VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Incentive mechanisms for societal networks [electronic resource]

A "societal network" is an interconnected structure of resources and consumers that drives a societal process. Examples include roads, electricity grids, health-care systems, and waste management networks. Societal networks are plagued by two pressing problems: (i) the demand for resources exceeds their supply, especially at "peak'' hours, and (ii) inefficiencies due to wastage are highly permeable, i.e., while the loss to an individual is very small, the overall loss to the societal network as a whole can be substantial. This suggests that small changes in the behavior of each user can lead to significant gains in the efficiency of societal networks. More importantly, such a change in each user is necessary to combat systemic problems such as congestion. There is a strong urgency to the problems in societal networks -- the scale of the problems has reached epic proportions. Fortunately, help is at hand. Over the past few decades, there have been great technological inventions such as the creation of the global Internet, the Web, cellular telephony and cloud computing. Now is the right time to address the problems in societal networks making use of the ubiquitous presence of smart sensing technology. This thesis presents a first attempt at that -- making use of a variety of sensing technology to monitor user behavior, informing the users about their actions and incentivizing them to adopt a desirable behavior. This thesis develops a general approach to affect change in the behavior of the users of societal networks. At the first level, it is based on fine-grained sensing of user behavior and communicating this information to a platform, and using incentives of monetary, social and other kinds to change user behavior. At the second level, the approach is concerned with the design of low-cost and accurate sensors, and backend algorithms to inform, engage and incentivize users to affect the desired behavior change. We describe some pilot projects which we have conducted to test and verify the effectiveness of this approach. The first project, INSTANT (Infosys-Stanford Traffic project), was conducted over 6 months in Bangalore, India, to incentivize roughly 14,000 commuters of Infosys Technologies to shift their commute to off-peak hours. The second project is a recycling experiment conducted over one week at Stanford to incentivize the members of the Stanford community to recycle. Third, we outline our contributions to Steptacular, an employee wellness program run at Accenture, USA. Finally, we describe CAPRI (Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives), a research project currently underway at Stanford University to incentivize off-peak travel and "off-center" parking.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering
Advisor: Prabhakar Balaji
Johari Ramesh
Van Roy Benjamin advisor. Thesis advisor
Incentive problems concerning the timing and quality of dialysis [electronic resource]

This dissertation is composed of three essays that analyze incentive problems concerning the health care of end stage renal disease (ESRD) in the United States. The first essay is concerned with the unintended consequences of a proposed change to the system for allocating kidneys to patients on the transplant waiting list. In particular, policymakers in the United States have recently proposed to modify the kidney allocation system by assigning higher priority to patients who are on dialysis longer. The essay examines how this change may create an incentive for physicians to start their patients on dialysis prematurely and investigates how to mitigate this unintended behavior. The second essay investigates physician behavior directly from data, analyzing why the kidney function at which patients start dialysis has been rising over time in the United States. That is, why do patients seem to be starting dialysis earlier and earlier over time? The third essay is concerned with the quality of care of profit-maximizing dialysis providers. In particular, Medicare recently restructured its reimbursement system and publicly released previously confidential data on the quality of care of dialysis facilities. The essay analyzes how such policy changes influence the quality of care decisions of profit-maximizing dialysis providers. On the whole, this dissertation is intended to help policymakers as they make difficult decisions about kidney allocation policies, ESRD-related spending, dialysis reimbursement, and disclosing dialysis facility performance information.

Keywords: Business.
Advisor: Zenios Stefanos A. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Lee Hau Leung advisor. Thesis advisor
Wein Lawrence advisor. Thesis advisor
Incorporating uncertainty in data management and integration [electronic resource]

Modern-day applications like information extraction on the web, data integration, entity resolution, scientific data management, and sensor data management are all required to cope with uncertainty in data. Motivated by this observation, recent years have witnessed a surge of research in the field of uncertain databases. The basic goal of this research is to abstract the common challenges and develop principled, general, and efficient techniques for dealing with uncertainty in the context of data management systems. This thesis makes advances in the field of uncertain data management by presenting efficient techniques for managing and integrating uncertain data. Specifically, the contributions may be classified under three areas: (1) Generalizing: We generalize uncertain databases to incorporate continuous probability distributions and incomplete information; (2) Integration: We establish foundations for integration of uncertain data sources; (3) Efficiency: We develop efficient algorithms for joins and indexing over uncertain data.

Advisor: Widom Jennifer primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Haas Peter advisor. Thesis advisor
Ullman Jeffrey D.
Individual differences and political equality [electronic resource] : two reconciliations

I argue that a theory of distributive justice should explain how citizens' (a) individual differences and (b) political equality rightfully influence their distributive entitlements. Two important contemporary theories, luck- and status egalitarianism, explain (a) or (b), respectively, but not both. Two historical views (Fichte's and Rawls's) offer competing strategies to reconcile distribution-relevant individual differences—in particular, the contributions, efforts, and needs that vary from person to person—with citizens' political equality. Fichte's position that people have the right to guaranteed employment at a living wage ensures that workers' individual work efforts make sufficient contributions to allow workers to satisfy their needs. Political equality influences distributive entitlements to the extent that all citizens have equal rights (including the right to employment) and equal opportunity. Rawls guarantees equal rights and equal opportunity (in a different manner from Fichte); his view also has the effect of enhancing the talents of disadvantaged people over generations. In the long run, then—i.e., after the least advantaged people have benefited from generations of access to talent-building resources—Rawls's theory of distribution ensures that people's work efforts make sufficient contributions to provide for their needs. Fichte's account attends to people's individual entitlements in the present generation—so people need not defer gratification to their descendants, as presently-disadvantaged people must under Rawls's system—but Rawls's ambitious program allows everyone to satisfy a sophisticated need (for self-realization in work) that requires enhanced talents. Finally, I detail how luck- and status egalitarians could improve their views by appropriating Fichte's or Rawls's resources for reconciling individual differences and political equality.

Keywords: Philosophy
Advisor: Cohen Joshua
Satz Debra advisor. Thesis advisor
Wood Allen W. advisor. Thesis advisor
Industrial debris [electronic resource] : memory, materiality, and the making of Mumbai's mill lands

This dissertation, Industrial Debris: Memory, Materiality, and the Making of Mumbai's Mill Lands, explores everyday life within Mumbai's declining textile mills and working-class tenement buildings, also known as "chawls." Like many cities across the globe, Mumbai is facing the grim realities of deindustrialization, urban restructuring, and the casualization of labor. The city's many textile workers once inhabited most of the city's centrally located chawls, but the collapse of the industry in the early 1980s has led to job loss, resettlement, redevelopment, and gentrification. Based on two years of ethnographic research amongst textile workers, mill owners, developers, activists, city bureaucrats, architects, and planners in the transforming mill lands of Central Mumbai, this study asks: "How does the experience of work help people create a sense of themselves? In asking this question, I travel between the last privately owned operational textile mill (which I call Dhanraj Spinning and Weaving, Ltd.) and the chawls inhabited by Dhanraj's remaining work force. Through these spaces, I ask what the place of work is in the production of personhood. By moving beyond the factory floor and into the domestic spaces of working-class life, the intersection of gender, class, caste, ethnicity, and regional origin is in direct and unavoidable conversation with large-scale narratives of belonging. In drawing attention to the simultaneity of multiple social positions, I argue that both Mumbai's written working-class history and its contemporary post-industrial landscape actively omit the diversity of mill labor, still evident on the factory floor and in the disappearing chawls. Specifically, I show how women and ethnic minorities are doubly marginalized through processes of transition. However, the dynamic built environment of postindustrial landscapes reflects the shifting livelihoods of poorer residents fighting to remain visible in urban centers. This study demonstrates that while the built environment may change, landscapes remain infused with memories. Through ethnographic methodology paired with feminist geography, queer theory, and theories of urban space, I excavate these traces of memory and juxtapose them against official narratives in order to make visible these processes of gendered erasure and racial anxiety. While ethnographically specific to Mumbai, this study speaks to current global economic and political trends of deindustrialization, privatization, and neoliberalism and highlights their gendered entailments.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Ebron Paulla A.
Cohen Lawrence
Hansen Thomas
Voss Barbara L.
Yanagisako Sylvia Junko
Information retrieval across multiple information sources using a knowledge based methodology [electronic resource]

The recent years have seen a tremendous growth in research and developments in science and technology, and an emphasis in obtaining Intellectual Property (IP) protection for one's innovations. Information pertaining to IP for science and technology is siloed into many diverse sources and consists of laws, regulations, patents, court litigations, scientific publications, and more. Although a great deal of legal and scientific information is now available online, the scattered distribution of the information, combined with the enormous sizes and complexities, makes any attempt to gather relevant IP-related information on a specific technology a daunting task. In this thesis, we develop a knowledge-based software framework to facilitate retrieval of patents and related information across multiple diverse and uncoordinated information sources in the US patent system. The document corpus covers issued US patents, court litigations, scientific publications, and patent file wrappers in the biomedical technology domain. A document repository is to be populated with issued US patents, court cases, scientific publications, and file wrappers in XML format. Parsers are developed to automatically download documents from the information sources. Additionally, the parser also extracts metadata and textual content from the downloaded documents and populates the XML repository. A text index is built over the repository using Apache Lucene, to facilitate search and retrieval of documents. Based on the document repository, the underlying methodology to search across multiple information sources in the patent system is discussed. The methodology is divided into two major parts. First, we develop a knowledge-based query expansion methodology to tackle domain terminological inconsistencies in the documents. Relevant knowledge is retrieved from external sources such as domain ontologies. Since our goal is to retrieve a collection of relevant documents across multiple sources, we develop a patent system ontology to provide interoperability between the different types of documents and to facilitate information integration. We discuss the Information Retrieval (IR) framework which combines the knowledge-based query expansion methodology with the patent system ontology to provide a multi-domain search methodology. A visualization tool based on term co-occurrence is developed that can be used to browse the document repository through class hierarchies of domain ontologies. The knowledge-based query expansion methodology is evaluated through formal measures such as precision and recall. A simple term-based search is used as a baseline reference for comparison. Additionally, the results from related works are also used for comparison. A series of common questions asked during patent prior art searches and infringement analysis are generated to evaluate the patent system ontology. A summary of the results and analysis is provided.

Advisor: Law K. H. (Kincho H.) advisor. Thesis advisor
Innate and adaptive immune barriers to neural stem/progenitor cell transplantation [electronic resource]

Stem cells and their derivatives, engineered in vitro prior to transplantation or patterned endogenously by the environment following transplant, are hailed for their promise in treating numerous diseases, from heart disease to diabetes and arthritis. However, one substantial barrier to the success of such treatments is the effect of the immunological response on survival and function of the cells. To this end, the transplantation of neural progenitor cells (NPCs) into the healthy brain provides one of the most favorable situations for graft survival, since the central nervous system is an immune privileged site and NPC are immune privileged cells. Herein, we address whether major histocompatibility complex (MHC) mismatch results in the rejection of NPC grafts placed in the murine hippocampus and investigate which immune effectors affect graft outcome. These transplantation studies reveal that while some allogeneic cells survive, MHC incompatibility strongly inhibits the differentiation and retention of graft-derived as well as endogenously produced new neurons. We also demonstrate that inhibiting innate immune activation with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs decreases observed microglial activation and restores allogeneic neuron production and retention to levels seen in syngeneic grafts. Additionally, we show that MHC and activating ligand expression profiles on NPC facilitates recognition by Natural Killer (NK) cells. We utilize animals deficient for critical innate and adaptive immune receptors to establish that both NK cells and T cells influence graft survival and differentiation. Finally, we evaluate how MHC expression intrinsically influences NPC arborization in vitro. Intriguingly, MHC deficiency results in longer and more extensively branched processes. Taken together, our data suggest that MHC expression on grafted NPC facilitates NPC interaction with multiple other cell types, and consequently cannot be ignored when considering NPC transplantation clinically. Indeed, clinical application of NPC will undoubtedly place these cells into injured or diseased brains, where immune barriers may be more substantial. However, these data provide a starting point for evaluation of appropriate immune modulation strategies for such transplants.

Keywords: Immunology.
Advisor: Martinez Olivia
Andreasson Katrin
Jones Patricia advisor. Thesis advisor
Palmer Theo advisor. Thesis advisor
Wyss-Coray Anton advisor. Thesis advisor
Inner valence contributions and phase-matching effects in high-harmonic spectroscopy [electronic resource]

Laser driven high-order harmonics can be used to monitor electron dynamics in molecules with angstrom spatial resolution and sub-femtosecond time resolution. I will discuss experiments extending high harmonic spectroscopy on two fronts: phase-matching and multiple orbital effects. First, measurable harmonic yields require phase-matched emission from macroscopic numbers of molecules. Due to this, observed spectra contain both single molecule and macroscopic responses. We study phase-matching's influence on spectral information using the Cooper Minimum in Argon as a spectral marker. In addition, we develop a phase-matching-based highly dispersive transient Bragg gratings scheme, which shows that phase-matching can actively be used in high harmonic spectroscopy experiments. Second, high harmonics originating from several valence orbitals and their subsequent interferences offers dynamical information but complicates the interpretation of data. Using molecular nitrogen, we show that adjustment and control of the molecular axis can to some extent isolate the contribution of an inner valence orbital. Using water, we demonstrate a different scheme for isolating inner valence contributions based on isotopic substitution. This technique marks the ionizing orbitals by the vibrational motion during the first femtosecond following ionization. These results show that inner valence contributions are ubiquitous and can be isolated even without vibrational or rotational pre-excitation.

Keywords: Physics
Advisor: Bucksbaum Philip H. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Martinez Todd J. (Todd Joseph)
Reis David A.
Inorganic/graphene hybrid nanomaterials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion [electronic resource]

The increasing demand for energy together with the growing concerns about air pollution and global warming has stimulated intensive research on energy processes ranging from production, conversion, storage, transmission and consumption. Energy storage is to become more and more important with the gradual shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources which are temporally intermittent and geographically localized. On the other hand, electric vehicles are now a trend in the automobile industry with the goal to cut emission and reduce oil consumption. It is thus crucial to develop electrochemical energy conversion and storage devices such as batteries and supercapacitors with high specific energy and power, long cycle life, low cost and safety. We aim to design and synthesize novel nanostructured electrode materials and electrocatalysts by using chemically derived graphene sheets as growth substrates for electrochemical functional materials. The unique chemical interactions between graphene and the active nanomaterials affect the morphology and size of the nanomaterials, enhance electron transport, stabilize the nanomaterials during cycling, and generate synergistic effects in electrocatalysis, leading to superior electrochemical performance. We have grown nanocrystals of hydroxides, oxides, chalcogenides and phosphates with controlled morphology, sizes and structures on graphene, affording materials that can be readily integrated in current lithium ion batteries, alkaline batteries and supercapacitors to boost their performance, as well as materials that support rising technologies such as Li-S and Li-air batteries. The novel materials we have studied also allow for deepening our understanding in materials chemistry and electrochemistry.

Keywords: Chemistry
Advisor: Dai Hongjie
Andersen Hans
Moerner W. E. (William Esco)
Instruction for struggling adolescent readers and the limited influence of curriculum materials [electronic resource]

While many adolescents struggle to meet the literacy demands of high school, teachers in secondary schools are typically not prepared to teach reading. Districts respond to these challenges by adopting packaged reading intervention programs, sets of curriculum materials for courses aimed at quickly developing students' reading abilities. Typically, these programs are meant to be implemented "with fidelity, " or with little change from the designed lessons, but past research questions both the likelihood and the appropriateness of "implementing with fidelity." This case study examines three high school teachers' use of one such program with the goal of describing the sorts of adaptations teachers commonly made and determining the degree to which those adaptations could be explained by how teachers read the curriculum materials and how they conceptualized reading instruction. Data included curriculum materials, classroom observations, and teacher interviews. Although the participating teachers were enthusiastic about the program, each of them made substantial adaptations during planning and implementation. This was partially explained by teachers attending more closely to the student materials than to the accompanying instructional recommendations and by teachers' apparent unfamiliarity with instructional practices promoted by the program. Each teacher's adaptations tended to shift the mode of classroom instruction away from explicit instruction and discussion towards recitation and written work. The shifts also tended to lower the rigor of the academic work from comprehension tasks to memory and procedural tasks. This study illustrates the limits of a written curriculum's influence on instruction and has implications for efforts to improve practice through the adoption of materials.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Grossman Pamela L. (Pamela Lynn)
Borko Hilda advisor. Thesis advisor
Juel Connie advisor. Thesis advisor
Willinsky John