VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cultural Centers on College Campuses: Understanding Marginalized Students' Perceptions of Community Centers
Keywords: Education
Higher Education
Belonging
Community
Cultural Centers
Multicultural Centers
Marginalized Students
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Community Centers
Text
Thesis

Cultural centers are spaces at colleges and universities that provide resources, programming, community, and more for marginalized students. While some universities have a multicultural center aimed to serve students of many identities, many universities have centers that cater to a specific identity of students, including racial/ethnic backgrounds, gender, sexuality, and more. Cultural centers play a crucial role in fostering a sense of belonging and support for marginalized student populations in higher education, however, there is still little research that understands the diverse range of feelings and experiences that students have about these spaces. This thesis aims to bridge this knowledge gap by using a survey-based approach to explore the perceptions and emotions of marginalized students towards cultural centers.
A mixed-methods research design was utilized to collect and analyze data from marginalized students at Stanford University. The survey consisted of both quantitative Likert-scale questions and qualitative open-ended prompts, allowing for the analysis based on marginalized identities, cultural centers, frequency with the centers, and other specific methods. The survey focused on understanding frequency and reasoning behind students’ participation within cultural centers, how students view the cultural centers in terms of the main goals of the centers, and how these cultural centers affect students in terms of their perceptions of their identities, as well as their sense of belonging and sense of self.
Results from this survey indicated a wide range of experiences, with a substantial number of students holding positive opinions. Many students expressed a strong sense of belonging, community, and cultural pride, and prioritized interacting with cultural centers within their regular schedules. However, others felt there was a need for more programming surrounding intersectionality, more diverse representation within identities, more opportunities for first-time students to interact, and routine assessment of these spaces. Overall, this study showed more about how different communities on campus view and value cultural centers, as well as how having these spaces within a prestigious and elite university such as Stanford extremely influence student life.
Curating an empire : creating and destroying archives of nature in Spain and Spanish America, 1781-1821
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
History.

The Enlightenment was an age of institution building. Throughout the 1700s, natural history museums fed by imperial spoils emerged in European capitals. In the case of the Spanish Empire, more studies focus on such institutions in Madrid than those across the Atlantic. Ample textual evidence confirms the creation of two public natural history institutions in Spanish America—one in Mexico City in 1790 and another in Guatemala City in 1797—although the locations of the objects once within them are unknown. I argue that scholars have written about these colonial museums less than about contemporary European museums due to a dearth of extant material specimens from their collections. Throughout my research in Spain, Mexico, and Guatemala, I not only visited traditional textual archives, but also embedded myself within museum collections to study objects. In Spain, I encountered many specimens from the eighteenth century, but I found no such remnants in the Americas. Colonial violence led to the disappearance of objects in the Americas, while they survived on the Iberian Peninsula. On the surface, these findings appear to justify paternalistic rejections of repatriation. Yet, even without their physical collections, the historical impact of long-gone American institutions remains accessible. My dissertation tells the stories of multiple "lost" American collections—natural history museums, botanical gardens, and the spoils of nature collected on expeditions—thus breaking the historian's fixation on objects and "reading" for silences in the modern material archive. I use this decolonial approach to contextualize these American practices and institutions alongside their Spanish analogues.
A customer journey mapping framework with mobile application
Keywords: Engineering.
Mechanical Engineering.

Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a product and service design tool that is widely used by both researchers and practitioners. It tracks the customer and user interactions with products and services during their experiences and maps out significant changes in their experiences. While CJM possesses the advantages of studying customer experiences from their perspectives, it also suffers from limitations such as small sample sizes and biases. This thesis introduces a framework for performing CJM with mobile applications (mobile apps) and analyzing the data collected from the app. The framework was tested on the errand experiences of students and its findings were compared with those of a parallel study using traditional CJM approaches to demonstrate its effectiveness in performing CJM. The results showed that although existing methods are more suitable for small-scale data collection and identifying apparent user interactions, our proposed approach can better target diverse experiences and reveal latent needs. Overall, mobile applications have the potential to improve CJM and provide valuable insights into customer experiences
A darker form of discipline : the institutional character of Black literary studies, 1969-1999
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.

What has it meant to produce knowledge and to teach at the intersection of English literature and Black Studies? This dissertation asks after the history and function of Black literary studies as it emerged as an academic discipline in the late 20th century U.S. academy. I propose that Black literary studies' institutional knowledge project is best understood as an endeavor to reflexively theorize the conditions of its own institutionalization. To this end, I illustrate the tremendous promise represented by this endeavor as well as its significant liabilities. This introduction supplies theoretical and contextual exegesis and frames the methodological critique which grounds "A Darker Form of Discipline, " and which animates the broader experiment in interpretive method staged across my four chapters. This experiment attempts to reinvigorate Black literary studies' reflexive sensitivity to institutional knowledge production. Grounded in a disciplinary critique that defamiliarizes the subject/object relation of the critic and the literary text----arguing that Black literary studies' discipline formation relied on the mutualistic, co-creation of criticism and literary tradition----my interpretive method turns to the literary text as a collaborator and an informant on the institutional conditions of Black literary studies' discipline formation. In this way, I work toward a critical practice that can shed light upon its practitioners----helping us to assess the conditions under which we work, and to judge the type of work we actually do
Data science : a gateway to belonging in STEM and other quantitative fields
Keywords: Education.

The content of secondary mathematics leaves much to be desired in terms of student interest, but also in terms of its representativeness of real world mathematics, leaving students with only a limited glimpse of how math is applied in the world and perhaps prematurely deciding that the majors and careers that mathematics leads into are not of interest to them. Contrarily, data science is inherently real world, because the data itself comes from real contexts with authentic problems to solve. For example, students can explore how machine learning functions in music recommendation systems, or how data can be used to investigate skin tone representation in social media advertisements. In addition, data science can be learned and explored in contexts that are personally interesting and valuable to students. For these reasons, data science has the potential to capture the interest and engagement of mathematics students who are motivated to learn content that they find interesting and useful in ways that other mathematics coursework cannot. This study looks at the ways in which students' experience in a high school data science course served to increase their interest in pursuing majors and careers in STEM
Data-driven methods for characterizing temporal variation in agricultural water use
Keywords: Engineering.

Satellite remote sensing provides a consistent way to monitor water use over large agricultural regions with field-scale resolution. Maximizing the value of this data, for both water managers and water users, requires methods for identifying temporal variation in irrigation practices and evapotranspiration (ET) more generally. Chapter 1 provides motivation and context for the problem of ET estimation for monitoring agricultural water use. Chapter 2 analyzes sources of ET estimation error introduced by meteorological and land surface data inputs, evaluated at three winegrape vineyards in California. Chapter 3 presents a method for identifying the point-in-time irrigation status of a field without labeled training data or ancillary weather or geophysical data inputs. Chapter 4 presents a method for characterizing stages of crop development using multivariate satellite inputs, applies it to the problem of crop planting date estimation, and also uses the method to illustrate structural properties of intra-annual environmental time series. Together these projects advance the theory and practice of quantifying agricultural water use with satellite remote sensing
Data-driven sequential decision making by understanding and adopting rational behavior
Keywords: Engineering.

A remarkable feature of an intelligent agent is the ability to make sequences of smart decisions that are executed in coordination to reach goals. As can be seen by watching humans, a polished sequential decision making policy yields elegant behaviors such as smooth driving, dexterous locomotion, and prudent investments. Learning optimal policies for sequential decision making is challenging due to issues such as the difficulty of long-horizon credit assignment, exploration in exponentially large search spaces, and designing suitable reward functions to encourage the correct behavior. In this dissertation, we are interested in, perhaps, one of the most natural forms of learning that humans engage in: learning from observations. We would like to focus on algorithms that enable data-driven learning of sequential decision making policies by observing optimal behavior demonstrated by other rational agents. This process comprises two main steps: understanding and adoption. In the first part, we discuss how to design algorithms that allow an agent to understand and thus internalize rational behavior. We develop an active world model learning algorithm that enables an ego-agent to build models of complex behaviors demonstrated by human-like animate agents by efficiently directing its attention. We further investigate the feasibility of building models of other rational agents by Inverse Reinforcement Learning. In the second part, we develop methods to adopt rational behavior from demonstrations. We develop algorithms for Imitation Learning in the presence of domain mismatch such as morphological and viewpoint differences. We further propose algorithms for imitation via Inverse Reinforcement Learning where we propose algorithms that extract underlying rewards from demonstrations of complex behaviors such as robotic locomotion. We hope that these contributions bring us one step closer to solving real-world sequential decision making problems with machine learning.
Data-driven statistical sharding for industry-scale neural recommendation
Keywords: Engineering.

Deep learning based recommendation models (DLRMs) form the backbone of many internet-scale services such as web search, social media, and video streaming. Primarily composed of massive embedding tables, potentially terabytes in size, these models require immense system resources to train and the solving of the sharding problem. The sharding problem is the task of partitioning and placing the embedding table parameters throughout the target system memory topology such that training throughput is maximized. This dissertation: (1) Characterizes and derives statistics from DLRM training data which can be used to accurately and granularly predict the memory demands of individual embedding table rows; (2) Presents RecShard, a mixed-integer linear program based approach which uses these statistics to solve the sharding problem for capacity constrained single-node systems, where parameters must be placed across high-performance GPU HBM and much slower CPU DRAM; reducing accesses to the latter by orders of magnitude; and (3) Presents FlexShard, a precise row-level sharding algorithm which focuses on sharding emerging sequence-based DLRMs across multi-node GPU training clusters; leveraging these statistics to significantly reduce inter-node communication demand, the bottleneck of scale-out DLRM training
Data-driven sustainability : advancing electric vehicle adoption and carbon accounting using artificial intelligence and geospatial analytics
Keywords: Engineering.
Management Science and Engineering.

This dissertation explores data-driven, computational techniques for sustainability decision-making, particularly focusing on the transportation sector and the carbon accounting landscape. Given the urgency of large-scale decarbonization efforts underscored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this work proposes and evaluates methods to help decision-makers navigate complex interactions between humans, engineering systems, and ecological systems, taking into account factors such as data accessibility and uncertainty. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first, encompassing chapters two and three, delves into how computational techniques and data can expedite the decarbonization of the transportation sector. The second part, which includes chapters four and five, emphasizes elevating societal understanding and accounting of carbon emissions in the context of sustainable decision-making. Altogether, this dissertation underscores the importance of comprehensive, computationally-enhanced, data-driven, and uncertainty-aware approaches to sustainability decision-making, thus providing practical pathways for effective climate change mitigation.
De facto school discipline and the maintenance of inequality
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Sociology.

Like many American institutions, K-12 schools are attempting to shift away from punitive measures and embracing a rhetoric of restorative justice. In this dissertation, I draw on three years of ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in a racially and economically diverse public school, Northwest High, to answer the following question: how does the institutional shift towards non-punitiveness unfold in practice? I highlight how this shift corresponds with a shift in governance strategy. Amidst the non-punitive turn, institutions increasingly seek to govern by connecting their constituents with resources rather than enacting harsh punishment. At Northwest High, staff address challenges by connecting students and their families to goods and services in attempt to reduce their use of exclusionary discipline like suspensions and expulsions. As such, the school becomes a crucial site for the distribution of social services. This resource brokering can have many benefits. It can also maintain inequality. I show how resource brokering is intertwined with surveillance and discipline. Importantly, school staff lack the capacity to successfully serve as brokers for all their constituents. Staff therefore navigate the constraint of limited resources by strategically managing the boundaries of the institution, redefining which children get to remain a member and thus who they will continue brokering for. I then explain why these forced removals -- which I call de facto expulsions -- typically occur through informal rather than formal means. I argue that informal methods of exclusion become favored in the non-punitive turn because organizational leaders seek to submit low official counts of discipline to the state accountability system. These processes sustain discipline inequality. Students who depend more on the school to access goods and services - many of whom are poor or recent immigrants - are more likely to become perceived as a burden and be expelled. Because these removals often occur informally, punishment becomes invisibilized and official data undercount the number of students forcibly removed from their schools. Finally, I document that even absent institutional consequences, informal discipline can harm young people and their families by challenging their self-concept and altering their social ties. I conclude by considering how we might maximize the positive benefits of school resource brokering while minimizing the negative, often unintended consequences
Dealing with a deadly diet : molecular mechanisms of alkaloid sequestration in poison frogs
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Biology.

Chemical defense is a widespread phenomenon where organisms employ toxic compounds as a means of protection against predators. Poison frogs (family Dendrobatidae) sequester an array of alkaloid toxins onto their skin from their diet for chemical defense, and often possess aposematic signals warning potential predators of their toxicity. Although the skin alkaloids, coloration, and dietary resources of poison frogs have been rich areas of research in the last 40 years, little is known about the molecular mechanisms involved in their ability to uptake alkaloids from their diet. My dissertation focused on applying comparative biochemical and genetic approaches to better understand the molecular processes involved in toxin sequestration, metabolism, and autoresistance. In Chapter 2 I investigate the effects of dietary pumiliotoxin 251D (PTX) on gene expression and identify a candidate cytochrome P450 protein involved in PTX hydroxylation. Chapter 3 focuses on an unlikely member of the serine protease inhibitor family, alkaloid binding globulin (ABG), as a transporter of alkaloids in poison frog plasma. In Chapter 4 I compare the alkaloid and transcriptomic profiles of toxic, moderately toxic, and non-toxic poison frogs, unraveling the molecular correlates of toxicity and autoresistance. This work expands our understanding of PTX metabolism, identifies potential candidate enzymes involved in alkaloid hydroxylation, and sheds light on the multifaceted physiological roles played by serpin proteins, exemplified by ABG. Furthermore, we challenge the conventional notion of toxicity as a binary trait and suggest that gene expression plasticity may be a key aspect of poison frog evolution. Potential avenues for future work include testing poison frog cytochrome P450 proteins for metabolic activity, exploring the functional diversity of serpin proteins, and more comprehensive analyses of poison frog genomes, transcriptomes, and alkaloid profiles. Overall, we applied experimental techniques to better understand the molecular underpinnings of chemical defense in poison frogs, paving the way for future work in poison frog physiology.
Death is a feast : the ideology of the homeric banquet
Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Classics.

In large part, feasting in the Iliad and the Odyssey has been critically overlooked by studies on the political ideology of the Homeric poems. This dissertation studies the meaning of the feast, δαίς, in these poems and contends that the feast in Homeric poetry is what the anthropologist Bryan Hayden has called "a critical element, almost entirely overlooked in the past." Feasting, as the anthropologists Bryan Hayden and Michael Dietler have shown, forms critical reciprocal obligations which encompass "the political, economic, ritual, and social universe." Likewise, I argue that feasting reveals the reciprocal obligations at the heart of the political, economic, and ritual world of Homeric society. By providing an updated formulaic and linguistic analysis of the language of feasting in Homer, the "critical" social relations of the Homeric community are revealed. Part I one of this dissertation provides an exhaustive formulaic analysis of two contrastive verbs used to describe feasting: (1) δατέομαι, "to divide up, share, " and (2) δαίνυμι, "to feast." Part II analyzes the formulaic meaning of the δαίς, "feast, " as a particular conceptual form of division. I show that the δαίς, derived from the Indo-European root, *deH2-, "to divide, " is not a "meal" that embodies egalitarian participation, but is instead a gift that instantiates an ideal form of hierarchy (social division). This study resolves contradictory definitions in the Homeric lexicography of feasting by showing how they rely on incomplete and partial conceptualization of the Homeric idea of division. Finally, this study concludes by re-contextualizing the Homeric feast within the anthropological study of feasting. It contends that the reciprocal obligations of the feast reflect a singular vision of ideal power and community: single patron rule. This allows us a unique perspective on the question of the political ideology of Homeric poetry. Instead of the struggle between aristocratic and plebiscitary democratic ideology, it is suggested that the Homeric feast reflects an ideological struggle between royal tributary rule (Odysseus' patron feast) and the rise of oligarchy (the Suitors' symposium) in the 8th to 6th century BCE.