ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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Description
This philosophical inquiry explores the work of philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and posits applications to music education. Through the concepts of multiplicities, becoming, bodies without organs, smooth spaces, maps, and nomads, Deleuze and Guattari challenge prior and current understandings of existence. In their writings on art, education, and how might one live, they assert a world consisting of variability and motion. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on time and difference, I posit the following questions: Who and when are we? Where are we? When is music? When is education? Throughout this document, their philosophical figuration of a rhizome serves as a recurring theme, highlighting the possibilities of complexity, diverse connections, and continual processes. I explore the question "When and where are we?" by combining the work of Deleuze and Guattari with that of other authors. Drawing on these ideas, I posit an ontology of humans as inseparably cognitive, embodied, emotional, social, and striving multiplicities. Investigating the question "Where are we?" using Deleuze and Guattari's writings as well as that of contemporary place philosophers and other writers reveals that humans exist at the continually changing confluence of local and global places. In order to engage with the questions "When is music?" and "When is education?" I inquire into how humans as cognitive, embodied, emotional, social, and striving multiplicities emplaced in a glocalized world experience music and education. In the final chapters, a philosophy of music education consisting of the ongoing, interconnected processes of complicating, considering, and connecting is proposed. Complicating involves continually questioning how humans' multiple inseparable qualities and places integrate during musical and educative experiences. Considering includes imagining the multiple directions in which connections might occur as well as contemplating the quality of potential connections. Connecting involves assisting students in forming variegated connections between themselves, their multiple qualities, and their glocal environments. Considering a rhizomatic philosophy of music education includes continually engaging in the integrated processes of complicating, considering, and connecting. Through such ongoing practices, music educators can promote flourishing in the lives of students and the experiences of their multiple communities.
ContributorsRicherme, Lauren Kapalka (Author) / Stauffer, Sandra (Thesis advisor) / Gould, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Schmidt, Margaret (Committee member) / Sullivan, Jill (Committee member) / Tobias, Evan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The rapid escalation of technology and the widespread emergence of modern technological equipments have resulted in the generation of humongous amounts of digital data (in the form of images, videos and text). This has expanded the possibility of solving real world problems using computational learning frameworks. However, while gathering a large amount of data is cheap and easy, annotating them with class labels is an expensive process in terms of time, labor and human expertise. This has paved the way for research in the field of active learning. Such algorithms automatically select the salient and exemplar instances from large quantities of unlabeled data and are effective in reducing human labeling effort in inducing classification models. To utilize the possible presence of multiple labeling agents, there have been attempts towards a batch mode form of active learning, where a batch of data instances is selected simultaneously for manual annotation. This dissertation is aimed at the development of novel batch mode active learning algorithms to reduce manual effort in training classification models in real world multimedia pattern recognition applications. Four major contributions are proposed in this work: $(i)$ a framework for dynamic batch mode active learning, where the batch size and the specific data instances to be queried are selected adaptively through a single formulation, based on the complexity of the data stream in question, $(ii)$ a batch mode active learning strategy for fuzzy label classification problems, where there is an inherent imprecision and vagueness in the class label definitions, $(iii)$ batch mode active learning algorithms based on convex relaxations of an NP-hard integer quadratic programming (IQP) problem, with guaranteed bounds on the solution quality and $(iv)$ an active matrix completion algorithm and its application to solve several variants of the active learning problem (transductive active learning, multi-label active learning, active feature acquisition and active learning for regression). These contributions are validated on the face recognition and facial expression recognition problems (which are commonly encountered in real world applications like robotics, security and assistive technology for the blind and the visually impaired) and also on collaborative filtering applications like movie recommendation.
ContributorsChakraborty, Shayok (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Balasubramanian, Vineeth N. (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Mittelmann, Hans (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The increasing popularity of Twitter renders improved trustworthiness and relevance assessment of tweets much more important for search. However, given the limitations on the size of tweets, it is hard to extract measures for ranking from the tweet's content alone. I propose a method of ranking tweets by generating a reputation score for each tweet that is based not just on content, but also additional information from the Twitter ecosystem that consists of users, tweets, and the web pages that tweets link to. This information is obtained by modeling the Twitter ecosystem as a three-layer graph. The reputation score is used to power two novel methods of ranking tweets by propagating the reputation over an agreement graph based on tweets' content similarity. Additionally, I show how the agreement graph helps counter tweet spam. An evaluation of my method on 16~million tweets from the TREC 2011 Microblog Dataset shows that it doubles the precision over baseline Twitter Search and achieves higher precision than current state of the art method. I present a detailed internal empirical evaluation of RAProp in comparison to several alternative approaches proposed by me, as well as external evaluation in comparison to the current state of the art method.
ContributorsRavikumar, Srijith (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liu, Huan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
ABSTRACT In this work, I provide two novel pieces of evidence in favor of the view that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. First, I present an empirical case via the results of a series of recent experiments to show that folk-knowledge attributions may be sensitive to time constraints even when the latter are construed in a non-truth relevant manner. Along the way, I consider some comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (2006) as it pertains to interpreting time constraints-sensitivity in a manner that supports contextualism, before offering reasons to resist such a treatment. I proceed by applying interest relative invariantism to adjudicate a conflict in the epistemology of testimony namely, the positive reasons requirement a la, reductionism vs. non-reductionism. In particular, I highlight how whether an epistemic subject H needs positive non-testimonial reasons to be justified in accepting S's testimony that p, depends on what is at stake for H in believing that p and how much time H has in deliberating about p.
ContributorsShin, Joseph Ellis (Author) / Pinillos, N. Angel (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Steven L (Committee member) / White, Michael J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Emergentism offers a promising compromise in the philosophy of mind between Cartesian substance dualism and reductivistic physicalism. The ontological emergentist holds that conscious mental phenomena supervene on physical phenomena, but that they have a nature over and above the physical. However, emergentist views have been subjected to a variety of powerful objections: they are alleged to be self-contradictory, incompatible with mental causation, justified by unreliable intuitions, and in conflict with our contemporary scientific understanding of the world. I defend the emergentist position against these objections. I clarify the concepts of supervenience and of ontological novelty in a way that ensures the emergentist position is coherent, while remaining distinct from physicalism and traditional dualism. Making note of the equivocal way in which the concept of sufficiency is used in Jaegwon Kim's arguments against emergent mental causation, I argue that downward causation does not entail widespread overdetermination. I argue that considerations of ideal a priori deducibility from some physical base, or "Cosmic Hermeneutics", will not themselves provide answers to where the cuts in the structure of nature lie. Instead, I propose reconsidering the question of Cosmic Hermeneutics in terms of which cognitive resources would be required for the ideal reasoner to perform the deduction. Lastly, I respond to the objection that emergence in the philosophy of mind is in conflict with our contemporary scientific understanding of the world. I suggest that a kind of weak ontological emergence is a viable form of explanation in many fields, and discuss current applications of emergence in biology, sociology, and the study of complex systems.
ContributorsWatson, Jeffrey (Author) / Kobes, Bernard W (Thesis advisor) / Pinillos, Nestor (Committee member) / Horgan, Terence (Committee member) / Reynolds, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis explores the conceptual span and plausibility of emergence and its applicability to the problem of mental causation. The early parts of the project explicate a distinction between weak and strong emergence as described by Jaegwon Kim. They also consider Kim's objections regarding the conceptual incoherence of strong emergence and the otiose nature of weak emergence. The paper then explores Mark Bedau's in-between conception of emergence and ultimately finds that middle conception to be both coherent and useful. With these three emergence distinctions in hand, the thesis goes on to explore Evan Thompson's recent work - Mind in Life (2010). In that work, Thompson advances a strong emergence approach to mind, whereby he concludes the incipient stages of cognition are found at the most basic levels of life, namely - biologic cells. Along the way, Thompson embraces holism and a nonfundamental
onhierarchical physics in order to counter Jaegwon Kim's objections to the notion of downward causation needed for strong emergence. The thesis presents arguments against Thompson's holism and nonfundamental physics, while supporting his assertion regarding the incipient stages of cognition. It then combines an important distinction between mental causation and the experience of mental causation with Thompson's notion of incipient cognition to arrive at a dual realms approach to understanding mental causation.
onhierarchical physics in order to counter Jaegwon Kim's objections to the notion of downward causation needed for strong emergence. The thesis presents arguments against Thompson's holism and nonfundamental physics, while supporting his assertion regarding the incipient stages of cognition. It then combines an important distinction between mental causation and the experience of mental causation with Thompson's notion of incipient cognition to arrive at a dual realms approach to understanding mental causation.
ContributorsFournier, Thomas (Author) / Kobes, Bernard W (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Steven L (Committee member) / Armendt, Brad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Saying, "if Mary had watered Sam's plant, it wouldn't have died," is an ordinary way to identify Mary not watering Sam's plant as the cause of its death. But there are problems with this statement. If we identify Mary's omitted action as the cause, we seemingly admit an inordinate number of omissions as causes. For any counterfactual statement containing the omitted action is true (e.g. if Hillary Clinton had watered Sam's plant, it wouldn't have died). The statement, moreover, is mysterious because it is not clear why one protasis is more salient than any alternatives such as "if Sam hadn't gone to Bismarck." In the burgeoning field of experimental metaphysics, some theorists have tried to account for these intuitions about omissive causes. By synthesizing this data and providing a few experiments, I will suggest that judgments - and maybe metaphysics - about omissive causes necessarily have a normative feature. This understanding of omissive causes may be able to adequately resolve the problems above.
ContributorsHenne, Paul (Author) / Kobes, Bernard W (Thesis advisor) / Pinillos, Nestor A (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Steven (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
With the number of internationally-run clinical drug trials increasing, the double standards between those in developed nations and those in developing nations are being scrutinized under the ethical microscope. Many argue that several pharmaceutical companies and researchers are exploiting developing nation participants. Two issues of concern are the use of a placebo control when an effective alternative treatment exists and the lack of drug availability to the country that hosted the clinical trial should the experimental drug prove effective. Though intuitively this seems like an instance of exploitation, philosophically, exploitation theories cannot adequately account for the wrongdoing in these cases. My project has two parts. First, after explaining why the theories of Alan Wertheimer, John Lawrence Hill, and Ruth Sample fail to explain the exploitation in clinical drug research, I provide an alternative account of exploitation that can explain why the double standard in clinical research is harmful. Rather than craft a single theory encompassing all instances of exploitation, I offer an account of a type, or subset, of exploitation that I refer to as comparative exploitation. The double standards in clinical research fall under the category of comparative exploitation. Furthermore, while many critics maintain that cases of comparative exploitation, including clinical research, are mutually beneficial, they are actually harmful to its victims. I explain the harm of comparative exploitation using Ben Bradley's counterfactual account of harm and Larry May's theory of sharing responsibility. The second part of my project focuses on the "standard of care" argument, which most defenders use to justify the double standard in clinical research. I elaborate on Ruth Macklin's position that advocates of the "standard of care" position make three faulty assumptions: placebo-controlled trials are the gold standard, the only relevant question responsive to the host country's health needs is "Is the experimental product being studied better than the 'nothing' now available to the population?", and the only way of obtaining affordable products is to test cheap alternatives to replace the expensive ones. In the end, I advocate moving towards a universalizing of standards in order to avoid exploitation.
ContributorsFundora, Danielle (Author) / McGregor, Joan (Thesis advisor) / Brake, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Portmore, Douglas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Objective of this thesis project is to build a prototype using Linear Temporal Logic specifications for generating a 2D motion plan commanding an iRobot to fulfill the specifications. This thesis project was created for Cyber Physical Systems Lab in Arizona State University. The end product of this thesis is creation of a software solution which can be used in the academia and industry for research in cyber physical systems related applications. The major features of the project are: creating a modular system for motion planning, use of Robot Operating System (ROS), use of triangulation for environment decomposition and using stargazer sensor for localization. The project is built on an open source software called ROS which provides an environment where it is very easy to integrate different modules be it software or hardware on a Linux based platform. Use of ROS implies the project or its modules can be adapted quickly for different applications as the need arises. The final software package created and tested takes a data file as its input which contains the LTL specifications, a symbols list used in the LTL and finally the environment polygon data containing real world coordinates for all polygons and also information on neighbors and parents of each polygon. The software package successfully ran the experiment of coverage, reachability with avoidance and sequencing.
ContributorsPandya, Parth (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Dasgupta, Partha (Committee member) / Lee, Yann-Hang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Linear Temporal Logic is gaining increasing popularity as a high level specification language for robot motion planning due to its expressive power and scalability of LTL control synthesis algorithms. This formalism, however, requires expert knowledge and makes it inaccessible to non-expert users. This thesis introduces a graphical specification environment to create high level motion plans to control robots in the field by converting a visual representation of the motion/task plan into a Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specification. The visual interface is built on the Android tablet platform and provides functionality to create task plans through a set of well defined gestures and on screen controls. It uses the notion of waypoints to quickly and efficiently describe the motion plan and enables a variety of complex Linear Temporal Logic specifications to be described succinctly and intuitively by the user without the need for the knowledge and understanding of LTL specification. Thus, it opens avenues for its use by personnel in military, warehouse management, and search and rescue missions. This thesis describes the construction of LTL for various scenarios used for robot navigation using the visual interface developed and leverages the use of existing LTL based motion planners to carry out the task plan by a robot.
ContributorsSrinivas, Shashank (Author) / Fainekos, Georgios (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Burleson, Winslow (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013