Design environments for Intelligent Systems

There is a need to balance the quality of professionally designed information systems with the end user’s current knowledge of specific decision contexts. This is particularly so for intelligent systems. This paper looks at some theoretical underpinnings for the potential end- user development of intelligent systems. General requirements are characterised and the metaphor of a semantic spreadsheet is introduced. A two level process enabling end user development of knowledge-based systems is described. The first involves the development of a design environment that allows experts to develop the knowledge base. The second involves development within the design environment for the ultimate end users

Omnivariate rule induction using a novel pairwise statistical test

Rule learning algorithms, for example, RIPPER, induces univariate rules, that is, a propositional condition in a rule uses only one feature. In this paper, we propose an omnivariate induction of rules where under each condition, both a univariate and a multivariate condition are trained, and the best is chosen according to a novel statistical test. This paper has three main contributions: First, we propose a novel statistical test, the combined 5 x 2 cv t test, to compare two classifiers, which is a variant of the 5 x 2 cv t test and give the connections to other tests as 5 x 2 cv F test and k-fold paired t test. Second, we propose a multivariate version of RIPPER, where support vector machine with linear kernel is used to find multivariate linear conditions. Third, we propose an omnivariate version of RIPPER, where the model selection is done via the combined 5 x 2 cv t test. Our results indicate that 1) the combined 5 x 2 cv t test has higher power (lower type II error), lower type I error, and higher replicability compared to the 5 x 2 cv t test, 2) omnivariate rules are better in that they choose whichever condition is more accurate, selecting the right model automatically and separately for each condition in a rule.Publisher's VersionAuthor Post Prin

(Dis)Possessed Black Youth: How America\u27s Architecture Challenges Coming of Age in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century African American Women\u27s Literature

This dissertation advances studies of Black childhood, particularly Black girlhood, by examining how African American women writers depict the troubled journey to adulthood in stories of segregation, immigration, and incarceration. I argue that authors of four representative literary works emphasize architectural structures as well as ancestral hauntings among which Black children grow up. Without examining the material structures, we cannot understand the strategies these haunted Black youth deploy to reach adulthood. Examining the architectural structures that the protagonists of Maud Martha (1953), Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), Zami (1982), and Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) grow up in and around, I demonstrate how each protagonist develops an alternative model of adulthood to challenge whiteness as property and to reckon with haunting. Looking at structures from the kitchenette to the prison in these coming-of-age narratives, I endeavor to show how whiteness as property shifts shape to continue to subject young Black people and keep them from the full rights of adulthood. In each chapter, I expound on the history and development of a different architectural structure. I follow that context with close readings that illuminate how each protagonist experiences haunting in a particular built environment on their journey to adulthood and how that spurs them on to develop alternative maturity markers. In chapter one, I grapple with two narratives of segregation. I argue that Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, unable to buy a home because of redlining restrictions, builds a rich interiority to combat the haunting she endures in her oppressive kitchenette. Conversely, Paule Marshall’s Selina refuses to bow to familial and societal pressure to purchase property. Instead, to dispel the haunting she experiences in her Brooklyn brownstone, she returns to the Caribbean to reclaim her ancestral memory. In chapter two, I examine how Audre Lorde’s experience as immigrant and lesbian propels her to embrace rather than reject haunting. I assert that Lorde queers the diaspora as she draws on the erotic as power to create a “house of difference” and reject the monumental whiteness of the United States. In chapter three, I emphasize how whiteness as property changes shape but not substance throughout U.S. history by examining Parchman Prison. I illustrate how Jesmyn Ward’s protagonist, Jojo, and his younger sister Kayla, practice conjure to cope with the ghosts that appear to them and how these inherited conjure abilities offer protection for their futures threatened by incarceration. While each protagonist draws on a different mechanism to reckon with haunting: building interiority, claiming ancestral memory, using the erotic as power, and practicing conjure, in so doing, they construct homes, create spaces for survival, and develop models for adulthood outside of whiteness as property. Thus, they become self-possessed in a world built to dispossess them

Volume 15 - Issue 6 - March, 1906

https://scholar.rose-hulman.edu/technic/1483/thumbnail.jp

Race on Display in 20th- and 21st Century France

In Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France Knox turns the tables France’s rhetoric of ‘internal otherness’, asking her reader not to spot those deemed France’s others but rather to deconstruct the very gazes that produce them. Weaving together a vast corpus of colonial French children’s comics, Francophone novels, and African popular music, fashion, and dance, Knox traces how the ways colonial ‘human zoos’ invited their French spectators to gaze on their colonized others still inform the frameworks through which racial and ethnic minorities are made—and make themselves—visible in contemporary France. In addition to analyzing how literature and music depicting immigrants and their descendants in France make race and ethnicity visible, Knox also illustrates how the works she analyzes self-reflexively ask whether they, as commodities sold within wider cultural marketplaces, perpetuate the culture of exoticism they seek to contest. Finally, Knox contends that to take seriously the way the texts interrogate the relationship between power, privilege, and the gaze also requires reconsidering the visions of normalcy from which racial and ethnic minorities supposedly depart. She thus concludes by exposing a critical ‘blind spot’ in French cultural studies—whiteness—before subjecting it to the same scrutiny France’s ‘visible minorities’ face

A novel bubble function scheme for the finite element solution of engineering flow problems

This thesis is devoted to the study of some difficulties of practical implementation of finite element solution of differential equations within the context of multi-scale engineering flow problems. In particular, stabilized finite elements and issues associated with computer implementation of these schemes are discussed and a novel technique towards practical implementation of such schemes is presented. The idea behind this novel technique is to introduce elemental shape functions of the polynomial forms that acquire higher degrees and are optimized at the element level, using the least squares minimization of the residual. This technique provides a practical scheme that improves the accuracy of the finite element solution while using crude discretization. The method of residual free bubble functions is the point of our departure. [Continues.