VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Futureproofing EU law: the case of algorithmic discrimination

The paper presents the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (the Charter) and the General Principles of European Union (EU) law as tools which can be used to futureproof the current EU non-discrimination framework against the main substantive challenges raised by algorithmic discrimination. The first chapter identifies the narrow personal and material scope of the current non-discrimination framework as being substantial limitations in the face of algorithmic discrimination, the effects of which are also discussed. The Charter and the General Principles are presented as potential solutions, given their goal to ensure the evolution of EU law in response to societal changes and technological development. The second chapter provides a closer look into these futureproofing tools and their dynamic, as well as the role of the Court in applying them and the potential issues involved with it doing so, including claims of judicial activism and competence creep. Having set out what needs futureproofing and why, as well as the tools available for the task, chapter three discusses ways in which the futureproofing process itself could unfold and argues that there are four approaches that the Court could take, each with its respective benefits and limitations. These four approaches are presented as being complementary rather than mutually exclusive, giving the Court the chance to use the most appropriate one in each specific case and therefore the possibility to futureproof EU non-discrimination law for the age of Artificial Intelligence.

Keywords: EU law
general principles
non-discrimination
algorithmic discrimination
Advisor: Butler, O
An fMRI study on the effects of the dopamine & noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor bupropion on reward processing in depressed individuals

Anhedonia, the loss of pleasure or motivation for usually enjoyable activities and rewards, is an established cardinal symptom in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) whose underlying pathophysiology is not well-understood, and which lacks specific efficacious treatments. This thesis investigates the effects that bupropion, a dual reuptake inhibitor of dopamine and noradrenaline, has on the neural substrates implicated in reward processing amongst clinically depressed individuals compared to unmedicated healthy controls. This investigation may help elucidate the role of aberrant dopaminergic activity on reward processing and the relevance of reward within anhedonia. First, examining baseline neural activation during completion of a monetary reward learning task revealed significantly different functional activity patterns at the whole brain level and for pre-specified anatomical regions of interest in MDD patients compared to healthy volunteers. These activation clusters largely pertained to brain regions implicated in the dopaminergic system, including the striatum, orbitofrontal cortex, and insular cortex. However, this was not found to correlate with symptomatic severity of anhedonia at baseline, which showed significant group differences in anhedonia and positive affect between depressed and healthy control participants.
Administering the NDRI-antidepressant drug bupropion was found to normalise initially aberrant neural activation during reward processing in MDD patients compared to their baseline measures and activation clusters obtained in healthy volunteers. Given the widely reported difficulty in the treatment of reward-related impairments with SSRIs, studying bupropion’s effects on neural activation during reward processing contributes to our understanding of alternative therapeutic options for alleviating maladaptive cognition associated with anhedonic MDD aside from those targeting the serotonin system. The gained insights may thus help inform the development and implementation of more precise and efficacious pharmacological interventions used for treating symptoms of anhedonia in clinical depression. Methodological strengths as well as possible limitations to the findings obtained in this study are discussed.

Keywords: major depressive disorder
anhedonia
neuroimaging
dopamine
psychopharmacology
reward processing
Advisor: Harmer, C
Cowen, P
Harnessing oxonium ions for catalysis and arylation

This thesis describes work on the synthesis and applications of trialkyl and triaryloxonium ions. Chapter 1 describes the development of a transannular dehydration methodology to construct ‘stable’ trialkyloxonium ions from cyclic triols along with work towards using them to catalyse simple transformations.
In Chapter 2, the development of a mild, functional group tolerant method for the generation of arynes from fluoroarene or phenol derived triaryloxonium ions is described. Further work on triaryloxonium ion chemistry involving the construction of helically chiral triaryloxoniums with defined point chirality at oxygen and resolution of the enantiomers is described in Chapter 3.

Keywords: chirality
aryne
oxonium ion
Advisor: Smith, MD
Burton, J
Paton, R
Advancing remote sensing methods to monitor wildlife

Historically, natural history museums have collected and preserved specimens to provide data on the occurrence and distribution of wildlife populations. Zoologists still track animals by recording footprints, collecting dung and spoor and observing, recording and quantifying behaviour from the ground. However, these traditional observational techniques allow only a few populations to be monitored at once at limited spatial scales and disturbance from the ground can disrupt observation of natural behaviour. We are now in a golden age of technological advances and are able to remotely monitor and track wildlife via a variety of electronic sensors. Significant questions remain about how best to methodologically apply these new technologies for the purposes of wildlife monitoring. In this thesis, I consider challenges of using Earth observation satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to track wildlife and understand movement in relation to the expanding human footprint and anthropogenic risk. Specifically: (i) I collate and analyse spatially explicit data on the distribution of illegal hunting incidences via a systematic map. I show that hunting increases in proximity to roads, water bodies, and human settlement areas and there is a considerable lack of systematically collected quantitative data. (ii) I investigate acoustic disturbance to understand anthrophony from the species perspective. I create a mitigation method applied in the case of UAV noise using species weighted audiograms (iii) I test whether very high-resolution satellite imagery and machine learning can be used to automate the detection of African elephants in vast heterogeneous landscapes. This is achieved presenting a new method to monitor elephants (iv) I record the spatial relationship of African elephants in relation to the human footprint using GPS tracking data and satellite imagery. I show elephants readily adapt their foraging habits and itineraries, spatially and temporally in relation to human settlement. Accurate and up-to-date data is vital for effective wildlife conservation planning. Remote sensing technologies offer enhanced capabilities to understand the spatial relationship between wildlife and the increasing human footprint. This body of work contributes to the global wildlife conservation effort by devising methods that can enable more reliable data collection at larger spatial scales.

Keywords: remote sensing
telemetry
movement ecology
convolutional neutral network
unmanned aerial vehicle
object detection
GPS
wildlife
audiometry
machine learning
elephant
bushmeat
poaching
aerial survey
Boma
anthrophony
corral
Kraal
Advisor: Wang, T
MacDonald, D
Vapour detection of explosives, chemical agents and drugs

The detection of ultra-low concentrations of clandestine material has many applications across many sectors, particularly in relation to the military and security. The detection of many of these types of materials, and especially in the case of explosives, is made challenging because of low vapour pressures and intentional attempts at concealment. The aim of this project is to create a new type of sensing system for portable, in the field detection, where the active components are chemiresistive layers operating in the specifically targeted region between being insulating and fully conducting, known as the percolation region. Applying percolation theory to chemiresistive conducting layers increases sensitivity, and exploring new methods of analysis, deposition and deployment has the potential to increase selectivity.
When considering how sensors may be deployed in the field, the first challenge to overcome is to assess how current lab-based analytical techniques are, in some cases, inhibited by the parameters imposed on them as a function of being carried out in a highly controlled environment, and how that may not always translate into real-world utility. Next, sensors are created based on a percolation network of conductive polymers on a glass substrate, and the effect of incorporating gold nano-islands onto the substrate to support percolation network formation is assessed. In order to increase potential applications, percolation sensors are then created on flexible substrates and compared against both those on glass substrates and against other polymer sensors created in other research groups using different methods. One drawback of conducting polymers is that humidity often has an adverse effect on sensing performance. Metal organic frameworks have shown improved stability under humid conditions, and so finally conductive 2D MOFs are synthesized and deposited in novel ways on a variety of substrates and assessed as sensing materials.

Keywords: percolation
chemiresistors
conductive materials
explosives detection
Advisor: Castell, MR
Understanding transport behaviour and policies to increase walking and cycling

This thesis examined the factors affecting active mobility, walking and cycling, in urban environments using a multilevel perspective, from individual agency to built environment, to national-level policies. Understanding that health behaviour change is complex, and cannot be achieved through a single one-size-fits-all policy is the key premise of this thesis. In order to recognise the system-wide influences on walking and cycling, a socio-ecological framework was developed. This combines insights from psychological literature, transportation, and broader policy, and presents their relative roles and interactions in determining urban transport. Statistical analysis based on data from seven European cities showed the crucial role attitudes and psychosocial variables play in determining active travel. Based on the principles of realist evaluation, an analysis of interventions aimed at changing the psychosocial mindset of study participants in four of the seven cities revealed the short-term positive effects of such soft-measure interventions. However, the analysis also emphasised the need to change people's experiences for these measures to have a lasting effect. Finally, an economic analytical framework was developed to evaluate the potential effectiveness of a nation-wide policy (higher fuel taxes) to reduce car use and increase active travel. While including physical inactivity as a social cost greatly increases the optimal value of a fuel tax, limiting factors such as the psychosocial mindsets of people, or lack of suitable infrastructure, reduce the potential impact of such policies. Hence, working in an integrated, multidisciplinary manner is necessary for changing complex systems such as urban transport, physical activity-related health, and reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Keywords: socio-ecological framework
longitudinal study
active travel
PASTA
Advisor: Brand, C
Mattauch, L
Minimally invasive autopsy - navigating uncertainties of death in the Global South

In recent years, global health practitioners and policy-makers have been confronted with the complex challenge of identifying and quantifying the causes of death of the world’s poorest people. In order to address this cause-of-death uncertainty and to minimise longstanding sensitivities and reservations about full autopsies in the Global South, funding bodies such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have advocated minimally invasive autopsies (MIA) as an alternative.
MIA is a technology that involves using hollow needles to collect samples from key bodily organs. It has the potential to be more acceptable and less invasive than a full autopsy, which requires opening the cadaver. While the global development and introduction of MIA is growing, little attention has been paid to the ethical implications of its introduction in the Global South.
This DPhil project aimed to provide a greater understanding of the various motivations underlying, barriers to, and debates about the development and implementation of MIA technology in the Global South. These include the various social, ethical, and political implications of this technology.
In this thesis, empirical data that I collected in a range of contexts and countries is used to demonstrate that a core problem exists in current understandings of death in global health. Death is unavoidable; this is certain. However, at global and national levels, persistent uncertainty surrounds the exact numbers of deaths occurring and the causes of these individual deaths. The findings demonstrate the complexities in closing this information gap and shows a plurality of uncertainties underlying and contributing to the above-mentioned issue.
I show that while MIA technology has been introduced as a solution to this enduring cause-of-death uncertainty, the development and deployment of technologies such as these always constitute interventions in complex social and moral worlds, and, in this respect, are both solutions to and causes of new problems. Therefore, MIA inevitably creates new kinds of uncertainties that need to be addressed. I deconstruct the ways in which these different dimensions and levels of uncertainties have been articulated, experienced, and approached, and the ways the uncertainties relate to each other. Finally, I argue that given the radical uncertainty of the future, the full impact of MIA technology is unknown.

Keywords: global health
socio-cultural
minimally invasive tissue sampling (MITS)
pathology
philantrocapitalism
autopsy
technology
minimally invasive autopsy (MIA)
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
uncertainty
death
post-mortem
ethics
postmortem
cause of death
Advisor: Kingori, P
Parker, M
Chambers, M
Study of a highly boosted Higgs boson decaying to b-jets final states with the ATLAS experiment at CERN

The observation of the decay of the Higgs boson to a b ̄b pair in 2018 confirmed the Yukawa interaction and provided the first measurement of a Yukawa coupling to down-type quarks.
The most sensitive channel in the H → b ̄b measurement is given by the associated Higgs boson production with a vector boson V decaying leptonically.
The main focus is now the measurement of the Higgs boson production cross section as a function of its transverse momentum (pT ). This study is motivated by a wide range of Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) theories predicting an enhancement of V H(H → b ̄b) events at high transverse momentum with respect to the SM expectations. At such high energy regimes, the Higgs boson is highly Lorentz-boosted and the H → b ̄b de- cay is reconstructed in the detector as a single object with a two-prong substructure.
This thesis describes the measurement of V H(H → b ̄b) in the boosted regime performed inclusively, as well as in bins of the vector boson trans- verse momentum, for pVT ∈ [250,400[ GeV and pVT ∈ [400,∞[ GeV. The interpretation of these measurements using the Effective Field Theory (EFT) framework is also discussed. The results are based on the full LHC Run 2 dataset collected by the ATLAS experiment, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139 fb−1. A very important component of this study is the correct identification of b-jets. A new calibration of the b-jet tagging algorithm at very high transverse momentum, which reduced the uncertainties for high-pT b-jets by 50%, is also included.

Keywords: Higgs Boson
Advisor: Bortoletto, D
The role of abiotic and biotic factors in infection outcomes

Hosts, parasites, and the environment are interlinked in the disease triangle. Thus, environmental changes can lead to shifts in the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of host-parasite interactions. In this thesis, I combine meta-analytical and experimental approaches to explore the role of abiotic and biotic factors, specifically nutrition and within-host parasite-parasite interactions, on infection outcomes. Firstly, I conducted a literature search to gather data from a wide range of host-parasite systems and carried out a meta-analysis to investigate whether changes to host nutrition affect virulence. Among other findings, this study reveals that changes to host nutrition may have diverse effects across host and parasite species, depending upon a balance between the effect of host nutrition on the immune system and on parasite resources. Subsequently, using a similar meta-analytic approach, I investigate the extent to which coinfections affect virulence relative to single infections. Across host-parasite systems, I find that coinfections are overall more virulent than single infections, with phylogenetic divergence of coinfecting parasites and their transmission strategies key determinants. Extending on this analytical work, I experimentally test the role of specific pathogen traits (a ‘producer’ and two ‘non-producers’ for siderophore production and quorum sensing) on within-and-between-host dynamics in single infection and coinfections, using a nematode host (Caenorhabditis elegans) and pathogenic bacterium (Pseudomonas aeruginosa). I find that producer strains are consistently better at both colonising and transmitting between nematode hosts than non-producers in single infections and coinfections. On a different theme to the preceding research, in the final data chapter, I ask the broad evolutionary question: why don’t all animals avoid inbreeding? I demonstrate that inbreeding avoidance only evolves when there is a risk of inbreeding depression and when related sexual partners frequently come into contact. In this thesis, I use the disease triangle as a tool to investigate abiotic and biotic drivers of host-parasite interaction outcomes and dynamics, extending on previous research highlighting the importance of studying host-parasite dynamics within an ecological context at both the level of within-host and between-host dynamics. In a changing world, this work is a timely contribution to our understanding of the broad and varied effects of environmental change on infection outcomes.

Advisor: Griffin, A
King, K
Photocatalytic generation of free radicals from furan

This thesis concerns the development of a stannane-free method for generating reactive free radicals adjacent to a 2,5-disubstituted furan, the development of a furan oxidation method, and the total synthesis of the legonmycins, bacterial pyrrolizidine alkaloids.
The synthetic utility of free radicals, and the effectiveness of organotin compounds in generating them, are discussed in Chapter 1, as are the reasons for avoiding organotin contamination of synthetic compounds, established means for doing so, and photoredox catalysis. The synthesis of model substrates for photoredox-mediated hydrogen abstraction from 2,5-disubstituted furans is described in Chapter 2. Visible light-mediated cyclisation did not occur as intended, but the use of a polyoxometalate cluster and ultraviolet light to effect the same transformation is also described. Chapter 3 concerns the synthesis of precursors to tin-mediated generation of free radicals adjacent to furan, the behaviour of those radicals once formed, and the implications for the work described in Chapter 4. A side reaction was observed when carrying out the work described in Chapter 2; Chapter 4 describes the development of this into a method for complete and efficient conversion of furans into 2-ene-1,4-dicarbonyls, complementing existing methods for the same transformation. Chapter 5 describes abortive routes for the total synthesis of legonmycin A, via the methodology described in Chapter 4 and via nitrile activation upon acylation, and a successful route based on an existing synthesis of the jenamidines, incorporating an iodine-catalysed hydroxylation with O2 as the terminal oxidant. This transformation proved problematic in previous syntheses of similar structures.

Keywords: Photochemistry
Organic Chemistry
Radicals
Total Synthesis
Pyrrolizidine Alkaloid
Advisor: Robertson, J
Discovery of jets launched by classical nova eruptions

Classical novae are stellar explosions that occur on the surface of white dwarfs in close binary systems. This thesis presents time-domain spec- troscopy of four recent eruptions in the Milky Way, carried out by the Global Jet Watch telescopes. Careful analysis of these observations re- veals the presence of a circumbinary disc around classical nova V906 Car following its cataclysmic event in March 2018. Its existence may provide an answer to the long-standing problem of explaining the white dwarf mass distribution. This thesis also presents the discovery of line-emitting jets and an accre- tion disc in classical nova YZ Reticuli, using sustained follow-up spec- troscopy commencing soon after the eruption in July 2020 and lasting several months. A qualitatively similar spectral signature is also observed for classical nova V6568 Sgr, hinting that jets may be a feature of classical novae more generally than previously thought. The same jets and accretion disc model is subsequently applied to the remaining two classical novae in the Global Jet Watch archive, V5668 Sgr and V906 Car, which exhibit the same behaviour. In the case of V5668 Sgr, the jets are found to persist for at least 2000 days after the eruption in March 2015. This thesis then suggests future imaging measurements that could be obtained using current instrumentation for spatially-resolved spectroscopy, which would elucidate further properties of nova jets like those discovered in all four classical novae observed by the Global Jet Watch. This thesis also uses Global Jet Watch time-lapse spectroscopy on classical novae V906 Car and V5668 Sgr to tightly constrain (to within hundreds of seconds) the duration of certain phases and their transitions that take place in the immediate aftermath of these recent eruptions.

Keywords: transient
classical nova
astrophysics
Advisor: Blundell, K