VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Political Ecology of Maroon Autonomy: Land, Resource Extraction and Political Change in 21st Century Jamaica and Suriname

The primary concern in this dissertation is the question of how racially marginalized societies practicing autonomous governance negotiate conflicts with sovereign states over resource extraction and its consequences. Specifically, this research provides a description, interpretation, and analysis of contemporary social organization and governance of the Maroon polity of Accompong as it brings to bear a distinct history of resistance onto the terrain of political conflict and negotiations with the Jamaican state. The Ndyuka Maroon polities of the Moengo region of Suriname are used as a comparative example where, like Jamaica, the activities of the aluminum industry are the fulcrum of an environmental and political crisis threatening Maroon territorial and cultural integrity. Standing as the first comparison of these two Maroon societies in the contemporary period, this research reveals that Accompong has developed political strategies of separatism and sovereignty while seeking stability with the Jamaican state, whereas the Ndyuka have eschewed separatism in favor of state entryism. These divergent strategies are responses to the differential tolerances of each national state toward Maroon autonomy given political economic calculations based on the valuation of Maroon land for its resource wealth. Yet, in both Maroon communities, a practice of environmental preservationism grounded in distinct collective memories of resistance to enslavement has guided their responses to the crisis. Ultimately, 21st century Maroon political action suggests the need for plurinational and decentralized approaches to national state formation. This research uses systematic empirical data, articulated through an engagement with key theories in both African Diaspora Studies and Environmental Studies, to create a generative conversation between the two fields. This research contributes to a greater understanding of environmental politics, ethnic multiplicity in the African diaspora, the politics of autonomy, diaspora theory, Caribbean colonial history, socio-economic development in developing countries, and the lateral possibilities of freedom and social transformation.

Advisor: Small, Stephen A
Meteorological Imperialism: Climate Science, Environment, and Empire in Liberal and Fascist Italy (1870-1940)

“Meteorological Imperialism” is the first history of Italian colonialism from the perspective of the history of science and environmental history. I argue that the experience of colonizing African environments transformed Italian imperialism from a liberal to a fascist organization of science, politics and nature, that is, to a “techno-political regime.” I focus on the mutation of meteorology from the nineteenth-century paradigm of international meteorology to its militarization under fascism as a product of Italian colonialism. By combining the approaches of the history of science, environmental history and Science and Technology Studies, I use meteorology as the “infrastructure of knowledge” of Italian imperialism in the arid environments of North and East Africa./nThe Italian invasion of the Horn of Africa triggered the ecological unraveling of the Ethiopian Empire and the myth of a settlement colony for Italian emigrants in Africa. Italy’s defeat at the hands of Ethiopia in the battle of Adwa in 1896 posed a set of environmental and political challenges which Italians addressed with the organization of a liberal techno-political regime. Scientific experts, including meteorologists, mobilized to build a new consensus on the colonial project and promote the economic development of the dry colonies of Eritrea and Somalia. The conquest of Libya, the Great War, and the re-conquest of the colony in the interwar period marked the crisis of Italian liberal imperialism. The birth of aviation, the invention of chemical weapons, and the disappointment of projects in the arid environment of Libya transformed Italian meteorology and colonial practices into a more authoritarian organization. Finally, the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia marked the triumph of Italian fascist techno-politics as an alternative strategy to compete with the hydro-politics of the British Empire./nDrawing on research carried out in English, French, German, and Italian in hitherto unexplored archives, I reconstruct the transformation of liberalism into fascism as the product of imperial tensions and environmental constraints in Africa, rather than as a political event occurring in Europe. I advance a new interpretation of Italian colonialism as a palimpsest of liberal and fascist imperialism whose knowledge-production practices are crucial to understanding Italy’s socially-constructed ignorance of its colonial past.

Advisor: Mazzotti, Massimo
Material Quality and Process Monitoring in Metal Additive Manufacturing

Additive manufacturing is rapidly becoming available to designers, hobbyists, and industrial manufacturers. Unfortunately, process control and predictability remain beyond the grasp of most users and even machine tool builders. This manuscript employs design and material quality monitoring to explore solutions to these challenges. Metallurgical study and design limitations were explored through intentional design. Design for additive manufacturing was shown to provide insight into both process constraints for aesthetics and metallurgical properties. In assessing the process-structure-property relationships of metal additive manufacturing, test designs must consider the heat and mass transport phenomena as well as post-fabrication analysis requirements, several such designs were presented. On monitoring, an algorithm with inspiration from the field of statistical learning was proposed. This method serves as a computationally feasible approach to monitoring real-time material quality. This algorithm employs a dynamic Bayes network model and can be shown to reduce to a Kalman filter under some assumptions. Thus, direct comparison of the proposed algorithm with known control methods is possible. Graphical analysis was also conducted on the various parameter relationships reported in the literature for powder-bed fusion. The analysis revealed optimal clustering of the parameters and serves as a guide for future researchers to look beyond the melt pool for quality control. In support of in-process monitoring, a numerical simulation and validation experiment were constructed related to the acoustic emissions of particle impacts during directed energy deposition. Representative particle spray is simulated with the discrete element method. Impacts upon the build surface were used as inputs to a finite-difference wave propagation model to approximate the acoustic signature of the spray. The results of these several studies support manufacturing process monitoring for additive manufacturing. They also serve as a base for further investigation into material property tailoring and generally improved system control for additive manufacturing.

Advisor: Zohdi, Tarek I
Dornfeld, David A
Submodular Inequalities for the Path Structures of the Capacitated Fixed-Charge Network Flow Problems

Capacitated fixed-charge network flow problems (CFCNF) are used to model a variety of problems in telecommunication, facility location, production planning and supply chain management. We model CFCNF as a linear mixed-integer program and study the polyhedral structure of various path networks./nWe investigate capacitated path substructures and derive strong and easy-to-compute path cover and path pack inequalities. These inequalities are based on an explicit characterization of the submodular inequalities through a fast computation of parametric minimum cuts on a path, and they generalize the well-known flow cover and flow pack inequalities for the single-node relaxations of fixed-charge flow models. Computational results demonstrate the effectiveness of the inequalities when used as cuts in a branch-and-cut algorithm./nMoreover, we consider single item lot-sizing problems with backlogging and inventory bounds and fixed costs (LSBIB). Using the underlying fixed-charge network structure of LSBIB, we derive explicit path pack inequalities that are proposed in this thesis. These inequalities are generalizations of the valid inequalities proposed by Atamturk and Kucukyavuz (2005) for lot-sizing problems under the existence of backlogging. Furthermore, we propose extensions of these inequalities where the binary variables for inventory and backlogging are lifted. Finally, we present computational results suggest that show the effectiveness of both path pack and extended path pack inequalities when used in a branch-and-cut algorithm.

Advisor: Atamturk, Alper
Equality and Human Development

While much has been written regarding human development - economic growth, lifespan, education - and income distribution, there are few studies that conduct large quantitative analysis of the impact of different levels of income distribution on human development at the national level. This dissertation examines the development of 193 countries starting in 1990 and ending in 2015. I examine how economic equality in the form of income distribution corresponds with development in the form of wealth, lifespan and education. The first stage of the analysis compares two regions, the Middle East and Latin America, and explores the impact of Islam and oil exports on development. This part focuses on the United Nations Human Development Report’s Human Development index - excluding income - as the variable dependent on income distribution. The second stage of the analysis covers all the countries in the dataset, with the United States of America, the United Kingdom, France and Germany examined in depth. In this part of the analysis, I break apart the Human Development Index and examine lifespan and education as individual dependent variables and how they are affected by income distribution and changes in income.

Advisor: Petersen, Trond
Sterol-dependent regulation of mTORC1 activation at the lysosomal surface

The mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) is a multi-subunit protein kinase that regulates growth and metabolism in response to nutrients and environmental signals. Since its discovery in 1991, intensive studies have shown that these signals regulate mTORC1 in experimental systems ranging from yeast to fruit flies, mice and human cells. Only recently has research identified molecules responsible for the mechanisms involved in mTORC1 regulation, especially by amino acids. I led a collaboration with others in my research group, by which I identified cholesterol as a novel positive input for mTORC1 activation and characterized components that the cell uses to sense and convey the cholesterol signal. I showed that sterol levels correlate with mTORC1 activity in vivo, and that the lysosome has the machinery necessary for sterol-dependent regulation of mTORC1 in vitro. I found that a putative lysosomal cholesterol transporter, Niemann-Pick C1 (NPC1), is necessary for modulating mTORC1 activity in response to changing cholesterol levels. In cells lacking NPC1, or expressing NPC1 mutants incapable of transporting cholesterol, mTORC1 activity is elevated and no longer sensitive to changes in sterol levels, suggesting that NPC1 functions as a negative regulator. Conversely, an apparent amino acid transporter, SLC38A9, was identified as necessary for sterol-dependent activation of mTORC1. SLC38A9 contains conserved cholesterol responsive motifs that I showed are necessary to convey cholesterol responsiveness to mTORC1 because mutagenesis of these motifs decoupled the effect of amino acids and cholesterol in regulation mTORC1 activity. Overall, this work elucidated a novel mechanism by which cells integrate cholesterol- and amino acid-dependent signals to precisely regulate mTORC1 function for optimal cell growth.

Advisor: Zoncu, Roberto
Brezhnev's War on Crime: The Criminal in Soviet Society, 1963-1984

One of the most important questions concerning Soviet history is: how did the period widely known as the era of “stagnation” lead to the very opposite of stagnation, indeed to the most sudden and cataclysmic changes in the region since the Russian Revolution? Was the Brezhnev era (1964-1982) simply the calm before the storm, or was it in fact the culmination of a tempest that had been brewing for decades? I argue that it was during “stagnation,” when many citizens learned to articulate their frustrations with Soviet society and formulate demands and solutions. Those solutions drew heavily from images, ideas and promises made by agents of the Soviet state. By taking a closer look at the Brezhnev era, we can see that it was in fact the legitimacy of the state's claims, and the seriousness with which people took them in this period, that actually helped to precipitate its downfall./nNothing brings this to light better than a focus on crime. I analyze debates in Soviet society about crime and punishment as these problems became increasingly central to public life in the final decades of the Soviet Union's existence. I study the Soviet Union's first post-Stalin criminological research institute from its formation in 1963 through the height of its influence in the early 1970s, along with journalistic writing on crime and justice, films, and television programs from the thriving genre of crime fiction. I also access popular views on criminality through private and public letters and other writings./n/nThese sources show that in the Brezhnev era, an increase in scientific research on the causes of crime, coupled with a new focus on a Soviet “war on crime” in the media, opened up new possibilities for mass discussions of important political and ideological issues in multiple venues. Additionally, they show that alliances were formed between elite scholars and journalists on one hand, and ordinary citizens on the other, forcing many intellectuals to reformulate their ideas about the nature of criminality and the meaning of justice in the Soviet state. In these discussions, ordinary Soviet citizens made it clear that they had heard a good deal about the concept of justice, but witnessed only its opposite. For many, this contradiction did not discredit the ideals of Soviet justice as much as it made them all the more desirable, and the disillusionment with Soviet reality more acute./n/nIt turned out that the earlier campaigns to educate the public about crime and morality had a powerful effect on popular legal consciousness in the Soviet Union: they stoked a deep desire in people for promises of justice they never saw realized, and gave them the language to condemn the state and justice system on its own terms.

Advisor: Slezkine, Yuri
Frede, Victoria
Transferrable Representations for Visual Recognition

The rapid progress in visual recognition capabilities over the past several years can be attributed largely to improvements in generic and transferrable feature representations, particularly learned representations based on convolutional networks (convnets) trained “end-to-end” to predict visual semantics given raw pixel intensity values. In this thesis, we analyze the structure of these convnet representations and their generality and transferrability to other tasks and settings./nWe begin in Chapter 2 by examining the hierarchical semantic structure that naturally emerges in convnet representations from large-scale supervised training, even when this structure is unobserved in the training set. Empirically, the resulting representations generalize surprisingly well to classification in related yet distinct settings./nChapters 3 and 4 showcase the flexibility of convnet-based representations for prediction tasks where the inputs or targets have more complex structure. Chapter 3 focuses on representation transfer to the object detection and semantic segmentation tasks in which objects must be localized within an image, as well as labeled. Chapter 4 augments convnets with recurrent structure to handle recognition problems with sequential inputs (e.g., video activity recognition) or outputs (e.g., image captioning). Across each of these domains, end-to-end fine-tuning of the representation for the target task provides a substantial additional performance benefit./nFinally, we address the necessity of label supervision for representation learning. In Chapter 5 we propose an unsupervised learning approach based on generative models, demonstrating that some of the transferrable semantic structure learned by supervised convnets can be learned from images alone.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
Improving Sequential Decision Making in Human-In-The-Loop Systems

Interactions between humans and autonomous systems are always necessary. They could be very simple interactions such as a person pushing a button to trigger a specific function, or more complicated interactions such as an autonomous vehicle interacting with other human drivers. Therefore, a safe and efficient interaction is crucial for advancing autonomous systems, especially those requiring persistent interactions with humans./nOne common type of such systems is the human-assistance system such as warning systems in the aircraft and automatic braking systems in automobile. Traditionally, they only monitor the states of the machine to prevent human errors and enhance safety, but not take into account the state of the human in their decision-making processes, arguably the greatest variability affecting the safety. In light of the above drawbacks, we believe that more desirable autonomous systems should take the human state into account in their decision-making processes. In other words, other than the task completion, the exploration, estimation or even control of the human state should be a part of the decision-making loop in such human-in-the-loop systems. Moreover, to estimate the state of the human, most autonomous systems just passively gain information from their sensors, while ignoring the fact that the action of the autonomous system can actually help understand and estimate the human state better, and a better understanding of the human state will better achieve its goal as well./nIn this thesis, we will develop frameworks and computational tools for human-in-the-loop systems to achieve a safe and efficient interaction. Beginning with a general form of the interactive model using a partially observable discrete-time stochastic hybrid system, we describe how its discrete form, partially observable Markov decision process, can be used to integrate the human model, the machine dynamical model and their interaction in a probabilistic framework. We will further advance the discrete version to hidden mode stochastic hybrid systems that can consider continuous states with discrete hidden modes used to model the hidden human intents. We tackle the computational challenge of the optimal control problem in hidden mode stochastic hybrid systems and show a significant improvement in the computational time. A driver-assistance application shows the efficacy of our proposed method. Finally, we propose to incorporate the safety constraint by a novel model predictive control based framework, which will encourage the exploration of the hidden human intent as well as achieving its goal with hard safety constraints. Taking them together, these contributions advance the computational framework for next generation human-in-the-loop systems, which are capable to monitor both the human and the machine states, actively explore the human intent, and give appropriate feedbacks to them in order to enhance both safety and efficiency.

Advisor: Sastry, Shankar
Bandgap Engineering of Gallium Telluride

Layered semiconductors, like transition-metal dichalcogenides and III-VI monochalcogenides, possess interesting properties attractive for future opto-electronic applications. Among the III-VI monochalcogenides, gallium telluride (GaTe) possesses a unique monoclinic structure, good p-type transport properties, and contrary to most layered materials, a direct bandgap in the bulk (1.67 eV). This dissertation explores different avenues for the bandgap engineering of GaTe, including access to the bandstructure through the layers’ surfaces, conventional semiconductor alloying and stabilization of alternate metastable phases./nIn the presence of air, mechanically exfoliated GaTe develops a deep-level defect band effectively reducing the bandgap in a direct-to-indirect transition to about 0.8 eV. The intercalation and chemisorption of molecular oxygen to the Te-terminated layers was responsible for the behavior. I discuss on how surface defects created by the mechanical exfoliation facilitate the transformation as well as procedures to delay or accelerate such transformation. Contrary to traditional bandgap engineering methods, the partial reversibility of this process can also be achieved./nThe alignment of the conduction and valence band edges as well as shallow-defect levels were determined following an ion irradiation study. Based on the amphoteric defect model, the conduction band and valence band edges of GaTe were found to be 3.47 eV and 5.12 eV below vacuum, respectively. Low-temperature spectroscopy found two acceptor levels around 100 and 150 meV above the valence band and a donor level around 130 meV below the conduction band./nGallium selenide (GaSe) and GaTe alloys (GaSexTe1-x) were grown by vapor deposition. Monoclininc crystals were obtained for x < 0.32, and hexagonal crystals were obtained for x > 0.28. The bandgap of the monoclinic phase increases linearly with Se content from 1.65 eV to 1.77 eV while hexagonal-phase bandgap decreases from 2.01 eV (GaSe) to 1.38 eV (x = 0.28). Finally, the bandgap of hexagonal GaTe was confirmed to be 1.45 eV, by epitaxially growing hexagonal GaTe crystals on GaSe substrates. The results presented here show how the selected bandgap-engineering avenue can affect the structural and opto-electronic properties of GaTe.

Advisor: Dubon, Oscar D
"Eating Everything and Leaving Nothing": Chinese Commerce in Postwar Angola

Recovering from a decades-long civil war, the Angolan government agreed in the early 2000s to contract the majority of projects under its National Reconstruction Program to Chinese state-owned enterprises, in exchange for multiple billions of dollars in oil-backed loans. This partnership has facilitated migration and commerce between China to Angola on an unprecedented scale. While some have denounced Chinese investments in postwar Angola as a form of neo-imperialism, others have celebrated Chinese financing of Angolan reconstruction as a practical mode of cooperation, or even a non-hegemonic expression of South-South solidarity. Without engaging in a moralistic debate between two “sides,” this dissertation examines the contradictions of Chinese-Angolan relations through an ethnographic study of everyday life and work at a Chinese state-owned construction firm in Luanda. By attending to ordinary interactions among employees of this firm and their co-workers, business partners, competitors, and critics, it explores how ethical relations are forged and broken in a context of political instability and moral controversy.

Advisor: Liu, Xin