Because of their potential to assist and entertain children, social robots are increasingly being developed and studied as companions for children in education, therapy, entertainment, healthcare, and more. In most of these domains, a single interaction between a robot and a child is insufficient to achieve the desired goal (e.g., to increase learning gains or promote behavior change). Therefore, researchers in the field are faced with the challenge of developing robust and autonomous robots capable of interacting with children over weeks, months, or even years.

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Cities are rising at a fast pace. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has seen this with Dubai, and shortly after, Masdar City.

In the meantime, millions of refugees are being displaced within cities throughout the UK, Europe, Middle East, and beyond, with nowhere to live and no infrastructure to support basic daily needs.

How do we rebuild and redesign an ancient city like Damascus, while maintaining and honoring its history?

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A major hurdle to understanding how neural activity leads to behavior is determining which spikes originated from which neurons, a problem known to electrophysiologists as spike sorting. This problem becomes easier when sensors of neural spikes are small and more numerous than neurons in their recordable volume. This fact motivated the recent design of “ultra-dense” multi-electrode arrays (MEA) with many close-packed sensors (e.g. 10um x 10um recording sites spaced 1.5um apart with 256 to a shank).

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The Scratch community keeps growing and growing. Young people around the world have shared more than 14 million projects in the Scratch online community—with 20,000 new projects every day.

But what excites us most is not the number of projects but the diversity of projects. Take a look at the Scratch website, and you’ll find an incredible variety of projects: musical animations, virtual tours, science simulations, interactive tutorials, and much more.

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Data is a powerful lens for learning about the world. Driven by advances in computational technologies and methods that make it easier to collect, store, and analyze vast amounts of data about our world, data science has emerged as a new discipline with immense possibilities for discovery and learning. However, these possibilities are primarily accessible for adult experts -- in this thesis, Dasgupta develops and examines new pathways to support children as data scientists.

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In order to map the dynamics of neural circuits in mammalian brains, we need tools that can record activity over large volumes of tissue and correctly attribute the recorded signals to the individual neurons that generated them. High-resolution neural activity maps will be critical for the discovery of new principles of neural coding and neural computation, and to test computational models of neural circuits.

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Rapid prototyping has been in the limelight for the past decade. 3D printers have an evocative name that promises production of complex parts on demand. However, current practice doesn't quite deliver on these promises of advanced manufacturing.

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The experience of wonder imbues the ordinary world around us with a magical sense of possibility that was not there before. When technology is seamlessly integrated into the commonplace, it can evoke a sense of wonder.

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