Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Perception of science'
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Jayaraman, Usha P. "Science teachers' perception of virtual high school instruction." Cincinnati, Ohio : University of Cincinnati, 2002. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=ucin1037982055.
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Adal, Elif Ece. "Science Teachers." Master's thesis, METU, 2011. http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12612948/index.pdf.
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Rossi, Michael Paul Ph D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The rules of perception : American color science, 1831-1931." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/69452.
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Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 365-389).
Although vision was seldom studied in Antebellum America, color and color perception became a critical field of scientific inquiry in the United States during the Gilded Age and progressive era. Through a historical investigation of color science in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I argue that attempts to scientifically measure, define, and regulate color were part of a wider program to construct a more rational, harmonious, and efficient American polity starting from one of the very baseline perceptual components of reality - the experience of color. As part of this program, I argue secondly that color science was as much a matter of prescription as description - that is, color scientists didn't simply endeavor to reveal the facts of perception and apply them to social problems, they wanted to train everyday citizens to see scientifically, and thereby create citizens whose eyes, bodies, and minds were both medically healthy and morally tuned to the needs of the modern American nation. Finally, I argue not simply that perception has a history - i.e. that perceptual practices change over time, and that, for Americans of a century ago, experiences of color sensations were not taken as given but had to be laboriously crafted - but also that this history weighs heavily upon our present day understanding of visual reality, as manifested not least of all in scientific studies of vision, language, and cognition. Employing a close reading of the archival and published sources of a range of actors including physicist Ogden Rood, semiotician Charles Peirce, logician Christine Ladd-Franklin, board game magnate Milton Bradley, and art professor Alfred Munsell, among others, this study reveals the origins of some of the most deeply-rooted conceptions of color in modern American culture.
by Michael Paul Rossi.
Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS
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Gauthier, Roberto. "La représentation de la science chez les finissants de sciences humaines au collégial /." Thèse, Chicoutimi : Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, 1995. http://theses.uqac.ca.
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Straub, Julian Ph D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Nonparametric directional perception." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/112029.
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Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-257).
Artificial perception systems, like autonomous cars and augmented reality headsets, rely on dense 3D sensing technology such as RGB-D cameras and LiDAR. scanners. Due to the structural simplicity of man-made environments, understanding and leveraging not only the 3D data but also the local orientations of the constituent surfaces, has huge potential. From an indoor scene to large-scale urban environments, a large fraction of the surfaces can be described by just a few planes with even fewer different normal directions. This sparsity is evident in the surface normal distributions, which exhibit a small number of concentrated clusters. In this work, I draw a rigorous connection between surface normal distributions and 3D structure, and explore this connection in light of different environmental assumptions to further 3D perception. Specifically, I propose the concepts of the Manhattan Frame and the unconstrained directional segmentation. These capture, in the space of surface normals, scenes composed of multiple Manhattan Worlds and more general Stata Center Worlds, in which the orthogonality assumption of the Manhattan World is not applicable. This exploration is theoretically founded in Bayesian nonparametric models, which capture two key properties of the 3D sensing process of an artificial perception system: (1) the inherent sequential nature of data acquisition and (2) that the required model complexity grows with the amount of observed data. Herein, I derive inference algorithms for directional clustering and segmentation which inherently exploit and respect these properties. The fundamental insights gleaned from the connection between surface normal distributions and 3D structure lead to practical advances in scene segmentation, drift-free rotation estimation, global point cloud registration and real-time direction-aware 3D reconstruction to aid artificial perception systems.
by Julian Straub.
Ph. D.
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Sun, Li. "Integrated visual perception architecture for robotic clothes perception and manipulation." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2016. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7685/.
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This thesis proposes a generic visual perception architecture for robotic clothes perception and manipulation. This proposed architecture is fully integrated with a stereo vision system and a dual-arm robot and is able to perform a number of autonomous laundering tasks. Clothes perception and manipulation is a novel research topic in robotics and has experienced rapid development in recent years. Compared to the task of perceiving and manipulating rigid objects, clothes perception and manipulation poses a greater challenge. This can be attributed to two reasons: firstly, deformable clothing requires precise (high-acuity) visual perception and dexterous manipulation; secondly, as clothing approximates a non-rigid 2-manifold in 3-space, that can adopt a quasi-infinite configuration space, the potential variability in the appearance of clothing items makes them difficult to understand, identify uniquely, and interact with by machine. From an applications perspective, and as part of EU CloPeMa project, the integrated visual perception architecture refines a pre-existing clothing manipulation pipeline by completing pre-wash clothes (category) sorting (using single-shot or interactive perception for garment categorisation and manipulation) and post-wash dual-arm flattening. To the best of the author’s knowledge, as investigated in this thesis, the autonomous clothing perception and manipulation solutions presented here were first proposed and reported by the author. All of the reported robot demonstrations in this work follow a perception-manipulation method- ology where visual and tactile feedback (in the form of surface wrinkledness captured by the high accuracy depth sensor i.e. CloPeMa stereo head or the predictive confidence modelled by Gaussian Processing) serve as the halting criteria in the flattening and sorting tasks, respectively. From scientific perspective, the proposed visual perception architecture addresses the above challenges by parsing and grouping 3D clothing configurations hierarchically from low-level curvatures, through mid-level surface shape representations (providing topological descriptions and 3D texture representations), to high-level semantic structures and statistical descriptions. A range of visual features such as Shape Index, Surface Topologies Analysis and Local Binary Patterns have been adapted within this work to parse clothing surfaces and textures and several novel features have been devised, including B-Spline Patches with Locality-Constrained Linear coding, and Topology Spatial Distance to describe and quantify generic landmarks (wrinkles and folds). The essence of this proposed architecture comprises 3D generic surface parsing and interpretation, which is critical to underpinning a number of laundering tasks and has the potential to be extended to other rigid and non-rigid object perception and manipulation tasks. The experimental results presented in this thesis demonstrate that: firstly, the proposed grasp- ing approach achieves on-average 84.7% accuracy; secondly, the proposed flattening approach is able to flatten towels, t-shirts and pants (shorts) within 9 iterations on-average; thirdly, the proposed clothes recognition pipeline can recognise clothes categories from highly wrinkled configurations and advances the state-of-the-art by 36% in terms of classification accuracy, achieving an 83.2% true-positive classification rate when discriminating between five categories of clothes; finally the Gaussian Process based interactive perception approach exhibits a substantial improvement over single-shot perception. Accordingly, this thesis has advanced the state-of-the-art of robot clothes perception and manipulation.
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Nannestad, Charles Leif. "The Role Of Students: Perceptions In Modifying Science And Mathematics Classroom Activities." Thesis, Curtin University, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/2077.
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The aim of this study was to provide teachers with a practical means to obtain timely indications of their students reactions to individual activities. Teachers could then modify their presentations of activities cognisant of those students perceptions. The study set out to establish a suitable instrument, and then to evaluate its use by classroom teachers.Five experienced science and mathematics teachers identified five characteristics of interest when considering students perceptions of classroom activities: Understand Content, Communication, Relevancy, Work Output, and Enjoyment. A fifteen-item instrument based upon these characteristics was developed for this study. The viability of the survey for use by busy classroom teachers was increased by the short and succinct format, as well as the provision of a computer graphing template to process and display responses. The combination of the survey and computer template is called the Students' Perceptions of an Activity Instrument and Display (SPAID).Teachers appreciated the provision of a structure to assist their reviewing the use of activities, and the rapidity with which the information was available. Students' responses provided timely support for teachers' decisions to engage classes in the activities and increased teachers' confidence in the worth of the activities. Alterations to activities were small in scale and idiosyncratic to the student cohorts. Teachers' use of the SPAID package was also noted to enhance cooperation with colleagues within the government secondary schools of Brunei Darussalam.
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Verwey, Johan. "Speech perception in virtual environments." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6371.
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Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-64).Many virtual environments like interactive computer games, educational software or training simulations make use of speech to convey important information to the user. These applications typically present a combination of background music, sound effects, ambient sounds and dialog simultaneously to create a rich auditory environment. Since interactive virtual environments allow users to roam freely among different sound producing objects, sound designers do not always have exact control over what sounds the user will perceive at any given time. This dissertation investigates factors that influence the perception of speech in virtual environments under adverse listening conditions.
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Faisman, Arthur. "Visual perception of shape from matte, glossy, and mirror surfaces." Thesis, McGill University, 2014. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=121306.
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The human visual system has a remarkable ability to perceive complex 3D shape from a variety of surface types. These surfaces can include ones shaded using the standard Phong model or mirror surfaces which can be rendered using a variety of surrounding environments. This thesis presents four visual perception experiments that examine the perception of local qualitative shape under various conditions. Surfaces were rendered using standard computer graphics models of matte, glossy, and mirror reflectance. For each experiment, the subjects' task was to judge whether a marked point on each surface lay on a local hill or valley. A variety of novel findings were made in these experiments which touch on various aspects of perceptual capabilities of the visual system. In Experiment 1 it was found, contrary to previously known results, that under some circumstances it is more difficult to perceive shape from a glossy rather than a matte surface. In Experiment 3 this finding is re-examined and it's found that glossy surfaces are more easily perceived than matte ones when the highlight falls on local extrema such as hills and valleys, but can be more difficult to perceive when the highlight falls on frontally-oriented portions of the local geometry. A perceptual model is proposed to explain this effect. Experiment 3 expands on this finding by investigating the perception of surfaces when lit from a variety of different angles as well as comparing these lighting types to the ones used in commercial visualization software such as MATLAB and Mathematica. The results of Experiment 1 also indicate that when rendering mirror surfaces an inhomogeneity in the environment map may be exploitable by the visual system as an additional cue to aid in the perception of qualitative local surface shape. Experiment 4 expands on this finding by finding that the orientation of this environmental inhomogeneity has an additional effect on performance. The Appendix generalizes the well-known depth reversal ambiguity to mirrors and highlights. Experiment 2 utilizes this finding to producing the first tests examining how the visual system resolves this ambiguity when viewing mirrors. The findings indicate that the visual system tends to resolve this ambiguity by utilizing a prior for upward-facing surface orientation in the case of surfaces rendered as mirrors, similarly to the known upward-facing surface prior for Phong surfaces. The upward-facing surface prior is found to be weaker for mirror than for Phong surfaces, however, as subjects tended to rely more heavily on perspective cues in the former rendering condition rather than the latter.Le système visuel humain a une capacité remarquable à percevoir les formes complexes en 3D à partir d'une variété de types de surfaces. Ces surfaces peuvent inclure celles ombragées en utilisant le modèle standard Phong ou bien des surfaces miroir qui peuvent être rendues à l'aide d'une variété de milieux environnants. Cette thèse présente quatre expériences de perception visuelle qui examinent la perception de la forme qualitative locale dans diverses conditions. Les surfaces furent rendues en utilisant des modèles standards informatiques graphiques de mat, de brillant et de réflexion de miroir. Pour chaque expérience, les participants de l'étude devaient juger si un point marqué sur chaque surface se trouvait sur une colline ou sur une vallée. Une variété de nouvelles découvertes ont été faites grâce à ces expériences qui touchent à différents aspects des capacités perceptives du système visuel. Dans l'expérience 1 il a été constaté, contrairement aux résultats déjà connus, que dans certaines circonstances il est plus difficile de percevoir la forme d'une surface brillante que celle d'une surface matte. Dans l'expérience 3 cette constatation est réexaminée et il se trouve que les surfaces brillantes sont plus facilement perçues que celles qui sont mattes lorsque le reflet spéculaire tombe sur les extrema locaux tels que les collines et les vallées, mais peuvent être plus difficiles à percevoir quand le reflet spéculaire est situé sur les portions de la géométrie locale qui sont orientées frontalement. Un modèle perceptif est proposé pour expliquer cet effet. L'expérience 3 élabore sur cette conclusion en étudiant la perception des surfaces lorsqu'elles sont allumées à partir d'une variété d'angles différents ainsi qu'en comparant ces types d'éclairage à ceux utilisés dans les logiciels de visualisation commerciaux tels que MATLAB et Mathematica. Les résultats de l'expérience 1 indiquent également que, lors du rendu des surfaces, miroir un manque d'homogénéité dans le plan de l'environnement peut être exploitable par le système visuel comme un repère supplémentaire pour aider à la perception de la forme de la surface locale qualitative. L'expérience 4 développe cette constatation en remarquant que l'orientation de cette hétérogénéité de l'environnement a un effet supplémentaire sur la performance. L'annexe généralise l'ambiguïté bien connue sur l'inversion de la profondeur à des miroirs et des reflets spéculaire. L'expérience 2 utilise ce résultat pour produire les premières expérimentations sur la manière selon laquelle le système visuel résout cette ambiguïté lorsqu'il perçoit des miroirs. Les résultats indiquent que le système visuel essaye souvent de résoudre cette ambiguïté en utilisant une hypothèse que la surface est orientée vers le haut dans le cas de surfaces miroir, ressemblant à l'hypothèse connue des surfaces orientées vers le haut pour les surfaces Phong. Pourtant, l'hypothèse de la surface orientée vers le haut est jugée plus faible pour les surfaces miroir que pour les surfaces Phong, puisque les participants avaient tendance à s'appuyer d'avantage sur des indices de perspective dans le cas des surfaces miroir que des surfaces Phong.
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Ahmad, Zaidi Adruce Shahren Mueller Milton. "Academic authors' perception on copyright protection." Related electronic resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Rubin, Adrianne. "'This difficult and uncertain science' : Roger Fry's interpretation of aesthetic perception." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2006. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.432113.
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Liang, Qianhui S. M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Machine mediated human perception." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129882.
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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, September, February, 2020Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February, 2020
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-76).
'The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.' --Steve Jobs In recent decades, there has been a growing interest in designing places through the lenses of the human experience. However, research on the relationship between the physical environment and its influence on human perception has been constrained. The constraint is partially due to the difficulty of assessing perception and physical features through objective mathematical models. The idea of this thesis is to explore how machine learning can contribute to better integration of previously unquantifiable human perception with urban theories matrix in the design process: In particular, the thesis will investigate the relationship between the built environment features and the human's perception at the street level. The thesis explore machine learning methodologies, combining computer vision's application in modeling building features, in assessment of urban landscape liveliness: Taking the central area of Shanghai as the experimental site, the thesis designs a crowd-sourcing platform to collect residents' perception of streets in Shanghai by evaluating street spaces displayed in the form of rendered 3D model scenes and panoramic videos. I revisit urban study principles to define a matrix of spatial features and simulate such perceptions through a machine learning approach. This AI-assisted pipeline will shed light on how features of the urban environment influence individuals' perceptions and to further assist with decision-making toward human-centered urban design.
by Qianhui Liang.
S.M.
S.M.
S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture
S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Paulin, T. (Tuomas). "DevOps in Finland:study of practitioners’ perception." Master's thesis, University of Oulu, 2018. http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201812063244.
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DevOps is currently one of the latest software development practices. Lately it has gained the interest of people in academia and practice. DevOps extends Agile practices to software operations and aims to make software development process faster, more reliable and increase collaboration. Currently there are multiple studies which aim to define DevOps but only a few which try to understand and evaluate how DevOps is utilized and understood in practice and at large.
The aim of this study is to investigate DevOps adoption, practices and tool usage by software professionals in Finland. In addition, the study investigates perceived benefits and challenges of DevOps adoption.
A survey with an online questionnaire was selected as the method for gathering data from software practitioners in Finland. Previous literature focusing on DevOps was used to establish an understanding of DevOps and to create meaningful questions for the survey. A link to online survey questionnaire was then distributed using Slack, LinkedIn and mailing lists during Spring 2018 to Finnish practitioners. Multiple channels were selected to collect sufficient responses for analysis. A total of 81 respondents answered to the questionnaire and were from different backgrounds with respect to organization size, role and team size.
Most of the participants had already adopted DevOps and clear understanding of the concept was considered the most important factor in DevOps implementation. Automation was both an important meaning of concept and also most agreed practice. Faster release cycle time and system quality were the most agreed benefits and lack of common understanding for DevOps was considered the most challenging. A multitude of different tools are used in organizations. The most popular in their own categories were Jenkins(CI), Kibana(Monitoring), Amazon AWS(Cloud) and Ansible(Config/Provisioning).
Automation was considered important aspect of the DevOps concept and also in practice. Further research and qualitative data is required to find out the actual reasons behind these results. The questionnaire instrument can be reused on different target groups. Qualitative questions should be asked on organization level to find out the reasons behind different implementations of DevOps.
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Nolan, Lucille Marie. "Vision science and the visual arts : an enquiry into the science of perception and the art of immersion." Thesis, Northumbria University, 2009. http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/312/.
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This research addresses questions surrounding two currently prominent visual art topics. The first revolves around the concept of immersion and perceptions of immersive art, the second concerns current interests in art and science and the practice of art and science collaboration. Current debates and theories of immersion revolve around technologically informed virtual models and interactive virtual art environments, however, the history of immersion as a creative medium has been traced to pre-technological, even pre-historical beginnings. In this study, a pre- technological concept of immersion per se is explored, and a new perceptual model of immersion is developed based on the scientific laws and principles of vision. This model is shown to encompass and a long history of immersive traditions and a type of contemporary art practice that until now was not recognised as an immersive art genre. Working at the interstices of visual immersive art and visual science disciplines, collaborative experimental environments are developed that embody both the concepts and definitions proposed in the thesis, and the scientific laws and principles on which they are founded. Pre-technological/visual and contemporary/virtual concepts are further distinguished by their respective scientific and technological alignments and by the types of perceptual phenomena they engender. It is shown that as a creative medium, immersion comprises scientifically informed visual and technologically informed virtual immersive sub-genres, which together provide a broader and more comprehensive account of historical and contemporary immersive art practice.
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Zito, Claudio. "Planning simultaneous perception and manipulation." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6765/.
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This thesis is concerned with deriving planning algorithms for robot manipulators. Manipulation has two effects, the robot has a physical effect on the object, and it also acquires information about the object. This thesis presents algorithms that treat both problems. First, I present an extension of the well-known piano mover’s problem where a robot pushing an object must plan its movements as well as those of the object. This requires simultaneous planning in the joint space of the robot and the configuration space of the object, in contrast to the original problem which only requires planning in the latter space. The effects of a robot action on the object configuration are determined by the non-invertible rigid body mechanics. To solve this a two-level planner is presented that coordinates planning in each space. Second, I consider planning under uncertainty and in particular planning for information effects. I consider the case where a robot has to reach and grasp an object under pose uncertainty caused by shape incompleteness. The main novel outcome is to enable tactile information gain planning for a dexterous, highdegree of freedom manipulator with non- Gaussian pose uncertainty. The method is demonstrated in trials with both simulated and real robots.
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Ahmad, Zaidi Adruce Shahren Mueller Milton Mueller. "Academic authors' perception on copyright protection /." Related Electronic Resource: Current Research at SU : database of SU dissertations, recent titles available full text, 2004. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/syr/main.
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Borkin, Michelle A. "Perception, Cognition, and Effectiveness of Visualizations with Applications in Science and Engineering." Thesis, Harvard University, 2014. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11526.
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Visualization is a powerful tool for data exploration and analysis. With data ever-increasing in quantity and becoming integrated into our daily lives, having effective visualizations is necessary. But how does one design an effective visualization? To answer this question we need to understand how humans perceive, process, and understand visualizations. Through visualization evaluation studies we can gain deeper insight into the basic perception and cognition theory of visualizations, both through domain-specific case studies as well as generalized laboratory experiments.Engineering and Applied Sciences
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Hackworth, Ruth M. "Radiation Science Educators' Perception of Obstacles in the Use of Critical Thinking." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1262120623.
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Hospedales, Timothy. "Bayesian multisensory perception." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2156.
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A key goal for humans and artificial intelligence systems is to develop an accurate and unified picture of the outside world based on the data from any sense(s) that may be available. The availability of multiple senses presents the perceptual system with new opportunities to fulfil this goal, but exploiting these opportunities first requires the solution of two related tasks. The first is how to make the best use of any redundant information from the sensors to produce the most accurate percept of the state of the world. The second is how to interpret the relationship between observations in each modality; for example, the correspondence problem of whether or not they originate from the same source. This thesis investigates these questions using ideal Bayesian observers as the underlying theoretical approach. In particular, the latter correspondence task is treated as a problem of Bayesian model selection or structure inference in Bayesian networks. This approach provides a unified and principled way of representing and understanding the perceptual problems faced by humans and machines and their commonality. In the domain of machine intelligence, we exploit the developed theory for practical benefit, developing a model to represent audio-visual correlations. Unsupervised learning in this model provides automatic calibration and user appearance learning, without human intervention. Inference in the model involves explicit reasoning about the association between latent sources and observations. This provides audio-visual tracking through occlusion with improved accuracy compared to standard techniques. It also provides detection, verification and speech segmentation, ultimately allowing the machine to understand ``who said what, where?'' in multi-party conversations. In the domain of human neuroscience, we show how a variety of recent results in multimodal perception can be understood as the consequence of probabilistic reasoning about the causal structure of multimodal observations. We show this for a localisation task in audio-visual psychophysics, which is very similar to the task solved by our machine learning system. We also use the same theory to understand results from experiments in the completely different paradigm of oddity detection using visual and haptic modalities. These results begin to suggest that the human perceptual system performs -- or at least approximates -- sophisticated probabilistic reasoning about the causal structure of observations under the hood.
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Nannestad, Charles Leif. "The Role Of Students: Perceptions In Modifying Science And Mathematics Classroom Activities." Curtin University of Technology, Science and Mathematics Education Centre, 2002. http://espace.library.curtin.edu.au:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=12448.
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The aim of this study was to provide teachers with a practical means to obtain timely indications of their students reactions to individual activities. Teachers could then modify their presentations of activities cognisant of those students perceptions. The study set out to establish a suitable instrument, and then to evaluate its use by classroom teachers.Five experienced science and mathematics teachers identified five characteristics of interest when considering students perceptions of classroom activities: Understand Content, Communication, Relevancy, Work Output, and Enjoyment. A fifteen-item instrument based upon these characteristics was developed for this study. The viability of the survey for use by busy classroom teachers was increased by the short and succinct format, as well as the provision of a computer graphing template to process and display responses. The combination of the survey and computer template is called the Students' Perceptions of an Activity Instrument and Display (SPAID).Teachers appreciated the provision of a structure to assist their reviewing the use of activities, and the rapidity with which the information was available. Students' responses provided timely support for teachers' decisions to engage classes in the activities and increased teachers' confidence in the worth of the activities. Alterations to activities were small in scale and idiosyncratic to the student cohorts. Teachers' use of the SPAID package was also noted to enhance cooperation with colleagues within the government secondary schools of Brunei Darussalam.
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Khan, Aamir. "Scene understanding by robotic interactive perception." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/30773/.
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This thesis presents a novel and generic visual architecture for scene understanding by robotic interactive perception. This proposed visual architecture is fully integrated into autonomous systems performing object perception and manipulation tasks. The proposed visual architecture uses interaction with the scene, in order to improve scene understanding substantially over non-interactive models. Specifically, this thesis presents two experimental validations of an autonomous system interacting with the scene: Firstly, an autonomous gaze control model is investigated, where the vision sensor directs its gaze to satisfy a scene exploration task. Secondly, autonomous interactive perception is investigated, where objects in the scene are repositioned by robotic manipulation. The proposed visual architecture for scene understanding involving perception and manipulation tasks has four components: 1) A reliable vision system, 2) Camera-hand eye calibration to integrate the vision system into an autonomous robot’s kinematic frame chain, 3) A visual model performing perception tasks and providing required knowledge for interaction with scene, and finally, 4) A manipulation model which, using knowledge received from the perception model, chooses an appropriate action (from a set of simple actions) to satisfy a manipulation task. This thesis presents contributions for each of the aforementioned components. Firstly, a portable active binocular robot vision architecture that integrates a number of visual behaviours are presented. This active vision architecture has the ability to verge, localise, recognise and simultaneously identify multiple target object instances. The portability and functional accuracy of the proposed vision architecture is demonstrated by carrying out both qualitative and comparative analyses using different robot hardware configurations, feature extraction techniques and scene perspectives. Secondly, a camera and hand-eye calibration methodology for integrating an active binocular robot head within a dual-arm robot are described. For this purpose, the forward kinematic model of the active robot head is derived and the methodology for calibrating and integrating the robot head is described in detail. A rigid calibration methodology has been implemented to provide a closed-form hand-to-eye calibration chain and this has been extended with a mechanism to allow the camera external parameters to be updated dynamically for optimal 3D reconstruction to meet the requirements for robotic tasks such as grasping and manipulating rigid and deformable objects. It is shown from experimental results that the robot head achieves an overall accuracy of fewer than 0.3 millimetres while recovering the 3D structure of a scene. In addition, a comparative study between current RGB-D cameras and our active stereo head within two dual-arm robotic test-beds is reported that demonstrates the accuracy and portability of our proposed methodology. Thirdly, this thesis proposes a visual perception model for the task of category-wise objects sorting, based on Gaussian Process (GP) classification that is capable of recognising objects categories from point cloud data. In this approach, Fast Point Feature Histogram (FPFH) features are extracted from point clouds to describe the local 3D shape of objects and a Bag-of-Words coding method is used to obtain an object-level vocabulary representation. Multi-class Gaussian Process classification is employed to provide a probability estimate of the identity of the object and serves the key role of modelling perception confidence in the interactive perception cycle. The interaction stage is responsible for invoking the appropriate action skills as required to confirm the identity of an observed object with high confidence as a result of executing multiple perception-action cycles. The recognition accuracy of the proposed perception model has been validated based on simulation input data using both Support Vector Machine (SVM) and GP based multi-class classifiers. Results obtained during this investigation demonstrate that by using a GP-based classifier, it is possible to obtain true positive classification rates of up to 80\%. Experimental validation of the above semi-autonomous object sorting system shows that the proposed GP based interactive sorting approach outperforms random sorting by up to 30\% when applied to scenes comprising configurations of household objects. Finally, a fully autonomous visual architecture is presented that has been developed to accommodate manipulation skills for an autonomous system to interact with the scene by object manipulation. This proposed visual architecture is mainly made of two stages: 1) A perception stage, that is a modified version of the aforementioned visual interaction model, 2) An interaction stage, that performs a set of ad-hoc actions relying on the information received from the perception stage. More specifically, the interaction stage simply reasons over the information (class label and associated probabilistic confidence score) received from perception stage to choose one of the following two actions: 1) An object class has been identified with high confidence, so remove from the scene and place it in the designated basket/bin for that particular class. 2) An object class has been identified with less probabilistic confidence, since from observation and inspired from the human behaviour of inspecting doubtful objects, an action is chosen to further investigate that object in order to confirm the object’s identity by capturing more images from different views in isolation. The perception stage then processes these views, hence multiple perception-action/interaction cycles take place. From an application perspective, the task of autonomous category based objects sorting is performed and the experimental design for the task is described in detail.
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Wu, Jiajun Ph D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Computational perception of physical object properties." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/103736.
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Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 49-50).
We study the problem of learning physical object properties from visual data. Inspired by findings in cognitive science that even infants are able to perceive a physical world full of dynamic content at a early age, we aim to build models to characterize object properties from synthetic and real-world scenes. We build a novel dataset containing over 17, 000 videos with 101 objects in a set of visually simple but physically rich scenarios. We further propose two novel models for learning physical object properties by incorporating physics simulators, either a symbolic interpreter or a mature physics engine, with deep neural nets. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that these models can learn physical object properties well and, with a physic engine, the responses of the model positively correlate with human responses. Future research directions include incorporating the knowledge of physical object properties into the understanding of interactions among objects, scenes, and agents.
by Jiajun Wu.
S.M.
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Landau-Wells, Marika. "Dealing with danger : threat perception and policy preferences." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/118222.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-216).
This dissertation develops and tests a new individual-level theory specifying the relationship between threat perception and policy preferences. The project takes a unified approach to studying the space of danger-mitigating political behaviors. It is designed to demonstrate that a single psychological model can apply to both citizens and elites and in both domestic and foreign policy issue areas. The first paper develops Threat-Heuristic Theory, a new individual-level model of the psychological processes linking the detection of danger to specific policy preferences for mitigating it. The paper presents a review of the literature in biology and cognitive science regarding evolved systems of threat perception and response, on which the theory draws. The paper demonstrates that the theory's core explanatory variable, threat classification, is not a proxy for other constructs already incorporated into political science. The paper also illustrates that the domain of complex dangers, characterized by low levels of agreement in threat classification, contains issues of interest to political science. The second paper applies the theory to explain variation in preferences for specific forms of immigration restriction in the U.S. The paper highlights the importance of understanding threat classification in order to move beyond explanations of pro/anti-immigrant sentiment towards a model that captures preferences for real-world policy options. The third paper applies the theory to a small number of elite policy-makers in order to explain their support for particular measures included in U.S. national security strategies of the early Cold War and of the first George W. Bush Administration. The paper demonstrates how "bad strategy' and problematic policy preferences can arise systematically through the operation of Threat-Heuristic Theory's psychological model and need not be solely explained by bureaucratic politics or error.
by Marika Landau-Wells.
Ph. D.
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Cerda, Mauricio. "Calcul neuronal distribué pour la perception visuelle du mouvement." Phd thesis, Université Nancy II, 2011. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00642818.
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Le travail présenté dans cette thèse propose des modèles de calcul pour l'extraction du mouvement et la reconnaissance de formes dynamiques à partir du flux d'informations visuelles, en s'inspirant des mécanismes correspondants mis en jeu dans le cerveau. Plus précisément, nous proposons des hypothèses sur la façon dont le mécanisme cérébral de ces tâches peut fonctionner et nous nous efforçons de déterminer comment des neurones avec un petit champ récepteur sont en mesure de fournir des réponses cohérentes et de coder des formes dynamiques complexes. Nous étudions chaque aspect du traitement réalisé dans le cerveau que nous avons modélisé dans un cadre connexionniste, en montrant comment ces systèmes distribués peuvent être utilisés pour des tâches complexes telles que la détection de mouvement et la reconnaissance de formes dynamiques. Du point de vue informatique ces modèles offrent de nouveaux algorithmes, avec des propriétés intéressantes telles que l'utilisation de mémoire distribuée et la robustesse. La détection de mouvement et la discrimination de motifs visuels complexes à partir de ce signal (ou "vision cognitive") structurent les deux parties dans lesquelles le manuscrit se divise. La première partie porte sur la détection de mouvement en étudiant la façon dont l'extraction de caractéristiques visuelles est effectuée à partir du flux d'information visuel, et en particulier la façon dont les problèmes dus à la petite taille et la gamme de détection réduite des détecteurs de mouvement locaux peuvent être résolus. Dans la deuxième partie nous étudions la façon dont la classification des motifs visuels dynamiques complexes est réalisée à partir du traitement fourni par le système primaire de vision pour réaliser ce que nous appelons la vision cognitive, en évaluant au passage différentes techniques d'extraction de caractéristiques visuelles.
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Brahmi, Frances A. "Medical students' perception of lifelong learning at Indiana University School of Medicine." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3297081.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science, 2007.Title from dissertation home page (viewed Sept. 24, 2008). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-02, Section: A, page: 0414. Adviser: Debora Shaw.
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Tauber, Justin. "Reading Merleau-Ponty: Cognitive science, pathology and transcendental phenomenology." Faculty of Arts, Department of Philosophy, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/1965.
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Master of Philosophy (Dept. of Philosophy)This thesis explores the evolution of the way the Phenomenology of Perception is read for the purpose of determining its relevance to cognitive science. It looks at the ways in which the descriptions of phenomena are taken to converge with connectionist and enactivist accounts (the "psychological" aspect of this reading) and the way Merleau-Ponty's criticisms of intellectualism end empiricism are treated as effective responses to the philosophical foundations of cognitivism. The analysis reveals a general assumption that Merleau-Ponty's thought is compatible with a broadly naturalistic approach to cognition. This assumption has its roots in the belief that Merleau-Ponty's proximity to the existential tradition is incompatible with a commitment to a genuine transcendental philosophical standpoint. I argue that this suspicion is unfounded, and that it neglects the internal structure of the Phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty's criticism of classical forms of transcendental philosophy is not a rejection of that tradition, but instead prompts his unorthodox use of pathological case-studies. For Merleau-Ponty, this engagement with pathology constitutes a kind of transcendental strategy, a strategy that is much closer to Husserl's later work than is commonly acknowledged. The thesis also demonstrates a different mode of engagement with cognitive science, through a critical encounter with John Haugeland's transcendental account of the perception of objects. Confronting his account with the phenomenon of anorexia, I challenge him to differentiate his notion of an existential commitment from the anorexic's pathological over-commitment to a particular body image. Merleau-Ponty's account does not suffer from the same problems as Haugeland's because transcendence is not construed in terms of independence, but in terms of the fecundity and inexhaustibility of the sensible. I attempt to articulate Merleau-Ponty's own notion of a pre-personal commitment through the metaphor of invitation and show how this commitment and the Husserlian notion of open intersubjectivity can shed light on the anorexic's predicament.
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Chaumette, Francois. "De la perception à l'action : l'asservissement visuel, de l'action à la perception : la vision active." Habilitation à diriger des recherches, Université Rennes 1, 1998. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00843890.
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Deery, June Elizabeth. "Doors of perception : science, literature and mysticism in the works of Aldous Huxley." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1989. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.359659.
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Osman, Kamil Bashir. "Emirati Nursing Students Perception and Experiences of Studying Nursing and Science through English." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.531675.
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Ahmed, Zaiboenisha. "Teachers’ perception of the integration of socio-scientific issues in their science classes." Thesis, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11838/1856.
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Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree
MASTER OF EDUCATION
in the
FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
at the
CAPE PENINSULA UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
2014The purpose for this study was to reveal the perceptions held by science teachers on the integration of socio-scientific issues in their science teaching. Also pertinent to this investigation was an understanding of what these teachers saw as the purpose(s) of such integration, how they purported to carry out the integration in their classroom, and how they perceive the role of social justice in science teaching. The theoretical principles of critical pedagogy underpinned the study and its methodology was guided by a phenomenological approach. The qualitative study was confined to eight schools in the Cape Town Metropole and ten science teachers made up the purposefully selected sample. Grounded theory was used as a method of analysis of the transcripts obtained from the semi-structured interviews conducted with the teachers on the socio-scientific issues depicted by two scenarios. Teachers saw the purposes for SSI integration in terms of its focus on the science curriculum, the everyday relevance of science and the impact of science. In addition they thought SSI integration could be useful to inculcate values, encourage behaviour change, advance both society and self, and develop critical thinking. They cited seven different teaching strategies and practices which they preferred for such integration: enquiry-based tasks; science content-specific activities; science-technology-society-environment (STSE) activities; communication of science information; science oriented projects; literacy programmes and deliberation and decision-making. The teachers thought that they could use the SSI scenarios to address socio-economic issues and issues pertaining to equity, self-determination, equality and civic values. Four general teacher profiles emerged from the research findings. These profiles captured both the commonalities and diversity existing among the participants’ perspectives.
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Jackson, Yvonne Jackson. "Health Science Adminstrators' Perception of Remediation with Students in the Professional Track Programs." ScholarWorks, 2016. https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/dissertations/2833.
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Remediation to improve student retention is rapidly becoming an important part of health science programs in higher education. A career college located in the midwestern United States implemented remediation for students to address declining enrollment health science professional-track programs. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to explore how remediation was carried out by college instructors and their perceptions of instructional best practices for students in health science programs in the context of current research. The conceptual framework that guided this study was based on constructivism and adult learning theory. Research questions focused on how instructors were carrying out the processes for remediation and explored their views of effective remediation practices. The sample of 11 participants included 4 program directors, 3 fieldwork coordinators, and 4 adjunct faculty members. Data were collected from individual interviews, classroom lab observations, and program documents. Data were open coded and analyzed for themes. Findings indicated that instructors who conducted remediation used instructional techniques that matched effective practices found in the current research literature, e.g. videos, case studies, patient simulation, mind-mapping, and mock practicals.- Based on the findings of best practices, recommendations were proposed for the development of a formal remediation plan for the health science programs to improve the success rate for student completion. This study may promote positive social change by standardizing the use of effective instructional techniques for remediation in the professional-track programs, thereby improving student retention and declining enrollment in the career college health science programs.
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Slavik, Michael P. (Michael Paul) 1978. "Planned perception within concurrent mapping and localization." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/87827.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2002.Also issued in leaves.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [127]-132).
by Michael P. Slavik.
S.M.
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Bylinskii, Zoya. "Computational perception for multi-modal document understanding." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/120375.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2018.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-192).
Multimodal documents occur in a variety of forms, as graphs in technical reports, diagrams in textbooks, and graphic designs in bulletins. Humans can efficiently process the visual and textual information contained within to make decisions on topics including business, healthcare, and science. Building the computational tools to understand multimodal documents can have important applications for web search, information retrieval, captioning and summarization, and automated design. This thesis makes contributions on two fronts: (i) to the development of data collection methods for measuring how humans perceive multimodal documents (i.e., where they look, what they find important), and (ii) to the development of computer vision tools for automatically parsing and making predictions about multimodal documents (i.e., the subject matter they are about). Specifically, the crowdsourced attention data captured from our novel user interfaces is used to train neural network models to predict where people look in graphic designs and information visualizations, with demonstrated applications to thumbnailing, design retargeting, and interactive feedback within graphic design tools. Separately, our models for detecting visual elements and parsing text elements in infographics (information graphics) are used for topic prediction and to present a system for automatic summarization. This thesis makes contributions at the interface of human and computer vision, with applications to human-computer interfaces and design.
by Zoya Bylinskii.
Ph. D.
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Florence, Peter R. (Peter Raymond). "Integrated perception and control at high speed." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108982.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-110).
We present a method for robust high-speed quadrotor flight through unknown cluttered environments using integrated perception and control. Motivated by experiments in which the difficulty of accurate state estimation was a primary limitation on speed, our method forgoes maintaining a map in favor of using only instantaneous depth information in the local frame. This provides robustness in the presence of significant state estimate uncertainty. We compare the method against a benchmark approach using a simulated quadrotor race through a forest at high speeds in the presence of increasing state estimate noise. We then present hardware validation experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments, performing robust obstacle avoidance at speeds of up to 10 m/s, including sustained flight through a forest at 6 m/s. Finally, we add to the memoryless method, and develop a robust obstacle avoidance approach that uses memory without resorting to a maximum-likelihood mapping framework.
by Peter R. Florence.
S.M.
35
Bachrach, Abraham Galton. "Trajectory bundle estimation For perception-driven planning." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79151.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2013.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-122).
When operating in unknown environments, autonomous vehicles must perceive and understand the environment ahead in order to make effective navigation decisions. Long range perception can enable a vehicle to choose actions that take it directly toward its goal, avoiding dead ends. In addition, the perception range is critically important for ensuring the safety of vehicles with constrained dynamics. In general, the faster a vehicle moves, the more constrained its dynamics become due to acceleration limits imposed by its actuators. This means that the speed at which an autonomous agent can safely travel is often governed by its ability to perceive and understand the environment ahead. Overall, perception range is one of the most important factors that determines the performance of an autonomous vehicle. Today, autonomous vehicles tend to rely exclusively on metric representations built using range sensors to plan paths. However, such sensors are limited by their maximum range, field of view, and occluding obstacles in the foreground. Together, these limitations make up what we call the metric sensing horizon of the vehicle. The first two limitations are generally determined by the weight, size, power, and cost budget allocated to sensing. However, range sensors will always be limited by occlusions. If we wish to develop autonomous vehicles that are able to navigate directly toward a goal at high speeds through unknown environments, then we must move beyond the simple range-sensor based techniques. We must develop algorithms that enable autonomous agents to harness knowledge about the structure of the world to interpret additional sensor information (such as appearance information provided by cameras), and make inferences about parts of the world that cannot be directly observed. We develop a new representation based around trajectory bundles, that makes this challenging task more tractable. Rather than attempt to explicitly model the geometry of the world in front of the vehicle (which can be incredibly complex), we reason about the world in terms of what the vehicle can and cannot do. Trajectory bundles are designed to capture an abstract concept such as the command "go straight and then turn towards the right" in a concrete and actionable manner. We employ a library of trajectory bundles to reason about the layout of obstacles in the environment based on which bundles in the library are predicted to be feasible. Trajectory bundles provide a lens through which we can look at perception tasks, allowing us to leverage machine learning tools in much more effective ways for navigation. In this thesis we introduce trajectory bundles, and develop algorithms that use them to enable perception-driven planning. We develop a trajectory clustering algorithm that enables us to construct a set of trajectory bundles. We then develop a Bayesian filtering framework that enables us to estimate a belief over which trajectory bundles are feasible based on the history of actions and observations of the vehicle. We test our algorithms by using them to navigate a simulated fixed wing air vehicle at high speeds through an unknown environment using a monocular camera sensor.
by Abraham Galton Bachrach.
Ph.D.
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Wang, Shaoxiong S. M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "3D shape perception from vision and touch." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/122914.
Full textAbstract:
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 47-52).
Perceiving accurate 3D object shape is important for robots to interact with the physical world. Current research along this direction has been primarily relying on visual observations. Vision, however useful, has inherent limitations due to occlusions and the 2D-3D ambiguities, especially for perception with a monocular camera. In contrast, touch gets precise local shape information, though its efficiency for reconstructing the entire shape could be low. In this thesis, we propose a novel paradigm that efficiently perceives accurate 3D object shape by incorporating visual and tactile observations, as well as prior knowledge of common object shapes learned from large-scale shape repositories. We use vision first, applying neural networks with learned shape priors to predict an object's 3D shape from a single-view color image. We then use tactile sensing to refine the shape; the robot actively touches the object regions where the visual prediction has high uncertainty. Our method efficiently builds the 3D shape of common objects from a color image and a small number of tactile explorations (around 10). Our setup is easy to apply and has potentials to help robots better perform grasping or manipulation tasks on real-world objects.
by Shaoxiong Wang.
S.M.
S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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Shannon, Vaughn Parnell. "Interpreting interventions : identity, images, and the perception of normative behavior /." The Ohio State University, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1486401895207787.
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Keefer, Lucas Allen. "Defending Noe's Enactive Theory of Perception." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2009. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses/52.
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Theories of perception can broadly be divided into two groups: orthodox and heterodox theories (Noë & Thompson, 2002). Orthodox theories of perception consider perception as a neurological process, i.e. as a phenomenon which can be explained solely in terms of intracranial facts. Heterodox views expand this scope, maintaining that an understanding of perception must include extracranial facts, or facts about the environment in which a perceiver is situated (ibid.). This thesis will attempt to defend a particular exemplar of this heterodox approach, namely the enactive theory of perception proposed by Alva Noë. The thesis has two primary goals. First, I will attempt to offer an exegesis of Noë's theory, attempting to clarify the scope and strength of Noë's view. Secondly, I will consider the particular objections leveled against Noë, and heterodox theories more generally, by Ken Aizawa. I conclude that Noë's theory can better account for the nature of perception.
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Keel, Terence. "The Religious Pursuit of Race: Christianity, Modern Science, and the Perception of Human Difference." Thesis, Harvard University, 2012. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:10471.
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This dissertation is a work in intellectual history that chronicles racial theories within Western science and medicine. Therein, I address two interrelated questions. Firstly, has Christianity shaped modern scientific perceptions of race? Secondly, is the search for the origin of human life, vis-à-vis theories of race, a purely scientific matter or, a more basic human existential concern? To answer these questions I undertook archival research within the history of European and American racial science, analyzing contemporary scientific work, archival data of primary scientific material, biblical commentaries, literary monthlies, and early maps of the major continents. I argue that Christian ideas about nature, humanity, and history have facilitated modern scientific perceptions of race since the time of the Enlightenment. This is true despite what is believed to be the “Death of Adam” within Western science following the emergence of Darwinian evolution. In defense of my thesis I trace the currency of three ideas derived from Christianity that have shaped the assumptions and reasoning styles of early modern and contemporary scientific theorists of race. These ideas are: common human descent (derived from the Biblical creation narrative), the ontological uniqueness of human life (drawn from Biblical claims about the “image of God” mirrored in “mankind”), and the longevity of racial traits (an idea that has its roots in theological claims about the stability and inherent order of nature). I chart the development of these three Christian concepts across four different historical moments that reveal how religious and scientific perceptions of race share a common foundation in the West. These moment are: Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s attempt to develop anthropology as a secular science during the end of the eighteenth-century; mid-nineteenth-century debates in the U.S. over common human descent; early twentieth-century theories of race and disease that relied on polygenist assumptions about distinct human ancestry; and finally the recent discovery of
Neanderthal DNA exclusively in the descendents of Eurasia. Ultimately, this thesis concludes that religious and scientific ways of viewing race have been interconnected and are animated by irresolvable questions about what it means to be human.
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Thomas, Nigel James Trehaine. "Psychological theories of perception, imagination and mental representation, and twentieth century philosophies of science." Thesis, University of Leeds, 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.410576.
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Sharan, Lavanya. "Image statistics and the perception of surface reflectance." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34356.
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Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2005.MIT Institute Archives copy: p. 223 (last page) bound in reverse order.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-223).
Humans are surprisingly good at judging the reflectance of complex surfaces even when the surfaces are viewed in isolation, contrary to the Gelb effect. We argue that textural cues are important for this task. Traditional machine vision systems, on the other hand, are incapable of recognizing reflectance properties. Estimating the reflectance of a complex surface under unknown illumination from a single image is a hard problem. Recent work in reflectance recognition has shown that certain statistics measured o an image of a surface are diagnostic of reflectance. We consider opaque surfaces with medium scale structure and spatially homogeneous reflectance properties. For such surfaces, we find that statistics of intensity histograms and histograms of filtered outputs are indicative of the diffuse surface reflectance. We compare the performance of a learning algorithm that employs these image statistics to human performance in two psychophysical experiments. In the first experiment, observers classify images of complex surfaces according to the perceived reflectance. We find that the learning algorithm rivals human performance at the classification task. In the second experiment, we manipulate the statistics of images and ask observers to provide reflectance ratings. In this case, the learning algorithm performs similarly to human observers. These findings lead us to conclude that the image statistics capture perceptually relevant information.
by Lavanya Sharan.
S.M.
42
Pillai, Sudeep. "SLAM-aware, self-supervised perception in mobile robots." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/114054.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 152-171).
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a fundamental capability in mobile robots, and has been typically considered in the context of aiding mapping and navigation tasks. In this thesis, we advocate for the use of SLAM as a supervisory signal to further the perceptual capabilities in robots. Through the concept of SLAM-supported object recognition, we develop the ability for robots equipped with a single camera to be able to leverage their SLAM-awareness (via Monocular Visual-SLAM) to better inform object recognition within its immediate environment. Additionally, by maintaining a spatially-cognizant view of the world,we find our SLAM-aware approach to be particularly amenable to few-shot object learning. We show that a SLAM-aware, few-shot object learning strategy can be especially advantageous to mobile robots, and is able to learn object detectors from a reduced set of training examples. Implicit to realizing modern visual-SLAM systems is its choice of map representation. It is imperative that the map representation is crucially utilized by multiple components in the robot's decision-making stack, while it is constantly optimized as more measurements are available. Motivated by the need for a unified map representation in vision-based mapping, navigation and planning, we develop an iterative and high-performance mesh-reconstruction algorithm for stereo imagery. We envision that in the future, these tunable mesh representations can potentially enable robots to quickly reconstruct their immediate surroundings while being able to directly plan in them and maneuver at high-speeds. While most visual-SLAM front-ends explicitly encode application-specific constraints for accurate and robust operation, we advocate for an automated solution to developing these systems. By bootstrapping the robot's ability to perform GP Saided SLAM, we develop a self-supervised visual-Slam front-end capable of performing visual ego-motion, and vision-based loop-closure recognition in mobile robots. We propose a novel, generative model solution that it is able to predict ego-motion estimates from optical flow, while also allowing for the prediction of induced scene flow conditioned on the ego-motion. Following a similar bootstrapped learning strategy, we explore the ability to self-supervise place recognition in mobile robots and cast it as a metric learning problem, with a GPS-aided SLAM solution providing the relevant supervision. Furthermore, we show that the newly learned embedding can be particularly powerful in discriminating visual scene instances from each other for the purpose of loop-closure detection. We envision that such self-supervised solutions to vision-based task learning will have far-reaching implications in several domains, especially facilitating life-long learning in autonomous systems.
by Sudeep Pillai.
Ph. D.
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Henson, Cory Andrew. "A Semantics-based Approach to Machine Perception." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2013. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1387645909.
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Linne, Brianne M. "Quantification of oral roughness perception and comparison with mechanism of astringency perception." The Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1466550825.
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Misra, Amalendu. "Perception of Islam in Indian nationalist thought." Thesis, University of Hull, 1999. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:8003.
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Boyle, Stephanie Claire. "Investigating the neural mechanisms underlying audio-visual perception using electroencephalography (EEG)." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8874/.
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Traditionally research into how we perceive our external world focused on the unisensory approach, examining how information is processed by one sense at a time. This produced a vast literature of results revealing how our brains process information from the different senses, from fields such as psychophysics, animal electrophysiology, and neuroimaging. However, we know from our own experiences that we use more than one sense at a time to understand our external world. Therefore to fully understand perception, we must understand not only how the brain processes information from individual sensory modalities, but also how and when this information interacts and combines with information from other modalities. In short, we need to understand the phenomenon of multisensory perception. The work in this thesis describes three experiments aimed to provide new insights into this topic. Specifically, the three experiments presented here focused on examining when and where effects related to multisensory perception emerged in neural signals, and whether or not these effects could be related to behaviour in a time-resolved way and on a trial-by-trial basis. These experiments were carried out using a novel combination of psychophysics, high density electroencephalography (EEG), and advanced computational methods (linear discriminant analysis and mutual information analysis). Experiment 1 (Chapter 3) investigated how behavioural and neural signals are modulated by the reliability of sensory information. Previous work has shown that subjects will weight sensory cues in proportion to their relative reliabilities; high reliability cues are assigned a higher weight and have more influence on the final perceptual estimate, while low reliability cues are assigned a lower weight and have less influence. Despite this widespread finding, it remains unclear when neural correlates of sensory reliability emerge during a trial, and whether or not modulations in neural signals due to reliability relate to modulations in behavioural reweighting. To investigate these questions we used a combination of psychophysics, EEG-based neuroimaging, single-trial decoding, and regression modelling. Subjects performed an audio-visual rate discrimination task where the modality (auditory, visual, audio-visual), stimulus stream rate (8 to 14 Hz), visual reliability (high/low), and congruency in rate between audio-visual stimuli (± 2 Hz) were systematically manipulated. For the behavioural and EEG components (derived using linear discriminant analysis), a set of perceptual and neural weights were calculated for each time point. The behavioural results revealed that participants weighted sensory information based on reliability: as visual reliability decreased, auditory weighting increased. These modulations in perceptual weights emerged early after stimulus onset (48 ms). The EEG data revealed that neural correlates of sensory reliability and perceptual weighting were also evident in decoding signals, and that these occurred surprisingly early in the trial (84 ms). Finally, source localisation suggested that these correlates originated in early sensory (occipital/temporal) and parietal regions respectively. Overall, these results provide the first insights into the temporal dynamics underlying human cue weighting in the brain, and suggest that it is an early, dynamic, and distributed process in the brain. Experiment 2 (Chapter 4) expanded on this work by investigating how oscillatory power was modulated by the reliability of sensory information. To this end, we used a time-frequency approach to analyse the data collected for the work in Chapter 3. Our results showed that significant effects in the theta and alpha bands over fronto-central regions occurred during the same early time windows as a shift in perceptual weighting (100 ms and 250 ms respectively). Specifically, we found that theta power (4 - 6 Hz) was lower and alpha power (10 – 12 Hz) was higher in audio-visual conditions where visual reliability was low, relative to conditions where visual reliability was high. These results suggest that changes in oscillatory power may underlie reliability based cue weighting in the brain, and that these changes occur early during the sensory integration process. Finally, Experiment 3 (Chapter 5) moved away from examining reliability based cue weighting and focused on investigating cases where spatially and temporally incongruent auditory and visual cues interact to affect behaviour. Known collectively as “cross-modal associations”, past work has shown that observers have preferred and non-preferred stimuli pairings. For example, subjects will frequently pair high pitched tones with small objects and low pitched tones with large objects. However it is still unclear when and where these associations are reflected in neural signals, and whether they emerge at an early perceptual level or later decisional level. To investigate these questions we used a modified version of the implicit association test (IAT) to examine the modulation of behavioural and neural signals underlying an auditory pitch – visual size cross modal association. Congruency was manipulated by assigning two stimuli (one auditory and one visual) to each of the left or right response keys and changing this assignment across blocks to create congruent (left key: high tone – small circle, right key: low tone – large circle) and incongruent (left key: low tone – small circle, right key: high tone – large circle) pairings of stimuli. On each trial, subjects were presented with only one of the four stimuli (auditory high tone, auditory low tone, visual small circle, visual large circle), and asked to respond which was presented as quickly and accurately as possible. The key assumption with such a design is that subjects should respond faster when associated (i.e. congruent) stimuli are assigned to the same response key than when two non-associated stimuli are. In line with this, our behavioural results demonstrated that subjects responded faster on blocks where congruent pairings of stimuli were assigned to the response keys (high pitch-small circle and low pitch large circle), than blocks where incongruent pairings were. The EEG results demonstrated that information about auditory pitch and visual size could be extracted from neural signals using two approaches to single-trial analysis (linear discriminant analysis and mutual information analysis) early during the trial (50ms), with the strongest information contained over posterior and temporal electrodes for auditory trials, and posterior electrodes for visual trials. EEG components related to auditory pitch were significantly modulated by cross-modal congruency over temporal and frontal regions early in the trial (~100ms), while EEG components related to visual size were modulated later (~220ms) over frontal and temporal electrodes. For the auditory trials, these EEG components were significantly predictive of single trial reaction times, yet for the visual trials the components were not. As a result, the data support an early and short-latency origin of cross-modal associations, and suggest that these may originate in a bottom-up manner during early sensory processing rather than from high-level inference processes. Importantly, the findings were consistent across both analysis methods, suggesting these effects are robust. To summarise, the results across all three experiments showed that it is possible to extract meaningful, single-trial information from the EEG signal and relate it to behaviour on a time resolved basis. As a result, the work presented here steps beyond previous studies to provide new insights into the temporal dynamics of audio-visual perception in the brain.All experiments, although employing different paradigms and investigating different processes, showed early neural correlates related to audio-visual perception emerging in neural signals across early sensory, parietal, and frontal regions. Together, these results provide support for the prevailing modern view that the entire cortex is essentially multisensory and that multisensory effects can emerge at all stages during the perceptual process.
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Smith, Evann. "Mass Mobilization in the Middle East: Form, Perception, and Language." Thesis, Harvard University, 2016. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:33493280.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation consists of three separate but related papers on mass mobilization in the Middle East. The first paper investigates the landscape of collective resistance and empowerment struggles in the Middle East. It exploits new data that catalogues mass political movements in the 19 countries of the Middle East and North Africa from 1900 to 2012 to offer a framework for understanding two basic aspects of mass political movements in the region: the forms such movements take, and the forms that are more likely to emerge and endure. Using Latent Class Analysis, it develops a complete typology of mass political movements in the Middle East based on three central aspects of mass mobilization--organization, collective identity, and action--and finds evidence that these three aspects not only constitute three dimensions of difference in mass movements that are orthogonal, but that each ranges from "fluid" to "stable" extremes, which jointly determine the likelihood of movements forming and deforming.
The second paper explores how the occurrence of mass movements in the Middle East affects individual citizens' perceived economic grievances. By pairing public opinion data with the new data on mass movements in the Middle East, it finds a strong and consistent negative relationship between the occurrence of mass mobilization and individual perceptions of well-being. Using causal mediation analysis, however, it finds no evidence that this relationship is the product of real economic or institutional declines. Instead, it finds consistent evidence that mass movements directly and negatively impact individuals' perceptions and that this is plausibly the product of three psychological processes, which suggest an alternative micro-level explanation for "cycles of contention."
The third paper develops a computer-assisted keyword-based approach to the retrieval and identification of Arabic dialects--which pose a distinct challenge to the machine processing of languages--that systematically incorporates machine learning and human expertise in a manner that is fast, efficient, transparent, and effective. Using a dataset of over 11 million tweets, it then applies this approach to an analysis of the linguistic character of Arabic Twitter during the 2013 Egyptian protests, which led to the military coup of Egypt's first democratically elected president. Analysis of the linguistic trends indicates that spikes of dialectical Arabic mark two notable types of discourse: 1) reporting and reacting in real-time to unexpected events, and 2) capturing major emotional responses to landmark events, which "take the temperature" of the country's politically engaged population.Government
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Filliat, David. "Navigation, perception et apprentissage pour la robotique." Habilitation à diriger des recherches, Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris VI, 2011. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00649692.
Full textAbstract:
Nous avons mené des travaux de recherche principalement dans les domaines de la navigation, la perception et l'apprentissage pour la robotique mobile. Ces travaux, orientés vers une robotique " cognitive ", ont pour objectif général de per- mettre aux robots de s'adapter à leur environnement, en fournissant les primitives de base telles que l'espace libre, la position ou la présence d'objets nécessaires au choix des actions. Une grande partie de ces travaux sont guidés par une inspi- ration biologique essentiellement fonctionnelle, s'inspirant de capacités trouvées dans la nature, sans chercher à en reproduire précisément le fonctionnement. La navigation, plus particulièrement la cartographie, a été jusqu'à présent le thème principal de nos travaux. Durant notre thèse, nous avons développé une méthode de cartographie utilisant un filtre bayésien, appliqué à une structure de carte et à des perceptions inspirées des connaissances biologiques sur les capacités de navigation du rat. L'intérêt de cette approche est de permettre, à partir de capteurs très simples, une localisation globale durant la cartographie, apportant ainsi une bonne robustesse à la navigation, au prix d'une exploration relativement lente. Cette inspiration biologique s'est ensuite effacée dans les tra- vaux menés à la Direction Générale pour l'Armement ou nous avons participé à la mise en place d'un démonstrateur utilisant des techniques de cartographie classiques à base de télémétrie laser et d'évitement d'obstacles en environnement dynamique. Depuis 2005 à l'ENSTA ParisTech, nos travaux se sont orientés sur les problèmes de navigation topologique, avec une approche de navigation topo- logique par apprentissage dans laquelle un utilisateur désigne les pièces à re- connaître et montre le chemin entre les différentes pièces. Nous avons également développé une approche de cartographie topologique utilisant un algorithme de détection de fermetures de boucles qui permet de détecter le retour d'un robot à une position connue. Enfin, ces travaux se sont maintenant étendus, depuis 2009 dans le cadre du projet ANR PACOM, à la problématique de la cartographie sé- mantique. L'objectif est d'obtenir des modèles de l'environnement contenant des informations de plus haut niveau; en particulier des informations plus proches de celles utilisées par l'humain, telles que les pièces ou les objets présents dans l'environnement. Au niveau de la perception, certains de ces travaux ont fait appel à la télémétrie laser, qui est bien adaptée à la navigation. Ils sont néanmoins axés principalement sur l'utilisation de la vision. En particulier, nous nous sommes intéressés au problème de la représentation de l'information visuelle qui est essentielle pour apporter une robustesse au bruit tout en fournissant l'information nécessaire aux applications. Nous avons ainsi développé une approche incrémentale inspirée des modèles de " sac de mots " visuels que nous avons appliqué à la localisation qualitative, topologique, au guidage visuel et à la reconnaissance d'objets. En collaboration avec Pierre-Yves Oudeyer nous avons étendu cette représentation à la reconnaissance auditive et audio-visuelle. Nous nous sommes également intéressés au problème de la perception active afin d'améliorer les capacités de localisation et d'améliorer la robustesse du guidage visuel. Enfin, la plupart de ces travaux ont fait appel à des méthodes d'apprentissage pour apporter de l'adaptabilité à la localisation, à la cartographie ou à la re- connaissance d'objets. Nous avons principalement travaillé avec des méthodes Bayésiennes et nous avons notamment développé des méthodes actives, permet- tant au robot de sélectionner les exemples d'apprentissage pour améliorer ses performances. Ces méthodes permettent également de profiter d'interactions avec l'utilisateur pour adapter les concepts appris par le robot. Nous les avons appli- quées à la reconnaissance de pièces et d'objets. Nous avons également appliqué la technique de factorisation en matrices non-négatives, une méthode d'appren- tissage non supervisée, pour la reconnaissance audio-visuelle d'objets. Cette der- nière application se place dans le cadre de la robotique développementale où nous cherchons à nous inspirer de l'homme pour créer des méthodes d'apprentis- sage intuitives et à long terme pour la robotique, approche que nous développons actuellement dans le cadre du projet ANR MACSi. Dans la continuité de ces travaux, nous souhaitons poursuivre nos recherches sur le thème de la navigation sémantique et de l'apprentissage pour la percep- tion dans le cadre de la robotique développementale. Ces recherches auront pour objectif commun de fournir au robot ou à son utilisateur des modèles d'environ- nement riches et contenant des informations utiles à l'analyse de la situation ou aux tâches du robot. Ces méthodes s'appliqueront essentiellement dans le cadre de la navigation en milieu intérieur ou urbain et à la robotique de service ou d'assistance, en interaction directe avec l'homme.
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Lee, Myeong. ""I know where that is"| Cultural differences in perception of places." Thesis, University of Maryland, College Park, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1568786.
Full textAbstract:
This study focuses on modeling people's perceptions of places and how those perceptions are affected by cultural differences. Cultural background affects the way people feel and recall information. However, it is unclear how cultural background influences individual's perception of geospatial areas such as a town or a city. One way an individual's cultural background varies is with regard to the patterns of one's routine communication. This concept is described by Hall's high- and low-context cultural model (1976). The ways people perceive geospatial places can be characterized in terms of their tendency to rely on specific landmarks or symbolic addresses. In this study, we use an online survey and an online place recognition game to test the hypothesis that high-context individuals will perceive urban places in terms of landmarks rather than symbolic addresses. The results suggest that high- and low-context is not a unified construct. Instead it is a multi-dimensional construct with sub-dimensions where one of those, i.e. one's attitude towards other's communication style, may affect an individual's perception of places.
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Ritter, Tara Eve. "Exploring the Relationship between Risk Perception and Farmer Nutrient Management Decisions." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1343243182.
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