VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Speech-enabled Systems for Language Learning

Levels of literacy and the variance in them, continue to be a problem in the world. These problems are ubiquitous in the sense that they change form from developing to developed regions, but do not seize to exist. For example, while teacher absenteeism is a fairly large problem in the developing world, student motivation can pose challenges in the developed world. Prior research has demonstrated that games can serve as an efficient medium in bridging these literacy gaps, generating student motivation (or engagement) not just in short term but also in the long term. This dissertation is dedicated to the investigation and application of spoken language technology to language acquisition contexts in the developed world. We explore the broader research question in two major contexts./nFirstly, lack of proper English pronunciations is a major problem for immigrant population in developed countries like U.S. This poses various problems, including a barrier to entry into mainstream society. Therefore, the first part of the dissertation involves exploration of speech technologies merged with activity-based and arcade-based games to do pronunciation feedback for Hispanic children. This also involves using linguistic theory to determine computational criteria for intelligibility in speech and computational adaptations to reflect them. We also present results from a 3-month long evaluation of this system./nSecondly, a large body of research has shown that the literacy gap between children is well-established before formal schooling begins, and predicts academic performance throughout primary, middle and secondary school. Therefore, in the second part of the dissertation we explore natural interactions for preschoolers that would engage them in game-like activities that involve short follow-up conversations. We explore the design and implementation of a conversational agent called Spot, that acts as a question-answering companion for preschool children. We present a month long study with 20 preschoolers with some insight on the potential, efficiency and usage of such a system. We end with a discussion on computational complexities in building Spot, and rules that it uses to work around speech recognition and natural language understanding errors.

Advisor: Canny, John
Where There Are No Landlines: Mobile Technology, Community Health Workers and Family Planning

Access to family planning has powerful health, social and economic benefits for families and communities. Family planning use protects the health of women and their children by spacing births, preventing unwanted or high-risk pregnancies, reducing the need for abortions and helping to fight HIV/AIDS. Further, family planning use supports women's rights and opportunities for education, employment, and full participation in society, and protects the environment by stabilizing population growth. In high fertility societies, slowing rapid population growth through voluntary means greatly facilitates economic and social development. While significant progress has been made in the provision and uptake of family planning, an estimated 222 million women around the globe who want to avoid pregnancy are not using an effective, modern method of contraception. Community based family planning (CBFP) programs can successfully reach remote, resource-constrained populations with high unmet need for family planning. The most common approach to CBFP is the community based distribution of contraceptives, in which community health workers (CHWs) provide family planning education and counseling, contraceptive methods, and referrals for clinic-based services./nThe past decade has seen worldwide rapid growth in the delivery of health services via mobile communication devices, collectively known as mHealth. With the increased availability, adaptability and capability of mobile phones come new prospects for improving the quality of and access to health care. Increasingly, these new technologies are being developed, tested, and deployed with CHWs in developing countries. mHealth tools could enhance community based approaches to family planning, yet this potential is only beginning to be explored. Accordingly, FHI 360, the Tanzania National Institute for Medical Research, Pathfinder International, and D-Tree International collaborated on the development of a mobile phone job aid for family planning service delivery by CHWs in Tanzania. The introduction of this mobile job aid presents an exciting, innovative opportunity to increase knowledge about, access to and use of family planning information and services. This dissertation aims to provide data that can improve the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of mHealth projects targeted for CHWs, and can inform program and policy decisions to implement mHealth technologies into future family planning efforts, in Tanzania and beyond.

Advisor: Potts, David M
Changing Profiles of Poverty: Policy Implications of a Multi-Dimensional Measure for the United States

The very term "poverty" continues to evoke debates on what it means to be poor. Although poverty is commonly described in uni-dimensional or monetary terms, many scholars have argued that poverty is more aptly understood as a constellation of deprivations -- a multi-dimensional concept. Different measures unavoidably generate different results, and the extent of poverty is, thus, dependent on the measure used to quantify the number of poor in a given society. A looming question today is whether the official federal poverty measure, developed in the 1960s, still provides an accurate picture of the poor in America. In order to rectify the long-questioned adequacy and validity of the federal poverty measure, Congress authorized the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to address key shortcomings of the official measure. In early 2010, the Obama administration adopted the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that largely follows the recommendations of the NAS Panel. However, the NAS-based measure is still criticized for taking a "reductionist" approach to understanding a complex, socially constructed, and dynamic concept like poverty. To counter the limitations of income-based measures of poverty, there has been a push to advance the field by employing multi-dimensional poverty measures. Amartya Sen laid the groundwork for a paradigm shift in the way poverty is conceptualized. He defines poverty as the lack of capability to generate or obtain the required resources to meet one's basic needs. Drawing on Sen's ideas, the UNDP introduced the Multi-dimensional Poverty Index in 2010, which complements income poverty by measuring the number of deprivations a poor person faces simultaneously with regard to education, health, and living standard. Using secondary data analysis, this study first examines changes in poverty rates by gender, marital status, and race/ethnicity based on the official measure and the supplemental poverty measure in the period 2005-2010. Next, this study creates a multi-dimensional measure for the U.S. that mimics the UN's Multi-dimensional Poverty Index. This study seeks to contribute to the literature by exploring how such a measure can help us better understand the profile of poverty in America today and what the ensuing policy implications are.

Advisor: Gilbert, Neil
Statistical models for longitudinal analysis of single and mixed species infections

Abstract/nStatistical models for longitudinal analysis of single and mixed species infections/nBy/nKathryn Louise Colborn/nDoctor of Philosophy in Biostatistics/nUniversity of California, Berkeley/nProfessor Terence P. Speed, Chair/nThere are numerous examples of infectious diseases that are caused by various species of/nthe same pathogen. Some examples include Lyme disease, malaria, Leishmaniasis, Dengue/nfever, and Ehrlichiosis. The advancement of laboratory methods has facilitated more sensitive/ndetection of mixed species infections in humans, which has resulted in a surge of research focussing/non the eects of mixed infections on clinical outcomes. Cross-sectional blood samples/ncompared with clinical outcome measures provide a limited scope of the interactions between/nspecies. It is important to study these infections in humans longitudinally, and within their natural/nenvironments, in order to develop an understanding of the complex relationships between/nhosts, pathogens and vectors of transmission./nPapua New Guinea is a country with high prevalence of both Plasmodium falciparum and P./nvivax, two species of parasites that can cause malaria. It is well known that these two parasites/ncan cause severe morbidity and mortality independently, but there has not been conclusive/nevidence of the eect of mixed P. falciparum and P. vivax infections on clinical symptoms./nChildren under age five are at highest risk of experiencing adverse outcomes from Plasmodium/ninfections. In 2006, a cohort study was implemented to conduct an investigation of the eects/nof mixed P. falciparum and P. vivax infections on clinical episodes of malaria in children living/nin a rural area of Papua New Guinea. The data collected from this study are used throughout/nthis dissertation to address both the epidemiological questions of the study investigators and to/npresent statistical models for analyzing longitudinal malaria data and mixed species infections.

Advisor: Speed, Terence P
Beta-delayed neutron spectroscopy using trapped radioactive ions

A novel technique for beta-delayed neutron spectroscopy has been developed using trapped radioactive ions. The neutron energy spectrum was reconstructed by measuring the time of flight (TOF) of the nuclear recoil following neutron emission, thereby avoiding all the challenges associated with neutron detection such as backgrounds from scattered neutrons and gamma rays and complicated detector-response functions. A proof-of-principle measurement was conducted on 137I+ by delivering ions from a 252Cf source, confining them in a linear Paul trap surrounded by radiation detectors, and measuring the neutron energy spectrum and branching ratio by detecting the beta and recoil ions in coincidence. Systematic effects were explored by determining the branching ratio three ways. Improvements to achieve higher detection efficiency, better energy resolution, and a lower neutron energy threshold were implemented by upgrading the detectors and optimizing the trapping apparatus. These improvements were demonstrated in a campaign of measurements including 138I, which is a standard beta-delayed neutron precursor outlined by a recent IAEA report on delayed neutron measurements.

Advisor: Norman, Eric B
Writing for the Masses after Mao: News-Production in Contemporary China

Newspapers in China were once considered an essential ideological weapon in the revolutionary struggle to liberate the masses. Under Mao's leadership, all newspapers were run by the Communist Party-state for the purpose of promoting its perspectives and mobilizing the people to its projects. Since the end of the Mao era in 1978 and over some three decades of market reform since, this same Socialist-propaganda apparatus has transformed into a teeming, multi-billion dollar commercial media industry. Through an ethnographic study of everyday news-production practices at a Chinese newspaper, this dissertation explores the practical, intellectual and ethical dimensions of writing about society, for society, amidst the great material changes and ideational reorientations at play in China today.

Advisor: Ong, Aihwa
Life at the Influenza Epicenter

This thesis is an anthropological study of the making of global health on China's grounds, based on inquiry into the health programs assembled around China's poultry sector amidst outbreaks of avian influenza. Influenza pandemics are global in scale, but since the 1960s flu experts have hypothetically located the origin, or "epicenter," of flu pandemics in southern China. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among flu experts, Chinese veterinarians, and farmers, the thesis describes how the farmed ecology of Poyang Lake in southern China is being studied as a possible epicenter of influenza emergence. As global dangers are attributed to specific Chinese environments and agricultural practices, I follow flu experts as they move from the laboratory to the field and as they shift their scientific object from the sequence to the ecosystem. This movement outside the laboratory is also a movement onto China's grounds, a motion that I argue raises three anthropological problems./nFirst, emerging transnational scientific collaborations around avian influenza go well beyond the idea that China is a political obstacle to global health. These scientific transactions taking place on China's grounds reframe the historical problematization of China and modern science, as a rising China plays a fundamental role in shaping the contemporary global science of influenza./nSecond, unlike other well-studied Asian biotech sites, bird flu research is grounded in transactions with farmers, livestock animals, and rural ways of life. The thesis analyzes how influenza experts adjust their scientific concepts and categories to account for historically and culturally specific practices of breeding and raising livestock, and shows how these livestock breeding practices continue to exceed and complicate scientific categories./nLastly, the thesis concludes by showing how China's livestock veterinarians become controversial mediating figures between the lab and the farm, transforming the social break between the scientist and the livestock breeder into an ethical problem of vocation and "quality" (suzhi). As a result, the thesis argues that the movement from the lab to the field calls for an anthropology of science that attends to vocation and social relation as ethical problems, going beyond the sociology of scientific fact construction.

Advisor: Rabinow, Paul
The City Recycled: The Afterlives of Demolished Buildings in Postwar Beijing

This dissertation traces the afterlives of demolished buildings in post-war Beijing as a case to interrogate the changing role of waste in the political economy of development in contemporary China. In contrast to the mainstream narratives about China's post-Mao transformation, which often render waste as an "external cost" of economic development, I argue that waste has remained treated in China as a resource from the Mao to post-Mao eras. What has changed during the period of market reform, instead, is the geography of waste consumption. I establish this argument by showing a profound change of the network of institutions that removes used building materials from Beijing's demolition sites. In Mao's Beijing (1949-1978), the state was the main consumer of used building materials. Governments and state-owned enterprises in the city used the materials to accomplish production goals and to construct public urban projects. Used building materials, therefore, stayed at the urban center and contributed to the modernization of the city. In contrast, in the reform era (1978-present), villages and towns surrounding Beijing have become the center of demolition waste consumption. These peripheral villages and towns appropriate used building materials from the city to cultivate resources and to open up opportunities for growth. In focusing on the network, this study further reveals the diverse forms of businesses involved in the organization of waste work. In this respect, I show that the labor process of un-building (that is, the process of stripping a building down and of removing the resulting materials from its original location to another location) has always been a value-adding activity in China: it gives used building materials a second life. In the reform era in particular, the recovery of demolition waste constitutes a vibrant part of the urban economy. In urban areas, businesses emerge to organize the collection, sorting, and transportation of used building materials. These businesses purchase waste materials from property owners in the city, help urban governments reduce the costs of disposal, and offer a great number of jobs for the city's rural migrants.

Advisor: Walker, Richard
Predictive models in neuroscience and bioinformatics

This dissertation discusses how predictive models are being used for scientific inquiry. Statistical and computational advances have given rise to high-dimensional models that can be fit on relatively small samples but still predict well the behavior of complex systems. Scientists try to use such models to learn about complex biological systems; but it is not always clear how prediction accuracy translates to understanding the underlying system. In the chapters below, I present different approaches to learn from predictive models in bioinformatics and neuroscience. In each of these collaborative works, we tailor models that would both fit well and be interpretable in the context of the scientific questions./nIn the first chapter, we fit and compare predictive models for the GC-content bias, an important confounder in DNA-sequencing. We develop a high-resolution model that treats each base-pair in the genome as a separate example; this allows us to compare many representations of GC-content, identifying which representation best predicts the variation in the coverage. To deal with the huge volumes of data, we develop a new conditional dependence measure that efficiently compares different models. Selection of the model that maximizes this dependence reveals a recurring association with an experimental parameter: the selected model in each sample corresponds to a window size almost identical to the average size of DNA fragments in the sample. This recurring result can be used both for correcting the bias and for learning about the causes for the bias./nIn the next chapter, we propose a new estimator for interpreting prediction-accuracy results of models for neural activity in the visual cortex. Our shuffle estimator targets the explainable variance - the proportion of signal in the measured response - while accounting for auto-correlation in the noise. Re-analyzing models of functional MRI voxels within visual area V1, we observe a strong linear correlation between the signal-to-noise and prediction accuracy./nIn the final chapter we analyze neurophysiology data recorded from visual area V4, and present a full cycle of scientific investigation using prediction models in neuroscience. Whereas the previous chapters developed metrics for evaluating feature sets and prediction models, this chapter takes an extra leap: we use optimization algorithms together with prior scientific knowledge to propose a new feature-set. We then fit regularized linear models based on this representation that generalize well to a validation data set. Finally, novel visualization and model-summary techniques help interpret the resulting prediction models, revealing rich patterns of activity in the different neurons and unexpected categories of neurons.

Advisor: Yu, Bin
Airport Modern: The Space between International Departures and Arrivals in Modern Korean National Imaginings

Challenging the Eurocentric discourse of Modernization, Modernity and Modernism and the reified notions of space that underpin them and which linger in contemporary theories of globalization, this dissertation argues that the examination of the historical, social and political economic processes and experiences of modernization and modernity at the intersection of particular national sites and the uneven geography of the global capitalist system is fundamental to grappling with how we can begin to talk about globalization in South Korea or East Asia and its corresponding social and cultural changes. In an attempt to read what is new about South Korea's Incheon International airport (2001) and the symbolism of the new `global' aesthetic that prominently shapes the sensational form of this strategic social space, I situate Incheon airport within the historical lineage of modern South Korean airports from the first International Style Kimpo terminal (1960) to the subsequent two traditional-styled kiwa Kimpo terminals (1980, 1988), which preceded the development of Incheon in 1989 as the largest-scale expansion of Kimpo airport. In addition, I trace back the historically produced cultural imaginary of the airport as a crucial space and symbolic marker of a highly ambivalent and contradictory experience of modernity to its linkage with early colonial era railroads and railway journeys. Like the contradictory character of modern postcolonial airports and air travel, the colonial railroads, appearing at the turn of the 20th century Korea, functioned as a significant international gateway and modern technology of long-distance transportation which doubled as the vehicle of the repressive and exploitative processes of colonial statecraft, as well as the vehicle of Korean nationalists seeking to re-appropriate modern ideas and technologies in anticolonial struggles for national independence./nI thus situate the new turn to `globalization' within the historically changing cosmopolitan-national discourses, practices and landscapes of Korean modernity from late 19th century `enlightenment and civilization,' to postwar Cold War internationalism, and developmental national capitalism--linked through the commanding modern trope and technology of railroads and airports. In part a rejoinder to the view of airports as `non-places' vacated of historical meaning or `flow spaces' homogenously aligning airports and cities from Tokyo to New York, I argue that the postcolonial airport in South Korea, like other airports in East Asia I would imagine, are embedded within situated historical-geographies of modernization and development which inscribe the airport not only as a product of uneven global processes but also a vehicle with which to maneuver the uneven terrain of global capitalism.

Advisor: Cheah, Pheng