VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Towards understanding human strategies for encoding robot manipulation skills

Enabling robots to perform tasks in unstructured, human environments has been a long standing vision of roboticists for decades. Some mobile platforms are already operating in these environments, such as autonomous robot vacuums and telepresence robots. In industrial settings, robots perform many manipulation tasks such as welding and handling and transporting objects, however, in these settings, the environment is very structured and the position and orientation of obstacles and work pieces are known with high accuracy. In unstructured human environments, few practical applications of robots performing manipulation tasks exist yet, especially for constrained motion, assembly-type tasks that require forming contact relationships to perform the task. Due to uncertainty in object poses and geometry in unstructured environments, it is essential that the robot complies with object constraints to perform the task and ensure safe operation. This thesis presents work towards developing compliant, human-inspired manipulation skills in task space for robots operating in unstructured environments that are able to accommodate uncertainty and adapt to environmental perturbations. To develop a framework for programming compliant manipulation primitives, we study how humans use contact relationships and compliance while performing insertion-type tasks in a haptic simulation environment. The analysis from the haptic simulation experiments motivates subsequent studies in the physical environment of how humans use contact force information to perform a basic constrained task and combine several primitives for a more complex task. We use insights gleaned from the human experiments to develop robot contact primitives to perform basic tasks and networks of contact primitives to encode more complex skills. The robot skills are encoded at the task level, which inherently enables robot skills to be transferable between robot platforms. Additionally, we use the operational space whole body control architecture which enables handling task and whole body motion coordination while in contact under various constraints within a unified and general form. The contact primitives are developed for tasks where the robot has already firmly grasped an object and uses contact sensing, not relying on any visual information. This thesis also presents work on developing perception primitives using vision-based algorithms to grasp objects and identify visual features to parameterize motion primitives for manipulating simple constrained objects.

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Khatib Oussama 
Rock Stephen
Schwager Mac
Towards understanding the interaction between learning algorithms and humans

This thesis considers several learning problems where interaction between the end-user and the algorithm play an important role. The thesis is organized as follows. The first chapter provides background material on mechanism design and reinforcement learning, and discusses related work. This sets us up for the next three chapters, which cover our contributions. In the second chapter, we consider recommendation systems. Many recommendation algorithms rely on user data to generate recommendations. However, these recommendations also affect the data obtained from future users. We aim to understand the effects of this dynamic interaction. We propose a simple model where users with heterogeneous preferences arrive over time. Based on this model, we prove that naive estimators, i.e. those which ignore this feedback loop, are not consistent. We show that consistent estimators are efficient in the presence of myopic agents. Our results are validated using simulations. In the third chapter, we consider a platform that wants to learn a personalized policy for each user, but the platform faces the risk of a user abandoning the platform if they are dissatisfied with the actions of the platform. For example, a platform is interested in personalizing the number of newsletters it sends, but faces the risk that the user unsubscribes forever. We propose a general thresholded learning model for scenarios like this, and discuss the structure of optimal policies. We describe salient features of optimal personalization algorithms and how feedback the platform receives impacts the results. Furthermore, we investigate how the platform can efficiently learn the heterogeneity across users by interacting with a population and provide performance guarantees. In the fourth chapter, we propose a new experimentation framework for the setting where there are many hypotheses and observations are costly. In such scenario, it is important to internalize the opportunity cost of assigning a sample to an experiment. We fully characterize the optimal policy and give an algorithm to compute it. Furthermore, we provide a simple heuristic that helps understand the optimal policy. Simulations based on baseball batting average data demonstrate superior performance compared to alternative algorithms. We also discuss more general insights gained from this testing paradigm, such as the paradox of power; high-powered tests can lead to inefficient sampling.

Advisor: Johari Ramesh
Goel Ashish 
Ugander Johan
Towns in Transition: Kern County, CA as a Case Study for Justice Considerations in Decarbonization

The 2016 presidential election revealed the political power of discourse surrounding the collapse of coal towns. In my research, I investigate the future of towns reliant on another geopolitically potent fossil fuel resource: oil. Kern County, California has some of the oldest oilfields in the nation, and typically supplies about 75% of the oil consumed in California. Unstable oil prices have caused county budget crises and plagues of unemployment. At the same time, the statewide policy push toward renewable energy has jumpstarted the solar sector in Kern County. My research takes an ethnographic and economic perspective in order to understand how the two energy industries interact in the community. The goal of the project is to build a better understanding of the cultural effects of these industries, both for academic purposes and concerned citizenry. Through a range of interviews with stakeholders from the oil and solar industries, local government and social impact sector, themes emerged surrounding the normalcy of boom-bust cycles, solar as an economic growth area non-competitive with oil, cultural resentment tied to energy policy, and complicated environmental and equity issues. Some indicators, such as the fairly comparable nature and distribution of work in oil and solar, support the idea that solar can help pave the way for smooth local transitions in a decarbonizing economy. Other considerations, such as complicated property tax schemes, reveal challenges that merit more policy attention as we move toward further decarbonization. Finally, I examine how both these social and economic indicators fulfill the goals of justice in the transition to a low carbon economy. To do so, I examine the Kern County case study under three emerging frameworks: energy justice, just transition, and climate policy equity.

Keywords:  Earth Systems
earth systems
Bill Lane Center
American West
Kern County
renewable energy
oil and gas production
politics
public opinion
environmental justice
environmental policy
Thesis
Advisor: Cain Bruce
Burke Marshall
Tracing the Arctic regions : exploring ice and time in nineteenth-century photographs of Greenland

"Tracing The Arctic Regions: Exploring Ice and Time in Nineteenth-Century Photographs of Greenland" is a study of a single, rare photographic book. Created by the American marine painter, William Bradford, The Arctic Regions was a lavish publication that paired the artist's narrative of an audacious art expedition to Greenland with 141 photographs taken to document the journey. This dissertation treats these images both as traces of real things—the people, animals, and ice that existed on the western coast of Greenland in the summer of 1869—and as expressions of how nineteenth-century Americans understood natural history and their place on its lengthening arc. Case studies of specific photographs show how images of a world that seemed strange and remote helped Americans to understand their home environments and the rights of others living within them. With attention to distant and often-marginalized subjects, "Tracing The Arctic Regions" is a study of how different kinds of looking—close looking, past looking, and environmental looking—can generate new perspectives in art history in an age of changing climate.

Keywords: Art and Art History.
Advisor: Nemerov Alexander 
Marrinan Michael 
Wolf Bryan Jay
Transcribing real-valued sequences with deep neural networks [electronic resource]

Speech recognition and arrhythmia detection from electrocardiograms are examples of problems which can be formulated as transcribing real-valued sequences. These problems have traditionally been solved with frameworks like the Hidden Markov Model. To generalize well, these models rely on carefully hand engineered building blocks. More general, end-to-end neural networks capable of learning from much larger datasets can achieve lower error rates. However, getting these models to work well in practice has other challenges. In this work, we present end-to-end models for transcribing real-valued sequences and discuss several applications of these models. The first is detecting abnormal heart activity in electrocardiograms. The second is large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Finally, we investigate the tasks of keyword spotting and voice activity detection. In all cases we show how to scale high capacity models to unprecedentedly large datasets. With these techniques we can achieve performance comparable to that of human experts for both arrhythmia detection and speech recognition and state-of-the-art error rates in speech recognition for multiple languages.

Advisor: Jurafsky Dan
Ng Andrew Y.
Kundaje Anshul
Zou James advisor. Thesis advisor
Transcriptional control of differentiation in cerebellar granule neurons and medulloblastoma

Cerebellar granule neurons (GN), the most numerous neurons in the brain (~5 x 1010 in humans) mediate critical steps in motor control and motor learning. They arise from symmetric division of progenitors known as granule neuron precursor cells (GNPs). GNP terminal differentiation involves cell cycle exit, extension of processes, nuclear migration, and synapse formation with mossy fibers and Purkinje cells. Much remains to be learned about how gene regulation underlies neurogenesis steps like migration or neurite extension during GNP differentiation. Increasing, our understanding of GNP differentiation could have important therapeutic importance for children with brain tumors. Medulloblastoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in children and the SHH subtype of medulloblastoma arises from the cerebellar GN lineage. If we can identify what regulates differentiation in GNPs these processes could be targeted to induce differentiation of medulloblastoma cell. We have combined gene transcription data over the course of GN differentiation with measures of chromatin features such as histone marks, DNA methylation and DNA accessibility in proliferating GNPs. Of the genes that increase as GNPs terminally differentiate, more than half the genes are marked by H3K27me3 near their promoters, implying repression by the protein complex PRC2. Genetic inactivation of Ezh2, which encodes the enzyme that catalyzes formation of H3K27me3, resulted in GNPs leaving the external granule cell layer prematurely. while not affecting cell cycle exit. Ezh2 the catalytic methyltransferase of the repressive PRC2 complex shows the most substantial transcriptional decrease of the genes that are known to directly or indirectly effect H3K27me3. A normal role of Ezh2 is therefore to restrain GNP radial migration. Shh medulloblastoma tumors arise from cells within the GN lineage. Mice, which are heterozygous for Ptch1 will develop spontaneous medulloblastoma. In medulloblastoma cells from Ptch1+/- mice, ¾ of the H3K27me3 marked GN differentiation genes are persistently marked with H3K27me3 and the majority did not show an increase in transcription in MB compared to the dividing GNPs. In human SHH subtype medulloblastoma, the EZH2 transcript varies, with low EZH2 transcript being associated with higher expression of the differentiation genes and better survival. PRC2 mediated repression of differentiation genes seen in GNPs is ongoing in medulloblastoma. As with GNPs, Ezh2 inhibition in actively dividing Ptch1+/-MB cells did not induce differentiation. Combining a cell cycle inhibitor with the Ezh2 inhibitor, did allow differentiation of the tumor cells as measured by morphology and gene expression markers. Thus Ezh2 delays transcription of a set of differentiation genes in GNPs which, when depressed in MB cause differentiation preventing re-entry into cell cycle.

Keywords: Developmental Biology.
Advisor: Fuller Margaret T.
Crabtree Gerald R. 
Meyer Tobias 
Wysocka Joanna
A transcriptional regulatory circuit regulates fat cell differentiation

Glucocorticoid and other adipogenic hormones are secreted in mammals in circadian oscillations. Loss of this circadian oscillation pattern correlates with obesity in humans, raising the intriguing question of how hormone secretion dynamics affect adipocyte differentiation. Using live, single-cell imaging of the key adipogenic transcription factors CEBPB and PPARG, endogenously tagged with fluorescent proteins, we show that pulsatile circadian hormone stimuli are rejected by the adipocyte differentiation control system. In striking contrast, equally strong persistent signals trigger maximal differentiation. We identify the mechanism of how hormone oscillations are filtered as a combination of slow and fast positive feedback centered on PPARG. Furthermore, we confirm in mice that flattening of daily glucocorticoid oscillations significantly increases the mass of subcutaneous and visceral fat pads. Together, our study provides a molecular mechanism for why stress, Cushing's disease, and other conditions for which glucocorticoid secretion loses its pulsatility may lead to obesity.

Keywords: Chemical and Systems Biology.
Advisor: Teruel Mary
Chen James
Qi Lei (Professor of Bioengineering)
Transferable kinetic Monte Carlo models with thousands of reactions learned from molecular dynamics simulation of hydrocarbon chemistry

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of complex chemistry typically involves thousands of atoms propagating over millions of time steps, generating a wealth of data. Traditionally this data is used to calculate some aggregate properties of the system and then discarded, but we propose that this data can be reused to study related chemical systems. Using approximate chemical kinetic models and methods from statistical learning, we study hydrocarbon chemistries under extreme thermodynamic conditions. We discover that a single MD simulation can contain sufficient information about reactions and rates to predict the dynamics of related yet different chemical systems using kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulation. Our learned KMC models identify thousands of reactions and run orders of magnitude faster than MD. The transferability of these models suggests that we can viably reuse data from existing MD simulations to accelerate future simulation studies and reduce the number of new MD simulations required.

Keywords:  Department of Materials Science and Engineering
molecular dynamics
kinetic Monte Carlo
statistical learning
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Reed Evan J.
Brock Ryan E.
Translation and its Potentials—A Discussion of World Literature through Han Kang’s "The Vegetarian" and its Translation

In May 2016, Han Kang's novel "The Vegetarian" was the first translation ever to win the Man Booker International Prize, which also for the first time split the prestigious cash award between writer and translator. Following the announcement of the win, both Han Kang and the novel's translator Deborah Smith were drawn to the center of the media spotlight. The celebration within Korea, however, did not continue for long when Korean readers and critics began to accuse the novel of mistranslation. Who won the prize? Was it Han's original craft or Smith's translation? The debate over the novel's translation turned Han's novel and its prize-winning episode into a matter of controversy over literature and national identity. It also brings back to the discussion table, larger questions around the topic of world literature. What is the relationship between national and world literature? What kind of national literature can become successful world literature? What is the role of translation in world literature?
This thesis provides a comprehensive view of the origins of world literature and explains the controversies around how to read world literature today. Through the reading of "The Vegetarian" in Korean, English, and Chinese, I offer my own understanding of world literature as not a definable category but a methodology that readers can apply to work of literature written in a foreign language.

Keywords:  Stanford Global Studies
Stanford Global Studies
East Asian Studies
World Literature
National Literature
Translation
Thesis
Advisor: Zur Dafna
Transmission electron microscopy investigation of fuel cells related materials

This dissertation will mainly deal with the TEM characterization on the fuel cell using a variety of different TEM techniques. The most of sample was prepared by site-specific lift-out technique using a focused ion beam (FIB). Subsequent TEM studies on these energy-related materials lead to have deep understanding of the relationship between the atomic scale structures with the other chemical/electronic properties. To provide a scientific establishment for break-out high-efficiency, cost-effective energy technologies, research activities have been focused on manipulation of materials at the nanometer scale to increase efficiency of energy conversion devices and exploitation of fundamental advances in charge transport, light absorption, and reaction thermodynamics and kinetics to improve performance and efficiency in energy conversion devices like fuel cell. To achieve these goals, we need to understand how nano-structuring modifies and governs the properties of materials, and how to control dimensionality and confinement to learn insights on model energy conversion materials, structures and devices. Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) with additional advanced functions enables us to approach profound understanding of the fundamental relationship between chemical / electronic properties of materials and crystal structure, composition, size, shape of them through the characterization at atomic or nano/micro scale.

Keywords: Materials Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Sinclair Robert (Materials scientist) 
Prinz F. B. 
Salleo Alberto
Troubled waters : a political ecology of water scarcity in rural Colombia

Colombia has had a long, sordid history of conflicts over natural resource management, particularly among its Afro and indigenous populations in rural areas. Privatization of and development along major water sources continue to threaten communities' equitable access. Moreover, climate change is rapidly altering landscapes and water availability, putting more stress on both social and natural systems, further complicating how communities respond to these changes. While many studies focus on black communities in the Pacific region and Indigenous groups throughout other areas of Colombia, there is little attention given to black groups in the Caribbean, especially as it relates to social mobilization. This doctoral research addresses this gap by examining the ways in which Afro-indigenous communities, in two rural Caribbean villages of Colombia, mobilize amid several water development projects. When confronted with extreme water scarcity during a drought, the national government proposed projects to increase water services, but instead they became key sites of cultural and political contention. Throughout each chapter, I focus on the dynamics between community members, government officials, and private companies at two water sites—a marsh and municipal water plant. The goal is to identify how different members within these communities respond to environmental and development challenges through ethnocultural (identity) projects. This work contributes to broader understandings of identity, social movements, and environmental politics, which are particularly critical during times of rapid climate change. This study yields three primary findings. The first reveals that the water infrastructure projects were creating divisions within communities across different groups and further contributing to water inequity. This was largely a result of continued practices based on racially exclusive legislation and inefficient land tenure policies. The second finding identifies three social mobilization strategies employed by communities to resist their exclusion: 1) community-level engagements, 2) multi-level engagements, and 3) impromptu gatherings or protests. The final finding suggests that members who engage in community-level mobilizing, specifically around ethnocultural (Afro-indigenous) traditions were able to make a case for their inclusion in future development projects.

Keywords: Anthropology.
Advisor: Durham William
Thiranagama Sharika 
Gaffikin Lynne
Luby Stephen
Twenty Months of Terror: Examining the Proliferation of Islamic-Related Terrorism in France during 2015 and 2016

Between December 1996 and January 2015, France experienced only one Islamic-related terrorist attack. Then, starting in 2015, France experienced an acceleration of terrorism that shocked the country and the wider European community. Between the attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015 and the assassination of Jacques Hamel, a Catholic priest in Normandy on July 26, 2016, 239 people of various nationalities and religious backgrounds were killed by Islamic terrorists on French soil. Existing literature has attempted to explain the phenomenon by analyzing changing French foreign policy and shifting domestic conditions. While helpful for shedding light on the driving forces behind the attacks, existing texts fail to explain the dramatic increase in the number and scope of the attacks during this time period. This thesis evaluates the acceleration from two opposing angles: the breakdown of counterterrorism operations and the evolution and adaptation of terrorist strategies and targets. French counterterrorism agencies had historically been extremely capable of adapting to new threats, but the dramatic change in the nature of the threat and inability to recognize precursor attacks lead to distinct challenges for law enforcement. On the other side, terrorists themselves perfected low sophistication strategies, such as stabbings and vehicle rammings, to perpetuate fear and persuade others of the ease of carrying out attacks within French borders. Ancillary factors, such as the high correlation between criminalization and terrorism, the deteriorating conditions in the banlieues, and the high numbers of foreign fighters further contributed to the dramatic acceleration.

Keywords:  Center for International Security and Cooperation
France
terrorism
Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC
Thesis
Advisor: Blacker Coit
Chamorel Patrick