VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
A random walk through combinatorial probability [electronic resource]

This thesis comprises a collection of three stand-alone problems in combinatorial probability. A common aspect to all three problems is the use of perturbation based techniques to show that a quantity we wish to estimate is asymptotically equivalent to another known quantity. The first problem generalises Arratia, Barbour and Tavare's (2000) theory of logarithmic combinatorial structures, showing that conditional independence of component counts is not necessary for results such as the central limit theorem, the Poisson-Dirichlet limit and the Erdos-Turan limit, and unifying these theorems within a single universality result that sheds greater insight into why the same limit theorem should hold for all families of combinatorial structures in this class. The second problem studies the Hopfield model in the limit where the number of patterns is superlinear in the number of sites, computing the asymptotic behaviour of the free energy by applying Guerra and Toninelli's (2002) interpolation technique to the related Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model. The third problem describes a new strategy for sampling combinatorial structures, including many simple demonstrative examples, and with particular application to the case of labelled graphs with given degree sequence, where we describe an algorithm whose domain of applicability and running time compare quite favourably to existing algorithms in the literature.

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Diaconis Persi primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Dembo Amir advisor. Thesis advisor
Montanari Andrea advisor. Thesis advisor
Rapid and high-specificity assay for micro-RNA detection using combined on-chip isotachophoresis and affinity hydrogel purification [electronic resource]

microRNAs are short, non-coding RNA molecules that regulate gene expression in animal and plant cells and play important roles in diverse cellular functions. Dysregulation of microRNAs has been linked to diseases such as diabetes, alzheimer's disease, and many forms of cancer. microRNA expression signatures have therefore emerged as important new clinical biomarkers with both diagnostic and prognostic value. Despite growing interest, quantitative microRNAs continues to pose challenges for traditional RNA profiling methods due to their low abundance, high degree of sequence similarity, and complex biogenesis. In this work, we demonstrate the development of a microfluidic microRNA detection assay which addresses these challenges by leveraging two key technologies: on-chip isotachophoresis (ITP) and photopatterned functionalized hydrogels. ITP is a robust electrokinetic technique which uses a heterogeneous buffer system to perform greater than 10,000-fold focusing. In addition to providing signal enhancement, ITP focusing also accelerates reaction kinetics of nucleic acid hybridization. Our microRNA detection assay first uses ITP to enhance hybridization between microRNAs and complementary DNA reporters. Following hybridization, the ITP zone migrates into a purification region which a hydrogel decorated with DNA capture probes. Excess (unhybridized) reporters bind to the capture probes and become immobilized, while reporters hybridized to microRNAs remain focused in ITP and can be detected downstream. In the first part of the dissertation, we present a proof of concept study to assess the feasibility of a microRNA assay and characterize assay sensitivity and dynamic range under low stringency conditions. We demonstrate our technique performs quantitative analysis of synthetic microRNAs with 4 orders of magnitude dynamic range, near 1 pM (30,000 molecules) sensitivity, and assay run time of only 10 min. This constitutes a 100- fold improvement in dynamic range and limit of detection over previous ITP-based approaches. In the second part of the dissertation, we present modifications to our basic assay which allow us to detect microRNAs with single-nucleotide specificity (high stringency) and using total RNA extracted from real tissues. Using this modified assay, we quantify concentration of let-7a microRNA in mouse and human tissues, and validate these measurements, and our method more generally, by comparison with qPCR. We further develop a numerical model which demonstrates that our modified assay leverages both thermodynamics (in the first stage) and off-rate kinetics (in the second stage) to enhance hybridization specificity.

Keywords: Mechanical Engineering.
Advisor: Santiago Juan G. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Mani Ali (Professor of mechanical engineering) advisor. Thesis advisor
Pruitt Beth advisor. Thesis advisor
Rate adaptation in MIMO wireless systems [electronic resource]

In Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) systems, predicting performance prior to data transmission is needed to appropriately select transmitter parameters (e.g. QAM modulation, code rate). We want to select transmitter parameters aggressive enough to take advantage of the available channel capacity, but not so aggressive that we do not meet desired performance (error) requirements. The prediction must, therefore, be accurate. But, practical considerations must be accommodated as well. The prediction needs to be easy to compute, given limited resources. An algorithm taking too much time to run or excessive circuitry to implement cannot be deployed. Further, the prediction must be tolerant to imprecise data, as deployed hardware often does not know the environment with complete accuracy. This dissertation presents a family of algorithms to accurately predict the average bit error rate (BER) and packet error rate (PER) of a MIMO system. Further, we address these practical considerations of low computational complexity, and imprecise data. Since the algorithms make no a-priori assumptions about the channel, they are applicable to a wide variety of random channels.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Cox Donald C. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Cioffi John M. advisor. Thesis advisor
Paulraj Arogyaswami advisor. Thesis advisor
Realizing the public value of learning [electronic resource] : creating community history in a high school classroom

This dissertation investigates a project in which high school students research a significant and sensitive event in the history of their community and then create a series of articles about it for a community history website. The dissertation argues for the educational benefits associated with students producing work of public value. This concept is situated, first, with respect to previous project- and product-oriented curricular theories and, second, through the development of the local high school program within which this work was conducted. The dissertation then narrates the process by which students created these entries and reports on the various forms of educational value it created, as perceived by the students themselves and members of the public. The researcher worked as a participant-observer, guiding the students throughout the two-month long project while collecting field notes and artifacts. He interviewed the 19 participating students at the beginning and end of the project and then interviewed 4 historians and 7 other members of the public as they examined the students' finished work. All groups saw significant value in the project, both in the development of students' historical understanding and in the creation of a publicly accessible historical resource for the community and beyond.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Willinsky John
Goldman Shelley
McDermott Ray (Raymond Patrick)
Wineburg Samuel S. advisor. Thesis advisor
Reasonable disagreement [electronic resource] : liberal citizens and epistemic peers

Reasonable people disagree. Political liberalism claims that the fact of reasonable disagreement has major implications for political justification: important political decisions should not be based on considerations that are reasonably disputed. Recent discussions in epistemology focus on whether reasonable disagreement undermines the justification of our controversial beliefs. My dissertation brings these political and epistemological issues together. I argue for a new position on the epistemology of disagreement, and show that this position, together with the correct understanding of liberal citizenship, leads to a skeptical challenge to political liberalism. The challenge is that the requirements of liberal citizenship are in tension with justified religious, moral, and philosophical belief. In answer to this challenge, I explore the strategy of thinking about people's fundamental convictions in terms of acceptance rather than belief.

Keywords: Philosophy.
Advisor: Bratman Michael primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Cohen Joshua
Lawlor Krista advisor. Thesis advisor
Reconfigurable hardware for software-defined networks [electronic resource]

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables change and innovation within the network. SDN moves the control plane into software independent of the data plane. By doing so, it allows network operators to modify network behavior through software changes alone. The controller and switches interact via a standardized interface, such as OpenFlow. Unfortunately, OpenFlow and current hardware switches have several important limitations: i) current switches support only a fixed set of header types; ii) current switches contain a fixed set of tables, of fixed size, in a fixed order; and iii) OpenFlow provides a limited set of actions to modify packets. In this work, I introduce the Reconfigurable Match Tables (RMT) model. RMT is a RISC-inspired switch abstraction that brings considerable flexibility to the data plane. With RMT, a programmer can define new headers for the switch to process; they can specify the number, size, arrangement, and inputs of tables, subject only to an overall resource limit; and finally, they can define new actions to apply to packets, constructed from a minimal set of action primitives. RMT enables the data plane to change without requiring the replacement of hardware. To demonstrate RMT's feasibility, I describe the design of an RMT switch chip with 64 x 10 Gb/s ports. The design contains a programmable packet parser, 32 reconfigurable match stages, and over 7,000 action processing units. A comparison with traditional switch designs reveals that area and power costs are less than 15%. As part of the design, I investigate the design of packet parsers in detail. These are critical components of any network device, yet little has been published about their design and the trade-offs of design choices. I analyze the trade-offs and present design principles for fixed and programmable parsers.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: McKeown Nick primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Horowitz Mark (Mark Alan) advisor. Thesis advisor
Varghese George
Redesign of next-generation broadband-network architectures with limited cooperation, cross-layer scheduling, and dynamic resource allocation [electronic resource]

The explosion of internet-enabled devices in home networks, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and internet-protocol TV (IPTV), threatens to choke current wire-line and wireless broadband-access speeds and demands an order-of-magnitude improvement. Furthermore, the heterogeneous nature of these devices' traffic requires intelligent management of the access networks' quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees, especially for video traffic. This dissertation investigates the redesign of broadband-access architectures by using limited cooperation to deliver an order-of-magnitude increase in data-rates, and by using cross-layer scheduling and pre-caching protocols to balance the QoS requirements of both data and video traffic. The first part of the dissertation investigates the gains of cooperative communication systems when only a limited number of receivers cooperate. The cooperation benefits in terms of data-rate gains can diminish significantly in such limited cooperation scenarios by using the state-of-the-art algorithms that fail to account for the interference between cooperative and non-cooperative links. Novel dynamic spectrum management (DSM) techniques are proposed to manage such interference and the proposed techniques allow these limited cooperation scenarios to retain most of the cooperation benefits in next-generation cooperative systems while maintaining the performance of legacy non-cooperative systems. Chapter 2 focuses on the theoretical bounds in terms of achievable rate-regions, while Chapter 3 proposes distributed algorithms that can approximate the theoretical performance with low-complexity and practically implementable protocols in wire-line digital-subscriber-line (DSL) systems. The second part of the dissertation investigates the use of cross-layer protocols to balance QoS requirements of heterogeneous data, video, and other multimedia application traffic. Chapter 4 proposes cross-layer protocols for distributed scheduling that exploit the channel or noise cyclo-stationarity to enable higher throughputs for low-priority data traffic while meeting the QoS guarantees of high-priority video traffic, thereby promising to balance internet uplink speeds for both high-priority video traffic and low-priority data traffic in home networks. Chapter 5 proposes novel cross-layer pre-caching protocols to meet the increasing demands of IPTV traffic on wire-line broadband-access networks. IPTV viewers tend to watch at similar periods during the day (e.g. 6-9 PM or Friday nights), creating peak-bandwidth demands on interference-limited networks when there is insufficient physical-layer bandwidth to meet these demands. The proposed protocol estimates the impact of future peak-demand periods on interference-limited networks and pre-allocates bandwidth to deliver the forecasted videos and avoid the peak-demand periods.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Cioffi John M. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
El Gamal Abbas A. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
O'Neill Daniel
Reducing energy consumption in America's government buildings [electronic resource]

With commercial and residential buildings accounting for 41% of the energy consumption in the US, there are economic, environmental, and health reasons to make buildings more efficient, but there are barriers: lack of awareness, high upfront costs, market fragmentation with split incentives, and difficulty calculating actual energy savings. To overcome these barriers, the government sector, the largest building owner in the United States, can more easily breach these barriers by implementing an energy policy through legislation, which the federal government has already initiated through executive orders. The government's progress is captured in four case studies: NASA's Moffett Airfield, Joint Base Lewis McChord, Presidio of Monterey, and the Santa Clara County Jail. The strengths and weaknesses from these case studies are compared to the Energy Star's Guidelines for Energy Management. In all four cases, the government agencies are reducing their energy consumption, but there is still room for improvement.

Keywords: Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Advisor: Fischer Martin
Reducing the school readiness gap [electronic resource] : the role of early education and care interventions

This dissertation consists of three-related research papers that investigate the relations between core features of non-parental childcare settings —quality, quantity, and type—and children's school readiness. My first paper is a descriptive study of the role that childcare quality might play in narrowing school readiness gaps. Drawing on data from the ECLS--B longitudinal study, I estimate gaps between low--SES and high--SES children on early academic and socio-behavioral outcomes, measured at preschool age and kindergarten entry. I decompose SES gaps to estimate how much the disparity in the quality of childcare environments contribute to SES gradients in child outcomes. Then, I identify predictors of participation in higher-quality childcare services at preschool age. My second dissertation paper explores the impact of the timing (duration) and sequence of exposure to different childcare arrangements on child outcomes. Based on ECLS--B data and a novel strategy to account for dynamic selection bias—an extension of the Inverse Probability of Treatment Weights (IPTW), I estimate the differential effect of the age of entry into center-based care and the effect of the cumulative exposure of attending one type of care at the age of 2 and switching to another type at the age of 4 on child outcomes. Next, I examine the extent to which both effects vary by family income and race. Finally, my third dissertation paper evaluates afterschool center-based care programs in kindergarten as a means of supporting children's development during the transition to formal schooling. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study--Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS--K) and matching estimators, I examine families' propensity to use afterschool center-based care as well as the causal impact of attending such programs on a child's academic and socio-behavioral outcomes, measured at the end of the kindergarten year. To evaluate the potential of afterschool center-based care programs to reduce the school readiness gap, I explore heterogeneous effects by family income and race.

Keywords: Education.
Advisor: Carnoy Martin primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Loeb Susanna advisor. Thesis advisor
Stipek Deborah J.
Reflections and reciprocity [electronic resource] : China and German modernist literature

This dissertation examines the portrayal of China in German modernist literature, as well as the adaptation of said literature in post-Mao China. It analyzes how the German texts of the modernist period negotiate cultural and political identity in the age of imperialism and Orientalism, and how their Chinese interpretations approach similar issues of representation and reform in different decades of China after Mao. How do the de-nationalizing elements of the original German-language writings create resonance with the nationalist aspects found in their contemporary Chinese counterparts? Drawing upon specific examples, I situate the German-language sources and their Chinese adaptations within their literary, cultural and historico-political contexts, and implement a multidisciplinary approach that combines textual analysis with postcolonial theory and cultural studies on global capitalism. Demonstrating how each work addresses and challenges the dominant discourse of its day, my thesis shows the continued influence of Germany literary modernism upon culture and politics in present day China, and argues in support of the existence of dynamic cultural transference between Germany and China. German-language works discussed include: Arthur Schnitzler's fragment "Boxeraufstand" (1926), Bertolt Brecht's drama Der gute Mensch von Sezuan (1953), Franz Kafka's short story "Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer" (1917), and Stefan Zweig's novella Brief einer Unbekannten (1922). Chinese works discussed include: the Sichaun opera Sichuan Haoren (1987), Can Xue's essay "Building in Sections: The Artist's Way of Life" (1997), and Xu Jinglei's film Letter From an Unknown Woman (2004).

Keywords: German Studies.
Advisor: Berman Russell A.
Dornbach Marton
Wang Ban
Regional Profits: The Rise of Hybrid Terrorism in West Africa Post 9/11

All organizations – terrorist ones included – seek financial resources in order to support their members and fund their activities. However, in West Africa, the intersection between criminal activity and terrorism goes beyond a simple marriage of convenience to ensure funds. Focusing on the region, case studies of the financial activities of AQIM, Boko Haram, and Hezbollah demonstrate a criminal involvement that is deeply entrenched in their nature and behavior in West Africa.
The qualitative data presented was collected through the analysis of NGO and governmental unclassified reports, testimonies, and interviews. Findings indicate that, contrary to the traditional belief that criminal and terrorist groups belong at the opposite extremes of a spectrum, these groups gravitate around the center. They are both criminal and political – they represent a hybrid type of organization, one that is a product of regional factors conducive to illicit lucrative businesses.
Determining a hybrid class of terrorist groups, one that is also a product of its theater of operation, possesses many policy implications since the U.S. cannot develop an effective response without understanding the nature of the threat. AFRICOM, established in 2008, was designed to defend American national interests on the continent. However, its focus on training local militaries or implementing health projects does not address the key factors that have enabled Boko Haram, Hezbollah, and AQIM to expand their operations in the region: weak state capacity and poor governance. Instead, the U.S. should focus on strengthening law enforcement training and partnerships within a comprehensive interagency counterterrorism framework.

Keywords: Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC
Stanford University
West Africa
terrorism case studies
Foreign Terrorist Organizations
FTO
Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
Boko Haram
Hezbollah
Thesis
Advisor: Crenshaw Martha
Relations among characteristic classes of manifold bundles [electronic resource]

We study a generalization of the tautological subring of the cohomology of the moduli space of Riemann surfaces to manifold bundles. The infinitely many "generalized Miller-Morita-Mumford classes" determine a map R from a free polynomial algebra to the cohomology of the classifying space of manifold bundles. In the case when M is the connected sum of g copies of the product of spheres (S^d times S^d), with d odd, we find numerous polynomials in the kernel of the map R and show that the image of R is a finitely generated ring. Some of the elements in the kernel do not depend on d. Our results contrast with the fact that the map R is an isomorphism in a range of cohomological degrees that grows linearly with g. This is known from theorems of Madsen-Weiss and Harer for the case of surfaces (d=1) and from the recent work of Soren Galatius and Oscar Randal-Williams in higher dimensions. For surfaces, the image of the map R coincides with the classical tautological ring, as introduced by Mumford.

Keywords: Mathematics.
Advisor: Galatius Søren
Cohen Ralph L.
Vakil Ravi advisor. Thesis advisor