Society faces many complex management problems, particularly in the area of shared public resources such as ecosystems. Existing decision making processes are often guided by personal experience and political ideology rather than state-of-the-art scientific understanding. This dissertation envisions a future in which multiple stakeholders are provided with computational tools for...
Assessing and understanding intelligent agents can be a difficult task for users who may lack an artificial intelligence (AI) background. A relatively new area, called “explainable AI,” is emerging to help address this problem, but little is known about how to present and structure information that an explanation system might...
This dissertation addresses few-shot object segmentation in images. The goal of segmentation is to label every image pixel with a class of the object occupying that pixel, where the class may represent a semantic object category or instance. In few-shot segmentation, training and test datasets have different classes. Every new...
Over time, Open Source Software (OSS) has become indispensable in the creation and upkeep of software products, serving as the fundamental building block for widely used solutions in our daily lives, including applications that enable communication, entertainment, and productivity. A sustainable OSS ecosystem is one that attracts and retains a...
Beaversource provides both code-hosting tools and social networking in one place. Students and faculty at Oregon State University have been using Beaversource to host their projects, both for classwork and research. Several usability problems were reported in a survey conducted on Beaversource last year. Some of these issues were severe...
Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communi- ties, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers...
We describe a series of novel computational models, CERENKOV (Computational Elucidation of the REgulatory NonKOding Variome) and its successors CERENKOV2, CERENKOV3, and Convolutional CERENKOV3, for discriminating regulatory single nucleotide polymorphisms (rSNPs) from non-regulatory SNPs within non-coding genetic loci. The CERENKOV models are designed for recognizing rSNPs in the context of...
Profile Hidden Markov Models utilize the information stored in a multiple sequence alignment such as its residues and conserved regions to assign probabilities at each column. This indicates areas in the sequences where similar functionality is observed. These probability weights are then combined to assign a sequence score, which is...
Data variations are prevalent in real-world applications. For example, software vendors have to handle numerous variations in the business requirements, conventions, and environmental settings of a software product. In database-backed software, the database of each version may have a different schema and content. As another example, data scientists often need...
How should reinforcement learning (RL) agents explain themselves to humans not trained in AI? To gain insights into this question, we conducted a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants’ mental models of an RL agent in the context of a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. The four treatments isolated...