When a family member is incarcerated, the task of emotionally and financially supporting the remaining family members and the incarcerated loved one often falls upon women, who are likely to be under-resourced and overwhelmed. Women whose husbands are incarcerated in India are likely to possess multiple marginalized identities, increasing their vulnerability to intersecting forms of oppression. Empirical research is lacking on wives of incarcerated men in India, contributing to their invisibility in policy-making and programmatic interventions. Guided by intersectional feminism and symbolic interactionism, the purpose of this study was to document the stories of women who had experienced spousal incarceration in the Indian context. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 wives of prison inmates who resided in or around the National Capital Territory of Delhi, all of whom either held a lower caste identity or a Muslim religious identity. Transcribed interviews were analyzed following the steps of narrative analysis. Results illustrate the diversity of storied experiences of wives of incarcerated husbands in India. First, by grouping narratives that conveyed the same overall storyline into the same cluster, I identified three story clusters: Ambivalent but Hanging On, Unconditionally Devoted, and Independent and Disillusioned. Second, by attending to how women's day-to-day lives are shaped by intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, particularly those tied to gender and class, I identified three overarching themes that spanned women's narratives: (a) a complicated relationship with patriarchy, (b) the weight of socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and (c) when resilience is not a choice. The results of this study emphasize the need to distinguish between feminist agency and welfare agency, to recognize women's experiences of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief, and to critique the systemic injustices that forced women to be resilient. Documenting their stories is instrumental in bringing attention to the needs, challenges, and triumphs of this underserved and overlooked population. / Doctor of Philosophy / When a family member is incarcerated, the task of emotionally and financially supporting the remaining family members and the incarcerated loved one often falls upon women, who are likely to be under-resourced and overwhelmed. Women whose husbands are incarcerated in India are likely to possess multiple marginalized identities, increasing their vulnerability to intersecting forms of oppression. Empirical research is lacking on wives of incarcerated men in India, contributing to their invisibility in policy-making and programmatic interventions. The purpose of this study was to document the stories of women who had experienced spousal incarceration in the Indian context. Interviews were conducted with 14 wives of prison inmates who resided in or around the National Capital Territory of Delhi, all of whom either held a lower caste identity or a Muslim religious identity. Results illustrate the diversity of women's stories and experiences with spousal incarceration. First, by grouping narratives that conveyed the same overall storyline into the same cluster, I identified three story clusters: Ambivalent but Hanging On, Unconditionally Devoted, and Independent and Disillusioned. Second, by attending to how women's day-to-day lives are shaped by intersecting systems of privilege and oppression, particularly those tied to gender and class, I identified three overarching themes that characterized women's narratives: (a) a complicated relationship with patriarchy, (b) the weight of socioeconomic disenfranchisement, and (c) when resilience is not a choice. The results of this study emphasize the need to distinguish between feminist agency and welfare agency, to recognize women's experiences of ambiguous loss and disenfranchised grief, and to critique the systemic injustices that forced women to be resilient. Documenting their stories is instrumental in bringing attention to the needs, challenges, and triumphs of this underserved and overlooked population.

Gödel proved his Incompleteness theorems for any theory 'strong' enough to represent recursive functions. In the process he showed that the provability predicate can be represented in such theories. Modal logics of provability are modal logics which attempt to express the concept of 'provability' and 'consistency' using the modal operators '[]' and '<>' respectively. This is achieved by forcing '[]' to behave like the provability predicate. GL is a modal logic which has been shown to be complete and sound with respect to arithmetic theories (theories which can represent all recursive functions), hence results about concepts such as 'consistency,' 'provability' and 'decidability' in arithmetic theories can be stated and proved in GL. It has also been proved that GL is complete with respect to the class of finite, transitive, reversely well-founded models. This essentially means that the set of theorems of GL is recursive and hence there exists an effective procedure to determine whether a given wff is a theorem of GL or not. We investigate a weaker version of GL called GH and show that GH is not complete with respect to arithmetic theories. We show this by first showing that GH is a proper subset of GL and then showing that the theorems missing from GH are properties of the provability predicate. We finally, show that GH is not complete with respect to the class of transitive, reversely well-founded models and hence not sound and complete with respect to any frame. / Master of Science

In utilizing Kristeva's psychoanalytic discursive theory of identity-formation within literary symbolic structures, my thesis seeks to follow the ontological processes involved in identity and signification in “subversive” signifying practices. Specifically, I'm interested in the ways modern poetry (such as Elizabeth Bishop) defies traditional patriarchal discourse as dominant literary devices while embracing plurality and inherent virtues of the female voice. My project will trace Kristeva's semiotic/psychoanalytic evolution from linguistic models of the signifying process, to particulars of her psychoanalytic/linguistic theories, and finally, will attempt to construct a space within modern poetry, where it can be said, the subject (poet) remains on trial/in crisis, and poetic expression reveals the “jouissance” or unspoken voice of repression. Bishop's poetry constantly questions reality, knowledge, sexuality and the self. I strive to expose how Bishop's poetry performs Kristeva's theory of the self in writing; her poetry puts at the core of the self a sense of loss in her attempts to express herself in language. I offer close readings of “The Fish,” “Questions of Travel,” and “One Art,” to show how Bishop's self exposes the unconscious process of poetic activity. Kelly Oliver articulates Kristeva's contributions to linguistics and psychoanalysis quite succinctly, “When we learn to embrace the return of the repressed/the foreigner within ourselves, then we learn to live with, and love, others” (14). / Master of Arts

Mechanized theorem proving is a promising means of formally establishing facts about complex systems. However, in applying theorem proving methodologies to industrial-scale hardware and software systems, a large amount of user interaction is required in order to prove useful properties. In practice, the human user tasked with such a verification must gain a deep understanding of the system to be verified, and prove numerous lemmas in order to allow the theorem proving program to approach a proof of the desired fact. Furthermore, proofs that fail during this process are a source of confusion: the proof may either fail because the conjecture was false, or because the prover required more help from the user in order to reach the desired conclusion. We have implemented a symbolic execution framework inside the ACL2 theorem prover in order to help address these issues on certain problem domains. Our framework introduces a proof strategy that applies bit-level symbolic execution using BDDs to finite-domain problems. This proof strategy is a fully verified decision procedure for such problems, and on many useful problem domains its capacity vastly exceeds that of exhaustive testing. Our framework also produces counterexamples for conjectures that it determines to be false. Our framework seeks to reduce the amount of necessary user interaction in proving theorems about industrial-scale hardware and software systems. By increasing the automation available in the prover, we allow the user to complete useful proofs while understanding less of the detailed implementation of the system. Furthermore, by producing counterexamples for falsified conjectures, our framework reduces the time spent by the user in trying to determine why a proof failed. / text

THE DEBATES CONCERNING IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE HAVE A RICH AND COMPLICATED HISTORY. MOVING FROM THIS HISTORY, THIS THESIS AIMS TO INVESTIGATE HOW PIERRE BOURDIEU, ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT SOCIOLOGISTS IN EUROPE, CAN BE READ ON THE DEBATES CONCERNING IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE.ALTHOUGH THE TERM IDEOLOGY IS NOT PARTICULARLY CENTRAL TO BOURDIEU&#039 / S WORK, WE ASSERT THAT HIS CONCEPTUAL WORLD TELLS US A STORY WHICH IS PERTINENT TO THE ONES IN IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE DEBATES.MOVING FROM THIS AXIS, WE SHED LIGHT UPON BOURDIEU&#039 / S CONCEPTS SUCH AS HABITUS, DOXA, FIELD, SYMBOLIC POWER AND SYMBOLIC VIOLENCE. WE EXAMINE BOTH THE ANATOMY OF THE CONCEPTS MENTIONED AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS WITH EACH OTHER.WE SHOW THAT HOW THESE CONCEPTS CAN BE OPERATIONAL FROM THE ANGLE OF THE DEBATES ON IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE. IN OUR STUDY, WE ARGUE THAT BOURDIEU&#039 / S CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK EXTENDS THE SOCIOLOGICAL DIMENSION OF THE DEBATES CONCERNING IDEOLOGY AND DISCOURSE AND PIERRE BOURDIEU CAN BE READ WITH THE OTHER MONUMENTAL NAMES, FROM MARX TO FOUCAULT, IN THE HISTORY OF THE DEBATES.

In this thesis, we explore the interface between symbolic and dynamical system computation, with particular regard to dynamical system models of neuronal networks. In doing so, we adhere to a definition of computation as the physical realization of a formal system, where we say that a dynamical system performs a computation if a correspondence can be found between its dynamics on a vectorial space and the formal system’s dynamics on a symbolic space. Guided by this definition, we characterize computation in a range of neuronal network models. We first present a constructive mapping between a range of formal systems and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), through the introduction of a Versatile Shift and a modular network architecture supporting its real-time simulation. We then move on to more detailed models of neural dynamics, characterizing the computation performed by networks of delay-pulse-coupled oscillators supporting the emergence of heteroclinic dynamics. We show that a correspondence can be found between these networks and Finite-State Transducers, and use the derived abstraction to investigate how noise affects computation in this class of systems, unveiling a surprising facilitatory effect on information transmission. Finally, we present a new dynamical framework for computation in neuronal networks based on the slow-fast dynamics paradigm, and discuss the consequences of our results for future work, specifically for what concerns the fields of interactive computation and Artificial Intelligence.

This paper studies symbolic dynamical systems {0, 1}G, where G is a countably infinite group, {0, 1}G has the product topology, and G acts on {0, 1}G by shifts. It is proven that for every countably infinite group G the union of the minimal free subflows of {0, 1}G is dense. In fact, a stronger result is obtained which states that if G is a countably infinite group and U is an open subset of {0, 1}G, then there is a collection of size continuum consisting of pairwise disjoint minimal free subflows intersecting U.

The situational self-image, which recognizes the affect of situational influences, particularly social roles, was the specific topic of investigation of this study. It has generally been hypothesized in marketing literature that consumers will purchase the brand with the image most congruent with the consumers' self-image. Symbolic Interactionism, a field of study in sociology, provides the theoretical foundations for the construct situational self-image. Realization of the relationship between the situational self-consciousness and involvement was also investigated.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Robby / Software defects cost our economy a significant amount of money. Techniques that can detect software defects before the software begins its operational life-cycle are therefore highly valuable. Unfortunately, as software is becoming more ubiquitous, it is also becoming more complex. Static analysis of software can be computationally intensive, and as software becomes more complex the computational demands of any analysis applied increase also. While increasingly complex software entails more computationally demanding analysis, the computational capabilities provided by computers have increased exponentially over the last half century of computing. Historically, the increase in computational capability has come by increasing the clock speed of the computer's central processing unit (CPU.) In the last several years, engineering limitations have made it increasingly difficult to build CPU's with progressively higher clock speeds. Instead, processor manufacturers now provide increased capability in the form of `multi-core' CPUs; where each processor package contains two or more processing units, enabling that processor to execute more than one task concurrently. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a parallel version of symbolic execution which can take advantage of modern multi-core and multi-processor systems to complete analysis of software units in a reduced amount of time.

Testing is the dominant technique for quality assurance of software systems. It typically consumes considerable resources in development projects, and is often performed in an ad hoc manner. This thesis is concerned with model-based testing, which is an approach to make testing more systematic and more automated. The general idea in model-based testing is to start from a formal model, which captures the intended behavior of the software system to be tested. On the basis of this model, test cases can be generated in a systematic way. Since the model is formal, the generation of test suites can be automated and with adequate tool support one can automatically quantify to which degree they exercise the tested software. Despite the significant improvements on model-based testing in the last 20 years, acceptance by industry has so far been limited. A number of commercially available tools exist, but still most testing in industry relies on manually constructed test cases. This thesis address this problem by presenting a methodology and associated tool support, which is intended to be used for model-based testing of communication protocol implementations in industry. A major goal was to make the developed tool suitable for industrial usage, implying that we had to consider several problems that typically are not addressed by the literature on model-based testing. The thesis presents several technical contributions to the area of model-based testing, including - a new specification language based on the functional programming language Erlang, - a novel technique for specifying coverage criteria for test suite generation, and - a technique for automatically generating test suites. Based on these developments, we have implemented a complete tool chain that generates and executes complete test suites, given a model in our specification language. The thesis also presents a substantial industrial case study, where our technical contributions and the implemented tool chain are evaluated. Findings from the case study include that test suites generated using (model) coverage criteria have at least as good fault-detection capability as equally large random test suites, and that model-based testing could discover faults in previously well-tested software where previous testing had employed a relaxed validation of requirements.