Doctoral Thesis
Recent Submissions
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Understanding the impacts of climate variability and change on rainfed crop production in Ethiopia
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Nonplanar Layered Morphologies
(2024)This thesis investigates the potential of nonplanar robotic 3D printing for architectural applications and develops novel methods to design nonplanar print paths for medium to large-scale robotic FDM 3D printing. Latest developments in additive manufacturing have opened new possibilities for 3D printing objects with unprecedented geometric complexity. However, these advancements are still hindered by the inherent limitations of current ...Doctoral Thesis -
Control of Large-Scale Discrete-Time Systems - Dissipativity, Optimality, and Learning
(2024)Society faces a number of major global challenges, including climate change mitigation, healthcare and quality of life improvement, and design of smart infrastructures such as those in transportation, water, food, and energy systems. Control theory plays a central role in the development of technologies and solutions for many of these key problems. The ever complex requirements of the global challenges when it comes to control solutions ...Doctoral Thesis -
Production of extracellular vesicles and investigation of their use as nucleic acid carriers
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -
Unravelling Causes of Biodiversity Gradients in Tetrapods via Eco-Evolutionary Simulations
(2024)Species and clades of tetrapods - amphibians, birds, mammals and reptiles - are not distributed randomly across the globe but follow gradients of latitude, elevation as well as varying in space and time. These biodiversity gradients in tetrapods vary equally depending on which dimension of diversity - taxonomic, phylogenetic or functional - is studied and which metric is used to summarize that specific dimension. Different metrics quantifying ...Doctoral Thesis -
Efficient Annealing and Particle Displacement for Sequential Importance Sampling Algorithms
(2024)Sampling algorithms play a pivotal role in various domains where probabilistic models with intractable normalized density functions are utilized. Sequential Importance Sampling (IS) algorithms gradually update particle state with simple transitions starting from a simple tractable distribution. Many possess convergence guarantees with lengthy sequences. Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) and its variants are the most popular methods used ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Trusted Computing on Modern Platforms: Analysis, Challenges, and Implications
(2024)Computing architectures come in all forms and shapes, and they impact our daily lives significantly. Smartphones are omnipresent, most jobs require daily interactions with computers, and leisure time is dominated by the availability of decades worth of TV shows at the tip of a finger. As computing architectures dominate many fields, they must also process confidential data, from medical data and e-voting to personal communications in ...Doctoral Thesis -
Accelerator mass spectrometry below 300 kV
(2024)A prototype of a compact, low-energy, multi-isotope accelerator mass spectrometer (MILEA) with a maximal terminal voltage of 0.3 MV was built at ETH Zurich in 2017. The presented work eval- uates the capabilities of the new system and thereby investigates ion beam physics at low energies. The findings of this work allowed to optimize the operational parameters for AMS measurements of 10Be, 26Al and uranium at low energies (<1 MeV). The ...Doctoral Thesis -
Tree planting: How new state strategies of forest governance, community ownership, and consultation lead to uneven outcomes for communities and places
(2024)With a forest cover of 18%, Scotland is one of the least forested countries in Europe. The loss of forest cover in Scotland took place throughout the Middle Ages up until the 19th century, due to iron works, demand for charcoal and tanbark, and industrialization. After the timber shortage of the first world war, the UK government established the Forestry Commission in 1919 with powers to acquire land throughout Britain for securing Timber ...Doctoral Thesis -
Explaining and Improving Communication in Graph Neural Networks
(2024)This thesis studies improvements for message-passing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) from two angles. First, we tackle the problem of understanding how GNNs reason. We quantify how much GNN architectures achieve the combined reasoning over features and edges that GNNs uniquely offer. We then present two methods to explain GNN predictions. The first explanation method explains graphs by contrasting them to similar examples. The second explanation ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Resiliente Demokratie
(2024)This thesis analyses the normative relationship between the stability of a democratic system, its legitimacy, and political inclusion and exclusion. It starts from the premise that the ideal of equality of opportunity and the autonomous realisation of one's own concept of the good life can only be achieved within a stable democracy. The question is therefore (a) under what conditions people are able and willing to organise their lives ...Doctoral Thesis -
Automatisierte Öffentlichkeit und künstliche Kommunikation
(2024)Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, talking to AI-based systems has become part of many people's everyday lives. In my thesis, I ask how this affects interpersonal communication and the political public sphere of democratic societies. Therefore, I examine empirical material from three applications of language-generating systems (Replika Chatbot, ChatGPT, and Fact Checking Algorithms). Based on the preconditions and characteristics of ...Doctoral Thesis -
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Cost-efficient Hyperspectral Imaging Methods with Deep Learning
(2024)Hyperspectral images (HSIs) are useful in numerous domains. The key obstacle to fully unleashing the potential of HSIs is the challenge of data acquisition -- acquiring HSIs of high spatial and high spectral resolution at a high frame rate is a grand challenge. This thesis addresses the challenge from two perspectives: 1) developing data-efficient HSI super-resolution (SR) methods and 2) developing a single-shot hyperspectral imaging ...Doctoral Thesis -
Magnetically responsive bacteria as living therapeutics for cancer treatment
(2024)Doctoral Thesis -