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…

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…

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…

The antimicrobial effects of copper have been well established and may prove to be an effective means of reducing nosocomial or hospital-acquired infections. However, discussions surrounding the antimicrobial properties of copper-containing surfaces rarely address the effect of such materials on…

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

The goal of this project was two-fold: first, to improve the performance of machine learning
algorithms for the diagnosis of pediatric tuberculosis, and second, to use machine learning algorithms
to better understand the problem of diagnosis. We constructed and examined…

This paper discusses the motivation, design, implementation, and evaluation of a
new electronic beat sequencing system called HMM Beats. HMM Beats is inspired
by recent work in machine learning on user drum beat prediction. HMM Beats is
an interactive system…

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…

In this dissertation I examine the conceptions of opinion (<italic>doxa</italic>}), knowledge (<italic>gnosis</italic>), and understanding (<italic>episteme</italic>) that are presented by the character Socrates in Plato's <italic>Meno</italic> and <italic>Republic</italic>. A central claim I make, and one that sets my interpretation apart from…