Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

So How To Make Group Decisions? Arrow's Impossibility Theorem 70 Years After, Hung T. Nguyen, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

In 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved that it is not possible to have a group decision making procedure that satisfies reasonable requirements like fairness. From the theoretical viewpoint, this is a great result -- well-deserving the Nobel Prize that was awarded to Professor Arrow. However, from the practical viewpoint, the question remains -- so how should we make group decisions? A usual way to solve this problem is to provide some reasonable heuristic ideas, but the problem is that different seemingly reasonable idea often lead to different group decision -- this is known, e.g., for different voting schemes. In this paper, …

Connectivism: Adopting Quantum Holism In International Relations, Grant Randal Highland

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The current scientific context of both quantum science and an ever-increasingly connected global citizenry has set the conditions for a new perspective whereby the social sciences are on the cusp of adopting a quantum approach of probability and potentiality versus the clockwork mechanistic determinism of cause-and-effect Newtonian mechanics. While a scientific realist approach toward the application of quantum science to the social sciences is germane, there is a valid reason international relations should also consider and adopt the philosophical worldviews outside the genealogical canon of our early western forbears, as well as the philosophical explorations of consciousness and humanism which …

State Antifragility: An Agent-Based Modeling Approach To Understanding State Behavior, Rebecca Lee Law

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding what makes states antifragile and why this matters by constructing a parsimonious, first of its kind agent-based model. The model focuses on the key elements of state antifragility that reside along a spectrum of fragility and transverse bidirectionally from fragile to resilient to antifragile given a certain set of environmental conditions.

First coined by Nicholas Nassim Taleb and applied to economics, antifragility is a nascent concept. In 2015, Nassim Taleb and Gregory Treverton’s article in Foreign Affairs outlined five characteristics of state antifragility. This project aims to advance the study of anti-fragility …

Move: Mobile Observers Variants And Extensions, Ryan Florin

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Traffic state estimation is a fundamental task of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Recent advances in sensor technology and emerging computer and vehicular communications paradigms have brought the task of estimating traffic state parameters in real-time within reach.

This has led to the main research question of this thesis: Can a vehicle accurately estimate traffic parameters using onboard resources shared through CV technology in a lightweight manner without utilizing centralized or roadside infrastructure?

In 1954 Wardrop and Charlesworth proposed the Moving Observer method to measure traffic parameters based on an observed number of vehicle passes. We start by proposing methods for detecting …

Codar's Surface Flow At The Mouth Of The Chesapeake Bay: Relation To Bay's And Atlantic's Forcing, Shelby Kathryn Henderson

OES Theses and Dissertations

Surface currents in the lower Chesapeake Bay (CB) observed with land-based high-frequency radar antennas, or Coastal Ocean Dynamics Application Radar (CODAR), produce hourly 2D maps of current velocities used for search and rescue, pollution tracking, and fishing operations. This study analyzes the correlations between a 9-year record of surface currents measured by CODAR to coastal sea level, local wind forcing, river discharge into CB, and water transport through the Florida Straits, representing the Gulf Stream’s control on sea level along the U.S. mid-Atlantic coast. The goal of this study is to find ways to use CODAR data to detect and …

Methods For Detecting Floodwater On Roadways From Ground Level Images, Cem Sazara

Computational Modeling & Simulation Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Recent research and statistics show that the frequency of flooding in the world has been increasing and impacting flood-prone communities severely. This natural disaster causes significant damages to human life and properties, inundates roads, overwhelms drainage systems, and disrupts essential services and economic activities. The focus of this dissertation is to use machine learning methods to automatically detect floodwater in images from ground level in support of the frequently impacted communities. The ground level images can be retrieved from multiple sources, including the ones that are taken by mobile phone cameras as communities record the state of their flooded streets. …

Improving Collection Understanding For Web Archives With Storytelling: Shining Light Into Dark And Stormy Archives, Shawn M. Jones

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

Collections are the tools that people use to make sense of an ever-increasing number of archived web pages. As collections themselves grow, we need tools to make sense of them. Tools that work on the general web, like search engines, are not a good fit for these collections because search engines do not currently represent multiple document versions well. Web archive collections are vast, some containing hundreds of thousands of documents. Thousands of collections exist, many of which cover the same topic. Few collections include standardized metadata. Too many documents from too many collections with insufficient metadata makes collection understanding …

21st Century Ecopoetics And Ecotheory, Robert Balun

Open Educational Resources

Ecopoetics is the study of literature that is concerned with ecology and nature. However, beyond just literature about nature, this course will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated in the 21st century, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of the climate crisis and the 6th mass extinction (don’t worry, we will define these and other key terms).

In the 21st century, humans are now confronted with a growing awareness of their destructive impact on the earth, its environments, and its human and non-human inhabitants. In this class we will examine how ecology and nature have become complicated …

Step-Wise Deep Learning Models For Solving Routing Problems, Liang Xin, Wen Song, Zhiguang Cao, Jie Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Routing problems are very important in intelligent transportation systems. Recently, a number of deep learning-based methods are proposed to automatically learn construction heuristics for solving routing problems. However, these methods do not completely follow Bellman's Principle of Optimality since the visited nodes during construction are still included in the following subtasks, resulting in suboptimal policies. In this article, we propose a novel step-wise scheme which explicitly removes the visited nodes in each node selection step. We apply this scheme to two representative deep models for routing problems, pointer network and transformer attention model (TAM), and significantly improve the performance of …

Internal And External Factors’ Influence On Recycling: Insights From A Laboratory Experiment With Observed Behavior, Nooh Linder, Sonny Rosenthal, Patrik Sorqvist, Stephan Barthel

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Internal psychological factors, such as intentions and personal norms, are central predictors of pro-environmental behavior in many theoretical models, whereas the influence from external factors such as the physical environment is seldom considered. Even rarer is studying how internal factors interact with the physical context in which decisions take place. In the current study, we addressed the relative influence and interaction of psychological and environmental factors on pro-environmental behavior. A laboratory experiment presented participants (N = 399) with a choice to dispatch a used plastic cup in a recycling or general waste bin after participating in a staged “yogurt taste …

Bridging The Simulation-To-Reality Gap: Adapting Simulation Environment For Object Recognition, Hardik Yogesh Sonetta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Rapid advancements in object recognition have created a huge demand for labeled datasets for the task of training, testing, and validation of different techniques. Due to the wide range of applications, object models in the datasets need to cover both variations in geometric features and diverse conditions in which sensory inputs are obtained. Also, the need to manually label the object models is cumbersome. As a result, it becomes difficult for researchers to gain access to adequate datasets for the development of new methods or algorithms. In comparison, computer simulation has been considered a cost-effective solution to generate simulated data …

Frameaxis: Characterizing Microframe Bias And Intensity With Word Embedding, Haewoon Kwak, Jisun An, Elise Jing Jing, Yong-Yeol Ahn

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Framing is a process of emphasizing a certain aspect of an issue over the others, nudging readers or listeners towards different positions on the issue even without making a biased argument. Here, we propose FrameAxis, a method for characterizing documents by identifying the most relevant semantic axes (“microframes”) that are overrepresented in the text using word embedding. Our unsupervised approach can be readily applied to large datasets because it does not require manual annotations. It can also provide nuanced insights by considering a rich set of semantic axes. FrameAxis is designed to quantitatively tease out two important dimensions of how …

A Look Into Increasing The Number Of Veterans And Former Government Employees Converting To Career And Technical Cybersecurity Teachers, Vukica M. Jovanovic, Michael Anthony Crespo, Drew E. Brown, Deborah Marshall, Otilia Popescu, Murat Kuzlu, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Linda Vahala

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

The current state of technology with recent explosions in the digital processing of paperwork, computer networking use, and online and virtual approaches to areas, which until very recently had traditional and non-computerized ways of operating, led to a steady increase in the demand for jobs in the area of computer science and cybersecurity. The education system, the pipeline for the incoming workforce, needs to keep up with this tremendous pace in technology and the job market. The current K-12 school system has been extensively challenged to fill out necessary positions in order to address the increasing need for programs that …

Developing An Effective Targeted Mobile Application To Enhance Transportation Safety And Use Of Active Transportation Modes In Fresno County: The Role Of Application Design & Content, Samer Sarofim

Mineta Transportation Institute

Do pedestrians and cyclists need their own app? Pedestrians and cyclists in Fresno county think so, and this research examined this need and how it relates to the importance of app design. Survey participants (all who regularly use active transportation modes) along with a variety of transportation stakeholders, including the Fresno Council of Government, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) District 6, and the City of Fresno — Public Works Department, indicated the importance of designing effective communication tools to enhance the utilization of active transportation modes and to ensure the safety of vulnerable road users. In this study, over …

Efficient Heuristic Solutions To Scheduling Online Courses, Rida Zaidi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The demand for efficient algorithms to automate (near-)optimal timetables has motivated many well-studied scheduling problems in operational research. With most of the courses moving online during the recent pandemic, the delivery of quality education has raised many new technical issues, including online course scheduling. This thesis considers the problem of yielding a near-optimal schedule of the real-time courses in an educational institute, taking into account the conflict among courses, the constraint on the simultaneous consumption of the bandwidth at the hosting servers of the courses, and the maximum utilization of the prime time for the lectures. We propose three approaches …

Simulating Subject Communities In Case Law Citation Networks, Jerrold Tsin Howe Soh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

We propose and evaluate generative models for case law citation networks that account for legal authority, subject relevance, and time decay. Since Common Law systems rely heavily on citations to precedent, case law citation networks present a special type of citation graph which existing models do not adequately reproduce. We describe a general framework for simulating node and edge generation processes in such networks, including a procedure for simulating case subjects, and experiment with four methods of modelling subject relevance: using subject similarity as linear features, as fitness coefficients, constraining the citable graph by subject, and computing subject-sensitive PageRank scores. …

Deep Learning Approaches For Seagrass Detection In Multispectral Imagery, Kazi Aminul Islam

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Seagrass forms the basis for critically important marine ecosystems. Seagrass is an important factor to balance marine ecological systems, and it is of great interest to monitor its distribution in different parts of the world. Remote sensing imagery is considered as an effective data modality based on which seagrass monitoring and quantification can be performed remotely. Traditionally, researchers utilized multispectral satellite images to map seagrass manually. Automatic machine learning techniques, especially deep learning algorithms, recently achieved state-of-the-art performances in many computer vision applications. This dissertation presents a set of deep learning models for seagrass detection in multispectral satellite images. It …

Geolocation Of Monitoring Wells Using Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Joel Deyoung

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Groundwater monitoring wells are commonly installed on a property as part of an environmental investigation to observe hydrological subsurface conditions, facilitate the collection of groundwater samples, and predict the flow of groundwater across a site. In addition to their installation, monitoring wells should be surveyed or mapped as accurately as possible. Traditional surveying techniques have employed the use of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) technologies or other surveying equipment. A common surveying approach is to use real-time kinematic (RTK) GNSS to accurately measure the coordinates of each monitoring well on the site.In recent years, drones, or small unmanned aircraft systems …

Towards A Large-Scale Intelligent Mobile-Argumentation And Discovering Arguments, Controversial Topics And Topic-Oriented Focal Sets In Cyber-Argumentation, Najla Althuniyan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

User-generated content (UGC) platforms host different forms of information, such as audio, video, pictures, and text. They have many online applications, such as social media, blogs, photo and video sharing, customer reviews, debate, and deliberation platforms. Usually, the content of these platforms is provided and consumed by users. Most of these platforms, mainly social media and blogs, are often used for online discussion. These platforms offer tools for users to share and express opinions. Commonly, people from different backgrounds and origins discuss opinions about various issues over the Internet. Furthermore, discussions among users contain substantial information from which knowledge about …

Of Biodiversity, Boundaries, And Distribution: The Myxomycetes Of The Philippines And Beyond, Sittie Aisha Bustamante Macabago

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation contains a compilation of independently performed studies primarily focusing on the myxomycetes (plasmodial slime molds) from the Philippines and integrating local and worldwide data to demonstrate regional and global trends. The major themes include the following: (I) a review of the diverse group of spore-producing amoeboid protists, including the myxomycetes; (II-IV) diversity assessments in three different groups of islands in the Philippine archipelago; (V) mapping the myxomycetes found in the Philippines for databasing and analyzing the geocoded data; (VI) a study on regional boundaries, including the Philippines, using myxomycete species composition; and, (VII) creating a global species distribution …

Microfabrication And Electrochemical Characterization Of A Novel Su-8 Probe With An Array Of Individually Addressable Electrodes Suitable For Redox Cycling Experiments In Ultra-Small Volumes, Mahsa Lotfi Marchoubeh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Redox cycling is an electrochemical technique that utilizes closely spaced generator and collector electrodes to cycle reversible redox species between their oxidative states. With advantages in signal amplification, selectivity of species based on their electrochemical reaction mechanism, and limited or no background subtraction, this technique is well suited for selective detection of important electrochemically active molecules such as dopamine at basal or slowly changing levels.

Miniaturized medical devices have become an area of great interest for measurement of chemicals in limited volumes with low concentrations or in sensitive tissues. A probe on a polymeric SU-8 substrate with suitable dimensions and …

Promoting Diversity In Academic Research Communities Through Multivariate Expert Recommendation, Omar Salman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Expert recommendation is the process of identifying individuals who have the appropriate knowledge and skills to achieve a specific task. It has been widely used in the educational environment mainly in the hiring process, paper-reviewer assignment, and assembling conference program committees. In this research, we highlight the problem of diversity and fair representation of underrepresented groups in expertise recommendation, factors that current expertise recommendation systems rarely consider. We introduce a novel way to model experts in academia by considering demographic attributes in addition to skills. We use the h-index score to quantify skills for a researcher and we identify five …

Riverology: Promoting Stewardship Of Rivers Through Youth Participation In Science And Art, Robin R. Dunbar

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This project focuses on mentoring children to help reduce marine debris in their local river by implementing one of ten lessons from an inquiry-based Riverology curriculum to empower youth voice, increase geo-literacy, and spatial thinking. Eighteen participants aged seven and eight, piloted Riverology Lesson 2: What Do I Know or Imagine about the Elizabeth River? that includes six steps: inquire, visualize, draw, share, act, and reflect. The children were asked to make drawings before and after viewing an Elizabeth River Story Map presentation (Dunbar, 2021a). The drawings were then compared to see if the participants included marine debris, stewardship solutions, …

Examining Melt Pond Dynamics And Light Availability In The Arctic Ocean Via High Resolution Satellite Imagery, Austin Wesley Abbott

OES Theses and Dissertations

As the Arctic experiences consequences of climate change, a shift from thicker, multi-year ice to thinner, first-year ice has been observed. First-year ice is prone to extensive pools of meltwater (“melt ponds”) forming on its surface, which enhance light transmission to the ocean. Changes in the timing and distribution of melt pond formation and associated increases in under-ice light availability are the primary drivers for seasonal progression of water column primary production and warming. Observations of melt pond development and distribution require meter scale resolution and have traditionally been limited to airborne images. However, recent advances in high spatial resolution …

Towards An Integrated Assessment Of Sea-Level Observations Along The U.S. Atlantic Coast, Brett A. Buzzanga

OES Theses and Dissertations

Sea levels are rising globally due to anthropogenic climate change. However, local sea levels that impact coastal ecosystems often differ from the global trend, sometimes by a factor of two or more. Improved understanding of this regional variability provides insights into geophysical processes and has implications for coastal communities developing resilience to ongoing sea-level rise. This dissertation conducts an investigation of sea level and its contributing processes at multiple spatial scales. Focusing on primarily interannual time-scales and data-driven approaches, new data sources and technologies are utilized to reduce current uncertainties.

First, sea-level trends are assessed over the global ocean and …

Implications Of The Links Between Demography And Ecology For The Economy Of The Republic Of Karakalpakstan, Keunimjay Allanazarov, Gulya Khodjaeva, Katherine Shields

Karakalpak Scientific Journal

This article analyzes the impact of demographic factor on territorial organization of production in rural areas of the Republic of Karakalpakstan and reveals the main trends in production development. The analysis of statistical data of rural areas is given and proposals to improve the negative situation are given. More than 1306.8 thousand people live in rural areas of the Republic of Karakalpakstan, where they are concentrated in 1187 settlements, 26 urban settlements, and 11 towns of district subordination. All this testifies to the presence of large undeveloped production reserves and huge human potential. However, due to reduction of Amudarya water …

Calibration-Based Estimators Using Different Distance Measures Under Two Auxiliary Variables: A Comparative Study, Piyush Kant Rai, Alka Singh, Muhammad Qasim

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

This article introduces calibration estimators under different distance measures based on two auxiliary variables in stratified sampling. The theory of the calibration estimator is presented. The calibrated weights based on different distance functions are also derived. A simulation study has been carried out to judge the performance of the proposed estimators based on the minimum relative root mean squared error criterion. A real-life data set is also used to confirm the supremacy of the proposed method.

Pareto Distribution Under Hybrid Censoring: Some Estimation, Gyan Prakash

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

In the present study, the Pareto model is considered as the model from which observations are to be estimated using a Bayesian approach. Properties of the Bayes estimators for the unknown parameters have studied by using different asymmetric loss functions on hybrid censoring pattern and their risks have compared. The properties of maximum likelihood estimation and approximate confidence length have also been investigated under hybrid censoring. The performances of the procedures are illustrated based on simulated data obtained under the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and a real data set.

Weather And Crime: New York State, Yuna Kim

Student Theses

The present study assesses the degree to which temperature affects the crime rates in all 62 counties in the State of New York. Five different crimes (i.e., robbery, aggravated assault, burglary; larceny, and motor vehicle theft) for the year 2019 were selected from the Division of Criminal Justice Services of New York to be examined. The current study examined whether the rate of these crimes was associated with the changes in weather, with the assumption that higher weathers would lead to higher property and violent crimes, when controlling for the effect of various control variables. The findings suggest that the …

Climate-Induced Stressors To Peace: A Review Of Recent Literature, Ayyoob Sharifi, Dahlia Simangan, Chui Ying Lee, Rose Reyes, Tarek Katramiz, Jairus Carmela C. Josol, Leticia Dos Muchangos, Hassan Virji, Shinji Kaneko, Thea Kersti Tandog, Leorence Tandog, Moinul Islam

Environmental Science Faculty Publications

Climate change is increasingly recognized as a threat to global peace and security. This paper intends to provide a better understanding of the nature of interactions between climate change and events that undermine peace through a systematic review of recent literature. It highlights major methodological approaches adopted in the literature, elaborates on the geographic focus of the research at the nexus of climate change and peace, and provides further information on how various climatic stressors, such as extreme temperature, floods, sea-level rise, storms, and water stress may be linked to different events that undermine peace (e.g. civil conflict, crime, intercommunal …