VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Slovene Bilingualism and German Language Contact

This dissertation addresses the issue of Slovene/German bilingualism in the province of Carinthia in southeastern Austria. The study examines the relationship between learning Slovene in the home and the ability to speak good German later in life; it is based on research conducted in the bilingual community of Bad Eisenkappel (Eisenkappel) in Carinthia. Over the course of two years (January 2013—August 2014 and June 2015), I made many trips to Eisenkappel to establish connections with the community and begin my fieldwork. This consisted of person-to-person interviews with residents of Eisenkappel, ten of which are represented in this study./nI argue that there is no basis for the claim that raising a child speaking Slovene in this community disadvantages the child by undermining the opportunity to speak German as well as those children who are raised speaking German only. My argument is contrary to both a long history of treating Slovene speakers as second-class citizens, and to the lingering perception among many monolingual and bilingual inhabitants of Eisenkappel that one must be raised speaking only German in order to be successful in mastering German./nIn this dissertation I investigate the historical and cultural underpinnings of bias against the dialect of Slovene spoken in Eisenkappel, as well as against the speakers of Slovene themselves. I then draw contrasts between the dialect of German spoken in the region (Eisenkappel German) and that of the standard language taught in schools (Modern Standard German) in order to establish the two major varieties of German that inhabitants of Eisenkappel encounter. Finally, based on original data collected from my fieldwork, I analyze the similarities and differences in the speech of bilingual and monolingual speakers in Eisenkappel./nMy dissertation challenges not only erroneous stereotypes envisaged for bilingual speakers in Eisenkappel or for speakers of Slovene in Carinthia at large, but also for bilingualism in border communities throughout Europe and the rest of the world. The principles of this study are applicable beyond border communities as well. This project could be replicated in virtually any community in which more than one language is spoken and there is incentive for minorities to learn the dominant language of the region or country.

Advisor: Rauch, Irmengard
Shannon, Thomas
Safe and Interactive Autonomy: Control, Learning, and Verification

The goal of my research is to enable safe and reliable integration of human-robot systems in our society by providing a unified framework for modeling and design of these systems. Today's society is rapidly advancing towards autonomous systems that interact and collaborate with humans, e.g., semiautonomous vehicles interacting with drivers and pedestrians, medical robots used in collaboration with doctors, or service robots interacting with their users in smart homes. The safety-critical nature of these systems require us to provide provably correct guarantees about their performance. In this dissertation, we develop a formalism for the design of algorithms and mathematical models that enable correct-by-construction control and verification of human-robot systems./nWe focus on two natural instances of this agenda. In the first part, we study interaction-aware control, where we use algorithmic HRI to be mindful of the effects of autonomous systems on humans' actions, and further leverage these effects for better safety, efficiency, coordination, and estimation. We further use active learning techniques to update and better learn human models, and study the accuracy and robustness of these models. In the second part, we address the problem of providing correctness guarantees, while taking into account the uncertainty arising from the environment or human models. Through this effort, we introduce Probabilistic Signal Temporal Logic (PrSTL), an expressive specification language that allows representing Bayesian graphical models as part of its predicates. Further, we provide a solution for synthesizing controllers that satisfy temporal logic specifications in probabilistic and reactive settings, and discuss a diagnosis and repair algorithm for systematic transfer of control to the human in unrealizable settings./nWhile the algorithms and techniques introduced can be applied to many human-robot systems, in this dissertation, we will mainly focus on the implications of my work for semiautonomous driving.

Advisor: Seshia, Sanjit
Sastry, Shankar
Shellular biology – exploring the biochemistry and physiology of a protein nanocompartment

Bacteria and Archaea use proteinaceous compartments for a variety of different reasons such as creating unique chemical environments or isolating pathways with toxic intermediates. Recently, a new class of protein compartment was discovered and named for its founding member, encapsulin. Encapsulins are structural similar to bacterial microcompartments but are smaller; hence, encapsulins are interchangeably called nanocompartments. Encapsulins assemble into 24-32 nm icosahedral shells and usually package a single type of cargo protein such as a ferritin-like protein or a peroxidase. Cargo proteins are directed to the interior of encapsulins through an interaction between the encapsulin lumen and the C-terminus of the cargo protein. With the recent discovery of encapsulins, there are many fundamental questions to answer in regards to both the biochemistry and physiology of nanocompartments. In this work, I began by heterologously expressing and then purifying the T. maritima encapsulin. I was able to show the subunits readily and robustly assemble into nanocompartments and these nanocompartments are resistant to both thermal and chemical insults. Through fusion of the C-terminus from a cargo protein to GFP, I was able to load encapsulins with GFP both in vitro and in vivo. However, in vitro loading was only accomplished by disassembling and reassembling encapsulin in the presence of targeting, suggesting that in vivo encapsulins are only competent to load cargo during assembly. While purifying T. maritima encapsulin, I discovered the shell is a flavoprotein that co-purifies with riboflavin and flavin mononucleotide. Cryo-electron microscopy identified the flavin binding site as being adjacent to a surface tryptophan and mutation of the tryptophan to alanine substantially reduced the amount of flavin that co-purified with encapsulins. Flavins are common cellular electron transporters and the presence of a flavin tightly bound to an encapsulin shell suggests it may be related to the functioning of the native cargo, a ferritin-like protein that oxidizes ferrous iron and forms an iron oxide mineral. I am currently investigating whether the bound flavins act as electron donors or acceptors for the reduction or oxidation of iron. This work was one of the first biophysical characterizations of an encapsulin and the first suggestion that nanocompartments may not be passive barriers separating the encapsulin interior from the cytosol. Instead, encapsulins may play a direct and active role in the function of encapsulated cargo.

Advisor: Savage, David F
Presence and Praise: Writing the Imperial Body in Han China

The ruler’s body in early Chinese literature—whether silent and tranquil or bearing the scars of restless public toil; whether emanating light from the depths of the palatial chambers or displaying charisma while traversing the empire—has served as an idiom for the articulation of competing ideals of rulership, governance, and bureaucratization. This work takes the idiom of the ruler’s body and the language of imperial representation as the primary object of scrutiny. It analyzes prevalent rhetorical and literary patterns in light of observations gained in the cross-cultural study of the royal body, metaphor in political discourse, and theories of representation. In particular, I am interested in the way top-down representation, of the ruler by his officials, was conceptualized and advocated in bodily terms, giving rise to some of the most common figures in early Chinese literature. This attention to the work of language in the political discourse of the early imperial period reveals some of the unique features of Chinese theories of monarchy, and brings to light paradigms that structure the literary representation of rulers and rulership across seemingly incompatible genres./nThe main texts that drive the inquiry in the three core chapters date from two middle points in the long span of the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE): the reign of Emperor Cheng成帝 (r. 33 – 7 BCE) in the late Western Han, and the reign of Emperor Zhang章帝 (r. 75 – 88) in the early Eastern Han. The first chapter takes Liu Xiang’s劉向 (79 – 8 BCE) Shui yuan說苑 as the gate to an ongoing intertextual discourse of rulership and bureaucratization, looking in particular at metaphors that take the ruler’s body as the source domain. I show, in the second chapter, that some of the conceptual paradigms that structure such figurative constructions in the discourse of authority and delegation underlie literary strategies that support the goals of the ruler’s encomiasts. At the center of analysis in this chapter is Cui Yin’s崔駰 (d. 92) “Four Panegyrics for the Imperial Tours” 四巡頌—a text that fell under the radar of most early-China scholars, East and West, due to a long interruption in its transmission. In the third chapter, focusing on the summaries and evaluations Ban Gu 班固 (32 – 92) had appended to the imperial chronicles of the Han shu 漢書 (History of the Han), I argue that awareness to the poetics of praise is instrumental to the study not only of the rhetorical construction of the ruler’s body but also the language of imperial historiography./nThis work thus examines the relation between metaphor and politics, body and representation, and history and praise so as to highlight features of the early Chinese discourse of rulership that will have hermeneutical and analytical value for scholars of Chinese literature, political thought, and theories of monarchy across cultures.

Advisor: Csikszentmihalyi, Mark
Nylan, Michael
Modeling the Acute Effects of Exercise on Insulin-Glucose Dynamics

Only four grams of glucose are present in an adult's blood stream at any moment in time. This amount of glucose can be burned up in only 10 minutes during exercise. To maintain glucose homeostasis, the human body has an outstanding control system that utilizes several hormones, mainly insulin. Unfortunately, in type 1 diabetes (T1D), this control system is faulty because the pancreas no longer secretes insulin. Those with T1D must manually dose and inject insulin to survive. Exercise drastically changes the needed insulin dose, and an overdose can be fatal. An artificial pancreas that can autonomously and safely adjust the insulin dose would greatly improve the lives of those with T1D./nThis dissertation focuses on the development of a novel pharmacokinetics model of insulin-glucose dynamics that is specifically designed to include the effects of exercise. We model five primary glucoregulatory phenomena that are sensitive to exercise. To validate the model we compare predictions to data from four cohorts of human subjects studied during controlled clinical exercise trials. We also carry out several test cases to demonstrate the effects of exercise intensity and duration on blood glucose levels. The model provides insight into insulin dosing during exercise and can be used to improve model predictive control algorithms in the artificial pancreas.

Advisor: Szeri, Andrew J
Gestures of Undoing: The Desire for the Neutral in Modern Hebrew Literature

This dissertation traces throughout the history of modern Hebrew literature a fantasy of disengagement with systems of action and thought that are predicated on ideologies of achievement, oppositionality, or productivism. Through readings that range from the stories of Uri Nissan Gnessin in the first decade of the twentieth century to the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein in the 1980s, my project recovers the workings of a largely unacknowledged poetics of tacit refusal that operates at the heart of a predominantly strong, conflictual, and essentially opinionated cultural imaginary. Following the late work of Roland Barthes, I call this poetics “the desire for the neutral”—the desire to rid oneself of the burden of paradigms, to baffle any demand to occupy a predetermined position. This project thus traces a fantasmatic trajectory that often goes completely unnoticed in conventional critical and historiographical accounts. Taken together, the chapters of this dissertation argue for the persistence in modern Hebrew literature of a shared desire for the neutral, conceptualized neither as a fixed discursive position nor as a stance of direct resistance (which only reinstitutes the oppositional structure)—but rather as a category of historicized strategies of non-compliance, an ethos of minimal action that outplays the very logic of the paradigm./nChapter 1 explores the emergence of the figure of the failed writer in Gnessin’s “Sideways” (1905) and in Elisheva’s Side-Streets (1929) as a fantasy of non-participation against the coercive discourse of imperative collectivist writing at that period. These narratives of failure, I argue, manifest not a self-deprecating anxiety but rather an affirmative “desire to retire” from the overdetermined task of the Hebrew writer. Chapter 2 focuses on the claim for a “freedom not to write” in Aharon Megged’s The Living on the Dead (1965). Through the lens of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality (in which any potentiality is always also impotentiality), I read this trope as indicative of what I describe as the potential unconscious of Israeli literature: a radical fantasy of retaining a state of literary and political impotentiality—and thus, ultimately, of potentializing given political realities. Chapter 3 examines the pedagogy of nuance in the bilingual fiction of Yossel Birstein, from the 1950s to the 1980s. Responding to the crisis of Yiddish literature in Israel, Birstein’s fiction, I argue, teaches an activism of nuance—an ethics and politics of action that, against historical conditions that hinder one’s ability to act, consists in minimal, often nearly inconsequential yet nonetheless insistent tiny bits of difference.

Advisor: Kronfeld, Chana
Parallel Machine Learning Using Concurrency Control

Many machine learning algorithms iteratively process datapoints and transform global model parameters. It has become increasingly impractical to serially execute such iterative algorithms as processor speeds fail to catch up to the growth in dataset sizes./nTo address these problems, the machine learning community has turned to two parallelization strategies: bulk synchronous parallel (BSP), and coordination-free. BSP algorithms partition computational work among workers, with occasional synchronization at global barriers, but has only been applied to ‘embarrassingly parallel’ problems where work is trivially factorizable. Coordination-free algorithms simply allow concurrent processors to execute in parallel, interleaving transformations and possibly introducing inconsistencies. Theoretical analysis is then required to prove that the coordination-free algorithm produces a reasonable approximation to the desired outcome, under assumptions on the problem and system./nIn this dissertation, we propose and explore a third approach by applying concurrency control to manage parallel transformations in machine learning algorithms. We identify points of possible interference between parallel iterations by examining the semantics of the serial algorithm. Coordination is then introduced to either avoid or resolve such conflicts, whereas non-conflicting transformations are allowed to execute concurrently. Our parallel algorithms are thus engineered to produce the same exact output as the serial machine learning algorithm, preserving the serial algorithm’s theoretical guarantees of correctness while maximizing concurrency./nWe demonstrate the feasibility of our approach to parallelizing a variety of machine learning algorithms, including nonparametric unsupervised learning, graph clustering, discrete optimization, and sparse convex optimization. We theoretically prove and empirically verify that our parallel algorithms produce equivalent output to their serial counterparts. We also theoretically analyze the expected concurrency of our parallel algorithms, and empirically demonstrate their scalability.

Advisor: Jordan, Michael I
The Statistical Dynamics of Nonequilibrium Control

Living systems, even at the scale of single molecules, are constantly adapting to changing environmental conditions. The physical response of a nanoscale system to external gradients or changing thermodynamic conditions can be chaotic, nonlinear, and hence difficult to control or predict. Nevertheless, biology has evolved systems that reliably carry out the cell’s vital functions efficiently enough to ensure survival. Moreover, the development of new experimental techniques to monitor and manipulate single biological molecules has provided a natural testbed for theoretical investigations of nonequilibrium dynamics. This work focuses on developing paradigms for both understanding the principles of nonequilibrium dynamics and also for controlling such systems in the presence of thermal fluctuations./nThroughout this work, I rely on a perspective based on two central ideas in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics: large deviation theory, which provides a formalism akin to thermodynamics for nonequilibrium systems, and the fluctuation theorems which identify time symmetry breaking with entropy production. I use the tools of large deviation theory to explore concepts like efficiency and optimal coarse-graining in microscopic dynamical systems. The results point to the extreme importance of rare events in nonequilibrium dynamics. In the context of rare dynamical events, I outline a formal approach to predict efficient control protocols for nonequilibrium systems and develop computational tools to solve the resulting high dimensional optimization problems. The final chapters of this work focus on applications to self-assembly dynamics. I show that the yield of desired structures can be enhanced by driving a system away from equilibrium, using analysis inspired by the theory of the hydrophobic effect. Finally, I demonstrate that nanoscale, protein shells can be modeled and controlled to robustly produce monodisperse, nonequilibrium structures strikingly similar to the microcompartments observed in a variety of bacteria.

Advisor: Geissler, Phillip L
Investigation of Effect of Zn on Passive Film for Alloy 600 in High Temperature Primary Water

Due to its excellent corrosion resistance, Alloy 600 has been extensively used as the heat exchanger tubing material in the steam generator (SG) of pressurized water reactor (PWR) in nuclear industry for many years. However, the Alloy 600 is susceptible to stress corrosion cracking (SCC) on the primary side of the tubing, causing safety problems as well as increasing the cost of maintenance. Zn treatment has been applied in recent years in the industry to suppress the SCC problems, but the main mechanism for this effect is not fully understood. Since the surface film is strongly related to SCC initiation, the goal of the research is to understand how Zn affects the surface film growth on Alloy 600. This research focuses on understanding the change of kinetic parameters on oxide formation as well as the change in chemistry and structure on Alloy 600 oxide./nElectrochemical tests are performed to understand how the passive layers respond electronically to the presence of Zn. Alloy 600 samples are oxidized at various potentials from -743 mV SHE to -223 mV SHE in a lab constructed autoclave at simulated PWR PW environment with 0.1ppm Zn addition. EIS is performed in-situ to determine how the passive layer changes electrochemically over potential, and cross-section TEM-EDS is conducted to some samples to investigate the film formation./nThe passive film formed on Alloy 600 consists of a (NixFe1-x)O outer layer, a Cr-rich spinel layer and a Cr2O3 inner layer. Zn incorporates into the outer and intermediate layer, and changes the morphology of the outer layer. EIS equivalent circuits based on the TEM results is constructed for each potential, and it is found that Zn largely reduces the rate of oxygen incorporation into the inner layer at potentials below -573 mV SHE. Other parameters are not affected by Zn addition in to the solution, which agrees with the TEM results.

Advisor: Devine, Thomas M.
Social Influence and Innovation Adoption in the Clinical Setting

Advanced use of electronic health record (EHR) tools that standardize care and increase patient access to their providers are purported to improve care quality and safety; however, clinician uptake of these advanced tools has been slow. As U.S. health care reform measures continue to encourage the use of teams in care delivery, team dynamics may play a role in innovation adoption decisions of clinicians. Little detail is known about whether clinicians' use of technological innovations is influenced by peer and team use patterns./nFrom the patient perspective, clinical trials are the primary mechanism by which new approaches to cancer treatment are evaluated; yet, only a small proportion of eligible cancer patients are offered the opportunity to participate in clinical trials, and fewer actually become enrolled. Trends toward more patient-centered care delivery have encouraged shared decision-making between patients and their care providers, which may influence patient awareness and consideration of medical innovations as treatment options, and ultimately decide to enroll in clinical trials./nThis dissertation research assesses whether there are team effects associated with individual adoption of innovations, as well as whether there are normative pressures or internal motivations, as opposed to more passive interpersonal influences, that are related to clinician innovation adoption. It also assesses whether individual attitudes and awareness alone, or more active information sharing are more likely to result in patient innovation uptake./nFindings from self-reported clinician and patient surveys in an integrated delivery system suggest that interpersonal interactions contribute to individual clinician and patient awareness and eventual use of innovations in the clinical setting. Specifically, clinician adoption of advanced EHR tools was associated with their team members' use of the innovation. However, team cohesion was not directly associated with individual adoption and did not moderate the relationship between team use and eventual individual use of advanced tools. This suggests that more a passive transfer of knowledge may account for team influence on individual team member's adoption of advanced EHR tools. Conversely, medical oncologist behaviors and patient care experience, both play important roles in patients' ultimate decision to enroll in cancer clinical trials. This points to the need for clinicians to more actively engage with their patients, and greater patient understanding of trials to effectively encourage cancer clinical trial participation.

Advisor: Rodriguez, Hector P