VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Fast, distributed computations in the cloud [electronic resource]

Control planes of cloud frameworks trade off between scheduling granularity and performance. Centralized systems schedule at task granularity, but only schedule a few thousand tasks per second. Distributed systems schedule hundreds of thousands of tasks per second but changing the schedule is costly. This dissertation presents a new, third strategy, called execution templates. Execution templates leverage a program's repetitive control flow to cache control plane decisions in templates. A template is a parametrisable block of tasks: it caches some information (e.g., task dependencies) but instantiation requires some parameters (e.g., task identifiers). Executing the cached tasks in a template requires sending a single message that loads the new parameters. Large-scale scheduling changes install new templates, while small changes apply edits to existing templates. Execution templates are not bound to a static control flow and efficiently capture nested loops and data dependent branches. Evaluation of execution templates in Nimbus, a cloud computing framework, shows that they provide the fine-grained scheduling flexibility of centralized control planes while matching the performance of the distributed ones. Execution templates in Nimbus support not only the traditional data analytics, but also complex, scientific applications such as hybrid graphical simulations.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Levis Philip primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Aiken Alexander advisor. Thesis advisor
Rosenblum Mendel advisor. Thesis advisor
Fast linear algebra algorithms and applications to computational flow physics [electronic resource]

This is an interdisciplinary study on fast linear algebra algorithms and high performance computing methods with applications in flow physics. Fast linear algebra algorithms are the essence of most high performance scientific calculations. In this thesis we study various novel fast linear algebra techniques, including adaptive fast multipole method and fast sparse linear solvers using low-rank approximation and extended sparsification. We also discuss numerical and computational methods developed for high fidelity simulation of heated particle-laden flows, which is followed by review of new physics discovered. We show heated particles can modify spectral properties of the background turbulence. The effect of particle preferential concentration in particle-to-gas heat transfer is studied. In addition, we use the developed computational physics framework to benchmark our proposed novel sparse matrix linear solver.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Darve Eric primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Mani Ali (Professor of mechanical engineering) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Alonso Juan José
Iaccarino Gianluca advisor. Thesis advisor
Fate, Belief, and Consolation: Fortunetelling and Divination in South Korea

This thesis investigates the popularity of fortunetelling in South Korea, which has today situated itself as a leisurely activity, and one that also generates sociality. Patrons hardly sit across from fortunetellers expecting an accurate peak into the future; the pleasure of dwelling
where excitement and eerie fright cross, the hazy zone of belief and non-belief, and stories embellished with inexplicable, but fascinating experiences, sustain the
relish and popularity of fortunetelling. By constituting and contending "truths" of the session together, fortunetelling also opens up possibility for therapeutic efficacy. Fortunetelling is understood as an opportunity to untangle perplexing emotional problems at hand through a meticulous naming of the past, present, and the future, as well as through the reinstatement of hope that practitioners are invested in offering their patrons. By shedding light on a uniquely Korean emotion, dapdapham, and the recently burgeoning trend towards hɪlɪŋ, a search for consolation and encouragement, that drive these visits to the fortunetellers, I argue that patrons in particular seek a way to make heard burdensome stories, whether those be pestering problems of the everyday or much weightier ones. Fortunetelling, through this lens, is not merely an extension of the tradition it is steeped in; it is also a thoroughly modern response to the hectic rhythm and values that leave little room for attention to individual accounts of affliction.

Keywords:  Department of Anthropology
fortunetelling
divination
South Korea
Department of Anthropology
Thesis
Advisor: Luhrmann Tanya
Inoue Miyako
Fatigue of metallic alloys at sub-millimeter sizes [electronic resource]

This thesis reviews fatigue data available in the literature for smaller size scales, focusing on metallic alloys. Then, it summarizes different testing approaches that have been developed to perform fatigue testing of small specimens. With that background, we set out to build a machine that would allow for very simple, precise, and efficient testing of fatigue properties of engineering materials at a sub-millimeter size scale. We determined that using rotating wire as the method of testing fatigue was the simplest way to ensure that fatigue would happen where we predicted in a specimen (wire). It also avoided the need to manufacture tiny specimens, which can be challenging. It allowed for a high cyclic frequency and precise determination of stress, based on the geometry of the bend of a wire. The machine needed to maintain the length of the wire very precisely in order to maintain the desired stress levels. Using a motor mounted to a translation stage, and bushings set at fixed intervals, we were able to control the geometry and create a precise rotating wire machine. Analyses supporting the design of the test machine are provided, as well as a detailed description of the design.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Nelson Drew advisor. Thesis advisor
Feature-conditioned neural network pre-training for skin cancer classification

Despite tremendous advances in image recognition using convolutional neural networks over the past few years, the performance of deep learning based models on supervised classification is typically benchmarked using enormous labeled datasets comprising millions of images. Realistically, for many highly impactful classification tasks, such as medical image analysis, obtaining sufficient labeled data may be prohibitively expensive, time-consuming, or even impossible. However, it is often easier to obtain unlabeled image datasets, along with con-textual information that is related to the true desired labels. In this work, we propose two separate pre-training algorithms to leverage these datasets a GAN-based pre-training algorithm, and a purely CNN-based algorithm and evaluate their performance specifically for binary classification of skin lesions as either benign moles or cancerous melanomas. When tested against traditional model pre-training using the ImageNet dataset, both pre-training algorithms boost performance on the classification task, especially when smaller labeled datasets of only 5,000-10,000 images are available for training. Additionally, using the feature conditioned CNN-based pre-training algorithm, subsequent model performance exceeds both dermatologist and previous state-of-the-art results when evaluated on a test set of dermoscopic skin lesion images.

Keywords: Ben Wegbreit Prize for Best Undergraduate Honors Thesis
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Science
Thesis
Advisor: Esteva Andre
Thrun Sebastian
Feedback regulation of steady-state epithelial turnover and organ size [electronic resource]

Continual cell turnover is crucial for the long‐term maintenance of healthy organs, but to avoid pathological consequences, new cells must be produced at the precise rate that old cells are lost. Here we identify the signaling basis of feedback inhibition that equalizes cell production and loss during stem cell‐driven turnover of the Drosophila intestinal epithelium. E‐cadherin at the cortex of mature enterocytes inhibits EGF‐dependent stem cell divisions by repressing the EGF maturation factor rhomboid. Single, apoptotic enterocytes disrupt this inhibitory relay by degrading E‐cadherin, which de‐ represses rhomboid to activate EGFR and promote divisions of nearby stem cells. Ectopic loss of E‐cadherin in non‐apoptotic cells upregulates rhomboid, causing EGFR hyperactivation and excessive divisions. In contrast, blocking apoptosis precludes EGFR activation and slows down divisions to keep total cells constant. Thus, stem cell divisions require enterocyte apoptosis to relieve proliferative inhibition, ensuring equal rates of cell production and loss.

Keywords: Molecular and Cellular Physiology.
Advisor: O'Brien Lucy
Axelrod Jeffrey (Jeffrey David)
Nelson William
Nusse Roel
Feeling critical [electronic resource] : literary practices of postwar critique

Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique's chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique's political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature's social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism's erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.

Advisor: Ngai Sianne primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Saldívar Ramón
McGurl Mark
A Fermi liquid perspective on the high field ground state of the cuprate superconductors [electronic resource]

The nature of the parent metallic state from which high temperature superconductivity emerges has remained fiercely controversial in the three decades since the discovery of the cuprate superconductors. Surprisingly, recent experiments in magnetic fields high enough to quench superconductivity have revealed a metallic state whose properties are remarkably conventional, and well explained within the context of Fermi liquid theory. Yet, even within this paradigm, these experiments have raised several fundamental theoretical questions. This thesis focuses on a few such experimentally motivated matters of theoretical principle. The primary themes involve issues surrounding quantum oscillations, as well as the recent discovery of charge density waves (CDWs) in the underdoped cuprates. I begin with a discussion of how charge density waves in YBCO can be related to earlier discovered stripes in the `214' family of cuprates, and also consider the experimental consequences of the resulting vestigial orders which break discrete rotational and/or mirror symmetries. I show that X-ray scattering measurements of seemingly biaxial CDW order, can in fact originate from a three dimensional `crisscrossed' pattern of stripes. This three dimensional pattern breaks mirror symmetries, leading to sharp consequences for quantum oscillation spectra, possible detection in elastoresistance experiments, and each of these topics form chapters of this thesis. The discussion of quantum oscillations starts by considering whether they are even possible in the presence of incommensurate CDWs that formally destroy translation symmetry, rendering the concept of a Fermi surface approximate at best. Using exact dualities, I show that quantum oscillations are no longer periodic in 1/B, and even disappear for sufficiently strong incommensurate CDWs. In a subsequent chapter, I use similar dualities to constrain the form of the Fermi surface that is possible in YBCO, and discuss the strong evidence for both mirror symmetry breaking and significant quasiparticle renormalization. Finally, I examine the behavior of the Hall number of a metal when nematicity results in a Lifshitz transition where the Fermi surface topology evolves from a closed pocket to open sheets. I provide analytic expressions for the critical behavior of the Hall number, and also relate these results to recent experiments in the cuprates. I conclude this thesis by synthesizing these ideas into a proposed doping evolution for the Fermi surface of an idealized cuprate.

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Raghu Srinivas
Hwang Harold Yoonsung
Kivelson Steven advisor. Thesis advisor
Field theory for cosmology [electronic resource] : an effective approach

Effective field theory (EFT) is our most successful tool to date for exploring the fundamental processes of particle physics: it has been able to describe all know particle interactions in the lab to astonishing accuracy. We are now entering an era of precision cosmology, where we can use the power of EFT, a tool that has only recently been applied to the field of cosmology, to fully make use of cosmological observations. This thesis comprises recent work applying effective field theory in the context of early-universe cosmology and large-scale structure (LSS).

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Senatore Leonardo
Kachru Shamit
Silverstein Eva
Financial markets and trading networks [electronic resource]

In this doctoral dissertation, I study the market structure and efficiency of over-the-counter (OTC) financial markets. Specifically, I model how financial trading networks endogenously form, and how trading networks and trade protocols affect pricing, trading behavior, liquidity, and efficiency. This dissertation consists of two chapters. The first chapter addresses the endogenous structure of financial networks. Here, I model how core-periphery trading networks arise endogenously in over-the-counter markets as an equilibrium balance between trade competition and inventory efficiency. A small number of firms emerge as core dealers to intermediate trades among a large number of peripheral firms. The equilibrium number of dealers depends on two countervailing forces: (i) competition among dealers in their pricing of immediacy to peripheral firms, and (ii) the benefits of concentrated intermediation for lowering dealer inventory risk through dealers' ability to quickly net purchases against sales. For an asset with a lower frequency of trade demand, intermediation is concentrated among fewer dealers, and interdealer trades account for a greater fraction of total trade volume. I show, party in separate work, that these two predictions are strongly supported by evidence from the markets for German sovereign bonds and U.S. corporate bonds. From a welfare viewpoint, I show that there are too few dealers for assets with frequent trade demands, and too many dealers for assets with infrequent trade demands. The second chapter models bargaining in over-the-counter network markets over the terms and prices of contracts. Of concern is whether bilateral non-cooperative bargaining is sufficient to achieve efficiency in this multilateral setting. For example, will market participants assign insolvency-based seniority in a socially efficient manner, or should bankruptcy laws override contractual terms with an automatic stay? The model provides conditions under which bilateral bargaining over contingent contracts is efficient for a network of market participants. Examples include seniority assignment, close-out netting and collateral rights, secured debt liens, and leverage-based covenants. Given the ability to use covenants and other contingent contract terms, central market participants efficiently internalize the costs and benefits of their counterparties through the pricing of contracts. We provide counterexamples to efficiency for less contingent forms of bargaining coordination.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Duffie Darrell primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Jackson Matthew O. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dembo Amir advisor. Thesis advisor
Krishnamurthy Arvind advisor. Thesis advisor
Fingerpad skin deformation for sensory substitution of force in teleoperation and virtual reality [electronic resource]

During real-world physical interaction, haptic information provides people with important information about environment properties and interaction forces. While world-grounded kinesthetic devices have traditionally been used to provide multi-degree-of-freedom haptic feedback to the users of teleoperation and virtual reality systems, another option is skin deformation feedback, where a device stimulates mechanoreceptors within the skin. Skin deformation can be used to convey force information similar to that provided by kinesthetic devices, but does not necessitate external grounding, meaning that it could potentially function in much larger workspaces. This thesis presents the development and evaluation of novel skin deformation devices for sensory substitution of force in teleoperation and virtual reality applications. With a new lateral skin deformation device capable of deforming skin on the fingerpads during teleoperation of a robot manipulator, we showed that user stiffness discrimination was as good with skin deformation feedback as with kinesthetic force feedback. The usefulness of this device and feedback method were validated in a teleoperated palpation experiment, during which participants performed just as well as with kinesthetic feedback and better than with previously investigated sensory substitutes, without the risk of feedback-induced instability. Next, we designed and validated a new fingertip-wearable skin deformation device for use in virtual reality systems. Users were able to perform virtual palpation and surface friction discrimination with feedback from this device. By using two of these devices on the index finger and thumb, we showed that naive users were able to determine virtual object physical properties such as mass, stiffness, and friction with no prior experience or training. Finally, we integrated haptic rendering with pseudohaptic graphical scaling to extend the range of virtual mass rendering and determine how mass perception is affected by the haptic and visual channels when using skin deformation feedback. These results show that skin deformation feedback is an effective substitute for kinesthetic force feedback in both teleoperation and virtual reality scenarios. With minimal training, users of systems with skin deformation feedback are able to perform nearly as well as with true force feedback, while avoiding many of the issues traditionally associated with kinesthetic feedback systems.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Okamura Allison primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Cutkosky Mark R. advisor. Thesis advisor
Follmer Sean advisor. Thesis advisor
Fishing for answers [electronic resource] : can aquaculture transform food security in rural Kenya?

Aquaculture is one of the fastest growing food-producing sectors in the world. Though the bulk of current aquaculture production occurs in China, certain sub-Saharan African countries are beginning to make meaningful forays into the sector. Many of these interventions are born out of concerns over declines in key wild fish stocks, and the hope that fish farming - when directed toward rural communities - can bring about transformative food security gains. Yet with a few notable exceptions, much of the empirical evidence exploring these causal relationships comes from Asia. As fish farming begins to take root in sub-Saharan Africa, several questions will need to be addressed, among them: will farmed fish production take pressure off of wild fish stocks by augmenting supply; and will fish farming bring about the anticipated gains in food security? This dissertation is intended to aid policy makers, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, to answer these questions. Research is focused in Kenya, where the government introduced a massive fish farming intervention, which ran from 2009 - 2012. By collecting and analyzing socioeconomic survey data from 1000+ fish farming households in the Lake Victoria region, this dissertation aims to shed light on the conditions under which fish farming can bring about household-level food security benefits. It is particularly focused on the 'pro-poor' dimensions of the sector, and explores what the addition of an aquaculture pond can mean for households at the so-called 'bottom of the pyramid'. Results indicate positive nutritional and income gains for adopting households, but also show that well diversified 'middle-income' households tend to benefit the most. Indeed, low rates of adoption among poorer households paint a concerning picture. Finally, an analysis of wider supply chain dynamics underscores the need for a cohesive policy approach that improves the efficiency of input production and that links fish farmers to more lucrative markets. For countries in the region worried about declining wild fish stocks and the food security of their citizens, this dissertation provides recommendations on possible pathways forward.

Advisor: Caldwell Margaret R.
Naylor Rosamond primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Crowder Larry B.
Falcon Walter P.
Flexible bandwidth allocation framework [electronic resource]

We present NUMFabric, a novel transport design that provides flexible and fast bandwidth allocation control. NUMFabric is flexible: it enables operators to specify how bandwidth is allocated amongst contending flows to optimize for different service-level objectives such as weighted fairness, minimizing flow completion times, multipath resource pooling, prioritized bandwidth functions, etc. NUMFabric is also very fast: it converges to the specified allocation 2.3 times faster than prior schemes. Underlying NUMFabric is a novel distributed algorithm for solving network utility maximization problems that exploits weighted fair queueing packet scheduling in the network to converge quickly. We evaluate NUMFabric using realistic data center topologies and highly dynamic workloads and show that it is able to provide flexibility and fast convergence in such stressful environments.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Katti Sachin primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Alizadeh Mohammad (Professor) advisor. Thesis advisor
McKeown Nick advisor. Thesis advisor