Final Report/Synopsis of Research Results:

This research project is an ethnographic investigation of a microcredit-based development initiative in Ciudad del Este, a commercial “special customs zone” on Paraguay’s triple-frontier with Brazil and Argentina.  As a border town, much of the economic activity in Ciudad del Este is based on cross-border trade.  I began this project with an interest in how development projects that aim at financial inclusion operate in a city already configured by extensive commercial activity: even marginal neighborhoods in Ciudad del Este are caught up in the financial flows of cross-border trade and petty arbitrage.  If the microfinance Non-Government Organization (NGO)— Fundación Paraguaya —is working through solidarity loans to foster entrepreneurship in its  committees of women entrepreneurs,  how is the institutional notion of entrepreneurship similar to or different from the lived-experience of commerce in the ‘special customs zone?’  How does microcredit-based development fit into the many small-scale credit options available in Ciudad del Este?

Through interviews with adult children of queer parents, this paper begins to understand the possibilities, consequences, and limitations of queer families and to take seriously the lives and feelings of queer-raised adults as a potential site for theorizing. This project contributes to conversations in queer theory surrounding children and family – conversations that, while lively and contentious, have yet to contend with the actual experiences of adults raised by queer people. Through qualitative analysis of informal interviews with people raised by queer parents this thesis considers two main sites of tension – how adult children of queer people navigate and refuse visibility and legibility and how we respond to pressures to perform as the “happy, healthy and heterosexual” children of our parents. These themes, as well as our potential wisdom in intergenerational queer and feminist conversations, are potential entry points for taking adult children of queer seriously as thinkers in queer theory.

This dissertation includes contributions to both live programming and program verification and explores how programming environments can be designed to leverage benefits of both concepts in an integrated way.

Programming environments assist users in both writing program code and understanding program behavior. A fast feedback loop can significantly improve this process. In particular, live programming provides continuous feedback for live code updates of running programs. This idea can also be applied to program verification. In general, verifiers statically check programs based on source code annotations such as invariants, pre- and postconditions. However, verification errors are often hard to understand, so programming environment integration is crucial for supporting the development process.

The research for this dissertation involved the implementation of esverify, a program verifier for JavaScript, as well as prototype implementations of multiple programming environments. These implementations demonstrate potential benefits and limitations of proposed solutions and enable empirical evaluation with case and user studies. Additionally, the proposed designs were formally defined in order to explain the core idea in a concise way and to prove properties independent of concrete specifics of existing systems and programming languages.

The resulting systems represent possible solutions in a vast design space with various contributions. The research on live programming showed that a programming model that separates event handling from output rendering enables not only live code updates but also runtime version control and programming-by-example. For program verification, esverify represents a novel approach for static verification of both higher-order functional programs and dynamically-typed programming idioms. esverify can verify nontrivial algorithms such as MergeSort and a formal proof in the Lean theorem prover shows that its verification rules are sound. Finally, a programming environment based on esverify supports inspection and live edits of verification conditions including step-by-step debugging of automatically generated tests that serve as executable counterexamples. As part of a user study, participants used these features effectively to solve programming tasks and generally found them to be helpful or potentially helpful.

Quantum information has emerged as a unifying force in our understanding of large-scale quantum mechanical systems. In quantum technologies, the precise dispersal of quantum information enables computational advantages beyond those of any classical computer. In quantum materials, spatial patterns in the quantum information of electrons give rise to topological phases, with exotic properties when these patterns are "cut" by a material boundary. In more remarkable systems still, quantum information appears central to the unification of quantum mechanics and gravity, one of the frontier open questions in our understanding of the universe. At the same time, the emergence of quantum technologies and accompanying theoretical developments have motivated a widespread interest in dynamical quantum phenomena. In this thesis, I explore several questions at the interface of quantum information and many-body quantum dynamics. Can dynamical many-body quantum systems realize stable coherent quantum phenomena---for example, topological phases---beyond those of static systems? How does quantum information move under many-body dynamics? How can we characterize this movement, and what are its physical implications? And finally, what are the best strategies to learn properties of unknown quantum dynamics from measurements involving them? These inquiries are united by their pursuit to realize and understand large-scale quantum mechanical phenomena in the world around us.

When a liquid is cooled below its melting temperature under conditions that prevent it from crystallizing, it forms an amorphous solid, or "glass." Glass-forming materials are ubiquitous, ranging from familiar silica glasses of which everyday windows are composed, to liquid water. While structurally indistinguishable from high-temperature liquids, supercooled liquids exhibit rich and complex dynamics. For instance, as the temperature is lowered, structural reorganization within supercooled liquids occurs over increasingly long time scales. Inspecting atomistic mobility over an interval of time reveals that dynamics is "heterogeneous," with distinct regions of mobility and immobility in space-time. In this dissertation, we characterize glassy dynamics in experimental systems and in coarse-grained lattice models. We show how the characteristic dynamics of atomistic glass-forming materials can be reproduced using a kinetically constrained lattice model referred to as the Arrow model, and thus present glassy dynamics "on a lattice." We then show that combining the Arrow model with a second lattice model that undergoes a thermodynamic phase transition captures the competition between crystallization and glass formation experienced by a material cooled below its melting temperature. With this combined model, we demonstrate how specific cooling protocols influence polycrystalline structure, and we qualitatively reproduce the non-monotonic temperature dependence of crystallization time scales. Finally, we explore glassy dynamics "in nature" by applying many of the same tools and ideas used to characterize glasses to study dynamical features of protein side-chains. We demonstrate the presence of supercooled liquid-like dynamics in a biomolecular system.