Study of Employment Retention Veterans (SERVe): Improving Reintegration of Oregon National Guard and Reserves in the Workplace

This presentation will provide an overview of the recently funded Department of Defense grant (Principal Investigator, Leslie Hammer, Ph.D.). Since 9/11 over 2.8 million United States military personnel have served in and around Iraq and Afghanistan. By 2018, the number of post-9/11 veterans is projected to top 3.1 million. Of these most recent veterans, 18% have difficulty holding a job and many experience family difficulty. Presently, a third or more of these post-9/11 veterans – some 874,728 service members and counting – have deployed to various global hotspots as active-duty reservists of the U.S. armed forces. Unemployment, underemployment and mental health symptoms are trending higher among reservist veterans than active-duty. In addition to facing unique employer perceptions upon their return, reservist veterans, unlike active-duty troops, are reintegrating with less community and social supports such as: free military housing; convenient medical care; accessible quality child care and steady and secure employment. Neurobiological analysis of the effects of high levels of social support reveal discrete physiological mechanisms that can lower PTSD symptoms and increase social bonding. The U.S. military transitions about 160,000 active-duty troops and demobilizes 110,000 reservists annually. With hundreds of thousands of soldiers returning from overseas little focus has been placed on post-deployment efforts of veterans around work-family conflict and job retention. Since maintaining gainful employment is critical to successful reintegration, along with our research partners we plan to develop, implement and evaluate our (V)eteran (S)upportive (S)upervisor (T)raining intervention

Factors Influencing Intention to Gamble Online

The objective of this research was to validate a model on online gambling intention. Given that there are many forms of online gambling, this research focused on sports betting. We adopted the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as our research model. Additionally, we included subjective norm as an antecedent to online gambling intention. We tested the model using data collected from a questionnaire survey. We collected 212 returns from students in a Chinese tertiary institution. The results provide support for the six hypotheses proposed in our research. We discussed the implications of the results for industry practitioners and gambling counselors

SVARM-IQ: Efficient Approximation of Any-order Shapley Interactions through Stratification

Addressing the limitations of individual attribution scores via the Shapley value (SV), the field of explainable AI (XAI) has recently explored intricate interactions of features or data points. In particular, extensions of the SV, such as the Shapley Interaction Index (SII), have been proposed as a measure to still benefit from the axiomatic basis of the SV. However, similar to the SV, their exact computation remains computationally prohibitive. Hence, we propose with SVARM-IQ a sampling-based approach to efficiently approximate Shapley-based interaction indices of any order. SVARM-IQ can be applied to a broad class of interaction indices, including the SII, by leveraging a novel stratified representation. We provide non-asymptotic theoretical guarantees on its approximation quality and empirically demonstrate that SVARM-IQ achieves state-of-the-art estimation results in practical XAI scenarios on different model classes and application domains

Recent Decisions

Comments on recent decisions by Daniel W. Hammer, John E. Kennedy, William J. Harte, Patrick F. McCartan, William D. Bailey, Jr., Donald L. Very, William C. Rindone, Jr., and Eugene F. Waye

FAU FabLab: A Fabrication Laboratory for Scientists, Students, Entrepreneurs and the Curious

Creative thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration is encouraged within academic institutions, but often inhibited by resource availability and distribution, as well as interfaces and opportunity for exchange. We–students of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU)–set out to improve this by creating a common open prototyping workspace for researchers, students, staff from all fields and schools as well as unaffiliated entrepreneurs, inventors and the generally curious. In this technical report, we present the origin of the Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) concept and its realization as the FAU FabLab in Erlangen

Predation on Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus ) eggs by the resident predator community in coastal transitional waters

Atlantic herring (Clupea harengus) migrates from offshore to coastal areas to spawn and their eggs and larvae may substantially increase prey resources for resident predators. We combined an in situ predator exclusion experiment using eggs naturally spawned on submerged aquatic vegetation and field observations of predator abundance to estimate the magnitude of predation mortality of herring eggs. During our predator exclusion experiment, performed in an important spawning ground in the southwest Baltic Sea, 20% of the herring eggs were consumed resulting in an extrapolated predation of 42% of all eggs between spawning and hatch. Abundance and stomach content analyses indicated that one predator (threespine stickleback, Gasterosteus aculeatus) was responsible for the majority of the predation impact. Predation mortality estimates from this in situ study were more than 10-fold higher than those of an empirical egg predation model for the same predator in the same region. Our findings highlight the potential of resident predators to regulate the survival of early life stages of ocean-going fishes that rely on the nursery functions of inshore transitional waters

MODELING TRIBAL LEADERSHIP DYNAMICS: AN OPINION DYNAMICS MODEL OF PASHTUN LEADERSHIP SELECTION

We propose a new approach to modeling the selection of leaders in Pashtun tribal society. Pashtuns are the largest tribal group in Afghanistan. In traditional Pashtun society, leadership is manifested as an informal power system where potential leaders gain and maintain their position by means of group consensus. Leadership power is spread over three areas of influence resulting in a triad of leadership roles. These leaders compete, vying for power and control based on public opinion. The addition of extremists into this system who utilize threats of harm to gain power disrupts the traditional system, altering the balance of power. In this research we implement a bounded confidence opinion dynamics model to describe the dynamics of Pashtun leadership selection and to describe the changes resulting from the addition of extremists to the system. Keywords

Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction for Transfer Learning

Blöbaum P, Schulz A, Hammer B. Unsupervised Dimensionality Reduction for Transfer Learning. In: Verleysen M, ed. Proceedings. 23rd European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning. Louvain-la-Neuve: Ciaco; 2015: 507-512.We investigate the suitability of unsupervised dimensionality reduction (DR) for transfer learning in the context of different representations of the source and target domain. Essentially, unsupervised DR establishes a link of source and target domain by representing the data in a common latent space. We consider two settings: a linear DR of source and target data which establishes correspondences of the data and an according transfer, and its combination with a non-linear DR which allows to adapt to more complex data characterised by a global non-linear structure