A large number of sequential decision-making problems in uncertain environments
can be modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In such settings, an agent
can observe at each time step the state of the environment and then executes an
action, causing a stochastic transition to a new state of the environment...
In recent years there have been many improvements in the reliability of critical infrastructure systems. Despite these improvements and despite targeted efforts to improve the operation and control of the electric grid, the power systems industry has seen relatively small advances in this regard. For instance, today's power system is...
Sugar pine and western white pine are widely distributed, economically valuable, and ecologically important native tree species in North America. However, white pine blister rust (WPBR), caused by a non-native fungal pathogen, Cronartium ribicola J.C. Fisch. in Rabh., has substantially affected populations of these species. Cronartium is an obligate parasite,...
Microchannel arrays are being developed across a wide spectrum of microfluidic applications including blood processing, fuel cells and thermal management among many others. Typical arrays are based on a flat laminated architecture produced in a vacuum hot press (VHP) through solid-state diffusion bonding. Due to the cylindrical nature of certain...
Recent advances in multiagent learning have led to exciting new capabilities spanning fields as diverse as planetary exploration, air traffic control, military reconnaissance, and airport security. Such algorithms provide a tangible benefit over traditional control algorithms in that they allow fast responses, adapt to dynamic environments, and generally scale well....
In grasslands, grazing by large ungulates can influence vegetation structure, composition, primary productivity, and ultimately, ecosystem functioning. While grazing represents a complex disturbance, grazing intensity largely determines the effects of
grazing on vegetation. Structural and compositional changes in the plant community caused by grazing could have bottom-up effects on species...
An existing database of relative sea-level (RSL) reconstructions from the U.S. Atlantic coast lacked valid sea-level index points from Georgia and Florida. This region lies on the edge of the collapsing forebulge of the former Laurentide Ice Sheet making it an important location for understanding glacio-isostatic adjustment and the history...
Full Text:
. Richard Peltier f, Niamh Cahill g, David F. Hill h, Erica Ashe i, j, Clark R. Alexander k
a Department of
OWET convened the second annual OWET Developersʼ Summit on August 2, 2011 in
Portland, Oregon.
The Summit brought together participants, both new and those who had attended the first
OWET Developersʼ Summit 2010, to review the Blueprint for Ocean Energy Development
2010-2015 and to discuss: the progress made in developing...
Public housing (PH) provides a substantial portion of the housing in both developed and less developed countries, and the demand for it is increasing. The PH projects, however, are facing many challenges that are affecting their performance and cause their failures. The United States has demolished large portions of their...
This thesis proposes expanding the locations where literacy narratives are currently used as readings and as writing assignments and considering broad conceptions of the types and uses of literacy narratives read in classrooms. In particular, this thesis asserts the value of expanding the literacy narratives read beyond the current canonical...
In a simulator-defined MDP, the Markovian dynamics and rewards are provided in the form of a simulator from which samples can be drawn. This paper studies MDP planning algorithms that attempt to minimize the number of simulator calls before terminating and outputting a policy that is approximately optimal with high...
Animal pollination is critical to plant reproduction in agricultural and wildland ecosystems. Much of the production of seeds and fruits in natural areas, which underlie many food webs, depends on pollination services by insects. The taxon responsible for delivering the bulk of these services in most temperate systems is bees....
Pollination is a critical ecosystem function for sustaining biodiversity. However, pollinators and the services they provide are threatened by landscape-altering anthropogenic activities across the globe. Habitat loss and fragmentation, introduction of invasive species, chemical use, and urbanization have been shown to impact pollination. Pollinator foraging behavior is thought to be...
The purpose of this study was to determine the
effects of an experimental approach to English language
acquisition among preschool children attending
low-cost community kindergartens in Singapore. Group
and sex differences in the performance of four language
tasks, as well as the effect of the interaction
between group and sex...
Native bees are critically important organisms that support biodiversity and crop production via their pollination services. Wildfires in temperate conifer forests can increase bee abundance and flowering plant density due to increased light exposure, but little information is available regarding how wildfire severity influences provisioning to bee offspring, which is...
Error-correcting output coding (ECOC) is a method for converting a k-classsupervised learning problem into a large number L of two-class supervised learningproblems and then combining the results of these L evaluations. Previous researchhas shown that ECOC can dramatically improve the classi cation accuracy of supervisedlearning algorithms that learn to classify...
Published July 1975. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalog
The miniaturization of Microtechnology-based Energy, Chemical and Biological Systems (MECS) is made possible by the use of high aspect ratio microchannel arrays to increase the surface-area-to-volume ratio of the flow conduits within the devices, resulting in an improvement in the heat and mass transfer performance of the devices. However, advantages...
Irradiation of a tryptamine linked through its side-chain nitrogen to an alkylidene malonate residue results in an intramolecular [2 + 2] cycloaddition to the indole 2,3-double bond. The resultant cyclobutane undergoes spontaneous retro-Mannich fission to produce a spiro[indoline-3,3-pyrrolenine] with relative configuration defined by the orientation of substituents in the transient...
The importance of pollinators in native and managed landscapes is well known, and recent interest is directed towards investigating the role of native bees as providers of pollination ecosystem services. Uncertainty about bee populations at global and local scales has prompted research and general interest in conservation of bee diversity....
This index provides access to infonnation about women in 102 books and journals. The information contained in each entry is only as good as the original and the quality varies considerably. Much of this infonnation has not before been easily accesible in this form. My hope is that this index...
The abilities of plant biologists to characterize the genetic basis of physiological traits are limited by their abilities to obtain quantitative data representing precise details of trait variation and mainly to collect this data on a high-throughput scale at low cost. Deep learning-based methods have demonstrated unprecedented potential to automate...
We consider the problem of tactical assault planning in real-time strategy games where a team of friendly agents must launch an assault on an enemy. This problem offers many challenges including a highly dynamic and uncertain environment, multiple agents, durative actions, numeric attributes, and different optimization objectives. While the dynamics...
Deep learning is becoming the latest trend in sensitive applications, such as healthcare, criminal justice, and finance. As these new applications emerge, adversaries are circumventing them.
Further, there have been concerns about the possibility of bias and discrimination in predictive applications.
In order to address these issues, we propose an...
This circular describes research activities of the Oregon State College School of Engineering during the school years 1958-59 and 1959-60. These activities are listed according to the engineering department in which the research is carried out. In each department section are described facilities of the department, research projects, and graduate...
The purpose of the study is to gauge the scope of bioenergy opportunities by identifying and profiling bioenergy projects and potential projects in Oregon, and learning directly from developers the key challenges and issues this nascent sector faces. Bioenergy projects are defined as projects that would produce biofuels (ethanol and...
The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of
Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in selected
schools of the Oregon Small Schools Project. Specifically, the
objectives were to analyze:
1. To what extent were the objectives of the OSSP
accomplished.
2. To what degree...
This qualitative study examined organizational change including the
necessary steps that a large school district took in planning and implementing a
reform effort. This project told a story of one school district's experience.
The study covered a five year period from 1990 to 1995 in the 30,000 student
Salem-Keizer School...
Longevity and germination of seed of western dwarfmistletoe (Arceuthobium campylopodum Engelm. f. campylopodum) of ponderosa
pine (Pinus ponderosa Laws.) was investigated to determine:
1) the influence of humidity and temperature on seed viability and
deterioration during storage; 2) the physiology of seed dormancy;
3) the composition of seed reserve food...
The purposes of this study were to determine the effects of
temperature, nutrients, growth regulators, and culm detachment
during seed development on ryegrass seed dormancy and weight.
The effects of storage temperature on seed dormancy were also
studied.
Seed dormancy of annual (Lolium multiflorum Lam.) and
perennial (Lolium perenne L.)...
Chronic hepatitis B disproportionately affects Asian Americans. Although Asians make up only 4.2% of the total United States (U.S.) population, they account for more than half of those infected with hepatitis B. If left untreated, chronic hepatitis B could lead to cirrhosis, liver damage, and liver cancer. Studies show that...
Purpose of Study:
The purpose of this study was to find the specific qualifications
of a programmer in order that counselors and educators can better
advise students who are interested in electronic data processing for
career purposes. The information received from the data processing
companies will offer some criteria on...
Many approaches for achieving intelligent behavior of automated (computer) systems involve components that learn from past experience. This dissertation studies computational methods for learning from examples, for classification and for decision
making, when the decisions have different non-zero costs associated with them. Many practical applications of learning algorithms, including transaction...
I offer a personal and prehistoric exploration of the concept of immanence, the principle of a divine force living, remaining, and operating within living creatures, inherent in the human, including the female; a unifying force that connects humans to each other, to nature, and to the earth. I examine the...
Design considerations are presented which apply to all types of
electrical resistance strain gage transducers. While the concepts
apply to mass produced transducers, the information should be most
useful for the engineer or technician who designs one-of-a-kind or
"home-made" transducers.
Errors which affect the accuracy of strain gage transducers are...
This study investigated the opinions of bicyclists/pedestrians
regarding how safe from a bicycle traffic injury they felt while on
campus. Most earlier studies had been concerned with the taxonomy
of bicycle/pedestrian accidents. Because of the paucity of
research on attitudes of bicyclists and pedestrians, this research
was undertaken.
The survey...
This dissertation has two objectives. The first objective is to determine where best to situate the study of mentoring (i.e. the 'making of scientists') on the landscape of the history of science and science studies. This task is accomplished by establishing mentoring studies as a link between the robust body...
How can an agent generalize its knowledge to new circumstances? To learn
effectively an agent acting in a sequential decision problem must make intelligent action selection choices based on its available knowledge. This dissertation focuses on Bayesian methods of representing learned knowledge and develops novel algorithms that exploit the represented...
Individuals participating in the enviromental sport activity courses of backpacking-orienteering, mountaineering, and scuba diving responded to pre- and post - test trials of the Self-Cathexis Scale ard the Body-Oathexis Scale. Two control groups composed of random samples of the university student population reponded to the Self-Cathexis Scale Body-Cathexis Scale: one...
This work is inspired by problems in natural resource management centered on the challenge of invasive species. Computing optimal management policies for maintaining ecosystem sustainable is challenging. Many ecosystem management problems can be formulated as MDP (Markov Decision Process) planning problems. In a simulator-defined MDP, the Markovian dynamics and rewards...
River ecosystems throughout the arid southwestern U.S. are imperiled. Water management infrastructure, climate change, unsustainable water use, and political conflict harm the region's aquatic and riparian ecosystems. This case study surveys one such desert river, an endemic fish species, and conservation efforts in southwestern Utah. The analysis focuses on the...
At a time of rapid global change, a socio-ecological system (SES) approach can provide a framework through which to quantify and communicate the risks and uncertainties of coupled human-natural systems. Islands, and tropical coral reef islands in particular, can be excellent models for SES research since they may be considered...
We developed and investigated machine learning methods that require
minimal preprocessing of the input data, use few training examples, run fast, and
still obtain high levels of accuracy.
Most approaches to designing machine learning programs are based on the
supervised learning paradigm – training examples are chosen randomly and given...
Coordinating multiple robots to achieve a complex task requires solving two distinct control problems: the high-level control problem of ensuring that each robot aims to perform a useful task (e.g., coordination) and the low-level control problem of ensuring that each robot actually performs the correct actions to achieve its task...
Most tasks in natural language processing (NLP) try to map structured input (e.g., sentence or word sequence) to some form of structured output (tag sequence, parse tree, semantic graph, translated/paraphrased/compressed sentence), a problem known as “structured prediction”. While various learning algorithms such as the perceptron, maximum entropy, and expectation-maximization have...
This study examines two major issues: (1) to what extent have the
conditions at non-reservation Indian boarding schools, as described by
the Meriam Report of 1928, been in evidence from the beginning?; and
(2) to what extent have these conditions improved since 1928?
The conditions examined are: (1) General Conditions...
Land useable for livestock grazing in the western United States is
diminishing because of spreading municipalities, irrigation developments,
highway construction, recreational demands and withdrawals.
Concurrently, the demand for livestock and livestock products is increasing
because of a rapidly growing population. As a result, production
from the grazing land that remains...
Gastrointestinal (GI) transit data were collected using pigs
as animal models. Density and size effects of non-disintegrating
dosage forms on GI transit were investigated. Total GI transit
times range from 2 to 33 days for 22 administrations of these nondisintegrating
dosage forms. Pigs are found to not be an
appropriate...
Oregon Biography Index is intended to serve primarily as a starting point in locating biographies of Oregonians. We have indexed 47 historical volumes which are either entirely devoted to biographies or have large self-contained biographical sections. The profiles in the books vary widely in accuracy and detail. Birth dates of...
The War Production Board issued limitation order 85 in April 1942 in order to conserve fabric and manpower needed for the war effort. The L-85 order froze the silhouette so no major style changes in women's wear would occur during the war. It is clear that on the one hand...
A key aspect of how we understand the world revolves around an ability to
manipulate our surroundings to experiment. From the scientific method through
theories of child development, the ability to experiment is deemed critical; however,
few studies have been performed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of
different experimental...
Ecological domains seeking to understand the environment and the behavior of species have received little attention in machine learning (ML), despite the fact that environmental changes have a significant impact on humans as well as ecosystems. Some ecological problems can be formulated similarly to other common ML applications, but there...
Sequential supervised learning problems arise in many real applications. This dissertation focuses on two important research directions in sequential supervised learning: efficient training and feature induction.
In the direction of efficient training, we study the training of conditional random fields (CRFs), which provide a flexible and powerful model for sequential...
Hop (Humulus lupulus L. var. lupulus) is a diploid, dioecious plant with an extensive history of cultivation and use in brewing, as a textile, and for its therapeutic properties. Hop is prized for its ability to produce a variety of aromatic and flavor compounds, as well as compounds with anti-microbial...
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...
The first project of this thesis is an in vitro study. This study was performed with 8 hydrocortisone topical products on the market for the purpose of comparing one Tec Lab product, a Corticool gel, to the other seven common products on the market. The permeation of these products was...
Reconstructing the sensitivity of past climate to forcings, and of ancient glaciers and ice sheets to this climate, can allow us to better understand the range of climate and cryosphere behavior we may see in the coming centuries. The Arctic is a region of particular importance due to its well-documented...