VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The People's Champ?: Legal Aid from Slavery to Mass Incarceration

This dissertation project explores the historical development of legal aid--a woefully underexplored topic in the deluge of scholarship on criminal justice and social welfare. Most literature tracks the beginning of legal aid to the 1876 development of the Deutscher Rechts-Schutz Verein (German Legal Aid Society) in New York City. The Society was designed to protect German immigrants from unscrupulous employers, landlords, and loan sharks. It evolved into the New York Legal Aid Society in 1886 and provided a template for cities across the country. Standard treatments of legal aid either remain mum on the issues of race and ethnicity or suggest that legal aid offices provided services to individuals irrespective of social identity./nMy project uses a variety of sources to reconsider the historiography on legal aid. By identifying a variety of unacknowledged legal aid institutions--from the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society of the antebellum era to the ethnic mutual aid societies of the Progressive Era--my project demonstrates how legal aid is not just about class, as common orthodoxy suggests, but is deeply woven in the social divisions of race, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship. This revised interpretation of legal history challenges assumptions about public defenders and drives the theoretical contributions of my project./nThe People's Champ advances the theoretical terrain by looking at indigent defense as a crucial, but underappreciated component of the welfare state. Like welfare, criminal legal aid often entails a lukewarm commitment to social justice by the federal government that establishes entitlements to services while devolving responsibility to the local and state level, which results in wildly different expressions of social inequality. I argue that indigent defense has always been and continues to be animated by competing interests and motivations that include: serious investments in egalitarianism and the rule of law; intraprofessional and societal contestation around lawyers' ethical obligations to the poor; the pesky persistence of racialized, classed, and gendered social control; the political economy of punishment; and efforts to create the symbolic appearance of justice in order to legitimate the legal system. I also explicate the importance of ethical motivations that cross the conservative-liberal divide, the role of fiscal austerity, and the populist ambivalence toward the rights of individuals accused of crimes./nSince the government has the power to prosecute and punish, and because most trials between the state and the average defendant are inherently unequal, indigent defense is an important index of how the government and the legal profession manage their ethical responsibilities for the criminally accused. Taken as whole, I argue that the historical and contemporary study of public defenders offers critical insights into social welfare policy, the ebb and flow of penal changes, and mass incarceration.

Advisor: Henry, Charles P.
Quantum Bayesian networks with applications to games displaying Parrondo's paradox

Bayesian networks and their accompanying graphical models are widely used for prediction and analysis across many disciplines. We will reformulate these in terms of linear maps. This reformulation will suggest a natural extension, which we will show is equivalent to standard textbook quantum mechanics. Therefore, this extension will be termed "quantum". However, the term "quantum" should not be taken to imply this extension is necessarily only of utility in situations traditionally thought of as in the domain of quantum mechanics. In principle, it may be employed in any modelling situation, say forecasting the weather or the stock market--it is up to experiment to determine if this extension is useful in practice. Even restricting to the domain of quantum mechanics, with this new formulation the advantages of Bayesian networks can be maintained for models incorporating quantum and mixed classical-quantum behavior. The use of these will be illustrated by various basic examples./nParrondo's paradox refers to the situation where two, multi-round games with a fixed winning criteria, both with probability greater than one-half for one player to win, are combined. Using a possibly biased coin to determine the rule to employ for each round, paradoxically, the previously losing player now wins the combined game with probabilitygreater than one-half. Using the extended Bayesian networks, we will formulate and analyze classical observed, classical hidden, and quantum versions of a game that displays this paradox, finding bounds for the discrepancy from naive expectations for the occurrence of the paradox. A quantum paradox inspired by Parrondo's paradox will also be analyzed. We will prove a bound for the discrepancy from naive expectations for this paradox as well. Games involving quantum walks that achieve this bound will be presented.

Advisor: Grunbaum, Francis A
Low Dimensional Materials for Next Generation Electronics

Ever since the invention of the transistor, aggressive channel length scaling has been pursued to achieve higher performance and greater packing density. In order to preserve gate control at short channel lengths, the transistor channel has evolved from bulk to low dimensional substrates, such as 2D thin films and 1D nanowires. For scaling to continue, it is vital that we understand the processing and physics of low dimensional materials./nChapter 2 focuses on quasi-2D ultrathin body InAsSb-on-insulator n-FETs. III-V materials offer high mobilities for excellent on-state currents, and by using a thin film platform we could potentially obtain good off-state characteristics. Previously we have demonstrated high performance InAs-on-insulator n-FETs. In this study we implement InAsSb transistors on SiO2 and achieve a ~2x enhancement in effective mobility over analogous InAs devices. Top-gated devices are demonstrated with an ION/IOFF of 102-103 and an intrinsic conductance of ~0.56 mS/μm./n1D InAs nanowire (NW) n-FETs are explored in chapter 3. In particular, the nanowire transistors are used to study ballistic transport, the theoretical current density upper limit. We experimentally observe ~ 60nm channel length devices reaching ~80% of the ballistic limit. Length dependent studies on the same nanowire are used to extract a mean free path of ~150nm for the 1st and 2nd electron subbands. We find the mean free path to be independent of temperature, suggesting that surface roughness scattering is the dominant scattering mechanism./nChapter 4 explores 2D transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) thin films. TMDC thin films offer the physical limit of scaling, and ohmic contacts to its conduction and valence bands are required for it to realize low power complementary logic. Previous studies show that elemental metal energy levels are pinned near the conduction band of TMDCs and do not offer effective hole injection. To address this we explore a high work function transition metal oxide, substoichiometric molybdenum trioxide (MoOx, x<3), as a hole injection layer to MoS2 and WSe2. MoS2 diodes and p-FETs are demonstrated with MoOx contacts. WSe2 p-FETs with MoOx contacts show a ~10x on-current improvement over devices with Pd contacts./nIn chapter 5 we present heterojunction diodes formed by thin films of InAs and WSe2. In traditional epitaxial heterojunctions, the number of possible material combinations are limited by lattice constraints. In this study we overcome this restraint by transferring one layer upon another to form a heterojunction. Specifically, InAs/WSe2 heterojunction diodes are fabricated and measured. A forward/reverse current ratio >106, reverse bias current <10-12μm2, and ideality factor of 1.1 are observed.

Advisor: Javey, Ali
Sensitivity of a Multi-view Bremsstrahlung Scanning Technique for Radiography of Intermodal Cargo Containers to Identify Fisssionable Materials

Rapid scanning of intermodal cargo containers for clandestine fissionable material is a security concern of the United States government. This issue has been investigated over the past ten years with limited success. This dissertation builds on previous simulation work to investigate the limits of a multi-view scanning technique to determine the linear attenuation coefficients of small high-Z objects hidden within cargo containers. Monte Carlo modeling was used to estimate the uncertainties in the measurement, the false negative rates, and the false positive rates, as well as the dose that a person inside the container might receive. It was found that bremsstrahlung beams with 6 and 9 MeV endpoint energies provide sufficient penetration through the cargo. With an applied energy threshold of 2-3 MeV and a correction for the intensity due to singly-scattered photons, the effective linear attenuation coefficient could be determined for uranium spheres as small at 1.5 cm radius with an estimated dose of 10-40 mad and an estimated 1% false negative rate.

Advisor: Cerny, Joseph
Prussin, Stanley G
Optimizing Resource Allocations for Dynamic Interactive Applications

Modern computing systems are under intense pressure to provide guaranteed responsiveness to their workloads. Ideally, applications with strict performance requirements should be given just enough resources to meet these requirements consistently, without unnecessarily siphoning resources from other applications. However, executing multiple parallel, real-time applications while satisfying response time requirements is a complex optimization problem and traditionally operating systems have provided little support to provide QoS to applications. As a result, client, cloud, and embedded systems have all resorted to over-provisioning and isolating applications to guarantee responsiveness. Instead, we present PACORA, a resource allocation framework designed to provide responsiveness guarantees to a simultaneous mix of high-throughput parallel, interactive, and real-time applications in an efficient, scalable manner. By measuring application behavior directly and using convex optimization techniques, PACORA is able to understand the resource requirements of applications and perform near-optimal resource allocation---2% from the best allocation in 1.4ms while only requiring a few hundred bytes of storage per application.

Advisor: Asanovic, Krste
Patterson, David
Language Support for Loosely Consistent Distributed Programming

Driven by the widespread adoption of both cloud computing and mobile devices,/ndistributed computing is increasingly commonplace. As a result, a growing/nproportion of developers must tackle the complexity of distributed/nprogramming---that is, they must ensure correct application behavior in the/nface of asynchrony, concurrency, and partial failure./nTo help address these difficulties, developers have traditionally relied upon/nsystem infrastructure that provides strong consistency guarantees/n(e.g., consensus protocols and distributed transactions). These mechanisms/nhide much of the complexity of distributed computing---for example, by/nallowing programmers to assume that all nodes observe the same set of events/nin the same order. Unfortunately, providing such strong guarantees becomes/nincreasingly expensive as the scale of the system grows, resulting in/navailability and latency costs that are unacceptable for many modern/napplications./nHence, many developers have explored building applications that only require/nloose consistency guarantees---for example, storage systems that only/nguarantee that all replicas eventually converge to the same state, meaning/nthat a replica might exhibit an arbitrary state at any particular/ntime. Adopting loose consistency involves making a well-known tradeoff:/ndevelopers can avoid paying the latency and availability costs incurred by/nmechanisms for achieving strong consistency, but in exchange they must deal/nwith the full complexity of distributed computing. As a result, achieving/ncorrect application behavior in this environment is very difficult./nThis thesis explores how to aid developers of loosely consistent applications/nby providing programming language support for the difficulties they/nface. The language level is a natural place to tackle this problem: because/ndevelopers that use loose consistency have fewer system facilities that they/ncan depend on, consistency concerns are naturally pushed into application/nlogic. In part, our goal has been to recognize, formalize, and automate/napplication-level consistency patterns./nWe describe three language variants that each tackle a different challenge in/ndistributed programming. Each variant is a modification of Bloom, a/ndeclarative language for distributed programming we have developed at UC/nBerkeley. The first variant of Bloom, BloomL, enables/ndeterministic distributed programming without the need for distributed/ncoordination. Second, Edelweiss allows distributed storage reclamation/nprotocols to be generated in a safe and automatic fashion. Finally,/nBloomPO adds sophisticated ordering constraints that/nwe use to develop a declarative, high-level implementation of concurrent/nediting, a particularly difficult class of loosely consistent programs.

Advisor: Hellerstein, Joseph M
Nuclear Structure Measurements of Fermium-254 and Advances in Target Production Methodologies

The Berkeley Gas-filled Separator (BGS) has been upgraded with a new gas control system. It allows for accurate control of hydrogen and helium gas mixtures. This greatly increases the capabilities of the separator by reducing background signals in the focal plane detector for asymmetric nuclear reactions. It has also been shown that gas mixtures can be used to focus the desired reaction products into a smaller area, thereby increasing the experimental efficiency./nA new electrodeposition cell has been developed to produce metal oxide targets for experiments at the BGS. The new cell has been characterized and was used to produce americium targets for the production of element 115 in the reaction 243Am(48Ca,3n)288115. Additionally, a new method of producing targets for nuclear reactions was explored. A procedure for producing targets via Polymer Assisted Deposition (PAD) was developed and targets produced via this method were tested using the nuclear reaction 208Pb(40Ar,4n)244Fm to determine their in-beam performance. It was determined that the silicon nitride backings used in this procedure are not feasible due to their crystal structures, and alternative backing materials have been tested and proposed.par/nA previously unknown level in 254Fm has been identified at 985.7 keV utilizing a newly developed low background coincident apparatus. 254Fm was produced in the reaction 208Pb(48Ca,2n)254No. Reaction products were guided to the two-clover low background detector setup via a recoil transfer chamber. The new level has been assigned a spin of 2- and has tentatively been identified as the octupole vibration in 254Fm. Transporting evaporation residues to a two-clover, low background detector setup can effectively be used to perform gamma-spectroscopy measurements of nuclei that are not accessible by current common methodologies. This technique provides an excellent addition to previously available tools such as in-beam spectroscopy and gamma-ray tracking arrays.

Advisor: Cerny, Joseph
Queries with Bounded Errors & Bounded Response Times on Very Large Data

Modern data analytics applications typically process massive amounts of data on clusters of tens, hundreds, or thousands of machines to support near-real-time decisions. The quantity of data and limitations of disk and memory bandwidth often make it infeasible to deliver answers at human-interactive speeds. However, it has been widely observed that many applications can tolerate some degree of inaccuracy. This is especially true for exploratory queries on data, where users are satisfied with "close-enough" answers if they can be provided quickly to the end user. A popular technique for speeding up queries at the cost of accuracy is to execute each query on a sample of data, rather than the whole dataset. In this thesis, we present BlinkDB, a massively parallel, approximate query engine for running interactive SQL queries on large volumes of data. BlinkDB allows users to trade-off query accuracy for response time, enabling interactive queries over massive data by running queries on data samples and presenting results annotated with meaningful error bars. To achieve this, BlinkDB uses three key ideas: (1) an adaptive optimization framework that builds and maintains a set of multi-dimensional stratified samples from original data over time, (2) a dynamic sample selection strategy that selects an appropriately sized sample based on a query's accuracy or response time requirements, and (3) an error estimation and diagnostics module that produces approximate answers and reliable error bars. We evaluate BlinkDB extensively against well-known database benchmarks and a number of real-world analytic workloads showing that it is possible to implement an end-to-end query approximation pipeline that produces approximate answers with reliable error bars at interactive speeds.

Advisor: Stoica, Ion
Insect ecology from the scale of plant-level interactions to continent wide phylogeography

This dissertation considers insect ecology from two perspectives, at two scales of space and time, using two different methodologies. In the first chapter, I investigate the direct interactions between plants and insects through plant defenses against herbivory. I explore the effect of plant exposure to natural smoke on herbivore growth, using the model system Nicotiana attenuata and Manduca sexta. Despite finding no effect in these tests, I believe that the mechanisms for potential impacts of smoke exposure on plant defenses are convincing enough to warrant further study./nIn the second and third chapters, I investigate the geographic patterns of genomic diversity in an herbivorous insect that underwent a dramatic host switch to become an important invasive agricultural pest. The Colorado potato beetle, Leptinotarsa decemlineata, is one of the most successful insect pests of agriculture. However, its evolutionary origins as an insect pest of potato remain unclear. I conducted reduced genome sequencing using RADseq on samples collected from across the proposed native range of Mexico and from the East Coast of the USA in the introduced range. I describe the geographic population structure of the beetle, examine the genomic diversity across the samples, and conduct a phylogenomic analysis.

Advisor: Tsutsui, Neil D
Computations and Moduli Spaces for Non-archimedean Varieties

Tropical geometry and non-archimedean analytic geometry study algebraic varieties over a field K with a non-archimedean valuation. One of the major goals is to classify varietiess over K by intrinsic tropical properties. This thesis will contain my work at UC Berkeley and my joint work with others towards the goal./nChapter 2 discusses some moduli spaces and their tropicalizations. The image of the complement of a hyperplane arrangement under a monomial map can be tropicalized combinatorially using matroid theory. We apply this to classical moduli spaces that are associated with complex reflection arrangements. Starting from modular curves, we visit the Segre cubic, the Igusa quartic, and moduli of marked del Pezzo surfaces of degrees 2 and 3. Our primary example is the Burkhardt quartic, whose tropicalization is a 3-dimensional fan in 39-dimensional space. This effectuates a synthesis of concrete and abstract approaches to tropical moduli of genus 2 curves./nChapter 3 develops numerical algorithms for Mumford curves over the field of p-adic numbers. Mumford curves are foundational to subjects dealing with non-archimedean varieties, and it has various applications in number theory. We implement algorithms for tasks such as: approximating the period matrices of the Jacobians of Mumford curves; computing the Berkovich skeleta of their analytifications; and approximating points in canonical embeddings./nChapter 4 discusses how to tropicalize del Pezzo surfaces of degree 5, 4 and 3. A generic cubic surface P^3 is a Del Pezzo surface of degree 3, which is obtained by blowing up the plane at 6 points. We study its tropicalization by taking the intrinsic embedding of the surface surface minus its 27 lines. Our techniques range from controlled modifications to running gfan on the universal Cox ideal over the relevant moduli space. We classify cubic surfaces by combinatorial properties of the arrangement of 27 trees obtained from the image of the 27 lines under this tropicalization./nChapter 5 discusses the classical Cayley-Bacharach theorem, which states that if two cubic curves on the plane intersect at 9 points, then the 9th point is uniquely determined if 8 of the points are given. The chapter derives a formula for the coordinates of the 9th point in terms of the coordinates of the 8 given points. Furthermore, I will discuss the geometric meaning of the formula, and how it is related to del Pezzo surfaces of degree 3.

Advisor: Sturmfels, Bernd
Photomechanical Response of Molecular Nanostructures

This dissertation focuses on the optomechanical behavior of molecular adsorbates on semiconducting and metal surfaces. Specifically, light-induced conformational changes of an azobenzene derivative on a semiconducting surface and infrared active vibrational modes of diamondoid molecules on a metal surface were studied in a scanning tunneling microscopy setup./nUsing conventional scanning tunneling microscopy, the self-assembly and light-induced mechanical switching of 3,3',5,5'-tetra-tert-butylazobenzene deposited on GaAs(110) were explored at the single-molecule level. After exposure to ultraviolet light, tetra-tert-butylazobenzene molecules exhibited conformational changes attributed to trans to cis photoisomerization. Photoisomerization of the molecules was observed to occur preferentially in one-dimensional stripes, a behavior that is significantly different from optically induced switching behavior observed when these molecules were placed on a gold surface./nTo characterize infrared absorption of submonolayers of molecules on electrically conducting crystals, a new scanning-tunneling-microscopy-based spectroscopy technique was developed. The technique employs a scanning tunneling microscope as a precise detector to measure the expansion of a molecule-decorated crystal that is irradiated by infrared light from a tunable laser source. Using this technique, the infrared absorption spectra of adamantane, [121]tetramantane, and [123]tetramantane on a Au(111) surface were obtained. Significant differences between the infrared spectra for the two tetramantane isomers show the power of the new technique to differentiate chemical structures even when single-molecule-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy images look quite similar. For adamantane on Au(111), the simplest studied system, ab initio calculations allowed for the interpretation of the microscopic vibrational dynamics revealed by the measurements. The infrared spectrum of an adamantane monolayer on Au(111) was found to be substantially modified with respect to the gas-phase infrared spectrum due to both the adamantane-adamantane interaction and adamantane-gold interactions./nThe results presented in this dissertation improve our understanding of photoisomerizational and optically induced vibrational properties of molecules placed in a condensed matter environment, and highlight the important role played by the molecule-surface and molecule-molecule interactions. These results are highly relevant to the field of molecular electronics and optically actuated molecular nanomachines.

Advisor: Crommie, Michael F.