VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Gentrification on the urban fringe: Prosperity and displacement in West Marin, California

The global housing crisis, the epidemic of foreclosures, and rising global inequality have put the spotlight on gentrification in cities around the world. In the gentrifying San Francisco Bay Area, Marin County (and West Marin in particular) has escaped attention by gentrification scholars, but it is an essential part of the larger story of gentrification in the Bay Area. This dissertation examines the history of gentrification in West Marin, its relationship to regional socioeconomic transformations, and its local articulations./nGentrification in West Marin has similar characteristics to that in San Francisco and Oakland, though the continuity in West Marin’s physical landscape conceals the extent of the socioeconomic transformations gentrification has caused. West Marin communities feel the effects of the Bay Area’s tech economy in high home prices, increased short-term rentals and second-home owners, and long commutes for workers. Many of the people most affected are also not readily visible—often undocumented immigrants who work in agriculture and are isolated by living conditions and by language and culture. The local agricultural economy, rather than disappear in the face of rising land prices, has been mandated to remain, and has had to transform itself to stay viable. In doing so, agriculture has created a culture of food that contributes to the gentrification of West Marin, as it draws an elite customer base and contributes to the shrinking housing available for the workers that keep the agricultural and service sectors going. This dissertation engages with the literature on urban, rural, and agricultural gentrification in order to understand local articulations of gentrification processes, and what they can tell us about the consequences of gentrification in general.

Advisor: Sayre, Nathan
Generational Care: Psychology, Race, and History in South Africa

In contemporary South Africa, spatial segregation, racism, and economic exclusion remain trenchant features of everyday life twenty-five years after the end of apartheid. Based on twenty months of ethnographic research in the township of Khayelitsha and Cape Town more broadly, this dissertation tracks different post-apartheid approaches to mental health care, which attempt to address these ongoing legacies. Through extensive fieldwork at a community-based organization that provides therapeutic support in isiXhosa, I argue that therapeutic practices by black South Africans de-stabilize and experiment with the normative confines of the psychotherapeutic encounter. Rather than treat individual psyches, therapists’ practices are oriented toward the relational space between generations, a political therapeutic driven by the affective force of the therapists’ own history of struggle toward a different future for black youth, who continue to be marked by the legacies of colonialism and apartheid (what I call “generational care” throughout the dissertation). Second, I argue that normative psychology continues to assume a nuclear family configuration as the norm against which all pathology is judged and therapeutic interventions practiced. I suggest this is particularly so for theories of attachment and infant development, which assume that only a particular configuration of the family—biological parents who unconditionally care for a child in the same physical space as them—is productive of “stable” subjects later in life. By following the history of psychiatry in South Africa, narratives of care from mental health professionals working on the Cape Flats, as well as policy and research agendas, I track how discourses of “cultural difference” evade processes of racialization and consequential racisms in normative psychological theories and interventions. I argue that different practical and conceptual therapeutic experiments are necessary, ones that imagine forms of care adequate to the lived afterlives of the settler-colonial project, and particularly ones for those related outside the nuclear family form.

Advisor: Cohen, Lawrence
The Ware Course: Architecture as a Useful, Liberal, and Fine Art

This dissertation examines the academic career of William Robert Ware (1832-1915), an American architect who became the leading architectural educator in the late nineteenth century. Previous accounts of Ware have focused either on his work as a practicing architect or his role as a department builder at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University, where he imported the Beaux-Arts system of design instruction to the United States. This dissertation, in contrast, interprets archival documents and nineteenth-century architectural theory to situate Ware in relation to a number of core questions and concepts in the broader history of architectural expertise, including the construction of professional authority, the meaning of culture, the use of judgment, and the tension between creative expression and information processing. In addressing these core questions and concepts as a pedagogue, Ware helped to embed architectural education within the institutional setting of the modern research university and—for a brief historicist moment near the turn of the century—transform the discipline from a useful art into a liberal art…

Advisor: Shanken, Andrew
Cheah, Pheng
Visual Understanding through Natural Language

Powered by deep convolutional networks and large scale visual datasets, modern computer vision systems are capable of accurately recognizing thousands of visual categories. However, images contain much more than categorical labels: they contain information about where objects are located (in a forest or in a kitchen?), what attributes an object has (red or blue?), and how objects interact with other objects in a scene (is the child sitting on a sofa, or running in a field?). Natural language provides an efficient and intuitive way for visual systems to convey important information about a visual scene./nWe begin by considering a fundamental task as the intersection of language and vision: image captioning, in which a system receives an image as input and outputs a natural language sentence that describes the image. We consider two important shortcomings in modern image captioning models. First, in order to describe an object, like “otter”, captioning models require pairs of sentences and images which include the object “otter”. In Chapter 2, we build models that can learn an object like “otter” from classification data, which is abundant and easy to collect, then com- pose novel sentences at test time describing “otter”, without any “otter” image caption examples at train time. Second, visual description models can be heavily driven by biases found in the training dataset. This can lead to object hallucination in which models hallucinate objects not present in an image. In Chapter 3, we propose tools to analyze language bias through the lens of object hallucination. Language bias can also lead to bias amplification; e.g., if otters occur in 70% of train images, at test time a model might predict that otters occur in 85% of test images. We propose the Equalizer model in Chapter 4 to mitigate such bias in a special, yet important, case: gender bias./nMoving on from captioning, we consider how systems which provide natural language text about an image can be used to help humans better understand an AI system. In Chapter 5, we propose to generate visual explanations with natural language, which rationalize the output of a deep visual classifier. We show these explanations can help humans understand when to accept or reject decisions made by an AI agent. Finally, in Chapter 6, we consider a new task at the intersection of language and vision: moment localization in videos with natural language. We detail the collection of a large scale dataset for this task, as well as the first models for moment localization.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
A Study of Gold(I/III) Redox Events by Means of Photredox Catalysis

Chapter 1. Photoredox Catalysis Unlocks Single-Electron Elementary Steps in/nTransition Metal Catalyzed Cross-Coupling/nA brief survey of photoredox/transition metal dual catalysis is provided. The central message of this chapter is that the photoredox catalysis enables transition metal catalysts to access open-shell intermediates that could rapidly undergo desired elementary steps such as oxidative addition, transmetallation, and reductive elimination./nChapter 2. Visible light-mediated gold-catalysed carbon(sp2)-carbon(sp) cross-coupling/nA dual photoredox and gold-catalysed cross-coupling reaction of alkynyltrimethylsilanes and aryldiazonium tetrafluoroborates is described. The reaction proceeds through visible-light mediated oxidative addition of aryldiazoniums, transmetalation of alkynyltrimethylsilanes and aryl-alkynyl reductive elimination. Exclusive selectivity for silyl-substituted alkynes is observed, with no reactivity observed for terminal alkynes./nChapter 3. The Mechanism of Photoredox-Catalyzed C−C and C−N Bond Formation by/nArylation of IPrAu(I)−CF3 and IPrAu(I)−Succinimide/nHerein we report on the photoredox-catalyzed gold-mediated C(sp2)−CF3 and C(sp2)−N coupling reactions. By adopting gold as a platform for probing metallaphotoredox catalysis, we demonstrate that cationic gold(III) complexes are the key intermediates of the C−C and C−N coupling reactions. The high-valent gold(III) intermediates are accessed by virtue of photoredox catalysis through a radical chain process. In addition, the bond-forming step of the coupling reactions is the reductive elimination from cationic gold(III) intermediates, which is supported by isolation and crystallographic characterization of key Au(III) intermediates.

Advisor: Toste, F. D.
Neuroimmune interactions drive chronic itch and inflammation

Chronic itch remains a highly prevalent disorder with limited treatment options. Most chronic itch diseases are thought to be driven by both the nervous and immune systems, but the fundamental molecular and cellular interactions that trigger the early development of itch, and the acute-to-chronic itch transition, remain unknown. Here, we show that skin-infiltrating neutrophils are key initiators of itch behaviors in atopic dermatitis, the most prevalent chronic itch disorder. Neutrophil depletion significantly attenuated itch-evoked scratching behaviors in a mouse model of atopic dermatitis. Strikingly, neutrophils were required for several key hallmarks of chronic itch, including upregulation of inflammatory cytokines, skin hyperinnervation, enhanced expression of itch signaling molecules upregulation of activity-induced genes and markers of neuropathic itch in spinal cord and sensory ganglia. We also demonstrate that induction of CXCL10, a ligand for the CXCR3 receptor that promotes acute itch via direct activation of itch sensory neurons, is neutrophil-dependent. Indeed, we find that blockade of CXCR3 signaling attenuates atopic dermatitis itch. Our findings define a new role for neutrophils in atopic dermatitis, and establish the importance of CXCR3 signaling in bridging neutrophils and neurons in the transition from acute to chronic itch.

Advisor: Bautista, Diana M
Republican Monsters: The Cultural Construction of American Positivist Criminology, 1767-1920

This dissertation examines the history of and cultural influences on positivist criminology in the United States. From Benjamin Rush to the present day, the U.S. has produced an extensive corpus of empirical and theoretical studies that seeks to discern an objective, scientifically-grounded basis for criminal behavior. American positivist criminology has drawn on numerous subfields and theories, including rational choice / economic theory, biology, and psychology, but in all cases, maintains that a purely scientific explanation of offending is possible./nThis study proceeds from the perspective that divisions between scientific and non-scientific thought are untenable. Drawing on scholarship in literary criticism and sociology, I argue that positivist criminology confronts an inherent contradiction in purporting to develop a purely scientific account of phenomena that are defined by the moral and cultural sentiments of a society. I thus hypothesize that positivist criminology is in fact reliant on the irrational and fictive cultural tropes and images of crime that it claims to exorcize./nThe dissertation proceeds by reviewing the literature on the history of criminology, developing a set of functional types or tropes for character analysis, and then examining four separate periods in the development of scientific criminology: eighteenth century studies of rational action, nineteenth century studies of defective reasoning, early twentieth century studies of race and crime, and the development of scientifically informed criminalistics programs. Each of these cases captures a different period and focus in the development of scientific criminology. In threading continuity between these cases, I show how criminological positivism is consistently reliant on culturally informed tropes and characters to render itself sensible and coherent.

Advisor: Tomlins, Christopher
Who Narrates the Bible: Reformation Commentary and English Verse Culture

This dissertation argues that early modern scholars invented the idea of the biblical narrator. In Pentateuchal commentaries beginning with Luther and Calvin, the pressures of Protestant theology forced commentators to focus on Moses, whom they imagined as a mediating, human presence within the divinely authored text. In turn, this innovative literary theory shaped how seventeenth century English poets—particularly Lucy Hutchinson, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton—wrote their own biblically themed poems, offering them a new, narratological sophistication.

Advisor: Kahn, Victoria
Advanced Sliding Mode Control and its Application to Autonomous Vehicle at the Limits of Handling

Model uncertainty is one of the most challenging areas of control theory. It is the key reason for using feedback control in order to achieve safety and performance. High-gain feedback is the simplest solution to improve performance. However, it comes at the price of instability and constraints violation. In particular, in sliding mode control, it manifests itself as an undesirable chattering. This dissertation addresses this issue by focusing on the development of advanced sliding mode control and demonstrating its effectiveness for autonomous vehicles under the limits of sensing and driving capabilities. First, a new adaptive sliding mode control (ASMC) strategy is proposed to reduce the control action to its minimum possible value while guaranteeing robust stability. Then, integral sliding model predictive control is introduced by merging the concept of ASMC with a robust model predictive control formulation for nonlinear constrained systems. Motivated by the ever-growing interests in autonomous vehicles, we apply the proposed control techniques to control an autonomous vehicle at the limits of handling. Different extreme driving scenarios such as large side slip angle estimation, path tracking with a large model mismatch and drifting maneuvers are considered and solved with the proposed control algorithms. Successful experimental results support the effectiveness of the developed control method.

Advisor: Borrelli, Francesco
Analysis and applications of the Locally Competitive Algorithm

The Locally Competitive Algorithm (LCA) is a recurrent neural network for performing sparse coding and dictionary learning of natural signals. The network itself lacks much of the anatomical structure we see in real brains, but it does include lateral connectivity and iterative, or recurrent, computation. These together produce population nonlinearities that facilitate desirable coding properties, including improved robustness, selectivity, and efficiency when compared to more traditional architectures. When trained on images of natural scenes, the network also has many overlapping response properties with those of biological neurons. This has encouraged scientists to use it as a means to conceptualize theories of neural coding and explore their consequences. Probing the network enables us to observe and test theories that account for neurophysiological phenomena. In this thesis, we will provide motivation for investigating the model, a detailed derivation of the model, an analysis of its response properties, and offer some extensions. The core computational principles in the LCA are distinct from those used in most production artificial neural networks, and we will argue that there is much to be gained from incorporating LCA-like computations in exchange for feed-forward, pointwise nonlinear model neurons.

Advisor: Olshausen, Bruno
Rethinking Self-Reflexivity and Genre in Medieval French Romance

This dissertation argues that gestures of literary self-consciousness, especially those articulated through rhetorical play and ironic voicing on the part of the first-person narrator, become a conventional feature of medieval French romance tradition in the wake of Chrétien de Troyes./nThe highly developed self-reflexivity of a number of canonical twelfth-century French romances has been the focus of much scholarly attention over the last few decades, but critics have tended to treat them as the unique hallmarks of a handful of exceptional canonical texts, ascribing the innovation of literary self-consciousness to the individual master authors. Thus, much criticism of French romance beyond a few canonical masterworks has taken as its primary goal to prove that a romance text exhibits literary self-consciousness of its own forms and conventions; self-reflexivity is taken as the end of analysis, and its presence indicates that a text is unique and worthy of critical interest./nThe dissertation looks at explicitly intertextual French romances of the late twelfth century (Renaut de Beaujeu’s Le Bel Inconnu, chapter 1) and the thirteenth century (Heldris de Cornuailles’s Le Roman de Silence and the anonymous Amadas et Ydoine, chapter 2), as well as a thirteenth-century German adaptation (Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, chapter 3), in order to show how readers, adaptors, and translators of a canonical generation of twelfth-century romance recognized and responded to the techniques of self-reflexive literary play that pervade Chrétien and the French Tristan tradition. The romancers that followed in Chrétien’s footsteps did not fail to recognize the irony, ambiguity, and play within his oeuvre; nor did they simply offer derivative or lesser imitations of his famous scenes and passages. Rather, they relied on readers’ previous knowledge and expectations formed by an earlier generation of romance in order not only to reproduce but to build and comment upon by-now familiar gestures of self-reflexivity, often pushing romance to its formal and logical limits. Or, in the case of Iwein, written for German readers largely without access to or detailed knowledge of the French source corpus or subsequent tradition, Hartmann manages to adapt and translate the poetic concerns of his French source and his French contemporaries for a different audience./nAttentiveness to gestures of self-reflexivity not as the indicator of individual authorial ability (something that distinguishes good and interesting authors from derivative and uninteresting ones) but as forms that can and do become familiar and conventional, and that can be and are innovated upon, satirized, and subverted help us to understand the later romance tradition and its relation to its predecessors in a new, more productive way.

Advisor: Hult, David F.
Visual Dynamics Models for Robotic Planning and Control

For a robot to interact with its environment, it must perceive the world and understand how the world evolves as a consequence of its actions. This thesis studies a few methods that a robot can use to respond to its observations, with a focus on instances that can leverage visual dynamic models. In general, these are models of how the visual observations of a robot evolves as a consequence of its actions. This could be in the form of predictive models that directly predict the future in the space of image pixels, in the space of visual features extracted from these images, or in the space of compact learned latent representations. The three instances that this thesis studies are in the context of visual servoing, visual planning, and representation learning for reinforcement learning. In the first case, we combine learned visual features with learning single-step predictive dynamics models and reinforcement learning to learn visual servoing mechanisms. In the second case, we use a deterministic multi-step video prediction model to achieve various manipulation tasks through visual planning. In addition, we show that conventional video prediction models are unequipped to model uncertainty and multiple futures, which could limit the planning capabilities of the robot. To address this, we propose a stochastic video prediction model that is trained with a combination of variational losses, adversarial losses, and perceptual losses, and show that this model can predict futures that are more realistic, diverse, and accurate. Unlike the first two cases, in which the dynamics model is used to make predictions for decision-making, the third case learns the model solely for representation learning. We learn a stochastic sequential latent variable model to learn a latent representation, and then use it as an intermediate representation for reinforcement learning. We show that this approach improves final performance and sample efficiency.

Advisor: Abbeel, Pieter
Levine, Sergey
Homological mirror symmetry for the genus 2 curve in an abelian variety and its generalized Strominger-Yau-Zaslow mirror

Motivated by observations in physics, mirror symmetry is the concept that certain manifolds come in pairs $X$ and $Y$ such that the complex geometry on $X$ mirrors the symplectic geometry on $Y$. It allows one to deduce information about $Y$ from known properties of $X$. Strominger-Yau-Zaslow (1996) described how such pairs arise geometrically as torus fibrations with the same base and related fibers, known as SYZ mirror symmetry. Kontsevich (1994) conjectured that a complex invariant on $X$ (the bounded derived category of coherent sheaves) should be equivalent to a symplectic invariant of $Y$ (the Fukaya category). This is known as homological mirror symmetry. In this project, we first use the construction of SYZ mirrors for hypersurfaces in abelian varieties following Abouzaid-Auroux-Katzarkov, in order to obtain $X$ and $Y$ as manifolds. The complex manifold comes from the genus 2 curve as a hypersurface in its Jacobian torus, and we equip the SYZ mirror manifold with a symplectic form. We then describe an embedding of the category on the complex side into a cohomological Fukaya-Seidel category of $Y$ as a symplectic fibration. While our fibration is one of the first nonexact, non-Lefschetz fibrations to be equipped with a Fukaya category, the main geometric idea in defining it is the same as in Seidel's construction for Fukaya categories of Lefschetz fibrations.

Advisor: Auroux, Denis