Sun of Justice Rising: Tonatierra Community Development Institute

Salvador Reza, a longtime organizer for indigenous Mexican rights, helped lead a successful campaign to organize taco vendors in Phoenix. Faced with a local ordinance that would restrict the operation of mobile food stands, effectively banning them, Reza and his colleagues at Tonatierra mobilized the vendors to fight back. Their ultimate success recaptured the spirit of a community traumatized by 500 years of colonization and cultural destruction. Tonatierra's strategies included the following:Involve Vendors: Once vendors understood that the ordinance targeted them and threatened their livelihoods, they were able to establish a working group, representative of the community. They fashioned a way of regulating vendors that would ensure safe food and safe neighborhoods.Create a Team and a United Voice: The vendors negotiated among themselves until they could present their recommendations as a team.Rekindle Culture: According to Reza, "We are fighting back, but not with weapons of guns. Our weapons are culture and understanding and communication.

Experiments with Encoding Structured Data for Neural Networks

The project's aim is to create an AI agent capable of selecting good actions in a game-playing domain called Battlespace. Sequential domains like Battlespace are important testbeds for planning problems, as such, the Department of Defense uses such domains for wargaming exercises. The agents we developed combine Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) and Deep Q-Network (DQN) techniques in an effort to navigate the game environment, avoid obstacles, interact with adversaries, and capture the flag. This paper will focus on the encoding techniques we explored to present complex structured data stored in a Python class, a necessary precursor to an agent.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

USING COMMERCIAL 5G AND LEO TECHNOLOGIES TO ENHANCE NAVY-ARMY SENSOR-TO-SHOOTER NETWORKS

The emerging commercial technologies of 5G and low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications have the capability to provide links that send large amounts of data with low latency. As the DOD continues to explore how to best leverage these technologies, it is important to develop potential use cases within the military. This thesis describes a sensor-to-shooter operational scenario and the network transport links currently in use to move data from a Navy sensor to an Army shooter. The current sensor-to-shooter network transport links are then compared to the emerging commercial alternatives of 5G and LEO satellite communications in the categories of throughput, latency and range. This analysis demonstrates the comparative advantages and disadvantages of both 5G and LEO technologies over current links.Captain, United States ArmyLieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Frailty and the Burden of Concurrent and Incident Disability in Patients With Cirrhosis: A Prospective Cohort Study.

Frailty results from the chronic effects of malnutrition and muscle wasting in patients with cirrhosis. It is well-established that frailty is strongly associated with mortality in this population. However, little is known of its relationship with physical disability, a critical patient-centered outcome. Adults with cirrhosis underwent outpatient testing of frailty using the Liver Frailty Index (LFI) and disability using activities of daily living (ADL; range 0-6) and Instrumental ADL (IADL; range 0-8) scales at one center between 2012 and 2016. We used adjusted multilevel logistic mixed-effects regression to test the association between frailty and current disability (impairment with ≥1 ADL or IADL) and incident disability at 6 months among those without baseline disability. Of the 983 participants, 20% were robust, 32% were less robust, 33% were prefrail, and 15% were frail; 587 (60%) had at least 1 assessment. The percentage of participants with at least 1 baseline ADL or IADL impairment was 28% and 37%, respectively. In adjusted regression models, each point LFI increase was associated with a 3.3 and 4.6 higher odds of current difficulty with at least 1 ADL and IADL (P < 0.001 for each), respectively. Among participants without baseline disability, each point LFI increase was associated with a 2.6 and 1.7 higher odds of having difficulty with at least 1 ADL and IADL at 6 months, respectively. Conclusion: Frailty is strongly associated with concurrent and incident disability in patients with cirrhosis. In the clinic, the LFI can be used to identify those in greatest need for additional support/resources to maintain functional independence. In research settings, the LFI may help to identify an enriched population for clinical trials of interventions aimed at those most vulnerable to disability

Ecological Effects of the Biocontrol Insects, Larinus Planus and Rhinocyllus Conicus, on Native Thistles

Biological control of invasive weeds is, by nature, a delicate balance between introducing effective biological control agents and not introducing another invasive species. A disconcertingly similar suite of traits is used to describe invasive insect species and to identify appropriate biological control agents (or candidates): good control agents and invasive exotic species are good dispersers, they are good colonizers, they have high reproduction rates, and they are suited for broad distribution. It shouldn't come as a surprise that two previously released weed biological control agents can now be characterized as invasive species. The purpose of this dissertation is twofold: first, it is to explore the ecological relationship between predispersal seed predation and plant population dynamics, and second, it is to elucidate the risks to native plants involved with introduction and redistribution of exotic species. Rhinocyllus conicus and Larinus planus are Eurasian seed-head weevils, introduced and redistributed broadly across the western U.S. to control exotic thistles. Exclusion experiments on native thistles, including one that is rare and imperiled, at sites in Colorado present strong evidence that a decrease in seed production due to herbivory by both R. conicus and L. planus has lead to a reduction in recruitment of the thistles. The density of seedlings in both cases, even in the excluded units, was far below where density dependent effects may play a role in the dynamics of the thistle. Further, a survey of eight western states demonstrates established populations of L. planus and effects on seed production in multiple native species in four states. It also documents the near ubiquity and broad diet breadth of R. conicus. The process for approval of phytophagous biocontrol agents has become more cautious and more efforts are made to prevent nontarget herbivory. Nevertheless, land managers still routinely redistribute previously approved, non-regulated agent insects that appear to pose a higher risk to the native flora. The results of this research will benefit resource managers who wish to consider use of phytophagous insects as biological control agents as well as help ecologists and environmental managers understand the risk probabilities of biological control applications

Explanations and Processes to Enable Humans to Assess AI with Respect to Manipulable Properties

Assessing AI systems is difficult. Humans rely on AI systems in increasing ways, both visible and invisible, meaning a variety of stakeholders need a variety of assessment tools (e.g., a professional auditor, a developer, and an end user all have different needs). We posit that it is possible to provide explanations and assessment processes that enable AI non-experts observing multiple intelligent agents in sequential domains to differentiate the agents with respect to a property (e.g., quality or fairness), as well as articulate justification for their differentiation. Further, we hypothesize that if the property can be manipulated in a highly controllable fashion, then it is possible to measure the quality of an explanation and/or assessment process by its ability to expose that such manipulation has occurred. This dissertation presents our contributions in explanations, processes, and manipulations for assessment. Specifically, we present our investigations into explanations to judge fairness of a classifier, the After-Action Review for AI process to structure explanation consumption, the Ranking task for explanation evaluation, and the Mutant Agent Generation approach for introducing controllable variation. By improving explainability of AI in all these phases, we seek to empower assessors to calibrate trust in the system appropriately

Studies to inform a visual language for authoring interactive exercise prescriptions

Communicating dynamic motion content, such as exercise, with a static medium, such as paper, is difficult. The technology exists for presenting 3D animated exercise content to patients; however, the tools for allowing exercise domain experts to effectively author the content do not exist. We conducted two formative studies with exercise science domain experts to discover the requirements for an exercise prescription authoring notation. Based on our findings, we implemented a prototype notation and performed a think-aloud study to understand its strengths and weaknesses. The results of our studies have implications for any software solution aimed at the authoring of physical activity content

Explaining Reinforcement Learning to Mere Mortals: An Empirical Study

We present a user study to investigate the impact of explanations on non-experts' understanding of reinforcement learning (RL) agents. We investigate both a common RL visualization, saliency maps (the focus of attention), and a more recent explanation type, reward-decomposition bars (predictions of future types of rewards). We designed a 124 participant, four-treatment experiment to compare participants' mental models of an RL agent in a simple Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game. Our results show that the combination of both saliency and reward bars were needed to achieve a statistically significant improvement in mental model score over the control. In addition, our qualitative analysis of the data reveals a number of effects for further study.Comment: 7 page