VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Changing minds and machines: a case study of human rights advocacy in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

Below the visible aspects of social media and other Internet applications lies a vast infrastructure, where opaque organisations and unaccountable technologists exercise significant power over the Internet. This dissertation is a first-hand anthropological study of how the culture of one such important organisation, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), influences infrastructural politics thereby shaping the development of technology across the Internet. I propose a framework for ‘Critical Internet Governance’ to focus on the cultural forces shaping Internet governance and which groups have the power to define it.
My dissertation asks: What role does IETF culture play in its infrastructural politics? To answer this question, I conducted an ethnographic case study of human rights advocates working in the IETF. My findings draw on three years of ethnographic fieldwork (2017—2020), archival work, and 65 interviews.
Through this case study, my research demonstrates how the IETF’s conservative protocol politics and narrow network imaginaries shape the overall development of the Internet. Displaying what I call ‘engineered innocence’, IETF technologists primarily intervene in human rights’ matters when their culturally particular political commitments are threatened. My empirical chapters make this case by focussing on three interrelated aspects of the IETF: its organisational culture, its exclusionary working practices and how they affect the reception of human rights values, and how the IETF’s imaginaries shape engineers’ narrow understanding of responsibility for the technology ‘they choose to create’.
Throughout this research, I document the cultural specificity of Internet standardisation to complicate current theorising in Internet governance that postulates a ‘turn to the infrastructure’ and dismisses human rights’ efforts without cultural analysis. This dissertation supports the development of theoretical and policy frameworks that define corporate responsibility in digitally distributed systems and hold Internet governance organisations, and their participants, accountable for the power they exercise.

Keywords: Network Imaginaries
Protocol Politics
Internet infrastructure
Ethnography
Civil Society
Big Tech
Internet Engineering Task Force
Public Interest Technologists
Standards
Engineering Culture
Human Rights
Power
Internet Governance
Civil Society
Business and Human Rights
Advisor: Nash, V
Neff, G
Labour in the South East: a regional study of political culture and practices c 1931-1945

This Thesis examines how, following its near collapse in 1931, the political and ideological restructuring of Labour Party circa 1939-1945 was achieved not in the traditional, industrial northern heartlands, but within the south east among a burgeoning middle-class membership. For the south-east between the wars provided the main site for a significant spatial-temporal restructuring in the division of labour where the urban core of the region turned to light or service industries centred upon the production of consumer goods and free-time where women became the targets of collective consumption. Indeed, Labour’s south eastern membership was not only crucial to its sizeable victory in 1945, but contributed to the Party’s recovery by offering a democratic, welfarist model of socialism that could potentially appeal to both service workers or clerical/professional employees within the south-east. They succeeded in preserving a utopian vision of socialism essential to Labour’s revival as the champion of equality and solidarity during the war years.
Following charges that ‘Corbynmania’ was built on the support of a south east metropolitan elite, this Thesis suggests that there is nothing novel about the spatialisation of socio-political divisions, for this can be traced back through the ‘Metropolitan Intellectuals’ of Michael Foot’s 1930s. At the same time it takes issue with this simplification by noting the importance of a new, service based working-class within the Greater London region, more concerned with wage regulation and the efficient provision of collective consumption than production centred grievances concerning alienation within the workplace. Overall, this work argues that the progressive alliance essential to Labour’s success was rebuilt within the social clubs, party branches, universities and reading groups of the south-east.

Keywords: Labour History
South East
Inter War
Region
Political Culture
1930s
Labour Party
Advisor: Jackson, B
‘Certain modes of valuation are appropriate to certain goods.’ (Sandel, 1998) Does financial valuation undermine dignity? 

Many of us think some things should not be for sale: human organs are one example. Other market exchanges seem innocuous: there seems nothing wrong with buying an orange. But how can we delineate what should be bought and sold and what ought to be distributed some other way?
One view is that markets in some goods undermine human dignity. Paying someone to hand over their organ for transplant, on this view, undermines the dignity of even a consenting seller. Similar arguments are made of prostitution and surrogacy. In this thesis, I seek to provide an understanding of the dignity claim which gives us reason to restrict market transactions in particular commodities. I examine one understanding, in terms of the inter-personal, relational rights of market participants and argue that it imprecisely targets market transactions. I then set out an alternative: the dignity of market transactors is undermined by the presupposition of ‘radical fungibility’ which is required by such transactions. I argue that this presupposition gives us reason to consider restricting market transactions. I consider the examples of surrogacy and reparations for historical injustice.

Advisor: Wolff, J
The development of outgroup contact

Decades of intergroup contact research have highlighted the beneficial effect of outgroup contact on outgroup attitude measures. However, there is a need to add a complementary perspective focused on increasing outgroup contact (i.e., behaviour) as improved attitude measures do not always translate into outgroup contact. While research has started to explore the development of outgroup contact, there is a need for more and better research in that direction. The present thesis addresses this paucity of research and provides an additional step towards filling this gap further by addressing when and how the development of outgroup contact over time can be facilitated. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical foundation of this thesis. Next, in three empirical chapters, I focus on the development of outgroup contact in adolescence in England, Germany, The Netherlands, and Sweden by using longitudinal social network survey and intervention data. Chapter 2 explores the relationship between contact capacity and the development of outgroup contact and finds that individuals’ level of existing contact is associated with less outgroup (and ingroup) contact. Chapter 3 considers self-esteem as a mediator in the relationship between perceived discrimination and the development of outgroup contact, whereby perceived discrimination reduces individuals’ self-esteem, which, in turn, reduces the development of outgroup contact. Chapter 4 introduces an intergroup contact intervention programme aimed at facilitating the development of outgroup contact and reports that individuals who (indirectly) participate in the programme develop more outgroup contact over time in comparison to individuals without exposure to the intergroup contact intervention. Finally, Chapter 5 summarises and discusses the findings of this thesis and further addresses its implications. Overall, the presented research in this thesis highlights the importance of outgroup contact development in intergroup contact research and advocates strongly for a more profound examination of the development of outgroup contact to assess the effectiveness of outgroup contact in increasingly diverse societies.

Keywords: friendships
contact capacity
adolescence
perceived discrimination
development
longitudinal
self-esteem
intergroup contact intervention
outgroup contact
An investigation of the underlying mechanisms of arterial vasomotion

The role of the endothelium in regulating resistance arterial tone is well established, both through endogenous nitric oxide production and endothelium-dependent hyperpolarization or EDH. Also well reported is the link between endothelial cell dysfunction and cardiovascular diseases, resulting in increased vascular smooth muscle sensitivity to constrictor inputs, and compromising endothelium-dependent vasodilatation. A consequence is loss of small artery vasomotion and myogenic tone, disrupting the autoregulation of tissue blood flow. Vasomotion is an important physiological mechanism for optimising blood perfusion of tissues, and myogenic tone ensures constant flow. The loss of this capacity is thought to contribute to elevated blood pressure and associated adverse effects concurrent with cardiovascular disease. This thesis examines the role of the endothelium in the regulation and maintenance of vasomotion, and the effect of dysfunction, particularly loss of nitric oxide. Initially this involved probing the possible downstream actions of nitric oxide, including direct nitrosylation and mediation via soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC). Upon establishing the route of the dysfunction was sGC-facilitated, electrophysiology studies were performed to investigate the electrical basis for the aforementioned observations. Of particular novelty were the appearance of smooth muscle action potentials in cells that are usually electrically quiescent. This effect could be reversed by introducing exogenous nitric oxide and depression of electrical activity seemed to reflect a direct action of cGMP, independent of PKG. EDH appeared responsible for intermittent repolarization, causing partial vasorelaxation and leading to a chaotic form of vasomotion. Further removal of EDH abolished the intermittent repolarization and led to sustained vasospasm.
Action potentials had an absolute requirement for T-type voltage-dependent calcium channels, and channel block abolished these events and the associated vasoconstriction. The relationship between T-type and L-type voltage-dependent calcium channels indicated the latter could sustain but not initiate action potentials. Interestingly, action potentials could be initiated by direct, pharmacological opening of L-type VGCCs once eNOS was blocked, although this did not occur during vasomotion, in which L-type VGCCs are responsible for, and therefore open. The association between BKCa channels and ryanodine receptors was also investigated and indicated a limiting influence but not a link to initiation of action potentials. Activation of T-type channels via oxidative stress also appeared not to play a role in action potential generation. Finally, an endogenous inhibitor of eNOS, ADMA was studied and found also to switch on an ability to generate action potentials, and longer term may represent a new therapeutic target as levels of this endogenous inhibitor rise in disease.

Keywords: Electrophysiology
Vascular endothelium
Vasomotion
Advisor: Garland, CJ
Neuropathic pain in endometriosis

Chronic pelvic pain is one of the main symptoms of endometriosis which affects 1 in 10 women of reproductive age. Historically, despite the prevalence of this condition and the impact it has on those affected, endometriosis-associated pain (EAP) has been poorly understood. In this thesis I explore endometriosis-associated pain, specifically the presence of neuropathic pain (pain due to lesion/disease of the somatosensory system). To do this, I use a variety of different techniques including questionnaires, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and quantitative sensory testing (QST).
To determine the prevalence of neuropathic pain in a large population is difficult. In this thesis I use an online questionnaire on patient support websites to give an estimation of the proportions of women experiencing neuropathic pain. I investigate differences between those with and without neuropathic pain with respect to pain symptoms, psychological and cognitive function, number of surgeries to the abdomen and duration of pain. I also sub-divided women further based on their sensory symptom profiles. I replicate these findings in a novel cohort and relate them to treatment response.
Central nervous system changes have been demonstrated in people with neuropathic pain. In this thesis I investigate the association between neuropathic pain features and functional connectivity of the brain in women with endometriosis-associated pain.
Sensory testing is an important aspect of neuropathic pain research and in this thesis I use QST to investigate sensory perception. A range of stimuli are used to determine whether there are changes in sensory processing in women with endometriosis-associated pain.
Overall, the aims of the research described in this thesis are to advance knowledge regarding the prevalence of neuropathic pain in endometriosis; how women can be stratified using questionnaires and whether that relates to treatment response; what changes associated with neuropathic pain can be seen in the activity of the brain at rest; and the sensory profiles of women with EAP. Research in the area of EAP is critical to inform clinical practice and improve treatment.

Keywords: quantitative sensory testing QST
painDETECT
neuropathic pain
endometriosis
chronic pelvic pain
resting state functional connectivity
fMRI
Advisor: Wiech, KA
Vincent, K
Translating Culturally Specific Items (CSIs):  A Korean & English case study

This research focuses on the translation of Culturally Specific Items (CSIs) that are notoriously difficult to translate yet not widely studied in the field of Translation Studies and even less studied in Korean <> English language pair. The need for this particular research is that CSIs certainly do exist in a text that needs to be translated and those CSIs constantly hamper translators’ minds in the real world of translation, but we know so little about how they are translated in the target language. By presenting CSI translation on an empirical data basis, we shall gain a better understanding with Korean and English pair CSI translation and enhance our understanding in the provision of Korean professional translation. This research observes 8 professional Korean translators who translated text in both directions, Korean into English, and English into Korean, in an aspect of how the Korean professional translators translate Culturally Specific Items into the target language, discern the phenomena and particular tendencies detected from the 80 sets of the translated texts. This research is a rare opportunity to establish the purview of Culturally Specific Items (CSIs) in Translation Studies and to correct the scarcity of Korean CSI reference materials available in Translation Studies which is empowered by descriptive data, directly reported from the 8 professional Korean translators and the in-depth empirical data, analysed from the translated text.

Keywords: Culturally Specific Item
Korean Culture
Translation Studies
Cultural Mediator
Korean Translator
Advisor: Kiaer, I
Robustness evaluation of deep neural networks with provable guarantees

This thesis presents methodologies to guarantee the robustness of deep neural networks, thus facilitating the deployment of deep learning techniques in safety-critical real-world systems. We study the maximum safe radius of a network with respect to an input, such that all the points within the radius are guaranteed to be safe, while, if exceeding the radius, there must exist an adversarial example. We extend the maximum safe radius to two variants: the expected maximum safe radius to evaluate global robustness of a dataset, and the maximum safe radius w.r.t. optical flow when the input is a video. We also study the feature robustness problem to quantify the robustness of features, extracted from an input, to adversarial perturbations. Specifically, we develop tensor-based parallelisation algorithms to compute the (expected) maximum safe radius of networks on (a set of) pixel-level images. For features of an image, we propose a game-based framework to compute the maximum safe radius and the feature robustness properties, where Player I selects features and Player II determines pixels within the feature to manipulate. Subsequently, we extend this game framework to video inputs to compute the maximum safe radius w.r.t. optical flow, with Player I choosing flows and Player II imposing modifications within the flow. As our work applies to large neural networks and high-dimensional inputs, we calculate the upper and lower bounds to approximate the maximum safe radius and the feature robustness, and guarantee that they converge to the optimal value, by utilising Lipschitz continuity. We implement the algorithms into three tools, DeepTRE, DeepGame, and DeepVideo, and demonstrate their effectiveness on benchmark image and video datasets.

Keywords: Automated Verification
Deep Neural Networks
Advisor: Kwiatkowska, M
Locality and many-body quantum spectra

This thesis is concerned with many-body quantum dynamics in lattice models. Our focus is on the spectral properties of Floquet operators that describe local interactions in one dimension. Physical properties are expressed as multiple sums over paths in the many-body Fock space, and this leads naturally to interpretations in terms of interference effects, or of paired paths. By averaging properties over ensembles of random systems we wash out non-universal interference effects, and study the structures which survive.
We first address the ergodic phase of quantum dynamics. In this setting random matrix theory (RMT) and the eigenstate thermalisation hypothesis (ETH) are expected to describe spectral properties. This can be understood through the diagonal approximation to sums over paired paths. We show how the diagonal approximation must be extended in systems with local interactions, and that as a result there are deviations from RMT and the ETH which, at finite times, diverge with system size. Our focus is primarily on the spectral form factor (SFF) and related quantities, and our approach is to express averaged sums over pairs of paths in terms of a transfer matrix that acts in the space direction.
We then show how, within this framework, the transition from a many-body localised (MBL) phase to an ergodic one can be viewed as symmetry breaking. This transition in dynamics has sharp signatures in spectral statistics, so it is natural to consider the SFF. The transfer matrix generating the SFF has symmetries associated with translations in time: in the ergodic phase one of these symmetries is broken, whereas in the MBL phase it is not. For the Floquet models we consider the relevant symmetry group is that of a clock model. We introduce an order parameter for the broken symmetry, and show how the applicability of the diagonal approximation can be understood as a form of long-range order.

Keywords: Spectral statistics
Quantum circuits
Feynman paths
Random matrices
Localisation
Quantum chaos
Advisor: Chalker, J
The role of histone H3K36me3 in mammalian cell cycle regulation and genome stability

Although the molecular genetics regulating DNA replication onset have been studied in great detail, the epigenetic contribution to this step is poorly understood. H3K36me3 has been identified as a key factor regulating the catalytic ribonucleotide reductase subunit RRM2, suggesting an important role in DNA replication. To investigate this potential role, RNA-sequencing was carried out on SETD2 parental and CRISPR U2OS cell lines to identify genes differentially expressed in the absence of SETD2. Loss of SETD2 was found to lead to significantly reduced expression of a subset of E2F target genes critical for DNA replication and the G1/S transition. Consistent with this reduced expression, SETD2 deficient cells were found to have prolonged G1 delay, reduced replication fork progression and replication stress-associated 53BP1 bodies and γH2AX foci. Additionally, DNA under-replication was found to result in FANCD2-associated ultrafine anaphase bridges, micronuclei formation, and to G1 53BP1 bodies. A role was also identified for checkpoint-induced H3K36me3 in facilitating E2F transcription in response to replication stress. Together these findings support a dual role for H3K36me3 in the regulation of transcription of E2F target genes in the unperturbed G1/S transition, and as part of the replication stress response.
Further work focussed on investigating additional synthetic lethalities with WEE1 inhibition. The synthetic lethality between WEE1 inhibition and loss of p53 was found to be mechanistically similar to the SETD2/WEE1 synthetic lethality, contrary to previously published work. Novel synthetic lethalities were also investigated, and loss of three tumour suppressors (MGA, KMT2D and KDM5C) was found to sensitise cells to WEE1 inhibition, potentially expanding the subset of tumours that can be targeted by WEE1 inhibition.

Advisor: Humphrey, T
Import mechanisms of pyocins G and AP41

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a priority pathogen for antibiotic development. Multi-drug-resistant strains of this bacterium cause serious nosocomial infections and are the leading cause of death in cystic fibrosis patients. Pyocins, bacteriocins of P. aeruginosa, are protein antibiotics deployed during intraspecies bacterial competition. Pyocins are produced by more than 90 % of P. aeruginosa strains. Due to their diversity and potency, pyocins may have utility as last resort antibiotics against P. aeruginosa. In this thesis, the import mechanism of two poorly-understood nuclease pyocins, G and AP41, was explored using microbiological, biochemical, biophysical and cell-based approaches. Pyocin G (PyoG) was previously identified by the Kleanthous lab through bioinformatics analysis of P. aeruginosa genomes. I demonstrate that PyoG binds Hur (Hemin uptake receptor), an outer membrane TonB1 dependent transporter. Hur binds hemin in vitro, and this interaction is blocked by PyoG. Both PyoG and Hur interact with TonB1, which links proton motive force generation across the inner membrane with energy-dependent pyocin translocation across the outer membrane, most likely through Hur. Inner membrane translocation of PyoG requires the conserved inner-membrane AAA+ATPase/protease, FtsH, similar to the situation for E. coli-specific colicins. Surprisingly, however, this translocation step also requires TonB1 as well as the unstructured N-terminus of PyoG that binds TonB1. Moreover, inner membrane translocation is dependent on the so-called Pyocin S domain, which is conserved amongst nuclease bacteriocins. Pyocin AP41, like PyoG, requires TonB1 and FtsH to kill P. aeruginosa and the unstructured N-terminus of AP41 is similarly involved in binding TonB1. The outer membrane receptor of AP41 remains unknown, but there are indications that FhaC, a putative hemagglutinin transporter, may be the outer membrane receptor and/or translocator.

Keywords: antibiotic
bacteriocin
pyocin
protein import
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
Advisor: Kleanthous, C
Maiden, M