VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The neurological consequences of non freezing cold injury

Non-freezing cold injury is a clinical syndrome characterised by altered sensory perception following prolonged exposure to cool temperatures. Acutely there is loss of sensation but after several hours or days, pain emerges in the distal extremities, which may last months or years after injury. The pain is characteristically more severe when the affected skin is cooled, at temperatures that would not have elicited pain before injury. The condition is well known in the military, most notoriously in The First World War as “Trench Foot”. New cases are still seen in the British Military in the 21st Century. There has never been a detailed study to address the neurological phenotype of patients with chronic symptoms. In this thesis 80 such patients underwent neurological phenotyping and assessment for the presence of neuropathic pain. The data in this thesis provide clear evidence for the presence of a sensory neuropathy with severe neuropathic pain due to small fibre neural injury, as demonstrated by abnormalities on quantitative sensory testing and reduced intraepidermal nerve fibre densities. Soldiers of African heritage have long been recognised to be predisposed to injury, raising the question of whether there could be a genetic contribution to this syndrome. Using a whole genome sequencing approach, a variant in the voltage gated sodium channel gene, SCN9A, was found to be over-represented in the cohort. Furthermore, in cellular electrophysiology experiments, the variant bestowed gain of function effects on HEK293 cells, but only at cool temperatures, providing a molecular correlate for the cold-aggravated pain seen in patients. Assessment of axonal excitability by threshold tracking suggests that there may be a reduction in slow potassium current, which has been shown to associate with neuropathic pain and cold allodynia. This thesis provides an evidence base for assessment and management of patients and suggests abnormalities in both sodium and potassium channel function, which warrant further research. This could have important implications for targeted therapy.

Keywords: Threshold tracking (nerve excitability testing)
Neuropathy
Small fibre neuropathy
Non freezing cold injury
Neuropathic pain
SCN9A
Advisor: Bennett, D
Wide deep neural networks

Deep neural networks have had tremendous success in a wide range of applications where they achieve state of the art performance. Their success can be generally attributed to three main pillars: their natural back-propagation structure which allows time and resources efficient gradient computation; recent advances in optimization theory which have led to the development of fast training algorithms; and availability of computationally efficient software (neural networks frameworks such as PyTorch and Tensorflow), hardware (Graphics Processing Units(GPUs), and more recently Tensor Processing Units(TPUs)).
Deep neural networks are now the model of choice for many practitioners. As a result, there is a growing research interest in their theoretical properties. Classical results from approximation theory ensure that neural networks, even with a single hidden layer, are universal approximators, provided the model is big enough. From an optimization point of view, the loss surface of a deep neural network is generally highly non-convex, posing a big limitation on what results from Optimization theory can be applied to such models. Therefore, little is known about the local minimas, the saddle points, and the convergence of gradient based method (e.g. Stochastic Gradient Descent), with these models. Another interesting and understudied research topic is that of randomly initialized neural networks. Indeed, random neural networks provide a compelling framework that offers, in many cases, a simplified short-cut to understand theoretical properties of neural networks at initialization and Bayesian neural networks. Against this backdrop, the research presented in this thesis focuses on the theoretical properties of randomly initialized wide deep neural networks. It provides a comprehensive analysis of these models at initialization, leveraging a duality between random wide neural networks and Gaussian processes. Particularly, the research here presented pays careful attention to the role of the initialization hyperparameters, the activation function, and the neural architecture in the behaviour of these models. This level of depth allows for the derivation of principled guidelines for the training and designing of deep neural networks.

Keywords: initialization
signal propagation
deep learning
gaussian processes
neural networks
Advisor: Doucet, A
Rousseau, J
Wilkie Collins and the politics of adaptation on the Victorian stage

As the sensation novel was reclaimed by literary critics and cultural historians as a legitimate site of academic inquiry in the mid-twentieth century, Wilkie Collins’s canonical works became the topic of much scholarly interest. His works have consistently been identified as the locus of a plethora of narrative and formal innovations that have irrevocably shaped how we understand both the Victorian novel and its successors. As this thesis will demonstrate, however, Collins’s writing for the stage – in particular dramatising his own novels – had a more significant influence on his career than has previously been acknowledged. By reading those dramatic works alongside their novelistic versions and against the landscape of Victorian theatre, this thesis refines our understanding of this canonical novelist while also demonstrating the interrelatedness of the novel and the stage for Victorian readers, writers, audiences, and critics.
The central proposition of this thesis is that our understanding of cultural production in the nineteenth century has been shaped by literary criticism’s insistent focus on the novel, and that research attuned to the amorphous formal boundaries that characterised the careers of Victorian writers reveals the mutually constitutive relationship between the novel and the theatre. In offering a chronological account of Collins’s theatrical writing, this thesis demonstrates how the social, psychological, and political complexity woven into the fabric of his novels gets adapted, repurposed, and represented in their dramatic versions, revealing both their narrative complexity and investment in the social and political ethos of Collins’s England.

Keywords: copyright
adaptation
Wilkie Collins
intellectual property
theatre
Victorian literature and culture
Advisor: Eltis, S
The theological power of film: embodiment, time, and the work of Andrei Tarkovsky

This thesis contributes to the interdisciplinary study of theology and film. It recognises that the prevailing methodologies in this study seldom prioritise questions about the formal properties of cinema as an artistic medium, and so overlook several productive and substantial questions for the theologian: What theology and theological practice does cinematic art give rise to? What are the perceptual and affective potentials of film for theology, and what, if anything, is theological about the cinematic medium itself? In condensing and synthesising these inquiries, I offer this central research question: What is the theological power of film? By prioritising these questions, this thesis engages in theological-cinematic analysis which aims to render a properly theological account of the medium of film. This account constitutes a shift away from the ‘textual’ analysis of film, towards an ‘experiential’ analysis of the art form itself. As such, this is not a matter of ‘applying’ theological concepts to film. Rather, ‘the theological power of film’ designates the medium’s power to express, signify, prime and perform certain conceptual and theological practices. In this way, the film experience is the proper subject of an inquiry into the theological power of film, and so this thesis adopts a phenomenological method, drawing on a major project of recent cinematic theory: film-phenomenology. Foregrounding the body in the film experience through the Merleau-Pontian concept of the body-subject, I argue for an understanding of cinema as a haptic and somatic medium of perception-cum-expression. The embodied nature of the art form also reveals the distinct temporality of film, for our embodied being in the world is indissolubly connected with our being in time. The films and writings of Andrei Tarkovsky emerge as the fulcrum of my response, as his work becomes a singular illustration of the theological power of film.

Keywords: Andrei Tarkovsky
Theology
Philosophy of Religion
Embodiment
Time
Film Theory
Phenomenology
Advisor: Ward, G
On global existence for variants of Teichmueller harmonic map flow

We resolve questions of existence and singularity formation for the Teichmueller harmonic map flow, a geometric flow introduced by Rupflin and Topping that deforms surfaces immersed in a Riemannian manifold into minimal surfaces.
We obtain global solutions of Teichmueller harmonic map flow in new settings from cylinders into nonpositively curved targets, and prove their asymptotic convergence to solutions of the Douglas–Plateau problem of finding minimal surfaces spanning given boundary curves in a Riemannian manifold. Due to the nonlinear nature of the formulation with non-local projection operators and unusual boundary conditions, even short-time existence presents a challenge, requiring consideration of a time discretisation scheme and partial differential inequalities.
In the second part of the thesis, we present joint work with Rupflin establishing a mechanism by which solutions to Teichmueller harmonic map flow will degenerate in finite time into maps from surfaces of simpler topological type. We give sufficient criteria for degeneration for the flow both from closed surfaces and from cylinders in terms of the rate at which images of thin collars in the domain stretch out. Moreover, for the rescaled variant of the flow by Huxol, we show that such a rate is both necessary and sufficient for a degeneration. Furthermore, for both types of the flow from cylinders we construct settings in which the metric on the cylinder degenerates in finite time, settling an open question on whether such a finite-time degeneration is possible.

Keywords: 58E20
53C43
53C44
53A10
Advisor: Rupflin, M
‘A most peculiar form of disease’: The creation of anorexia nervosa in late nineteenth-century Britain

Anorexia nervosa appeared as a newly named disorder in the 1870s in Britain, leading historians and other scholars to pinpoint this as the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal. An abiding interest in locating the historical roots of this contemporary disorder has led scholars to emphasise the ways in which anorexia nervosa is therefore an historical and not merely a ‘modern’ disorder. It has also resulted in a body of scholarship that emphasises continuity over discontinuity in anorexia nervosa’s medicalised history. This has meant that scholars have neglected to ask why after its introduction into the medical lexicon, anorexia nervosa failed to become established as a credible, universally recognised and endorsed, and utile diagnostic category.
This thesis is therefore concerned with two intertwined curiosities about anorexia nervosa’s appearance in this period. It on the one hand explores the conditions within the medical profession that facilitated anorexia nervosa’s identification and influenced the form in which it was articulated. It then pivots away from its emergence to show that this new disorder failed to make inroads into either the medical community or into late Victorian society and culture more broadly. The thesis argues that following its identification, anorexia nervosa failed to achieve supremacy within the medical profession and further failed to either reflect or influence women’s social reality or align neatly with the anxieties encoded within cultural discourses about young women’s health. As a result, and complicating the notion of a binary between continuity or discontinuity, it concludes that although the creation of anorexia nervosa as a new and distinct clinical syndrome in the late nineteenth century does indeed represent the origin point of a medicalised understanding of female food refusal, anorexia nervosa’s early history can be most aptly characterised as a ‘false start’ for what would become, much later, an enduring, troubling and highly visible psychiatric disorder.

Keywords: Women's Life-Writing
Anorexia Nervosa
Illness Narratives
Eating Disorders
Women's periodicals, British
Advisor: Mahone, S
Magmatism and volcanism on Io

Global volcanism has implications for planetary evolution far beyond the surface features that we observe. Magmatic and volcanic processes control the structural, thermal and compositional evolutions of the bodies where they operates. Jupiter’s moon Io, the most volcanically active body in the Solar System, is an extreme ‘end-member’ that allows us to investigate the effects of planetary magmatism and volcanism in relative isolation of other processes. Previous research has generally investigated melting and magmatism within Io’s partially-molten mantle separately from the volcanic systems in its lithosphere. In this thesis I present a suite of models that move beyond previous works by coupling mantle melting and magmatism to lithospheric evolution and volcanism. With this approach I show that magmatic intrusions within Io’s lithosphere are a fundamental part of the global heat balance, delivering significant mass and energy to the lithosphere and controlling its thickness. As well as transporting heat, magmatism and volcanism also transport chemical species. With the inclusion of a simple chemical system, I show how magmatism and volcanism control Io’s compositional evolution, leading to a layered mantle structure and the generation of ultra-high-temperature magmas in the deep mantle that can explain Io’s highest temperature eruptions. Finally, the structural implications of magmatism and volcanism can be related to underlying tidal heating; I show how tidal heating distributions can be inferred from improved observations of long-wavelength lithospheric thicknesses and topography.

Keywords: Two-phase flow
Geophysics
Fluid dynamics
Volcanism
Magmatism
Volcano
Planetary
Io
Geodynamics
Advisor: Katz, R
Hewitt, IJ
Pierrehumbert, R
Litigation funding: its place in the civil justice system

The practice of third parties funding litigation for commercial purposes was, for centuries, impermissible, owing to the operation of the doctrines of maintenance and champerty. But it is now permissible in England and Australia, and accepted as part of the legal landscape. The change in the court’s attitude was largely driven by a pragmatic desire to improve access to justice for the impecunious.
The question motivating this thesis is: where does litigation funding fit in the modern civil justice system?
This thesis has three objectives. The first is to assess critically the various criticisms that are made of litigation funding (such as concern about the prospect of third-party control of litigation, or the commodification of legal claims). These criticisms – which are the vestiges of the doctrines of maintenance and champerty – can be seen as reflecting a particular concept of the proper role and values of the civil justice system. But recent decades have seen enormous changes in the civil justice system and the legal profession – including the acceptance (or imposition) of managerial culture, and market rhetoric. When one considers the values and priorities of the modern civil justice system, it can be seen that commercial third-party litigation funding is a consistent part of the broader picture.
Secondly, the thesis presents a more nuanced account of how litigation funding promotes ‘access to justice’: namely, that it removes or mitigates a variety of disincentives to ligation (which deter all rational litigants, and not just the impecunious).
Finally, the thesis identifies market failures which might exist or emerge in the litigation funding market, identifies some difficulties in the current state of regulation in England and Australia, and make some broad suggestions for regulatory options. The task of regulation ought to be informed by the conclusions reached in the first parts of the thesis.

Keywords: Civil justice system
Access to justice
Litigation funding
Advisor: Zuckerman, A
Regulation of intestinal T cell homeostasis by autophagy

Mice in which the autophagy protein ATG16L1 was selectively ablated in T cells develop spontaneous intestinal inflammation, characterized by loss of Foxp3+ Treg cells and a selective expansion of Gata3+ Th2 cells. This phenotype was most pronounced in the colonic lamina propria. Thus, a lack of autophagy simultaneously reduces anti-inflammatory Treg cells and increases pro-inflammatory Th2 effector cells in the intestine. This discrepancy could be partly attributed to an altered metabolic programme employed by Atg16l1-deficient Treg cells, with increased glycolysis and impaired fatty acid metabolism. In contrast, the metabolic profile of in vitro polarized Th2 cells seemed to be independent of autophagy.
The aims of this thesis are to investigate the mechanistic consequences of altered autophagy in different T cell subsets and also to explore the link between the dominant type 2 immune responses and the observed intestinal pathology.

Keywords: Treg
Gata3
cellular degradation systems
Foxp3
GWAS
regulatory T cells
autophagy
Atg16l1
Seurat
WAT
single-cell RNA sequencing
FACS
proteasome
T cell metabolism
BAT
Th2 cells
Advisor: Maloy, K
Simon, A
Finite covers of graphs and cube complexes

In this thesis we study finite covers of graphs, cube complexes and related spaces, and explore applications to rigidity of groups.
Leighton's Theorem states that two finite graphs with a common universal cover must have a common finite cover. We prove three generalisations of this. The first restricts how balls of a given size in the universal cover can map down to the two finite graphs when factoring through the common finite cover. The second generalises to covers of graphs of spaces that restrict to isomorphisms between vertex spaces. And thirdly, if the two finite graphs admit regular coverings by the same quasitree, then we arrange for the common finite cover to also be covered by this quasitree. In addition, we provide counter-examples to show that the assumptions in these generalisations cannot be relaxed.
Central to Haglund and Wise's theory of special cube complexes is the construction of the canonical completion and retraction, which enables one to build finite covers of special cube complexes in a highly controlled manner. We give a new approach to this construction with the idea of imitator covers. This idea provides greater insight into the construction and leads to powerful generalisations. It enables us to prove various results about finite covers of special cube complexes - most of which generalise existing theorems of Haglund and Wise to the non-hyperbolic setting. In particular, we prove a convex version of omnipotence for virtually special cubulated groups. Continuing the theme of special cube complexes, we give a novel account of Agol's proof that hyperbolic cubulated groups are virtually special; we retain the underlying ideas and constructions of Agol, but substantially change or add to many parts of the argument to give a more transparent and detailed account.
Finally, we apply Leighton-type arguments similar to those in the aforementioned results to obtain a quasi-isometric rigidity theorem. To be more precise, let G be a group that is one-ended, hyperbolic relative to virtually abelian subgroups, and has JSJ decomposition over two-ended subgroups containing only virtually free vertex groups that aren't quadratically hanging; we prove that any group quasi-isometric to G is abstractly commensurable to G. In particular, this theorem applies to certain "generic" HNN extensions of a free group over cyclic subgroups.

Keywords: covering maps
Leighton's Theorem
quasi-isometric rigidity
cube complexes
Advisor: Bridson, M
Uncertain execution in order-driven markets

So-called 'latency' refers to the various small but significant time delays that occur in the course of the communications between a trader and a market. Such delays happen between the time an exchange streams market data to a trader, the time at which the trader processes the information and decides to trade, and the time at which the exchange receives and processes the order from the trader. Latency is a challenge faced by all traders and is of great importance in modern financial markets. In the present work, we develop mathematical models to solve a variety of problems faced by liquidity takers regarding uncertainty in executions.
Firstly, we devise a model for computing the price that traders are willing to pay to reduce their latency. This latency-optimal strategy balances the tradeoff, over a period of time, between the costs of walking the limit order book and the percentage of orders filled. This work may lead to social benefits, since it offers a way to stop the arms race to being faster in the marketplace.
Secondly, we develop a latency-optimal trading strategy that improves the marksmanship of liquidity takers. We make use of the techniques of variational analysis to obtain the optimal price limit of each marketable limit order (MLO) that the trader sends. The price limit of each MLO is characterized as the solution to a new class of forward-backward stochastic differential equations (FBSDEs) driven by random measures. We prove the existence and uniqueness of the FBSDE solution and solve the FBSDE numerically to illustrate the performance of the strategies.
Finally, we show how traders can optimally liquidate a position over a trading window when there is latency in the marketplace. We frame our model as an impulse control problem with stochastic delay -- this work contributes to the stochastic control literature by allowing one to have random delays before the impulses take place. We show that impatient liquidity takers submit MLOs that may walk the book (capped by the limit price) to increase the probability of filling the trades. Patient traders who are fast do not use their speed to hit the quotes they observe, nor to finish the execution programme early: they use speed to complete the execution with as many speculative MLOs as possible. We use foreign exchange data to implement the random-latency-optimal strategy and to compare it with various benchmarks. We find that for patient traders, the random-latency optimal strategy outperforms the bechmarks that do not account for latency by a quantity that is greater than the transaction costs paid by liquidity takers. Around news announcements, the value of the outperformance significantly increases. The superiority of the latency-optimal strategies is due to both the speculative MLOs that are filled and the price protection of the MLOs.

Keywords: optimal execution
fill ratios
marketable limit orders
market microstructure
latency
uncertain execution
algorithmic trading
Advisor: Cartea, A