VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
African Autocrats and Progressive Refugee Governance: Motivating the Illiberal Paradox in African Asylum Policy Through a Case Study of Uganda

The refugee and asylum policies of developing world countries have long been overlooked in academic and policy circles. This represents a critical gap in the literature, as developing countries host 84% of the world’s refugees. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, hosts 26% of the global refugee population. Some African countries welcome refugees and facilitate their safety and prosperity by offering them liberal freedoms. Others seek to prevent the entry of refugees or limit their freedom with draconian policies. How do African countries formulate asylum policies and how do they respond when borders are threatened or crossed by refugees? Uganda is an empirical outlier which can offer insight into this understudied area. Uganda hosts over 1 million refugees, which the country supports with policies that are perceived to be the most progressive in the world.
The limited literature on the determinants of asylum policy in the developing world fail to explain Uganda’s policy response. This thesis argues that this failure stems from an inadequate engagement with the nature and political priorities of the host state’s governing regime. Host governments formulate asylum policies with a view towards both domestic and international political considerations. How much or how little governing regimes provide for refugees is influenced by the possibilities afforded by the state’s domestic political environment. For Museveni, progressive refugee governance fits into a broader foreign policy strategy of image management with the West, reinforcing his reputation as a guarantor of regional stability and deflecting scrutiny of his authoritarian domestic policies.
Evaluating the relationship between regime type and asylum policy is one way to examine how policy outcomes vary across different domestic political environments. Analysis of this relationship reveals that autocrats comprise some 93% of asylum policy liberalizers in Sub-Saharan Africa since the Cold War. In particular, personalist autocrats – those autocrats who have “personalized” power and most closely resemble the stereotype of unconstrained dictatorial rule – account for 60% of liberalizers. This trend supports the idea that progressive refugee governance has strategic value for African autocrats, deflecting international scrutiny into repressive domestic policies, indicating a commitment to international norms, and highlighting a state’s stability relative to regional neighbors. This thesis posits that liberalization of national asylum policy came to serve as a signaling device of these desirable characteristics in the Cold War’s aftermath as liberalizing pressure was applied to African dictators.

Keywords:  Fisher Family Honors Program in Democracy
refugee
asylum
Uganda
Africa
migration
autocracy
Center on Democracy
Development
and the Rule of Law
Thesis
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy
"The age of foreclosures and evictions" : literature of the 2008 financial crisis in Spain

This dissertation analyzes the literary response to the 2008 financial crisis in Spain. I argue that literature serves as a powerful tool to capture what is all too often left behind in discussions of the crisis. The texts analyzed in this dissertation show that the 2008 crisis was a symptom of deeper issues: the legacy of the Spanish transition and its links to corruption and crony capitalism; the precarity that defines the modern labor environment; and the tendency of official discourses to divert attention from emerging crises. I draw on the writings of Karl Marx and Adam Smith to discuss the inner workings of capitalism and its propensity for crisis. In conclusion, I put forth that by looking to the past, the literature of the 2008 financial crisis in Spain teaches us important lessons for the future

Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Resina Joan Ramon
Barletta Vincent 
Hoyos Ayala Héctor
AI Is Increasing the Gap Between Countries: Effects in Human Development and Strategies to Prevent It

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the world. Earlier studies have concluded that countries will adopt AI technologies at different rates and that therefore some countries will likely experience greater economic growth from AI than others. This paper asks an additional question: how might these differences in AI-based economic growth in turn affect average national life expectancy and mean years of education? Using regression analysis and data from the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), the paper first identifies 2019 correlations that show the relationship between national per capita income, on the one hand, and national life expectancy and mean years of education, on the other hand. Then by assuming that the 2030 relationship among these variables is likely to be similar to the 2019 correlations, the analysis combines these correlations and existing projections of 2030 per capita incomes in 20 countries, after they adopt different levels of AI, to estimate what life expectancy and years of schooling might be in those countries in 2030. These estimates show just how much different rates of AI adoption may increase existing differences in lifespans and education among nations. Further studies are needed to establish causal relationships and to develop effective public policy responses.

Keywords:  Public Policy Program
Stanford University
Humanities and Sciences
Public Policy Program
Artificial Intelligence
AI
Human Development Index
HDI
Economic Growth
Health
Life Expectancy
Education
Schooling
Thesis
Advisor: Windham Patrick
AK47s, Tanks, and F16s: Understanding Shifts in Pakistan's Conventional Military Strategy in the Post-Cold War Era

The United States has navigated a turbulent and complex relationship with Pakistan since its inception in 1947 in an attempt to achieve security and stability in South Asia. The Pakistan Army is a primary actor in determining geopolitical relations in the region and its conventional military strategy is a strong indicator of the army’s strategic calculus. Despite a renaissance of interest in understanding the Pakistan Army, there are no existing empirical analysis on the strategic calculus of the Pakistan Army. This thesis analyzes when, how and why the Pakistan Army has shifted its conventional military strategy in the post-Cold war era.
A shift in an army’s conventional military strategy indicates a major change in its perceived existing threats and in the capabilities of the army to address a shifting threat landscape. What accounts for the Pakistan Army’s strategy shifts since 1989? An investigation of the Pakistan Army’s capabilities, doctrines, rhetoric and force distribution discovers that Pakistan shifted its conventional military strategy four times since 1989: a ‘post-Cold war strategy’ from 1989-1994, a ‘defense minimal strategy’ from 1994-2001, a ‘two-front commitment strategy’ from 2001-2010, and a ‘three-front commitment strategy’ from 2010-2019.
Few institutions face such extreme pressures from a variety of different factors. Based on existing literature and interviews, this investigation finds that the Pakistan Army must balance external forces, internal forces, bureaucratic pressures and its nuclear strategy when forming and evolving its conventional military strategy. Through an analysis of the conditions surrounding strategic shifts and examining each individual pressure, this thesis presents the case that external forces, specifically those emanating from India and the U.S. and bureaucratic politics, primarily in leadership changes, have impacted shifts in Pakistan’s conventional military strategy substantially. A proposed policy to address these new findings centers on a carefully calibrated US South Asia policy comprising the management of Pakistan-India relations and balanced incentives and coercive tools.

Keywords: Center for International Security and Cooperation
Pakistan
Strategy
Military
South Asia
Conventional
Thesis
Advisor: McMaster Herbert Raymond
Vardi Gil-li
The algebra and machine representation of statistical models

As the twin movements of open science and open source bring an ever greater share of the scientific process into the digital realm, new opportunities arise for the meta-scientific study of science itself, including of data science and statistics. Future science will likely see machines play an active role in processing, organizing, and perhaps even creating scientific knowledge. To make this possible, large engineering efforts must be undertaken to transform scientific artifacts into useful computational resources, and conceptual advances must be made in the organization of scientific theories, models, experiments, and data. This dissertation takes steps toward digitizing and systematizing two major artifacts of data science, statistical models and data analyses. Using tools from algebra, particularly categorical logic, a precise analogy is drawn between models in statistics and logic, enabling statistical models to be seen as models of theories, in the logical sense. Statistical theories, being algebraic structures, are amenable to machine representation and are equipped with morphisms that formalize the relations between different statistical methods. Turning from mathematics to engineering, a software system for creating machine representations of data analyses, in the form of Python or R programs, is designed and implemented. The representations aim to capture the semantics of data analyses, independent of the programming language and libraries in which they are implemented

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Candès Emmanuel J. (Emmanuel Jean)
Chambers John M.
Hastie Trevor 
Musen Mark A.
Algebraization theorems for coherent sheaves on stacks

Given a moduli problem, two important questions one can ask are the following: Is there an algebraic stack representing the moduli problem? If so, does it have a coarse space? A necessary step to answering these questions in the post-GIT era is to prove an algebraization result akin to formal GAGA for proper schemes. In this dissertation, we will present two such results. The first result (Chapter 2) is Grothendieck's existence theorem for relatively perfect complexes on an algebraic stack. This generalizes work of Lieblich in the setting of algebraic spaces. The second result (Chapter 3) is coherent completeness of BG (with G a split reductive group) and [\SL_d \backslash \mathbf{A}^d]. The results of this chapter are joint work with Jack Hall and are an important step to extending the \'{e}tale slice theorem of Alper-Hall-Rydh to positive characteristic. Finally, in future work with Jack Hall and Jarod Alper, we prove that an arbitrary [G \backslash \spec A] with G reductive is coherently complete

Keywords: Alper, Jarod, degree supervisor.
Mathematics.
Advisor: Vakil Ravi
Taylor R. L. (Richard Lawrence)
All Roads Lead From Home: The Rhetoric of the Interactive Superhighway and Its Effects on the Development of Targeted Advertising

As privacy and security leaks continue to expose the weaknesses in the massive reams of data gathered on us, targeted advertising and Big Data have come under fire for their handling of consumer information. Much of these discussions have centered around Web media in particular. Due to its dynamism, measurability, and classification as an “interactive medium,” as opposed to television and radio, the Web has perhaps disproportionately contributed to predictive modeling. Yet the nature of interactivity is not well agreed-upon; furthermore, while it has been studied across fields such as computer science, information science, or industrial design, less attention has been paid to how advertising agencies have understood it. Through an analysis of internal research documents and case studies from ad agency J. Walter Thompson, combined with coverage of “interactive media” in industry trades, this thesis traces how advertising defined “interactive” over time and links those processes with the steps taken in targeted marketing. In doing so, it breaks from the technocentric narrative that has dominated the literature and aims to provide more sociohistorical perspective. It finds that the commercialization of the Web has heavily favored user-message interactivity, to the detriment of earlier concepts of interactivity that favored user-user interactivity and community building. The discussion concludes that given this knowledge, approaches to future interactive media must be wary of transplanting current-day structures without a critical eye.

Keywords: Advertising
STS
Interdisciplinary Honors
Internet
Media Studies
Historical Analysis
Thesis
Allegory after modernism : a history of a structure of thought

This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley's psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey's communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought—a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures—it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode's contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory's structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence

Advisor: Hills David James
Marrinan Michael 
McGurl Mark
Nemerov Alexander
Ambient intelligence for healthcare

Advances in machine learning and contactless sensors have given rise to ambient intelligence--physical spaces that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of humans. In this dissertation, I will discuss how ambient intelligence could improve our understanding of the metaphorically dark, unobserved spaces of healthcare. In hospitals, I will describe how computer vision can improve patient safety in intensive care units and streamline surgical workflows in operating rooms. Specifically, I describe my technical work on human pose estimation, person re-identification, and pedestrian detection. I then discuss how to apply and evaluate these methods for monitoring hospital hand hygiene. In the operating room, I review computer vision methods for inventorying small surgical objects during operative procedures. In daily living spaces outside the hospital, I will describe how speech recognition and natural language processing can identify depressive mental health symptoms and streamline psychotherapy research. Using ambient microphones, I propose several technical methods for recognizing human emotions and transcribing speech from audio recordings. These methods are then applied to de-identified recordings of real therapy sessions from clinics. Similar to other technologies in healthcare, ambient intelligence must overcome challenges such as rigorous clinical validation and appropriate data privacy. I discuss the tradeoff between privacy and algorithm performance, and propose a method for making inferences directly from encrypted data

Advisor: Li Fei Fei
Jurafsky Dan
Shah Nigam
America in East Africa: Security Partnerships, Aid Dependence, and Diplomatic Leverage

Why is the United States able to shape the actions of friendly nations? In this thesis, I offer an answer by examining American efforts to influence cases of invasion and the liberalization of domestic politics in Kenya and Uganda from 1989 to 2012. Drawing on academic, journalistic, and participant reporting on each case, including interviews with key American policymakers, I test three theoretical frameworks: balance of interests, dependence, and diplomatic strategy. Through these I attempt to explain American influence over the 1998 Ugandan and Rwandan invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 2011 Kenyan invasion of southern Somalia, the 1991 Kenyan reinstitution of multiparty politics, and the 2005 Ugandan abolition of presidential term limits and reinstitution of multiparty politics. The existing literature on these cases focuses on outcomes broadly, and on African states’ comparative ability to secure agency relative to the wishes of their donors. Taking the United States as my focus, in this comparative case study, I find consistent limits to America’s ability to shape the actions of Kenya and Uganda regarding their core interests; however, clear, sustained application of coercive diplomacy still altered outcomes — especially when it used the leverage offered by dependence. This thesis creates a model of American agency in maximizing leverage over aid-dependent states.

Keywords:  Center for International Security and Cooperation
Center for International Security and Cooperation
Kenya
Uganda
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Somalia
diplomacy
coercive diplomacy
balance of interests
dependence
liberalization
Thesis
Advisor: Weinstein Jeremy
Analysis and development of algorithms for fully compositional, thermal and reactive numerical simulation of in-situ combustion at laboratory scale

In this work, we study the numerical simulation of computational, thermal and reactive flow in porous media. We built, tested and verified a robust numerical framework to obtain solutions of the coupled and non-linear system of partial differential equations. We illustrate that some of the models typically used in isothermal simulations need to be adapted in the presence of thermal effects. Our cases are largely impacted by the evaporation and condensation of components, and we demonstrate that lumping has a strong influence on the accuracy of the solutions. Aggressive lumping of the heavy components results in premature evaporation and an overestimation of the recovery. We designed a new multi-level delumping method suitable to thermal recovery processes and were able to lower the error made in the phase behavior calculations by an order of magnitude. Finally, we propose a new family of multi-stage preconditioners dedicated to thermal and reactive cases, reducing the number of iterations of a GMRES linear solver by 40-85% compared to the usual CPR method. The new preconditioners exhibit little to no sensitivity to the thermal regime (advection or diffusion dominated)

Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.
Advisor: Gerritsen Margot (Margot G.) 
Kovscek Anthony R. (Anthony Robert)
Tchelepi Hamdi
Analysis of wide neural networks : insights from linearized models

In this thesis, we study two linearized approximations to neural networks: Random Feature model (RF) and Neural Tangent Model (NT). For two-layer neural networks (NN), we prove the existence of a performance gap between NN and these approximations under two simple data distribution models. We show that this gap in performance stems from the fact that, unlike NT and RF, NN learns efficient representations of the target function. In the second part of this thesis, we study the approximation power of NT and RF in high dimensions. We show that when the features are uniformly distributed on the sphere, these models can only fit surprisingly simple polynomial functions to the data. In the end, we examine the generalization behavior of these approximations in high dimensions. We show that in order to learn anything beyond low-degree polynomial functions, these approximate networks require extremely large number of training data points. Our results suggest that, while these approximations might perform well in various applications, they do not sufficiently capture the full power of neural networks

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Donoho David Leigh
Johnstone Iain
Montanari Andrea
Weissman Tsachy
Analyzing the feasibility of transitioning United States Army vehicles, contingency bases, and permanent bases toward 100% clean, renewable energy

The United States Army relies upon energy to maintain its mission readiness and capability to deploy forces worldwide in support of national security. Consequently, a chief priority of the Army's energy policy is to pursue energy security and energy resilience. This dissertation investigates a hypothesis that electrifying all end uses of energy, improving efficiency, and transitioning toward 100% clean, renewable energy generation in all sectors is a feasible means of improving energy security and resilience while simultaneously reducing air pollution, carbon emissions, and battlefield casualties. Three major challenges are identified and investigated: (1) transitioning vehicles from using combustion engines to either battery electric or hydrogen fuel cell systems; (2) reducing diesel consumption at contingency bases with combinations of solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, and energy storage to offset generators making electricity; and (3) offsetting all Army-wide energy requirements on a net-zero, annual basis using solar and wind power at permanent bases. The analysis included producing computational and spreadsheet models to identify the potential for transitions, the scale of infrastructure required, the technology necessary, and potential benefits to the environment and human health. The key findings were: (1) vehicles; which include wheeled and tracked vehicles, locomotives, helicopters, prop planes, turbofan aircraft, small watercraft, and large ships; have the potential to transition using technological advancements and/or design changes while, in some cases, maintaining or improving power- (or thrust-) to-weight ratio, range, mass, and/or volume characteristics; (2) using energy efficient buildings made from structural insulated panels and installing battery energy storage, rooftop solar photovoltaics, and vertical axis wind turbines at contingency bases can decrease annual consumption of diesel in generators by upwards of 75% in all major climate zones worldwide while reducing air pollution, carbon emissions, and the risk of combat casualties; and (3) electrifying all end uses of energy and incorporating improvements to efficiency at permanent bases can potentially reduce projected energy demand for the year 2050 by 30%, which would facilitate offsetting all energy on a net, annual basis using locally-available clean, renewable resources

Advisor: Jacobson Mark Z. (Mark Zachary)
Billington Sarah L. (Sarah Longstreth)
Dabiri John O. (John Oluseun)