VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Nowhere to hide: investigating the use of unilateral alternatives to extradition in United States prosecutions of transnational cybercrime

Transnational cybercrime is an increasing public menace, and prosecuting countries must often turn to extradition and its alternatives to bring perpetrators to justice. These alternatives include quasi-extradition (informal cooperation with the host country) and unilateral action (capture or lure operations). I posit that pursuing countries are more likely to employ unilateral alternatives over extradition and quasi-extradition in prosecutions of cybercrime as compared to other transnational crimes. I predict this is due to the remote nature of cybercrime; legal barriers; and political considerations in the host country.
The United States is a leader in prosecuting cross-border cybercrime, so I focus my analysis there. Interviews with 81 US officials and case studies suggest that unilateral alternatives are applied more frequently for cybercrime. I uncover that the need for such tools does not stem from legal barriers. Rather, it stems from the remote and anonymous nature of cybercrime, a lack of political will in host countries, and state sponsorship.
I then compare the trajectory of transnational cybercrime prosecutions to those of terrorism; drug trafficking; fraud and foreign corruption; and export control and sanctions violations. Unlike these other offenses, I conclude that cybercrime prosecutions cannot be expected to rely, even in the long-term, on cooperation with the host country or the perpetrators traveling as part of the conspiracy. This foreshadows that cybercrime prosecutions will likely require a sustained reliance on unilateralism.
Building on existing scholarship related to the use of unilateral alternatives in war crimes, terrorism, and drug trafficking prosecutions, I thus propose a pragmatic framework to guide pursuing countries when the use of lures may be prudent in cybercrime cases. This framework seeks to mitigate any infringements on the sovereignty of the host country and human rights of the accused while still enabling the pursuing country to end ongoing cybercrimes, recognize victims’ injuries, and deter future attacks.

Keywords: transnational crime
alternatives to extradition
cyberespionage
transnational criminal law
Budapest Convention on Cybercrime
international cooperation
extradition
lure operations
computer crimes
international law
United States Department of Justice
cybercrime
hacking
Advisor: Ramanna, K
The Jacobian of solutions to the conductivity equation and problems arising from EIT

The first contribution of this thesis is an extension of the work originally done in [12]. We derive a general asymptotic expansion for the solution un to the conductivity equation in the presence of perturbative inclusions of very conductive or very insulating material. We study the perturbative regime, that is the case when this solution un converges to a limiting “background” potential u0, in which, the convergence may be described at first order volume expansion by a limiting Radon measure μ and a polarisation tensor M ∈ L2(Ω,Rd×d; dμ) which describes the variations of ∇un when a material is present in the conducting domain. The convergence result here is general for any inclusion set Qn which is Lebesgue measurable and has Lebesgue measure |Qn| converging to 0. From a numerical point of view, an asymptotic formula in terms of volume expansion is useful as it may be used to tackle a problem posed on very “small” sets which may be difficult to simulate by traditional finite elements methods due to the small mesh sizes.
The second focus of this thesis is on the behaviour of the solution to the conductivity system in Rd(d ≥ 3), where the solution satisfies a certain Jacobian determinant constraint. Namely, we demonstrate the failure of univalent γ−harmonic mappings in dimension d ≥ 3 by constructing a class of materials Q , and boundary conditions φ ∈ H1/2 (∂Ω) such that the Jacobian determinant of the γ−harmonic extension of φ in Ω changes sign in some open neighbourhoods of Ω. Our focus here is on quantifying the measure of the sets where the Jacobian determinant is positive and simillarly negative. We provide a general rule of thumb to obtain these estimates by a constructive approach.
The results obtained in this thesis would find itself useful in several problems in the field of elliptic inverse problems, homogenization and electrical impedance tomography. In particular, the sign changing Jacobian determinant property is applicable to the mathematical theory of cloaking whereas the asymptotic formula for the conductivity equation may be applied to a wide array of applications in the detection of inhomogeneity sets of small volume fraction such as cancer cells detection and mine detection for example.

Keywords: Numerical Analysis
Inverse Problems
Partial Differential Equations
Sigma Harmonic Mappings
Advisor: Capdeboscq, Y
Responding to emerging viral pathogens: Characterization of neutralizing epitopes on the Nipah virus glycoproteins and the humoral immune response against SARS-CoV-2

The emergence of zoonotic viral pathogens into the human population represents a continuous threat to global health. Emergent human pathogens of significance include the henipaviruses, Hendra (HeV) and Nipah (NiV), and the coronaviruses, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV, and SARS-CoV-2. Virion surface displayed viral glycoproteins mediate the critical processes of cellular attachment and membrane fusion that are required for infection. These glycoproteins are also major targets for host antibodies and are therefore important vaccine immunogens. Furthermore, characterization of antibody epitopes and mechanisms of neutralization can guide the selection and improvement of such immunogens as well as expand the basic understanding of the host immune response against these pathogens.
This thesis first aims to characterize the antibody response to NiV. Structural analysis identified neutralizing monoclonal antibody epitopes on the NiV attachment and fusion glycoproteins (NiV-G and NiV-F). The membrane distal apex of NiV-F was identified as a conserved, common site of vulnerability. Additionally, one anti-NiV-F monoclonal protected hamsters from lethal NiV challenge. Characterization of additional epitopes, such as the putative dimerization interface on NiV-G, to reveal additional sites of vulnerability can provide a blueprint for the structure guided design of vaccines and therapeutics.
The emergence of SARS-CoV-2 highlighted the need to quickly respond to outbreaks. Serology assays were optimized to study the antibody response to SARS-CoV-2. These assays were also used as part of a case study evaluating long-term SARS-CoV-2 shedding in an immunocompromised patient wherein replication competent virus was successfully cultured from the samples up to 70 days after diagnosis, demonstrating a longer infectious period than previously observed, as well as significant within-host virus evolution.
Taken together, the studies herein demonstrate the utility of structural approaches in defining sites of vulnerability on the viral surface. Additionally, future work to classify the immune components of reservoir host species, such as bats, is warranted to understand the risk of future spillover events and understand the infection dynamics of emerging viral pathogens.

Keywords: viral glycoproteins
henipavirus
SARS-CoV-2
antibody response
Nipah
monoclonal antibody
Advisor: Bowden, T
De-mystifying asylum adjudication - judicial perspectives on law and experience in German Administrative Courts 

Refugee status determination is often described as one of the most complex adjudication functions in industrialised democracies. Such statements are driven by the legal and factual complexities of asylum adjudication. As a result, refugee law and status determination are seen as different to other legal areas and described as particularly ambiguous and discretion-heavy. At the same time those legal professionals who make asylum decisions every day - like judges - lack attention. This study therefore interrogates how judges in German administrative courts make asylum decisions and how they deal with uncertainty, investigating asylum adjudication from the perspective of the judge.
This research is based on extensive fieldwork at two different administrative courts in Germany, including courtroom observations, case and file material and semi-structured interviews with judges. It argues that judges use different strategies and techniques, referring both to law and experience to make sense and solve a case reaching a rationally justifiable decision. Thereby it promotes a holistic idea of decision-making or ‘judgecraft’ in which elements like professional experience and intuition become active parts of the reasoning and decision-making process, questioning the binaries of reason and emotion, rules and discretion that underpin much of the decision-making literature. This thesis further argues that a crucial part of judges’ experience is formed by those cases a judge decided in the past, the dialogue, discourse and exchange between colleagues and his or her chamber, as well as the use and acceptance of intuition as a technique, such as letting time pass and writing. By revealing how these strategies interlock in the daily decision-making practices of judges, this thesis’ findings challenge the assumption that asylum decisions are arbitrary, subjective or akin to a ‘lottery’. Instead, this research nuances these debates by showing how legal norms and professional methods come together, and how judges employ intuition, experience and emotions pro-actively as part of a decision-making strategy underpinned by the rationalizable confines of procedure and principle.

Keywords: Socio-Legal Studies
Asylum Adjudication
Refugee Studies
Courts
Judgecraft
Judicial Decision-Making
Germany
Advisor: Kurkchiyan, M
Justice in armed humanitarian intervention

This thesis throws new light on a central question in the normative theory of armed humanitarian intervention. Assuming that it is, under certain conditions, permissible to employ lethal force to protect people from atrocity crimes, what are the principles governing wars fought for distinctly humanitarian purposes?
The thesis comprises seven self-standing chapters, each of which makes a distinct contribution to philosophical debates about the moral nature of other-defence, the just distribution of risks of harm between morally innocent persons, the legal regulation of just conduct in humanitarian intervention, and rectificatory duties that arise once hostilities have ceased.
Chapter 2 argues that duties to rescue may take the form of a duty to harm in other persons’ defence. Chapter 3 defends a conception of the requirement to minimise harm that extends across multiple agents, which entails that victims’ and rescuers’ respective permissions to harm in victims’ defence may become interdependent. Chapters 4-6 argue that key considerations to which philosophers and militaries have appealed - intending to benefit vulnerable people, the lesser evil, and acting in supererogatory fashion - do considerably less to justify harms to non-liable people than is commonly assumed. Chapter 7 questions the moral adequacy of international humanitarian law in light of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect,’ and explores a case for affording morally innocent people greater legal protection from being harmed in military rescue operations. Chapter 8 defends duties of compensation for harmful military acts that were all-things-considered permissible on lesser-evil grounds.
Collectively, these chapters show that the conditions under which carrying out a military intervention may be permissible is not all that matters. The way in which such operations are conducted is just as critical. There are weighty constraints on how intervening forces may seek to bring about good consequences, even in pursuit of distinctly humanitarian aims.

Keywords: international law
justice
defensive harming
ethics
humanitarian intervention
human rights
war
Advisor: Butt, D
Three-dimensional colloidal crystals: Crystallisation, deformation and grain boundaries

In this thesis, the crystallisation, deformation, and grain boundaries of three-dimensional colloidal crystals are studied in real space using confocal laser scanning microscopy, CLSM, and in reciprocal space using small angle X-ray scattering, SAXS. Two instances of crystallisation are studied, the first being crystallisation under shear induced by capillary action. Using CLSM and SAXS, we find that drawing a high volume fraction suspension of colloidal particles into a flat and narrow capillary creates a large random hexagonal close packed, RHCP, crystal with long-range orientational order over tens of thousands of colloidal particles. Subsequently, we monitor the deformation of the shear aligned crystals under a gravitational field using CLSM and SAXS. We find that at low enough crystal volume fractions, the initial single orientation of the crystal breaks apart into many crystallites and thus, form grain boundaries at their interfaces. We characterise the rotations of the crystallites during deformation and reveal the mechanism initiating the break-up of the uniform crystal orientation. We develop a method to locate and characterise grain boundaries which can measure local grain boundary misorientations and structure as well as determine the crystal structure of the grains either side. We demonstrate the method’s utility by applying it to experimental real space coordinates of colloidal particles. In particular, we consider particle coordinates obtained from an epitaxially templated colloidal Σ17 (a coincident site lattice grain boundary) bicrystal, finding a mosaic of different grain boundary types instead of only Σ17. We conclude with the second study of crystallisation: homogeneous crystal nucleation in a colloidal fluid. This time, crystallisation produces a crystal with many differently oriented grains and provides an opportunity to study grain boundaries and the misorientation structural changes of nuclei during nucleation. We examine the spatial misorientation variation during nucleation and growth to reveal changes with time. At early times, nuclei exhibit exclusively high misorientation angles, however, at late times, misorientation angles at the surface are higher than the angles within the nuclei cores. Thus, we show that nuclei exhibit structures intermediate between the liquid and the crystal structure at late times during nucleation and growth.

Keywords: Confocal microscopy
Small angle X-ray scattering
Crystallisation
Grain boundaries
Colloidal crystal
Deformation
Homogeneous crystal nucleation
Flow alignemnet
Advisor: Dullens, R
Petukhov, A
Multi-isotope tracing of complex crustal fluid systems

There is significant societal concern regarding environmental issues, including ensuring safe long- term CO2 storage and safeguarding against groundwater pollution. However, the complex nature of the crustal systems mean there are still many questions surrounding fluid behaviour within the subsurface. This study utilises noble gas, stable and clumped isotopes to investigate, constrain and predict subsurface fluid behaviour within the context of CO2 storage and hydrocarbon contamination of shallow aquifers. Firstly, a novel method was developed that enabled the first noble gas analysis of multi-phase fluids. This approach was validated by comparing casing gas and produced fluids samples from oil fields in California. We then characterised the noble gas isotopes and abundances in these reservoirs and found a clear relationship between noble gas compositions and injected volumes. This allows for the prediction of both pristine and evolved reservoir compositions, which represents a crucial first step in characterising the various endmember compositions in groundwater contamination studies. Secondly, we use an integrated isotope approach to place constraints on both physical and biogeochemical processes resulting from CO2 injection into a depleted hydrocarbon reservoir CO2 storage target. We show that a significant proportion of the injected CO2 has been consumed by microbial methanogenesis and estimate a rate for this process. These findings are significant as methanogenesis can affect the trapping efficiency of a given system and thus it is a paramount consideration in site selection for future CO2 storage projects. Finally, the Paradox Basin (Colorado Plateau) is used to investigate the utility of noble gases to understand the role of basin architecture in controlling subsurface fluid composition and connectivity. Here, we use noble gas data to inform conceptual models in order to show that subsurface fluid composition and extent of fluid migration is controlled by the presence of a thick evaporite unit. The data and interpretation presented in this thesis, greatly expands our understanding of both noble gas behaviour in response to anthropogenic perturbations and the resulting processes. Additionally, this study demonstrates the utility of a multi-isotope approach for probing subsurface processes.

Keywords: noble gas
clumped isotopes
stable Isotopes
helium
carbon capture and storage
enhanced oil recovery
Advisor: Ballentine, C
Barry, P
Kulongoski, J
Why parades are peaceful: a study of mobilisation, segregation and authority in Northern Ireland, 2006-2016

Across the world, from India to Israel, it is common for parades to trigger episodes of ethnic violence. In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants have sometimes come to blows over parades, however the number of parades-related riots is small. This is puzzling, because between 2006-2016 over 30,000 parades associated with Northern Ireland’s Protestant & Catholic populations took place. If parades are indeed a spur to ethnic enmity, we should expect Northern Ireland to experience far more violence than it does. This thesis seeks to explain why this is not the case.
First, I demonstrate that there is indeed a link between ethnic conflict and the desire to parade. I show that threats to the status of one’s ethnic group correlate with increased participation in parades.
Second, I find that PUL parades that march in the vicinity of borders between majority-Catholic and majority-Protestant areas, are more likely to be protested. The fact that such borders are rare in Northern Ireland constitutes one explanation for the absence of parades-related violence.
Third, I assess the role played by local leaders in preventing violence. By examining Belfast’s Crumlin Road parade dispute, I show that peace activists can prevent violence under certain conditions. These conditions prove to be far more common outside of Belfast. This offers another explanation for why parades-related violence is unexpectedly rare in Northern Ireland.
In making this argument I draw upon both quantitative and qualitative sources. My study of parade motivation and protests depends upon a previously-unused dataset obtained from the Parades Commission of Northern Ireland. My study of the Crumlin Road parades dispute uses a combination of interviews and analysis of newspapers and archival material. In summary, I use this evidence to argue that parades in Northern Ireland should trigger more ethnic violence, but the absence of hard borders and the presence of peace activists ensures they do not.

Keywords: orange order
parades
northern ireland
segregation
On the adversarial robustness of Bayesian machine learning models

Bayesian machine learning (ML) models have long been advocated as an important tool for safe artificial intelligence. Yet, little is known about their vulnerability against adversarial attacks. Such attacks aim to cause undesired model behaviour (e.g. misclassification) by crafting small perturbations to regular inputs which appear to be insignificant to humans (e.g. slight blurring of image data). This fairly recent phenomenon has undermined the suitability of many ML models for deployment in safety critical applications. In this thesis, we investigate how robust Bayesian ML models are against adversarial attacks, focussing on Gaussian process (GP) and Bayesian neural network (BNN) classification models. In particular, for GP classification models, we derive guarantees for the robustness against adversarial attacks that facilitate the evaluation of their suitability for a given safety critical application. Furthermore we investigate whether better posterior approximations benefit the adversarial robustness of BNNs, comparing the adversarial robustness resulting from high quality posterior approximations to that resulting from deterministic approximations in a range of experiments. We find that well approximated BNNs tend to be empirically more susceptible to adversarial attacks than deterministic neural network models for most popular priors. This calls for caution when deploying such BNNs in safety critical applications. Lastly, we show that using GPs in a Bayesian optimisation framework, it is possible to craft successful adversarial perturbations in black-box scenarios (where the attacked model is a priori unknown and can only be studied by querying it) with fewer model queries than previously needed. This facilitates a better evaluation of the adversarial robustness of a model in black-box scenarios.

Keywords: Bayesian inference
adversarial robustness
machine learning
Advisor: Roberts, SJ
Osborne, M
First measurement of reactor antineutrinos in scintillator at SNO+ and study of alternative designs for large-scale liquid scintillator detectors

This thesis presents the first measurement of oscillation in antineutrinos from nuclear reactor cores, detected in liquid scintillator at SNO+. The small cluster of reactor cores along the Canadian-American border creates a distinct oscillated antineutrino energy spectrum, from which oscillation parameter values can be extracted. A likelihood analysis is presented, measuring the sensitivity to neutrino oscillation parameter ∆m 221 based on 100 tonne-years exposure. The Covid-19 pandemic forced a halt of the SNO+ scintillator fill, however stable data was recorded over 127 days in an approximately half-full detector. BiPo214 coincidence pairs provided an in-situ calibration of the LAB + 0.5g/L PPO scintillator cocktail. The reduced scintillator volume and livetime in the partially filled detector lead to limited sensitivity to the neutrino oscillation parameter ∆m^{2}_{21} . Strong agreement was seen between the 44 events measured in data and the total 45±6.7 stat events expected due to signal reactor antineutrinos and background geoneutrinos and α-n. Due to the limited statistics, two values of ∆m^{2}_{21} were favoured,8.8(+1.1,-1.3) and 12.6(+1.6,-1.3) ×10^{-5} eV^2. The current global PDG value of ∆m^{2}_{21} = 7.53±0.18×10^{-5}eV^{2} was found to be within a 1σ frequentist confidence interval of the smaller of the best-fit ∆m^{2}_{21} value. Following a successful first measurement of reactor antineutrinos, the analysis will be continued into the fully filled scintillator phases of SNO+. Simulation studies show that a precise measurement of ∆m 221 may be possible, where the current global uncertainty (dictated primarily by the KamLAND measurement) can be surpassed in 3-5 years of livetime in the Te-loaded scintillator phase, depending primarily on continued reactor activity and α-n levels. The uncertainty in ∆m^{2}_{21} impacts the interpretation of neutrino beam experimental results, making its measurement particularly relevant. Also discussed in this work, is a novel design for the next generation of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors (comparable to JUNO in size). The proposed ‘SLIPS’ design may allow for a much more simple and economical construction of large-scale liquid scintillator detectors, potentially impacting a number of areas, 0νββ and solar, supernova and geoneutrinos along with long baseline monitoring of reactors. Potential detector designs are discussed, with simulation studies demonstrating the possible quality of event reconstruction.

Keywords: neutrinos
oscillation
particle physics
antineutrinos
scintillator
nuclear reactor
Advisor: Biller, S