VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Emotional Response Coherence and Interoceptive Awareness: Development and Validation of a Novel Assessment Method

Interoceptive awareness (IA), the conscious perception of signals originating in the body, is a fundamental component of our subjective experience of emotion and may be its proximate cause. IA is integral to attention, motivation, emotion regulation, and decision-making—processes that are essential to our survival, sense of agency, and wellbeing. A clear understanding of individual differences in IA is currently hampered by the limitations of prevailing assessments—namely, self-report questionnaires and heartbeat perception tasks—which have questionable reliability and validity, fail to capture the full spectrum of individual variability, and disregard the emotional contexts in which interoceptive processes naturally unfold. This dissertation proposes a novel method for assessing IA that capitalizes on emotional response coherence. Specifically, the method assesses variability in the extent to which physiology and subjective experience track together within individuals while they are experiencing strong emotions. Theoretical and empirical rationales for considering the “Coherence Task” to be a proxy measure of IA are elucidated and its psychometric properties are systematically evaluated./n/nFifty-six men and women aged 18 to 50 completed the coherence task on two occasions spaced one week apart. While watching evocative film montages that captured a range of emotions, subjects provided momentary ratings of their subjective experience on valence and arousal dimensions (2 separate trials per session) and their physiology was continuously recorded. Cross-correlation coefficients of the coherence between subjective ratings and heart period (“Coherence Scores”) were then computed for each individual./nCoherence Scores derived from valence-based ratings of subjective experience and heart period demonstrated significant 1-week test-retest reliability (i.e., temporal stability); were positively associated with self-reported body awareness (i.e., convergent validity); and were negatively associated with a composite measure of distress and positively associated with empathy (i.e., predictive validity). Moreover, these findings showed specificity for the coherence between subjective experience and visceral over somatic signals (i.e., for interoceptive over proprioceptive awareness; discriminant validity)./nThe Coherence Task shows early promise as an empirically grounded assessment of individual differences in IA. This task would also enable us to evaluate the efficacy of interventions that target interoceptive awareness for health and wellbeing (e.g., mindfulness meditation).

Advisor: Levenson, Robert W
Essays in China's Anti-corruption Campaign

China's unique system of hiring and promoting talented people within the state, under the supervision of the Communist Party, has been held up as an important institutional factor supporting its remarkably rapid and sustained economic growth. Jointly with Professor Peter L. Lorentzen, we explore this meritocracy argument in the context of Chinese leader Xi Jinping's ongoing anti-corruption campaign. Some question the sincerity of the campaign, arguing that it is nothing but a cover for intra-elite struggle and a purge of Xi's opponents. In the first chapter of my thesis, we use a dataset I have created to identify accused officials and map their connections. Our evidence supports the Party's claim that the crackdown is primarily a sincere effort to cut down on the widespread corruption that was undermining its efforts to develop an effective meritocratic governing system. First, we visualize the "patron-client'' network of all probed officials announced by the central government and identify the core targets of the anti-corruption campaign. Second, we use a recursive selection model to analyze who the campaign has targeted, providing evidence that even personal ties to top leaders have provided little protection. Finally, we show that, in the years leading up to the crackdown, the provinces later targeted had departed from the growth-oriented meritocratic selection procedures evident in other provinces./n/nIn addition to its motivation, I also discuss the campaign's effects on economic efficiency. The second chapter of my thesis tests the "greasing-the-wheels'' hypothesis in the context of China's residential land market. We show that China's anti-corruption campaign, aimed at removing corruption in China's monopoly land market, caused a decrease in land transaction volumes. Furthermore, not removing any form of corruption would also lead to a similar decrease. It is only necessary to remove corruption that enables real estate developers to circumvent red tape and reduce trading costs. Our findings support the "greasing-the-wheels'' hypothesis hypothesis: when an economy has a low outcome owing to some preexisting distortions, corruption could be a positive factor in that it offers a "second-best world.''

Advisor: Wright, Brian
Quantum Transport and Phase-Field Modeling for Next-Generation Logic Devices

Modeling of semiconductor devices plays an important role in determining which future technologies are most promising for the semiconductor industry as well as optimizing the performance and better understanding the underlying physics of existing devices. This thesis focuses on the design, development, and use of software to study transport in low-dimensional materials and explores the physics of negative capacitance in ferroelectrics./nQuantum transport simulation is used to examine the properties of graphene nanoribbons in geometries that can be fabricated through bottom-up chemical synthesis. The chevron graphene nanoribbon is shown to have an electronic structure analogous to traditional semiconductor superlattices. It is shown how this property could be utilized to create a new type of device, which exhibits both negative differential resistance and steep-slope (< 60 mV/decade) switching for low-power electronics applications. We discuss BerkeleyNano3D, a new quantum transport simulator based on the non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) formalism, which is capable of efficient three-dimensional device simulation on large computing clusters./nFinally, the phenomenon of ferroelectric negative capacitance is examined through the lens of phase-field simulations based on the time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau equation. This phenomenon has been previously predicted as a means to enable energy-efficient steep-slope device with minimal modification to existing transistor processes. Simulation results from three-dimensional phase-field modeling provide new insight into the underlying mechanisms for negative capacitance and give far better agreement with experiment than previously studied single domain models.

Advisor: Salahuddin, Sayeef
Quantum groups, character varieties and integrable systems

In this thesis we address several questions involving quantum groups, quantum cluster algebras, and integrable systems, and provide some novel examples of the very useful interplay between these subjects. In the Chapter 2, we introduce the classical reflection equation (CRE), and give a construction of integrable Hamiltonian systems on $G/K$, where $G$ is a quasitriangular Poisson Lie group and $K$ is a Lie subgroup arising as the fixed point set of a group automorphism $\sigma$ of $G$ satisfying the CRE. As an application, we provide a detailed treatment of the algebraic integrability of the XXZ spin chain with reflecting boundary conditions./nIn Chapter 3, we study doubles of Hopf algebras and dual pairs of quantum moment maps. For any Hopf algebra $A$, we construct a natural generalization of the (quantized) Grothendieck-Springer resolution; the standard resolution corresponds to taking $A$ a quantum Borel subalgebra. In this latter case, we apply the general construction to yield an algebra embedding of the Drinfeld-Jimbo quantum group $U_q(\mathfrak{g})$ into a quantum torus algebra which is a central extension of the quantum coordinate ring of the reduced big double Bruhat cell in the corresponding simply-connected group $G$./nChapter 4 gives an alternative geometric description of this quantum torus embedding. Namely, we construct an embedding of $U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_n)$ into a quantum cluster chart on a quantum character variety associated to a marked punctured disk. We obtain a description of the coproduct of $U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_{n})$ in terms of a quantum character variety associated to the marked twice punctured disk, and express the action of the $R$-matrix in terms of a mapping class group element corresponding to the half-Dehn twist rotating one puncture about the other. As a consequence, we realize the algebra automorphism of $U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_{n})^{\otimes 2}$ given by conjugation by the $R$-matrix as an explicit sequence of cluster mutations, and derive a refined factorization of the $R$-matrix into quantum dilogarithms of cluster monomials./nWe conclude by mentioning some applications of our cluster realization of quantum groups to the decomposition of tensor products of positive representations, and the construction of a modular functor from quantum higher Teichmuller theory.

Advisor: Reshetikhin, Nicolai
Aeroscopics: Spectacles of the Bird’s-Eye View

The aerial view was widely democratized prior to commercial flight. This media archaeology details the practice of terrestrial aerial views presented as cartographic spectacles in the long nineteenth century. The project considers panorama paintings that reproduced the view from above; models of cities that served as proxies for a balloon view; observation rides that provided slow-moving, elevated vistas of cities; as well as the public’s first encounter with the airplane. Although these bird’s-eye art forms have largely been forgotten, this project resurrects these lacunae as “aeroscopics.” Aeroscopics fundamentally skew the epistemology of the cartographic: time slows, scale shifts, and what was a quality of observation becomes instead intoxication.

Advisor: Sandberg, Mark
Essays on the Economics of Supply Chain

Agrifood firms in a globalizing and competitive market, both in developing and developed countries, often undertake innovations in products and technologies. Innovators, both firms and other agents, develop supply chains to accommodate the nature of the innovations. In this dissertation, we explore the economics of supply chain design./nIn the first essay, we analyze an innovator's supply chain design problem. We show that the innovator determines its overall level of production taking advantage of its monopoly power, derived from the innovation, in the output market, and behaves as a monopsony in buying feedstock from contractors. These decisions are constrained by the marginal cost of capital and the properties of production and marketing technologies. When the innovator is risk averse, risks in farm production, processing, and marketing will affect both processed output and the share of feedstock bought through contracts. In the second essay, we develop a framework to analyze adoption of indivisible technologies by small farms using a threshold diffusion model. The article shows that different supply chains may emerge to enable the adoption of these technologies. When the gain from adoption is not affected by scale or ownership of the technology, independent technology dealers or larger farmers may buy the indivisible equipment that embodies the technology and rent it to farmers or enable farmers to outsource the machine's services by supplying custom services. The article derives equilibrium prices and quantities in the output and equipment rental or outsourcing markets. The final chapter presents a conceptual framework depicting the issues and strategies of a firm with an innovation (in product or technology or system). To implement the innovation in terms of procurement of feedstock (intermediate inputs), production and processing, and marketing, the innovating firm undertakes strategic design of its supply chain. The paper illustrates with cases from developed and developing economies, draws policy implications, and lays out a research agenda.

Advisor: Zilberman, David
Cash Transfers and Adult Mortality: Evidence from Pension Policies

I examine the impacts of (unconditional) cash transfers on adult mortality, exploiting eligibility rules for a universal pension income program in Mexico for identification. Using differences-in-differences estimates with the universe of vital statistics data between 2002 and 2011, I estimate a 5% increase in mortality associated with participation in the universal pension program, driven by changes in deaths attributable to cardiovascular/circulatory disease. The positive income-mortality elasticity contrasts with recent work from low and middle income countries that show decreases in mortality in response to income transfers in later life, but is consistent with other evidence on cash transfers and risk factors for chronic disease. I hypothesize the findings may be explained by increase in food consumption, changes in diet, and retirement transitions. The results have important implications for the design of welfare programs, particularly those targeted towards aging populations, and add nuance to our understanding of socioeconomic determinants of health.

Advisor: Dow, William
Machine Learning and the Reliability of Adjudication

Machine learning can be used to help guide and regulate adjudicator decisions, increasing the reliability and overall quality of decision making. The first chapter provides an analytic and normative overview of what I refer to as ``statistical precedent." It explains how statistical models of previous decisions can help assess and improve the reliability of an adjudication system. The subsequent chapters elaborate on and empirically illustrate two of the techniques introduced in the first chapter. Chapter two, using an original dataset of Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions, presents a method for estimating the amount of inter-judge disagreement. Chapter three, using an original dataset of California parole hearings, demonstrates the potential of synthetically crowdsourced decision making.

Advisor: McCrary, Justin
Microfluidic Device Development for Analyzing Single Glioblastoma Cells

Glioblastoma remains a deadly disease due to the diffuse infiltration of single tumor/ncells into the surrounding tissue. Even with the current treatment regimens of surgery,/nradiation, and chemotherapy, the median survival time is approximately one year. Like/nmany solid tumors, glioblastoma is extremely heterogeneous with respect to multiple/nphenotypes such as invasive capacity, therapeutic resistance, and tumorigenicity. This/nheterogeneity complicates our understanding of glioblastoma and consequently, our/nability to treat this disease. Unfortunately, standard population-based assays can mask/nthe properties of rare subpopulations within a tumor and therefore, obscure our/nunderstanding of these subpopulations. As a result, without tools that allow for single/ncell analysis, we are unable to interrogate how different subpopulation phenotypes may/nserve as indicators of glioblastoma tumor growth and progression./nIn this dissertation, we sought to develop and optimize new microfluidic tools to analyze/nsingle glioblastoma cells for a range of phenotypes: viscoelasticity, motility, and/ninvasion. First, we developed a cross-slot based platform and a corresponding/nanalytical model that enables the determination of cellular viscoelastic properties/n(stiffness and fluidity) in a high-throughput manner. Using this platform, we quantified/nthe viscoelastic properties of 3T3 fibroblasts and glioblastoma tumor initiating cells/n(TICs) and observed the expected changes in the cellular elastic modulus in response/nto agents that soften or stiffen the cytoskeleton. Second, we developed a microfluidic/ndevice and workflows that integrates measurements of invasive motility and targeted/nprotein expression with single cell resolution, which we named SCAMPR (Single Cell/nAnalysis of Motility and Proteotype). Using this platform, we identified two proteins,/nNestin and EphA2, which positively correlates with TIC invasive motility./nIn summary, this dissertation focuses on the development of microfluidic platforms for/nsingle cell analysis. Our developed platforms provide a method in which to interrogate/nsingle cells in a high throughput manner and to identify novel relationships between/nvaried cellular phenotypes. These insights are crucial for the identification of both rare/nsubpopulations within a given tumor and patient-specific protein markers that describe/nthese subpopulations.

Advisor: Kumar, Sanjay
Awe Reduces the Magnitude of Reponses to Daily Hassles

Stress in the quotidian events of daily life, or daily hassles, is a powerful predictor of individuals' health and well-being. In the current investigation, across four studies, I tested whether and how awe reduces hassle-related stress, and thus leads to boosts in people's well-being. On a trait level, individuals with higher awe proneness (Study 1) reported lower levels of hassle-related stress. In follow-up laboratory experiments (Studies 2 & 3), induction of awe, compared to control conditions (amusement, joy, pride, & neutral), significantly decreased the intensity of individuals' major hassle-related stress. Finally, a naturalistic induction of awe in which participants viewed august sceneries from the top floor of a 200 feet campus tower reduced levels of both general hassle-related stress and personal major concerns (Study 4). Mediational data demonstrated that the effect of awe on reduced daily hassle-related stress is explained by a sense of perceived vastness. Furthermore, the relationship between awe and decreased daily hassle-related stress, in turn, explained awe's positive influence upon individuals' well-being. Together, these data establish awe's unique role in reducing daily concerns as well as increasing well-being.

Advisor: Keltner, Dacher
Estimation of the costs and benefits of climate change mitigation

The global climate is changing, and it is incumbent on researchers to determine both the costs and benefits of slowing this change. This dissertation contributes to the study of both of these goals. One chapter examines the effect that measurement error in control variables can have on the empirical estimation of the relationship between economic variables and temperature, using the case of maize in the United States of America. This chapter suggests that measurement error in precipitation could bias temperature coefficients away from zero, in this context. One chapter studies the effect of weather variables on the world's largest livestock industry, dairy, in the New Zealand context, and finds large and different effects of weather in summer and winter, and finds that bottom-line conclusions are sensitive to the assumption that the effects do not vary by season. Finally, with a co-author, one chapter studies the potential for a low carbon fuel source that uses a proven, mature, technology, sugarcane ethanol, and finds that a substantial proportion of carbon-intensive fuel could be displaced, under modest subsidies, suggesting that some fossil fuels can be replaced with low abatement costs.

Advisor: Auffhammer, Maximilian
Spot Ignition of Natural Fuels by Hot Metal Particles

The spot ignition of combustible material by hot metal particles is an important pathway by which wildland and urban spot fires and smolders are started. Upon impact with a fuel, such as dry grass, duff, or saw dust, these particles can initiate spot fires by direct flaming or smoldering which can transition to a flame. These particles can be produced by processes such as welding, powerline interactions, fragments from bullet impacts, abrasive cutting, and pyrotechnics. There is little published work that addresses the ignition capabilities of hot metal particles landing on natural fuels. The work presented here investigates the ignition capabilities of these particles by breaking the overall spot ignition process into three distinct subprocesses: generation, simultaneous transport and thermo-chemical change of the particle, and ignition of a fuel. This dissertation will present research on these subprocesses./nThe first subprocess, generation, was studied through literature searches and the results are shown in Section
???
of Chapter
???
along with background on spot fires and previous and associated literature. Then in Chapter 2 a model for the heterogeneous oxidation of iron and steel particles is presented. In Chapter 3 results are presented on the ability of hot metal particles composed of four different metals to ignite a cellulose powder fuel. Then in Chapter 4, the ability of aluminum particles to ignite six natural fuels of different compositions and morphologies was investigated. Then the ability of aluminum and stainless steel particles to ignite a smolder in a grass powder fuel was investigated through experiments and modelling in Chapter 5.

Advisor: Fernandez-Pello, Carlos
Guided GUI Testing of Android Apps with Minimal Restart and Approximate Learning

In recent years, there has been a significant surge in the use and development of apps for smartphones and tablets. The complexity of mobile apps mostly lies in their graphical user interfaces (GUIs) since the computational part of these apps are either simple or is delegated to a backend server. Therefore, testing efforts of these apps mostly focus on the behavior of graphical user interfaces./nIn this thesis, we address two problems in GUI testing, test suite generation and test suite reduction, in the context of Android apps. In the first part of the thesis, we propose the SwiftHand algorithm for automatically generating sequences of test inputs for GUI apps. The algorithm uses machine learning to learn a model of the app during testing, uses the learned model to generate user inputs that visit unexplored states of the app, and uses the execution of the app on the generated inputs to refine the model. A key feature of the algorithm is that it avoids restarting the app, which is a significantly more expensive operation than executing the app on a sequence of inputs. We evaluate SwiftHand on several Android apps, showing that it can outperform a simple fuzz-testing algorithm and a traditional active-learning based testing algorithm./nIn the second part of the thesis, we address the problem of reducing GUI test suites generated by automated testing tools. Automated testing tools, including SwiftHand, have been shown to be effective in achieving good test coverage and in finding bugs. Being automated, these tools typically run for a long period, e.g. for several hours, until the time budget for testing expires. However, these tools are not good at generating concise regression test suites that could be used for testing in incremental development of the apps and in regression testing. We propose DetReduce, a heuristic technique that helps to create a small regression test suite for a GUI app given a large test suite generated by running an automated GUI testing tool. The key insight is that if we can identify and remove some common forms of redundancies introduced by existing automated GUI testing tools, then we can drastically lower the time required to minimize a GUI test suite. We evaluate DetReduce on several Android apps, showing that it can reduce the size and running time of an automatically generated test suite by at least an order of magnitude.

Advisor: Sen, Koushik