VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Online active learning with linear models [electronic resource]

In this thesis we address online decision making problems where an agent needs to collect optimal training data to fit statistical models. Decisions on whether to request the response of incoming stochastic observations or not must be made on the spot, and, when selected, the outcomes are immediately revealed. In particular, in the first part, we study scenarios where a single linear model is estimated given a limited budget: only k out of the n incoming observations can be labelled. In the second part, we focus on active learning in the presence of several linear models with heterogeneous unknown noise levels. The goal is to estimate all the models equally well. We design algorithms to efficiently solve the problems, extend them to sparse high-dimensional settings, and derive statistical guarantees in all cases. In addition, we validate our algorithms with synthetic and real-world data, where most of our technical assumptions are violated. Finally, we briefly explore active learning in pure exploration settings for reinforcement learning. In this case, an unknown Markov Decision Process needs to be learned under a fixed budget of episodes.

Keywords: Mathematical and Computational Engineering.
Advisor: Johari Ramesh
Duchi John advisor. Thesis advisor
Ugander Johan advisor. Thesis advisor
Online and distance instruction in lower income countries [electronic resource] : evidence from three field experiments

In recent decades, the advancement of computing technologies has resulted in a proliferation of new educational resources -- from computerized learning software to fully online courses, offered free of charge and available to anyone with Internet access. While excitement around the new technologies has ebbed and flowed, there is no slowdown in the creation of computerized and online teaching products, many which target disadvantaged populations, including those in lower income countries. However, little rigorous evidence exists about whether online and distance instruction is effective these settings where student needs may differ considerably from those in higher income nations, where most research in this area is conducted. My dissertation offers some of the first evidence in this area of inquiry through three field experiments on the use of online and distance-learning instruction in two lower-middle income countries, Ghana and Mongolia. I begin by examining the demand among Ghanaian educators for online sources of professional development and identifying barriers for effective implementation. I then investigate the effectiveness of a blended online instructional pilot in STEM courses in Mongolia and finally evaluate an interactive model of distance learning in Ghanaian primary schools that could represent the future of online learning.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Bettinger Eric primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dupas Pascaline advisor. Thesis advisor
Loeb Susanna
Opening Up Open Access: Investigating Alternate Funding Models to Stimulate Open Access Publishing

Open access, or the publishing practice of making a printed work available to anyone, embodies the idea that the world is better off when we freely share knowledge. As it stands, only a small percentage of academic articles are published under such a license, meaning that new, emerging, and exciting research is often inaccessible to many who might benefit from it. This is, in part, due to the cost of publishing; those journals that do offer open access as an option must shift the cost of lost revenue to the authors. As a result, the author usually must spend thousands of dollars of their grant money to make an article open access. In this thesis, I explore the question: is it economically feasible for publishers to make a revenue-neutral move to open access by realigning funding pathways? I propose a new model which shifts the monetary burden of open access from publishers and authors to funding agencies through the direct support of article publishing. This thesis shows how such a model can be revenue-neutral for a journal moving from closed subscription to open access. The results demonstrate that funding agencies are already involved in sponsoring research articles, and that a revenue-neutral shift is possible due both to a reduction in transaction costs and the proposed redistribution of publishing costs across several stakeholders. The data collected for the purpose of this thesis from publicly available sources indicates which groups of agencies play large roles in funding research, and addresses various concerns raised about the proposed system. My analysis shows that a revenue-neutral move from subscriptions to open access system is feasible, while pointing to potential cost savings and advantages for each stakeholder in the academic publishing industry.

Keywords: Science Technology and Society
Open Access Publishing
Thesis
Advisor: Willinsky John
Optimization, random graphs, and spin glasses [electronic resource]

This thesis studies a class of optimization problems on sparse random (hyper-)graphs. Of central focus is the optimum value of these problems on graphs with a large number of vertices. The first part introduces a general framework to study the typical value of some combinatorial optimization problems on sparse random graphs, via a connection with mean-field spin glasses. An an application, we derive novel bounds on various combinatorial quantities such as Max-Cut, min-bisection, max XORSAT etc. The second part of this thesis studies a semi-definite relaxation of the min-bisection problem on sparse random graphs. As a consequence, we provide near optimal recovery guarantees for a natural semi-definite programming based algorithm for the community detection problem.

Keywords: Statistics.
Advisor: Dembo Amir primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Montanari Andrea primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Chatterjee Sourav advisor. Thesis advisor
Optimizing technology R&D and adoption with adaptive adversaries [electronic resource] : a Markov game approach with cyber and biosecurity applications

Decision makers in government, industry, and academia need to consider adversaries with harmful intentions when planning the development and adoption of some new technologies. Typical decision models for technology focus on commercial applications where patent law or market economics strongly influence competition. Existing models do not address all cases where adversaries can co-opt or misuse even a tightly regulated technology. This dissertation extends the technology adoption literature to consider technology decisions with adversaries in conflict scenarios where technology determines outcomes for the decision makers. We develop a general framework and model that is intended to capture strategic issues in technology decision making using a Markov game. Then we use the model to answer contemporary risk management questions in two diverse fields: cyber operations (a high-obsolescence technology field) and synthetic biology (a case study on dual-use influenza viral research). Technology R& D, conflict events, and external random events are modeled as stochastic processes for each player. These cases seem unrelated—but they share mathematical features that benefit from analysis with our model.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Paté-Cornell M. Elisabeth (Marie Elisabeth) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Relman David A. advisor. Thesis advisor
Weyant John P. (John Peter) advisor. Thesis advisor
Orbital diversity for global navigation satellite systems [electronic resource]

The underlying theme of this dissertation is the utilization of new orbits to improve the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) we rely upon in nearly all facets of modern life. This includes new orbits for safety-critical augmentation systems as well as for navigation core-constellations. Today, safety-oriented augmentation is placed in geosynchronous orbit while navigation core-constellations such as GPS are placed in medium Earth orbit. This lack of diversity leads to certain pitfalls. Augmentation systems are limited in platforms on which they can piggyback and do not reach users at high latitude. Navigation systems have limited geometric diversity as well as faint signals, leaving them vulnerable to interference and limited in urban and indoor environments. The orbital diversity introduced here improves the service, reliability, and functionality of GNSS. In the present work, new orbital representations are developed to enable orbits such as medium, inclined geosynchronous, and highly elliptical for augmentation with a tenfold improvement in orbit description accuracy compared to service today. This, along with constellation and frequency diversity on the horizon, is shown to enable safety-critical services for both aviation and maritime operations in the entire northern hemisphere. This is of great importance in the Arctic where commerce and traffic is on the rise due to decreasing sea ice. The addition of these orbit classes also increases SBAS visibility in urban canyons where safety critical systems like autonomous automobiles are beginning operation. For navigation, we propose leveraging the wealth of low Earth orbiting (LEO) satellites coming in the near future. This unprecedented space infrastructure is planned by the likes of OneWeb, SpaceX, and Boeing to deliver broadband Internet globally. These LEO constellations offer a threefold improvement on geometry compared to navigation constellations today, relaxing constraints on other aspects while still maintaining the positioning performance of GPS. Closer to Earth, LEO offers less path loss than MEO, improving signal strength by 1000 fold (30 dB). This strengthens us to interference and aids substantially in urban and indoor environments.

Keywords: Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Advisor: Enge Per primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Kochenderfer Mykel J.
Walter Todd advisor. Thesis advisor
Orders and disorder in high-temperature superconductors [electronic resource]

Strongly correlated electronic systems have stimulated numerous developments in theoretical frameworks, numerical tools, and experimental techniques. One group of materials that have been attracting meticulous efforts is the high-temperature (high-Tc) superconductors, not merely due to its large transition temperature, but also because it offers a well characterized laboratory for the study of exotic phenomena such as quantum criticality and non-Fermi liquid behavior. One pressing question in the field is the role played by disorder: inevitable in real materials, disorder is able to fundamentally alter the properties of system under certain circumstances. This thesis studies, from a theoretical point of view, how disorder affects various electronic orders in several model high-Tc superconductors, in particular copper-based high-Tc materials (cuprates). Various recent experiments in these materials are readily interpreted in light of our results.

Keywords: Physics.
Advisor: Kivelson Steven primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Qi Xiaoliang advisor. Thesis advisor
Raghu Srinivas
The origins and requirements of the duty to promote justice [electronic resource]

This dissertation addresses a simple moral question that is often taken for granted in political theory: do citizens have a duty to promote political justice through their political actions and in their everyday lives? Furthermore, if they do, what kind of a duty is it, and how does it relate to other moral duties they may have? Many theorists, including Bernard Williams, Bonnie Honig, William Galston, Raymond Geuss, Jeremy Waldron, and Marc Stears argue that politics is a unique sphere governed by its own standards and logic, meaning that guidance about such matters cannot come from our everyday intuitions about morality. Richard Posner and others go even further than this, arguing that citizens do not have any duty at all to promote justice or the common good through their political activities, denying that it is realistic or even desirable for them to base their political choices on anything but purely self-interested motivations. In my dissertation, I mount a principled defense of the duty to promote justice against such criticisms. First, I argue that it is not unrealistic to think citizens may be motivated to promote the common good through their political actions. In fact, I claim, this norm is already widespread among citizens, though it is often misidentified or mischaracterized as being grounded on self-interest. Second, I argue that this motivation may find a philosophical justification in the ordinary kinds of moral obligations we hold towards others in our daily lives. Citizens are enmeshed in a range of authoritative and non-optional legal orders from which they may benefit or under which they may be burdened, and over which they may often exert (or attempt to exert) a degree of influence in common with others in society. These laws and institutions deeply affect the interests of others, and I argue that by attempting to change them, individual citizens are effectively "doing things to others" to whom they hold direct moral duties. Therefore, we might view the focus on establishing more just laws and institutions as a necessary substitute for the impossible moral calculus that would be required if they were to carry out a complete pairwise moral justification of choices and actions from each individual to every other individual.

Keywords: Political Science.
Advisor: Reich Rob primary advisor. Thesis advisor
McQueen Alison
Ober Josiah advisor. Thesis advisor
Outcome prediction using electronic medical record data with missing entries [electronic resource]

The United States has been ranked 37th for overall health system performance and scores poorly in terms of patient safety, coordination and efficiency. Furthermore, the current healthcare system is costly as well as inefficient, consuming a large and increasing proportion of the gross domestic product. The use of technology and big data methodologies to improve performance and lower cost has already been demonstrated in non-healthcare fields and early studies have further demonstrated its potential in the clinical setting; however, implementation is challenging because most predictive models rely on complete data, which is costly and unrealistic to obtain. In this dissertation, we present a suite of innovative online matrix completion methodologies tailored to high amounts of missingness, which decrease the feature space and improve computation time over gold standard methods. We demonstrate their predictive performance using simulated and real electronic medical record data. Finally, we apply these methods to predictions using waveform data and in the development of a data driven system for predicting patient deterioration in a children's hospital. The use of these innovative matrix completion methods enables the implementation of sophisticated machine learning methodologies and thus allows for improved accuracy and efficiency when performing event prediction using EMR data.

Advisor: Bayati Mohsen primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Horvitz Eric J. (Eric Joel)
Owens Douglas K. advisor. Thesis advisor
Overburdened: How School Nurses Struggle to Meet Health Needs of Students

Blood glucose testing, carbohydrate counting and insulin administration are common tasks for a majority of the registered nurses in Redwood City School District. Diabetic care, however, is but one of many medical conditions being managed by the nursing team, made up of five registered school nurses serving 7,951 students across 16 elementary and middle school campuses in Redwood City.
The dynamic found in Redwood City represents a trend facing school districts across the country to varying extents. Gone are the days of school nurses solely doing vision screenings and doling out Band-Aids.
As the medical needs of students have increased – including conditions such as diabetes, asthma, food allergies and seizure disorders, the ability of the school nurses to cover the health needs of all students has become more difficult.
In 2010 California ranked 42nd in the nation for nurse-to-student ratio with 2,187 students per school nurse, according to the National Association of School Nurses. In 2015, the average statewide ratio of nurses to students grew to 2784 to 1, but the ratios vary widely among districts, according to KidsData.org.

Keywords:  Department of Communication
Stanford University Department of Communication
Master's in Journalism Program
school nurse
public education
California
student health
pupil health
Thesis
Advisor: Zacharia Janine
The overriding power of ought nots [electronic resource] : evidence from microfinance for why some types of hybrid organizations fail to achieve comprehensive performance

Prior work suggests that when organizations are faced with multiple performance demands, performance is diminished unless it is concentrated on only one set of those demands. However, recent scholarship on "hybrid" organizations describes organizations that arrange to simultaneously fulfill multiple types of demands. Do hybrid organizations tend to achieve comprehensive performance on more than one demand at once? In this dissertation study, I use quantitative and qualitative methods to address the question of hybrid organizational performance in the context of microfinance. Microfinance is an industry where small, "micro" loans are given to borrowers in extremely low income situations, often with the intent to lift the recipient out of poverty. For qualitative study, I review secondary resources and perform numerous informal interviews with industry affiliates, complete semi-structured interviews with 38 industry affiliates, and analyze keyword frequency patterns in 1,339 organizational mission statements. For quantitative analysis, I compare the performance of non-hybrid and hybrid organizations relative to two types of demands (social and financial), by analyzing 10,069 firm years of data from 1,640 organizations in the microfinance industry over the past fifteen years. In this industry, two types of hybrid and two types of non-hybrid organizations regularly report both their social and financial performance. These industry characteristics allow for testing hypotheses related to hybrid organizational performance and for investigation of a key contingency. I develop a theoretical model which proposes that when a hybrid organization combining two logics is dominated by a logic that is negatively valenced (i.e., repulsed by) its counterpart logics, then hybrid organizational performance will tend to be diminished. When a hybrid organization is dominated by a logic that is positively valenced (i.e., attracted to) its counterpart logic, then the organization will tend to achieve more comprehensive performance. Empirical study of informal interviews, semi-structured interviews, mission statements, and annual performance data largely corroborate the theoretical model. This study's findings have implications for hybrid organizations combining multiple logics, for organizations reconciling social and financial performance, and for organizations dealing with various other combinations of multiple, concurrent demands.

Keywords: Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Barley Stephen R. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Valentine Melissa (Melissa A.) primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Katila Riitta advisor. Thesis advisor
Sutton Robert advisor. Thesis advisor
Palo Alto Civic Notes

City Council and other public meeting notes offer a trove of information informing a city’s history, development, and actions. Taken together, they can map a timeline of development projects and legislation. However, this longitudinal perspective is difficult to obtain unless one is actively following a project because the meeting minutes and agendas are posted as individual PDFs and, in its current form, is difficult to perform a full-text search on. If I wanted to search for the city’s recent actions with relation to Palantir or follow the development of an affordable housing project, I would either have to know in advance which city council meetings were related to the query in question or skim through the entire trove of meeting minutes to find what I am looking for. Luckily, technology provides us with a solution.

Keywords:  Department of Communication.
Journalism
Search
CivicTech
Palo Alto
California
Thesis
Advisor: Nguyen Dan
Parallel education and the reproduction of inequality [electronic resource]

Recent research has unexpectedly revealed that the largest gaps in academic performance occur in more socioeconomically advantaged communities and school districts (Reardon, Kalogrides and Shores 2017). In this dissertation, I ask: How do students become "high-performing" students in elite (public) high schools? And, how do the strategies that students use to excel academically affect students across the class spectrum? To answer these questions, I draw on a case study of a high-performing, well-resourced high school that I refer to as Willow Creek. The data come from 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork and 72 in-depth interviews with high school students and key informants, including teachers, staff, administrators, and parents. Analysis of the data reveals the mechanisms that support the stratification system that operates within the school. I show that performance is tied to access to parallel education—which I define as private educational activities (such as tutoring and counseling) that families obtain from sources outside the school and that become institutionalized via the school environment. Parallel education is a mechanism that drives the divergence in academic outcomes by class and exacerbates within-school inequality in well-resourced, high-performing public schools.

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Jiménez Tomás R. (Tomás Roberto)
Rosenfeld Michael J.
Snipp C. Matthew advisor. Thesis advisor
Passive seismic study of a magma-dominated rift [electronic resource] : the Salton Trough

In this PhD thesis I study earth's crustal and upper-mantle structure in southern California, focusing on the magmatic structure beneath Salton Trough transtensional rift basin in southernmost California. Seismic data was collected with a temporary array of seismometers deployed across the basin and its margins, and augmented with seismic data recorded on permanent and other temporary seismometer arrays throughout the western U.S.A.. I use ambient-noise tomography to create a 3D shear-velocity model of southern California's crust and upper-mantle. The new 3D model reveals previously unimaged structure beneath the San Andreas Fault, Peninsular Ranges batholith, southern Sierra Nevada batholith and the Salton Trough, with implications on the geologic and tectonic history of the region. I use shear-wave splitting of seismic waves, caused by anisotropic upper-mantle structure beneath the Salton Trough, to show evidence of a sharp rheological boundary in the upper-mantle beneath the Salton Trough region, at the southwest limit of the San Andreas Fault system, and infer the presence of upper-mantle melt-filled inclusions oriented parallel to transform motion on the San Andreas Fault.

Keywords: Geophysics.
Advisor: Klemperer Simon primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Beroza Gregory C. (Gregory Christian) advisor. Thesis advisor
Sleep Norman H. advisor. Thesis advisor