Thesis (M.S.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-99). Also available on the Internet.

My dissertation applies philosophical analysis to the problem of how we should cognitively characterize brain activity. Let us distinguish between high-level cognitive functions—e.g. decision-making, face recognition—and the lower-level computational operations that are carried out by discrete regions of the brain. One can assume that cognitive functions are assembled from interactions between relatively autonomous computational operations carried out by discrete brain regions. My thesis, stated very broadly, is that in order to be effective, the decomposition of a cognitive function into a set of interactions between localized computational operations may need to be specified domain-neutrally, and not in terms of a particular informational domain or stimulus class. Jerry Fodor’s influential work on modularity has sparked an industry of research that is based on the idea that the mind is, to a large extent, a configuration of domain-specific and relatively autonomous cognitive mechanisms, or modules. My treatment indicates how this modular approach must be modified in order successfully to decompose domain-specific cognitive functions into localizable computational operations. I proceed in two steps. First, I provide an analysis of the kinds of inferences that are used by cognitive scientists to postulate the existence of cognitive modules; I call these the modularity inferences. I offer a new characterization of these inferences, and argue that they can, and do, operate in three distinct modes in cognitive scientific research. Second, I present a general approach to the decomposition of a cognitive function into localizable computational operations. According to this approach, which I call the working zone approach, the contribution of a distinct brain region to a cognitive function is specified in terms of the type of operations that this region performs, and not in terms of a particular informational domain. I demonstrate the value of this approach in several research contexts within the cognitive sciences. / Arts, Faculty of / Philosophy, Department of / Graduate

No description available.

Members of the Pyramidellidae are ectoparasites that have highly unusual feeding habits relative to other heterobranch gastropods. Pyramidellid foregut anatomy is so complex that it is difficult to recognize homologous parts relative to other heterobranch gastropods, which is a necessary step in reconstructing evolutionary changes to the foregut developmental program. We investigated foregut development through metamorphosis and beyond in the pyramidellid Odostomia tenuisculpta. By examining sections of larval and post-velum loss stages, we conclude that the so-named acrembolic proboscis of this pyramidellid is actually an eversible oral tube and the piercing stylet is either a modified radular tooth or a jaw derivative. Much of the complex, multi-component foregut of the post-metamorphic stage is constructed during a 10-day period of explosive metamorphic morphogenesis. This stands in marked contrast to predatory neogastropods, where most components of the adult feeding system become extensively differentiated in the larval stage prior to settlement and metamorphosis. / Graduate / 2020-06-10

Caviomorph rodents arrived from Africa as sweepstakes colonists to the South American island continent between 54 and 37 Ma, and subsequently underwent a rapid and widespread adaptive radiation beginning in the middle Eocene. The geographic isolation of South America gave rise to a number of endemic mammal species that filled a wide variety of ecological niches. The resulting size of caviomorph rodents spanned over three orders of magnitude, making them an intriguing lineage to explore the morphological and ecological implications of size evolution. Here, I explore the morphological cranial patterns of extinct and extant caviomorph taxa using 2D landmark-based geometric morphometric analysis. Results are key to advancing our understanding of the effects phylogeny and body size have on cranial morphology of caviomorphs (and more broadly, mammals). This study indicates a deviation from the mammalian modular patterns determined a priori, suggesting unique evolutionary processes at play during the caviomorph adaptive radiation.

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Concurrency has recently come to the forefront of computing as multi-core processors become more and more common. General purpose graphics processing unit computing brings with them new language support for dealing with co-processor environments such as OpenCL and CUDA. Programming language support for multi-core architectures introduces a fundamentally new mechanism for modularity--a kernel. Developers attempting to leverage these mechanism to separate concerns often incur unanticipated performance penalties. My proposed solution aims to preserve the benefits of kernel boundaries for modularity, while at the same time eliminate these inherent costs at compile time and execution. KFusion is a prototype tool for transforming programs written in OpenCL to make them more efficient. By leveraging loop fusion and deforestation, it can eliminate the costs associated with compositions of kernels that share data. Case studies show that Kfusion can address key memory bandwidth and latency bottlenecks and result in substantial performance improvements. / Graduate

Thesis (M. S.)--Industrial Design, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009. / Committee Chair: Kevin D. Shankwiler; Committee Member: Abir Mullick; Committee Member: William Rouse.

Ontologies are descriptions of the knowledge about a domain of interest encoded in computer processable languages, e.g., Description Logics, which are decidable fragments of First Order Logic. The main aim of ontologies is to define unambiguous vocabularies to facilitate knowledge sharing and integration. A critical issue with ontologies consists of their increasing complexity. To address this problem several notions of modularity have been recently proposed. Modularity notions can help in two ways: 1) If we know what sub-part of the ontology we want to work with, obtaining the appropriate module will allow us to work with that sub-part in a principled way; 2) a notion of module might induce a modular structure which allows users to explore the entire ontology in a sensible manner (perhaps finding appropriate sub-parts to work on). However, the most popular notion --- locality based modules --- while excelling at modular extraction have thus far resisted attempts to induce a modular structure. Indeed, due to their nature, locality based modules tend to occur in unfeasible numbers in ontologies. We tackle this problem by identifying basic building blocks of modules as sets of axioms which 'cling together', that is, sets of axiom such that if any element appears in a module, then all the rest due. This notion of an 'atom'' proves key to defining a useful family of locality based modular structures, the (Labelled) Atomic Decompositions ((L)ADs). In this thesis, we define (L)AD and explore its properties. We show that ADs are efficiently computable and, with appropraite labellings, provide a reasonably terse representation of the entire set of locality based modules. From ADs, we are able to distinguish so-called "genuine" modules, i.e., modules that cannot be decomposed further as the union of two or more modules. Finally, we explore several of the applications to which (L)ADs have been applied including module extraction, ontology comprehension, and modular reasoning.

PhD Thesis (Software Engineering) / Model-Based Development (MBD) is an approach that uses software models to describe the behaviour of embedded software and cyber-physical systems. MBD has become an increasingly prevalent paradigm, with Simulink by MathWorks being the most widely used MBD platform for control software. Unlike textual programming languages, visual languages for MBD such as Simulink use block diagrams as their syntax. Thus, some software engineering principles created for textual languages are not easily adapted to this graphical notation or have not yet been supported. A software engineering principle that is not readily supported in Simulink is the modularization of systems using information hiding. As with all software artifacts, Simulink models must be constantly maintained and are subject to evolution over their lifetime. This principle hides likely changes, thus enabling the design to be robust with respect to future changes. In this thesis, we perform repository mining on an industry change management system of Simulink models to understand how they are likely to change. Then, we explore the various modelling mechanisms available in the Simulink language to see how they could support modular design with information hiding. Next, we propose a module structure, syntactic interface, and modelling conventions for Simulink designs, which are supported by our open-source Simulink Module Tool. Finally, we apply the proposed techniques on case studies from the aerospace and nuclear domains, in order to demonstrate their practicality and validate their effectiveness. Overall, the approach helped support information hiding by encapsulating secrets and facilitating likely changes. It also had a positive effect on interface complexity, cohesion, and coupling. The larger system also exhibited reductions to cyclomatic complexity, testing effort, and execution time, but the smaller case study benefited less in these areas. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)