Dissertation or Thesis Defense

Silicon's advanced fabrication processes have enabled the miniaturization of complex electronic systems, enhancing performance and efficiency. Recent technological developments have further expanded silicon's utility to integrate photonic systems, merging electronic and photonic technologies on a single chip. This integration has opened new avenues for high-speed communication and computation, attracting significant interest from both research and […]

Given the widespread use of deep learning models in safety-critical applications, ensuring that the decisions of such models are robust against adversarial exploitation is of fundamental importance.  In this thesis, we discuss recent progress toward designing algorithms that exhibit desirable robustness properties.  First, we discuss the problem of adversarial examples in computer vision, for which […]

Photoluminescent point defects, or color centers, in wide-bandgap semiconductors are important platforms for quantum information science because they can be operated as solid-state quantum spin-light interfaces. Implementing so-called defect qubits in an expanded variety of materials systems is beneficial for applications, since the host-defect material properties determine operating parameters such as emission wavelength, spin coherence […]

Robotic mission planning in uncertain environments remains a formidable challenge due to environmental complexity and sensor noise. This dissertation introduces new methodologies to tackle these issues. We develop a method for Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) planning, extending it to completely unknown environments to enable dynamic understanding and task fulfillment. Large language models (LLMs) are also […]