VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Procedural communities : infrastructures and platforms of recreation in America from 1945 to 2018
Keywords: Communication.

This work analyzes three historically sequential forms of recreation and leisure—Post-World War II recreation centers, McDonald's and Yelp, and Minecraft in order to advance the claim that recreation and leisure—unproductive, voluntary, and ostensibly completely divorced from productive labor—has been one of the central, and more under-recognized forces in creating and sustaining communities in post-war America. It also develops the concept of procedural communities—process based groupings of individuals who were originally connected through a geographical arrangements of material recreation infrastructure, and subsequently through digital platforms, that helped inculcate shared modes of interaction in the world—seen through the lens of recreation, as it transitions from public infrastructures to private platforms. In spaces that were encoded with particular affordances, Americans could perform modes of sociality that demonstrated and inculcated a particular sense of what it meant to be a post-war democratic citizen: namely, someone with flexible, near-limitless choice, but with very clearly defined standards of what the range of that "limitless choice" would be.
Process-based modeling of ice stream shear margins and their effect on ice stream stability
Keywords: Geophysics.

The largest uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise is ascribed to mass loss associated with fast ice flow on Earth's ice sheets. This uncertainty is a result of an incomplete understanding of the subglacial environment, and the physics governing this interface. Regions of fast ice flow without topographic bounds, called ice streams, are particularly sensitive to the underlying subglacial properties. Here, we explore the underlying physics governing ice stream stability in several regions across the West Antarctic ice sheet. Specifically, we develop models that interrogate the role of subglacial conditions on the lateral bounds of ice streams, known as shear margins. Shear margins are liable to migrate, and their location is often controlled by dynamic processes. First, we demonstrate that rapidly evolving subglacial processes, such as meltwater drainage, have the potential to induce changes in large-scale ice dynamics on decadal timescales. Next, we develop a model to investigate the relative role of sediment and hardrock on ice stream stability. We then develop a technique to generate synthetic radargrams in regions of complex ice deformation. Finally, we develop a method that includes both dynamic shear margins, and grounding lines to enable research into potential coupling of these two sensitive boundaries. In each of these cases, we connect the model to targeted areas of interest across Antarctica, and connect the underlying physics to observations at the surface. Through these investigations, this thesis develops a more detailed understanding of the role of the subglacial environment on ice stream stability.
ProduceHER - Where womxn music producers get heard
Keywords: Learning Design and Technology
LDT
GSE
Graduate School of Education
Music
Education
Learning Problem
Diversity
Inclusion
Representation
Thesis

There is a diversity issue within the music industry: only 2% of music producers are womxn .
The principal goal of ProduceHER is to increase the number of working womxn producers within the music industry by providing a safe environment for womxn producers to practice and hone their skills, receive constructive feedback from reputable sources, and build networking skills, all while improving self-efficacy and encouraging sense of belonging within the field.
While there are several existing solutions that assist in introducing womxn to music production careers, there are still many barriers in the music industry for these womxn producers to get hired and recognized, and to be considered skillful in the field. There exists no wide scale environment that mitigates this recognition barrier successfully, and this often leaves aspiring womxn producers discouraged and unmotivated towards pursuing the music industry professionally.
In order for an aspiring womxn music producer to go from a place of limited opportunities and exposure (losing interest/motivation in the field) to developing a continued, motivated, and lucrative interest in production, she must have a welcoming environment and opportunities to practice and expand her skills, feel welcome and able to use her skills and talents, and have availability to role models, mentorships, and recruiters .
ProduceHER focuses on giving womxn producers a safe environment to show and develop their skills through receiving feedback from established producers, production shops, and recruiters while mitigating the recognition barrier; this feedback environment will help increase focused visibility amongst recruiters, increase womxn producer self-efficacy, and combat the problem of stereotype threat and discounting womxn producers’ skills.
Programmatic weak supervision to label training data
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

As deep learning models are applied to increasingly diverse problems, a key bottleneck is gathering enough high-quality training labels tailored to each task. Manually labeling this amount of data can be slow, expensive, and static, requiring relabeling if the task changes or new training data is introduced. Users therefore turn to weak supervision, relying on imperfect sources of labels like pattern matching and user-defined heuristics to efficiently, albeit noisily, label training data. Recently, generative models have been used to model and combine the outputs of these sources to assign high quality training labels to unlabeled data across various domains. However, current work treats these weak supervision sources as black-boxes and limits the ability to further simplify and automate the process of labeling training data. In this dissertation, we open the black-box of supervision sources by combining tools from traditional programming languages with statistical algorithms to improve theoretical guarantees and build weak supervision systems that generate labels to train state-of-the-art models. We begin by studying the role of domain specific primitives, interpretable building blocks of data, which simplify the process of developing supervision signals. We then address the issue of complex dependencies that arise as a result of sharing these primitives and present a method to learn correlations among supervision sources using static analysis over the programs that define the sources, and an additional statistical method that can capture correlations not evident from the source code. By gaining access to the reasoning and logic behind supervision sources, we then design a system inspired by program synthesis to automatically generate supervision sources, and provide theoretical guarantees for the accuracy of these signals. To validate the benefits of opening the black-box of supervision, we apply our methods across applications from relation extraction to image classification. We build systems that use supervision sources developed in conjunction with cardiologists to label real-world population-level medical datasets. We use our program synthesis-based approach to automatically complete benchmark visual knowledge bases by labeling rare relationships without requiring additional manual labeling. This body of work demonstrates how traditional programming language analysis methods, combined with the appropriate statistical tools, can enrich weak supervision systems by improving theoretical guarantees and empirical performance of real-world tasks.
The promised republic : developmental society and the making of modern Seoul, 1961-1979
Keywords: History.

My dissertation, "The Promised Republic: Developmental Society and the Making of Modern Seoul, 1961-1979, " tells a new kind of story of development in South Korea. While previous studies have investigated the nexus of government and industry that propelled economic growth in South Korea under strongman Park Chung Hee (in power 1961-1979), this dissertation instead focuses on the human effects of rapid development, looking at the struggles of ordinary Koreans to keep pace with a rapidly changing economy and society. I investigate these struggles through a focus on the history of Seoul, a city which more than tripled in size through the 1960s and 1970s. In researching these changes I have come to an appreciation for what I term "developmental society, " a phrase meant to highlight the way South Koreans were increasingly marshaled into a developmentalist framework, which they in turn deployed to press claims to their country's growing regime of abundance.
Proprioception in the upper limb of non-disabled and stroke-impaired populations
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Stroke, the restriction of oxygen to a particular brain region, is a leading cause of adult disability. As many as 5.5 million Americans are living with motor deficits that were caused by a stroke. Up to ninety percent of these survivors experience some level of sensory dysfunction and approximately half face a specific deficit in proprioception, defined as the sense of one's body in space without the use of vision. In general, sensory loss---especially proprioceptive deficit---slows sensorimotor recovery. However, proprioceptive acuity is difficult to measure, and proprioceptive deficits in stroke-impaired populations have not been thoroughly characterized. We developed an assessment of proprioceptive position sense that brings together existing approaches from the literature in an attempt to isolate and characterize individual contributions to the overall proprioceptive percept. To facilitate our studies, we developed the chARM robot, an open-source platform for studying sensorimotor control in the upper limb. We used our assessment approach and chARM to measure proprioceptive acuity in samples from the non-disabled (healthy) and chronically stroke-impaired populations. In the non-disabled sample, trends in proprioceptive acuity confirm major findings from the literature, as well as revealing a synergistic relationship between active and task-space assessments, which provides new insight into the functioning of the brain's system for state estimation. In the stroke-impaired sample, we demonstrated a correlation between deficits in position sense and movement following stroke, refuting claims that the two are independent. Despite this correlation, we found only a weak relationship between scores on our robotic sensorimotor assessments and scores on the Fugl-Meyer Assessment, a commonly used clinical test of sensorimotor ability. Our results deepen understanding of proprioception in general and begin to establish a relationship between proprioceptive and motor impairments after stroke. These findings could inform the design of post-stroke therapy, ultimately accelerating recovery during the window of high neural plasticity that immediately follows stroke, as well as increasing the efficacy of treatments that extend past this window.
A protein acyltransferase complex regulates nonapoptotic cell death
Keywords: Biology.

The synthetic oxime caspase-independent lethal 56 (CIL56) induces an unconventional form of cell death distinct from apoptosis, necroptosis, ferroptosis, and classic necrosis. CIL56-induced cell death requires a protein acyltransferase (PAT) complex comprised of the enzyme ZDHHC5 and an accessory subunit, GOLGA7. ZDHHC5 activity promotes cell death in the context of CIL56 treatment, which inhibits protein secretion from the Golgi apparatus. These results define a novel PAT complex that regulates an unconventional form of nonapoptotic cell death in response to compound treatment.
Protestantism, ritual change, and the politics of everyday life in colonial Korea, 1910-1945
Keywords: History.

My dissertation examines transformations in Korean ritual life to explore how and why religious difference emerged as a political problem under Japanese colonial rule (1910-1945). Protestant missionaries early on banned ancestral rites and other folk customs, while spreading liturgical (marriage and funerary) ceremonies, in an effort to inculcate orthodox doctrines among new believers. Converts' rejection of indigenous Confucian rites, however, became the focal point of heated public debates, as Korean nationalists and Japanese colonial officials grew concerned that Protestant rites posed threats to their own efforts to mold Korean identity. Reformist intellectuals seeking to construct a distinct national culture proposed avowedly modern and culturally authentic rites that transcended creed. Colonial bureaucrats, for their part, strove to foster loyal subjects of the emperor by simultaneously promoting simplified Confucian practices—ancestral veneration in particular—and Shinto observances. These nationalist and colonial efforts, I argue, incrementally yet substantially narrowed the meaning of religious freedom. By reframing rituals as civic concerns, reform initiatives underscored patriotic obligations at the expense of individual conscience, a development that only intensified when the Japanese empire shifted towards war.
Proust et la voie indirecte
Keywords: French & Italian.

In my dissertation, titled "Proust et la voie indirecte" [Proust and the indirect way], I explore the mechanism of "indirectness" in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. I study indirect strategies, ranging from invisible manipulations to imposed obligations, through which some characters achieve theirs goals by using other people who act for them. I show that some indirect actions can take a passive form. Even if the intermediary is passive, his/her presence remains mandatory to allow the desiring character to reach his/her goal. More specifically, I study situations in which the goal is the acquisition of prestige. I also identify particular situations in which indirect actions are only pseudo-actions, through which characters justify their disempowerment and their inability to assume responsibility for their acts. I show that the most typical indirect actions are those in which the desiring character's chances of success are extremely limited or even non-existent. I also argue that in some cases in which characters perceive someone's help as a chance event, there is a certain amount of intentionality involved. Therefore, those actions could be apprehended as indirect ones. I also apply the mechanisms found in the characters' behavior at a superior level, by considering the text itself the result of an indirect act. I argue that the writing of the book by the narrator -- the main subject of the novel -- could also be apprehended as an indirect mechanism that results in the book being potentially produced by a different "author, " after the potential death of the narrator saying "I." Finally, in the conclusion, I show that Proust's pragmatic ambitions for his reader imply indirectness as well: the author trains his reader to use indirect methods in his/her interpretations.
Public liquidity and banking
Keywords: Business.

This thesis is an exploration of the interactions between public liquidity (treasuries and reserves) and the banking sector. My research provides two perspectives. First, the banking sector demands public liquidity to guard against large systemic funding withdrawals. I find supportive evidence for this liquidity insurance motive, by quantifying a general equilibrium model with infrequent banking crises. The model implies that the supply of public liquidity impacts the cost of liquidity insurance, and therefore, affects banking sector fragility. Counterfactual analyses reveal that public liquidity expansions in QE1 is much more powerful than those in QE3, mostly due to differences in bank equity. Second, treasuries, as part of public liquidity, are partially substitutable to bank deposits. I quantify a model where both treasuries and bank deposits provide liquidity services, and their elasticity of substitution is a parameter to be estimated. I show that on average, their level of substitution is medium, which contradicts the recent findings in the literature. My estimations have implications for the time series variations of the liquidity premium and the monetary effects of fiscal policies.
Quantifying Refugee and Migrant Portrayals in Literature and Media
Keywords: Refugees > Social conditions
Databases
Mass media
Text
Thesis

For his capstone project, Andrew Quirk developed a statistical analysis that examined depictions of refugees in media using NLP & NLU techniques, taking advantage of large datasets of multinational news (scraped using the Python Newspaper3k library) to understand differences in geographic depictions of refugees (Syrian refugee crisis, “African” refugee crisis, etc.). Utilizing existent human rights literature, news sources, and similar data models, Andrew found that language had a huge influence on how refugees were portrayed in various mediums, often being associated with danger and criminality, but also a sense of opportunity. Andrew hopes his project helps uncover nuances in the portrayal of people groups and validate the technique of word embeddings to reveal the unconscious biases that are embedded in news and literature.
Quantitative imaging of cartilage and meniscus for detection of early osteoarthritic degeneration
Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.

Osteoarthritis is a prevalent disease that results in pain and loss of mobility of the joints. Knee osteoarthritis in particular affects an estimated 37% of the population over 60 years of age. Osteoarthritis of the knee is typically diagnosed with a weight-bearing radiograph following symptomatic knee pain. Unfortunately, by this point osteoarthritis has usually reached an advanced stage. There are no current cures for osteoarthritis, but to allow for development of disease-modifying treatments it is necessary to develop and validate methods that can reliably detect the earliest osteoarthritic changes. This dissertation focuses on the development and application of imaging methods with the potential for early osteoarthritic detection in the knee joint. The first part of this dissertation focuses on the utility of a weight-bearing computed tomography system for cartilage compression detection by assessing manual methods of cartilage segmentation and developing an automated method for segmentation of the CT images. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has high potential for detecting early osteoarthritis due to its excellent soft tissue contrast and ability to measure quantitative relaxation times, such as T2 and T1ρ. The next part of the dissertation focuses on optimizing the ex situ imaging environment for relaxation time analysis and then applying these methods to a study comparing relaxation times and the equilibrium compression modulus of cartilage. Finally, the last study uses an ACL-injured population to investigate changes to cartilage using MRI over 18-months post-surgery. A cluster analysis approach, which looks at regions of elevated T2 relaxation times in cartilage between MRI scan time-points is applied and shows that changes can be detected in the ACL-injured knees just 3-months following surgery. The results from this study suggest that the T2 cluster analysis might be ideal for detecting cartilage changes, and potentially more sensitive for detecting cartilage degeneration than relying on absolute values of T2 relaxation times. Overall, the work from this dissertation progresses the application of imaging for understanding early osteoarthritis by focusing on both CT, MRI and the development of advanced imaging analysis techniques.
Quantum acoustics with lithium niobate nanostructures
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Phononic crystals are today the most sophisticated technology for manipulating acoustic waves on the surface of a chip. As such, ordinarily these devices can be described by the classical physics of elasticity; accessing a regime where their behavior is manifestly quantum mechanical has so far remained elusive. One way of reaching this regime would be to use a superconducting qubit to monitor and control the acoustics. Such `quantum acoustic' devices would have wide-ranging applications to quantum transduction, sensing, and information processing. In this thesis I present a collection of works that lay the groundwork for realizing this vision. First I introduce a technique for calculating coupling strengths between superconducting circuits (which include, but are not restricted to, transmon qubits) and arbitrary piezoelectric nanostructures. I then present the first demonstration of direct, resonant coupling between a superconducting circuit and a phononic-crystal-defect resonator (PCDR). This required developing a fabrication process that combines superconducting microwave circuits and suspended lithium niobate nanostructures in a fully integrated, on-chip platform. I then present results from a later generation of devices, including the demonstration of a transmon qubit and an array of PCDRs in the strong coupling regime. Finally, using these same devices I show we can generate a strong dispersive interaction that results in phonon-number-dependent splitting of the qubit spectroscopic line. This constitutes the first observation of the quantized energy levels of a nanomechanical oscillator, taking us back to the original scientific motivation of directly observing the quantum mechanical nature of a (confined) acoustic wave. Needless to say, such dispersive physics also has applications in quantum sensing and information processing. I conclude with a discussion on future experiments along that direction, including quantum nondemolition measurements of single phonons and generation of coherent state superpositions (a.k.a. cat states) of mechanical motion.
Quantum engineering with solid state nanophotonic systems
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Photonics and optics are ubiquitous in our daily lives. By exploiting the quantum mechanical nature of light and matter, quantum optics holds promise to revolutionize communication, computing, metrology, and sensing. One class of quantum matter that interacts strongly with light is solid state color centers. These color centers are optically active lattice defects hosted in large bandgap materials such as diamond, which can serve as individual quantum nodes interacting in a quantum network through the emitted photons. In this dissertation, we explore a type of color center in diamond called silicon-vacancy (SiV) center, which presents a promising platform for implementation of quantum technologies. In particular, we will introduce the background on the photo-physics of SiV centers in diamond, and then walk through our journey studying this color center. We start by studying the optical properties of SiVs in nanodiamonds, and created hybrid diamond-silicon carbide (SiC) platforms to take advantage of the material properties of both diamond and SiC. Next, we discuss optical coherent control of optical transition of a single SiV center in a nanopillar array platform, which is a step towards scalable, on-chip quantum systems. Lastly, we discuss our efforts to create SiV-photon interface by embedding single SiV centers in diamond optical resonators. Using this platform, we demonstrate strong Purcell enhancement and cavity-enhanced Raman emission from a single color center, thereby achieving a large frequency tuning range of 100 GHz for Raman photon emission.
Qubits and chaos : on the power of quantum packing lemma, universal codes and random circuits
Keywords: Physics.

This thesis explores two major topics, quantum Shannon theory and many-body quantum chaos. The first two chapters present results in quantum Shannon theory: a quantum multiparty packing lemma and universal quantum codes for the compound quantum channel. The last chapter uses random quantum circuits and numerical methods to study the onset of random matrix behavior in many-body quantum chaotic systems.