VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
End-User Record and Replay for the Web

The usefulness of today's websites is limited by their form and ease of access. Even though the web contains an ever-expanding wealth of information, much of it exists in a form that is not directly useful. How can end-users access the web in a way that meets their needs?/nWe present record and replay (R+R) as a way to bridge the gap between a website's functionality and the end-user's goal. R+R leverages an interface the user knows and is stable --- that is, the webpage --- in order to automate repetitive tasks. A R+R system observes a user interacting with a website and produces a script which, when executed, repeats the original interaction. End-users can use R+R to automate a sequence of actions and programmers can use these recordings as an API to execute more complicated tasks. Unfortunately, as websites become more complex, R+R becomes increasingly difficult./nThe challenge with modern websites is that a single demonstration of the interaction has limited information, making scripts fragile to changes in the website. For past R+R systems, this was less of an issue because of the static nature of websites. But as the web becomes more dynamic, it becomes difficult to produce a robust script that mimics the interactivity of the user and can adapt to changes on the page./nTo solve this problem, we developed Ringer, a R+R system for the web. Ringer is built on three key abstractions --- actions, triggers, and elements. Ringer takes a user demonstration as input and synthesize a script that interacts with the page as a user would. To make Ringer scripts robust, we develop novel methods for web R+R. In particular, Ringer uses the following features:/nInferring triggers automatically which synchronize the script with the state of the webpage/nMonitoring the replay execution to ensure actions faithfully mimic the user/nIdentifying elements on the replay-time page using a similarity metric/nTo evaluate our work, we run Ringer on a suite of real-world benchmarks by replaying interactions on Alexa-ranked websites. We compare Ringer against a current state-of-the-art replay tool and find that Ringer is able to replay all 29 benchmark interactions, compared to only 5 benchmarks for the previous approach. Additionally, our benchmarks show that a replayer needs to synchronize with the state of a webpage in order to replay correctly, motivating Ringer's use of triggers. We show that our trigger inference algorithm can synthesize sufficient synchronization, while also having the added benefit of speeding up the replay execution. Finally, we show that R+R is useful as a building block for end-user applications by building two such tools using Ringer. One allows end-users to scrape structured data from a website simply through demonstration. The other allows end-users to aggregate real-time data from various websites in the form of live tiles, by specifying the data they want on a website through demonstration.

Advisor: Bodik, Rastislav
Understanding how Cyclopean Perception Arises from Binocular Vision

In vision sensation and perception are rarely equivalent. Most notably, humans perceive the world with three-dimensional depth in a manner consistent with having a single, cyclopean eye centered above the nose even though the inputs to the visual system are a pair of binocular inputs each of which is two-dimensional. In this dissertation we address three aspects of cyclopean perception and how each is influenced by its underlying binocular inputs. In Chapter 1 we study how viewing distance affects retinal disparity and how the visual system is able to maintain a depth percept that is invariant to these changes. In Chapter 2 we examine how binocular disparity and monocular luminance cues are integrated to perceive edges. Finally, in Chapter 3 we consider how monocular images from the left and right eyes are combined to optimize the cyclopean image. Together these studies provide insights into how the visual system interprets retinal inputs and transforms them into a single perception of the world.

Advisor: Banks, Martin S
Shifting Coalitions: Business Power, Partisan Politics, and the Rise of the Regulatory State

The central claim of this dissertation is that organized business’s rise to political power and its variable relationship with the Republican Party are tightly linked. Indeed, I argue that business’s political renaissance in the late twentieth century is tied to an increasing reassertion of power within the Republican coalition. Whereas analysts of business power typically highlight the organizational tools developed by business groups to assure unity within an otherwise diverse array of interests and pursue their political comeback, I will show that attention to the relationship between business and the GOP enables us to situate these tools — business’s deployment of PACs, for example, or their increasing attention to elite-level lobbying — in a larger partisan political context. As we will see, and in contrast to existing scholarship, business’s relationship with the conservative movement of the postwar period and the Republican establishment varied over time. Careful attention to the reasons underlying that variability make clear that business’s central place within the Republican Party has never been guaranteed, but rather is the result of hard effort and creative defense.

Advisor: Pierson, Paul
Kagan, Robert A.
Patterns of Care, Status Differentiation, and the Reproduction of Inequality in Hospital Nursing

Feminist scholars have established care work as a key site for intersecting systems of power. The naturalization of feminized caring legitimates the institutionalized coercion and exploitation of care work, inflecting a matrix of inequalities built up around these relations of caring labor. However, there has been little systematic analysis of the mechanisms of social reproduction through caring labor in a medical setting. This project, based on three years of IRB-approved ethnography of RNs and CNAs at work in a California hospital, addresses this gap. It analyzes the social processes in the social construction of care, illustrating how RNs created and used culture to mitigate coercion, exploitation, and subordination. Specifically, they used semiotic codes—and their respective sets of daily practices—to define what counted as “care” in particular contexts. They also delegated tasks linked with servitude to CNAs through rituals of subordination. These processes enabled RNs to assert professional power, but they also linked status differentiation to empathy/disempathy, facilitated affective structures and subjectivities of disempathy, and reproduced racialized relations of domination between themselves and the CNAs. Thus, mechanisms of empathy/disempathy reproduced inequality. This analysis identifies the limitations of professional nursing power based on the ideological dichotomization of emotional and technical dimensions of medical work and highlights how this ideology—and the structure of feelings that animate it—obscures the actual role of empathy as medical work. This research leads to the formulation of a general theory of empathy/disempathy as a mechanism that contributes to inequality. The argument is that structures of domination, coercion, and exploitation devalue and constrain care throughout the social formation. Institutions that order these power relations are organized through affective structures—and their corresponding ideologies and subjectivities—that link status differentiation to empathy/disempathy. Mechanisms of empathy/disempathy rearticulate the ideological interpellation of subjects by shaping “subject-centric” perceptions of power and determining the processes through which people produce and use culture to rationalize it. On one hand, hegemonic structures of feeling constrain capacities to care and facilitate subjectivities of disempathy. These subjectivities refract experiences of agency through disempathy, power, and status. On the other hand, another category of subjectivity, which I call double-agency, constructs experiences of agency through capacities for empathy— and estrangement from those very capacities. Consequently, processes of empathy/disempathy function as a mechanism in the social reproduction of inequality.

Advisor: Thorne, Barrie
Convex geometric tools in information theory

The areas of information theory and geometry mirror each other in remarkable ways, with several concepts in geometry having analogues in information theory. These observations provide a simple way to posit theorems in one area by translating the corresponding theorems in the other. However, the analogy does not extended fully, and the proof techniques often do not carry over without substantial modification. One reason for this is that information theoretic quantities are often defined asymptotically, as the dimension tends to infinity. This is in contrast to the setting in geometry, where the dimension is usually fixed. In this dissertation, we try to bridge the gap between these two areas by studying the asymptotic geometric properties of sequences of sets. Our main contribution is developing a theory to study the growth rates of intrinsic volumes for sequences of convex sets satisfying some natural growth constraints. As an illustration of the usefulness of our techniques, we consider two specific problems. The first problem is that of analyzing the Shannon capacities of power-constrained communication channels. In particular, we study a power-constrained channel arising out of the energy harvesting communication model, called the $(\sigma, \rho)$-power constrained additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Our second problem deals with forging new connections between geometry and information theory by studying the intrinsic volumes of sequences of typical sets. For log-concave distributions, we show the existence of a new quantity called the intrinsic entropy, which can be interpreted as a generalization of differential entropy.

Advisor: Anantharam, Venkat
Two Paths Diverged: Exploring Trajectories, Protocols, and Dynamic Phases

Using tools of statistical mechanics, it is routine to average over the distribution of microscopic configurations to obtain equilibrium free energies. These free energies teach us about the most likely molecular arrangements and the probability of observing deviations from the norm. Frequently, it is necessary to interrogate the probability not just of static arrangements, but of dynamical events, in which case analogous statistical mechanical tools may be applied to study the distribution of molecular trajectories. Numerical study of these trajectory spaces requires algorithms which efficiently sample the possible trajectories. We study in detail one such Monte Carlo algorithm, transition path sampling, and use a non- equilibrium statistical mechanical perspective to illuminate why the algorithm cannot easily be adapted to study some problems involving long-timescale dynamics. Algorithmically generating highly-correlated trajectories, a necessity for transition path sampling, grows exponentially more challenging for longer trajectories unless the dynamics is strongly-guided by the “noise history,” the sequence of random numbers representing the noise terms in the stochastic dynamics. Langevin dynamics of Weeks-Chandler-Andersen (WCA) particles in two dimensions lacks this strong noise guidance, so it is challenging to use transition path sampling to study rare dynamical events in long trajectories of WCA particles. The spin flip dynamics of a two-dimensional Ising model, on the other hand, can be guided by the noise history to achieve efficient path sampling. For systems that can be efficiently sampled with path sampling, we show that it is possible to simultaneously sample both the paths and the (potentially vast) space of non-equilibrium protocols to efficiently learn how rate constants vary with protocols and to identify low-dissipation protocols./nWhen high-dimensional molecular dynamics can be coarse-grained and represented by a simplified dynamics on a low-dimensional state space, the trajectory space may also be analytically studied using methods of large deviation theory. We review these methods and introduce a simple class of dynamical models whose dynamical fluctuations we compute exactly. The simplest such model is an asymmetric random walker on a one-dimensional ring with a single heterogeneous link connecting two sites of the ring. We derive conditions for the existence of a dynamic phase transition, which separates two dynamical phases—one localized and the other delocalized. The presence of distinct classes trajectories results in profoundly non-Gaussian fluctuations in dynamical quantities. We discuss the implications of such large dynamical fluctuations in the context of simple stochastic models for biological growth.

Advisor: Geissler, Phillip L
The Space that is Sacred (VASA/Ocean): Pacific Islanders in Highr Education

"Vāsā (Ocean)--The Space that is Sacred: Pacific Islanders in Higher Education" investigates how Pacific Islander students across three college campuses--City College of San Francisco, University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of California, Berkeley--change their schools though the use of their indigenous cultures (ocean). Creating a voice for an often invisible community in higher education, students "talk-story" about the challenges and triumphs of their journey in higher education while questioning the politics of knowledge production, identity constructions, indigenous cultural practices, community formations, and inclusion in their schools. The project illustrates how these Pacific Islander movements are critiques of diversity in post-secondary educational institutions but also explores students' engagement with contemporary colonization as a way of understanding their personal lives, their families and communities, and their worlds.

Advisor: Hilden, Patricia P
Modeling Rater Effects and Complex Learning Progressions using Item Response Models

This dissertation is comprised of three papers that propose and apply psychometric models to deal with complexities and challenges in large-scale assessments, focusing on modeling rater effects and complex learning progressions. In particular, three papers investigate extensions and applications of multilevel and multidimensional item response models, with a primary focus on (1) detecting rater effects in double-scored performance assessments, (2) monitoring human raters with automated scoring engine, and (3) developing measurement models for complicated learning progressions./nThe first paper applies and assesses the trifactor model for multiple ratings data in double-scored performance assessments, in which two different raters give independent scores for the same responses (e.g., the GRE essay). The trifactor model incorporates a cross- classified structure (e.g., items and raters) in addition to the general dimension (e.g., examinees). The paper includes a simulation design that follows the GRE example to reflect the incompleteness and imbalance in the real world assessments. The effect of the missingness rate in the data and ignoring the differences among the raters are investigated using the simulations. The use of the trifactor model is illustrated with empirical data./nThe second paper applies mixed-effects ordered probit models for the purpose of examining the effectiveness and efficiency of utilizing scores from automated scoring engines (AE) to monitor and provide diagnostic feedback to human raters under training compared to the scores from the human experts (HE). Using the real rater training study data, three types of rater effects—severity, accuracy, and centrality of each rater—are related with model parameters, and compared for cases (a) when the AE is considered as the true score and (b) when the HE is considered as the true score./nThe third paper proposes a structured constructs model based on change-point analysis to deal with complicated learning progressions, in which relations between levels across multiple constructs are assumed in advance. Based on the change-point analysis, and reparameterizations of the multidimensional Rasch model and partial credit model, cut score parameters and discontinuity parameters are incorporated to classify the examinees into the levels in the learning progressions, and to model the hypothesized relations as the advantage for examinees belonging to a certain level in one construct to reach a level in another construct. Parameter recovery of the proposed model and the consequences of ignoring the hypothesized relations are assessed using simulations. The use of the proposed model is illustrated with empirical data and interpreted as contributing to validity evidence for the hypothesized relations.

Advisor: Mark, Wilson
Branch-and-Cut for Nonlinear Power Systems Problems

This dissertation is concerned with the design of branch-and-cut algorithms for a variety of nonconvex nonlinear problems pertaining to power systems operations and planning. By understanding the structure of specific problems, we can leverage powerful commercial optimization solvers designed for convex optimization and mixed-integer programs. The bulk of the work concerns the Alternating Current Optimal Power Flow (ACOPF) problem. The ACOPF problem is to find a minimum cost generation dispatch that will yield flows that can satisfy demand as well as various engineering constraints. A standard formulation can be posed as a nonconvex Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Program with complex variables. We develop a novel spatial branch-and-bound algorithm for generic nonconvex QCQP with bounded complex variables that relies on a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation strengthened with linear valid inequalities. ACOPF-specific domain reduction or bound tightening techniques are also introduced to improve the algorithm's convergence rate. We also introduce second-order conic valid inequalities so that any SDP can be outer-approximated with conic quadratic cuts and test the technique on ACOPF. Another application is the incorporation of convex quadratic costs in unit commitment, which is a multi-period electric generation scheduling problem. We show that conic reformulation can both theoretically and practically improve performance on this mixed-integer nonlinear problem. We conclude with methods for approximating a mixed-integer convex exponential constraint. Applications include capital budgeting, the system reliability redundancy problem, and feature subset selection for logistic regression.

Advisor: Oren, Shmuel S
Atamturk, Alper
New Approaches to the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman and Related Problems

The Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem and its variants are optimization problems that are widely studied from the viewpoint of approximation algorithms as well as hardness of approximation. The natural LP relaxation for ATSP has been conjectured to have an $O(1)$ integrality gap. Recently the best known approximation factor for this problem was improved from the decades-old $O(\log(n))$ to $O(\log(n)/\log\log(n))$ using the connection between ATSP and Goddyn's Thin Tree conjecture./nIn this work we show that the integrality gap of the famous Held-Karp LP relaxation for ATSP is bounded by $\log\log(n)^{O(1)}$ which entails a polynomial time $\log\log(n)^{O(1)}$-estimation algorithm; that is we provide a polynomial time algorithm that finds the cost of the best possible solution within a $\log\log(n)^{O(1)}$ factor, but does not provide a solution with that cost. This is one of the very few instances of natural problems studied in approximation algorithms where the state of the art approximation and estimation algorithms do not match./nWe prove this by making progress on Goddyn's Thin Tree conjecture; we show that every $k$-edge-connected graph contains a $\log\log(n)^{O(1)}/k$-thin tree./nTo tackle the Thin Tree conjecture, we build upon the recent resolution of the Kadison-Singer problem by Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava. We answer the following question by providing sufficient conditions: Given a set of rank 1 quadratic forms, can we select a subset of them from a given collection of subsets, whose total sum is bounded by a fraction of the sum of all rank 1 quadratic forms?/nFinally we address the problem of designing polynomial time approximation algorithms, algorithms that also output a solution, matching the guarantee of the estimation algorithm. We prove that this entirely relies on finding a polynomial time algorithm for our extension of the Kadison-Singer problem. Namely we prove that ATSP can be $\log(n)^\epsilon$-approximated in polynomial time for any $\epsilon>0$ and that it can be $\log\log(n)^{O(1)}$-approximated in quasi-polynomial time, assuming access to an oracle which solves our extension of Kadison-Singer.

Advisor: Rao, Satish B
A Study on Correlations between Genes' Functions and Evolutions

Genes are functional units in organisms' genomes that are believed to play an important role in how organisms develop their inheritable characteristics such as eye and hair colors. One of the fundamental problems in computational biology is to predict gene functions from DNA sequence data. Researchers have developed several methods, both experimental and computational, to tackle the problem and some of those methods rely on an assumption that genes that have similar functions would likely evolve in a correlated fashion and vice versa. I aim to investigate this assumption under a statistical framework./nI define a measure that quantifies the dissimilarity level of the evolutions of any pair of genes. In order to properly define the measure, I use an evolutionary model to represent the evolution of each gene. The model essentially serves as an encoding of the distribution of all possible character sequences that could be observed at the leaf nodes of the model. Then the measure between any two evolutionary models is precisely defined as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the two distributions, encoded by the models. Since computing the exact measures are not computationally tractable, I instead propose an efficient algorithm for estimating them. Genes' functions are determined based on the Gene Ontology consortium database. In the end, I apply statistical tests for clustering to verify if genes with correlated evolutions tend to have similar functions. I find that the hypothesis is not always true. There are some groups of genes whose functions are not correlated with their evolutions and there are some other groups of genes whose functions and evolutions are correlated well./nIn addition, the methods presented in this research lay out a framework for any studies that involve quantitative analysis on genes' or proteins' evolutions. This thesis exhibits one application in this framework, which focuses solely on genes' functions. But the methods can be applied to other type of attributes such as proteins' structures.

Advisor: Pachter, Lior