The thesis proposes a number of techniques for elaborating requirements constructively from high-level goals. The techniques are based on the KAOS goal-oriented method for requirements engineering. This method consists in identifying goals and refining them into subgoals until the latter can be assigned as responsibilities of single agents such as humans, devices and software. Domain properties...

Incorporating evidence-based practice (EBP) training in dental curricula is now an accreditation requirement for dental schools, but questions remain about the most effective ways to assess learning outcomes. The purpose of this study was to evaluate and compare three assessment methods for EBP training and to assess their relation to students' overall course grades. Participants in the study w...

We present an unsupervised method for labelling the arguments of verbs with their semantic roles. Our bootstrapping algorithm makes initial unambiguous role assignments, and then iteratively updates the probability model on which future assignments are based. A novel aspect of our approach is the use of verb, slot, and noun class information as the basis for backing off in our probability model...

In an effort to infuse gerontological content throughout a BSW curriculum, the College of Mount St. Joseph developed community partnerships with agencies that serve older adults. These partnerships led to specific "out-of-class" assignments in a macro social work practice class using a service-learning approach. The development and implementation of those assignments in the agency settings are ...

A novel data-evaluation procedure for the automatic atom to peak or multiplet assignment of 1H-NMR spectra of small molecules has been developed using a fast and robust expert system. The applicability and reliability of the method are demonstrated by comparison of a manually assigned database of 1H-NMR spectra with the assignments produced by the automatic procedure. The results of this analys...

Providing feedback, both assessing final work and giving hints to stuck students, is difficult for open-ended assignments in massive online classes which can range from thousands to millions of students. We introduce a neural network method to encode programs as a linear mapping from an embedded precondition space to an embedded postcondition space and propose an algorithm for feedback at scale...

Gender identification of sexually monomorphic mammals can be difficult. We used analysis of zinc-finger protein (Zfx and Zfy) DNA regions to determine gender of 96 beavers (Castor canadensis) from 3 areas and used these results to verify gender determined in the field. Gender was correctly determined for 86 (89.6%) beavers. Incorrect assignments were not attributed to errors in any one age or s...

In multicriteria decision problems many values must be assigned, such as the importance of the different criteria and the values of the alternatives with respect to subjective criteria. Since these assignments are approximate, it is very important to analyze the sensitivity of results when small modifications of the assignments are made. When solving a multicriteria decision problem, it is desi...

We formulate ensemble clustering as a regularization problem over nuclear norm and cluster-wise group norm, and present an efficient optimization algorithm, which we call Robust Convex Ensemble Clustering (RCEC). A key feature of RCEC allows to remove anomalous cluster assignments obtained from component clustering methods by using the group-norm regularization. Moreover, the proposed method is...