VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
THE LIMITS OF LIBERALIZATION: SUB-NATIONAL GOVERNMENT AUTONOMY AND THE AUTO INDUSTRY IN POST-WTO ERA CHINA

This dissertation investigates the effects of international linkages on regional economic development in China, with a specific focus on China's burgeoning automotive industry. Whereas most scholars predicted that China's entry into the WTO would increase economic liberalization, I argue that China's WTO entry ironically enabled local governments to gain increased authority and incentives to undermine domestic competition by restricting the Chinese Central government's ability to monitor and control local protectionism. In order to enter the Chinese automotive industry, foreign corporations must form JVs with local governments. These governments frequently manipulate public policy to favor their JV partners over those of neighboring regions. Therefore, China's entry into the WTO has only resulted in what I call "fragmented liberalization," whereby sub-national governments selectively adopt measures of liberalization and protectionism rather than wholly adopt liberalizing measures imposed by the WTO on the Chinese Central government. Second, I also contend that multinational corporations are not necessarily the main drivers of liberalization as often assumed in the literature, in that the foreign partners within sub-national JVs foster fragmented liberalization in China. Third, while China has increasingly integrated its economy into the global economy, it has been using state-owned enterprises to promote economic development and industrial upgrading. Yet I find a great deal of variations in the extent to which state-owned enterprises have been able to engage in backward and forward linkages by drawing on their global automaker partners. Thus, understanding the micro-foundations of industrial policy is critical to understanding its impact on the global economy and international institutions. To show this, I conducted a structured comparative case study of three automotive JVs (Shanghai GM, Beijing Hyundai, and First Auto Works-Tianjin Toyota). I collected data through in-depth interviews and the analysis of secondary publications, primary documents and archival materials. I spent 18 months in China and conducted 112 in-depth interviews in Chinese, English, Korean and Japanese. My research highlights the importance of considering industrial policy at the sub-national level precisely because this is the level at which nation-to-nation agreements and national regulations are implemented and reinterpreted on the ground. By examining the interplay of international, national and sub-national politics, I show that international agreements like the WTO have complex effects that are both counterintuitive and heavily dependent on the local context.

Advisor: Aggarwal, Vinod K.
Pempel, T.J.
Metal-optic and Plasmonic Semiconductor-based Nanolasers

Over the past few decades, semiconductor lasers have relentlessly followed the path towards miniaturization. Smaller lasers are more energy efficient, are cheaper to make, and open up new applications in sensing and displays, among many other things. Yet, up until recently, there was a fundamental problem with making lasers smaller: purely semiconductor lasers couldn't be made smaller than the diffraction limit of light./nIn recent years, however, metal-based lasers have been demonstrated in the nanoscale that have shattered the diffraction limit. As optical materials, metals can be used to either reflect light (metal-optics) or convert light to electrical currents (plasmonics). In both cases, metals have provided ways to squeeze light beyond the diffraction limit. In this dissertation, I experimentally demonstrated one nanolaser based on plasmonic transduction and another laser based on metal-optic reflection./nTo create coherent plasmons, I designed a nanolaser based on a plasmonic bandgap defect state inside a surface plasmonic crystal. In a one-dimensional periodic semiconductor beam, I was able to confine surface plasmons by interrupting the periodicity of the crystal. These confined surface plasmons then underwent laser oscillations in effective mode volumes as small as 0.007 cubic wavelengths. At this electromagnetic volume, energy was squeezed 10 times smaller than those possible in similar photonic crystals that do not utilize metal. This demonstration should pave the way for achieving engineered nanolasers with deep-subwavelength mode volumes and enable plasmonic crystals to become attractive platforms for designing plasmons./nAfter achieving large reductions in electromagnetic mode volumes, I switched to a metal-optics-based nanolaser design to further reduce the physical volumes of small light sources. The semiconductor nanopatch laser achieved laser oscillations with subwavelength-scale physical dimensions (0.019 cubic wavelengths) and effective mode volumes (0.0017 cubic wavelengths). The ultra-small laser volume is achieved with the presence of nanoscale metal patches which suppress electromagnetic radiation into free-space and convert a leaky cavity into a highly-confined subwavelength optical resonator. The nanopatch laser, with its world-record-breaking small physical volume, has exciting implications for data storage, biological sensing, on-chip optical communication, and beyond.

Advisor: Wu, Ming C
Student Union: The Architecture and Social Design of Postwar Campus Community Centers in California

This dissertation examines the architecture and social intent of Student Union buildings. The narrative reaches back to the first quarter of the twentieth century when students and college leaders in the Midwest and Northeast formed the Association of College Unions, but focuses on the postwar period in California when Student Unions became modern, standard fixtures on North American campuses. Early ideas about social education in the targeted the socialization of young men and women, class distinctions, and the business sphere that many students would enter as graduates. Subsequently, architects took cues from private social clubs and YMCA buildings. In the 1950s, however, ideas about social education turned toward the G.I. and the postwar demographic of college students. As a result, campus leaders took steps to build large postwar Union buildings that they thought addressed the needs of a broad middle-class culture. By providing arenas for consumption and postwar leisure activities, proponents reframed the social agenda and gave buildings new form./nThe underlying institutional armature of Student Unions and the rhetoric behind them remained largely unchanged between 1920 and 1960. Student Unions were and continued to be called "living rooms" or "hearthstones" of the campus. But after World War II, the strategies deployed by Union proponents and architects, especially in California, adapted to the social context of the university campus, creating a complex combination of rhetoric and form. Vernon DeMars, Donald Hardison, and Lawrence Halprin, who designed the postwar Student Union at the University of California, Berkeley, and Welton Becket, who designed the postwar Union at UCLA, dutifully called their buildings "campus living rooms." The interior spaces, however, were boldly modern, and the buildings mimicked corporate hotels, shopping malls, and civic centers. The shift domesticated non-residential campus buildings and helped introduce modernism and its social vision to large postwar public universities. Students no longer experienced separate lounges for men and women but found themselves in coed commercial complexes with large cafeterias, bookstores, and bowling alleys. By examining parallel architectural developments such as the design and growth of suburbs and urban renewal, this dissertation recasts the history of Student Unions.

Advisor: Shanken, Andrew
The Trouble with "Queerness": Drag and the Making of Two Cultures

This dissertation responds to the frequent charge within academic and activist circles that queer theory is simply gay male theory cloaked in more inclusive language. Taking as its starting point an ethnographic case study of drag king and queen performance cultures, it challenges the efficaciousness of an everything and the kitchen sink approach to queer theorizing and organizing. This work constitutes the first academic monograph centered on queer life in Cleveland, Ohio and is also the first to focus simultaneously on kinging and queening, a lacuna at once explained by and demanding interrogation of the fact that these practices have almost nothing in common with each other. Despite the shared heading of drag, these iconically queer institutions overlap little with respect to audience, movement vocabulary, stage persona, and treatment of gender, class, race, and sexuality. The radical (in)difference between these genres serves as a microcosmic representation of the perennial rift between lesbians and gay men and highlights the heteronormativity of the assumption that all of the identity categories subsumed under (and often eclipsed by) the queer umbrella ought a priori to have anything in common culturally, politically, or otherwise. I argue instead for the legitimacy of studies that focus exclusively on e.g., gay men or lesbians or transsexuals, free from the intersectional compulsion to extrapolate one's claims to the rest of the queer spectrum.

Advisor: Williams, Linda
Multivariate pattern analysis of anatomic, physiologic, and metabolic imaging data for improved management of patients with gliomas

The characterization of brain tumors involves the analysis of multiple heterogeneous data sets that include various types of medical images and spectroscopy, clinical and histopathology data, treatment history, and patient outcome. Of particular interest for such analyses is the utilization of recent advances in brain tumor imaging research, which have given rise to novel techniques for exploiting a number of different biological properties of normal and tumor tissue. The systematic analysis of these data could lead to better disease understanding, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment./nThe main focus of this thesis was the development of computer-assisted support for glioma understanding, diagnosis, and prognosis in clinical environments. This was achieved by analyzing heterogeneous biomedical data using multivariate pattern recognition methods. The tools developed in this thesis were used to characterize biological changes predictive of malignant transformations and treatment effects in gliomas, and for the early detection of disease progression. They were crucial in finding links between in vivo and ex vivo data that could give insight into the biology of brain cancer and help determine the right course of treatment for individual patients. The methods that are described in this thesis can contribute to clinical practice by improving the selection of biopsy sites and the targeting of treatment. The models that were learned in this thesis produced results with high classification accuracy, interpretability by means of clinical knowledge, and capacity to generalize the performance to new samples. The technical aspects covered in this thesis included the feature selection and modeling of biomedical data, the inference and evaluation of predictive models, and the use of models for clinical applications.

Advisor: Bajcsy, Ruzena
Nelson, Sarah J
The Capitalization Effects of Work and Nonwork Accessibilities in Southeast Michigan

Is accessibility, the key to connect land use and transportation, still important in modern metropolitan areas? Some say no, arguing that well-established transportation network has weakened its influences. Others have found that accessibility is still critical in affecting households and business's location choices. Yet few studies have examined how accessibility is evaluated in housing transactions and how this relationship interacts with different local context, information that is needed for planners to make informed land use decisions./nThis dissertation examines accessibility's capitalization effects using data from the Southeast Michigan region. In particular, it compares the impacts of work accessibility with the impacts of three major nonwork accessibilities, that is, shopping accessibility, school accessibility and recreational accessibility. The results from multilevel modeling show that work accessibility is still important in affecting property values, but the effects vary by local housing markets and development context. For example, the impact of work accessibility in Ann Arbor is very different from that in Detroit. The study also confirms the significant capitalization effects from the three nonwork accessibilities, especially when the local context has been accommodating./nBy comparing model results across different accessibility measurements, this dissertation also echoes what previous studies have found, that is, the impacts of accessibility tend to be more localized in modern urban areas. Thus, good accessibility measurement should capture local variations by incorporating disaggregated information with refined methodology that is both theoretically sound and appropriate for the study context.

Advisor: Cervero, Robert
Analysis and Enforcement of Web Application Security Policies

Web applications are generally more exposed to untrusted user content than traditional applications. Thus, web applications face a variety of new and unique threats, especially that of content injection. One method for preventing these types of attacks is web application/nsecurity policies. These policies specify the behavior or structure of the web application. The goal of this work is twofold. First, we aim to understand how security policies and their systems are currently applied to web applications. Second, we aim to advance the/nmechanisms used to apply policies to web applications. We focus on the first part through two studies, examining two classes of current web application security policies. We focus on the second part by studying and working towards two new ways of applying policies./nThese areas will advance the state of the art in understanding and building web application security policies and provide a foundation for future work in securing web applications.

Advisor: Song, Dawn
The Effect of Acetylcholine on the Reduction of the Required Voltage for Muscle Contraction

Facial nerve dysfunction and the subsequent inability to blink is a common complication caused by numerous medical problems, such as stroke. Denervation and dysfunction of the orbicularis oculi, the muscle responsible for eye blinks can result in corneal abrasions and breakdown. Direct electrical stimulation of the muscle is not a viable solution, as the required electrical stimulus needed to induce a blink in denervated muscle is 3 mA while the human pain threshold is 1 mA. The insufficiency of electrical stimulation alone in triggering painless muscle contraction in denervated orbicularis oculi muscles indicates a need to investigate other methods of stimulation. The focus of this dissertation has been to investigate the response of skeletal muscle to combined electrochemical stimulation by initiating the intricate cascade that leads to muscle contraction with the application of acetylcholine (ACh) in order to reduce the required electrical stimulus. Initial in vivo testing in rabbits demonstrated that the required current to stimulate a muscle contraction could be reduced with the incorporation of ACh, supporting the feasibility of the concept of electrochemical stimulation. Focus was then shifted to in vitro testing using cultured C2C12 cells grown on microposts to determine the correlation between electrical stimulation to myotube excitability, indicated by the contraction force generated. Insufficient myotube growth and cell detachment upon electrical stimulation resulted in the decision to continue experiments using excised skeletal muscle from laboratory rats. Image analysis testing of excised biceps femoris demonstrated that the change in area of samples increased in response to electrochemical stimulation in comparison to electrical stimulation. Force analysis testing of excised extensor digitorum longus demonstrated that the application of ACh for electrochemical stimulation clearly enhanced the contraction force, thus allowing for a lower level of electrical stimulation. The influence of electrochemical testing in enhancing contraction forces in denervated muscle has been demonstrated. Thus potentially creating a new platform for the control of muscles that no longer have a functional neural control.

Advisor: Liepmann, Dorian
Theoretical Investigation of Binary Eutectic Alloy Nanoscale Phase Diagrams

Recently, embedded binary eutectic alloy nanostructures (BEANs) have drawn some attention. A previously calculated equilibrium structure map predicts four possible nanocrystal alloy morphologies: phase-separated, bi-lobe, core-shell and inverse coreshell/ngoverned by two dimensionless interface energy parameters. The shape of the bilobe nanoparticles is obtained by nding the surface area of all interfaces that minimizes the overall energy, while also maintaining mechanical equilibrium at the triple point./nTwo representative alloy systems displaying eutectic phase diagrams and negligible solid solubility were chosen: GeSn and AuGe. GeSn samples were prepared by sequential implantation of Ge and Sn into SiO2. AuGe samples were prepared by implanting Ge within Au-doped silica lms. Transmission electron microscopy images revealed bi-lobe nanocrystals in both samples. Therefore, the interface energies in both systems must be such that the dimensionless parameters lie in the region of bi-lobe stability./nCareful analysis of the bi-lobe structure leads to the determination of two dimensionless length scales, which describe the bi-lobe independent of the size of the nanoparticle. These two parameters, eta 1 and eta 2 can be used to calculate contours of equal eta 1 and eta 2 over the entire range of bi-lobe stability. Experimental measurement and comparison to predicted structures leads to determination of acting dimensionless interface energies. Experimentally available wetting data is then used to calculate the remaining interface energies in the system. gamma Ge(s)/SiO2 was found to be between 0.82-0.99 J/m2 . gamma Ge0.22Sn0.78(l)/SiO2 and gamma Au0.53Ge0.47(l)/SiO2 are determined to be 1.20 and 0.94 J/m2 , respectively./nTo investigate the possibility of size eects at the nanoscale, size dependent phase diagrams for the AuGe and GeSn system are determined. This is done by the theoretical approach rst outlined byWeissmueller et al., which takes into account the energy contribution of the various morphologies listed above. Results from this calculation are compared to those using the tangent line construction approach. The composition dependent surface energies of binary alloy liquids required in this calculation are determined using Butler's equation.

Advisor: Chrzan, Daryl C
Efficient Methods for Unsupervised Learning of Probabilistic Models

High dimensional probabilistic models are used for many modern scientific and engineering data analysis tasks. Interpreting neural spike trains, compressing video, identifying features in DNA microarrays, and recognizing particles in high energy physics all rely upon the ability to find and model complex structure in a high dimensional space. Despite their great promise, high dimensional probabilistic models are frequently computationally intractable to work with in practice. In this thesis I develop solutions to overcome this intractability, primarily in the context of energy based models./nA common cause of intractability is that model distributions cannot be analytically normalized. Probabilities can only be computed up to a constant, making training exceedingly difficult. To solve this problem I propose `minimum probability flow learning', a variational technique for parameter estimation in such models. The utility of this training technique is demonstrated in the case of an Ising model, a Hopfield auto-associative memory, an independent component analysis model of natural images, and a deep belief network./nA second common difficulty in training probabilistic models arises when the parameter space is ill-conditioned. This makes gradient descent optimization slow and impractical, but can be alleviated using the natural gradient. I show here that the natural gradient can be related to signal whitening, and provide specific prescriptions for applying it to learning problems./nIt is also difficult to evaluate the performance of models that cannot be analytically normalized, providing a particular challenge to hypothesis testing and model comparison. To overcome this, I introduce a method termed `Hamiltonian annealed importance sampling,' which more efficiently estimates the normalization constant of non-analytically-normalizable models. This method is then used to calculate and compare the log likelihoods of several state of the art probabilistic models of natural image patches./nFinally, many tasks performed with a trained probabilistic model (for instance, image denoising or inpainting and speech recognition) involve generating samples from the model distribution, which is typically a very computationally expensive process. I introduce a modification to Hamiltonian Monte Carlo sampling that reduces the tendency of sampling trajectories to double back on themselves, and enables statistically independent samples to be generated more rapidly./nTaken together, it is my hope that these contributions will help scientists and engineers to build and manipulate probabilistic models.

Advisor: Olshausen, Bruno A
DeWeese, Michael R
Amorphous Silicon-Carbon Nanostructure Photovoltaic Devices

A novel solar cell architecture made completely from the earth abundant elements silicon and carbon has been developed. Hydrogenated amorphous silicon (aSi:H), rather than crystalline silicon, is used as the active material due to its high absorption through a direct band gap of 1.7eV, well matched to the solar spectrum to ensure the possibility of improved cells in this architecture with higher efficiencies. The cells employ a Schottky barrier design wherein the amorphous silicon absorber layer generates electron-hole pairs from incoming photons and holes are preferentially extracted through a metallic material consisting of a carbon nanostructure. Both graphene and buckypaper were used as the metallic component of the Schottky junction to effectively convert incoming light to electricity./nSubsequent work focused on graphene-based cells because graphene offers better transparency and conductance compared to buckypaper, making it promising as a top conductor in a solar cell. Reactions of the graphene-aSi:H interface were investigated and strategies developed to minimize reactions that lead to performance degradation. Finally, photon management strategies were executed to significantly enhance the performance of the cells using silver nanoparticles to increase the absorbance of light and extraction of charges in a thin aSi:H film. Solar cells optimized with these improvements show performance enhancements of 1-2 orders of magnitude compared to initially published cells in this architecture./nIn addition to yielding strategies for improved protection and performance of the solar cells presented in this thesis, investigations presented here into reactions at the graphene-silicon interface should inform further research into applications of graphene.

Advisor: Zettl, Alex
Sohn, Lydia