived in three-dimensional space serve as visual evidence, according to which downstream agents take action in the real world. However, since any vision-system may miss or hallucinate detections, we would like to obtain a measure of perception confidence to determine whether to act or not. For the task of temporal action localization (TAL), the main challenges are high intra-class variability and a large, diverse background class. " Read more

"Ultra-high-performance concrete (UHPC) offers superior strength and durability for marine infrastructure while its widespread adoption is limited by high cement content, reliance on natural sand, and the lack of structural-scale life-cycle data that represent actual service behavior and maintenance needs in marine environments. This dissertation addresses these challenges through three integrated studies. First, cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are investigated as a renewable nanoreinforcement to enhance sustainability and mechanical performance. However, their use is hindered by severe agglomeration in the highly alkaline, multivalent-ion-rich cementitious environment. " Read more

"Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS) is an industrial chemical that has been widely used for decades in products such as stain repellents, firefighting foams, and food packaging. Its chemically inert and highly stable nature prevents it from breaking down efficiently in the environment or in human tissues, leading to significant bioaccumulation. As a result of this persistence, PFOS is widely detected in human serum. Growing evidence links PFOS exposure to health problems such as infertility, pregnancy complications, and certain cancers, but how it affects the reproductive system at the cellular level remains poorly understood." Read more

"There has been a great amount of speculation on how gravity works on a quantum level, but very little experimental input. Recently, we have shown that single gravitons, the expected quantum particle of gravity, can be detected. Here I will summarize how single gravitons can be detected and discuss how this result facilitates the study of gravitational waves and the exploration of quantum gravity, inspired by historical tests probing the quantization of light." Read more

"My project examines cognitive errors—including cognitive biases and logical fallacies—and their impact on decision making in real-world contexts. It aims to map, detect, and mitigate these errors by integrating behavioral science with advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques. The first chapter develops a computational taxonomy of 370 cognitive errors using sentence-transformer embeddings derived from bias descriptions, examples, mitigation notes, and academic abstracts. " Read more