VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Scalable Systems for Large Scale Dynamic Connected Data Processing

As the proliferation of sensors rapidly make the Internet-of-Things (IoT) a reality, the devices and sensors in this ecosystem—such as smartphones, video cameras, home automation systems, and autonomous vehicles—constantly map out the real-world producing unprecedented amounts of dynamic, connected data that captures complex and diverse relations. Unfortunately, existing big data processing and machine learning frameworks are ill-suited for analyzing such dynamic connected data and face several challenges when employed for this purpose./nThis dissertation focuses on the design and implementation of scalable systems for dynamic connected data processing. We discuss simple abstractions that make it easy to operate on such data, efficient data structures for state management, and computation models that reduce redundant work. We also describe how bridging theory and practice with algorithms and techniques that leverage approximation and streaming theory can significantly speed up connected data computations. The systems described in this dissertation achieve more than an order of magnitude improvement over the state-of-the-art.

Advisor: Stoica, Ion
Paradox in Thought and Natural Language

Around 600BC, Epimenides, a Cretan apparently discontented with the/nhonesty of his compatriots, lamented that all Cretans are liars./nTogether with a few innocent assumptions, well-entrenched principles/nof logic entail that Epimenides' lamentation cannot be true, and yet/ncannot be untrue---a flat contradiction. What's gone wrong? In this/ndissertation, I argue that the source of the problem has been/nmisdiagnosed as one about language (especially formal languages). The/nproblem runs deeper, and stems from the structure of thought itself./n/nThe dissertation proceeds in two main stages. The first stage/n(Chapter 2) makes the case that that the intuitions that underlie the/nparadoxes come from natural languages, not from formal/mathematical/nones. The Liar and related paradoxes are generally presented as/nconstraints on the latter. Their lesson, the story goes, is that no/nformal theory strong enough to represent the primitive recursive/nfunctions can include a satisfactory truth predicate. I argue that/nit's our natural-language competence with the truth predicate that/nunderlies our understanding of what 'satisfactory' means here, which/nshifts the focus of the project to natural language semantics. In this/ndomain, it's tempting to think (and many have thought) that the/nproblem with Epimenides' utterance is that it fails to express a/nproposition, and this failure explains why we have trouble assigning/nit a truth-value. Or, perhaps it does express a proposition, but not/nthe one that it seems to express. Or, perhaps it can express a/nproposition, but which proposition it expresses depends on context. I/nargue that all such responses fail, in part because they cannot make/nsense of related attitude attributions. I can believe or disbelieve/nEpimenides, which wouldn't be possible if his utterance didn't express/nthe proposition it seems to express./nIn the second stage, I argue that such paradoxes arise, not from the/nlanguage/thought interface, but rather from thought itself. The first/nstep in this argument concerns knowledge attributions (Chapter 3),/nwhere I develop and defend a novel solution to the Knower paradox./nThen I move from attitude attributions to attitudes themselves/n(Chapter 4). Just as sentential truth and knowledge predicates gives/nrise to paradoxical sentences, seemingly innocent combinations of/nbeliefs and desires give rise to paradoxical propositions---even when/nthose beliefs and desires are not expressed in language. The/npossibility of such pathological combinations isn't accounted for by/nany extant theory of mental content, and, I argue, provides support/nfor a non-classical theory. Finally (Chapter 5) I consider an/nobjection to these putative combinations of desires. I introduce what/nI call /advisory/ desire reports, which seem to exhibit the radically/nexternalist behavior that the previous chapter rejects. I conclude by/noffering reasons to think that the availability of these readings does/nnot undermine the case for non-classical accounts of attitudes.

Advisor: MacFarlane, John
Yalcin, Seth
The Power of a Black Superheroine: Exploring Black Female Identities in Comics and Fandom Culture

2018 begins on very promising note for comic book fans, as the long-awaited Marvel Comics Black Panther film premieres in February. While Black Panther is the first black superhero comic character to appear in American comics in July 1966, and his stories are plentiful, the adventures of America’s first black superheroine are few and disparate. The appearance of “The Butterfly,” America’s first black superheroine is not as well-known and documented along with many other noteworthy black female superheroines in comic books. The black female superheroine’s narrative, a diverse and complex one, is slowly building traction and worthy of scholarly attention. Her narrative is crucial and significant to the overall story of American comics. Thus, examining various Black female superheroine stories offers an opportunity to (re)explore new identities and territories in comics, reframe our understanding of certain terminology and concepts, and most notably to empower the black female voice.

Advisor: Elliott, Chiyuma
De Kosnik, Abigail
States of Nature: Revolution, Conservatism, and Anticipations of Ecological Thought

In States of Nature, I trace an alternative prehistory to environmental thought in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates about revolution. I argue that proponents of revolution understood the state of nature not only as a philosophical abstraction but also through their engagements with science, agriculture, and frontier settlement. By contrast, conservatives claimed that revolution would disrupt the relational networks they imagined as vitally entangling human and nonhuman life. In particular, Edmund Burke describes ideal national communities as intricately interwoven, yet tenuous, social ecologies: evolving networks that bind together past, present, and future generations./nIn the opening chapters, I depict Burke not as a reactionary opponent of change but as a practicing agriculturalist who looks to nature to regulate the pace of social transformation. I also consider challenges to Burke: Thomas Paine’s assertion that revolution, rather than tradition, restores nature’s true order; Mary Wollstonecraft’s warning that normative appeals to the nonhuman world naturalize inequality; and Joel Barlow and Gilbert Imlay’s beliefs that technocratic land transformation would fulfill America’s revolutionary project./nIn the middle chapters, I read James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels as restaging the Burke/Paine debate in an environmentally and socially precarious frontier setting. I interpret Natty Bumppo not as an embodiment of the state of nature, but as a social being who laments the decline from an intercultural and interspecies Burkean community to a Lockean polity where political belonging is purchased by appropriating natural objects as property. Building upon the temporal turns in queer and critical race studies, I also suggest that Cooper conflates racialized sexuality and environmental determinism, punishing characters he sees as too close to nature by associating their failures to reproduce with the forest’s doomed embrace./nIn my final chapter, I argue that writers throughout the age of revolution fixated on compost as a political metaphor capable of synthesizing Burkean gradualism and revolutionary renewal. Articulating what I call a “compostable past,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman maintain that material bodies and political structures are best reinvigorated through regenerative decay. I argue that their re-workings of America’s revolutionary tradition decouple the lapsed possibility of Burkean ecology from the more pernicious strains of Burke’s social conservatism. By contrast, Charles Chesnutt exposes compost’s role in sustaining Southern slave-holding agriculture, thereby anticipating central concerns of modern environmental justice scholarship.

Advisor: Otter, Samuel
An Exploration of Quantum Materials: From Topological Semimetals to Antiferromagnetic Memory

This dissertation presents the results of several research projects on condensed matter systems that fall within the broad scope of quantum materials. These are compounds which possess emergent phenomena that would not be expected from conventional solid state theory. These include the topological semimetals Cd3As2, TaAs, and ZrTe5, as well as the frustrated antiferromagnet Fe1/3NbS2. In Cd3As2, a Dirac semimetal, focused ion beam microstructured devices were found to exhibit a new type of coherent electron orbit. This “Weyl orbit” involves the Fermi arc surface states. Although these states are a necessary consequence of the topological nature of Cd3As2, they had not previously been observed in electronic transport. In the Weyl semimetal TaAs, the same focused ion beam microstructuring techniques were found to induce superconductivity on the device surface due to the differential sputtering of tantalum and arsenic. Instead, mechanical polishing techniques were used to thin devices in order to observe signatures of surface-driven transport, likely stemming from Fermi arc states as well./nIn ZrTe5, magnetization and magnetic torque measurements found a paramagnetic to diamagnetic crossover at the quantum limit magnetic field. This is the result of charge carriers entering a chiral, zeroth Landau level pinned at zero energy. This is a direct consequence of a topological band crossing, and therefore points to ZrTe5 as a Dirac semimetal. A possible transition out of this topological phase was also observed as a function of temperature./nFinally, at sufficiently low temperatures and high current densities, Fe1/3NbS2 was found to be a switchable antiferromagnet. A spin transfer torque produced by an applied current was found to rotate the antiferromagnetic order. The rotation of these moments is reflected in the anisotropic magnetoresistance, changing the resistance of the device. In this manner, microstructured devices of Fe1/3NbS2 form an antiferromagnetic memory bit with electronic write-in and read-out. The low current densities involved and tunability of the device response point to Fe1/3NbS2 as a promising platform for antiferromagnetic spintronics.

Advisor: Analytis, James G
End to End Learning in Autonomous Driving Systems

Convolutional neural networks have advanced visual perception significantly in recent years. Two major ingredients that enable such a success are the composition of simple modules into a complex network and the end to end optimization. However, such success has not yet revolutionized robotics as much as vision, even if robotics suffer from similar problems as traditional computer vision, i.e. imperfectness of the manual pipeline design of the system./nThis thesis investigates using end-to-end learning for the autonomous driving system, a concrete robotic application. End to end learning can produce reasonable driving behaviors, even in the complex urban driving scenarios. Representation learning in end-to-end driving models is crucial, and auxiliary vision tasks such as semantic segmentation can help to form a more informative driving representation especially when training data is limited. Naive convolutional neural networks are usually only capable of doing reactive control and can not involve complex reasoning in a particular scenario. This thesis also studies how to handle scene conditioned driving behavior, which goes beyond the capability of reactive control. Alongside the end-to-end structure, learning methods also play a critical role. Imitation learning methods will acquire meaningful behaviors but usually, the robot can not master the skill. Reinforcement learning, on the contrary, either barely learns anything if the environment is too complex, or it can master the skill otherwise. To get the best of both worlds, this thesis proposes an algorithmically unified method to learn from both demonstration data and the environment.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
Paperwork Before Paper: Law and Materiality in China's Early Empires (221 BCE-220 CE)

xThis dissertation examines the role of law in the formation of China’s earliest empires (221 BCE-220 CE). Using thousands of manuscripts written on bamboo and wood which have been excavated in China in the several decades, I argue that legal practice was central to the formation of imperial identity. Building on theoretical insights from the anthropology of paperwork, as well as from recent studies of manuscript culture, I argue that legal manuscripts can be read not only as representations or records of social conditions, but as material objects whose production and circulation itself constituted new forms of sociality. Eschewing a conventional law and society approach, my dissertation follows a diverse array of actors —women, servants, magistrates, foreigners and family members— as they use practices of writing and law to lodge claims of status, identity, kinship, and property./nIn linking newly excavated manuscripts with discussions of law and materiality, this dissertation aims to challenge multiple orthodoxies derived from notions of European legal and bureaucratic modernity. Accounts of early law have long cited certain types of legal text, such as penal statutes, as evidence for the idea that early law was informed by the rationality of state and directed at social control. By locating legal practice not in state sanction but in the circulation of legal manuscripts, I am able to reframe this persistent debate to take account both of newly discovered manuscripts and also to interpret receive sources in new ways. My dissertation thus complements and provides crucial context for revisionist trends in the historiography of imperial China that query the central presumption of despotism and legal orientalism. By linking law to material practices, I am further able to sidestep teleological narratives of rationalization and state control, and to provide a plausible explanation of why imperial legal culture could persist both beyond the geographic reach of the imperial court and long after its collapse.

Advisor: Nylan, Michael
Lattice models for photosynthetic membrane stacks

Proteins in photosynthetic membranes can organize into patterned arrays that span the membrane's lateral size. Attractions between proteins in different layers of a membrane stack play a key role in this ordering, as has been demonstrated by both empirical and computational methods. The architecture of thylakoid membranes, depending on physiological conditions, also may create circumstances for inter-layer interactions that instead disfavor the high protein densities of ordered arrangements. This dissertation introduces several statistical mechanical models for exploring the interplay between these opposing forces and for characterizing phases that reflect the periodic geometry of stacked thylakoid membrane discs. First, we propose a lattice model that roughly accounts for proteins' attraction within a layer and across the stromal gap, steric repulsion across the lumenal gap, and regulation of protein density by exchange with the stroma lamellae. Mean field analysis and computer simulation reveal a broken-symmetry striped phase disrupted at both high and low extremes of density. We expect that the widely varying light and stress conditions in higher plants explore the space of protein density and interaction strength broadly. The phase transitions we identify should thus lie within or near the range of naturally occurring conditions. Second, we expand upon this lattice description, allowing the thickness of each thylakoid's lumenal gap to fluctuate. This fluctuating-gap model introduces the possibility of mechanical control of photosynthetic function. We monitor how changing gap thickness affects mean protein occupation on both sides of the discs. Via mean field analysis and computer simulation we find even richer phase behavior for this model, featuring transitions that originate in long-ranged protein interactions mediated by lumenal gap fluctuations. These results suggest that compression or expansion of lumenal gaps could lead to sudden and dramatic changes in the population and spatial patterning of photosynthetic proteins. Taken together, the lattice models we have constructed and explored provide a framework for minimalistic modeling of the physics underlying structure and function of photosynthetic membranes.

Advisor: Geissler, Phillip L
The characterization of LUTI mRNAs in budding yeast meiosis

Differentiation programs such as meiosis depend on extensive gene regulation to mediate cellular morphogenesis. The molecular events associated with gene regulation in budding yeast meiosis are particularly well-documented at both the transcriptional and the translational levels. Through the integrated study of these two steps in gene regulation, a novel mode of gene repression was identified whereby an mRNA does not produce the protein coded within it, but rather plays a purely regulatory role (Chapter 2, Chapter 3)./nWe first discovered this by investigating the regulation of the kinetochore gene NDC80 (Chapter 2). The program of meiosis requires transient removal, and thus inactivation, of the outer kinetochore, the complex that connects microtubules to chromosomes. We found that in budding yeast, this occurs by reducing the abundance of a limiting subunit, Ndc80. Central to this mechanism is the developmentally controlled transcription of an alternate NDC80 mRNA isoform (Long Undecoded Transcript Isoform, LUTI), which itself cannot produce protein due to regulatory upstream ORFs (uORFS) in its extended 5'-leader. Instead, transcription of the LUTI represses the canonical NDC80 mRNA expression in cis through the deposition of Set1-dependent histone H3K4 dimethylation, Set2-dependent H3K36 trimethylation, and increased nucleosome occupancy to establish a repressive chromatin state in the downstream canonical NDC80 promoter and thereby inhibit Ndc80 protein synthesis./nWe further investigated whether other genes may be regulated in a similar fashion (Chapter 3). We identified 74 genes that have 5'-extended leaders in meiotic prophase, all but two of which have at least one ATG uORF, and the vast majority of which are translationally repressed. While the translational down-regulation of these extended transcripts is near universal, the transcriptional repression of the canonical isoform is more variable. The features important for transcriptional repression at the NDC80 locus are associated with down regulation of the canonical transcript in the newly identified LUTIs. More specifically, H3K36 trimethylation and a decrease in strong positioning of the +1 nucleosome correlate with a greater decrease of the canonical transcript upon LUTI induction. Higher LUTI abundance also correlates with greater repression./nTogether we have delved deeply into the regulation of how a novel regulatory mRNA affects the expression of a single gene, and we provide evidence that the same mechanics of gene repression occur at additional loci throughout the genome during meiotic prophase.

Advisor: Ünal, Elçin
Physical Constraints and Modeling Uncertainties on the Intensication of the Global Hydrologic Cycle

Climate change induces shifts in the statistical distribution of rain in the form of more intense rainfall events and longer dry spells. This acceleration of the hydrologic cycle can be characterized by tiered increases in mean and extreme rainfall in response to warming. This dissertation revisits how this behavior is driven by the energetic, thermodynamic and dynamic properties of the atmosphere: by summarizing these processes into a few physical constraints, it evaluates the general performance of climate models and underscores the need for better understanding the interactions between cloud processes and the atmospheric circulation./nChanges in the atmospheric energy balance robustly contrains the 1-2%/K increase in global mean precipitation, and we use it to demonstrate that parameterizations shortwave radiative transfer for water vapor are a large source of modeling uncertainty. We then use a formula which approximates heavy precipitation rates to investigate changes in extreme events in a global climate model, in a superparameterized climate model and in an idealized cloud-resolving model. Detailed comparison of convective dynamics in these three modeling frameworks led to the following conclusions: (1) increases in extreme rainfall closely follow the 6-7%/K thermodynamic increase in humidity dictated by the Clausius-Clapeyron formula, while changes in convective instability and in the large-scale circulation have a negligible impact, and (2) an additional acceleration of 1-2%/K could arise from the reinforcement of mesoscale circulations associated with convective organization. These circulations are likely a crucial ingredient that connects the large-scale atmospheric flow to local convective processes, and their omission from current convective parameterizations might be a source/nof error when modeling changes in the hydrologic cycle./nCapturing shifts in the entire distribution of rain from first principles is not realistically achievable on global scales. However, a better understanding of the physics that constrain the spatiotemporal and statistical properties of rain in smaller idealized modeling setups is a promising avenue towards reducing uncertainties in global climate models.

Advisor: Collins, William D
Tug-of-Ear: The Play of Dialect in Modern Bengali and Tamil Literature

The dissertation foregrounds Bengali and Tamil ideas of nonstandard language that complicate dominant discourses of literary language and its political contexts, including modernism, nationalism, and contemporary movements. The first half of the dissertation explores dialect, place, and literary form in Bengali through the idea of “dēśer kathā” (“dialect,” from dēś “homeland” and kathā “word-form”). I begin with how kathā (oral and dialectal forms) disrupts the dominant paradigms of sādhu (“pure”) and calit (“current”) Bengali in the modernist novel, through readings of three classic works by Manik Bandyopadhyay, Advaita Mallabarman, and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay. Then I examine how the discourses of indigeneity (ādibāsī) and refugee experience (udbāstu) in Bengali āñcalik (regional) and Dalit poetry, short fiction, and kabigān (poet’s songs) complicate conceptions of dēś (homeland) and jāti (birth community). The second half of the dissertation carries these questions into contemporary Tamil literature through the idea of vaṭṭāra vaḻakku (“dialect,” from vaṭṭāram “region” and vaḻakku “practice”). Here too, regional language problematizes the dominant “spoken/written” (pēccu/eḻuttu) binary by stressing place and practice. I trace these threads in the work of contemporary Tamil authors, highlighting dialect as a mode of attention in the work of Kanmani Gunasekaran, regional author and lexicographer based in Virudhachalam, Tamil Nadu, and dialect as play in the work of Tamilselvi, feminist author from Tiruvarur district now based in Virudhachalam. These ideas, I argue, offer innumerable places from which it may be possible to challenge hegemonic concepts of the nation and the global as well as complicate or reimagine past and present regional discourses. Thus, dialect offers a space to grapple with the problems of representation of and by marginalized communities, minorities, Dalits, and women.

Advisor: Hart, George L