An Engineering Decision Support System, EDSS, was developed using Bayesian mathematics which incorporates knowledge and confidence components observed in alternative-criterion pair decision making. The separation of knowledge and confidence has been previously unaccounted for in decision-making methods. EDSS provides decision support to individuals or teams which must make choices between...
Current robots are no match for biological organisms when adapting to real-world, dynamic environments. Collective control strategies, such as those used by synergistic biological systems composed of large numbers of identical parts like the human nervous system, provide a novel and alternative approach for the design of fault-tolerant, adaptable robotic...
Uganda has experienced the largest decline of HIV prevalence of any country in the world, from a peak of 15% in 1991 to 5% today. In cooperation with community-based and faith-based organizations, the Ugandan government has pursued an AIDS prevention strategy centered on urging people to Abstain from sex, Be...
Racism on college campuses continues to create a toxic environment for students of color to learn and thrive in. In order for institutions of higher education work to address the complexities of the issues that students of color face, it is important to understand the context in which those issues...
The purpose of this dissertation was to extend the current body of knowledge regarding the experiences and processes involved regarding how White mental health counselors deconstruct their internalized, and often unacknowledged, racism as well as attempt to dismantle institutionalized racism, in order to develop nonracist White racial identities. By adding...
This dissertation focuses on personal privacy in human-robot interaction, which we call "privacy-sensitive robotics." Our understanding of "privacy" is very broad, including not just information privacy but also physical, psychological, and social privacy. We begin by surveying the scholarly literature on privacy and talking about why it applies to interactions...
The purpose of this study was to characterize glenohumeral joint laxity and
stiffness using instrumented arthrometry. To evaluate the validity of an instrumented
measurement system we compared cutaneous and bone-pinned measures of laxity and
stiffness that replicate previously reported in vivo methodology. Characterization of
capsular laxity was achieved through determination...
Although much effort has been invested to build applications that support group work, collaborative applications have not found easy success. The cost of adopting and maintaining collaborative applications has prevented their widespread use, especially among small distributed groups. Application developers have had difficulties recognizing the extra effort required by groups...
Two interesting challenges have been created in the traditional transportation planning process through recent adoption of more interactive roles by Federal, State and local transportation agencies and of those representing the communities being impacted by proposed transportation projects. First, the decision-making groups that formerly included solely transportation and related professionals...
The engineering design process and the advancement of future computer-aided-design systems need new design aids to be used during the conceptual design phase. This design phase is where information gathering and understanding of the problem are developed, analyzed and broken into small more manageable elements. These elements consist of customer...