ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION ‘what’ did not move: Sluicing in Minimalist Grammars by Deborah Jia Ming Wong Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Timothy Hunter, Chair Sluicing is a type of ellipsis where only a wh-phrase, the remnant, is pronounced while ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Exploiting Program Structure for Scaling Probabilistic Programming by Steven J. Holtzen Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Todd Millstein, Co-Chair Professor Guy Van den Broeck, Co-Chair This dissertation examines their simultaneity by drawing together several actors involved in these processes: architects, engineers, counterinsurgency experts, resistance fighters, church advocacy groups, and Indigenous peoples, to show how responses and resistance against developmentalism created alternative conceptions of architecture and landscape
UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations
membership demographics. A hope offering Black people a racial paradise 2. Providing favorable coverage and representation among the Black community.
The reorganization of pastoral life in the twentieth century was inextricably bound to the rise of industrial agriculture and the forms of resource extraction that accompanied it. The places that witnessed the most sweeping ecological changes, from labor-intensive plantation agriculture to industrial monocropping and extractive industries, were also dissertation university of california los angeles places that experienced a form of fast-paced developmentalism in the latter half of the century, dissertation university of california los angeles.
This dissertation follows how architecture mediated the perception of these rural ecological changes in the Philippine archipelago and wider Southeast Asia. In its materiality—concrete, stone, earth, and plant materials—architecture provided form for the rise of capitalism in rural tropical places in the shape of hydroelectric dams, agribusinesses, and their resulting resettlement villages. Cold War environmental change and Third World land struggles that developmentalism provoked are often presented as separate narratives.
This dissertation examines their simultaneity by drawing together several actors involved in these processes: architects, engineers, counterinsurgency experts, resistance fighters, church advocacy groups, and Indigenous peoples, to show how responses and resistance against developmentalism created alternative conceptions of architecture and landscape.
I follow this process with nipa palm, a ubiquitous species in island Southeast Asia, used as a construction material woven into roof shingles and wall panels attached to a bamboo framework. As a tectonic material, celebrated for its lightweight, rhizomatic characteristics, reading nipa palm with and beyond its material use-value illustrates its political economy as an integral aspect of displacement, where the implicit movement and mobility of lightweight dwellings was crucial to developmentalism and the counterinsurgency operations that accompanied it.
Lentivirus is a type of retrovirus that can integrate viral genetic information into the DNA of the host cell.
Lentivirus has gone through generations of engineering to become a safe robust gene delivery vehicle for gene and cell therapies, known as the lentiviral dissertation university of california los angeles LVs.
LVs demonstrate advantages over other gene delivery methods including effective infections of both dividing and non-dividing cells, long-term stable expression of the transgene, and relatively safe integration profile, dissertation university of california los angeles. Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplant HSCT in combination with gene therapy has successfully treated multiple genetic blood diseases, such as sickle cell disease and severe combined immunodeficiency, in clinical trials.
The genetically modified HSCs with the therapeutic gene can self-renew and differentiate into different blood cells, therefore providing life-long therapeutic benefits for patients. The success of lentiviral gene therapy relies on several intrinsic properties of the LVs. The first property is the viral titer, the concentration of transduction units TU per milliliter mL.
We and others have observed that titer decreases with increasing vector length, making it difficult to produce LVs with high titers for diseases that require large transgenes. Some LVs have limited gene transfer capacity that the copies of the integrated genome do not further increase with additional TU and cannot achieve the minimum copy number required for therapeutic benefits.
Although the vector length is a well-known factor that affects titer and infectivity, how the vector genome limits the lentiviral lifecycle remains elusive. These truncated vRNAs failed to be reverse transcribed and subsequently cannot be integrated into the host cell genome. Our findings uncovered two rate-limiting steps, vRNA truncation and defective virion formation, in the lentiviral lifecycle leading to low titer and infectivity.
We then developed strategies to overcome these two roadblocks. In Chapter 3, we focused on overcoming cellular restriction factors RF in the packaging cells by conducting a targeted CRISPR Cas9 screen to knock out potential RFs. We created a new packaging cell line CRISPRed HEKT to Disrupt Antiviral Responses CHEDAR by knocking out OAS1, LDLR, and PKR. Dissertation university of california los angeles Chapter 4, we explored several methods to improve vRNA production, such as shortening the vector length, packaging with Tat, and overexpressing transcription elongation factors.
The strategies described in Chapters 3 and 4 worked additively to increase titer and infectivity of different LVs, especially those with low titer or reverse-oriented transgene cassettes. In summary, the work described in this thesis elucidates the rate-limiting steps in lentiviral production and demonstrates multiple strategies to increase titer and infectivity of LVs.
We hope this work help to advance the field of gene and cell therapy by improving the production technology and reducing the cost to make the therapy more effective and accessible for patients.
The transfer of facial expressions from people to 3D face models is a classic computer graphics problem. In this paper, we present a novel, learning-based approach to transferring facial expressions and head movements from images and videos to a biomechanical model of the face-head-neck musculoskeletal complex. Specifically, leveraging the Facial Action Coding System FACS as an intermediate representation of the expression space, we train a deep neural network to take in FACS Action Units AUs and output suitable facial muscle and jaw activations for the biomechanical model.
Through biomechanical simulation, the activations deform the face, thereby transferring the expression to the model. Our approach has advantages over previous approaches. First, the facial expressions are anatomically consistent as our biomechanical model emulates the relevant anatomy of the head, neck, and face.
Second, by training the neural network using data generated from the biomechanical model itself, dissertation university of california los angeles, we eliminate the manual effort of data collection for expression transfer. The success of our approach is demonstrated through experiments involving the transfer of a range of expressive facial images and videos onto our biomechanical face-head-neck model.
My first chapter explores the effect of income on health in the context of Social Security and Medicare. Income is a powerful predictor of health among the elderly, but existing research has struggled to identify a causal link, dissertation university of california los angeles. I estimate the causal effect of Social Security income on health care utilization and health outcomes among elderly men.
Using Medicare administrative records and a regression discontinuity design, I exploit several changes in the Social Security benefit formula that vary abruptly by date of birth. This feature has been overlooked by prior research and causes workers born one day apart to receive positive and negative income shocks.
To provide evidence the decline in spending is driven by improvements in health, I show income leads to reductions in diagnoses for chronic conditions and mortality. My results suggest cuts to Social Security benefits may have unintended social and fiscal costs. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of examining health outcomes when evaluating the dissertation university of california los angeles and benefits of social insurance programs, dissertation university of california los angeles.
My second chapter examines the Qualified Medicare Beneficiary QMB programa means-tested benefit that exempts low-income Medicare beneficiaries from their cost-sharing obligations. Patients enrolled in the QMB program face zero prices for Medicare services, receive monthly premium exemptions, and subsidized Part D prescription drug coverage, dissertation university of california los angeles. However, because providers face administrative burdens and lower reimbursement rates, they may limit access dissertation university of california los angeles QMB patients.
Given these offsetting features, it is unclear whether patients benefit from enrolling in the program. To examine the effect of QMB enrollment on patient access and outcomes, I study an expansion of QMB eligibility that occurred in Connecticut in By doubling the income limit and removing the asset test, the state more than doubled enrollment.
Using a difference-in-difference design and Medicare administrative records, I estimate the effect of QMB enrollment on health care utilization and health outcomes. I find that the program appears to be successful at reducing beneficiary costs without limiting access to care. Overall, my results suggest that within the universe of Medicare, the program transfers a substantial share of producer surplus to consumers.
My third chapter studies how cuts to Social Security retirement benefits affect Social Security disability dissertation university of california los angeles. Specifically, I exploit a policy change which caused an abrupt decline in the generosity of retirement benefits for workers near certain date of birth cutoffs.
Using various regression discontinuity designs, I do not find evidence that cohorts affected by the policy change have higher rates of benefit receipt. My preferred specification estimates a precise null effect. My confidence interval implies the increase in the full retirement age caused disability enrollment to only change between Relative to existing work, dissertation university of california los angeles paper provides evidence that disability enrollment is less sensitive to policy changes.
I find there are fewer marginal SSDI applicants implying the program's moral hazard effects are more modest than prior work would suggest. Dissertation university of california los angeles understand the uniqueness of our solar system, we must assess the system architectures and demographic features existing in the known planet population, but such a task requires a homogeneous set of candidates. Fortunately, the Kepler spacecraft continuously collected photometry from a single patch of the sky, which in turn produced a well characterized catalog of transiting exoplanets, dissertation university of california los angeles.
However, previous studies assumed multi-planet systems were subject to the same selection effects as their single-planet counterparts. I investigate this assumption, finding that a proper completeness accounting significantly increases the underlying occurrence of multi-planet systems to 5. Using this correction I provide an updated extrapolation of the occurrence of Earth analogs and find that 5.
Additionally, the K2 mission collected photometry from 18 fields along the ecliptic plane, providing a unique opportunity to understand how exoplanet formation may be affected by galactic latitude, stellar metallicity, and stellar age.
For my thesis, I developed a fully automated pipeline able to detect and vet transit signals in K2 photometry, enabling assessment of sample completeness and reliability. This catalog contains planets, with newly identified candidates. Correspondingly, I present the first uniform analysis of small transiting exoplanet occurrence outside of the Kepler field, finding a metallicity dependence in small planet occurrence.
Eventually perturbations from passing stars will trigger large-scale instability, culminating in the disassociation of all outer planets. Extrapolating this result to other systems indicates a temporal dependence on bound planet occurrence in the Galaxy. Dynamic element matching DEM has been widely researched in the domain of digital-to-analog converters.
Different architectures, noise shapes and ever higher order shaping have been devised, dissertation university of california los angeles. However, beyond first order, no schemes guarantee the absence of tones.
Herein presents a band-pass shaping scheme that is provably toneless based on tree structured DEM. This scheme does incur a noise penalty and additional hardware, dissertation university of california los angeles.
However, the former of which can be controlled and the later of dissertation university of california los angeles is only moderate, dissertation university of california los angeles. How do perceptions of racial resilience of African Americans influence the dissertation university of california los angeles and substance of their participation in American politics? To date, there are few accounts of how racial resilience, or an individual resilience matters in politics.
Nor are there accounts of how racial resilience dissertation university of california los angeles political engagement and participation, particularly in costly political acts. This dissertation examines the role of racial resilience among African Americans — a racial group that votes at higher rates compared to non-black minorities, and as a bloc for the Democratic party - and the influence of racial resilience in American politics.
This project presents a novel framework and an original measure of racial resilience to investigate how the varied response to adversity — including an orientation to Black triumph, and an awareness of Black economic subjugation — shape political involvement and engagement among African Americans.
Using surveys, survey experiments, and qualitative data, I create, construct, and validate a novel measure of racial resilience.
I explore the demographic contours associated with higher racial resilience. I find that racial resilience is a salient attribute and is consistently associated with higher cost political engagement among African Americans. The findings of this dissertation also have implications for how Black political behavior is motivated through shared group attributes.
Furthermore, the contributions of this dissertation expand beyond racial and ethnic politics to understand how politics, today, requires extra-ordinary effort and engagement, dissertation university of california los angeles, and resilience to adversity is central to participation.
Deep Neural Networks DNNs have made many breakthroughs in different areas of artificial intelligence. However, recent studies show that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples. A tiny perturbation on an image that is almost invisible to human eyes could mislead a well-trained image classifier towards misclassification.
This raises serious security concerns and trustworthy issues towards the robustness of Deep Neural Networks in solving real world challenges.
Researchers have been working on this problem for a while and it has further led to a vigorous arms race between heuristic defenses that propose ways to defend against existing attacks and newly-devised attacks that are able to penetrate such defenses.
On the other hand, despite the fast development of various kinds of heuristic defenses, their practical robustness is still far from satisfactory, and there are actually little algorithmic improvements in terms of defenses during recent years.
This suggests that there still lacks further understandings toward the fundamentals of adversarial robustness in deep learning, which might prevent us from designing more powerful defenses.
In terms of understanding adversarial robustness, we propose to theoretically study the relationship between model robustness and data distributions, the relationship between model robustness and model architectures, as well as the relationship between model robustness and loss smoothness. The techniques proposed in this dissertation form a line of researches that deepens our understandings towards adversarial robustness and could further guide us in designing better and faster robust training methods.
Marine ecosystems are complex and diverse, with multiple, often simultaneous processes influencing community structure and functioning.
ETD Formatting Requirements Tutorial
, time: 8:47
ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION A Constraint-Based Approach to Crowd Simulation and Layout Synthesis by Tomer Weiss Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Demetri Terzopoulos, Chair Position-based methods have become popular for real-time simulation in computer graphics This dissertation examines their simultaneity by drawing together several actors involved in these processes: architects, engineers, counterinsurgency experts, resistance fighters, church advocacy groups, and Indigenous peoples, to show how responses and resistance against developmentalism created alternative conceptions of architecture and landscape ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Exploiting Program Structure for Scaling Probabilistic Programming by Steven J. Holtzen Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Todd Millstein, Co-Chair Professor Guy Van den Broeck, Co-Chair
No comments:
Post a Comment