Digital Commons Network^™

Still A New Problem For Defeasibility: A Rejoinder To Borges, John Nicholas Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

I gave a new objection to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, namely that prohibits you from knowing that you know that p if your knowledge that p is a posteriori. Rodrigo Borges claims that Peter Klein has already satisfactorily replied to a version of my objection. He attempts to defend this reply and argues that my objection fails because a principle on which it is based is false. I show that my objection is not a version of the old one that Klein attempts (unsatisfactorily) to address, that Borges’s defence of Klein’s reply fails and that his argument against my …

Towards Integrated Historical Climate Research: The Example Of Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions Over The Earth, R. Allan, G. Endfield, V. Damodaran, G. Adamson, M. Hannaford, F. Carroll, N. Macdonald, N. Groom, J. Jones, Fiona Williamson, E. Hendy, P. Holper, J. Pablo, L. Hughes, L. Arroyo-Mora, R. Bickers, A.-M. Bliuc

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Climate change has become a key environmental narrative of the 21st century. However, emphasis on the science of climate change has overshadowed studies focusing on human interpretations of climate history, of adaptation and resilience, and of explorations of the institutions and cultural coping strategies that may have helped people adapt to climate changes in the past. Moreover, although the idea of climate change has been subject to considerable scrutiny by the physical sciences, recent climate scholarship has highlighted the need for a re-examination of the cultural and spatial dimensions of climate, with contributions from the interpretive humanities and social sciences. …

The Question Of School Resources And Student Achievement: A History And Reconsideration, Larry Hedges, Terri D. Pigott, Joshua Polanin, Ann Marie Ryan, Charles Tocci, Ryan T. Williams

Education: School of Education Faculty Publications and Other Works

One question posed continually over the past century of education research is to what extent school resources affect student outcomes. From the turn of the century to the present, a diverse set of actors, including politicians, physicians, and researchers from a number of disciplines, have studied whether and how money that is provided for schools translates into increased student achievement. The authors discuss the historical origins of the question of whether school resources relate to student achievement, and report the results of a meta- analysis of studies examining that relationship. They find that policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders have addressed …

Openline Newsletter, March/April 2016, Civil Service Council

OpenLine Newsletter

A monthly newsletter for Civil Service employees, March/April 2016.

A Business Zone Recommender System Based On Facebook And Urban Planning Data, Jovian Lin, Richard Jayadi Oentaryo, Ee Peng Lim, Casey Vu, Adrian Wei Liang Vu, Philips Kokoh And Prasetyo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present ZoneRec—a zone recommendation system for physical businesses in an urban city,which uses both public business data from Facebook and urban planning data. The systemconsists of machine learning algorithms that take in a business’ metadata and outputs a list ofrecommended zones to establish the business in. We evaluate our system using data of foodbusinesses in Singapore and assess the contribution of different feature groups to therecommendation quality.

Liver And Other Gastrointestinal Cancers Are Frequent In Mexican Americans, Ariana L. Garza, Kristina Vatcheva, Jen-Jung Pan, Mohammad H. Rahbar, Michael Fallon, Joseph B. Mccormick, Susan P. Fisher-Hoch

School of Mathematical & Statistical Sciences Faculty Publications

Background

Disease patterns in Mexican-American health-disparity populations differ from larger United States populations.

Aims

Determine frequency of gastrointestinal cancers in Mexican Americans.

Methods

We analyzed self-reported data from the Cameron County Hispanic Cohort where we find high rates of risk factors for cancer: obesity (48.5%), diabetes (30.7%). Participants provided cancer histories about themselves and first and second degree relatives. Logistic regression models assessed risk factors. Frequencies of cancer sites were ranked and validated using concurrent age local cancer registry data.

Results

Among 9,249 individuals (participants and their relatives) there were 1,184 individuals with reports of cancer. Among cohort participants under …

Mobilaudio – A Multimodal Content Delivery Platform For Geo-Services, James Carswell, Keith Gardiner, Charlie Cullen

Articles

Delivering high-quality context-relevant information in a timely manner is a priority for location-based services (LBS) where applications require an immediate response based on spatial interaction. Previous work in this area typically focused on ever more accurately determining this interaction and informing the user in the customary graphical way using the visual modality. This paper describes the research area of multimodal LBS and focuses on audio as the key delivery mechanism. This new research extends familiar graphical information delivery by introducing a geoservices platform for delivering multimodal content and navigation services. It incorporates a novel auditory user interface (AUI) that enables …

Diversity Maximization Speedup For Localizing Faults In Single-Fault And Multi-Fault Programs, Xin Xia, Liang Gong, Tien-Duy B. Le, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Hongyu Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Fault localization is useful for reducing debugging effort. Such techniques require test cases with oracles, which can determine whether a program behaves correctly for every test input. Although most fault localization techniques can localize faults relatively accurately even with a small number of test cases, choosing the right test cases and creating oracles for them are not easy. Test oracle creation is expensive because it can take much manual labeling effort (i.e., effort needed to decide whether the test cases pass or fail). Given a number of test cases to be executed, it is challenging to minimize the number of …

Learning To Find Topic Experts In Twitter Via Different Relations, Wei Wei, Gao Cong, Chunyan Miao, Feida Zhu, Guohui Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Expert finding has become a hot topic along with the flourishing of social networks, such as micro-blogging services like Twitter. Finding experts in Twitter is an important problem because tweets from experts are valuable sources that carry rich information (e.g., trends) in various domains. However, previous methods cannot be directly applied to Twitter expert finding problem. Recently, several attempts use the relations among users and Twitter Lists for expert finding. Nevertheless, these approaches only partially utilize such relations. To this end, we develop a probabilistic method to jointly exploit three types of relations (i.e., follower relation, user-list relation and list-list …

Spectral Pre And Post Processing For Infrared And Raman Spectroscopy Of Biological Tissues And Cells, Hugh Byrne, Peter Knief, Mark Keating, Franck Bonnier

Articles

Vibrational Spectroscopy, both infrared absorption and Raman spectroscopy, have attracted increasing attention for biomedical applications, from in vivo and ex vivo disease diagnostics and screening, to in vitro screening of therapeutics. There remain, however, many challenges related to the accuracy of analysis of physically and chemically inhomogeneous samples, across heterogeneous sample sets. Data preprocessing is required to deal with variations in instrumental responses and intrinsic spectral backgrounds and distortions in order to extract reliable spectral data. Data postprocessing is required to extract the most reliable information from the sample sets, based on often very subtle changes in spectra associated with …

The Research Express, Georgia Southern University

Research & Economic Development

• Grant Award Winners
• 8 Key Questions Considered by Reviewers of Grant Proposals
• U.S. House Supports New Bid to Require a “National Interest” Certification for NSF Grants
• Historical Trends for R&D Funding
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Faculty Intellectual Property In Capstone Design Projects, Jay R. Goldberg

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

Reports on the Capstone Design challenge, focusing on design challenges for the participants. By focusing on the design process and allowing students to gain hands-on experience in design, they help prepare students for careers in engineering. In many capstone design courses, students design a product or device to solve a problem and build and test a prototype to verify and validate the design. Student teams are often advised by some combination of industry sponsors, clinical advisors, and/or faculty advisors. Faculty advisors serve as technical advisors to the teams and provide guidance to keep them on track. They are not members …

Topological Contact Dynamics Iii: Uniqueness Of The Topological Hamiltonian And C0-Rigidity Of The Geodesic Flow, Stefan Müller, Peter Spaeth

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

We prove that a topological contact isotopy uniquely defines a topological contact Hamiltonian. Combined with previous results from [MS11], this generalizes the classical one-to-one correspondence between smooth contact isotopies and their generating smooth contact Hamiltonians and conformal factors to the group of topological contact dynamical systems. Applications of this generalized correspondence include C0 -rigidity of smooth contact Hamiltonians, a transformation law for topological contact dynamical systems, and C0 -rigidity of the geodesic flows of Riemannian manifolds.

Directed Proper Connection Of Graphs, Colton Magnant, Patrick R. Morley, Sarabeth A. Porter, Pouria Salehi Nowbandegani, Hua Wang

Mathematical Sciences: Faculty Publications

An edge-colored directed graph is called properly connected if, between every pair of vertices, there is a properly colored directed path. We study some conditions on directed graphs which guarantee the existence of a coloring that is properly connected. We also study conditions on a colored directed graph which guarantee that the coloring is properly connected.

An Overview Of The Every Student Succeeds Act, Charles J. Russo

Educational Leadership Faculty Publications

Controversial since becoming law in 2002 as the re-authorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been portrayed by critics as federal overreach in education, even as supporters viewed the bill as a necessary reform to improve the academic performance of students in K–12 schools. Regardless, NCLB proved so unwieldy that 43 states and the District of Columbia received waivers from many of its accountability provisions in return for adopting policies favored by the U.S. Department of Education (Layton 2015).

The recent seven-year-overdue re-authorization of the law received widespread bipartisan support …

Estimation Of Large Dimensional Factor Models With An Unknown Number Of Breaks, Shujie Ma, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we study the estimation of a large dimensional factor model when the factor loadings exhibit an unknown number of changes over time. We propose a novel three-step procedure to detect the breaks if any and then identify their locations. In the first step, we divide the whole time span into subintervals and fit a conventional factor model on each interval. In the second step, we apply the adaptive fused group Lasso to identify intervals containing a break. In the third step, we devise a grid search method to estimate the location of the break on each identified …

Model Selection For Explosive Models, Yubo Tao, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the limit properties of information criteria for distinguishing between the unit root model and the various kinds of explosive models. The information criteria include AIC, BIC, HQIC. The explosive models include the local-to-unit-root model, the mildly explosive model and the regular explosive model. Initial conditions with different order of magnitude are considered. Both the OLS estimator and the indirect inference estimator are studied. It is found that BIC and HQIC, but not AIC, consistently select the unit root model when data come from the unit root model. When data come from the local-to-unit-root model, both BIC and …

Cycling State That Can Lead To Glassy Dynamics In Intracellular Transport, Monika Scholtz, Stanislav Burov, Kimberly L. Weirich, Björn J. Scholtz, S.M. Ali Tabei, Margaret L. Gardel, Aaron R. Dinner

Faculty Work

Power-law dwell times have been observed for molecular motors in living cells, but the origins of these trapped states are not known. We introduce a minimal model of motors moving on a two-dimensional network of filaments, and simulations of its dynamics exhibit statistics comparable to those observed experimentally. Analysis of the model trajectories, as well as experimental particle tracking data, reveals a state in which motors cycle unproductively at junctions of three or more filaments. We formulate a master equation for these junction dynamics and show that the time required to escape from this vortexlike state can account for the …

Harmonic Analysis In Integrated Energy System Based On Compressed Sensing, Ting Yang, Haibo Pen, Dan Wang, Zhaoxia Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The advent of Integrated Energy Systems enabled various distributed energy to access the system through different power electronic devices. The development of this has made the harmonic environment more complex. It needs low complexity and high precision of harmonic detection and analysis methods to improve power quality. To solve the shortages of large data storage capacities and high complexity of compression in sampling under the Nyquist sampling framework, this research paper presents a harmonic analysis scheme based on compressed sensing theory. The proposed scheme enables the performance of the functions of compressive sampling, signal reconstruction and harmonic detection simultaneously. In …

Interactive Teachable Cognitive Agents: Smart Building Blocks For Multiagent Systems, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developing a complex intelligent system by abstracting their behaviors, functionalities, and reasoning mechanisms can be tedious and time consuming. In this paper, we present a framework for developing an application or software system based on smart autonomous components that collaborate with the developer or user to realize the entire system. Inspired by teachable approaches and programming-by-demonstration methods in robotics and end-user development, we treat intelligent agents as teachable components that make up the system to be built. Each agent serves different functionalities and may have prebuilt operations to accomplish its own design objectives. However, each agent may also be equipped …

Iris: Tapping Wearable Sensing To Capture In-Store Retail Insights On Shoppers, Meera Radhakrishnan, Sharanya Eswaran, Archan Misra, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We investigate the possibility of using a combination of a smartphone and a smartwatch, carried by a shopper, to get insights into the shopper’s behavior inside a retail store. The proposed IRIS framework uses standard locomotive and gestural micro-activities as building blocks to define novel composite features that help classify different facets of a shopper’s interaction/experience with individual items, as well as attributes of the overall shopping episode or the store. Besides defining such novel features, IRIS builds a novel segmentation algorithm, which partitions the duration of an entire shopping episode into atomic item-level interactions, by using a combination of …

Magi: Enabling Multi-Device Gestural Applications, Tran Huy Vu, Choo Tsu Wei, Kenny, Youngki Lee, Richard Christopher Davis, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We describe our vision of a multiple mobile or wearable device environment and share our initial exploration of our vision in multi-wrist gesture recognition. We explore how multi-device input and output might look, giving four scenarios of everyday multi-device use that show the technical challenges that need to be addressed. We describe our system which allows for recognition to be distributed between multiple devices, fusing recognition streams on a resource-rich device (e.g., mobile phone). An Interactor layer recognises common gestures from the fusion engine, and provides abstract input streams (e.g., scrolling and zooming) to user interface components called Midgets. These …

Improving The Sensitivity Of Unobtrusive Inactivity Detection In Sensor-Enabled Homes For The Elderly, Alvin C. Valera, Hwee-Pink Tan, Liming Bai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unobtrusive in-home monitoring systems are gaining acceptability and are being deployed to enable relatives and caregivers to remotely monitor and provide timely care to their elderly loved ones or senior clients, respectively, who are living independently. Such systems can provide information about nonmovement or inactivity of the elderly resident. As prolonged inactivity could mean potential danger, several algorithms have been proposed to automatically detect unusually long durations of inactivity. Such schemes, however, suffer from low sensitivity due to their high detection latency. In this paper, we propose Dwell Time-enhanced Dynamic Threshold (DTDT), a scheme for computing adaptive alert thresholds that …

Value-Inspired Service Design In Elderly Home-Monitoring Systems, Na Liu, Sandeep Purao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The provision of elderly home-monitoring systems to enhance aging-in-place requires the service to meet the needs of both the elderly and their caregivers. The design of such IT services requires interdisciplinary efforts to look beyond the technical requirements. Taking a value-inspired design perspective, the study argues that service design for promoting aging-in-place needs to reconcile the values of both the elderly and caregivers. Drawn from the framework of basic human values and the unique experience of the SHINESeniors project, the study extracts the core values for elderly and caregivers using a multi-method case analysis. We suggest that both system and …

Scrum-X: An Interactive And Experiential Learning Platform For Teaching Scrum, Wee Leong Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Motivating and engaging thecurrent generation of technology-savvy students and improving the quality oflearning is becoming more challenging with traditional instructional methods.Educational games and simulations are gaining more ground, both in formal andinformal learning environments. With experiential learning, learners canenhance their management skills and ability to make decisions by analyzingdifferent scenarios and paths that the project could have taken if specificdecisions were made during the project. This paper presents Scrum-X, acomputer-based simulation game to teach Scrum, an agile project managementmethodology, to graduates and professionals with IT background. In the game,players plan, execute and manage a software development project using Scrummethodology. Players …

Did You Take A Break Today? Detecting Playing Foosball Using Your Smartwatch, Sougata Sen, Kiran K. Rachuri, Abhishek Mukherji, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Prolonged working hours are a primary cause of stress, work related injuries (e.g, RSIs), and work-life imbalance in employees at a workplace. As reported by some studies, taking timely breaks from continuous work not only reduces stress and exhaustion but also improves productivity, employee bonding, and camaraderie. Our goal is to build a system that automatically detects breaks thereby assisting in maintaining healthy work-break balance. In this paper, we focus on detecting foosball breaks of employees at a workplace using a smartwatch. We selected foosball as it is one of the most commonly played games at many workplaces in the …

Rack: Automatic Api Recommendation Using Crowdsourced Knowledge, Mohammad M. Rahman, Chanchal K. Roy, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Traditional code search engines often do not perform well with natural language queries since they mostly apply keyword matching. These engines thus need carefully designed queries containing information about programming APIs for code search. Unfortunately, existing studies suggest that preparing an effective code search query is both challenging and time consuming for the developers. In this paper, we propose a novel API recommendation technique -- RACK that recommends a list of relevant APIs for a natural language query for code search by exploiting keyword-API associations from the crowdsourced knowledge of Stack Overflow. We first motivate our technique using an exploratory …

Campus-Scale Mobile Crowd-Tasking: Deployment And Behavioral Insights, Thivya Kandappu, Archan Misra, Shih-Fen Cheng, Nikita Jaiman, Randy Tandriansiyah, Cen Chen, Hoong Chuin Lau, Deepthi Chander, Koustuv Dasgupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mobile crowd-tasking markets are growing at an unprecedented rate with increasing number of smartphone users. Such platforms differ from their online counterparts in that they demand physical mobility and can benefit from smartphone processors and sensors for verification purposes. Despite the importance of such mobile crowd-tasking markets, little is known about the labor supply dynamics and mobility patterns of the users. In this paper we design, develop and experiment with a realwporld mobile crowd-tasking platform, called TA$Ker. Our contributions are two-fold: (a) We develop TA$Ker, a system that allows us to empirically study the worker responses to push vs. pull …

Cd33 Expression And Its Association With Gemtuzumab Ozogamicin Response: Results From The Randomized Phase Iii Children's Oncology Group Trial Aaml0531., Jessica A. Pollard, Michael Loken, Robert B. Gerbing, Susana C. Raimondi, Betsy A. Hirsch, Richard Aplenc, Irwin D. Bernstein, Alan S. Gamis, Todd A. Alonzo, Soheil Meshinchi

Manuscripts, Articles, Book Chapters and Other Papers

PURPOSE: CD33 is variably expressed on acute myeloid leukemia (AML) blasts and is targeted by gemtuzumab ozogamicin (GO). GO has shown benefit in both adult and pediatric AML trials, yet limited data exist about whether GO response correlates with CD33 expression level.

PATIENTS AND METHODS: CD33 expression levels were prospectively quantified by multidimensional flow cytometry in 825 patients enrolled in Children's Oncology Group AAML0531 and correlated with response to GO.

RESULTS: Patients with low CD33 expression (lowest quartile of expression [Q1]) had no benefit with the addition of GO to conventional chemotherapy (relapse risk [RR]: GO 36% v No-GO 34%, …

Efficacy Of Physical Layer Preamble Manipulation For Ieee 802.11a/Ac, Benjamin W. Ramsey, Jonathan D. Fuller, Christopher W. Badenhop

Faculty Publications

Wireless physical layer manipulation is a recently discovered technique for selective packet obfuscation. This process exploits the unique and proprietary nature of transceiver designs rather than manufacturing imperfections. To date, preamble manipulation has only successfully been demonstrated on low data rate transceivers operating in the2.4 GHz band. This Letter investigates the effectiveness of preamble manipulation on common 5 GHz IEEE 802.11a and IEEE 802.11ac wireless transceivers for the first time. Herein it is demonstrated that the preamble short training sequence length can be manipulated to discern among the six transceiver designs under test with greater than 99% accuracy using fewer …