VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Distributing morphologically conditioned phonology: Three case studies from Guébie

The focus of this study is process morphology in Guébie, an endangered Kru language spoken in Côte d'Ivoire. Unlike many primarily affixing morphological systems, much of the morphology in Guébie involves root-internal phonological changes like tone shift and vowel replacement. For this reason, Guébie data have much to offer discussions of the interface between morphology and phonology. Based on the Guébie facts presented here, I argue 1) that process morphology, where a non-concatenative phonological process is the sole exponent of a morpheme, is a subtype of morphologically conditioned phonology, and 2) that not all morphology involves underlying phonological items. I conclude that whether a morpheme triggers a phonological process is independent of whether a morpheme is associated with underlying phonological content. Instead, morphologically conditioned phonological processes are driven by phonological constraints, whose rankings are determined by particular morphosyntactic features present in the domain being phonologically evaluated./nThis study describes the phonology and morphology of Guébie, focusing in particular on three case studies of morphologically conditioned phonological processes. These include phonologically determined noun class agreement, scalar tone shift, and vowel replacement. In each of these case studies we see evidence for specific interactions between not only morphology and phonology, but also syntax and phonology. On the morphological side, Guébie tonal morphology shows us that not every morpheme is associated with an underlying (abstract) phonological item. With respect to syntax, we see that domains of phonological evaluation in Guébie must be larger than a single word, but not larger than a syntactic phase. We also see phonological processes sensitive to both morphosyntax and lexical class in Guébie, suggesting that any model of phonological grammar must be able to reference morphosyntactic and lexical information. By exploring morphological exponents across a language, we can narrow down the space of possible models that account for morphosyntactic interaction with phonology.

Advisor: Inkelas, Sharon
Reasoning about High-Level Constructs in Hardware/Software Formal Verification

The ever shrinking feature size of modern electronic chips leads to/nmore designs being done as well as more complex chips being/ndesigned. These in turn lead to greater use of high-level/nspecifications and to more sophisticated optimizations applied at the/nword -level. These steps make it more difficult to verify that the/nfinal design is faithful to the initial specification. We tackle two/nsteps in this process and their formal equivalence checking to help/nverify the correctness of the steps./nFirst, we present LEC, a combinational equivalence checking tool that is learning driven. It focuses on data-path equivalence/nchecking with the goal of transforming the two logics under comparison to be more/nsimilar in order to reduce the complexity of a final Boolean (bit-level)/nsolving. LEC does equivalence checking of combinational logic between two RTL (word-level) designs, one the original and one an optimized RTL version. LEC features an open architecture such that users and developers can/nlearn with the system as new designs and optimizations are met, and then it can be modularly extended with new proof procedures as they are discovered./nTo address the use of higher level specifications, we build a simple trusted C to Verilog translation procedure based on the/nLLVM compiler infrastructure. The translator was designed to implement an almost vertatim/ntranslation of the C language operators and control structures into/nthe Verilog \emph{always\_ff} and \emph{always\_comb} blocks through traversing LLVM/nBytecode programs. The procedure reliably bridges the language barrier/nbetween software and hardware and allows hardware synthesis/nand verification techniques to be applied readily./nIn combination, these two procedures allow for equivalence checking/nbetween a software-like specification and an optimized word-level RTL/nimplementation.

Advisor: Brayton, Robert K
Resilience Beyond Rebellion: How Wartime Organizational Structures Affect Rebel-to-Party Transformation

Scholars have established that the best prospects for long-term stability and democratization in war-torn states occur when former rebels compete in post-conflict elections. However, only half of the insurgencies with political aspirations successfully reinvent themselves as lasting opposition parties. Why are some rebel groups able to seamlessly transition into political parties while others revert to violence or die trying? My dissertation draws on insights from organizational sociology to model the process and risks of rebel-to-party transition. I identify three wartime domains that I call proto-party structures: shadow governance, political messaging, and social service wings. Proto-party structures represent a surprising dimension of rebel organizational diversity. Crucially, however, not all insurgencies have them. I demonstrate that these structures---by mirroring the key components of political party organizations---provide insurgencies with two decisive advantages when attempting to transition into a party: (1) relevant experience that translates into the political arena, and (2) an easier path to transition by repurposing existing structures rather than building a party from scratch. I use a mixed-method approach---combining statistical analyses on a novel dataset with process tracing in three cases---to test my organizational theory of transition.

Advisor: Collier, David
Hassner, Ron
DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF A PARSIMONIOUS WATER BALANCE MODEL FOR MEDITERRANEAN CLIMATE CONDITIONS

The annual water balance is an important indicator of the hydrologic function and utility of a watershed, and yet there has been relatively sparse research of the special considerations that control the yearly partition of precipitation in a Mediterranean climate (MC) like that of California. In particular, there is a gap in empirical characterization of the annual water balance over a broad collection of watersheds spanning the diverse climate and landscape conditions of the state. This research develops and applies a top-down, parsimonious, physically interpretable water balance model that explicitly accounts for seasonality, a critical climate factor for MC regions./nThe research was motivated by the observation of a straightforward, linear relationship between total annual precipitation and streamflow for watersheds in the Russian River Basin of northern California. A dataset of monthly water balance variables was developed to meet the criteria of accurate estimations, geographic contiguity, and temporal longevity, continuity, and consistency. Inspection of the long-term water balance for 159 watersheds in the state led to a more general form of the precipitation-streamflow relationship, a segmented linear model. Model parameters were estimated for each watershed via regression of water balance observations using a structural probabilistic model that was resilient to uncertainties in the input data./nModel parameter estimates displayed aggregate clustering by prevailing wetness conditions, as well as geographic regionalization. The average predictive uncertainty for gaged watersheds ranged from 50 to 125 mm per year in terms of area-normalized streamflow. Modeled streamflow residuals were used to evaluate historical changes in the water balance, revealing a decreasing trend in the streamflow of most California watersheds during the onset of the climate change era, controlling for precipitation. Sensitivity analysis showed that changes in the seasonality of precipitation and potential evapotranspiration have an order-of-magnitude larger impact on the water balance relative to other climate drivers. Spatial proximity correlation and watershed feature regression both showed promise as methods for estimation of model parameters in ungaged watersheds. The model was also contextualized with regards to the influential Budyko curve./nThis research demonstrated that a parsimonious and interpretable model was capable of describing the annual water balance for the diverse hydrologic conditions across California. By focusing on the analysis of many watersheds over long timeframes it was possible to characterize and interpret broad trends and patterns that influence the water balance in MC regions.

Advisor: Hunt, James R
The Life of Shari'a

This dissertation is a conceptual inquiry about Shari’a exploring distinct and yet interrelated dimensions of the revealed law of Islam: (i) political, (ii) spiritual, (iii) ethical, (iv) epistemic and (v) rational. These dimensions are studied from the perspective of Sunni Islam in revolutionary and post-revolutionary Egypt on the basis of a fieldwork conducted in Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo in 2012-2014, as well as of works by classical and contemporary Islamic scholars./nThis study of Shari’a is guided by the following questions: What kind of political subjectivity is enabled by Islamic jurisprudence when dealing with revolutionary protests, power, and order? What kind of spirituality is entailed by Shari’a rules? To what extent is Shari’a a kind of law distinct from contemporary state law that gives shape to a form of ethical life based on the relationship between acts of worship and social interactions? Under what epistemic conditions does revealed speech call for deeds? How does the Islamic legal episteme involve the use of reason in relationship to revelation?/nThis dissertation shows that any attempt to deepen our understanding of Shari’a and the epistemic and cultural practices associated with it requires the study not only of jurisprudence (fiqh) and the sources of jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) but also of other forms of knowledge such as Sufism, theology (kalam), and philosophy and the ways in which they are intertwined with the revealed law. It brings to light the epistemic language and the evidential regime displayed in shared assumptions and agreements between Islamic scholars versed in these disciplines as much as in disagreements between them./nIn the light of this research, this dissertation reconsiders several theses which have been influential in the study of Shari’a. First, it reassesses the claim that Shari’a should be studied merely as a juridical law enforced by a central authority. Second, it revisits the thesis of Shari’a’s demise in modern times. Third, it recasts the thesis according to which Shari’a is set in opposition to spirituality, ethics, philosophy and rationality. Finally, if modernity is understood as the regime of separation of between knowledge, religion, law, ethics and politics understood as autonomous spheres within the modern polity, then my dissertation is an invitation to question this normative assumption and to think about the intertwinement of all these dimensions in Islam.

Advisor: Pandolfo, Stefania
Convection and Gravity Waves in the Tropical Atmosphere

Moist convective clouds play a key role in the earth's energy and water cycles, but their turbulent and localized nature makes it difficult to study how they interact with the large-scale atmospheric circulation. In this dissertation, we study the interaction between convection and the large-scale tropical atmosphere in two ways. First, we develop simple analytical models for how convection interacts with large-scale circulations in the tropical atmosphere. These models are primarily based on a traditional-but-crude approximation of gravity wave dynamics, in which the tropopause is assumed to be a rigid lid. We test these models in cloud-resolving numerical simulations of a small patch of tropical atmosphere and determine that some of these methods pass a simple test of self-consistency, but are far from perfect./nAlternately, we take a more sophisticated analytical approach-- instead of using the traditional rigid lid model of the tropical atmosphere, we derive novel analytical solutions for pulses of buoyancy (a crude representation of the effects of convective clouds) in an atmosphere with both a troposphere and a stratosphere. This construction allows wave energy to realistically radiate out of the troposphere. We find that allowing wave energy to radiate out of the troposphere causes buoyancy anomalies in the troposphere to decay on timescales of hours to days, in stark contrast to the rigid lid model, which predicts that buoyancy anomalies persist forever in the absence of dissipation.

Advisor: Romps, David M
An Integrated Multilevel Converter with Sigma Delta Control for LED Lighting

High brightness LEDs have become a mainstream lighting technology due to their efficiency, life span, and environmental benefits. As such, the lighting industry values LED drivers with low cost, small form factor, and long life span. Additional specifications that define a high quality LED driver are high efficiency, high power factor, wide-range dimming, minimal flicker, and a galvanically isolated output. The flyback LED driver is a popular topology that satisfies all these specifications, but it requires a bulky and costly flyback transformer. In addition, its passive methods for cancelling AC power ripple require electrolytic capacitors, which have been known to have life span issues. This dissertation details the design, construction, and verification of a novel LED driver that satisfies all the specifications. In addition, it does not require a flyback transformer or electrolytic capacitors, thus marking an improvement over the flyback driver on size, cost, and life span./nThis dissertation presents an integrated circuit (IC) LED driver, which features a pair of generalized multilevel converters that are controlled via sigma-delta modulation. The first is a multilevel rectifier responsible for power factor correction (PFC) and dimming. The PFC rectifier employs a second order sigma-delta loop to precisely control the input current harmonics and amplitude. The second is a bidirectional multilevel inverter used to cancel AC power ripple from the DC bus. This ripple-cancellation module transfers energy to and from a storage capacitor. It uses a first order sigma-delta loop with a preprogrammed waveform to swing the storage capacitor voltage. The system also contains an output stage that powers the LEDs with DC and provides for galvanic isolation. The output stage consists of an H-bridge stack that connects to the output through a small toroid transformer./nThe IC LED driver was simulated and prototyped on an ABCD silicon test chip. Testing and verification indicates functional performance for all the modules in the LED driver. The driver exhibits moderate efficiency at half voltage. Although the part was only testable to half voltage, loss models predict that its efficiency would be much higher at full voltage. The driver also meets specifications on the line current harmonics and ripple cancellation./nThis dissertation introduces multilevel circuit techniques to the IC and LED research space. The prototype's functional performance indicates that integrated multilevel converters are a viable topology for lighting and other similar applications.

Advisor: Sanders, Seth R
Setting Out (Again): Ethnographic Deliverance in Malawi

The following is an experimental work of anthropology in the form of an ethnovella, a work informed from experiences that brought me to the field site for my dissertation research, a relatively small Pentecostal-charismatic ministry in Southern Malawi in 2011-2012. It takes seriously the ethical and epistemological demand made upon all persons who enter Pentecostal-charismatic scenes in search of breakthroughs: namely, to submit themselves narratively in the form of testimony as a precondition for the kind of inquiry generated within the space of the congregation. In doing so, it interrogates presumptions made with regard to ethnographic practice and representation, demonstrating that a work of anthropology can sometimes operate alongside ethnography. Ultimately a non-linear, narrative performance that attempts to evoke an ontology of deliverance that an ethnography to come will hope to enunciate, this dissertation relies on memory and creativity to account for an ethnographic fiction, in the truest sense of the term. At a moment in the discipline when new forms and accounts are finally being offered their place in the long wake of a crisis of representation, this dissertation is a contribution to fresh experiments in ethnographic writing (e.g., Pandian and McLean, eds. 2017) within the context of a revitalized anthropology of becoming (e.g., Biehl and Locke, eds. 2017), one which attempts to express what I have referred to elsewhere as “the joyfulness in prefiguration’ (Price 2016). In this regard, the work is, like most works of anthropology, provisional—only more radically so, by design.

Advisor: Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
Picasso by Stein

Picasso by Stein contains five sections and a postscript that are structurally linked by, and radiating widely from, Gertrude Stein’s 1938 booklet Picasso. The booklet originally was written and published in French (an exceptional endeavor for Stein) and then translated to English by Alice Toklas and significantly re-edited by Stein. This dissertation offers a comparative study of the French and English publications as well as considers the role and function of art criticism and biographical writing within Stein’s oeuvre, particularly in how they overlap with or become part of her broader poetic project./nRather than reading Picasso to glean express information on Pablo Picasso’s art, or to correlate Stein’s projects with Picasso’s in order to explicate, or to add luster, to her writing, I argue that Stein figures the rise of modern art, illustrated through Picasso, as the development of a language-based and ultimately poetic thinking in pictures. Stein’s insights into Picasso’s achievements – with her studies ranging from Young Girl With a Basket of Flowers (1905) to Guernica (1938) – are as necessary to understanding his role in modern art as the writings of Guillaume Apollinaire and David-Henry Kahnweiler, and they direct us to the foundational, but often overlooked, presence of poetry in the trajectory of twentieth and twenty-first century art. Further, they foreshadow critical insights on abstraction and semiotics made in later art writing, such as those by Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois. I propose that in writing about Picasso, Stein in fact writes about poetry (including, of course, her own poetry) as a conceptualist force: how it frames, re-frames, our perceptual procedures and capacities; how it provide us with experimental and expansive models of seeing and reading, or what Stein calls “direct vision;” and ultimately how it provides us with models for producing opposition against dominant structures of identification and interpretation. This sense of the genre as a both a perceptual and persuasive mode, rather than a set of fixed forms, underlies Stein’s crucial legacy in American avant-garde writing – illustrated here through citations of the ways Stein has been read by, or demonstrates clear affinity to, contemporary writers such as David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Jamaica Kincaid, Harryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Bob Perelman, Lisa Robertson, and Juliana Spahr./nStein’s notion of “direct vision” becomes an imperative in the context of the booklet’s composition, which occurs at the cusp of war. Ultimately I read in Stein the potential for an ethical dimension to formalist readings; this places her art writing between Friedrich Nietzsche’s call for “reading as an art” in On the Genealogy of Morality and recent theorizations of how aesthetic experience might establish the organizing principles of social and political experience.

Advisor: Altieri, Charles
Diplomacy and Empire in the Age of Charles V: Johannes Dantiscus in Spain, 1519-1532

This dissertation describes the culture and practices of Early Modern European diplomats in their work, their travels, and the personal networks they developed to help them with both. The protagonist of this study is Johannes Dantiscus, Polish-Lithuanian ambassador to the Court of Charles V in Spain; his experience shows the integration of Eastern Europe into the Northern Renaissance and its diplomatic culture. Because of a shared concern about Ottoman power—for Poland this threat was located in the Balkans and the east, for Spain and Italy, it was in the Mediterranean—Dantiscus participated in an influential circle of courtiers around Imperial Chancellor Mercurino Gattinara which developed a vision of empire for Charles V that began in opposition to the perceived Turkish menace and expanded to include the whole world. Early modern advancements in organization and communication allowed one ruler, for the first time since the fall of Rome, to reach that far. The language these diplomats used in the imagination of such a universalizing polity came from both the classical Roman and Medieval Christian traditions. However, the other European powers, especially King Francis I of France, opposed it, preferring to ally with the Muslim Turks than to support Catholic Charles. In the following centuries, both the desire for far-flung empires and the mutual rivalry of European rulers shaped the development of statecraft and global history of the modern age. Therefore, the Early Modern State—from sprawling empires to circumscribed city-states—had roots in a pan-European, Renaissance humanist culture and also a Christian effort that minimized borders aiming at the triumph of a shared Christendom united behind the emperor.

Advisor: Dandelet, Thomas J
Compositional Stability, Performance, and Safety Certification of Interconnected Systems

Modern computational tools for stability, performance, and safety certification are not scalable to large nonlinear systems. In this dissertation we propose a compositional analysis approach that takes advantage of the interconnected structure of many modern large-scale systems to solve this problem. Specifically, we pose the certification problem as a distributed optimization that searches over the input-output properties of each subsystem to certify a desired property of the interconnected system. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), a popular distributed optimization technique, is employed to decompose and solve this problem./nThis approach is very general in that it allows us to search over a wide range of input-output properties for each subsystem. We demonstrate the use of dissipativity, equilibrium independent dissipativity (EID), and integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) to characterize the properties of the individual subsystems and the entire interconnection. Multiple examples showing the applicability and scalability of the approach are presented./nFurthermore, we demonstrate how symmetries in the interconnection topology can be exploited to further improve the computational efficiency and scalability of the distributed optimization problem. Unlike other symmetry reduction techniques this approach does not require the subsystems to be identical, but only to share input-output properties. Thus, it can be applied to many real world systems. We demonstrate these reduction techniques on a large-scale nonlinear example and a vehicle platoon example./nFinally, we present a passivity-based formation control strategy for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperatively carrying a suspended load. This strategy is designed such that the input-output properties of the individual UAVs and the interconnection structure guarantee stability of the system under appropriate conditions. Specifically, we show that the system is stable for any configurations where the cables carrying the suspended load are in tension.

Advisor: Packard, Andrew