The early care and education workforce, including those who work in center- and home-based child care (HBCC) settings, is situated within outside systems of child care supports and resources. Some outside system components serve to support compliance with regulatory guidelines (e.g., child care licensing: health and safety protocols, minimum training...
The social sciences are increasingly used in conservation to describe interactions and relationships between humans, wildlife, and ecosystems. Scientists and policy-makers have concluded that promoting human tolerance for wildlife is critical to the success of conservation efforts. Yet, the concept of tolerance is relatively new in the context of human-wildlife...
This dissertation incorporates coalition formation and probabilistic planning towards a domain-independent automated planning solution scalable to multiple heterogeneous robots in complex domains. The first research direction investigates the effectiveness of Task Fusion and introduces heuristics that improve task allocation and result in better quality plans, while requiring lower computational cost...
Fashion bloggers have become a changing force of the retail industry over the past decade, redefining where consumers look for fashion inspiration, product reviews, and brand credibility. Despite the widespread popularity of fashion bloggers, there is little industry consensus as to what characteristics make a fashion blogger successful and to...
Food sovereignty is increasingly being conceptualized as a human rights issue. This is evidenced in the growth of local actors, communities, and nation-states that are working towards a food sovereignty agenda. Indicators of food sovereignty center on people having the right and ability to define their food polices. One of...
Ian Angell, in the New Barbarian Manifesto, said “A ‘brave new world’ is being forced upon unsuspecting societies by advances in information technology.” It would seem then, that technological advances happen automatically and have a life of their own. There is a logic to technological advancements that is outside human...
When type inference fails, it is often difficult to pinpoint the cause of the type error among many potential candidates. Generating informative messages to remove the type error is another difficult task due to the limited availability of type information. Over the last three decades many approaches have been developed...
The study of variational typing originated from the problem of type inference for variational programs, which encode numerous different but related plain programs. In this dissertation, I present a sound and complete type inference algorithm for inferring types of all plain programs encoded in variational programs. The proposed algorithm runs...
Emerging infectious diseases impact both human and wildlife populations. Infectious agents, in particular the aquatic fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid), have an influential role in driving global amphibian population declines. The emergence of the chytrid fungus has aspects of both geographic spread as well as climate shifts altering environmental conditions and...
Benton County, Oregon is presently experiencing a crisis level of police contacts with mentally ill suspects. The cause of this sudden increase is currently unknown and local law enforcement is not adequately equipped or funded to respond to this development. This report summarizes the recent literature on law enforcement encounters...