The dominance of federal and state contracts by large enterprises reduces the share of contracts small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) business leaders obtain. As of the last census reading in 2016, SMEs received only 23% of contracts. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies of 3 small business leaders, operating in south Florida, for obtaining state contracts through public procurement. The thematic findings were in the context of the principal-agent theory as the conceptual framework. The participants answered 10 questions in semistructured interviews and provided organizational procurement documents for review. The methodological triangulation of multiple data sources and data analysis led to the identification of 3 primary themes: business performance, overcoming barriers, and strategic initiatives. Enabling proper business performance protocols for revenue, company reputation, pricing, and compliance benefitted the 3 participants as a strategy for successfully winning state contracts. The participants first identified the barriers they experienced, which included access, bargaining power, funding, and labels. The barriers encountered by the participants became less overwhelming with the implementation of strategic initiatives based on knowledge, relationship building, skilled personnel, and taking action. Findings included the importance of SME business leaders and personnel educating themselves on the public procurement process and building relationships with individuals in the various agencies. Application of the findings may lead to a social change of higher small business employment rates, increased revenue, and improved innovation for business leaders.

The adversarial multi-agent patrol problem is an active research topic with many real-world applications such as physical robots guarding an area and software agents protecting a computer network. In it, agents patrol a graph looking for so-called critical vertices that are subject to attack by adversaries. The agents are unaware of which vertices are subject to attack by adversaries and when they encounter such a vertex they attempt to protect it from being compromised (an adversary must occupy the vertex it targets a certain amount of time for the attack to succeed). Even though the terms adversary and attack are used, the problem domain extends to patrolling a graph for other interesting noncompetitive contexts such as search and rescue. The problem statement adopted in this work is formulated such that agents obtain knowledge of local graph topology and critical vertices over the course of their travels via an API ; there is no global knowledge of the graph or communication between agents. The challenge is to balance exploration, necessary to discover critical vertices, with exploitation, necessary to protect critical vertices from attack. Four types of adversaries were used for experiments, three from previous research – waiting, random, and statistical - and the fourth, a hybrid of those three. Agent strategies for countering each of these adversaries are designed and evaluated. Benchmark graphs and parameter settings from related research will be employed. The proposed research culminates in the design and evaluation of agents to counter these various types of adversaries under a range of conditions. The results of this work are agent strategies in which each agent becomes solely responsible for protecting those critical vertices it discovers. The agents use emergent behavior to minimize successful attacks and maximize the discovery of new critical vertices. A set of seven edge choosing primitives (ECPs) are defined that are combined in different ways to yield a range of agent strategies using the chain of responsibility OOP design pattern. Every permutation of them were tested and measured in order to identify those strategies that perform well. One strategy performed particularly well against all adversaries, graph topology, and other experimental variables. This particular strategy combines ECPs of: A hard-deadline return to covered vertices to counter the random adversary, efficiently checking vertices to see if they are being attacked by the waiting adversary, and random movement to impede the statistical adversary.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Over the past decade, universities had a significant improvement in using online learning tools. A standard learning management system provides fundamental functionalities to satisfy the basic needs of its users. The new generation of learning management systems have introduced a novel system that provides social networking features. An unprecedented number of users use the social aspects of such platforms to create their profile, collaborate with other users, and find their desired career path. Nowadays there are many learning systems which provide learning materials, certificates, and course management systems. This allows us to utilize such information to help the students and the instructors in their academic life. The presented research work's primary goal is to focus on creating an intelligent personal assistant within the social learning systems. The proposed personal assistant has a human-like persona, learns about the users, and recommends useful and meaningful materials for them. The designed system offers a set of features for both institutions and members to achieve their goal within the learning system. It recommends jobs and friends for the users based on their profile. The proposed agent also prioritizes the messages and shows the most important message to the user. The developed software supports model-controller-view architecture and provides a set of RESTful APIs which allows the institutions to integrate the proposed intelligent agent with their learning system.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第17864号 / 工博第3773号 / 新制||工||1577(附属図書館) / 30684 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科社会基盤工学専攻 / (主査)教授 後藤 仁志, 教授 戸田 圭一, 准教授 原田 英治 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第18934号 / 工博第3976号 / 新制||工||1613(附属図書館) / 31885 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科社会基盤工学専攻 / (主査)教授 後藤 仁志, 教授 戸田 圭一, 准教授 原田 英治 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DGAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第19738号 / 工博第4193号 / 新制||工||1647(附属図書館) / 32774 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科物質エネルギー化学専攻 / (主査)教授 近藤 輝幸, 教授 辻 康之, 教授 大江 浩一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DGAM

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第20423号 / 農博第2208号 / 新制||農||1047(附属図書館) / 学位論文||H29||N5044(農学部図書室) / 京都大学大学院農学研究科食品生物科学専攻 / (主査)教授 安達 修二, 教授 金本 龍平, 教授 谷 史人 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

No description available.

ABSTRACT In this dissertation, I occupy two realms of philosophy that have not been commonly associated. On the one hand, I enter into debates about the proper interpretation of Kant, specifically having to do with the very fractured debate on the nature and applications of transcendental idealism. I adjudicate on the matters of the relationship between appearances and things in themselves, i.e. whether it is epistemological or ontological, the way in which TI resolves the antinomial conflict of reason as it thinks the unconditioned in its exploration of cosmological questions, and the way Kant applies TI to articulate the intelligible and empirical characters in his metaphysics of agency. In addition to this historical research, I also turn to contemporary formulations of libertarian freedom. Libertarianism in free will debates is the view that free will is incompatible with determinism (i.e. incompatibilism), and free will exists. Libertarianism is a competitor to compatibilist views that claim that free will is compatible with determinism, i.e. the view that there is a unique outcome given a past and laws of nature characterizing the past. Within libertarianism, there are important differences in terms of the metaphysics of free will. Most contemporary libertarians opt for a reductionist metaphysics, in which causation consists in relationships between events and does not involve underlying grounds or substances. Both event-causal and non-causal libertarianism accordingly ground their views of freedom on the interplay of psychological events conceived of as states of affairs at instants in time. Event-causal accounts locate free will in indeterministic causal series, involve conflicting sets of motivations that resolve themselves probabilistically into a certain kind of action. Non-causal accounts do not attach free will to causality at all, instead associating it with a spontaneously occurring event. ECL and NCL struggle with establishing how the agent actually settles her action. If the action is merely the indeterministic byproduct of a set of psychological processes or process, then what ultimately occurs is not up to the agent but a product of chance. ECL and NCL nevertheless object that even an action settled by chance is done consciously and according to reasons. But these criteria are aligned with compatibilist criteria for free will. Compatibilists deny to the agent the unconditioned power to choose, which is independent of any prior determination but also not subject to chance. They point out, though, that the action is externally unconstrained, or that, if the reasons had been different, the agent would have acted differently. Since contemporary libertarianism deprives the agent of control, and creates a kind of pseudo-agent that acts ultimately according to chance, I explore other metaphysical frameworks for free will. Agent-causal libertarianism involves the agent directly causing her action as a substance. It is not some state of affairs that causes the action—a desire or belief characterizing the agent’s psychology at a certain time—but the agent herself. Agent-causation promises to resolve the problem of control associated with event-causation. The agent-caused action is neither produced deterministically from a prior event, nor is it an indeterministic fallout from probabilistic causation. Instead, it is caused by an agent-substance able to act independently of events. Timothy O’Connor is a well-known and articulate defender of agent-causation, but he also subscribes to the naturalistic framework popular in contemporary metaphysics. Even though he accepts the reality of emergent properties, the agent-cause, which has a special capacity for self-determination, is supposed to be causally united to a microphysical level where there is only passive event-causation. In this dissertation, I seek to frame agent-causation in terms of transcendental idealism. Rather than establishing the level of event-causation as metaphysically fundamental, I explore an idealistic metaphysics in which the empirical world in the spatiotemporal framework of human experience is not an absolute measure of reality. The human person is a hybrid creature, spanning two domains. On the one hand, the person exists in the empirical order in space and time. It is characterized by events subject to a causal law, by which they are accounted for in terms of prior events. On the other hand, there is a deeper level to the person, not encompassed within the limited structures of human experience. On this deep intelligible level, the human person is able to serve as the unconditioned ground of its empirical character. / Philosophy

Taking precautions to restrain aflatoxin M1 (AFM1) from milk is critical, particularly due to the health and economic impact AFM1 imposes. The predominant post-harvest means of reducing AFM1 in milk includes the addition of sequestering agents to feed to diminish the bioavailability of aflatoxin B1 (AFB1), the parent compound of AFM1 found in contaminated feed. Still, residual AFM1 has been found in the milk. Using sequestering agents added to raw milk, we found that activated carbon was the most effective binder to reduce AFM1 contamination. The combination of 0.75% granular activated carbon (GAC) and a flow rate of 0.4 mL/min to pump contaminated milk through a glass column were chosen as optimum conditions for the removal of AFM1. These conditions obtained a 98.4% reduction of 0.75 ng/mL AFM1 from raw milk. The treated milk was also analyzed to assess the effects of GAC on milk constituents. The results determined that GAC had no significant effect on major nutritive milk constituents: total protein, lactose, minerals, and fat. Additionally, we optimized an extraction method coupled to high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS/MS) that minimized matrix effects, lowered the levels of detection, and reduced analysis costs. The optimized extraction method was based on QuEChERS (Quick, Easy, Cheap, Effective, Rugged, and Safe). Results determined 5 mL milk (15°C) with 10 mL acetonitrile, 3200 g centrifugation, and 0.2 μm syringe filter were the optimum conditions for the extraction of 0.5 ng/mL AFM1 from raw milk. The method was validated according to AOAC guidelines. This study reports experimental results on AFM1 remediation from raw bovine milk. The use of GAC for the removal of AFM1 in raw milk has reduced the amount of AFM1 below the FDA action limit and European Union maximum regulatory level. This method could have a global health impact, particularly, for people in developing nations and for infants and children who are more susceptible to the adverse effects of AFM1.