VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Raising the Dead and Saving Them: Transformations in Funerary Manuals of the Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra

The Sarvadurgatipariśodhana Tantra (SDP), or Purification of All Negative Rebirths, is a Buddhist yoga tantra that has long been associated with funerary practice in multiple Buddhist cultures. However, when it comes to ritual practice, the tantra itself, as with most canonical tantras, does not give practical guidance. Rather, this task falls to the genres of local ritual manuals and handbooks that have grown up around the text and evolved over the centuries. This dissertation examines several such manuals, drawn from two separate traditions where the SDP has been important: Tibetan texts from Dunhuang, and bilingual Newari-Sanskrit texts from the Kathmandu Valley. Since they originate from very different historical contexts, the aim is not to compare them with one another, but rather to consider the diverse range of ritual traditions that have developed with the SDP as their basis. In doing so, this dissertation shows that, rather than drawing on funerary elements alone, Buddhist tantric funerary rites in these traditions make use of the same basic tantric technology central to yoga tantra in general, including initiation and sādhana techniques. So too, it argues that the adaptability of the text relates to its capacity to combine with other types of Buddhist tantric ritual technology, a quality that may also contribute to its widespread popularity and remarkable longevity./nPart One focuses on a Tibetan initiation manual from Dunhuang that may be used for the living or dead. It proposes a re-ordering of the manuscript and a reading of the text as a coherent whole centering on the SDP maṇḍala and incorporating two others. Notable, in particular, is the relative lack of customization in the text and the absence of any particular focus on the deceased's consciousness. Part Two examines Newari-Sanskrit manuals of the 19th century, in particular, ones that combine the SDP tradition with the practice of utkrānti, an advanced technique that involves recalling the deceased's consciousness to their body, performing initiations, and finally directing the consciousness to depart again via the crown of the head, in order to ensure a good rebirth. Finally, Part Two provides new material for the study of Newar Buddhism, an area that has received comparatively little attention. Overall, this study contributes to the understanding of the SDP tradition and brings into conversation differing Buddhist tantric funerary practices on its basis. It also takes a closer look at the genre of ritual manuals, and considers the relationship between localization, levels of detail, and pragmatic needs of ritualists.

Advisor: Dalton, Jacob P
von Rospatt, Alexander
Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition

Never, in oil’s one and a half century of commercial extraction has the global oil industry’s future been so fraught. The renewable energy transition, an ongoing investment and volatility crisis, the decline in the quality of reserves and current production, renewed fears of geopolitical conflict, and the inherently anarchic character of capitalist oil production have all converged to cast a shadow over the future of oil, and energy as a whole. This dissertation is a combination of four distinct essays, each of which contributes to unraveling the current juncture. My argument, put simply, is that under this convergence, the capitalist renewable energy transition will be plagued by the greatest period of dysfunction the oil industry has ever seen, impacting billions of people around the world in their access to energy during this time. This, what I call, ‘Carbon Purgatory,’ deserves study as this tumultuous period of transition begins.

Advisor: Watts, Michael J
Educational (Im)possibilities: Newcomer Students and Benevolent Imperialism

This dissertation examines the entanglements between the promise of a good American life, the liberal mission of education, and benevolent forms of empire as experienced in a California public high school and its newcomer program (an intervention designed for helping (im)migrant students develop basic English language skills while also providing them with socioemotional support). Specifically Educational (Im)possibilities shows how newcomer programs and the schooling of (im)migrant and refugee students are inextricably entangled within a matrix of benevolent imperialism, liberal education, and the gift of freedom. Set against a professed egalitarian ethos America is upheld—domestically and abroad—as a beacon of freedom and democracy where anyone can achieve the American dream. Furthermore, professing to be a benevolent nation, the United States as an empire of freedom, has militarily intervened in other nations’ domestic affairs under the guise of imparting freedom and democracy (Espiritu, 2006; Nguyen, 2012). Thus, reckoning with the continuity of U.S. empire and its enduring gift of freedom, this ethnographic project asks what are the sources of sustenance for the empire of freedom within the school site?/nInformed by migration, critical refugee studies, and a critical pedagogical perspective Educational (Im)possibilities features ethnographic data (classroom participant observation and interviews) collected over 12 months at the school site. Findings show that educators’ practices of separation, care, and sanctuary are unwittingly complicit in the sustenance of the empire of freedom. In the case of newcomer students these benevolent inflected practices become entangled in the reproduction of, among others, longstanding processes of racialization and differentiation. In all, this dissertation urges educators and researchers to critically reflect on our own unwitting complicity with benevolent imperialism. To support us in this work it contributes a framework to chart paths of (un)learning required in the deep study and personal reflection on the history of the U.S. in relation to U.S. empire, (im)migration, and liberal education.

Advisor: Baquedano-López, Patricia
Strategies Toward Saturated Cyclic Amine Diversification

Strategies aimed at the diversification of saturated cyclic amines are appealing due to theprevalence of such aza-cyclic scaffolds within biologically active small molecules. The following dissertation discusses the development of complementary strategies related to this endeavor, specifically those involving peripheral functionalization, topological diversification, and skeletal editing./nChapter 1 begins with a brief introduction into heterocycle editing. In this chapter, a classificationscheme with related nomenclature is provided. From here, each molecular editing subclass is further contextualized by discussing the motivations for these respective areas of investigation. An overview of the state-of-the-art techniques utilized for these transformations is also highlighted./nChapter 2 then describes our initial efforts toward the peripheral functionalization of cyclic aminesusing inherently strained ring systems. Under visible light irradiation, we achieve a Norrish–Yang cyclization, generating N-fused bicyclo a-hydroxy-b-lactams. The resulting strain embedded in these heterocycles is further exploited to achieve mild cross-couplings, arriving at peripherally functionalized saturated aza-cycles. Notably, this work represents the first palladium catalyzed C– C cleavage/functionalization of a-hydroxy-b-lactams./nChapter 3 discusses our work toward the topological diversification of amine frameworks. Here,we present a general method for bridged bicyclic amine formation based on Hofmann–Loffler– Freytag reactivity. In our C–H bond amination strategy, we identified the distinct roles of light and heat activation, providing evidence that light promotes N–I bond homolysis and HAT, whereas heat promotes SN2 ring closure. The expansion of this strategy to fused and spirocyclic bicyclic amines is also reported./nLastly, Chapter 4 details our most recent work related to the skeletal editing of heterocycles.Through the strategic application of a Norrish type II reaction, we established a versatile method for the ring contraction of piperidines as well as other saturated heterocycles. Initial computational insight also led to development of an asymmetric contraction variant using chiral phosphoric acids.

Advisor: Sarpong, Richmond
A Diachronic Application of Frame Semantics to Meaning Change in Prepositions: The Case of German mit

The word class preposition contains many highly polysemous members whose meanings may often seem completely unrelated. This project in a close examination of the polysemy network of the German preposition mit in each of the four (documented) major time periods of the language, namely Old High German, Middle High German, Early New High German, and New High German (Penzl 1995). Each of the distinct senses of the preposition is analyzed using Charles Fillmore’s frame semantic approach (Fillmore 1982, Fillmore & Baker 2009, among others) and a visual representation of the polysemy network in each of the time periods is drawn up to show precisely how the senses are related to one another.By using frame semantics as a methodological basis for this undertaking, this work is able to illustrate the motivation behind the changes in the polysemy network diachronically rather than merely appealing to traditional textbook mechanisms of semantic change, such as amelioration, pejoration, synecdoche, etc. (Crowley & Bowern 2010). While these mechanisms are indeed still at work, they do not account for the motivation behind the semantic change. This project aims to offer the field of historical lexical semantics a framework to follow in order to analyze the polysemy network of a word both synchronically and diachronically and to show the motivation behind the semantic changes of that word. This study is organized as follows: In chapter 2, I review traditional, non-cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and illustrate the reasons for which these approaches are ill-suited for the undertaking in this dissertation. Chapter 3 is a discussion of cognitive approaches to lexical semantics and shows the reasons for which I have chosen frame semantics as the theoretical basis for this study. Chapter 4 details the methodology, including discussion of the applicability of frame semantics to this task as well as an overview of the corpora used and the method of data analysis. In chapter 5, I present the findings of this study, including a discussion of the twenty- five frames found in the data to be evoked by the preposition mit as well as visual representations of the synchronic and diachronic polysemy networks of mit. In this chapter, I also compare my findings to three authoritative works which offer semantic analysis of the preposition to varying degrees. In chapter 6, I make concluding remarks, discuss limitations, and suggest further research.

Advisor: Shannon, Thomas F
Discrimination in Liquid Xenon and Calorimetry in Superfluid Helium for the Direct Detection of Particle Dark Matter

In this dissertation, we present several recent developments in instrumentation for dark matter detectors. The liquid/gas two-phase xenon time projection chamber is well-established as an excellent technology to search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). We present analyses of data from the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) and Particle Identification in Xenon at Yale (PIXeY) experiments, in which we study signal vs. background discrimination as a function of detector parameters. This informs design decisions for current and future xenon detectors. Then, we focus on cutting-edge calorimetric technologies geared towards searches at the MeV/c^2 scale. We present measurements of the superconducting transition of several materials, and we discuss their potential use as transition-edge sensors (TES). Helium as a detection target with TES signal readout is explored, and its sensitivity to dark matter-induced nuclear recoils is calculated.

Advisor: McKinsey, Daniel N
The Agricultural Chemist at the Table: Land Grant Colleges, Experiment Stations, and the Birth of Nutrition Science in the United States, 1887-1930

This dissertation examines the often-overlooked work of scientists investigating nutrition at land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations in the mid to far West, especially in Wisconsin and California, from 1887 to 1930. It challenges the historiography’s dominant narrative that nutrition science was exclusively laboratory-based and quantitatively-focused; that it was primarily a tool of social control; and that it was chiefly the work of scientists and reformers in the urban Northeast. Rather, I argue, chemists working at land grant colleges and experiment stations around the nation forged a holistic tradition of nutrition research that countered the reductionist views of the Northeast’s “pure” and industrial scientists and urban reformers. Chemists working in the agricultural tradition were skeptical of the ability of quantitative methods alone to assess nutritional value. They placed a value on taste, pleasure, and custom in their approach to nutrition and expressed caution over the use of new industrially-processed foods and preservatives. They were concerned not only for the health of consumers, but also about the impact of new industrial foods and food systems on their farming constituents. They worked assiduously for the passage of pure food and drug laws. Nutrition science itself was transformed by their pioneering vitamin experiments. Drawing on the archival papers of chemists investigating nutrition at the agricultural colleges and experiment stations in the Midwest and California, I trace the rise and fall of the agricultural tradition of nutrition science through five significant events in nutrition science in the United States from the 1880s to the 1920s. These events include the first USDA dietary surveys of the 1890s; the debates over pure food laws leading up to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906; precursors to and early vitamin experiments in the 1910s; the work of scientists in the U.S. Food Administration during the First World War; and food fortification research and university-industry partnerships at the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s. I explain how these chemists investigated nutrition questions, framed their understanding of healthful diets, and positioned their role in relation to farmers, consumers, processors, and government in the increasingly industrial food system throughout these events. Shifting the focus from nutrition workers and urban reformers in the Northeast to agricultural chemists in the Midwest and California, my dissertation also positions the development of the science in the changing agricultural landscape and industrializing food system. Finally, I show how this history challenges the linear narratives that have dominated the historiography, how it reveals an alternative possible trajectory for the science, and how it significantly shaped the development of nutrition science and its role in American society.

Advisor: McLennan, Rebecca
Human-Guided Generation of Sketches and Prototypes

Sketching and prototyping are central to creative activities that improve and advance many aspects of human lives. They enable non-experts to express themselves through drawing, or help User Interface (UI) designers explore diverse alternatives through low-fidelity prototyping. Generating these sketches and prototypes, however, typically requires significant expertise that casual users might not possess, and may be effortful and time-consuming even for professional users./nIn this dissertation, I will introduce multiple deep-learning methods and systems that can generate sketches and prototypes. The generation of these artifacts is designed to be guided by annotations in familiar modalities (e.g., generating user interfaces from text descriptions). The presented generation systems and methods include Sketchforme, a system that generates individual sketched scenes from text descriptions; Scones, a system that iteratively generates and refines sketched scenes based on users' multiple text instructions; and Words2ui, a collection of methods that can create UI prototypes from high-level text descriptions. This research creates unique affordances, advances the state-of-the-art of creativity support tools, contributes benchmark metrics, and explores novel interaction paradigms in diverse domains from non-expert sketching to professional UI design. These research contributions can serve as important building blocks towards future multi-modal systems that enable more effective and efficient sketching and prototyping for all.

Advisor: Canny, John
Guarantees for a few structured statistical problems

In recent years, we have seen a tremendous interest in applying statistics and machine learning methods in various areas of science: health, education, drug design, public policy design to name a few. This immense popularity of statistical methods comes with challenging new questions which lie in the boundary of theoretical and methodological aspects of statistics, machine learning and optimization. The aim of this dissertation is to address some of the these challenges that arise in modern reinforcement learning, and in modern data science practice and provide new insights that are helpful to practitioners. The dissertation is divided into four parts. In Part I we discuss principled ways of designing fast algorithms for various reinforcement learning problems. The Part II of the dissertation is devoted to problems that arise due to model misspecification. In Part III we discuss how can we perform inference when the data set is collected in a sequential manner; i.e. the helpful iid structure is not present in the data. Finally, Part IV focuses on deriving fast algorithms for structured non-convex problems.

Advisor: Jordan, Michael I. M.I.J.
Wainwright, Martin J. M.J.W.
Developments in Ultrafast Electron Diffraction for Recording Lattice Dynamics in Quantum and Nanoscale Materials

Ultrafast electron diffraction is a developing technique for recording the evolution of atomic structure during dynamic processes. While many exciting discoveries and important observations have been made so far, the technique still faces instrumentation, modeling, and other challenges that inhibit materials science studies, especially of quantum and nanoscale materials. In this dissertation, I describe several developments of UED technology and modeling capabilities to overcome these challenges as well as show a couple of scientific applications. I begin with a general introduction to UED and its value to materials science. I then describe the scattering theory underlying UED patterns and demonstrate a multislice approach that dramatically improves quantitative retrieval of atomic motions in crystals. After this, I introduce the High Repetition-rate Electron Scattering (HiRES) beamline, a state-of-the-art high-brightness UED setup which enables several advances in UED capabilities. I follow up by detailing the first scientific study using the beamline, where a unique light-induced structural melt-recovery process in a quantum material was recorded for the first time. I then show proof-of-principle demonstrations of nanoscale probing enabled by HiRES, including diffraction from isolated nanomaterials as well as focused nanoprobes for nanodiffraction and nanoimaging. Following this, I describe progress towards plasmon-enhanced nanoemitters and how they can be used to further improve the brightness of UED nanoprobes. Finally, I briefly tie together these varied developments and outline areas for further development and scientific exploration. Altogether, the work detailed here expands the reach of UED for study of quantum and nanoscale materials and lays groundwork for further advances that will enable new, wide-open frontiers in materials science.

Advisor: Minor, Andrew M
Incorporating Intent, Impact, and Context for Beneficial Machine Learning

Advancements in machine learning hold unprecedented potential to help humans understand and shape our world, from deriving data-driven policies with global prediction systems to combating long-standing prejudice in social decision-making. However, in practice, machine learning is not achieving its potential. Algorithmic systems that are theoretically well motivated fail to live up to anticipated performance in the real world, and all too often, they exacerbate inequality rather than relieve it. In order to translate potential into real benefit, machine learning systems need to address the context of the domain they’re applied in to better interface with system intent and system impact./nIn this thesis, we present research on the context-aware design of machine learning systems that interface with individuals, our environment, and our societies. We emphasize the core themes of intent, impact, and context through three interweaving threads: (i) contrasting algorithmic impact with desired intent, (ii) contextualizing learning algorithms through structures in input data, and (iii) advancing machine learning with remotely sensed data as precise applications of intent- and context-aware design in practice. We conclude with overarching lessons learned that carry into constructive opportunities for future research.

Advisor: Recht, Benjamin
Jordan, Michael I
Efficiently Designing Efficient Deep Neural Networks

A number of competing concerns slow adoption of deep learning for computer vision on“edge” devices. Edge devices provide only limited resources for on-device algorithms to employ, constraining power, memory, and storage usage. Examples include mobile phones, autonomous vehicles, and virtual reality headsets, which demand both high accuracy and low latency, two objectives competing for resources./nTo tackle this sisyphean task, modern methods expend gargantuan amounts of computationto design solutions, exceeding thousands of GPU hours or years of GPU compute to design a single neural network. Not to mention, these works maximize just one performance metric – accuracy – under a single set of resource constraints. What if the set of resource constraints changes? If additional performance metrics rise to the forefront, such as explainability or generalization? Modern methods for designing efficient neural networks are handicapped by excessive computation requirements for goals too singularly and narrowly sighted./nThis thesis tackles the bottlenecks of modern methods directly, achieving state-of-the-artperformance by efficiently designing efficient deep neural networks. These improvements don’t only reduce computation or only improve accuracy; instead, our methods improve performance and reduce computational requirements, despite increasing search space size by orders of magnitude. We also demonstrate missed opportunities with performance metrics beyond accuracy, redesigning the task so that accuracy, explainability, and generalization improve jointly, an impossibility by conventional wisdom, which suggests explainability and accuracy participate in a zero-sum game./nThis thesis culminates in a set of models that set new flexibility and performance standards forproduction-ready models: those that are state-of-the-art accurate, explainable, generalizable, and configurable for any set of resource constraints in just CPU minutes.

Advisor: Gonzalez, Joseph E