VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
Exploring interactions between anions and kinetically stable lanthanide complexes in aqueous solution

This work utilises the interactions between lanthanide complexes and anions in solution to explore the nature of coordination chemistry in the f-elements, and to define fundamental behaviour in paramagnetic complexes, as well as investigating the factors responsible for ensuring high lanthanide luminescence quantum yields.
Chapter one describes characteristic lanthanide properties with a focus on luminescence and the current understanding of lanthanide complexes. Illustrating the response of luminescent lanthanide complexes to a range of analytes in aqueous solution.
Chapter two explores the factors affecting luminescence quantum yield in arylacylDO3A complexes as well studying the pH behaviour of these species, showing that the whole energy transfer cascade involved in sensitisation of lanthanide luminescence must be considered when optimising the properties of lanthanide complexes.
Chapter three describes the effect of fluoride binding in lanthanide tetra-amide complexes appended with fluorinated benzyl groups on the lanthanide crystal field, demonstrating that the effect of a strong axial donor on the overall ligand field can determine the nature of the magnetic anisotropy at the lanthanide centre. This in turn determines both the optical spectra and the NMR spectra of the complexes. The results obtained illustrate that the whole structure of the complex (and not just the donor set) need to be considered when defining the behaviour of the lanthanide complex.
Chapter four investigates the interaction between fluoride and lanthanide complexes of the Lehn cryptand. In this case, the relatively symmetric donor set associated with the cryptand, combined with exchange between isomers, gives rise to small observed anisotropies in the absence of fluoride that are dramatically enhanced by fluoride binding. A range of fluoride responsive behaviour has been identified.
Chapter five describes the synthesis and study of a group of halogenated phenacylDO3A lanthanide complexes. It is shown how such complexes respond to changes in cyanide concentration but are essentially inert towards fluoride as a consequence of the reduced residual charge on the lanthanide centre. The interaction with cyanide is assigned to the formation of a cyanohydrin which is assisted by the proximate lanthanide ion, which acts as a Lewis acid.
Chapter six draws together the work described in earlier chapters.
Chapter seven provides experimental procedures along with characterisation data for the compounds studied.

Advisor: Faulkner, S
Behold your mother: the Virgin Mary in English monasticism, c. 1050-c. 1200

This thesis examines the place of the Virgin Mary in the intellectual culture of Benedictine and Cistercian monasticism in medieval England, between c. 1050 and c. 1200. Drawing high profile thinkers, including Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), into dialogue with lesser known figures, it reveals the richness of monastic contributions to Marian doctrine and devotion, in many cases for the first time. The shape of the analysis is provided by five key 'moments' from Mary’s life, unfolded consecutively across six chapters. Chapters 1 and 2, on Mary's conception, reveal a confident and pioneering monastic culture which drove the evolution of an obscure Anglo-Saxon feast into a theological doctrine, despite fierce opposition at home and abroad. Chapter 3 explains how Mary's virginity was adopted as a blueprint for the monastic life by Ælred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) and Baldwin of Forde (d. 1190), both of whom were inspired by its fruitfulness in the Incarnation of Christ. Chapter 4 brings to light the contributions made to exegesis of the Song of Songs as a poem about Mary’s humility by the mysterious Honorius Augustodunensis (d. 1140) and John of Forde (d. 1214). Chapter 5, on the divine maternity, demonstrates how English monastic theologians gave new life to understanding of Mary as Theotokos ('God-bearer') by drawing out its significance for their own spiritual maternity as leaders of religious communities. Chapter 6 shows how Mary was believed to have entered into the pain of the Crucifixion through her own spiritual martyrdom, and how monks sought to share the experience with her by a communion of charity. These and other insights offer a compelling glimpse into the culture of English monasticism between the demise of the Anglo-Saxons and the advent of the friars. Inspired by a desire to understand and ultimately to know Mary, Benedictine and Cistercian monks produced theological and spiritual works which were imaginative, often intimate and occasionally pioneering. Most of all, they were profoundly pastoral, composed in the belief that Mary could inspire and support those who had embarked upon the monastic via perfectionis.

Keywords: Virgin Mary
Anglo-Norman England
Medieval Monasticism
Advisor: Foot, S
Innovation hubs in Africa: assemblers of technology entrepreneurs

Innovation hub organizations—or 'hubs'—have become a prevalent form of support for technology entrepreneurship in Africa. About 170 African hubs have been established, most since 2010. Practitioners have argued either that hubs are transformative network infra-structures for Africa's fledgling digital economy or that they are ineffective business incubators. This thesis steps back from this debate about whether hubs work. Instead, it asks how African hubs work, specifically how they shape relationships of technology entrepreneurs. Literature on intermediation and incubation is reviewed to establish a theoretical framework. The thesis then tests and extends the framework based on an extensive, grounded empirical inquiry. In-depth case study data (including 119 interviews with 133 participants) on six hubs were collected during field studies in Kigali, Harare, and Accra from September-December 2014. The thesis finds that the analyzed hub organizations were defined by nested, fluidly bounded entrepreneurial communities. Communities varied by their level of activation: mem-bers of active communities had concern for each other and recognized communities as social entities, while inactive community members only shared a loose purpose. The six hubs followed two distinct organizational patterns: the technology hub (depending on active core communities) and the entrepreneurship hub (relying on active peripheral communities). Based on these results, the thesis theorizes hubs as assemblers of technology entrepreneurs: hubs assemble previously distant and different actors into entrepreneurial communities. Assembly is unique to hubs: it is related to but different from incubation and most forms of intermediation. Assembly theory addresses important meso-level analytical gaps in prior research on the coordination and organization of entrepreneurship. The thesis underscores limitations in African technology entrepreneurship environments, advising hub practitioners to acknowledge that 'only what is there can be assembled.' Ultimately, it highlights that hubs have been critically misunderstood, and clarifies what hubs can and cannot do for technology entrepreneurs

Keywords: organization of entrepreneurship
assembly
entrepreneurial communities
Africa
innovation hubs
Advisor: Graham, M
Ventresca, M
Molecular determinants of chromatin accessibility at CpG islands in mouse embryonic stem cells

In eukaryotic cells, transcription factors and polymerases must access DNA in the context of nucleosomes and chromatin. The accessibility of DNA sequences to such trans-acting factors is an important feature of gene regulatory elements, including promoters. In vertebrates, the majority of gene promoters coincide with CpG islands (CGIs), which remain free from DNA methylation and exhibit elevated CpG densities. This hypomethylated and CpG-rich state at CGI promoters is associated not only with transcriptional activity, but also with high levels of chromatin accessibility. However, the causes and consequences of such chromatin accessibility remain unclear. To address this, I have profiled chromatin accessibility in mouse embryonic stem cells (ESCs). In addition to confirming that CGI accessibility is independent of transcriptional activity, I was able to demonstrate that the loss of DNA methylation in ESCs resulted in increased chromatin accessibility at a subset of CpG-rich repetitive elements, suggesting that non-methylated CpG-rich sequences may, at least partially, facilitate open chromatin states. This was supported by preliminary work targeting bacterial CpG-rich sequences into the mouse genome, where they were sufficient to establish novel regions of chromatin accessibility. To examine potential mechanisms by which hypomethylated DNA could serve to promote chromatin accessibility, I profiled chromatin accessibility in mouse ESCs lacking various chromatin-modifying proteins which are normally enriched at CGIs, with the histone demethylases KDM2A/B linked to maintaining open chromatin at CGIs. As an alternative approach to understanding the causes of chromatin accessibility in mouse ESCs, I examined the mechanism by which the pioneer transcription factor OCT4 is able to access previously inaccessible chromatin, and reveal that it requires the chromatin remodeller BRG1 to remodel chromatin and facilitate transcription factor binding at distal regulatory elements. Ultimately, this work provides an insight into some of the molecular determinants of chromatin accessibility in mouse ESCs, although many of the consequences of such chromatin states remain unclear.

Keywords: genomics
chromatin accessibility
transcription
epigenetics
Advisor: Klose, R
North African intellectual migration to Paris from 1914 to 1962: a local history of cultural encounters and a global history of ideas

From 1914, it was increasingly common for North Africa's intellectual and political elite to study in France. While the mobility of North African labourers has been the subject of considerable analysis over the past six decades, the international mobility of the intellectual elite for intellectual purposes has been comparably neglected.
Drawing from French archive material, this study begins by setting out what intellectual migration is in relation to other migratory patterns and how to study it. It positions this topic within the North African context and situates it within the lives of migrants who, for the most part, became authors, artists, thinkers and politicians of note. It also investigates Paris’ agency as a stage for cultural encounters.
It then moves on to interpreting the significance of this historical phenomenon on a migrant’s life trajectory, their future literary or cultural production, on the ensuing decolonisation movement, on nation building, on East-West relations and on the spiritual-material dialectic. Through the material produced by migrants themselves, we can obtain insight into the significance of this 'rite of passage' on the individual, while situating it within wider structures of intellectual and political colonialism, international political relations and on narratives of cultural encounters. By observing how global contacts were established in a particular locality, this study demonstrates how global discourse developed through a series of local encounters.
Though an exercise in global history, the thesis draw on disciplines from migration studies, the sociology of literature and comparative literature, to political theory, urban theory and religious thought.
It finds that intellectual migration to Paris was important for local North African artistic, literary and political movements, but not for the reasons previously accredited. It will also show that 1914 to 1962 was a time when this migratory process was particularly significant on the global development of ideas.

Advisor: Robinson, F
Easing information extraction on the web through automated rules discovery

The advent of the era of big data on the Web has made automatic web information extraction an essential tool in data acquisition processes. Unfortunately, automated solutions are in most cases more error prone than those created by humans, resulting in dirty and erroneous data. Automatic repair and cleaning of the extracted data is thus a necessary complement to information extraction on the Web.
This thesis investigates the problem of inducing cleaning rules on web extracted data in order to (i) repair and align the data w.r.t. an original target schema, (ii) produce repairs that are as generic as possible such that different instances can benefit from them. The problem is addressed from three different angles: replace cross-site redundancy with an ensemble of entity recognisers; produce general repairs that can be encoded in the extraction process; and exploit entity-wide relations to infer common knowledge on extracted data.
First, we present ROSeAnn, an unsupervised approach to integrate semantic annotators and produce a unied and consistent annotation layer on top of them. Both the diversity in vocabulary and widely varying accuracy justify the need for middleware that reconciles different annotator opinions. Considering annotators as "black-boxes" that do not require per-domain supervision allows us to recognise semantically related content in web extracted data in a scalable way.
Second, we show in WADaR how annotators can be used to discover rules to repair web extracted data. We study the problem of computing joint repairs for web data extraction programs and their extracted data, providing an approximate solution that requires no per-source supervision and proves effective across a wide variety of domains and sources. The proposed solution is effective not only in repairing the extracted data, but also in encoding such repairs in the original extraction process.
Third, we investigate how relationships among entities can be exploited to discover inconsistencies and additional information. We present RuDiK, a disk-based scalable solution to discover first-order logic rules over RDF knowledge bases built from web sources. We present an approach that does not limit its search space to rules that rely on "positive" relationships between entities, as in the case with traditional mining of constraints. On the contrary, it extends the search space to also discover negative rules, i.e., patterns that lead to contradictions in the data.

Keywords: List Segmentation
Semantic Annotations
Web Data Extraction
Data Repair
Knoweldge Base
Data Cleaning
Named Entity Recognition
Advisor: Gottlob, G
Simultaneous reconstruction of spatial frequency fields and field sample locations

Classically, spatial smoothing methods such as kriging estimate smooth interpolating fields for features measured at well-located points. In this thesis, we make a simultaneous reconstruction of interpolating spatial fields and measurement locations.
We give models, and sample-based Bayesian inference, for estimating locations of dialect samples on a map of England. The method exploits dialect-based spellings to locate these samples.
The data are feature vectors extracted from written dialect samples. Just a fraction of the feature vectors ('anchors') have an associated spatial location. When coupled to a prior for the smoothly varying feature field, and the anchor texts, the unlocated feature vectors are jointly informative of their own location and the feature fields.
The dataset is large, but sparse, since a given word has a large number of variant spellings which may appear in just a few documents. We report an analysis including Bayesian model fitting and validation on a large and representative subset of the data.
The thesis has two main aims - to provide statistical tools for the linguists who collected the data, and to meet the computational and inferential challenge of simultaneously locating large numbers of feature vectors. The results presented in this thesis show that we have largely succeeded in meeting these challenges.

Advisor: Nicholls, G
On the soliton resolution conjecture for wave maps

Broadly speaking, the research presented in this thesis is centered around the study of the Soliton Resolution Conjecture (SRC) for the wave maps equation in dimension 2+1, which is rooted in a belief held by the physics community since the 1970's predicting that for a large class of non-linear dispersive/hyperbolic evolution equations in mathematical physics (of which wave maps are an example), the solution should decompose into a decoupled sum of rescaled solitons plus a regular term, up to an error of asymptotically vanishing energy, as one evolves towards its maximal time of existence.
To be more precise, we consider large energy wave maps as in the resolution of the threshold conjecture by Sterbenz and Tataru, but more specifically into the unit round sphere &Sopf;n-1 ⊂ &Ropf;n with n ≥ 2 (although parts of our argument work for general targets). We prove that, on a suitably chosen sequence of time slices approaching maximal existence, there is a decomposition of the map, up to an error with asymptotically vanishing energy, into a decoupled sum of rescaled solitons concentrating in the interior of the light cone and a term having asymptotically vanishing energy dispersion norm. For the latter, we further describe it as a linear gauge co-variant wave, concentrating on the null boundary and converging to a constant locally in the interior of the cone, in the energy space.
Similar and stronger results have been recently obtained in the equivariant setting by several authors, where better control on the dispersive term concentrating on the null boundary of the cone is provided and in some cases the asymptotic decomposition is shown to hold for all time. Here however, we do not impose any symmetry condition on the map itself and our strategy follows the one from bubbling analysis of harmonic maps into spheres in the supercritical regime due to Lin and Rivière, which we make work here in the hyperbolic context of. A large part of the work presented in this thesis has appeared in author's.

Advisor: Ritter, A
Joyce, D
Ax-Schanuel type inequalities in differentially closed fields

In this thesis we study Ax-Schanuel type inequalities for abstract differential equations. A motivating example is the exponential differential equation. The Ax-Schanuel theorem states positivity of a predimension defined on its solutions. The notion of a predimension was introduced by Hrushovski in his work from the 1990s where he uses an amalgamation-with-predimension technique to refute Zilber's Trichotomy Conjecture. In the differential setting one can carry out a similar construction with the predimension given by Ax-Schanuel. In this way one constructs a limit structure whose theory turns out to be precisely the first-order theory of the exponential differential equation (this analysis is due to Kirby (for semiabelian varieties) and Crampin, and it is based on Zilber's work on pseudo-exponentiation). One says in this case that the inequality is adequate.
Thus, by an Ax-Schanuel type inequality we mean a predimension inequality for a differential equation. Our main question is to understand for which differential equations one can find an adequate predimension inequality. We show that this can be done for linear differential equations with constant coefficients by generalising the Ax-Schanuel theorem.
Further, the question turns out to be closely related to the problem of recovering the differential structure in reducts of differentially closed fields where we keep the field structure (which is quite an interesting problem in its own right). So we explore that question and establish some criteria for recovering the derivation of the field. We also show (under some assumptions) that when the derivation is definable in a reduct then the latter cannot satisfy a non-trivial adequate predimension inequality.
Another example of a predimension inequality is the analogue of Ax-Schanuel for the differential equation of the modular j-function due to Pila and Tsimerman. We carry out a Hrushovski construction with that predimension and give an axiomatisation of the first-order theory of the strong Fraïssé limit. It will be the theory of the differential equation of j under the assumption of adequacy of the predimension. We also show that if a similar predimension inequality (not necessarily adequate) is known for a differential equation then the fibres of the latter have interesting model theoretic properties such as strong minimality and geometric triviality. This, in particular, gives a new proof for a theorem of Freitag and Scanlon stating that the differential equation of j defines a trivial strongly minimal set.

Keywords: Ax-Schanuel theorem
Hrushovski construction
Abstract differential equation
Model theoretic algebra
Advisor: Zilber, B
Pila, J
Comparative planetary circulation regimes in simple general circulation models

This thesis presents the studies of terrestrial planetary atmospheric circula- tion regimes using simplified GCMs with different levels of complexity. Two different versions of the simplified GCM PUMA (Portable University Model for the Atmosphere) are used — PUMA-S with Newtonian cooling scheme and PUMA-G with a semi-grey two-band radiative transfer scheme and dry convective adjustment. A series of controlled experiments are conducted by varying planetary rotation rate and imposed equator-to-pole temperature difference using PUMAS-S, and by varying rotation rate, planetary obliquity, and the ratio of optical depth in long-wave (thermal radiation) band to that in short-wave (stellar radiation) band using PUMA-G. These defining parameters are further combined with each other into dimensionless forms to establish parameter spaces, in which the occurences of different circulation regimes are mapped and classified. For the PUMA-S experiments, very coherent trends when varying planetary rotation rate (thermal Rossby number) is found. It is demonstrated that the GRW mechanism is mainly responsible for the equatorial super-rotation observed in our experiments. Regular baroclinic waves are obtained at intermediate values of thermal Rossby number and depend strongly on the strength of radiative and frictional damping. Global atmospheric energetics in terms of Lorenz energy cycle and meridional heat transport efficiency also exhibits strong dependence on planetary rotation rate from our PUMA-S experiments. Theories of geostrophic turbulence (especially the recently introduced zonostrophic turbulence) and jet formation are examined using the PUMA-S experiments. For the PUMA-G experiments, Similar trends are observed with respect to varying planetary rotation rate, while new regimes like strongly subrotating atmospheres are found when varying obliquity in PUMA- G. Tidally-locked planets are also studied by modifying the incoming stellar irradiation in PUMA-G. It is found that atmospheric optical depth in the longwave band plays an important role in setting the heat transport efficiency from day-side to night-side. These results provide significant insights into the terrestrial planetary atmospheric circulation dynamics and the inference of circulation regimes of extrasolar planets. Future studies will focus on the effect of seasonal/diurnal cycle, the parametrisation of eddy heat transport efficiency, as well as the modification of the two-band semi-grey radiative transfer scheme to incorporate pressure broadening effects.

Keywords: geophysical fluid dynamics
planetary science
atmospheric circulation
Advisor: Read, P