VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A two-pronged approach to urban ants: How is behavior affected by habitat urbanization level and what characteristics of an urban tree are attractive to native ants?

Urban landscapes offer a new and different ecosystem to organisms living in them, fostering different communities from neighboring natural areas and affecting the behavior of some organisms. Ants can be useful to urban ecology studies but are relatively understudied in this sphere. This thesis examines urban ants in two different ways. The first chapter compares seasonal foraging activity of a native ant, Liometopum occidentale, in urban and natural landscapes. I analyzed foraging activity at colonies in Naturalized Woodland, Urban Woodland, and Urban landscapes using rate counts and qualitative trail maps throughout the year. Results indicate that foraging activity is affected by season and an interaction between season and habitat urbanization type. Overall highest activity level occurred in the Spring, and lowest occurred in the Summer. During the Winter, Naturalized Woodland sites had higher activity than the colonies in other habitat urbanization types. During the late Summer, Urban colonies had higher activity than the colonies in other habitat urbanization types. This indicates a behavioral response to the different environmental conditions found in urban areas. The second chapter compares characteristics of native urban park oaks utilized by native and invasive ants. Of all ant species found in the surveys, the only invasive ant was Linepithema humile, the Argentine ant. Size and groundcover of oaks were found to be correlated with indigeneity of ants. Native ants were on significantly larger oaks than Linepithema humile and were disproportionately more likely than Linepithema humile to be on oaks with leaf litter groundcover, whereas Linepithema humile was disproportionately more likely than native ants to be on oaks with grass groundcover. Broadly, this thesis helps us understand how landscape influences behavior and how native ants occupy urbanized landscapes. These results have implications for behavioral ecology and urban planning.

Keywords:  Department of Biology
Urban Ecology
Ants
Biology
Ecology
Thesis
Advisor: Gordon Deborah M.
Fukami Tadashi
A Virtual Solution to a Painful Reality: An Analysis of Virtual Reality Integration into Paediatric Pain Management

Advancements in virtual reality (VR) technology have the potential to revolutionise many areas of medicine. In particular, VR use for paediatric pain management is offering promising clinical results, yet the long-term effects of this technology—both for patients and healthcare systems—remain unknown. The goal of this honors thesis was to analyse the current state of VR integration into paediatric pain management. This research answers two main questions: 1) How does VR function as an effective pain management tool for children? And 2) What are providers’ opinions of VR as an effective tool in paediatric pain management? This first part of this thesis addresses the former question through a comprehensive analysis of relevant literature related to VR use in children experiencing acute or chronic pain. To answer the latter question, interviews were completed with providers affiliated with the CHARIOT program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, which is a groundbreaking initiative aimed at implementing VR in paediatric medicine. These interviews addressed five themes related to providers’ use of VR: motivations, barriers, experiences, challenges and opportunities. Providers’ responses were summarised and evaluated against published opinions of VR use in medicine. This thesis concluded that there is a significant need for further research on the use of VR in paediatric pain management. Additionally, in order for VR to be effectively employed in current clinical practice, it is essential that preliminary provider experiences be used to develop a standard VR implementation protocol that can be used by healthcare systems across the United States. Ultimately, this thesis contributes both to the academic literature on VR use and offers a novel analysis of provider opinions that will help to ensure that VR integration into paediatric pain management is done both with efficacy and integrity.

Keywords: Science
Technology &amp; Society
Thesis
Abstraction : a literary history

This dissertation turns to computational semantics and natural language processing in order to trace forms of abstract language as they travel across literary history. Abstract words, when studied at the scale of the digital archive, weave a broad historical pattern for which we have no name: a slow-moving, centuries-long rise and fall across the literature of the modern period. This pattern, invisible but to the macroscope of distant reading, provides a new kind of map, and a new kind of prominence, to the literary history of the long eighteenth century. Zooming in on these distant data, I explore two literary forms of abstract language more closely: "abstract realism, " in the "tell, don't show" narration of the early realist novel; and "abstract persons, " in the personified abstractions of the mid-eighteenth-century poetry. Drawing on both close reading and computational analysis, my dissertation historicizes a cultural logic of abstraction as it develops across the long eighteenth century through a range of linguistic, literary, and social forms. Critically, Abstraction: A Literary History aims to recuperate abstraction as both a method and an object of literary study. For decades, literary criticism has been largely hostile to abstract methods, from the New Critics' insistence on a poem's irreducible ambiguity to the new historicism's emphasis on its material circulation and exchange. My dissertation participates in, and theorizes, what I call an "abstract turn" in criticism, a set of related trends encompassing not only digital humanities work, but also newly abstract, interdisciplinary notions of form, along with new investments in large-scale critical frameworks like the institutional, the transhistorical, and the planetary. Working, computationally, at the scale of four hundred years, Abstraction: A Literary History visualizes this abstract turn within a broader history of negotiations between the literary, the critical, and the abstract.

Advisor: Algee-Hewitt Mark 
Bender John
Greif Mark
Accelerating machine learning with training data management

One of the biggest bottlenecks in developing machine learning applications today is the need for large hand-labeled training datasets. Even at the world's most sophisticated technology companies, and especially at other organizations across science, medicine, industry, and government, the time and monetary cost of labeling and managing large training datasets is often the blocking factor in using machine learning. In this thesis, we describe work on training data management systems that enable users to programmatically build and manage training datasets, rather than labeling and managing them by hand, and present algorithms and supporting theory for automatically modeling this noisier process of training set specification in order to improve the resulting training set quality. We then describe extensive empirical results and real-world deployments demonstrating that programmatically building, managing, and modeling training sets in this way can lead to radically faster, more flexible, and more accessible ways of developing machine learning applications. We start by describing data programming, a paradigm for labeling training datasets programmatically rather than by hand, and Snorkel, an open source training data management system built around data programming that has been used by major technology companies, academic labs, and government agencies to build machine learning applications in days or weeks rather than months or years. In Snorkel, rather than hand-labeling training data, users write programmatic operators called labeling functions, which label data using various heuristic or weak supervision strategies such as pattern matching, distant supervision, and other models. These labeling functions can have noisy, conflicting, and correlated outputs, which Snorkel models and combines into clean training labels without requiring any ground truth using theoretically consistent modeling approaches we develop. We then report on extensive empirical validations, user studies, and real-world applications of Snorkel in industrial, scientific, medical, and other use cases ranging from knowledge base construction from text data to medical monitoring over image and video data. Next, we will describe two other approaches for enabling users to programmatically build and manage training datasets, both currently integrated into the Snorkel open source framework: Snorkel MeTaL, an extension of data programming and Snorkel to the setting where users have multiple related classification tasks, in particular focusing on multi-task learning; and TANDA, a system for optimizing and managing strategies for data augmentation, a critical training dataset management technique wherein a labeled dataset is artificially expanded by transforming data points. Finally, we will conclude by outlining future research directions for further accelerating and democratizing machine learning workflows, such as higher-level programmatic interfaces and massively multi-task frameworks.

Advisor: Ré Christopher 
Liang Percy 
Olukotun Oyekunle Ayinde
Achieving both low latency and strong consistency in large-scale systems

Today's datacenter applications demand large-scale and low-latency systems. Unfortunately, consistency mechanisms were not designed in consideration of large-scale and low-latency settings. Most existing consistency mechanisms incur huge penalties on scalability or latency, so many datacenter systems have forgone consistency. As a result, application developers or end-users suffer from unpredictable system behaviors. This dissertation presents two new consistency mechanisms for large-scale and low-latency systems: Reusable Infracture for Linearizability (RIFL) and Consistent Unordered Replication Protocol (CURP). RIFL provides a general-purpose mechanism for converting at-least-once RPC semantics to exactly-once semantics, thereby making it easy to turn non-linearizable operations into linearizable ones. RIFL is designed for large-scale systems and is lightweight enough to be used in low-latency environments. On the RAMCloud storage system, RIFL adds only 0.5 us to the 13.5 us base latency for durable writes, and it can support 1 million clients with minimal performance degradation (~5% latency increase). We also used RIFL to construct a new multi-server transaction mechanism (RIFL-TX) in RAMCloud; RIFL's facilities significantly simplified the transaction implementation. The transaction mechanism can commit simple distributed transactions in about 20 us and it outperforms the H-Store main-memory database system for the TPC-C benchmark. Replication is a must-have for large-scale systems for masking individual server failures and maintaining high availability. However, consistent replication incurs significant overhead, such as doubling the latency of operations. As a result, many large-scale systems have settled for weakly consistent replication. To address this dilemma, I present Consistent Unordered Replication Protocol (CURP), which removes most of the overhead of consistent replication. CURP avoids performance penalties by allowing clients to directly replicate their requests, as long as the requests are commutative. This strategy allows most operations to complete in 1 RTT (the same as an unreplicated system). On RAMCloud, CURP improved write latency by ~2x (14 us -> 7.1 us) and write throughput by 4x. Compared to unreplicated RAMCloud, CURP's latency overhead for 3-way replication is just 1 us (6.1 us vs. 7.1 us).

Advisor: Ousterhout John K. 
Mazières David (David Folkman)
Rosenblum Mendel
Achieving political control and regional development : spatial mobility in the Chinese bureaucracy

The allocation of career opportunities to local officials has long been identified as a central strategy to promote conformity and discipline in authoritarian regimes. While previous studies of career mobility in authoritarian regimes mostly focus on the political incentives from position promotion, spatial mobility, as a crucial component of career mobility, is given little attention. Spatial mobility refers to the top-down process of transferring local officials across administrative jurisdictions. This dissertation advances the literature by examining the mechanisms, patterns, applications, and implications of spatial mobility in the contemporary Chinese bureaucracy, which provide an important lens through which to inspect the institutional logic of governance in this authoritarian regime, especially how it maintains a delicate balance between political control and regional development. Specifically, this dissertation consists of three inter-related studies. In the first study, I examine the dominant spatial mobility mechanisms in the Chinese bureaucracy. I propose that there are three dominant mechanisms: (1) mobility to reward bureaucrats, (2) mobility to train bureaucrats, and (3) mobility to achieve political control. The three mechanisms induce distinct mobility patterns at the aggregate level and have differential applications across top-administrative positions. In the second study, I focus on the implication of spatial mobility of local political leaders, i.e., the heads of local governments and party committees at the county-, prefectural-, and provincial jurisdictions. Specifically, I analyze how local political leaders' administrative ranks and jurisdictions of their immediate previous positions influence their promotion hazard in their current terms. Finally, in the third study, I examine how the different patterns of spatial mobility of local officials of different positions, particularly local political leaders and the more stable political elites, result in their different roles in promoting the local economy. This dissertation contributes to the comparative study of bureaucracy and, in particular, our understanding of the institutional logic underlying China's economic growth and political stability

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Zhou Xueguang
Powell Walter W. 
Walder Andrew G. (Andrew George)
Activating the sacred landscape : the visual culture of the Wuyi Mountains

This dissertation examines the visual culture of the Wuyi Mountains, one of the sacred Daoist sites in China's southeastern Fujian province. Since the twelfth century, the breathtaking topography of Wuyi has inspired a great variety of cultural productions, including stone inscriptions, topographic paintings, cartography, and contemporary theatrical performances. Grounded in the cultural practice of boating initiated by the influential Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200), these cultural productions developed amid Confucian, Daoist, tourist, and contemporary political currents. Reflecting diverse ways in which humans engaged with Wuyi, these visual materials have defined and augmented the mountains' sacredness. Through integrated analyses of ecology, topography, and visual culture, this study traces the dynamic yet neglected ecological episodes of Wuyi. I argue that understanding ecologically engaged artistic production illuminates historical conceptions of the sacred, reveals histories of human intervention in and interaction with Wuyi, and exemplifies the ways in which we can re-imagine our relations with the environment.

Keywords: Art and Art History.
Advisor: Vinograd Richard Ellis 
Egan Ronald
Kwon Marci 
Wigen Kären
Acts of commitment : prefigurative politics on the agitprop stage

"Acts of Commitment" examines the purposeful conflation of theatrical and political acts in agitprop performance: a genre of anti-fascist street theater popular in the final years of the Weimar Republic (ca. 1926-1933). Using largely unpublished archival materials—production ephemera, performer memoirs, and police reports—I reconstruct the performance scenarios of this amateur theater movement, while also locating its trajectory within larger cultural debates about the social function of art. Although agitprop has long been dismissed as an overly simplistic aesthetic practice defined solely by its capacity to convey party doctrine (that is, as "propaganda"), my research dismantles the presumed unidirectionality between political conviction and artistic form. My findings demonstrate that agitprop's political import stemmed less from its (usually pro-Communist) discursive content than from the performative acts of the players, spectators, and police who co-produced the theatrical events. As a transient space that enticed participants to perform political commitments in the face of increasingly fascist state forces, the agitprop stage allowed urban workers to prefigure their own political identities, modes of discourse, and, most significantly, strategies of resistance. At stake in this research is a concrete understanding of how theater has functioned as a vital site for disenfranchised communities to negotiate theoretical models of revolutionary action and their embodied realization.

Keywords: Theater and Performance Studies.
Advisor: Smith Matthew Wilson 
Hill Leslie
Phelan Peggy
Adapting local minimax theory to modern applications

Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is influential because it can be easily applied to generate optimal, statistically efficient procedures for broad classes of estimation problems. Nonetheless, the theory does not apply to modern settings—such as problems with computational, communication, or privacy considerations—where our estimators have resource constraints. The thesis will introduce a modern maximum likelihood theory (through generalization of local minimax theory) that addresses these issues, focusing specifically on procedures that must be computationally efficient or privacy-preserving. To do so, I first derive analogues of Fisher information for these applications, which allows a precise characterization of tradeoffs between statistical efficiency, privacy, and computation. To complete the development, I also describe a recipe that generates optimal statistical procedures (analogues of the MLE) in the new settings, showing how to achieve the new Fisher information lower bounds.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Duchi John 
Candès Emmanuel J. (Emmanuel Jean) 
Johnstone Iain
Adhocracies, for chamber orchestra with dual soprano soloists

Through recent works, I have been interested in the perceptual transitions between intelligibility and ambiguity with language in music. With Adhocracies I wanted to attempt a much larger scale transition between the states of unintelligible chatter, to ambiguous speech, to (finally) articulated prose. Adhocracies has become a vessel where I could address these language and speech procedures in the same context as several other compositional devices I have been developing concurrently.

Keywords: Music.
Advisor: Ferneyhough Brian
Chafe Chris 
Kapuscinski Jaroslaw
Adjoint optimization of free-space metasurfaces

Metasurfaces are ultrathin optical elements that are highly promising for constructing lightweight and compact optical systems. In order to enhance the capabilities of the technology beyond what is achievable with conventional optics, I introduce a method for designing free-space metasurfaces via adjoint topology optimization. Using silicon on glass as a platform, I demonstrate that the optimization of wavelength-scale sections can be used to construct both periodic and aperiodic optical devices. For periodic devices, I show the process for optimizing a polarization-insensitive grating which efficiently deflects light to 75 degrees, as well as gratings which are capable of independently splitting up to 5 separate wavelengths. For aperiodic devices, I demonstrate the process by which we construct large objects, such as lenses, using wavelength-scale sections that are individually optimized to deflect to specific angles with a specified phase delay. Overall, we envision that the proper application of optimization techniques to free-space metasurfaces can realize their usage in enabling technologies requiring compact control over multiple distinct channels of light.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Byer R. L. (Robert L.)
Fan Jonathan Albert 
Vuckovic Jelena
Adjoint-based optimization and inverse design of photonic devices

Photonic devices are important to a wide range of applications, from communications to fundamental science. However, the design of such devices is traditionally done by hand, using physical intuition and trial and error. The development of 'inverse design', where computational optimization techniques are used to design devices based on certain specifications, has led to the discovery of many compact, non-intuitive structures with superior performance. Among various methods, large-scale, gradient-based optimization techniques have been one of the most important ways to design a structure containing a vast number of degrees of freedom. These techniques are made possible by the 'adjoint method', in which the gradient of an objective function with respect to all design degrees of freedom can be computed using only two full-field simulations. In this thesis, we will discuss the application of inverse design to two emerging photonic technologies and discuss the generalization of the adjoint method to new scenarios. First, we will present the inverse design of laser-driven particle accelerators on a chip as well as our efforts to scale this technology to higher energy gains using photonic integrated circuits. Next, we will discuss how the adjoint method may be used to perform on-chip training of optical neural networks. We will show that this technique corresponds to a physical implementation of the backpropagation algorithm, commonly used in traditional neural networks. A procedure for measuring the gradient determined by the adjoint method will be introduced. Then, we will discuss the application of this technique to design general wave systems capable of perform machine learning computation on sequence data in the form of time series signals. Finally, we will discuss the generalization of the adjoint method to nonlinear optical phenomena and show that this may be used to devise compact photonic switches in a Kerr nonlinear material.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Fan Shanhui
Byer R. L. (Robert L.)
Solgaard Olav