SLO-Aware Power Management for Elastic Cloud Applications

The enormous power consumption of cloud data centers poses severe financial and environmental concerns. Server consolidation, server throttling, and power capping emerge as several of the numerous approaches proposed to manage the power consumption of data centers. While these methods notably increase data center power efficiency by reducing the power consumption of data center servers, they also negatively impact the performance SLOs of hosted applications. Thus, data center operators must grasp and navigate the tradeoffs between power and performance. The motivation behind this thesis is to design techniques for managing power-performance tradeoffs in cloud data centers. To such an end, this thesis investigates the connections between the power usage of cloud data center servers and the performance SLOs of applications hosted on the servers, designs models that capture these connections, and develops controllers aimed at controlling the power usage of data center servers while considering application performance SLO targets. This thesis presents the following three key contributions. First, I design techniques to automate the process of power-performance controller generation for latency-sensitive web applications, ensuring that the generated controllers control power allocation while meeting application performance SLOs and offer improved performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques. I achieve this by designing DDPC, an autonomous data-driven controller generation system for power-performance management. Second, I introduce SLO-Power, a framework for effectively coordinating elastic resource provisioning and power management techniques under performance constraints. SLO-Power shows improvements over the standalone state-of-the-art elastic resource provisioning and power management methods. Finally, I design PADS, a hardware-agnostic power capping technique that integrates horizontal and vertical scaling of CPU resources—termed diagonal scaling—with the power-performance models of applications to keep the total power consumption of servers under power cap while respecting application SLOs. I show that PADS outperforms the state-of-the-art power capping solution in the literature regarding dealing with power cap violations and keeping application performance under control.Republic of Türkiye Ministry of National Education YLSY ProgramDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.

Local Changes in Sleep Following Declarative Learning

Traditionally, sleep has been viewed as a uniform, global state. This idea is contrasted by local sleep, which is characterized by transient periods of brain activity within specific brain regions, or even at the level of individual neurons during sleep. Previous studies have shown increased slow wave activity (SWA) in the parietal cortex during sleep following motor learning, indicating a local increase in sleep depth in response to motor learning. Here we ask a simple question: does this local use-dependent sleep response also occur during non-motor/declarative memory tasks? During one wake and one overnight session, participants completed a word pair learning task, consisting of an encoding phase, followed by immediate and delayed recall sessions. As a control, participants completed an overnight non-learning task, where they passively viewed sham word pairs. There was an increase in SWA following the declarative learning task compared to the control task, particularly in the fronto-central and left temporal regions, suggesting that localized SWA increases occur following non-motor learning. These localized changes in SWA were significantly correlated with memory recall performance when controlling for subjective sleepiness. These findings provide novel evidence for localized sleep responses following declarative memory tasks and suggest that SWA may be region-specific to task demands, though further investigation is needed to understand the relationship between SWA and memory consolidation in non-motor tasks.Master of Science (M.S.)2025-11-1

Module 11

This module contains materials on GIS modeling concepts and practice

THE GLAMOR OF IT

THE GLAMOR OF IT is a collection of poems.Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)2030-05-1

Novel Reagents and Approaches for Portable Sample Preparation and Detection of Foodborne Pathogens

Significant advances have been made in recent years to develop portable endpoint detection methods for foodborne virus detection, particularly in the form of isothermal nucleic acid amplification methods. However, these methods have significant drawbacks; namely, they can only analyze a very small sample volume, and are vulnerable to matrix-associated amplification inhibitors. If these isothermal amplification methods are to be effective in in-field settings, there is a need for equally portable sample preparation methods. The first step in any diagnostic assay is disinfection. Both intact microbes and residual nucleic acid from previous samples can contaminate nucleic acid-based detection assays, leading to false positive results. However, few surface disinfectants have been validated against free nucleic acid. For this reason, we tested the capacity of several commercial surface disinfectants to degrade three types of nucleic acid (viral ssRNA, eukaryotic DNA, PCR product). Only hypochlorite-based disinfectants were effective (dilute chlorine bleach and a commercial hypochlorite-based disinfectant). However, the bleach must be diluted fresh in distilled water before each use for best results, while the commercial disinfectant gave consistent results over several months without the need for extra preparation steps. Therefore, the commercial hypochlorite-based disinfectant would work better as part of a portable microbial detection kit. The next step is sample preparation, specifically target separation and concentration from the sample matrix. For this purpose, we evaluated a class of capture reagents known as magnetic ionic liquids (MILs) which would be ideal for in-field applications as their use requires minimal electrical equipment and no cold-chain storage. The MIL formulations used had already been evaluated for capture of bacterial pathogens from liquid food matrices, but had not yet been tested with non-enveloped viruses. Therefore, we tested a number of parameters impacting MIL-based capture and recovery of both an intact human norovirus surrogate (bacteriophage MS2) and purified viral ssRNA from aqueous suspension. All MIL formulations were effective for both targets, though they varied some in capture and recovery efficiency, and none appeared to significantly damage the virus capsid. We also determined that maximizing MIL dispersion is critical for ensuring optimal performance, and is determined by both the complexity of the input suspension and the relative volume of MIL used. We also showed that MILs have some capacity to concentrate the target. Most interestingly, they were able to effectively capture and recover free RNA while also appearing to give some protection from degradation in suspension. This raised the possibility that they could play a role in nucleic acid extraction. The last sample preparation step needed for nucleic acid-based detection is genomic extraction. However, though many established methods exist for viral nucleic acid extraction, few are designed with a focus toward in-field applications. Therefore, we explored the use of MILs as a binding substrate similar to the magnetic silica beads in commercial kits, which would enable target separation, concentration, and genomic extraction to occur in a single tube with minimal target loss. We found that some MIL formulations were able to recover target RNA at levels comparable to magnetic silica beads when used with commercial RNA extraction reagents. We also developed our own lysis, wash, and elution buffers that showed comparable performance to the commercial reagents when used with both MILs and magnetic silica beads. Though there is still much to explore, this work constitutes a meaningful step toward development of a complete and portable sample preparation method for foodborne virus detection. When combined with a portable endpoint detection method, this could significantly reduce barriers to in-field pathogen detection, facilitating faster outbreak tracking and more routine testing for foodborne viruses.Work for chapter 3 and 4 was partially funded through the Chemical Measurement and Imaging Program at the National Science Foundation (Grant number CHE-2203891). Other funding sources for collaborators include the Alice Hudson Professorship at Iowa State University and the Iowa Agriculture and Home Economics Experiment Station Project No. IOW04202, sponsored by the Hatch Act and State of Iowa Funds. This work was also supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Agricultural and Food Research Initiative Competitive Program, grant numbers: 2023-67011-40392 FELLOWSHIP and 2022-67021-36408.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.

The Production of Dignity: Ideological Creativity For and Against Empire

Recent debates over “the concept of dignity” have tended to posit it as a potential legitimating principle for what Jürgen Habermas terms “just political orders.” Within these debates, theorists have tended to represent dignity as an essentially singular idea whose immanence in the so-called Western tradition was broadly “discovered” in the 1940s against the backdrop of the Holocaust. Breaking this frame, I develop an approach that considers “dignity” primarily as keyword rather than concept—that is, as a word around which the language of a particularly salient vector of political struggle has come to be structured in a given historical conjuncture; a site of ideological creativity through which social conditions or transformations are represented in a variety of conflicting ways to motivate and/or justify political institutions/actions. On this approach, “dignity” is recast as a means of interpreting/representing the dynamism of historical transformation rather than as a concept to be clarified and stabilized as legitimating principle for putatively liberal- democratic institutions. Applying this interpretive method, dignity’s landmark codification in the preamble to the United Nations Charter in relation to “the human person” is re-cognized, not as a discovery, but as the product of an elite project spearheaded by Jan Smuts to shore up imperial social relations in a moment of crisis by means of an effort to universalize the colonial strategy of indirect rule. It also becomes salient that, in direct opposition to this project, “dignity” was subsequently appropriated by figures like Gamal Abdel Nasser and Frantz Fanon and reconfigured to attach, not to the paradigmatic subject of colonial regulation, but to the anticolonial nation. This dissertation undertakes to trace the genesis and dialectical development of these contradictory and antagonistic usages. In developing this alternative interpretive method and historical account, the question arises of whether academic political theorists should be legislating the correct conceptualization of keywords in the first place. Turning to Palestine, I conclude by demonstrating how such projects continue to facilitate a disavowal of the violence underpinning the very institutions on which the claimed authority of the academic political theorist is founded—a disavowal that forecloses on meaningful anticolonial solidarity.W. E. B. Du Bois Centre Mellon FoundationDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)2026-05-1

Compassion and Contempt: Dante's Moral Corrections of Shades in the Inferno

In Dante’s Commedia, he uses his contrapasso as an enforcing justice of punishment as the mirrored consequence of sinner’s Earthly sin. The contrapasso is used as a tool of moral correction for how Dante responds to the shades’ choices committed in sin. Dante’s responses range from pity, contempt, and more rarely, violence. These instances of violence raise ethical questions to the reader that challenge preconceived notions about sin’s severity of punishment. These instances also include disassembling the dichotomy that is Dante auctor and Dante agens, by raising questions of historical narrative into his treatment of certain shades. This question of justice is prompted by the poet for the reader and for himself as the pilgrim. His responses are often guided or scolded by Virgil, who serves as his personification of reason, offering Dante the opportunity to extend this influence of reason to those in Hell who betrayed it in life

An Open Access Policy Review and Considerations on Future Relevance

Presentation at the 2025 Charleston Conference (virtual) about the UMass Amherst Open Access Policy review with discussion of the relevance of open access policies more generally in the current scholarly publishing landscape

Textual Flows of 'Visitors': Mediatization, Positioning Bodyscapes, and Multiple Semblances of Place

With nationalistic sentiment on the rise around the world over the past decade, politicians have sought to estrange groups of people who ether or settle in a region, often deeming migrants or refugees as ‘others’. Stereotyping and orienting negative perceptions towards particular groups of people can threaten social sustainability in tourism regions. This work takes a geographical and socio-spatial justice lens to understand discriminate labeling through mediatized communications. This work helps us understand how different ‘visitors’ (refugees and tourists) are perceived in relation to each other in a tourism region (Mediterranean Europe). Where one group feels welcomed, another faces marginalization and discrimination. There is a need to consider this dichotomy in relation to how inbound mobility towards tourism destinations shapes not only perceptions of places, but how places are imagined as ideal for some groups, yet (almost) intentionally unmade for another group. This ‘othering’ of particular groups of people is increasingly apparent in the media. The paper looks at a point in time from 2015 to 2019 concerning Mediterranean European countries as popular destinations that saw visitors come from different directions and for vastly different purposes. Tourists would ascend to Greece, Italy, Malta, Republic of Cyprus, and Spain year-round, as did refugees whose destination entry-point is most commonly one of these five European countries according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Since 2015, rapid increases in arriving refugees led to the deemed “European Refugee Crisis”, also referred to as the “European Migrant Crisis”. The media began popularizing the arrival of refugees as an apparent crisis, and thus acted to marginalize refugees by associating their presence as a threat to tourism. This papers positions these overlapping communications of visitors as different constructions of bodyscapes in papers that offers narratives of tourists and refugees. Findings show that newspapers emphasis on spatial awareness, as storylines and narratives sought to ensure separation between visitors and refugees mediatization