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Smaller, Faster, Cheaper: Architectural Designs for Efficient Machine Learning
No full textMajor advancements in the capabilities of computer vision models have been primarily fueled by rapid expansion of datasets, model parameters, and computational budgets, leading to ever-increasing demands on computationalinfrastructure. However, as these models are deployed in increasingly diverse and resource-constrained environments, there is a pressing need for architectures that can deliver high performance while requiring fewer computational resources.
This dissertation focuses on architectural principles through which models can achieve increased performance while reducing their computational demands. We discuss strides towards this goal through three directions. First, we focus on data ingress and egress, investigating how information may be passed into and retrieved from our core neural processing units. This ensures that our models make the most of available data, allowing smaller architectures to become more performant. Second, we investigate modifications to the core neural architecture, applied to restricted attention in vision transformers. This section explores how removing uniform context windows in restricted attention increases the expressivity of the underlying neural architecture. Third, we explore the natural structures of Normalizing Flows and how we can leverage these properties to better distill model knowledge.
These contributions demonstrate that careful design of neural architectures can increase the efficiency of machine learning algorithms, allowing them to become smaller, faster, and cheaper
Relicensing of Oroville Facilities : California Supreme Court Creates Additional Opportunity to Consider Modern Hydrological Findings at the Cost of a Coherent Preemption Doctrine
Full text link14 pagesIn August 2022, the California Supreme Court issued a decision in the case "County of Butte v. Department of Water Resources," in which the majority held that the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is only partially preempted by the Federal Power Act (FPA). The case concerned the California Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) application for a new fifty-year license to operate the “Oroville Facilities.” This Article will (1) summarize the majority opinion of the court case "Friends of the Eel River v. N. Coast R.R. Auth."; (2) present the reasoning of the dissent in "County of Butte"; and (3) critically analyze the arguments forwarded by both
Exploring Palladium Catalyzed Decarbonylative Dehydration of Carboxylic Acids
Full text link58 pagesTransition metal catalysis is an expanding field within the chemical community. Of specific interest is the identification of a renewable synthesis of alkenes for the retirement of fossil fuel consumption. Current procedures, with this end goal in mind, focus on palladium (Pd) for its catalytic properties. The focus of this research is to develop a Pd catalyst for the decarbonylative dehydration of carboxylic acids to form alkenes as precursors for synthetic molecules on an industrial level. Optimization of this catalytic system explores the impact of varying phosphine ligands, steric hindrance of the sacrificial anhydride, amount of base added, reaction temperature, and reaction rates between Pd(0) and Pd(II) sources. The aim is to tune the procedure towards the kinetically favorable terminal alkene
Black Nihilism, Racial Capitalism, and the Tradition of Black Radicalism
No full textThis dissertation offers a philosophical analysis of Black nihilism through the lens of Black existential philosophy, racial capitalism, and the Black Radical Tradition. By Black nihilism, I am referring to the existential condition that leads Black people to conclude that life is meaningless and hopeless, which I broadly term “the absence of meaning.” The absence of meaning has the potential for individual and collective ruination of Black people as seen with the increased rates of Black youth suicides in recent years. The most prominent philosophical literature on Black nihilism focuses primarily on moral values and principles that are meant to make life meaningful and offer moral guidance.
My dissertation argues that Black nihilism is undergirded by the system of racial capitalism that began with transatlantic slave trade. Black nihilism, however, does not represent the totality of the Black experience. There’s a concurrent history that parallels Black nihilism. This history is known as the Black Radical Tradition. The Black Radical tradition began when Black Africans resisted enslavement to retain their humanity, values, cosmologies, and cultural histories. Although the Black Radical Tradition is not a singular entity or tradition, I focus on the current iteration of the Black Radical Tradition which is expressed through the Black Lives Matter movement and modern Black feminism. By framing the problem of Black nihilism in this way, I offer a broader and more inclusive genealogy of nihilism as both a human condition and a philosophical theory.
It might be useful to explain my motivation for developing this project. In the year 2021, I came across a report released by the Congressional Black Caucus that was published in 2019. This report revealed that Black youth suicides, attempted suicides, and suicidal ideation (ages 10-19) are on the rise and have increased faster than youth from other racial and ethnic groups since the 1990s. I was also alarmed by the lack of data, research, and scholarship devoted to this problem. The data and scholarship that currently exist are incomplete, but they highlight how previous scholarships on Black suicides have been ignored. The underlying assumption was that Black people did not kill themselves because Black people are a psychologically unsophisticated race and did not ponder the most fundamental existential questions.Part of my philosophical research is aimed at bringing attention to this understudied area. This is why my dissertation historicizes Black suicides by showing that Black suicide (including ideation, attempts, and planning) have existed since slavery. While no existing data can illuminate the actual number of suicides committed by the enslaved (nor to the prevalence of suicidal ideation, attempts, etc.), I found that slave narratives speak of suicide from the perspective of the enslaved. The wisdom gained from reading these narratives provided me with the philosophical basis for historicizing what can be called “Black nihilism”.
When discussing contemporary Black experience from an existential and philosophical standpoint, it’s conventional for academics and ordinary people to turn to Afropessimist philosophy. Frank Wilderson—the most prominent Afropessimist—asserts that anti-Black racism is foundational to the creation and continual existence of the modern world. Therefore, any form of redemption or liberation of Black people from this anti-Black condition is impossible except for “End of the World” as we know it. The “End of the World” would result in the creation of new categories of identification, new forms of knowledge, and new ways of living in the world. This dissertation offers a different perspective of Black suffering that does not lead to Afropessimistic fatalism or resignation.
This dissertation should be read as contributing to emerging philosophical literature that supplants the association of the word “nihilism” with the European continent. The point is not to dismiss the salience of philosophical literature that is devoted to understanding nihilism in Europe. I only intend to show that nihilism is not exclusively a European philosophical and real-world problem. Overall, this work makes a valuable contribution to the philosophical discipline and giving voice to Black people who may not always have the means or opportunity for bringing attention to their own existential afflictions.2027-08-0
An Investigation into the Influence of Fractal Dimension on Visual Search: Insights in the Context of Search and Rescue
Full text link46 pagesThe field of search and rescue organizes the identification and return of missing and lost people. Visual search is a main part of conducting a successful search and rescue mission. Visual searches for search and rescue take place in natural environments of differing levels of complexity. In order to model the different complexities of natural environments, Fractal Dimension (D) is used. This research uses a visual search task to model performing a visual search for a sign of a missing individual in a natural environment. Shoeprints are the first sign search and rescue personnel are taught to find in natural environments. The visual search experiment uses shoeprints as the sign that is being searched for to simulate a search and rescue environment. The experiment found a significant effect of Fractal Dimension (D) on both reaction time and accuracy (p<0.001)
Girl on Fire, Girl on Display: Femininity and Gender Performance in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games
Full text link76 pagesThis thesis explores young adult dystopia through the first installment of Suzanne Collins’s acclaimed series The Hunger Games (2008). A standout in its genre, The Hunger Games imagines a post-civil war future in which the wealthy, governing Capitol requires each of twelve outlying districts to send two children to participate in the Hunger Games, a tournament-style fight to the death. Coming from the poorest district, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen travels to the Capitol—alongside Peeta, the boy tribute from her district—and is immediately thrust into the limelight, forced to grapple with the commodity driven social order and desirability politics. Collins paints a picture of the gendered expectations society places on young girls and portrays Katniss adeptly navigating the gaze of the camera within the arena. By examining Katniss’s physical appearance, how she performs gender for the omnipresent audience, the contrast of Katniss’s actions with what Peeta can get away with, and Katniss’s relationship to the youngest tribute, Rue, this thesis argues for the literary value of young adult dystopia and its ability to illuminate oppressive societal norms. Ultimately, through her nuanced navigation of traditional gender and power structures, Katniss cultivates her own empowerment and serves as a role model for the young adult audience
Hindsight and Numeric Confidence: Influences on Decision Processes
Full text linkHindsight bias has long been speculated to increase confidence for subsequent decisions and judgments (e.g., Dawson et al., 1993; Hawkins & Hastie, 1990; Roese & Vohs, 2012); however, to our knowledge, there is no empirical evidence for this consequence of hindsight. The goals of the present dissertation are to: 1) provide evidence of the causal relationship between hindsight bias and increases in both prospective and retrospective confidence, 2) study how the amount of hindsight experience can affect changes in confidence, 3) begin to understand the consequences of elevated confidence due to hindsight bias on decision processes, and 4) investigate possible emotional processes underlying how people learn confidence from experiences. To accomplish these goals, we developed a paradigm that would afford some participants hindsight bias during training for a novel math choice task (Pilot Studies). Then participants completed a set of test trials during which they indicated their confidence in their answers.Using an online sample of participants (N = 842 MTurkers; Study 1), we found that participants who experienced hindsight trials during training reported greater prospective confidence than participants who completed the training in foresight without any feedback (but not more confidence than those with feedback). Additionally, participants who experienced hindsight trials during training reported greater retrospective confidence than participants who completed the training in foresight without any feedback. However, foresight participants appear to have decreased in prospective confidence, rather than hindsight participants increasing in prospective confidence, challenging the speculation that hindsight bias increases confidence. Moreover, the amount of training did not appear to play a significant role in participants’ confidence judgments. Prospective confidence had a parabolic relation with response times (such that people with moderate levels of prospective confidence answered more slowly), suggesting that prospective confidence modulates decision processes.
Using an in-person sample of undergraduates (N = 199; Study 2), we replicated key findings from Study 1 and investigated the role of affective responses to feedback (i.e., participants learning that they were correct/incorrect or judging in hindsight that they would have been correct/incorrect) in changes to prospective confidence. Affective responses appear to be important for people to learn prospective confidence and to learn to recognize errors in decision making. Greater positive affect to positive feedback was associated with increases in prospective confidence. On the other hand, greater negative affect to negative feedback was associated with more sensitive retrospective confidence judgments (i.e., participants’ retrospective confidence judgments differed more for correct and incorrect responses). Drift diffusion modeling revealed that hindsight training (versus foresight-with-feedback) reduced participants’ rate of evidence accumulation and their cautiousness in subsequent decisions. Moreover, greater prospective confidence was associated with faster evidence accumulation and more cautious decision making
Quantifying the Effects of Environmental Covariates on Leaf Area Index (LAI) in Riparian Reforestation in Western Oregon, USA: Supplementary Data
No full textSupplementary data for the dissertation title: Quantifying the Effects of Environmental Covariates on Leaf Area Index (LAI) in Riparian Reforestation in Western Oregon, US
Effect of the psychedelic drug DOI on synaptic plasticity in the nematode C. elegans
Full text link24 pagesPsychedelic drugs have shown promising potential for treating mental health disorders. Of particular interest is the ability of psychedelic drugs to induce synaptic plasticity, a phenomenon thought to underlie their long-term effects. Research into how psychedelic drugs affect synaptic plasticity would benefit from testing on a genetically tractable animal. The aim of this project is to establish C. elegans as a model for studying the effects of psychedelic drugs on synaptic plasticity. We studied the sexually dimorphic synaptic pruning between two neurons, PHB and AVA, in C. elegans. We observed a lower number of synaptic puncta in males than in hermaphrodites. Contrary to previously published results, we did not observe a change in sex-specific number of synaptic puncta in response to starvation, and we did observe an increase in synaptic puncta in males in response to serotonin. Experiments with the psychedelic drug 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI) led to inconclusive results. Further work is needed to explore the potential effects of psychedelic drugs on synaptic plasticity in C. elegans
Wildfire Policy and Latine Agricultural Workers in Oregon
Full text link35 pages.The record level increase in intensity and length of the fire season in the Pacific Northwest has affected the life of every single person in Oregon. Air pollution caused by smoke, millions of dollars' worth of property loss, business closures, and many other effects of peak fire season have become anticipated events during the hottest months of summer. A community at the forefront of wildfire exposure is Latine agricultural workers. Not only does their busiest season of work coincide with the peak wildfire season, but the risk of exposure to smoke and warm weather conditions are also unavoidable as outdoor workers. Cuts in disaster aid from the federal government and ICE raids in rural workplaces have also left a large margin of Latine workers vulnerable to disparate health risks caused by wildfire smoke. This makes policy intended to protect workers from health risks like wildfire smoke exposure essential to safeguarding equitable outcomes. Understanding how current policy may ultimately be failing to address the social and economic inequalities that impact fair outcomes in the enforcement of wildfire smoke exposure policy. Using archival research of wildfire policy and an environmental justice lens of analysis indicate that while state wildfire policy is oriented around distributive justice, it also fails to address how fears over immigration status, Spanish or English language proficiency, and power hierarchies in the workplace can impact fair outcomes. This thesis will explore how understanding where current wildfire policy succeeds and fails can aid in imagining what a more just policy could include as the state of Oregon continues to plan a justice future for both workers and the environment they work in