Automated sketch collaborators might help us create more dynamic intelligent tutoring systems, work out designs, reduce bias in solving spatial social problems, and organize our ideas. Here, we examine some properties of sketch recognition methods designed to help serve that goal. Structure Mapping techniques are applied to symbolic structural descriptions...
Natural Language Processing methods have become increasingly important for a variety of high- and low-level tasks including speech recognition, question answering, and automatic language translation. The state of the art performance of these methods is continuously advancing, but reliance on labeled training data sets often creates an artificial upper bound...
In response to exponentially increasing demand for digital media, today's Internet landscape has evolved into a multitude of diverse and interdependent distribution systems designed to move content as efficiently as possible. While many of these systems have \emph{individually} been explored in depth by both academic and industrial communities, a cross-sectional...
Assistive robotics focuses on human-robot systems that provide physical support and assistance to the elderly and people with motor-impairments. While assistive machines, such as the powered wheelchair, can significantly enhance the functional independence of individuals, many users are challenged by their direct operation, the manner in which such systems are...
Citizen media literacy is essential in a democratic society, particularly in the online environment where valid media sources have proliferated alongside purveyors of fake news. This dissertation explores technologies that automatically detect aspects of bias in news articles, with the ultimate aim of leveraging them to augment media literacy. It...
Historically, there have been large disparities in the degree to which different communities have access to resources and representation within society. With the increased availability of the internet and the growth of user-generated content platforms like Twitter and Wikipedia, there are opportunities to alleviate some these long-standing barriers to access...
The analytical paradigm in philosophy has as a pillar an analysis of the sentence as a basic entity. New sentences may be built from old sentences recursively through the application of logical constants, recently including intensional operators. Models are built on how these logical constants interact with each other, and...
Deep neural networks have shown impressive performance for many applications. In this dissertation, leveraging the capabilities of neural networks for modeling the non-linearity exists in the data, we propose several models that can project data into a low dimensional, discriminative, and smooth manifold. The suggested models can transfer knowledge from...
Many volunteer communities rely on technological systems to help their members connect, collaborate and learn the norms of how to participate in the organization. This dissertation presents research that examines technological interventions designed to support participation in three different volunteer-run communities, all of which have porous boundaries, and allow volunteers...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...