VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Body Mandala Debate: Knowing the Body through a Network of Fifteenth-Century Tibetan Buddhist Texts

Buddhist texts perpetually remind readers to realize the pervasive nature of suffering by reflecting upon the impermanent and even putrid nature of the human form. However, they also proclaim birth in a human body to be the ideal condition for liberating oneself from that suffering. How can the body be both a tool for transcendence and an obstacle to be overcome? Within tantric Buddhism, the body mandala is a ritual process of imagining parts of the human body as parts of the mandala, a cosmic palace inhabited by Buddhas and attendant deities. In examining a network of texts by scholar-monks Mkhas grub rje (1385-1438) and Ngorchen Kun dga' bzang po (1382-1456) concerning body mandala, this dissertation brings to light complex attitudes towards the role of the body in tantric practice and contextualizes esoteric conceptions of the body in terms of larger social, religious, and political dynamics circulating in fifteenth-century Tibet. In bringing the esoteric into conversation with the humanistic, this dissertation demonstrates the value of studying ritual technologies of the body within their historical contexts as well as in relation to discourses on the body across disciplines and cultures.

Advisor: von Rospatt, Alexander von Rospatt
Berger, Patricia
Coordination Avoidance in Distributed Databases

The rise of Internet-scale geo-replicated services has led to upheaval in the design of modern data management systems. Given the availability, latency, and throughput penalties associated with classic mechanisms such as serializable transactions, a broad class of systems (e.g., "NoSQL") has sought weaker alternatives that reduce the use of expensive coordination during system operation, often at the cost of application integrity. When can we safely forego the cost of this expensive coordination, and when must we pay the price?/nIn this thesis, we investigate the potential for coordination avoidance---the use of as little coordination as possible while ensuring application integrity---in several modern data-intensive domains. We demonstrate how to leverage the semantic requirements of applications in data serving, transaction processing, and web services to enable more efficient distributed algorithms and system designs. The resulting prototype systems demonstrate regular order-of-magnitude speedups compared to their traditional, coordinated counterparts on a variety of tasks, including referential integrity and index maintenance, transaction execution under common isolation models, and database constraint enforcement. A range of open source applications and systems exhibit similar results.

Advisor: Hellerstein, Joseph M
Stoica, Ion
From Sound to Meaning: Representations of Speech in Human Cortex

This dissertation investigates the cortical representation of speech perception, using a combination of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and psychoacoustical experiments./nPrevious research has shown that low-level acoustical structure, phonemes, and words are processed by distinct cortical areas. However, little is known about the relationship between these different representations. To address this problem we simultaneously mapped many different representations of speech. We recorded fMRI responses from subjects listening to over two hours of natural speech. We then examined three features spaces representing the speech sounds in terms of auditory, articulatory and semantic features. We used voxel-wise modeling for each feature space combined with a novel variance-partitioning method to assess how much response variance could be explained uniquely by each model or jointly between two or three models. Validating our approach, we found that a quarter of the brain was significantly responsive to the stories, and that our models could account for up to 45% of the explainable variance in cortex and over 60% of the explainable variance in auditory areas. We also found a hierarchical set of processing steps starting in primary auditory areas and moving along the posteroventral region of the temporal lobe that are involved in the sound to word meaning transformation./nThe second part of this dissertation is a psychoacoustical investigation of the modulation power spectrum (MPS) of speech. The MPS is obtained by taking the 2-dimensional Fourier transform of the speech spectrogram. We showed that comprehension of vowels and consonants is differently affected by removal of specific spectral or temporal modulations. Supplementary consonant analysis showed differences in MPS and psychoacoustical comprehension results between three groups of consonants, separated based on the manner in which they are pronounced (fricatives, stops, and sonorants). The MPS could serve as an excellent intermediate step between lower and higher levels of speech processing, and could in future studies add nuance to our previous three cortical models of speech perception.

Advisor: Theunissen, Frederic E.
Symplectic approaches in geometric representation theory

We study various topics lying in the crossroads of symplectic topology and geometric representation theory, with an emphasis on understanding central objects in geometric representation theory via approaches using Lagrangian branes and symplectomorphism groups./nThe first part of the dissertation focuses on a natural link between perverse sheaves and holomorphic Lagrangian branes./nFor a compact complex manifold $X$, let $D_c^b(X)$ be the bounded derived category of constructible sheaves on $X$, and $Fuk(T^*X)$ be the Fukaya category of $T^*X$. A Lagrangian brane in $Fuk(T^*X)$ is holomorphic if the underlying Lagrangian submanifold is complex analytic in $T^*X_{\mathbb{C}}$, the holomorphic cotangent bundle of $X$. We prove that under the quasi-equivalence between $D^b_c(X)$ and $DFuk(T^*X)$ established by Nadler and Zaslow, holomorphic Lagrangian branes with appropriate grading correspond to perverse sheaves./nThe second part is motivated from general features of the braid group actions on derived category of constructible sheaves. For a semisimple Lie group $G_\mathbb{C}$ over $\mathbb{C}$, we study the homotopy type of the symplectomorphism group of the cotangent bundle of the flag variety and its relation to the braid group. We prove a homotopy equivalence between the two groups in the case of $G_\mathbb{C}=SL_3(\mathbb{C})$, under the $SU(3)$-equivariancy condition on symplectomorphisms.

Advisor: Nadler, David
Social Influences on Healthcare Outcomes in a Major Academic Medical Center

Social scientists note that patients’ interactions with others can trigger changes in emotional state, behavior, attitudes, or opinions, and that these changes can have clinically significant outcomes./nHospital room assignment, a largely random process, may create social relationships that influence individual social states. The nature of these social relationships, in turn, can impact clinical outcomes as social interactions, the placement, presence, or circumstance of social relations, and perhaps even the mere presence of another individual are key components of the care process. As such, it stands to reason that peer and social support effects may influence measurable clinical outcomes among hospitalized patients./nI test this thesis using a large, novel, retrospective dataset extracted from the clinical record of a major academic medical center, exploring the impact of chance socially and clinically concordant matches on a patient’s length of stay in the hospital, risk of readmission and mortality within thirty days of hospital discharge, and risk of mortality during hospitalization, employing a variant of the standard lagged linear-in-means peer influence model proposed by Manski (1993), where markers for clinical outcomes of the focus patient at time of discharge from the hospital are regressed on the concordance of peer group-average of markers for sociodemographic factors and clinical condition of the roommates with related factors and conditions of the focus patient, controlling for nosocomial conditions and relevant characteristics of the focus patient./nThe analyses proceed in three stages. The first stage demonstrates the existence of a homophilic effect on outcomes of concordant pairings along sociodemographic and clinical lines occurring by chance in a population of hospitalized patients. The second stage demonstrates the existence of a social contagion or spillover effect of positive or negative clinical status on the health outcomes of another. The final stage of analysis examines homophily and contagion jointly, assessing the impact of concordance between roommates on the transference of benefit or threat between hospitalized patients./nI find that evidence exists for both peer effects on clinical outcomes and social concordance, and while both significant, social concordance may be more a more important determinant of clinical outcomes than peer effects. These findings lend support to the hypotheses that social concordance (or decreased social distance) between hospitalized roommates may be clinically beneficial, and that these benefits – manifested in shorter hospitalizations – may be mediated by information sharing, psychological comfort due to affiliation with a similar other, or by sharing clinically similar experiences./nThese findings suggest that social influence on clinical outcomes exists, and that social and structural factors of the care process may impact patient outcomes in a statistically significant and clinically meaningful way.

Advisor: Shortell, Stephen M
Teacher Learning through Practices: How Mathematics Teachers Change in Practices with Innovative Curriculum Materials

Professional learning and development in and from practices have focused either on how individuals learn from formally organized contexts or on how a group of teachers collectively develop within contexts. Thus there is little research on individual teacher professional learning through practices. This dissertation investigates the ways in which two experienced mathematics teachers develop the means of making sense of content and student thinking, and change their practices through their interactions with innovative curriculum materials. This dissertation also conceptualizes a new framework for teaching practices termed student thinking responsive teaching practices, which is grounded in the literature and this dissertation’s empirical investigations./nIn my dissertation, I conducted case studies with two teachers, observing their classrooms over the course of a year to capture their everyday teaching practices during regular lessons, as well as their teaching practices during lessons involving innovative curriculum materials. I also conducted teacher interviews and observed professional development workshop sessions to inform my analysis of how the teachers changed their teaching practices in the classroom. I analyzed the collected data using a mixed methods approach. First, I conducted a qualitative analysis with an existing coding scheme from the literature and a new coding scheme I specifically developed. Second, I quantified my qualitative analysis findings to capture how and whether the two teachers changed toward becoming more responsive to student mathematical thinking in their everyday practices./nMy dissertation findings clarify some of the mechanisms for change in teacher practices. First, when teachers are supported in, and make use of, instructional moves that focus on student mathematical thinking, not only is student learning advanced, but teacher learning is also advanced. Second, when teachers’ interactions with curriculum materials involve adapting and developing new pedagogical strategies for student thinking responsive teaching practices, they create opportunities to making sense of content and student thinking. In contrast, when they adapt curriculum materials to align with their existing practices, those opportunities are lost. Lastly, in addition to teachers’ beliefs and knowledge, their professional identity is critical for understanding the ways in which teachers interact with and implement curriculum materials. It is important for teachers to see and make sense of themselves as learners and as professionals who are continuously reflecting on and through their practices. Such an identity may become a catalyst for changing their practices and need to be supported not only by innovative curriculum materials, but also at the school and district level. These results have implications for the design of professional development systems that support the positive aspects of curriculum-based learning.

Advisor: Schoenfeld, Alan H.
From Subjects to Citizens: American Colonial Education and Philippine Nation-Making, 1900-1934

This dissertation examines the U.S. colonial state's efforts to promote Filipino national sentiment and patriotism through the public school system between 1900 and 1934. During the early years of American rule, U.S. colonial officials argued that Filipinos lacked a sense of nationality due to their linguistic and religious diversity, cultural heterogeneity, and regionalism. This perception shaped U.S. educational policy in the Philippines, leading to the creation of a curriculum that would attempt to homogenize and foster national affiliation among Filipinos. Using administrator files, Bureau of Education records, textbooks, and curricular materials collected in both the United States and the Philippines, this study reconstructs the colonial curriculum, paying special attention to English language instruction, history and civics, and vocational education. It shows that colonial education aimed to quell Filipino anti-colonial nationalism and facilitate obedience to the colonial state by casting good citizenship and “proper” patriotism in terms of economic self-sufficiency and non-violence, and by defining national allegiance as loyalty to both the Philippines and the U.S. Its central contention is that American colonial education created a form of Philippine nationalism that would become the dominant strain of official nationalism among Filipino leaders and educators. Bringing local actors the fore, this study enlists Filipino students’ and educators’ writings, vernacular novels, newspapers, and Philippine education journals to examine how Filipinos, both in the colony and metropole, responded to colonial education. It finds that Filipinos reformulated colonial lessons to fit in with older strains of Filipino nationalism even as they saw their American education as a path to economic opportunity and Philippine independence. By looking at the U.S. colonial state’s promotion of a native national identity, this study contributes to and complicates current narratives of U.S. colonial education and Philippine nationalism.

Advisor: Candida Smith, Richard
Decay Branching Ratios of Excited States in Mg24

The carbon burning nuclear reactions 12C(12C, alpha)20Ne, 12C(12C,p)23Na, and 12C(12C,n)23Mg occur during the carbon burning phase of sufficiently large stars and during explosive events such as supernovae. The Gamow window for these reactions is typically around 1.5 MeV, however direct measurements at energies in this range are very difficult due to the large Coulomb barrier between the carbon atoms. The compound nucleus formed during these reactions is 24Mg. For energies around the Gamow window this compound nucleus has an excitation energy of 15 to 16 MeV. A surrogate experiment which produces the compound nucleus can measure the branching ratios for the excited compound nucleus and thus the ratios between the carbon burning reaction cross sections. An experiment was performed using inelastic scattering of 40 MeV alpha particles to produce 24Mg excited up to 27 MeV and the applicability of these results as a surrogate for the carbon burning reactions is examined. A successful surrogate measurement, which this experiment partially achieves, will both provide the branching ratios within the Gamow window and aid future direct measurements of carbon burning within the Gamow window.

Advisor: Norman, Eric B
Ultra-low energy photoreceivers for optical interconnects

Optical interconnects are increasingly important for our communication and data center systems, and are forecasted to be an essential component of future computers. In order to meet these future demands, optical interconnects must be improved to consume less power than they do today. To do this, both more efficient transmitters and more sensitive receivers must be developed. This work addresses the latter, focusing on device level improvements to tightly couple a low capacitance photodiode with the first stage transistor of the receiver as a single phototransistor device./nFirst I motivate the need for a coupled phototransistor using a simple circuit model which shows how receiver sensitivity is determined by photodiode capacitance and the length of wire connecting it to the first transistor in a receiver amplifier. Then I describe our use of the unique rapid melt growth technique, which is used to integrate crystalline germanium on silicon photonics substrates without an epitaxial reactor. The resulting material quality is demonstrated with high quality (0.95 A/W, 40+ GHz) germanium photodiodes on silicon waveguides./nNext I describe two germanium phototransistors I have developed. One is a germanium- gated MOSFET on silicon photonics which has up to 18 A/W gate-controlled responsivity at 1550 nm. Simulations show how MOSFET scaling rules can be easily applied to increase both speed and sensitivity. The second is a floating base germanium bipolar phototransistor on silicon photonics with a 15 GHz gain x bandwidth product. The photoBJT also has a clear scaling path, and it is proposed to create a separate gain and absorption region photoBJT to realize the maximum benefit of scaling the BJT without negatively affecting its absorption and photocarrier collection. Following this design a 120 GHz gain x bandwidth photoBJT is simulated. Finally I present a metal-cavity, which can have over 50% quantum efficiency absorption in sub-100 aF germanium photodiodes, which addresses the issue of absorption in photodiodes which have been scaled to near sub-wavelength dimensions.

Advisor: Wu, Ming C
Identity (Geo)Politics: Pakistani Communities and the Nation State System

My dissertation explores the relationships between states in the age of globalization, and the construction and expression of Pakistani immigrants’ national, ethno-racial, and religious identities at the individual and group levels. It is driven by the question of how we make sense of boundaries and belonging, and I explore the relationship(s) between immigrant communities’ identities and local, state, and global contexts. Concretely, I examine how Pakistani immigrants in the global metropolitan areas of San Francisco, California and Toronto, Ontario construct and participate in various identity communities both within and across borders. I argue that accurate study of global phenomena requires we question the assumptions built into the nation-state system, which overly constrain our analyses and representations of reality. I demonstrate the import of American hegemony, and show how the US and Canada, in their separate and dialectic ways, create visually-identified others. I suggest an analytic framework of the administrative and the affective of the macro and the micro, and apply it to citizenship to comment upon the processes of racial disciplining that structure subjectivities in an increasingly interconnected global society. This dissertation adds to the little discussed question of how race is made across boundaries, shows how states structure subjectivities, and how immigrants’ identity projects are instances of the deterritorialization of the nation-state.

Advisor: Lie, John
Targeted Minimum Loss Based Estimation: Applications and Extensions in Causal Inference and Big Data

Causal inference generally requires making some assumptions on a causal mechanism followed by statistical estimation. The statistical estimation problem in causal inference is often that of estimating a pathwise differentiable parameter in a semiparametric or nonparametric model. Targeted minimum loss-based estimating (TMLE) is a framework for constructing an asymptotically linear plug-in estimator for such parameters./nThe natural direct effect (NDE) is a parameter that quantifies how some treatment affects some outcome directly, as opposed to indirectly through some mediator value between the treatment and outcome on the causal pathway. In Chapter 2, we introduce the NDE among the untreated and show that under some assumptions the NDE among the untreated is identifiable and equivalent to a statistical parameter as the so called average treatment effect among the untreated. We then present a locally efficient, doubly robust TMLE for the statistical target parameter and apply it to the estimation of the NDE among the untreated in simulations and of the NDE in a data set from an RCT./nSome estimators that adjust for the propensity score (PS) nonparametrically, such as PS matching or stratification by the PS, are robust to slight misspecification of the PS estimator. In particular, if the PS estimator fails to estimate the true propensity score, but still approximates some other balancing score, such methods are still consistent for average treatment effect (ATE). In Chapter 3, we extend a traditional TMLE for the ATE to have this property while still being locally efficient and doubly robust and investigate the performance of the proposed estimator in a simulation study./nOnline estimators are estimators that process a relatively small piece of a data set at a time, and can be updated as more data becomes available. Typically, online estimators are used in the large scale machine learning literature, but to our knowledge, have not been used to estimate statistical parameters associated with causal parameters. In Chapter 4, we propose two online estimators for the ATE that are asymptotically efficient and doubly robust in a single pass through a data set. The first is similar to the augmented inverse probability of treatment weighting estimator in the batch setting, and the second involves an additional targeting step inspired by TMLE, which improves performance in some cases. We investigate the performance of both in a simulation study.

Advisor: van der Laan, Mark J