VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Essays on Finance, Accountability, and Publication Bias in the Economics of Education.

School quality exerts a significant impact on children well beyond their school-age years. High quality primary and secondary schools improve educational attainment, reduce criminal behavior, and increase labor market performance. Decades of federal and state policy efforts have sought to ensure broad access to effective schools. Two of the most consequential reform efforts of the past thirty years, school accountability and financial adequacy reforms, have been moderately successful at raising average performance on standardized tests of literacy and numeracy, yet critics contend that these gains mask serious limitations. In the pages that follow, I address salient concerns of each policy by analyzing the impact of No Child Left Behind on social emotional development and the impact of California’s recent school finance reform, the Local Control Funding Formula. I conclude with an assessment of publication bias in policy-relevant scholarship.

Advisor: Johnson, Rucker C
Who’s afraid of the Saint Venant Equations? (Everyone, so I replaced it with Machine Learning)

This thesis addresses the development of a coupled 2D Saint Venant Equation - 1D Richards equation (SVE-R) model, emulation of its output using a machine learning algo- rithm, and the application of the resulting emulations to predict storm-driven overland flow and infiltration in patchily vegetated dryland systems. The motivation for this work lies in the critical importance of runoff-runon processes in the function of dryland ecosystems: evaluating how these processes work in real or designed settings is crucial for assessing the vulnerability to desertification or the probability of success of management or restoration plans. The SVE-R equations describe the physics of runoff-runon processes, and are solved here by coupling a finite element SVE solver developed by Bradford and Katopodes [1999] to the Richards equation solver developed by Celia et al. [1990]. The coupled SVE-R model is validated against analytical solutions to the kinematic wave equations [Giraldez and Wool- hiser, 1996]. I firstly show that the hydrological outcomes of interest in dryland systems (i.e. the distribution of infiltration, the runoff ratio and peak flow velocities) were insensi- tive to the choice of a roughness closure scheme. I then develop a machine learning (ML) approach to emulate its predictions. This approach involves training random forest (RF) regressors on collections of pre-computed SVE-R model runs to predict the spatial patterns of infiltration and maximum flow velocity. The RF emulator is very accurate and is several orders of magnitude faster than the SVE-R model. To demonstrate the utility of the ML emulation approach for simulating and managing dryland ecosystems, I present two case studies. Firstly, I apply RF regression to represent within-storm processes in an ecohydro- logical model of spatial patterning of vegetation on the landscape. For the first time, I show that the modeled spatial patterns of vegetation are sensitive to storm characteristics such as duration and intensity. Secondly, I develop a web-based tool to assess plant water availabil- ity and erosion risk at hillslope scales for user-supplied vegetation patterns, which embeds random forest regressors trained on a representative library of storm and hillslope conditions. This case study demonstrates how the combination of machine learning and a web tool can make otherwise challenging predictive insights available to a broad set of potential users.

Advisor: Thompson, Sally
Fung, Inez
Nuclear translocation of RNA binding proteins links accelerated cytoplasmic mRNA decay and transcription

Alterations in global mRNA decay broadly impact upstream and downstream stages of gene expression, although signals that connect these processes are incompletely defined. Here, we used tandem mass tag labeling coupled with mass spectrometry to reveal that changing the mRNA decay landscape, as frequently occurs during viral infection, results in subcellular redistribution of RNA binding proteins. Accelerating Xrn1-dependent mRNA decay through expression of a gammaherpesviral endonuclease drove nuclear translocation of many RBPs, including poly(A) tail-associated proteins. Conversely, cells lacking Xrn1 exhibited changes in the localization or abundance of numerous factors linked to mRNA turnover. Using these data, we uncovered a new role for cytoplasmic poly(A) binding protein in repressing mammalian TATA-binding protein and RNA polymerase II transcription upon its mRNA decay-induced translocation to the nucleus./nWe identified PABPC nuclear-specific protein-protein interactions, and found a number of interactions with proteins involved in the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Two of these protein partners were required to maintain the mRNA decay-transcription feedback pathway. Furthermore, mRNA decay initiated using the decapping enzyme, D10 from vaccinia virus, revealed that this system did not depend on the process by which the accelerated mRNA decay was initiated and instead is responsive to broad changes in mRNA abundance. In addition, we found that PABPC nuclear translocation was not affected by Dis3L2. Together with the finding that PABPC nuclear accumulation alone was not sufficient to repress nascent mRNA synthesis by RNAPII, these data provide evidence that another unknown factor is required, along with PABPC, to fulfill the feedback loop./nCollectively, our results show that changes in cytoplasmic mRNA decay can directly impact protein subcellular localization, providing a mechanism to connect seemingly distal stages of gene expression.

Advisor: Glaunsinger, Britt
Discriminating Palates: Evaluation and Inequality in American Fine Dining

How are cultural fields organized? How do producers make sense of their products’ value in a cultural field informed by structures of both art and commerce? How are categorization and evaluation related in cultural fields? How do these processes relate to broader systems of social inequality, such as those based on race, class and gender? In this dissertation, I analyze 120 in-depth interviews with critically recognized chefs and 1380 Michelin Guide restaurant reviews in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area to examine the relationship between ethnoracial and gender inequality and cultural production in the context of American fine dining./nI find that the system of ethnoracial categorization that defines the boundaries between restaurants and chefs in the field of American fine dining interacts with a system of three logics of evaluation that have different meanings and relevance to the assessment of distinct categories of cuisine in the field. This differential evaluation of different categories of cultural products and cultural producers then reproduces gender and ethnoracial hierarchies of culinary, artistic, and material value. I argue that chefs and restaurant critics use the logics of (1) technique, (2) creativity, and (3) authenticity to differentially evaluate restaurants and chefs serving (1) Classic, (2) Flexible, and (3) Ethnic cuisine, reflecting and reproducing a broader system of value that disproportionately celebrates culinary products and producers associated with whiteness and masculinity and devalues those actors that are symbolically or socially connected to femininity and /or non-whiteness./nI find that Classic restaurants, that is, those restaurants serving French, Italian, and Japanese cuisine, occupy a prestigious position based on their historical association with formalized technique, culinary hegemony, and tradition. Classic restaurants are primarily and uniquely valued for their ability to replicate institutionalized techniques and shared traditions in fine dining. Restaurants and chefs serving unfamiliar Flexible cuisine types, such as “Contemporary,” American, and Californian cuisine, which lack shared meanings in the field are primarily valued for their artistic and scientific creativity, uniquely celebrated for the distinct contributions they make to the field through the production of personal, previously unknown cuisine. Finally, Ethnic restaurants are evaluated according to the logic of authenticity, which has inconsistent standards formed in relation to three reference points—(1) Classic and Flexible restaurants already recognized as legitimate in the fine dining field, (2) inexpensive, Americanized take out establishments, and (3) Ethnic home cooking. This differential system of evaluation then veils an insidious form of gender and racial bias in language focused on the technical, creative, and authentic merits of artistic and commercial products in an emerging, globalizing cultural field.

Advisor: Ray, Raka
Haveman, Heather
A Platform-Based Approach to Verification and Synthesis of Linear Temporal Logic Specifications

The design of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is challenging as it requires coordination across several domains (e.g., functional, temporal, mechanical). To cope with complexity, rarely a CPS is built from scratch. Instead, it is assembled by reusing available components and subsystems. If a component is not available, then it is made to order according to a specification which ensures its compatibility with the rest of the system./nTo achieve design goals faster while guaranteeing system safety, the correct instantiation of modules and subsystems is essential. Formal specifications, such as those expressed in Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), have the potential to drastically reduce design and implementation efforts by enabling rigorous requirement analysis and ensuring the correct composition of reusable designs. Composing formal specifications, however, is a tedious and error-prone activity, and the scalability of existing formal analysis techniques is still an issue./n/nIn this dissertation, we present a set of techniques and algorithms that leverage compositional design principles to enable faster verification and correct-by-construction, platform-based synthesis of LTL specifications. In our framework, a design is a composition of several components (which could describe both hardware and software elements) represented through their specifications, expressed as LTL assume/guarantee interfaces, or contracts. The collection of all the available contracts, i.e., a library, describes the design platform. The contracts in the library are the building blocks of different possible designs, and they are simple enough that their correctness can be easily verified, yet complete enough to guarantee the correct and safe use of the components they represent./n/nOur contribution is two-fold. On the one hand, we address the verification task: given an existing composition of contracts from the library, we want to check whether it satisfies a set of desired requirements. We improve the scalability of existing verification techniques by leveraging pre-verified relations between contracts in the library. On the other hand, we enable specification synthesis: given a (possibly incomplete) set of desired system properties, we are able to automatically generate a composition of contracts, chosen from a library, that satisfies them. We do so by devising a set of algorithms based on formal inductive synthesis, where a candidate is either accepted as correct or is used to infer new constraints and guide the synthesis process towards a solution. Additionally, we show how to increase the scalability of our approach by leveraging principles from the contract framework to decompose a synthesis problem into several independent tasks, which are simpler than the original problem. We validate our work by applying it to several industrial-relevant case studies, including the problem of verification and synthesis of a controller for the electrical power system of an aircraft.

Advisor: Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, Alberto L
The Toric Code at Finite Temperature

Alexei Kitaev's toric code is a rich model, that has birthed and stimulated the development of topological quantum computing, error correction, and field theory. It was also the first example of a quantum error correcting code that could resiliently store quantum information in certain types of noisy environments without the need for active error correction. Unfortunately, the toric code loses much of its power as a noise-resilient quantum memory at any finite temperature. Many of the problems with the toric code at finite temperature are likewise shared among its cousin stabilizer codes. These problems can be traced to the proliferation of stringlike ``defects'' in these codes at finite temperature. The aim of this thesis is then twofold./nFirst, I characterize both numerically and theoretically the failure modes of the toric code at finite temperature with fairly modest bath assumptions. I achieve this by numerically sampling the nonequilibrium dynamics of the toric code using a continuous time monte carlo algorithm. From this analysis, I was able to derive an exact expression for the low and high temperature dynamics of the toric code, as well as a regime over which the toric code is ``most'' stable to noise./nSecondly, by leveraging the results of this analysis, I construct algorithms that aim to suppress these noise channels. These algorithms are broadly separated into measurement-free and few-measurement protocols. The measurement-free algorithms are reminiscent of dynamical-decoupling pulse sequences, applied in parallel or in serial to a target stabilizer code, and are entirely unitary. I find that measurement-free algorithms can provide a constant factor increase to the lifetime of a large class of stabilizer codes at finite temperature. The few-measurement protocols are more complex, but I provide evidence that they can provide a threshold for the toric code with asymptotically fewer measurements than was previously known to be achievable.

Advisor: Whaley, Birgitta
Moore, Joel
The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño's 2666

This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole. I proceed by examining these characters in all their particularity and closely reading the novel’s key scenes, in which they meet one another, while also tracking how these characters and encounters are paradigmatic of different ways of relating. Chapter 1, “Insufferable Hierarchies,” focuses on 2666’s most bookish characters and their rage for “greatness,” exploring how literature in the novel both enlarges the moral imagination of certain characters and curdles that of others. My second chapter, “Women in the Shape of Monsters,” is centered on the novel’s least bookish stretch, the famous middle section about the murdered women of Santa Teresa. It examines how the fight waged by that section’s living women against gendered violence runs up against patriarchal power and the overwhelming burden of having to represent or avenge their murdered sisters. In “Everything in Anything,” my final chapter, I explore how the novel—itself a storehouse of miscellaneous but true information—allows its characters to form multi-generational and trans-historical bonds through the sharing of random facts and by unsystematic but assiduous reading in marginal spaces. In a brief coda, I argue that 2666’s ethics and poetics require both an openness to the possibility of change and a commitment to one’s particular way of being.

Advisor: Masiello, Francine
Atomistic Simulations of Extended Defects in Metals

In this dissertation the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of extended defects in metals are investigated using atomistic simulation methods, i.e., methods in which the behavior of individual atoms is explicitly considered. The dissertation is divided into two main applications. The first presents a study of surface steps where a theory for the thermodynamic properties of steps on faceted crystalline surfaces is introduced, leading to the development of an equation for the temperature dependence of the step free energy. The application of this new formalism is demonstrated in thermodynamic-integration (TI) calculations of the step free energy, based on Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations, considering <110> steps on the {111} surface of a classical potential model for elemental copper for a temperature range of zero up to the melting point. Calculated results for the step free energy show relatively weak temperature dependencies up to a homologous temperature of 0.6, above which the temperature dependence becomes strong and the step free energy becomes more isotropic. It is found that the step free energy remains finite up to the melting point, indicating the absence of a roughening temperature for this {111} surface facet, but the step free energy decreases by roughly fifty percent from the zero-temperature value. At high temperatures the step becomes configurationally disordered due to the presence of appreciable capillary fluctuations; these fluctuations are investigated by computing the fluctuation spectrum near the melting temperature. Step stiffnesses are derived from the fluctuation analysis and the values obtained are compared to the step free energy as obtained from the TI study. Results from the capillary-fluctuation analysis and TI calculations yield statistically significant differences that are discussed within the framework of statistical-mechanical theories for configurational contributions to step free energies. The second application of the dissertation focuses on the study of quantum effects on dislocation motion. The thermally activated motion of dislocations in alpha-iron is investigated using a simulation method that rigorously accounts for quantum effects on the dynamics of condensed-phase systems, namely the Ring-Polymer Molecular Dynamics method. Calculated results for the flow stress of 1/2 <111> screw dislocations indicate that arguments based solely on the zero-point energy of the system overestimate the observed reduction in the Peierls stress by a factor of four as they do not account for the atomic quantum dispersion, i.e., the finite size of the atomic wave function as opposed to the point-particle representation in classical mechanics.

Advisor: Asta, Mark
Bulatov, Vasily V
Energy-efficient and High-bandwidth Density Monolithic Optical Transceivers in Advanced CMOS Processes

Today's conventional cloud computing and mobile platforms have been challenged by the advent of Machine Learning (ML) and Internet of Things (IoT). The performance and diversity requirements of these applications demand the shift towards hyper-scale data centers, Exascale high-performance computing (HPC), energy-efficient edge computing, and new sensing and imaging modalities. My research goal is to design and implement large-scale and energy-efficient integrated systems that answer these technological changes by merging state-of-the-art electronics with photonics./nThis thesis developes several monolithic photonics platforms in advanced CMOS technologies that were designed as key enablers for the next-generation of integrated systems: (1) Using unmodified CMOS in 32/45nm SOI nodes places photonics next to one of the fastest transistors and enhances integrated system applications beyond the Moore-scaling, while being able to offload major communication tasks from more deeply-scaled compute and memory chips without the complications of 3D integration approaches. (2) Poly-silicon based photonics in bulk CMOS as a path for embedding photonics in the most advanced CMOS nodes (sub-10nm). We demonstrate system results using these platforms for the immediate application area of high-performance optical transceivers. We elaborate on the electronic-photonic co-optimization opportunities on the example of optical interconnect application, a 40Gb/s optical transmitter achieving the world record energy and bandwidth density. Furthermore, we explain how deep insight into details of an advanced CMOS process can leverage photonic device design, enabling new degrees of freedom in a seemingly constrained environment. Lastly, we demonstrate the first monolithic integrated photonics platform in a commercial 300mm-wafer bulk CMOS technology. We implemented the photonic system-on-chip (SoC) in this platform for in-situ device characterization and process development, and demonstrated wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical transceivers. These integrated platforms and system design methodologies can unlock new functionalities in many applications such as HPC, high-bandwidth wireless connectivity, LiDAR, bio-sensing, etc.

Advisor: Stojanovic, Vladimir
CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR RESPONSES TO MECHANICAL CUES: FROM THE EXTRACELLULAR MATRIX TO THE NUCLEUS

Mechanical signals affect virtually every fundamental single- and multi-cellular process in biology. The local responses of individual molecules to mechanical stimuli at the interface of cell with its adjacent microenvironment (extracellular matrix or material) elicit global responses at the cell and tissue scales. Understanding and manipulating the cell-material interaction can be leveraged to design biomaterials with unique characteristics tailored towards a wide variety of biological applications such as platforms that direct stem cell differentiation for tissue engineering, sensors that can record accurate electrical signals in single cells for neuroscience, and implants that are susceptible to cell adhesion for biomedical applications. In this thesis I present work characterizing the response of cells to mechanical stimuli at the single cell and single molecule scales. At the single cell scale, we provide insights into how mechanical signals such as micro- and nano-topography of metallic and metallic surfaces affect cell adhesion, both in mammalian and bacterial cells. Next we characterize the mechanical response of protein complexes involved in the transmission of mechanical signals across the cytoskeleton to the nucleus./nThe four main contributions of the work presented in this thesis are as follows: 1) We used high resolution scanning electron microscopy to characterize the cell-nanostructure interface and provide insights into the response of individual mammalian cells to nanostructures with complex geometries. 2) We provide a first look at how individual bacterial cells adhere to metallic nanostructures, which could lead to new techniques to thwart infections. 3) We proposed a novel technique to control the growth and arrangements of bacterial cell communities. This method will allow precise small-scale mechanical manipulation of bacterial cells and could be utilized for unraveling the understudied mechanisms of bacterial mechanosensitivity. 4) We performed the first molecular dynamics study on the mechanisms of force transmission to the nucleus of eukaryotic cells through protein complexes known as linkers of the nucleoskeleton and cytoskeleton (LINC complexes). We showed that LINC complexes are highly stable under tensile forces, and that the transmission of force across the complex depends highly on the unique intermolecular covalent bonds formed between the two proteins that construct the complex. Finally, we presented a model for the molecular mechanisms of LINC complex activation and regulation at the nuclear envelope.

Advisor: Mofrad, Mohammad R.K.