VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Predictive and Programmable Testing of Concurrent and Cloud Systems

Today's software systems often have poor reliability. In addition to losses of billions, software defects are responsible for a number of serious injuries and deaths in transportation accidents, medical treatments, and defense operations. The situation is getting worse with concurrency and distributed computing becoming integral parts of many real-world software systems. The non-determinism in concurrent and distributed systems and the unreliability of the hardware environment in which they operate can result in defects that are hard to find and understand./nIn this thesis, we have developed tools and techniques to augment testing to enable it to quickly find and reproduce important bugs in concurrent and distributed systems. Our techniques are based on the following two key ideas: (i) use program analysis to increase coverage by predicting bugs that could have occurred in "nearby" program executions, and (ii) provide programming abstractions to enable testers to easily express their insights to guide testing towards those executions that are more likely to exhibit bugs or help achieve testing objectives without having any knowledge about the underlying testing process. The tools that we have built have found many serious bugs in large real-world software systems (e.g. Jigsaw web server, JDK, JGroups, and Hadoop File System)./nIn the first part of the thesis, we describe how we can predict and confirm bugs in the executions of concurrent systems that did not show up during testing but that could have shown up had the program under consideration executed under different thread schedules.This improves the coverage of testing, and helps find corner-case bugs that are unlikely to be discovered during traditional testing. We have built predictive testing tools to find different classes of serious bugs like deadlocks, hangs, and typestate errors in concurrent systems./nIn the second part of the thesis, we investigate how we can improve the efficiency of testing of distributed cloud systems by letting testers guide testing towards the executions that are interesting to them. For example, a tester might want to test those executions that are more likely to be erroneous or that are more likely to help her achieve her testing objectives. We have built tools and frameworks that enable testers to easily express their knowledge and intuition to guide testing without having any knowledge about the underlying testing process. We have investigated programmable testing tools in the context of testing of large-scale distributed systems.

Advisor: Sen, Koushik
Lowness For Computational Speed

From the original definition of a set whose jump is as simple as possible (A' =T 0'), to more recent definitions involving randomness, notions of lowness appear throughout recursion theory. In that spirit, a non-recursive set A will be said to be low for speed if for any recursive set R and any computation of R from A, there is an oracle-free computation of R that is no more than polynomial-time slower than the A-computation./nWe will construct such an r.e. set and discuss some properties of these sets. We will show that promptly simple r.e. sets cannot be low for speed, and also that there are non-prompt sets that are not low for speed. We conclude by showing that generic sets are low for speed if and only if P = NP.

Advisor: Slaman, Theodore
Entertainment-Education and the Fotonovela: A New Strategy to Increase Help-Seeking Behaviors for Depression among Immigrant Latinas

Recent studies find a high risk of depression among immigrant Latinas known to increase during the acculturation process. Several barriers, such as stigma and low health literacy, frequently separate Latinas from treatment. In response this study aimed to replicate the effectiveness of Entertainment-Education (E-E), in the form of a Spanish language fotonovela, in increasing depression literacy among immigrant Latinas at risk for depression. This study specifically sought to assess if exposure to the fotonovela, delivered in a multifaceted approach to health education used by promotoras, improved depression knowledge, the self-efficacy to identify the need for treatment, and the intent to seek treatment while reducing stigma towards depression treatment. Additional exploratory research assessed the participants' response to the fotonovela. Through a mixed methods approach comprised of quantitative data (employing a pretest-posttest randomized control group experimental design) and qualitative data (composed of structured follow- up interviews) 142 immigrant Latinas in a large urban setting were included in this study. Results indicate statistically significant posttest differences in depression knowledge, self-efficacy to identify the need for treatment, and antidepressant stigma between control and experimental group participants. Results also suggest a positive response to the fotonovela reflected in the participants' identification and engagement with the story and its characters. Follow-up interviews detect most participants discussed the content of the fotonovela with friends whom they identified as depressed. Findings suggest use of cost effective E-E health literacy tools, in combination with the multifaceted approach to health education used by promotoras, may increase mental health knowledge and intention to share knowledge among underserved populations. Further mixed methods research is recommended in the continued assessment of mental health literacy among Latinos and development of culturally competent mental health literacy tools.

Advisor: Organista, Kurt C
Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity

"Beyond the Limit: Gender, Sexuality, and the Animal Question in (Afro)Modernity" demonstrates that key texts of twentieth-century African American and African diasporic literature, performance, and visual culture provide crucial interventions into the racialization of the human/animal border. Pairing African American, South African, and Afro-Caribbean literature, film, visual and performance art with historical representations of animalized blackness found in philosophy, science, and law, "Beyond the Limit" highlights African diasporic literary and visual culture's disruptions of the racialization of the human/animal boundary.

Advisor: JanMohamed, Abdul
Information Sharing Tools and Behavior in Collaborative Human-Centered Design Teams

Developing innovative products and services benefits from collaboration within multidisciplinary design teams. Design teams gather and generate large quantities of data, including user research, information on competing products and applicable technologies, and new design ideas; however, teams often struggle to synthesize this diverse design information. Collaboration can break down if they cannot form a shared understanding of the design problem. This dissertation examines current design practices to construct theoretical models of the design process and to develop new tools to help design teams create, communicate, and collaborate. It explores how information tools are used to support collaborative design processes, and suggests forms for future tools. It presents a series of qualitative research studies, i.e., survey and interviews with professional and student designers as well as observations of face-to-face student design team meetings. The analysis of surveys and interviews with professional designers offer a descriptive characterization of how design teams use technology to share information with each other in practice. These studies also inform a new conceptual framework--the sharing spiral-- that describes how information is shared throughout individual and collaborative design tasks, across user research and conceptual design phases. With this new framework guiding qualitative analysis of observations of face-to-face student design team meetings, nine challenges to information sharing are identified. This dissertation proposes design guidelines for new design collaboration technology, based on these challenges. Finally, it applies these guidelines to a new system, Dazzle. Dazzle is an information sharing tool for face-to-face design teams that allows teammates to share, log, and annotate shared design resources. This dissertation offers a new understanding of information sharing in design practice, and has implications for improving design practice and the development of future design tools.

Advisor: Agogino, Alice M
Beckman, Sara L
Using Program Analysis to Reduce Misconfiguration in Open Source Systems Software

Thanks to the Cloud, developers today often have access to dozens or hundreds of nodes. Managing this hardware requires a large software stack. Often, this software is open-source and community developed. As a result of this development model and the complexities of distributed resource management, modern software systems can have dozens or even hundreds of configurable options. The open source development process makes it easy for developers to add options and easy for documentation to become stale. We offer a static analysis to identify the options present in a given program and to infer types for them. Our analysis is often more precise than the existing human-written documentation./nWe offer a similar analysis to aid in debugging configuration errors. We build an explicit table matching program points to the configuration options that might have caused a failure at that point. The analysis runs quickly, taking less than an hour for programs with hundreds of thousands of lines of code. We use Hadoop and JChord as case studies to assess accuracy. For those programs, our technique diagnoses over 80% of the errors due to randomly-injected illegal configuration values. Precision is high; our analysis finds an average of 3-4 possibly relevant options for each error. Using stack traces in the analysis removes approximately a third of the imprecision as compared to error messages alone./nWe also present a solution to a quite different problem: poor quality console logs. Log analysis and logging configuration are hampered by the fact that there is no way to refer unambiguously to a particular log statement. Assigning a unique identifier to every statement enables fine-grained control of which messages are printed and how they are labeled. We achieve this using program-rewriting, retrofitting statement numbers to legacy Java programs. This numbering is consistent across program runs and in the presence of software updates. We use an offline analysis to match statements across program versions. The runtime overhead of our approach is negligible.

Advisor: Katz, Randy H
Towards Comprehensible and Effective Permission Systems

How can we, as platform designers, protect computer users from the threats associated with malicious, privacy-invasive, and vulnerable applications? Modern platforms have turned away from the traditional user-based permission model and begun adopting application permission systems in an attempt to shield users from these threats. This dissertation evaluates modern permission systems with the goal of improving the security of future platforms./nIn platforms with application permission systems, applications are unprivileged by default and must request permissions in order to access sensitive API calls. Developers specify the permissions that their applications need, and users approve the granting of permissions. Permissions are intended to provide defense in depth by restricting the scope of vulnerabilities and user consent by allowing users to control whether third parties have access to their resources./nIn this dissertation we investigate whether permission systems are effective at providing defense in depth and user consent. First, we perform two studies to evaluate whether permissions provide defense in depth: we analyze applications to determine whether developers request minimal sets of permissions, and we quantify the impact of permissions on real-world vulnerabilities. Next, we evaluate whether permissions obtain the user's informed consent by surveying and interviewing users. We use the Android application and Google Chrome extension platforms for our studies; at present, they are popular platforms with extensive permission systems./nOur goal is to inform the design of future platforms with our findings. We argue that permissions are a valuable addition to a platform, and our study results support continued work on permission systems. However, current permission warnings fail to inform the majority of users about the risks of applications. We propose a set of guidelines to aid in the design of more user-friendly permissions, based on our user research and relevant literature.

Advisor: Wagner, David
Multi-Scale Studies of Transport and Adsorption Phenomena of Cement-based Materials in Aqueous and Saline Environment

The transport and adsorption phenomena in cement-based materials are the most important processes in the durability of concrete structures or nuclear waste containers, as they are precursors to a number of deterioration processes such as chloride-induced corrosion, sulfate attack, carbonation, etc. Despite this importance, our understanding of these processes remains limited because the pore structure and composition of concrete are complex. In addition, the range of the pore sizes, from nanometers to millimeters, requires the multi-scale modeling of the transport and adsorption processes. Among the various environments that cement-based materials are exposed to, aqueous and saline environments represent the most common types. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the adsorption and transport phenomena of cement-based materials exposed to an aqueous and saline environment from atomic to macro-scales using different arrays of novel spectroscopic techniques and simulation methods, such as scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM), X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES), molecular dynamics (MD), and finite element method (FEM). The structure and transport of water molecules through interlayer spacing of tobermorite was investigated using MD simulations because the interlayer water of calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H) gel influences various material properties of concrete. The adsorption processes of cementitious phases interacting with sodium and chloride ions at the nano-scale were identified using STXM and XANES measurements. A mathematical model and FEM procedure were developed to identify the effect of surface treatments at macro-scale on ionic transport phenomena of surface-treated concrete. Finally, this dissertation introduced a new material, calcined layered double hydroxide (CLDH), to prevent chloride-induced deterioration.

Advisor: Monteiro, Paulo J.M.
Organic and Printed Electronics for Biological Microfluidic Applications

Advances in research and technology are happening now more than ever in the biotechnology industry. Efficient methods for biological processes and better detection and treatment methods are constantly being sought by researchers. Collaboration among different fields of science and technology has brought us one step closer towards achieving this goal in this work. One such technology that has the capability of providing efficient methods and processes for biology is printed electronics. Printed electronics is an attractive paradigm for realization of biological microfluidic systems. The large area of these systems makes printing valuable from a cost perspective. Furthermore, since printing allows for easy integration of disparate materials on the same substrate through spatially-specific deposition, printed electronics is particularly useful for integration of diverse biological microfluidic functionality on the same substrate./nWhile there have been instances of printed transistors and passive components, there have been no demonstrations to date of the critical components required for biological microfluidic applications or lab on a chip (LOC) devices. In this work, for the first time, we present all-printed gold heaters, gold resistive temperature detectors, and electrostatically actuated PDMS microfluidic valves designed for biological microfluidic applications. In addition, work on DNA sensors using printable organic (pentacene) thin film transistors (OTFTs) is also presented for use in LOC devices./nMany biological applications require precise control and stability of temperature, which is demonstrated here through the integration of printed heaters and printed RTDs into a microchip bioprocessor system capable of polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Flow rate measurements and dynamic characteristics of printed PDMS valves are also presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of these devices. With the 440 microns wide and 16 microns deep microfluidic channels used in this project, the valve with the thinnest PDMS membrane (55 microns) closed the channel completely (i.e. flow rate = 0) at a pull-in voltage of 250V. This valve closed and opened in approximately 1.5 and 5.5 seconds, respectively. Pentacene surface has also been optimized to arrive at the best sensitivity for DNA immobilization and hybridization, bringing us a step closer in realizing printed OTFT DNA sensors for `tag-free' electrical detection. To summarize the sensor results, thinner films, higher substrate temperature, and higher input current during pentacene evaporation ensured that DNA immobilized in the channel part of the transistor and therefore provided for highest sensitivity of pentacene film to DNA./nThis work has thus successfully revealed the potential of printed electronics in real-world biological applications and has also paved the way for exciting future research areas for this technology.

Advisor: Subramanian, Vivek
On Freudenthal Duality and Gauge Theories

In this thesis, I write down a Lagrangian for an exotic gauge theory defined using Freudenthal Triple Systems (FTS). FTSs are algebraic systems that arise in the context of Lie algebras and have have been found useful in D=4 Supergravity. These systems come with a symmetry known as Freudenthal Duality (or F-duality) which preserves a certain degree four polynomials Delta(x). The Lagrangian I write down is invariant under both the exotic gauge theory defined by the FTS and Freudenthal Duality. In prepration for discussing these topics, I review FTS and touch on their relationship to Lie algebras. I then discuss F-duality and present a novel proof that only depends on the axioms of the FTS on not on a direct calculation of any particular realization. I then review N=2 Maxwell-Einstein Supergravity in 4D (and 5D) and go over how F-duality arose in the first place. The final main chapter goes over my main results, which is taken from a paper which will be published soon, with several coathurs.

Advisor: Zumino, Bruno
Chalk Talk: Investigating Reading Coaches' Role in Implementation

Bridging the macro and micro levels, this dissertation uses the case of coaching to investigate how people and ideas affect implementation. I drew on institutional theory and framing theory to reveal that coaches, situated between the district and school levels, serve as intermediaries in the education system. I conducted a qualitative cross-case study of coaching in one urban school district. I collected data on the field of reading instruction, the policy environment, coaches' work, and teachers' classroom practice. To advance our understanding of instructional reform, I determined how reading coaches engaged with logics from the broader environment. I paid particular attention to coaches' political role in persuading teachers to change their practice./nI found that two logics of reading instruction, Accountability First and Just Read, co-existed in an urban school district in California. These logics held conflicting principles about appropriate and effective ways to teach reading. Coaches actively transformed and combined these logics, building them into structures and practices at the district and school-levels while generating rules, instructional materials, and trainings. Thus, coach-developed reading policies were infused with the principles and practices of Accountability First and Just Read. Coaches then actively drew upon logics from the environment to frame reading policy for teachers during implementation. Coaches differentiated their framing to meet the perceived needs of their school and teachers and used socially skilled tactics to motivate change. Ultimately, coaches' framing of the two logics of reading instruction helped influence teachers' adoption of the new reading program by persuading teachers to respond positively to particular specific pedagogical elements of the program. These findings have implications for institutional theory, research on coaching, and the preparation of educational leaders.

Advisor: Coburn, Cynthia E
Multi-Mode Sub-Nyquist Rate D/A Converter for TV Band Cognitive Radio

Advances in high-speed DAC implemented in deeply scaled-CMOS processes open up the possibility of direct IF and RF waveform synthesis in a next-generation digitized transmitter architecture. A state of the art CMOS current-steering DAC is capable of providing wide bandwidth and high dynamic range for direct RF waveform generation. This enables the mostly-digital implementation of a direct waveform synthesis transmitter for TV band cognitive radio. RF waveforms with various modulation schemes can be synthesized in the digital domain and directly converted by a high-speed DAC. The transmission characteristics can be dynamically adapted to time-varying spectral environment. This transmitter architecture brings the benefits of reconfigurability and frequency agility. However, conventional waveform synthesis requires a >2GS/s DAC to fulfill the Nyquist requirement for covering the whole TV band (54 ~ 862MHz). Nevertheless, an alternative method is to convert the signals at a sampling rate below the Nyquist requirement and extract the image spectrum in higher Nyquist zones by bandpass filters./nThis work demonstrates a proof-of-concept design of sub-Nyquist rate conversion and wideband direct synthesis using image spectrum. By utilizing the proposed multi-mode reconstruction, the DAC can shape the spectral envelope for enhancing the image spectrum located in the target channels. The desired transmission waveforms can be extracted from the second or third Nyquist zone by a bandpass filter. A circuit prototype demonstrating the proposed concept has been designed, fabricated, and measured in a general-purpose 65nm CMOS process./nThis work presents the implementation of a 600MS/s 10-bit multi-mode sub-Nyquist rate DAC that enables wideband direct waveform synthesis for TV band cognitive radio transmitters. Measurement results show SFDR >55dB across the first three Nyquist zones and a low power consumption of 30mW. The IM3 is < -60dBc in the first and second Nyquist zones and < -55dBc in the third Nyquist zone.

Advisor: Rabaey, Jan M.