VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Touch in late medieval English theatre
Keywords: Medieval Visual Culture
English Literature
Medieval Literature
Touch
The Senses
Medieval Manuscripts
Medieval Theatre

This thesis examines touch in late medieval English theatre, considering tactile encounters on stage and the role of touch in audience experience. Although touch is increasingly attracting attention in medieval studies, theatre has thus far been an exception to this trend. To rectify this, I focus primarily—though not exclusively—on biblical drama, especially the York and N-Town Plays. My methodology is threefold, synthesizing lexical analysis, interdisciplinary comparisons of drama and art, and materially informed readings of medieval theatre.
At the heart of this thesis lies a paradox in medieval understandings of touch that has hitherto gone unnoticed: the sense of touch offered a pathway to the sacred, but it was also a source of uncleanness. Medieval plays—precisely because they involved human bodies—were ideally positioned to interrogate this paradox on stage. Further, some medieval plays put their spectators in a position to experience the touch paradox first hand. However, from the 1530s onwards, the sacred half of the medieval touch paradox was in decline. This development was also reflected on the contemporary stage.
The introduction provides a review of existing scholarship, defines my corpus and terminology, outlines my methodology, and advances my theory of the medieval touch paradox. Here, I also introduce a leitmotif for the thesis as a whole: Doubting Thomas, the apostle who refused to believe in Christ’s Resurrection without tangible proof. Chapters one and two explore moments of touch on the medieval stage in relation to the themes of gender and religious difference respectively. The remaining three chapters explore the tactile aspects of audience experience, focusing respectively on the eyes, the hands, and the feet as agents of touch.
The conclusion explores the wider implications of my thesis for medieval studies. In brief, this thesis offers a rich new theory of touch through which to examine not only medieval plays but also other contemporary texts. Secondly, it challenges the prevailing view that medieval theatre appealed to the senses primarily or even exclusively via sight and hearing. Thirdly, it draws attention to an important sensory rupture in sixteenth-century England, one whose influence can be felt on the stage and beyond.
Age, depositional history and tectonics of the Indo-Burman ranges
Keywords: Indo-Burman Ranges, Ophiolites, Neotethys, Geochronology, Provenance

This thesis examines the provenance and depositional processes of the sedimentary rocks of the Indo-Burman Ranges (IBR), discusses the tectonic evolution of the IBR, and provides a synthesis of the geological evolution of Myanmar. The IBR form an enigmatic mountain belt, comprising a western belt of folded and thrusted mainly Cenozoic sedimentary rocks, a central zone of highly deformed Triassic turbidites (Pane Chaung Formation) and low-grade metamorphic rocks (Kanpetlet Schist), and an eastern zone comprising a major Neo-Tethyan suture zone. The newly discovered early Jurassic-early Cretaceous radiolarian assemblages from ophiolitic mélange in the Kalemyo area and late Paleocene-early Eocene radiolarian ages from the Ngapali mélange, with ages similar to those of the Indus – Yarlung Tsangpo suture zone of south Tibet and Nagaland, reinforces the hypothesis that the Kalemyo - Nagaland suture and Indus – Yarlung Tsangpo suture represent a single suture zone that separates the Indian plate to the west (IBR) and Asian plate to the east (Central Basin and Wuntho-Popa Arc). The data presented suggest that Triassic turbidites were originally deposited on the northeastern India (Gondwana) margin, not the Asian (Sibumasu) plate, and that a wide Neo-Tethyan ocean separated the IBR from the Wuntho-Popa Arc (WPA) and the Shan Plateau. The geochemistry of detrital zircons from Upper Cretaceous sedimentary rocks of the IBR to be derived predominantly from the core of the IBR where marks a broad suture zone. Similar data from the Paleocene-Eocene flysch sediments suggest derivation from the Wuntho-Popa Arc and the core of the IBR.
Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo’s 'Suma de la política': The Civic Kingdom-City and Spanish Vernacular Humanism
Keywords: Nobility
Renaissance humanism
Ethics
Vernacular humanism
Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo
Politics
Monarchy
Suma de la política

The dissertation is an edition of Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo’s 'Suma de la política' with an introductory essay that focuses on the main political and ethical ideas addressed in the treatise, the texts and sources used, and the general implications that the text and its author have in the context of Spanish vernacular humanism. The introductory essay underscores that Arévalo’s writing in Spanish is much more novel and interesting than literary critics have often recognized and points out that Arévalo’s attitudes toward Renaissance humanism are more open than several acclaimed scholars have been willing to admit, or at least to recognize. This edition intends to supplant Mario Penna’s (1959), as his text has many errors and a limited critical apparatus. Moreover, I have added commentary on the treatise, located many of the numerous texts and authors mentioned by Arévalo in his text, and offered a complete critical apparatus that includes not only Penna, but also the first copy to appear in print of Arévalo’s work by Juan Beneyto Pérez (1943) and a recent French translation—based on Penna’s text—by Beátrice Leroy (2015). Both the edition and the introductory essay intend to provide a reliable scholarly edition, as well as new perspectives on one of Castile’s most important, yet not fully appreciated, political and ecclesiastical figures of the fifteenth century. Moreover, the edition and introduction will offer new insights and views on the impact of the recent revival of Classical thought through Renaissance humanism in the reconfiguration and reorganization of government in Castile, especially through the lens of the monarchy’s attempts to rein in the nobles and (re)construct society, politics, and literature around the king himself.
A qualitative exploration of postgraduate students’ and lecturers’ perspectives on whether their experiences of higher education reflect an ‘Intellectually Humble Dialogic Space’
Keywords: dialogue
intellectual freedom
dialogic education
self-formation
higher education
humility
intellectual humility

My dissertation explores whether self-reported experiences of higher education from lecturers and postgraduate students reflect an ‘intellectually humble dialogic space’; this is a conceptual space representing a disposition to rigorously consider opposing ideas to beliefs held, where ideas are presented in a manner where they are rigorously considered to be true relative to alternatives; finally, it is a space where participants incorporate the most truthful ideas in developing their deeply held beliefs.
Utilising a pragmatic, qualitative approach, ten lecturers and ten postgraduate students in the social sciences participated in semi-structured interviews centred on whether their experiences of higher education reflected an intellectually humble dialogic space. Through a comparative thematic analysis inspired by Braun and Clarke (2007), results showed that lecturers are less certain of the positive epistemic status (or truth) of their beliefs compared to students. Students’ beliefs were mainly confirmed resulting in an increased motivation to act on their beliefs because of their experiences of higher education. Lecturers were also more favourable to disagreement, with students being described as intolerant towards differing views. Experiences reflected that higher education encouraged a harsh treatment of lecturers’ deeply held beliefs when they were students, but now (due to factors such as fear of complaint and precarity of employment) students deeply held beliefs are not challenged. Overall, the experiences of both lecturers and students did not reflect an intellectually humble dialogic space.
Suggestions for future research are made. The themes identified in this small scale, exploratory study could be used as a framework for investigating differing contexts of higher education in terms of their reflection of an intellectually humble dialogic space (or related concepts).
Visual and thermal odometry with Deep Neural Networks
Keywords: deep neural networks
multi-modal inference
knowledge distillation
deep learning
deep visual odometry
thermal-inertial odometry
visual odometry

Accurate camera ego-motion estimation, widely known as Visual Odometry (VO), remains a key prerequisite for many applications in computer vision and robotics. Conventional VO, which relies on hand-crafted feature engineering, is prone to drift and can easily lose track as the extracted features contain outliers and unknown noise. This is problematic for application which requires robustness and high level accuracy such as for tracking UAV position in underground tunnel or estimating firefighter position in emergency operation. To alleviate the problem of noisy feature engineering, machine learning algorithms, especially Deep Neural Networks (DNN), have been used in the past few years to automatically learn robust odometry features from large amounts of data. However, despite some promising results, several fundamental drawbacks still exist in terms of accuracy, efficiency, and applicability to visually-denied environments.
The work presented in this thesis tackles these shortcomings by proposing a novel network architecture and optimization strategy for DNN-based odometry estimation. To address issues of accuracy and long-term consistency, we propose to train DNN-based VO using both a windowed-based composite transformation loss and relative transformation loss through curriculum learning. With this approach, we can improve the generalization ability of the network for both translation and rotation by 21% and 16% respectively. We also propose the use of an attention network to conditionally re-weight image features such that the network can produce more accurate poses whilst being more amenable to interpretation. This method improves translation and rotation estimation by 27.8% and 43.1% respectively over the model without attention.
The second contribution deals with the efficiency problem of DNN-based VO by proposing the first distillation approach for camera pose regression. We demonstrate that distilling knowledge from a deep pose regression network can be done effectively if we emphasize the knowledge transfer only when we trust the teacher network prediction. We also show that a distilled network can be further compressed with factorization and could be more generalizable due to low-rank constraints. Our proposed approach can reduce the number of student parameters by up to 92.95% (2.12× faster) whilst keeping the prediction accuracy very close to that of the teacher.
Finally, we deal with the issue of tracking in visually-denied environments by proposing the first DNN-based thermal-inertial odometry system. Since thermal images inherently lack robust features, we design the network to not only extract features from the thermal images, but to also hallucinate visual features given thermal image as the input. Through extensive evaluation across two datasets, we conclude that our proposed method can produces accurate odometry estimation with less than 2 m absolute trajectory errors on average.
Ammonium-directed epoxidation in the asymmetric syntheses of dihydroconduramines and conduramines
Keywords: Epoxidation
Asymmetric synthesis
Dihydroconduramines
Chemoselectivity
Stereoselective synthesis
Conduramines
Regioselectivity
Diastereoselectivity
Amino alcohols
Ring-opening

This thesis centres on the asymmetric syntheses of a family of synthetic products: dihydroconduramines and conduramines. The work aims to use the ammonium-directed epoxidation methodology as a key step in all cases.
Chapter 1 introduces a review of literature reports relating to the biological activity and synthetic strategies to access dihydroconduramines and conduramines.
Chapter 2 investigates the olefinic oxidation protocol of racemic N-protected anti- and syn-2-aminocyclohex-3-en-1-ols. Concise syntheses of racemic dihydroconduramines (±)-A-2 and (±)-C-2 are also presented.
Chapter 3 describes the syntheses of enantiopure N-protected anti- and syn-2-aminocyclohex-3-en-1-ols in order to access enantiopure dihydroconduramines. Investigation of the surrogacy of these substrates to the racemate is also undertaken.
Chapter 4 details the asymmetric synthesis of four new enantiopure dihydroconduramines from an appropriate enantiopure anti-2 aminocyclohex-3-en-1-ols.
Chapter 5 details the asymmetric synthesis of six enantiopure dihydroconduramines from an appropriate enantiopure syn-2 aminocyclohex-3-en-1-ols.
Chapter 6 investigates the olefinic oxidation protocol of primary, secondary and tertiary racemic allylic amino alcohols, derived from ring-opening of benzene oxide with primary, secondary and tertiary amines.
Chapter 7 describes concise asymmetric syntheses of six conduramines, including four new, from enantiopure allylic amino alcohols, derived from ring-opening of benzene oxide with (R)-α-methylbenzylamine.
Chapter 8 contains full experimental procedures and characterisation for all compounds synthesised in chapter 2-7.
Negotiation transparency and consistency in configurable protocols: an empirical investigation
Keywords: consistency
www
inconsistency
attack
internet
discriminatory
security
downgrade
transparency
network
scan
configuration
configurable
protocol
model
HTTPS
transport
application
fine-grained
measurement
TLS
discrimination
SSL
defense
confusion
attacker

Configurability (also known as agility), is a protocol design framework that allows protocols to support multiple values for parameters such as the protocol version and ciphersuite. At the beginning of a new protocol session, both communicating parties, e.g. client and server, negotiate these parameters to reach a mutual agreement on optimal values for these parameters, which will be used for the rest of the session. The parameters negotiation phase is critical as it defines the security guarantees that the protocol can provide in a particular session. Hence, it has been an attractive target for downgrade attacks. While the literature has looked at the authenticity and integrity of parameters negotiation in configurable protocols to prevent downgrade attacks under the man-in-the-middle attacker model, negotiation transparency and consistency under other attacker models have been largely overlooked.
Are there unexplored attacker models that can result in a downgrade? Can a semi-trusted server discriminate against its clients without being detected? Can two clients' requests to the same server receive inconsistent security guarantees? Can we achieve a better balance between security and backward compatibility?
In this thesis we aim to answer these unexplored interrelated questions, with a focus on the TLS protocol as one of the most important and widely used configurable protocols. To this end, we first introduce a taxonomy of downgrade attacks in the TLS protocol and application protocols using TLS. Second, we define three types of negotiation models based on a new notion we introduce, which we call the "negotiation power". Third, we introduce a novel attacker model which we call the "discriminatory" model. Fourth, through a measurement-based case study on the Forward Secrecy property and the TLS protocol, we find that there are indeed servers that select non-Forward Secrecy, nevertheless they support it, proving that, in the same vein, discrimination downgrade attacks can go unnoticed. Fifth, through two measurement-based case studies in TLS and HTTPS, we quantify inconsistencies in HTTPS and TLS responses to requests that differ in subtle variables that are not expected to affect the received security guarantees. Namely, we quantify inconsistent servers' responses to requests with versus without the www. prefix, and to requests from different geographic locations. Finally, we examine the concept of "prior knowledge" to reduce the downgrade attacks' surface. The results of this thesis introduce transparency and consistency as needed properties in configurable protocols, and show that they are not perfectly achieved in widely used protocols today such as TLS and HTTPS.
MCI progression classification for early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease using machine learning and deep learning methods
Keywords: Alzheimer's disease
Machine learning
Deep learning

Alzheimer’s disease (AD), the most common cause of dementia, affects more than 520,000 people in the UK. It is a progressive disease and its causes still remain unclear. Besides the traditional neuropsychological test, imaging biomarkers are playing an increasingly important role for AD detection and especially for early stage diagnosis including prediction of the transition from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) to AD. The use of structural imaging such as T1 MRI for AD diagnosis has been widely explored, however, the application of PET imaging to AD is relatively novel, with new tracers appearing. In addition, the development of machine learning and deep learning algorithms can help researchers and clinicians build computer-based image analysis tools, which can be used to further enhance the AD diagnosis results by utilising image features that cannot be easily interpreted directly by human eyes. This thesis focuses on the development of such image analysis methods for the prediction of MCI to AD conversion.
We first propose the use of novel features, based on complexity measurement, from volumetric amyloid PET images, which we use as input to a nonlinear Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. We tested this method using the novel PET features alone or in combination with standard PET metrics and MRI-derived features, obtaining state of the art accuracy.
Our second main contribution involves the development of a deep learning model using two parallel 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to combine the information from amyloid PET and T1 MRI. Deep learning methods in this area are typically limited by the small size of available PET datasets. We show that prediction accuracy is improved by combining “diagnostically similar” datasets together as a form of augmentation (progressed MCI + pAD against stable MCI, as well as progressed MCI + pAD against stable MCI + healthy volunteer).
Our third major contribution explores a new method for augmentation using data synthesis through a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN), which can generate new amyloid PET images from volumetric T1 MRI scans, for which there is much larger availability. The generated amyloid images are used to augment the original progressed MCI dataset to address the problem of data imbalance. The results showed that the accuracy for MCI to AD prediction using generated data augmentation method outperformed traditional augmentation methods substantially.
New reactivity and selectivity in rhodium-catalysed hydroacylation
Keywords: Amido ketones
Rhodium catalysis
1,3-Dicarbonyls
Intermolecular hydroacylation
Enantioselective alkyne hydroacylation
Dynamic kinetic resolution
Aldehyde

This thesis documents the development of two new rhodium(I)-catalysed methodologies. The first shows the use of 1,4-dicarbonyl systems in hydroacylation for the preparation of synthetically valuable alpha-N-amido ketones. The second method is a dynamic kinetic resolution process for the synthesis of enantiomerically enriched 1,3-dicarbonyl compounds.
Chapter 1 introduces the concept of rhodium-catalysed hydroacylation and presents a literature review covering key developments in the field of intra- and intermolecular hydroacylation, with a focus on chelating aldehydes that can be used to overcome decarbonylation. The advancement of enantioselective hydroacylation reactions has also been briefly summarised in this chapter.
Chapter 2 describes that readily available alpha-N-amidoaldehydes are effective substrates for intermolecular Rh-catalysed alkyne hydroacylation reactions. The catalyst [Rh(dppe)(C6H5F)][BArF4], allows a broad range of aldehydes and alkynes to be used as substrates, delivering alpha-N-amido ketone products in high yields and high levels of regiocontrol. The use of alpha-N-amido aldehydes as substrates establishes that 6-membered rhodacyclic intermediates provide suitable chelating stability to enable productive hydroacylation.
Chapter 3 presents the development of enantioselective Rh-catalysed alkyne hydroacylation of beta-amido aldehydes via dynamic kinetic resolution. The method delivers enantiomerically enriched 1,3-dicarbonyl products in a highly enantioselective fashion with good yields and high regiocontrol, using a combination of cationtic Rh, commercially available (R)- DMMGarphos ligand and Cs2CO3. To the best our knowledge, this is the first example of dynamic kinetic resolution in intermolecular hydroacylation.
Chapter 4 summarises the research work done and the potential future work.
Chapter 5 documents the experimental data and procedures.
Mapping of signalling pathways using a FACS-based forward genetic approach
Keywords: SEPHS1
FLCN
LAMTOR4
functional genomics
QRICH1
FACS
haploid cells
mTORC1
insertional mutagenesis
TNFR1

Since its inception, the central goal of functional genomics has been to gain a mechanistic understanding of how genes operate and interact with each other to regulate cellular and organismal phenotypes. To this end, screening approaches have been designed to systematically perturb the activity of every genetic element in the genome and identify mutants affecting defined phenotypic traits. Only recently, screenable phenotypes in mammalian cell systems moved past “fitness” and onto detection of molecular markers’ gradients at single cell resolution. This thesis describes the interrogation of regulatory gene networks behind key intracellular signalling pathways using a Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting (FACS)-based approach coupled to haploid genetic screening.
After establishing the technology’s robustness and reproducibility in the first result Chapter, a set of iterative screens is performed in the presence of pharmacological and genetic perturbations to dissect mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) activation and tumour necrosis factor α (TNFα) pro-inflammatory signalling.
Data presented in the second result Chapter demonstrate that, contrary to previous assumptions, Ragulator subunit LAMTOR4 is not strictly required for in mTORC1 activation under steady-state conditions. Furthermore, LAMTOR4 is part of a “synthetic-sick” interaction with tumour suppressor gene FLCN, resulting in inhibition of cell proliferation which could be therapeutically relevant.
The third result Chapter describes a novel regulatory mechanism of TNFα-dependent pro-inflammatory signalling through transcriptional modulation of its receptor TNFR1. The effect is mediated by the largely uncharacterised proteins QRICH1, SEPHS1 and ZNF652, the first two of which functionally, and possibly also physically, interact.
Together, this thesis details how genetic screening for modulation of molecular makers can advance understanding of functional cellular signalling network.