VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Intelligent and High-Performance Behavior Design of Autonomous Systems via Learning, Optimization and Control

Nowadays, great societal demands have rapidly boosted the development of autonomous systems that densely interact with humans in many application domains, from manufacturing to transportation and from workplaces to daily lives. The shift from isolated working environments to human-dominated space requires autonomous systems to be empowered to handle not only environmental uncertainties such as external vibrations but also interaction uncertainties arising from human behavior which is in nature probabilistic, causal but not strictly rational, internally hierarchical and socially compliant./nThis dissertation is concerned with the design of intelligent and high-performance behavior of such autonomous systems, leveraging the strength from control, optimization, learning, and cognitive science. The work consists of two parts. In Part I, the problem of high-level hybrid human-machine behavior design is addressed. The goal is to achieve safe, efficient and human-like interaction with people. A framework based on the theory of mind, utility theories and imitation learning is proposed to efficiently represent and learn the complicated behavior of humans. Built upon that, machine behaviors at three different levels - the perceptual level, the reasoning level, and the action level - are designed via imitation learning, optimization, and online adaptation, allowing the system to interpret, reason and behave as human, particularly when a variety of uncertainties exist. Applications to autonomous driving are considered throughout Part I. Part II is concerned with the design of high-performance low-level individual machine behavior in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Advanced control laws based on adaptation, iterative learning and the internal structures of uncertainties/disturbances are developed to assure that the high-level interactive behaviors can be reliably executed. Applications on robot manipulators and high-precision motion systems are discussed in this part.

Advisor: Tomizuka, Masayoshi
Working Against Racism from White Subject Positions: White Anti-Racism, New Abolitionism & Intersectional Anti-White Irish Diasporic Nationalism

This dissertation is an intervention into Critical Whiteness Studies, an ‘additional movement’ to Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory. It systematically analyzes key contradictions in working against racism from a white subject positions under post-Civil Rights Movement liberal color-blind white hegemony and "Black Power" counter-hegemony through a critical assessment of two major competing projects in theory and practice: white anti-racism [Part 1] and New Abolitionism [Part 2]./nI argue that while white anti-racism is eminently practical, its efforts to hegemonically rearticulate white are overly optimistic, tend toward renaturalizing whiteness, and are problematically dependent on collaboration with people of color. I further argue that while New/nAbolitionism has popularized and advanced an alternative approach to whiteness which understands whiteness as ‘nothing but oppressive and false’ and seeks to ‘abolish the white race’, its ultimately class-centered conceptualization of race and idealization of militant nonconformity has failed to realize effective practice./nPart 3 considers alternative identities to whiteness, argues for a stronger race-centered definition of whiteness as a secular coalition of previously antagonistic european peoples forged on global frontiers for the purposes of dispossessing, exploiting, and killing people of color, advances a framework for understanding processes of ‘becoming white’ without ‘necessary correspondence to class’, and proposes an alternative approach to ‘abolishing the white race’ focused on its internal ‘ethnic fissures’ called intersectional, anti-white, Irish Diasporic nationalism.

Advisor: Nasir, Na’ilah
Custodians of Value: Meritocracy, Classlessness, and Other Late Modernist Dreams

Custodians of Value takes as its starting point Thomas Piketty’s unusual thesis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century that World Wars I and II were accidental engines of equality that wiped away older structures of capitalist inequality and occasioned Thirty Glorious Years (1945-1975) of felt classlessness and meritocratic faith in the advanced industrialized democracies of the US, UK, and Europe. It traces the continuation of modernism beyond WWII as it was reanimated, rearticulated, and reinvented in these spaces under new postwar coordinates of the disappearance of capital, the eradication of the old aristocratic order, and the rise of meritocracy, before they shifted again in 1973. Complicating Raymond Williams’s claim that modernism—and all its manifold powers of negativity and varied techniques of disruption—went to its death in a “post-war settlement” with mass-organized, official institutional cultures of higher education, the university, and the museum, Custodians of Value traces a modernism that did not die but grew, mutated, and shifted terrain in the gyre of meritocracy./nThe dissertation analyzes the work of four late modernists under the sway of meritocratic optimism—Samuel Beckett, D.W. Winnicott, Iris Murdoch, and Frederick Wiseman—and shows how each, variously, exalted and enshrined key liberal meritocratic values of autonomy, discipline, hard work, self-expansion, merit, and right. None of their relationships to the culture and values of meritocracy is straightforward or simple. Rather, meritocracy sets the backdrop through which these figures came to be and through which their projects—literary, theatrical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and filmic—emerged. Being late modernists, they struggled to take hold of the contradictions inherent in meritocracy’s commands to seize on talent, work hard, study, and move up beside its hierarchical sadisms, its evacuation of social realities, and its limited horizons for play, ethical life, moral vision, and cultural experience. Faced with the problem of how to reconcile individual freedom and social dependence under newfound postwar conditions of apparent equality and prosperity, the late modernisms of Beckett, Winnicott, Murdoch, and Wiseman wrestled with key paradoxes, failures, and agonies of meritocratic culture at the same time as they registered its seductions, powers, aesthetic heights, and affinities with earlier modernist dreams of self-expansion and collective transformation. They present as a rich set of authors to read at the ends of modernism as liberal democratic capitalist cultures now face uncertain futures but remain in thrall to meritocratic dreams.

Advisor: Butler, Judith
Analytic and Combinatorial Features of Stable Polynomials

We investigate two main overarching topics in the theory of stable polynomials./n1. Differential and Difference Operators. We first study root properties of differen-/ntial and difference operators. This includes the location of roots, the spacing between/nroots, and the effect of linear operators on the roots. Our results in this direction/nare mainly for the purpose of theory, with motivation being derived from previous/napplications which rely on such results./n2. Applications to Graphs. We next study some examples of the connection between/ngraphs and polynomials. This includes a study of polynomial capacity and its relation/nto bipartite matchings, as well as a study of the roots of the independence polynomial/nand implications of various properties. Our results in this direction are applications of/nthe theory of stable polynomials, and demonstrates their use in combinatorics./nIn the vein of (1), we extend the root bound of [47] to demonstrate the submodular nature/nof the roots of real-rooted polynomials. This natural extension leads to further questions/non generalizations to multivariate polynomials, which are important steps on the path to/nunderstanding the barrier arguments of Marcus-Spielman-Srivastava. We further settle a/nconjecture of Brändén-Krasikov-Shapiro on a finite difference convolution which preserves/nthe spacing of roots of real-rooted polynomials. This convolution generalizes the one studied/nby Marcus-Spielman-Srivastava, and the connections between these results yield interesting/nopen problems which have not yet been fully explored./nTowards (2), we combine the Borcea-Brändén characterization of stability preservers with/nGurvits’ capacity results to produce a theory of capacity preservers. We use this to give a new/nproof of Csikvári’s lower bound on the matchings of a biregular bipartite graph. In another/ndirection, we give a new proof of the Chudnovsky-Seymour result on the real-rootedness of/nthe independence polynomial of a claw-free graph. We also prove root bounds similar to that/nof Heilmann-Lieb for a class of independence polynomials, using an interesting multivariate/nextension of Godsil’s divisibility relations for the matching polynomial.

Advisor: Holtz, Olga
Essays in Monetary Policy and Financial Markets

One of the ultimate goals of financial economics is to understand the mechanisms that drive asset prices, both on the macroeconomic level, and on the more granular level that involves interactions between groups of investors. In my dissertation, I study the settings in which monetary policy announcements act as a source of exogenous shocks. The heterogeneous cross-sectional response of asset prices to such shocks could be used to understand the channels through which the policy affects the market, and also to study the effects of market frictions on prices./nIn the first chapter, I focus on the movements of the stock prices in anticipation of monetary policy announcements. Lucca and Moench (2015) document a significant upward drift in the stock market in the 24 hours preceding meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). This drift is not conditional on realized monetary policy shocks. My first chapter offers an explanation for this finding that is based on disagreement and short-selling constraints. When investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the content of the upcoming monetary policy announcement and for some market participants it is costly or impossible to short-sell, speculative demand from optimistic investors can drive up prices before the announcement. This can be especially the case for stocks that are more sensitive to the monetary policy shocks, more expensive to short-sell, and during periods of high disagreement about the FOMC decisions. I confirm this intuition in a series of empirical tests using the cross-section of U.S. equities./nIn the second chapter, my coauthor Christian Jauregui and I seek to understand what could monetary policy shocks tell us about optimal bank capital requirements. We find news following U.S. FOMC announcements can be viewed as quasi-natural "stress-tests" impacting U.S. banks depending on their equity capital ratios. The heterogeneous response of banks' equity returns and bond yields to surprises in interest rates reveal how financial markets favorably value excess equity capital. We show the equity return of a bank in the 75th percentile of total equity capital ratio is roughly 1/6 less sensitive to monetary policy shocks than a bank in the 25th percentile. Similarly, corporate bond yields of banks with larger equity capital ratios are better insulated against unexpected changes in the "slope", or rate of change, of monetary policy. We conclude that higher capital requirements are viewed positively by market participants.

Advisor: Sraer, David
Public Intellectuals in the Era of Privatization: An Examination of Academic Freedom and its Protection of Dissident Scholars at U.S. Public Universities

The university is often celebrated as a site for critique where intellectual laborers, protected by academic freedom, may address the pressing social issues of their time and thus contribute to public opinion and to the advancement of knowledge. As the public university increasingly adopts neoliberal practices, however, such as shifting its governing power to private funders and by emphasizing its marketable versus non-marketable benefits to wider society, critical university studies (CUS) argues that academic freedom—the bedrock of the U.S. university system—is under threat. This project contributes to CUS scholarship by examining how academics who are committed to advancing social justice and who actively engage with broad audiences, experience the protection of academic freedom while employed at U.S. public universities. Are faculty members who publicly critique systemic injustice protected by academic freedom? More specifically, using in-depth interviews, I inquire: 1) What are the motivations for, and experiences of scholars when exercising their academic freedom in politically controversial ways? 2) To what extent do economic, racial and gendered politics, as well as faculty members’ institutional status impact public universities’ commitment to academic freedom? I draw on 31 in-depth interviews with publicly-engaged scholars from three Research One public universities who reflect a diverse range of academic ranks and disciplines as well as racial and gender positionalities in order to better understand what it is like for those who consistently take stands on controversial political issues. This project reveals that, in general, academic freedom is a stratified freedom drawn across academic-rank lines, reflecting the racial and gender hierarchies of larger society. This research argues that while the culture of the academy encourages conformity rather than ethical risk-taking, the university is still a space of edifying possibilities. By examining the effectiveness of academic freedom and the commendable dissidence of activist-scholars, this dissertation aims to contribute to higher education accountability efforts that seek to reinforce the academy’s connection to, and responsibility for the public that it is tasked to serve.

Advisor: Leonardo, Zeus
Re-Writing Dali: the Construction of an Imperial Locality in the Borderlands, 1253-1679

This dissertation examines the interactions of two late imperial Chinese regimes of understanding, experiencing, and moving through space through a local study of Dali, a district in the south-western borderlands of Mongol Yuan and Chinese Ming states. The city of Dali had been the capital of independent Nanzhao and Dali Kingdoms until it was conquered by Mongol armies in 1253 and subsequently incorporated into the Yuan empire. Over the next four centuries, the former nobility of the Dali kingdom transformed themselves into imperial scholar-gentry, educating their sons in literary Chinese, taking the civil service examinations, and establishing themselves as members of the literati elite. As a result, their social relationships and their place in the world, that is, their identities, were reconstructed in dialogue with the institutional, political, and discursive practices that now shaped their daily lives./nThrough examination of writings produced in Dali during the Yuan and Ming, I argue that Dali elite families used their proximity to and facility in the written word to maintain their position within the status hierarchies of local society. At the same time, the concept of the “locality” provided a framework within which local elites were able to express a sense of difference both comprehensible and acceptable to the state. As a result, Dali’s position in the world as it emerged over the first four centuries of colonisation was neither a differentiated periphery nor a homogenised locality but a praxis of the native place as the legitimated form of spatialised identity for civilised men.

Advisor: Tackett, Nicolas
Three Essays on Structural Racism in US Law Enforcement

Paper 1: While scholars have identified ways that racial conservatives exerted out-sized influence on criminal justice policies, little attention has been paid to whether police departments have incentives to learn about and adopt reforms that reduce racial disparity./nI present a game of imperfect information between residents and a municipal police chief to show that a chief's inability to prevent officer behavior that residents perceive to be abusive, coupled with resident unwillingness to assist police in the aftermath of this behavior, creates an incentive for the chief to choose and learn about new policing strategies that rely less on resident assistance. This induces a bias in favor of aggressive over collaborative tactics in the police chief’s policy selection and learning decisions./nSegregation and discrimination ensured that many Black Americans lived in conditions that produced this result in the later twentieth century; thus the model shows structural racism in local police policy making./nPaper 2: Scholarship on racial inequality in policing has largely focused on factors that would cause individual officers to rely on race when deciding whether to make an arrest. Extant explanations suggest that if officers chose not to discriminate and managed to eliminate the influence of stereotypes and implicit associations on their behavior, any remaining racial disparity would be statistical discrimination. I identify an additional source of officer bias: strategic limits on information transmission. I show that when dedicated officers are uncertain whether their police chief is independent of political pressures, a chief who cares about crime control cannot credibly communicate the reason for their policy choices. Therefore if the chief is better informed than the officers about what arrest intensities would be optimal for reducing crime, chief policy choice will give officers exaggerated or understated posterior beliefs about the probability that individuals within a particular group should be arrested. Under certain conditions this would lead to the endogenous development of taste-based discrimination./nPaper 3: This paper examines the conditions under which municipal police chiefs in the latter half of the 20th century would have adopted policies that reduced the rate of arrests among Black residents. I use a two player game of incomplete information, in which the commonly valued outcome depends upon non-contractible effort from a less informed subordinate, to show that officer uncertainty about their chief's competence and skepticism of policies that reduce rates of arrest among Black people could have prevented chiefs from adopting such policies in equilibrium. This conservatism arises even when both chief and officer are not individually racist and the chief knows that the new policy would be more effective at controlling crime.

Advisor: Gailmard, Sean P
Engineering ultrastable protein scaffold for the controlled assembly of multifunctional nano-biomaterials

Self-assembling protein templates are of increasing interest in the field of nanoscale fabrication of biomaterials, where precise patterning of functional biomolecules, such as enzymes, is often desired. In particular, protein building blocks can be strategically chosen to exhibit desired functionality, while engineering their assembly allows for the controllable positioning of the subunits. The filamentous protein gamma-prefoldin (gPFD) from the hyperthermophilic archaeon Methanocaldococcus jannaschii is an excellent candidate for such a tunable scaffold. Its remarkable stability, unique modularity, and self-assembly into filaments with chaperone activity render it an ideal candidate for the bottom-up construction of novel protein nanostructures./nOur research aimed to construct functional protein biomaterials with precisely controlled nanostructures using gPFD as a building block. We engineered a versatile gPFD-based platform upon which scaffolded biocatalytic systems can be constructed in a customizable fashion. Furthermore, to gain precise positioning of functional molecules on our protein nanostructures, we developed multicomponent protein templates composed of distinct monomers that assemble in repeating orders; fusing different biomolecules to each subunit enabled periodic positioning of multiple functional features along the filament. Finally, we explored gPFD’s potential to form cross-linked network, and reported a gPFD-based functional hydrogel with tunable bulk properties. Ultimately, we expect the strategies developed in our lab to provide a gPFD-based biomolecular construction toolkit, which will enhance our ability to fabricate advanced multifunctional nanobiomaterials with novel chemical, catalytic, and structural properties.

Advisor: Clark, Douglas S
Data Analytics and Smart City Operations

This thesis presents models and algorithms that leverage data analytics and optimization approaches to address the challenges in traditional manufacturing systems as well as emerging smart city contexts. The increasing availability of data sources and computing power has created the need for smarter data-driven decision making models, which motivates us to explore various ways of integrating statistics and optimization tools. In particular, we focus on analyzing practical operational problems with real-world data sets. Chapter 2 is devoted to improving yield prediction accuracy in integrated circuit manufacturing using the wafer map data. We propose an innovative yield prediction model, called adjacency-clustering, to capture the neighborhood effect that is often present in the wafer map. The adjacency-clustering model can be solved efficiently and deliver superior prediction performance than the state-of-the-art methods. Chapter 3 studies the order assignment problem in urban last-mile delivery services. We propose a framework to integrate travel time predictors with assignment optimization models to capture the drivers' practical routing behaviors. The proposed framework yields tractable formulations compatible with the existing stochastic and robust optimization tools. We further develop a branch-and-price algorithm to facilitate its real-time application. The real-world case study demonstrates the substantial benefits of applying our framework. Chapter 4 addresses the urban bike lane planning problem based on the real-world GPS trajectory data. We present a flexible optimization model based on the cyclists' utility functions. We analyze the problem structure and propose efficient algorithms to solve the bike lane planning model. We perform extensive numerical experiments on a real-world trajectory data set to validate the performance of our models and algorithms. The numerical study also generates managerial insights to help the city managers improve their bike lane planning decisions.

Advisor: Shen, Zuo-Jun
Law and Literature in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

This dissertation studies what socialist law and literature owe to each other, and how both can shore up or strain the party-state. It focuses on the 1970s–1990s, when the Socialist Republic of Vietnam set up a complex legal system to ease its transition to a market economy. This period also saw the appearance of a body of literary works, known as Đổi Mới [Renovation] fiction. In four chapters, this dissertation uncovers just how the government built up socialist law, testing Soviet and Chinese legal principles, adapting them by fits and starts to strengthen its own legal order. Each chapter examines the ways Vietnamese writers created characters who must confront the force of law. These characters represent the socialist legal subject long overlooked by the scholarship on Asian postsocialism, and the interdisciplinary field of law and literature.

Advisor: Britto, Karl A
Zinoman, Peter