VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Writing love and agency [electronic resource] : narrative revisions in the academic and life texts of high school youth

This dissertation presents the self-narratives and academic texts of four high school students who engage in the work of revision. It is also my attempt to translate between theory and practice in my high school classroom. Over the course of a literacy curriculum that builds around Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, students write their way through a series of narratives and essays that they develop around themes of narrative truth, family relationships, defeat and agency, and personal and collective struggle. By focusing first on the topic of love, students attempt to identify their surface stories and the more internal stories that drive them, and consider how well these stories are serving them. In some cases, students are able to shift their interpretation and framing of life experience to a more agentic tone and outlook. As they consider revisions to their self-narratives, they reconsider their readings of Morrison's novel and its characters, as their academic writings reveal. The curriculum develops within the classroom social context over the two years that the students and I work together, as they increasingly grow to share their views and writing with one another. Implicit in students' ways of thinking about life challenge is their relationship with education and school. Students' evolving views of reading, writing and education that surface in their writings, interviews and class discussions, emerge throughout the dissertation.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Lunsford Andrea A.
McDermott Ray (Raymond Patrick)
Lotan Rachel A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Nasir Na'ilah Suad advisor. Thesis advisor
Yeast and chemostats, balls and urns [electronic resource] : two comments on the dynamics of adaptive evolution

Kao & Sherlock (2008) present three-color data on yeast evolutionary dynamics. Four of their experiments depict one hundred million yeast cells; four depict one billion yeast cells. Each shows the adaptive evolution of an initially neutral population for about five hundred generations. Each cell in their experimental populations fluoresces one of three colors (red, yellow, or green). Their data show subpopulations so-defined evolving through time. Our work deals with the Wright-Fisher model (Fisher 1922; Wright 1931) and its use in modeling the Kao-Sherlock data (2008). In particular we use the model in an attempt to approximate the adaptive characteristics of the subpopulations that underlie the red, yellow, and green Kao-Sherlock subpopulations. We introduce our work on these data in Chapter 2. Specifically, we describe the data in detail and review the model and its continuous time approximation. We also review briefly previous work pertinent to our work here. Chapter 3 deals with two mathematical features of the Wright-Fisher model. We bound the means of certain stopping times relating to the process. Such bounds show that the process with selection spends little time in the central part of its domain; it spends most of its time near the boundaries of such. We then discuss approximating the mean of the process with selection. We show how typical calculations break down and discuss the assumptions underlying our approximation. Chapter 4 then applies the results of Chapter 3 to the Kao-Sherlock yeast data. We discuss issues relating to data fitting and parameter estimation and arrive at an approach based on sequential non-linear regressions. We give our results in the context of additional recent results by Kvitek & Sherlock (unpublished) and discuss pros and cons relating to in silico versus experimental approaches. In the end each informs the other. Model-based results allow the direct comparison of assumptions and outcomes. In Chapter 5 we consider an urn model of simplified adaptive dynamics. Imagine an urn containing one ball. On closer inspection we see that it has a "0" printed on it. We select the ball from the urn. Seeing the "0" we return it to the urn along with a new "1" ball. We repeat this indefinitely. At each step we: 1. Select a ball at random from the urn making a mental note of its number; 2. Throw the selected ball back into the urn and then add a brand-new ball. The new ball sports a number one greater than that on the selected ball. In Chapter 5 we derive bounds for the expected dynamics of this process. In addition, we take pains to build a tenuous connection between this process and the process underlying our conception of adaptive evolution. We close by suggesting several possible interesting research directions involving urn models in population genetics.

Keywords: Statistics
Advisor: Siegmund David
Tang Hua (Geneticist) advisor. Thesis advisor
Zhang Nancy R. (Nancy Ruonan) advisor. Thesis advisor
3D modeling with data-driven suggestions [electronic resource]

Creating detailed three-dimensional shapes on the computer is hard. The standard tools for the task are complex and require long training and familiarization. As a result, 3D modeling is typically the domain of the professional artist and not the casual user. Professionals invest the time to master their tools, but such tools are usually restricted to low-level sculpting operations. High-level reasoning and geometric manipulation, of which computers are well capable, are not used to help the artist reach her goals more efficiently or creatively. In this dissertation, I propose techniques by which computers, endowed with a greater understanding of the structure of shapes, can both support the creative pursuits of professionals, as well as significantly ease the burden of 3D modeling for the casual user. To this end, I describe methods for generating "suggestions" during the 3D modeling process: component shapes that may be directly used to augment the currently-modeled shape, or to inspire directions for its further development. These suggestions are drawn from a large library of previously-modeled shapes. Also, I discuss the construction of an assembly-based modeling tool that enables casual users to rapidly construct shapes from suggested components, with minimal training. Experiments with both professional and casual users suggest that this approach successfully supports rapid, creative 3D modeling.

Advisor: Koltun Vladlen
Guibas Leonidas J. advisor. Thesis advisor
Levoy Marc advisor. Thesis advisor
3D velocity and scalar field diagnostics using magnetic resonance imaging with applications in film-cooling [electronic resource]

A new Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) technique was developed to measure the three-dimensional, time-averaged scalar concentration distributions in turbulent mixing applications. The diagnostic was initially developed and tested in a turbulent free shear layer experiment where it was validated using planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) experiments. The remainder of the study examined a three-dimensional mixing flow motivated by trailing edge film cooling of an aircraft gas turbine blade. A modern slotted trailing edge cutback geometry was added in which coolant was discharged from rectangular slots separated by tapered lands. Water, and water with copper sulfate were the working fluids, and the MR-based experiments were conducted at Reynolds numbers based on airfoil chord and bulk velocity from 100,000-250,000. The magnetic resonance concentration (MRC) technique was further refined in the film cooling apparatus to reduce the uncertainty to under 6.0% in concentration and to provide robust measurement of the surface concentration. Combined magnetic resonance velocimetry (MRV) and MRC measurements were acquired for a generic trailing edge cutback geometry. The effect of variations in the blowing ratio and Reynolds number were examined. Reynolds number was found to have no significant effect while the variations in blowing ratio produced relatively small changes. Combined MRV and MRC data sets were analyzed in detail for insight into the mean flow structures primarily responsible for rapid mixing of the mainstream and coolant flows. Longitudinal vortices formed inside the slot feed channels and at the edges of the lands played a critical role as did the separation bubble behind the slot lip. Three modifications to the breakout geometry were designed with the goal of minimizing the adverse effects of these flow structures. Performance improvements with the redesigned trailing edge geometries indicate as much as a 40% improvement in the averaged surface effectiveness using a non-dimensional performance parameter.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering
Advisor: Eaton John K. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Iaccarino Gianluca advisor. Thesis advisor
Santiago Juan G. advisor. Thesis advisor
60 GHz 4-Element RF beamforming receiver array [electronic resource]

Mm-wave technology is attractive for non-destructive high resolution imaging, high data rate communication, and automobile radar applications. For example, the large available bandwidth at the unlicensed 60 GHz band can potentially support up to 7 Gb/s in IEEE 802.11ad. However, one fundamental problem in mm-wave technology is the high signal path loss. Multiple-antenna arrays can be exploited to compensate for this drawback. Since CMOS technology has evolved to a stage where its performance is comparable to the traditional III-V compound semiconductor counterpart, low cost, lower power design and integration of an mm-wave wireless circuit in CMOS technology has become feasible. In this work, we first characterize the on-chip passive elements and active elements in a 65-nm CMOS technology. Slotted ground CPW and MSL lines are proposed which provide high Q ($> 20$) performance or flexible design capabilities. Two low noise amplifiers (LNA) with and without cascode devices are implemented and compared. The LNA without the cascode device turns out to be a better option. It is shown that the cascode device will degrade noise figure, bandwith, and linearity. The noise figure without the cascode device is only 3.8 dB with 16.2 dB gain at 59 GHz, 8.7 GHz bandwidth, and 8.3 mA current consumption under the 1 V supply. A 4-element RF beamforming receiver front end with four off-chip antennas is implemented in 65-nm CMOS. The front end is digitally controlled and based on the proposed phase oversampling vector modulation (POVM) method. The receiver front end includes 4 LNAs, 4 POVMs, and power combining networks. Four off-chip antennas are wire bonded to the receiver. Different substrate materials are experimented and compared for the antenna design, including RO4003, FR4, and RT5880 materials. Compared to start-of-the-art work, we achieve high phase resolution ( .5^o$), very low NF (5.6 dB) with high gain (18.5 dB) for the beamformer at 56 GHz, and demonstrate truly spatial power combining and beam steering by using antennas. Compared with the conventional exhaustive lookup table method, the proposed POVM uses a semi-lookup table method. It uses a very small lookup table consisting of $\emph{only}$ basic oversampling vectors, and utilizes the linearity characteristics to adaptively select the weighting coefficients to compensate for the non-idealities in circuits, antenna array, and interfaces.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Poon Ada Shuk Yan
Wong S. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Wooley Bruce A.
Accelerating chemical similarity search using GPUs and metric embeddings [electronic resource]

Fifteen years ago, the advent of modern high-throughput sequencing revolutionized computational genetics with a flood of data. Today, high-throughput biochemical assays promise to make biochemistry the next data-rich domain for machine learning. However, existing computational methods, built for small analyses of about 1,000 molecules, do not scale to emerging multi-million molecule datasets. For many algorithms, pairwise similarity comparisons between molecules are a critical bottleneck, presenting a 1,000x-1,000,000x scaling barrier. In this dissertation, I describe the design of SIML and PAPER, our GPU implementations of 2D and 3D chemical similarities, as well as SCISSORS, our metric embedding algorithm. On a model problem of interest, combining these techniques allows up to 274,000x speedup in time and up to 2.8 million-fold reduction in space while retaining excellent accuracy. I further discuss how these high-speed techniques have allowed insight into chemical shape similarity and the behavior of machine learning kernel methods in the presence of noise.

Advisor: Pande Vijay primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Altman Russ advisor. Thesis advisor
Koller Daphne advisor. Thesis advisor
Achieving collision avoidance and fairness in CSMA-based wireless mesh networks [electronic resource]

CSMA-based wireless mesh networks are vulnerable to collisions. Even a single unicast flow can exhibit excessive collisions from hidden terminals. Furthermore, fairness objectives for single-hop networks can cause undesirable behaviors for mesh networks. Mesh networks of wireless sensors suffer from undesirable protocol interactions due to these challenges. Inter-protocol collisions and unfair channel usage between protocols cause the behavior of one protocol to change depending on other protocols. These inter-protocol interactions complicate the design of large sensor network systems. Motivated by these problems, this dissertation presents grant-to-send, a novel collision avoidance mechanism for wireless mesh networks. Rather than announce packets it intends to send, a node using grant-to-send announces packets it expects to hear others send. This dissertation provides evidence that inverting collision avoidance in this way greatly improves wireless mesh performance without significant overhead. Grant-to-send is simple to implement, and is compatible with existing hardware. Grant-to-send is also general enough to replace protocol-specific collision avoidance mechanisms common to sensor network protocols. While these individual mechanisms only avoid intra-protocol collisions, grant-to-send provides a MAC mechanism which can address both intra- and inter-protocol collisions. This dissertation also proposes a fairness scheme for mesh networks, which can be applied to protocol fairness. The fairness scheme combines and modifies traditional flow-based fairness techniques such as fair queueing and fair scheduling. However, the complexities of wireless make these mechanisms insufficient by themselves. This dissertation therefore proposes two new mechanisms that address these limitations, channel decay and fair cancellation, and shows that the fairness scheme can significantly improve protocol fairness. Together, this dissertation shows that achieving collision avoidance and fairness can make mesh networks perform better, more reliable, and thus easier to design.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Levis Philip primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Katti Sachin advisor. Thesis advisor
Tobagi Fouad A.
Acquisition of sociolinguistic knowledge in a Mandarin-English dual immersion school [electronic resource]

As children acquire language and encounter new speakers and linguistic situations, they also acquire the knowledge of sociolinguistic variation necessary to achieve communicative competence (Romaine 1984). When children enter school, they encounter new speakers, a new set of linguistic situations and styles, and sometimes new language varieties or even entirely new languages. Children's exposure to new languages is particularly intense in language immersion models; in the dual-language immersion model, students dominant in different languages interact in the same classroom, and spend time learning in each language. The "dual" in dual-language simplifies the more complex reality of many such programs, in which multiple varieties of languages are in fact present (Rubinstein-Avila 2002). In dual-language immersion classrooms where teachers and students speak a range of dialects, participants must learn to negotiate between varieties as well as between languages. The present study seeks to investigate what sociolinguistic knowledge children can acquire in the early elementary school years of a Mandarin-English dual-language immersion program, by examining how sociolinguistic meaning is reflected and negotiated in the linguistic practice and metalinguistic discourse of members of the school community. This question is addressed through ethnographic and quantitative analysis of teacher and student language use, corrective feedback, and other metalinguistic discourse. The present research draws on data from a year-long participant-observation study of first-grade and second-grade classes (ages 5-8) at a Mandarin-English dual-language immersion program in the United States. Analysis of language use and metalinguistic discourse at the school establishes that, rather than simply imitating the speech of their teachers or classmates, students in the early elementary grades can make use of sociolinguistic information present in stylistic variation and metalinguistic discourse to target and acquire a variety distinct from that used by the speakers around them. This analysis of the variation present in a dual-language immersion school setting also suggests that the sociolinguistic information present in classrooms is more rich and varied than has been previously assumed, and equips students to competently navigate a range of linguistic situations.

Keywords: Linguistics
Advisor: Eckert Penelope primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Clark Eve V. advisor. Thesis advisor
Rickford John R.
Action and knowledge [electronic resource]

This dissertation mounts a defense of the claim, made by Elizabeth Anscombe in her monograph Intention, that when an agent is acting intentionally, he knows what he is intentionally doing immediately---without observation or inference. We can separate out three elements, which build on each other, in this claim: the agent is acting, is acting intentionally, and has knowledge of what he is doing. The progress of the dissertation roughly follows this rough division. The first two chapters are concerned with articulating what is at stake in the characterization of an agent as acting. Since someone can be doing something without its being the case that she will have done it, and the knowledge claim concerns the doing rather than the having done of an action, we should first of all investigate what is predicated of someone who is said to be underway toward an end. I begin in the first chapter at a further remove from intentional action, with an investigation of not necessarily agential process-claims in general; the second chapter begins the transition to acting intentionally be applying the considerations of the first to the agential context. The third and fourth chapters explicitly turn to acting intentionally. The third begins by addressing an argument meant to establish that intentional action is compatible with ignorance of what one is doing, and in doing so formulates a criterion for performing non-basic actions intentionally. The fourth chapter takes up teleologically basic actions and supplements the criterion of the third to give a sufficient and necessary condition on acting intentionally. The final pair of chapters addresses the knowledge element of the claim. In the fifth, I articulate the concern that the nature of action is such as to render it only knowable theoretically, and examine several theories that attempt to account for knowledge of action observationally or inferentially. This concern is viable in the context of the causal theory of action; in the sixth chapter, I endorse in its place a metaphysically modest teleological theory. With that in place, space is opened up for a neo-expressivist account of knowledge of intention in action, which, when combined with the results of the preceding chapters, redeems the knowledge claim.

Keywords: Philosophy
Advisor: Bratman Michael primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hills David James
Hussain Nadeem J. Z. advisor. Thesis advisor
Lawlor Krista advisor. Thesis advisor
Adaptive decision making in information networks [electronic resource]

The goal of this thesis is to develop techniques that enable us to analyze network precesses in which nodes of the network make decisions based on local and limited information. Such processes arise naturally in many information networks such as the World Wide Web (WWW), online social networks, and sensor networks. First we study a stochastic version of the online bipartite matching problem in which the sequence of arrivals are i.i.d samples of a given distribution. We use the ideas of offline statistics and adaptivity to give the first algorithm for this problem that improves the 1 − 1/e competitive ratio of the celebrated algorithm by Karp, Vazirani, and Vazirani, for the stochastic version in its general form. We also model and study the evolution of cooperation in populations with local interactions. Every node of the network corresponds on an individual choosing whether to cooperate or defect in a repeated prisoner's dilemma game. The players try to learn the best action by imitating those neighbors who have higher payoffs. We show that when the interactions take place on graphs with large girth, cooperation is more likely to emerge as a result of local clustering of cooperators. We also consider the practical problem of constructing well-connected sensor networks by locally moving the sensors. We design decentralized algorithms in which sensors identify the critical edges and then move in directions that improve connectivity in more critical regions. In our algorithms, nodes determine their movement direction only with local information exchange with their neighbors.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Saberi Amin primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Johari Ramesh
Montanari Andrea advisor. Thesis advisor