VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The adaptation of cuneiform to write semitic: an examination of the use of syllabic sign values in late third and early second millennium Mesopotamia and Syria

The earliest, but scarce, evidence of cuneiform signs being used syllabically to write Akkadian words and proper nouns is at Fara and Tell Abu Salabikh between 2600 BC and 2500 BC. Between around 2350 BC and 1800 BC, there is an increase in the development and use of signs with syllabic values across Mesopotamia and Syria, but these syllabic values (together called ‘syllabaries’) are still very local in nature with significant and observable differences in sign usage and values between sites. Starting around 1800 BC, reforms to the system begin to be enforced that standardise these signs and their values, which essentially ends any major variability in the script within specific periods. This provides us with a period of almost 600 years, spanning the second half of the third millennium and early second millennium BC, during which there is a wealth of textual data documenting the first full adaptation of the cuneiform script to syllabically write Semitic words and proper nouns.
This thesis investigates the attestations and usage of syllabic values to write Semitic lexemes in the cuneiform text corpora from Ebla, Mari, Nabada, Tuttul, Adab, Eshnunna, Kish, Tutub, Assur, and Gasur – with a particular focus on the Syrian sites – during the second half of the third millennium BC and early second millennium BC in order to answer the following two research questions:
1. Did each third millennium site in Mesopotamia and Syria have its own unique syllabary?
2. What were the primary factors that influenced the differences between the syllabaries?
This research uses a series of three interdependent techniques to determine and understand the use and distribution of syllabic values within the cuneiform writing system during the second half of the third millennium BC and early second millennium BC. The results suggest that during this period cuneiform syllabaries are variable, and that variation can further inform us about the regional, temporal, and dialectical contexts in which they existed. The addition of this research to the wider literature on the early adaptation of cuneiform will enhance the field’s understanding of how cuneiform syllabic values began to develop and emerge across the ancient Near East, and demonstrates how scientific and computational methods of analysis can be applied to research questions in humanities subjects.

Advisor: Dahl, J
The politics of participation: an ethnography of gamelan associations in Surakarta, Central Java

Professional Javanese gamelan musicians and the way they think about and make music have been extensively studied by ethnomusicologists. This thesis shifts the analytical focus to the experience and practice of players in ‘gamelan associations’ for whom music is neither their primary occupation nor main source of income. It addresses two issues: firstly, who are these musicians and what does their way of playing and conceiving of music tell us about gamelan, and secondly, what opportunities and benefits does participation in these groups afford them.
The first section sets out the details and context of fourteen gamelan associations in Surakarta. It examines local terminology for different forms of musicianship, their practice in relation to factors such as recompense for playing, ability, repertoire, and training, and discusses the combination of rehearsal and social gathering which I claim is fundamental to these groups. I argue that, whilst there is significant diversity among gamelan associations and their members, they represent a unified category of musicians distinct from those who are officially employed to play and that the specific benefits they obtain from playing derive from this non-professional status.
The second section sets out these benefits in five chapters, relating respectively to gamelan’s implication in discourses of community at local and state level, expressions of cultural ownership, the display and negotiation of personal authority, access to power, and the production of public sound. I argue that these connections mean that participation in gamelan associations is not simply recreational but a potentially powerful way for Solonese people to create meaning and influence for themselves amidst the competing models of modernity and rapid political change of contemporary Indonesia.

Advisor: Stokes, M
Religious landscapes, places of meaning: the religious topography of Arcadia from the end of the bronze age to the early Imperial period

The thesis examines the religious topography of Arcadia through two particular aspects: the built and the natural landscape, and how each relates to human communities, their places of living, and their understanding of the world around. It relies on the assumption commonly made in the field that, since ritual practice was of prevalent importance for the Greeks, cult sites are the most important places for the communities, and therefore they can tell us a lot about the people who built, visited and looked after them.
The first part rests on the acknowledgement that sanctuaries are places of interaction for a certain community of cult (which can but need not overlap with a given polis) and explores how they can be indicators of social change, defined here as responses to changes with large impact on the human milieu. These changes and their response articulated in sacred space are identified in four chapters. The first sets the stage and surveys the known sacred sites of Arcadia at the end of the Bronze Age and during the Early Iron Age. The second looks at how the building of temples after the eighth century indicates a significant change in the way communities were structured in Arcadia. The third looks at how Arcadian sanctuaries responded to the increased religious mobility of the Classical and Hellenistic period. Finally, chapter four evaluates the impact of the Roman conquest on Arcadian religious sites.
The second part explores how myths and rationalising discourses allowed the Greeks to make sense of the salient characteristics and numen of their surrounding natural landscape. Each of the three chapters departs from a situation observed in Arcadia by ancient sources and examines the responses articulated to explain it. Among the variety of topics to pursue, three have been selected because they exemplify a typical characteristic of Arcadia: its wetness. They also allow spatial areas that were less prominent in part one to be explored. The first chapter investigates the attribution of Mycenaean waterworks in Arcadia to Herakles in myth. The second chapter examines the connection made in ancient sources between Poseidon’s lordship over the Peloponnese, earthquakes, floods and cults of Poseidon Hippios in Arcadia. Finally, the last chapter explores the apparent contradiction of having infernal rivers observable in the world of the living, such as the Styx flowing in the Aroania Mountains.

Keywords: ancient religion
ancient history
sanctuaries
Arcadia
ancient Greece
Greek religion
Pausanias
Advisor: Purcell, N
Parker, R
Complexity of mixed equilibria in boolean games

Boolean games are a succinct representation of strategic games wherein a player seeks to satisfy a formula of propositional logic by selecting a truth assignment to a set of propositional variables under his control. The difficulty arises because a player does not necessarily control every variable on which his formula depends, hence the satisfaction of his formula will depend on the assignments chosen by other players, and his own choice of assignment will affect the satisfaction of other players' formulae.
The framework has proven popular within the multiagent community and the literature is replete with papers either studying the properties of such games, or using them to model the interaction of self-interested agents. However, almost invariably, the work to date has been restricted to the case of pure strategies. Such a focus is highly restrictive as the notion of randomised play is fundamental to the theory of strategic games – even very simple games can fail to have pure-strategy equilibria, but every finite game has at least one equilibrium in mixed strategies.
To address this, the present work focuses on the complexity of algorithmic problems dealing with mixed strategies in Boolean games. The main result is that the problem of determining whether a two-player game has an equilibrium satisfying a given payoff constraint is NEXP-complete. Based on this result, we then demonstrate that a number of other decision problems, such as the uniqueness of an equilibrium or the satisfaction of a given formula in equilibrium, are either NEXP or coNEXP-complete. The proof techniques developed in the course of this are then used to show that the problem of deciding whether a given profile is in equilibrium is coNP#P-hard, and the problem of deciding whether a Boolean game has a rational-valued equilibrium is NEXP-hard, and whether a two-player Boolean game has an irrationalvalued equilibrium is NEXP-complete. Finally, we show that determining whether the value of a two-player zero-sum game exceeds a given threshold is EXP-complete.

Keywords: Game theory
Boolean games
Propositional logic
Computational complexity
Advisor: Ong, L
Representations of the princesse de Lamballe (1749-1792): the portraiture, patronage and politics of a royal favourite at the court of Marie-Antoinette

This thesis examines the portraiture and patronage of Marie Thérèse Louise de Savoie-Carignan, the princesse de Lamballe (1749-1792). It is the first comprehensive and detailed study to be undertaken of the princess's activities as patron. Lamballe was Marie-Antoinette's longest-serving confidante and Superintendent of the Queen's Household. Through close formal analysis of the portraits combined with careful consideration of the sitter's personal circumstances and the wider cultural and historical context, the thesis challenges scholarly assumptions that the princess had only negligible influence as a sitter and patron. As a case study of an independent, professionally ambitious and childless widow, it identifies a wider range of motives and cultural meanings than has previously been ascribed to female court patronage of this period.
The first chapter demonstrates that the early depictions of Lamballe as a docile and grieving princess were largely dictated by her father-in-law, an identity the princess subsequently discarded when she assumed a professional role at court. Chapter two examines portraits executed during the princess's rise to political and social prominence and shows that her attachment to the queen and the length of time she spent in her company and service, together with her publicly visible roles as freemason and salonnière, made her a figure of considerable renown and influence and thereby a highly significant patron at the French court. This was enhanced by the princess's international reputation as a talented amateur artist in her own right and by her financial and social support of aspiring artists and art institutions. The princess's engagement with the cult of sentiment and advocacy of women artists is allied to the sorority encouraged by Marie-Antoinette within the women of her select circle. Complementary chapters on the princess's previously unknown anglophile inclinations (discussed in Chapter three) and her private collections, library, and musical and literary patronage (considered in Chapter four) further reveal that Lamballe was an informed and cultivated female patron who operated at the very centre of Marie-Antoinette's circle.

Keywords: Hôtel de Lamballe
Anglomania
Versailles
Hôtel d’Eu
Duc de Penthièvre
Hôtel de Toulouse
Rambouillet
Courtiers
Female patronage
Print collecting
Advisor: Johnson, G
Whiteley, L
The coinage of the Gallic Empire

This thesis presents a new systematic arrangement of the coinage of the Gallic Empire as the basis for a revised edition of Roman Imperial Coinage. The coinage of all denominations, gold, silver and bronze, are unified into a single structure of issues.
In 260, Postumus revolted against the Roman emperor Gallienus and took control of the Gauls. The chronology of his reign and of his successors is reviewed. The short reign of Domitianus II is interpreted as a revolt against the elevation of Tetricus. A rearrangement of Tetricus’s coinage supported by the epigraphic evidence proves that the elevation of Tetricus II to the Caesarship must be redated from 273 to 272. The location of the mints is discussed. Conclusive hoard evidence proves that the main mint was located at Trier, and not at Cologne. The study of iconography implies that choices were not necessarily made by the imperial authorities, but that more freedom was given to engravers than is usually assumed. The use of earlier coins as an iconographic repertoire strongly suggests that earlier coins were brought to the mint to be melted down. Metrological analyses of gold coins of the Gallic emperors show for the first time that silver was deliberately added to the alloy, following a practice introduced by Valerian and continued by Gallienus. The debasement of the ‘silver’ coinage is studied in parallel with its contemporary evolution within the Central Empire. Coin circulation is used in order to determine the frontiers of the Gallic Empire. It is demonstrated that the Gallic Empire reached its apogee between 262 and 265, ruling over Britain, the Gauls, Hispania and Raetia. The nature of the Gallic Empire is discussed. It is argued that this ‘Empire’ should not be viewed as a form of separatism, as often claimed, but as the unintended result of a status quo following Postumus’s acclamation and the long postponement of a final confrontation against the emperor of Rome.

Keywords: Gallic Empire
coins
coinage
Roman Empire numismatics
Advisor: Howgego, C
Bland, R
Laser induced fluorescence studies in the gas phase

Laser Induced Fluorescence has been used to study rotational and vibrational energy disposal following gas phase photodissociations and reactions of small molecules. Three distinct systems have been studied.
,p>The rotational and vibrational distributions in the ground and first electronically excited states of the OH radical have been studied following the two and three photon dissociation of water using laser radiation of 266nm and 355nm wavelength respectively. The results have been compared to recent theoretical calculations and experimental investigations at different wavelengths in the same region of the spectrum.
The rotational distribution in vibrational levels of the ground electronic state of the NO molecule following 355nm photodissociation of methyl nitrite have been studied and compared to recent experimental studies of the photodissociation of NO containing molecules. A statistical treatment allowed the vibrational distribution to be determined. A simple model is described which rationalises the process.
Finally, the rotational distributions within vibrational levels of the ground electronic state of the CO molecule, produced via the gas phase reaction between oxygen atoms and the CS radical, are presented. The vibrational distribution resulting from this reaction is well established but, to date, there have been no reports of the rotational distribution. A proposal has been made to employ the system studied in a vacuum ultra violet laser. Some comments are made concerning this proposal.

Advisor: Hancock, G
The acquisition of coarse gaze estimates in visual surveillance

This thesis describes the development of methods for automatically obtaining coarse gaze direction estimates for pedestrians in surveillance video. Gaze direction estimates are beneficial in the context of surveillance as an indicator of an individual's intentions and their interest in their surroundings and other people. The overall task is broken down into two problems. The first is that of tracking large numbers of pedestrians in low resolution video, which is required to identify the head regions within video frames. The second problem is to process the extracted head regions and estimate the direction in which the person is facing as a coarse estimate of their gaze direction.
The first approach for head tracking combines image measurements from HOG head detections and KLT corner tracking using a Kalman filter, and can track the heads of many pedestrians simultaneously to output head regions with pixel-level accuracy. The second approach uses Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo Data Association (MCMCDA) within a temporal sliding window to provide similarly accurate head regions, but with improved speed and robustness. The improved system accurately tracks the heads of twenty pedestrians in 1920x1080 video in real-time and can track through total occlusions for short time periods.
The approaches for gaze direction estimation all make use of randomised decision tree classifiers. The first develops classifiers for low resolution head images that are invariant to hair and skin colours using branch decisions based on abstract labels rather than direct image measurements. The second approach addresses higher resolution images using HOG descriptors and novel Colour Triplet Comparison (CTC) based branches. The final approach infers custom appearance models for individual scenes using weakly supervised learning over large datasets of approximately 500,000 images. A Conditional Random Field (CRF) models interactions between appearance information and walking directions to estimate gaze directions for head image sequences.

Keywords: randomized fern
surveillance
randomised fern
machine vision
thesis
head pose
video surveillance
randomised tree
gaze
tracking
visual surveillance
predicate fern
MCMCDA
video analysis
randomized tree
computer vision
attention
head tracking
Advisor: Reid, I
Task Graph Performance Bounds Through Comparison Methods

When a parallel computation is represented in a formalism that imposes series-parallel structure on its task graph, it becomes amenable to automated analysis and scheduling. Unfortunately, its execution time will usually also increase as precedence constraints are added to ensure series-parallel structure. Bounding the slowdown ratio would allow an informed tradeoff between the benefits of a restrictive formalism and its cost in loss of performance.This dissertation deals with series-parallelising task graphs by adding precedence constraints to a task graph, to make the resulting task graph series-parallel. The weak bounded slowdown conjecture for series-parallelising task graphs is introduced. This states that the slowdown is bounded if information about the workload can be used to guide the selection of which precedence constraints to add. A theory of best series-parallelisations is developed to investigate this conjecture.Partial evidence is presented that the weak slowdown bound is likely to be 4/3, and this bound is shown to be tight.
Multisensory integration of redundant and complementary cues

During multisensory integration, information from distinct sensory systems that refers to the same physical event is combined. For example, the sound and image that an individual generates as s/he interacts with the world, will provide the nervous system with multiple cues which can be integrated to estimate the individual’s position in the environment. However, the information that is perceived through different sensory pathways/systems can be qualitatively different. The information can be redundant and describe the same property of an event in a common reference frame (i.e., the image and sound referring to the individual’s location), or it can be complementary. Combining complementary information can be advantageous in that it extends the range and richness of the information available to the nervous system, but can also be superfluous and unnecessary to the task at hand – i.e. olfactory cues about the individuals perfume can increase the richness of the representation but not necessarily aid in localisation. Over the last century or so, a large body of research has focused on different aspects of multisensory interactions at both the behavioural and neural levels. It is currently unclear whether the mechanisms underlying multisensory interactions for both type of cue are similar or not. Moreover, the evidence for differences in behavioural outcome, dependent on the nature of the cue, is growing. Such cue property effects possibly reflect a processing heuristic for more efficient parsing of the vast amount of sensory information available to the nervous system at any one time.
The present thesis assesses the effects of cue properties (i.e., redundant or complementary) on multisensory processing and reports a series of experiments demonstrating that the nature of the cue, defined by the task of the observer, influences whether the cues compete for representation as a result of interacting, or whether instead multisensory information produces an optimal increase in reliability of the event estimate. Moreover, a bridging series of experiments demonstrate the key role of redundancy in inferring that two signals have a common physical cause and should be integrated, despite conflict in the cues. The experiments provide insights into the different strategies adopted by the nervous system and some tentative evidence for possible, distinct underlying mechanisms.

Keywords: recalibration
cue combination
temporal estimates
multisensory integration
perception
Advisor: Spence, C
Ernst, M
Studies of magnetoresistance and hall sensors in semiconductors

The design, fabrication and performance of an Extraordinary Magnetoresistance (EMR) and a Vertical Mesa Hall Sensor (VMHS) are studied.
EMR devices have been fabricated from a 2DEG InAs/GaSb structures which exhibit a low carrier density and high mobility that achieve the best performance. The general electrical magneto-transport properties are given. The experiments investigate mainly different metallic patterns, which are Rectangular, Triangular and Tip pattern between 4-300 K. Probe configurations and the enhancement of relative size of metallic patterns are described. EMR effect is due to current deflection around the metal-semiconductor interface. The results are metallic pattern dependent. Using finite element analysis, good agreement between experimental and theoretical results was found. The best performance sensor is a symmetrical metallic Tip pattern. It is enhanced by the length of the Tip’s point and the large metallic area. This pattern when combines with an asymmetrical probe configuration, exhibits the highest EMR of 900% at –0.275T measured by inner probes and the best sensitivity of 54Ω/T at room temperature.
The second study presents in-plane Hall effect sensors made from InSb. A simple device geometry has been used in which current flows in a plane perpendicular to the device surface. Device sensitivity depends on its geometry and a series of different contacts are used to investigate the geometry of the current flow distribution. The structures produced are only sensitive to the presence of one in-plane field component, and they also demonstrate good angular selectivity. Multi-electrodes were used to investigate biasing current from both mesa and substrate condition. We are able to examine the Hall voltage as a function of contact positions and also to create multiple VMHS. Offset reduction of devices has been achieved by moving the ground contacts to re-balance the current distribution under the mesa surface.

Keywords: Hall effect
III-V compound semiconductor
Extraordinary Magnetoresistance
Advisor: Nicholas, R