VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Jizhu xiangchou: rural nostalgia and revitalization in Xi-era
China

This dissertation probes a critical “turning point” in mainland China’s development. This turning point is characterized by an observable shift in the state’s developmental priorities from the urban to the rural, and a noticeable shift in official and popular discourses surrounding the concept of ‘rurality.’ Specifically, under the Xi-administration, and especially as evidenced by the state’s Rural Revitalization Strategy, I argue that there is a renewed urgency and call to action for capital – human, financial, and cultural – to be redirected out of China’s swollen cities and (back) into its depleted countryside. Meanwhile, whereas the ‘backwards countryside’ has been viewed as the underdeveloped antithesis to the ‘modern city;’ now, it is the ‘rural idyll’ that is framed as the desired escape from the ‘urban disease.’ Following decades of urban-biased development, China is now confronting a series of anthropogenic ‘crises’ across not only its political-economic and sociocultural landscapes, but to borrow from Li Zhang’s Anxious China, there is also a rupture in people’s “inner landscapes.” Recent years have seen not only a top-down imperative to build-up rural industries, but, critically, I also observe an almost ‘nostalgic’ yearning across society to literally or figuratively ‘return’ to the countryside. Using the ancient village of Heyang, situated in Xinjian Township, Jinyun County, Zhejiang Province, this dissertation illustrates how intersecting at these nodes of political-economic necessity, ecological urgency, and sociocultural and psychological desires to “return” to the countryside is the mandarin Chinese concept of xiangchou 乡愁. In the spirit of Raymond Williams’ (1976) seminal work, Keywords, this dissertation works towards a (re)definition of xiangchou as a critical keyword within contemporary China during a pivotal developmental ‘turning point.’

Keywords: ethnography
rural modernity
nostalgia
contemporary China
area studies
rural revitalization
migration
rural development
urban-rural relations
cultural studies
affect
rural China
Advisor: Murphy, R
Investigating the contribution of the unfolded protein response to prostate cancer bone metastasis

The majority of deaths from prostate cancer (PCa) arise following metastasis, particularly to the skeleton. ER stress and the unfolded protein response (UPR) promote primary PCa, however, the contribution of the UPR to PCa bone metastasis remains unknown. The aim of this work was to determine the role of the UPR in PCa bone metastasis, focusing on the osteogenic potential of PCa cells, epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) and migration, and PCa-induced bone disease. Using paired androgen refractory cancer of the prostate (ARCaP) cell lines ARCaPE and ARCaPM which differ in their epithelial (E) and mesenchymal (M) characteristics, I found that components of IRE1 and ATF6 ER stress pathways are higher in ARCaPE cells than in ARCaPM and decreased upon osteogenic differentiation of ARCaPM cells. Inhibition of the IRE1 or PERK pathway increased alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity in ARCaPM cells. Inhibition of specific arms of the UPR produced a varied response in EMT markers with no effect on migration of ARCaPM cells. Increasing ER stress using tunicamycin significantly reduced the migration of ARCaPM cells. The bone disease associated with PCa bone metastases is driven by alterations in a complex signalling network, including the RANKL/OPG pathway and Wnt signalling. ER stress, induced by tunicamycin, decreased RANKL and DKK1 expression and increased OPG expression in ARCaPM cells. This response of bone-related factors to ER stress was blocked by PERK inhibition. Taken together, my research demonstrates that the UPR has multiple effects in bone metastatic PCa cells, including a reduction in migration and in osteolytic factors following UPR activation, suggesting a novel mechanism by which the UPR may modulate PCa-induced bone disease.

Keywords: Epithelial-mesenchymal transition
Bone
Prostate
Unfolded protein response
Advisor: Edwards, C
Rao, S
Mills, I
Christianson, J
Climate change, sustainable power sources, and developing economies: a case study on two power companies in China

The aim of this study was to discover the attitudes and beliefs underlying China’s limited corporate environmental response to climate change. It employs as its theoretical framework the notion of attitudes and hence practices contributing to climate change as being a “wicked problem” in which multiple issues are synergistically related, and apparently resistant to linear cause and effect thinking or solution. Using a case-study approach in an interpretive paradigm, data were collected, during a nine-month internship in China, from semi-structured interviews with managers and on-site observations of two of China’s leading power companies. The purpose was to discover what they believed were barriers to the adoption of clean technology in which China has invested heavily, what incentives they felt were and could be applied to speed the process, and what stakeholder interests they thought to be involved. Relevant documentary evidence was also explored.
Findings revealed that there was significant consensus and little difference in managerial attitudes and beliefs in these two power companies. All managers expressed uncertainty about the benefits that might accrue from a switch to clean technology, with considerable adherence to path dependence, and awareness of the sunk costs involved in the generation of power through fossil fuels. Although they claimed that incentives were in place, few of these appeared to be directly related to facilitating corporate environmental response. There was some evidence of movement towards involvement of the workforce in idea-generation, yet little evidence of an infrastructure that might support radical or rapid change in beliefs or practices, or a culture that might take stakeholder positions and guidance fully into account. The environment tended to be viewed as an externality.
The uniqueness of this study is that it was conducted from the position of intern, enabling a qualitative approach to data collection and analysis through observation of and discussion with members of a workforce directly involved in implementing aspects of climate change policy in two power companies in China. The adoption of the innovative theoretical framing of the question as a “wicked problem” proved helpful in considering views on climate change and possible solutions, as it revealed a web of multiple interdependent and situated attitudes and beliefs, leading to practices that may stand in the way of the adoption of clean technology in an emergent economy like China. This framework may be usefully adopted in further research studies on this subject.

Keywords: China
clean technology
climate change
Advisor: Clark, G
The deployment of art: the Imperial War Museum's artistic records committee 1968-1982

Situated at the intersection of art and military history, this thesis addresses a subject about which nothing has been published to date: the Artistic Records Committee (ARC), which the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) constituted in 1972 in response to the suggestion by the General Officer in Command of Northern Ireland (GOCNI), Lieutenant General Sir Harry Tuzo, that the Museum should commission artistic records of activities involving British Armed Forces (BAF) then deployed in the North of Ireland. The ARC was modelled on the World War Two (WW2) War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), and the artists the ARC commissioned during its first decade of existence fitted the Official War Artist (OWA) paradigm that had evolved during the two world wars. In complete contrast to these high-intensity conflicts, the British military operation in the North of Ireland known as Operation Banner (1969-2007) was initially launched in response to growing civil unrest between nationalist Catholic and loyalist Protestant communities and was officially framed as a counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operation. But when photographs and filmed footage of paratroopers murdering peaceful Catholic protestors at a civil rights march in Derry on 30 January 1972 (‘Bloody Sunday’) were seen around the world, this shattered the image of the Army as non-partisan. Through a close reading of artworks, archival research, and interviews with artists, former IWM staff, and a former British Army psychological operations (PSYOPs) expert, I show how the ARC was implicated in the ‘propaganda war’ that the British Government waged to counteract negative public perceptions of Operation Banner after ‘Bloody Sunday.’ At a time when emergent conceptual and non-object-based art practices were increasingly concerned with exposure, concealment, and photographic evidence, I demonstrate the potential operational significance of Tuzo’s idea of creating pictorial records. I advance evidence of nepotism involving the Army, the ARC commissioners and Britain’s aristocratic elite, and demonstrate the Committee’s dissociation from the internationally networked, counterculturally invested and pacifist-inclined London art world of the 1970s. Case studies of the painter Ken Howard’s ARC commissions to record Operation Banner in 1973 and 1978, and the illustrator Linda Kitson’s ARC commission to record the ‘Falklands Campaign’ (Operation Corporate) in 1982, lead me to conclude that the dominant visual representation of contemporary conflict by the mass media meant that the OWA paradigm was an anachronism that camouflaged the deployment of art for operational military purposes in the period under review.

Keywords: civil rights
artistic records committee
contemporary art
linda kitson
counterinsurgency
ken howard
Northern Ireland
media event
modern art
colin wallace
frank kitson
Falklands/Malvinas
operation corporate
operation banner
bloody sunday
imperial war museum
militarism
Advisor: Gardner, A
Metapopulation models of pandemic risk and control

A pandemic is a global outbreak of an infectious disease, which can increase rates of death and disability worldwide, and impact economies and civilisations more generally. Ascertaining the risk of large pandemics with high mortality is challenging, due to their rarity. We can understand pandemics better by using the methods of theoretical epidemiology. In this thesis, I explore what one of these methods—metapopulation models—can tell us about pandemic risk and control. Metapopulation models can represent the spatial spread of pathogens, and thereby capture the global nature of pandemics.
I begin by exploring the effect on pandemic risk of cross-immunity between strains of a pathogen. Cross-immunity occurs when infection and subsequent recovery with one strain confers ongoing protection against another strain. I develop a novel Markov chain method to explore the effects of cross-immunity in a metapopulation model. I find that cross-immunity could help to explain why some pandemics cause more mortality than others, and that its effects are likely to change non-linearly as global travel increases.
Using mathematical models to study pandemic risk naturally leads to questions about how to define a pandemic in quantitative terms. I find that quantitative changes in definition can lead to qualitative changes in the interpretation of model results. I use my novel Markov chain method to explore the effects of different pandemic definitions in interpreting metapopulation models, underlining the importance of precise language when discussing pandemic risk.
Metapopulation models can be used to generate recommendations for pandemic control. I evaluate spatial control strategies that could help prevent or ameliorate pandemics, comparing risk-targeting and centrality-targeting strategies for regional allocation of prophylaxis. Risk-targeting strategies use simulation to allocate prophylaxis to regions at the highest risk of epidemics. Centrality-targeting strategies use properties of the travel network to detect regions that contribute most to a pathogen's circulation. Risk-targeting strategies are more commonly discussed in the literature on spatial pathogen control, but I find that centrality-targeting strategies can reduce infections more effectively when resources for control are limited and the pathogen has the potential to spread widely.
A large quantity of data has been gathered on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in England during the COVID-19 pandemic. I use these data to parameterise a metapopulation model to evaluate prophylactic drug stockpiling for pandemic preparedness. I find that prophylactic drugs can be particularly effective at containing or slowing an outbreak when used alongside non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Keywords: pandemic risk
pandemic preparedness
vaccine strategy
metapopulation models
epidemiology
mathematical biology
Advisor: Bonsall, MB
Thompson, RN
Storeys of emptiness: an ethnography of empty homes In London

Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in a luxury square and a council estate in Chelsea, London, this thesis questions widespread conceptualisations of empty homes as sites of decay and decline associated with a loss of community. I combine current debates about the transformation of homes into financial assets with the latest material culture approaches to land, belonging and the home, to offer unique insights into everyday experiences of living alongside empty homes. Through rituals and practices such as gardening, visiting the nearby cemetery, drawing family trees and carol singing, the participants in my research created strong feelings of belonging and identity amidst flows of capital and the financialisation of housing. By focusing on specific creative practices that residents engage in to battle or conceal emptiness across the two sites, the thesis extends beyond the policy-oriented approach of “solving” the problem of emptiness, while allowing for a critical interrogation of which homes fall within this problematisation in the first place. I argue that the perceived emptiness is less about absence and more about neglect towards particular forms of care. By paying close attention to practices of care and the trope of the community that is evoked across both my sites, my research transcends any simplistic binary narrative of emptiness as absence or crisis and reveals instead how the concept is linked with deeply ingrained patterns of ownership, cycles of renewal and long-lasting relationships to land.

Keywords: Mapping
Ethnographic Fiction
Estates in London
London
Council Flats in London
City
Housing
Regeneration
Heritage
Storytelling
Emptiness
Land
Advisor: Dzenovska, D
Daniels, I
The beginnings of disease control in London : the work of the medical officers in three parishes, 1856-1900

The present study examines the problems which the London medical officers of health encountered in public health improvement. The problems of health and disease in nineteenth century England have attracted some attention from historians in recent years, although little attention has so far been paid to the local difficulties of public health improvement. Without an illumination of these problems, the magnitude of the task facing the medical officers, the men responsible for the local control of disease, must remain obscure. The London medical officers of health created by the Metropolis Local Management Act 1855, were representative of the new specialist administrators of the Victorian period, and were the first group of doctors to take a professional interest in the general problems of health and disease in the Victorian city. Their annual reports, which are the principal primary source for this study, are the earliest continuous series of material existing for the comparative study of local health problems in England. This thesis examines the legislative, institutional, intellectual and social context in which the medical officers operated; the structure of the local health organisation; the work of the officers in relation to particular communicable diseases (typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis, smallpox, cholera, scarlet fever, diphtheria, measles and whooping cough); and in the fields of environmental improvement and housing reform. Although the work of the medical officers can be seen to be contributory rather than crucial in the diminution of mortality in the nineteenth century, the conclusions of this study indicate that they played an important part through health education in preparing the way for the successful implementation of social legislation in the twentieth century.

Keywords: parishes
communicable diseases
London
public health
disease control
medical officers
health planning
epidemiology
preventive medicine
nineteenth century
England
19th century
Learning invariant representations in neural networks

Symmetries and invariances are ubiquitous in machine learning tasks. While convolutional neural networks famously and successfully exploit translational symmetries, other symmetries have, until recently, often been neglected. Incorporating symmetries or invariances into the neural network architecture avoids costly data augmentation and alleviates the need for large datasets. The presented work focuses on invariant and equivariant neural network layers, putting symmetries at the centre of neural network architecture design. Concretely, this thesis covers three different invariances: permutation invariance, roto-translation invariance, and label invariance.
• For permutation invariance, this work presents an analysis of the capacity and constraints of sum aggregation, one of the most used permutation invariant neural network paradigms. Next, different permutation invariant relational reasoning modules in the context of multi-object tracking are proposed and compared.
• For roto-translation invariance, a new roto-translation equivariant graph network based on self-attention is introduced. In a subsequent step, this is adapted to enable iterative position refinement, a crucial feature for protein structure prediction.
• Lastly, the case is covered where there is no known symmetry group but instead a nuisance factor that the practitioner would like the neural network to be invariant to. We refer to this concept as label invariance. To that end, a neural network module is introduced that can promote or suppress the nuisance factor while simultaneously making the network more interpretable.

Keywords: invariance
symmetries
artificial neural networks
equivariance
Advisor: Posner, H
Bioquality and the flora of Japan: an investigation into the factors that influence the distribution of rare endemic plant species of the Japanese flora

With two in five plant species threatened with extinction, the identification, evaluation, and prioritisation of plant communities requiring intervention is of critical importance. Whilst Japan is one of 36 global biodiversity hotspots, this is a broad scale assessment, limiting its value and application at finer scales or management levels. Bioquality is a term that applies to a (plant) community and emphasises the concentration of high conservation value elements of biodiversity within it, global rarity, and taxonomic distinctiveness, and does not encompass the separate issue of predicted threats to be treated in a separate analysis. Bioquality assessments can be applied meaningfully at various spatial resolutions.
Japan’s land has 70% “forest” cover, but 40% of this is single species plantations. According to the Red List of Japan, 25% of the flora is threatened with extinction. Japan is a good study area for investigating biodiversity hotspots and issues surrounding their conservation due to the high number of rare and of threatened species and the well-established taxonomic framework.
For this study, a database of 4.8 million plant distribution records has been compiled and cleaned for Japan, and the assembly of this database is described in chapter two. With 60% of records georeferenced, maps showing patterns in the floristic composition of Japan were generated from various perspectives, with the island of Shikoku being the principal focus. Working within the bioquality concept and using the database and maps, Genetic Heat Index (GHI) scores were calculated across Shikoku, revealing patterns in the bioquality at different scales. These, and models derived from them, were used to demonstrate how species occurrence data can be utilised to identify areas rich in globally rare species, the level of protection afforded them, and how these data can be utilised for conserving plant diversity. The outcomes of this research can be utilised as a Key Biodiversity Area (KBA) scoping tool to inform and assist those involved with the identification, evaluation, and prioritisation of plant communities requiring intervention for conservation management, across national, regional, and local scales.

Advisor: Hawthorne, W
Harris, S
Self-supervised and cross-modal learning from videos

Deep learning has demonstrated impressive results for tasks where the training of neural networks can be supervised with paired input and manually labelled output data. However, labelling data can be expensive and might not be feasible for some applications. In this thesis, we consider learning from video data using less supervision than standard supervised learning methods. In particular, we focus on self-supervised learning, where the data itself provides supervision without requiring manually annotated labels, and cross-modal audio-visual learning.
Firstly, we propose two self-supervised frameworks: one for controlling face generation, and another for obtaining a meaningful face representation. We use a proxy task to train both frameworks in a self-supervised way which exploits the knowledge that two frames belong to the same video track. It consists of learning to warp one frame into another, and we can leverage a large video dataset of talking faces for training. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this proxy task for driving face generation with a face image of the same or of a different person. This same framework can be used to control face generation with head pose vectors or audio representations through vector arithmetic in the embedding space. Our other proposed framework distils information about facial attributes into a face embedding which can be used for facial landmark prediction, head pose estimation, and facial expression estimation.
Secondly, we consider the task of visual music transcription which aims to generate audio information from visual information alone. This task is similar to lipreading in the speech domain, and it can be particularly useful for enhancing audio information in the presence of noise or when aiming to separate sounds of different instruments. We pose visual music transcription as a cross-modal learning problem where audio information is used to supervise learning from visual inputs, exploiting the natural co-occurrence of audio and visual signals in videos. We present two frameworks for transcribing music from videos of violin and piano playing respectively, which are trained with pseudo ground-truth labels obtained from audio-based pitch estimation methods. Due to the nature of the piano, the starting points of notes (note onsets) give a clear audio signal whose energy decays quickly. This makes it difficult to derive pseudo ground-truth note endings (note offsets) from audio information. Therefore, in the case of piano playing, we focus on predicting note onsets only. For violin playing, on the other hand, we predict not just the starts of notes, but also the note durations. We curate new datasets of violin and piano playing which consist of video recordings in constrained settings and of in-the-wild videos downloaded from YouTube. For violin playing, the in-the-wild videos exhibit significant variation in viewpoints and body pose of the violinists; for piano playing we only consider top-view recordings.

Keywords: cross-modal learning
self-supervised learning
Advisor: Zisserman, A