General overview of the Puerto Rican signed language interpreter

The aim of this research is to explore the research question: What is the general profile of the Puerto Rican signed language interpreter? The purpose of this study was to identify the overall characteristics of the Puerto Rican signed language interpreter, including the demographics, their training in interpreting, and their work settings, experiences, needs, and challenges. This study used a mixed methods approach; the data was collected from a survey and three interviews. According to the data, the signed language interpreting field in Puerto Rico is behind compared to the field in the United States, due to lack of research and limited educational opportunities for continuing education. The data revealed that the signed language interpreting field in Puerto Rico is still young; it is dominated by females and a majority of interpreters work in educational and VRS settings. Most Puerto Rican signed language interpreters feel that they need more educational support

Master of Science

thesisTensors are mathematical representations of physical entities that have magnitude with multiple directions. Tensor contraction is a form of creating these objects using the Einstein summation equation. It is commonly used in physics and chemistry for solving problems like spectral elements and coupled cluster computation. Mathematically, tensor contraction operations can be reduced to expressions similar to matrix multiplications. However, linear algebra libraries (e.g., BLAS and LAPACK) perform poorly on the small matrix sizes that commonly arise in certain tensor contraction computations. Another challenge seen in the computation of tensor contraction is the dierence between the mathematical representation and an ecient implementation. This thesis proposes a framework that allows users to express a tensor contraction problem in a high-level mathematical representation and transform it into a linear algebra expression that is mapped to a high-performance implementation. The framework produces code that takes advantage of the parallelism that graphics processing units (GPUs) provide. It relies on autotuning to nd the preferred implementation that achieves high performance on the available device. Performance results from the benchmarks tested, nekbone and NWChem, show that the output of the framework achieves a speedup of 8.56x and 14.25x, respectively, on an NVIDIA Tesla C2050 GPU against the sequential version; while using an NVIDIA Tesla K20c GPU it achieved speedups of 8.87x and 17.62x. The parallel decompositions found by the tool were also tested with an OpenACC implementation and achieved a speedup of 8.87x and 10.42x for nekbone, while NWChem obtained a speedup of 7.25x and 10.34x compared to the choices made by default in the OpenACC compiler. The contributions of this work are: (1) a simplied interface that allows the user to express tensor contraction using a high-level representation and transform it into high-performance code; (2) a decision algorithm that explores a set of optimization strategies for achieving performance; and, (3) a demonstration that this approach can achieve better performance than OpenACC and can be used to accelerate OpenACC

Expanding Carceral Frontiers: The 100-Mile Border Zone and Constituting Latinx Political Subjectivity

The thesis has two interrelated concerns. The first explores the emergence of the 100-mile border zone in order to study how the U.S. has expanded its borders inward and redefined notions of national security and carcerality. The second will define the 100-mile border as a carceral frontier that has emerged from previous years of racial security operations such as “Operation Wetback” in 1953. Moreover, I will demonstrate how the 100-mile border zone, a carceral frontier, blends the logic of security and the carceral in order to create a space of total state control. This inward turn of the 100-mile border zone and the security and carcerality of this space reveals much about the constitution of the sovereign state’s right to define and secure its borders within the nation, the rights of the state over that of the citizen, a citizen\u27s right to free movement and due process, and the racial dynamics of security actions. To explore this contradictory logic of security, I conduct an analysis of security language on border and immigration “operations” that constituted the emergence of the 100-mile border zone since 1953. Through this analysis, I will argue that the 100-mile border zone, as a carceral frontier, is a new theoretical development in Critical Carceral Studies. In this way, this thesis will engage in Securitization Studies, Border Theory, and Carceral theories. This type of analysis will reveal that the 100-mile border zone, and the making of this carceral frontier, is inextricably bound to the rights and status of Latinx

The Adapted Ordering Method for Lie Algebras and Superalgebras and their Generalizations

In 1998 the Adapted Ordering Method was developed for the representation theory of the superconformal algebras in two dimensions. It allows: to determine maximal dimensions for a given type of space of singular vectors, to identify all singular vectors by only a few coefficients, to spot subsingular vectors and to set the basis for constructing embedding diagrams. In this article we present the Adapted Ordering Method for general Lie algebras and superalgebras, and their generalizations, provided they can be triangulated. We also review briefly the results obtained for the Virasoro algebra and for the N=2 and Ramond N=1 superconformal algebras.Comment: Many improvements in the redaction for pedagogical purposes. Latex, 11 page