VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
UNDERSTANDING STEREOTYPE WITHIN TEXT: AN APPLICATION TO PERCEPTIONS OF COMPUTER SCIENTISTS
Keywords: Symbolic Systems
Stereotype in Computer Science
Gender in Computer Science
Stereotype Text Analysis
Thesis

In a world where the technology sector is growing rapidly and computer scientists seem ubiquitous, it is important to take into account the perceptions of these computer scientists who are driving this technological advance forward. Prior literature has described the stereotypical computer scientist as highly intelligent, socially unaware, obsessed with technology, and masculine. This project aims to analyze these stereotypes against some experimental data. With over 500 participants taking part in a survey on Mechanical Turk that asks the participant to describe the stereotype or anti-stereotype of a computer scientist, enough data was collected to answer the questions of how consistent with the literature were the stereotypes presented in this experimental data and could a stereotype score be attributed to each of the words used? To assess whether or not these descriptions were consistent with prior literature, the first step was to calculate the word similarity using word embeddings of each word with lexicons that represented the stereotypes of competence and social (in)ability. The second step was to find where geometrically each word fell on an axes of competence and anti-competence/social and anti-social, before calculating the distance from the middle point as the final stereotype score. Overall, the analysis finds that stereotypes and anti-stereotypes present in experimental data are consistent with literature, and this paper makes a major contribution in providing a method to assign any word a competence or social stereotype score along the lines of stereotyping in computer science.
Understanding the dynamics of hippo pathway signaling
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Yes-associated protein 1 (YAP) is a transcriptional co-activator in the Hippo pathway, playing critical roles in mechano-transduction, organ size control, and regeneration. Here, we report a robust experimental platform for real-time visualization of native YAP dynamics and downstream gene expression. Using this platform, we show that activation of YAP target genes is preceded by localization resets, which are dramatic, concerted departure/re-entry cycles of nuclear YAP. These resets could be induced by intracellular calcium release, modulation of Src-kinase activity, and mitosis. Using nascent-transcription reporter knockins, we found that native YAP target-gene activation is strictly correlated to such localization resets. Oncogenically transformed cells, with chronically elevated YAP-driven transcription, lacked these resets, but displayed rapid nucleo-cytoplasmic exchange of YAP, suggesting an escape from compartmentalization-based control. Measurement of chromatin binding kinetics revealed no detectable binding of YAP in Ras-transformed cell lines. However, untransformed cells showed a high degree of bulk YAP-chromatin binding. Taken together, we propose that YAP activity is not a simple linear function of nuclear enrichment. We suggest a novel mode of transcriptional regulation involving the dynamic re-partitioning of YAP prior to gene activation, where high nuclear retention of YAP through non-specific binding acts to gate transcription activity. Under oncogenic signaling contexts, this gating mechanism is by-passed, and rapid nucleo-cytoplasmic communication of YAP aids unregulated transcription.
Understanding the Geography of Housing Instability: Eviction and Affordable Housing Development
Keywords: Eviction
Housing
Economics
Thesis

As more Americans shift from owning to renting homes, more scholarship is needed to understand how rental markets are changing, and particularly how low-income individuals are impacted by growing rent burdens across the United States. In this paper, I analyze what characteristics of census tracts are most related to high eviction rates, and what impact a plausibly exogenous increase in Low Income Housing Tax Credit housing has on eviction rates. To estimate this effect, I leverage a discontinuity in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s funding formula in which census tracts for which 50% of the population is below 60% of the Area Median Gross Income are designated as Qualified Census Tracts and receive 30% more funding. In my primary regression discontinuity analysis, I find that census tracts just above the threshold received approximately five units more low-income housing on a base of approximately seven units and had higher rents and eviction rates, though this result is not robust to additional functional forms. The mechanism for this effect is likely that an increase in Low Income Housing Tax Credit housing increases economic development in low-income neighborhoods, increasing the opportunity cost for landlords, and increasing the incentive to evict tenants.
Understanding the Underlying Biological Pathways Affected by Treatment of Triple Negative Breast Cancer Cell Lines with Novel Natural Product Derivatives
Keywords:  Department of Bioengineering
mass spectrometry
Bioengineering
drugs
natural derivatives
breast cancer
triple negative breast cancer
Thesis

Breast cancer is a common disease and the second leading cause of cancer-related death in women. Therapeutic challenges arise due to the heterogeneity of breast cancer with multiple molecular phenotypes with no single therapy able to effectively treat all disease subtypes. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most aggressive subtype with a high recurrence and metastasis rates, adding to the significant need to develop new therapies. Basal-like and claudin-low are two molecular subtypes of TNBC and the diversity of these subtypes further highlight the therapeutic challenges in treating TNBC.
Naturally-derived compounds are attractive drug candidates for cancer therapeutics due to their anti-cancer activity with minimal toxic side effects. Here we investigated two classes of novel small molecules, inspired by natural products: chalcones and azapodophyllotoxins (AzPs). These molecules were previously screened using a panel of 60 cancer cell lines and shown to have anti-cancer activity in TNBC cell lines. Chalcones have been previously shown to inhibit HSP90 while AzPs have been shown to inhibit tubulin assembly. Both of these mechanisms lead to an apoptotic response in TNBC cell lines.
In this study, we used three derivatives of chalcones and AzPs to treat basal-like and claudin-low TNBC cell lines. A viability assay was performed to determine the IC50 values of each drug candidate. Proteomic analysis by mass spectrometry was performed to identify the proteins and biological pathways affected by drug treatment. AzP derivatives were found to be more potent than chalcone derivatives and there was no significant differences in cell viability between basal-like and claudin-low cell lines. The proteomic results support previous findings of chalcone and AzP mechanisms in TNBC and also suggest new methods of action for these drug candidates.
Understanding Violence Against the LGBT Community in the Colombian Armed Conflict: Constructing Durable Peace through Education and Gender Ideology
Keywords: LGBT
Colombia
Violence
Gender Ideology
Stanford University
Center for Latin American Studies
Thesis

This project aims to contribute to conversations about the underlying reasons for violence perpetrated against the LGBT population during the Colombian Armed Conflict. This project draws on historical retellings of the Armed Conflict, on reports published by the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, on academic articles from within and without Colombia, Colombian news articles, and more in order to weave together a conversation about the importance of Gender Ideology in the analysis of and the subsequent healing from thee Armed Conflict. After explaining Gender Ideology and connecting it to the atrocities committed, governmental promises made, and subsequent failures to uphold those promises, this project highlights the importance of using a critical gender lens to understand the nature of the violence against the LGBT community and for constructing a lasting peace through future generations of the country.
Universal Basic Participation: Reforming Campaign Finance by Expanding Political Influence
Keywords: Symbolic Systems
Political Science
Voting
Universal Basic Income
Thesis

As the importance of money to political success increases, along with the growing income gap, it is critical to consider new campaign finance reform efforts. I introduce the term Universal Basic Participation to describe programs that provides citizens with money to make political donations. Such proposals may be key to drowning out the importance of big money. By allowing all citizens the opportunity for political influence through the act of donating, creating coalitions of financial support, and running for office, a Universal Basic Participation scheme might have a salubrious effect on American democracy. I specifically consider the benefits for historically underrepresented groups, and also explore Seattle's recent launch of a similar program.
Upconverting nanoparticles as a new class of optical sensors for visualizing mechanical forces in vivo
Keywords: Applied Physics.

Mechanical forces influence a variety of biological processes, including stem cell differentiation, muscle contractions, and disease. However, few sensors have the nanoscopic size, signal stability, or dynamic range to measure forces in vivo. In my research, I design lanthanide-based upconverting nanoparticles (UCNPs) that emit visible light when excited with near infrared light, thereby enabling background-free imaging. In the presence of a mechanical stimuli, like a push or a squeeze, they change color, allowing us to see differences in mechanical environments and track force-dependent behavior. These mechanosensitive nanoparticles have broad applications, as they can be deployed in a variety of biological systems with minimal invasiveness through the bloodstream, ingested, or even taken up by the roots of a plant. Further, they represent an entirely new class of probes for monitoring mechanotransduction in biology. First, I will discuss how I achieve bright, sub-50 nm mechanosensitive UCNPs. In one strategy, d-metal ions couple to lanthanide ions with an efficiency that varies with pressure. In another strategy, a core-shell architecture enhances upconversion efficiency, while synthetically induced strain at the core-shell interface tunes sensitivity. By looking at different crystal phases and shell materials, I create a toolkit of optical sensors, all with a reproducible and ratiometric color response to mechanical stimuli. Then, I evaluate the biocompatibility and performance of UCNPs in biological environments, including a range of buffers, pH gradients, and in vivo in C. elegans worms. Finally, I demonstrate the first in vivo visualization of mechanical stresses involved in C. elegans digestion. Real-time videos reveal how stresses change both spatially and temporally, opening up future directions for monitoring disease and its impact on mechanotransduction.
Urban Sanity: Examining Administrators' Perceptions of School-Based Mental Health Programs in Oakland Unified School District
Keywords: Stanford University Department of Urban Studies. School-to-Prison Pipeline
Punitive Discipline Policies
Trauma
Mental Health
Mental Health Professionals
Oakland Unified School District
Thesis

The school-to-prison pipeline, a process of criminalizing students through discipline policies in schools that put students in contact with law enforcement, plagues urban schools and communities across the nation. Every day students from marginalized communities, specifically Black and Latinx students, are over-disciplined through punitive policies in urban schools. These policies can lead students to become involved in juvenile delinquency or even eventually become incarcerated. This disturbing national trend that leads students from the schoolhouse to the jailhouse negatively impacts the incarcerated student and the student’s family. It also decreases the likelihood of a student being a successful citizen and exacerbates racial inequality in prison and society. Many students who are victims of the school-to-prison pipeline suffer from immense trauma and mental health difficulties that often go unnoticed and untreated. Scholars suggest that mental health programs may be beneficial to students living with trauma and experiencing harsh disciplinary punishments, but there is little empirical research that explores these suggested mental health programs and their impact. Understanding teachers’ and mental health professionals’ perspectives can provide important information about whether school-based mental health programs and practices are effective in improving outcomes for punished students. This research aims to examine the perspectives of administrators on current mental health programs in schools where students experience punitive disciplinary outcomes, specifically in low income, urban schools in Oakland, CA. This research incorporates data on disciplinary outcomes from the years 2011-2015 of students in the 88 schools in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), as well as interviews with 15 school administrators and mental health professionals in OUSD. Teachers and mental health professionals perceived school-based mental health programs as effective for some students experiencing harsh disciplinary sanctions because the mental health programs provide coping mechanisms for students living with trauma. However, they believed that there were significant challenges in accessing school-based mental health programs, specifically for Black and Latinx students. Teachers also reported that some of their peers lacked cultural competency to support students’ mental health needs.
The use of a low-latency key-value store for implementing a scalable and high-performance graph database
Keywords: Electrical Engineering.

This dissertation presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of TorcDB, a high performance graph database system that inherits its ability to scale from a generic key-value store. The key-value store, RAMCloud, is an in memory and low latency distributed storage system that provides the necessary features for scaling, including fault-tolerance, automatic data distribution, and distributed transactions, without assuming anything about the type of data stored by clients. TorcDB achieves high performance using RAMCloud by carefully laying out data and translating traversals into a read and write schedule that minimizes query latency. Using this approach, TorcDB is able to achieve competitive and often better performance than the state of the art in graph database systems today. Evaluated on a large scale social network workload, TorcDB is able to achieve an overall 50th percentile latency of 246us for update queries, 139us for short read queries, and 4.6ms for complex analytical queries.
Useful thermal effects in electrochemical systems
Keywords: Chemical Engineering.

Redox reactions with high entropy changes can be used to make effective refrigerators and heat engines. This work demonstrates electrochemical systems that harvest heat energy (with efficiency > 60% of Carnot) and can provide effective cooling (at power > 0.5W/cm^3). A key advantage is that electromigration and mass advection in electrolytes can be optimized separately to decouple charge, entropy, and heat transport in ways that aren't possible with solid-state thermoelectrics. While these devices are a long way from any practical use, they might inform or inspire other researchers working towards hydrofluorocarbon-free refrigeration or energy harvesting.
Using seawater to transition offshore energy production from petroleum to clean energy
Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.

The most abundant material on our planet, seawater, could help us to build a bridge between the fossil fuel industry and human-timescale renewable energy resources. In this thesis, I show that seawater can enhance oil recovery from porous media and store electrical energy. Therefore, seawater unlocks clean offshore energy storage hubs. This report shows that seawater (1) can alter the wettability of carbonate porous media towards more water-wet conditions that are favorable for oil recovery and (2) can store chemical energy after oil removal from porous media. Specifically, my work demonstrates that seawater enhances oil recovery from carbonate fields and offshore petroleum reservoirs could become underground porous electrodes of a giant redox flow battery. With this proposal, I use seawater as a base material for the design of the injection water and add ions that help to detach oil from the rock. I enable seawater as injection fluid to increase oil recovery by wettability alteration adding ions that have been proved to help oil recovery. The mean water contact angle of the ganglia showed a 28% contact angle reduction from an oil-wet to a water-wet system when using a tuned seawater composition with high salinity in a tertiary displacement. The wettability alteration might not be as drastic as simplified ion compositions or diluted seawater, but it potentially provides a more economically efficient solution. In this way, I contribute to enhanced oil recovery and with an eye toward the economics involved in tuning the seawater to make it an injection fluid that alters wettability. I induced potential on a connate salinity and seawater salinity brines cell set-up to transfer sulfide reverting the redox reaction and therefore storing energy. Hence, a seawater ion-exchange cell could be considered as one of the most attractive candidate applications for offshore large-scale energy storage and chemical ionic tuning. Despite the fact that a seawater-battery has lesser gravimetric and volumetric energy density, natural underground reservoir electrodes have the size to make large scale energy storage possible.
Using sequencing to analyze exotic circulating nucleic acids in primates and transplantation immunity of a sea squirt
Keywords: Physics.

High throughput sequencing allows the accurate quantification of millions to billions of biomolecules at a time. I have looked to answer questions across a range of biological fields by building analysis pipelines for this data, utilizing high-performance computing infrastructure, and applying techniques from machine learning. In the last decade, studies of circulating nucleic acids in humans have yielded noninvasive tests of fetal chromosome abnormalities and signatures of rejection events in transplant recipients. Here I describe how circulating nucleic acids also have microbial and viral signatures which allow us to detect pathogens in a hypothesis-free manner, to identify highly divergent and novel microbes in humans, to characterize the microbiome of non-human primates, and to unveil disease dynamics and changes in the immune system in individuals living with HIV. Another area I've researched relates to the immune system of sea squirts, or tunicates, the sister group of vertebrates and are separated about 400 million years from us. The tunicate Botryllus schlosseri is a colonial organism with a natural allogeneic fusion reaction that produces chimeras, and therefore serves as a model system for transplantation. Here I used deep sequencing to present a molecular, genetic and cellular description of the process of resorption of unstable chimeras, characterization of the haematopoietic system, and molecular, cellular and morphological changes during development of this fascinating organism.
Using the Global Decarbonization Movement to Create a Socioeconomically Equitable World
Keywords: Renewable energy
social equity
socioeconomic equity
environmental justice
Hawaii
community engagement
community
Thesis

The International Panel on Climate Change estimates that over the next three decades the global economy must invest $2 trillion per year into decarbonizing the infrastructure that supports our society. Using existing business models for community energy, this massive wave of investment can simultaneously be used to alleviate socioeconomic inequities that exist in developed nations like the United States. Deploying community energy projects successfully requires a particular emphasis on community engagement as our team learned while building a community co-design framework on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i. We learned that physical models of the island and in-person role play of business model specifics motivate residents to share culturally relevant requests for project specifications. Executing on these specifications as a renewable energy developer facilitates resident’s emotional ownership of a project and stimulates a more socioeconomically equitable society while reducing carbon emissions.
UV and IR properties of quantum gravity from amplitudes
Keywords: Physics.

We state the motivation of our work on quantum gravity using modern amplitudes techniques, and give a brief review of basics of amplitudes, including the spinor-helicity formalism, unitarity cuts, and relations between graviton amplitudes and gluon amplitudes. After this introduction, we review our work investigating the ultraviolet behavior of the 2-loop 4-graviton amplitude using generalized unitarity cuts in dimensional regularization in -2\epsilon$ dimensions. We find a surprisingly simple dependence on the renormalization scale, which is the physical quantity we should focus on, for graviton amplitudes at 2-loop level. Since every simple result needs a simple derivation, we re-derive this simple renormalization scale dependence of the 2-loop graviton amplitude using the unitarity-cut method directly in 4-dimensional spacetime. This method relates the renormalization scale dependence to discontinuities of the amplitudes and elucidates the physics within. Last, we review our work on the infrared, or long-distance, properties of quantum gravity by studying the first quantum correction to the bending angles of massless projectiles with different spins, using 1-loop scattering amplitudes. Our calculation of the bending angle for gravitons, in particular, completes this line of research. The difference between the quantum corrections to the bending angles of different massless projectiles indicates a violation of the classical equivalence principle at the quantum level.