Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2015, EECS - System and Control Engineering

This thesis consists of various studies in information theory, including its connection with control theory and the computational aspects of information measures. The first part of the research investigates the connection between control theory and information theory. This part extends previous results that mainly focused on this connection in the context of state estimation and feedback control. For linear systems, mutual information, along with the concepts of controllability and observability, is used to derive a tight connection between control theory and information theory. For nonlinear systems, a weaker statement of this connection is established. Some explicit calculations for linear systems and interesting observations about these calculations are presented. The second part investigates the computation of mutual information. An innovative method to compute the mutual information between two collections of time series data based on a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) is proposed. For continuous-valued data, a HMM with Gaussian emission is used to estimate the underlying dynamics of the original data. Mutual information is computed based on the approximate dynamics provided by the HMM. This work improves the estimation of the upper and lower bounds of entropy for Gaussian mixtures, which is one of the key components in this proposed method. This improvement of these bounds are shown to be robust compared to existing methods in all of the synthetic data experiments conducted. In addition, this research includes the study of the computation of Shannon mutual information in which the strong assumptions of independence and identical distribution (i.i.d.) are imposed. This research shows that even if this assumption is violated, the results process a meaningful interpretation. The study of the computation of Shannon mutual information for continuous-valued random variables is included in this research. Three coupled chaotic systems are used as exemplars to show that the c (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kenneth Loparo (Advisor); Vira Chankong (Committee Member); Marc Buchner (Committee Member); Richard Kolacinski (Committee Member) Subjects: Engineering; Mathematics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures

The interdisciplinary effervescence of the 1960's-1970's resulted in the adoption of terms like “information,” “entropy” and “code” into linguistic and literary analysis; one of the schools that contributed to this tendency was the Soviet semiotics school, represented by scholars like Iurii Lotman, Boris Uspenskii, Viacheslav Vs. Ivanov. This dissertation offers a critical examination of the controversial aspects of the interdisciplinary connection between information theory and semiotics, concentrating on Iurii Lotman's works on the theory of the text. In order to address the question of the applicability and relevance of information-theoretic principles to text analysis, this dissertation proposes (a) to offer an understanding of how “structure” in the linguistic sense can be related to the concepts of information theory; (b) to evaluate Lotman's use of information-theoretic terminology against the scientific “standard”; (c) to develop an understanding of what, in information theory, could be relevant to the analysis of texts. The central claims that emerge from my theoretical investigation are (a) that the formalism of information theory is not compatible with Iurii Lotman's theory of the text and that the attached terminology has been used in ways unrelated to the assumptions and results of information theory; (b) that the formalism of information theory does provide the basic elements for an approach to structure in the most general sense and that these elements can be made relevant to both linguistic description and text analysis; (c) that it is possible to formulate a coherent approach to the text as an informational object by taking into account the distributional properties of the variables that can be defined in the text at various structural levels; (d) that it is possible to use these properties to characterize the specifics of the language of a text and its relationships to other texts, and therefore to guide, and add coherence to, the application of tr (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Dr. Irene Masing-Delic (Advisor); Dr. Charles Gribble (Committee Member); Dr. Daniel Collins (Committee Member) Subjects: Language; Linguistics; Literature; Slavic Literature

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2024, Design

It can be mind-boggling to understand how one can end up being absorbed in anti-science conspiracy theories, especially those that contradict the core facts of our world that we have known since we were young. These conspiracy theorists, especially flat earthers, are often labeled as “insane” or “crazy” due to their beliefs. This thesis dives into the mindset of anti-science conspiracy theorists and flat earthers to understand the headspace they are in that drives them into these communities. The Minds of Conspiracy is a website designed and developed by synthesizing the research done by psychologists, sociologists, historians, and communication scholars. It is an exploration into providing a holistic and empathetic introduction to the complex topic of conspiracy theory with flat earthers as the case study through the use of visuals and concise language. With individuals who are non-experts in these fields as the target audience, the website is designed to effectively deliver the research findings in an easily digestible format through the principles of information design. Readers can educate themselves about the flat earth community, its impact, methods of disseminating the theory, current and potential interventions, and the importance of collaboration between relevant stakeholders to bring change for our future.

Committee: Paul Nini (Advisor); David Staley (Committee Member); Yvette Shen (Committee Member) Subjects: Design

Doctor of Education, Miami University, 2023, Educational Leadership

This study sought to explore the perceived effectiveness of a teacher mentoring program in a large urban school district in Ohio. One hundred fifty-three new teachers enrolled in the district's residency mentoring program were surveyed about its effectiveness and general demographic information within their first five years of teaching. Furthermore, ten survey respondents volunteered to be interviewed, with five randomly chosen for the study. The results of this study were intended to provide insight into how teacher mentoring programs can help reduce the rate of new teachers leaving the profession, which has increased by 50% in the last decade, as well as the rate of experienced teachers going, which is over 20%. Half of all new teachers are gone within five years, leaving districts and states to invest heavily in recruiting, hiring, and retaining new teachers to combat this growing issue. Over the past decade, the number of new teachers leaving their profession has increased by more than 20% nationally. Many new teachers leave the profession within the first three years, and half are gone within five years. To address this issue, billions of dollars are spent by districts and states to recruit, hire, and retain new teachers. The research was conducted to understand how new teachers feel about their mentoring program in a large urban school district. The opinions of these teachers were examined to explore the program's effectiveness, given the significant investments districts and states have made in recruiting, hiring, and retaining them. This research utilized Bandura's social cognitive theory, sociocultural theory, and Knowles's adult learning theory to explore how new teachers viewed the benefits and drawbacks of their mentoring program, the strategies employed, and what modifications could be made to enhance it. Through surveys, interviews, and transcripts, the research found that having a mentor, more structure, collaboration, and support (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Lucian Szlizewski, Dr. (Advisor); Sherrill Sellers Dr. (Committee Member); Kate Rousmaniere, Dr. (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Educational Leadership

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Large-scale machine learning has shown great promise for solving many practical applications. Such applications require massive training datasets and model parameters, and force practitioners to adopt distributed computing frameworks such as Hadoop and Spark to increase the learning speed. However, the speedup gain is far from ideal due to the latency incurred in waiting for a few slow or faulty processors, called straggler; to complete their tasks. To alleviate this problem, current frameworks such as Hadoop deploy various straggler detection techniques and usually replicate the straggling task on another available node, which creates a large computation overhead. In this dissertation, we focus on a new and more effective technique, called coded computation to deal with stragglers in the distributed computation problems. It creates and exploits coding redundancy in local computation to enable the final output to be recoverable from the results of partially finished workers, and can therefore alleviate the impact of straggling workers. However, we observe that current coded computation techniques are not suitable for large-scale machine learning application. The reason is that the input training data exhibit both extremely large-scale targeting data and a sparse structure. However, the existing coded computation schemes destroy the sparsity and creates large computation redundancy. Thus, while these schemes reduce delays due to the stragglers in the system, they create additional delays because they end up increasing the computational load on each machine. This fact motivates us to focus on designing more efficient coded computation scheme for machine learning applications. We begin by investigating the linear transformation problem. We analyze the minimum computation load (number of redundant computations in each worker) of any coded computation scheme for this problem, and construct a code we name diagonal code; that achieves the above minimum computation (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ness Shroff (Advisor); Atilla Eryilmaz (Committee Member); Abhishek Gupta (Committee Member); Andrea Serrani (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Electrical Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1970, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Mathematics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1969, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Engineering

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2014, Management

For 150 years, scholars and practitioners have been studying the relationship between the leaders of an organization and the performance of their firm, but despite this extensive research, there are few sure prescriptions for success. A recent survey revealed that 90% of board directors believe their personal performance is exemplary, but only 30% of directors feel the performance of their board as a whole is exemplary (Heidrick & Struggles, 2010). Equally disturbing is that 85% of directors believe the biggest weakness of their CEO is the ability to effectively lead teams and generate results (Larcker & Miles, 2013). My dissertation research explored this gap between individual and team performance at the board and C-Suite levels and further explored the impact of team dynamic quality on financial performance. We focused on the upper echelons of the organization as this level is has been shown to have a significant impact on firm outcomes (Hambrick, 2007). The dissertation describes four phases of research. In the first study, we interviewed 23 directors of public companies and looked at governance data from a third-party source to explore the relationship between team dynamic quality in the boardroom and governance quality of the firm. The second and third studies were quantitative and attempted to assess the quality of team dynamic in the boardroom and C-Suite to understand the role of team dynamic in explaining an organization’s ability to out-perform its competitors. Our second study analyzed input from 182 board directors, the majority of whom served on publicly-traded companies. Our third study analyzed input from 123 C-Suite executives of publicly traded organizations. Our research showed that the quality of board team dynamic can explain 4% of corporate profitability, and the quality of C-Suite team dynamic can explain 20% of corporate profitability. We also found a leveraged effect of team outcomes on financial performance for both samples, with boa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Tony Lingham PhD (Committee Chair); Kalle Lyytinen PhD (Committee Member); David Cooperrider PhD (Committee Member); Richard Leblanc PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Management

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2003, Music

The most common method for measuring melodic expectancy is the “probe-tone” design, which relies on a retrospective report of expectancy. Here a direct measure of expectancy is introduced, one that uses a speeded, serial categorization task. An analysis of the reaction time data showed that “Implication-Realization” contour models of melodic expectancy provide a good fit. Further analysis suggests that some assumptions of these contour models may not be valid. The traditional “key profile” model of tonality was not found to contribute significantly to the model. Following Krumhansl's (1990) argument that tonality is learned from the statistical distribution of scale degrees, a tonality model based on the actual probability of scale degrees did significantly improve the fit of the model. It is proposed that the probe-tone method for measuring key profiles encourages listeners to treat the probe tone as being in phrase-final position. Indeed, the key profile was found to be much more similar to the distribution of phrase-final notes than to the distribution of all melodic notes. A second experiment measured reaction times to notes that subjects expected to be phrase-final. In this experiment the key profile contributed significantly to the fit of the model. It is concluded that the probe-tone design creates a task demand to hear the tone as a phrase-final note, and the key profile reflects a learned sensitivity to the distribution of notes at ends of melodies. The “key profile” produced by the new reaction-time design is apparently related to the general distribution of notes in melodies. The results of this study indicate that the relationship between melodic structure and melodic expectation is more straightforward than has been previously demonstrated. Melodic expectation appears to be related directly to the structure and distribution of events in the music.

Committee: David Huron (Advisor) Subjects: Music; Psychology, Cognitive

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1965, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2006, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Science, The Ohio State University, 1967, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: