VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Understanding the use of geospatial disease mapping in malaria risk stratification and intervention targeting across sub-Saharan Africa

Malaria risk maps are a critical tool to assist national malaria programmes in the prioritization and targeting of their malaria control activities to maximize efficacy and equity, especially under conditions of resource constraint. The research study sets out to answer a core series of questions pertaining to the use of malaria mapping, the actors involved, the mapped outputs produced, and approaches for their improvement and knowledge translation.
The research study conducts a narrative literature review and an audit of over 100 control programme documents from 47 malaria-endemic sub-Saharan African countries to better understand the typologies of malaria risk maps, their development, their applications, and their potential value across different decision-making levels. The research study then conducts a thematic analysis of 17 qualitative, in-depth interviews held with malaria control stakeholders in Madagascar in order to identify current-state use cases, perceived utility, perceived limitations, and future-state use cases of malaria risk mapping in the country. Finally, the study evaluates the results of a modelled map workshop organized by The Demographic and Health Surveys Program and conducted with technical malaria stakeholders in Madagascar to assess methods for capacity-strengthening and knowledge translation in malaria risk mapping.
The research study finds that malaria risk maps are increasingly used in national and sub-national fora, and have perceived value across a range of use cases, including surveillance, intervention stratification, logistics, descriptive epidemiological or climatic visualizations, and predictive analyses. Further explorations of stakeholder perceptions can help to better understand the decision points and trade-offs faced by health policymakers in malaria elimination and control when considering the use of malaria risk maps.

Keywords: malaria
Advisor: Howes, R
The threat of screenshot-taking malware: analysis, detection and prevention

Among the various types of spyware, screenloggers are distinguished by their ability to capture screenshots. This gives them considerable nuisance capacity, giving rise to theft of sensitive data or, failing that, to serious invasions of the privacy of users. Several examples of attacks relying on this screen capture feature have been documented in recent years.
On desktop environments, screenshot APIs are widely used by legitimate applications that provide screen sharing, screen casting, remote control, employee control, and parental control. This makes malicious use of the screenshot functionality particularly stealthy. Existing malware detection approaches are not adapted to screenlogger detection due to the composition of their datasets and the way samples are executed.
Moreover, the available countermeasures either suffer from a lack of usability that prevents their large-scale use or have a limited effectiveness.
In this thesis, I propose a defence-in-depth approach combining prevention and detection against screenshot-taking spyware. This approach was developed after an extensive analysis of this spyware category.
Our detection model achieves an accuracy of 97.4% versus 94.3% for a standard state of the art detection model. This model was trained and tested on the first complete and representative dataset dedicated to malicious and legitimate screenshot-taking applications.
Our prevention mechanism is based on the retinal persistence property of the human visual system. Its usability was tested with a panel of 119 users.

Keywords: malware analysis
screenshot
malware detection
malware dataset
defence-in-depth
flicker fusion
screenlogger
retinal persistence
spyware
Advisor: Goldsmith, M
Happa, J
Mobility that emplaces: governance of presence in the aftermath of the Donbas war

This thesis examines displacement in the context of the war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. I argue that displacement has affected both those who left Donbas as well as those who stayed. While conventional definitions of displacement posit movement as part of the problem of displacement, I argue that for current and former residents of Donbas mobility is often a means for overcoming it.
The thesis is organised around experiences of the “mobile displaced,” that is, people who left from Donbas after 2014 but whose attempts at emplacement elsewhere were frustrated. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in multiple sites in Ukraine and Russia carried out over the course of a year, as well as a rich selection of historiographical materials, books, and films.
The thesis describes how in their quest for emplacement, the mobile displaced encountered certain displacement effects in their new places of residence produced by the governance of presence. These displacement effects were different in Ukraine and Russia: housing emerged as the most important issue for the mobile displaced in Ukraine, whereas in Russia they were mainly concerned with legalisation of their status. The fact that struggles for emplacement are articulated in relation to different issues in Ukraine and Russia shows the divergences in how these states perceive and govern the presence of people from Eastern Ukraine, as well as how they configure a person’s relationship to place and time.
Critically examining the role of mobility and immobility in producing displacement allows this thesis to enrich the literature on migration by turning the analytical gaze to mechanisms hindering emplacement rather than placing the onus of integration on the migrant. The thesis also offers an alternative take on mainstream concerns with debunking disinformation in the aftermath of the Donbas war. It examines the production of knowledge about the war, as well as the role of different ways of knowing in shaping eastern Ukrainians as particular kinds of acting subjects.

Keywords: Donbas
Ukraine
Russia
displacement
Advisor: Dzenovska, D
Burden-sharing in peace operations: quantitative studies on the global, regional, and national level

Increased demand for peacekeeping, rising resource requirements, and capacity constraints threaten to outstrip the willingness of the international community to shoulder the burden of peace operations. Not only has peacekeeping grown in size, but it has also become an increasingly complex undertaking involving a multitude of actors. This thesis addresses this challenge and asks: How does the international community share the burden of peace operations? The thesis argues that the question of peacekeeping burden-sharing emerges and requires exploration at various levels of analysis, most notably the global, regional, and national level. Three research articles explore peacekeeping burden-sharing each at one level of analysis. The first article, ‘Partnership Peacekeeping: The Division of Labour Between the United Nations and Regional Organisations’, develops and tests a framework for the division of the peacekeeping labour at the global level, specifically between the United Nations, African Union, and European Union, employing a crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis. The second article, ‘Negotiating Collective Peace: The Provision of Troops to EU Peace Operations’, examines the role of interrelationships between EU member states in the context of troop contributions to regional peace operations by means of panel data regressions on an original dataset of troop contributions to EU operations. The third article, ‘Public Attention, Elections, and Peace Operations: Democratising the Making of Peacekeeping Policy’, focuses on the national level and analyses whether countries’ peacekeeping contributions are adjusted in the run-up to elections contingent upon public attention; the analysis deploys Google search data as a measure for public attention in panel data regression models. This multi-level approach generates a comprehensive understanding of burden-sharing in peace operations and insights into how to increase its efficiency and effectiveness, with the objective to ensure that peacekeeping can succeed as the international community’s primary tool for creating and maintaining international peace and security.

Keywords: European Union
Peacekeeping
Peacebuilding
African Union
United Nations
Advisor: Ruggeri, A
Disruptive children: desegregation, student resistance, and the carceral turn in New York city schools

This thesis seeks to understand the origins, development, and consequences of the carceral turn in American public education. Specifically, it considers how and why New York City came to deploy a vast force of police officers and security personnel, install sophisticated surveillance equipment, and put into place a set of highly punitive disciplinary policies that govern student behavior. Drawing from more than 40 different archives as well as 20 original oral histories, it maintains that school policing and student discipline have historically served as tools of social control and racial dominance, emerging with the very founding of organized education in America, and expanding most rapidly and dramatically as a direct response to the prospect of desegregated schooling and the attendant rupture in American life. In the wake of this conflict, the carceral apparatus was not only linked with, but institutionalized into, the public education system. Opposition to school desegregation, panic over the issue of juvenile delinquency, and white fears of Black criminality were mutually constitutive and jointly reinforcing – coming to a head in the mid-twentieth century and continuing to build upon each other throughout the ensuing decades towards a comprehensive system in the schools of exclusion, punishment, and arrest. On the level of both individual institutions and the education system as a whole, as more Black students enrolled in schools and flipped the demographics from predominantly white to predominantly Black, city and school officials increasingly met even ordinary student problems with carceral responses. City schools instituted sweeping disciplinary policies, forged partnerships with the municipal police department, and created security forces of their own as part of a larger system of student criminalization that both reflected and exacerbated existing social and racial hierarchies, stifled student organizing, and expanded the reach and power of the carceral state.

Keywords: Education history
Student discipline
School policing
School-to-prison pipeline
Student organizing
Carceral history
History
Advisor: Tuck, S
Human nature, after all: affective realism in Russian foreign policy

Russia continues to challenge the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, perhaps even Western interpretations of a rules-based international order. Its actions have repeatedly blindsided foreign policy analysis. That is partly due to shortcomings of predominant theoretical paradigms in International Relations. To supplement prevailing perspectives, this thesis proposes the use of affect as a conceptual lens.
Affective realism combines classical realist scholarship on human nature with research in the life sciences. The resulting analytical framework outlines a process of appraisal, which generates specific affective responses and action tendencies. A didactic and probabilistic approach, affective realism is not intended to disprove competing narratives. In fact, affective science may corroborate the assumptions on which some rationalist or constructivist models are predicated.
The plausibility of the theoretical propositions and methodological approach thus developed is probed via four cases: Russia’s response to NATO intervention in the Balkans in 1999; a study of Russian attitudes towards Europe and the US between 2000 and 2008; the Russian-Georgian war of 2008; and the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Anger over the non-recognition of Russian great-power status has steadily curtailed elites’ willingness to compromise. Around 2007, the quality and intensity of their affective disposition towards the West shifted from resentment to contempt, favouring yet more assertive policies. The thesis also finds that concerns regarding analysts’ inability to distinguish between genuine and instrumental displays of affect might be overstated. What leaders experience and express publicly is often congruent or converges over time. However, affectively valenced concerns are located at different levels. References to security threats, for example, could be indicative of more deeply felt ontological anxieties or officials’ visceral fear over regime stability and their personal safety. Understanding affective dynamics, and the action tendencies they promote, can improve explanations of foreign policy in the Russian case and potentially others.

Keywords: Emotion
Russia
Realism
Foreign policy analysis
Political psychology
Advisor: Fawcett, L
MacFarlane, S
Identity, place and legitimate language: a comparative study of language attitudes among teenagers in two Irish-medium schools

This thesis explores how teenagers in two Irish-medium secondary schools see their relationship with Irish. It is based on research conducted in the school year 2017-2018, involving both participant observation and focus groups.
Ireland’s language policy has long distinguished between ‘Gaeltacht’ areas, where Irish remains the main community language, and the rest of the country, where English is the community language. Research suggests a sharp decline in the level of use of Irish among young people in Gaeltacht areas (young ‘Gaeltacht speakers’) and there has been an increasing focus in research and policy on the role of Irish-speakers outside the Gaeltacht (‘new speakers’). ‘New speakers’ in many contexts have historically been neglected in both policy and research, but have become increasingly prominent in both in recent years. They are more likely to be socioeconomically and culturally advantaged than ‘traditional speakers’.
This is the first comparative qualitative study of language attitudes among new Irish-speakers and Gaeltacht Irish-speakers. It illustrates both the gap between the two groups in terms of attitudes and practices and how they are affected differently by policy. For Gaeltacht participants, the language is integral to local identity and family relationships, meaning that even those who want to cannot avoid the language entirely. In contrast, for most new speaker participants, Irish is confined to school. Both groups prize authenticity but define it very differently. This difference is reflected in their language practices, which means interactions between new and Gaeltacht speakers, in the accounts of participants, can be fraught. The fact that policy does not differentiate between the two groups adds to these tensions, particularly for Gaeltacht participants, who are torn between their local dialect and the standard variety valued in the education system.
Unlike much research on language revitalisation this study focuses on the views of young people as stakeholders. Education is the focus of many language revitalisation movements and consequently young people, as future speakers, are cast either as saviours of the language or, more often, as obstacles to its revitalisation, with little opportunity to shape the policy that affects them. The research reported here shows how they struggle with the moral weight attached to their language practices and with the contradictory ideologies passed down to them by those who shape language policy.

Keywords: Gaeilge
new speakers
traditional speakers
Celtic languages
language revitalisation
Irish
teenagers
minority languages
Advisor: Cameron, D
Interpretable causal systems: interpretability and causality in machine learning for human and nonhuman decision-making

In order to integrate machine learning into human decision-making in a useful way, we must trust machine learning systems enough in our reasoning processes. To evaluate a system’s trustworthiness, humans naturally seek interpretable causal systems to understand outcomes, make decisions, and integrate feedback. This thesis presents four explorations into interpretable causal systems, progressing from associational interpretability up the “Ladder of Causation” to counterfactual representation. In the first contribution, I introduce a Bayesian nonparametric method for calculating the expected value and volatility of gradients in the data; this helps inform further experiments for deriving causal effects and interpreting changes when faced with decision-making scenarios. In the second, I show how latent expert knowledge can be collected to produce an interpretable model with policy-relevant consequences. In the third, I interpret time series treatment effect inference as a problem naturally handled by multitask Gaussian processes, addressing several shortcomings in a popular approach. In the fourth, I consider twin networks, a novel but understudied method of representing counterfactual questions; I show that one can sometimes improve on computational cost, error, and insight by representing counterfactual problems as twin networks. I then introduce a prototype probabilistic programming engine that natively leverages the efficiencies gained from twin networks. I close by considering the future of how interpretability and causality might integrate into machine learning-driven decision-making and speculate that causality is a key component in achieving efficient, generalisable intelligence in a variety of applications.

Keywords: interpretability
machine learning
artificial intelligence
decision-making
causality
Advisor: Osborne, M
Mitigating the cyber security skills shortage: The influence of national skills competitions on cyber security interest

There is a shortage of cyber security professionals in the current labour market, which is detrimental to countries' economic development and national security. Governments have attempted to deal with this issue by designing policies targeting both the supply and demand of cyber security skills. Among these policies, national cyber security skills competitions (NCSSCs) have been widely implemented to increase the pipeline of students entering the cyber security labour market. However, scientific studies on these interventions are scarce, and many questions are still unanswered: How do participants develop an interest in cyber security before joining a NCSSC? Do NCSSCs influence participants' interest in cyber security as a topic and as a career? What factors contribute the most to influence their interest? By answering these questions, this thesis aims to discuss the role of national skills competitions as a public policy to mitigate the lack of cyber security workers.
This research used the Italian NCSSC, the CyberChallenge.IT (CCIT), as a case study as it is the skills competition in Europe that provides cyber security training to the largest number of participants. This research employed a before and after design, collecting data from non-randomised comparison groups. Data were gathered following a mixed-method approach: quantitative data were collected through two online surveys and qualitative data through 50 interviews with competition participants.
This study found that CCIT students became interested in cyber security through a mix of “triggers,” most notably curiosity, formal and informal coursework, and the CCIT itself. Moreover, the CCIT increased interest in both cyber security as a topic and as a career. However, participants differentiated between the two, suggesting that theory should further investigate the relationship between interest development and vocational interest. Finally, this research recommends going beyond the concept of interest to fully appreciate NCSSCs’ impact, particularly by including other relevant outcome variables, such as educational and career planning, key choices, and competing interests.
This thesis argues that NCSSCs organized and implemented like the CCIT could be a valuable solution to mitigate the lack of cyber security professionals. However, on its own, a skills competition programme is unlikely to achieve what a concert of policies might in dealing with the shortage. As the shortage issue has several roots, there are limits to what a NCSSC alone can do. However, it would lay a strong foundation for other policies to further steer students into the cyber security sector.
This thesis contributes to important debates such as interest theory, the relationship between skills competitions and interest, the design and implementation of NCSSCs and ultimately cyber security education and skills policy.

Keywords: Interest
cyber security
cyber security skills shortage
cyber security skills competitions
Advisor: Martin, A
Keep, E
Investigating the role of GWAS-identified NCX3 and Gas7 in pain

This thesis reports the results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of experimental pain in healthy volunteers and focuses on the validation of the identified genes as targets for pain research. We found a significant association between SLC8A3 encoding the sodium-calcium exchanger type-3 (NCX3) and wind-up ratio; as well as an association between Gas7 (growth arrest specific protein 7) and secondary punctate hyperalgesia after mustard oil. We were able to validate the role of both of these genes in pain processing through behavioural tests in mice lacking either NCX3 or Gas7. We found increased response to the second phase of the formalin test in mice with an NCX3 genetic deletion. Using in vitro calcium imaging and in vivo electrophysiology in the same mouse line, we observed increased intracellular calcium following stimulation, slowed calcium clearance and increased wind-up which could be evoked at lower frequencies. On the other hand, mice with a Gas7 genetic ablation showed decreased pain behaviour after capsaicin treatment. We also performed in vivo electrophysiology and dorsal horn dendritic spine analysis, searching for functional and structural mechanisms linked to our behavioural results. While this work is still on-going, our attempt to back-translate GWAS results, has revealed and validated two important and novel pain genes, one of which, NCX3, showed a distinct mechanism of action in the spinal dorsal horn.

Keywords: pain
Central sensitisation
Gas7
NCX3
Advisor: Bennett, D
Schmid, A