VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Providence and acceleration [electronic resource] : prophetic modalities in early modern Iberian literature

Rather than foretelling the future in any strict sense, prophecy in early modern Iberian literature works to read a telos—what I call "destiny"—out of the historical or legendary past. An act of postdiction, this teleological mode of reading also has an important pragmatic and interpellative element; it calls for and even demands present action in light of a preordained future. Prophecy, in this sense, works to transcend time in order to act both within and upon it. Particularly in early modern Catholic Europe, prophecies shaped perceptions of and controlled destiny through two modalities that, drawing on Reinhardt Koselleck's "Futures Past" (1985), I call "providentialism" and "accelerationism"—that is, the practice of slowing time down to defend the status quo with triumphalist postdictions or quickening its pace to rush to meet a future perceived to be redemptive. Although providentialist and accelerationist prophecies crop up frequently across literary genres in early modern Iberia, given the simultaneously evangelical and acquisitive motives that underlay the development and expansion of Portugal and Spain's respective empires, they are most prevalent in texts sitting at the crossroads of the sacred and the political. Such texts include, but are not limited to, epic poems, autos sacramentales, sermons, and political treatises that appropriate, develop, and use prophecy in their interrogations of empire. More specifically, I focus on epics such as Alonso Ercilla y Zúñiga's "La Araucana" (1569, 1578, 1589) and Luís de Camões's "Os Lusíadas" (1572), Pedro Calderón de la Barca's autos sacramentales, as well as António Vieira's prophetic treatises and a selection of his sermons.

Keywords: Iberian and Latin American Cultures.
Advisor: Barletta Vincent primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Greene Roland
Rocha Marília Librandi advisor. Thesis advisor
Pseudorandom functions with new properties [electronic resource]

Pseudorandom functions (PRFs), first defined by Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Micali, are a fundamental building block in cryptography and have numerous applications. They are used for encryption, message integrity, signatures, key derivation, user authentication, and many other cryptographic mechanisms. It is therefore unsurprising that pseudorandom functions have proven to be an important and widely researched subject. This thesis focuses on three new properties of PRFs. We start by explaining how to construct efficient algebraic pseudorandom functions. To do this, we develop a new, general PRF construction technique called the augmented cascade and show that it leads to efficient algebraic PRFs. In addition, we show how to use our techniques to build new verifiable random functions. Secondly, we show how to build PRFs with new functionality: key homomorphic PRFs. Intuitively, a key homomorphic PRF is just a PRF with an efficiently computable homomorphism over the key space. This new functionality enables a number of interesting applications, such as distributed PRFs and updatable encryption. Finally, we explain how to build PRFs that are resistant to certain kinds of attacks where the PRF key is updated in a deterministic manner. More precisely, we show how to use our key homomorphic PRFs to build PRFs secure against related-key attacks.

Advisor: Boneh Dan
Williams Ryan (Richard Ryan)
Williams Vassilevska Virginia
Quantitative reservoir characterization integrating seismic data and geological scenario uncertainty [electronic resource]

The main objective of this dissertation is to characterize reservoir models quantitatively using seismic data and geological information. Its key contribution is to develop a practical workflow to integrate seismic data and geological scenario uncertainty. First, to address the uncertainty of multiple geological scenarios, we estimate the likelihood of all available scenarios using given seismic data. Starting with the probability given by geologists, we can identify more likely scenarios and less likely ones by comparing the pattern similarity of seismic data. Then, we use these probabilities to sample the posterior PDF constrained in multiple geological scenarios. Identifying each geological scenario in metric space and estimating the probability of each scenario given particular data helps to quantify the geological scenario uncertainty. Secondly, combining multiple-points geostatistics and seismic data in Bayesian inversion, we have studied some geological scenarios and forward simulations for seismic data. Due to various practical issues such as the complexity of seismic data and the computational inefficiency, this is not yet well established, especially for actual 3-D field datasets. To go from generating thousands of prior models to sampling the posterior, a faster and more computationally efficient algorithm is necessary. Thus, this dissertation proposes a fast approximation algorithm for sampling the posterior distribution of the Earth models, while maintaining a range of uncertainty and practical applicability. Lastly, the proposed workflow has been applied in an actual reservoir. The field, still in the early stage, has limited well data, seismic data, and some geological observations. Accordingly, the proposed workflow can guide several processes, from selecting geological scenarios to suggesting a set of models for decision makers. The case study, applied in a turbidite reservoir in West Africa, demonstrates the quantitative seismic reservoir characterization constrained to geological scenarios. It contains a well log study, rock physics modeling, a forward simulation for generating seismic responses, and object-based prior modeling. As the result, we could pick some promising geological scenarios and its geological parameters from seismic data using distance-based pattern similarity. Next, based on the selected geological scenarios, Metropolis sampler using Adaptive Spatial Resampling (M-ASR) successfully sampled the posterior conditioned to all available data and geological scenario uncertainty.

Keywords: Energy Resources Engineering.
Advisor: Mukerji Tapan
Caers Jef advisor. Thesis advisor
Mavko Gary
Quantum bose and Fermi gases of dysprosium [electronic resource] : production and initial study

Advancements in quantum manipulation of ultracold atomic gases are opening a new frontier in the quest to better understand strongly correlated matter. By exploiting the long-ranged and anisotropic character of the dipole-dipole interaction in ultracold gases, we hope to simulate or create novel forms of quantum matter. Quantum dilute gases of the most magnetic element, dysprosium, provide an important platform to study this dipolar physics. We present details of experiments that produce strongly dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates of Dy164 and Dy162, as well as the first dipolar degenerate Fermi gas of Dy161 (0.2 x Fermi temperature) in low magnetic field. Particularly, we demonstrated for the first time the direct evaporative cooling of single component ultracold fermions (Dy161) to Fermi degeneracy, predicted by universal dipolar scattering theory. Due to its large spin multiplicity in the ground state, large effective gauge fields for simulating, e.g., the quantum Hall effect, may be synthesized by exploiting the Dy atomic structure. Moreover, as a non-S-state atom, Dy is predicted to be an ideal candidate for spin-orbit coupling experiments in ultracold gases since the Raman dressing would be largely free from the incoherent scattering problems induced by the additional laser beams.

Keywords: Applied Physics.
Advisor: Lev Benjamin L. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Hollberg Leo (Leo William)
Mabuchi Hideo advisor. Thesis advisor
Quantum networking with quantum dot spins and telecom photons [electronic resource]

An outstanding challenge in quantum information processing is the harnessing of entanglement on a large scale and across long distances. Semiconductor quantum dot spins are promising building blocks for large-scale quantum information processors because of their short gate times and scalability using fabrication technology. Telecom photons carry information for the long-distance telecommunications because of their low propagation loss in silica optical fibers. For extensive quantum information processing, however, quantum dot spins and telecom photons need to be synergized with a set of quantum networking operations. We have demonstrated the following set of quantum networking operations: wavelength translation, quantum erasure, encoding, and standardization. First, single photons from quantum dots are wavelength translated from 910 nm to the telecom wavelength band while preserving photon statistics and coherence. Second, the energy difference between spin branches, potentially leaking which-path information to the environment, is quantum erased to verify quantum-dot spin-photon entanglement. Third, the entanglement is encoded into a time-bin basis, such that the spin-photon correlation can persist over 2 km of propagation distance in optical fibers. Fourth, 900- and 910-nm single photons from disparate, remote quantum emitters are standardized to show two-photon interference in the telecom wavelengths. The combination of these four operations could entangle solid-state quantum information processors across tens of kilometers.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Yamamoto Yoshihisa primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fejer Martin M. (Martin Michael) advisor. Thesis advisor
Vuckovic Jelena advisor. Thesis advisor
Que(r)er [electronic resource] : aesthetic politics of race, space, and affect

In Que(r)er: Aesthetic Politics of Race, Space, and Affect, I identify a corpus of cultural productions by queer Latin@ writers and artists who, I contend, are using an array of expressive practices to conceptualize an aesthetic politic that I call que(r)er. Drawing from affect theory, I posit that que(r)er functions in one sense as a theoretical hermeneutic for analyzing contemporary queer Latin@ cultural production and in another sense as an emergent cultural movement that interrogates a set of systematic relations between race, spatiotemporal politics, and affective experience. Specifically, I suggest that que(r)er encodes the search for queer Latin@ history within political upheavals about race and space, but not without complicating these conflicts as dramas about the sensorial experience of spatiality. That sensorial experience, I assert, is felt as querer, the Spanish verb, which evokes multiple affective resonances. I chiefly argue that queer Latin@ cultural producers are formulating que(r)er as an aesthetic politic that centers enigmatic feelings as theoretical and historical sites for documenting ways of unknowing. In other words, I speculate that we are witnessing an emergent queer Latin@ affective identity rooted in our collective experiences in which we try to answer for ourselves what queer Latin@ history is and feels like. Classic texts in affect theory, however, often posit that affect exists outside the social. Such arguments present problems for integrating affect with research on race, gender, and sexuality. Que(r)er reasserts affect theory's place in examining the social by analyzing aesthetics as abstractions of social relations in three sets of cultural texts: (1) Horacio N. Roque Rámirez's short story "El Sereno, " (2) Club Chico's nightclub flyers, and (3) Laura Aguilar's diaries. Ultimately, this project thinks through affect as a means for recovering queer Latin@ community histories.

Advisor: Sohn Stephen Hong primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Yarbro-Bejarano Yvonne
Moya Paula M. L. advisor. Thesis advisor
Race, parenting, disability and special education [electronic resource] : three papers

This dissertation features three papers examining race, parenting, and special education. The first paper, a version of which is published in The Modern American, is an essay that challenges the parental participation mandate in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ("IDEA"). The second paper is an analysis of the Procedural Safeguards Notice, a document that explains to parents their rights under IDEA. The third paper reports on similarities and differences between the socialization processes of black middle class parents and white middle class parents of children with disabilities. All three provide insights into the legal and sociological processes involved in parenting Black children and children with disabilities.

Keywords: Sociology.
Advisor: Carter Prudence L.
Correll Shelley Joyce primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fields Corey advisor. Thesis advisor
Spaulding Norman W.
Randomized algorithms for large-scale strongly over-determined linear regression problems [electronic resource]

In the era of big data, distributed systems built on top of clusters of commodity hardware provide cheap and reliable storage and scalable data processing. With cheap storage, instead of storing only currently relevant data, most people choose to store data as much as possible, expecting that its value can be extracted later. In this way, exabytes (10^18) of data are being created on a daily basis. However, extracting value from big data requires scalable implementation of advanced analytical algorithms beyond simple data processing, e.g., regression analysis and optimization. Many traditional methods are designed to minimize floating-point operations, which is the dominant cost of in-memory computation on a single machine. In a distributed environment, load balancing and communication including disk and network I/O can easily dominate computation. These factors greatly increase the complexity and challenge the way of thinking in the design of distributed algorithms. Randomized methods for big data analysis have received a great deal of attention in recent years because they are generally faster and simpler to implement than traditional methods, it is easier to distribute the work, and they sometimes have theoretically provable performance. In this work, we are most interested in random projection and random sampling algorithms for l_2 regression and its robust alternative, l_1 regression, with strongly rectangular data. Random projection and random sampling are used to create preconditioned systems that are easier to solve or sub-sampled problems that provide relative-error approximations. Our main result shows that in near input-sparsity time and only a few passes through the data we can obtain a good approximate solution, with high probability. Our theory holds for general p in [1, 2], and thus we formulate our results in l_p.

Advisor: Saunders Michael
Gerritsen Margot (Margot G.) advisor. Thesis advisor
Mahoney Michael advisor. Thesis advisor
Rapid breast MRI with low distortion [electronic resource]

Spiral imaging has the potential to improve the temporal resolution of dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI. Malignant lesions are highly vascularized and appear bright on contrast-enhanced images. Echo-planar imaging facilitates the rapid acquisition of diffusion-weighted images, which are useful for identifying malignant lesions based on their high cellular density. High-resolution images are desired to facilitate morphological assessment of lesions. However, breast imaging suffers from susceptibility-induced magnetic field inhomogeneity. Rapid imaging techniques typically use k-space trajectories that vary in two dimensions. In the presence of inhomogeneity, such trajectories suffer from blurring, which reduces the effective image resolution and can obscure useful morphological features, such as spiculations. This thesis presents techniques for rapid breast MRI with low distortion. A multi-frequency reconstruction reduces blurring in spiral images by reconstructing each voxel at the optimal resonance frequency. The double-echo steady-state sequence is modified to facilitate diffusion-weighted imaging using a Cartesian trajectory, which is less sensitive to field inhomogeneities than echo planar imaging. These techniques improve the image quality while providing diagnostically useful contrast in clinically feasible scan times.

Keywords: Electrical Engineering.
Advisor: Hargreaves Brian Andrew primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Daniel Bruce (Bruce Lewis) advisor. Thesis advisor
Nishimura Dwight George advisor. Thesis advisor
Rapidly evaluating damage using high density networks in noisy urban environments [electronic resource]

Rapidly determining the extent of damage as soon as possible after a major earthquake is of utmost importance to saving lives and downtime costs. Earthquake Early Warning (EEW) systems are being developed using traditional seismometers, but with costs of millions of dollars, they are cost prohibitive for many countries. By incorporating low-cost micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) sensors, it is possible to create a working seismic network that has the potential for EEW and creating maps of estimated shaking for a fraction of the cost of a traditional network. The Quake-Catcher Network (QCN) has roughly 2000 MEMS sensors around the world, with particularly dense arrays in New Zealand, Chile, and the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas. When testing the possibility of using QCN as an EEW system, it was clear that traditional rapid magnitude estimation techniques, like those used in other EEW systems, would not work with the QCN dataset due to their lower quality data. In this thesis, I explore the use of these new devices in combination with new and old seismic methods. Following a major earthquake, a potentially damaged building must be inspected before it is reoccupied. With tall buildings, however, it may be difficult to determine the extent of the structural damage. By utilizing urban networks located in buildings, I show that it is possible to use ambient vibrations of the building to obtain a building response in less than a day, and using a single station alone.

Keywords: Geophysics.
Advisor: Lawrence Jesse primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Beroza Gregory C. (Gregory Christian) advisor. Thesis advisor
Segall Paul
Real-time human pose tracking from range data [electronic resource]

Real-time human pose tracking enables a variety of applications, including intuitive human-machine interaction, smart surveillance, character animation, virtual reality, gaming, and physical therapy. Traditional approaches have required multiple cameras and special suits with markers, rendering these techniques impractical for most consumer applications. Consequently, recent research has focused on marker-less human pose estimation using only a single camera. We approach this problem with a single consumer-grade range camera, which is an active sensor that measures distance at each pixel. While direct distance measurements greatly assist the reconstruction problem, these cameras are low resolution and noisy compared to traditional color cameras, and self-occlusion causes ambiguities when attempting to reconstruct pose from a single view. This thesis presents a new real-time human pose tracking algorithm based on a generative model of the range camera measurement process. Bayes' theorem is applied to find the maximum a-posteriori estimate of the pose given the measured range image and priors on human shape. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is difficult to solve, often containing many plateaus and multiple local maxima. We address these difficulties with an algorithm comprised of an outer loop that proposes new poses based on a prior on motion and part detections from the observed image, and an inner loop that refines the pose to better match the observations. The latter refinement itself decomposes into two alternating phases; the first establishes correspondences between observations and the surface of the human model, while the second updates the pose given the correspondences via a constrained continuous optimization. For quantitative evaluation, a large dataset was collected using two types of range cameras and a traditional marker-based motion capture system. The presented algorithm is able to accurately track complicated full-body movements involving significant self-occlusion and fast motions on humans of different sizes and shapes without any explicit initialization. The algorithm runs at more than 30 frames per second on a consumer computer using about half of one processor core.

Advisor: Koller Daphne primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Ng Andrew Hock-soon
Thrun Sebastian
Reconciling laboratory studies and field-scale flow inferences of turbidity currents using numerical modeling [electronic resource]

This thesis examines turbidity current dynamics, and how inferences of flow processes at the laboratory-scale might affect our understanding of turbidity current dynamics at the field-scale, using numerical modeling. Turbidity currents flow due to the excess density provided by suspended sediments. Measurements of turbidity currents in natural systems have proven difficult due to the destructive nature of the flows. As a result, researchers have primarily investigated turbidity current dynamics using physical models at the laboratory-scale, and numerical models at the field-scale to understand the processes that control the excess density of the flows. Given the difficulties inherent in scaling the turbulent behavior of these flows in physical models, my thesis focuses on the empirical relationships that describe how sediment and clear-water entrainment rates relate to flow turbulence. Additionally, I expand the widely-used four-equation model for turbidity currents to account for previously neglected processes that exchange mass and momentum between the flow and its surroundings, allowing for a more complete description of turbidity current dynamics. To examine the processes that exert primary influences on the excess density, I began by quantifying the uncertainties within the empirical relationships that describe sediment and clear-water entrainment. The range of statistically sampled relationships, particularly the clear-water entrainment relationships, obscured turbidity current evolution beyond 200-500 m, suggesting that consideration of a wide range of entrainment parameters might be necessary to accurately predict the range of plausible field-scale flow dynamics. I then simulated flows through a series of well-studied natural systems and found that all modeled turbidity currents reached physically unrealistic flow heights (10-200x the channel depth) when laboratory-derived clear-water entrainment rules were used. This suggests that the net-clear-water entrainment rate is too high, either due to the neglect of alternate processes that remove mass and momentum from the flow, or due to improper parameterization of the clear-water entrainment relationship at the field-scale. I completed this thesis by expanding the numerical model to account for flow stripping and overspill processes that remove fluid and sediment mass from the flow and help regulate flow height and velocity. Simulated flows not only maintained more realistic flow conditions, but reached a dynamic equilibrium. This dynamic equilibrium, particularly Richardson sub-critical equilibrium, might help elucidate the long runout distances of turbidity currents on low slopes inferred from extensive natural systems.

Keywords: Geological and Environmental Sciences.
Advisor: Hilley George E. primary advisor. Thesis advisor
Fildani Andrea
Fringer Oliver B. (Oliver Bartlett) advisor. Thesis advisor
Graham S. A. (Stephan Alan)
Lowe Donald R.