Mozart and Genius: Music and Philosophy

This output poster serves as an overview to my efforts and responsibilities throughout the duration of the internship. Here I also showcase a brief sample of the concepts and areas of exploration within which I have been immersed, both in regards to the the content of the book I am helping to prepare for publishing as well as accompanying readings and discussions

Measurement of intracellular strain on deformable substrates with texture correlation.

Mechanical stimuli are important factors that regulate cell proliferation, survival, metabolism and motility in a variety of cell types. The relationship between mechanical deformation of the extracellular matrix and intracellular deformation of cellular sub-regions and organelles has not been fully elucidated, but may provide new insight into the mechanisms involved in transducing mechanical stimuli to biological responses. In this study, a novel fluorescence microscopy and image analysis method was applied to examine the hypothesis that mechanical strains are fully transferred from a planar, deformable substrate to cytoplasmic and intranuclear regions within attached cells. Intracellular strains were measured in cells derived from the anulus fibrosus of the intervertebral disc when attached to an elastic silicone membrane that was subjected to tensile stretch. Measurements indicated cytoplasmic strains were similar to those of the underlying substrate, with a strain transfer ratio (STR) of 0.79. In contrast, nuclear strains were much smaller than those of the substrate, with an STR of 0.17. These findings are consistent with previous studies indicating nuclear stiffness is significantly greater than cytoplasmic stiffness, as measured using other methods. This study provides a novel method for the study of cellular mechanics, including a new technique for measuring intranuclear deformations, with evidence of differential magnitudes and patterns of strain transferred from the substrate to cell cytoplasm and nucleus

Gaussian Process Repetitive Control for Suppressing Spatial Disturbances

Motion systems are often subject to disturbances such as cogging, commutation errors, and imbalances, that vary with velocity and appear periodic in time for constant operating velocities. The aim of this paper is to develop a repetitive controller (RC) for disturbances that are not periodic in the time domain, yet occur due to an identical position-domain disturbance. A new spatial RC framework is developed, allowing to attenuate disturbances that are periodic in the position domain but manifest a-periodic in the time domain. A Gaussian process (GP) based memory is employed with a suitable periodic kernel that can effectively deal with the intermittent observations inherent to the position domain. A mechatronic example confirms the potential of the method

A Gaussian Process approach to multiple internal models in repetitive control

Disturbances that come from multiple originating domains, e.g., time, position, or commutation-angle domain, are often encountered in practice due to the increasing complexity of mechatronic systems. The aim of this paper is to present a generalized approach that enables asymptotic rejection of multi-dimensional disturbances which are periodic in the different originating domains, e.g., if speed changes, then spatially-periodic disturbances manifest themselves differently in the time domain. A multi-dimensional Gaussian process (GP) based internal model is employed in conjunction with a traditional repetitive control (RC) setting using non-equidistant observations, allowing to learn a multidimensional buffer for RC. A case study with a spatio-temporal disturbance confirms the benefit of this method