VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Advancing ultrasound image analysis by capturing operator gaze patterns
Keywords: ultrasound
ultrasound image analysis
obstetric ultrasound
saliency prediction
machine learning
ultrasound video analysis
visual saliency
saliency modeling
eye tracking
ultrasound probe movement guidance
gaze tracking
ultrasound safety
expected value bias

Obstetric ultrasound scanning is a safe and effective tool for the early detection of fetal abnormalities and therefore crucial for determining the necessity of clinical intervention. However, ultrasound relies on operator expertise, which is a scarce resource globally. Moreover, there are large geographical and inter-observer variations of clinical outcomes. To address this, the PULSE project aims to develop a new generation of ultrasound scanning capabilities based on big data and machine learning models which capture the knowledge of experienced sonographers. To this end, the project team acquired a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset of routine clinical ultrasound scanning with gaze-tracking data.
In this thesis, we first examine shortcomings of the operator-machine interaction. We find that sonographers adjust the biometric measurements of fetuses with potential growth abnormalities towards the healthy expected value, providing a possible explanation for the known deficiencies of these measurements. Moreover, we study the adherence to safety recommendations regarding thermal energy emission and find that, while sonographers keep within the appropriate limits, they rarely check the safety indices. We provide suggestions for the modification of the ultrasound machine interface to address these two issues.
Second, we develop the first model that predicts sonographer gaze-tracking data on ultrasound video through the method of visual saliency prediction. In addition, we propose the first unified visual saliency model for the prediction of gaze on both images and videos. Besides unifying the two modalities, the model obtains state-of-the-art performance on both tasks for all relevant computer vision benchmarks.
Third, we show that sonographer gaze-tracking data is a powerful supervision signal for ultrasound image feature representation learning. We develop a general framework for representation learning and transfer of the trained neural network to the downstream tasks of standard plane detection and automatic biometry plane annotation. We also show that the learned representations, in combination with the sonographer gaze prediction, can be used to discover and localize visually salient anatomical landmarks, i.e., landmarks that sonographers use for visual navigation.
Finally, we provide an overarching discussion and an extended outlook chapter which describes a system for guiding sonographers during standard plane acquisition.
Securing new space: on satellite cyber-security
Keywords: satellite security
launch vehicle security
aerospace security
space systems security
SSA
space security
cyber-ASAT
launch safety
satellite communications
systems security
space cybersecurity
satellite cybersecurity
space situational awareness
satellite hacking
SATCOMS
satellite systems security

Satellites offer critical services impacting the lives of billions around the world. However, the cyber-security properties of space systems are poorly understood. As the next generation of space missions begins to launch, there exists an acute need for robust and open research on space systems security.
This thesis offers a first step towards meeting that need, presenting a general method for uncovering novel cyber-physical security problems at the intersection of outer space and cyber-space. The foundation for this contribution is an analysis of historical space security incidents and emergent trends in space technologies and attacker capabilities.
Our method is developed through in-depth analysis of the security and privacy properties of modern satellite broadband services. Using real-world experiments, we identify previously unknown vulnerabilities impacting the security and privacy of millions of satellite customers, including many of the world’s largest businesses. We further isolate underlying physical causes of these vulnerabilities and develop original techniques for their mitigation.
Building on this research, we systematize our method into a four-step process represented by the acronym RCMA (Recognize, Connect, Motivate, Adapt). This approach is then applied to further topics in space security, including Space Situational Awareness integrity and launch integration safety. In doing so, we find similar cyber-physical gaps between status-quo security practices and emergent threats. This recognition allows us to present novel solutions which bolster space mission security.
Over the course of this thesis, we identify and mitigate numerous technical vulnerabilities that impact hundreds of space platforms. More importantly, we propose and validate a flexible method for effective security research at the intersection of outer space and cyberspace. The intention throughout is to offer a launchpad for sustained and necessary work in an unusual domain.
On the Rozansky-Witten TQFT
Keywords: double categories
bicategories
Rozansky-Witten TQFT

This thesis studies a potential method for constructing the Rozansky--Witten TQFT as an extended
(
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-TQFT. A monoidal
2
-category consisting of schemes, complexes of sheaves and sheaf morphisms is constructed, and it is shown that there are
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1
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1
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-TQFTs valued in the truncation of this category, whose state spaces agree with the Rozansky--Witten TQFT. However, it is also shown that if such a TQFT is based on a reduced Noetherian scheme, it cannot be extended upwards to a
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-TQFT.
A pedagogy of desiring and thinking for politics in Hannah Arendt's reading of Augustine
Keywords: desire
Hannah Arendt
Augustine
mystagogy
political theology

This thesis investigates the pedagogy of desiring and thinking in Hannah Arendt’s reading of Augustine. In this interdisciplinary work, two orders of discourse are compared and contrasted: the political and the theological. Points of convergence between the two spheres are named pedagogy and points of divergence, mystagogy.
Addressing a lacuna in scholarship concerning Arendt’s Augustinian heritage that has predominantly focused on her early work on love in Augustine, this thesis shifts the interpretive focus to her mature treatment of him in The Life of the Mind. Arendt’s initial criticism of Augustinian desiring is that it generates worldlessness, or a denigration of the political. Although this concern pervades her entire work, it obtains a more nuanced reading when she considers the movements of thinking, desiring, and loving in her later engagement with Augustine.
It is the purpose of this thesis to attend to these movements of thinking, desiring, and loving and to inspect the spatio-temporal framework which structure Arendt’s conception of the political in her engagement with Augustine. This is done to assess the claim that Arendt’s conception of the political is drawn from a pedagogy of desiring and thinking from Augustine. Arendt herself makes the claim that Augustine knew what it meant to live inter homines esse; a phrase she often used to clarify the political. This reading suggests that the city of God functions as a heuristic for Arendt’s notion of the political. Although this interdisciplinary study respects the methodology of political theory, it also argues that Arendt’s severing of Augustinian pedagogy from his mystagogy results in an insurmountable aporia which she herself detected. This thesis seeks to embed these Augustinian pedagogical practises within his theological architectonic to suggest how that aporia might be overcome and used to develop a mystagogy for politics.
The transformation of rural society : the Syrian interior, 1830-1930
Keywords: rural development
Syrian
interior
Syria
rural conditions
rural society

The subject of this study concerns the transformation of the traditional rural society and economy of Syria in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The research focuses on the important agricultural regions of the Homs-Hama plain and the Ghuta of Damascus while examining the wider developments of the ‘transitional period', taken as the century spanning from 1830-1930. These regions are to be considered in terms of the particular and varied response of each to changing conditions brought about in large measure by the gradual absorption of the Levant into a world economic order emanating from an industrialized Europe.
European economic penetration in the 19th century and the expansion of merchant and usurious capital linked to this process unleashed forces which led to the creation of new relations of production. The study considers the extent to which capitalist forms of production and enterprise could take root because they were placed into the framework of traditional agrarian arrangements, such as the sharika contract and musha, The principal developments of the period: an increased emphasis upon production for the market and the growth of an export oriented agriculture, the evolution of a private property regime and the emergence of huge estates upon which peasants were transformed into mere share croppers and the sedentarization of nomadic society are examined in terms of the forces European economic expansion and Ottoman reform set in motion.
Much of this study is devoted to the social implications of the development of private land ownership in Syria from the mid-19th century onwards. In this context, the effects of the Ottoman Land Code, which is closely associated with the increased privatization of land holdings, are examined. This process was frequently accompanied by the dispossession of the peasantry and their transformation from small proprietors and partners in communal landholdings into share-cropping tenants. In the 1870's, in particular, much of the land of the Ghuta and the Homs-Hama plain passed into the hands of urban-based notable families and merchant-moneylending groups. This process accelerated during the Mandate period.
Epidemiological studies of sleep characteristics and breast cancer
Keywords: breast cancer
epidemiology
sleep characteristics

Short sleep, disrupted sleep, daytime napping, and late chronotypes are putative risk factors for breast cancer, but observational evidence on associations with sleep duration is inconsistent and prospective evidence for other sleep characteristics is limited. To address these research gaps, I conducted prospective analyses of sleep characteristics and of melatonin in relation to breast cancer risk. In investigations of potential intermediate factors, I analysed sleep duration and chronotype measures in relation to personal characteristics and sleep duration in relation to circulating concentrations of several endogenous hormones.
There were some interrelationships of sleep duration and/or chronotypes with self-rated health variables and some risk factors for breast cancer risk, such as age and body mass index, in 19,651 women in EPIC-Oxford study, highlighting the potentials for confounding and reverse causality in the prospective investigation of sleep characteristics with breast cancer risk. In up to 713,150 postmenopausal women in the Million Women Study, there was little or no evidence that sleep duration, daytime napping, sleep quality, insomnia symptoms, and diurnal preference were associated with breast cancer risk. The meta-analysis of 15 prospective studies (65,410 cases) did not support an association between sleep duration and breast cancer risk.
In investigations of potentially mediating hormones, I found no significant association between urinary melatonin (6-sulfatoxymelatonin) levels and breast cancer risk (274 cases) in a nested case-control study in the Dutch DOM prospective study. Further, the meta-analysis of six prospective studies and the DOM study did not show a significant association between 6-sulfatoxymelatonin and breast cancer risk. Although I found modest cross-sectional associations of sleep duration with circulating testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin, and insulin-like growth factor-1 in 118,935 postmenopausal women in UK Biobank, residual confounding cannot be excluded and these biomarkers are unlikely mediators.
In conclusion, I found little or no evidence for associations of sleep characteristics with breast cancer risk.
Central exclusive production of Xc mesons in √s = 13 TeV proton-proton collisions 
Keywords: pomeron fusion
LHCb
chi_c meson
chi_c
particle physics
Forward rapidity counter
High energy physics
double pomeron exchange
Higgs boson
central exclusive production
CERN
HEP
chic meson
pomeron
chic
low multiplicity
Herschel
CEP
HRC
LHC
proton collision

A measurement is made of the central exclusive production of χc1 and χc2 mesons in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV, using data collected by the LHCb experiment corresponding to a total single-interaction integrated luminosity of 711 pb-1. The χc candidates are reconstructed through their radiative decay into J/ψγ , where we use photons that have converted into an electron pair, γ → e+e-, and reconstruct the J/ψ through its dimuon final state. The High Rapidity Shower Counter sub-detector HeRSCheL is used to reduce inelastic background. The product of the cross section and the branching fractions, where the J/ψ muons are measured to be within the pseudorapidity region 2< η <4.5, are measured to be,
σ
    (2<ηµ+µ− <4.5)
χc1→J/ψ[µ+µ−]γ   = 19.5 ± 15.0(stat) ± 15.4(syst) pb [90% C.L.]


σ
    (2<ηµ+µ− <4.5)
χc2→J/ψ[µ+µ−]γ = 99.6 ± 12.7(stat) ± 27.7(syst) pb,
where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second is systematic. The product of the cross section and the branching fractions of χc1 mesons is quoted at a 90% confidence level (C.L.). These results are found to be in agreement with theoretical predictions.
Evolution and development of spinal cord stem cells and cell type diversity
Keywords: spinal cord patterning
BMP
Wnt
amphioxus
retinoic acid
Fgf
lamprey
notch
spinal cord development
evolution
Shh

How did spinal cord in vertebrates evolve to have its current morphology and function? To answer this I have looked at spinal cord organogenesis in different lineages. I use lamprey, a basally diverging vertebrate, as a model for the vertebrate ancestor and amphioxus, a cephalochordate, as an out-group for comparison. I have approached the question from three dimensions, the anterior-posterior (AP) axis, dorsal-ventral (DV) axis, and the medial-lateral (ML) axis, with my main focus on DV patterning. When comparing gene expression, I found that expression patterns are more similar between lamprey and gnathostomes than between amphioxus and vertebrates. Building on this foundation, some candidate genes with defined neural cell type expression were chosen to study the effects of signalling pathway manipulation on spinal cord patterning. Despite conserved gene expression patterns in lamprey, the effects of signalling pathway manipulation are very different from those observed in gnathostomes, with amphioxus even more diverged. This suggests that the roles of signals evolved divergently along different chordate lineages. In addition to the gene expression and signal patterning levels, I have also investigated the non-coding sequence level. I found an enhancer upstream of lamprey Nkx2.2 which seems to be a vertebrate innovation. Overall, my work shows that gnathostomes, agnathans, and cephalochordates have evolved differently to pattern their spinal cord as demonstrated in the lack of cell type boundaries and different functions of signalling pathways in lamprey and differences in neuroanatomy, molecular pattern, and cis-regulatory elements in amphioxus.
Structural and functional characterisation of Alzheimer's disease risk factor TREM2
Keywords: scFv
Alzheimer's disease
microglia
nauroinflammation
TREM2

Single point mutations in TREM2, a receptor expressed by microglia in the brain, are associated with an increased risk of neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s disease. Numerous studies support a role for TREM2 in sensing damaging stimuli and triggering signalling cascades necessary for neuroprotection. TREM2 contains an immunoglobulin-like domain followed by a flexible stalk region, a transmembrane domain and a cytoplasmic tail. Despite its significant role, ligands and regulators of TREM2 activation, and the mechanisms governing TREM2-dependent responses and its cleavage from the membrane, remain poorly characterised. Here, I characterise phage display generated single-chain variable antibody fragments (scFvs) to human TREM2 ectodomain. The highest published affinity to human TREM2 was measured for one of the produced antibodies. Co-crystal structures revealed the binding of two scFvs to an epitope on the TREM2 Ig-like domain distal to the putative ligand-binding site. Functional activity was observed for oligomeric scFv species, which inhibited the accumulation of soluble TREM2 shed by transfected HEK293 or THP-1 cells. Treatment of HEK293 cells with fluorochrome-conjugated scFvs and quantification of surface TREM2 revealed scFv-induced receptor endocytosis as the likely mechanism of action in these cells. Furthermore, the multivalent scFv led to the activation of a TREM2 signalling cascade measured by phosphorylation of spleen tyrosine kinase in human iPSC-derived macrophages (iMac) and THP-1 cells. Similar activation in iMac cells was achieved upon conversion to monoclonal antibodies, with agonist values exceeding those in the literature. Further studies in combination with physiological ligands, such as apoptotic neurons, need to be performed to probe the overall effect on the TREM2 pathway and microglial activity in models of AD. The detailed characterisation of the epitopes and properties of these antibodies should facilitate the use of these renewable binders as structural and functional biology tools for TREM2 research.
The political ideas of Lorenz Stein and their influence on Rudolf Gneist and Gustav Schmoller
Keywords: Gustav Schmoller
Political science
Germany
political ideas
Lorenz Stein
Rudolf Gneist

The thesis traces the development of the social and political ideas of Lorenz Stein (1815-1890), a north German social and political scientist. In the early 1840's in Paris, under the influence of the Young Hegelians and Saint-Simon, he decided to attempt to develop a ‘science of society'. During the revolution of 1848-49, Stein worked out a political theory, his theory of state and society, which tried to show how the monarchical state could be defended against social revolution. After the revolution, Rudolf Gneist (1816-1895), a Prussian liberal politician and constitutional theorist, applied Stein's theory to the study of English constitutional history. In doing so, Gneist produced a theory of local government, which he called 'Self government', which was supposed to answer the question, left unanswered by Stein, of how the antagonism between state and society was to be overcome. Gneist postulated Selfgovernment as an intermediate structure, in which the state fused with the strongest social class. Selfgovernment consisted of Verwaltung, an organic combination of powers, which was best carried out by honorary,unpaid office holding. Gneist's model was the English gentleman-magistrate of the eighteenth century. The thesis also treats the relation of the young economist and historian Gustav Schmoller (1838-1917) to Stein. Schmoller developed Stein's ideas on state,economy and society, but from a historical point of view. Like Stein in his later years, Schmoller concentrated on Verwaltung. Stein's theory of Verwaltung was legalistic and philosophical, whereas Schmoller's was more sociological. Stein, Gneist and Schmoller represent a current in German political thought which was authoritarian, yet socially liberal. They tried to render popular participation in government superfluous by developing the scientific foundations of a technically perfect, autonomous 'administrative' apparatus.
Investigating translaminar signaling from layer 5 Pyramidal subpopulations to layer 2/3 in Somatosensory Cortex
Keywords: Neuroscience
Connectivity
electrophysiology
retrograde
Optogenetics
Neuron
Somatosensory
Pyramidal cell
Cortex

Information processing in the mammalian cortex is achieved via a precise arrangement of synaptic connections between different neuronal subtypes. The excitatory neurons of the cortex are arranged in a laminar manner across six layers and form specific intralaminar and translaminar connections with one another. In addition, these excitatory neurons interact with a series of inhibitory interneuron subtypes, such that the relative levels and timing of excitatory and inhibitory synaptic transmission determine how information is processed by the cortical network. This thesis examines the translaminar signaling from layer 5 (L5) to layer 2/3 (L2/3) of cortex. Considered the principal output layer, L5 is populated by intratelencephalic (IT) and pyramidal tract (PT) pyramidal neurons, which form long-range projections to other cortical and subcortical regions, respectively. These long-range axons of L5 pyramidal neurons also branch locally and form ascending collaterals that extend to more superficial layers, including L2/3. An unanswered question in the field, is what sorts of translaminar signals do these local collaterals deliver.
I have used the mouse somatosensory cortex in order to address this question. In the first series of experiments, transgenic mice expressing the optogenetic activator, channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), were used to stimulate a non-specific population of L5 pyramidal neurons. This was shown to elicit both monosynaptic excitation and disynaptic inhibition within L2/3, and to modulate the action potential activity of L2/3 pyramidal neurons in vitro and in vivo. I then used retrograde labelling strategies in order to distinguish between IT and PT L5 pyramidal neurons, revealing that the long-range target of the L5 neuron is associated with morphological differences in its local ascending collaterals. To investigate whether the functional consequences, I used a retrograde viral system to deliver ChR2 to each of the projection-defined L5 subtypes. Patch clamp recordings revealed that IT L5 neurons evoked robust excitation but little inhibition within L2/3. In contrast, PT L5 neurons elicited significant levels of synaptic inhibition, which was shown to result from the selective targeting of L2/3 parvalbumin-expressing interneurons. Finally, I was able to demonstrate that this differential recruitment of excitation and inhibition by the L5 subtypes results in opposing modulatory effects upon L2/3 pyramidal neuron activity in vitro and during sensory-driven input in vivo.
The work supports growing evidence that L5 plays a significant role in modulating ongoing local cortical activity. It also suggests that projection-defined L5 subpopulations provide opposing translaminar signals to L2/3, which could be important for sensory processing, sensory-motor integration and synaptic plasticity.