VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A Contemporary Study in Gauge Theory and Mathematical Physics: Holomorphic Anomaly in Gauge Theory on ALE Space & Freudenthal Gauge Theory

This thesis covers two distinct parts: Holomorphic Anomaly in Gauge Theory on ALE Space and Freudenthal Gauge Theory./nIn part I, I presented a concise review of the Seiberg-Witten curve, Nekrasov's background, geometric engineering and the holomorphic anomaly equation followed by my published work: Holomorphic Anomaly in Gauge Theory on ALE Space, where an deformed N = 2 SU(2) gauge theory on A1 space and its five dimension lift is studied./nWe find that the partition functions can be reproduced via special geometry and the holomorphic anomaly equation. Schwinger type integral expressions for the boundary conditions at the monopole/dyon point in moduli space are inferred. The interpretation of the five dimensional partition function as the partition function of a refined topological string on A1×(local P1 × P1) is suggested./nIn part II, I give a comprehensive review of the Freudenthal Triple System, including Freudenthal's orginal construction from Jordan Triple Systems and its relation to Lie algebra, Yang-Baxter equation, and 4d N = 2 BPS black holes, where the novel Freudenthal-dual/nwas discovered. I also present my published work on the Freudenthal Gauge Theory, where we construct the most generic gauge theory admitting F-dual, and prove a no-go theorem that forbids coupling of a F-dual invariant gauge theory to supersymmetry.

Advisor: Zumino, Bruno
Methods for Comparative Model Selection and Parameter Estimation in Diverse Modeling Applications

Predictive accuracy of a model is of key importance in research and to a lay audience. Diverse modeling methods and parameter estimation methods exist, such that a wide range of techniques are available from which to select when approaching a modeling task. Given this, two questions naturally arise in relation to a modeling task: model selection and model parameter estimation. This dissertation is intended to advance the theory and practice of model selection and parameter estimation for the topics discussed here./n* In Chapter 2, I develop A3, a novel method for assessing predictive accuracy and enabling direct comparisons between competing models in an accessible framework. This method uses resampling techniques to "wrap" predictive modeling methods and estimate a standard set of error metrics for both the model as a whole and additionally for each explanatory variable utilized by the model. Two case studies in the chapter illustrate the applied utility of the method and how improved models may not only result in increased predictive accuracy, but also potentially alter inferences and conclusions about the effects of parameters in the model. An R package implementing the method is made available on CRAN./n* In Chapter 3, I develop ICE, a novel method of home range estimation. ICE uses a competitive method for estimating home ranges. Effectively, an estimator of estimators, ICE pits existing home range estimators against each other, each of which may be best suited for a given type of data. By selecting between different approaches, ICE can theoretically improve on the performance of any individual estimator across heterogeneous data sets./n* In Chapter 4, I develop Contingent Kernel Density Estimation, an extension to Kernel Density Estimation designed to account for the case when observations are measured with a specific form of error. Chapter 4 develops the method and derives contingent kernels for commonly-used kernels and sampling regimes. An application of the method is presented to data collected from the social networking site, Twitter, to estimate the national distribution of a sample of Twitter users./n* The study in Chapter 5 analyzes a large data set collected from Twitter. This study is based on data from over four million Twitter users and estimates parameters of this population with a primary focus on color preference choices made by these users. Novel results are found in this "big data" analysis approach that may not have been able to be identified with earlier, traditional approaches of sampling and surveying the behavior of individuals.

Advisor: Getz, Wayne
Principals Utilizing Leadership for Special Education: The PULSE Workshop Model for Improving the Practice of Instructional Leadership for Special Education

Elementary principals are expected to be instructional leaders for all students. However when it comes to leadership for students with disabilities, this role can be problematic. This is largely due to a lack of their own efficacy about their special education leadership role, unfamiliarity about the unique cultural features of special education, and a lack of technical competence for special education. These factors contribute to a diminished principal leadership role. Special education leadership has become a significant concern for elementary principals as their roles have increased to ensuring successful outcomes for all students. The research has demonstrated that in general, principals receive little to no formal training in leading special education in pre-service or on-going professional development./nFor this study, I developed a theory of action to guide the design and implementation to address the problem of practice for principals leading special education. Drawing from the literature on instructional leadership and special education leadership, I identified three key design dimensions to address principal learning in the area of special education instructional leadership: principal efficacy, the unique cultural aspects about special education, and technical competence for special education. I created a 10-week professional development intervention, referred to as PULSE - Principals Utilizing Leadership in Special Education: The PULSE Workshop Model for Improving the Practice of Instructional Leadership for Special Education./nDuring the course of the study, I investigated the impact of the design on the principals' learning and practice based on pre and post intervention data. In addition, I examined the design process including the appraisal of lesson content, instructional method, session length, and overall usefulness of curriculum material. Overall, the impact and process data findings suggest that the PULSE workshop series intervention contributed to enhancing principal instructional leadership behaviors for special education and the impact of that change can be attributed to the design of the intervention. Results reveal that the structure, content, and method of the PULSE intervention workshop helped shift principal behavior in a positive leadership direction. These findings also inform potential future design modifications that may be utilized to improve upon the foundational elements of the PULSE workshop intervention.

Advisor: Mintrop, Heinrich
Catalyzed Intramolecular Aminocyclization Reactions

The scope of my doctoral studies was intended to address the specific synthetic challenge of the construction of heterocycles. As a result, the synthesis of nitrogen-containing heterocycles has been a key research focus during my graduate career and with this in mind, new methods for their construction were investigated./nIn Chapter 1 of this dissertation, an aminoarylation reaction methodology was developed. This system utilized gold catalysis to accomplish an intramolecular aminocyclization followed by a aryl cross-coupling event to accomplish an overall aminoarylation. The strong oxidant Selectfluor was chosen as the terminal oxidant in the reaction due to its previous use in metal- catalyzed reactions. Experimentation and literature precedent led to the use of a bimetallic gold complex to facilitate the Au(I)-Au(III) oxidation which is typically a synthetic challenge. An unusual reaction mechanism was proposed for this reaction as a result of experimental probing in conjunction with a series of DFT calculations. This oxidative gold-catalyzed aminoarylation was found to provide access to a variety of heterocycles in a racemic fashion./nThe second chapter continues with the theme of aminocyclization reactions but focuses on developing an asymmetric methodology. Previous work in our group had shown that dicationic Selectfluor is insoluble and generally unreactive in non-polar organic solvents. This reagent could be rendered useful after undergoing a phase-transfer event when used with lipophilic chiral phosphoric acids and accomplishing an enantioselective fluorination. However only cyclizations involving oxygen nucleophiles were disclosed. With this in mind, studies were undertaken to extend this phase-transfer technology towards aminocyclization reactions. It was found that an enantioselective 1,4-fluoroamination reaction could be accomplished with different diene substrate scaffolds./nChapter 3 concentrates on another extension of the phase-transfer methodology utilizing a aryldiazonium salts. Literature precedent had shown that the terminal nitrogen of these reagents could serve as electrophiles for carbon-based nucleophiles, and their monocationic nature would allow for them to be sparingly soluble in organic solvents, thus revealing them as ideal candidates for phase-transfer reactivity. The reaction of these electrophilic nitrogen sources with tryptamine-based substrates allowed for the enantioselective construction of C3-functionalized pyrroloindolines which are an exotic framework found in natural products. The diazenated pyrroloindoline products could be further elaborated using photochemistry to provide C3-arylated compounds, exhibiting the versatility of this methodology for the construction of C-C or C-N bonds at the C3 position on the pyrroloindoline scaffold.

Advisor: Toste, F. Dean
Evidence for the production of two $W$ bosons with the same electric charge and two jets in 20.3 fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 8$ TeV using the ATLAS detector

This dissertation presents a measurement of \ssWW production in proton-proton collisions with a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV at the Large Hadron Collider using the ATLAS detector. The $W$ bosons are required to decay leptonically, giving a signature of two leptons of the same electric charge, two jets, and missing transverse energy. The analysis is performed on the entire 8 TeV dataset, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb$^{-1}$. The cross section is measured in two fiducial regions, and an excess over the background-only prediction is observed with a significance of 4.5$\sigma$ for inclusive \ssWW production and 3.6$\sigma$ for electroweak \ssWW production. The measured cross sections are in agreement with Standard Model predictions, and limits are set on anomalous quartic gauge couplings.

Advisor: Heinemann, Beate
High Performance Machine Learning through Codesign and Rooflining

Machine learning (ML) is a cornerstone of the new data revolution. Most attempts to scale machine learning to massive datasets focus on parallelization on computer clusters. The BIDMach project instead explores the untapped potential (especially from GPU and SIMD hardware) inside individual machines. Through careful codesign of algorithms and ``rooflining'', we have demonstrated multiple orders of magnitude speedup over other systems. In fact, BIDMach running on a single machine exceeds the performance of cluster systems on most common ML tasks, and has run computer-intensive tasks on 10-terabyte datasets. We can further show that BIDMach runs at close to the theoretical limits imposed by CPU/GPU, memory or network bandwidth. BIDMach includes several innovations to make the data modeling process more agile and effective: likelihood ``mixins'' and interactive modeling using Gibbs sampling./nThese results are very encouraging but the greatest potential for future hardware-leveraged machine learning appears to be on MCMC algorithms: We can bring the performance of sample-based Bayesian inference up close to symbolic methods. This opens the possibility for a general-purpose ``engine'' for machine learning whose performance matches specialized methods. We demonstrate this approach on a specific problem (Latent Dirichlet Allocation), and discuss the general case./nFinally we explore scaling ML to clusters. In order to benefit from parallelization, rooflined nodes require very high network bandwidth. We show that the aggregators (reducers) on other systems do not scale, and are not adequate for this task. We describe two new approaches, butterfly mixing and ``Kylix'' which cover the requirements of machine learning and graph algorithms respectively. We give roofline bounds for both approaches.

Advisor: Canny, John F
Bad Seeds: Inhuman Poetics in Nineteenth-Century America

Plants sprout, vegetate, flower, and molder pervasively across nineteenth-century American literature and yet, like most roadside weeds today, are largely ignored. My dissertation demonstrates that, far from mere stylistic ornamentation, this profusion of vegetation was a means of imagining literature and humanness as inhuman: responsive to otherness outside of texts as well as at the core of a composing subject. Applied to aesthetic agents and objects, plant metaphor unsettled more rhetorical claims during the period for genius or formal convention as self-contained or individuated. The inhuman poetics I trace reveals ways in which poetry in nineteenth-century America was defined not only by genre and print conventions, but also by attempts to make literature responsive to what stands outside of texts: nature, history, and experience. I show how, by directing attention to literary texture and to the extra-literary, plant metaphors model ways of dialectically thinking through the relationship between humans and nature./nAlthough, like many cultural forms in nineteenth-century America, this poetics drew on sources outside of the United States (particularly works of German and British Romanticism), attention to plant-life in America was necessarily localized. This common attention engaged many of the most canonical authors of the day. I undertake immersive readings of plant-life across the careers of Dickinson, Thoreau and Melville to offer new insight into some of their more under-studied works and to deepen understandings of what "poetry" meant to each. My work contextualizes these readings by demonstrating intersections between these authors and Romantic theory and biology, popular botany in ante-bellum New England, and sentimental poetry on friendship and flowers. Relating my findings to contemporary debates about poetics and crises in the humanities and in the environment, I demonstrate how historical particularity sheds light not only on the past but also on present attempts to theorize poetry's relationship to the social and ecological.

Advisor: Otter, Samuel
Inheritance and Inflectional Morphology: Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek

The inheritance framework originates in the field of artificial intelligence. It was incorporated first into theories of computational linguistics, and in the last two decades, it has been applied to theoretical linguistics. Inheritance refers to the sharing of properties: when a group of items have a common property, each item is said to inherit this property. The properties may be mapped in tree format with nodes arranged vertically. The most general (i.e. the most widely shared, unmarked) properties are found at the highest nodes, and the most specific (marked) information is found at the lowest nodes./nInheritance is particularly useful when applied to inflectional morphology due to its focus on the generalizations within and across paradigms. As such, it serves as an alternative to traditional paradigms, which may simplify the translation process; and provides a visual representation of the structure of the language's morphology. Such a mapping also enables cross-linguistic morphological comparison./n/nIn this dissertation, I apply the inheritance framework to the nominal inflectional morphology of Old High German, Latin, Early New High German, and Koine Greek. The corpus consists of parallel biblical passages in each language which will serve as the basis for comparison. The trees may be used as a translation aid to those reading these texts as an accompaniment to or substitute for traditional paradigms. Moreover, I aim to shed light on the structural similarities and differences between the four languages by means of the inheritance trees.

Advisor: Rauch, Irmengard
Materialism As Critique in the French Enlightenment

This dissertation is a study of the materialist current of the French Enlightenment. Far from assuming that early modern materialism constituted a homogenous philosophical current, my dissertation applies the materialist method of critique to the category of "materialism" itself. I argue that "Materialism" was invented in the 18th century, and it had little to do with the simple affirmation of the primacy of matter or the reductionist "one -substance monism", as its detractors at the time wanted the public to believe. I show that the adjective "materialist" was coined in the context of a social transformation of philosophy (a social reconfiguration of philosophical activity with the rise of the bourgeois public sphere) and in the midst of an ideological crisis of French absolutism. I argue that religious and political authorities labeled a set of public philosophical interventions that advocated for a new conception of public philosophy, an experimental and critical one, as "materialists". Most of the thinkers which were labeled as materialists (Julien Offray La Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Claude-Hadrien Helvetius, Paul Henry Thiry D'Holbach) borrowed from the emerging field of modern science a critical method of inquiry, yet, what distinguished them particularly was that they extended this critique to moral values, metaphysical concepts and the political institutions of the regime. They also shared a commitment to an intellectual political independence from the State and to the development of the critical function of philosophy in an expanded public sphere. It was for this reason that materialism was considered morally and politically "dangerous" as a philosophy, one that needed to be repressed and persecuted. By the early 19th Century with the re-institutionalization of philosophy by the Empire materialism as a public philosophical critique was dead./nAfter 1758 the debate around materialism polarized the Enlightenment movement itself. Some of the key figures of the Enlightenment, like Voltaire, Jean e Rond D'Alembert or Nicolas Condorcet, which had secured for them a place in the French academy, began to distance themselves from the materialist figures and from their public positions, by defending publicly the benefits of an "enlightened monarchy" and a necessary metaphysical base for science, philosophy and morality./nIn my dissertation I argue that the "radical" and "political" dimension of La Mettrie's and Diderot's philosophy is not to be found in the proposal of a positive program of reform. Theirs was an exploration of the new public status of philosophy and the philosophical means to achieve a popular enlightenment. Besides being the first advocates for a public education system open to all and targeted to a diversity of social needs, they reflected on the form philosophical texts should produce. Philosophical form, for La Mettrie and Diderot had to necessarily appeal not only to reason but also to imagination, using fiction, and requesting from the reader an active and open interpretation in order to "enlighten" him or her in a non-deterministic way.

Advisor: Blocker, Déborah
The Fisher Droplet Model and Physical Clusters at Liquid-Vapor Phase Coexistence with Implications for the Nuclear Phase Diagram

The nuclear strong force, which binds the nucleons within an atomic nucleus, is a van der Waals force. A consequence of this is that the phenomenon of liquid-vapor phase coexistence occurs in the nuclear system. The experimental means of constructing the nuclear phase diagrams rely heavily on the thermodynamics of cluster theories, theories that historically have not served in many practical applications. In this thesis I explore the validity of the ideal cluster law and the Fisher droplet model in systems where the phase diagrams are known from traditional means./nFor molecular fluids, I show that the phase coexistence of a wide variety of systems can be described using the Fisher theory. This study is closely related to the study of an extended principle of corresponding states. These considerations demonstrates the utility of the Fisher droplet model in describing liquid-vapor phase coexistence of van der Waals fluids./nFor model systems, I show that the physical clusters of the Lennard-Jones model at coexistence can be used to construct the phase diagrams of the fluid. The connection between the physical clusters and the thermodynamic properties of the vapor are established using the ideal cluster law. Furthermore, the cluster concentrations are well described by the Fisher droplet model. These considerations lead to an alternative construction of the phase diagrams for the Lennard-Jones system./nThe success of cluster theories to describe properties of liquid-vapor coexistence that are already well established demonstrates the validity of applying these concepts to construct the nuclear phase diagrams.

Advisor: Moretto, Luciano G
Designing Genetic Circuits for Memory and Communication

The goal of synthetic biology is to allow the rapid design of organisms that can find diverse uses in environmental remediation, chemical production, or human health. Genetic engineering has traditionally been done by trial and error, but synthetic biology seeks to apply engineering principles and build complex circuits by rationally composing genetic parts together. We envision engineering microbes to form spatial communities for applications such as programmable tissues. We present novel circuit designs for memory and communication, which are basic building blocks for programming these behaviors. Our memory device uses molecular sequestration instead of cooperativity that was used in almost all previously built synthetic switches. In addition, our design allows predictable tuning of the switching boundaries and enables the rapid design of custom bistable switches that can function as a set-reset latch./nWe also present designs for contact-based communication by utilizing the recently discovered contact-dependent inhibition (CDI) system. Such a communication channel could allow programmed spatial features with micron-scale resolution, which can be advantageous compared to existing communication methods that rely on diffusible molecules. We present two strategies for harnessing the CDI system. In the first method, we fuse a small transcriptional activator to the protein that is delivered during CDI. In the second method, we exploit the known biology that the delivered domain can co-localize two other proteins. We use this co-localization effect to trigger an increase in activity from a split enzyme, and design an ultrasensitive response to the small number of molecules delivered during the CDI process. While we were not able to show control of gene expression in touching E. coli cells, we believe that our circuit designs can guide future engineering efforts.

Advisor: Arkin, Adam P