VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Achieving Consistent Latencies in Datacenter Networks

In this thesis, we begin by analyzing the increasing trend of running large-scale services on Warehouse Scale Computers to provide user functionality. We see that user demands for interactivity place stringent requirements on these services, compelling them to consistently meet tight deadlines. To provide users a rich experience while meeting these deadlines, services typically parallelize requests, dividing tasks among many servers to speed-up computation. Consequently, services depend on the network to provide consistent, low-latency communication so that servers can coordinate and deliver their results in a timely manner./nWe explain why current networks are poorly suited for delivering consistent, low-latency performance. These networks typically run the TCP/IP stack, which explicitly trades consistent performance for generality and interoperability. This decision was appropriate for the Internet, which was designed to interconnect heterogeneous networks. However, given the new stringent requirements that these networks must support, we hypothesize that they can no longer accept this design decision. Instead, they must employ a series of tightly-integrated layers to deliver the consistent latencies services depend on./nTo understand the benefits of foregoing generality, we design and implement two approaches DeTail and FastLane. DeTail is a network stack that employs a series of tightly integrated layers. Each layer in the DeTail stack depends on, and overcomes the limitations of, others, reducing the latency spikes that often plague networks. FastLane employs an alternate approach, where network components directly communicate with transports, helping them respond more agilely to events that drive up latencies./nTo evaluate these approaches, we employ both simulation and implementation platforms. Based on these platforms, we see that both DeTail and FastLane are able to dramatically reduce latencies by foregoing generality and having the layers of the network stack directly depend on the functionality of others. We argue that this approach is a fruitful one and will become increasingly important as network requirements become increasingly stringent.

Advisor: Katz, Randy
Fool's Gold, Density Functional Theory, and the Future of Photovoltaics: Experimental and Computational Approaches to Reducing the Price of Solar

At the outset of this research, there was significant doubt as to whether incumbent solar photovoltaic semiconductors, particularly silicon, would be sufficiently available, efficient, and affordable to meet the growing demand for solar cells. Chapter 1 is an introduction that frames some of the challenges with developing new semiconductor materials. In short, I encourage any researcher pursuing new materials to take a more holistic view of many material properties which contribute to photovoltaic performance rather than over-focusing on a single property to the exclusion of others./nThis dissertation explores two distinct routes, one experimental and one computational, to achieving future photovoltaics with the potential for either higher efficiency or lower cost. Chapter 2 presents one of the first colloidal nanocrystal syntheses of a novel, earth-abundant semiconductor, FeS2, better known as "fool's gold" or "iron pyrite". This particular synthesis is controlled by an aliphatic sulfonate ligand, a new ligand in the field of nanocrystal synthesis. In contrast, Chapter 3 takes a theoretical approach by using combinatorial density functional theory calculations to identify which dopants would be most likely to generate favorable electronic energy levels in zinc sulfide. The goal of the computation is to identify the dopant-matrix most likely to form the absorber layer for an intermediate band solar cell./nLastly, Chapter 4 is an outlook that compiles a variety of categorical approaches, as well as specific techniques, for improving device efficiency and/or lowering costs. Since this field is sure to experience both incremental and step-change progress, keeping new approaches in mind is essential to planning future research activities.

Advisor: Alivisatos, Paul
Greif, Ralph
Construction of the unitary free fermion Segal conformal field theory

This thesis is primarily concerned with the construction and analysis of free fermion Segal CFTs in arbitrary genus, with emphasis placed on analytic aspects of the construction. In particular, our Segal CFTs take values in the "category" of Hilbert spaces and trace class maps. The main results are:/n* A detailed construction of the free fermion Segal CFT, in arbitrary genus, using Hilbert spaces and trace class operators (Chapter 4),/n* An explicit identification of the operators assigned to three-punctured spheres with the free fermion vertex operator algebra (Chapter 5.1),/n* Preliminary construction of (quotients of) tensor products of $SU(k)_\ell$ WZW vertex modules via descent from fermions. (Chapter 5.2)./nAs a technical tool, we will develop a Riemann surface generalization of the Cauchy transform for planar domains (Appendix A).

Advisor: Jones, Vaughan F. R.
Enforcing Conditionality: Human Rights and Preferential Trade Agreements

Whether human rights can be promoted and promulgated with persuasion or coercion has been much debated in the literature. But coercive measures, such as economic sanctions, for human rights purposes are often viewed with skepticism because of their inconsistent use and application. Against this backdrop, some economically dominant states have been increasingly attaching social clauses to trade agreements. These clauses stipulate standards that must be upheld if the beneficiary state is to continue to receive preferential market access./nIn this dissertation I examine and quantitatively evaluate the operation of so-called "hard" law enforcement mechanisms. I ask whether the observed pattern of enforcement is consistent with a concern for human rights violations or do other factors, such as economic or strategic relationships, offer a better explanation. In particular, I focus on the operation of the US Generalized System of Preferences because it is one of the longest running trade agreements with a clearly articulated formal annual review and suspension process should a beneficiary state violate standards. Moreover, the set of eligible beneficiary countries is geographically broad./nI collect information from original source documents produced by the US Trade Representative in order to compile a unique dataset detailing enforcement proceedings over the last twenty-five years. This extensive dataset provides numerous cases of enforcement (and non-enforcement) from which I draw inferences about the factors influencing the US decision to punish violating states and thereby assess the institutional credibility of the GSP./nThe extant literature on the operation of the US GSP has been qualitative in nature. This dissertation contributes by offering the first quantitative cross-country empirical assessment. I offer formal inferences, as opposed to anecdotal evidence, and in doing so I uncover new insights about the review and enforcement process. While I find that, for the most part, economic and strategic factors are an important part of the explanation for the enforcement pattern, they are not the only determining factors. The level of violations does play a role, albeit a small role at a key juncture in the review process --- a juncture that is overlooked and obscured by previous studies. In addition, I find domestic politics also plays a role, in particular, the composition of Congress.

Advisor: Vogel, David
The Politics of Disaster in a Colony of Citizens: Compatriotism, Citizenship, and Catastrophe in French Martinique (1870 - 1902)

As politicians of France's Third Republic vied to build a democratic consensus and distance themselves from France's recent autocratic past, they projected a fantasy of assimilation onto Martinique--one of France's oldest colonies where the predominately non-white population had received full citizenship and universal manhood suffrage with the ratification of the Constitution of 1875. However, at the close of the nineteenth century, a series of disasters struck the French island of Martinique that threatened the republican fantasy of seamless assimilation: (1) the 1890 fire that destroyed the island's capital of Fort-de-France; (2) the 1891 Atlantic hurricane that devastated the island's economy and prompted a reevaluation of the place of the colony within the French nation; (3) the first general strike in 1900 wherein civil unrest in the colonies caused a political disaster in the metropole; and (4) the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée that killed over 30,000 people nearly instantaneously and cemented a postcolonial relationship characterized by dependence. Throughout the Third Republic, the Martiniquais sugar economy was in rapid decline, and as capital was injected into the island in the form of disaster relief, the "old colony" that had once been a valuable asset was fast becoming a financial drain on the French economy. In their interactions with French economic and political imperatives, environmental disasters brought to the fore existing racial and social tensions and held to the fire France's ideological convictions of assimilation and citizenship./nThe present work intervenes in the current historiography of France by bringing France's old colonies into the story of late-nineteenth-century nation-building and by underscoring the role played by the environment in race-making, identity formation, and class-based politics. Scholars of the French West Indies have extensively examined the importance of assimilation in Antillean politics and culture, clearly elucidating the significance of the short-lived emancipation of 1794; the transient citizenship gained in 1848 and suspended in 1851; and finally the full citizenship restored in 1871 and codified in the Third Republic's Constitution of 1875. This work does not seek to retrace their steps, but to explore how disastrous events in the French West Indies shaped the colonial relationship and interacted with broader developments in the metropole itself. During the age of new empire, the "old colony" of Martinique redefined what it meant to be a French citizen by precipitating a discussion over economic rights and social welfare.

Advisor: Stovall, Tyler
Spatial Triage: Data, Methods, and Opportunities to Advance Health Equity

This dissertation examines whether spatial measures of health determinants and health outcomes are being used appropriately and effectively to improve the health of marginalized populations in the United States. I concentrate on three spatial measures that have received significant policy and regulatory attention in California and nationally: access to healthful foods, climate change, and housing quality. I find that measures of these health determinants have both significant limitations and unrealized potential for addressing health disparities and promoting health equity./nI define spatial triage as a process of using spatial data to screen or select place-based communities for targeted investments, policy action, and/or regulatory attention. Chapter 1 describes the historical context of spatial triage and how it relates to ongoing health equity research and policy. In Chapter 2, I evaluate spatial measures of community nutrition environments by comparing data from in-person store surveys against data from a commercial database. I find that stores in neighborhoods with higher population density or higher percentage of people of color have lower availability of healthful foods and that inaccuracies in commercial databases may produce biased measures of healthful food availability./nChapter 3 focuses on spatial measures of climate change vulnerability. I find that currently used spatial measures of "disadvantaged communities" ignore many important factors, such as community assets, region-specific risks, and occupation-based hazards that contribute to place-based vulnerability. I draw from examples of successful actions by community-based environmental justice organizations and reframe "disadvantaged" communities as sites of solutions where innovative programs are being used to simultaneously address climate mitigation, adaptation, and equity goals./nIn Chapter 4, I combine electronic health records, public housing locations, and census data to evaluate patterns of healthcare utilization and health outcomes for low-income children in San Francisco. I find that children who live in redeveloped public housing are less likely to have more than one acute care hospital visit within a year than children who live in older, traditional public housing. These results demonstrate how integrating patient-level data across hospitals and with data from other sectors can identify new types of place-based health disparities. Chapter 5 details recommendations for analytic, participatory, and cross-sector approaches to guide the development and implementation of more effective health equity research and policy.

Advisor: Morello-Frosch, Rachel
Return of the Indian: Bone Games, Transcription, and Other Gestures of Indigeneity

Native Americans are currently in what is being called a `renaissance.' A term that in its application to Native Americans was originally understood to have been a matter of literary production, a re-birth on the level of imagination, its focus has shifted recently to the (re)production of peoples themselves through various projects of cultural and biopolitical revitalization. Much of the material basis for this (second) re-birth lies in material culture, more particularly, the collections in museums, echoing the use of stories and rites from the archives in Native American literatures. Rebeginning from and with the ruins: What are these materials collected during the heyday of colonial violence, understood by ethnographers and anthropologists at the time to be `salvage' of the remainders of peoples on the verge of disappearance? In the somewhat rationally organized, but often baroquely cluttered, immensity of fragments, there is produced an odd relation to the post-apocalypse where the collections function as contested political sites of open and incomplete identity formation. Because of the difficulty of materialization in its relation to the scripted imagination, this space of (re)production is both gestural and transcriptive, made emblematic by the relation between the collection and the archive./nReturn of the Indian explores the possible uses and misuses of these sensitive materials in their reappropriation by tribes for various revitalization projects, and tries to understand the current situation of Native American identity within such a politics and art of recovery. Drawing on perspectives from philosophy; postcolonial theory and indigeneity; literary theory; art practice; and feminist, gender and sexuality studies, this dissertation seeks a sensitivity to the materials that respects opacity and the role of the interval in the delicate practice of making Indians. Located between what Michael Taussig has called the "rituals" of University based knowledge-production and the politico-tribal praxis of reproduction of indigenous subjects using the University's materials and methodologies, it follows the path and praxis of an indigenous call for return.

Advisor: Minh-ha, Trinh T.
Hebrew Reminiscences: Global Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in the Rise of Hermeneutic Thinking

Hebrew Reminiscences: Global Religion, Politics and Aesthetics in the Rise of Hermeneutic Thinking examines emerging approaches to the Old Testament in the late eighteenth century as constitutive to the period's egalitarian notions of textual interpretation and aesthetic sensibility. I argue that the universalization of the Hebrew Bible during this period was both instrumental and emblematic for the Enlightenment notion of a global community of interpreters. The dissertation evinces a parallel between the community of interpreters, established with the presumption that "hermeneutic thinking" is a universal human capacity, and the community of citizens in the modern nation state. Showing how interpretation was uprooted from its origins in specific religious cultures, the dissertation thus underscores the tensions pertaining to the symbolic communal form of the nation state in view of the separatist history of religious communities./nThe first and second chapters deal respectively with Johann Gottfried Herder's historiography and aesthetics, which he develops in his writings on the Old Testament. These chapters demonstrate that the consideration of biblical texts as a global asset holds a reciprocal connection to the emerging notion of "humankind." The third chapter examines Moses Mendelssohn's lobbying for emancipatory politics, and proposes that the interreligious circulation of the Old Testament shows secular constructs to be porous to competing religious values. The fourth chapter describes how Schleiermacher's psychological hermeneutics built on the replacement of the Old Testament with the New Testament as the model object for interpretation, and traces how literary realism evokes Jewish ritual to repond to the theological backdrop for this paradigm shift in hermeneutics. Considering the incessant identification of the Old Testament with Jews in twentieth-century German poetics and thought, I conclude that the persistence of the Bible's standing as an unchanging, material object of worship has posed a continual challenge to models of modern interpretation that highlight restoration--a seminal aspect of Protestant biblical interpretation in Enlightenment theology--as the hegemonic perspective on reading.

Advisor: Kudszus, Winfried
System Design of Cooperative Wireless Networks

With the prediction that the number of wireless devices will reach tens of billions by 2020, wireless networks that exist today will have to be reengineered to support the increase in the number of users and the required capacity. Cooperation among terminals is envisioned as an enabling technique that can benefit from the increased number of connected devices and boost the network capacity beyond what is possible with today's network architectures, which rely on direct source-destination transmissions. While most of the work in this area focuses on designing relaying schemes that can achieve the promised capacity increase, little has been done in terms of implementing practical cooperative systems. To implement cooperation among terminals, a number of practical challenges need to be addressed across several layers of the communication system. This work focuses on the design aspects of physical and MAC communication layers, by suggesting low-complexity signal processing algorithms for multi- device cooperation and designing digital baseband hardware that showcases cooperation between two wireless devices./nWe use the quantize-map-and-forward (QMF) relaying scheme, which has been shown to have good theoretical performance with multiple relays. System design of a cooperative communication link with half-duplex QMF relays is presented in three steps. First, we perform a theoretical analysis of the achievable rate and propose a local relay scheduling algorithm that performs close to the optimal relay scheduling algorithm. This local scheduling algorithm, as well as the system design approach in general, is based on the premise that relay terminals can be oblivious to other relays in the network. We show that spectral efficiency scaling with the number of relays achieved with this approach is close to optimal for both slow and fast- fading channel environments. The performance of a physical layer system design procedure for a QMF link is demonstrated by an example in which the spectral efficiency of a direct link is doubled by cooperating with three relays close to the source, as predicted by the theoretical analysis. Finally, we design the main baseband blocks for the three cooperating terminals in hardware and implement them on FPGAs. We show that the complexity of the cooperative receiver's baseband increases by 40% compared to a direct-link receiver.

Advisor: Nikolic, Borivoje
Measurement of the B-mode power spectrum with POLARBEAR

We present the \pb experiment and its measurement of the B-mode power spectrum. \pb is a millimeter wave telescope that is measuring the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization, using large format arrays of photon noise limited Transition-Edge Sensor (TES) bolometers. The instrument observes from the Atacama Desert at 5.2km in elevation with a 2.5m primary aperture telescope. This telescope has sufficient angular resolution (3.5' FWHM) to resolve the gravitational lensing features of the CMB, a new channel for obtaining information on fundamental physics such as the sum of the mass of neutrinos./nThis dissertation describes the design, integration and results of the first season of \pb observations. The receiver observed for 1 year with a noise-equivalent temperature (NET) of $22.8\mu K \sqrt{s}$ and mapped a 30 square degree area of the CMB, obtaining evidence for gravitational lensing in the BB power spectrum at a significance of $2\sigma$.

Advisor: Lee, Adrian T
The Shadow: An Unruly Modern Specter

This study makes a contribution to the question of what it means to engage with literary and filmic texts in times of a transnational, environmental crisis. To this end, it takes up texts as complex, poetic encounters with diverse ecologies. Specifically, this study investigates the ecological complexity of the figure of the shadow as it emerges in filmic and literary texts. A prominent figure in the catalogue of uncanny doubles, the shadow is most commonly interpreted as a representation of interiority--the soul. This project offers a different perspective: the shadow as a figure that explores the limits of the body and its profound enmeshments with the material, nonhuman world. Rather than focusing on the shadow as a figure of immateriality, lack, or absence, I pursue it as an interface between the human body and its environment. In works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, F. W. Murnau, Walter Benjamin, and Thomas Mann, the shadow is overfull and lively. It contests the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman and challenges notions of human isolation and apartness from her environment./nThis project benefits from the recent material and ecocritical turns in literary theories. Ecocriticisms and new feminist materialisms that build the theoretical scaffolding of this project repudiate the notion that matter is passive and explore the complexity of the interactions between humans and nonhumans. Furthermore, I rely on queer ecologies as well, which challenge binaries like human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, man/woman, nature/culture. Explored against this backdrop, the shadow emerges as a figure with the potential to reconfigure the sensible and to disclose the present life-worlds as always in flux. It situates human bodies in their environment and broadcasts their profound enmeshment with the material, nonhuman world. This study foregrounds the shadow's potential to upset, or rather queer, the essentialized elements and limits of human and nonhuman bodies./nIn this project, I also investigate how advances in technologies of seeing (x-ray, cinema, and psychoanalysis), and the shadow's involvement in these technologies register in literary, philosophical, or filmic works. I furthermore ask how the shadow, reconfigured through said technologies at the close of the nineteenth century, brings about the disruption of the distinction between inside/outside, reframes the situatedness of the human, and functions as an interface between the human and the nonhuman in selected texts.

Advisor: Kudszus, Winfried