VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
On the bridge between constraint satisfaction and Boolean satisfiability
Keywords: constraint satisfaction
Boolean satisfiability

A wide range of problems can be formalized as a set of constraints that need to be satisfied. In fact, such a model is called a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP). Another way to represent a problem is to express it as a formula in propositional logic, or, in other words, a Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). In the quest to find efficient algorithms for solving instances of CSP and SAT specialised software has been developed. It is, however, not clear when should we choose a SAT-solver over a constraint solver (and vice versa). CSP-solvers are known for their domain-specific reasoning, whereas SAT-solvers are considered to be remarkably fast on Boolean instances. In this thesis we tackle these issues by investigating the connections between CSP and SAT.
In order to answer the question why SAT-solvers are so efficient on certain classes of CSP instances, we first present the various ways one can encode a CSP instance into SAT. Next, we show that with some encodings SAT-solvers simulate the effects of enforcing a form of local consistency, called k-consistency, in expected polynomial-time. Thus SAT-solvers are able to solve CSP instances of bounded-width structure efficiently in contrast to conventional constraint solvers. By considering the various ways one can encode CSP domains into SAT, we give theoretical reasons for choosing a particular SAT encoding for several important classes of CSP instances. In particular, we show that with this encoding many problem instances that can be solved in polynomial-time will still be easily solvable once they are translated into SAT. Furthermore, we show that this is not true for several other encodings.
Finally, we compare the various ways one can use a SAT-solver to solve the classical problem of the pigeonhole principle. We perform both theoretical and empirical comparison of the various encodings. We conclude that none of the known encodings for the classical representation of the problem will result in an efficiently-solvable SAT instance. Thus in this case constraint solvers are a much better choice.
Chinese muslims and the conversion of the Nusantara to Islam
Keywords: conversion
China
Islamisation
Southeast Asia

This thesis is a comprehensive re-examination of Maritime Southeast Asia's (or the Nusantara's) Islamic conversion history between the late thirteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Traditionally, academia has attributed this event to Muslim traders and/or Sufis from either India and/or the Middle East. During the late twentieth century, however, a number of scholars began to consider the possibility of Chinese Muslim involvement. The resulting discussions focused on a re-evaluation of Javanese history in the context of attempts to re-conceptualise pre-modern Nusantara trade (considered the catalyst for Islamisation) as fundamentally orientated towards Southern China, where Muslims played a significant commercial role from the seventh through to the early fifteenth centuries. Despite the intrinsic merits of these efforts, however, they have all been limited by an overwhelming focus on Java and a tendency to examine the relevant issues over only a very narrow time span. This thesis seeks to rectify these problems. First, it will evaluate the validity of the new commercial framework over a much longer period – from the rise of &Sacute;r&imacr;vijaya in the seventh century CE to the establishment of the early seventeenth-century European trade monopolies. This longue dureé view will provide a much stronger basis for both conclusively re-orientating pre-modern Nusantaran trade towards China and also positing it as the catalyst for conversion, with Chinese Muslims at its heart. Second, the thesis will look beyond Java to examine the conversion histories of several other important Nusantara locations (Samudera-Pasai, Melaka and Brunei), as accessed through early written texts (indigenous, European and Chinese) and archaeology. The thesis then, and thirdly, couples this examination with a consideration of the Islamic influences which came to bear on the Nusantara’s early intellectual and architectural expressions of Islam. Ultimately, by taking this broad chronological, geographical and cultural approach, the thesis aims to more reliably assess the possibility that Chinese Muslims influenced the Nusantara’s initial Islamisation process.
Enhancing the synthetic utility of silicon: an investigation into organosilicon chemistry
Keywords: Organosilicon
oxidation
silicon tethering

The aims of this work were two-fold - to enhance the 'latent functionality' of a silicon centre by expanding the range of functionalisation reactions available to such compounds, and to develop novel silicon-tethered transformations in order to increase the utility of this attractive synthetic strategy.
1. Aryle Silane Oxidation
Building upon the earlier work of Tamao and co-workers, we have developed a mild, functional group-tolerant oxidation of arylsilanes, allowing a wide range of phenols to be readily accessed. One key insight uncovered during this work was the observation that this oxidation could be acheived with sub-stoichiometric quantities of a fluoride promoter, thus allowing several TBS-protected substrates to be oxidised without any concomitant loss of the protecting group.
2. Silicon-Tethering Methodology
In order to utilise our recently acquired expertise in the field of alkoxy arylsilane synthesis, we sought to develop a novel silicon-tethered iron-catalysed biaryl coupling. Unfortunately, despite our considerable efforts, this methodology was found to suffer from reproducibility issues, and thus our attentions subsequently turned to silicon-tethered palladium- and platinum-catalysed processes. These investigations proved to be more fruitful, with the palladium-catalysed methodology affording a small range of silicon-tethered products. Finally, a novel platinum-catalysed hydro-silylation / electrocyclisation cascade was also developed, allowing a substituted arene to be accessed from a dienyne precursor.
Maltreatment-related processes of emotion regulation and social understanding: A study of adolescents in care in New South Wales
Keywords: social cognition
emotion regulation
developmental psychopathology
Child maltreatment

Child abuse and neglect is a significant social issue with long term consequences for affected children and young people, including increased risk of emotional and social difficulties. Models of the impacts of maltreatment outline a developmental process in which maltreating parent-child relationships affect the development of neural networks, which in turn undermine developing cognitive processes, including emotion regulation and social understanding, thereby increasing risk of emotional and social difficulties. This study explores a subset of these cognitive processes in a sample of adolescents in long-term out-of-home care as a result of maltreatment, relative to a sample of non-maltreated peers, including situation selection (conditioned avoidance and risk-taking), attentional deployment (attention biases and attention control) and cognitive change (interpretation bias), as well as aspects of social understanding (mentalising, emotion understanding and prosocial responding). Further, the relative effects of maltreatment factors, and the relationship between emotion regulation and social understanding with adolescent adjustment was also explored. Results demonstrated maltreatment-related effects in conditioned avoidance, risk-taking, attention processes and social understanding, and explored the relative effect of exposure to physical abuse on the development of these processes, differences in such processes did not appear to significantly predict poor or normative adjustment of maltreated adolescents. These results are discussed with respect to models of maltreatment, emotion regulation and social understanding, with implications for the development and implementation of interventions.
The safe lambda calculus
Keywords: lambda calculus
game semantics
safety restriction

We consider a syntactic restriction for higher-order grammars called safety that constrains occurrences of variables in the production rules according to their type-theoretic order. We transpose and generalize this restriction to the setting of the simply-typed lambda calculus, giving rise to what we call the safe lambda calculus. We analyze its expressivity and obtain a result in the same vein as Schwichtenberg's 1976 characterization of the simply-typed lambda calculus: the numeric functions representable in the safe lambda calculus are exactly the multivariate polynomials; thus conditional is not definable. We also give a similar characterization for representable word functions. We then examine the complexity of deciding beta-eta equality of two safe simply-typed terms and show that this problem is PSPACE-hard. The safety restriction is then extended to other applied lambda calculi featuring recursion and references such as PCF and Idealized Algol (IA for short). The next contribution concerns game semantics. We introduce a new concrete presentation of this semantics using the theory of traversals. It is shown that the revealed game denotation of a term can be computed by traversing some souped-up version of the term's abstract syntax tree using adequately defined traversal rules. Based on this presentation and via syntactic reasoning we obtain a game-semantic interpretation of safety: the strategy denotations of safe lambda-terms satisfy a property called P-incremental justification which says that the player's moves are always justified by the last pending opponent's move of greater order occurring in the player's view. Next we look at models of the safe lambda calculus. We show that these are precisely captured by Incremental Closed Categories. A game model is constructed and is shown to be fully abstract for safe IA. Further, it is effectively presentable: two terms are equivalent just if they have the same set of complete O-incrementally justified plays---where O-incremental justification is defined as the dual of P-incremental justification. Finally we study safety from the point of view of algorithmic game semantics. We observe that in the third-order fragment of IA, the addition of unsafe contexts is conservative for observational equivalence. This implies that all the upper complexity bounds known for the lower-order fragments of IA also hold for the safe fragment; we show that the lower-bounds remain the same as well. At order 4, observational equivalence is known to be undecidable for IA. We conjecture that for the order-4 safe fragment of IA, the problem is reducible to the DPDA-equivalence problem and is thus decidable.
Functional laminar architecture of the rat primary auditory cortex
Keywords: spikes
cortical column
LFP
auditory cortex
microcircuit
stimulus specific adaptation
phase coding
information theory
local field potential

The goal of this thesis is to investigate the functional role of the cortical column architecture within some of the existing brain coding theories. Here I focus on the hierarchical models of predictive coding and the 'phase of firing' coding hypothesis.
Using an oddball paradigm consisting of a sequence of identical sounds interspersed with rare, unexpected sounds, one can observe a difference between the scalp potentials evoked by oddball and common sounds. This difference has been linked to predictive coding and novelty detection, and Stimulus Specific Adaptation (SSA) has been suggested as a likely substrate at the single neuron level. In order to simultaneously constrain hierarchical models of predictive coding, and so as to investigate the contributions that neural processing within the different cytoarchitectonic layers of the primary auditory cortex (A1) may make to SSA, I simultaneously recorded multi-unit activity and current source density (CSD) profiles across all layers in A1 of the rat in response to standard and oddball tones. Our results suggest that SSA arises at the level of the thalamocortical synapse and is further enhanced in the supragranular layers.
The phase of low-frequency Local Field Potentials (LFPs) in primary sensory cortices carries stimulus related information and disambiguates the information about different stimuli evoking similar spike rates. However, it is yet unclear how these informative LFP phase values arise within the laminar organization of cortical columns. To address this issue, I performed CSD recordings in the area A1 of anaesthetized rats during the presentation of complex naturalistic sounds. Information theoretic analysis revealed that most LFP phase information originates from discrete CSD events consisting of strong granular-superficial-layer dipoles, likely triggered by bursts of thalamocortical activation. These events, which occur at rates of 2-4 Hz, reliably reset LFP phases at times of strong network excitation. They therefore provide a useful reference frame to measure neural activity with respect to salient times of stimulus history. CSD events display a diverse, stimulus-dependent morphology: these reflect the outcomes of cortical computations which result in varying extents of activation of infragranular output layers.
Local moment phases in quantum impurity problems
Keywords: non-Fermi liquid
quantum phase transition
Fluctuation exchange approximation
diagrammatic many-body theory
magnetic field
local moment phase
Kondo physics
Luttinger
quantum impurity physics

This thesis considers quantum impurity models that exhibit a quantum phase transition (QPT) between a Fermi liquid strong coupling (SC) phase, and a doubly-degenerate non-Fermi liquid local moment (LM) phase. We focus on what can be said from exact analytic arguments about the LM phase of these models, where the system is characterized by an SU(2) spin degree of freedom in the entire system.
Conventional perturbation theory about the non-interacting limit does not hold in the non-Fermi liquid LM phase. We circumvent this problem by reformulating the perturbation theory using a so-called `two self-energy' (TSE) description, where the two self-energies may be expressed as functional derivatives of the Luttinger-Ward functional.
One particular paradigmatic model that possesses a QPT between SC and LM phases is the pseudogap Anderson impurity model (PAIM). We use infinite-order perturbation theory in the interaction, U, to self-consistently deduce the exact low-energy forms of both the self-energies and propagators in each of the distinct phases of the model. We analyse the behaviour of the model approaching the QPT from each phase, focusing on the scaling of the zero-field single-particle dynamics using both analytical arguments and detailed numerical renormalization group (NRG) calculations.
We also apply two `conserving' approximations to the PAIM. First, second-order self-consistent perturbation theory and second, the fluctuation exchange approximation (FLEX). Within the FLEX approximation we develop a numerical algorithm capable of self-consistently and coherently describing the QPT coming from both distinct phases.
Finally, we consider a range of static spin susceptibilities that each probe the underlying QPT in response to coupling to a magnetic field.
The concept of discipline
Keywords: Smectymnuus
Poetry
Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
Piety
Rhetoric
ethics
Church
Colasterion
ecclesiology
The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce
Augustine
Of Reformation
Milton
Discipline
Samson Agonistes

Discipline was an enduring concept in the works of John Milton (1608-1674), yet its meaning shifted over the course of his career: initially he held that it denoted ecclesiastical order, but gradually he turned to representing it as self-willed pious action. My thesis examines this transformation by analysing Milton’s complex engagement in two distinct periods: the 1640s and the 1660s-70s. In Of Reformation (1641), Milton echoed popular contemporary demands for a reformation of church discipline, but also asserted through radical literary experimentation that poetry could discipline the nation too (Chapter 1). Reflecting his dislike for intolerant Presbyterians in Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, the two versions of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 and 1644) reconsider discipline as a moral imperative for all men, rooted in domestic liberty (Chapter 2). Although written long after this period, the long poetry that Milton composed after the Restoration reveals his continued interrogation of the concept. The invocations of the term ‘discipline’ by Milton’s angels in Paradise Lost (1667) sought to encourage dissenting readers to faithfulness and co-operation (Chapter 3). Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671) advance the concept in the language of ‘piety,’ emphasising that ‘pious hearts’ are the precondition for godly action in opposition to contemporary Anglican ‘holy living’ (Chapter 4). In analysing Milton’s shifting concept of discipline, my thesis contributes to scholarship by showing his sensitivity to contemporary mainstream religious ideas, outlining the Christian—as opposed to republican or Stoic—notions of praxis that informed his ethics, and emphasising the disciplinary aspect of his doctrinal thought. Overall, it holds that in discipline, as word and concept, Milton expressed his faith in the capacity of writing to change its reader, morally and spiritually.
The American civil war in twentieth-century Britain: political, military, intellectual and popular legacies
Keywords: Anglo-American relations
memory
American civil war
transatlantic cultural exchanges
Britain

This thesis explores the continuous British interest in the American Civil War from the war’s end to the late twentieth century and the British utilisation of the conflict at home and in the Atlantic arena. Contributing to the limited, yet burgeoning literature on the subject, this study emphasises the independent agency of both the Civil War and its British interpreters. It thus rejects a simplistic depiction of British adoption of American culture and applies a more sophisticated methodology that accounts for the active, versatile and autonomous British use of complex foreign images. This enables a meaningful analysis of the Civil War’s place and role in modern British culture.
The thesis examines the British fascination with the conflict as reflected in four facets: politics, military thought, academe and popular culture. Additionally, it takes a transatlantic perspective and explores how Britons’ view of the United States has influenced their understanding of the Civil War. This study thus provides a first comprehensive and coherent overview as well as a nuanced picture of the American conflict as it travelled across the Atlantic from a historically distanced perspective.
The thesis reveals that the Civil War achieved unique prominence in British culture and that this British fascination with the war was part of a greater transatlantic encounter between an epic American affair and sophisticated British interpreters. Accordingly, the two main questions underpinning this study are ‘why were the British particularly interested in the Civil War?’ and, following directly on that path, ‘how did Britons use the war both at home and in the transatlantic sphere?’ Answering these questions further establishes the war’s prominence in British culture and explores the character of the British encounter with the conflict. In so doing, it contributes to our understanding of the Civil War’s global impact and casts another light on Anglo-American relations.
Bayesian statistical models of shape and appearance for subcortical brain segmentation
Keywords: image processing
segmentation
MRI
statistical shape models

Our motivation is to develop an automated technique for the segmentation of sub-cortical human brain structures from MR images. To this purpose, models of shape-and-appearance are constructed and fit to new image data. The statistical models are trained from 317 manually labelled T1-weighted MR images. Shape is modelled using a surface-based point distribution model (PDM) such that the shape space is constrained to the linear combination of the mean shape and eigenvectors of the vertex coordinates. In addition, to model intensity at the structural boundary, intensities are sampled along the surface normal from the underlying image. We propose a novel Bayesian appearance model whereby the relationship between shape and intensity are modelled via the conditional distribution of intensity given shape. Our fully probabilistic approach eliminates the need for arbitrary weightings between shape and intensity as well as for tuning parameters that specify the relative contribution between the use of shape constraints and intensity information. Leave-one-out cross-validation is used to validate the model and fitting for 17 structures.
The PDM for shape requires surface parameterizations of the volumetric, manual labels such that vertices retain a one-to-one correspondence across the training subjects. Surface parameterizations with correspondence are generated through the use of deformable models under constraints that embed the correspondence criterion within the deformation process. A novel force that favours equal-area triangles throughout the mesh is introduced. The force adds stability to the mesh such that minimal smoothing or within-surface motion is required.
The use of the PDM for segmentation across a series of subjects results in a set surfaces that retain point correspondence. The correspondence facilitates landmark-based shape analysis. Amongst other metrics, vertex-wise multivariate statistics and discriminant analysis are used to investigate local and global size and shape differences between groups. The model is fit, and shape analysis is applied to two clinical datasets.
Development of advanced three-dimensional tumour models for anti-cancer drug testing
Keywords: colorectal cancer cells
endothelial cells
three-dimensional culture
co-culture tumour model
breast cancer cells
anti-cancer drug testing
perfusion

Animal testing is still the common method to test the efficacy of new drugs, but tissue engineered in vitro models are becoming more acceptable for replacing and reducing animal testing in anti-cancer drug screening by developing in vitro three-dimensional (3D) tumour models for anti-cancer drug testing. In this study, three-dimensional (3D) culture methods were developed to mimic the tumour microenvironment. 3D culturing is to seed, maintain and expand cultured cells in three-dimensional space, in contrast to the traditional two-dimensional (2D) method in which the cells attach to the bottom of culture containers as monolayers. To mimic the intercellular interplay for tumour study, cell co-culture was applied. In this thesis, perfusion culture showed a better homeostasis for 3D tumour model growth over 17 days, with a more controllable working platform and a more reliable response-dose correlation for data interpretation. In the Matrigel sandwich system, the co-culture of breast cancer cells and endothelial cells demonstrated the morphology featuring a vascular network and tumour structures, with the thickness of the three-dimensional structure around 100µm and tubule length 200-400 µm, and maintained for 10 days. The comparisons studies between Matrigel sandwich and other methods suggest that though not fully characterised, Matrigel is still a valuable scaffold choice for developing co-culture 3D tumour model. Finally, the combination of perfusion and co-culture showed the potential of applying this model in angiogenesis assay, with a drug response profile combining cell viability and morphology to mimic in vivo tumour physiology.