Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Middle Savannah River: An A/R/Tographic Ecopedagogical Ethnography Experimenting With Rhizomatic Perspectives, Lisa Augustine-Chizmar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is an experiment in perspective. Using the four commonplaces (Schwab, 1978), I practiced letting the Savannah River teach me what there is to know about the water, the land, the people, and the other entities that depend on ki through artistic, ethnographic, and ecopedagogical lenses. The ethnographic findings describe the social actors that depend on ki and give a voice to the River. The a/r/tographic findings display the River on a canvas map through two hundred years using paint, clay, photography, video, abstract acrylics, and fabric. Together, these methods contribute to a unique ecopedagogical journey. This word cloud …

Can We Make It Better? Assessing And Improving Quality Of Github Repositories, Gede Artha Azriadi Prana

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The code hosting platform GitHub has gained immense popularity worldwide in recent years, with over 200 million repositories hosted as of June 2021. Due to its popularity, it has great potential to facilitate widespread improvements across many software projects. Naturally, GitHub has attracted much research attention, and the source code in the various repositories it hosts also provide opportunity to apply techniques and tools developed by software engineering researchers over the years. However, much of existing body of research applicable to GitHub focuses on code quality of the software projects and ways to improve them. Fewer work focus on potential …

Semantically Aligned Sentence-Level Embeddings For Agent Autonomy And Natural Language Understanding, Nancy Ellen Fulda

Theses and Dissertations

Many applications of neural linguistic models rely on their use as pre-trained features for downstream tasks such as dialog modeling, machine translation, and question answering. This work presents an alternate paradigm: Rather than treating linguistic embeddings as input features, we treat them as common sense knowledge repositories that can be queried using simple mathematical operations within the embedding space, without the need for additional training. Because current state-of-the-art embedding models were not optimized for this purpose, this work presents a novel embedding model designed and trained specifically for the purpose of "reasoning in the linguistic domain".Our model jointly represents single …

The Graduate Student Blues, Marion D. Cohen

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This is a memoir about my rather unconventional path to a mathematics Ph.D. There were difficulties, due partly to university politics, partly to my youth and immaturity, and partly to the thesis material itself – it was, in the words of some of my fellow students, “not what’s being done now”. I had written the thesis entirely on my own, without help from my Master’s thesis advisor or any other professor at my school. This is not the usual procedure of course. Nobody in my department could understand the thesis or was willing to vouch for it. There followed three …

Meta-Analysis Of Type I Error Rates For Detecting Differential Item Functioning With Logistic Regression And Mantel-Haenszel In Monte Carlo Studies, Eva Van De Water Ph. D.

Eva Van De Water

Differential item functioning (DIF) occurs when individuals from different groups who have equal levels of a latent trait fail to earn commensurate scores on a testing instrument. Type I error occurs when DIF-detection methods result in unbiased items being excluded from the test while a Type II error occurs when biased items remain on the test after DIF-detection methods have been employed. Both errors create potential issues of injustice amongst examinees and can result in costly and protracted legal action. The purpose of this research was to evaluate two methods for detecting DIF: logistic regression (LR) and Mantel-Haenszel (MH).

To …

Ligand-Receptor Interactions For Supramolecular Disassembly With Applications In Screening And Drug Delivery, Diego F. Amado Torres

Diego Amado Torres

Proteins have the capacity to bind specific sets of compounds known as ligands, these are small molecules with a recurrent theme in their molecular design that is a characteristic exploited here to (i) identify particular affinities of small molecules for proteins with the aim of using them as ligands, inhibitors, or targeting moieties in more complex systems by means of a methodology that screens small molecules based on protein affinity; (ii) decorate a self-assembling supramolecular system at different positions, making it responsive to a complementary protein with the aim of exploring differences in disassembly and sensitivity of the release of …

Sat-Based Answer Set Programming, Yuliya Lierler

Yuliya Lierler

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm oriented towards difficult combinatorial search problems. Syntactically, ASP programs look like Prolog programs, but solutions are represented in ASP by sets of atoms, and not by substitutions, as in Prolog. Answer set systems, such as SMODELS, SMODELSCC, and DLV, compute answer sets of a given program in the sense of the answer set (stable model) semantics. This is different from the functionality of Prolog systems, which determine when a given query is true relative to a given logic program. ASP has been applied to many areas of science and technology, from …

An Ethnographic Study: Becoming A Physics Expert In A Biophysics Research Group, Idaykis Rodriguez

Idaykis Rodriguez

Expertise in physics has been traditionally studied in cognitive science, where physics expertise is understood through the difference between novice and expert problem solving skills. The cognitive perspective of physics experts only create a partial model of physics expertise and does not take into account the development of physics experts in the natural context of research. This dissertation takes a social and cultural perspective of learning through apprenticeship to model the development of physics expertise of physics graduate students in a research group. I use a qualitative methodological approach of an ethnographic case study to observe and video record the …

Sat-Based Answer Set Programming, Yuliya Lierler

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Answer set programming (ASP) is a declarative programming paradigm oriented towards difficult combinatorial search problems. Syntactically, ASP programs look like Prolog programs, but solutions are represented in ASP by sets of atoms, and not by substitutions, as in Prolog. Answer set systems, such as SMODELS, SMODELSCC, and DLV, compute answer sets of a given program in the sense of the answer set (stable model) semantics. This is different from the functionality of Prolog systems, which determine when a given query is true relative to a given logic program. ASP has been applied to many areas of science and technology, from …

Some Aspects Of Soil Moisture In The Forest, Ian J. Craib

Yale School of the Environment Bulletin Series

By determining the moisture content of carefully selected soil samples taken at various depths down to three feet, the moisture content of soils in the forest and in the open have been compared. The soils investigated were similar in their mechanical properties. Part I is an investigation of the effect of forest cover on the amount of water in the soil over the growing season and its availability. Part II is an investigation of the effect of root competition on the available water supply of forest soils.