VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Standing in private law

This thesis is the first monograph-length work dedicated to investigating the idea of standing within private law. The overarching claim of this thesis is that standing is a separable concept that can, and should be distinguished more clearly from ‘right’. Doing so is important for the rational development of private law doctrine.
In public law, standing rules are well-recognised. Yet, to private lawyers, standing seems a missing concept. It even appears to be conventional wisdom that private law does not have or need standing rules. In this thesis, it is argued that a key reason why standing has been a relatively overlooked concept, receiving meagre attention from private lawyers, is because it has been obscured from plain sight, submerged within the more dominant concept of a ‘right’.
This is a situation ripe for confusion and error. The difficulty is compounded by the lack of a suitable vocabulary and conceptual apparatus to differentiate standing from ‘rights’. In a wide range of contexts, what we might think of as standing has been variously referred to as a ‘right to sue’, ‘right to enforce’, or ‘right of action’. For the unwary, these labels have proved misleading. Further, the role of standing has been subsumed within the broader umbrella of ‘privity’, itself an inadequately understood cluster of ideas.
Through extended analyses of case-law and statutory examples, the undesirable implications of this conceptual elision will be shown. A concept of standing is introduced, and then distinguished from neighbouring concepts which could obscure it from view. It is also argued that an implicit general standing rule exists across private law. Its content is defined, and questions about its justifiability, and the justifiability of its exceptions, are addressed.

Keywords: Standing
Private law theory
Powers
Rights
Law of obligations
Private law
Advisor: Steel, A
Stevens, R
Leveraging domain knowledge for self-supervision in scalable robot learning

Deep learning in robotics has a data problem.
Over the past decade, deep learning has revolutionised the application of robotics in the real world. From self-driving cars to drones and warehouse applications, deep learning has become an integral tool in deploying robots into complex domains. Despite many advances in training efficiency, operating performance, and inference speeds, there is one key problem that remains in utilising deep models in real-world applications; data efficiency due to the vast quantities of labelled data required for training.
Despite the clear successes that have emerged by using substantial manually annotated datasets to satisfy this need, human labelling, such as drawing bounding boxes around vehicles, is labour intensive, financially expensive and mentally unfulfilling. These datasets are extremely uneconomical and scale poorly to new geographic locations, weather conditions and robotic tasks. Even when deployed in well-labelled domains, trained models may fail when encountering novel data and have no means for self-improvement.
In this thesis we investigate the paradigm of self-supervised learning as a solution to these shortcomings, in which high fidelity training data is generated completely automatically without any human supervision. In particular, our goal is to utilise domain knowledge in expert systems for curating the data necessary to train deep models.
We apply this methodology on real-world tasks with clear commercial applications, such as predicting drivable paths in camera imagery for mapless urban navigation, learning ephemerality masks for robust monocular visual odometry, and learning keypoints for radar odometry and localisation. Not only do we meet or exceed state-of-the-art performance in these crucial tasks, but we do so with no human supervision. In sharing our approaches and ideas from the past four years, we lay the foundations for more efficient and scalable robot learning in the future.

Keywords: Machine Learning
Robotics
Advisor: Posner, I
Next best view planning with an unstructured representation

High-quality observations of the real world are crucial for creating realistic scene imitations and performing structural analysis. Observations can be used to produce 3D printed replicas of small-scale scenes (e.g., a toy bunny), conduct inspections of large-scale infrastructure (e.g., a building) or integrated into virtual environments that provide immersive experiences for our entertainment and training robotic systems.
Scenes are observed by obtaining point measurements using a sensor from multiple views. These views can be chosen by a human operator or planned using knowledge of existing measurements or an a priori scene model. The challenge of selecting the 'next' view of a scene to obtain that will provide the 'best' improvement in an observation is known as the Next Best View (NBV) planning problem.
This thesis presents work on NBV planning with a novel unstructured scene representation. In contrast to existing literature on the problem, which typically uses structured representations, an unstructured representation does not impose an external structure on scene observations. There is no reduction in the fidelity of information represented or simplifying assumptions made about the scene structure.
This unstructured representation is used to create the Surface Edge Explorer (SEE), a novel NBV planning approach. Observed points are classified based on the local measurement density. Views are chosen to improve the surface coverage of an observation until a minimum point density has been attained. Experiments comparing SEE with structured approaches demonstrate that it is able to obtain an equivalent observation quality using fewer views and a lower computation time.
Novel point-based techniques for considering occlusions and scene visibility are investigated. This work overcomes the raycasting constraints of existing methods used by structured approaches. The best performing strategies for addressing each of these challenges are integrated with SEE to create SEE++. An experimental comparison of SEE++ with SEE and structured approaches demonstrates that it achieves significant improvements in observation performance by requiring fewer views and shorter travel distances while maintaining a reasonable computation time.
Observations of real world scenes using SEE and SEE++ illustrate the successful transference of their capabilities from a simulation environment to the real world. Qualitative results show that both approaches are able to obtain highly complete observations of several scenes with varying size and structural complexity using multiple sensor modalities. Quantitative results demonstrate that SEE++ observes the scenes with greater efficiency than SEE by utilising an increased computational time.

Keywords: Next Best View
View Planning
3D Reconstruction
Advisor: Gammell, J
Newman, P
Essays on neutrality, perfectionism, and public reason liberalism

The six essays in this thesis all focus on the neutrality-perfectionism debate within contemporary liberal political philosophy. In the first paper, “Pluralist Neutrality”, I develop a novel account of the principle of state neutrality, according to which neutrality is a pluralist notion with consequential, justificatory, and intentional dimensions. In the second paper, “Deontic Perfectionism”, I distinguish between the claim that the state may promote the good life and the claim that the state must promote the good life, and I argue in favour of the latter, stronger thesis. In the third paper, “Does Edificatory Perfectionism Express a Quidnunc Mentality?”, I defend perfectionism against an intriguing and highly original objection that has recently been developed by Matthew Kramer, according to which perfectionist regimes that seek the edification of the citizenry are guilty of the mentality of a village busybody who meddles in matters that are none of her business. The fourth paper, “Perfectionism: Political not Metaphysical”, explores the idea of a “political perfectionism” — a view which combines the contractualist commitment to public justification favoured by political liberals with the perfectionist claim that the state may promote the good life. In the fifth paper, “Do the Reactive Attitudes Justify Public Reason?”, I argue against Gerald Gaus’s attempt to ground public reason in the kind of everyday reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation that seem impossible for us to renounce. In the sixth paper, “Does Social Trust Justify the Public Justification Principle?”, I criticize Kevin Vallier’s recent argument according to which adherence to the public justification principle is justified on the grounds that such adherence is necessary for sustaining a system of social trust within diverse and large-scale societies.

Advisor: McMahan, J
Miller, D
Sizing up, scaling down: Dickinson, Moore, Bishop, Niedecker, Ryan

This is a thesis about smallness and modern American poetry, as exemplified in and by the work of five poets: Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Lorine Niedecker, and Kay Ryan. I conceive smallness in two ways: first, the physical smallness of certain poems themselves; secondly, the way in which smallness is thematised, staged, and explored in poetry.
Being a suitably small-scale method of reading, close textual analysis is at the forefront of my approach. By building upon each poet’s particular version of smallness, I present a collective examination of the poetic stature that smallness can engender. In my first chapter, I explore Dickinson’s fascination with insects, and the ways in which these tiny creatures represent larger ideas in her writing. My second chapter examines the relationship between the part and the whole across various scales in Moore’s work. The private interior is the focus of my third chapter, where I consider the small, contained spaces of Bishop’s work. In my penultimate chapter, I unpack Niedecker’s description of a poet’s work as ‘condensery’. Finally, in my fifth chapter, I think about Ryan’s compact, comic poems in terms of motifs of survival.
Seen more generally within the framework of a modern preoccupation with smallness in its various manifestations, the work of these poets opens up different ways of thinking about the attendant ideas of size, scale, and perspective. In their work, nothing is too small: varieties of blue in an artichoke; a little granite pail; the octopus’s suction cups. Cumulatively, these details also amount to a defense against a certain large-scale way of reading poetry, in which the minutiae of individual perspective is at risk of being lost.

Advisor: Bevis, M
Socio-ecological factors shaping mixed-species groups

Understanding why individuals form groups that are strikingly diversein their organisation is a central focus in evolutionary ecology. Although mixed-species groups, where members of different species interact and move together, are common across animal taxa, inter-species interactions have often been a point of secondary interest in the study of animal sociality.Using mixed-species flocks of individually marked tits (Paridae) as a model system, I investigate how individuals make adaptive decisions in their multi-species social environment. First, I investigated the role of social information in facilitating mixed-species groups. I developed a frameworkthat is based on concepts of optimality to link processes of group formation to signalling theory and information use. I found that tits actively produce recruitment calls to form foraging flocks, but socialcontext mediates the strategies for recruiting group members (Chapter 2). Further, I showed that social information about food transmits through heterospecific social connections and that adaptive social learning strategies prevent birds from being trapped in maladaptive behaviour when wrong information is being provided (Chapter 3). In the second part of my thesis, I addressed whether flock formation is a result of preferential interspecies interactions. I found that active preference for foraging with heterospecifics can enhance social cohesion amongindividuals, which presumably provides members of mixed-species groups with additional social benefits to single-species grouping (Chapter 4). Separating the influence of spatial environmental patterns, such as resource distribution, from active social preferences is challenging, but comparing observational interaction data to null models using permutations tests, enables to separate the effect of spatial pattern and social preferences. Applying this approach to a large long-term observational data set of heterospecific interactions, I demonstrate that individuals differ consistently in their propensity to associate with heterospecifics (Chapter 5).The work presented in this thesis demonstrates that individuals consider both their social and non-social environment when making decisions in their natural, multi-species environment. Participation in mixed-species flocks appears to be a complex balance of competition cost and grouping benefits, mediated by both individual phenotype and environmental conditions.The work presented in this thesis supports previous notions that mixed-species flocking is a mutualistic relationship between participating species. This thesis contributes experimental evidence for the importance of positive interactions in community ecology, and justifies recent advances of linking individual behaviour to community processes.

Keywords: interspecific social behaviour
economic decision-making
collective animal behaviour
mixed-species group
foraging
paridae
social information
social network
Advisor: Cole, E
Farine, D
Sheldon, B
Understanding the effects of ion and neutron irradiation on tungsten

Tungsten will be an important material inside future fusion reactors. However, replicating the neutron irradiation that it will be exposed to in that environment is currently impractical. As a result ion irradiation is being used to extend the dose and temperature range. Irradiation hardening data from past experiments show a discrepancy between the results of these two irradiation species. This work involves the first direct comparison between ion irradiation and neutron irradiation of tungsten, carried out at fusion relevant temperatures to a dose of 1.6 dpa. The materials from these irradiations have been examined to investigate the induced microstructural changes. Irradiation hardening measurements were carried out using nanoindentation and a model applied to correlate this with the defects observed. This has provided critical insight into neutron irradiation induced hardening at fusion relevant temperatures and shown that the discrepancy between ion and neutron irradiation hardening can be significantly reduced by accounting for the effect of transmutation. The change in brittle to ductile transition (BDT) caused by neutron irradiation of single crystal tungsten has been fully characterised. These results show that the BDT temperature has increased by 500 K, yet activation energy has remained constant at 1.0 eV and activation volume at 5 b3, strongly suggesting that the controlling mechanism remains kink-pair nucleation of screw dislocations. Investigations into the BDT in polycrystalline tungsten have shown anomalous strain rate dependence, with micro-cantilever testing showing grain boundary embrittlement. Micro-pillar compression has also been applied to the ion irradiated W and W-1.4Re in order to acquire additional mechanical properties from ion irradiation experiments. Results from this experiment have shown that strain burst behaviour is strongly enhanced by ion irradiation of W-1.4Re, indicating that irradiation induced rhenium precipitation is changing dislocation behaviour. By comparison, displacement damage caused by ion irradiation of pure W appear to have a small effect on micropillar deformation.

Keywords: neutron
hardening
fusion
irradiation
microscopy
tungsten
ion
Advisor: Armstrong, D
Recognising information privacy: a comparative case study of legal change in late modern societies 

The development of privacy laws is often taken to represent a response to socio-technical changes of modern life. But why, if modern societies were confronted with innovations in information and communication technologies in roughly the same way at the same time, did legal systems develop such different approaches to information privacy?
Inspired by the diversity of the legal encoding of privacy, this thesis pursues two main objectives. The first is to develop a nuanced, empirically informed understanding of why information privacy acquired its respective legal status in the legal systems of Germany and the UK. Secondly, by drawing on privacy law developments in two legal systems during the latter half of the twentieth century as a case study, this thesis aims to contribute to a more general understanding of the phenomenon of legal change in late modern societies.
These objectives are achieved by a combination of theoretical reflections and qualitative empirical inquiries. The theoretical component of this thesis considers the problems we incur in pinpointing specific instances of legal change. A conceptualisation of legal change as acts of legal recognition provides the framework for the empirical component of this study. In particular, this research project develops an understanding of legal change as a meaningful type of social action that takes into account the significance that social agents attribute to their own actions. Empirical investigations thus focus on the reasons for recognising privacy that lawmakers express in official lawmaking discourses.
This thesis finds that considerations such as institutional norms and expectations about lawmaking (legal antecedents), dystopian themes in popular culture, and foreign and international legal developments have all prompted lawmakers to afford legal recognition to information privacy in Germany and the UK. These findings illustrate the role of reflexivity, metaphor and globalising pressures in late modern lawmaking.

Keywords: privacy
legal change
socio-legal
Advisor: Lange, B
Beyond Kandinsky: Exploring colour-shape correspondences through the lenses of emotions, individual differences, and aesthetics

This thesis brings together historical and empirical research on colour-shape correspondences. Historical accounts usually start with Wassily Kandinsky’s universal visual language of art and design, which explored colours and forms in depth as fundamental building blocks. Whilst colour-shape correspondences provide an example of an intramodal sensory correspondence, modern empirical work in this area has typically been grounded in the field of crossmodal correspondences research. All empirical work conducted on colour-shape correspondences is examined through a systematic review of 28 articles (k = 50, N = 4599), finding, on average, colour and shape to be associated to a small to moderate degree in terms of effect size. However, many inconsistencies in research to date are also found. Over the course of nine experiments, the high amount of variance in colour-shape matches and their task and stimuli-dependent nature is demonstrated. Particular areas that are explored are whether certain shape characteristics can be found that predict chosen colour characteristics, the role of individual differences, and the relationship of colour-shape correspondences with aesthetics. Key conceptual, statistical, and practical issues are highlighted throughout the thesis. Finally, a theoretical groundwork for colour-shape correspondences is posited based on a dynamic representational geometry associative model for intramodal and crossmodal correspondences.

Keywords: Intramodal correspondences
Colour-shape correspondences
Multisensory perception
Aesthetics
Colour-shape associations
Crossmodal correspondences
Kandinsky
Advisor: Spence, C
Murphy, R
Soft chemical routes to ferroelectric and multiferroic materials

This work is focussed on the synthesis and characterisation of ferroelectric and multiferroic materials which adopt n = 2 Dion-Jacobson or Ruddlesden-Popper structures.
A series of n = 2 Dion-Jacobson phases, RbNdM2O7 and CsNdM2O7 (M = Nb/Ta), were investigated and it was observed that they adopt polar crystal structures, confirmed by both second-harmonic generation and neutron diffraction experiments. Their polar structures are driven by several tilting distortions and cation displacement modes. The different polar structures adopted by the caesium and rubidium phases are attributed to the different sizes of Rb+ and Cs+ cations.
To extend our understanding on the size effect of interlayer cations, the metastable Ruddlesden-Popper phases NaNdM2O7 and LiNdM2O7 were prepared from RbNdM2O7 via cation exchange reactions. The lithium phases adopt a polar crystal structure, with lithium cations ordered as stripes. In contrast, the sodium phases are non-polar and the sodium cations adopt a checkerboard order pattern. Their different structures are again explained by the size differences between lithium and sodium cations.
A temperature dependant phase transition study of polar RbNdM2O7 and CsNdM2O7 reveals that upon heating, both rubidium and caesium phases undergo first-order phase transitions to anti-polar structures before reaching the highest symmetry aristotype structures. A complex competition between many distortion modes was observed during their phase transitions.
An n = 2 Ruddlesden-Popper phase, Li2SrTa2O7, was prepared by a ceramic synthesis and it adopts a polar crystal structure. A further cation exchange reaction using MnCl2 leads to a polar and magnetically ordered phase MnSrTa2O7. This manganese phase adopts an incommensurate crystal structure with an unambiguous modulation of the ordering pattern of manganese cations. The superstructure is explained by a competition between minimising Mn-Mn repulsion and optimising metal-oxide bonding. The unusual magnetolattice coupling behaviour observed from variable temperature neutron diffraction data indicates a magnetoelectric effect in MnSrTa2O7.
Similar cation exchange reactions performed on Li2SrTa2O7 using CoCl2 or CuCl2 produce partially exchanged phases CoxLi2-2xSrTa2O7 and CuxLi2-2xSrTa2O7 with different structures with respect to their manganese analogue. Complex cation order is expected in these two phases.
A polar oxynitride phase, Na1+xNdTa2O7-xNx, was prepared by a low temperature ammonolysis from non-polar NaNdTa2O7, suggesting layered perovskite oxynitrides can be a new family of polar materials. In addition, a series of transition metal oxynitrides, MxLiyNdTa2O7-zNz (M = Mn/Fe/Co/Ni/Cu) were made from a four-step synthesis. Among these materials, the nickel phase adopts a polar crystal structure and exhibit a magnetic order below 20 K.

Keywords: multiferroics
perovskites
crystallography
ferroelectrics
soft chemistry
Advisor: Hayward, M