VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Hindu pilgrimage, with particular reference to West Bengal, India

Journeying to sacred places is an ancient yet contemporarily popular tradition in the Hindu society of India. At the outset of this thesis, the philosophical foundations and general patterns of pilgrimage practice in West Bengal, India, where fieldwork was conducted, are discussed. Case studies of three West Bengali pilgrimage centres — Tarakeswar, Navadvip and Tarapith, which are Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava and Śākta sacred places, respectively — reveal the considerable diversity in the regional pilgrimage tradition. In analysing each of these centres, ethnographic data on the social and economic organisation of specialised religious places, roles of sacred specialists, beliefs regarding the deities, patterns of ritual, and social characteristics and behaviour of pilgrims are presented. The literature on pilgrimage is reviewed in search of theoretical tools for the task of generalising about pilgrimage, inclusive of the evident diversity. Analysis and criticism of existing theories indicates that analysts have focused on limited aspects of pilgrimage practice which conform to disciplinary boundaries rather than seeking the patterned consistencies which define the full institution. Comparison of the three case studies reveals that the variation in religious patterns in the centres relates to wider traditions of religious culture in Bengal: the several strands of pilgrimage tradition generally replicate the sub-traditions of Bengali Hinduism and patterns of belief and practice in any sacred place are closely associated with the religious tradition of the regional cult which dominates that centre. It is possible, however, to identify two levels at which the diversity of the pilgrimage institution is founded in systematic conceptual unity. Both levels concern the meaning of pilgrimage within prevalent patterns of Bengali Hinduism. The explicit meaning of pilgrimage in the conscious thought of participants emphasises the journey to the deity's terrestrial abode in search of interaction with the divine. Implicit within this patterned behaviour are important Hindu metaphysical concepts — the implicit ideology of pilgrimage — which invest pilgrimage with meaning derived from abstract Hindu religious thought.
Abstract satisfaction

This dissertation shows that satisfiability procedures are abstract interpreters. This insight provides a unified view of program analysis and satisfiability solving and enables technology transfer between the two fields. The framework underlying these developments provides systematic recipes that show how intuition from satisfiability solvers can be lifted to program analyzers, how approximation techniques from program analyzers can be integrated into satisfiability procedures and how program analyzers and satisfiability solvers can be combined. Based on this work, we have developed new tools for checking program correctness and for solving satisfiability of quantifier-free first-order formulas. These tools outperform existing approaches.
We introduce abstract satisfaction, an algebraic framework for applying abstract interpre- tation to obtain sound, but potentially incomplete satisfiability procedures. The framework allows the operation of satisfiability procedures to be understood in terms of fixed point computations involving deduction and abduction transformers on lattices. It also enables satisfiability solving and program correctness to be viewed as the same algebraic problem.
Using abstract satisfaction, we show that a number of satisfiability procedures can be understood as abstract interpreters, including Boolean constraint propagation, the dpll and cdcl algorithms, St ̊almarck’s procedure, the dpll(t) framework and solvers based on congruence closure and the Bellman-Ford algorithm. Our work leads to a novel understand- ing of satisfiability architectures as refinement procedures for abstract analyses and allows us to relate these procedures to independent developments in program analysis. We use this perspective to develop Abstract Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (acdcl), a rigorous, lattice-based generalization of cdcl, the central algorithm of modern satisfiability research. The acdcl framework provides a solution to the open problem of lifting cdcl to new prob- lem domains and can be instantiated over many lattices that occur in practice. We provide soundness and completeness arguments for acdcl that apply to all such instantiations.
We evaluate the effectiveness of acdcl by investigating two practical instantiations: fp-acdcl, a satisfiability procedure for the first-order theory of floating point arithmetic, and cdfpl, an interval-based program analyzer that uses cdcl-style learning to improve the precision of a program analysis. fp-acdcl is faster than competing approaches in 80% of our benchmarks and it is faster by more than an order of magnitude in 60% of the benchmarks. Out of 33 safe programs, cdfpl proves 16 more programs correct than a mature interval analysis tool and can conclusively determine the presence of errors in 24 unsafe benchmarks. Compared to bounded model checking, cdfpl is on average at least 260 times faster on our benchmark set.

Keywords: program analysis
satisfiability
logic
abstract interpretation
Advisor: Kroening, D
Azo-anions in organic synthesis

Novel synthetic applications of ambident azo-anions derived from hindered hydrazones have been investigated. Reaction with electrophiles occurred predominantly at carbon as the N-addition pathway was sterically retarded. Trityl, diphenyl-4-pyridylmethyl (DPP) benzhydryl, and t-butyldiphenylmethyl (BDP) hydrazones of various aldehydes and ketones were prepared in good yields from the corresponding hydrazines and carbonyls in aqueous methanol. The lithium salts derived from trityl and DPP hydrazones, by treatment with methyl lithium at -55°C, reacted with aldehydes and ketones to generate azo-alkoxides. These could be diverted to alcohols,by sequential protonation and spontaneous homolysis (about -20°C) in the presence of ethanethiol, or to alkenes,by treatment with phosphorus trichloride at -78 G followed by azo-homolysis. The reactions enabled efficient reductive cross-coupling of aldehydes and ketones. The mechanism of the alkene forming reaction was investigated. Anions of benzhydryl hydrazones were found to react inefficiently by a G-addition pathway giving mainly N-addition products.
Anions of BDP hydrazones conveniently gave excellent yields of azo-alkanes upon treatment with alkyl halides,but no products were obtained on reaction with carbonyl electrophiles. The azo-alkanes could be isolated and purified and acted as key intermediates for several synthetically useful transformations. Homolysis in refluxing benzene with thiophenol gave alkanes in good yields. Phenylselenenyl-, bromo-, and chloro-alkanes,and β-alkylstyrenes were generated when thiol was replaced by diphenyl diselenide, N-bromosuccinimide, N-chlorosuccinimide and β-nitrostyrene respectively.
Treatment of the azo-alkanes with trifluoroacetic acid generated benzophenone alkylhydrazones. These were dissolved in ethanol with concentrated hydrochloric acid, thereafter hydrolysis yielded alkylhydrazines or treatment with hydrogen (1 atm., 50°C, 20h) over 10% Pd/C generated primary amines by a novel use of carbonyls as α-aminocarbanion equivalents.

Advisor: Baldwin, J
Static and dynamic performance of Ti foams 

Titanium (Ti) foams of different densities 1622-4100 Kgm-3 made by a powder sintering technique were studied as to their structural and mechanical properties. The foams were tested under static and dynamic loading. The material was tested quasi statically and dynamically under strain rates in the range of 0.001-2500 s-1 and under different loading modes. It was found that strain rate sensitivity is more pronounced in lower density foams. Experiments were complimented by virtual testing. Based on the Voronoi tessellations a computational method was developed to generate stochastic foam geometries. Statistical control was applied to produce geometries with the microstructural characteristics of the tested material. The generated structures were numerically tested under different loading modes and strain rates. Voronoi polyhedrals were used to form the porosity network of the open cell foams. The virtually generated foams replicated the geometrical features of the experimentally tested material. Meshes for finite element simulations were produced. Existing material models were used for the parent material behaviour (sintered Ti) and calibrated to experiments. The virtual foam geometries of different densities were numerically tested quasi statically under uniaxial, biaxial and triaxial loading modes in order to investigate their macroscopic behaviour. Dynamic loading was also applied for compression. Strain rate sensitive and insensitive models were used for the parent material model in order to examine the influence of geometry and material strain rate sensitivity under high rates of deformation. It was found that inertial effects can enhance the strain rate sensitivity for low density foams and numerical predictions for the generated foam geometries were in very good agreement with experimental results. Power laws were established in scaling material properties with density. The study includes: 1. Information on the material behaviour and data for macroscopically modelling this type of foams for a range of densities and under different strain rates. 2. A proposed method for virtually generating foam geometries at a microscopic scale and examine the effect of geometrical characteristics on the macroscopic behaviour of foams.

Keywords: Foams
Titanium
Voronoi
engineered materials design
strain rate
finite element
multiscale
cellular materials
virtual foam
stochastic geometry
materials design
Advisor: Petrinic, N
Tagarielli, V
Quantitative STM imaging of metal surfaces

Many deductions made about STM images are based upon the model of Tersoff and Hamann, in which images are given in principal by a combination of surface atomic positions and local charge density. There is a now a need for a fuller understanding of this technique in order to explain experimental evidence which indicates that the tip and sample can interact strongly during normal imaging.
In order to investigate the fundamental STM imaging process, a method for deducing the tunnel barrier height has been developed which is based on corrugation height measurements of constant current topographs. From experiments on clean Cu(100), values of the tunnel barrier height have been shown to be somewhat below the workfunction (~ 1-2.5eV) but are in good agreement with other reports of atomically resolved barrier height data.
At large values of the tunnel conductance (~ 1μS), a fall-off (based upon extrapolation of large separation data) in the corrugation heights is observed with increasing conductance. This effect is quantitatively explained using a Molecular Dynamics simulation of the tip approaching the sample. The simulation gives a good estimate of both the absolute tip-sample separation and site-dependent tip-surface forces.
Distributions of corrugation heights indicate that variations in both tip geometry and chemistry are likely to occur in practice and strongly influence the phenomena described above.
Similarly, it is found that increased local tunnel barrier heights are measured when the Cu(100) surface is modified with small numbers of single halogen atoms. This data has been used to estimate the contributions to the increase in local barrier height of both adsorbate induced dipoles and geometric topography. Values for the charge transfer between the surface and adsorbate have been established. The process of tip-induced adsorbate manipulation has also been demonstrated at room temperature.

Advisor: Pethica, J
Educational planning for situations of instability: standardization and advocacy in humanitarian aid practice 

This thesis examines the role and relationship of standardization and advocacy in humanitarian aid planning processes within the emergent field of education and instability. Standardization refers to the aid industry’s increasing emphasis on establishing ‘universal’ principles and normative frameworks. Advocacy refers to transnational-policy-network activities that move forward the global standardization agenda. The study focuses on the purposes and practices of knowledge creation by an education-and-instability ‘epistemic community’: the Inter-Agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE).
Drawing on global-level interviews with key figures, participant observations, and documentary analysis, the research explores how this epistemic community promotes its core tenets: that education is an inherent human right and that educational provision should be a frontline humanitarian response on par with food distribution and shelter construction. The thesis analyzes the consensus-making process that resulted in the publication of the 2004 INEE Minimum Standards handbook, the then-epitome of the epistemic community’s knowledge.
Next, the thesis examines the local application and adaptation of such global standardization processes in post-conflict Uganda. The case study presents the relationships among international and local ‘development partner’ institutions concerned with educational planning as a complex and contradictory story of power dynamics and knowledge circulation. These ‘partnerships’ are characterized by a shared quest for adherence to the knowledge encapsulated within standardized global frameworks and their normative principles. For Ugandan institutions, fluency in this discourse is a powerful tool to appropriate for their own ends. For international institutions, the knowledge is at once a technical resource and a means to bring ever more stakeholders into the wider epistemic community concerned with humanitarian aid.
I argue that, through judicious use of standardization and advocacy mechanisms, INEE seeks to legitimize the education sector’s existence within the humanitarian aid industry and expand support for (or ‘conversion’ to) the education-and-instability epistemic community’s core beliefs.

Keywords: policy
education
humanitarian assistance
planning
advocacy
INEE
Advisor: Mills, D
Signal processing methods for non-invasive respiration monitoring

This thesis investigates the feasibility of using a set of non-invasive biomedical signals to monitor respiration. The signals of interest being the electrocardiogram (EGG), photoplethysmography (PPG) and impedance plethysmography (IP) signals.
The work has two main aims; the first being to estimate breathing rates from the signals, the second being to detect apnoeas from the signals.
The fusion of information from different signals is used throughout in developing algorithms that give more accurate respiratory information than that obtained using one signal alone. Respiratory waveforms are derived from the signals, and the accuracy of detecting individual breaths from the waveforms is assessed and compared objectively. Results from evaluations on two separate databases show there is no waveform that gives sufficient accuracy to consider using it alone.
A novel fusion method is developed which uses measurements from all three signals. This fusion method is based on weighting the estimates from each signal, according to the innovation from a Kalman filter model, applied to each respiratory waveform separately. The fused estimates give a higher overall correlation with respect to the reference breathing rate values than any of the breathing estimates derived from a single waveform.
The detection of both central and obstructive sleep apnoea from the signals is investigated. It is shown that the accuracy of detecting central apnoeas from the IP signal using a timedomain method, often used in practice, can be improved by combining it with information from the frequency-domain.
When discriminating between obstructive sleep apnoeic and non-apnoeic data it is seen that combining features from two signals results in a superior classification accuracy than is possible by using features from just one signal. The proposed classification system using just one of these signals, the EGG, is shown to give a performance accuracy comparable to that found in the literature.
In conclusion this thesis shows that by fusing information from a number of non-invasive biomedical signals, estimations of breathing rates can be found with correlation 0.8. This is superior to estimation using only the impedance pneumography signal (correlation 0.64) which is currently used to monitor respiration. The fusion approach could potentially be applied to improve other non-invasive physiological monitoring systems.

Advisor: Tarassenko, L
Automatic verification of competitive stochastic systems

In this thesis we present a framework for automatic formal analysis of competitive stochastic systems, such as sensor networks, decentralised resource management schemes or distributed user-centric environments. We model such systems as stochastic multi-player games, which are turn-based models where an action in each state is chosen by one of the players or according to a probability distribution. The specifications, such as “sensors 1 and 2 can collaborate to detect the target with probability 1, no matter what other sensors in the network do” or “the controller can ensure that the energy used is less than 75 mJ, and the algorithm terminates with probability at least 0.5'', are provided as temporal logic formulae. We introduce a branching-time temporal logic rPATL and its multi-objective extension to specify such probabilistic and reward-based properties of stochastic multi-player games. We also provide algorithms for these logics that can either verify such properties against the model, providing a yes/no answer, or perform strategy synthesis by constructing the strategy for the players that satisfies the specification. We conduct a detailed complexity analysis of the model checking problem for rPATL and its multi-objective extension and provide efficient algorithms for verification and strategy synthesis. We also implement the proposed techniques in the PRISM-games tool and apply them to the analysis of several case studies of competitive stochastic systems.

Keywords: stochastic games
probabilistic logic
Markov chains
Advisor: Kwiatkowska, M
Development of magnetic bond-order potentials for Mn and Fe-Mn

While group VII 4d Tc and 5d Re have hexagonally close-packed (hcp) ground states, 3d Mn adopts the complex chi-phase which exhibits non-collinear magnetism. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations have shown that without magnetism the chi-phase remains the ground state of Mn implying that magnetism is not the critical factor, as is commonly believed, in driving the anomalous stability of the chi-phase over hcp. Using a tight-binding (TB) model it is found that while harder potentials stabilise close-packed hcp, a softer potential stabilises the more open chi-phase. By analogy with the structural trend from open to close-packed phases down the group IV elements, the anomalous stability of the chi-phase in Mn is shown to be due to 3d valent Mn lacking d states in the core which leads to an effectively softer atomic repulsion between the atoms than in 4d Tc and 5d Re.
Subsequently an analytic Bond-Order Potential (BOP) is developed to investigate the structural and magnetic properties of elemental Mn at 0 K. It is derived within BOP theory directly from a new short-ranged orthogonal d-valent TB model of Mn, the parameters of which are fitted to reproduce the DFT binding energy curves of the five experimentally observed phases of Mn, alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and epsilon-Mn. Not only does the BOP reproduce qualitatively DFT binding energy curves of the five different structure types, it also predicts the complex collinear antiferromagnetic (AFM) ordering in alpha-Mn, the ferrimagnetic (FiM) ordering in beta-Mn and the AFM ordering in the other phases that are found by DFT. A BOP expansion including 14 moments is sufficiently converged to reproduce most of the properties of the TB model with the exception of the elastic shear constants which require further moments.
Magnetic analytic BOPs are also developed for Fe and Fe-Mn. The Fe model correctly reproduces trends in the structural stabilities of the common metallic structures except that AFM hcp is overstabilised. Reproduction of the elastic constants with a 9-moment BOP is reasonable although as is found for the Mn BOP the elastic shear constants require more moments to converge. Vacancy formation energies are close to those determined by experiment and DFT and the relative stabilities of self-interstitial atom (SIA) defects in ferromagnetic bcc Fe are correctly reproduced. The SIA formation energies are found to be better than those calculated with existing BOP models.
The Fe-Mn TB and BOP models were challenging to fit and nonmagnetic face-centred cubic (fcc) structures are overstabilised. Furthermore within BOP an incorrect magnetic solution is predicted for one fcc structure resulting in poor reproduction of the DFT stacking fault energies. Refitting the bond integrals might help to better reproduce the nonmagnetic hcp-fcc energy differences while an environment-dependent Stoner parameter could help provide the flexibility needed to correctly capture the magnetic energy differences.

Keywords: DFT
Materials Modelling
Iron
Manganese
BOP
High Manganese Steels
Density Functional Theory
Advisor: Pettifor, D
Drautz, R
The origin of heresy in Hindu mythology

Hinduism has always been noted for its ability to absorb potentially schismatic developments. The assimilation of heresies (pākhaṇḍa- dharmas) was made possible in part by the open-ended quality of the religion itself but also by the vagueness of the Hindu definition of heresy. The two primary, ostensible criteria of orthodoxy are the acceptance of the Vedas as the sacred canon and adherence to the basic law of society -- varṇāśrama dharma, the regulation of class and stage of life. By these criteria, heresy would seem to be a fairly straightforward matter, separating Hindus from non-Hindus, but this is not the case. To the Hindus as a whole, Buddhists arid Jains (and Cārvākas or Materialists, with which these two religions are often confused) are heretics. To most Hindus but Śaiva Kāpālikas, Kāpālikas are heretics. To the Brahmin Kāpālikas, the Śudra Kāpālikas, are heretics. To most non-Tantric Hindus, Tantrics are heretics. Levels of heresy and hierarchical concepts of status cloud the issue and invalidate any single definition.
[Continued in text ...]