Home Literacy Activities in Latino Immigrant Families: Contributions to Toddlers’ Expressive and Receptive Language Skills

The development of language is a critical component of early childhood, enabling children to communicate their wishes and desires, share thoughts, and build meaning through linguistic interactions with others. A wealth of research has highlighted the importance of children’s early home experiences in fostering language development. This literature emphasizes the importance of a stimulating and supportive home environment in which children are engaged in literacy activities such as reading, telling stories, or singing songs with their parents. This study examined the association between low-income Latino immigrant mothers’ and fathers’ home literacy activities and their children’s receptive and expressive language skills. It also examined the moderating influence of maternal (i.e., reading quality and language quality) and child (engagement during reading, interest in literacy activities) characteristics on this association. This study included observational mother-child reading interactions, child expressive and receptive language assessments, and mother- and father-reported survey data. Controlling for parental education, multiple regression analyses revealed a positive association between home literacy activities and children’s receptive and expressive language skills. The findings also revealed that mothers’ reading quality and children’s engagement during reading (for expressive language skills only) moderated this association. Findings from this study will help inform new interventions, programs, and policies that build on Latino families’ strengths.

Language-based Techniques for Practical and Trustworthy Secure Multi-party Computations

Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) enables a set of parties to collaboratively compute, using cryptographic protocols, a function over their private data in a way that the participants do not see each other's data, they only see the final output. Typical MPC examples include statistical computations over joint private data, private set intersection, and auctions. While these applications are examples of monolithic MPC, richer MPC applications move between "normal" (i.e., per-party local) and "secure" (i.e., joint, multi-party secure) modes repeatedly, resulting overall in mixed-mode computations. For example, we might use MPC to implement the role of the dealer in a game of mental poker -- the game will be divided into rounds of local decision-making (e.g. bidding) and joint interaction (e.g. dealing). Mixed-mode computations are also used to improve performance over monolithic secure computations. Starting with the Fairplay project, several MPC frameworks have been proposed in the last decade to help programmers write MPC applications in a high-level language, while the toolchain manages the low-level details. However, these frameworks are either not expressive enough to allow writing mixed-mode applications or lack formal specification, and reasoning capabilities, thereby diminishing the parties' trust in such tools, and the programs written using them. Furthermore, none of the frameworks provides a verified toolchain to run the MPC programs, leaving the potential of security holes that can compromise the privacy of parties' data. This dissertation presents language-based techniques to make MPC more practical and trustworthy. First, it presents the design and implementation of a new MPC Domain Specific Language, called Wysteria, for writing rich mixed-mode MPC applications. Wysteria provides several benefits over previous languages, including a conceptual single thread of control, generic support for more than two parties, high-level abstractions for secret shares, and a fully formalized type system and operational semantics. Using Wysteria, we have implemented several MPC applications, including, for the first time, a card dealing application. The dissertation next presents Wys*, an embedding of Wysteria in F*, a full-featured verification oriented programming language. Wys* improves on Wysteria along three lines: (a) It enables programmers to formally verify the correctness and security properties of their programs. As far as we know, Wys* is the first language to provide verification capabilities for MPC programs. (b) It provides a partially verified toolchain to run MPC programs, and finally (c) It enables the MPC programs to use, with no extra effort, standard language constructs from the host language F*, thereby making it more usable and scalable. Finally, the dissertation develops static analyses that help optimize monolithic MPC programs into mixed-mode MPC programs, while providing similar privacy guarantees as the monolithic versions.

THE LESSER-KNOWN PIANO CHAMBER MUSIC OF CAMILLE SAINT-SAENS: A RECORDING PROJECT

Throughout his long and industrious lifetime, Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) devoted himself unconditionally to music both as a composer and a performer. Saint-Saens was a self-described traditionalist and musical purist, yet his works are distinctly expressive and imaginative, and they reflect the composer's own unique musical language which incorporates recognizably modem traits such as chromaticism and frequent modulation. As a performer, Saint-Saens preferred to premiere his own works and often included his chamber music in his concert programs. Regarded primarily as a symphonic composer in the present day, however, his extensive and varied collection of chamber music works is sadly neglected. Six varied small-ensemble works with piano from his chamber music repertoire have been selected for study and recording for this project: Piano Trio No. 1 in F Major, Op. 18 (1864); Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 inC Minor, Op. 32 (1872); two pieces for two pianos, Le Rouet d'Omphale (The Spinning Wheel ofOmphale), Op. 31 (1871) and Phaeton, Op. 39 (1874); piano duet Konig Harald Haifagar (King Harald Haarfager), Op. 59 (1880); and a wind quartet, Caprice sur des airs Danois et Russes (Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs) for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet and Piano, Op. 79 (1887). Analyses of the forms and harmonic structures of these compositions will be included in this dissertation paper as well as studies from the viewpoint of Saint-Saens' compositional style, ensemble characteristics, and writing for the piano. The recordings for this project were made in four sessions in LeFrak Concert Hall at Queens College, the City University of New York. On September 24, 2003, Op. 31, Op. 39 and Op. 59 were recorded with Professor Morey Ritt, piano. On March 2, 2004, Op. 18 was recorded with Elena Rojas, violin, and Clare Liu, cello, and on March 15, 2004, Op. 32 was recorded, also with Ms. Liu. The Caprice, Op. 79 was recorded on June 27, 2008 with Laura Conwesser, flute; Randall Wolfgang, oboe; and Steve Hartman, clarinet. The recordings may be found on file in the library at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Polish Violin Music in the 20th and 21st Century

The purpose of this dissertation is to promote Polish violin music written in the 20th and 21st Century. My recitals included many lesser-known compositions and composers which I strongly believe deserve to be better known and more often performed. The search and preparation of those pieces, for which recordings and music scores are not easily found, was a very exciting and stimulating process. Much Polish music written in the 20th and 21st Century is interesting, expressive, beautiful, and deserves to be more often performed. Performing 20th and 21st Century music opens new perspectives in two directions: musically and technically. Performer and listener are, in many cases, unbound from tonality. Composers are looking for new sonorities and exploring such performing techniques as varieties of harmonics, quarter tones, extreme dynamics, complex rhythms, and usage of a wide range of registers. An important part of Polish music is Polish folklore. The little town of Zakopane is known for Polish traditional clothing, food, architecture, dance and music. Also, most prominent Polish luthiers including Wojciech Topa, whose instrument I am playing, have been making their instruments in Zakopane. This little town in the Tatras Mountain has been an inspiration for many Polish artists including Iwaszkiewicz, Witkacy, Karłowicz, and Szymanowski. Those composers used such folklore elements as folk scales, popular tunes, and imitations of the sound of the folk band with characteristic folk dance rhythms. Other musical genres where folk elements are strongly present are the compositions dedicated to young musicians, with a specifically educational purpose. Among composers who wrote educational music were Grażyna Bacewicz, Witold Lutosławski, and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki. This approach makes the works more easily understood by young performers and, at the same time, broadens their understanding of Polish culture and prepares them for the challenges of contemporary music. This has been an exciting project for me because, on the one hand, it allowed me the challenge of performing compositions that are lesser-known and often consist of musical language new to me while, on the other, it brought me back to my roots and the country of my mother tongue.