ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst
We are now able to accept submissions directly in ScholarWorks. For submissions that are not doctoral dissertations or masters theses, please log in with your NetID, click the + (plus) in to the top left corner, and select the Submit Research option.
Graduate students filing for February 2025 degrees: We are now accepting submissions directly to ScholarWorks. Directions for submissions can be found in this guide. Please email scholarworks@library.umass.edu if you have any questions.
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Recent Submissions
Publication How Emerging Challenges in Highyer Education are Revolutionizing the Campus Planning Paradigm(2024-09)From the 1990s to the present, U.S. public universities have invested heavily in campus development as part of the fierce competition with peer institutions over students and funding. At the same time, these institutions are confronted with enormous demographic, economic, pedagogical, and technological challenges. This dissertation studies this problem through three parts: a) a semi-structured literature review investigating the impacts of the emerging trends in higher education on the prevailing 21st century’s campus expansion paradigm, b) a cross-case-study analysis of institutional planning documents measuring the level of awareness of the emerging challenges impacting campus physical planning, and c) a cross-case-study analysis of interviews with senior administrators and planners evaluating the level of institutional response to the emerging challenges in question. The review synthesis of the scholarly sources confirms the looming risks and their implications for all aspects of institutional and campus planning; the cross-case-study documentary analysis confirms an overall strong awareness of the emerging risks; and the evaluation of interviewee’s insights and answers to the research questions reveals a high-level of concern and a moderate institutional response to these risks. With a wide range of recommendations and strategies unearthed in all three parts, this study indicates that a new planning paradigm is taking shape that institutions are gradually adopting in response to the growing risks. Most institutions, however, are still tied to several strategies of the old model of business and planning for Higher Education (Higher-Ed). The findings of this research emphasize the magnitude of the growing risks and their implications for campus physical planning, the urgency for place-based institutions to rapidly re-examine their prevailing capital planning priorities, and the need to explore innovative response strategies as part of the new and improved planning paradigm.Publication Controllable Personalization for Information Access(2024-09)Information access systems mediate how we find and discover information in nearly every walk of life. The ranking models powering these systems base their predictions on users' historical interactions to cater to the wide variety of users and workflows that leverage them. However, during a task session, personalized predictions often fall short of user's expectations, with users desiring greater control over a system. Greater control, in turn, leads to greater user trust and satisfaction in using a system. In this thesis, I explore methods to dynamically update personalized rankings through user interaction with ranking models. I explore control in various retrieval tasks through (1) expressive natural language queries, (2) control over latent user representations, and (3) control over both queries and latent user representations. First, I explore long-form narrative queries as a way for users to express rich context-dependent preferences in a narrative-driven recommendation (NDR) task. Here, I propose MINT – a data augmentation strategy leveraging LLMs to generate long-form narrative queries from historical user interactions to allow the training of effective NDR models. Next, I propose LACE, a text recommendation model that represents users with a transparent concept-based user profile inferred from historical user documents. The concepts function as an interpretable bottleneck within a neural recommender, allowing users to control the underlying model. To allow control through queries and latent user representations, I introduce CtrlCE, a controllably personalized cross-encoder which leverages the concept-value profiles introduced in LACE. Specifically, I treat concept-value profiles as editable memories of a user's historical documents and augment a transformer cross-encoder with these memories. Allowing cross-encoders to condition on large amounts of user data while allowing users effective control over personalization. Further, in augmenting cross-encoders with editable memories I train a calibrated mixing model to combine non-personalized query-document scores with personalized user-document scores and only solicit user input when necessary. Finally, having leveraged concept-value memories as a user representation for controllable personalization, I explore such a corpus representation as an interactive topic model, introducing EdTM. I show EdTM to support a variety of user interactions, scale to large corpora, and effectively leverage expressive LLM scoring functions opening the possibility of a wider variety of user control mechanisms over personalized information access tasks in future work.Publication St. Luke's Hospital and the Modernisation of Japan, 1874–1928(Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine, 2013-12)By 1902, Japanese physicians' mastery of western medicine had made western missionary doctors and their hospitals seemingly obsolete. One missionary hospital, however, opened its doors that year, and represents a notable exception to the trend of missionary medicine's decline in modern Japan. While other missionary hospital enterprises faltered, St. Luke's Hospital survived the tumultuous modernisation of Japan and its health care system to become one of Japan's premier general hospitals. Using hospital reports, fundraising materials, correspondence, memoirs, government statistics and other sources, this paper sheds light on the hospital's early success and its important place in the development of medical care, education, and public health in modern Japan.Publication Publication Preaching Modern Japan: National Imaginaries and Protestant Sermons in Meiji and Taishō Tokyo(University of Hawaii Press, 2014)
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