VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Inventing ritual: moving images of social reality in contemporary art

Ritual is a notion that the art world has increasingly reclaimed. From critical writing that zealously identifies rituals to artists who qualify their work as ritualistic, the notion circulates, poking at the boundaries of art practice. The pattern raises critical questions for art history: does it vanish the distinction between art and social practices, casting art’s separation from ritual as a passing historical phase? What are the distinctions in the first place between representing and producing a ritual? These concerns come to the fore with moving images, given that ritual has long been at the heart of ethnographic film, while the very act of filming is becoming central to a growing number of social customs. Addressing these relationships, this thesis focuses on video work since the late 1990s. The thematic research moves through three case studies: series of works by Mike Kelley, Pierre Huyghe, Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch, while keeping a comparative view towards other observers and producers of ritual in premodern painting, ethnographic filmmaking, post-internet practices, mainstream cinema, and homemade videos. Among the most influential artists at the turn of this century, Kelley, Huyghe, Trecartin and Fitch share the singular practice of restaging, for and through film, the rituals that surround them, from high school hazing and carnivals to coronations, corporate team-building, Halloween, Valentine and May Days, suburban street fairs, birthdays, and the new observances of social media. Through close study of the artworks and of moving image tropes that shape social imaginaries, the thesis suggests that these artists produce new insights into contemporary human behaviour. While art and ritual tend to be tackled as coded objects to be deciphered, holding condensed information about the societies to which they point, anthropological theory that considers ritual for what it does (rather than what it symbolises) invites us to examine them instead as practices where portions of social reality are produced – formalised and reinvented.

Keywords: video installation
art and anthropology
Pierre Huyghe
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch
contemporary art
ritual
Mike Kelley
Advisor: Gardner, A
Living in a dynamic world: semantic segmentation of large scale 3D environments

As we navigate the world, for example when driving a car from our home to the work place, we continuously perceive the 3D structure of our surroundings and intuitively recognise the objects we see. Such capabilities help us in our everyday lives and enable free and accurate movement even in completely unfamiliar places. We largely take these abilities for granted, but for robots, the task of understanding large outdoor scenes remains extremely challenging.
In this thesis, I develop novel algorithms for (near) real-time dense 3D reconstruction and semantic segmentation of large-scale outdoor scenes from passive cameras. Motivated by "smart glasses" for partially sighted users, I show how such modeling can be integrated into an interactive augmented reality system which puts the user in the loop and allows her to physically interact with the world to learn personalized semantically segmented dense 3D models. In the next part, I show how sparse but very accurate 3D measurements can be incorporated directly into the dense depth estimation process and propose a probabilistic model for incremental dense scene reconstruction. To relax the assumption of a stereo camera, I address dense 3D reconstruction in its monocular form and show how the local model can be improved by joint optimization over depth and pose.
The world around us is not stationary. However, reconstructing dynamically moving and potentially non-rigidly deforming texture-less objects typically require "contour correspondences" for shape-from-silhouettes. Hence, I propose a video segmentation model which encodes a single object instance as a closed curve, maintains correspondences across time and provide very accurate segmentation close to object boundaries.
Finally, instead of evaluating the performance in an isolated setup (IoU scores) which does not measure the impact on decision-making, I show how semantic 3D reconstruction can be incorporated into standard Deep Q-learning to improve decision-making of agents navigating complex 3D environments.

Keywords: Interactive segmentation and reconstruction
Smart glasses for partially sighted
Rotoscoping
Decision making
Video segmentation
Dense 3D reconstruction
Semantic segmentation
Advisor: Torr, P
Perez, P
Ima deshō: the vacuum of immediacy in contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture

The value of literature in the contemporary age is a controversial issue. The challenge posed by the interpretation of this era is expressed by the provocative remarks of critics such as Karatani Kōjin and Suzuki Sadami maintaining that after the 80s modern "pure" literature died (History and Repetition, 2012; The Concept of "Literature" in Japan, 2006). Reading Karatani and Suzuki's comments as merely provocative, signifying that a form of literature has died, this study enquires into how literature (and the arts) have changed and found new ways of expression after the historical break of 1989.
The dissertation offers immediacy as a possible answer. Immediacy is a theme, a literary device stressing the present moment submerging clear notions of past and present. The precondition for immediacy is an ideological vacuum, experienced by characters across age groups and genders, where they do not share social ideologies or collective purposes. In this isolation, they concentrate only on their local realities, on what they perceive directly (physically and emotionally), acting quickly and repeatedly in the absence of critical thought. The constant action is often carried out in response to corporeal stimuli, specifically violence and sex, that grant immediate gratification in the vacuum. However, at the core characters indulging in immediacy long for inter-personal connections. Building a community based on critical thought and mutual understanding is the solution to escape from immediacy.
The dissertation explores manifestations of immediacy in contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture (manga and anime) published or broadcast between 1995 and 2011. Through the analyses of cultural theories, literature by Takahashi Genichirō, Taguchi Randy and Hirano Keiichirō, and influential works in manga and anime (Neon Genesis Evangelion, Psycho-Pass and Shingeki no kyojin), it shows the theme’s relevance and discusses how it contributes to the broader fields of contemporary Japanese literature and popular culture. By doing so, the dissertation also provides a study of the current artistic panorama in Japan, one that is often neglected critically, but that speaks of its culture with great force and imagination.

Keywords: Manga
Literature
Anime
Japan
Popular culture
Advisor: Flores, LM
Metabolic flux analysis of the nitrogen-fixing bacterium Azorhizobium caulinodans

Symbiotic nitrogen fixation in rhizobial-legume symbioses is important for agriculture and the establishment of a successful symbiosis depends on the metabolic integration of the rhizobia inside the host nodules. This study aims to understand the metabolic adaptations in a rhizobium during nitrogen fixation. The study uses 13C-metabolic flux analysis to derive carbon fluxes across the metabolic network of the model diazotrophic rhizobium, Azorhizobium caulinodans ORS571. The flux maps obtained for aerobic, micro-aerobic and nitrogen-fixing free-living cultures identified these metabolic adjustments as an increase in polyhydroxybutyrate synthesis and tricarboxylic acid cycle fluxes required to sustain growth and metabolism during micro-aerobic nitrogen fixation. Flux maps for bacteroids, isolated from the root and stem nodules of S. rostrata, highlighted reduced tricarboxylic acid cycle fluxes and increased flux through the methyl malonate semialdehyde pathway relative to the free-living N2-fixing cultures. Polyhydroxybutyrate was indispensable for nitrogen fixation and diazotrophic growth in free-living cultures, and for establishment of effective symbiosis with the host, but it was less important for the growth of non-nitrogen fixing free-living cultures under aerobic and micro-aerobic conditions. Deletion of polyhydroxybutyrate under aerobic conditions resulted in slow growth and caused changes in biomass synthesis, mainly affecting lipids and exo-polysaccharide. Under micro-aerobic conditions, deletion of polyhydroxybutyrate also resulted in slow growth and increased fluxes through the tricarboxylic acid cycle, gluconeogenesis, and the pentose phosphate pathway. There was a significant rise in lipid production that potentially substituted for polyhydroxybutyrate and maintained redox balance during micro-aerobic growth. The combined findings from the flux maps highlight the adjustments in central carbon metabolism associated with free-living and symbiotic nitrogen fixation. This knowledge is important for research aimed at improving the existing symbiosis and developing synthetic symbioses between rhizobia and non-legumes, which will reduce dependence on chemical nitrogen fertilizers.

Advisor: Kruger, N
Poole, P
The fluvial cultural landscape of Angkor

The development of the medieval city of Angkor (802-1431 CE) in the floodplains of the Tonle Sap Lake has lead researchers to believe that Angkor made use of its extensive river network; however, little attention has been given to Angkor's relationship with its watery environment. Previous studies have presented a fragmentary view of the subject by analyzing different components in a compartmentalized way, placing the focus on nautical technology or neglecting discussion on water transport in academic works on land transport. This work aims to provide a more comprehensive study on Angkor's specific cognitive and functional traits that could be construed as a distinctive form of fluvial and cultural landscape. This is done by examining the environment, nautical technology, and the cultural biography of boats within the theoretical framework of the maritime cultural landscape and using a cross-disciplinary approach that integrates data from archaeology, iconography, history, ethnography, and environmental studies. A new topological map of Angkor's landscape of communication and transport is presented, as well as new insights on the use of boats as liminal agents for economic and political activities.

Keywords: Angkor
maritime cultural landscape
fluvial landscape
River networks
Nautical technoloy
Cambodian archaeology
Advisor: Robinson, D
Hulin, L
The schooling of irregular migrant children in Canada

This thesis examines the practice of accommodating irregular migrant children in Canadian public schools, specifically, public schools in Toronto, Ontario. Estimates indicate that there are close to 500,000 irregular migrants in Canada; half are thought to be living in the City of Toronto.
Since the early 1990s there have been several novel policy developments in Ontario that have facilitated access to public schooling for irregular migrant children. This project seeks to identify the normative ideas that have been appealed to by public authorities in the policy development process. First, a critical review is undertaken of theoretical justifications developed in moral and political theory for extending schooling rights to irregular migrant children in liberal states. Then, arguments put forward by public authorities in Canada for extending or limiting schooling rights are analysed and compared with the dominant normative frameworks in the theoretical literature. This research finds that public authorities at the sub-state level made use of normative arguments that fall outside common theoretical approaches in moral and political theory. Normative arguments at the sub-state level are found to cohere with a fiduciary conception of public authority.
It is argued that fiduciary theory provides a systematic and innovative theoretical framework for understanding the normative ideas appealed to by public authorities in practice. Moreover, fiduciary theory makes available the normative resources necessary to provide a strong way of conceptualising the duty of public authorities to educate irregular migrant children. This research contributes both to theoretical scholarship aimed at understanding and conceptualizing obligations to irregular migrant children, and also to the field of Canadian Studies, by contextualizing the policy response to irregular migrant children in Canada over time, demonstrating how specific policy responses reflect shifting normative understandings about belonging, government obligation, national culture(s) of citizenship, and the scope of provision of social welfare services to irregular migrant children.

Keywords: Fiduciary theory
Irregular migration
Migrant rights
Advisor: Gibney, M
Volatilities of trace elements in silicate melts

The loss rates of volatile elements from silicate melts are of considerable interest to a number of branches of volcanology, petrology, and geochemistry. In the volcanic context emanation coefficients are used as empirical measures of the extent of loss of individual elements in the gas phase. In geochemistry and cosmochemistry relative loss rates control the pattern of element depletions during melting and core segregation on asteroids and proto planets. Incorporation of such differentiated, pre-melted bodies probably influenced the well-known pattern of volatile element depletion in the Silicate Earth.
This study makes two independent measurements of the volatilities of the elements Ag, Bi, Cd, Cr, Cu, Ga, Ge, In, Mo, Pb, Sn, Tl, V, W and Zn, in molten silicate. The first includes a series of high pressure (1.5GPa) metal–silicate partitioning experiments used to determine the activities of trace elements in silicate melts. The second involves direct measurement of volatile loss from a representative basaltic melt at oxygen fugacities applicable to planetary formation.
Results from this study show that some elements (e.g. indium) are less volatile than previously thought, while others (e.g. copper) are more so. Applying these results to volatile depletion in the Silicate Earth reconciles the supposed overabundance of indium, as suggested by condensation temperatures. Comparing depletion of the Silicate Earth relative to CI meteorites shows a remarkably consistent trend with the measured volatility factors, suggesting that evaporative volatile loss occurred during planetary formation, most likely from planetesimals.
The volatile loss data from this study also support the observation of volatile depletion in lunar basalts. Such agreement provides additional evidence that the Moon experienced some degree of volatile loss during its accretion after the giant impact by Theia.

Advisor: Wood, B
Comparative analyses of cooperative breeding in birds

In cooperatively breeding species, groups of three or more individuals cooperate in raising young. The challenge is to explain why investing in another individual’s reproduction is a better strategy for transmitting genes to future generations than breeding independently. Theoretically, individuals cooperate either because it increases their own reproduction (direct fitness) or because it increases the reproductive success of relatives with whom they share genes (indirect fitness). Life history and demographic parameters are expected to influence the direct and indirect fitness benefits of cooperating. However, how these parameters shape the evolution of cooperative breeding remains largely unexplored. In this thesis, I develop our understanding of the role of life history and demographic parameters in the evolution of cooperative breeding using birds as a model system. Specifically: 1) I review the role of longevity in the evolution of cooperative breeding; 2) I demonstrate that long life makes the evolution of cooperative breeding more likely, supporting a theoretical prediction that territory inheritance is an important incentive for helping behaviour; 3) I show that female helpers invest more in raising siblings than male helpers when they have a higher probability of breeding in their natal group, which suggests that future breeding opportunities shape investment in helping as relatedness of male and female helpers to their siblings is equal; 4) I show that ancestral polyandry only influences the likelihood of cooperative breeding evolving in family groups, not in non-family groups, and that there is a reproductive division of labour in family groups while nonfamily groups are smaller and consist of co-breeders; 5) Finally, I test whether breeders adjust their investment in parental behaviour when they have helpers at the nest in response to the reproductive costs of care.
The cost of social isolation in older people in the English and Portuguese National Health Services

In this thesis I explore the impact of social isolation on delayed hospital discharges of older proximal femoral fracture (PFF) patients in Portugal and in England, and estimate the costs associated with these delays. A delayed discharge occurs when a patient remains in hospital after being deemed medically fit for discharge, and a better understanding of them will help when designing policies to reduce them and improve the allocation of scarce healthcare resources.
Although the literature reports that delayed hospital discharges are prevalent and costly, I found limited knowledge about the impact of pre-admission patient characteristics, including social isolation, on these delays; the significant variability in prevalence of delayed discharges, which could be better understood if estimated by disease area; and the costs associated with such delays.
To address these knowledge gaps, I assessed the impact of social isolation, measured with a validated tool, on delayed hospital discharges in older patients using two case studies: PFF patients admitted to the Hospital de Santa Maria (HSM) in Portugal and to the John Radcliffe Hospital (JRH) in England. My research showed that social isolation is a predictor of the number of days of delayed hospital discharges. However, whereas in Portugal the number of days of delayed discharges increased progressively with the level of social isolation, in England no such dose-response relationship was observed, indicating that any social isolation leads to delayed discharge but the level of social isolation has little effect.
The costs of delayed discharges were found to be significant in both countries. Preventing delayed discharges could have led to a €2,352 saving in hotel costs per PFF patient with a delay in discharge in Portugal, and £2,328 in England. When extrapolated to a national level, the annual costs of delayed discharges were estimated to vary between 5.4% and 11.2% of total acute inpatient costs for PFF patients aged 75 and above in Portugal, and between 2.9% and 4.4% of total acute inpatient costs for PFF patients aged 70 and above in England.
Two interventions aiming at alleviating social isolation were identified through a systematic review and were incorporate in the delayed discharge models at the HSM and the JRH. The case studies show potential for these interventions to reduce the number of days of delayed discharge.

Advisor: Gray, A
Leal, J
Eye tracking to aid fetal ultrasound image analysis

Current automated fetal ultrasound (US) analysis methods employ local descriptors and machine learning frameworks to identify salient image regions. This ‘bottom-up’ approach has limitations, as structures identified by local descriptors are not necessarily anatomically salient. In contrast, the human visual system employs a 'top-down' approach to image analysis guided primarily by image context and prior knowledge. This thesis attempts to bridge the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches to US image analysis. We conduct eye tracking experiments to determine which local descriptors and global constraints guide the visual attention of human observers interpreting fetal US images. We then implement machine learning frameworks which mimic observers’ visual search strategies for anatomical landmark localisation, standardised image plane selection, and video classification. We first developed a framework for landmark localisation in 2-D fetal abdominal US images. Informed by the eye movements of observers searching for anatomical landmarks in images, we derived a pictorial structures model which achieved mean detection accuracies of 87.2% and 83.2% for the stomach bubble and umbilical vein. We extended this framework to automate standardised imaging plane detection in 3-D fetal abdominal US volumes, achieving a mean standardised plane detection accuracy of 92.5%. We then implemented a bag-of-visual-words model for 2-D+t fetal US video clip classification. We recorded the eye movements of observers tasked with classifying videos, and trained a feed-forward neural network directly on eye tracking data to predict visually salient regions in unseen videos. This perception inspired spatiotemporal interest point operator was used within a framework for the classification of fetal US video clips, achieving 80.0% mean accuracy. This work constitutes the first demonstration that high-level constraints and visual saliency models obtained through eye tracking experiments can improve the accuracy of machine learning frameworks for US image analysis.

Advisor: Noble, A
Cooperation and conflict across the major transitions

The history of life is punctuated by major transitions in individuality, when previously-independent biological units assemble into new agents. The stability of these evolutionary alliances is governed by the extent of cooperation and conflict among their constituents. In this thesis, I explore how ecology influences these social interactions. Part I investigates cooperation in arthropod societies. W. D. Hamilton's haplodiploidy hypothesis, which holds that asymmetries in sibling relatedness explain the exclusively-female worker caste of the social Hymenoptera, has fallen out of favour; instead, the preadaptation of females for rearing young is thought to explain who helps in these taxa. Analysing the evolution of paternal care, I show that this pattern of preadaptation is not itself a consequence of haplodiploidy inhibiting brood care by males. I then show how five key factors of sexual ecology—sex-specific preadaptation, labile sex allocation, sib-mating, promiscuity, and reproductive autonomy—have a major impact upon the evolution of sex-biased helping in arthropod societies. Finally, inclusive-fitness theory predicts that monogamy should promote worker sterility in insect societies, but a recent population-genetics model has challenged this prediction. I show that relaxing this model's genetic, evolutionary, and ecological assumptions supports inclusive-fitness theory. Part II investigates conflict within genomes. I show that transposons are under selection to drive their host populations extinct, and explore the transposon–host and transposon–transposon interactions that might prevent this outcome. While neither selection against transposons' deleterious effects nor exploitation by parasites can plausibly prevent extinction, I show that host suppression of transposons can; however, this is only stable in the long term if suppression makes transposition costlier. I conclude that complex life could not exist without the active suppression of genetic conflict. Overall, I argue that ecology explains patterns of cooperation and conflict across the major transitions.

Advisor: Foster, K
Gardner, A