VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cinematic languages and the unrealized film projects of Sergei Eisenstein

This dissertation investigates a series of incomplete film projects initiated by Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein between the years 1927 and 1933. Its purpose is to consider the value, both aesthetically and theoretically, of the materials used by Eisenstein in the generation, elaboration, communication, and exploitation of cinematic ideas that for a variety of reasons were never able to be filmed. Through a thorough analysis of archival materials, Eisenstein's published works, and secondary literature, I suggest that these incomplete films, far from being failures, instead represent a glimpse into a creative process yet unbounded by the practical considerations of actual film production, and can be read as utopian attempts to further develop Eisenstein's personal cinema aesthetic as well as that of the medium in general. In Chapter One, I analyze the external similarities of the Capital (1928--29) and Glass House (1927--30) projects and their shared film-theoretical mandate to develop the possibilities of intellectual cinema—in the domains of vision and cognition. I demonstrate here how their cinematic execution would have required new, and ultimately impossible, film languages for both camera and page. In Chapter Two, I consider the evolution of Eisenstein's theoretical assumptions about the sound film and development of the ideas of audiovisual counterpoint and the internal monologue. I analyze the two resulting "American" screenplays and the novels from which they were adapted: Sutter's Gold (1930), based on the novel L'Or by Blaise Cendrars, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1930). Eisenstein reworks the ideological fabric of these literary works and uses audio to both deepen the sensual atmosphere of the action and complicate the psychology of the central characters. In Chapter Three, I address the demand from above for a new form of Soviet comedy and its influence on the origins of the incomplete project MMM (1932--33), analyzing the strange textual structure, verse form, and content of the script. An unbounded plasticity of bodily boundaries and shapes arises in the script and leads to a climax in which Eisenstein uses the mechanical devices of cinema production to penetrate into the human body. The intention of this study is to formulate an approach to the unfinished Eisenstein work, modeled as an opportunity to look deeply into the process of cinema creation. In introducing new information on this canonical Russian artist and thinker, I argue for an understanding of the cinematic work as a syncretic collection of evolving written and visual forms and demonstrate the value of what is produced around the cinema—its literary apparatuses and graphic generators. I propose that such a view of cinema as a multiform process, segmented into many stages, can allow the part—the unrealized film—to stand in for the illusory whole of the completed work.

Keywords: Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Advisor: Jakovljević Branislav 
Skakov Nariman
Greenleaf Monika
Oeler Karla
CO₂ utilization via carbonate-promoted C--H carboxylation and CO₂ hydrogenation

With the CO2 level in the atmosphere at 400 ppm and rising, finding new and efficient ways to recycle this greenhouse gas is of paramount importance. Most previous efforts have focused on converting CO2 to low-value C1 compounds such as CO, formic acid, methanol and methane. The use of CO2 as a feedstock for the synthesis of multi-carbon compounds is advantageous because these targets generally have higher value and greater energy density. The key chemical challenge is to form C--C bonds to CO2 without using energy-intensive reagents. Here we describe a novel carboxylation reaction in which a C--H bond and CO2 are transformed into a carboxylate (C--CO2--) using alkali carbonates as a promoter, in absence of any catalyst or solvent. Alkali carbonate salts are capable of deprotonating C--H bonds that are ordinarily weak acids (pKa> 40 in organic solvent) to generate carbanions (C--) at intermediate temperatures (200-360 °C). In the presence of CO2, the carbanions react rapidly to form carboxylates. The chemistry has been applied in the synthesis of 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA) from 2-furoic acid, which can readily be made from lignocellulose. FDCA is an attractive green replacement for fossil fuel-derived terephthalic acid, used in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) polymer synthesis. Based on the above-described approach of C--C bond formation, we also demonstrate that a mixture of alkali carbonate, CO2 and H2 can be readily converted to formate, oxalate and other C2+ carboxylates like acetate, propionate and succinate. The reaction occurs at intermediate temperature and pressure and requires H2O vapor for hydrating the carbonate salt. Isotopic labelling studies are consistent with a mechanism that proceeds by a series of H2 and C--H deprotonations to form H-- and C-centred nucleophiles that undergo H--C and C--C bond formations.

Keywords: Chemistry.
Advisor: Kanan Matthew William
Stack T. (T. Daniel P.)
Wandless Thomas
Coherent pattern identification in fluid flows

The motion of complex fluid flows, and material advection in them, can be understood though the identification and analysis of persistent transport features in the flow. These features, often referred to as coherent structures, act as a robust framework of material surfaces that separate the flow into distinct regions which resist mixing with surrounding regions. Understanding the evolution of these structures is a critical step in identifying the mechanisms underlying fluid transport. Material transport is central to many geophysical flow phenomena, such as the development of marine ecosystems, and the spread of pollutants including volcanic ash and oil. However, many of the techniques currently available for measuring such flows, including tracking arrays of Lagrangian drifters (e.g. ocean surface drifters and weather balloons), result in sparse and spatially irregular velocity data. This is insufficient for the use of many coherent structure detection algorithms, which rely on an assumption of initially closely-spaced fluid tracers. Additionally, current methods often focus on determination of the full boundaries of coherent sets, whereas in practice, it is often more valuable and practical to identify the complete set of trajectories that are coherent with an individual trajectory of interest. Motivated by the successes in using coherent structure analysis to study transport, and considering the limitations of measuring large-scale geophysical flows, this work details the development of an algorithm for detecting coherent patterns from potentially sparse Lagrangian flow trajectories. The method, based on principles from graph coloring and unsupervised machine learning, groups trajectories based on a measure of pairwise dissimilarity between their displacement patterns. Through the use of several analytical and experimental validation cases, this method detects coherent flow patterns using significantly less data than is required by existing techniques. Consideration of less optimal groupings of trajectories also allows for the detection of all trajectories coherent with a chosen trajectory of interest. Due to the robustness of the coherent patterns to effects such as chaotic advection, the flow structures identified prove useful in the assimilation of Lagrangian trajectory data into models of geophysical flows. Importantly, although the method is demonstrated here in the context of fluid flow kinematics, the generality of the approach allows for its potential application to other unsupervised clustering problems in dynamical systems.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Dabiri John O. (John Oluseun)
Darve Eric 
Ouellette Nicholas (Nicholas Testroet)
Saberi Amin
College of Last Chance: Latinx Students and the Community College System

Growing up, the local community college, notoriously re-named “College of Last Chance,” was never any of my peer’s dream school, but by decision day, most high school seniors were enrolled. The Latinx community college experience is one that is highly stigmatized through existing literature and quantitative data on attendance and retention rates, and even through misconceptions about the institution that are unaware of its history and place in communities. Very often, community college is seen as the final opportunity for students to change their life trajectory a Last Chance. While this framing highlights the overall disparity that exists within the community college system, it does not fully encapsulate the complexities of the Latinx community college student experience. In my thesis, I argue that educational outcomes that are often framed as products of individual behaviors, such as working hard and following the rules, must be understood as institutionalized phenomena, such that our theory of change should focus on restructuring institutions rather than simply modifying individual behaviors. Through my methodology, I highlight the need to center this type of research on those that are most influenced and affected: Latinx students, both past and present. My research takes into account the lived experiences of 10 Latinx community college students that have attended, left, or transferred out of the College of Last Chance, and also considers their ideas to improve the system that most affects them. Through my analysis, I conclude that Latinx students must be understood in the context of their historical disposition, rather than individuals separate from outside influences. Furthermore, community colleges, like the College of Last Chance, are building a space for students to succeed through their social equity efforts, but cannot do it alone. The responsibility lies in the institutions extending from community colleges to four-year institutions, local cities or townships, and beyond.

Keywords: Community college
Latinx
Latinos
Higher education
Disparities
Low-income
Disenfranchised
Meritocracy
Barriers
Family
Illinois
Free education
Focus groups
Embodied knowledge
System justification
Thesis
Colonial pasts, future cities : urban heritage advocacy in post-authoritarian Indonesia

In cities across Indonesia, the tangible traces of Dutch colonial rule are drawing the attention of an eclectic group of academics, activists, and artists, who now advocate vigorously for these crumbling buildings and aging infrastructures to be treasured as "heritage." This dissertation explores this emergent phenomenon, which I term "urban heritage advocacy, " as one that can offer critical insights into wider debates regarding colonialism and postcolonialism, urban development and urban governance, and the political and social sea-changes that post-Reformasi Indonesia has undergone since the fall of authoritarian rule in 1998. Drawing upon extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Semarang, Central Java, urban heritage advocacy is shown here to shape not only the material fabric of the neighborhoods now designated as heritage sites, but also to produce new forms of citizenship, re-negotiate the relationship between civil society and state authority, and profoundly impact the lives of the city's most marginalized inhabitants. Throughout, I argue that heritage furnishes Indonesia's newly-energized middle-classes with the opportunity and means to order and re-order the world around them, while also constraining the lives and livelihoods of the urban poor with whom they share this rapidly-changing cityscape.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Meskell Lynn 
Ebron Paulla A.
Inoue Miyako
Kusno Abidin
Combining algorithms and humans for large-scale data integration

The number of enterprises that exploit the data they collect in their decision making processes has been rapidly growing. A fundamental component to achieve this goal, is data integration, the process of combining and unifying data from multiple sources. Through data integration, an enterprise can find the underlying types of entities and entity attributes in the collected data, and map the data to those types and attributes. Enterprises expect constant improvements in the quality of the data integration outcome. At the same time, the volume and diversity of the collected data increases at a fast pace, as enterprises decide to monitor and collect data from more of their operations or other external sources. To satisfy the quality-improvement requirements, human involvement in data integration has been proposed and applied in the last years: the main idea is to use human intelligence in tasks that require the understanding of data semantics or involve data containing images, video, or natural language. In this thesis, we study approaches for different data integration tasks that combine machine algorithms and human intelligence. In particular, we focus on three data integration tasks: entity resolution, top-k item detection, and data aggregation. In entity resolution, for each underlying entity in a set of records (e.g., peoples' face images), the goal is to create one cluster containing only the records that refer to the same entity (e.g., same person). In top-k item detection, the input is a set of records (e.g., restaurant images) and the goal is to find the top-k records based on some criteria (e.g., how nice the restaurant looks in the image). In data aggregation, the goal is to create a summary of some input content (e.g., 5-minute summary of a 2-hour movie or summary of the main points in the reviews for a movie or product). The approaches we develop, provide solutions to a spectrum of challenges that hybrid machine-human, data-integration approaches face. Furthermore, our approaches provide significant performance, accuracy, and monetary-cost gains compared to state-of-the-art alternatives. The gains come from efficiently solving a number of fundamental problems for hybrid data-integration approaches: a) combining human errors with machine algorithm errors, b) selecting the best questions to ask humans, c) selecting between different interfaces for human questions, d) managing the resources available for human questions, e) preprocessing data before human curation is applied, and f) creating a context describing the whole dataset, to assist humans in accurately answering questions.

Advisor: Garcia-Molina Hector 
Bailis Peter 
Ré Christopher
Comics as a Literary Resource

The English Language Arts (ELA) classroom has evolved from a space for students to not only learn about general reading and writing skills, but to also gain prowess in articulating and backing up claims with textual evidence. With the recent adoption of the Common Core State Standards Initiatives by California (CCSSI), evidence-based claim-writing has become an essential component of the modern day ELA class. The adoption of CCSSI also comes at a time where student consumption of visual media outside of the classroom is at an extreme high-point. As a result of developments in technology and increasing access to a proliferation of media platforms, visual media consumption is leading to an increase in potential for visual literacy development for students. In order to engage students of this visually immersed generation, the employment of multimedia texts will be important in acknowledging the skills in visual literacy that students have developed outside of the classroom to be bridged towards evidence-based claim-writing. I am proposing that comics, as a genre of multimedia text, can bridge this gap between budding visual literacy and relevance towards the skills emphasized by the CCSSI for modern day ELA classrooms.
In order to see what effects comics have on student engagement, and whether comics can viably be integrated into a CCSSI classroom in order to improve claim-based evidence writing, I conducted a field study at Sequoia High School in Redwood City, California, in conjunction with an english teacher in a 9th grade English II Support Classroom. Over the course of two months, I made weekly visits to the classroom, creating comics-based assignments and lesson plans for students in conjunction with their classroom teacher to aid them in developing claim-writing skills for their final semester essay, which was to prove a claim about a group of characters in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I found that the use of comics as text allowed for a quantitative and qualitative increase in student textual engagement, and was conducive in aiding students generate original claim ideas and opinions about the text as well.

Keywords: Multimedia
comics
ELA
English language arts
high school students
Graduate School of Education
survey
Thesis
Advisor: Garcia Antero
Commodity crop expansion pathways and impacts in tropical forest regions of Africa and Asia

Tropical forests are critically important ecosystems that store large amounts of carbon, maintain over half of the planet's biodiversity, and play key roles in the regulation of global as well as regional climate systems. In recent decades, the changing structure of demand for food and energy commodities has had a remarkable impact on land use in tropical forest regions, resulting in rapid deforestation and degradation. My dissertation seeks to understand the impacts of recent commodity crop expansion on deforestation in sub-Saharan Africa and the effects of large-scale forest conversion on characteristics of remaining forest ecosystems in Southeast Asia. Using a variety of methods including farmer surveys, remote sensing and spatial analysis, and econometrics, I demonstrate that commodity crop expansion in sub-Saharan Africa is increasing pressure on tropical forests, albeit through expansion pathways linked to informal economies quite unlike more comprehensively studied regions in Southeast Asia and South America. Using high-resolution airborne imaging spectroscopy and LiDAR data, I identify long-lasting effects of tropical forest conversion to oil palm plantations on neighboring forest structure and function. Understanding the role of informal economies in commodity crop expansion and the ecological impacts of forest conversion for commodity crop production more broadly is important for the identification of regionally relevant, sustainable land use strategies.

Keywords: Environmental Earth System Science
Advisor: Lambin Eric F. 
Asner Gregory P. 
Field Christopher B. 
Naylor Rosamond
Communicating and computing with spikes in neuromorphic systems

We provide an overview of neuromorphic engineering and describe two contributions to Braindrop, a state-of-the-art neuromorphic system. First, we describe a method for performing summing and weighting of spike trains by accumulative thinning, a deterministic procedure for merging and dropping spikes. Previous methods relied on probabilistic thinning, which results in Poissonian statistics. As a result, when the thinned spike-train is filtered with a first-order low-pass synapse, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scales as the square-root of its rate. For our accumulative thinning method, the SNR depends on the weight w; it scales linearly in the best-case scenario (w-> 0) and as the square-root in the worst-case (w-> 1). We find that a three-quarter power scaling minimizes energy consumption. Second, we present a serial H-tree router for two-dimensional (2D) arrays. Existing routing mechanisms for 2D arrays either use low-overhead grids with one or two shared wires per row or column (e.g., RAM) or high-overhead meshes with many wires connecting neighboring clients (e.g., supercomputers). Neither is suitable for intermediate-complexity clients (e.g., small clusters of silicon neurons). We present a router tailored to 2D arrays of such clients. It uses a tree laid out in a fractal pattern (H-tree), which requires less wiring per signal than a grid, and adopts serial-signaling, which keeps link-width constant, regardless of payload size. To route from the tree's leaves to its root (or vise versa), each node prepends (consumes) a delay-insensitive 1-of-4 code that signals the route's previous (next) branch; additional codes carry payload. We employ this serial H-tree router to service a 16x16 array of silicon-neuron clusters, each with 16 spike-generating analog somas, 4 spike-consuming analog synapses, and one 128-bit SRAM. Fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS process, the router communicates 26.8M soma-generated and 18.3M synapse-targeted spikes per second while occupying 43% of the client's 35.1x36.1 sq.um.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Boahen Kwabena (Kwabena Adu) 
Khatib Oussama 
Shenoy Krishna V. (Krishna Vaughn)
Communicating generalizations : probability, vagueness, and context

Knowledge that extends beyond the present context is crucial to thrive in our open-ended, dynamic world, and generic language (or generics, e.g., "Birds fly", "Mosquitos carry Zika", "Bill smokes") is a simple way to communicate such generalizations to and from one another. Though found in every language and emerging early in development, generic language is philosphically puzzling and has resisted precise formalization. In this thesis, I propose the first formal account of generic language that makes quantitative predictions about human understanding. This formalism is both general enough to explain behavior in multiple dependent measures across diverse domains and precise enough to capture fine-grained, context-sensitive differences in understanding. Having such a unified, computational framework sheds light on the mechanisms by which conceptual knowledge can influence judgments about generics. It also allows us to quantitatively compare the context-sensitivity of interpretation vs. production, clarifying the role of generics in stereotype propagation.

Keywords: Psychology.
Advisor: Goodman Noah (Noah D.) 
Frank Michael C. (Professor of human biology) 
Markman Ellen M.
Community Supported Fisheries and Their Strategies for Social Media Marketing

Today, there is a compelling movement taking shape in the seafood industry, and Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) are at the heart of it. This movement is working to create a shift in consumer mindsets from careless consumption to mindful consumption. Trending hashtags like #knowyourfisherman and #sustainableseafood have worked to encourage consumers to understand the story behind their seafood products. The movement has been especially prevalent with fish species like salmon and tuna. In supporting such a movement, CSFs are not only working to cultivate a relationship between consumer and product, but they are also working to promote the idea of sourcing products from fishermen who practice sustainable fishing methods. This allows CSFs to share the stories behind their products — stories that make consumers feel more connected to their food and their well-being. The purpose of my research is to gain some perspective on the “how”. How are CSFs connecting with the community, and how are they building their consumer base? How are they working to convince people that it’s worth understanding the story behind a product? I will approach these questions, and questions alike, through the lens of social media; perhaps the CSF method-of-choice when it comes to consumer engagement and connectivity. My research question asks: What are the most successful social media marketing (SMM) strategies that CSFs are using today to promote their business and their products?

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Community Supported Fishery
social media
social media marketing
storytelling
consumer engagement
mindful consumption
seafood
Thesis
Advisor: Hancock Jeff
Liu Sunny