594 research outputs found
Probabilistic Topic Modeling for Comparative Analysis of Document Collections
No full textProbabilistic topic models, which can discover hidden patterns in documents, have been extensively studied. However, rather than learning from a single document collection, numerous real-world applications demand a comprehensive understanding of the relationships among various document sets. To address such needs, this article proposes a new model that can identify the common and discriminative aspects of multiple datasets. Specifically, our proposed method is a Bayesian approach that represents each document as a combination of common topics (shared across all document sets) and distinctive topics (distributions over words that are exclusive to a particular dataset). Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art models. The proposedmodel can be useful for "comparative thinking" analysis in real-world document collections.
Insurgent Kinship: Queer P’urhépecha Migrations and Kinship
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2023My doctoral dissertation examines how Indigiqueer P’urhépecha people in Michoacán and the diaspora face precarious presents and futures where their role within a nuclear family, belonging to society, and safety are conditional and based on their cooperation with racialized colonial heteropatriarchal norms. The concept of insurgent kinship weaves together this project, kin made through, as Adele E. Clarke explains in Making Kin not Population, “daily actions that transform partial relations into deeper ones” and “crafted through the exchange of sharing activities and other practices” with humans and more than humans that create “viable presents and futures” for queer P’urhépecha, with humans, more than human species and land. I write about the P’urhépecha migrant diaspora, a largely ignored academic topic. Also, until recently, scholarship on P’urhépecha people was done predominantly by external white and Chicano gazes. My work is among the current resurgence of creative and intellectual work about P’urhépecha people by P’urhépecha people. This research further examines the imposition of colonial heteropatriarchy by looking closely at the history of the P’urhépecha people and pueblos near the P’urhépecha Plateau. This work turns the gaze on the importation of colonial gender and sexuality by examining various ways that the Church, Family, and State have worked to create a dominant and violent heteropatriarchy. Whereas non-P’urhépecha scholars have relied on the P’urhépecha historical archive to theorize on the colonial roots of queer indigeneity, my scholarship intervenes by reclaiming and re-reading the P’urhépecha archive through an intentionally queer P’urhépecha lens. My research can discuss this archive in a way non-P’urhépecha scholars cannot, an essential contribution to queer studies.
This project uses the methods of autoethnography, oral history, narrative research, genealogical archival research, and Indigenous Feminist analysis. It is multi-genre and combines conventional academic writing with personal narrative, stories, and poetry. I argue that kinship with biological family, land, ancestors, and more than humans is not a given for Indigiqueer P’urhépecha born in rural communities near the P’urhépecha original pueblos of Michoacán, and kinship must be made with them. Insurgent kinship for Indigiqueer P’urhépecha people is more possible with the matriarchs of the family in part because colonial heteropatriarchy makes matriarchs and gender-diverse and LGBTQ people more vulnerable to violence. Using Lionel Cantú and Chandan Reddy’s work on migration and gender and sexuality, I contend that when P’urhépecha people go through the United States immigration process, the colonial hetero-patriarchy from Mexico is layered with the United States, and Indigiqueer migrants face an emboldened vulnerability to violence based on their sexuality and gender. Insurgent kinship with cities in the diaspora is possible by understanding Indigenous migrants' entanglement with settler colonialism and our position as settlers. The emboldened vulnerability may result in further migration for Indigiqueer migrants who find the city their “homing” place, rather than in their communities, a place of belonging, rebuilding, and strengthening their relationship to P’urhépecha knowledge and land-based practices, especially when insurgent kinship is made with intertribally with other Indigiqueer people. Lastly, insurgent kinship with dogs is made by understanding the eight millennia of relationships that Indigenous people in the Americas had before contact and severed further by ongoing colonialism that normalizes domination over relationships and understanding
Book Review - Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State
No full textBook Under Review
Reddy, Chandan. 2011. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Data analytics for pervasive health
No full textNowadays, the majority of industrialized nations are facing significant complications regarding the quality and cost of various healthcare and well-being services. These difficulties will exacerbate even more due to an increasing aging population, which translates into a multitude of chronic diseases and tremendous demand for various healthcare services. As a result, the cost of the healthcare sector might not be sustainable and therefore industrialized countries need to find and plan policies and strategies to use the limited economical resources more efficiently and effectively. This need for sustainable healthcare systems translates into a range of challenges in science and technology, which if solved, ultimately could benefit our global society and economy. In particular, the exploitation of information and communication technology for implementing autonomous and pro-active healthcare services will be extremely beneficial
Optimization of a novel Hybrid Wind Bio Battery Solar Photovoltaic System Integrated with Phase Change Material
No full textThe intermittent nature of renewable sources, such as solar and wind, leads to the need for a hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) that can provide uninterrupted and reliable energy to a remote and off-grid location with the use of a biogas generator and battery. In the present study, conventional PV panels have been integrated with phase change material (PCM) for power enhancement. In addition, various configurations (i. PV-Wind-Battery system, ii. PV-PCM-Wind-Battery, iii. PV-Wind-Biogas-Battery and iv. PV-PCM-Wind-Biogas-Battery) have been compared for the hot and humid climatic location of Chennai, India. Optimization has been carried out to minimize the cost of energy and the net present cost has also been computed. It has been found that the integration of PCM with the PV-Wind-Biogas-Battery-based off-grid system results in savings of USD 0.22 million in terms of net present cost and reduces the cost of energy from USD 0.099/kWh to USD 0.094/kWh. Similarly, for another off-grid HRES configuration of PV-Wind-Battery, the integration of PCM results in savings of USD 0.17 million, and reduces the cost of energy from USD 0.12/kWh to USD 0.105/kWh
Capacity Proportional Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks
No full textExisting methods to utilize capacity-heterogeneity in a P2P system either rely
on constructing special overlays with capacity-proportional node degree or use topology adaptation to match a node's capacity with that of its neighbors. In existing
P2P networks, which are often characterized by diverse node capacities and high
churn, these methods may require large node degree or continuous topology adaptation, potentially making them infeasible due to their high overhead. In this thesis,
we propose an unstructured P2P system that attempts to address these issues. We
first prove that the overall throughput of search queries in a heterogeneous network
is maximized if and only if traffic load through each node is proportional to its capacity. Our proposed system achieves this traffic distribution by biasing search walks
using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, without requiring any special underlying
topology. We then define two saturation metrics for measuring the performance of
overlay networks: one for quantifying their ability to support random walks and the
second for measuring their potential to handle the overhead caused by churn. Using
simulations, we finally compare our proposed method with Gia, an existing system
which uses topology adaptation, and find that the former performs better under all
studied conditions, both saturation metrics, and such end-to-end parameters as query
success rate, latency, and query-hits for various file replication schemes
The Familial Stranger: The U.S. Adoptive Kinship and The Question of Race
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020“The Familial Stranger: The U.S. Adoptive Kinship and The Question of Race” explores how race informs the U.S. adoptive kinship formation. By placing race at the center of its inquiry, the dissertation traces what role race has played in the cultural and legal inscription of children as the orphan/adoptee in the U.S. adoption history. In particular, it questions how race conditions the cultural imaginary and the legal institutionalization of the U.S. adoptive kinship in which race intersects with (non-) biological ties, ethnicity, gender, class, and national belonging. Combining the literary, historical, and cultural studies approach, this dissertation expands the temporal frame to think the genealogy of racialization of the U.S. adoptive kinship. The narrative of U.S. adoption that creates and defines the adoptability of children in need racializes the adoptee by framing their deficiency and difference as concurrently the possibility of modification and fulfillment and the irremovable mark of otherness. Interrogating the way that the racial otherness of the adoptee has been historically constructed from the late nineteen century to the present, this work contends that despite its philosophy to create the “as-if-begotten” family, U.S. adoption has been producing adoptees as the “familial strangers” with the promising potentials to be like ‘us’ but also with indelible flaws coming from their biological and social origin, while also demomstraing how the adoptee’s transgressive presence and border-crossing disrupt and redefine the boundary of kinship, race, and culture
Diversity, Temporality, Population: The Securitization of the Democratic Pastorate and the Rise of the Racial Liberal Security State
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022Reading across the domains of disciplinary knowledge formations, public educational initiatives, governmental documentation, and social movement discourses, this dissertation examines emergent meanings of security as the antiracist renovation of the liberal tradition conjoins with questions of social and national security during the U.S. “encounter with totalitarianism” in the years leading up to WWII. In the development of the ethnicity paradigm in the social sciences, the principles of neutrality that governed the administration of New Deal state programming, and the advent and proliferation of public and private educational initiatives to promote cultural pluralism, this dissertation identifies and traces a series of interrelated and co-constitutive “racial security logics” that create new parameters of intelligibility (and governance) for subjects of and for a purportedly antiracist state. The purportedly antiracist state form that liberal progressive narratives claim is achieved later during what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have famously referred to as “the period of the racial break,” is a state form that is simultaneously imagined as “achieved” and perpetually “coming into being” in the postwar period. This dissertation locates and names the material and epistemic preconditions for this shift in the immediate prewar period. Central to this new state form coming into being, I argue, was the production of a progressive telos for the nation that both constructed racial liberals as a “democratic pastorate” and conducted them as mangers of the general population to work toward the “common good” of a progressive, inclusive future secured through the monitoring, surveillance, and policing of the disorganizing potentialities of race. Through the securitization of the democratic pastorate, a new form of state rationality developed that could secure both a still thoroughly racialized stratified population, as well new material relations for the racial state, while simultaneously disavowing those relations of violence through the rise of race relations knowledge industries. At its core, this dissertation examines how the U.S. racial liberal state state extended and transformed its modes of racial violence precisely through purportedly antiracist progressive social, political, and intellectual movements that understood liberal progress as the achievement of cultural identity through the universalizing rubrics of procedural neutrality and inclusive diversity
Alien Intimacies: Queer Kinships and the Asian Resident Alien
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025This project locates and names forms of alien intimacies in order to make visible the ways conceptions of complicity and resistance within discussions of queer kinships and queer reproductivity are conditioned by questions of race, nationality, and citizenship. By attending to such alien intimacies, this project investigates the limits of queer kinship imaginaries in two distinct forms. The first is characterized by social movements that claim queer alterity and non-complicity to state power, and posit reproductive queer kinship as a vehicle for liberation or radical social change. The second is an anti-normative queer theory approach that works to critique queer kinship's homonormative complicities with the state and consigns queer reproduction to the realm of homorepronormative assimilation to hegemonic family forms. I enter into these discussions of queer kinships and interrogate their limits by reading immigration laws and how they have been used to reproduce the nation and its national imaginaries of racial and sexual purity through family morality. In particular, I read immigration laws as functioning not just through their exclusion of undesirable subjects, but also their production of a contingent class of alien citizenship of those are administratively incorporated into the nation, but nevertheless live under the threat of exclusion due to their detainable and deportable identity/status. Immigration law thus differentially limits and resources the extent to which certain racialized subjects can socially and biologically reproduce family across both exclusionary and inclusionary barriers. The entrance of immigration law into sites of social and sexual reproduction breaks down the public-private divide and provides a different entry point into discussions of queer family making practices as alternative social politics.This project's approach differs from the important ways feminist social reproduction theory and queer theory have broken down the public/private in their respective investigations into both the necessity of under-/unpaid work of social reproduction as the precondition for reproducing the conditions of production, as well as the ways sex, as a purportedly private category of acts and identities, is nevertheless mediated by sexualized publics. Alien intimacies attends to the constitutive racialized conditions that organize feminist inquiries into social reproduction and queer theories of alternative social reproduction. Through its functions as a racializing technology, immigration constitutes the racialized conditions that undergird and organize views of social and sexual reproduction as sites available for radical transformation. By reading these sites of queer kinships through their constitutive racializations as resident alien sexual bottomhood, this project attends to the ways feminist, queer, and critical race studies continue to fail to theorize the ways in which these sites and forms of social change and transformation, which we so heavily invest in the name of liberatory politics, can only operate through investments in certain kinds of complicities with domination. Re-entering these conversations from the perspective of the resident alien bottom, makes it impossible to turn away from such investments in complicity. The resident alien bottom becomes thinkable only through its precarious racialized and sexualized alien citizenship, which can only be understood by acknowledging some level of its complex complicity with the same state that consigned it to its inhabited precarity.
This dissertation takes up three major inquiries. The first is a question about how alternative intimacies, such as those imagined through queer kinship, come to reproduce dominant structures of intimacy. The second is a question about how critiques of alternative intimacies' reproduction of dominance often themselves operate through terms of binary complicity and resistance organized by constitutive racial conditions. Lastly is a question of the politics of queer and feminist knowledge production, highlighted by the ways this project's mixed methods approach organizes through Octavia Butler's science fictional short story "Bloodchild," as well as the detours, delays, and impossibilities that emerged from my own identifications with determining forms of racialization that simultaneously catalyzed, barred, and reproduced this project. Revealed in "Bloodchild's" methodological innovation and the autoethnographic form that weaves throughout my subsequent arguments, this project works through a formal intervention into the dissertation genre by exploring my own (dis)identifications with dominant racialized social orders that interrupt my scholarly inquiry into the questions above, as well as become reproduced through my own racialized feminist research anxieties and resident alien intimacies
Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ‘Local’ Hawaiʻi Narratives
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017-06My dissertation, “Empire’s Imagination: Race, Settler Colonialism, and Indigeneity in ʻLocal’ Hawaiʻi Narratives,” addresses the history of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi, arguing that empire persists into the present through the structuring of contemporary literary representations of Asian migrants and Kanaka Maoli, the Indigenous population. This project intervenes into postcolonial studies, American studies, and ethnic studies as I rely on the optic of U.S. empire to reveal the concurrent processes of Asian and Indigenous racialization historically and in cultural memory. Through a comparative approach to Asian American studies and Indigenous studies, I demonstrate how Hawaiʻi operates as an opportunity to reckon with the determinative force of U.S. empire in the imaginative realm of aesthetic production. Contrary to the belief that contemporary literature’s imaginative force can transcend or repair the violence of U.S. empire restoring voice to those whom empire violated, I theorize the desire for literary representation as a legacy of empire. Furthermore, I argue for a more contradictory understanding of contemporary literature, one in which the history of U.S. empire remains coercive and determinative. By examining narratives about and by Hawaiʻi based writers, commonly referred to as “local” writing, I argue that “local” writing often functions as a “resolution” to the past. While it makes visible the history of empire through the stories it tells, “local” writing often positions itself as evidence of contemporary Hawaiʻi as a multicultural paradise of universal belonging. Yet, I demonstrate how “local” writing can only “resolve” the violence of empire by perpetuating the erasure of Kanaka Maoli colonization in the present. I argue the genre of “local” writing both critiques and perpetuates the violence of Indigenous dispossession and liberal racial formation. This leads me to also argue for the limitations of literary narrative to reconcile or resist the violences of U.S. empire. Thus, “local” writing produces Asian migrants as “local” subjects, substitutes for Kanaka Maoli, in order to maintain U.S. settler colonial hegemony. My dissertation examines specific flashpoints of U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi in the 19th and 20th century with post-2000 literary and cultural production that reimagines these moments. Together, these cultural texts demonstrate the possibilities and limitations of “local” fiction to reckon with the history of colonization and its legacies in the colonial present. Thus, in order to resist the paradigm of U.S. empire and to reimagine alternatives to colonized spaces, I propose the possibility of a material politics that accounts for how imperial epistemologies constitute the realm of the historical and literary imaginaries. In refusing to collapse Kanaka Maoli and Asian settler into a false political and racial equivalence, I instead argue for the necessity of reorienting the figure of the “local” Asian settler reveals the continuation of U.S. nationalist and imperialist knowledge production in the present. This relationality between history and narrative conveys how imaginative practices undergo continual colonization. This situates my project at the juncture of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and ethnic studies where my theoretical interventions identify how Hawaiʻi’s history and literary production reveals the limits of current Asian American and postcolonial studies. Thus, my project calls for alternative strategies of decolonization where the aesthetic imagination becomes a material site of decolonizing politics. As such, I theorize how this form of decolonial and anti-imperial politics needs to account for how the imaginative realm is structured by the history of U.S. empire
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