ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    Comparative analysis of U.S. and Canadian approaches to copyright in the age of AI
    (Association for Library and Information Science Education, 2024-10-15) Di Valentino, Lisa
    As the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in everyday life (and particularly in education) increases in what seems to be an exponential way, lawmakers are racing to catch up with policy implications. This poster will present the results of an analysis of cases, legislation, and literature (widely defined) related to copyright concerns involved in the creation and use of AI. The review will take the form of a comparative analysis of approaches of the United States and Canada in crafting policy to address the incorporation of copyrighted materials in training generative AI systems such as ChatGPT and Midjourneyand the use of such output in various settings such as education. The analysis will consider existing copyright laws (including user rights such as fair use/dealing and educational uses), and proposed changes to the current laws.
  • Publication
    Effect of Intermittent Water Supply on Water Quality in a Model Pipeloop
    (2021) Alkattan, Mariam
    Intermittent water supply (IWS) is defined as a piped drinking water distribution system that operates for less than 24 hours per day. Water quality is found to be negatively impacted in IWS, which creates a human health risk. There are still may gaps in our understanding of pathways of contamination in IWS, which has been a limitation in creating appropriate solutions to maintain water quality in IWS systems. To characterize these pathways, we ran a study to investigate the impact of intermittency on water quality, biofilms, and water pressure in IWS, which consisted of constructing two identical model drinking water distribution systems. One was operated as an IWS and the other a continuous water supply(CWS),as a control. Water samples were taken for water quality analysis, biofilms were sampled, and pressure was monitored continuously in these systems. Key finding included a significant decrease in chlorine residual and increases in turbidity, TOC, and microbial concentration as in the water that was first flushed through the IWS pipeloop. However, IWS water quality parameters matched those is the CWS pipeloop or were better over the course of an IWS supply period. This implies the need for management of flush water in IWS systems. In addition, the biofilms in the IWS pipeloop before a supply period were found to have a larger spread than those after a supply period. Lastly, negative pressures were found in the IWS system. These results have implications for future research and IWS operation.
  • Publication
    A systematic literature review on residential demand response, with a focus on equity
    (2024) Aristizabal, Ximena; Baker, Erin
    The largest source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions remains the combustion of fossil fuels for electricity generation and transportation. Notwithstanding a global shift towards renewable energy, current projections indicate total energy consumption will double by 2050 (Crawley, 2021). Current energy supply scenarios fall short of achieving the reductions in GHG emission that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deems necessary to avert catastrophic climate impacts (Auffhammer, 2022). Adding urgency to the need for sustainable energy practices, the residential sector plays a crucial role in the transition to a decarbonized economy (Langevin et al., 2024). This underscores the importance of effective demand response (DR) programs within the sector, where energy use is both significant and variable (Trotta et al., 2020). This paper explores literature around residential demand and the evolution of DR programs in the United States over the past fifty years, tracing advancements in modeling, incentive design, and technology deployment. Early residential DR initiatives borrowed heavily from industrial and commercial sectors (Hirst, 1990), yet these approaches soon proved insufficient for the disaggregated and diverse patterns of household energy use, where socioeconomic, demographic, and behavioral factors play a critical role (Jin et al., 2021).
  • Publication
    Event-Structure and the Internally-Headed Relative Clause Construction in Korean and Japanese
    (2004-09) Kim, Min-Joo
    This dissertation investigates how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors interact to produce the Internally-Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction in Korean and Japanese. The IHRC construction differs from the more familiar Externally-Headed Relative Clause (EHRC) construction in several ways. First, unlike an EHRC, an IHRC's content restricts the matrix clause's content, rather than the semantic head's. Second, its interpretation is heavily influenced by the discourse context in ways not seen with the EHRC. Third, unlike the head of an EHRC, the head of an IHRC does not correspond to any overt syntactic phrase, so it needs to be determined by language users, based on the relative clause's content, the matrix predicate's semantics, and the discourse context. The literature offers numerous insightful analyses of the IHRC construction, but it leaves two central questions unanswered: what determines the interpretation of the construction? And, if pragmatic principles have a role to play, how do they interact with the morphosyntax and the semanties? I answer these questions within an event semantics framework. 1 show that the construction's interpretation is determined partly by grammatical factors (e.g., the embedded clause's aspect, the matrix predicate's semantics) and partly by pragmatic factors (e.g., the discourse context and discourse participants' world knowledge). In particular, I isolate two sources of the semantic variability of the construction. First, the matrix clause contains a pronominal definite description, whose denotation contains a free relation variable. This variable's value is determined by the embedded clause's event structure, the matrix predicate's semantics, and the discourse context. Second, the relative operator that occurs in this construction connects the embedded clause's content with the matrix clause's content by establishing either a temporal or a causal relation between them, depending on whether the embedded clause describes a temporary state or a permanent state. This study establishes important connections between the semantics of a definite description and event structure, thereby solving the particularly challenging formallinking problem, one that afflicts existing E-type pronoun analyses. It also provides a constrained but flexible interpretive mechanism for the construction, eliminating the need for many of the extra-grammatical constraints that characterize existing treatments.
  • Publication
    Circadian Effects of Melatonin Receptor-Targeting Molecules in vitro
    (University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2024-10) Chhe, Kaitlyn; Hegde, Maya; Taylor, Stephanie; Farkas, Michelle E.
    The dataset is first categorized into two folders (Bmal and Per2) based on the promoter reporter. The data is further separated by experiment date/treatment time of day (standard timing versus delayed timing, indicated as "standard" and "delayed," respectively). For the data labeled "standard" the cells were treated with small molecules immediately after synchronization. For data labeled "delayed" the cells were treated with molecules 12 h after synchronization. Each excel file will have the date the experiment started followed by the promoter gene, treatment time, and treatment type (MT = melatonin, NT = not treated, DMSO = vehicle, UCSF7447 = melatonin receptor-targeting molecule).