Energy transitions, sub-national government and regime flexibility : how has devolution in the United Kingdom affected renewable energy development?

We acknowledge the support of the Economic and Social Research Council for funding the research on which this paper was based (Grant Number RES-062-23-2526).Peer reviewedPostprin

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationAtravesada: the traveler, the scholar inside and outside research, inside and outside the academy; an identity taken up to survive the contradictions associated with research. Drawing from Chicana/Latina feminist, anticolonial, and queer of color thought, this study examines the testimonios/pláticas of eight Chicana/Latina feminist education scholars who actively disrupt research methods. The testimonios/pláticas alongside a review of key texts shed light on the problems that can occur while conducting research in academic spaces. The problems identified and theorized through the testimonios/pláticas include: construction of knowledge, modes of representation, issues of voice, and researcher roles. While these issues are familiar, the testimonios/pláticas exposed feelings and emotions associated critical research practices. These feelings-including passion, fear, and pain-allow and support reimagining of research through alternative forms of mentorship practices, community-based research, and accessibility that support processes of healing and critical reflexivity in research. Data are displayed through thick textual narratives and narrative reflections of the author. This study adds nuance to a growing body of research on Chicana/Latina epistemologies and methodologies and contributes to critical qualitative research discussions by raising challenges to data analysis and representation and reimagining researcher subjectivity

Group SELFIES: A Robust Fragment-Based Molecular String Representation

We introduce Group SELFIES, a molecular string representation that leverages group tokens to represent functional groups or entire substructures while maintaining chemical robustness guarantees. Molecular string representations, such as SMILES and SELFIES, serve as the basis for molecular generation and optimization in chemical language models, deep generative models, and evolutionary methods. While SMILES and SELFIES leverage atomic representations, Group SELFIES builds on top of the chemical robustness guarantees of SELFIES by enabling group tokens, thereby creating additional flexibility to the representation. Moreover, the group tokens in Group SELFIES can take advantage of inductive biases of molecular fragments that capture meaningful chemical motifs. The advantages of capturing chemical motifs and flexibility are demonstrated in our experiments, which show that Group SELFIES improves distribution learning of common molecular datasets. Further experiments also show that random sampling of Group SELFIES strings improves the quality of generated molecules compared to regular SELFIES strings. Our open-source implementation of Group SELFIES is available online, which we hope will aid future research in molecular generation and optimization.Comment: 11 pages + references and appendi

Factors shaping the evolution of electronic documentation systems

The main goal is to prepare the space station technical and managerial structure for likely changes in the creation, capture, transfer, and utilization of knowledge. By anticipating advances, the design of Space Station Project (SSP) information systems can be tailored to facilitate a progression of increasingly sophisticated strategies as the space station evolves. Future generations of advanced information systems will use increases in power to deliver environmentally meaningful, contextually targeted, interconnected data (knowledge). The concept of a Knowledge Base Management System is emerging when the problem is focused on how information systems can perform such a conversion of raw data. Such a system would include traditional management functions for large space databases. Added artificial intelligence features might encompass co-existing knowledge representation schemes; effective control structures for deductive, plausible, and inductive reasoning; means for knowledge acquisition, refinement, and validation; explanation facilities; and dynamic human intervention. The major areas covered include: alternative knowledge representation approaches; advanced user interface capabilities; computer-supported cooperative work; the evolution of information system hardware; standardization, compatibility, and connectivity; and organizational impacts of information intensive environments

Exploring Annotation-free Image Captioning with Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation

Training an image captioner without annotated image-sentence pairs has gained traction in recent years. Previous approaches can be categorized into two strategies: crawling sentences from mismatching corpora and aligning them with the given images as pseudo annotations, or pre-training the captioner using external image-text pairs. However, the aligning setting seems to reach its performance limit due to the quality problem of pairs, and pre-training requires significant computational resources. To address these challenges, we propose a new strategy ``LPM + retrieval-augmented learning" where the prior knowledge from large pre-trained models (LPMs) is leveraged as supervision, and a retrieval process is integrated to further reinforce its effectiveness. Specifically, we introduce Retrieval-augmented Pseudo Sentence Generation (RaPSG), which adopts an efficient approach to retrieve highly relevant short region descriptions from the mismatching corpora and use them to generate a variety of pseudo sentences with distinct representations as well as high quality via LPMs. In addition, a fluency filter and a CLIP-guided training objective are further introduced to facilitate model optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses the SOTA pre-training model (Flamingo3B) by achieving a CIDEr score of 78.1 (+5.1) while utilizing only 0.3% of its trainable parameters (1.3B VS 33M). Importantly, our approach eliminates the need of computationally expensive pre-training processes on external datasets (e.g., the requirement of 312M image-text pairs for Flamingo3B). We further show that with a simple extension, the generated pseudo sentences can be deployed as weak supervision to boost the 1% semi-supervised image caption benchmark up to 93.4 CIDEr score (+8.9) which showcases the versatility and effectiveness of our approach.Comment: 10 pages 5 figure

Proeja’s classroom as a space for teacher education

We developed this research focusing on the classroom as a space for teacher education, aiming at pointing out which of the teachers’ knowledges are re-signified in a mathematics classroom of Proeja-Ifes-Vitória. We emphasize the importance of a school space of interaction among the people involved, aware that although learning is an individual process, it occurs collectively. We opted for a qualitative research, based on an in-situ observation, with written records and filming that would assure us a greater proximity with the perceptions of the field of subjectivity. As a theoretical framework that discusses teacher education from a critical perspective, we use the works of Charlot, D'Ambrósio and Freire. From the results, we can point out that the openness to the transformation of Eja modality can be the foundation for a new teaching-learning process, since we saw in the classroom an articulation of knowledges, sometimes of the theoretical field and sometimes of lived experience, a clear sign of the perceptions of these teachers' knowledges. Adding that if the same process of educating while teaching follows intentionality, that is, the awareness of the fact, we may consider the exercise of self-education more likely

Cuz It\u27s in My Blood : Bilingual Latinx Youth, Their Decolonial Visions, and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative for Educators

The pervasive deficit lens of multilingual language learners (MLLs) in U.S. education dehumanizes and fragments students in ways that disconnect them from their cultural and linguistic identities (CLI). MLLs are first and foremost humans with rich linguistic heritages, complex cultural backgrounds, and multiple and non-mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing (de los Ríos & Molina, 2020; Kasun, 2016). The deficit lens is a legacy of colonization that persists in our schools. Colonial education saw Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) transnationals as savage and backwards with cultures and languages that needed to be erased in order for them to assimilate into dominant, mainstream U.S. culture. These colonial legacies persist in our schools today. The intent of this critical ethnographic, arts-based, youth participatory action research (YPAR) study was to explore the experiences of MLLs as they learned about and made sense of their CLI in the context of a critical multimodal, multiliteracies, ethnic studies, arts-based summer collaborative called Nuestra Escuelita. The study was framed overall by a decolonizing framework through which the researcher sought to address the persisting colonial legacies in schools and their fragmenting and dehumanizing effects on MLL students. The participants were fourteen high school, bilingual, Latinx MLLs. The overarching assertion is that the students experienced a decolonial journey towards healing, wholeness, and humanity. Specifically, this journey is reflected in the four findings: 1) feeling connections of community and care; 2) reweaving the tapestries of their identities and heritage; 3) activating critical consciousness through historical learnings, shadow work and shifts toward power; and 4) feeling inspiration for change and imagining a decolonial vision for new educational futures. These findings represent the students’ experiences, and their journey mirrored the seven stages of Anzaldúa’s (2015) conocimiento. Implications include centering MLLs’ CLI in curriculum and the need for implementing ethnic studies programs for the New Latinx/Global South youth