In February 2009, the Oregon Wave Energy Trust kicked off a project titled the Utility Market Initiative (UMI). The project's purpose was to initiate a process to align the needs of the regional electric utilities with the resource potential of the wave energy industry. Pacific Energy Ventures' proposal that include...
Academics and practitioners agree that in water governance, the quality of a decision making process should influence the quality of the outcome and the degree to which it is accepted by interested parties. However, finding a feasible way to evaluate and then improve the quality of a decision making process...
Multiagent learning offers a rich framework to address challenging real-world problems such as remote exploration and healthcare coordination, which require autonomous agents to express elaborate interactions. To be effective in such systems, agents must collectively reason about and pursue high-level, long-term, and possibly nebulous objectives while adapting their strategy to...
This dissertation explores the real world problem of rural youth out-migration and finds that the central problem is one of persistent class difference in this rural Oregon town. The research that informs this dissertation was conducted in a rural community of approximately 2300 residents in Eastern Oregon, here called Talltown....
In this research, we have captured, in pattern form, key elements of programming and design in four programming paradigms (imperative, object-oriented, functional and logical) as well as multiparadigm programming. These pattern sets have formed a foundation upon which we were able to build a deeper understanding of multiparadigm programming and...
Private matching (PM) is a key cryptographic primitive in secure computation that allows several parties to jointly compute some functions depending on their private inputs. Indeed, this primitive has many practical applications. For instance, in online advertising, two companies may wish to find their common customers for a joint marketing...
This is a case study of the cooperative development of an ocean condition forecasting tool by Oregon commercial fishermen, Oregon State University (OSU) scientists, and OSU student software engineers. Ocean condition forecasting models developed by OSU scientists were used to create an online tool to assist decision-making for fishermen. This...
This dissertation explores the structural dynamics of human understanding and particularly the concept of meaning and its connections to concepts of ultimate ground, necessity and contingency, language, and perception. It focuses on the history of the concept of meaning in early twentieth-century European physics and philosophy, through an analysis of...
Statistically, travel by air is one of the safest forms of transportation. Yet we
continue to experience aviation tragedies. Do we fully understand flight safety or is
there another way of looking at the problem? In this work a new way of approaching
the question of flight safety is developed,...