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This thesis develops a theoretical account of the basis and justification for the doctrine of Joint Criminal Enterptise in international criminal law by examining principles governing the ascription of criminal responsibility in English and German criminal law. The first part consists of a comprehensive review of the development of the JCE doctrine, including its historical antecedents, its initial formulation by the ICTY, its subsequent explication by tribunals and academics, and recent alternatives doctrines proposed by the ICC and by commentators. It identifies the main loopholes and contradictions in the construction of these theories, and presents factual scenarios for which these theories, particularly JCE, either have no answers, or problematic ones. The second part examines whether any of the variants of JCE can be justified as principal responsibility. It first identifies elements that distinguish international crimes from their domestic counterparts, and which are pertinent in developing an account of criminal responsibility for international crimes. It also examines the concept of perpetration responsibility in English and German criminal law and theory. It then combines the insights gleaned from these analyses to conclude that only JCE I can be appropriately considered as perpetrator responsibility and proposes a modified version of the doctrine of Organisationsherrschaft in German criminal law as a more accurate characterisation of the role and function of high level participants in mass atrocity. The final part focuses on the concept of accomplice responsibility in German and English criminal law and doctrine to address whether JCE II and JCE III can be justified as modes of secondary criminal responsibility. It concludes that JCE II and JCE III can be retained as distinct modes of accomplice liability using expressive and risk justifications, provided their operation is limited in ways that correspond to principles of secondary responsibility in domestic jurisdictions.

Pulmonary hypertension (PH) is characterized by an increase in blood pressure in the pulmonary vasculature associated with excessive vasoconstriction of pulmonary arteries and vascular remodeling. Pulmonary vasoconstriction is controlled by endogenous mediators, including those that act by stimulating G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Vasoconstrictors such as serotonin (5-HT), endothelin-1 (ET-1) and thromboxane signal via GPCRs coupled to the G protein Gq. Gq activates signaling cascades in vascular smooth muscle that cause vasoconstriction. Regulators of G Protein Signaling 2 (RGS2) proteins turn off Gq signaling and thus inhibit the downstream pathways that cause vasoconstriction. Inhibition of RGS2 increases Gq-coupled GPCR vasoconstriction caused by many endogenous vasoconstrictors, including those implicated in PH.|Hypoxia is a key factor in the development of PH. Acute hypoxia causes hypoxic pulmonary vasoconstriction (HPV), which regulates ventilation by diverting blood flow away from poorly oxygenated regions of the lung. HPV is associated with an increase in calcium (Ca2+) mobilization, initially due to Ca2+ release from intracellular stores and followed by a sustained increase in Ca2+ influx through voltage-gated Ca2+ channels. Chronic hypoxia causes PH, in part, by enhanced Ca2+ mobilization contributing to HPV. Thus I hypothesized that hypoxia reduces RGS2 in pulmonary arteries, causing increased calcium mobilization and excessive vasoconstriction that may contribute to the development of PH. My objectives were:|1. To characterize the effects of RGS2 on Gq-coupled GPCR agonistmediated constriction and Ca2+ signaling in human pulmonary arterial smooth muscle (HPASM) cells. RGS2 protein was knocked-down (KD) in HPASM cells using RGS2 siRNA. I measured Gq-coupled GPCRmediated Ca2+ mobilization and contraction in RGS2 KD and scrambled HPASM cells.|2. To determine the effects of RGS2 on mouse pulmonary artery vasoconstriction activated by Gq-coupled GPCR agonists. I prepared precision cut lung slices (lung slices) from RGS2 KO and WT mice and assessed Gq-coupled GPCR agonist-mediated constriction concentrationresponse curves.|3. To determine the effects of hypoxia on mouse pulmonary artery vasoconstriction activated by Gq-coupled GPCR agonists. RGS2 KO and WT lung slices were incubated in hypoxia for 48 h and concentrationresponse curves for 5-HT and U46619 (thromboxane A2 mimetic) were analyzed.|4. To determine whether hypoxia enhancement of Gq-coupled GPCR agonist-mediated Ca2+ signaling and pulmonary arterial constriction is caused by down-regulation of RGS2 expression, HPASM cells were incubated in hypoxia (1% O2) or normoxia (21% O2) for 1-48 h and RGS2 expression was measured by western blotting. HPASM cells were also cultured for 48 h in hypoxia and Ca2+ mobilization and contraction of HPASM cells measured. Additionally, I incubated RGS2 KD HPASM cells in hypoxia and measured RGS2 expression along with Ca2+ mobilization and contraction.|5. To determine whether RGS2 KO mice develop right ventricular hypertrophy. I measured the heart wt /body wt (HW/BW) and Fulton Index of RGS2 KO and WT mice.|U46619- and ET-1-mediated Ca2+ mobilization and contraction were significantly increased in RGS2 KD HPASM cells compared to scrambled control cells. Pulmonary arteries from RGS2 KO lung slices also exhibited enhanced constriction induced by 5-HT and U46619 compared to WT mice. Hypoxia enhanced the Ca2+ mobilization and contraction induced by U46619 and ET-1 in HPASM cells. Hypoxia did not significantly down-regulate RGS2 expression in RGS2 KD HPASM cells but did increase the Ca2+ mobilization and contraction of RGS2 KD HPASM cells. Hypoxia enhanced the pulmonary arterial constriction of WT mouse lung slices; however, it did not increase constriction of RGS2 KO lung slices. HW/BW and Fulton Index were significantly increased in RGS2 KO mice in comparison to WT mice.|In conclusion, RGS2 plays a role in GPCR-mediated contraction and Ca2+ mobilization of HPASM cells and mouse pulmonary arteries. Hypoxia downregulates RGS2, which is associated with augmented Ca2+ signaling and constriction that may contribute to the development of PH.

This thesis presents a study of a time domain electromagnetic induction (EMI) system used for detection and discrimination of unexploded ordnance. In general, EMI system components include transmitter and receiver coils, corresponding transmitter and receiver coil amplifiers and a data acquisition system. This thesis explains differences in electronic circuitry of EMI sensors that measure the current or voltage response of a target. In the case of a current measurement it is essential to use a current-to-voltage converter as the first stage before any amplification is done so that the lower 3 dB point of the receiver coil is sufficiently low to capture all important target characteristics. Also using a compensation circuit to lower the 3 dB point makes it possible to acquire the undistorted late time response of targets. This capability is essential for discrimination purposes. In voltage measurement methods, however, only a voltage amplifier is used on the receiver side and there is no need for compensation circuitry as the 3 dB point of the receiver coil is high enough to capture an undistorted version of the target response. Both voltage and current measurement methods were used to record the target response and it was observed that in general, the voltage measurement method is better than the current measurement method. Comparison of the response collected from a commercial EMI sensor and a constructed EMI sensor (voltage method) is made. Observations are made for possible reasons for superior response from the commercial EMI sensor In addition to the above topics, a software tool is developed for evaluating electromagnetic transmitter coil designs and configurations that are used in EMI sensor arrays. This software tool generates static sensitivity maps in any desired plane when transmitter and receiver coil space coordinates are given as inputs. These maps give a good idea of how effective an EMI sensor layout can be in terms of its sensitivity to a target’s presence at different points in space. The advantage of using static sensitivity maps is that they are independent of target characteristics and thus can be used as an effective tool to measure the performance of a proposed coil layout. Maps have been presented for different coil configurations and important observations and conclusions are made. To verify the fidelity of the software tool output field measurements are taken using a commercial sensor and compared to the same from the software model. In general, good qualitative agreement was obtained though more careful measurements should be done in the future. In addition to sensitivity maps, streamline plots can also be generated from a similar software tool with minor changes in software coding. Streamline plots are helpful in visualizing the direction of the magnetic field due to transmitter or receiver coils in any orientation.

Academic and industrial conference organizers invite members of academia and industry over e-mails containing Calls for Papers(CFPs). These invites are manually typed e-mails and do not follow a standard template. Currently, there does not exist any simple way of systematically condensing the conference data available from these e-mails. Hence, organizing all the CFPs and extracting each conference information from the e-mails involves manual parsing for key data fields such as event URL, submission deadlines, updates and so on. Also, the conference organizers have to maintain conference web pages and e-mail address lists to send the calls for papers, updates and reminders. To simplify this tedious manual task, a system with automated data orchestration has been proposed. The system comprises of two key components. The first component, CeParse, is a parser with a pattern matching component that accesses CFP e-mails on the mail server, parses them and extracts the CFP data. This data is then forwarded to the second component,CReWS. CReWS is a Web service oriented central repository that accepts and displays the CFP data. This integrated system thereby eliminates the repeated manual overhead of parsing and updating the conference CFP data. Data from the repository is available for public viewing via a graphical interface with capabilities of sorting, searching and providing RSS feeds. This implementation offers a loosely coupled service oriented architecture which can serve to the advantage of operating with other software systems.

Recent technological advances have enabled distributed micro-sensing for large scale information gathering through a network of tiny, low power devices or nodes equipped with programmable computing, multiple sensing and communication capabilities. This network of sensor nodes, known as a wireless sensor network, has revolutionized remote monitoring applications because of its ease of deployment, ad hoc connectivity and cost-effectiveness. In this dissertation, we design distributed routing protocols for minimizing energy consumption in a sensor network. There are two main contributions of this work. The first contribution is the design of an energy aware multiple path routing protocol to route heavy data traffic between a source and a destination node in a sensor network. The protocol spreads the routing load between the source and destination nodes over a large number of sensor nodes to minimize disparity in the energy levels of the sensor nodes. We also grade the multiple paths based on their route length to support time critical queries on the shortest available paths. The second contribution is the design of a communication architecture that supports distributed query processing to evaluate spatio-temporal queries within the network. We represent these queries by query trees and distribute query operators to appropriate sensor nodes. As operator execution demands high computation capability, we propose use of a heterogenous sensor network where query operators are assigned to sparsely deployed resource-rich nodes within a dense network of low power sensor nodes. We design an adaptive, decentralized, low communication overhead algorithm to determine an operator placement on the resource-rich nodes in the network to minimize cost of transmitting data in the routing tree constructed to continuously retrieve data from a set of spatially distributed geographical regions to the sink. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to build an energy aware routing infrastructure to enable in-network processing of spatio-temporal queries. In order to maximize energy savings the proposed multiple path routing protocol can be used to route data between the nodes that form the routing tree.