The thesis focuses on model-based approximation methods for reinforcement
learning with large scale applications such as combinatorial optimization problems.
First, the thesis proposes two new model-based methods to stablize the
value–function approximation for reinforcement learning. The first one is the
BFBP algorithm, a batch-like reinforcement learning process which iterates between...
Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers’ debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information...
Until recently, research has not considered whether the design of end-user programming environments, such as spreadsheets, multimedia authoring languages, and CAD systems, affects males and females differently. As a result, we began investigating how the two genders are impacted by end-user programming software and whether attention to gender differences is...
Most of the work so far in the subfield of Gender HCI has followed a theory-driven approach. Established theories, however, do not take into account specific issues that arise in end-user debugging. We suspected that there may be important information that we were overlooking. We therefore employed a methodology change:...
There has been little research into how end-user programming environments can provide explanations that could fill a critical information gap for end-user debuggers – help with debugging strategy. To address this need, we designed and prototyped a video-based approach for explaining debugging strategy, and accompanied it with a text-only approach....
There has been little prior research reporting strategy usage in end-user problem solving, and even less using gender as a factor. Without this type of information, enduser programming systems cannot know the “target” at which to aim, if they are to support male and female end-user programmers’ debugging. As a...
This dissertation’s three essays investigate trade and productivity effects on firm behavior based on new heterogeneous-firms trade models in the case of Korea. In the first essay, firms’ decision to export in the case of Korean manufacturing industries is examined, where the change in firms’ productivity before and after exports...
In its simplest form, the process of diagnosis is a decision-making process in which the diagnostician performs a sequence of tests culminating in a diagnostic decision. For example, a physician might perform a series of simple measurements (body tem- perature, weight, etc.) and laboratory measurements (white blood count, CT scan,...
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...
Long-run food price changes respond to long-run changes in food demand, quasi-fixed and variable production factors, and agricultural productivity. Recent global food-price volatility puts a renewed spotlight on the trends and sources of any agricultural productivity growth. Because food prices’ most critical effects are on human hunger, it is especially...
Programmers spend a substantial fraction of their debugging time by navigating
through source code, yet little is known about how programmers navigate. With the
continuing growth in size and complexity of software, this fraction of time is likely to
increase, which presents challenges to those seeking both to understand and...
Although there have been decades of research into how professional programmers debug, only recently has work begun to emerge about how end-user programmers attempt to debug their programs. Without understanding how end-user programmers approach debugging, we cannot build tools to adequately support their needs. To help fill this need, this...
End-user programmers’ code (e.g., accountants’ spreadsheet formulas) is fraught with errors. To help mitigate this problem, end-user software engineering research is becoming established. However, most of this work has focused on feature usage, rather than debugging strategies. If a debugging tool were to support end-user programmers’ specific debugging strategy needs,...
End-user programmers’ code is notoriously buggy. This problem is amplified by the increasing complexity of end users’ programs. To help end users catch errors early and reliably, we employ a novel approach for the design of end-user debugging tools: a focus on supporting end users’ effective debugging strategies. This paper...
The results of a machine learning from user behavior can be thought of as a program, and like all programs, it may need to be debugged. Providing ways for the user to debug it matters because without the ability to fix errors, users may find that the learned program’s errors...
End users' programs are fraught with errors, costing companies millions of dollars. One reason may be that researchers and tool designers have not yet focused on end-user debugging strategies. To investigate this possibility, this dissertation presents eight empirical studies and a new strategy-based end-user debugging tool for Excel, called StratCel....
This paper introduces the even-odd POMDP, an approximation to POMDPs in which the world is assumed to be fully observable every other time step. The even-odd POMDP can be converted into an equivalent MDP, the
2MDP, whose value function, V*[subscript 2MDP], can be combined online with a 2-step lookahead search...
Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers' debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information...
Little is known about the strategies end-user programmers use in debugging their programs, and even less is known about gender differences that may exist in these strategies. Without this type of information, end-user programming systems cannot know the "target" at which to aim, if they are to support male and...
"The specifi c problem addressed in this proposal is the development of
good approximation algorithms for solving problems that have partial observability. The model we propose associates costs with obtaining information about the current state. We want to predict when and how much it is necessary to observe. We want...
This paper introduces the even-odd POMDP an approximation to POMDPs Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems in which the world is assumed to be fully observable every other time step. This approximation works well for problems with a delayed need to observe. The even-odd POMDP can be converted into an equivalent...
A common heuristic for solving Partially Observable Markov Decision Problems POMDPs is to first solve the underlying Markov Decision Process MDP and then construct a POMDP policy by performing a fixed depth lookahead search in the POMDP and evaluating the leaf nodes using the MDP value function. A problem with...
A diagnostic policy species what test to perform next based on the results of previous tests and when to stop and make a diagnosis. Cost-sensitive diagnostic policies perform tradeoffs between (a) the costs of tests and (b) the costs of misdiagnoses. An optimal diagnostic policy minimizes the expected total cost....
This dissertation explores and analyzes the performance of several Bayesian anytime inference algorithms for dynamic influence diagrams. These algorithms are compared on the On-Line Maintenance Agent testbed, a software artifact permitting comparison of dynamic reasoning algorithms used by an agent on a variety of simulated maintenance and monitoring tasks. Analysis...
Thesis explores the ways in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT)use, specifically that of telephones and the Internet, impacts the lives of Eritrean refugees in Rome, Italy. Informal interviews, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation were carried out in a 'center of second reception.' Results show that information obtained through the...
Natural resource decisions require consideration at many levels, ranging from how one invertebrate will be affected by a nearby road, to how an entire watershed will be transformed by a massive clearcut. Considerations reach farther than just the local ecological community-human communities, economies, and future impacts on the communities and...
The electron, gamma and neutron radiation degradation of III-V semiconductors
and heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) is investigated in this thesis.
Particular attention is paid to InP and InGaAs materials and InP/InGaAs
abrupt single HBTs (SHBTs). Complete process sequences for fabrication of
InP/InGaAs HBTs are developed and subsequently employed to produce...
Although there has been significant research into gender regarding educational and workplace
practices, there has been little awareness of gender differences as they pertain to software tools,
such as spreadsheet applications, that try to support end users in problem-solving tasks. Although
such software tools are intended to be gender agnostic,...
This paper studies the problem of learning diagnostic policies from training examples. A diagnostic policy is a complete description of the decision-making actions of a diagnostician (i.e., tests followed by a diagnostic decision) for all possible combinations of test results. An optimal diagnostic policy is one that minimizes the expected...
End-user programmers face many barriers in programming. Research has seen many programming environments that attempted to lower or remove the barriers but despite these efforts, empirical studies continue to report barriers users face. To investigate this issue, we took a theory-informed approach. Using theories from design, creativity, and problem solving...
Professional software engineers have an arsenal of techniques such as unit testing and assertions to check their specifications, but these techniques require tools, motivation, experience and training that programmers without professional software engineering training may not have. As a result, professionals in other fields, such as scientific modelers, face greater...
This thesis explores the experiences and negotiations of belonging for children of Mexican migrant farmworkers in Oregon. Ethnographic data was collected over the course of several months with Mexican migrant farmworkers and their children in agricultural fields in Oregon and at Oregon State University. The children in this project have...
This thesis focuses on the identification of ecohydrological processes in nested system of catchments in a tropical alpine (the wet Andean páramo) ecosystem. We accomplish this by conducting a water stable isotopic characterization of water sources, an evaluation of the mean transit time (MTT) of streams waters, and the investigation...
Surface water quality is a growing concern in the Willamette River Basin and elsewhere. The region's growing population is dependent on the availability of clean water for drinking water, irrigation, wastewater dilution, and wildlife habitat. Watershed management to produce economic goods and environmental services requires an understanding of basic hydrologic...
Quotient rings of Gaussian and Eisenstein-Jacobi(EJ) integers can be deployed to construct interconnection networks with good topological properties. In this thesis, we propose deadlock-free deterministic and partially adaptive routing algorithms for hexagonal networks, one special class of EJ networks. Then we discuss higher dimensional Gaussian networks as an alternative to...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Limnology is undergoing a transition to high-throughput -omic analysis of freshwater
bacterial communities. An important first step in making the transition is to
characterize several genomes that can be used as references to guide metagenome
assembly and analysis. Here I characterize four new freshwater cyanobacterial
genomes, a pair of lake...
A great deal of research has been focused on the microbiomes of terrestrial angiosperms (flowering plants), but much less research has been performed on the microbiomes of aquatic angiosperms (Turner et al. 2013). Eelgrass beds are extremely productive ecosystems that provide habitat for many marine organisms, such as fish, shellfish,...
The National Research Council has aggregated research evidence on the pedagogy of science teaching and learning (NRC, 2012), culminating in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These standards support emphasis on eight scientific practices as an important component for teaching science as inquiry to K-12 students. This latest framework for...
Although most eastern North Pacific (ENP) gray whales feed in the Bering, Beaufort,
and Chukchi Seas during summer and fall, a small number of individuals,
referred to as the Pacific Coast Feeding Group (PCFG), show intra- and interseasonal
fidelity to feeding areas from northern California through southeastern Alaska. We
used...
Full Text:
., Burkanov, V.
N., Gearin, P., Litovka, D. I., Robertson, K. M., Mate, B. R., Jacobsen, J. K. and
Taylor, B
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Full Text:
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Natalia L. Demchenko1☯*, JohnW. Chapman2☯, ValentinaB. Durkina3☯, Valeriy I. Fadeev1†
1 Laboratory of
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Full Text:
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Date Site_Yr
Repli-
cates
Longitude Latitude
Depth,
m
T, °С PSU Sediment n
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...
Ampelisca eschrichtii are among the most important prey of the Western North Pacific gray whales, Eschrichtius robustus. The largest and densest known populations of this amphipod occur in the gray whale’s Offshore feeding area on the Northeastern Sakhalin Island Shelf. The remote location, ice cover and stormy weather at the...