VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Applying artificial intelligence to the sociological study of meaning
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Sociology.

As artificial intelligence changes nearly every facet of modern society, we should not be surprised that it is changing how we do social science. By leveraging the power of machine learning and automated text analysis, researchers can analyze complex patterns from data and extract meaning from natural language at an unprecedented scale. However, the application of these tools to social scientific inquiry raises important issues concerning construct validity and the very nature of deductive social science. Throughout this dissertation, I examine the promises and pitfalls of applying these cutting-edge technologies specifically to the sociological study of meaning. In the first chapter, I provide a comprehensive review of popular automated text analysis methods and classify them according to the pre-analytic constructs they extract from text. In the following chapters, I present two original studies that use machine learning and automated text analysis to answer fundamental questions about culture and meaning. The first study asks: does everyday symbolic exchange contain sufficient information to effectively enculturate a tabula rasa learner? The second asks: does the way an individual understands their nation shape their immigration policy preferences? Via novel and rigorous applications of computational methods, I provide compelling evidence that supports the affirmative answers to both questions. Ultimately, this dissertation highlights the potential of machine learning and automated text analysis to produce sound social science research. However, it also underscores analytical concerns of which researchers should be mindful
Applying physical principles for reliable and precise human manipulation
Keywords: Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.

When faced with complex design questions, it may seem natural to design complex devices. However, careful consideration of underlying physical principles can help lead to concise and simple solutions, which in turn can have higher impact. In this dissertation, we present two complimentary projects which illustrate this principle, focusing on human manipulation. The first project is the design, analysis, and utility evaluation of a two-finger force feedback haptic interface. It explores the utility of high-performance haptic feedback at the fingertips for interaction in teleoperated and virtual environments. The second project entailed the design and validation of a low-cost electricity-free device for automating the preparation of whole blood samples for pathology assessment. This device is a key part of our in-house low-cost pipeline for automatically diagnosing malaria, a preventable infectious disease that still kills hundreds of thousands of people per year.
Are National Parks Reserved for Certain Visitors? Effects of Timed-Entry Reservation Systems on the Demographic Composition of Arches National Park Visitors
Keywords: Public Policy Program
National parks and reserves
Public lands
Land use > Management
Race
Diversity, equity, and inclusion
Socioeconomic status
Accessibility
Environmental justice
Stanford University
Humanities and Sciences
Public Policy Program
Text
Thesis

Timed-entry reservation systems are an increasingly popular visitation management strategy at National Parks. Acquiring a reservation through these systems requires computer literacy, advance notice of work and family scheduling, and familiarity with national park policies. These characteristics are concentrated within particular demographic groups, and as such timed-entry systems create an inequitable barrier to national park visitation. Using a difference-in-differences regression model on survey data collected in 2015 and 2016 and data from the Recreation Information Database, I find preliminary evidence that the timed-entry system at Arches National Park resulted in an increase in median household income and educational attainment based on park visitors’ zip codes. Building on existing research which suggests that requiring reservations for campsites can have negative impacts on racial and socioeconomic diversity, I show that the pattern holds in national parks that implement reservation systems park-wide. This finding exists within the context of underrepresentation of marginalized groups in national park visitation and outdoor recreation more broadly. While timed-entry systems may protect the environmental assets of national parks, they make outdoor spaces less accessible and are contradictory to the mission of public lands.
Art under a spell : gender, sexuality, and esotericism in Los Angeles
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Art and Art History.

Art Under a Spell: Gender, Sexuality, and Esotericism in Los Angeles examines the roles of magic, altered states of consciousness, and other esoteric practices in the work of Cameron, Kenneth Anger, Curtis Harrington, Wallace Berman, and Steven Arnold. As the center of the burgeoning aerospace industry, psychedelic counterculture, and Hollywood, Los Angeles was uniquely positioned for their otherworldly ambitions. However, what unites these figures beyond geographic proximity are their shared desires to think expansively about identity and sexuality; their propensities toward secrecy and interiority; performative impulses; and ambitions to make the dreamlike worlds of their imaginations come alive. Drawing from rarely seen archival materials, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies, this dissertation situates esotericism as a means through which these artists engage with and reconfigure conceptions of subjectivity, opting for marginality and social deviancy rather than visibility and legibility. This dissertation not only offers a deeper understanding of these artists, but also calls for methodologies that might embrace the irrational, magical, and hidden impulses within histories of postwar American art.
Artificial intelligence and dynamic markets
Keywords: Business.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been transforming digital and analog markets in the past few years. Will the current economic analysis apply to new decision-making technologies? In my dissertation, Artificial Intelligence and Dynamic Markets, I study this question from multiple perspectives. I model automated decision-makers, the markets they operate in, and the information structures of dynamic digital economies. Through this research, my aim is to enhance our understanding of the functioning of dynamic digital markets and identify the market structures that facilitate efficient AI adoption
Artificial intelligence methods for discovery in large biobanks
Keywords: Engineering.
Bioengineering.

Large-scale biobanks, housing vast genetic and phenotypic data, are driving scientific discoveries across a wide range of diseases. However, harnessing the full potential of biobanks requires innovative methodologies that address challenges in phenotype recognition, genetic association studies, and multimorbidity. First, in order to define the disease cohorts accurately, we must recognize phenotypes that may not be labelled in the primary data. To address this challenge, we developed an AI-based method called POPDx (Population-based Objective Phenotyping by Deep Extrapolation) that computes disease liabilities for 12,803 ICD-10 codes and 1538 Phenotype codes for all participants in the UK Biobank. Second, the genetic data in biobanks are often used to conduct association studies in order to understand the genetic architecture of key health traits. These studies are commonly set up as case-control, but the "healthy" may evolve over time and become cases. We demonstrate that our disease liability estimates from patient phenotyping allow us to improve downstream genetic discovery by mapping disease risk to a quantitative scale that provides greater statistical power compared to the dichotomous designs. Finally, multimorbidity (the coexistence of multiple diseases in an individual) provides an opportunity to understand disorders that may share genetic or environmental risk factors. Therefore, we present ForeSITE (Forecasting Susceptibility to Illness with Transformer Embeddings), an automatic framework powered by a GPT-style architecture that models disease trajectories and can predict likely future diseases. These new capabilities, both alone and in combination, enhance the utility of large-scale biobanks for scientific discoveries. In particular, our contributions to phenotype recognition, genetic association studies, and multimorbidity modeling pave the way for improved disease understanding and personalized healthcare interventions.
The arts of diplomacy : artistic exchange between Italy and Safavid Iran
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Art and Art History.

This dissertation explores the artistic and diplomatic exchanges between Italy and Safavid Iran (1501-1736) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a primary focus on the embassies sent by the Persians to Florence, Rome, and Venice. Originally dispatched to forge an alliance against the Ottomans, these embassies sparked artistic exchanges that, unfortunately, have been largely overlooked by art historians. The dissertation addresses this shortcoming while introducing brand new evidence in three areas: the adoption of Persian ideas of kingship at the outset of the Medicean Grand Duchy in Florence, the presence of Safavid Shi'a converts in Rome, and the significant exchange of Safavid silks for Venetian glass, sent to Persia through demanding journeys.
Aspects of entanglement and chaos in many-body quantum systems
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Physics.

We discuss foundational questions around thermalization and chaos in closed quantum systems, as well as new ways to characterize chaos and thermalization through entanglement growth. We explore these questions in 1-d spin chains and random circuit models. This thesis is structured as follows: Part I builds the backbone. This is aimed at beginning graduate students or undergraduates wanting to learn about the subject methods. Part II is a compilation of published works. Each chapter is a paper. This is aimed at the examiners or anyone interested in new results.
Assessing household climate vulnerability through behavioral decision science and remote sensing
Keywords: Sustainability.
Earth System Science.

Climate change has already adversely impacted people and nature, and is projected to continue to do so. However, not everyone who is equally exposed to a hazard is equally affected by it. To mitigate the impacts of climate hazards on communities and individuals, it is crucial to understand who is vulnerable to these hazards, and what it is that makes them vulnerable. In this dissertation I contribute to understanding of household climate vulnerability by connecting different methods of inquiry across vastly different fields from behavioral decision science to remote sensing. In Chapter 2, I explore the impacts, protective behaviors, and barriers and facilitators to protective action against household rainwater intrusion in the San Francisco Bay Area through a qualitative interview study. I specifically focus on top-down rainwater intrusion (i.e., entering through the roof or walls), an overlooked form of rainwater intrusion. In Chapter 3, I further this work through a quantitative survey study in both California and the U.S. Midwest, and include ground-up flooding. In Chapter 4, I return focus to the San Francisco Bay Area and develop a deep learning algorithm using remotely sensed imagery to show that blue roof tarps, used in the area as semi-permanent fixtures to reduce roof leakage, can serve as a proxy for poor-quality housing.
Assessing the Regional Biological and Chemical Exposure Risk of Pacific Salmonids to Agricultural Cropland Practices
Keywords: Vulnerability Assessment
Pacific Salmonid
Salmonid
Salmon
Agriculture
Cropland Agriculture
Pesticide
Fertilizer
Biological and Chemical Exposure
Impact of Pesticide and Fertilizer on Salmonid
Pacific Salmonid Vulnerability Assessment
Text
Thesis

A vulnerability assessment is a science-driven policy tool that enables practitioners in salmonid conservation to identify the relative threat level of individual salmonid DPSs. Existing vulnerability assessments focus on the threats posed to Pacific salmonids by urban land use and climate change, but there is a need to assess present and future threats from agricultural land use practices. Here I identify both an index that quantifies exposure risk to agricultural lands which may pose threats for juvenile Pacific salmonids and a methodology to analyze threats to freshwater habitat by fertilizer and pesticide (herbicide, insecticide, fungicide) pollution. This project characterized the exposure risk, a component of vulnerability, of all 30 ESA-listed DPSs of anadromous Pacific salmon and steelhead to agricultural cropland use, with particular consideration of biological and chemical threats from pesticide and fertilizer use. Novel geospatial analysis approaches reveal a range of exposure risks of Pacific salmonid DPS freshwater stream habitat to pesticide and fertilizer pollution from agricultural croplands, with concentrations of high-exposure risk DPSs in the Central Valley of California and the Interior Columbia River recovery domain. These findings support efforts to characterize Pacific salmonid exposure to agricultural land use externalities as part of a larger vulnerability assessment.
Assessment and application of methodologies for the study of physiology and pathogens of the gastrointestinal tract
Keywords: Medicine.
Microbiology and Immunology.

The gastrointestinal system is a major organ system that performs numerous functions to maintain organismal health. To maximize our ability to make discoveries about gastrointestinal health and cure gastrointestinal diseases, we must make novel insights into the factors governing gastrointestinal function as well as improve the methods by which we study the gastrointestinal tract. In this dissertation, I present three projects that detail my efforts to do both. In Chapter 1, I summarize the background and motivation for the different projects. In Chapter 2, we examine how the gut physiology of mice, a ubiquitous animal model, is altered by proposed warming of ambient housing temperature in facilities to mouse thermoneutrality (30°C) from standard facility temperatures (22°C). We report, for the first time, a temperature-dependent difference in mouse gut motility that is driven primarily by differences in stress levels experienced at 22°C and 30°C. Additionally, we report the first species-level differences in the gut microbiota of mice raised at 22°C and 30°C. In Chapter 3, we compared the efficacy of different methods for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 in fecal samples from patients with COVID-19. We ultimately recommend a rigorously benchmarked pipeline to maximize the accuracy with which researchers can study the dynamics of fecal SARS-CoV-2 RNA shedding. In Chapter 4, we apply a novel bioinformatic tool to identify insertion-enriched regions of the Salmonella Typhimurium genome that, when disrupted by mobile genetic elements, may provide antimicrobial resistance. We create deletion mutants and screen them against antimicrobials, identifying several that produce altered resistance and sensitivity profiles to numerous chemicals. Finally, in Chapter 5, I summarize the intellectual contributions of this dissertation and discuss recommended future directions for re-search to further the findings from each preceding chapter. Altogether, the work presented here advances both our insights into factors governing gastrointestinal function as well as the methods with which we can study the gastrointestinal tract.
At Home Online: Using Twitter to Understand the Perception of Bay Area Affordable Housing
Keywords: Housing
English language > Discourse analysis
Social media
Text
Thesis

Discourse about affordable housing on social media has grown immensely in recent years, especially in the Bay Area, which is home to one of the most expensive housing mar- kets in the country, but questions remain about how this discourse relates to the actual development of affordable housing projects. Using a set of 3,567 Tweets about affordable housing from San Francisco, Alameda, and Santa Clara counties, we investigate affordable housing discourse, using sentiment analysis, dictionary analysis, and topic modeling. We find that affordable housing Tweets from Santa Clara county carry the most positive sentiment on average—which is surprising, because Santa Clara county has the lowest level of low-income housing among the three counties. Topics modeled from the Tweets positively associated with positive sentiment tend to focus on development and communal values. Topics that have a positive association with first person plural pronouns indicate efforts towards development and community building. These results suggest that online discourse can be useful for understanding the perception of various actors in affordable housing development and that the sentiment attached to affordable housing discourse does not necessarily reflect a community’s realized rate of affordable housing development.
Atomic to wafer-scale imaging and control of two-dimensional quantum materials
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Applied Physics.

Two-dimensional quantum materials have emerged as a class of growing interest for their potential in technological applications and as platforms for exploring new physics. Access and control of atomic- scale features of these materials is critical to understanding their behavior at device and wafer scales. Scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy (STM/STS) provide powerful tools to both locally measure and locally control the electronic properties of these materials. This thesis explores the connection between atomic-scale features, including those locally manipulated by STM, and wafer- scale characteristics of two distinct two-dimensional electronic systems. First, we demonstrate that the Cu(111) surface state under wafer-scale hBN is homogeneous in energy and spectral weight over nanometer length scales and across atomic terraces. In contrast, a new spectral feature, not seen on bare Cu(111), varies with atomic registry and shares the spatial periodicity of the hBN/Cu(111) moir ́e pattern. This demonstrates that, for some 2D electron systems, an hBN overlayer can act as a protective yet remarkably transparent window on fragile low-energy electronic structure below. The second system I will discuss is magnetically active manganese atoms in molybdenum disulfide (Mn-MoS2), a system which theory has suggested could behave as a two-dimensional dilute magnetic semiconductor, with implications for spintronics applications and novel ground states. Local gating with the STM tip allows for identification and control of the charge and magnetic state of individual Mn atoms, enabling an understanding of bulk paramagnetic behavior observed with Kerr rotation experiments over centimeter-size samples. These experiments show that single Mn atoms in MoS2 function as active unscreened magnetic moments in the monolayer, and can be harnessed for spin physics applications and science. The third material, sodium cobaltate, hosts a half-metallic surface state. Using a superconducting STM tip, superconductivity can be introduced into the surface state via the proximity effect, producing interesting point contact spectroscopy features including a zero-bias peak suggestive of a Majorana mode. By comparison with models of chiral p-wave superconductivity it is shown that it is likely that the superconductivity induced into this surface state is topologically non-trivial. Lastly, a characterization of the surface and subsurface defects on cleaved Weyl semi-metal tungsten ditelluride is performed. It is shown that defects in this material affect the electronic structure at the Fermi level over several nanometers, and that even subsurface defects not visible iv in topography of the surface act as scattering centers for the surface electrons. This has important implications for the study of superconductivity induced into the topological surface state of this material.
Attosecond and femtosecond beam shaping for nonlinear X-ray spectroscopy with X-ray free-electron laser
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Applied Physics.

X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFELs) are the brightest source of X-ray radiation with sufficient intensity to perform nonlinear X-ray spectroscopy, such as pump-probe experiments. By extending the nonlinear soft X-ray pump-probe techniques to few-femtosecond and attosecond timescales, we can probe the motion of valence electrons in molecular systems on their natural time scale. In this thesis, I will discuss two projects that use advanced electron beam shaping techniques to generate attosecond soft X-ray FEL pulse pairs and high-intensity few-femtosecond pulses at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS). In the first project, we demonstrated the generation and control of two-color soft X-ray FEL pulse pairs with attosecond-scale durations and timing stability. We employed angular streaking to measure the time delay between pump/probe pulses. These gigawatt-level attosecond soft X-ray FEL pump/probe pulse pairs have been applied to directly time-resolve the charge migration in molecules. In the second project, we used the wakefield of a corrugated structure called a dechirper to produce a nondestructive transverse kick in the electron beam and selectively radiated different slices of the electron beam in multiple stages, enabling the generation of few-femtosecond soft X-ray FEL pulses with peak power of hundreds of gigawatts
Autocrats, alignment, and American values : democracy promotion under great power competition
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Political Science.

This dissertation critically examines the geostrategic implications of American democracy promotion, challenging the notion that it is a mere smokescreen for policies aimed at achieving national interest or advantage. It addresses two understudied questions: how the effect of U.S. democracy promotion efforts differs depending on a country's alignment, and why the U.S. government promotes democracy even when other policy objectives might appear more pressing. Drawing on the full range of international relations traditions--realist, liberal, and constructivist--it attempts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between U.S. democracy promotion and alignment. To that end, it deploys survey methods, archival research, and new data sets related to alignment and pro-democratic demonstrations. The dissertation elucidates several notable discoveries, most prominently that, ceteris paribus, autocracies aligned with Western powers exhibit a propensity to be overthrown by pro-democratic protests at a rate nearly triple that of their counterparts aligned with Russia or China. The text further argues that it is the domestic politics of liberal patrons, like the United States, that lead them to adopt policies that make their autocratic clients more susceptible to pro-democratic mobilizations. This risk, the work concludes, may have implications for how autocracies decide to align themselves in the international system.