In Chapter 1, the introduction and literature review are provided for the basis of pancreatic cancer, its treatment options, and the current state of clinical trials. Autophagy as a process is discussed along with its relevance in cancer and particularly its role in pancreatic tumors is highlighted. Finally, cancer stem cells are reviewed with basic background, their relevance to pancreatic cancer and autophagy are again highlighted. Chapter 2 discusses the current state of nanomaterials that can transform to adapt to each biological barrier present in tumors. Each stage of drug delivery is discussed to apply the relevant design ideas for new chemotherapeutics in the future. In Chapter 3, the previous chapters are combined to illustrate the ability of the self-assembling nanoparticle, bisaminoquinolone derivative BAQ12O, that targets the cancer stem cell population in pancreatic tumor models. Finally, a short conclusion summarizing the three chapters closes the dissertation.

This report describes the current status of benchmarks for the 1992 High-Level Synthesis Workshop and suggests guidelines for benchmark submission. The benchmark set currently has 9 designs, where each benchmark includes a VHDL description of the design, documentation of the design's functionality, as well as a set of test vectors and expected outputs for simulation. Documentation of the testing strategy the test vectors are also provided with each benchmark. Although the benchmarks are currently written in VHDL, we have attempetd to organize the benchmarks in a language-independent format so that users can easily translate the benchmarks into their favorite HDL; the representative set of test vectors and expected outputs allow a user to ensure, with some level of confidence, that their HDL descriptions preserve the original behavior of the benchmarks. The current benchmark set contains designs that exercise different types of functionality (e.g., DSP, FSM-based, arithmetic, etc.), as well as different types of HDL behavioral constructs (e.g., nested loops and nested conditionals). We conclude with a suggested set of guidelines for benchmark submission.

This report describes the optimization of tool path plans to minimize burr formation while face milling powertrain components in the automotive industry. The algorithm controls conditions responsible for burr formation by manipulating tool offsets to generate a feasible region for selection of tool paths.

Reassembling Traditional Dance reveals traditional dance choreography in contemporary Singapore and Southeast Asia to be a zone of intense interaction between two interwoven but distinct sets of postcolonial and globalized elements. The first is the colonial assemblage of governance practices formed in the era of British colonialism in Malaya, which continues to define the discourse of tradition in Singapore. I identify how racial and temporal logic rooted in colonial epistemologies replicates itself as grant frameworks, self-Orientalizing marketing strategies and festival themes, rendering non-western dance within the familiar frame of the “traditional”. The entrepreneurial assemblage of contemporary, neoliberal Singapore on the other hand is constituted by neoliberal policy instruments that now transform community-based performance cultures like Indian, Malay and other “traditional” dance, into sites of creative economic regulation, adding market values to the mix of factors that shape urban Indian identity performance in Singapore today.

I offer choreographic reassembly as an organizing conceptual framework to analyze choreographers emerging in relation to both the colonial and entrepreneurial assemblages. Choreographic reassembly entails deliberate and conscious experimentation with dance forms and aesthetics to meet immediate concerns of contemporary professional life as an artist in a complex, postcolonial, globalized, multiracial and multicultural art ecology. Choreographic reassembly is therefore the deliberate reshuffling and play with conventional and unconventional elements in a given traditional dance form, as a response to transformations in the context of cultural production in different sites. A range of examples ranging from early experiments by Singaporean choreographers K.P. and Santha Bhaskar in the 1950s, to more recent works by Singaporean, Indian, Malaysian, Thai and Indonesian choreographers are explored as cases of choreographic reassembly. Methodologically, this dissertation employs performance and dance analysis, historiography and ethnography. The concept of choreographic reassembly is indebted to Collier and Ong’s conceptual model of “global assemblages” drawn from contemporary, urban anthropological studies of globalization. Notions of cultural mutation and cross-generic experimentation draw from Donna Haraway’s philosophical interventions into anthropocentric epistemologies by “staying with the trouble” of colonial and capitalist inheritances.

This report provides instructions for installing and using the Behavioral Design Assistant (BdA). BdA is a behavioral synthesis system that synthesizes structures from an abstract description written with VHDL behavioral constructs. The system uses components from a generic component library (GENUS), which can be mapped into a user defined technology library. The output of BdA is in structural VHDL and could be verified using a commercial VHDL simulator. The designer can control the synthesis process by providing different resource constraints to the system. BdA is also capable of producing different architectures which can be selected by the designer.

Many high level synthesis systems produce designs without any consideration for the underlying architecture. In such systems, tradeoffs between area and delay can only be achieved by changing the synthesis constraints (e.g., number of functional units). These systems do not exploit the wider range of tradeoffs that can be achieved by modifying the underlying architecture. In this report we derive a relationship between architectural constraints and scheduling algorithms, and demonstrate how architectural styles impose certain restrictions on the scheduling process. In particular, we consider different control pipelining architectures. We also propose a versatile scheduling algorithm that is capable of synthesising designs for different control pipelining styles.