Rising Tides: A Guide to Sea Level Rise and the Coastal Organisms It Will Affect

A lot has been written about how humans will be impacted by sea level rise, but there are many species of animals and plants that will also be affected. Lottie the Loggerhead Sea Turtle, Marshall and Marsha Marshgrass, and Ollie the Eastern Oyster are here to tell their stories. You’ll learn all about their life-cycles, the important roles they play in their environment, and what the future may hold for them. So pick up this book, and get to know your coastline!https://stars.library.ucf.edu/ceelabbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Double-edged Sword of Pedagogy: Modeling the Effect of Pedagogical Contexts on Preschoolers’ Exploratory Play

URL to paper from conference siteHow does explicit instruction affect exploratory play and learning? We present a model that captures pedagogical assumptions (adapted from Shafto and Goodman, 2008) and test the model with a novel experiment looking at 4-year-olds’ exploratory play in pedagogical and non-pedagogical contexts. Our findings are consistent with the model predictions: preschool children limit their exploration in pedagogical contexts, spending most of their free play performing only the demonstrated action. By contrast, children explore broadly both at baseline and after an accidental demonstration. Thus pedagogy constrains children’s exploration for better and for worse; children learn the demonstrated causal relationship but are less likely than children in non-pedagogical contexts to discover and learn other causal relationships.American Psychological Foundation (Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship)Templeton FoundationJames S. McDonnell Foundatio

Backward Reachability Analysis of Neural Feedback Loops: Techniques for Linear and Nonlinear Systems

As neural networks (NNs) become more prevalent in safety-critical applications such as control of vehicles, there is a growing need to certify that systems with NN components are safe. This paper presents a set of backward reachability approaches for safety certification of neural feedback loops (NFLs), i.e., closed-loop systems with NN control policies. While backward reachability strategies have been developed for systems without NN components, the nonlinearities in NN activation functions and general noninvertibility of NN weight matrices make backward reachability for NFLs a challenging problem. To avoid the difficulties associated with propagating sets backward through NNs, we introduce a framework that leverages standard forward NN analysis tools to efficiently find over-approximations to backprojection (BP) sets, i.e., sets of states for which an NN policy will lead a system to a given target set. We present frameworks for calculating BP over approximations for both linear and nonlinear systems with control policies represented by feedforward NNs and propose computationally efficient strategies. We use numerical results from a variety of models to showcase the proposed algorithms, including a demonstration of safety certification for a 6D system.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures. Journal extension of arXiv:2204.0831

CEO succession and the CEO’s commitment to the status quo

Chief executive officer (CEO) commitment to the status quo (CSQ) is expected to play an important role in any firm’s strategic adaptation. CSQ is used often as an explanation for strategic change occurring after CEO succession: new CEOs are expected to reveal a lower CSQ than established CEOs. Although widely accepted in the literature, this relationship remains imputed but unobserved. We address this research gap and analyze whether new CEOs reveal lower CSQ than established CEOs. By analyzing the letters to the shareholders of German HDAX firms, we find empirical support for our hypothesis of a lower CSQ of newly appointed CEOs compared to established CEOs. However, our detailed analyses provide a differentiated picture. We find support for a lower CSQ of successors after a forced CEO turnover compared to successors after a voluntary turnover, which indicates an influence of the mandate for change on the CEO’s CSQ. However, against the widespread assumption, we do not find support for a lower CSQ of outside successors compared to inside successors, which calls for deeper analyses of the insiderness of new CEOs. Further, our supplementary analyses propose a revised tenure effect: the widely assumed relationship of an increase in CSQ when CEO tenure increases might be driven mainly by the event of CEO succession and may not universally and continuously increase over time, pointing to a “window of opportunity” to initiate strategic change shortly after the succession event. By analyzing the relationship between CEO succession and CEO CSQ, our results contribute to the CSQ literature and provide fruitful impulses for the CEO succession literature

The Effects of Fire and Logging on Montane Forest Soils in Southern Oregon

41 pagesClimate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of forest fires and drought across the Pacific Northwest (PNW) of the United States. Due to increasingly variable temperature and precipitation patterns, the effects of fire on forest vegetation can be modeled and predicted with great confidence. However, the effect of fire frequency on soils remains poorly understood. Soils in PNW forests have the potential to sequester large quantities of carbon, which can mitigate the effects of climate change. Furthermore, severely burned forests may be “salvage” logged post-fire in which consequences for carbon storage are uncertain. To quantify the effects of fire on soil properties and carbon content, we measured soil organic carbon (SOC), pH, and texture among a fire severity and post-fire management gradient in a region affected by the Biscuit Fire of 2002. Samples were collected at four sites and two depths for percent SOC, pH, and percent clay analyses. Laboratory analyses showed the low severity (8.10 ± 0.5) had higher levels of SOC than high severity sites (7.21 ± 0.9). However, the unburned site contained 4.29 ± 0.4 % SOC, the lowest percentage of the four sites. There were minimal differences in percent SOC between the salvage logged and non-salvage logged sites. Soil from the high severity non-salvage logged site had a significantly higher pH than the other sites, and percent clay remained relatively similar across all sites. The results indicate that low severity fires, potentially in the form of prescribed burns, may be optimal for sequestering SOC and could help mitigate the impact of climate change in montane forests in the PNW region

As the Seas Rise: How Coastal Plants and Animals Will Be Affected by Sea Level Rise

Lottie the Loggerhead Sea Turtle, Marshall and Marsha Marshgrass, and Ollie the Eastern Oyster are here to tell their stories. You\u27ll learn about each of them and how their futures are threatened by sea level rise. So read this book, and get to know your coastline!https://stars.library.ucf.edu/ceelabbooks/1001/thumbnail.jp

Efficient Determination of Safety Requirements for Perception Systems

Perception systems operate as a subcomponent of the general autonomy stack, and perception system designers often need to optimize performance characteristics while maintaining safety with respect to the overall closed-loop system. For this reason, it is useful to distill high-level safety requirements into component-level requirements on the perception system. In this work, we focus on efficiently determining sets of safe perception system performance characteristics given a black-box simulator of the fully-integrated, closed-loop system. We combine the advantages of common black-box estimation techniques such as Gaussian processes and threshold bandits to develop a new estimation method, which we call smoothing bandits. We demonstrate our method on a vision-based aircraft collision avoidance problem and show improvements in terms of both accuracy and efficiency over the Gaussian process and threshold bandit baselines.Comment: 10 pages, 14 figures, submitted to the 2023 Digital Avionics Systems Conferenc

ZoPE: A Fast Optimizer for ReLU Networks with Low-Dimensional Inputs

Deep neural networks often lack the safety and robustness guarantees needed to be deployed in safety critical systems. Formal verification techniques can be used to prove input-output safety properties of networks, but when properties are difficult to specify, we rely on the solution to various optimization problems. In this work, we present an algorithm called ZoPE that solves optimization problems over the output of feedforward ReLU networks with low-dimensional inputs. The algorithm eagerly splits the input space, bounding the objective using zonotope propagation at each step, and improves computational efficiency compared to existing mixed-integer programming approaches. We demonstrate how to formulate and solve three types of optimization problems: (i) minimization of any convex function over the output space, (ii) minimization of a convex function over the output of two networks in series with an adversarial perturbation in the layer between them, and (iii) maximization of the difference in output between two networks. Using ZoPE, we observe a $25\times$ speedup on property $1$ of the ACAS Xu neural network verification benchmark compared to several state-of-the-art verifiers, and an $85\times$ speedup on a set of linear optimization problems compared to a mixed-integer programming baseline. We demonstrate the versatility of the optimizer in analyzing networks by projecting onto the range of a generative adversarial network and visualizing the differences between a compressed and uncompressed network.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Modeling the effect of pedagogical contexts on preschoolers’ exploratory play

How does explicit instruction affect exploratory play and learning? We present a model that captures pedagogical assumptions (adapted from Shafto and Goodman, 2008) and test the model with a novel experiment looking at 4-year-olds ’ exploratory play in pedagogical and non-pedagogical contexts. Our findings are consistent with the model predictions: preschool children limit their exploration in pedagogical contexts, spending most of their free play performing only the demonstrated action. By contrast, children explore broadly both at baseline and after an accidental demonstration. Thus pedagogy constrains children’s exploration for better and for worse; children learn the demonstrated causal relationship but are less likely than children in non-pedagogical contexts to discover and learn other causal relationships