VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Cellular organization in Agrobacterium tumefaciens

Bacterial cell structures are macromolecular features found among all types bacteria. They often serve essential or specialized functions, and are important contributors to the widespread diversity and success of bacteria. I have focused my research on the formation and localization of two of these structures in the plant pathogen Agrobacterium tumefaciens: the type IV secretion system (T4SS) and the bacterial cell envelope./nA. tumefaciens is an Alphaproteobacterium uniquely capable of genetically transforming plant host cells during its infection process. DNA and protein substrates are transferred into plant cells via the T4SS, which forms multiple complexes around the bacterial circumference. To understand the mechanisms driving T4SS positioning, I assessed their spatial distribution by quantitative analysis and modeling. My findings indicate that these secretion complexes localize in a non-random periodic pattern along the cell perimeter. These results, along with additional plant infection studies, suggest this spatial organization serves to promote efficient delivery of substrates into host cells/nA potential mechanism behind this periodic arrangement is the unipolar cell growth recently described for A. tumefaciens. To better understand this unusual growth mechanism, I carefully scrutinized growing cells, nascent peptidoglycan, and peptidoglycan synthesis components by electron and fluorescence microscopy. My results indicate that the unipolar growth process is surprisingly dynamic, multi-dimensional, and involves both novel and familiar components. These findings thus represent a significant departure from the canonical growth mechanism of E. coli and other well-studied bacilli.

Advisor: Zambryski, Patricia C
Formal Verification and Synthesis for Quality-of-Service in On-Chip Networks

Quality-of-service (QoS) in on-chip communication networks has a tremendous impact on overall system performance in today's era of ever-increasing core counts. Yet, Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) are still designed and analyzed using RTL simulation, or analysis of highly abstracted models. The formal techniques that are used in core components do not find use in QoS verification due to the scale of the problems of interest, such as verifying latency bounds of hundreds of cycles./nThis dissertation presents my recent work toward leveraging formal methods for NoC design and QoS verification. In particular, it addresses the problems of (1) verifying end-to-end latency bounds in a mesh network using abstraction; (2) scalable latency verification using compositional inductive proofs; and (3) optimal buffer sizing based on bounded model checking.

Advisor: Seshia, Sanjit A
Protecting User Privacy in Remotely Managed Applications

This thesis presents an end-to-end system architecture for online services to provide it's users with a ”privacy guarantee”. The privacy guarantee as described in this thesis relates to the technological enforcement of the user's privacy policies by these online applications that are otherwise untrusted by the user./nApplications on the Internet are complex in that they integrate different types of functionalities into a consistent interface for the user. This thesis categorizes these functionalities into three generic components – a learning module that operates on the data from multiple users to gather higher level trends and aggregates, a data storage and transformation module that provides the core functionality of data presentation and finally a client-side component that interacts with the cloud-side functionalities and is responsible for sourcing input from the user and presenting them on the user's device in a secure fashion./nThis thesis looks at the privacy risks introduced by each of these components and describes a ”trusted system” that can be used by these online services to prove that the user specified privacy policies are enforced. The system consists of multiple independently developed solutions – Gupt, Rubicon, Bubbles and MobAds. These solutions work at tandem with each other to provide an end-to-end privacy perspective./nWhile privacy policies and EULAs have largely been enforced in the realm of legal proceedings, this prototype implementation of an end-to-end privacy enforcement architecture demonstrates that it is both feasible and practical to enforce user privacy policies within the system.

Advisor: Culler, David E
Toward Healthy and Successful Aging: Intelligent Home Care Environments for the Elderly

Due to increases in chronic diseases, hospital costs, and aging populations, home care has become a growing worldwide trend in elder care. This research proposes Intelligent Home Care Environment (IHCE) as a solution that can assist the elderly with physical and cognitive functioning, while reducing costs and avoiding the social and cultural problems associated with current solutions./nIn order to research the interrelationship between the elderly and their physical environments in home care, this study starts with ecological models (Satariano, 2006) of human-environment relationships and the disablement model (Verbrugge & Jette, 1994) that is used in the epidemiology of aging and gerontology. Then, Acupuncture Theory (M.-T. Chen, 2000; Zhang & Rose, 2001) is employed as a metaphor/model for formulating a Dynamic Multi-Agent System (DMAS) that can dynamically respond to ever-changing events in the environment; this is a way to design the physical environment as a "living ecology". Finally, to consider how the elderly are assisted in home care from a social and cultural perspective, quantitative and qualitative case studies describe how personal and cultural tastes affect the user's physical and cognitive functioning. The Healthy Aging Network Study provides the representative samples for system testing and evaluation./nThe objectives of the IHCE are to assist the elderly through the optimization of safety, adaptability, and resource efficiency. From the viewpoint of gerontology, successful aging requires three attributes: 1) Low risk of disease and disease-related disability, 2) High mental and physical function, and 3) Active engagement with life (especially socially engaged) (Rowe & Kahn, 1997). With the assistance of IHCE, the elderly may live more independently, have higher self-confidence, and enjoy successful, well-balanced, and healthy aging.

Advisor: Kalay, Yehuda E.
Contested Identities: Nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (1954-1963)

This dissertation presents the first full-length study of anticommunist nationalism in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, 1954-1975, or South Vietnam). Specifically, it focuses on state nationalism during the rule of Ngo Dinh Diem (1954-1963). Conventional research depicts the Vietnam War (1954-1975) as a conflict between foreign intervention and indigenous nationalism, but this interpretation conflates Vietnamese communism with Vietnamese nationalism and dismisses the possibility of nationalism in the southern Republic. Using archival and published sources from the RVN, this study demonstrates that the southern regime possessed a dynamic nationalist culture and argues that the war was part of a much longer struggle between communist and anticommunist nationalists. To emphasize the plural and factional character of nationalism in partitioned Vietnam, the study proposes the concept of contested nationalism as an alternative framework for understanding the war.

Advisor: Zinoman, Peter
Energy Efficient Digital Logic Using Nanoscale Magnetic Devices

Increasing demand for information processing in the last 50 years has been largely satisfied by the steadily declining price and improving performance of microelectronic devices. Much of this progress has been made by aggressively scaling the size of semiconductor transistors and metal interconnects that microprocessors are built from. As devices shrink to the size regime in which quantum effects pose significant challenges, new physics may be required in order to continue historical scaling trends. A variety of new devices and physics are currently under investigation throughout the scientific and engineering community to meet these challenges./nOne of the more drastic proposals on the table is to replace the electronic components of information processors with magnetic components. Magnetic components are already commonplace in computers for their information storage capability. Unlike most electronic devices, magnetic materials can store data in the absence of a power supply. Today's magnetic hard disk drives can routinely hold billions of bits of information and are in widespread commercial use. Their ability to function without a constant power source hints at an intrinsic energy efficiency. The question we investigate in this dissertation is whether or not this advantage can be extended from information storage to the notoriously energy intensive task of information processing./nSeveral proof-of-concept magnetic logic devices were proposed and tested in the past decade. In this dissertation, we build on the prior work by answering fundamental questions about how magnetic devices achieve such high energy efficiency and how they can best function in digital logic applications. The results of this analysis are used to suggest and test improvements to nanomagnetic computing devices. Two of our results are seen as especially important to the field of nanomagnetic computing: (1) we show that it is possible to operate nanomagnetic computers at the fundamental thermodyanimic limits of computation and (2) we develop a nanomagnet with a unique shape that is engineered to significantly improve the reliability of nanomagnetic logic.

Advisor: Bokor, Jeffrey
Experiments in Participatory Urbanism: Reform and Autogestión as Emerging Forms of Urban Activism in Barcelona

This project is an attempt to recuperate citizen participation in urban design and planning from the top-down attitudes that make them less and less relevant to informing the complex, dynamic ways that public space is actually produced. It critiques the status quo modes of practice and conceives of urban activism as reactions against that system, reactions that follow particular dispositions between preservation of the status quo to revolt. It focuses on two modalities of urban activism that hold promise for transformation--reform activism and autogestión. The dissertation specifically examines experiments in participatory urbanism in Barcelona, through which urban activists engage with institutions, organizations, and residents to either reform existing systems or to build alternative systems that are semi-autonomous (autogestionado). Using archival and ethnographic methods, this study offers insights on emerging activist roles that designers and urbanists are assuming in an effort to give citizens more local control over urban space. Understanding these new roles is important not only for aspiring urban activists but also to officials and other professionals who likewise must negotiate the dynamic terrain between institutions, professionals and publics.

Advisor: Mozingo, Louise A
Multichroic Bolometric Detector Architecture for Cosmic Microwave Background Polarimetry Experiments

Characterization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) B-mode polarization signal will test models of inflationary cosmology, as well as constrain the sum of the neutrino masses and other cosmological parameters. The low intensity of the B-mode signal combined with the need to remove polarized galactic foregrounds requires a sensitive millimeter receiver and effective methods of foreground removal. Current bolometric detector technology is reaching the sensitivity limit set by the CMB photon noise. Thus, we need to increase the optical throughput to increase an experiment's sensitivity. To increase the throughput without increasing the focal plane size, we can increase the frequency coverage of each pixel. Increased frequency coverage per pixel has additional advantage that we can split the signal into frequency bands to obtain spectral information. The detection of multiple frequency bands allows for removal of the polarized foreground emission from synchrotron radiation and thermal dust emission, by utilizing its spectral dependence. Traditionally, spectral information has been captured with a multi-chroic focal plane consisting of a heterogeneous mix of single-color pixels. To maximize the efficiency of the focal plane area, we developed a multi-chroic pixel. This increases the number of pixels per frequency with same focal plane area./nWe developed multi-chroic antenna-coupled transition edge sensor (TES) detector array for the CMB polarimetry. In each pixel, a silicon lens-coupled dual polarized sinuous antenna collects light over a two-octave frequency band. The antenna couples the broadband millimeter wave signal into microstrip transmission lines, and on-chip filter banks split the broadband signal into several frequency bands. Separate TES bolometers detect the power in each frequency band and linear polarization. We will describe the design and performance of these devices and present optical data taken with prototype pixels and detector arrays. Our measurements show beams with percent level ellipticity, percent level cross-polarization leakage, and partitioned bands using banks of two and three filters. We will also describe the development of broadband anti-reflection coatings for the high dielectric constant lens. The broadband anti-reflection coating has approximately 100% bandwidth and no detectable loss at cryogenic temperature./nWe will describe a next generation CMB polarimetry experiment, the POLARBEAR-2, in detail. The POLARBEAR-2 would have focal planes with kilo-pixel of these detectors to achieve high sensitivity. We'll also introduce proposed experiments that would use multi-chroic detector array we developed in this work. We'll conclude by listing out suggestions for future multichroic detector development.

Advisor: Lee, Adrian T
Organizing Community: Commonwealth Citizens and Social Activism in Britain, 1948-1982

This dissertation studies the intersection of social democracy and decolonization in postwar Britain. By analyzing the formation of local voluntary councils to integrate Commonwealth migrants into British society, I demonstrate that welfare was not only a national formation, but a local and an imperial one. Commonwealth Citizen, a legal category created in 1948, extended to all in the empire and Commonwealth, and entitled those citizens to migrate freely to Britain, to seek employment and services as equals with native-born white Britons. In the face of discrimination and hostility towards these citizens, social workers and Commonwealth Citizens fought for equal access to state services, and sought to explain Commonwealth migrants to British society and vice versa. In an effort to secure Commonwealth Citizens' social rights, social services turned to cultural essentialism to explain migrants. Commonwealth Citizens likewise claimed the authority to speak for themselves on the basis of their distinctive culture, and rejected the ability of social work professionals to adequately represent their claims. These tensions came to a head in the 1970s, particularly after the British Government's sponsorship of these efforts to manage diversity. From a variety of perspectives, critiques of community relations undermined the singular social democratic community organized around a citizens' social rights. This led to a new, unstable consensus around the idea of a multicultural Britain in the early 1980s, which shaped the forms of participation of ethnic minorities within the nation./nAs this dissertation shows, the dream of collective security always involved the negotiation of community, in local, national, imperial and global terms. To Commonwealth Citizens and their allies, social democracy was always a question of standing, of identity, and equality in the community. Achieving this vision of community involved a reckoning with the imperial past and its continuing legacies.

Advisor: Vernon, James
The Influence of Explicit Racial Cues on Candidate Evaluation

Since Barack Obama's presidential campaign of 2008, media outlets have changed how race is covered and framed during political campaigns. In the so-called "post-racial" era of American politics when race is supposed to matter less, we are still very much attuned to stories that are framed by racial conflict. When the media wraps a "racial mode of interpretation" around a conflict between two candidates, there are potential electoral penalties involved for either a white or black candidate who becomes entangled in such a controversy./nThis project describes this process and provides empirical evidence that individuals' political judgments of candidates can be changed when exposed to such framing. Through a series of three survey experiments that simulate the effect of race-salient media coverage on voters, I find that there are statistically significant electoral penalties--in some cases, more than 10 percentage points--when respondents learn new information about a candidate that either assigns blame for a "race play" or connects him and his opponent to racial controversy. There is also evidence that the media plays a significant role in assigning blame for playing the race card. More respondents were willing to assign blame to a particular candidate when they read news stories in which a media analyst blamed that candidate./nWhile past literature has focused on racial priming processes that activate white resentment through implicit or explicit cues in campaign ads, this research demonstrates that there may be an important learning process that has been overlooked. Media coverage with an explicit racial mode of interpretation may activate a broader backlash effect among respondents regardless of their racial resentment scores.

Advisor: Citrin, Jack
Pushing the Boundaries: Organized Interests and the Expansion of Homeownership in the United States

This dissertation examines how public private social programs expand to incorporate new groups of citizens over time. I argue that several core features of public private provision, including its requirements for market information and technical expertise, the investment and risks that private providers are often asked to take on, and the state's role in shaping and then backing boundaries to access, give rise to political conflicts between providers, excluded citizens, bureaucrats, and policymakers around issues of access. Examining the development of government homeownership policies and related financial regulations over the twentieth century, I show that groups at the boundaries of inclusion in and exclusion from public private programs - including veterans, African Americans, and women - recognized their exclusion as being generated, in part, by the state and mobilized to redraw the boundaries that had prevented them from accessing homeownership on equal terms as other citizens. In each of these cases, advocacy groups pressed for greater inclusion by appealing to private providers' profit motives, by threatening businesses' position as providers of government-backed benefits, and by contesting the legitimacy of state agencies that sanctioned their members' exclusion. A comparison with the expansion of access to homeownership down the income scale highlights the different political dynamics underlying the expansion of access to groups who are farther from the margins and have a weaker organizational support base from which to draw. Contrary to accounts of the public private welfare state that stress public inattention and business dominance, I show that the public private welfare state can and does generate intense political conflicts between providers, outsiders, and bureaucrats over its terms of access.

Advisor: Pierson, Paul
Ziegler, J. Nicholas
Pride, Meritocracy, and Social Dominance Orientation

Hierarchies emerge across all human societies, resulting in some individuals holding more resources than others. Pride is a critical emotion that signals one's status in the hierarchy to the self and others. We propose that pride is also related to the rationale individuals hold for the existence of hierarchies. Different aspects of pride may underlie the explanations people use for why hierarchies exist and the criteria upon which to judge others' positions within the hierarchy. The current set of studies explore the relationship between two facets of pride and two attitudes related to hierarchy - a preference for the merit principle (PMP), which posits that resources should be distributed based on accomplishment and performance, and social dominance orientation (SDO), which posits that some groups of people are innately superior to others. Study 1 suggests that high trait levels of alpha pride, an emotion stemming from the belief that one's success is due to stable, uncontrollable factors, are associated with high SDO and low PMP. High trait levels of beta pride, an emotion stemming from the belief that one's success is due to unstable, controllable factors, are unassociated with SDO, but related to high PMP. These associations remain after controlling for alternative explanatory variables including entity beliefs, positive affect, and impression management. Study 2 manipulates experiences of alpha and beta pride in order to examine downstream effects on hierarchy-maintaining attitudes. The results of Study 2 indicate that while alpha pride is associated with increased SDO and beta pride is associated with decreased SDO, both facets of pride at the state level are associated with increased PMP. In order to begin addressing the mechanism underlying the associations between different facets of pride and hierarchy-maintaining attitudes, Study 3 manipulates attributions for failure. Results lend some evidence that the association can be attributed to motivated reasoning and a desire to preserve one's elevated status.

Advisor: Keltner, Dacher
Advanced Penning-type ion source development and passive beam focusing techniques for an associated particle imaging neutron generator

The use of accelerator-based neutron generators for non-destructive imaging and analysis in commercial and security applications is continuously under development, with improvements to available systems and combinations of available techniques revealing new capabilities for real-time elemental and isotopic analysis. The recent application of associated particle imaging (API) techniques for time- and directionally-tagged neutrons to induced fission and transmission imaging methods demonstrates such capabilities in the characterization of fissile material configurations and greatly benefits from improvements to existing neutron generator systems. Increased neutron yields and improved spatial resolution can enhance the capabilities of imaging methods utilizing the API technique. The work presented in this dissertation focused on the development of components for use within an API neutron generator with enhanced system spatial resolution. The major focus areas were the ion source development for plasma generation, and passive ion beam focusing techniques for the small ion beam widths necessary for the enhanced spatial resolution. The ion source development focused on exploring methods for improvement of Penning-type ion sources that are used in conventional API neutron generator systems, while the passive beam focusing techniques explored both ion beam collimation and ion guiding with tapered dielectric capillaries for reduced beam widths at the neutron production target.

Advisor: Leung, Ka-Ngo