VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Student perceptions of university sexual harassment policies

Sexual harassment has been pushed back to the forefront of issues in higher education as the fourth wave of feminism grips the western world. In the United Kingdom, this can be seen through a study which was conducted in 2018, showing that the majority of both undergraduate and postgraduate students have experienced sexual harassment and violence (Revolt, 2018). When specifically observing the University of Oxford, there has been a continuous rise in reports from 2018-2021 for sexual harassment and violence (SVHSS, 2022). This study utilizes a mixed-method approach and is informed by the intersectional and feminist theory. It explores the student perception of the current harassment policy at the University of Oxford, and how they may be related to the students’ gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, age, degree level, department, enrollment status, and fee status. Data collected includes 41 student responses to an online survey distributed to all Oxford colleges, and 10 semi-structured follow-up interviews with students from diverse backgrounds. Five conclusions can be drawn from the findings of this research: (1) analysis of the survey results predominantly found statistical significance amongst postgraduate and undergraduate students, (2) analysis from the interviews show a lack of awareness surrounding the policy and resources due to insufficient promotion from the university, (3) high levels of confusion surrounding the policy, (4) significantly more feelings of negativity toward the university than neutral or positive, and (5) participants desire and find it necessary to have some form of mandatory trainings or seminars. These findings suggest further policy and procedural changes need to occur, further promotion of the policy and resources by the university, as well as offering more resources to students such as trainings, and finally creating a more cohesive relationship between the colleges and university to better understand the needs of students.

Keywords: students
sexual harassment
survey
policies
university
perceptions
HE2022
HE
mixed methods
interviews
Advisor: Xu, X
A qualitative investigation into the contributing factors of student consumerism. With a specific focus on international students in the University of Oxford

Increasing competition among higher education institutions (HEIs) in the global market continues to shape the functions of higher education (HE) and influence students' HE experiences. This study, which focuses on students at a selective research-intensive university in the UK, seeks to identify contributing factors that drive students to adopt consumer attitudes. Previous studies on the student-as-consumer (SAC) approach indicated students' complicated and ambivalent attitudes toward the consumerism of HE. Therefore, this study also aims to explore the interconnections among these influencing factors and better explain students' inconsistent attitudes toward student consumerism. The first part of the study focuses on the concept of student consumerism and reviews literature on this topic, leading to the research questions, and the research focuses. The study then draws data from 20 semi-structured interviews to explore the processes of identity change and formation that occur during students' higher education experiences. Of the sample 70% of students identified themselves as consumers of higher education and 30% of students held mixed and conflicting attitudes. A thematic analysis was conducted on their narratives. The findings suggest individual differences (students’ previous life experiences; age; motivation for participating in HE and various university activities; social and cultural backgrounds), group differences (fee differences between international students and local students; adaptation of international students), and perceived differences (students' expectations that underpin their (dis)satisfaction) that are associated with consumer identity adaptation. The discussion of the interactions between these driving factors, as well as the influence of the neoliberal knowledge economy and globalisation of HE, which underpins the marketisation of HE, suggests that all actors in HE should be aware of the cognitive and behavioural changes caused by the inculcation of a neoliberal and capitalist mindset, which has negative implications such as reduced attention to knowledge and the learning process, and the adoption of patriarchal values. To avoid the adaptation of the consumer identity, with all the limitations on the student experiences that this imposes, governments and HEIs should stop positioning students as consumers driven only by an assumed need to maximise their financial self-efficacy.

Keywords: semi-structured interviews
tuition fees
qualitative empirical investigation
critical literature review
HE2022
HE
students as consumers
international students
Purposes of Higher Education
University of Oxford
Advisor: Marginson, S
How to characterize flexibility requirements of highly renewable energy systems over multiple timescales

This thesis addresses the question: Can we characterize requirements for flexibility over different timescales in electricity systems dominated by solar and wind power? Storage and flexibility play an increasingly important role, but there is great uncertainty about amounts of flexibility needed and how they depend on generation mix and demand, including electrification of heating and transportation. Furthermore, to inform investment and planning, it is valuable to characterize the timescales over which flexibility will be needed, as different resources can be used to shift energy over different time horizons. To address this problem, the analysis uses the novel application of three methods to disaggregate overall flexibility requirements into short-, medium-, and long-term requirements, without relying on assumptions about technology parameters or costs. These methods are illustrated using the case of Great Britain and results are used to draw insights into GB flexibility needs under future scenarios. Flexibility is required over multiple timescales, from less than hourly to interseasonal or longer. Overcapacity of renewables provides value in terms of avoided storage costs, particularly displacing requirements for the longest duration storage, though generation capacity beyond 120% of demand yields diminishing marginal returns. Heating electrification has a larger impact than EVs, though flexible heating can partially offset additional power capacity needs. In all cases, the capacity required to shift energy by up to a day was on the order of 1 TWh; this could account for over half of all energy shifted depending on flexible resource operation. Electricity systems with at least 80% of energy from solar and wind require 3-150 TWh to shift energy by weeks or longer. The required capacity to shift energy by more than one year could potentially be avoided using renewables overcapacity, dispatchable generation, or interconnectors.

Keywords: storage duration
flexibility
energy systems
renewable energy
energy storage
Efficient neural network verification and training

In spite of their highly-publicized achievements in disparate applications, neural networks are yet to be widely deployed in safety-critical applications. In fact, fundamental concerns exist on the robustness, fairness, privacy and explainability of deep learning systems. In this thesis, we strive to increase trust in deep learning systems by presenting contributions pertaining to neural network verification and training. First, by designing dual solvers for popular network relaxations, we provide fast and scalable bounds on neural network outputs. In particular, we present two solvers for the convex hull of element-wise activation functions, and two algorithms for a formulation based on the convex hull of the composition of ReLU activations with the preceding linear layer. We show that these methods are significantly faster than off-the-shelf solvers, and improve on the speed-accuracy trade-offs of previous dual algorithms. In order to efficiently employ them for formal neural network verification, we design a massively parallel Branch-and-Bound framework around the bounding algorithms. Our contributions, which we publicly released as part of the OVAL verification framework, improved on the scalability of existing network verifiers, and proved to be influential for the development of more recent algorithms. Second, we present an intuitive and inexpensive algorithm to train neural networks for verifiability via Branch-and-Bound. Our method is shown to yield state-of-the- art performance on verifying robustness to small adversarial perturbations while reducing the training costs compared to previous algorithms. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of specialized training schemes to train networks for multiple tasks at once, showing that they perform on par with a simple baseline. We provide a partial explanation of our surprising results, aiming to stir further research towards the understanding of deep multi-task learning.

Keywords: trustworthy AI
AI safety
neural network verification
robustness
Advisor: Mudigonda, P
Torr, P
Co-designing augmented reality books: connections between student distributed cognition and technology design

This study focuses on the relationship between community-based knowledge construction and participatory technology design. Contextualized against digital divide research, the goals of this study are twofold: understand how students from a low socioeconomic background perceive an emerging technology as a tool to learn with and understand how the iterative and inherently reflective process of technology design may influence student knowledge construction. Grounded in distributed cognition theory, this study examines this relationship by co-designing an augmented reality book with an eighth-grade class in New England, USA. Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging technology that allows users to place virtual models into the physical world using a mobile device or headset. The students created a book about COVID-19 and worked with the researcher to build an iOS app that projected virtual models atop the book. The analysis answers questions about how students perceive and use AR as a tool to learn with, demonstrating that students use AR as an exploratory tool, first broadly across a diverse set of topics, and then deeper into specific details. The study also examines the influence of iteration, observing how students switched between roles of producer and consumer as they sought to improve the app, thereby encouraging critical reflection on the material. Ultimately, this study shows the ways in which individual students used the unique affordances of AR to contribute and modify information for the advancement of the community’s knowledge.

Keywords: co-design
education technology
community knowledge building
distributed cognition
DSC2022
participatory design
participatory methods
DSC
augmented reality
technology design
Advisor: Winters, N
"For a quart of ale is a dish for a king"? Malting, brewing and beer in the Mid Saxon period: a case study of Sedgeford

Primary documentary sources attest to ‘oceanic’ beer drinking in Anglo-Saxon England; however, corresponding archaeological and archaeobotanical evidence has, to date, been conspicuously lacking. Archaeobotanical and structural evidence have together recently been used to designate a crop-processing complex, securely radiocarbon dated to the Mid Saxon era, at the site of Sedgeford in northwest Norfolk as, more specifically, a malting complex (comprising a steeping tank, and multiple germination floors and kilns): the earliest known in Anglo-Saxon England.
The key archaeobotanical criterion signifying malting is abundant germinated cereal grains. The malting complex assemblage is, unusually, dominated by rye grains, and secondarily, free-threshing wheat. New methods for assessing germination in ‘naked’ grains such as rye and free-threshing wheat, based on external morphology as visible under a light microscope, are presented. Results are ‘triangulated’ with other novel analyses -- geometric morphometric analysis and scanning electron microscopy – for assessing germination in malting complex grains. Coherence in these results provides multi-stranded evidence for widespread germination, and hence malting, at Sedgeford. This study sets the malting complex in its broader socio-economic and cultural context: describing Sedgeford’s place in the contested Mid Saxon ‘agricultural revolution’.
Stable isotope analysis and functional weed ecology together evidence all three components of the mooted ‘mouldboard plough package’: heavy plough use, extensification and, perhaps, early crop rotation, in the arable land supplying the malting complex. Further, results suggest Sedgeford may have been a ‘collection centre’ for harvested crops from surrounding arable land. Cultural continuity between the ‘eastern zone’ of England and northwest continental Europe in the era is increasingly recognised, and evidenced at the site. Rye was then commonly cultivated on the continent. Importation of rye-husbanding and -malting customs by recent immigrants to Sedgeford from littoral northwest Europe is tentatively hypothesised.

Keywords: beer
extensification
Scandinavia
archaeobotany
East Anglia
early medieval
germination
Anglo-Saxon
functional weed ecology
brewing
correspondence analysis
malting
rye
malting kiln
crop rotation
charred assemblage
agriculture
immigration
mouldboard plough
stable isotope analysis
crop processing
Norfolk
ale
eastern zone
Advisor: Bogaard, A
Charles, M
The role of technology in the school to work transition of vocational students in China

This dissertation examines the school to work transition of Chinese vocational students and how technology affects the transition. School-to-work transition is an important stage in an individual’s career development and is influenced by different factors. Technology's role in school-to-work transition, however, remains under-researched, especially among vocational students at higher educational levels. In China the employability of vocational students has been subject to various changes over the last few decades, leading to the stigmatisation of social inferiority and difficulties finding employment. Examining how technology impacts this group, therefore, may be illuminating, as technology has the potential to decrease social inequalities and facilitate social mobility and inclusion by providing a variety of access to information and promoting social networks. More particularly, technology may be able to help Chinese vocational students during their transition experiences, which offers better job opportunities and achieve social upgrade. Using semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis, this study surveys 22 students and one teacher on technology and school-to-work transitions, with results suggesting that vocational students tend to have a smooth transition with the aid of technology. While technology does not play a key role when applying for jobs, it is an important source of job-related information, showing that it is possible for them to gain useful information for the job hunting from the technology but may not fundamentally alleviate the social injustice on the students. Overall, the dissertation makes a new contribution to studies on technology’s contribution to school-to-work transitions in the Chinese context and vocational school employability.

Keywords: Interview
Vocational education
DSC2022
Technology
School to work transition
DSC
Advisor: Winters, N
From the mainframe to the flesh: Pedagogical approaches to conceptualizing human experience in bio-modeling

The design of medical instrumentation is a vital aspect of Biomedical Engineering (BME) programs. Yet, no full-length study analyzing the consequence of pedagogical methods on a medical device’s final design has been conducted. Being that these technologies are created with a specific end-use in mind, an examination of instructional design is essential for ascertaining how the user has come to be understood by those drafting solutions on their behalf. As such, this thesis examines the ways that biomedical engineering programs conceptualize user experience through design instruction. It navigates essentialist questions like who is a user and evolves to investigate the theoretical crux of medical device making to ask why decisions are made and what apparatuses might inform these choices. Through this process, it discerns a lack of critical pedagogy in BME design curricula, and thus argues that biomedical engineering programs must take seriously the ideas of race, gender, and other social categories in the teaching of medical device design.
This work begins by reflecting on the socio-historical relevance of medical devices. In doing so, it outlines health, education, and illness as value-laden, multi-dimensional notions that are often singularized. This piece contends that such singularization limits the reach and effectiveness of design instruction, reifying the belief that science is distinct from social meaning. It then reflects on the use of technology in the development of medical devices. Here, it offers a generational description of mechanical Computer Aided-Design (CAD)—a band of software used to transform 2D sketches into 3D digital models. Finally, through a series of semi-structured interviews with six recent graduates of two top ranked BME programs, this work develops the concept of exclusion as enactment to describe the catastrophic impacts exclusion can have for those underrepresented in currently utilized instructional frameworks.

Keywords: Medical bias
Biomedical engineering
Device design
Computer Aided Design
DSC2022
DSC
Medical devices
Advisor: Eynon, R
Reinforcement learning in large state action spaces

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising framework for training intelligent agents which learn to optimize long term utility by directly interacting with the environment. Creating RL methods which scale to large state-action spaces is a critical problem towards ensuring real world deployment of RL systems. However, several challenges limit the applicability of RL to large scale settings. These include difficulties with exploration, low sample efficiency, computational intractability, task constraints like decentralization and lack of guarantees about important properties like performance, generalization and robustness in potentially unseen scenarios.
This thesis is motivated towards bridging the aforementioned gap. We propose several principled algorithms and frameworks for studying and addressing the above challenges RL. The proposed methods cover a wide range of RL settings (single and multi-agent systems (MAS) with all the variations in the latter, prediction and control, model-based and model-free methods, value-based and policy-based methods). In this work we propose the first results on several different problems: e.g. tensorization of the Bellman equation which allows exponential sample efficiency gains (Chapter 4), provable suboptimality arising from structural constraints in MAS(Chapter 3), combinatorial generalization results in cooperative MAS(Chapter 5), generalization results on observation shifts(Chapter 7), learning deterministic policies in a probabilistic RL framework(Chapter 6). Our algorithms exhibit provably enhanced performance and sample efficiency along with better scalability. Additionally, we also shed light on generalization aspects of the agents under different frameworks. These properties have been been driven by the use of several advanced tools (e.g. statistical machine learning, state abstraction, variational inference, tensor theory).
In summary, the contributions in this thesis significantly advance progress towards making RL agents ready for large scale, real world applications.

Keywords: multi agent systems
variational methods
high dimensional systems
generalization in AI
sequential decision making
state abstraction
reinforcement learning
Advisor: Whiteson, S
Investigating triggering events in T and B lymphocytes

T cells have an important role in the resolution of infections and cancer. The mechanisms underlying early contact formation of T cells with antigen-presenting cells, and the contribution of T-cell receptor (TCR) microclusters (MCs) to T-cell activation, are still not well understood, especially given recent evidence demonstrating the importance of membrane topography in T-cell signalling. Furthermore, it is unclear what features of the TCR triggering mechanism are shared with other receptors, such as the B-cell receptor (BCR). For experiments presented in this thesis, cell lines were created that express TCRs with different affinities and surface densities, along with an inhibitable mutant of ZAP-70, which were used to probe the effects of TCR density and signalling in early T-cell contacts and antigen reactivity. TCR density did not affect the spreading or close contact formation of T cells with supported lipid bilayers (SLB) presenting agonist pMHC, suggesting that very few TCRs are needed to trigger these events. MC distribution was uncorrelated with close contacts, implying that these structures are real, and not imaging artefacts. However, T cells with low TCR expression levels signalled robustly, suggesting that MC formation might not be a pre-requisite of TCR signalling. Nevertheless, signalling triggered under these conditions did not result in full T-cell activation. ZAP-70 inhibited cells displayed reduced cell spreading, formed fewer but larger close contacts, and recruited more ZAP-70 at MCs. This data suggests that ZAP-70 is a strong regulator of T-cell contact formation, and that it also contributes to antigen discrimination, alongside its key role in signal amplification at the TCR. Finally, key requirements of the kinetic segregation (KS) model were confirmed in T and B cells, including the induction of TCR triggering by slowing the receptor’s diffusion within a close contact, and the demonstration that the BCR is unclustered on resting cells, similarly to the TCR, thereby ruling out a popular model of BCR triggering. Work carried out in this thesis provides insight into the mechanisms regulating early contact formation by T cells, and by demonstrating key predictions of the KS model in both T and B cells, raises the possibility that a unified mechanism for immune receptor triggering could exist.

Keywords: microscopy
immunology
immune cell signalling
Advisor: Davis, S
Santos, AM