VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
System-level analysis and design for reliability and security in wireless networks

The performance of four wireless network scenarios, focusing on reliable device-to-device (D2D) communications and secure physical layer communications, is analyzed based on stochastic geometry in this thesis. The analyses and methodologies in this thesis constitute a comprehensive framework for system-level analysis and design of reliability and security in future wireless networks.
Since reliability is the cornerstone of security in wireless communications, the first scenario focuses on enhancing the reliability of concurrent D2D transmissions in a Poisson clustered out-band D2D network. Two convex optimization schemes are proposed to maximize the joint coverage probability and minimize the power consumption for reliable concurrent transmissions. Meanwhile, the second scenario focuses on route selection for end-to-end reliability, which is jointly characterized by coverage, delay and trust criteria, in the multi-hop D2D based mission-critical communication systems. The proposed algorithm ensures that the candidate links meet the given requirements of the criteria while selecting the best path based on end-to-end coverage, timeliness or trust probabilities.
Apart from the reliability issues discussed above, wireless communication networks including D2D networks are vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. Thus, the third scenario moves on to study the meta distribution of the secrecy rate for a legitimate link in the presence of randomly located eavesdroppers (EDs) modeled by a Poisson point process. The meta distribution characterizes the fraction of the realizations of EDs that yield a target secrecy rate. Finally, the fourth scenario studies secure wireless communications in the presence of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) jamming and randomly located UAV EDs modeled by a uniform binomial point process. A fitting function on the line-of-sight probability is proposed so that a tractable expression is derived for the secure connection probability (SCP). The trends of the SCP on the transmit signal to jamming power ratio, UAV jammer location and UAV height are analyzed.

Advisor: Coon, J
The dual influence of tumour hypoxia on the activity of a group B oncolytic adenoviurs

Many oncolytic adenoviruses are in clinical development for the treatment of solid tumours and Enadenotucirev (EnAd), a chimeric group B adenovirus, is one leading candidate. Little is known about its activity in hypoxic regions, a feature present in virtually all solid carcinomas and well known to confer resistance to traditional therapies. Hypoxia may account for the long term persistence of adenovirus in tumours and incomplete tumour coverage, as intratumoral and even intravenous virus delivery may expose viruses to hypoxia due to perfusion changes in the tumour vasculature. We set out to define how hypoxia influences EnAd’s oncolytic activity through an in-depth analysis of the viral infection in cancer cells, its dissemination to bystander cells in hypoxic conditions in vitro, and characterisation of virus dissemination in animal tumour models. Work in this thesis showed that hypoxia in vitro actually boosts expression of virus early and late gene products leading to increased production of infectious virus (2 to 12-fold). It also increases expression of virus-encoded biotherapeutic agents. The mechanism appears to involve hypoxia specific over-expression of the immediate-early gene E1A, and we provide evidence that a hypoxia responsive element within the promoter of this key viral gene could be induced in a HIF 2α dependent fashion. Nevertheless, in conditions involving cell-to-cell spread in vitro, this ability of hypoxic cancer cells to produce greater number of virus particles is masked, due to poor paracellular spread reflecting the presence, or absence, of a factor smaller than 5 kilodaltons, yet to be characterised. We also assessed the impact of hypoxia in vivo by combining EnAd with atovaquone, a mitochondrial Complex-III inhibitor that reduces the cellular oxygen consumption rate, thereby alleviating hypoxia in tumours. Oral atovaquone treatment, which does not increase virus production in vitro, led to an unprecedented increase of tumoural viral spread while significantly reducing the hypoxic fraction, suggesting that hypoxia could be a key therapeutic barrier. In conclusion, hypoxia boosts the oncolytic activity of adenoviruses, but can inhibit intercellular spread. The overall impact of hypoxia upon the success of oncolytic adenovirus therapy will likely rely on the balance of improved expression of virus-encoded therapeutics, anti-tumour effects of pro inflammatory (antiviral) signalling, and limited viral spread.

Keywords: Adenovirus
Hypoxia
Oncolytic virus
Advisor: Seymour, L
Interpreting noun compounds

Noun compounds, which are sequences of nouns functioning as a single noun, are abundant in both written and spoken English and their interpretation is crucial for many natural language processing tasks, such as machine translation or information retrieval. Therefore there is significant ongoing interest in their interpretation. Although it is an easy task for humans, it is rather challenging for computers.
The interpretation of a noun compound can be given with a list of suitable paraphrases that are ranked according to their aptness, where the paraphrases can be verbs and prepositions. The aim of this dissertation is to develop methods that can automatically interpret two-noun noun compounds by paraphrases using large corpora. A general paraphrasing method is proposed that searches for paraphrases in static corpora, and uses Web search engine queries to validate results. Furthermore, a method for the SemEval-2 Task #9 is developed from the validation part of the general paraphrasing method.
The results of the general paraphrasing method were evaluated by human judges; based on their aptness for the noun compound, the first three paraphrases returned for each noun compound were given a score between 1 and 5 by each judge. The paraphrases ranked first, second and third by the method proposed here received average scores of 3.1842, 2.7687 and 2.5583, respectively. Further, when comparing the returned paraphrase distribution for each noun compound with the judges’ distributions, it achieved an average Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.3108, an average Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.2738 and an average Kullback-Leibler divergence of 0.1589. The method for the SemEval-2 Task #9 was evaluated with the scorer provided for the task, on the test data set, by calculating the similarity of the returned paraphrase distribution for each noun compound with a gold standard. It achieved an average Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient of 0.3387, an average Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.3196 and an average Kullback-Leibler divergence of 4.1520.

Keywords: Noun compounds
Natural language processing
Computational linguistics
Advisor: Pulman, S
Madness, medicine, and religious identity in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world

This thesis explores the experience, interpretation and treatment of religious beliefs and behaviours that were considered ‘mad’ in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Challenging historiographical emphases upon a secularising transition in the long eighteenth century, it argues that there was considerable overlap between the religious beliefs and values of the people who were deemed religiously insane and the people who confined and treated them. Nevertheless, for various reasons—theological, therapeutic and socioeconomic—medical approaches to religious insanity developed in ways that undermined patients’ religious identities. In addition to tracing these medical developments, this thesis looks at how the ‘religiously insane’ used theological ideas and narrative strategies to challenge the theoretical underpinnings of nineteenth-century psychological medicine. Chapter One uses the writings of an alleged madwoman whose religious activism spanned British and American contexts to highlight key differences between cultures of religious madness across the Atlantic world. It emphasises the greater degree of latitude for religious deviance that was permitted within the revivalist cultures of the Second Great Awakening in America. Chapter Two looks comparatively at the autobiographical writings of two people—one British and the other American—who were confined to asylums for religious insanity. It contrasts the social and economic factors that led to their marginalisation as religious lunatics to the theological meanings they attached to their own madness and exclusion. Chapter Three explores practices of pastoral care, demonstrating the ways in which evangelical ministers integrated medicine and theology as a means of preserving the contentious emotional and psychological features of evangelical interiority. Chapter Four explores, in turn, the treatment of religious ‘enthusiasts’ in insane asylums. It argues that the religious identities of patients were negated as a consequence of the theological and philosophical considerations which shaped psychological medicine in the early stages of professionalisation. Chapter Five looks at how the ‘religiously insane’ interpreted their own experiences. It argues that their spiritual experiences, their marginalisation as mad-people, and their engagement with contemporary medical ideas underpinned a unique and potent challenge to the authority of psychological medicine.

Keywords: American History
Illness Narratives
History of Religion
History of Evangelicalism
Atlantic History
British History
History of Psychiatry
History of Madness
History of Medicine
Religious Experience
History of the Emotions
Insane Asylums
Advisor: Garnett, J
Investigation of engineering conditions to enhance the culture efficiency of human mesenchymal stromal cells

As greater therapeutic potential is realized with human Mesenchymal stromal cells (hMSCs), the demand for hMSCs continues to grow. In order to improve the in vitro production rate and consistency, the effect of two key culture parameters, oxygen and culture surface, needs to be better understood. This study utilized biological experiments, mathematical modelling and RNA-sequencing to advance the knowledge on how in vitro hypoxia, and surface topography and hydrophobicity affect hMSCs growth rate.
Simulation and experimental results showed that severe hypoxia reduced, while mild hypoxia enhanced hMSCs growth rate. A novel linkage on how different oxygen levels regulate the cell cycle mechanism is proposed - through the rivalry effect of HIF1α and HIF2α. The highest growth rate was experimentally observed under 1% oxygen in two sources (one immortalized and one primary) of bone marrow-derived hMSCs.
Under normoxia, a shift in metabolism (represented by lactate production) was observed between slow-growing and fast-growing hMSCs. A flux-balance, genome-scale mathematical model was utilized with the incorporation of the proteomic resource allocation theory to capture the observed shift. Simulation results suggested the phenomenon was caused by the tricarboxylic acid cycle becoming interrupted at higher growth rates. Under hypoxia (1%), this phenomenon was not observed. Lactate production was found to positively correlate with growth rate with the interrupted Tricarboxylic acid cycle under all simulated growth rates.
Surfaces with different topographies and chemistry treatments were synthesized to culture hMSCs and were processed through RNA sequencing. hMSCs cultured on fibrous surfaces showed significantly lower growth rates and differentially regulated transcriptomes. The effect of different chemistry treatments was small, but its synergistic effect with topographical changes could be observed. Among the biomarkers commonly used for classifying hMSCs, many were significantly down-regulated on fibrous surfaces. Network and cluster analysis yielded a list of biomarkers that are not sensitive to changes in surface conditions. In addition, surface topography was found to significantly affect the expression of HIF2A and many HIF2A-correlated downstream targets. This finding suggests the possibility of designing future biomaterials to selectively activate or suppress certain hypoxic responses.
The findings from this work advance the understanding of how hypoxia and culture surfaces regulate the growth rate of hMSCs and encourages future studies to engineer an optimized set of culture conditions for hMSCs expansion in vitro.

Advisor: Yang, A
Ye, C
The school magazine in Victorian England

This thesis is the first detailed study of a neglected source: the school magazine. Most studies of secondary schools argue that the ideals and lifestyles of adult editors, teachers and parents defined a new cohesive middle class in nineteenth-century England, seeing pupils in terms of their conformity or rebellion to adult society. Yet this study traces middle-class ideals back to secondary schools which nurtured rich and lively youth cultures. School magazine production boomed from the mid nineteenth century, with hundreds of school magazines established across England, which remains a rich yet untapped body of periodical material. This thesis uses the archives of four secondary schools, containing an astonishing seventy-two magazines in total — alongside other pupil writings, and associational and institutional documents — to gain an insider’s view of social, cultural and educational developments in the lives of middle-class English youths. It analyses new ideals of youth and collective identity which were negotiated in magazines written and produced in schools and then circulated to create expansive educational networks across England, Britain, and the British Empire. The analysis reveals conformity and rebellion as too stark to account for a new youth-driven dynamic which was shaping middle-class ideals and lifestyles long before the turbulent youth cultures of the 1960s. In addition, the thesis argues that the school magazine was shaped by youths’ denominational, gendered, classed, local, and ethnic identities, complicating the picture of a cohesive middle class. By uncovering these youth-driven currents of social and cultural change, this thesis makes a substantial contribution to histories of print culture, education, and youth in the nineteenth century. It also challenges assumptions that all youths were passive witnesses or recipients of adult ideals by uncovering middle-class English teenagers as key beneficiaries and proponents of broader changes to culture, class, and imperialism.

Keywords: manuscript culture
history of childhood
girls' education
periodicals
school magazines
girlhood
history of education
boys' education
peer culture
boyhood
Advisor: Gleadle, K
de Bellaigue, C
The architecture of gentlemen's clubs in New York city: a study of gender and class in America, 1879-1909

This thesis is about America’s most famous architects and, frankly speaking, some of their least famous buildings. It is a study of the firm of McKim, Mead & White and the gentlemen’s clubhouses it built in New York City around the turn of the twentieth century. Though obscure, I argue, these buildings were of equal if not greater significance—architecturally as well as socially—than many of the firm’s more noted projects. While McKim, Mead & White’s pavilions at Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Madison Square Garden, and Pennsylvania Station have all been demolished, the great majority of the firm’s clubhouses are still extant, occupied by the same organisations that commissioned them more than a century ago. My aim here is to explore how McKim, Mead & White designed these places, what social function they served for their clients, and where they fit within the larger story of this fabled architectural firm.

Advisor: Whyte, W
(Dis)continuous identities: modalities of liberalism and the Sikh diaspora online

This project examines eleven different Sikhism-related websites that are operated largely by and for diasporic Sikhs, and which collectively constitute a digital discourse that both produces and reflects a distinctly diasporic Sikh identity. The central research questions guiding this dissertation are: How is liberal diasporic Sikh discourse redefining Sikh identity? How is this discourse produced and perpetuated as such? How does the digital nature of this discourse have an effect? What does this discourse tell us about the nature of diasporic Sikhism? I argue that liberal Sikh discourse redefines Sikhism as universal and cosmopolitan by showing it to resonate with the values of liberal modernity, and by situating it within the particular vision of universality encompassed in liberal modernity. It attempts to ground Sikh identity in a new way, one that is not based upon historical, ethnic or linguistic claims, but upon the abstract, liberal principles that underlie much of Western modernity. In so doing, it clears the way for creating a new sense of belonging in the West. This discourse wields liberalism as an analytical tool to engage, improve and fulfil Sikhism; however, it fails to realise the extent to which it is also embedded within the epistemological domain of liberalism, and how that epistemology actually shapes its concerns. I employ multi-modal discourse analysis to examine the particular discursive modalities that these websites employ, which are as follows: (1) translation, (2) critique, and (3) representing Sikhs as virtuous citizens. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that diasporic Sikh identity is not continuous with Punjabi Sikh identity, but is actually emerging as a distinctive way of being Sikh.

Advisor: Hausner, S
Anderson, S
Tweeting Islamophobia

The great promise of social media platforms such as Twitter is to connect people separated across time and space. This has had far-ranging consequences for politics by changing discursive, participative and organisational practices. However, despite much early techno-optimism about platforms like Twitter, concerns are growing that they enable harmful, hateful and divisive behaviours. In this thesis, I focus on one of the most concerning and harmful behaviours on Twitter and in politics more broadly: Islamophobic hate speech. The socio-political consequences of hate speech are deeply concerning, and include causing harm to targeted victims, spreading divisiveness, and normalizing dangerous and extremist ideas.
The aim of this thesis is to enhance our understanding of the nature and dynamics of Islamophobic hate speech amongst followers of UK political parties on Twitter. I study four parties from across the political spectrum: the BNP, UKIP, the Conservatives and Labour. I make three main contributions. First, I define Islamophobia in terms of negativity and generality, thus making a robust, theoretically-informed contribution to the study of a deeply contested concept. This argument informs the second contribution, which is methodological: I create a multi-class supervised machine learning classifier for Islamophobic hate speech. This distinguishes between weak and strong varieties and can be applied robustly and at scale.
My third contribution is theoretical. Drawing together my substantive findings, I argue that Islamophobic tweeting amongst followers of UK parties can be characterised as a wind system which contains Islamophobic hurricanes. This analogy captures the complex, heterogeneous dynamics underpinning Islamophobia on Twitter, and highlights its devastating effects. I also show that Islamist terrorist attacks drive Islamophobia, and that this affects followers of all four parties studied here. I use this finding to extend the theory of cumulative extremism beyond extremist groups to include individuals with mainstream affiliations. These contributions feed into ongoing academic, policymaking and activist discussions about Islamophobic hate speech in both social media and UK politics.

Keywords: twitter
social media
political parties
islamophobia
prejudice
uk politics
hate speech
online harm
Advisor: Yasseri, T
Margetts, H
Higher linear algebra in topology and quantum information theory

We investigate categorifications of linear algebra, and their applications to the construction of 4-manifold invariants, to the construction of a variety of linear algebraic structures in quantum information theory, and to the classification of certain instances of `quantum pseudo-telepathy', a phenomenon in quantum physics where two non-communicating parties can use pre-shared entanglement to perform tasks classically impossible without communicating.
This thesis is divided into four chapters, closely following arXiv:1812.11933, arXiv:1609.07775, and arXiv:1801.09705.
In the first chapter, we introduce semisimple 2-categories, fusion 2-categories and spherical fusion 2-categories. We prove that every finite semisimple 2-category is the 2-category of finite semisimple module categories of a multifusion category, and give examples of fusion 2-categories.
In the second chapter, we construct, for each spherical fusion 2-category, a state-sum invariant of oriented singular piecewise-linear 4-manifolds, and show that these invariants generalize various previous 4-manifold invariants, including the Crane-Yetter invariant and a recent invariant of Cui.
In the third chapter, we use biunitary connections in the 2-category of 2-Hilbert spaces to generate many new construction schemes for linear algebraic quantities of relevance to quantum information, including complex Hadamard matrices and unitary error bases, and we use these techniques to construct a unitary error basis which cannot be built using any previously known method.
In the fourth chapter, we classify quantum isomorphic graphs in terms of Morita equivalence classes of algebras in certain monoidal categories, give examples of such algebras arising from groups of central type, and discuss various applications to the study of quantum pseudo-telepathy in the graph isomorphism game.

Keywords: quantum graph isomorphism
monoidal 2-category
group of central type
biunitary
noncommutative graph
quantum pseudo-telepathy
4-manifold invariant
unitary error basis
state-sum
topological field theory
graphical calculus
quantum information
categorification
fusion category
Advisor: Vicary, J