VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
3D vertical resistive switching memory towards ultrahigh-density non-volatile memory

To meet the exploding information processing and data storage demands, memory technology, as one of the cornerstones in modern computing systems, faces the constant challenge of advancing to the next technology node with a larger capacity and higher density. As difficulties arise in the further scaling of conventional memories, new memories show the potentials to bridge the performance gap between memory and storage, providing new opportunities to innovate computing systems and architectures. Among emerging memories, resistive switching memory (RSM) is a promising solution due to its high device density and reasonably fast write/read operation speed. Resistive random-access memory (RRAM), as an example of RSM, has a simple structure and uses low-temperature fabrication that is compatible with back-end-of-the-line (BEOL) metal wiring of typical CMOS logic technology, thus potentially leading to low cost and on-chip integration with logic for high bandwidth access. Research efforts have been made to explore various material options, device and array structures, and chip architectures. However, to achieve an ultrahigh-density memory, a practical co-design must take into account all the above considerations to arrive at a superior solution. In this dissertation, I present a way to realize ultrahigh-density memory with 3D vertical RRAM (VRRAM). I develop a design guideline for ultrahigh-density 3D VRSM using simulations of 3D memory arrays based on an accurate and computationally efficient model of the memory and parasitic resistance of the memory wired in 3D. I detail the model formulation and validation with physics-based simulations. Combined with simulation results, I discuss design specifications for different physical levels from device to array to chip architecture and provide a comprehensive list of design tasks to achieve an ultrahigh-density 3D VRRAM. To prioritize design tasks among different levels, I focus on the rudimentary design constraints at the device level and extend design requirements to a ready-to-build memory device in the lab. I then experimentally demonstrate an 8-layer 3D Ru/AlOxNy/TiN VRRAM towards an ultrahigh-density memory. This 3D VRRAM satisfies the design requirements for a tera-bit class memory when integrated with a proper selector. I further investigate the downscaling potentials of 3D VRRAM based on experimental data and ongoing scaling techniques and trends in the industry. Incorporating these scaling prospects, I project that 3D VRRAM can achieve a much higher density and capacity with the same number of 3D layers and fewer bits per cell compared to the state-of-the-art 3D NAND. With the structural and process flexibility (e.g., BEOL), 3D VRRAM can expand its high-density applications to be integrated on-chip with CMOS logic for high bandwidth memory access

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Wong Hon-Sum Philip
Saraswat Krishna
Wong S. Simon
A democracy at what cost? The rise of drug cartels in Mexico's democratic transition

Over the last three decades, Mexico has undergone two radical changes. With the dawn of a new millennia, Vicente Fox of the opposition National Action Party (PAN) was elected as the nation’s chief executive. Through his victory, Mexico transitioned from seventy years of single party rule under the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) to a democratic system that persists to this day. At the same time, however, the smuggling of narcotics across the country’s northern border fueled the rise of violent drug cartels that threaten political stability. In this thesis, I seek to examine the forces of these seemingly unrelated events in four different ways. First, I provide a survey of existing literature pertaining to the topic. Second, I develop a game theory framework that explains how drug cartels evolved from small bandits to transnational operations capable of challenging the state. Third, using a multivariable regression, I delve into the effects of Mexico’s democratic transition on the criminal world, advancing a new approach to measure the presence of drug cartels. Finally, I invert the relationship to determine the impact of drug cartels on democracy—namely, the influence of drug cartels on electoral patterns. I find that Mexico’s transition had a significant impact on criminal activity as measured by drugs seized by the state. Furthermore, I show that drug cartels tacitly influence electoral results across all parties. In the end, this thesis shows the growing relationship between drug cartels and the state, suggesting these two are closely interconnected despite of common misconceptions.

Keywords: Mexico
Drug traffic
Democracy
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Thesis
Advisor: Díaz Cayerso Alberto
Magaloni Beatriz
A Markov Model-Based Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Interventions for Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease and Steatohepatitis

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and its more aggressive form, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), are the most prevalent liver diseases in the U.S. and throughout the world, and that prevalence is increasing. The current standard of care for these diseases is weight loss through diet and exercise with counseling support. No medications for NAFLD/NASH have been approved by the FDA. Using a Markov model with parameters from the literature, we compared the cost-effectiveness of no treatment, diet/exercise, bariatric surgery, and semaglutide, a possible treatment for NAFLD/NASH currently undergoing clinical trials. Diet/exercise and bariatric surgery are cost-effective alternatives to no treatment, but semaglutide is not cost-effective compared to other treatment options due to its high cost. Conditional policies where patients switch to bariatric surgery after one year of diet/exercise if they lose < 5%, < 7%, or < 10% of their weight are also cost-effective. Therefore, diet/exercise should remain the standard of care for most NAFLD/NASH patients even if semaglutide becomes FDA- approved. Bariatric surgery is a cost-effective alternative for NAFLD/NASH patients with a qualifying BMI.

Keywords: Computer Science
Liver
Markov processes
Diabetes
Obesity > Surgery
Semaglutide
Diet
Exercise
Weight loss
Cost effectiveness
Quality of life
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Thesis
Advisor: Valiant Gregory
Shachter Ross
A Movement for Myanmar Democracy

Sandra Kong’s capstone projects focused on advocating and bringing awareness to the political conflict in Myanmar following the military coup on February 1st, 2021. Along with other strong advocates and community members, Sandra worked with Global Movement for Myanmar Democracy (GM4MD), a youth-led grassroots organization coordinating international action among the Myanmar diaspora in support of Myanmar’s democracy, to create a centralized website platform for international campaigns and resources. While the website was created as a way of providing credibility and information about GM4MD’s projects, it quickly became a digital space providing real time and archival updates of the democracy movement such as snapshots of campaigns, political advocacy mechanisms, poetry and art, and breaking updates about fallen heroes. Moreover, the website’s central advocacy mission of positioning Myanmar’s political conflict as a global issue was critical in highlighting how the human right abuses (from women’s rights violations to endangerment of democracy to preventing access to healthcare) had impacts beyond Myanmar.

Keywords: Myanmar
Democracy and education
World politics
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Thesis
A Multi-Phase School Choice Mechanism: Theory and Practice

We study aspects of a multi-phase school choice system used to allocate students to primary schools (first to sixth grade) in Singapore. We first examine the institutional objectives and contextual constraints of the market. Using interviews and public sources, we then present evidence of strategic decision-making by parents, and outline common considerations they face. We then introduce a novel theoretical model of a sequential matching mechanism, and analyze its performance under uncertainty. We find that the sequential nature of the mechanism may permit equilibrium welfare improvements for students when compared to the static Boston Mechanism. However, we also find that in some important respects (e.g. stability of equilibrium outcomes), such a system may be less desirable than a slot-specific Deferred Acceptance mechanism, a variant of Deferred Acceptance that allows for quotas. We use empirical evidence to demonstrate, using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) inspired approach, that many parents use prior year's application information in strategic decision-making. We make partial progress towards additional empirical questions, such as explaining a spike in unassigned students in 2020. Finally, we use our data to provide recommendations for students and parents in their decision-making process.

Keywords: School choice
Singapore
Mechanism design
Matching theory
Elementary schools
Regression discontinuity
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Thesis
Advisor: Roth Alvin
A New Rhetorical Legacy? Humanitarianism, Human Rights, and US Foreign Military Intervention (1980-2020)

Previous academic literature indicates that the United States has used the rhetoric of democracy, international norms, and national security to justify its foreign military interventions from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Kerton-Johnson, 2011). However, scholars have failed to substantially investigate the American use of human rights rhetoric as a defense of military intervention. When the United States has intervened militarily in a foreign country, how has it used human rights rhetoric to justify its military action? Which human rights does the U.S. cite, and how do these statements match the reality of the human rights conditions on the ground for each case? To answer these questions, I conducted original textual analysis of 60 presidential speeches from the American Presidency Project and compared human rights justifications from these speeches to the actual human rights situations of each case. Through my research, I critically analyze the existence and political implications of the invocation of human rights rhetoric in the past, present, and future of American foreign policy. This thesis finds that American presidents historically have used human rights rhetoric to justify U.S. foreign military intervention, particularly during responses to humanitarian crises in the 1990s and more recently since the 2011 intervention in Libya. Further, within these justifications, presidents most often invoke the rhetoric of personal integrity rights, such as the human right to "life, liberty, and security." However, presidential uses of human rights rhetoric do not match human rights situations on the ground. American presidents frequently portray U.S. foreign policy as addressing human rights violations, yet there is no statistically significant relationship between presidential uses of human rights rhetoric and the actual human rights situations within countries of intervention. This thesis contributes new scholarship to the understanding of U.S. foreign policy and how it is argued to domestic and foreign publics. Through its multilevel investigation, this thesis raises critical implications of presidents’ potential to abuse the use of humanitarian and human rights rhetoric in justifications for U.S. military intervention.

Keywords:  Program in International Relations
Human rights
Intervention (International law)
Humanitarian intervention
Rhetoric > Political aspects
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Thesis
Advisor: Tomz Michael
A REDOX-FOCUSED GEOCHEMICAL SURVEY OF PHANEROZOICSOURCE ROCK-RESERVOIR SHALES FROM NORTH AMERICA

Source rock-reservoirs (SRR) are continuous-type hydrocarbon systems characterized by fine-grained facies that contain adequate organic matter (OM; typically >2 wt%) to generate and retain significant hydrocarbon¬ accumulations. It is clear from modern analogue studies that O2-deficient conditions favor preservation of qualitatively- and quantitatively-enhanced OM, with appreciable productivity and OM flux to the sediment required to establish and maintain these conditions. However, debates regarding controls on source rock quality have mainly focused on oxic versus anoxic conditions, and the implications of different anoxic redox states for exploration and production remain unexplored. Here, we present detailed multi-proxy sedimentary geochemical studies of major Paleozoic and Mesozoic North American SRRs to elucidate their depositional redox conditions. This is the first study focused on SRR geochemistry to use Fe-speciation – presently the only proxy able to independently distinguish anoxic conditions as ferruginous (H2¬S-limited) or euxinic (H2S-replete, Fe-limited) – coupled with total organic carbon (TOC) and redox-sensitive trace element proxies. These analyses demonstrate that SRRs were almost exclusively deposited under anoxic bottom waters, but that there is wide variance in the prevalence of euxinic versus ferruginous conditions. Specifically, in contrast to most modern analogue systems, many SRRs were deposited under dominantly ferruginous or oscillatory conditions. TOC is significantly higher under euxinic bottom waters, although sediments deposited under both redox states have economically appreciable levels. Differences in initial redox condition likely impact organic matter quantity and quality, the presence of carbonate and clay cements, and the abundance of authigenic phases (pyrite and toxic metals) that can cause environmental or engineering issues during production. Increased emphasis on how initial depositional conditions affect the properties of the sediment, and the downstream implications of these differences, will ultimately lead to better sweet spot targeting and higher resource extraction efficiencies than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model.

Keywords: Shale
Shale gas reservoirs
Geochemistry
Phanerozoic
Source Rocks
Geology
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Thesis
Advisor: Sperling Erik
A web-based platform for blind and visually impaired Russian-speaking children to learn English vocabulary and spelling

In developing countries, children with blindness and visual impairments (BVI) have limited access to education. They are placed under the “protection” of the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of education because disability is viewed as a disease that must be cured. Therefore, instead of creating an accessible environment for development, they try to rehabilitate or fix children to make them “normal.” I was born in Kyrgyz Republic, one of the developing countries where BVI children have limited educational opportunities. One of the commonly identified difficulties that children with BVI experience is learning foreign languages because adequate language learning materials are rare and inaccessible. Hence, I decided to develop an educational technology to support BVI children in improving their English vocabulary. BeeVoice represents an accessible audio interactive gamified web platform for BVI children. It will utilize Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles for accessibility, gamification techniques for engagement, the explicit vocabulary learning approach and associative networks theory for vocabulary acquisition, and spelling mode for spelling acquisition.

Keywords: Kanatbek kyzy, Malika
Blind and Visually Impaired Learners
English language > Acquisition
Kyrgyzstan
Accessible educational technology
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Accelerating structural optimization in the early aircraft design phases

In the search for higher efficiencies, a number of unconventional aircraft planforms have been proposed to replace the conventional tube and wing airliner. With entirely new designs, these new configurations would have to be designed from a clean sheet and makes for a risky proposition. To ensure that such an endeavor would succeed, high-fidelity geometry and analysis would need to be introduced earlier in the aircraft design process to ensure that the configuration is feasible before any component is manufactured. This thesis pursues this idea and presents several methods in which high-fidelity aircraft structures can be generated, analyzed and optimized in a faster manner. Within the design process, bottlenecks can occur in the geometry/mesh generation and the computationally expensive analysis modules. To speed up the generation process, a parametric framework was written which takes a set of inputs and automatically and quickly generates a finite element analysis (FEA) model of a wing structure. Fidelity is maintained by being able to model all primary structural components in both conventional and unconventional aircraft configurations. This ability to rapidly create meshes is then leveraged to generate models of different resolutions, which can be tailored for the various FEA analysis types in terms of computational speed and accuracy. One of the most computationally expensive FEA analysis is finding the buckling eigenvalues. To reduce the cost of local buckling analysis, an iterative method calculates the eigenvalue of an aircraft panel and its surrounding section. This method was found to match the eigenvalues of the same global model to high degree of accuracy at a lower computational cost. To find the global eigenvalues without repeating the local eigenvalues, a displacement constraint method was applied to limit the possible mode shapes. This application guarantees only global mode shapes from the eigenvalue solver, making the extraction of global buckling eigenvalues easier. These methods are applied the optimization of a conventional wingbox and the unconventional structures of a blended wing body and truss-braced wing, where the complete model is generated from scratch and optimized under its aeroelastic loading with stress and buckling constraints. Their demonstration shows that ability design and optimize with high-fidelity geometry and methods can be applied at the start of the aircraft design process and can be applied for unconventional aircraft planforms

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Alonso Juan José
Kroo Ilan
Senesky Debbie
The accidental ethnographers : race, recording technology, and nature in modern Latin American fiction

My dissertation, "The Accidental Ethnographers: Race, Recording Technology, and Nature in Modern Latin American Fiction, " examines how fictional works of early 20th century Cuban, Colombian, and Brazilian criollo authors were shaped by these authors' use of recording technologies in their ethnographic endeavors. I show that the process of perceiving the world through cameras and tape recorders, and interacting with unfamiliar places, cultures, and cosmologies, prompted these authors to incorporate Afro-descendant and indigenous worldviews in their texts. These fictional texts enable the conception of a reality that does not necessarily subscribe to the anthropocentric division between human culture and the natural world, commonly found in 19th-century literary naturalism. With this research, I participate in contemporary debates on technology's impact on literature and, by extension, the role of technology in defining Latin American fiction

Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Hoyos Ayala Héctor
Barletta Vincent 
Briceño Ximena
Adaptable behavior from anatomically fixed neural circuits : investigations into the synaptic bases of learning and ethanol pharmacology

The brain must strike a balance between reliable information processing and adaptation to an ever-changing environment. At a gross anatomical level, the brain's wiring diagram is believed to be relatively set after development. Therefore, a fundamental question arises: how does stereotyped wiring lead to flexible dynamics, computation, and behavior? This dissertation will explore this question through the lens of 2 phenomena -- the activity dependent strengthening of neural circuits and the pharmacology of ethyl alcohol. Chapter 1- Neurons are known to modify synaptic weights based on their history of coincident activity patterns, termed Hebbian plasticity. In the first study, I tested whether Hebbian potentiation of synapses in the hippocampus or striatum play a causal role in learning. Using the most specific manipulation of synaptic potentiation that we are aware of (Stx3 cKO), I tested a battery of behaviors that are known to require either the hippocampus or striatum. Much to our surprise, Stx3 cKO did not affect most behaviors we tested. However, hippocampal potentiation was critical for novelty-driven spatial learning. Further, we found that spatial/contextual coding was intact after Stx3 cKO, explaining our demonstration of normal spatial learning, and contextual novelty coding was greatly reduced after Stx3 cKO. Lastly, there were two other deficits related to reward and novelty coding that warrant further study. Over-all, our data refine the proposed role of synaptic potentiation -- from an all-encompassing learning signal to a synaptic mechanism for salience encoding. Chapter 2 -- A fixed neural circuit can update dynamics when a psychoactive sub-stance is applied. Indeed, the study of drugs of abuse has yielded insights into the basic biology of the brain. For example, the endogenous opioid and endocannabinoid systems were discovered through investigation of the pharmacological action of opioids and cannabinoids, respectively. In the second study, I continued this rich history by investigating the pharmacology of ethyl alcohol (EtOH). I found that EtOH reduces GABA co-release from dopamine neurons, a recently discovered property of dopamine neurons that has the potential to powerfully modulate brain-wide neural activity. Digging into the mechanism revealed that EtOH was not directly affecting GABA co-release, but rather EtOH's metabolite, acetaldehyde was out-competing GABA's precursor for access to the enzyme ALDH1a1

Advisor: Ding Jun (Jun B.)
Südhof Thomas C.
Hestrin Shaul
Luo Liqun
Shah Nirao