VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Dialectic Redemption: Lang Jingshan, Literati Landscape in Photomontage, 1920s-1940s

Whereas most existing studies on Lang Jingshan’s landscape photomontage center around a nationalistic and pictorialist perspective, this article explores the political implications of Lang’s montage as a way to revisit the problematic relations of the past, identity, and political aspirations in the Republican Era. The first part of the article delineates the cultural landscape of the era within which the artist’s symbolic “return” to past imagery, aesthetics and sensibilities could be adequately understood. For those who were not yet convinced that the present course of events could not be resisted – whether the encroachment of urbanization and its unsettling fragmentary spectacles, a long-established Western Orientalist gaze, or modern technology’s suspension of genuine human expressions – the author argues, the decision to redeem the hopes of the past might well have seemed the antidote for the current pathosis. Furthermore, through situating Lang’s globally acclaimed landscape iconography in intercultural politics, I seek to portray a historical conjunction between Chinese neotraditionalism and anti-Enlightenment Western philosophy, with respect to their allegation of the tyrannical discourse of modernity. By using photography in bringing past landscapes and aesthetics to the unsettling present, the author argues, Lang resorted to a device of immanent critique, extended the scope of what was confined in the May-Fourth-mythicized modernity, and anticipated a dialectical image of the future, a reality that was yet to be.

Keywords:  Center for East Asian Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
Photomontage
the Aesthetic of Redemption
Allegorical Impulses
Intercultural Politics.
Thesis
Advisor: Wang Ban
Dimensional reduction of halide double perovskites

Dimensional reduction, or conversion of a three-dimensional (3D) structure to a lower dimensional derivative, can afford dramatic changes in a material's optoelectronic properties. While the effects of dimensional reduction on the family of lead-halide perovskites have long been studied, dimensional reduction of the more compositionally diverse family of halide double perovskites has remained largely unexplored. I investigate the effects of dimensional reduction on two electronically distinct 3D double perovskites, Cs2AgBiBr6 and Cs2AgTlBr6, through the synthesis and characterization of lower-dimensional analogues of mono- and bilayer thickness. These studies reveal that quantum confinement has a much larger effect on the optical properties of the Ag--Tl materials than on their Ag--Bi analogues due to the more delocalized electronic character of the Ag--Tl lattice. Interestingly, electronic structure calculations reveal a substantial change in bandgap symmetry upon dimensional reduction. At the monolayer limit, the indirect bandgap of Cs2AgBiBr6 becomes direct, while the direct bandgap of Cs2AgTlBr6 becomes indirect. To understand these changes, I develop a model to describe and predict the band structures of 2D halide double perovskites based on the atomic orbitals of their constituent elements which reveals the underlying factors that drive the bandgap transitions. Finally, I describe how the increased structural flexibility of the 2D perovskite framework can be used to expand the compositional and functional diversity of the perovskite family through the synthesis of a mixed-valence Cu+--Cu2+--In3+ 2D perovskite. The unusual composition of this material affords optoelectronic properties which are not commonly found in 2D perovskites of monolayer thickness

Keywords: Chemistry.
Advisor: Karunadasa Hemamala
Bao Zhenan
Solomon Edward I.
Discovering and validating methylated cell-free DNA biomarkers for cancer

Methylated cell-free DNA (cfDNA) biomarkers have shown promise for blood-based cancer detection, in part because of their biological properties. Methylation of CpG dinucleotides in the promoter regions of tumor suppressor genes plays an early role in cancer development, and methylated DNA wraps around nucleosome proteins, protecting it from degradation by nucleases in the blood. Recent studies have mined high-dimensional epigenetic datasets to discover methylated cfDNA cancer biomarkers, employing statistical selection methods that may risk-rank correlative biomarkers with undefined biological relationships in a cancer type above biomarkers with known epigenetic roles. Accordingly, causative biomarkers with reproducible predictive power between patient cohorts could be filtered out during the discovery process. We hypothesized that utilizing a knowledge-based biomarker enrichment method to first decrease the dimensionality of these datasets followed by individual screening of the remaining biomarkers in the data would identify causative biomarkers that collectively embody a tumor-specific methylation signal in cfDNA. Our method, Layered Analysis for Methylated Biomarkers (LAMB), leverages meta-analysis to select an enriched set of CpG biomarker candidates in high-dimensional microarray data and then filters the biomarkers against public tissue methylation data from hundreds of cancer patients and lysed whole blood methylation data from over a thousand healthy patients. In this thesis, I will introduce LAMB and demonstrate that it can discover targeted methylated cfDNA biomarker panels that: (i) detected hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) tumors in at-risk cirrhosis patients and (ii) differentiated prostate adenocarcinoma (PRAD) patients by their tumor's response to abiraterone acetate and docetaxel. I will also describe a targeted bisulfite sequencing assay that I created to analyze LAMB biomarkers (termed LAMB-Seq). I will demonstrate that LAMB-HCC biomarkers exhibited excellent read coverage and high-resolution methylation quantification through LAMB-Seq. Through this thesis, I will show that LAMB can be used to find cancer biomarkers that have potential for improving at-risk screening and therapy monitoring. I will also lay the groundwork for its application to other cancers and provide evidence for the benefits of using the LAMB-Seq platform to validate LAMB biomarkers

Keywords: Bioengineering.
Advisor: Wang Shan X. 
Altman Russ 
Huang Possu
Discretion in mass adjudication

This dissertation asks how mechanisms of administrative review can constrain the decisions of line-level decisionmakers in three contexts: the immigration courts, Social Security disability adjudications, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Officers' decisions about whom to detain and deport. In all three contexts, mechanisms of review have mixed success; using quantitative strategies, I identify strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for reform

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Moe Terry M. 
Engstrom David Freeman 
Hainmueller Jens
Ho Daniel E.
Srikantiah Jayashri
Dissection of cancer-specific cis and trans-regulatory elements

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Although the 2% of the human genome that encodes proteins has been extensively studied, much remains to be learned about the noncoding genome and gene regulation in cancer. Genes that specify cells and cell states are actively regulated by transcription factor (TF) proteins acting on DNA regulatory elements that are scattered over the vast noncoding genome and exert long-range influences. This work charts the discovery and characterization of noncoding regulatory elements and provides key insights into the extent to which they contribute to oncogenesis. In this work, we profiled the chromatin accessibility landscape of over 400 primary tumors spanning 23 cancer types with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). We identified specific cis- and trans-regulatory elements that identify these diverse cancers. We discovered a new class of mutations in non-coding regulatory elements that lead to dramatic changes in chromatin accessibility in primary human cancer. We further extended and expanded the resolution of profiling chromatin accessibility to single cells for both solid and liquid primary tumor microenvironments. We developed a single cell multi-omic framework for deconvolution of abnormal molecular phenotypes spanning DNA accessibility, gene expression and surface protein abundance. With the growing scale of single cell chromatin accessibility datasets, we developed a scalable and comprehensive single cell ATAC-seq analysis software package enabling researchers world-wide to analyze this large data type with minimal computing resources. Furthermore, we leveraged both bulk and single cell chromatin accessibility profiling and characterized genotype-specific chromatin states of tumor and metastatic progression in lung adenocarcinoma. We developed a novel single cell multi-omic method for measuring sgRNA genotypes and chromatin accessibility to functionally interrogate trans-regulatory proteins. Lastly, we improved the efficiency of HiChIP, a protein-associated chromosome conformation assay, to work with noncoding RNAs and identified novel RNA-focused 3D interactions. The results of this work led to the development of novel genomic methods that were utilized to provide novel insights into the mechanisms of gene regulation in many cancer types that can be used for targeted therapies, minimal residual disease monitoring and early detection screening

Advisor: Chang Howard Y. (Howard Yuan-Hao)
Greenleaf William James
Bintu Lacramioara 
Engreitz Jesse
Divine transactions : the transformation of Buddhist communal liturgies at Dunhuang (8th--10th centuries)

The current dissertation centers on a host of communal liturgies at Dūnhuáng from the eighth through the tenth centuries. In this period, Buddhist ritual flourished by localizing the existing Chinese ritual elements and absorbing ritual techniques from Tibetan sources. The Dūnhuáng corpus discovered around 1900 CE contains a wealth of ritual documents written in Chinese, Tibetan, and occasionally in a combination of the two. These texts provide a rare window into the practice of premodern Chinese Buddhism and Buddhism on the ground. The dissertation can be divided into two parts. The first three chapters discuss how to classify Indian, Chinese, and Tibetan communal liturgies from a structural perspective; the next six chapters study six distinct genres of liturgies by analyzing relevant liturgical scripts in the Dūnhuáng corpus. Chapter 1 focuses on the so-called "lay ritual events" in Indian Mainstream Buddhism, which constitute Mainstream communal liturgies. Based on how they are discussed in the vinayas, these liturgies can be classified into eight distinct categories. Chapter 2 examines a host of communal liturgies termed zhāi in the Tang and at Dūnhuáng. Chapter 3 evaluates the structural issues in Tibetan Buddhist ritual and how it changed over time. Chapters 4 to 8, relying on relevant liturgical texts, explore four different categories of zhāi-liturgies: prayer feasts, sūtra-rotation liturgies, the afterlife-related liturgies, the dedicatory rites, and holiday liturgies. Chapter 9 analyzes the early Tibetan adaptation of the Indic tantric feast and how tantric concepts and ritual technology transformed the communal feast. The Conclusion focuses on seven themes: a comparison between the thanksgiving prayer and the zhāi-script, the dissolution of the zhāi-liturgical system, Sino-Tibetan zhāi-liturgies, the classification of Buddhist rituals, the kammatic and nibbanic dimensions of communal liturgies, the existence of two different kinds of merit, and cultural embeddedness

Keywords: Religious Studies.
Advisor: Kieschnick John
Dalton Jacob Paul
Gentry James Duncan
Harrison Paul M. (Paul Maxwell)
Do we look like our spouses and our names? Re-examining the convergence in physical appearance hypothesis with modern computational methods

Faces change over our lifetimes. The causes for these changes can be physical, such as age and diet, or mental, such as emotions and personality. The interplay between these physical and mental factors over time influences how our faces change in specific directions. This can lead to surprising, but not unreasonable, phenomenons. However, traditional studies in these subjects have been limited by challenges in data collection and subjective measurement methods. Recent advances in crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence have allowed us to address these challenges and conduct empirical studies with larger samples and in more objective ways. This dissertation presents two works that applied these modern computational methods to re-examine convergence in physical appearance with two factors: spouses and names. The first work asks the question of why we look like our spouses. The widely disseminated convergence in physical appearance hypothesis posits that long-term partners' facial appearances converges with time due to their shared environment, emotional mimicry, and synchronized activities. Although plausible, this hypothesis is incompatible with empirical findings pertaining to a wide range of other traits—such as personality, intelligence, attitudes, values, and well-being—in which partners show initial similarity but do not converge over time. Using two independent methods of estimating their facial similarity, human judgment and a facial recognition algorithm, we show that while spouses' faces tend to be similar at the beginning of marriage, they do not converge over time, bringing facial appearance in line with other personal characteristics. The second work asks whether we look like our names. The correlation between facial appearance and one's name is not controversial. First, both innate facial features and naming conventions vary across socio-demographic groups, defined by factors such as gender, ethnicity, profession, generation, etc. Second, people actively change their facial appearance to conform to social conventions of their socio-demographic group. However, it has been hypothesized that the link between facial appearance and one's name goes beyond socioeconomic and demographic factors, and that a name alone can affect an individual's facial appearance, as individuals conform to social expectations of how a person with a given name should look. Similarly, we used human judgment and a facial recognition algorithm to show that the face-name matching effect exists, but there is no proof that people alter their facial appearance to match pre-conceived notions of what they should look like

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Kosinski Michal 
Dutton Robert W.
Prabhakar Balaji
"Does doctrine matter? The role of discretion during counterinsurgency "

This dissertation extends theoretical debates about the effectiveness of counterinsurgency strategy by looking at how these theories were implemented in practice. Focusing on a particularly important case, this dissertation studies how the US Army implemented population-centric counterinsurgency in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2014 and asks three closely related questions. First, how consistent were military units in their implementation of counterinsurgency strategy? Second, what factors explain variation in soldiers' and officers' preferred counterinsurgency approach? Third, did this variation in counterinsurgency approach have an impact on the capabilities of Taliban forces? These questions are explored in three empirical papers that combine a variety of quantitative methods including Bayesian hierarchical modeling, original surveys, and instrumental variables with qualitative historical analysis. The first paper motivates the dissertation by demonstrating that military units varied significantly in their counterinsurgency approaches using Bayesian hierarchical models and a comprehensive dataset documenting the areas of operation for every NATO battalion deployed to Afghanistan. The second paper examines the causes of this variation and uses an original survey to demonstrate that soldiers' exogenous pre-conflict personal beliefs and values impacted their preferred counterinsurgency approach. The third paper examines the consequences of this variation and uses an instrumental variable approach to demonstrate that, all-else being equal, units which incurred more friendly casualties were more likely to employ enemy-centric tactics which then increased insurgent capabilities and escalated the cycle of violence. The broad take away from this research is that implementation on the ground often diverged significantly from how strategy was conceived by civilian and military leaders. Most importantly, the experiences and personalities of individual commanders often colored how they perceived and reacted to local conditions that were otherwise largely similar. As a result, some military units conducted operations that seemed to align closely with the official strategy while others diverged from this guidance. While some degree of flexibility is certainly necessary to conduct effective operations in such complex and ever-changing environments, this inconsistency may have undermined the effectiveness of international efforts to contain insurgency in Afghanistan. The results stress the importance of screening, selecting, and training soldiers and officers for specific mission requirements. This lesson is also likely to be applicable in other organizational settings where leaders must balance flexibility with consistency, such as domestic policing

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy M.
Fearon James D.
Schultz Kenneth A.
Does School EdTech Capacity Relate to Student Performance in Rural and Urban China?

Large gaps in educational resources and student performance have persisted between rural and urban schools in China. Investment in educational technology (EdTech) has increased drastically, with the expressed aim of improving the quality of rural education. Previous research has studied the use of EdTech in teaching and learning, but little attention has been given to how EdTech may be differentially effective and, consequently, may produce different student outcomes in urban and rural contexts. This study fills the gap by exploring and comparing the relationship between school EdTech capacity and student academic performance in rural and urban settings. We developed a multilevel model of 361 Chinese schools and 12,058 Chinese students who participated in the 2018 PISA to reveal there is a large positive relationship between access to internet and education software use at home for rural and urban students. Statistically significant relationships between school EdTech capacity and student academic performance were not established. Through these comparisons, we generate policy recommendations on equitably allocating financial and material resources to provide additional learning opportunities for students with EdTech in low-achieving rural schools, with the aim of narrowing the rural-urban educational gap.

Keywords: Educational technology (EdTech)
Rural and urban divide
Education equity
Resource allocation
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)
China
Stanford Graduate School of Education International Education Policy Analysis
Thesis
Domain-specific languages for convex and non-convex optimization

Convex optimization has many applications to fields as diverse as machine learning, control, finance, and signal and image processing. Using convex optimization in an application requires either developing a custom solver or converting the problem into a standard form. Both of these tasks require expertise, and are time-consuming and error prone. An alternative is to use a domain-specific language (DSL) for convex optimization, which allows the user to specify the problem in a natural way that follows the math; this specification is then automatically converted into the standard form required by generic solvers. In this thesis we demonstrate that DSLs for convex optimization are easy to use, scale to large problems, and can be extended to useful classes of non-convex problems. We begin with a discussion of CVXPY, a widely-used DSL for convex optimization. We present several examples of modeling optimization problems with CVXPY and highlight the novel features and modeling paradigms CVXPY introduced. We next illustrate how DSLs for convex optimization such as CVXPY can be extended to efficiently handle large-scale optimization problems involving structured linear operators. We call our approach matrix-free convex optimization modeling. We conclude with an exploration of non-convex optimization using convex optimization as a black-box method. In particular, we consider approximate minimization of convex functions over non-convex sets via an ADMM-based heuristic that solves a series of convex subproblems. Our approach lends itself to expression as a DSL, which we call NCVX

Advisor: Boyd Stephen P. 
Ré Christopher 
Aiken Alexander 
Wetzstein Gordon
Dreams in double time

Dreams in Double Time takes up a single question grounded in comparative, decolonial study: why was bebop, a radical, wartime music created by black experimentalists in 1940s Harlem nightclubs, so conceptually productive for Mexican American, Japanese American, and Afro-Chinese American listeners during the global realignments of the post-WWII years? The project works to answer this question by way of three novella-length chapters, each following a member of a "trio" of loosely linked writer-musicians—and, in effect, their varying contexts and communities. The first figure, James T. Araki, was a Nisei multi-instrumentalist, soldier-translator, and eventual literature and folklore scholar credited with helping introduce bebop to Japan during the Allied Occupation. The second, Raúl R. Salinas, was a Mexican American prison poet, jazz critic, and longtime activist whose investments in jazz helped document East Austin's rich music histories and instantiate a bop-inflected Chicano literary idiom. And the third, Harold Wing, was an Afro-Chinese American drummer, pianist, and songwriter who performed with bop pioneers including Charlie Parker, Errol Garner, and Babs Gonzalez—and, importantly, took the lessons of those performances to his work as a public servant in Newark's City Hall shortly after the uprisings of the late sixties. By following these figures during these postwar decades, Dreams in Double Time records the reach and importance of Harlem's black experimentalists among differently marginalized audiences of color across (and beyond) the United States—audiences newly driven to disrupt the standard logics of racial democracy. Among this project's key interventions are its interdisciplinary analyses of improvisation and composition across media; its attention to underground networks of music circulation, creation, and documentation in and beyond the United States; its investment in "histories from below" that highlight "minor" figures and materials; and its deeply relational (decolonial) commitment to the study of race and ethnicity. In form and content, Dreams in Double Time thus aspires to a fundamentally relational narrative discourse that interweaves figures, sites, materials, and histories typically considered in isolation—not to resolve their inevitable tensions in a tidy appeal to a universal, but instead to sit with them, listening for their chords

Advisor: Saldívar Ramón
Kronengold Charles (Charles Stewart) 
Saldívar José David
Schultz Anna C.