ETDs: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD)
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Welcome to the ETD collection of the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). We support electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide.
Individuals who have written a thesis or dissertation at an institution that does not have an ETD program may submit their ETDs to the NDLTD Theses and Dissertations collection. First, use the link at the right to register for an account in VTechWorks, then email vtechworks@vt.edu requesting permission to submit your ETD to this collection. You will receive an email with permission and a link to log in to VTechWorks. Complete the online submission and your ETD will be screened before being added to the NDLTD collection.
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Browsing ETDs: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) by Subject "AI"
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- Athletic Involvement and Its Effect on the Eating Behaviors of College WomenHanson, Lindsay (Florida State University, 2004-04)The purpose of this study was to investigate athletic participation and the development of disordered eating behaviors in women by comparing collegiate varsity athletes and the general university populations on three variables: disordered eating behaviors, body satisfaction, and self-esteem. Possible differences between athletes who participate in sports in which a lean figure is conducive to success and athletes who participate in sports in which a lean figure is not conducive to success were also investigated. As disordered eating includes many types of behavior, a disordered eating continuum was used to illustrate. Three existing inventories used to measure eating behaviors, body satisfaction, and self-esteem, respectively, were distributed to college women at a Division I university in the southeastern United States.
- Customer Loyalty and Employee Enthusiasm: An eclectic paradigm for strategic sales improvement at MB Silicon SystemsBotes, J.A. (Milpark Business School, 2008)The objective of this study was to examine the role that customer loyalty and employee enthusiasm can play as a strategic objective to increase sales at MB Silicon Systems. In order to address these two factors from a strategic perspective, elements from various concepts have been used to gain a new understanding of customer loyalty, employee enthusiasm and strategy. The final goal of the study was to use the knowledge gained throughout the report to propose a management framework which can be implemented to give MB Silicon Systems a competitive advantage in its competitive industry.The literature review suggested that a strategy of customer loyalty and employee enthusiasm will result in above average financial performance. Customer loyalty and employee enthusiasm cannot be separated from each other and they are linked by leadership, the vision and core values of the organisation. It is not possible to achieve customer loyalty and employee enthusiasm without the proper formulation and execution of a strategy. Such a strategy needs to utilize core management tools like the Balanced Scorecard which will bridge the vision of the organisation with goal setting mechanisms of motivation. The Balanced Scorecard will ensure that strategic objectives of the organisation will be mapped into the Balanced Scorecard while employees will be rewarded according to achieved targets of these objectives.Surveys which were conducted with customers and employees have shown that MB Silicon Systems performs below international standards with respect to customer loyalty and that the organisation is failing with its existing strategy. The surveys have also shown that employees are demotivated. This state of demotivation results in a lack of teamwork and mistrust between employees. The lack of teamwork and mistrust is only the symptoms of organisational problems which need to be resolved by organisational redesign, implementation of management principles and healthy corporate governance. The low base of loyal customers and the demotivated state of employees is resulting in below average financial performance.A management framework was recommended that will transform a strategy of customer loyalty and employee enthusiasm by using proven management tools. Implementation of the framework will ensure a competitive advantage to MB Silicon Systems which will result in above average financial performance.
- Der Mensch und die 'Künstliche Intelligenz': Eine Profilierung und kritische Bewertung der unterschiedlichen Grundauffassungen vom Standpunkt des gemäßigten RealismusEraßme, Rolf (RWTH Aachen, 2002-11)After a short introduction concerning the problem of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) the work continues with a summary of the state of the art.Thereafter, it goes on to profile four different basic scientific views of human beings and AI: symbolism, connectionism, biologism and physicalism. The emphasis is on the elucidation of anthropologically relevant statements to intelligence, spirit, thinking, perception, will, consciousness, self-consciousness, feelings and life.It is demonstrated that the basic views referred to represent greatly abbreviated and distorted pictures of human beings. Theories that do not go beyond the quantifiable level cannot adequately encompass the nature of relevant concepts and capabilities. That is above all because of the fact that generally a philosophical materialism is advocated, which considers the existence of intellectual substances impossible. For this reason a philosophical critique is necessary. The position of moderate and critical realism is advocated, whose anthropological statements are secured by epistemological and metaphysical investigations.The work comes to the conclusion that human beings cannot be understood symbolistically, connectionistically, biologistically or physicalistically. Man is a physical-intellectual entity, endowed with reason, a living social being. He is formed and led by his intellectual and therefore immortal soul, which gives him uniqueness, irreplaceability and the value of personhood. He is capable of thinking and thus of objective, abstract perception, and therefore is intelligent. Humans have an unfettered will, which, led by mental perception, is to be directed toward the good. They are moreover, through reflection, self-conscious. Humans live an intellectually determined life, which essentially differs, despite biological similarity, from that of animals and cannot possibly, due to its substantial superiority, have developed from animal life.All substantial anthropological abilities (such as intelligence, will, consciousness etc.) presuppose spirit. Because it is not within the power of human beings to create a simple substance such as spirit, a thinking, perceptive, intelligent, willing, self-conscious, sentient living being can at best be only technically imitated, modelled or simulated but never be reproduced, copied or created. The relationship of humans to AI is thus determined by an insuperable difference between their natures.
- Retrieving Definitions from Scientific Text in the Salmon Fish Domain by Lexical Pattern MatchingGabbay, Igal (University of Limerick, 2004-01)While an information retrieval system takes as input a user query and returns a list of relevant documents chosen from a large collection, a question answering system attempts to produce an exact answer. Recent research, motivated by the question answering track of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) has focused mainly on answering ‘factoid’ questions concerned with names, places, dates etc. in the news domain. However, questions seeking definitions of terms are common in the logs of search engines. The objective of this project was therefore to investigate methods of retrieving definitions from scientific documents. The subject domain was salmon, and an appropriate test collection of articles was created, pre-processed and indexed. Relevant terms were obtained from salmon researchers and a fish database. A system was built which accepted a term as input, retrieved relevant documents from the collection using a search engine, identified definition phrases within them using a vocabulary of syntactic patterns and associated heuristics, and produced as output phrases explaining the term. Four experiments were carried out which progressively extended and refined the patterns. The performance of the system, measured using an appropriate form of precision, improved over the experiments from 8.6% to 63.6%. The main findings of the research were: (1) Definitions were diverse despite the documents’ homogeneity and found not only in the Introduction and Abstract sections but also in the Methods and References; (2) Nevertheless, syntactic patterns were a useful starting point in extracting them; (3) Three patterns accounted for 90% of candidate phrases; (4) Statistically, the ordinal number of the instance of the term in a document was a better indicator of the presence of a definition than either sentence position and length, or the number of sentences in the document. Next steps include classifying terms, using information extraction-like templates, resolving basic anaphors, ranking answers, exploiting the structure of scientific papers, and refining the evaluation process.