VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Alexa, how do you change us? Exploring associations between children's exposure to digital voice assistants and their ontological understandings of (human) life and technology

This dissertation aims to contribute to a theoretical and empirical understanding of what role Digital Voice Assistants (DVAs), such as ‘Alexa’ or the ‘Google Assistant’, play in today’s Home and Childhood Environments (HCEs), and how children’s exposure to DVAs is related to children’s ontological understandings of their environments. This is done in three constituent chapters. First, on the methodological basis of a conceptual literature review, constituent chapter (I) advances the author’s previous work on children’s understandings of DVAs (Festerling & Siraj, 2020) by offering a more granular discussion of anthropomorphism research and how it relates to children and DVAs from a pragmatistic philosophical perspective. Second, the review forms the conceptual starting point for constituent chapter (II): inspired by Bernstein & Crowley’s (2008) original study on how children’s ontological conceptions of life and technology were systematically associated with their exposure to robotic entities, the chapter explores this association for children in their middle childhood (n=143, age: 7-11 years) and with different levels of DVA-exposure. Third, constituent chapter (III) further extends the previous chapters by applying a latent construct approach to children’s DVA-exposure and their ontological conceptions of humans and DVAs. The overall contribution of these three constituent chapters is twofold: first, it is argued that DVAs or other modern technologies should not be thought of as a new ontological category in a monistic metaphysical sense but one that is constructed in humans through experience. Consequently, children’s differing experiences of technology may yield different ontological categories in a pluralistic sense. Second, by exploiting naturally occurring variation in children’s DVA-exposure and ontological conceptions, it is shown that children in middle childhood with higher DVA-exposure conceptualise technology in general, and DVAs in particular, to be more psychological (e.g. emotionality, empathy).

Advisor: Siraj, I
Malmberg, L
The fall of partnerships: a commercial decision or a tax decision?

The fundamental question addressed in this thesis is: can the fall of the ordinary partnership be attributed to commercial (non-tax) considerations, or is it, at least in part, due to the distortionary effects of the tax system? The author seeks to establish, primarily using new empirical research, that the tax system is highly likely to have had a significant role to play in the demise of partnerships. That is not to say that genuine commercial considerations are irrelevant but, given that basic principles of good tax design require that taxation should not affect business form selection, the present situation must be regarded as unsatisfactory. The need for systemic reform, or at the very least steps towards it, is clear.
Chapter 1 presents the statistical background to the thesis. Chapter 2 considers the economic viability of the partnership as an alternative to incorporation for businesses involving more than one owner-manager, highlighting the limited liability illusion. Chapter 3 addresses the failing of the LLP, notwithstanding some initial optimism that the form would be highly attractive to businesses of all sizes. Chapter 4 explores the unfortunate truth that numerous acts of incorporation are, and have been, driven by tax considerations, rather than the sound commercial reasons discussed in Chapter 2. The availability of a double tax saving – perhaps exaggerated by artificial income splitting – in the corporate form for would-be partners leaves the partnership as the most vulnerable form for tax-motivated incorporation. Chapter 5 presents the case for a disincorporation relief as a way out for owner-managers locked into the company structure and concludes the thesis. Annexes A-D provide supplementary information, whilst Annex E provides a postscript on a more controversial proposal involving the decoupling business form and tax treatment.

Keywords: taxation
companies
tax reform
partnerships
LLPs
small business taxation
limited liability
business form selection
Advisor: Simpson, E
Power-law phenomena in Bayesian nonparametrics

Bayesian methods constitute a popular approach to perform statistical inference and predict phenomena of interest. Surely, part of the popularity of the Bayesian paradigm can be linked to their intuitive core idea: to take advantage of the user's prior knowledge and integrate it in the statistical procedure. The result of this synergy is the posterior distribution, focal point of Bayesian inference and instrument to quantify the uncertainty of the estimation. This thesis collects the work done as a research student on statistical models, built with the tools of Bayesian nonparametrics, to describe power-law distributed data. The motivation of the proposed models are to be found in two different fields of application: complex networks and privacy assessment.
After the introduction, in the first half of the thesis I concentrate on the proposal and analysis of models for networks, the mathematical objects that describe relations among entities by representing them as nodes connected through links. Power-laws usually appear in real-world networks as the distribution function of the degrees, namely the number of links of the nodes. The two pieces of work presented belong to the graphex process framework, a flexible generating process which allows to mimic empirically observed networks characteristics. Chapter 2 fits into this framework and extends the original proposal of Caron and Fox (2017) to provide a novel modelling approach to describe sparse networks with spatial structure or other covariates. An approximate inference strategy is provided and tested on simulated data. The paper presented in chapter 3 casts light on the asymptotic properties of networks generated under the graphex process, proving the desirable properties of sparsity, power-law degree distributions, clustering and two central limit theorems.
The second half of the thesis is devoted to the development of statistical methods to quantify the risk of disclosure, which arises whenever datasets with records of individuals are published: an intruder could match the data with prior information and disclose the identity, and therefore the sensitive features, of a person. Chapter 4 develops an estimator to quantify this risk using the Pitman-Yor process, a popular prior on probability distributions that has a distinguishable power-law tail. A closed form posterior distribution of the estimator is provided in a convenient mixture representation, and experiments on both simulated and real data show the effectiveness of the method. Chapter 5 deals with the estimation of the same risk under no distributional assumptions, using a fully nonparametric method. The estimator is extremely easy to understand, fast to compute and has provable guarantees of optimality.
Chapter 6 concludes the thesis with a final summary and some proposals to extend the current work towards new research directions.

Keywords: privacy
nonparametric statistics
networks
Bayesian statistics
disclosure risk
power-law
Advisor: Caron, F
Rousseau, J
Identification of a novel role for PARPs in replication stress recovery

The post-translational modification of proteins by ADP-ribosylation, catalysed by poly(ADP-ribose) polymerases (PARPs), forms a cornerstone of the human DNA damage response. Through the covalent attachment of ADP-ribose moieties to substrate proteins, PARPs coordinate the recruitment of repair factors to DNA lesions and promote damage resolution. First elucidated as sensors of single-strand breaks, PARPs bind and become activated by a variety of other lesions including double-strand breaks and dysfunctional replication forks. During prolonged replication stress, the dynamic remodelling of stalled forks is crucial for maintaining fork stability and generating substrates conducive for restart and/or repair through different recombination-mediated pathways. For example, existing models suggest RAD51 can facilitate restart by replisome reset, passive repair by fork fusion, or homologous recombination (HR)-dependent fork re-activation. Alternatively, RAD52 rescues forks through a break-induced replication (BIR) restart mechanism particularly active in the absence of canonical HR machinery. Here, having outlined the relative contributions made by PARPs to the maintenance of genome stability during replication stress, a novel role for PARP1 and PARP2 is described in regulating a RAD52-dependent replication fork recovery pathway. When disrupted, loss of this pathway elevates replication-associated damage and genome instability. Using degron technology to deplete BRCA1 in different genetic backgrounds, PARP1 and RAD52 are shown to function in the same pathway to maintain cell viability when HR is dysfunctional. Mechanistically, MRE11-dependent activation of PARPs promotes the assembly of RAD52 at replication forks in a BIR-like pathway required for effective recovery. Further, by exploiting mass spectrometry to map ADP-ribosylation sites, modification of two BIR proteins, MRE11 and POLD3 is identified during the replication stress response. Strikingly, the integrity of a single site in POLD3, S422, is required for its engagement to chromatin, BIR activity, and replication fork recovery. Overall, these data identify a critical role for MRE11-dependent PARP activation and site-specific ADP-ribosylation in regulating BIR by promoting POLD3-dependent DNA synthesis.

Keywords: PARPs
cancer
ADP-ribosylation
break-induced replication
genome stability
POLD3
RAD52
synthetic lethality
Advisor: Lakin, N
Strange usurped potentates: Elizabeth I, the papacy and the Indian summer of the medieval deposing power

This thesis centres on a pivotal event in the development of religious antagonism in England - the papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth I - considering its origins and consequences, especially its effect on Protestant thought and writing (since the political thought of Elizabethan Catholics has undergone more recent study).
The event appears as a revival of a claim not so antiquated as it is sometimes seen. I survey the medieval precedents for the papal claim to depose secular princes, which have lacked an overall survey, and the (often exaggerated) sixteenth-century views as to its past influence. There was indeed an exceptionally acute sense of this aspect of history during the early English Reformation.
The effect of this was that the actual deposition in 1570 served only to confirm Protestants’ preconceptions. In their views of history, they tended towards a conspiracy theory whereby the influence of Pope and prelates lay behind most, if not all, opposition to English and European monarchies. In their views of contemporary foreign affairs, they had, since the beginning of Elizabeth's reign, constantly suspected the machinations of a (fictional) Catholic League, whereby Catholic powers, probably in conjunction with an internal rising, would combine to destroy Protestant England. This would be heralded by the constantly predicted papal sentence against Elizabeth.
Demonstrably, this was not the case. Disagreements among Catholic potentates precluded any such agreement in the early part of Elizabeth's reign; and ensured that, when Pius V did issue his sentence, it proved a dangerous embarrassment (in no way mitigated by Gregory XIII's qualification of it). It did serve a pivotal role in actual Catholic plans, which however were unable to overcome conflicting interests; the result was notoriety without efficacy. Nevertheless, a paranoid and pessimistic view predominated in Protestant England, diminishing only Slowly even when overt confrontation late in the reign began to be crowned with success. Constant alertness for conflict had proved something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Keywords: England
potentates
Elizabeth I
Anti-Catholicism
Great Britain
Foreign relations
medieval
papacy
sixteenth century
16th century
A novel quantitative representation of the morphology of prostate cancer and a novel automated tool for advance requesting of immunohistochemistry

Prostate cancer is a disease affecting growing numbers of people, which can form metastases and cause death. The risk of mortality and complications from prostate cancer is assessed by visual inspection of tumour morphology in Haematoxylin & Eosin-stained tissue samples. The morphology of prostate cancer is highly heterogeneous: during tumorigenesis, the normal glands that traverse and branch through the prostate lose their structural organisation, and develop a range of aberrant morphological characteristics, such as smaller size, larger nuclei and loss of the layer of basal epithelial cells found in normal glands. Depending on the level of structural loss, and of dedifferentiation of the glands, tissue samples are assigned a Gleason Score from 4 to 10. A higher Gleason Score is indicative of increased clinical risk for patients, and it guides the decision on what type of treatment patients should receive. The Gleason Score suffers from considerable shortcomings, including a poor reproducibility that is due to its qualitative definition. In this work, we design an algorithm to extract a quantitative representation of the morphology of prostate cancer, based on the segmentation and morphological measurement of prostate glands. We validate the use of the representation by showing it automatically captures clinically relevant morphological classes, it is predictive of the Gleason Score, and it can be used to characterise different tissue specimen types used in prostate cancer diagnosis. The morphology of glands is used to diagnose prostate cancer. In some cases, the morphology may appear abnormal, but not to an extent to make a confident cancer diagnosis possible. Immunohistochemistry is then used to detect the lack of basal cells in glands, which is indicative of prostate cancer. We design an automated tool for advance requesting immunohistochemistry for such cases of ambiguous prostate morphology, and we estimate the temporal and monetary savings of introducing the tool into the clinical workflow.

Keywords: computer vision
Gleason Score
digital pathology
deep learning
prostate cancer
immunohistochemistry
interpretable machine learning
morphological analysis
Advisor: Rittscher, J
Verrill, C
A therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time

Gordon Baker’s reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a novel way to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Baker’s Wittgenstein is interested in offering liberation from being beholden to ‘pictures’ – conceptions & ways of looking at things. Instead of advancing philosophical theses, liberation from dogma consists in providing alternatives pictures, making one conscious of the picture they are beholden to, and showing that there are other possible ways of looking at things. The
In the 20th and 21st century, there have been debates between ‘A-theorists’ and ‘B-theorists’ who take themselves to be advancing theses on the nature of time and temporal order. Their disagreements include whether the past is real, whether the present really changes, whether our experience of temporal passage is an illusion or objective, whether their opponent’s theory is coherent, etc.
This thesis is in three parts. In the first chapter, I outline the main commitments of Baker’s reading and defend it against its main critics. In the second chapter, I explicate the commitments of the A and B-theorist and examine some main areas of debate and disagreement. In the final chapter, I examine the debate between A and B-theorist on Baker’s reading, where the goal is for them to recognize their views as stemming from pictures (as opposed to how time must be). In other words, I advance a therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time.

Keywords: Hans-Johann Glock
Peter Hacker
Wittgenstein and Waismann
a therapeutic reading of the A and B-theory of time
Ludwig Wittgenstein
therapeutic reading
Gordon Baker
Metaphysics of Time
Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects
pictures
aspect-switch
Gordon Baker's reading of Wittgenstein
A and B-Theory of Time
aspects
Rupert Read
craving for general explanation
Educational pathfinders? A study of international student mobility in China

To date, a significant body of qualitative scholarship on international student mobility has centred around migration flows to ‘Western’ destinations, particularly to Anglophone and/or European nations. On the contrary, educational migration from these established destination regions to newly emerging study abroad destinations is a relatively recent phenomenon and, consequently, remains eminently under-researched. To fill this gap in our knowledge, I discuss the findings of a qualitative study into European and North American students undertaking an English-taught undergraduate degree in China. Using literature from human geography, sociology, education, migration studies and tourism studies, this thesis explores the ways in which ‘Western’ transnational students engage with, and make meaning of, cross-border mobility, transnational higher education, and cosmopolitanism in neoliberal times.
Drawing on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews and social media content, I seek to understand the narratives that international students from Anglophone and European countries create and share during their study abroad experiences in China. The findings of this empirical research reveal that transnational students’ desires for mobility constitute variegated combinations of economic and non-economic (i.e., personal, emotional, and intangible) considerations. Regardless of how students’ motivations vary, in reflecting on their experiences of a ‘less-taken’ path, transnational students predominantly drew on neoliberal discourse of cosmopolitanism as an imperative part of the ongoing construction of the self as well as a narrative strategy to set themselves apart from others. In particular, visual and textual narratives on social media created by transnational students call for the need to conceptualise them as actively producing, performing, and curating cosmopolitan sensibilities while actively consuming the imagined and experienced differences of the host society. This study concludes by asserting the value of studying the emerging mobility of transnational students from the ‘West’ and its contribution to a wider project of understanding and intervening in international education’s social, economic, and cultural role in the modern world.

Advisor: Waters, J
Tyche: fortune and chance in Euripides and fifth-century historiography

This thesis is a study of tychē (success, good or bad fortune, chance, unexpected circumstances) and fortune talk in Greek literature, especially fifth-century tragedy and historiography. This concept is examined as part of popular beliefs about gods and other powers of fate, as an agent in contexts of causation, and as part of fortune talk and the rhetoric of success and failure (exhortation and consolation). It emerges that tychē language, moira language and god talk constitute alternative ways of expressing human uncertainty, ignorance and frailty in the face of the unforeseen future, danger or critical circumstances. The choice of word is important, as it expresses an attitude to events as well as an intellectual explanation of them. Calling events tychē points to their lack of any purpose or shape, and may also suggest the randomness of human life or the transience of all things mortal. Calling events ‘god-sent’ or ‘fated’ points to their acceptance as inevitable and as universal markers of the limits of the human condition. In Homer we find a distinction between broad, or large-scale, patterns of events - which tend to be attributed to the divine - and the small details which occur in their working out, which may be seen as chance circumstances. Similar instances of this juxtaposition of long-term and short-term causation can be found in Herodotus and Euripides. This juxtaposition often takes the form of different perspectives: an ‘as-it-happens’ limited perspective tends to be linked with tychē, whereas an ‘in-retrospect’ and post eventum perspective tends to be linked with the divine or moira. The tychē-gnōmē, tychē-technē and tychē-pronoia tensions occur in a variety of contexts and form part of fifth-century intellectual debates. Euripides, in his use of both fortune talk and god talk as well as in his adaptation of earlier ideas about them, turns out to be the most inclusive and inconclusive tragedian.

Keywords: Tyche
Greece
chance
historiography
Thucydides
Euripides
chance in literature
fortune in literature
fortune
Herodotus
Predictive coding inspires effective alternatives to backpropagation

The brain has developed a sophisticated hierarchical structure where information is processed across multiple layers (Van Essen et al. 1992), which is critical for forming abstraction from raw information. Inspired by this, modern machine learning is largely built on deep artificial neural networks (LeCun, Bengio, et al. 2015), where neurons are organized in layers, and synaptic weights connect neurons of different layers. One important piece of learning is to correct errors in one’s predictions, and the hierarchical structure requires spreading the errors in one’s predictions across multiple layers and neurons — creating the core challenge of learning known as “credit assignment” (Lillicrap, Santoro, et al. 2020). How the brain solves credit assignment is a key question to understand learning and for creating artificial learning machines, and many recent studies (Lillicrap, Santoro, et al. 2020; Richards, Lillicrap, et al. 2019; Whittington and Bogacz 2019; Zipser and Andersen 1988; Singer et al. 2018; Whittington, T. H. Muller, et al. 2020; Banino et al. 2018) approached it from the perspective of backpropagation (Werbos 1974; Rumelhart et al. 1985; Parker 1985; LeCun, Bengio, et al. 2015). However, it has been questioned whether it is possible for the brain to implement backpropagation exactly (Crick 1989; Grossberg 1987), and learning in the brain seems to be more efficient than backpropagation in several other critical aspects (Tsividis et al. 2017). On the other hand, neuroscience researchers have developed many biologically plausible models to solve the credit assignment problem (Rao and Ballard 1999; Whittington and Bogacz 2017; Whittington and Bogacz 2019; Lillicrap, Santoro, et al. 2020). However, biologically plausible models are still behind backpropagation in terms of generalization and efficiency. The thesis is inspired by this mismatch: the brain mseems to be more advanced than backpropagation, while biologically plausible models learn no better than machine learning models. Thus, the overall goal of the thesis is to demonstrate biologically plausible models can inspire alternative and potentially better solutions for credit assignment than backpropagation, and we take inspiration mainly from predictive coding (PC). Specifically, I first propose a variant of PC that is equivalent to backpropagation. I then propose that the original PC has advantages over backpropagation, implementing a fundamentally different principle from backpropagation, which I call “prospective configuration”. Inspired by the above two findings, I finally propose another variant of PC that is potentially more efficient than backpropagation and has a similar generalization quality as backpropagation.

Keywords: neural networks
predictive coding
artificial intelligence
brain-inspired learning, artificial intelligence, neural networks, energy-based networks
energy-based networks
Advisor: Lukasiewicz, T
Bogacz, R