Turkey in Seattle, an ongoing oral history project initiated in 2017 under the auspices of the Turkish & Ottoman Studies Program at MELC, seeks to document the lives and stories of the Pacific Northwest’s vibrant Turkish community. The project's focus is on the immigration stories of people from Turkey—delving into their reasons for immigration, identity, adaptation to American culture, community involvement, and return migration plans. By cataloging their stories into a publicly available database, the project aims to record, archive, and preserve the oral histories of people who immigrated from Turkey to the Pacific Northwest (PNW) Region in the United States, creating a digital library and datasets that can be used for future research. The project has existed in three distinct stages. Phase one began with the lead researcher, Melike Yücel-Koc, as the sole interviewer. Interviews were only conducted with first generation immigrants. Phase two continued the focus yet had additional research interns, and phase three (the project's current phase) has begun interviewing second generation immigrants. I, in partnership with Turkey in Seattle, conducted over 15 of these oral history interviews over the span of 10 months, starting in phase two of the project. This process began in a training stage in Honors 345, Fall quarter 2022. After careful analysis of past oral history projects and review of previous interviews conducted for the project, I began to conduct interviews the following quarter. Interviews were conducted for a period from 1-2.5 hours, and followed oral history best practices. My presentation will discuss the methodology, process, and results gathered throughout my research, with a heavy focus on the practical applications. Beyond this, I will discuss the unique mindset that oral history demands of its practitioners and how it has proved invaluable to discussing the story of the PNW Turkish community.

We live in an age of ever-pressing environmental crises. Scientists have determined that the cumulative impact of human activity on Earth in the last 300 years reaches a scale equal to that of a geological epoch—carving marks in the planet that will last longer than our species has existed. Practices of extraction—mining for coal, drilling for oil—are one collection of activities integral to that impact, prompting scholars to investigate the complex of cultural factors that drive and ultimately constitute these practices. Regarding these practices, scholars in the environmental humanities have raised an important question: how, in the first place, does nature get figured as a resource? How has Western humanity’s relation towards the natural world developed into one predominantly of exploitation? In this paper, I investigate the metaphysical basis of this relationship through Martin Heidegger’s ‘method’ of reflection [Besinnung]. My investigation begins with the thought of Descartes and Bacon, two philosophers who, at the commencement of modernity, interpreted the human as the relational center of being as such. This early-modern, anthropocentric philosophy prefigures an event Heidegger calls gestell—the disclosure of all beings exclusively as resources—which I argue is the underlying metaphysical basis of practices of extraction. I go on to argue that the very proliferation of extractive thinking reveals the crucial importance of poetry and philosophy today, both of which embody a kind of thinking that is antithetical to extraction and instrumentalization, a thinking that—rather than dominating, organizing, utilizing—lets things show themselves as they are. I conclude that art and philosophy both counter the ubiquitous logic of extraction and are therefore invaluable to any attempt at figuring a fuller, healthier mode of humanity’s relating to itself and the natural world.

I investigate the influence of cultural and linguistic backgrounds on visual perception and semantic interpretation within computer vision. This study addresses the question: Are there significant variations in the semantic content described by vision-language datasets and models across different languages? Guided by the hypothesis that cultural and linguistic diversities lead to distinct semantic interpretations, I compare multilingual datasets against monolingual counterparts. I developed metrics such as scene graph complexity, embedding space width, and linguistic diversity to quantify semantic variations across languages in both human-annotated and model-generated image captions. The methodology involves using linguistic tools and translation techniques to ensure semantic consistency across languages. Our findings indicate that multilingual captions contain, on average, 21.8% more objects, 24.5% more relations, and 27.1% more attributes than monolingual ones. Furthermore, models trained on diverse linguistic content demonstrate improved generalizability across different linguistic datasets. This study contributes to the understanding of how language and culture impact visual perception in computer vision and advocates for more inclusive dataset compilation and model training strategies.

Learning management systems (LMS) are used for facilitating communication between instructors and students, disseminating lecture materials, and grading assignments. They collect large amounts of student data, necessary or otherwise, with or without explicit consent from students. Furthermore, they make the data visible to instructors, which could have significant implications for students’ grades and experience in the classroom. My project aims to understand the unique nature of student privacy issues on LMS to inform design solutions. I consider how we can design features on LMS to protect students’ privacy and improve students’ educational experiences. We hypothesize that student privacy controls will improve education and student experiences, creating a more equitable learning environment. Using transcripts from 31 interviews with students who use the Canvas LMS at UW, my mentor and I used inductive thematic content analysis methods to understand themes in students’ attitudes toward these solutions. So far, our research suggests that students are concerned about the lack of transparency and control on LMS and would feel more comfortable with the implementation of a privacy dashboard that would allow customizable, context-appropriate data sharing. According to our findings, key factors influencing student comfort include transparency in data collection and sharing with instructors, concerns about instructor bias resulting from irrelevant data sharing, feelings of surveillance arising from lack of data protections and transparency on LMS, and the level of meaningful control students have over their data on LMS. Our findings indicate that this research could guide the design of student privacy dashboards in LMS, improve instruction by helping instructors facilitate better experiences online, and inform policy impacting the way LMS are used around the world.

Lck is a lymphocyte specific tyrosine kinase involved in T cell activation in response to T cell receptor (TCR) mediated signaling. T cell activation is essential for the adaptive immune response, as it results in the proliferation of T cells after the detection of a peptide presented on a Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) and the production of cytokines necessary for immune response coordination. Lck activity is dependent on its global conformation, which is dynamically regulated via phosphorylation on its activation loop and C-terminus tail. Upon TCR engagement, active Lck phosphorylates the CD3ζ chains of the TCR complex, transducing the intracellular signaling events that activates T cells. Because Lck activity is dependent on its global conformation, we sought to map the conformational changes in Lck upon TCR simulation, as well as identify cysteine-reactive fragments that target and stabilize Lck in its conformational extremes. Lck has few endogenous cysteines, so we performed a yeast-growth-based deep mutational scan (DMS) of Lck–in which we utilized Lck’s toxicity to yeast to calculate the activity scores of ~5,000 Lck mutants–and identified 109 solvent-exposed, wild-type-like cysteine mutants of Lck. Expressing these wild-type-like cysteine mutants in T cells, and utilizing competition-based mass spectrometry, we can quantify changes in electrophilic reactivity of the cysteine side chains in the wild-type-like cysteine mutants upon T cell receptor (TCR) stimulation. Thus far, I have identified six wild-type-like cysteine mutants of Lck that are quantifiable using mass spectrometry and exhibit reactivity to our set of cysteine-reactive fragments, some of which show differential reactivity upon TCR simulation and fragment selectivity. Currently, I am using these mutants to map the dynamics of a hyperactive mutant of Lck. These quantifications provide insight into changes in the conformational flexibility of Lck, accessibility of the mutated residue sites, and intramolecular protein-protein interactions of Lck upon TCR stimulation.
 

In order to design effective countermeasures against HIV, we must first understand the forces that drive it to evolve resistance within hosts. While linkage patterns in genetic data are potentially a powerful tool to quantify the relative contributions of multiple evolutionary forces (mutation, recombination, selection) acting during an HIV infection, the severe viral population bottlenecks accompanying drug therapy complicate these patterns. To interpret genetic linkage in the context of such major changes in population structure (which are themselves driven by specific mutations), we develop a simulation framework for viral evolution in which genetics and population structure influence each other. This framework overcomes limitations from both dynamical modeling, in which patterns of linked variation are ignored, and from population genetic modeling, in which population structure is predetermined. Using few parameters, we are able to reproduce linkage patterns and population bottlenecks that broadly conform to those observed in vivo. As a case study to demonstrate this model’s utility, we consider a recent hypothesis that viral recombination is suppressed during population bottlenecks due to diminished opportunities for coinfection. In simulating populations with and without recombination suppression during population contraction, we show that this effect measurably changes genetic diversity in rebounding populations, but is less visible when examining simulated viral loads or resistance mutations alone. Then, using this model as a null expectation for linkage patterns, we assess if the linkage structure in HIV populations treated with bNAbs is consistent with density-dependent recombination in vivo. Collectively, our work demonstrates that, by generating realistic null expectations of linkage under complex changes in population structure, we can employ linkage patterns as a powerful source of information for evaluating viral evolutionary hypotheses.

Sound symbolism is a phenomenon wherein the phonetic forms of certain words iconically represent attributes of the objects, qualities, or events they describe. This study focuses on the sound-meaning link in Panãra animal names, using vocabulary from field notes collected in the Panãra community by Dr. Lapierre the summers of 2015-19 and by Dr. Lapierre and PhD students Ananthanarayan, De Falco, and Jeter the summer of 2023. The Panãra vowel system has a combination of features not present in some more widely studied languages such as English, namely, a back, unrounded series, contrastive length, and contrastive nasality. Using this extensive inventory, I assess strength of size sound symbolism created by nasality, height, vowel length, and backness, as well as the interactions between multiple features. I organize Panãra names for different animals and find the average weight of that species. I calculate the percentage of vowels that have a certain feature in a word and assess the correlation between this percentage and the weight of the species denoted using a regression model. Previous research has shown that front and high vowels are associated with smaller sizes and back and low vowels with larger sizes. I predict that the phonetically central and mid series will be associated with sizes intermediate to the peripheral series. Alongside providing observations from an under-documented language regarding its sound symbolism, findings from this study will help guide the continued lexicographic and field research inquiries into the Panãra language.