This paper considers Aristotle’s account of technē (craft-knowledge) and the relationship it bears to phronesis (the capacity for excellent ethical deliberation). Neither techne nor phronesis are exclusively intellectual: both require practice and an evaluative capacity. Phronesis, however, structures a person’s…

The objective of this thesis project is to build a robot that can clearly demonstrate its
potential to solve standard jigsaw puzzles. This robot must be capable of picking up
and reorienting puzzle pieces to the precision required for completing…

A goal of fisheries management is to predict the probability of successful
establishment of invasive fish species. To address this goal, species distribution models
are used to project species distribution under different climate-change scenarios. In this
study, the geographic distribution…

The analysis of noisy consensus dynamics in networks is of great interest to both
advance the fundamental understanding of multi-agent systems in nature as well as
create robust decentralized engineering systems. We develop a protocol that heuristically attempts to optimize…

In this thesis, we investigated a sequential decision making problem. We tested
different policies for online portfolio optimization: for a given number of assets and
a time horizon, the weights on assets are rebalanced at every time step according to

Japan is one of the most active users of ART in the world. Infertile women in Japan have shared
a complex relationship with the technology due to paternalistic and pronatalist influences. ART
has given a means for the medical and…

Building off the work of Mark Granovetter and Nancy Howell Lee, this thesis observes the employment search networks of Princeton University seniors. I interviewed thirty-five students who were actively or had recently completed searches for employment and constructed visual representations…

This research looks at the efficiency and effectiveness of the United States Child
Welfare System. Specifically, it focuses on the lack of standardization in the system
as well as the relationship between the two main institutions involved in the
system—Child…

There is a gap between how male athletes are viewed and how female athletes are
viewed. This discrepancy in views stems from stereotyping that occurs towards
athletics as a whole. Who hold the most stereotypical views about the body types…

We explore, in increasing complexity, various strategies for addressing the Multi-
Armed Bandit Problem in order to find the algorithm that maximizes the clickthrough
rate in the Exploration and Exploitation Challenge 3 competition. The data used
result from the actions…

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan forced a revolution in military thinking that brought
stability operations to the forefront while coloring the military as one-part warrior, one part reluctant architect of peace. Despite years of experience in stability operations of…