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The work presented aims to show the complexity, causes, and challenges of being stateless in the Dominican Republic through the medium of documentaries. This thesis will also uncoverpossibilities of resistance and coalitional engagement. To do so, I align myself with a decolonial feminist approach, which is a way of searching for alternative ways of being, doing, sensing, knowing, and loving for resistance, change, and a different future. This approach opens the possibility to understand statelessness within the triad of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality and to move beyond the Eurocentric inventions of human rights, the concept of citizenship, and the figure of the 'citizen'. Decolonial feminism also grapples with the problem of victimization and gives us a possibility to see stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent both as an oppressed and resistant community. In a phenomenological sense, the documentaries Stateless by Michèle Stephenson (2020) and Our Lives in Transit by Sofia Olins (2015), are used in this thesis to explain and explore the lived conditions of being stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. I am conscious that film studies and particularly documentary filmmaking are colonized spaces and tools of modernity to spread the white / Anglo male gaze through the films' very impact on our senses and perception. For this reason, the work presented delinks from traditional methodologies which are often taken for granted in social sciences and migration studies. I aim to achieve this goal by practicing decolonial feminism as a theory and methodological guide for this thesis. Consequently, this thesis is a bridge-making process and an exploration of methodologies to grasp the complex reality in the Dominican Republic by practicing this work as a researcher, an audience, and a resister. Through the inspiring work of black feminists, decolonial and Caribbean scholars, but most importantly the lived experiences and voices of stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent, I intend to argue statelessness as amodern form of genocide to explain its root causes and persistence. Then, I will support this argument by bridging the links between statelessness and the coloniality of gender. Lastly, the different "world"-traveling experiences of directors Michèle Stephenson and Sofia Olins will deepen the discussion around possibilities of resistance to ongoing modes of subjugation through decolonial feminism.

(English) Brazil is not gifted by greatest conditions for its existence - president do have strong legislative powers, which allow him to dominate politics, and he is confronted by severely fragmented legislature. This kind of political constellation should cause strong political crises and should be responsible for unstability of political regime. In this paper, we are trying to describe reasons why it is not so. Thanks to the change of international ideological and political context (i.e. end of Cold War) democracy has been internalized by various political actors and army returned back to barracks. Parliament and president were left alone to face their own fate. Even though president dominates legislative process (thanks to his strong powers) and can structure parliament's choices, constitution (de facto) forces him to seek support in parliament and create wider coalitions. On the other hand parliament has strong tools how to offer president alternative proposals and de facto decides if president's policy will be permanent or not. In extreme cases (i.e. political crises) is parliament proactive actor, which controls presidents survival.

Evolutionary psychology often relies on experimental methods for testing theories due to their capacity to isolate independent variables, thereby enhancing internal validity. The scientific problem in this study, however, lies in the fact that an increase in internal validity in experiments might risk reducing ecological validity. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to test experimental results from the evolutionary coalitional psychology in a real case, to evaluate the ecological validity of the theory. The case is the Ukraine war and the method is a qualitative thematic text analysis, of President Volodymyr Zelensky's speeches, close to Russia's invasion on February 24, 2022. The results reveal that the president in his speeches, motivates with a collective gain of participating in the defence of Ukraine, exhibits a punitive attitude towards perceived free-riders, and does not show any gender bias in his appeals. The evidence of collective gain and a punitive attitude is particularly notable as it aligns precisely with the theoretical expectations based on previous experimental results from coalitional psychology. This alignment between real-world findings and experimental predictions enhances the ecological validity of the theory, thus fulfilling the aim of the study. The conclusion is that evolutionary psychology can be effectively applied to real- world conflicts within peace and conflict studies.

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Wireless communications are important in our highly connected world. The amount of data being transferred in cellular networks is steadily growing, and consequently more capacity is needed. This thesis considers the problem of downlink capacity improvement from the perspective of multicell coordination. By employing multiple antennas at the transmitters and receivers of a multicell network, the inherent spatial selectivity of the users can be exploited in order to increase the capacity through linear precoding and receive filtering. For the coordination between cells, distributed algorithms are often sought due to their low implementation complexity and robustness. In this context, the thesis considers two problem domains: base station clustering and coordinated precoding. Base station clustering corresponds to grouping the cell base stations into disjoint clusters in order to reduce the coordination overhead. This is needed in intermediate-sized to large networks, where the overhead otherwise would be overwhelmingly high. Two solution methods for the clustering problem are proposed: an optimal centralized method, as well as a heuristic distributed method. The optimal method applies to a family of throughput models and exploits the structure of the model to find bounds that can be used to focus the search for the optimal clustering into promising territories. The distributed method instead uses notions from coalitional game theory, where the base stations are modelled as rational and intelligent players in a game. By letting the players make individual deviations that benefit them in the game, i.e.\@ switching clusters, a distributed coalition formation algorithm is obtained. Coordinated precoding is the act of finding the linear precoders and receive filters that maximize the network performance, given a base station clustering. Four specific challenges are studied in this problem domain. First, coordinated precoding under intercluster interference is considered. The channels of the intercluster links are not explicitly estimated due to overhead reasons, and these links thus lead to intercluster interference. By exploiting the known statistics of the intercluster channels, a robust and distributed coordinated precoding algorithm is developed. Second, coordinated precoding under imperfect channel state information is considered. Relying on the channel reciprocity under time-division duplex operation, a distributed estimation framework is proposed. Given the estimated channels, a robust and distributed coordinated precoding algorithm is then derived. Third, coordinated precoding under imperfect radio hardware is considered. By modelling the radio frequency distortion noises, a distributed coordinated precoding method that accounts for the imperfections is proposed. Fourth, joint coordinated precoding and discrete rate selection is considered. By bounding and linearizing an originally intractable optimization problem, a heuristic algorithm is derived which selects the transmit rate from a finite set and simultaneously forms the linear precoders and receive filters. / Trådlös kommunikation är ett viktigt verktyg i dagens ständigt uppkopplade värld. Datamängden som överförs i mobilnätverk ökar stadigt och därmed behovet av mer kapacitet. För att öka kapaciteten i nedlänken så utvecklar denna avhandling nya metoder för koordinering av multicellnätverk. Med flerantenniga sändare och mottagare så kan den spatiala selektiviteten hos mottagarna utnyttjas för att separera dem, vilket ger en ökad kapacitet. För denna koordinering är distribuerade algoritmer ofta att föredra eftersom de är robusta och har låg implementeringskomplexitet. I detta sammanhang undersöker denna avhandling två problemområden: basstationsgruppering och samordnad förkodning. Basstationsgruppering innebär att basstationerna delas in i disjunkta grupper, vilket minskar overheadkostnaden för samordningen. Detta är framför allt nödvändigt i medelstora till stora nätverk, eftersom overheadkostnaden för koordineringen av dessa annars skulle bli för stor. Två lösningar för basstationsgruppering presenteras: dels en optimal och centraliserad metod samt dels en heuristisk och distribuerad metod. Den optimala och centraliserade metoden kan hantera en familj av modeller för den totala datatakten och utnyttjar strukturen i modellen för att fokusera sökandet efter den optimala grupperingen mot lovande områden. Den heuristiska och distribuerade metoden bygger på spelteori för koalitioner och modellerar basstationerna som rationella och intelligenta spelare i ett spel. En distribuerad algoritm för koalitionsformering härleds genom att låta spelarna göra individuella förflyttningar, dvs. byta grupp, när det gynnar dem under spelets regler. Vid samordnad förkodning använder de flerantenniga sändarna och mottagarna linjära förkodare och mottagningsfilter för att maximera nätverkets prestanda. Inom detta problemområde undersöks fyra olika specifika problem. Först undersöks problemet när det finns störningar mellan basstationsgrupperna. För att hålla nere mängden overhead så skattas inte kanalerna mellan grupperna, vilket ger upphov till störningar hos mottagarna. Genom att utnyttja den kända statistiska informationen för dessa okända kanaler kan en robust och distribuerade samordningsmetod för förkodningen utvecklas. Därnäst undersöks problemet då kanalkännedomen är bristfällig i allmänhet. Reciprociteten som uppstår vid tidsdelningsduplexning utnyttjas och flera distribuerade skattningsmetoder härleds. Givet den skattade kanalkännedomen föreslås en robust metod för samordnad förkodning. Därnäst undersöks problemet med samordnad förkodning då radiohårdvaran är bristfällig. En modell för det distortionsbrus som skapas av den bristfälliga hårdvaran används för att föreslå en robust distribuerad metod för samordnad förkodning för detta scenario. Slutligen undersöks valet av diskret datatakt med simultan samordnad förkodning. En heuristisk algoritm utvecklas som löser ett begränsat optimeringsproblem. Algoritmen väljer sänddatatakten från en ändlig mängd och bestämmer simultant de linjära förkodarna och mottagningsfiltrena. / <p>QC 20160407</p>

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T13:51:34Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JoaoMRN_DISSERT.pdf: 3197339 bytes, checksum: 8679305ed89e4c7f00dd0dbd6382c8b9 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-18 / Public policies have been studied in the various fields of humanities and social sciences, from different theoretical and technical aspects. However, there is still a lack of studies that incorporate the dimension that encompasses the political action and its interference in such actions, also recognizing the importance of the institutional setting of the Brazilian presidential model in implementing these policies. This fragmented and multiparty system has led to power heterogeneous sets of political parties. Thus, the ministerial offices, more than assisting the President?s government project, manage particularized agendas, which are party biased and have the influence of interest groups in hegemonic themes addressed by government agencies. When these agendas operate in sectoral and specialized policies, the friction level is apparently low. However, when this occurs in intersectoral actions, such as in regional development, there is evidence of strong signs of competition among government agencies, which in theory, should operate in an integrated manner. Although this is not a specific feature of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva?s government- the period to be studied- there was similar behavior in Fernando Henrique Cardoso?s presidency, one realizes that the expansion of coalition on behalf of governance is increasingly interfering in the outcome of intersectoral public policies, due to these multiple arguments in action. In order to understand these processes, this study focused on the Sustainable and Integrated Development Programme for Differentiated Meso-Regions (PROMESO), part of the National Policy for Regional Development (NPRD). The program provides interface with various government agencies and their public policies in a clear intersectoral design. The research sought to identify and analyze the relationships between government agencies and their programs with interest groups, whether political parties or other segments of civil society, highlighting the logic of favoritism, which poses in second place the integration of actions in the intersectoral policies. Therefore, besides the theoretical debate that incorporates several categories of political science, public administration, public policy, geography and economics, the study focused on secondary sources, using different government agencies databases in order to raise information. It was observed that the interference of partisan politics has been disastrous for some public policies. Thus, the research confirms that cooperative character is fragile within government agencies, often limited to official documents, and that there is indeed, a striking feature of competition, especially when it comes to transversalized policies / As pol?ticas p?blicas t?m sido estudadas em diversas ?reas das ci?ncias humanas e sociais, a partir de diferentes aspectos te?ricos e t?cnicos. No entanto, ainda h? car?ncia de estudos que incorporem a dimens?o do exerc?cio da pol?tica e suas interfer?ncias em tais a??es, reconhecendo inclusive a import?ncia da arquitetura institucional do modelo presidencialista brasileiro na implementa??o dessas pol?ticas. Esse sistema multipartid?rio e fragmentado tem levado ao poder conjuntos heterog?neos de partidos pol?ticos. Dessa forma, os gabinetes ministeriais, mais do que auxiliarem o projeto de governo do presidente da Rep?blica, passam a operar agendas particularizadas, que possuem marcas partid?rias e influ?ncia de grupos de interesse hegem?nicos nos temas tratados pelas ag?ncias governamentais. Quando estas agendas operam em pol?ticas setoriais e especializadas, o n?vel de atrito aparentemente ? baixo. Por?m, quando isto ocorre em a??es intersetoriais, a exemplo do desenvolvimento regional, evidenciam-se fortes tra?os de competi??o entre ag?ncias governamentais, que em tese deveriam operar de forma integrada. Embora este n?o seja um tra?o especifico do governo de Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva o per?odo que ser? estudado , encontrando-se comportamentos similares na presid?ncia de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, percebe-se que a amplia??o da coaliz?o em nome da governabilidade vem interferindo cada vez mais no resultado das pol?ticas p?blicas intersetoriais, em virtude destas m?ltiplas l?gicas que se manifestam. Para se entender estes processos, elegeu-se como foco do estudo o Programa de Desenvolvimento Integrado e Sustent?vel de Mesorregi?es Diferenciadas (PROMESO), parte da Pol?tica Nacional de Desenvolvimento Regional (PNDR). O programa estabelece interfaces com diversas ag?ncias governamentais e suas pol?ticas p?blicas em um claro desenho intersetorial. A pesquisa buscou identificar e analisar as rela??es das ag?ncias governamentais e seus programas com grupos de interesse, fossem eles partidos pol?ticos ou outros segmentos da sociedade civil, evidenciando as l?gicas de favorecimento, que secundarizam a integra??o de a??es nas pol?ticas intersetoriais. Para tanto, al?m do debate te?rico que incorpora categorias diversas da ci?ncia pol?tica, da administra??o p?blica, das pol?ticas p?blicas, da geografia e da economia, o estudo debru?ou-se sobre fontes secund?rias, utilizando bases de dados das diferentes ag?ncias governamentais, com a finalidade de levantar informa??es. Evidenciou-se que a interfer?ncia da pol?tica partid?ria tem sido um aspecto nefasto para algumas pol?ticas p?blicas. Assim, a pesquisa confirma que ? t?nue o car?ter cooperativo no ?mbito das ag?ncias governamentais, muitas vezes limitado aos documentos oficiais, e que de fato h? um tra?o marcante de competi??o, sobretudo quando se fala em pol?ticas transversalizadas

In many real world situations, especially involving multiagent systems and artificial intelligence, participating agents often need to agree upon a common alternative even if they have differing preferences over the available alternatives. Voting is one of the tools of choice in these situations. Common and classic applications of voting in modern applications include collaborative filtering and recommender systems, metasearch engines, coordination and planning among multiple automated agents etc. Agents in these applications usually have computational power at their disposal. This makes the study of computational aspects of voting crucial. This thesis is devoted to a study of computational complexity of several fundamental algorithmic and complexity-theoretic problems arising in the context of voting theory. The typical setting for our work is an “election”; an election consists of a set of voters or agents, a set of alternatives, and a voting rule. The vote of any agent can be thought of as a ranking (more precisely, a complete order) of the set of alternatives. A voting profile comprises a collection of votes of all the agents. Finally, a voting rule is a mapping that takes as input a voting profile and outputs an alternative, which is called the “winner” or “outcome” of the election. Our contributions in this thesis can be categorized into three parts and are described below. Part I: Preference Elicitation. In the first part of the thesis, we study the problem of eliciting the preferences of a set of voters by asking a small number of comparison queries (such as who a voter prefers between two given alternatives) for various interesting domains of preferences. We commence with considering the domain of single peaked preferences on trees in Chapter 3. This domain is a significant generalization of the classical well studied domain of single peaked preferences. The domain of single peaked preferences and its generalizations are hugely popular among political and social scientists. We show tight dependencies between query complexity of preference elicitation and various parameters of the single peaked tree, for example, number of leaves, diameter, path width, maximum degree of a node etc. We next consider preference elicitation for the domain of single crossing preference profiles in Chapter 4. This domain has also been studied extensively by political scientists, social choice theorists, and computer scientists. We establish that the query complexity of preference elicitation in this domain crucially depends on how the votes are accessed and on whether or not any single crossing ordering is a priori known. Part II: Winner Determination. In the second part of the thesis, we undertake a study of the computational complexity of several important problems related to determining winner of an election. We begin with a study of the following problem: Given an election, predict the winners of the election under some fixed voting rule by sampling as few votes as possible. We establish optimal or almost optimal bounds on the number of votes that one needs to sample for many commonly used voting rules when the margin of victory is at least n (n is the number of voters and is a parameter). We next study efficient sampling based algorithms for estimating the margin of victory of a given election for many common voting rules. The margin of victory of an election is a useful measure that captures the robustness of an election outcome. The above two works are presented in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, we design an optimal algorithm for determining the plurality winner of an election when the votes are arriving one-by-one in a streaming fashion. This resolves an intriguing question on finding heavy hitters in a stream of items, that has remained open for more than 35 years in the data stream literature. We also provide near optimal algorithms for determining the winner of a stream of votes for other popular voting rules, for example, veto, Borda, maximin etc. Voters’ preferences are often partial orders instead of complete orders. This is known as the incomplete information setting in computational social choice theory. In an incomplete information setting, an extension of the winner determination problem which has been studied extensively is the problem of determining possible winners. We study the kernelization complexity (under the complexity-theoretic framework of parameterized complexity) of the possible winner problem in Chapter 7. We show that there do not exist kernels of size that is polynomial in the number of alternatives for this problem for commonly used voting rules under a plausible complexity theoretic assumption. However, we also show that the problem of coalitional manipulation which is an important special case of the possible winner problem admits a kernel whose size is polynomial bounded in the number of alternatives for common voting rules. \Part III: Election Control. In the final part of the thesis, we study the computational complexity of various interesting aspects of strategic behaviour in voting. First, we consider the impact of partial information in the context of strategic manipulation in Chapter 8. We show that lack of complete information makes the computational problem of manipulation intractable for many commonly used voting rules. In Chapter 9, we initiate the study of the computational problem of detecting possible instances of election manipulation. We show that detecting manipulation may be computationally easy under certain scenarios even when manipulation is intractable. The computational problem of bribery is an extensively studied problem in computational social choice theory. We study computational complexity of bribery when the briber is “frugal” in nature. We show for many common voting rules that the bribery problem remains intractable even when the briber’s behaviour is restricted to be frugal, thereby strengthening the intractability results from the literature. This forms the subject of Chapter 10.

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