Hansen Elementary School Counseling

Last semester I had the opportunity to work closely with Jen Alexander, a school counselor at Hansen Elementary School. As a school counselor, Jen helps kids develop social skills, improve their learning, understand their emotions, and much more in order to help them thrive while they are in school. My poster discusses all the things I learned from interning at Hansen. It also goes into detail about what school counselors do, the best parts about being there, and research on Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and how they can affect kids

Exploring Political Consumerism: Its Antecedents and Mediating Role Between Family Communication and Political Activity

Viewed as an unconventional approach to politics, political consumerism is a rising form of political action that allows citizens to make political statements with their wallets. However, more research is warranted examining its motivating factors, as well as its connection to other forms of political activity. The family unit is the primary antecedent examined in this study, as it is regarded as one of the most important socializing agents for children, especially when it comes to political development. Conducting a national survey of 523 U.S. adults, the present study explored how one’s family communication environment during childhood affects their likelihood of engaging in political consumerism during adulthood, and in turn, how that influences their involvement in offline and online political activity. Through multiple regression analysis, the results showed that both the conversation and conformity orientations are positively associated with boycotting and buycotting. Path analysis further revealed the mediating role of political consumption on the relationship between family communication and political activity. Overall, this study expands the understanding of family communication patterns theory and suggests that political consumers are involved in various forms of political activity. The results further point to the growing trend of “dual participation,” whereby citizens combine offline and online political activities

Evaluating Self-Efficacy of Health Behaviors in Bariatric Surgery Patients Through Online Support

Obesity has become an epidemic in the United States leading to numerous health related conditions. Bariatric surgeries are recognized as reasonable treatment options for obesity. However, long term success can be limited without adequate support. Rural areas can be especially difficult to find adequate support, often related to access and distance to care. The main purpose of this project was to analyze changes in perceptions of participants’ ability to engage in health promoting behaviors pre-intervention and post intervention. The intervention was a virtual behavioral support program for post bariatric surgery patients. The main objective was to determine if following participation in an eight week virtual support program, participants would have improved scores of perceptions of ability to participate in and maintain health promotion behaviors. The changes in perceptions were evaluated via scores, measured pre and post intervention, using the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II tool. Overall results showed an increase in the mean scores of perceptions from pre-intervention to post intervention of 0.09 (2.54 to 2.63). Although this did not reach power or show statistical significance, the overall perceptions surrounding heathy lifestyles did increase a small amount overall and in noticeable amounts in certain categories

Connectivity Differences between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations

Human interaction with robot swarms (HSI) is a young field with very few user studies that explore operator behavior. All these studies assume perfect communication between the operator and the swarm. A key challenge in the use of swarm robotic systems in human supervised tasks is to understand human swarm interaction in the presence of limited communication bandwidth, which is a constraint arising in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present results of human-subject experiments designed to study the effect of bandwidth limitations in human swarm interaction. We consider three levels of bandwidth availability in a swarm foraging task. The lowest bandwidth condition performs poorly, but the medium and high bandwidth condition both perform well. In the medium bandwidth condition, we display useful aggregated swarm information (like swarm centroid and spread) to compress the swarm state information. We also observe interesting operator behavior and adaptation of operators' swarm reaction

Virtual spring damper method for nonholonomic robotic swarm self-organization and leader following

In this paper, we demonstrate a method for self-organization and leader following of nonholonomic robotic swarm based on spring damper mesh. By self-organization of swarm robots we mean the emergence of order in a swarm as the result of interactions among the single robots. In other words the self-organization of swarm robots mimics some natural behavior of social animals like ants among others. The dynamics of two-wheel robot is derived, and a relation between virtual forces and robot control inputs is defined in order to establish stable swarm formation. Two cases of swarm control are analyzed. In the first case the swarm cohesion is achieved by virtual spring damper mesh connecting nearest neighboring robots without designated leader. In the second case we introduce a swarm leader interacting with nearest and second neighbors allowing the swarm to follow the leader. The paper ends with numeric simulation for performance evaluation of the proposed control method

Human Swarm Interaction: An Experimental Study of Two Types of Interaction with Foraging Swarms

In this paper we present the first study of human-swarm interaction comparing two fundamental types of interaction, coined intermittent and environmental. These types are exemplified by two control methods, selection and beacon control, made available to a human operator to control a foraging swarm of robots. Selection and beacon control differ with respect to their temporal and spatial influence on the swarm and enable an operator to generate different strategies from the basic behaviors of the swarm. Selection control requires an active selection of groups of robots while beacon control exerts an influence on nearby robots within a set range. Both control methods are implemented in a testbed in which operators solve an information foraging problem by utilizing a set of swarm behaviors. The robotic swarm has only local communication and sensing capabilities. The number of robots in the swarm range from 50 to 200. Operator performance for each control method is compared in a series of missions in different environments with no obstacles up to cluttered and structured obstacles. In addition, performance is compared to simple and advanced autonomous swarms. Thirty-two participants were recruited for participation in the study. Autonomous swarm algorithms were tested in repeated simulations. Our results showed that selection control scales better to larger swarms and generally outperforms beacon control. Operators utilized different swarm behaviors with different frequency across control methods, suggesting an adaptation to different strategies induced by choice of control method. Simple autonomous swarms outperformed human operators in open environments, but operators adapted better to complex environments with obstacles. Human controlled swarms fell short of task-specific benchmarks under all conditions. Our results reinforce the importance of understanding and choosing appropriate types of human-swarm interaction when designing swarm systems, in addition to choosing appropriate swarm behaviors

Swarm simulation system

Swarm is a software package for multi-agent simulations of complex adaptive systems, originally developed at the Santa Fe Institute. Swarm is intended to be a useful tool for researchers in a variety of disciplines. The basic architecture of Swarm is the simulation of collections of concurrently interacting agents : with this architecture, we can implement a large variety of agent based models. The Swarm software is available to the general public under GNU licensing terms. Swarm is experimental software, which means that it\u27s complete enough to be useful but will always be under development

Connectivity-Preserving Swarm Teleoperation With A Tree Network

During swarm teleoperation, the human operator may threaten the distance-dependent inter-robot communications and, with them, the connectivity of the slave swarm. To prevent the harmful component of the human command from disconnecting the swarm network, this paper develops a constructive strategy to dynamically modulate the interconnections of, and the locally injected damping at, all slave robots. By Lyapunov-based set invariance analysis, the explicit law for updating that control gains has been rigorously proven to synchronize the slave swarm while preserving all interaction links in the tree network. By properly limiting the impact of the user command rather than rejecting it entirely, the proposed control law enables the human operator to guide the motion of the slave swarm to the extent to which it does not endanger the connectivity of the swarm network. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed strategy can maintain the connectivity of the tree network during swarm teleoperation