VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Direct and Indirect Adaptive Feedforward Repetitive Control of Servo Systems

Control methodologies for deterministic disturbance rejection and trajectory tracking have been of great interest to researchers in the fields of controls, mechatronics, robotics and signal processing in the past two decades. The applications of these methods span a wide range from satellite attitude control requiring an accuracy of a few meters, to positioning of the read/write head in hard disk drives with an accuracy of less than one nanometer. This dissertation addresses the problem of trajectory tracking and deterministic disturbance rejection in discrete time systems when the trajectory/disturbance is unknown, but can be realized as an a ne combination of known basis functions. Despite the prior work on this problem that assumes known and time invariant plant dynamics, we consider multi input single output systems with unknown dynamics. Moreover, we investigate the cases where the disturbance or system dynamics varies slowly or abruptly but infrequently. Within the broad class of disturbances/trajectories that satisfy the stated criteria, an elaborate study is conducted on periodic and superposition of multiple sinusoidal sequences. We propose two novel adaptive control methods for the aforementioned problem. The first scheme can be classified as an indirect adaptive algorithm since it consists of two parts, namely a system identification mechanism that provides a dynamic model of the closed loop system, and the adaptive compensator which deploys the aforementioned dynamic model to synthesize the control law. The second proposed method is a direct adaptive controller, meaning that the control law is generated directly and the stated separation is not possible./nBesides providing theoretical guarantees, we experimentally evaluate our algorithms on a challenging control task for nano-scale positioning of the read write head in a dual stage hard disk drive (HDD). Even with the advent of NAND ash based data storage devices, the HDD continues to thrive as the most cost effective, reliable solution for rewritable, very high density data storage. It remains a key technology particularly with the tremendously growing popularity of server based cloud computing and novel hybrid enterprise storage solutions. We described that the control methodologies that can address the problem under our study are crucial for Bit Patterned Media Recording which is one of the two breakthroughs in magnetic recording that have been immensely investigated in the past few years. Extensive computer simulations and implementation on a digital signal processor unit are performed to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms in full spectrum compensation of the repeatable runout in dual stage HDDs. This application introduces unique control challenges since it requires estimating a very large number of parameters that is order(s) of magnitude greater than prior work and frequency contents span from 120Hz to extremely large values (above 20KHz) where the plant dynamic uncertainties are large.

Advisor: Horowitz, Roberto
Games with vector payoffs : a dynamic programming approach

In several decision-making scenarios in adversarial environments, a decision-maker cares about multiple objectives at the same time. For example, in certain defense operations, an agent might be interested in simultaneously defending multiple targets from an enemy. In a repeated game against an unknown opponent, a player wants to minimize `regret', i.e., to try to choose a strategy that performs well relative to each strategy in some given class of strategies in hindsight. In dynamic asymmetric information games where a player lacks some information that other players have, a typical goal is to choose a strategy that gives appropriate worst-case guarantees simultaneously on all possibilities. Many of these scenarios can be modeled as a vector-valued sequential game between the agent and an adversary. This thesis is concerned with characterizing and efficiently computing the optimal worst-case guarantees that an agent can achieve on the losses in such games./nThe main contribution of this work is to show that for large classes of sequential games, these optimal guarantees can be characterized as the fixed point of a dynamic programming operator defined on the space of extremal (either maximal or minimal) elements of subsets of some partially ordered topological space. We first present this result in detail for the model of discounted repeated games with vector payoffs and then extend it to stochastic games with multiple states, and finally to reachability games (which model several types of pursuit-evasion games that arise in defense operations). For each of these models, we prove several structural properties of the set of these optimal guarantees and the corresponding optimal strategies. This approach opens up the possibility of using many well-known dynamic programming based methods and algorithms for approximating these guarantees and computing approximately optimal strategies. One such method based on approximate value-iteration is presented for the case of repeated games./nThis approach results in the first characterization of the minmax optimal regret and the corresponding optimal strategy for expected regret minimization in repeated games with discounted losses. Further, it results in the first known procedure for efficiently computing an approximately optimal strategy for the uninformed player in Aumann and Maschler's celebrated model of zero-sum discounted repeated games with incomplete information on one side.

Advisor: Walrand, Jean
Open Governance and Surveillance: A Study of the National Rural Employment Program in Andhra Pradesh, India

This dissertation grapples with the questions: Does transparency lead to accountability? Is it possible to "democratize" surveillance, turning surveillance into an instrument of democratic control over state bureaucracy? Can a state bureaucracy combine visions of surveillance within the state and "openness" to citizens to help police itself? To address these questions, I studied an "open governance" project located in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh and involving the countrywide National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). I raise the questions about transparency and accountability at two different levels: first at the level of the bureaucracy, and second at the level of the citizens themselves. Looking at the two inevitably raises further questions of the power relations both within the bureaucracy and between the state apparatus and the citizens it is intended to serve. Looking within the bureaucracy, I show that local bureaucrats and politicians have discovered ways to subvert these formal efforts of control through informal norms. Looking at relations between the state apparatus and the citizens, I examine the recruitment of citizens in two different social contexts, a class/caste-divided village and a tribal community. Between the bureaucracy and the citizenry, I argue that the state has attempted to construct a state-civil society "sandwich" to squeeze the lower-level bureaucrats both from the top, using information technology, and from the bottom, getting testimonies from workers by opening government records. Here, I find that expectations of participation from below in response to transparency from above are not met because workers fail to participate as expected. A central part of what follows explores and delineates the multiple, complex reasons for this failure of the "public sphere." Overall, these findings illustrate how hard it is to actually eliminate last-mile corruption, even with sophisticated technological and social strategies. (Nonetheless, I also find and lay out numerous potential benefits to this program.) In conclusion, I argue that instead of the prevalent metaphor of "sunlight," open governance is better thought of as a "flashlight" and that people embrace openness and reject surveillance depending on whether they are the subject or the object of the "flashlight." This shift in metaphor helps to raise more directly the inevitable issues of power.

Advisor: Saxenian, AnnaLee
Evans, Peter
Emotion, Norms, and Anchors: Three Investigations On Consumer Decisions Under Elective Pricing

This dissertation documents consumers’ decision-making when they have an opportunity be both maximally selfish and kind toward others. Using Consumer Elective Pricing, we explore how social forces operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. A set of three investigations examines how emotion, perceptions of social norms, and anchoring as judgment heuristics operate in influencing consumers’ decisions. We find that each of the three social forces uniquely shapes consumers’ behavior under elective pricing. Consumers are sensitive to the presence of charitable giving but largely insensitive to the scope of their giving when they pay what they want and a portion of their payment goes to charity (Chapter 2). When paying forward, consumers infer a higher level of kindness in others when they are informed about others’ kind behavior, raising their own payments to match their perceptions of social norms (Chapter 3). Inconsistent with the prior relevant research on anchoring effects, we find that consumers are not significantly influenced by payment anchors unless anchors are hypothetically presented in lab settings, have no actual financial consequences, or have large distributive (we also term subjective) gaps (Chapter 4). In a series of field and lab studies, this set of three investigations sheds light on the psychology that enforces the deviations from the “rational” economic decisions.

Advisor: Nelson, Leif D.
Essays in Macroeconomics and Trade

In the current thesis I investigate the impact of sectoral structure of the economy on some aspects of its short-run fluctuations and long-run trends./nIn the first chapter -- "Cost Structure and Price Rigidity across Sectors" -- I model a mechanism through which the structure of costs of producers can affect producers' decisions on the frequency of adjusting prices. First, I establish an empirical observation that sectors which are characterized by either a higher share of labor or more diversified structure of bundles of intermediate goods are characterized by more rigid prices. Then I build and solve a partial equilibrium model that describes optimal price-setting strategies of firms in different sectors. The model provides an explanation for heterogeneity in price rigidity across different sectors. The calibrated model can be used for predicting how changes in the production processes and in the structure of costs can affect the heterogeneity of price rigidity across sectors and, hence, the aggregate price rigidity in the economy./nIn the second chapter -- "Technological Spillovers and Dynamics of Comparative Advantage" -- I investigate the question of the evolution of sector productivity and comparative advantage under the presence of cross-sector technological spillovers. For that I develop a dynamic model of international trade with cross-sector spillovers. In addition to the standard effect of comparative advantage on labor allocation, the model accounts for the effects of labor allocation on the sector productivity and comparative advantage. The core mechanism is a combination of an idea-generating process within each sector and technological spillovers across sectors. I establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of a balanced growth path and describe the conditions under which a welfare-improving industrial policy is possible. I calibrate the model using the US patent data to parametrize the strength of technological spillovers and use the model to describe the optimal industrial policy.

Advisor: Gorodnichenko, Yuriy
Rodriguez-Clare, Andres
Beyond Bounding Boxes: Precise Localization of Objects in Images

Object recognition in computer vision comes in many flavors, two of the most popular being object detection and semantic segmentation. Object detection systems detect every instance of a category in an image, and coarsely localize each with a bounding box. Semantic segmentation systems assign category labels to pixels, thus providing pixel-precise localization but failing to resolve individual instances of the category. We argue for a richer output: recognition systems should detect individual instances of a category and provide pixel precise segmentations for each, a task we call Simultaneous Detection and Segmentation or SDS. We describe approaches to this task that leverage convolutional neural networks for precise localization. We also show that the techniques we develop are also effective for other tasks such as segmenting the parts of a detected object or localizing its keypoints. These are our first steps towards a recognition system that goes beyond category labels and coarse bounding boxes to precise, detailed descriptions of objects in images.

Advisor: Malik, Jitendra
Biological Networks: Dynamics, Mechanisms and Responses

The study of biological networks has been central to our understanding of life and its complex, dynamic nature. The elucidation of molecular networks began with the discovery and characterization of key cellular processes including metabolism, response to stimuli and control of gene expression. In the last several decades, genomics has emerged as a foundational pursuit within the life sciences. The size of datasets defined in relation to sequenced genomes has grown faster than exponentially, leading to the need for advanced analytical and computational methods. I present here three studies of large RNA-sequencing-based data sets. First, a study of the steady state transcriptional composition for Drosophila cell lines, tissues, developmental stages and biological perturbations provide a deeper understanding of spatiotemporally-resolved regulation in Drosophila, the first and still central genetic model system. This dataset, at the time of my analysis, was the largest and most complete transcriptional atlas ever composed. It was also the first large strand-specific study of its kind, which presented new opportunities and challenges. Second, a study of the RNA targets of 20 RNA binding proteins provides a map for one layer of post-transcriptional regulation, which contributes to the steady states presented in the first study. Finally, a study of transcriptional responses to the principle developmental hormone in arthropods, ecdysone, across 41 different and physiologically distinct cell lines sheds light on the dynamic, responsive nature of gene-regulatory networks that enable cells to differentiate into the diverse tissues that compose developing and mature organisms. These studies provide foundational knowledge, as well as models for future work in systems biology, as genome-scale studies across larger, more diverse cellular states become increasingly prevalent.

Advisor: Bickel, Peter
Allosteric Substrate Switching in Novel Voltage Sensing Lipid Phosphatase

The explosion of protein diversity through domain rearrangements and inter-domain coupling supported the evolution of multicellular organisms. To perform the advanced signaling necessary for multicellularity, sometimes unrelated protein domains combined to form novel domain architectures that over time evolved tight mechanisms of allosteric coupling. One such protein, the voltage sensing phosphatase (VSP), developed a sophisticated mechanism of inter-domain coupling, which enabled cells to integrate changes in membrane potential into chemical changes in a class of secondary signaling lipids called phosphatidylinositol-phosphates (PIPs)./nPhosphoinositol phosphate signaling lipids (PIPs) are important second messengers that regulate ion channels, transporters, cell motility and endo/exocytosis. PIP concentrations are controlled by enzymes, including VSP, which has broad specificity for a diverse class of PIPs. VSP is a novel lipid phosphatase, which contains a voltage sensing domain (VSD) homologous to voltage-gated ion channels, and a lipid phosphatase domain (PD). Until now it was not known what properties of the cytosolic PD were allosterically regulated by the membrane-associated VSD. Using a pair of new PIP sensors to monitor enzyme activity and voltage clamp fluorometry to monitor conformational changes in the VSD, it becomes clear the Ciona intestinalis VSP (Ci-VSP) has two distinct voltage regulated enzyme active states: a faster low-voltage state with substrate preference for PIP3 and a slower high-voltage state with preference for PIP2. This novel 2-step allosteric switch for enzyme specificity enables membrane potential to function as an allosteric effector that dynamically regulates PIP concentration./nIn this work, it is show that two unrelated domains, a VSD from voltage dependent ion channels and a lipid PD homologous to protein tyrosine phosphatases evolved a tight mechanism of allosteric regulation that transduces fluctuations in membrane potential into changes in the enzyme selectivity of a novel lipid phosphatase. This regulation of active site specificity in the PD by an allosteric effector domain represents a significant advancement in our understanding of allosteric regulation, which has previously been restricted to control of activity on only one type of substrate.

Advisor: Isacoff, Ehud Y
The Effect of the Foreclosure Crisis on Health

Foreclosure rates reached unprecedented levels in the United States during the Great Recession. During 2010, one in 45 housing units nationwide received a foreclosure filing. Residents who lived near properties in foreclosure from 2007 to 2012 lost an estimated collective $2.2 trillion in property values, local governments tax base declined, and affected communities experienced an increase in crime and blight. In the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, little is known about how the foreclosure crisis affected the health of homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure and the health of residents living in communities hit hard by the crisis. This dissertation, made up of three papers, first explores the explicit and implicit theories evoked by the literature in this space, and then empirically tests the hypothesis that the foreclosure crisis had spillover effects on health. The first paper systematically reviews the existing, early-stage research on foreclosures and health by presenting an organizational schema based on level of analysis, type of housing distress measure, and health outcome. In addition, the review describes the specific mechanisms linking foreclosures and health, and how this field aligns and departs from the larger body of work on recessions and health. The second and third papers empirically test if the foreclosure crisis has an impact on glycemic control (hemoglobin A1c) and weight change of patients in a large clinical population of continuously insured patients with diabetes living in the Bay Area of California during 2007 to 2010. The three primary conclusions from this work are: 1) there was no evidence of a spillover effect of the foreclosure crisis on A1c or weight change among patients in a managed care system; 2) the pathways by which health is influenced by experiencing a foreclosure compared to living near a foreclosure are distinct and vary based on the manner in which the exposure and outcome are operationalized; 3) housing and labor market factors appear to have related yet discrete repercussions on health and healthcare.

Advisor: Rodriguez, Hector
Tight, Inducible Gene Expression Using Alternatively Spliced Exons from Plants

Gene expression is regulated at multiple levels, from control of transcription to co-transcriptional processing steps to control of translation and decay. This multi-layered approach allows for sophisticated gene expression programs to be implemented. Previously, our lab engineered HyP5SM, a plant-derived alternatively spliced cassette exon which can be inserted directly and tracelessly into a variety of open reading frames to inducibly regulate protein expression in dicot plants. HyP5SM takes advantage of a gene regulation strategy common in nature – alternative splicing coupled to nonsense-mediated decay – to produce "default off, inducible on" gene expression. Here, we explored the benefits of combining two levels of regulation, a conditional promoter and an NMD-targeted cassette exon, and showed that we could obtain tight, inducible regulation of toxic genes. We demonstrate that addition of HyP5SM can regulate even the hypersensitive response (HR) phenotype, a defensive programmed cell death response initiated by disease-resistant plants upon detection of specific pathogen effector proteins. Effector-triggered immune pathways are important for disease-specific resistance to plant pathogens. We combine the dexamethasone inducible promoter and the HyP5SM cassette exon to regulate pathogen effector proteins. The inducible promoter alone results in leaky effector protein and HR, but HyP5SM renders the leaky transcript non-productive, thus eliminating leaky protein and the resulting auto-immune responses. Furthermore, plants inducibly recover both effector protein expression and the HR phenotype. We have tested this with Bs2/AvrBs2- and RPP1/ATR1Δ51-dependent hypersensitive response pathways in Nicotiana benthamiana and Nicotiana tabacum, respectively. We also show that Arabidopsis thaliana plants transgenic for these resistance/effector gene pairs are viable, healthy, and can complete their full life cycle (seed-to-seed) without inducing leaky HR phenotype from the pathogen effector transgene, unless the HR immune phenotype is specifically induced with dexamethasone. We also present progress identifying additional factors involved in the alternative splicing regulation of HyP5SM. The HyP5SM cassette can be generally applied to regulate other genes in dicot plants, and may be utilized with conditional, constitutive, or native promoters. Finally, we present progress toward engineering new variants of HyP5SM for gene regulation in mammalian cells.

Advisor: Hammond, Ming C
It's Not Whatever: How Teacher Leaders and Novice Teachers Develop as "Politically Determined Pedagogues" within an Urban High School

ABSTRACT/nIt’s NOT Whatever:/nHow teacher leaders and novice teachers develop as/n“politically determined pedagogues” within an urban high school/nby/nGerald Tiglao Reyes/nDoctor of Philosophy in Education/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Jabari Mahiri, Chair/nImplementing effective teacher development is one of the most critical aspects of school improvement. This study examines the cultural and structural nature and eventual outcomes of a politically relevant teacher development process in an urban high school that has a specific mission for its teachers to become humanizing, critically conscious, intellectual, and reflective practitioners. This critical participant research examined how three teacher leaders and three novice teachers of color representing English, social studies, and Science departments were facilitated within the school to make sense of and develop as what came to be termed “Politically Determined Pedagogues.” Data utilized for this study included existing school documents from the site, participant meetings, participant narratives, observations of participants during school organized teacher collaborations, participant interviews, field notes, and memos. Data was analyzed by initially coding to develop specific categories and eventual themes to capture the nature of focal participant activities within and across several cycles of the teacher development process. The findings illuminate a dynamic and systemic process of teacher development as humanizing, critically conscious, intellectually engaged, and reflective practitioners within the context of a School Cohesion Container as a framework. Within this framework, nurturing teachers’ political perspectives as Politically Determined Pedagogues was operationalized in a way that could be adapted for teacher development in other urban schools as well as for teacher preparation programs.

Advisor: Mahiri, Jabari