Discovering and developing primary biodiversity data from social networking sites

An ever-increasing need exists for fine-scale biodiversity occurrence records for a broad variety of research applications in biodiversity and science more generally. Even though large-scale data aggregators like GBIF serve such data in large quantities, major gaps and biases still exist, both in taxonomic coverage and in spatial coverage. To address these gaps, in this dissertation, I explored social networking sites (SNS) as a rich potential source of additional biodiversity occurrence records. In my first chapter, I explored the idea of discovering, extracting, and organizing massive numbers of biodiversity occurrence records now available on SNSs. I presented a proof-of-concept with Flickr as the SNS and Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) and Monarch Butterflies (Danaus plexippus) as target species. The methods presented in this chapter can easily be used for any other SNS, region, or species group. These approaches are broadly applicable to animal and plant groups that are photographed, and that can be identified from photographs with some degree of confidence (e.g., birds, butterflies, cetaceans, orchids, dragonflies, amphibians, and plants). SNS thus offer a rich new source of biodiversity data. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of biodiversity data, we need effective tools by which to explore and visualize these data. I developed a suite of such tools in an R package called bdvis, which is described in chapter two. The package allows users to explore spatial, temporal, and taxonomic dimensions of biodiversity data sets to highlight gaps and identify strengths. In the third chapter, I explored Flickr further as a source of biodiversity data for the birds of the world, to assess the potential of augmenting the largest portal to biodiversity occurrence data, i.e., the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). GBIF provides access to ~190 x 106 bird records, compared to ~7 x 106 that I could discover from Flickr, out of which only ~1.3 x 106 were geotagged. However, the Flickr data showed the potential to add to knowledge about birds in terms of geographic, taxonomic, and temporal dimensions, as Flickr data tended to be complementary to the GBIF-derived information. Finally, I developed a case study to investigate the quantity of records existing, and the quality of identifications by users on Flickr. I developed a detailed case study of Indian swallowtail butterflies, and implemented a crowd-sourcing platform to recruit identification expertise and apply it to butterfly photographs from the SNS. Results were encouraging, with 93% correct identities for records of this family of butterflies from across India

Architectural Refinement in HETS

The main objective of this work is to bring a number of improvements to the Heterogeneous Tool Set HETS, both from a theoretical and an implementation point of view. In the first part of the thesis we present a number of recent extensions of the tool, among which declarative specifications of logics, generalized theoroidal comorphisms, heterogeneous colimits and integration of the logic of the term rewriting system Maude. In the second part we concentrate on the CASL architectural refinement language, that we equip with a notion of refinement tree and with calculi for checking correctness and consistency of refinements. Soundness and completeness of these calculi is also investigated. Finally, we present the integration of the VSE refinement method in HETS as an institution comorphism. Thus, the proof manangement component of HETS remains unmodified

Interview with Endre Szemerédi

Endre Szemerédi is the recipient of the 2012 Abel Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. This interview was conducted in Oslo in May 2012 in conjuction with the Abel Prize celebration

Architectures of School Mathematics: Vernaculars of the Function Concept

This study focuses on the history of school mathematics through the discourse surrounding the function concept. The function concept has remained the central theme of school mathematics from the emergence of both obligatory schooling and the science of mathematics education. By understanding the scientific discourse of mathematics education as directly connected to larger issues of governance, technology, and industry, particular visions for students are described to highlight these connections. Descriptions from school mathematics focusing on expert curricular documents, developmental psychology, and district reform strategies, are meant to explain these different visions. Despite continued historical inquiry in mathematics education, few studies have offered connections between the specific style of mathematics idealized in schools, the learning theories that accompanied these, and larger societal and cultural shifts. In exploring new theoretical tools from the history of science and technology this study seeks to connect shifting logic from efforts towards rational organization of capitalist society with the logic of school mathematics across the discursive space. This study seeks to understand this relationship by examining the ideals evinced in the protocols of educational science. In order to explore these architectures, the science of mathematics education and psychology are examined alongside the practices in the New York City public schools--the largest school system in the nation. To do so, the discourse of the function concept was viewed as a set of connections between mathematical content, psychology, and larger district reform projects. Four architectures--the mechanical, thermodynamic, cybernetic, and network models--are examined

How Future Depends on the Past and on Rare Events in Systems of Life

A paraîtreInternational audienceThe dependence on history of both present and future dynamics of life is a common intuition in biology and in humanities. Historicity will be understood in terms of changes of the space of possibilities (or of " phase space ") as well as by the role of diversity in life's structural stability and of rare events in history formation. We hint to a rigorous analysis of " path dependence " in terms of invariants and invariance preserving transformations, as it may be found also in physics, while departing from the physico-mathematical analyses. The idea is that the (relative or historicized) invariant traces of past organismal or ecosystemic transformations contribute to the understanding (or the " theoretical determination ") of present and future states of affairs. This yields a peculiar form of unpredictability (or randomness) in biology, at the core of novelty formation: the changes of observables and pertinent parameters may depend also on past events. In particular, in relation to the properties of synchronic measurement in physics, the relevance of diachronic measurement in biology is highlighted. This analysis may a fortiori apply to cognitive and historical human dynamics, while allowing to investigate some general properties of historicity in biology