Change and planning in chance discovery.

The discovery of risks and opportunities, known collectively as chances, can have a significant impact on decision making. Chances (risks or opportunities) can be discovered from our daily observations and background knowledge. A person can easily identify chances in a news article. In doing so, the person combines the new information in the article with some background knowledge. Hence, we develop a deductive system to discover relative chances with respect to a particular chance seeker. A chance discovery system that uses a general purpose knowledge base and specialized reasoning algorithms is proposed. The thesis evaluates the implementation of this chance discovery system and discusses the achievements and limitations of its elements, such as Natural Language Processing Tool, Knowledge Entry Tool, Inference Engine and Planner. Finally, A case study about a virtual transportation planning domain implemented using SHOP planner is presented. Example chances are detected in this domain. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2005 .W89. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-03, page: 1418. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005

Negotiating Matters of Concern: Expertise, Uncertainty, and Agency in Rhetoric of Science

Debates over GMOs, vaccines, and climate change are but a few examples that highlight a growing body of high-stakes scientific controversies and the manifest difficulties inherent in communicating about them. Addressing these and similar issues requires navigating a wide array of competing scientific, technological, social, democratic, environmental, and economic exigencies. The development of scholarly approaches that can account for the complexity and dynamism of these cases is an essential part of ensuring effective, ethical interaction between scientists and publics. In this dissertation, I explore one such case, the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, in which seven technical experts were charged with manslaughter for failing to warn the public. With the addition of the trial, this earthquake overflowed the boundaries of seismology, entangling the public, political, and technical and foregrounding the specific challenges of public-expert communication about risk and uncertainty. To better account for and negotiate public-expert interaction, my dissertation develops rhetorically-oriented approaches for improving communication about risk and uncertainty. In so doing, I explore new synergies among three concepts – agency, expertise, and uncertainty – which have previously been treated separately by rhetoricians but are inextricably entangled in situations like L’Aquila

Data Mining

The availability of big data due to computerization and automation has generated an urgent need for new techniques to analyze and convert big data into useful information and knowledge. Data mining is a promising and leading-edge technology for mining large volumes of data, looking for hidden information, and aiding knowledge discovery. It can be used for characterization, classification, discrimination, anomaly detection, association, clustering, trend or evolution prediction, and much more in fields such as science, medicine, economics, engineering, computers, and even business analytics. This book presents basic concepts, ideas, and research in data mining

NASA Earth Resources Survey Symposium. Volume 2-A: Special session presentations. Plenary summaries

Practical application of earth resources survey data is considered. The utilization and results of data from NASA programs involving LANDSAT, the Skylab Earth Resources Experiment Package, and aircraft, as well as other data acquisition programs are included. User services and requirements and applications in land use, agriculture, coastal zone management, and geology are among the topics covered. For Vol. 1A, see N76-17469

Special Libraries, Summer 1992

Volume 83, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1992/1002/thumbnail.jp

Volume 20 - 1989: FRONTIERS IN GEOSCIENCE INFORMATION - Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of the Geoscience Information Society

Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of the Geoscience Information Society held November 6-9, 1989 in St. Louis, Missour

Developing a fire robustness index for the built environment

In recent years, resilience in fire has been recognised as a potential complement in risk assessments to achieve a more sustainable future. Robustness is a key component of resilience, in order to avoid the structure’s disproportionate failure to the original cause. The aim of this project is to develop an assessment methodology for the fire robustness of buildings, in the form of a risk index. The lack of available metrics, the relative immaturity of the discipline, rapid developments in the field of fire safety regulation, and issues around the potential liability of users and developers rendered this project a challenging endeavour. In the first part of this work, insurance rating methods were investigated. Their mechanics, development history, and impact are outlined, given their thematic relativity to the focus of this work. Fire risk indexing, which is a multi-attribute evaluation to produce a single ordinal measure of risk, and its existing body of knowledge was reviewed. This clarified issues of terminology and navigated concepts that up until now were convoluted, all in a harmonised body of work. Finally, modern fire risk indexing methods were presented in an exhaustive historical order, explaining the motivation for their creation, links with other methods, developmental tools used, along with their utility and impact. The dearth of information available in the published literature led to a series of interviews with past developers to address knowledge gaps and document unpublished findings. This is presented in a dedicated chapter. The review in the first part of this thesis, with the collation of the unpublished information, allowed for a historical highlighting of patterns and tendencies in the employment of fire risk indexing in fire safety, placing even this project within this pattern. This can inform practitioners and developers of potential pitfalls that have been repeated historically, yet remained unrecognised prior to this analysis In the last part of the work, tools from Decision Theory are explained and employed, expanding the existing scientific base of fire risk indexing approaches as it was suggested in existing works, but also highlighting their limitations. Prior to outlining an assessment methodology, a review of resilience and robustness is conducted, to link these concepts to the fire safety practice. A discussion on the practicalities of each available metric to quantify robustness is presented, supporting the developmental decisions of this work. Using these tools, a proposed fire robustness index structure is conceptualised, but the principles followed remain of value for building methods assessing any design objective that future developers would need to address. Following this approach is intended to improve the transparency of the decision-making in the design process, allow the comparison of different solutions, potentially reduce costs, and eventually lead to safer and more robust buildings while avoiding unintended consequences and pitfalls of the past. The assessment of a structure’s fire robustness through this method can facilitate an easier communication to stakeholders of different backgrounds, using this method as a means to promote fire safety in the design process