VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Coproducing the State: Water, Power, and Citizenship in Venezuela

In this dissertation I examine the history and politics of water sector reform in Venezuela’s Chavista period or ‘Bolivarian Process’ (1999-present), focusing primarily on Caracas. Venezuela’s reforms sought to improve water services for low-income and marginalized residents through infrastructure investments and by involving them in community water management committees. The committees’ design, in turn, informed the wider Chavista effort to build a participatory ‘communal state’ run by and for ‘the people.’ Yet, over two decades on, Venezuelans are confronting a major political and economic crisis, including challenges with water scarcity and reliability. I ask: How can we explain the gap between transformative promise and disappointment? How have the reforms shaped water service equity and quality? Following geographers and anthropologists of ‘infrastructural’ or ‘hydraulic citizenship,’ how are state authority and citizenship being re(made) through water governance? What can we learn about the conditions under which participation might promote water justice and deepen democracy, in line with the ‘water commons’? I suggest that water management and water infrastructures – and their relationship with oil— shaped the direction the change process took, including its eventual political economic crisis (from 2014 onwards). Specifically, I argue that water was central to the consolidation of Chavismo’s hegemony, but also productive of the political project’s key contradictions. First, I document tensions between utopian aspirations to transform the institutions and infrastructures of the state, while relying on those same institutions and infrastructures to maintain flows of water and political legitimacy. Second, I illustrate the contradiction between a local communal state and a non-communal oil economy which relies on global flows of capital and the exploitation and degradation of both nature and low-income and Black, Indigenous, and mestiza women’s labour and bodies. These constitutive tensions, between extraction and social reproduction, and preservation and transformation, helped create the conditions for the water crisis, and made its leaders vulnerable to claims of betrayal. My analysis further shows how urban environmental injustices and global extractive capitalism are intimately interconnected in the Venezuelan context. I therefore conclude by calling for a more inclusive and spatially expansive understanding of the urban ‘water commons’ which encompasses anti-extractive struggles.

Keywords: Coproduction
Gramsci
Political ecology
State theory
Venezuela
Water
Advisor: Prudham, Scott
Semiotic Validity in Incomplete Aegean Bronze Age Seal Impressions

The study of seals and seal impressions from the Bronze Age Aegean has had a stronglyiconographic leading edge, with multi-generational effort in identifying and archiving seal-face motifs at projects like the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen siegel (CMS), now housed at Heidelberg University. However, the underlying premise that visual information, encoded in iconography, was central to the semiotic operation of sealing practice for seal users in the Bronze Age has not been thoroughly queried. Indeed, it is the intuitive quality of stamping that obfuscates the richness of its multi-modal signification, containing not only visual information, but also relationships of causality and multiplication inherent to the indexicality of the imprint. These factors constitutively generate the basis for authority and authentication in seal impressions. It is in ‘failures’ that we can see lapses in the primacy of visual information: partial impressions that lack the entire seal-face motif—but were still deemed valid and operational for Bronze Age seal users—illustrate the relative significance of indexical trace-making versus complex visually-encoded iconography. This thesis designs and demonstrates an experimental model for identifying changing rates of forms of incompleteness across more than a millennium of seal use in the Aegean. In a comprehensive study of all of the impressions archived at the CMS, forms of incompleteness were categorically systematized, then quantitatively presented in multi-site comparisons as presence/absence frequency ratios to seek patterns and test against the null hypothesis (random distribution). Special focus is given to frequencies of overlapping impressions, impressions where inadequate surface area was provided to accommodate the diameter of the seal, and voids within the bounds of the impressing surface.

Keywords: Aegean
Bronze Age
imprints
sealings
seals
semiotics
Advisor: Knappett, Carl
Neural Networks for Mathematical Reasoning – Evaluations, Capabilities, and Techniques

This thesis investigates the potential of neural networks as a powerful approach to reasoning. It argues that neural networks can effectively leverage statistical structures to learn useful heuristics and model arbitrary action distributions, making them well-suited for reasoning tasks. To test this claim, the thesis focuses on mathematical reasoning as a well-defined domain with broad applications. The author sets up various benchmarks to define the problem and measure progress in this emerging field. Through extensive experimentation, the thesis demonstrates that neural networks can perform non-trivial mathematical reasoning tasks in both abduction and induction. Additionally, the author shows that various techniques, such as improved inductive bias design, high-level proof sketching, and self-supervised learning, can enhance neural networks' mathematical reasoning capabilities. Overall, this thesis provides compelling evidence that neural networks are a promising tool for mathematical reasoning, with the potential to surpass existing methods in the field.

Keywords: Machine Reasoning
Neural Networks
Theorem proving
Advisor: Grosse, Roger
Ba, Jimmy
Infectious Disease Surveillance Using Emerging Data Sources: Applications to Antimicrobial Resistance and COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has reawakened public awareness of the deadly threat posed by infectious diseases in our interconnected world. We face mounting challenges in tackling both emerging diseases as well as longstanding threats like the rising tide of antimicrobial resistance. Simultaneously, the digital revolution has unleashed a vast array of data applicable to the critical task of infectious disease surveillance. In this dissertation, I explore the use of emerging data sources to answer questions about two of the most important global health crises of our time: the COVID-19 pandemic and antimicrobial resistance. In the first study, I analyzed human mobility data from a public transit app to estimate the association of mobility reductions with the COVID-19 growth rate and reproduction number during the first wave of the pandemic across 41 global cities. I found that a 10% decline in mobility was associated with a 12.2% reduction in weekly growth rate and a 0.058 decrease in the effective reproduction number. These results persisted, albeit at a smaller magnitude, in a model adjusted for epidemic timing. In the second study, I developed a novel metric to measure the responsiveness of population-level mobility to reported COVID-19 incidence in Canadian provinces and U.S. states from December 2020 to November 2021. Results suggested that responsiveness to rising COVID-19 cases was stronger in Canada compared to the U.S. and revealed a correlation between greater responsiveness and lower reported COVID-19 death rates. In the third study, I evaluated the effectiveness of an automated feedback intervention for antimicrobial stewardship among primary care physicians in Canada and Israel, using concurrent controls drawn from two large primary care databases. The results showed a reduction in the mean duration of prescribing for antibiotics in the intervention group, but no statistically significant decline in overall or indication-specific antibiotic prescribing. This dissertation showcases the potential of human mobility data and large primary care databases for enhancing surveillance of infectious disease outbreaks and shaping interventions in antimicrobial stewardship. Continued research is necessary to effectively harness new and emerging data sources to address both current and future global infectious disease threats.

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance
Antimicrobial stewardship
COVID-19
Human mobility
Infectious disease surveillance
SARS-CoV-2
Advisor: Brown, Kevin A
Fisman, David N
Probabilistic Evaluation of Comparative Reconstructions

This dissertation introduces Wordlist Distortion Theory, a framework for the probabilistic evaluation of comparative reconstructions in historical linguistics. The framework estimates the likelihood that a randomly generated wordlist merits the same type and number of diachronic transformations (e.g. sound changes, replacements, etc.) as required by the reconstruction. This is the first probabilistic evaluation of comparative reconstruction of its kind. Wordlist Distortion Theory is primarily intended as a platform for objective and accessible debate surrounding spurious reconstruction in historical linguistics. Additionally, the framework can be used as a tiebreaker between conflicting reconstructions for the same data. Finally, the framework allows for probability-based theoretical arguments in historical linguistics about the interaction of synchronic and diachronic factors with reconstruction reliability. For example, this dissertation argues that the effect of semantic change on reconstruction reliability is relatively minor and the effect of contrast-preserving sound change almost negligible. Wordlist Distortion Theory can also feature as part of a machine learning algorithm, allowing for the stochastic generation and evaluation of comparative reconstructions. This dissertation presents the results of a case study conducted on 74 Austronesian languages and 5 proto-languages, where, for each pair of language and proto-language, the algorithm suggested sound changes with the goal of decreasing the probability of a random match as calculated by Wordlist Distortion Theory. The resulting reconstructions are in line with general knowledge about sound change and Austronesian historical linguistics. Additionally, Wordlist Distortion Theory was used to evaluate the putative connection between the Austronesian and Ongan language families. Automated reconstructions from Proto-Ongan-Austronesian to members of either family are not conclusive.

Advisor: Jurgec, Peter
Beekhuizen, Barend
Exploring Educational Technology Policies and Practices of the World Bank

With information and communications technologies proliferating into all aspects of life during the COVID-19 crisis, education has experienced “the world’s biggest educational technology (EdTech) experiment in history.” While the effectiveness of educational technology in increasing learning and decreasing inequality is still contested, international organizations such as the World Bank, have become a driving force in promoting ICT use in education. Yet there is not much research on how the World Bank supports ICT use in education conceptually and financially.This inquiry uses a case study approach to look at the World Bank’s policy prescriptions and funding of ICT in education between 2011-2022. It does this through a document analysis of World Bank research, formal policy documents, and its portfolio of projects in K-12 education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The analysis first describes the evolution of the Bank’s EdTech policies over time. It then examines the changes in education sector projects with ICT components in SSA over the same period. Finally, the study compares how those policies and projects align. Findings from this study suggest that the World Bank’s EdTech policies shifted from system-level prescriptions regarding infrastructure, management, monitoring, and evaluation pre-pandemic, to more instructional approaches during the pandemic. Similarly, the Bank’s pre-pandemic education projects with ICT in SSA showed more inclination towards system management, specifically in low-income countries. In contrast, during the pandemic, the Bank’s EdTech financing focused on curriculum, pedagogy, and equity, and advocated “multimodality” – the use of as many available ICT tools as possible for remote education. The comparison of the Bank’s EdTech policies and its financed projects with ICT components in SSA suggests that the Bank’s response to the pandemic has led to greater alignment between its EdTech policy advice and investments compared to previous periods. However, as per the Bank’s plan to continue its promotion of blended learning, more research on the Bank’s EdTech approach is needed to track how its support of EdTech affects its borrowing countries, as well as how its work compares to that of similar international organizations (such as UNESCO or OECD) and other actors in the EdTech field (such as civil society or technology and telecommunications firms).

Advisor: Mundy, Karen
Novel Approaches for Anthelmintic and Nematicide Discovery

Parasitic nematodes place an enormous burden on humanity. Nematodes infect over one quarter of the world’s population and cause billions of dollars in livestock and plant crop losses each year, threatening global food security. We rely heavily on the use of anthelmintic medicines and agrochemical nematicides to control these devastating parasitic nematode infections. The development of genetic resistance to anthelmintics and the phase-out of effective nematicides due to environmental toxicity and human safety concerns necessitates the discovery of new chemical controls for parasitic nematodes with novel targets and modes-of-action. The free-living nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has been an important model for identifying new lead chemical scaffolds with activity in parasitic nematodes and deciphering anthelmintic and nematicide mode-of-action. Here, I have used C. elegans as a model system, complemented by studies in parasitic nematodes, for the discovery and characterization of novel candidate anthelmintics and nematicides. I have taken two approaches towards achieving this goal. First, I have used small molecule screening and chemical genetic techniques in C. elegans to identify nematode kinases that hold potential as novel anthelmintic targets. I have complemented this work with in silico approaches to identify those kinases with potential for the design of nematode-selective inhibitors and identified those inhibitor scaffolds that could be modified to attain selectivity for the parasitic nematode ortholog of the target over that of the host. In my second study, I shift my focus to nematode parasites of plants. Here, I performed small molecule screens in both C. elegans and cultured parasitic species to identify compounds with broad spectrum activity across plant-parasitic nematodes. I used C. elegans to aid in the characterization of one promising selective nematicidal scaffold with a novel mode-of-action whereby the nematicide is bioactivated by cytochrome P450 enzymes within the worm. I ultimately show this mode-of-action to be conserved across parasitic nematode species. The investigations detailed herein have revealed a multitude of unexploited targets and small molecule scaffolds that may hold potential for development as sorely needed novel anthelmintics and nematicides to combat devastating parasitic nematode infections of humans, livestock, and plants.

Advisor: Roy, Peter J
Personal Support Workers’ Role in End-of-Life Care in Long-Term Care

Personal support workers (PSWs) are essential healthcare workers who provide the majority of direct care for Canada’s most vulnerable populations and thus are a critical part of the health workforce in Canada. As the Canadian population continues to age, there is a growing demand for this workforce to provide direct care for Canadians, including care in the long-term care (LTC) setting at the end of life. Despite this, PSWs' role within the Canadian context, and internationally, remains unclear. The role of PSWs has evolved concurrently with greater demands for complex institutional care. Consequently, the role of PSWs is increasingly unclear, with varying levels of responsibilities and autonomy reported based on the clinical setting and geographic location. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to understand PSWs’ role in end-of-life care in an LTC home in Ontario, Canada. This study aimed to answer the research question: what are PSWs’, nursing staff’s, managers’, administrators’, family members’, and residents’ perspectives on the role of PSWs in end-of-life care in an Ontario LTC home? A qualitative descriptive single case study was conducted virtually to describe and understand the experiences and perspectives of participants relating to the role of PSWs in end-of-life care. A conceptual framework, named the role behaviour framework, was used as the descriptive framework to guide the design, data collection, and data analysis. Multiple forms of data were collected using virtual methods, including study site characteristics, documentation data, archival records, demographic data, semi-structured individual interviews, and observation of physical artifacts. A descriptive framework data analysis strategy using the role behaviour framework was applied to guide and construct knowledge on the role of PSWs in end-of-life care in LTC. The findings highlight that LTC residents, family members and staff acknowledge that PSWs perform tasks outside their job description when providing end-of-life care; specifically for tasks that support the “experience of comfort” and “being at peace.” These extra-role behaviours performed by PSWs were perceived to improve the quality of end-of-life care that residents receive and were found to most likely be conducted because of the familial relationship between residents and PSWs. This study's findings revealed that as the role of PSWs continues to expand and evolve, there is less time and capacity for PSWs to perform social or relational care tasks; therefore, PSWs start to perform more tasks outside their role boundary.

Keywords: Case Study
End-of-Life Care
Long-Term Care
Personal Support Workers
Qualitative Research
Virtual Research
Advisor: Cranley, Lisa A
Assessing Institutional Internationalization: Examining Three Formal Tools and Their Representations by Universities

Some universities use formal tools to assess and develop their internationalization. This study explored universities’ online representations of three assessment tools, which included: the Hochschulrektorenkonferenz’s Audit: Internationalisation of Universities; the European Consortium of Accreditation in Higher Education’s (ECA) Certificate of Quality in Internationalisation (CeQuInt) and the International Association of Universities’ (IAU) Internationalization Strategies Advisory Service (ISAS and ISAS 2.0). Quantitative data was collected from the websites of 100% (n=127) of the universities that had used these tools to determine: what information they were sharing about the tools and how they were sharing it; if their international strategies or materials referred to the tools; the intended audience; and whether there were emergent themes or patterns. Four university cases for each tool (n=12) were then constructed solely using universities’ direct online content in order to determine the stories they were telling about each tool, and to explore more specific details, themes, and variations on quantitative findings. Results showed that universities’ uses of these assessments were pragmatic (e.g., for branding, demonstrating quality, strategic planning, or soliciting resources), but also sometimes with more complexity (e.g., using them to develop the university as a whole or as one component of a larger strategic planning process). Some universities delved even more deeply, using the tools and assessment process to: interrogate the ethical and philosophical foundations of the institution; defend their international programming, research, and institutional priorities; develop and present institutional cultures of transparency and openness; consider their roles in colonialism and academic hierarchies; and to examine the impact of institutional values on students and local/regional/international communities. Findings also suggested that universities are not likely to increase their use of these formal assessment tools in the future, and that the tools will likely continue to evolve, just as universities develop and respond to local and global factors. Findings can encourage members of universities—including decision-makers, planners and marketing teams—as well as members of professional associations, assessment panel members and government/policy-makers to reflect and to examine their assumptions, and consider evolving approaches to assessment and internationalization.

Keywords: Accreditation
Institutional assessment
Internationalization
Quality assurance
Strategic planning
Website analysis
Advisor: Hayhoe, Ruth
Knight, Jane
Fundamental Limits on Low-Latency Sequential Packet Communication

This thesis explores delay-constrained communication of packets generated sequentially. In the first part of the thesis, we study an established streaming setting, where packets are generated sequentially, transmitted through a network which may introduce packet erasures, and must be decoded by the destination within a strict delay constraint, without feedback. We review the literature on codes for this setting, focusing on the three-node setting in Fong et al., where a relay aids the transmission of the packets. In this relayed setting, a concept denoted as delay spectrum plays a major role. We present novel fundamental limits on this delay spectrum, and then show that, by using these results, we can construct codes for more general settings, such as a multi-access network, where two users transmit their messages to a common destination through a common relay. We further consider a multi-cast setting, where a source wishes to transmit its message to multiple destinations through a common relay, which requires the construction of streaming codes that are able to recover from different numbers of erasures with different delays. We then consider relay adaptation, where the relay changes its coding strategy based on the erasure pattern it observes, and show that adaptation increases the capacity of streaming codes. Finally, we consider a multi-path network and apply ideas developed in the previous settings to construct a code that is tested experimentally, and demonstrate that there are gains to be achieved in audio quality or rate. In the second part of the thesis, we consider a setting where feedback is available, however, with a non-negligible latency, and the channel is modeled as a Markov process that introduces erasures. We still wish to achieve low latency, while also minimizing resources used. We first consider a single-packet transmission, and show that this setting is equivalent to a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process. Motivated by this, we employ reinforcement learning to obtain a good transmission strategy that exploits the channel memory, and compare it to a lower bound. We then test this agent in a streaming setting and show that it outperforms a baseline transmission schedule.

Keywords: Erasure Coding
Low-Latency
Streaming
Advisor: Khisti, Ashish