ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis thesis—and all of the work that I’ve been involved in over the last six years—would nothave been possible without excellent mentorship. The depth of my research and the quality ofmy experience in graduate school is primarily attributable to my Ph.D. advisors, Hamed Hassaniand George J. Pappas, both of whom gave me the extraordinary benefit of their encouragement,feedback, and time. To both of you, all I can say is “Thank you.”I’m grateful for the mentorship of Rene Vidal, Eric Wong, and J. Zico Kolter, who offered invaluable feedback while serving on my doctoral committee. I’m also thankful for the advice that I’vereceived over the years from faculty members both at Penn and in the wider academic world,including Manfred Morari, Nikolai Matni, Stephen Tu, Edgar Dobriban, Chelsea Finn, AlejandroRibeiro, Radoslav Ivanov, and Volkan Cevher. And similarly, thanks to Sayna Ebrahimi and SercanÖ. Arik, who facilitated a wonderful research experience at Google Cloud AI.I had the privilege of working with many others during my Ph.D. I benefited tremendously fromthe mentorship, advice, and collaboration with several fantastic postdocs, including Lars Lindemann, Mahyar Fazlyab, David Hong, Aritra Mitra, Thomas Beckers, Ingvar Ziemann, and NicoloDal Fabbro. I also had memorable and productive collaborations with numerous students, including Patrick Chao, Fabian Latorre, Cian Eastwood, Haimin Hu, Allan Zhou, Fahim Tajwar, HaozeWu, Teruhiro Tagomori, Fengjun Yang, Thomas Waite, Kelly He, Edoardo Debenedetti, MaksymAndriushchenko, Francesco Croce, and Vikash Sehwag. And finally, I would be remiss if I did notacknowledge the many wonderful colleagues at Penn with whom I had many productive conversations, including Arman Adibi, Bruce Lee, Juan Cervino, Behrad Moniri, Thomas Zhang, EshwarRam Arunachaleswaran, Shayan Kiyani, Sima Noorani, Mahdi Sabbaghi, and Eric Lei.
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