VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Vibrant and Intricate Communication: Neurodiversity and the stories we navigate with and without words

This research project explores the communication opportunities for individuals in a community-based transition program in the Bay Area. The study focuses on the opportunities that are made available by a program that is founded on neurodiversity and trauma-informed principles. The research questions examined how a neurodiverse framework allows for diverse forms of communication to be utilized by participants throughout their activities at job sites, academic classes and travel training trips. The second question investigated the ways that using video recording can enhance our understanding of individual and community experiences. This was particularly relevant as I used and offered GoPro cameras to wear throughout data collection. Nine of the program’s participants agreed to participate in this study. I accompanied these individuals during their program two days per week over the course of approximately nine months. This study was halted to an immediate end by the start of the shelter-in-place due to the global pandemic. This study used observational, video, audio and photography data in its qualitative analysis. NVivo software was used to organize the data, code and analyze the findings. The first chapter describes the conceptual framework and methodological choices in detail. The following three chapters, chapter two, three and four each discuss specific groups of data excerpts that highlight distinct areas of findings. Chapter two uses data excerpts that closely analyze the interactional and accessibility of social space for the participants engaged in their program activities. With these examples, findings point to how the participants utilize strategies and are affirmed in their participation throughout program activities. Here, the discussion adds to socio-spatial theory and its direct relationship with accessibility. In chapter three, data examples are used to demonstrate the many ways that program participants invite interactional engagement through the use of material, appearance and proximity choices. The discussion builds on literature based on interactional engagement through shared referential material. Finally, in chapter four, data examples are used to describe how self-determination arises in the program. Both aspects related to how the program and staff support self-determination training and how the participants engage is discussed. This discussion provides examples for contextualized self-determination training in community-based programming. This study contributes to knowledge on the implications for neurodiverse and trauma-informed service models for individuals with intellectual/developmental disabilities. The study used an interactional analysis approach to demonstrate how choices that are made between communication partners can impact the overall flow and accessibility of spaces. Finally, this study further engages with how we come to understand self-determination as a process that is embedded in the daily practices of individual.

Advisor: Sterponi, Laura
Soto, Gloria
Examining the Relations Between Memory Support, Patient Memory for Treatment Contents, and Treatment Outcome Using Patient Conceptualizations of Clinical Vignettes

Background and Objectives: Patient memory for psychological treatment contents is a promising transdiagnostic mechanism of change, but there is little consensus concerning its measurement. We investigated the relations between memory support, patient memory for treatment, and treatment outcome using a novel measure called the Conceptualization Task.Methods: Patients from a randomized controlled trial comparing cognitive therapy-as- usual to cognitive therapy plus the Memory Support Intervention (MSI) for adults with depression (N = 171) completed the Conceptualization Task and existing measures of memory for treatment. For the Conceptualization Task, patients read clinical vignettes and provided written responses to assess three facets of conceptualization ability: identifying contributing factors to psychopathology, making intervention recommendations, and providing a rationale for intervention recommendations. Higher scores were given to responses reflecting accurate memory for the theoretical model and change strategies used in treatment. Results: The Conceptualization Task was associated with select existing measures of memory for treatment. Therapist use of strategies from the MSI that involve patients constructing new ideas and connections about treatment contents (termed “constructive memory support”) predicted better Conceptualization Task performance. Patients providing more treatment- consistent intervention recommendations on the Conceptualization Task reported better treatment outcome. Yet the Conceptualization Task did not predict independent variance in outcome above existing measures of memory for treatment, suggesting that the task is too similar to previous measures. Conclusions: Memory support interventions may be improved by placing more emphasis on constructive memory support and reinforcing practical treatment contents (e.g., change strategies) over conceptual treatment contents (e.g., the theoretical model).

Advisor: Harvey, Allison G
Model Selection for Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning

In many domains ranging from internet commerce, to robotics and computational biology, many algorithms have been developed that make decisions with the objective of maximizing a reward, while learning how to make better decisions in the future. In hopes of realizing this objective a vast literature focused on the study of Bandits and Reinforcement Learning algorithms has arisen. Although in most practical applications, precise knowledge of the nature of the problem faced by the learner may not be known in advance most of this work has chiefly focused on designing algorithms with provable regret guarantees that work under specific modeling assumptions. Less work has been spent on the problem of model selection where the objective is to design algorithms that can select in an online fashion the best suitable algorithm among a set of candidates to deal with a specific problem instance./nIn this thesis we provide a comprehensive set of algorithmic approaches to the problem of model selection in stochastic contextual bandits and reinforcement learning. We propose and analyze two distinct approaches to the problem. First, we introduce Stochastic CORRAL, an algorithm that successfully combines an adversarial EXP3 or CORRAL master with multiple stochastic bandit algorithms. Second, we introduce three distinct stochastic master algorithms: Explore-Commit-Eliminate (ECE), Regret Balancing, and Regret Bound Balancing and Elimination (RBBE) that recover the rates of Stochastic CORRAL under an EXP3 and a CORRAL master but with the advantage the model selection guarantees of RBBE extend to the setting of contextual linear bandits with adversarial contexts. We complement our algorithmic results with a variety of lower bounds designed to explore the theoretical limits of model selection in Contextual Bandits and Reinforcement Learning.

Advisor: Bartlett, Peter
Jordan, Michael
Essays on Psychological Resources and Political Behavior: Knowledge, Efficacy, and Trust

How do people get the resources they need to participate in politics? Generations of political scientists have studied how the processes that provide people with unequal money, time, education, and social capital produce inequalities in engagement with politics. This dissertation follows in that tradition. I examine the causes and consequences of three psychological resources that facilitate political engagement: knowledge about political issues, a sense of power over outcomes in one’s life, and a sense of attachment to the place one lives.Chapter One investigates an underappreciated kind of information about politics: knowledge of which social groups demand or benefit from policy proposals. My coauthor and I find evidence that this knowledge is widespread in the American public. We argue that people use information about the groups linked to policies to form issue attitudes that are stable over time and consistent across issues, qualities which prior work has argued are limited to only the most-informed citizens. Chapter Two moves from knowledge about politics to the next stage of political engagement:participation in civic and political life. Drawing on literature from social psychology, I argue that people who generally feel more power over outcomes in their lives participate more in politics. Because people from higher-status socioeconomic backgrounds tend to feel more efficacious than those from less-advantaged households, the sense of power is one in a long list of resources that allow the well-off to participate in politics at higher rates than others. Chapter Three contributes to an emerging literature on the political implications of the sense of attachment people feel to the places they live. I argue that people who feel the place they live is part of their sense of self should trust more in the people and institutions associated with the place. In a large survey, I find that Americans who identify with the place where they live have higher social and political trust and participate in civic life at higher rates. In summary, the first chapter of this dissertation finds reason for optimism about inequalities in psychological resources, documenting a widespread form of political knowledge that allows more people than previously thought to form stable and consistent issue positions. The second chapter is less optimistic, introducing an additional source of advantage for well-off people in political participation. The implications of my final chapter are less clear; more work on place identity is needed to understand how it affects the distribution of social and political trust in the mass public. Taken together, these chapters underscore that to understand inequalities in political participation, researchers must look beyond traditional socioeconomic resources to psychological resources like knowledge, efficacy, and trust.

Advisor: Lenz, Gabriel
Writing Living People: The Promise and Inadequacy of Mimetic Characterization in Late Soviet Literature

This dissertation traces the charged dynamic of mimetic characterization in late Soviet literature though a study of the works of Yuri Trifonov, Andrei Bitov, and Vasilii Belov. Emerging from the Stalinist era and its socialist realist doctrine of the “positive hero,” Soviet writers faced the daunting opportunity of returning a human face to literary characters. This study argues that writers in the era of “developed socialism” were drawn towards this prospect of writing “living people” into their works, only to be stymied by the incompatibility and obsolescence of mimetic modes of characterization inherited from the Russian literary tradition to individuals shaped by both the horrors of the recent past and a nonheroic present. This ultimate failure of mimetic characterization led writers to reference the late Soviet individual through novel means: unable to adequately represent verisimilar characters in words, the authors explored in this dissertation wove the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas surrounding this impossibility into the structure of their texts themselves.The dissertation’s three chapters examine the specific ways each author responded to this mimetic challenge through close readings of the narrative structure and character systems of texts like Trifonov’s Dom na naberezhnoi [House on the Embankment], Bitov’s Pushkinskii dom [Pushkin House], and Belov’s Privychnoe delo [A Typical Matter]. These readings are informed by the theoretical writings of both Western and Soviet literary scholars such as Lidiia Ginzburg, Gyorgy Lukács, James Phelan, and Mikhail Bakhtin. Despite the diversity of their literary styles, all three authors participated in official literary culture, and as such particular attention is given throughout this dissertation to the reception of these writer’s characters by the Soviet critical apparatus. Late Soviet writers not only had to navigate the newly opened landscape of a “socialist realism without shores” but also engaged with the legacies of 19th century Russian realism, whose model of character greatly informed understandings of mimetic characterization for a revived Russian literary culture. The limitations of this model encountered by late Soviet writers and the innovations these encounters produced have implications far beyond the field of literary history. Recent decades have seen a widespread critical reevaluation of the field of “Soviet subjectivity,” with a particular focus on the Stalinist era. A flood of new information, in particular pertaining to the routine or “everyday life” was made available after the fall of the Soviet Union, which saw the opening of historical archives and a flood of non-fiction documents, diaries and memoirs. Valuable insights can be made from a study of accounts both narrated by and about fictional persons, and this study of characterization in the late Soviet era aims to recover notions of selfhood among the writers, critics, and readers of late Soviet literature.

Advisor: Naiman, Eric
Scalable Methods for Detecting Microlensing Black Holes with the Zwicky Transient Facility

Despite models predicting the presence of millions of isolated black holes in the Milky Way galaxy, not a single one has been observed to date. Microlensing of background stars caused by these non-luminous black holes is theoretically the only observational method for detecting them. However black hole candidates obtained through photometric microlensing for astrometric follow-up have been scarce due to the limited number of surveys looking for microlensing events./nThis thesis presents the first wide-field untargeted microlensing survey designed and executed on a multi-purpose synoptic instrument. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has taken observations covering the visible Northern night sky in multiple filters every few nights for several years. This work makes predictions for the number of observable microlensing events contained within the ZTF surveys, implements significant improvements to ZTF long-wavelength optical calibration necessary to characterize these events, and carries out an all-sky search for microlensing events in the facility’s first several years of observations. A list of microlensing events containing black hole candidates is produced that cover regions of the Galactic plane and field stars not previously covered by microlensing campaigns./nZTF is a predecessor to upcoming synoptic surveys such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Observatory. Challenges exist in processing the massive heterogeneous datasets these instruments will generate as they attempt to further many different scientific pursuits. The computational and statistical techniques developed within this thesis can help realize the ambitions to conduct microlensing surveys on these instruments.

Advisor: Lu, Jessica
Nugent, Peter
Ricci flows with non-compact initial conditions

First, we show that a Ricci flow can be started from a non-compact complete manifold, if the manifold is non-collapsed and satisfies a lower bound for many known curvature conditions.In this theorem, we do not need the manifold to have bounded curvature, which was assumed in an earlier work by Bamler-Cabezas-Rivas-Wilking./nSecond, we show that a Ricci flow can be started from a 3d complete manifold with non-negative Ricci curvature.This gave a partial affirmative answer to a conjecture by Topping. we prove it by generalizing the concept of singular Ricci flow by Kleiner and Lott to non-compact initial conditions./nThird, we find a family of 3d steady gradient Ricci solitons that are flying wings. This verifies Hamilton's flying wing conjecture. We also show that the scalar curvature does not vanish at infinity in a 3d flying wing. For dimension $n\ge 4$, we find a family of non-collapsed, $\mathbb{Z}_2\times O(n-1)$-symmetric, but non-rotationally symmetric n-dimensional steady gradient solitons with positive curvature operator./nThis thesis is a composition of the following three papers of the author: "Ricci flow under local almost non-negative curvature conditions", "Producing 3d Ricci flows with non-negative Ricci curvature via singular Ricci flows", "A family of 3d steady gradient solitons that are flying wings" \cite{Lai2019,Lai2020,Lai2020a}.

Advisor: Bamler, Richard RB
Lucid Fabrication

The growing availability of digital fabrication tools has transformed how diverse communities of makers design, prototype, and manufacture physical objects. However, in order to fluently create physical objects using these tools, users must navigate a gauntlet of software packages to draft a digital model, devise a toolpath for manufacturing, and drive the fabrication machine itself. In my dissertation research, I consider alternative workflows and interactions that allow users to more fluidly engage with the capabilities of digital fabrication tools. My exploration in this domain is guided by the following question: How can digital fabrication tools engage and amplify opportunities for human judgment, skill, and creativity during the fabrication process?/nThis dissertation engages with this question from three perspectives embodied in three respective interactive systems. First, how can design intent be directly communicated to a digital fabrication tool? I examine this through MatchSticks, a bespoke CNC system that localizes design and fabrication workflows, and allows users to rapidly design and create wood joinery in-situ. Second, how can the existing ways users interact with physical tools be augmented, rather than defenestrated, by computation? Using a manual lathe as a case study, I exchange the mechanical coupling between handwheels and tool position for a digital coupling: sensors, actuators, computation. Users directly control this lathe "by-wire", while being supported by capabilities more often associated with digital fabrication. Last, how can the capabilities we associate with digital authoring be broadly incorporated within hands-on making? I examine how commonly used workshop jigs and fixtures can be generated computationally using an industrial robot. The resulting interactions afford the tangible familiarity of physical jigs and fixtures while taking full advantage of reprogrammable software./nAll three approaches acknowledge and celebrate the process of fabrication as a site of creative exploration and problem solving. With this framing, I demonstrate how not only can capabilities of digital fabrication be realized outside of established workflows, but that hands-on fabrication itself can be imbued with the characteristics of digital authoring.

Advisor: Paulos, Eric
The fate of working landscapes: Quantifying changes in social-ecological systems

Working landscapes face intensifying pressures from global and local environmental, socioeconomic, and governance changes. These landscapes represent social-ecological systems composed of natural and anthropogenic ecosystems, the human communities that use them, and interactions between the components of the system and the wider world. Disentangling the drivers of change in these complex systems poses conceptual and methodological challenges, but improved understandings of these systems’ interactions and feedbacks may enable humans to manage working landscapes to provide biodiversity conservation and sustainable livelihoods in the face of rapid environmental change. My dissertation integrates theories and methods from conservation science, land system science, and econometrics to identify and quantify drivers of change in three distinct social-ecological systems: fire-prone forests of the western US, California rangelands subject to livestock grazing and wildfire, and a protected area in Amazon Basin experiencing deforestation./nAcross three chapters, my dissertation examines three main questions: 1) What is the effect of land ownership on wildfire probability in forests of the western US? 2) How does livestock grazing impact wildfire probability in California’s rangelands? 3) How does integrating qualitative discourse analysis into land use change modeling affect model outcomes and predicted future forest loss? In the first chapter, I demonstrate that federally-owned forests are more likely to burn in wildfires than privately-owned forests and that these management effects are greater than some changes in climate variables. In my second chapter, I assess the impact of livestock grazing on wildfire probability in three regions of California and three different dominant land cover classes. I find that the impact of grazing on wildfire varies by region and vegetation type, but in some regions and land cover classes, grazing reduces wildfire probability. In my third chapter, I present a framework for integrating qualitative discourse analysis into quantitative land use change modeling and demonstrate the benefits of this methodological integration for understanding deforestation drivers and dynamics in Jamanxim National Forest, Brazil.

Advisor: Butsic, Van
Intersectional Implicit Bias: Evidence for a Category Dominance Hierarchy and The Predominance of Target Gender

Individuals demonstrate implicit evaluative biases with respect to multiple dimensions of socialcategorization. However, little is known about how such implicit biases manifest toward targets displaying simultaneously intersecting social categories. Across four studies (N = 4,314) we used Single-Target IATs (Studies 1-4) and Evaluative Priming Tasks (Study 4) to test competing hypotheses concerning implicit evaluations of multiply categorizable targets varying in race, gender, social class, and age. Overall, we observed a dominant pro-female/anti-male bias, which accounted for more target-level variation in implicit evaluations than race-, class-, or age-related biases. We also documented smaller and less consistent pro-upper-class/anti-lower-class biases, and pro-Asian/pro-White/anti-Black racial biases. We observed little evidence of consistent interactions between social categories, or of effects differing between student samples (Studies 1-3) and a representative US sample (Study 4), or as a function of presenting targets as full-body or upper-body photographs (Studies 3 & 4). Taken together, these results suggest that implicit evaluations of multiply categorizable targets may operate according to a category dominance hierarchy, with a single category (here, gender) predominantly driving evaluations, but ancillary categories producing compounding levels of bias toward individuals displaying multiple stigmatized or positively-valued social identities.

Advisor: Keltner, Dacher
Chen, Serena