VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Applications of Machine Learning for Character Animation

An important goal of character animation is to create believable, life-like movements and expressions. For film, artists spend significant amounts of effort to add sufficient complexity to a character rig to enable believable and emotionally evocative performances. However, once a complex character rig has been authored, an artist then needs to spend a significant amount of effort to animate a character and bring it to life. For video games, mesh deformations and geometry processing must be real-time, which affects the types of deformations included in a character rig for an interactive application. As a result, video game characters tend to lack some of the sophisticated deformations and motions seen in film-quality characters./nThis dissertation explores applications of machine learning for improving the quality of deformations in real-time character rigs as well as applications to assist artists in producing high-quality animations. We detail a deep learning-based approach to enable complex film-quality mesh deformations to run in real-time for both a character's body and face. Our method learns mesh deformations from an existing character rig and produces an accurate approximation using significantly less computational time. In addition to mesh deformations, we present a statistical approach to synthesize novel animations from a collection of artist-created animations. Thus, single-use animations for film can be leveraged for additional applications. We also present a method for generating facial animation from a recorded performance, which provides artists with an initial animation that can be fine-tuned to meet stylistic and expressive needs.

Advisor: Wawrzynek, John
Towards A Deeper Understanding of the Iron Spin Transition

Phase transitions at high pressure are typically expressed as changes in the material’s crystal structure and elastic parameters. This work describes the Fe(II) spin collapse in the ferropericlase system through examining structure factors and through modeling of compressibility data. Detailing electron density distribution changes with compression allows for a comprehensive picture of high-pressure chemistry underpinning the theory in first-principles calculations, giving detailed insight into not only the confidence of measured properties but the electronic landscape leading to essential differences between deep-Earth materials. Experimental charge density changes obtained from single-crystal x-ray diffraction are compared to atomic orbital theory for d-electron spin collapse in high-pressure (Fe,Mg)O, characterized by the spin pairing of the two high energy lone-spin electrons in the Fe valence to a spin-paired state in lower-energy orbitals. Expected changes in bonding can be compared with ratios of local electron density intensities relative to those from atom centers. When normalizing to the oxygen site, there is rough agreement between charge transfer around the cation site (5 percent local charge density changes) and expectation of 6 percent charge transfer for 53 percent Fe stoichiometry (two electrons from Fe divided by the total charge of the cation site). However, the change in charge density in the cation center is roughly twice as large (compared to oxygen) as expected from electron accounting, potentially related to expected electron donation from oxygen. Modeling of compression by way of normalized pressure (F) as a function of finite strain (f) provides an architecture for evaluating the phase transition over a suite of compositions. Through this, the volume collapse of the Fe(II) cation is found and the bulk modulus of both the low- and high- pressure phases is determined. Results are reported as a function of Fe content and display the strengths and limitations of this approach for the data examined.

Advisor: Jeanloz, Raymond
Of Molluscs and Middens: Historical Ecology of Indigenous Shoreline Stewardship along the Central Coast of California

This dissertation presents three cases studies on the archaeology and Historical Ecology of Indigenous shoreline management practices on the Central Coast of California. These studies focus on various invertebrates and marine plants and algae that were harvested and stewarded by coastal Native peoples as foodstuffs and raw materials. The work was undertaken as part of a broader collaborative eco-archaeological research program and partnership between the University of California Campuses at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, The National Park Service (NPS), California State Parks, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band (AMLT) and The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria (FIGR or Coast Miwok) that has been carried out over the past decade. The research integrates approaches in collaborative archaeology and the application of eco-archaeological for revitalizing Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and Traditional Resource Management (TREM) practices of coastal resources in California. In some cases, this knowledge has been repressed as a result of Spanish missionization and successive waves of colonialism during the Mexican and American periods./nSome of this information can be restored and revitalized through collaborative, community-based archaeological research that investigates Ancient Indigenous resource stewardship and management practices with the goal of providing baseline information for TEK revitalization and the restoration of TREM. The primary purpose of the dissertation is to provide crucial cultural and environmental data regarding Ancient and Historical marine resource harvesting that can be employed in contemporary shoreline stewardship by public land agencies and local Indigenous groups.

Advisor: Lightfoot, Kent G
The Impact of Retail Availability on Health Behaviors: Policy Applications for the Prevention & Management of Chronic Conditions

Chronic conditions contribute to vast sums of excess morbidity, mortality, and healthcare expenditures. Many leading risk factors for chronic conditions are related to behavior, including poor nutrition, alcohol misuse, and tobacco use. Literature from psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics suggests that aspects of the environment can encourage unhealthy behaviors. This dissertation uses natural experiments and new combinations of administrative data to explore the role of retail availability in the consumption of unhealthy foods, alcohol, and tobacco and health outcomes and service utilization for chronic conditions. The first paper assesses whether or not adults with diabetes residing in “food swamps” have higher rates of hospitalizations for complications. The second paper focuses on the privatization of liquor sales that occurred in Washington in 2012, investigating if the increase in liquor availability that followed privatization impacted hospitalizations for acute and chronic alcohol-related disorders and accidental injuries. The third paper analyzes the impact of CVS Health’s 2014 tobacco-free pharmacy policy on cigarette smoking among current smokers. Findings from these papers provide additional insight into to how governmental and organizational policies may be used to better prevent and manage chronic conditions.

Advisor: Rodriguez, Hector
Essays on Corporate Law, Governance and Development in the Pacific Alliance

The Pacific Alliance is an economic block formed by Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru in 2011. Driven by the shared goal of accelerating economic development through market liberalization and the preeminence of both democracy and the rule of law, it has gradually established common economic policies and institutions, including a venture capital fund and an integrated stock exchange—the Mercado Integrado Latinoamericano (MILA). Despite these and other accomplishments, corporate law and governance remain within the jurisdictional borders of the Alliance’s member States. This context offers a unique opportunity to critically review and test contemporary accounts on the extent to which corporate law and governance can contribute to economic development by promoting three objectives: sustainable corporate practices, entrepreneurship, and private firms’ access to external finance./nThis dissertation comprises three essays, each of which uses a different method—functional legal analysis, econometrics, and leximetrics, respectively—to dissect these questions individually. Together, they demonstrate that, beyond the regulation of entry and shareholder protection, corporate law and governance can induce meaningful changes to corporate behavior with an impact on economic development determinants. The essays also attest that the Pacific Alliance has not done enough to promote these objectives.

Advisor: Davidoff Solomon, Steven
Background and Occlusion Defenses Against Adversarial Examples and Adversarial Patches

Machine learning is increasingly used to make sense of our world in areas from spam detection, recommendation systems, to image classification. However, in each, it is vulnerable to adversarial manipulation. Within adversarial machine learning, we examine image classification attacks and defenses. We construct spoofs of face detection, and we create defenses against two attacks on image classification: normal and patch adversarial example attacks./nWe examine the Viola-Jones 2D face detection algorithm to study whether images can be created that humans do not notice as faces, yet the algorithm detects as faces. We show that it is possible to construct images that Viola-Jones recognizes as containing faces, yet no human would consider a face. Moreover, we show that it is possible to construct images that fool facial detection even after the images are printed and then photographed./nAdversarial examples allow crafted attacks against deep neural network classification of images. The attack changes the computer classification of an image without changing how humans classify it./nWe propose a defense of expanding the training set with a single, large, and diverse class of background images, striving to ‘fill’ around the borders of the classification boundary. We find that our defense aids the detection of simple attacks on EMNIST, but not advanced attacks. We discuss several limitations of our examination./nAn attacker limited to changing just a small patch of an image can still deceive deep learning image classification. We propose a defense against such patch attacks based on multiple partial occlusions of the image such that a few occlusions each completely hide the patch. We provide certified accuracy for CIFAR-10, Fashion MNIST and MNIST, with a tunable tradeoff between the false-positive rate and certified accuracy. For CIFAR-10 and a 5 × 5 patch, we can provide certified accuracy for 43.8% of images, at the cost of only 1.6% in clean image accuracy compared to the architecture we defend or a cost of 0.1% compared to our training of that architecture, including a 0.2% false-positive rate.

Advisor: Wagner, David A
Meaning through Context ‒ The Case of Discourse Neologisms: A Lexicological Approach to the Semiotic Nature and Function of Discourse Neologisms as an Extension to the Lexicographical Approach of Discourse Glossaries for COVID-19

This dissertation aims to contribute new terminology to the field by introducing discourse neologism to the lexicological and lexicographical approaches in the field of a discourse-related lexicon. The term describes a neologism that uses the discourse as an element of word-formation. The idea originates from the emergence of two COVID-19 discourse glossaries by two major German lexical institutes, from which a corpus was selected, including all the terms that could be identified as discourse neologism. In this dissertation, the semantic, semiotic and grammatical features of the discourse neologism are discussed with the examples from the corpus in order to make concluding statements on their nature and application.

Advisor: Rauch, Irmengard
Understanding the Influences and Organization of Systems to Improve Community Health

In any given community, there are multiple organizations and sectors – including health care, public health, education, and social services – that have a hand in addressing health, as well as the social and economic determinants of health. Often, these sectors are siloed and not coordinating as well as they could be. This dissertation examines organizational changes within different sectors that can support linkage and collaboration across sectors. The first study examines what area characteristics promote the establishment of school-based health centers (SBHCs), which are a key way to increase access to health care for children who are most in need. Findings showed that the availability of nearby community health centers, as well as the existence of a SBHC state advocacy organization, supported the establishment of SBHCs. These results point to the need for extra financial and technical support for school districts in counties that have few or no community health centers. The second study examines multilevel organizational influences of physician practices’ screening for social risks, a care delivery innovation recommended to mitigate disparities, and a key step for preparing health care systems to engage in relationships with relevant community organizations in service of addressing identified needs. Increasingly, physician practices are being acquired by health systems. This study examines how system versus practice characteristics influence whether practices implement screening for social risks, with the goal being to understand what organizational level of intervention may be most effective for increasing screening for social risks. We found that practice-level characteristics explained more of the variance in a practice's screening for social risks, which suggests that efforts to expand social risk screening among system-owned practices should focus on strategies at the practice level, such as increasing technology capacity and patient engagement strategies. The third study tests an approach for identifying US counties with better-than-expected child health outcomes, also known as positive deviants. This study provides the first step – identification of positive deviant counties – that future qualitative research can build on to understand community activities, including multi-sector collaboration and linkages, that contribute to exceptional child health outcomes.

Advisor: Brewster, Amanda L
Moving Further Upstream to Promote Racial Equity: A Mixed Method Analysis of Private Nonprofit Hospital Community Benefit

This dissertation examines how private nonprofit hospital community benefit aligns with health, and the extent to which racial health inequities are addressed. While previous empirical work has examined hospital community benefit in relation to state laws, tax savings, and hospital ownership, less is understood about the relationship between private nonprofit hospital community benefit spending and community health-related needs. The first paper of this dissertation systematically reviews empirical studies to assess the relationship between private nonprofit hospital community benefit and health, and to determine how social health inequities are considered. The findings suggest that hospitals generally report higher amounts of community-directed spending in communities with lower levels of socioeconomic and community health need. The second paper is a cross-sectional study that examines the association between hospital characteristics, community-level indicators of social vulnerability, and private nonprofit hospital community benefit spending for vulnerable populations. Support is found for the hypothesis that hospital capacity, rather than indicators of community social vulnerability, affects the amount of community benefit that private nonprofit hospitals spend. The third paper uses a comparative case study to analyze how two private nonprofit hospital investments in housing and workforce development are rationalized and deployed. The findings indicate that community-based resources are essential to align hospital investments with community need, and to prevent the use of race-neutral decisions that emphasize socioeconomic need yet under- appreciate racialized barriers to health. Together, the three papers provide support for a racial equity approach to private nonprofit hospital community benefit that builds upon existing theoretical and empirical work, and helps to move research and practice further upstream to advance racial equity and improve population health.

Advisor: Rodriguez, Hector
Breaking Schistosomiasis Transmission: Challenges, Opportunities, and a Path Forward

Schistosomiasis is the second most debilitating parasitic disease of humans in the world, trailing only malaria in terms of its harmful effects on global human health. Schistosomiasis is caused by infection with trematode parasites of the genus Schistosoma that are transmitted via intermediate host snails and thrive in areas of the world which lack adequate access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene. One of many neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), schistosomiasis is slated for elimination in the coming decades due to the availability of cheap and effective drugs to cure the disease. Like other diseases caused by helminthic parasites, schistosomiasis transmission is hypothesized to be limited by positive density dependent mate limitation, giving rise to a transmission breakpoint below which elimination becomes inevitable. This breakpoint represents a logical target for elimination campaigns, but there has been little effort devoted to empirically estimating the breakpoint population size of schistosomes. Furthermore, there has been limited investigation of the implications of breakpoints for elimination strategies./nThis dissertation seeks to fill these research gaps, using mathematical modeling and statistical analysis to investigate the breakpoint dynamics of schistosomiasis for the first time. Chapter 1 contextualizes schistosomiasis transmission, providing background on associated pathology and global burden, the schistosome life cycle, and the influence of positive density dependence on schistosomiasis transmission. Chapter 2 explores the dynamics of schistosome aggregation, a key determinant of the strength of positive density dependence, and its implications for the breakpoint. Chapter 3 proposes a novel intervention, the use of prawn aquaculture as a biocontrol agent and a source of revenue in impoverished areas, to combat schistosomiasis. Chapter 4 introduces a modeling framework and a novel, individual-based model of schistosomiasis to estimate schistosomiasis transmission breakpoints and to simulate intervention strategies including mass drug administration, snail control, snail habitat reduction, sanitation, and education to identify strategies that most effectively suppress transmission below the breakpoint. Chapter 5 concludes with commentary on the future of schistosomiasis control and elimination, some reflections on the strengths and limitations of the work, and future directions for the ideas introduced here.

Advisor: Remais, Justin V
Ecco la radio: Music, Media, and Politics in Fascist Italy

Italian radio was politicized from the first broadcast of a speech by Mussolini in 1925. The dictator’s thunderous voice may have sought domination over the airwaves, but in the only Western nation where radio broadcasting evolved under a totalitarian government, the vast majority of broadcasting hours was devoted to entertainment. Far from being apolitical, radio transmissions of music and theater were central players in fascism’s culture industry, shaped both by the profit-driven strategies of media enterprises and by the emotional investment and listening habits of consumers. In this dissertation, through analysis of musical scores, recordings, films and unpublished archival materials, I demonstrate that radio during fascism sought to immerse listeners within a statist fantasy, and that cultural broadcasts were not only political, but themselves generated fascist ideas and discourse. I argue that we cannot understand either fascism’s historical role or its lingering presence in global politics and culture without understanding the ways in which it was mediated by and through radio.

Advisor: Smart, Mary Ann
Explorations of Computational Approaches to Chemical Reactions

This thesis is concerned with the application, development, and assessment of computational approaches to treat chemical reactions from an electronic structure theory perspective. In Chapter 2, the recently developed density functional, wB97X-V, and coupled cluster with single, double and perturbative triple excitations [CCSD(T)] are applied to study the reaction networks of excited state silicon atoms with allene and methylacetylene in the circumstellar envelope of carbon stars. In Chapter 3, another recently developed density functional, wB97M-V, and CCSD(T) are used to benchmark the performance of the ReaxFF reactive force field as applied to hydrogen combustion systems. In Chapter 4, an extension of third-order Moller-Plesset perturbation theory (MP3) and regularized perturbation theory (k-OOMP2) is developed and used to calculate thermochemistry, barrier heights, and noncovalent interaction energies. In Chapter 5, the use of k-OOMP2 optimized orbitals is extended to CCSD(T) and used to investigate the vibrational frequencies of diatomic molecules.

Advisor: Head-Gordon, Martin P
Faces of Death: Towards the Sociogeny of Adolescent Incarceration

Scholars, policymakers, and practitioners often frame the problem of youth incarceration as a problem of youth criminality; a criminality that stems from young people’s inability to control their actions or the inability of families and neighborhoods to control their youth. This focus on criminality obscures other factors that push adolescents into the justice system. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to reframe the problem; rather than centering criminogenic factors that lead young people into the juvenile justice system, it seeks to understand the sociogeny of adolescent incarceration, that is, the structural and sociocultural factors that lead to incarceration and related intrapersonal suffering. The primary significance of this dissertation is in its novel ecological approach to conceptualize the ways schools and carceral systems contribute to adolescent incarceration and can detrimentally affect adolescent development./nUsing grounded theory methodology and ethnographic and interview methods with incarcerated youth and formerly incarcerated adults, this dissertation presents an ecological model to conceptualize participant experiences. This model is centered on three Faces of Death, where death is symbolic and represents three forms of suffering that schools and the carceral system inflicted or attempted to inflict on participants. The Three Faces of Death are: social death, which refers to the social suffering associated with criminalization, dehumanization and or disregard of youth; psychological death, which refers to the psychological suffering associated with social death; and biological death which refers to physical health consequences associated with social and psychological death. Together these Faces of Death advance our understanding of how schools and carceral systems are equally implicated in the sociogeny of adolescent incarceration. While this dissertation implicates schools in the suffering of adolescents, it also presents possibilities for education grounded in critical youth studies to help youth heal from, disrupt, and eradicate suffering from the Faces of Death.

Advisor: Nasir, Na'ilah
Carter, Prudence