VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Towards Informed Exploration for Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this thesis, we discuss various techniques for improving exploration for deep reinforcement learning. We begin with a brief review of reinforcement learning (RL) and the fundamental v.s. exploitation trade-off. Then we review how deep RL has improved upon classical and summarize six categories of the latest exploration methods for deep RL, in the order increasing usage of prior information. We then explore representative works in three categories discuss their strengths and weaknesses. The first category, represented by Soft Q-learning, uses regularization to encourage exploration. The second category, represented by count-based via hashing, maps states to hash codes for counting and assigns higher exploration to less-encountered states. The third category utilizes hierarchy and is represented by modular architecture for RL agents to play StarCraft II. Finally, we conclude that exploration by prior knowledge is a promising research direction and suggest topics of potentially impact.

Advisor: Sethian, James A
Abbeel, Pieter
Lakȟótiyapi kiŋ uŋglúkinipi (We revitalize our Lakota Language): Native Language Revitalization at Standing Rock

In recent decades Native communities have been dedicating time, energy, and resources to maintaining, reclaiming, and revitalizing their languages. Native languages serve as keys to accessing Native epistemologies and pre-contact perceptions of the world. Moreover, in settler societies like the United States–wherein settlers seek to eliminate Native bodies, identities, communities, culture, and ways of life as means to “justifiably” seize Indian territories– Native languages are politically significant. Because Native languages help maintain, sustain, and develop Native identity and sense of community, Native language revitalization serves as a direct form of decolonial resistance. However, Native communities are not simply “recovering” from a cultural-linguistic injury caused by a series of colonial incidents from the past. Rather, all Native communities are working to revitalize their languages within a society that is organized around those same colonial values and goals. My dissertation entitled “Lakȟótiyapi kiŋ uŋglúkinipi (We Revitalize our Lakota Language): Native Language Revitalization at Standing Rock” examines efforts to revitalize Native language in one particular reservation community in order to shed light on these processes at the grassroots level. Drawing from two-years of participant observation in the language movement at Standing Rock, my dissertation examines the limits and possibilities of Lakota/Dakota language education within the tribe’s three education-based language projects: Lakota/Dakota language and culture classes within K-12 schools, the Lakota/Dakota immersion programs, and Lakota/Dakota language education at Sitting Bull College. As an "applied" study of the actual implementation of a language revitalization program on an Indian reservation, my dissertation is meant to offer both "best practices" and "likely problems or areas of difficulty" to practitioners working in other Native communities. Second, as a community and tribal history, it tells the larger story of Standing Rock’s struggle to revitalize its language and culture against great odds.

Advisor: Biolsi, Thomas
Study of large electroweak logarithms at high energy in collider experiments

Using the known resummation of virtual corrections together with knowledge of the/nleading-log structure of real radiation in a parton shower, we derive analytic expressions/nfor the resummed real radiation after they have been integrated over all of phase space./nPerforming a numerical analysis for both the 13 TeV LHC and a 100 TeV pp collider, we/nshow that resummation of the real corrections is at least as important as resummation of/nthe virtual corrections, and that this resummation has a sizable eect for partonic center of/nmass energies exceeding/np/ns = O(few TeV). For partonic center of mass energies/np/ns & 10/nTeV, which can be reached at a 100 TeV collider, resummation becomes an O(1) eect and/nneeds to be included even for rough estimates of the cross-sections./nWe compute the leading-order evolution of parton distribution functions for all Standard/nModel fermions and bosons up to energy scales far above the electroweak scale, where electroweak/nsymmetry is restored. Our results include the 52 PDFs of the unpolarized proton,/nevolving according to the SU(3), SU(2), U(1), mixed SU(2)U(1) and Yukawa interactions./nWe illustrate the numerical eects on parton distributions at large energies, and show that/nthis can lead to important corrections to parton luminosities at a future 100 TeV collider./nWe present a resummation of those double-logarithmically enhanced electroweak correction/nthat arise in pp colliders because protons are not SU(2) singlets, by solving DGLAP/nequations in the full Standard Model. We then show how to match these results with those/nof xed-order electroweak calculations. At a 100 TeV pp collider, contributions beyond order/nare 10% at partonic center-of-mass energies of a few TeV. These are mainly due to/ninitial states with massive vector bosons.

Advisor: Bauer, Christian W
Low Power, Crystal-Free Design for Monolithic Receivers

Predictions of the proliferation of hundreds of billions of connected wireless devices have yet to come true./nThe economics of such deployments becoming feasible require that current wireless modules become smaller, cheaper, and use less power./nA typical wireless device combines a RF System-on-Chip with multiple frequency references, passive components, an antenna, and a battery on a printed circuit board./nThe Single Chip Mote project aims to reduce the size, weight, power, and cost of these devices by eliminating the off-chip frequency references and passives./nThe ultimate goal being to form a 2.4 GHz wireless node by attaching only an antenna and energy source to a single CMOS die./nOf particular interest is the range of applications this could enable where the size and weight of current wireless devices has prohibited their use./nThis work implements a crystal-free IEEE 802.15.4 receiver that covers the data path from RF to bits./nThe receiver utilizes a passive front-end to reduce power and quadrature down-conversion followed by on-chip filtering and digitization./nIntegrated digital baseband is included for demodulation and clock recovery as well as built-in estimation of the errors in the RF channel frequency and data rate./nInitial frequency calibration is performed simultaneously with bootloading using contact-less optical programming./nOperation across the 0 - 70 C commercial temperature range has been demonstrated while inter-operating with commercial off the shelf IEEE 802.15.4 devices./nThe analog portion of the receiver, including the free-running LO, consumes 1.03 mW from a 1.5 V battery while achieving a sensitivity of -83 dBm.

Advisor: Pister, Kristofer S.J.
Stimulation of substance P release from sensory nerves by incretin hormones

Abstract/nStimulation of substance P release from sensory nerves by incretin hormones/nBy/nFahima Mayer/nDoctor of Philosophy in Endocrinology/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Gregory W. Aponte, Chair/nThe communication between the gut and the brain is very complex and is regulated by various systems, such as the endocrine, immune, autonomic, and the enteric nervous system. Food intake has been known and thought to play a major role in this communication. Previously the laboratory of my graduate work showed that guanine nucleotide-binding protein couple receptor (GPCR) GPR93 (also known as lysophosphatidic acid 5 (LPA5) or GPR92) is located at the apical side of the gut lumen and senses nutrients in the lumen of the gut. This receptor was the first to be discovered to be localized on sensory nerves and yet respond to components in mesenteric lymph fluid (MLF) induced in response to the diet. The lymphatic fluid contains cells and molecules from the interstitial fluid (IF) that surrounds specific tissues. My study was to examine if the afferent sensory nerves that innervate the mesenteric lymphatic vasculature could be activated by diet induced molecules of the MLF to form a system of nutrient sensing of the interstitium. I observed that MLF stimulated primary cultured mouse dorsal root ganglia (DRG) sensory neurons. I discovered that Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) or Glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) as model molecules of the MLF stimulated those neurons resulting in the release of Substance P (SP). GLP-1 and GIP are incretin hormones, which induce blood glucose levels to go down after a meal. The results of this study showed a new mode of action for GLP1 and GIP incretin hormones that is extra-pancreatic and how the peripheral tissues and the central nervous system could be stimulated by molecules of the interstitium/MLF via afferent sensory nerves.

Advisor: Aponte, Gregory W
Determining Timescales and Paleoenvironments of Quaternary Human Evolution Using Stable and Radiogenic Isotopes

Assessing the covariance of human biological and cultural evolution with major climate fluctuations requires independent, precise, and accurate chronologies documenting environmental change in association with rare fossils and archaeology. This thesis aims to improve and diversify geochronological tools and associated paleoenvironmental characterization of paleoanthropological sequences using two of the most precise and accurate chronometers applicable in the Quaternary Period, 40Ar/39Ar and U-Series (i.e., 230Th) geochronology, combined with light stable isotopes, to reconstruct timescales and terrestrial paleoenvironments at paleoanthropological sites./nThe first chapter refines the age of the Alder Creek sanidine (ACs) fluence monitor which is frequently utilized to determine 40Ar/39Ar ages of volcanic rocks in association with hominid fossil-bearing and archaeological deposits in eastern Africa. The age of ACs is significantly different if anchored by astronomical tuning (tACs = 1.1848 ± 0.0006 Ma, σ) than if anchored solely by constraints from radioactive decay (tACs = 1.1891 ± 0.0008 Ma), possibly due to 1) leads and lags in the deposition of astronomically tuned sequences, 2) inaccuracy of decay constants, and/or 3) assumptions inherent to each dating method. The second chapter outlines the use of C, N, and O stable isotopes of ostrich eggshells to reconstruct local paleoenvironments at African archaeological sites. Combined with novel 230Th burial dating of ostrich eggshells, these may provide precisely dated paleoenvironmental records for sites up to ~ 500 ka. The light stable isotope composition of ostrich eggshells from two eastern African archaeological sites ~50 – 4 ka, which include diachronous occurrences of the Middle to Later Stone Age transition, suggest a mosaic of local environments through time and space that is not apparent from global or regional paleoenvironmental records. In the third chapter, I apply 230Th dating to coral abrader artifacts from a stratified archaeological sequence at Tangatatau Rockshelter, Mangaia (Cook Islands). I compare the results with a recent Bayesian 14C chronology for the site and develop screening criteria to identify reliable 230Th dates from buried contexts at other sites in an effort to develop more precise ways of dating Polynesian expansion. Precise 230Th dates from coral abraders support early Polynesian arrival to Mangaia (1011.6 ± 5.8 CE) and the arrival of the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to no later than 1361–1466 CE, indicating that trans-Pacific voyaging had introduced this South American native plant to the Cook Islands by that time. The techniques used in this thesis demonstrate the power of integrative research in isotope geochemistry to address questions about geological processes and human evolution.

Advisor: Renne, Paul R
Parent Involvement in the Treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorder: Validation of a Parent Involvement Survey

Researchers have acknowledged that parents play a pivotal role in their children’s autism spectrum disorder (ASD) treatment (Burrell & Borrego, 2012). Unfortunately, many measures of parent involvement for this population use fewer than 10 items and focus only on parents’ reinforcement of therapy skills at home, planning with clinicians, and/or knowledge about treatments (Burrell & Borrego, 2012; Solish & Perry, 2008). A measure of parent involvement that includes all the theorized ways parents support their children’s ASD treatment is necessary for researchers to investigate how parent involvement is related to ASD treatment outcomes. In this study, the validity and reliability of the scores of a new measure for parents’ involvement in their children’s ASD treatment, the Parent Involvement Survey for Autism Treatment-Version 2 (PISAT-2), were investigated using item response theory. Results indicated that PISAT-2 scores had good internal consistency and differentiated well among four of the five proposed levels of parent involvement. Scores from the PISAT-2 were found to be positively correlated with parent self-efficacy (r = 0.38), but not correlated with parent stress. Scores from the PISAT-2 were negatively related to parent education level and annual income, but not related to gender, ethnicity, number of caregivers in the home, reported SES, or work hours per week. The difficulty levels of the PISAT-2 items were similar for participants irrespective of gender, ethnicity, SES, annual income, or work hours per week. However, one item was found to be more difficult for participants with some high school as their highest level of education completed. Participant feedback indicated that the PISAT-2 covered the majority of the ways in which parents are involved in their children’s treatment with some suggestions for improvement.

Advisor: Worrell, Frank C
Driver Eye Movements and the Application in Autonomous Driving

Despite the exciting progress in computer vision in the field of autonomous driving, understanding efficiently which cues or objects are the most crucial ones in a crowded traffic scene is still a big challenge. Human drivers can quickly identify the important visual cues or objects in their blurry periphery vision and then make eye movements to direct their more accurate foveal vision to the important regions. Therefore, driver eye movements may be what computer vision can borrow from human vision to make autonomous driving systems better at locating and understanding the important regions of crowded traffic scenes. Meanwhile, the large-scale datasets and advanced object recognition algorithms that emerged in the field of autonomous driving make it possible to study classical human vision science problems in natural driving situations./nHere, we used driver eye movements to improve autonomous driving models and studied visual crowding—the bottleneck of human object recognition—in realistic driving situations through driver eye movements. First, we developed a new protocol that collects driver eye movements in an offline manner for large-scale driving video datasets. We built a deep neural network that predicts human driver gaze from dash camera videos for various driving scenarios. Our model outperformed the current state-of-the-art model. Furthermore, we incorporated the driver gaze prediction model into an autonomous driving model to make a new periphery-fovea multi-resolution driving model that predicts vehicle speed from dash camera videos. This model combines low-resolution input of the whole video frames and high-resolution input from predicted gaze locations to predict vehicle speed. We show that the added human gaze significantly improves the driving accuracy and that our periphery-fovea multi-resolution model outperforms a uni-resolution periphery-only model that has the same amount of floating-point operations. Finally, we studied visual crowding in driving situations. We show that crowding occurs in natural driving scenes and that the degree of crowding correlates with altered saccade localization in realistic driving-like situations. Together, these studies demonstrate the application of driver eye movements in making safer and more efficient autonomous driving models and show strong evidence of visual crowding in driving situations via the analysis of driver eye movements. These studies also present examples of combining human vision and computer vision to get mutual benefits from both fields.

Advisor: Whitney, David
Computable Continuous Structure Theory

We investigate structures of size at most continuum using various techniques originating from computable structure theory and continuous logic. Our approach, which we are naming ``computable continuous structure theory", allows the fine-grained tools of computable structure theory to be generalized to apply to a wide class of separable completely-metrizable structures, such as Hilbert spaces, the p-adic integers, and many others. We can generalize many ideas, such as effective Scott families and effective type-omitting, to this wider class of structures. Since our logic respects the underlying topology of the space under consideration, it is in some sense more natural for structures with a metrizable topology which is not discrete.

Advisor: Slaman, Theodore A
Surviving Nixon: The Politicization of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1969-1974

Abstract/nSurviving Nixon: The Politicization of Domestic and Foreign Policy, 1969-1974/nby/nAndrew Hobson Manson/nDoctor of Philosophy in Political Science/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Christopher Ansell, Chair/nThis dissertation examines politicization in domestic and foreign policy making, using approaches that are largely quantitative, including survival analysis and text-as-data methods, and the Nixon administration (1969-1974) as its central case. Politicization – the placement of political loyalists into the executive bureaucracy and the use of political criteria or pressures to retain them – is an important way modern presidents have attempted to control an increasingly large and complex institutional environment. Studies of presidential politicization have only in recent years become data-driven, supported by a growing number of datasets on the executive branch. This dissertation adds to that growth, first, by assembling a previously unavailable dataset on tenure for Nixon officials and advisors, including covariates for individual characteristics and the agencies in which they serve. Second, it assembles a unique corpus of documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series, programmatically pre-processing them to make them available for computational analysis./nUsing these tenure and textual data, this study finds that politicization, while an important dimension of official and advisor control under Nixon, is contingent and conditioned on several factors. Among these are the informational resources available to an official or advisor, which stem from characteristics of the agency in which she serves. Such characteristics include the agency’s robustness, its number of high-competence positions, and how specialized its policy product is. A second key factor, anticipated by the long literature on the “two presidencies,” is the domain of policy (domestic or foreign) an official is responsible for. In domestic policy, robust agencies with access to private, policy-relevant information tend to be politicized on the basis of conventional left-right ideology, while coordinating agencies are not. In foreign policy, left-right ideology is deployed when officials differ from the President over preferred policy instruments; otherwise, such “instrumental” preferences are more influential than left-right ideology.

Advisor: Ansell, Christopher
Context and Interaction in the Internet of Things

Future IoT killer apps leveraging ubiquitous sensors and actuators will create value in/nemergent properties of composition and contextual awareness. This thesis focuses on two/nkey aspects of principled IoT design: (1) using contextual information from the physical/nworld, and (2) enabling interaction and composition across distributed cyber physical systems./nThese challenges are mutually intertwined. Acquiring contextual information about/nthe world (1) usually involves building applications to coordinate device interaction (2)./nSimilarly, the decision an application makes about which sensors and actuators to interact/nwith (2) should be governed by contextual information (1)./nIn this thesis I will present research in both directions: I propose semantic localization, a/nlogical language as the interface between spatial modeling and spatial programming. I will/npresent the accessors platform as a framework for building dynamic swarm applications, and/ngive an architecture for connected car service discovery with semantic accessors. I will show/nhow ontology matching adapters may be used to enhance distributed cyber physical system/ninteraction. Finally, I will give an SMT solving algorithm for spatial ontology verification in/nsensor networks.

Advisor: Lee, Edward A
Essays in Industrial Organization

This dissertation consists of two essays in the fields of Industrial Organization and Behavioral Economics. It studies the issue of consumers' biased beliefs that result in misestimation of personal consumption and excessive spending on the products that will never be used in the future./nChapter 1 introduces the issue of overspending in the videogames market. The excessive purchasing exhibits itself in the behavior when consumers purchase games and never open them later. According to the descriptive statistics, around 29\% of games in people’s game libraries are unopened as of March 18, 2019. This setting is very beneficial for the analysis in question as besides purchasing decisions one can observe consumption patterns as well, which are usually problematic to track. I gather the main dataset from Steam, one of the biggest online gaming platforms. The data contain daily purchasing and consumption statistics as well as daily prices in all supported currencies for the period of 9 months. In this chapter I study economic and behavioral mechanisms that may be causing such conduct. In particular, I perform survival analysis, discuss search costs, study the effects of game heterogeneity, check for the presence of the projection bias, and consider intertemporal substitution of purchases as possible explanations of the puzzle. I show that none of the above mentioned mechanisms are supported by the dataset and arrive to the conclusion that the main reason for the excessive spending is consumers' biased beliefs regarding their future willingness to try new products./nChapter 2 builds on the results of the first chapter. In this part of the thesis I develop a structural model that takes into account people's biased beliefs at the point of purchasing new products. It is a static model with the elements of dynamic behavior where every period consumers decide how many games they want to purchase based on how many games they stopped playing in the previous period and then decide how much time to devote to playing. I discuss functional and distributional assumptions that I impose in order to identify the parameters of the model. Next I simulate the model and run three counterfactuals that could potentially alleviate the ovespending behavior. In particular, I consider debiasing consumers, removing sales, and decreasing variety (i.e. imposing a lower bound on game quality). According to the simulated results, removing sales only slightly decreases overspending. Decreasing variety also reduces excessive spending, but it is the most effective for low userscore thresholds. One has to determine the optimal threshold that minimizes the effect of the bias. Debiasing consumers is the most effective in the reduction of expenditures, and the total effect depends on the initial magnitude of the bias.

Advisor: Handel, Benjamin