VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Wildfire-specific PM2.5 and risk of ED visits for mental health, pregnancy, respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes: evidence from 2020 California wildfires

Beyond their immediate devastation, the 2020 wildfires in California increased the risk of exposure to fine particulate matter (PM2.5) at the population level to a broad region, which could have led to increased emergency department visits. However, studies to date have been on limited geographic areas and found inconsistent results. Additionally, the impact on mental health outcomes and pregnancy-complication in the aftermath of the fires is understudied. This is a retrospective, cross-sectional, ecological study conducted among people residing in California and presenting to California hospitals from July 1, 2020, to December 31, 2020. We studied patients who had an emergency department (ED) visit due to potentially PM2.5-related diseases (respiratory, cardiovascular, mental, and pregnancy-related) as identified by the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision codes. Using a distributed non-linear lagged model, we investigated the immediate (day 0) and delayed (up to 4 days after exposures) association between 10 ug/m3 increases in wildfire-specific PM2.5 and ED visits after adjusting for COVID-19 co-occurrence. The effect of an increase in wildfire specific PM2.5 concentration per 10 ug/m3 over 4 lag days was statistically significantly associated with an increase in the number of ED visits for chronic lower respiratory conditions (cumulative relative risk (cRR)1.121 [95% CI 1.071-1.174]), asthma (cRR 1.154 [1.090-1.222]), and all combined respiratory conditions (cRR 1.026 [1.001-1.052]). The additional significant relationship was evident for COPD (lag 0-3: cRR 1.126 [0.949- 1.336]), all combined mental health conditions (lag 0-2: cRR 1.052 [1.017-1.089]), other mood affective disorders (lag 0-3: cRR 1.189 [1.035-1.364]), and all combined pregnancy-related conditions (lag0-4: cRR 1.035 [1.001-1.071]) when we examine with multiple exposure windows. Our subgroup analyses indicated that Medicaid enrollees, females, and adults (age 25-64) had higher risks for ED visits during wildfires. Mediation analyses showed that the percent excess risk of wildfire-specific PM2.5 on outcomes explained by COVID-19 was -7% for respiratory and -31% for pregnancy-related outcomes. After using wildfire-specific PM2.5 across the entire of California and controlling COVID-19, our results found that increases in wildfire-specific PM2.5 are more likely to increase the number of ED visits at the ZCTA-level. We found elevated associations with mental and pregnancy-related outcomes and confirmed previously reported associations with respiratory and cardiovascular outcomes. Each health outcome has different lag times of susceptibility to wildfire smoke exposure and varies by sociodemographic characteristics, including age, sex, race/ethnicity, and health insurance types.

Keywords: Wildfires > Health aspects
Public health
Text
Thesis
Advisor: Nelson Lorene
Nadeau Kari
Win-Win Cooperation for Who? The Political Economy of State-Business Relations in Global China

China’s increased global engagement has animated debate among policymakers and academics alike. Prevailing analyses of China’s role in the world tend to frame China as a unitary actor under the control of Beijing. This thesis offers an alternative, granular approach to assessing the incentives and constraints that drive political economic activity in “Global China.” Drawing on foundational concepts from property rights theory, transaction cost economics, and agency theory, I introduce the “global state corporatism” model through which to analyze the complex set of actors, interests, and interdependencies subsumed within Global China. I conceptualize China’s state sector as a large corporation characterized by a series of nested principal-agent relationships. Within this structure, Beijing, local governments, and firms each have their own set of interests; when the interests of one actor are in conflict with another, principals are more likely to incur agency costs. This thesis draws on one case study of fiscal reforms to China’s export taxes and two case studies of Chinese firms operating in Ghana to interrogate the proposed model of global state corporatism. Perhaps the most important contribution of this work is my analysis of the fiscal reforms to the export VAT rebate mechanism. Previously unexplored, the export VAT rebate mechanism provides a specific political economic rationale behind local governments’ enthusiasm to participate in China’s internationalization initiatives. The logic of the export VAT rebate mechanism provides new alternative explanations for several key trade statistics in China. Finally, I demonstrate how host countries can exploit Global China’s nested principal-agent structure to exert significant agency in shaping outcomes from China’s engagement.

Keywords: China
Belt and Road Initiative
Intergovernmental fiscal relations
Central-local government relations
China-Africa Relations
Agency costs
Property rights
Transaction cost economics
China-Ghana Relations
China political economy
Going Out Strategy
Text
Thesis
Won't you be my neighbor? : reactions to online racial discrimination disclosures across U.S. neighborhoods and the promise of empathy

While American neighborhoods remain largely segregated by race, they offer valuable opportunities for people of different racial identities to interact, learn from, and support each other. This potential is amplified by technology, specifically neighborhood based social media platforms. However, the convergence of diverse individuals sometimes gives rise to conflicts and discrimination. In the face of discrimination, individuals may turn to the community to share their experiences. As listening and learning about racialized experiences often serves as the first step towards thriving of diverse communities, in the present research we ask whether individuals who choose to share their encounters with racial discrimination in their neighborhood receive the same level of empathetic support as those sharing negative race-neutral experiences. With access to millions of social media posts (Chapter 2), we learn that neighborhood racial discrimination disclosures face heightened censorship by both algorithms (Chapter 3) and humans (Chapter 4), compared to negative race-neutral disclosures. This disparate censorship against racial discrimination disclosures negatively impacts even third-party viewers, who feel more alienated from the community and the hosting platform (Chapter 5). Further, we propose an empathy intervention as a mitigation strategy (Chapter 6). These studies illuminate the emerging landscape of digital discrimination, highlighting how the actions of everyday people impact support and alienation in communities. These insights hold significance as communities navigate the complexities of constructive integration in an increasingly diverse society.

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Psychology.
Advisor: Eberhardt Jennifer
Markus Hazel
Steele Claude
Word Explorer Masters Project Report and Video

Word Explorer is a web-based game that supports teachers in using morphology (the study of the structure of words) to help students in grades 3-6 understand the complex vocabulary needed to succeed in middle school and beyond. By constructing words from bases, prefixes, and suffixes and then connecting them to meaning, students improve their ability to decipher multisyllabic words, recognize them automatically, and understand their meanings. Reading research indicates these skills are necessary for successful reading comprehension.

Keywords: Morphology
Literacy
Readers (Elementary)
Vocabulary > Study and teaching (Elementary)
Text
Report
Thesis
Words of passion : narrative technologies of modern China

This dissertation brings together Chinese literary and cultural studies, cognitive narratology, and digital humanities (DH) to explore the relationship between embodied cognition and the narrative form. Whereas traditional scholarship considered Chinese narrative artifacts as reflections of distinct ideological configurations (e.g., "Late Qing, " "Mao's China, " "post-socialism, " etc.), the techno-cognitive framework developed in this project brackets such historiographical categories and instead foregrounds formal continuities across political divides and epistemic shifts. Rather than explaining such observable transhistorical patterns through the prism of "Chinese tradition, " however, this project employs computational tools of humanistic inquiry to anchor formal features of narratives in the transcultural phenomenology of the human body, thus departing from the politicized and nationalized focus of much previous and current scholarship. Since the late 1960s, one of the dominant interpretive paradigms in literary and cultural studies has been Marxist historicism, also known under the term "genealogy, " which grounded cultural phenomena in historically situated structures of power. By contrast, this dissertation recovers the forgotten tradition of formalist school of literary criticism and showcases narrative elements whose significance is not exhausted by the sociohistorical contexts of their emergence. Specifically, my project draws upon findings from affective neuroscience indicating that human cognition is fundamentally embodied, i.e., the whole human body is deeply involved in how we perceive, make sense of, and interact with the world. As such, my dissertation offers a corrective to the disembodied paradigm of "distant reading" as it has been formulated so far in DH literature. In accordance with its anti-historicist ambition, this dissertation is conceived as a problematical rather than a chronological study. Each chapter explores a different narratological question from a biocultural perspective, including the Theory of Mind, situational schemas, narrative empathy, social identity, and the problem of character, which are then localized in the specific context of Chinese literary and cultural studies. Narrative technologies considered in this project include the metaphor of the heart (xin 心) as the center of cognitive and emotional life, the aesthetic of the sublime, the trope of the suffering woman, the we-narrative, and the distribution of agency among fictional characters. Dispersing narrative artifacts onto desynchronized timelines and multiple recursive structures, this dissertation demonstrates that narratives contain a mixture of historically stable and unstable elements, as does any technology, and encourages us to appreciate the "texture" of narrative works -- ordered collections of lexemes or words -- rather than treating them as mere epiphenomena of collective tradition

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
East Asian Languages and Cultures.
Advisor: Lee Haiyan
Algee-Hewitt Mark
Ilchuk Yuliya
Wang Ban
Working the gray areas : gender and labor in the digital age

Digital technologies are transforming the conditions and meaning of work in the twenty-first century. Yet research on the digital economy has often neglected the role of gender, while feminist scholarship has yet to account for how digital technologies are restructuring the relationship between gender and labor across economic sectors. This dissertation uses an interdisciplinary mixed methods approach including close visual and textual analysis and ethnographic interviews to examine case studies of technological "disruption" of gendered labor in three different sites of production: the home, the service industry, and corporate management. Attending to the exclusion of historically feminized work from formal employment, this project contributes to both digital media studies and feminist studies by showing how digital technologies are enabling new modes of formalization and visibility of gendered labor across economic spheres. At the same time, my research demonstrates how the specific socio-technical dynamics in each site create tensions between workers, employers, and platforms, leading to new avenues for bias and exploitation as social norms fill in the gaps between legal and technical regulation in a shifting world of work. I argue that dichotomies of formal/informal and visible/invisible labor are insufficient to understand gendered labor in the digital age. Rather, we must contend with how gender reattaches to different tasks, bodies, and skills in the gray areas created by new socio-technical configurations. This interdisciplinary cross-sector study highlights the complexity of labor formalization and illuminates challenges for policy makers, technology designers, and labor organizers seeking to address gender equity in the digital economy. My project not only demonstrates the importance of gender as a critical lens through which to understand the changing dynamics of technology and labor in the twenty-first century, but also shows how digital technologies impact how gender itself "works" in the digital age

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
Advisor: Moya Paula M. L.
Denson Shane
Turner Fred
Woundedness and reintegration : the phenomenology and transmission of women's trauma in modern and contemporary Italy

This project investigates the way in which the figure of the hysterical woman has been taken up and reworked by Italian women writers in the decades following WWI. The first section identifies the importance of surgical imagery in the works of Enif Robert, Goliarda Sapienza, and Elena Ferrante, and proposes that such imagery shifts characterization away from madness towards an experience of woundedness. With the help of Adriana Cavarero's feminist narrative philosophy and in dialogue with contemporary thinking on trauma, this section complicates the simplistic tendency to equate storytelling with agency and healing. The second section focuses on envied or desired wounds and wounds that cross generations, with a focus on Elsa Morante and Elena Ferrante. This analysis identifies the fervent witnessing of the wounds of others as significant for the feminist project of countering isolation; woundedness can then be understood as part of the work of a dark feminism. Taking Ferrante's call for the exploration of the dark sides of female experience as a theoretical point of departure, the third section analyzes four recent works of Italian film that explore maternity beyond the confines of traditional representation. The project identifies a strong Italian contribution to contemporary transnational feminist thought, and its connection to a long, underrecognized, pattern of carving out artistic space for darkly feminist forms of expression, particularly those that emphasize wounds as both evidence of painful experience and opportunities for deepened understanding

Keywords: Humanities and Sciences.
French & Italian.
Advisor: Wittman Laura
Harrison Robert L. (Robert Ligon)
Prodan Sarah Rolfe
The yellow brick road to artificial intelligence : an empirical study of developers developing artificial intelligent conversational socialbots

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly becoming ubiquitous and invisible - nudging, making recommendations, influencing and making decisions, providing information, forming long-term relationships with users, or merely providing company. Despite this prevalence, few studies have examined how these technologies are designed and developed. This study examines how developers of AI technologies, faced with high levels of ambiguity, approach their work. Development of artificial intelligent (AI) technologies presents a unique phenomenon in which two of the three, input-process-output variables are ambiguous. There is opacity in cause-effect, that is, it is difficult if not impossible to know how inputs to AI technologies are related to outputs, thereby making multiple interpretations of causality plausible. The evaluation of outputs of AI technologies is often based on datasets called ground truth that are inherently ambiguous and dependent upon subjective decisions such as what categories to include in the classification system, and on the interpretation of people assigning these categories to different entities in the dataset. Through this ethnographic study of the development process of conversational AI technologies, I find that developers engage in three ambiguity attitudes - avoiding ambiguity by using manually coded, rule-based response generation techniques to exert control over the output of the technology. They also exhibit ambiguity seeking by employing opaque, deep learning, large language models to auto-generate responses to build resilience in the technology to produce an output in unexpected situations in which the technology would otherwise 'fall off the cliff' or fail. At the same time, developers attempt to resolve ambiguity by engaging in a process of building an empirical understanding from first principles of the phenomenon being automated, by ad hoc experimentation with proxy metrics and intuitions. I call this process 'reverse-building of phenomena.' Developers who embraced ambiguity and built resilient technologies fared better in the competition than those who did not. I contribute to an understanding of how modern-day work is changing for developers with the advent of opaque and ambiguous artificial intelligent technologies

Keywords: Engineering.
Management Science and Engineering.
Advisor: Hinds Pamela
Christin Angèle
Valentine Melissa (Melissa A.)
Zirconium-doped hafnium oxide based ferroelectric materials for memory applications

As data processing and storage needs continue to grow at a rapid pace, the development of innovative memory technologies is crucial. The discovery of ferroelectricity in hafnia (HfO2)-based materials has garnered significant attention in both academia and industry, owing to their potential to revolutionize non-volatile memory (NVM) technology and enable novel computing architectures. HfO2-based ferroelectric materials offer advantages over conventional perovskite oxides, such as low-temperature synthesis and conformal growth in three-dimensional structures on silicon, making them compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology and ideal for device scaling. However, several challenges still exist for implementing ferroelectric HfO2 in commercial products, such as polarization variation during cycling (wake-up effect), high operation voltage, compatibility with back-end-of-line (BEOL) processing temperatures, and low memory density. In this dissertation, I tackled the challenges outlined above. I began by focusing on the Hf0.5Zr0.5O2 (HZO) material itself and addressing the wake-up effect through the introduction of an HfO2 buffer layer at the HZO/electrode interface. Subsequently, I developed a new measurement setup capable of directly measuring individual nm-sized devices, which enabled investigating the scaling effect in HZO-based ferroelectric capacitors. Through my research, I was able to demonstrate excellent ferroelectricity and reliability in ultra-thin HZO (4 nm) capacitors with molybdenum (Mo) electrodes. These capacitors exhibited low operation voltage, wake-up-free behavior, high endurance, and low RTA temperatures, making them highly desirable for practical applications. I also studied the size scaling effect down to 65 nm × 45 nm devices, where I observed ultra-high remanent polarization (2Pr) for the first time at this scale. In addition to exploring two-dimensional scaling to improve density, I also proposed a hybrid structure for 4 bits/cell storage, increasing the multi-bit capability in a single cell

Keywords: Engineering.
Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Wong S. Simon
McIntyre Paul Cameron
Wong Hon-Sum Philip
3D scene understanding with efficient spatio-temporal reasoning

Robust and efficient 3D scene understanding could enable embodied agents to safely interact with the physical world in real-time. The key to the remarkable success of computer vision in the last decade owes to the rediscovery of convolutional neural networks. However, this technology does not always directly translate to 3D due to the curse of dimensionality. The size of the data grows cubically with the voxels, and the same level of input resolution and network depth was infeasible compared to that of 2D. Based on the observation that the 3D space is mostly empty, sparse tensors and sparse convolutions stand out as an efficient and effective 3D counterparts to the 2D convolution by exclusively operating on non-empty spaces. Such efficiency gain supports deeper neural networks for higher accuracy in real-time reference speed. To this end, this thesis explores the application of sparse convolution to various 3D scene understanding tasks. This thesis breaks down a holistic 3D scene understanding pipeline into the following subgoals; 1. data collection from 3D reconstruction, 2. semantic segmentation, 3. object detection, and 4. multi-object tracking. With robotics applications in mind, this thesis aims to achieve better performance, scalability, and efficiency in understanding the high-level semantics of the spatio-temporal domain while addressing the unique challenges the sparse data poses. In this thesis, we propose generalized sparse convolution and demonstrate how our method 1. gains efficiency by leveraging the sparseness of the 3D point cloud, 2. achieves robust performance by utilizing the gained efficiency, 3. makes predictions on empty spaces by dynamically generating points, and 4. jointly solves detection and tracking with spatio-temporal reasoning. Altogether, this thesis proposes an efficient and reliable pipeline for a holistic 3D scene understanding

Advisor: Bohg Jeannette
Ermon Stefano
Fedkiw Ronald P.