The Role of Technical Communicators in Open-Source Software: A Systematic Review

To survive, Free/Open-Source Software (FOSS) projects need to attract and retain new contributors. Research has studied the many barriers that newcomers face when trying to contribute to FOSS projects. These barriers can cause newcomers to give up on contributing to FOSS projects. Many of the hurdles that newcomers face can be reduced or eliminated by skills that technical writers possess. In this paper, I aim to 1) present the results of a systematic literature review to identify the barriers that newcomers face, 2) identify roles that technical writers can take to help alleviate those barriers, and 3) identify ways that contributing to FOSS as part of the technical communication curriculum would be beneficial to students

Feasibility of Implementing Concrete Tetrapods into Duluth’s Coastal Environment

Department of Civil Engineering, Swenson College of Science and EngineeringUniversity of Minnesota's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Progra

Minutes: Student Senate: February 25, 2021

Administrative Response to Senate Actions; Approval of Appointed Twin Cities Senators; Approval of the Minutes; Assembly/Association Updates; Student Senate/Student Senate Consultative Committee Chair Report; Update on the University’s Student Financial Obligations and Responsibilities eAgreement in MyU; Report to Strengthen UMPD Alignment with UMN Expectations; Discussion on PSG Resolution Concerning COVID-19 Testing and Vaccination Sites; Discussion of Decorum; New Busines

Minutes: Senate Committee on Educational Policy: February 17, 2021

Fall Modalities; ROTC Subcommittee Update; Graduate Education Matters; Paper Versus Electronic SR

Non-invasive Surgical Robotics Chassis System Iteration 001

Faculty Adviser: Dr. Arshia KhanThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Minutes: Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure: January 29, 2021

Administrative Policy Review: Academic Appointments with Teaching Functions ; Discussion and Review of Upcoming Consultation on the Board of Regents Policy Faculty Tenure ; Discussion of Suspension of Tenure at Kansas Universities; AF&T Statement Concerning the Women's Faculty Cabinet’s Proposal to Adopt Holistic Teaching Evaluation Processe

The Trajectory of Zoom: Analyzing the Development of Video Conferencing Software and Accessibility in an Age of Remote Work

Video conferencing software is a medium and resource that we have become accustomed to in order to connect with loved ones, complete our work duties, and stay entertained during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those living with disabilities often have a different relationship with video conferencing software and are too often left out of the conversation when it relates to modern technologies. Through analyzing accessibility guidelines, charting the current standards of videoconferencing accessibility, and highlighting concerns from those with disabilities, I lay out the reasons why the conversation surrounding remote work and accessibility needs further progression

Poloxamer 407 as a Drug Delivery System to Treat Ear Infections

Faculty advisor: Michelle CalabreseThis research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain

Contents: An urgent invitation: theorizing postwar realist writing -- Billets and boardinghouses: shared space and the reconstruction novel -- Mobile housing: realizing movement in 1950s city fiction -- Country houses: nostalgia and the realist challenge -- Safe houses: seeking shelter and connection post-consensus.This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Towards an Open Monograph Ecosystem)—a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries—and the generous support of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at the TOME website, which can be found at the following web address: https://www.openmonographs.org

Distributed Optimization in Learning Algorithms with Parsimony in Communications

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. January 2020. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: Jarvis Haupt. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 138 pages.As we have seen, today machine learning and big data technologies are transforming both our daily life and economies fundamentally. An important factor that fuels the progress of learning algorithms is the abundance of data generated everyday. In many scenarios, including internet of things, intelligent transportation systems, mobile/edge computing, and smart grids, the datasets are often generated and stored locally in different locations. Traditional centralized (concentrated) algorithms, however, are facing challenges in these settings because they usually require much higher computation cost on a single machine, more communications for collecting raw local data, and are more vulnerable to possible failure of the host. Therefore the distributed learning and optimization algorithms, which are essentially exempted from those problems, are becoming promising alternatives that attract growing interest in recent years. Generally speaking, distributed algorithms describe the approaches that solve problems in a collaborative manner over multiple agents (machines, nodes, computation units or cores) based on communications among them. The main theme of this work is the identification of efficient and effective ways to exploit distributed procedures and communication structures in this type of settings and applications. The first part of this work contains the discussions of a communication-efficient distributed optimization framework for general nonconvex nonsmooth signal processing and machine learning problems under an asynchronous protocol. As we know, an important criterion for preferable distributed algorithms in latency and communication sensitive applications is that they can complete tasks fast with as less communication resources as possible. Thus in this part we present an asynchronous efficient distributed algorithm with reduced waiting time based on the updates utilizing local higher-order information and investigate the theoretical guarantee for the convergence and the simulation performance of this type of algorithms in both strongly convex and nonconvex nonsmooth scenarios. The second part of this work examines the relationship between communication structures and efficiency in distributed optimization. The strategy of setting proper communication structures or patterns is an inexpensive way to save the communication cost of distributed algorithms. It is shown here that in the background of multi-agent policy evaluation, certain communication structures can result in significant improvements in the efficiency of distributed algorithms, providing new insight into the setting of communication networks. Specifically, a hierarchical structure that differentiates the roles of each of the agents during the evaluation process is proposed allowing us to freely choose various mixing schemes (and corresponding mixing matrices that are not necessarily symmetric or doubly stochastic), in order to reduce the communication and computation cost, while still maintaining convergence comparable to the homogeneous distributed algorithms. Extensive numerical experiments corroborate that the performance of the proposed approaches indeed improves over other advanced algorithms in terms of total communication efficiency