VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Tortured Logics: Crafting the U.S. Response to Human Rights Violations during the Argentinian Dirty War and the Salvadoran Civil War

My dissertation examines the relationship between law and society by analyzing the implementation of U.S. human rights legislation. In the 1970s, the U.S. Congress, reflecting the growing international consensus that human rights were a matter of international policy, legislated that respect for human rights be considered in all foreign aid decisions. A central feature of this legislation stipulated that aid should not go to countries “engaged in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Subsequently, many have concluded that the United States has inconsistently applied this legislation, especially in United States-Latin America relations. These researchers have studied human rights as a self-evident concept, obscuring the fact that policy advocates—those with a vested interest in defining human rights and their violation and the United States’ response—imbue the concept with of human rights with meaning through policy debates. This dissertation takes a different approach, studying what I call the politics of meaning-making: the process by which policy advocates define and contest the meaning of these phenomena. In order to develop this approach, I examine two cases testing the United States’ commitment to promoting respect for human rights abroad: the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina (1976-1983) and the civil war in El Salvador (1980-1992). The similar scope and severity of human rights violations in both cases provides for a powerful comparison. Based upon a content analysis of 160 U.S. Congressional hearings—summing to more than 35,000 pages of documents, I find that policy advocates assessed each society’s supposed capacity for self-governance and leveraged their own analysis to develop a plan of restoring respect for human rights in Argentina and of establishing respect for human rights in El Salvador. The distinction between restoring and establishing respect for human rights is important because each had significant social consequences for all of the nations involved, both during and after these conflicts officially ended. This analysis served as a foundation for both how policy advocates framed human rights violations perpetrated during each conflict, and how they measured progress towards curbing human rights abuses. I trace the logics and resources policy advocates used to respond to each specific case of human rights violations abroad. My analysis offers a new way to understand the United States’ response to human rights violations through a unique lens. Moreover, my research points to the importance of examining the boundaries between crime and human rights violations. How and by whom these boundaries are drawn and redrawn, impacted all of the societies studied, and continues to have a contemporary impact on local, national, and global levels.

Advisor: Enríquez, Laura J
Bloemraad, Irene
Learning Semantic Image Representations at a Large Scale

I present my work towards learning a better computer vision system that learns and generalizes object categories better, and behaves in ways closer to what human behave. Specifically, I focus on two key components of such a system: learning better features, and revisiting existing problem statements. For the first component, I propose and analyze novel receptive field learning and dictionary learning methods, mathematically justified by the \nystrom sampling theory, that learn more compact and effective features for object recognition tasks. For the second component, I propose to combine otherwise independently developed computer vision and cognitive science studies, and present the first large-scale system that allows computers to learn and generalize closer to what a human learner will do. I also provide a large-scale human behavior database, which will hopefully enable further research along this research direction./nFollowing the recent success of convolutional neural networks, I present and release a well-engineered framework for general deep learning research, and provide an extensive analysis on the generality of deep features learned from the state-of-the-art CNN pipeline: whether they serve as a general-purpose visual descriptor that could be adopted in various applications, and future research directions made possible by such general features.

Advisor: Darrell, Trevor
Mothers' orientations to infants' moral, prudential, and pragmatic transgressions

The moral prohibition against harming others is fundamental to any social unit, including families with young children. Yet, infants appear less averse to harming others than do older children and adults. Infants' harmful actions may in turn elicit strong reactions from others that could contribute to the acquisition of morality./nThe present study investigated two main propositions: 1) mothers respond differently to infants' harmful acts against others (moral transgressions) than when intervening on transgressions related to infants' own well-being (prudential transgressions) or the creation of inconvenience, such as spilling (pragmatic transgressions). 2) Most infants harm others even without provocation. Twenty-six infants and their families participated in a 2.5-hour naturalistic home observation when the infant was 14 months old. Most of the families participated in additional visits when the infant was 19 (N = 24) and 24 (N = 22) months of age./nAll infants who participated in three visits had at least one instance of purposefully harming others and 82 percent did so without any provocation or sign of distress. The hourly frequency of unprovoked purposeful harm showed a curvilinear relation to age (Visit 1: 0.85, Visit 2: 1.42, Visit 3: 1.27). Compared to their interventions on prudential and pragmatic transgressions, mothers' interventions on moral transgressions involved increased use of physical interventions and direct commands, decreased use of softening interventions or distractions, and decreased relenting or compromising. Mothers also rated it as more important to discourage their children from moral transgressions than to discourage their children from prudential transgressions. These findings suggest that caregiver responses to transgressions provide unique opportunities for the early acquisition of the moral prohibition against harming others.

Advisor: Campos, Joseph J.
Turiel, Elliot
Power Conditioning and Stimulation for Wireless Neural Interface ICs

Brain machine interfaces have the potential to revolutionize our understanding of the brain, restore motor function, and improve the quality of life to patients with neurological con- ditions. In recent human trials, control of robotic prostheses has been demonstrated using micro-electrode arrays, which provide high spatio-temporal resolution and an electrical feed- back path to the brain. However, after implantation, scar tissue degrades the recording signal-to-noise ratio and limits the useful lifetime of the array. This work presents two systems which utilize wireless techniques to mitigate this effect and create high-density, long-term interfaces with the human brain./nA wirelessly powered 0.125mm2 65nm CMOS IC integrates four 1.5uW amplifiers (6.5uVrms input-referred noise with 10kHz bandwidth) with power conditioning and communication cir- cuitry. Multiple nodes free-float in the brain and communicate via backscatter to a wireless interrogator using a frequency-domain multiple access communication scheme. The full sys- tem, verified with wirelessly powered in vivo recordings, consumes 10.5uW and operates at 1mm range in air with 50mW transmit power./nA 65nm CMOS 4.78mm2 neuromodulation SoC integrates closed loop BMI functionality on a single IC which can be arrayed on a wireless sub-cranial platform. The IC consumes 348uA from an unregulated 1.2V supply while operating 64 acquisition channels with epoch compression (at an average firing rate of 50Hz) and engaging two stimulators (with a pulse width of 250us/phase, differential current of 150uA, and a pulse frequency of 100Hz). Com- pared to the state of the art neural SoCs, this represents the lowest area and power for the highest integration complexity achieved to date.

Advisor: Rabaey, Jan M
Universals and Cultural Variations in Emotional Expression

One of the most fascinating characteristics of emotions is that they have universal expressive patterns. These expressions, which are encoded through multiple bodily channels, allow us to identify distinct emotions in ourselves and others. After groundbreaking theorizing by Charles Darwin and early empirical work by Ekman and Izard, further research in emotion science revealed evidence in single cultures for more emotional expressions above and beyond the well-studied set comprising of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Some of these new emotions were displayed using nonfacial modalities, such as the voice, touch, and posture. Following the logic set forth by these methods and findings, we tested two hypotheses: 1) there are more than seven universal expressions of emotion; 2) expressive universality is not limited to facial expression./nFindings from three cross-cultural experimental studies yielded support to the above hypotheses. Our first study collected 5500 expressions of twenty-one emotions from five different cultures. Spontaneous behavioral analysis revealed core facial and bodily patterns for each of the 21 states across all five cultures. Additionally, we uncovered over 100 cultural variations to the universal patterns and hundreds of individual variations. We concluded from this study that there exist new potential universal expressions above and beyond the well-studied emotions. In a second study, we found that these core patterns were reliably decoded by naïve raters in 10 different countries. In this experiment, non-American participants rated the expressions of American actor-posed stills and acoustic recordings. We concluded that the new expressions were recognized universally and were reliably distinguished from the well-studied emotions anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Furthermore, nonverbal acoustic expressions of emotion were universally recognized at rates comparable to or greater than facial expression.

Advisor: Keltner, Dacher
The demography of tuberculosis in California in a time of transition:In search of empirical evidence to guide public health agencies' efforts to target tuberculosis screening in immigrant communities

This dissertation examines the relationships between immigration and the incidence of tuberculosis (TB) disease and prevalence of TB infection in California and in the United States (U.S.). The majority of TB cases in California occur among foreign-born persons from countries with high TB burdens. Although the incidence of TB is declining, the decline among immigrants has stalled, and relationships of this trend with changes in immigration patterns are not well characterized. Census data suggest that immigration to California has undergone notable transitions since the 1990s that have shaped the volume, demographic and socioeconomic composition of immigration streams to the state. The first two papers of this dissertation explore the relationships between changes in immigration and the incidence of TB using the decomposition method, and an innovative application of cohort analysis. The third paper examines the only nationally representative survey of new immigrants in the U.S. to determine gaps in TB screening and to assess the prevalence and risk of latent TB infection (LTBI) in immigrant subgroups by country of origin. This unique data source allowed for the assessment of important immigration, health, and socioeconomic variables./nThe decomposition of the recent decline in the incidence of TB among the foreign-born in California shows that changes in the population composition associated with immigration shifts made a modest contribution to the decline, with the majority of the decline due to group-specific declines in rates. There was a notable difference between Hispanics/Latinos and Asians/Pacific Islanders, whereby the impact of immigration shifts was much greater in the former group. The cohort analysis shows that waves of immigration have had varying impacts on the incidence of TB in California, some cohorts contributing to increasing incidence, and others to decreasing incidence. This suggests that the slowing in the decline of the incidence of TB may be due, in part, to immigration cohort entry effects. Identifying cohorts with elevated risk of TB can help develop and test hypotheses on the epidemiologic reasons for the observed effects, and can provide an evidence base for selecting demographic subgroups in which to prioritize TB screening. The TB screening uptake and TB prevalence analysis confirmed gaps in testing for TB that varied significantly by country of origin. Substantial variation in the prevalence and risk of LTBI was also found, which may inform public health efforts to prioritize the targeted testing and treatment to specific subgroups of highest risk.

Advisor: Riley, Lee W
From the Telegraph to Twitter Group Chats

Communication now is easier than ever before. One consequence of this is the emergence of virtual communities, unconstrained by physical proximity. We perform two investigations into changing social trends. We study a corpus of 100 years of newspaper articles to see if we can find evidence to support the popular intuition that as news cycles have sped up, the public's attention span has gotten shorter. We find no such evidence: to the contrary, we find that the typical length of time that a person's name stays in the news has not changed over time, and celebrities now stay in the news for longer than ever before. We also investigate a new kind of community on Twitter called a group chat, where members have regular meetings to discuss a broad range of topics, from medical conditions to hobbies. We find that the phenomenon is growing over time, and paint a broad picture of the topics which one could find a group chat to discuss. With a view to helping connect new participants to group chats they may not have been able to find or might not have been aware of, we design an algorithm to rank group chats in the context of a topic given as a query.

Advisor: Rao, Satish
At the Crossroads of Love, Ritual, and Archaeology: The Exhumation of Mass Graves in Contemporary Spain

Based on 17 months of ethnographic field work on the current exhumation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and subsequent Francisco Franco dictatorship (1939-1975), the dissertation examines the practice of exhuming as a death ritual animated by emotions. A large wealth of literature on the anthropology of death centers on funerary rituals as a way to reveal a people's social structures and cultural meanings. Yet what happens when the living are denied from performing the rituals surrounding death? What happens to those dead, such as Spanish Republicans killed and left in mass graves, who escape the boundaries of ritual? Never before have Republicans been recognized as victims worthy of reburial until 2000 when a team of experts conducted the first professional exhumation of a Republican mass grave. While the rituals associated with exhuming have had an important impact on Spanish society in that it promises recognition and reburial to Republicans, the Spanish exhumations also project a perspective of the recent past as being resolved through the creation of Republican victims. Underlying the exhumations is the use of the dead body to narrate a particular version of the Spanish past through exhumation practice and ritual. The conditions under which exhuming produces new hierarchies of knowledge via its evaluation of the dead is driven not just by practice, but also emotion. Such feelings of love and loss ultimately determine which remains are excavated (i.e., Republicans), and which are not (i.e., Moroccans and Nationalists). In my ethnography on the Spanish experience of death rituals and emotions, I examine the microcosm of exhumations in relation to a larger framework that situates: (1) exhumation practice as a tool to provide meaning of the violent past in post-dictatorship Spain, and (2) the use of such practices to create knowledge in the aftermath of conflict worldwide. The dissertation concludes with possibilities for understanding how emotions and interests drive the production of knowledge that is more open to personal ways of knowing--an invitation for a critical medical anthropology and science studies approach to exhumation practices.

Advisor: Scheper-Hughes, Nancy
Funerary Ritual and Urban Development in Archaic Central Italy

This dissertation examines the evidence for burial in archaic Rome and Latium with a view to understanding the nature of urban development in the region. In particular, I focus on identifying those social and political institutions that governed relations between city-states at a time when Rome was becoming the most influential urban center in the area. I examine the evidence for burial gathered primarily from the past four decades or so of archaeological excavation in order to present first, a systematic account of the data and second, an analysis of these materials. I reveal that a high degree of variation was observed in funerary ritual across sites, and suggest that this points to a complex system of regional networks that allowed for the widespread travel of people and ideas. I view this as evidence for the openness of archaic societies in Latium, whereby people and groups seem to have moved across regions with what seems to have been a fair degree of mobility. I connect the variety in tomb construction to the more widespread phenomenon of monumentalization, which encouraged the construction in stone of residences, temples and public buildings across the region. I consider the individuals and groups responsible for these types of construction, and how they contributed to the development of and interaction between city-states./nI begin with an assessment of the historical reliability of the ancient sources concerning early Rome, since they were written centuries later than the time in question, yet comment on some of the features in the archaeological record. I go on to consider the literary evidence for funerary ritual in early Rome, in order to determine what the ancient sources have to say about the customs of their ancestors and what significance this has for the archaeological evidence. Then, I consider the documentary evidence for funerary ritual, which comes from the legislation of the Twelve Tables. The prohibitions preserved here, if they represent a valid document, illustrate the concerns of lawmakers with regard to funerary activity in and around the city of Rome. In the following section I present the archaeological evidence for burial, and provide a detailed summary of archaic burials according to site, and offer a brief description of each settlement in order to better contextualize the data. I conclude this section with an interpretation of the evidence. Finally, I concentrate on the archaeological evidence from archaic Gabii, which results from my own participation on the excavation of the site. The results of these excavations allow for the study of the intersection between the urban area, burial and landownership.

Advisor: Pena, J. Theodore
Electronic Structure of the Metal/Phthalocyanine Interface Probed by Two-Photon Photoemission

Ultrafast angle-resolved two-photon photoemission (TPPE) is used to probe the electronic structure of highly ordered monolayers of organic materials deposited on the Ag(111) and Ag(100) surfaces. Studies focus on how the electronic states intrinsic to the silver surface are perturbed by the presence of the organic adlayer. These studies show that the strength of the interaction between the surface states and the organic adlayer depends on the nature of the surface state being investigated. For states localized at or near the organic adlayer, substantial changes in the surface state band structure were discovered, whereas for states residing farther in the vacuum the surface state band structure was perturbed surprisingly little. The results presented here give detailed insight into the interaction between the electronic states of organic adlayers and the silver surface.

Advisor: Harris, Charles B
Exploring the novel optical and electrical properties of layered transition metal chalcoginides

Layered Transition Metal Chalcogenides (LTMCs) exhibit a wealth of physical properties. Structurally, they are characterized by strong intra-layer bonding and weak inter-layer interactions. This strong structural anisotropy enables exfoliation into thin layers, sometimes even down to single unit cell thickness./nLTMCs have been studied for decades, but recent advances in nanoscale materials characterization and device fabrication have opened up new research opportunities. As the thickness of these materials go thinner and thinner, their properties may change significantly, which calls for re-exploring of their unique optical and electronic properties. During my PhD study, I have explored two categories of LTMCs: LTMC semiconductors and LTMC metals./nLTMC semiconductors such as MoS2, MoSe2, WS2 and WSe2 have sizable bandgaps that change from indirect to direct in single layers, allowing applications such as transistors, photodetectors and electroluminescent devices. I have studied the optical properties of few layer WSe2, and found a thermally induced direct-indirect band gap transition. The ultrathin body of these LTMC monolayer semiconductors also makes them sensitive to both the ambient and external electric field. By combining these two unique properties, I discovered a strategy for dynamically modulating the photoluminescence intensity of MoS2 by orders of magnitude. The defect free, nanometer-thick LTMC layers are ideal tunneling media. Based on this, I proposed to use LTMC as the elastic tunneling medium to construct a non-impact nano-electro-mechanical switch, which shows 4 orders of magnitude modulation in the electrical resistance by applying a mechanical force./nLTMC materials span a wide range of categories. Some LTMC show semiconducting properties, while others are metallic, or even superconducing. Bi2Te3, a metallic LTMC, commonly known as a high performance thermoelectric material, also attracts renewed attention because it is found to be topological insulator. The conduction on its surface is provided by topologically protected surface states, which has a massless Dirac like dispersion, with spin and momentum degree of freedom interlocked. It would be interesting to explore the possibility of engineering the geometry of these exotic conductive surfaces at nanoscale. During my PhD study, I introduced dense, nanosized antidot arrays into Bi2Te3 microflakes, and studied its magneto-transport properties. This modification completely altered the electrical properties of this material. I observed signature of Ahoronov-Bohm type oscillations in our device, indicating that charge carriers in topological insulators are indeed interacting with our antidot arrays, thus proved the possibility of creating new functionalities in this material via nano-structuring.

Advisor: Wu, Junqiao