VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Bridging machine learning and computational photography to bring professional quality into casual photos and videos

Having a compact, casual pocket camera always within reach is a delight. It opens the opportunity to capture spontaneous moments and casual events. While users appreciate the convenience of mobile experience, their crave for visual quality of the professionals is hard to achieve. Because of hardware limitations and a lack of control over suboptimal conditions in the environment, casual photos and videos suffer from noise, lack of sharpness, unflattering lighting, wrong focus, distracting obstructions, etc. The desires are eager to make cameras see as our human visual system does, to understand the world and produce photographs that are perceptually pleasing and meaningful. Professional studio photography and cinematography have made the best attempts delivering high-quality photos and videos by incorporating intricate hardware and gathering professional crew. Casual imaging, on the other hand, is still nowhere close./nIn this thesis, I argue that it is key for a camera to understand the semantics of the scene -- the context -- presented in its viewfinder in order to intelligently capture and process sensor data. The approach to bring in such contextual information is through machine learning. Thankfully, modern mobile cameras are integrated with fast image processors and even dedicated machine learning chips to drive the development of computational capacities. Machine-learning-driven computational photography algorithms are lifted to great practicality more than ever before. Throughout the thesis, I discuss the challenges of causal imaging and how its quality can benefit from professional photography and cinematography principles. The thesis focuses on the quality enhancement from three aspects -- perceptual, lighting and focus. We propose a number of learning-based methods to lift these limitations to produce unprecedented results, and show a potential direction that integrates machine learning and imaging systems to enhance casual photos and videos towards the quality of the professionals.

Advisor: Ng, Ren
Untranslated regions and the regulation of transcript specific translation

Proteins are considered the “workhorses” of the cell and they are produced according to/nthe central dogma of biology. The general rule is that the genetic information hard-wired into/nDNA is transcribed into a messenger RNA (mRNA) molecule which contains the program for/nprotein synthesis through the translation process. The regulation of protein production can/nhappen in many ways. The process of mRNA production (transcriptional regulation) has been/nstudied extensively and we have a good understanding of how it works. More recently, other/nforms of regulation have been gaining attention, particularly translation initiation regulation. This/nis the rate limiting step during translation and it is an important gatekeeper of protein synthesis./nThis regulation occurs by both the cis-regulatory elements, which are located in the 5′- and 3′-/nUTRs (untranslated regions), and by trans-acting factors. Translational control of mRNA/nprovides the cell with a rapid way to control changes in protein concentration and thus acts to/nassist in maintaining homeostasis while also having a role in modulating more persistent/nphysiological changes towards cell fate (Sonnenberg and Hinnebusch, 2009). A large proportion/nof the energy budget of a living cell is funneled into protein synthesis making it intimately/nintegrated with cell metabolism. For this reason, misregulation of translation results in/naberrations and several disease phenotypes (Silvera et al., 2010). It is therefore of great value to/nunderstand detailed aspects of translational control when studying cell homeostasis and disease./nUntranslated regions of messenger RNAs are populated with a variety of regulatory structures/nsuch as stem-loop structures, upstream initiation codons and open reading frames, internal/nribosome entry sites and cis-acting elements that interact with RNA-binding proteins. In the/npresent work, I will discuss the importance of untranslated elements on the 5’ and the 3’ ends of/nspecific transcripts and how interactions with these regions alter the interplay between the RNA/nand the translation machinery, focusing on eukaryotic translation initiation factor eIF3,the largest/ntranslation initiation factor.

Advisor: Cate, Jamie H
Postcolonial Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean

Legacies of colonialism and slavery continue to shape present life in Guadeloupe, a former colony of France in the Caribbean integrated as French overseas department in 1946. Many Guadeloupeans today still express feeling like second-class citizens in a society constituted through plantation economy and still shaped by the afterlives of slavery. Bringing together neurological readaptation, dance practices, and memorial struggles, Postcolonial Repair: Memory, Embodiment, and Therapeutics in the French Caribbean investigates how Guadeloupean health-care providers, patients, choreographers, dancers and activists wrestle with Guadeloupe's structural relationship with France and incessantly strive to transform their conditions of existence. Through an attention to Guadeloupeans practices of repair, this research connects the micropolitics of everyday life and the macroscopic political questions they reveal. This dissertation argues that, in parallel to symbolic and material demands for reparations regarding slavery addressed to the French State, Guadeloupeans actively attempt to repair their conditions of life from within./nI conceptualize these efforts through four movements: Cobbling, Countering, Balancing, and Enduring. Chapter 1 highlights the presence of history in Guadeloupe, takes stock of the current debates on reparations in France, and argues for the necessity of engaging movements of repair beyond the question of formal reparations. Chapter 2, “Cobbling Care,” investigates how patients and health workers in readaptation form and cultivate therapeutic relationships in the crumbling infrastructure of a French public hospital. Chapter 3, “Retracing History,” engages the efforts of activists to unearth historical narratives and presences—including the direct resurfacing of ancestors—against French-centered historical narratives. Chapter 4, “Balancing in Imbalance," explores how to find equilibrium in movement, both in dance practice and in the institutional work that is required to defend readaptation. Finally, chapter 5, “Enduring,” engages with the limits placed on Guadeloupean life yet looks for the liminal spaces where people live with history in the present and redefine their relationship with time, space, and their bodies to reclaim them as sites of freedom, belonging, and relationality. These five chapters are interspaced with three interludes and followed by a final reflection on Movement Politics that attend to the palimpsestic quality of Guadeloupean practices of postcolonial repair./nI argue that movements of repair generate possibilities of transformation beyond the scope of formal reparations. I think of postcolonial repair as an ongoing practice, a near-infinite series of movements and transformations enacted day in and day out. While reparations will never undo the structuration of Atlantic societies through colonialism and slavery, I argue that postcolonial repair contributes to structural transformation.

Advisor: Pandolfo, Stefania
Creatures of Art: The Laws of Creativity in the Nineteenth Century

This dissertation traces the history and theory of creativity from its theological origins to its modern apotheosis as a defining trait of human being and flourishing. Reclaimed from early modern creation theology, creativity was recast as an immanent mode of making dependent upon environmental context and historical circumstance. It became a natural capacity of humans reconceived as not just (or no longer) God’s “creatures” but creators in their own right—even creatures of their own making. The creature (literally “a product of creative action”) was turned into a model of artful making through empowering reciprocity. Insisting that the cultivation of creativity depended on recognizing humanity’s creaturely condition—its temporal and earthly finitude, material and social interdependence, and affinity with other living forms—writers from Mary Shelley to W. E. B. Du Bois recast the human as a “creature of” formative process and context: a creature of art. In so doing, they remind us that the creature is the missing protagonist in the history of creativity as a form of human making. The nineteenth-century conception of creativity moved away from ideals of autonomy and originality. Against the transcendence and timelessness attached to Romantic notions of creative genius, a creaturely creativity was grounded in the period’s fascination with the nitty-gritty of technology, the minutiae of technical know-how, and practical arts—simply, with making. I argue that the nineteenth century found in the creature a way of thinking about humans as products not of god’s eternal law but of the earthly laws of creativity: the operative conditions of creation that obtain in our lived environments. The effort to understand these laws left thinkers in the nineteenth century with a new conception of creativity as a mode of artful making enabled by the contexts and circumstances that make us who we are. Recovering this effort prompts us helps us see that our current fascination with making is part of a deeper and richer history than has been supposed.

Advisor: Tamarkin, Elisa
Beyond the Nation: The Literary Afterlife of the Damascus Spring in the 21st Century Syrian Novel

Through the lens of Syrian fiction published with the advent of the new millennium, this dissertation reflects on the crisis of nationhood in the Arab world and on the ways in which the novel as a genre created the conditions of possibility for the 2011 Syrian uprising. Tracing an aesthetic of destabilization, I explore the artistically performed emerging consciousness that carves out new spaces of intellectual and aesthetic inquiry for Syrian writers. These new spaces establish a new era because although the twentieth-century Syrian novel that proceeded them professed disenchantment with authoritarianism, it continued to function within a dominant modernist, nationalist epistemological and political discourse that emphasized the nation’s homogeneity and associated the project of modernity with humanism and secularism, conceiving of it as an opposition to tradition. In contrast, this dissertation argues, with the unfolding of the new millennium, as the country was going through an intense period of vocal opposition known as the Damascus Spring, a young generation of Syrian novelists turned their attention to investigating the paradigms that had hitherto governed the country’s political and intellectual fields and its literary production, both reflecting and contributing to the general atmosphere that engendered the 2011 uprising in Syria. Their creative endeavors, which embodied demands for reform, freedom of speech, and an open civil society, manifested in new modes of literary expression through daring and controversial texts that openly explored what had long been treated as risky territories and taboo themes./nThis investigation uncovers the remarkable and complex involvement of women novelists, who further interrogate both the nation and the novel as male-constructed spaces. My interviews with a diverse group of young writers who fled Syria in fear for their lives allow me to outline the emergence of a dialogical intellectual who aims to remap the nation’s ethos, reconnect with a repressed cultural past, and reposition the role of literature in society. Crucially, I investigate the ways in which this emerging consciousness manifests itself in these avant-garde works and underscore how these reformulations transpire through the re-gendering of multilingual and multicultural spaces within the Syrian collective. Guided by close readings, I focus on two pre-uprising novels written by women authors: Kamā yanbaghī li-nahr (As a River Should, 2007) by Manhal al-Sarrāj and Brūvā (First Draft, 2011) by Rūzā Yāsīn Ḥasan. I tarry with these author's use of intertextuality, narrative fragmentation, metafiction, and temporal distortion. It is these innovative literary practices, I argue, that enable the new generation of Syrian writers to contest history, unearth repressed memory, undermine the notion of an unquestionable author(ity), and highlight the embodied practices rooted in multiplicity.

Advisor: Larkin, Margaret
Bioinspired Strategies for Selective Molecular Recognition

Selective molecular recognition is critical for identification and capture of environmental contaminants, both inorganic and organic. Urban mining to recycle critical minerals requires selective binding of one chemical entity from a mixture of chemically and physically similar species. A diversity-based approach was used to discover new support-bound peptoid tertiary armine ligands that are selective for indium (III) over aluminum (III) that may be used to recycle flat panel displays. In other cases, activity-based recognition is more relevant than recognition based on chemical identity. Many organic contaminants are biologically active. Health monitoring depends on measuring total bioactivity of complex mixtures rather than identifying each individual compound. Progress was made towards a low-cost fluorescence-based estrogenic activity sensor using the human estrogen receptor alpha. Immobilization of the receptor on resin disrupted the native activity. Finally, the development of new materials requires convenient laboratory-scale methods for testing. To evaluate silicate-removing materials designed to reduce scale buildup, a lab-scale break-through test workflow was developed.

Advisor: Francis, Matthew B
Reduced Order Modeling of Blood Flow and Applications

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Image-based computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulations have been widely used to characterize patient-specific blood flow features in the cardiovascular system. The simulation results provide high spatiotemporal resolution of functional indicators of CVD not revealed through imaging. Moreover, computational modeling provides the ability to virtually test interventions or devices. Despite this upside, patient-specific simulations remain computationally expensive, prone to numerical instabilities, and can be sensitive to method parameters, all of which have limited their clinical use. These limitations have also been prohibitive in research applications requiring parametric analyses such as uncertainty quantification, data assimilation, optimization, parameter tuning, etc. These factors motivate the need for reduced-order modeling (ROM) of blood flow to be used in place of, or in conjunction with, fully-resolved CFD modeling./nAs such, this dissertation focuses on developing ROMs to efficiently compute blood flow in cardiovascular domains that can enable timely decision support, and applications requiring ensembles of numerical simulations. Through fundamental understanding of physics and physiology, we developed a novel physics-based ROM strategy, that not only calculates blood flow and pressure at a fraction of the computational cost compared to the current standard CFD, but can do so much more accurately than other existing ROM methods. The proposed method demonstrated consistent agreement with CFD simulations in terms of flow rate and pressure distribution over a broad range of hemodynamic conditions and vascular geometries. To evaluate the utility of this ROM methodology, we applied this framework to several translational and research applications.

Advisor: Shadden, Shawn SC
Artificial Bioenergetic Functional Models Templated by Viral Capsid Proteins

Natural photosynthetic light harvesting systems maintain precise control over the energetics, positions and relative orientations of densely packed arrays of chromophores. This dissertation describes the efforts to achieve similar structural control in synthetic analogues and to understand the structure-function interplays using the artificial systems. Based on the central scaffold, the double-disk assembly of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) capsid proteins, a series of protein-pigments conjugates were designed, constructed, and characterized. The mobility and orientation of the chromophores were carefully controlled combining linker engineering with the protein confinement. A systematic study was done to understand how the fine-tuning of these structural elements could affect the chromophore photophysics. The utility of the TMV scaffolds was further expanded by the introduction of unnatural binding sites to create protein-embedded metal porphyrin arrays. Finally, the use of a dimeric TMV coat protein to create higher-order membrane-attached light harvesting networks was explored.

Advisor: Francis, Matthew B.
The Great Refusal: The West, the Rest, and the Geopolitics of Homosexuality

The Great Refusal: The West, the Rest, and the Geopolitics of Homosexuality is a mixed-method, multi-scalar study comprising three chapters that investigate state regulations of sexuality. I use cross-sectional and longitudinal multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) of cross-national data from 175 countries between 1970 and the present, data that I collected and coded myself (this is the first MCA used in this dynamic, cross-temporal fashion). I supplement this global, quantitative analysis with local ethnographic and interview data collected over 18 months from the Dakar Tribunal, the largest court in Senegal, and from foreign embassies, international organizations, and local gay rights groups operating in Senegal. Chapter 1 argues that the world is sharply divided between a great embrace and a great refusal of homosexuality, a division that has grown more, not less striking over time. This division, I show, is primarily structured by the economic, political, and symbolic capital of nations, their national trajectories, as well as their racial and colonial legacies. Chapter 2 shifts down in scale, showing that the same divisions among nations paradoxically reappear within nations—and these are particularly evident in conflicts over the precedence of local claims versus international ones, which pit public-facing judges and prosecutors against international-facing ministry of justice officials. Western interventionism, I argue, further exacerbates these divisions, fueling local resentment and a backlash against the West, gay rights, and gay people. Chapter 3 dives even deeper into the work of courts and judges, but adds a comparative dimension by investigating how judicial institutions construct and punish women and men, in cases of abortion and homosexuality (or “acts against nature”). I show how judges’ opposition to both of these crimes is rooted in a logic of social and biological reproduction; I further show how judges proceed to make moral distinctions between two types of guilty offenders, redeemable and lifestyle offenders. In this chapter, another kind of empirical divide comes to the fore between how judges construct and punish women in cases of abortion on the one hand and men in cases of homosexuality on the other. Through the lens of sexuality, this work also tackles two broader global phenomena—namely, postcolonial resentment and resentment against political liberalism. Finally, I suggest that the backlash to the liberal order reveals a contradiction in liberalism itself as nations push back against liberalism’s universality by deploying liberalism’s own values of diversity, multiculturalism, and respect for cultural difference.

Advisor: Fourcade, Marion
Wacquant, Loïc
Symmetry-specific probes of strongly correlated materials: Angle-dependent magnetoresistance and resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

This thesis describes two distinct areas of research, and is accordingly presented in two parts./nThe first subject is the use of semi-classical calculations of angle-dependent magnetoresistance to explain and predict the behavior of certain copper-based high-temperature superconductors. We show that the unusual angle-dependent magnetoresistance of the overdoped cuprate Tl$_2$Ba$_2$CuO$_{6+\delta}$ may be explained by the presence of a ($\pi$, $\pi$) ordering. Additionally, we show that the angle-dependent magnetoresistance of HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4+\delta}$ can be used to constrain the possible nature of the Fermi surface reconstruction in the underdoped cuprates./nThe second part of this work is dedicated to resonant ultrasound spectroscopy, an experimental technique to determine the mechanical resonances of an object. We have applied this technique to study the temperature-driven magnetic phase transitions of lithium iridate and iron-intercalated niobium disulfide. In the case of lithium iridate, we show that there is no elastic signature of the proposed Kitaev paramagnet phase transition at roughly 100 K. In samples of iron-intercalated niobium disulfide with various levels of intercalation, we see clear signatures of the expected antiferromagnetic phase transition, in addition to the spin glass behavior. We are able to refine the freezing temperature of the spin glass for the under-intercalated compound. More importantly, we are able to determine the symmetry of the higher-temperature antiferromagnetic phase transition in a near-stoichiometric sample, thus determining the symmetry of the antiferromagnetic ordering.

Advisor: Analytis, James G
Essays in Psychology and Economics

This dissertation studies how the past influences our future choices. Leveraging insights from psychology, I study the role of past actions in forming habits and the role of past experiences in altering beliefs and preferences. I explore implications of these findings for individuals, firms, and the macroeconomy./nIn the first chapter, I ask - how should organizations incentivize routine behaviors? I use a cue-based model of habit formation to describe hand hygiene behavior in hospitals and suggest implications for intervention to change behavior. Hand hygiene is the best way to prevent healthcare-associated infections which affect millions of patients and cost billions of dollars each year. However, many studies find that healthcare workers comply with hand hygiene guidelines less than half of the time. Leveraging a unique dataset that tracks compliance behavior of 13,606 workers in 123M hand hygiene opportunities, I document patterns of behavior consistent with a cue-based theory of habit. High compliers benefit from automatic hand washing and are buffered from the negative impacts of cognitive load. However, habits are broken when high compliers are taken out of their normal routines. The findings have implications for how hospitals should design, target, and implement hand hygiene interventions./nIn the second chapter, in joint work with Ulrike Malmendier, we ask whether the past can explain some of the vast differences in homeownership rates across countries and cohorts. We argue that macroeconomic histories individuals have personally experienced in their home country over the past decades play a significant role in their decision to become a homeowner. We present novel survey data that reveals inflation protection as a key motivation to buy rather than rent a home. We then show that higher exposure to inflation predicts home ownership, controlling for other known determinants of homeownership as well as any differences across countries and over time. First, we find that immigrants' country-of-origin inflation experiences strongly predict their homeownership rates in the US. Second, analyzing data from 22 European countries, we estimate that a one log-point increase in personally experienced inflation predicts a 18pp increase in the average individual's likelihood of homeownership. As predicted by our model, the effects are strongest in countries with predominantly fixed-rate mortgages.

Advisor: Malmendier, Ulrike
DellaVigna, Stefano