VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Oncogenic control of aberrant glycosylation in murine and human hematopoietic cancers
Keywords:  Department of Biology
Sialoglycan
Myc
Sialic acid
Thesis

Upwards of 50% of cancers exhibit deregulation of MYC, a transcription factor that controls evasion of immune system detection and other aspects of cancer growth. MYC has also been implicated in the modification of the glycolcalyx, or cellular forest of sugars (glycans), and the production of sialic acid, a specific glycan modifier. Alterations to the glycocalyx broadly characterize a variety of cancers. Certain glycans containing sialic acid (sialoglycans) are known to inhibit immune function by binding to Siglecs, a family of inhibitory receptors present on most immune cells. However, the pathways leading to elevated sialoglycan synthesis (hypersialylation) in cancer are not well characterized. In this project, we explore a possible role for oncogenes in promoting sialoglycan production by upregulating transcription of sialyltransferases, which transfer sialic acids to nascent glycans, in murine and human MYC-driven hematopoieitic cancers.
Chemical and genetic MYC inhibition resulted in reduced Siglec ligands and altered glycosylation on murine and human T-ALL cells. Titration of MYC broadly altered transcriptional expression of sialoglycan biosynthetic enzymes; expression of several sialyltransferases, most notably ST6GALNAC4, decreased following MYC suppression. Deletion of ST6GALNAC4 in murine and human hematopoietic cancers reduced the expression of Siglec ligands and increased susceptibility to NK cell killing. While MYC has been implicated in a variety of cancer-promoting activities, our results offer a new connection between MYC and cancer immunoevasion through the glycocalyx in hematological malignancies. While current therapies targeting MYC have been unsuccessful, a better understanding of sialoglycan biosynthesis may provide novel prognostic markers and therapeutic targets.
Optical Control of the Motion and Spin of Cold Atoms for Quantum Simulations with Long-Range Interactions
Keywords:  Department of Physics
optical tweezers
cold atoms
quantum simulation
light-matter interaction
Thesis

Systems of laser-cooled atoms can be precisely controlled and detected with light, making them ideal platforms for understanding and engineering matter from the ground up. Long-range interactions, mediated either by Rydberg excitations or by photons in a high-finesse optical cavity, open up a wide range of possibilities for designing Hamiltonians and performing quantum simulations. A key component of these quantum simulations is the ability to prepare both the internal states and positions of the atoms prior to turning on the long-range interactions. We initialize states by deflecting light onto cold atoms using an acousto-optic deflector (AOD). The precise control over the position of deflected beams enables local control over the atoms’ motional and spin degrees of freedom. By manipulating the internal spin states of rubidium atoms, we prepare a spin texture within an optical cavity. We further demonstrate the creation of large arrays of optical tweezers, consisting of focused Gaussian beams of light, to trap and rearrange cesium atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice. Arbitrary spin textures and re-configurable atomic arrays will enable future efforts towards enhanced spin-squeezing for metrological applications, the study of frustrated triangular lattices, and gate operations for quantum information applications.
Optical scanning using MEMS phased array for 3D display
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

This thesis describes a direct view 3D display that utilizes a micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) phased array to steer and focally scan a patterned line to create an image at a desired depth. First, the steering and variable focus operation of the phased array device is analyzed. Then, the optical setup of the 3D display is explained and images with depth are shown. Finally, the thesis demonstrates 3D video frame generation using a clustered depth map approach and ends with a discussion of alternate holographic techniques.
Optimal aircraft rerouting during space launches
Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Commercial interest in space exploration and capabilities has seen steady growth. This growth has the potential to advance science, inspire innovation, introduce space tourism, and address global concerns such geospatial monitoring and data access, universal data communications, and weather. One challenge facing space exploration is how to expand operations while minimizing the disruption to shared resources like airspace. Currently, during a space launch or reentry, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibits air traffic within a large column of airspace around the launch trajectory. The prohibited airspace is often active for hours at a time, resulting in the rerouting of hundreds of flights at the cost of thousands of dollars to airlines per launch. If the current launch and reentry procedures do not change, they could limit technology advancement and space exploration or hurt airlines. A new method of managing the airspace during space launches would need to maintain safety, maximize efficiency, and not increase air traffic controller workload. To address safety and efficiency, recent research has focused on leveraging new technology to make the prohibited airspace dynamic throughout the space launch and to limit the geographical extent. To do this successfully, the approach must accurately model the airspace, including both the aircraft and the dispersion of debris in case of an anomaly, and must capture the inherent uncertainty of launch anomalies to provide encompassing rerouting regions. This thesis uses Markov decision processes to model the problem of aircraft rerouting during space launches and dynamic programming to solve for optimal rerouting policies. The resulting policies are run through simulated scenarios to measure their effects on safety and efficiency. The results produce smaller prohibited regions and provide real-time reroutes for air traffic controllers to relay to pilots during a space launch. These outputs can be used as the foundation for a decision support tool that assists air traffic controllers in rerouting flights during space launches.
Optimization-based modeling in investment and data science
Keywords: Mathematics.

Optimization has played a key role in numerous fields including data science, statistics, machine learning, decision science, control and quantitative investment. Optimization offers a way for users to focus on the modeling step. Convex optimization has been a very successful and powerful modeling framework. By formulating a problem as convex optimization, practitioners could focus on the modeling side without worrying about designing problem-specific optimization algorithms during prototyping time. However, there are hurdles in applying this convex modeling framework. First, lots of signal processing and machine learning problems are most naturally formulated as non-convex problems. Second, not all convex problems are tractable. Third, it may be hard to encode the knowledge of data into a simple regularizer or constraint and specify the mathematical form of the optimization problem. In this thesis, we talk about topics in optimization-based modeling, including 1) distributional robust Kelly strategy in investment and gambling; 2) convex sparse blind deconvolution; 3) missing data imputation via a new structure called matrix network; 4) neural proximal method for compressive sensing.In these works. I try to expand the boundary of convex optimization based modeling by conquering several hurdles. In the distributional robust Kelly problem, the original distributional robust optimization formulation isconvex but non-tractable; we transform the problem into a tractable form. In the sparse blind deconvolutionproblem, blind deconvolution has been perceived as a non-convex problem for a long time, we proposea scalable convex formulation, and find a phase transition for the convex algorithm. In the missing dataimputation problem, we study a slice-wise missing pattern on tensorial type data that is beyond the capabilityof typical tensor completion algorithms. We propose a new type of underlying low-dimensional structure thatallows us to impute the missing data. In the first three topics, we solve these problems via convex optimizationformulations. In the last topic, we step out of the safety zone of convexity. On the linear inverse problem, we go beyond the sparsity and1−norm regularizer for compressive sensing. To model complex structure innatural/medical images, we propose a learning-based idea to parameterize the proximal map of an unknownregularizer. This idea is inspired by the convex optimization modeling framework and the learning-basedmethod, although the result need not correspond to convex optimization.
The organization of educational markets and effects on individuals' decisions : an empirical analysis using Brazilian educational policies
Keywords: Education.

This dissertation aims to provide new evidence about how educational policies affect school markets and the decisions of their participants. To do so, I analyze two policies implemented in two regions in Brazil: Pernambuco and the city of Sao Paulo, respectively. In Pernambuco, I study the effects on student enrollment decisions and test scores of a policy that increased the length of the school day from 4.5 to 8 hours for public high school students: the full-day school policy. In Sao Paulo, I examine which school attributes influence the school choice decisions of public-school teachers. I do so in a context where teachers have all the power when deciding which schools they want to work at, without any interference of school administrators. I divide the analysis of the full-day high school policy into two papers. In the first paper, I show the program has a strong effect on the dynamics of the educational market. Specifically, my results suggest that migration from private middle schools to public high schools increased in Pernambuco after the full-day program's implementation. In the second paper, I compare student test scores gains throughout high school, accounting for fixed differences between the schools and common time effects. My results indicate the program has a positive effect of nearly 0.2 standard deviations on student test scores. Finally, in the third paper, I analyze the teacher labor market in the city of Sao Paulo. My results indicate that teachers are most influenced by a school's location as well as the average socioeconomic characteristics of the school. Also, I show that a small wage-premiums (about 5-7%) do not affect teacher choices. Altogether, my analysis indicates that the organization of educational markets have a significant influence on individual decisions and affects the distribution of physical and human resources across schools.
Organized Labor and Social Value Creation in Silicon Valley
Keywords: Labor movement
High technology industries
Income inequality
Text
Thesis

Ahmi Dhuna’s capstone project explored the relationship between organized labor, the growing tech industry, and economic disparities in the Silicon Valley. More specifically, she focused on the history of organized labor in the Silicon Valley, detailing the virulently anti-worker nature of tech’s market incentives and dominant business models, and contrasting these destructive anti-worker tactics with tech’s rhetoric of ‘bettering mankind.’ Her paper offers a critical look at how anti-union industries affect working conditions, low-income communities, and growing income inequality.
Student project deposited by department for archival purposes. Original work unavailable for public download due to permission restriction preferences of the author.
The origin of rice agriculture in the Lower Yangtze Valley, China
Keywords: East Asian Languages and Cultures.

The transition to agriculture is one of the most consequential events in human history. Rice agriculture is known to have originated from the Lower Yangtze River, but despite more than two decades of extensive studies, how and why rice first became domesticated remain unclear. Traditional theories tend to consider the transition as a result of resource stress, but recent archaeological data indicate no such evidence in this area. This dissertation provides a new approach to explain this phenomenon. Data for this research come from two sources: 1) a review of published materials of excavated sites dating to the Pleistocene-Holocene transition in China, and 2) a residue (starch and phytolith) and use-wear study on a total of 142 ceramic and stone artifacts from the Shangshan culture (11,400 -- 8,600 BP). Based on my analysis, I propose that the agricultural transition was a two-stage process, the first stage involving the self-domestication of humans and the second stage featuring human domestication of other species. The first stage began around the terminal Pleistocene (ca. 30,000-11,700 BP), when humans invented a diversified array of technologies (e.g. grinding stone, pottery, polished stones). These new technologies enabled humans to exploit more wild foods but also physically and culturally "domesticated" them, creating an irreversible reliance on external tools. The second stage arose in the warming climate of the early Holocene, when humans began a "mass production" of their Pleistocene innovations in order to process newly abundant plant resources, especially acorns. The physicality of tools and plants further tied people to specific locales and allowed them to experiment with plant cultivation. In the Lower Yangtze River, rice domestication occurred as an unintended consequence. Initially, rice was used as an important pottery temper and a minor food supplement; later a series of intensification events transformed the crop into a common staple food. Taken together, these conclusions depart from the anthropocentric approaches that consider plant domestication as a human strategy to produce sustenance. Instead, this research emphasizes how the active agencies of plants and tools resulted in the domestication of humans by eventually "trapping" them into a sedentary farming life with labor-demanding activities.
The other Floridas : ecofeminist bioregionalism and post-rural white identity politics in the facebook era
Keywords: Anthropology.

Florida is a crucible for environmental politics: once in the vanguard of environmental protection, in the 2010s, the state was a leader in the Tea Party dismantling of environmental protection. While the state's largest oyster population collapsed and cyanobacteria choked rivers, the Scott Administration brought the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to its regulatory low point. Based on sixteen months of fieldwork between 2014 and 2017 in public education settings, this oral history project examines ecological nativism among settlers in "the Other Florida, " a region of the Florida Panhandle that missed the state's twentieth-century population boom. In the twenty-first, it was remade by sustainable development discourse as a prized site of salable cultural and ecological heritage. The "ecological natives" were oysterfolk, mullet fisherman, and others in a demographic category steeped in political fantasy, rural whites. This dissertation describes two movements that both latched onto the ecologies of the Other Florida as the same fodder for very different visions of place-based identity: ecofeminist bioregionalism and post-rural white identity politics. Nature memoirists combined ecofeminism, with its critique of western "Man" exploiting and objectifying people and ecologies alike, with bioregionalism, a movement to build national identities around watersheds. Its potential to reform settler environmentalism has been overlooked because of lack of attention to women's contributions to environmentalism. Considering the status of the Apalachicola River in water management, this dissertation also finds multiple ontologies among settlers, as for some white settlers the Apalachicola is a living whole imbued with life force. "Post-rural" refuses to take rural white populations as a priori and instead attends to how during suburbanization, identity markers associated with white rurality remained and were politically mobilized to oppose regulation of the resource frontier by outsiders invested in real estate. Post-rural white identity politics was spread through Facebook, an addictive product whose behavior-modifying feedback loops were designed to amplify inflammatory content for profit. Facebook was also used to promote mullet, a "trash fish, " as a quasi-ethnic object for expressing a minoritized "white trash" identity laden with Christian symbolism. The dissertation concludes with consideration of the figure of "Man, " which ecofeminists criticize, as central to the advent of anthropos as a biogeochemical force. Might a queer anthropocene inaugurate Man's end?.
Outdoing Zarathustra : Salvador Dalí's rendering of Nietzsche's Übermensch
Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

Salvador Dalí is mainly known as a painter, but his artistic production expanded to other disciplines, particularly writing. In this dissertation, I examine his written work in relation to Friedrich Nietzsche. The objective of this study is to conduct a reading of Dalí that confronts his work with his boundless existential ambition, and, in the process, offer a particular definition of Nietzsche's Übermensch. I begin with a contextualization of Nietzsche's reception in early 20th century Spain and his direct influence on the young Dalí, who, since childhood, had the intention of embodying the Übermensch. Having established this relationship, this essay is then divided across three thematic chapters: accumulation, affirmation and generosity. In the first chapter, I show how Dalí integrated the entirety of his experiences into his autobiography (conceived as a work of art), and I use the work of Alexander Nehamas to illuminate Nietzsche's philosophy as a tool to make literature out of life. In the second chapter, I focus on the capacity of affirming everything accumulated, with Gilles Deleuze's reading of Zarathustra's dice-throw as an instrument for understanding Dalí's paranoiac-critical method. In the third chapter, I argue that generosity is a logical consequence of the previous two stages, and following Peter Sloterdijk, I show how self-eulogy can lead to munificence. In 1975, Dalí proclaimed that he was "the absolute Übermensch." By his early seventies, he had identified the mechanism of exaggeration as one of the most effective in his life. It was through exaggeration that he self-identified as the Übermensch. However, I argue that such a boastful claim is also an exaggeration, and conclude that he instead falls into the category of artist-tyrant -- practically the same, but less extreme. With this dissertation, I try to propose a new understanding of Dalí that goes beyond any moral judgment of him, as well as contribute a case study of the Übermensch that will hopefully shed some light on such a contested concept.
Pacific crossings : American encounters with Asians in the progressive era of empire and exclusion
Keywords: History.

This dissertation addresses a central but often-ignored question: what was so "progressive" about the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s), a period of unprecedented American overseas colonization in the Pacific and surge of anti-Asian immigration legislation? By taking up this question, it explains how historical figures in this period sought to reconcile a belief in racial hierarchy with the democratic promise of progressivism. What made this reconciliation possible, I argue, was the calibration of American imperial and immigration policies to allow for the selective inclusion of Asians who conformed with Western standards of "civilization." Japan, more than any other Asian country, symbolized this era's highly conditional form of racial inclusivity. Early 20th century American diplomats, politicians, academics, and missionaries recognized the Japanese as a respectable "race" based in part on the idea that the United States and Japan were engaged in analogous colonial projects to "develop" the "backward" races in Korea, the Philippines, and the American South. Imperial politics in the Pacific likewise shaped US immigration policy. Because of American imperialists' high regard for Japan, the United States government exempted the Japanese from exclusion acts that unilaterally restricted the entry of the Chinese and South Asians. In spite of the growing anti-Japanese sentiment in the American West, national policymakers prohibited only the entry of Japanese laborers through the bilateral Gentlemen's Agreement and continued to admit select classes of Japanese immigrants. Congress, however, eventually decided to exclude even the "civilized" Japanese after World War I, when a nativist lobby in California countered the national perception of its parochialism by recasting its desire for exclusion as a response to Japan's actions against people of "her own color." Although US and Japanese policies were quite different, the architects of the landmark Johnson-Reed Act (1924) adopted the Californian argument and used Japan's restriction of Chinese and Korean entry as a pretext to justify Japanese exclusion. Seen from the Pacific, the limits of the Progressive Era's conception of "progress" were made evident by this exclusion of the "civilized" Japanese. While American policymakers in the first two decades of the 20th century promised that Asians would gain increasing opportunities for participation in imperial governance and American life as they acquired the virtues of Western "civilization, " the promise of racial inclusion did not become a reality. Indeed, after 1924, American policymakers became far less concerned with Asian peoples' conformity with Western standards of "civilization" than the possibility of a war arising out of Asian migration, economic competition, and geopolitical conflict. By the time the United States entered the Pacific War in 1941, Americans no longer saw the Japanese as prime examples of the "civilized" non-white race but as "barbarians" who must be defeated in a race war.
Pagan nature : grottos, nymphs, and tritons in early modern poetry (1492-1616)
Keywords: Comparative Literature.

This dissertation documents the contested interrelation of poetry with natural history in the early modern period. It assesses how seminal poetic texts from Italy, Spain, Portugal, and England negotiated and probed the meaning of grottos, nymphs, and tritons as fables from 1492 to 1616. It first describes the Renaissance revival of the grotto and their humanoid inhabitants, nymphs and tritons, as key components of an early modern natural history which turned to pagan poetry to explain the natural world. It subsequently traces the shifts in meaning such fables underwent as legible signs amenable to competing natural historical frames of reference as they spread across Europe. While at the turn of the sixteenth century, poets like Garcilaso de la Vega and Jacopo Sannazaro used nymphs and grottos to convey a Platonic natural history, subsequent generations of poets like Luís de Camões and Edmund Spenser turned to the beguiling forms of the pagan maritime gods to inscribe competing Epicurean understandings of nature. Though Miguel de Cervantes ultimately questions such maritime fables, his novels and plays also indicate the importance of pagan gods to mediating understandings of human nature that continue to this day.