Autonomous robotic agents are on their way to becoming in-home personal assistants, construction assistants, and warehouse workers. The degree of autonomy of such systems is reflected by the manner in which we specify goals to them; the abstraction of low-level commands to high-level goals goes hand-in-hand with increased autonomy. In...
Social media platforms use many techniques to engage users' attention with their platforms, including notifications, popups, and gamification elements. The impact of social media on physical and mental health has been studied, but limited publicly available research exists on how social media users can be helped to disengage from these...
Over 37,000 people die each year in automobile accidents, with many of these fatalities resulting from collisions with emergency vehicles. The rise of autonomous cars creates the need for an accurate and failsafe method of detecting and responding to emergency vehicles safely and on time. This thesis investigates the ability...
The use of genetic algorithms to compose music and generate sounds is an area of interest in the artificial intelligence field. Music and instrument sounds have known rules and structures that can be followed which make them well-suited for genetic algorithms. However, genetic algorithms still struggle to generate sounds comparable...
We present student perceptions of a new first-year engineering programming class that was designed by informed research practices. While the College of Engineering at Oregon State University saw a lot of major switching in the first year, there were not many students switching into computer science (CS). This could have...
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) systems aim to improve users’ understanding of AI but rarely consider the inclusivity aspects of XAI. Without inclusive approaches, improving explanations might not work well for everyone. This study investigates leveraging users’ diverse problem-solving styles as an inclusive strategy to fix an XAI prototype, with the...
Metric spaces (X, d) are ubiquitous objects in mathematics and computer science that are able to capture pairwise distance relationships d(x, y) between points x, y ∈ X. Because of this, it is natural to ask what useful generalizations there are of metric spaces for capturing “k-wise distance relationships” d(x1,...
Distributed version control allows developers to manage software evolution among distributed development teams. But it does not eliminate all consistency and concurrency issues, and instead introduces additional complexity when merging code. And resolving merge conflicts is nontrivial when automated merging fails. In such cases, developers are forced to inspect the...
Sonification, or the “technique of rendering sound in response to data and interactions” [1], is an alternative to visual graphs and has the potential to make data more interpretable and accessible. As a combination of the arts (music) and the sciences (data), sonification is an interdisciplinary tool for connecting people...
Despite an increase in the number of people who rely on manual wheelchairs, there are still substantial economic barriers to affordable and accessible localization systems. As a result, there is a pressing need to build a versatile yet low cost localization system for manual wheelchairs. Such systems allow users to...