Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Resonance of Change: An Exploration of Repertoire Programming Shifts in Choral Conducting Graduate Programs in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic and George Floyd Protests(2024) Helms, Mark; Ferdinand, Jason M; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Few decisions made by a choral conductor are as important as the selection of repertoire. This study seeks to uncover the ways repertoire selection practices may have shifted in choral conducting graduate programs following two major concurrent disruptive events: the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd protests. The study also seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining repertoire trends in standard concerts on university campuses rather than in concerts occurring exclusively in festival settings (such as ACDA conferences). Complete repertoire data for four academic years (2017–2019 and 2021–2023) were collected from sixteen research universities with choral conducting graduate programs. The design of the study was guided by four major questions, which concerned: (1) the overall characteristics of the body of repertoire performed, (2) changes in the characteristics of performed repertoire between the two-year time periods studied, (3) similarities and differences in programming practices among the sixteen participating schools, and (4) whether the trends found in the present study echo those found in previous studies of repertoire trends in festival settings. The data were also analyzed with two hypotheses in mind: (1) that composer and composition diversity and representation would increase (in part in response to the George Floyd protests), and (2) that composition difficulty would generally decrease (due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic). Findings reveal high variation in the works and composers performed by the sixteen schools in the study, with few specific composers and works seeing broad performance across a majority of the schools. Demographically, performed composers were overwhelmingly White and male, though the percentage of non-White- and non-male-composed works performed at each school increased significantly between 2017–2019 and 2021–2023. It was found that much of this increase could be attributed to non-idiomatic works by Black composers, though this increase did not come at the expense of idiomatic works by the same. The data further suggest that conductors may often select a single piece to fill both race- and gender-based diversity goals. Performed compositions skewed significantly toward newly-composed works, though to what extent varied substantially between schools; the data suggest these variations are largely attributable to the programming practices of individual faculty members. A high level of variation among the schools was seen for sacred/secular status and accompaniment status. No conclusive result was found concerning the average difficulty of performed works, but English- language works were found to be inversely related to composition difficulty; the percentage of English-language works increased significantly between 2017–2019 and 2021–2023, suggesting a corresponding decrease in average difficulty.Item Mother-child and father-child "serve and return" interactions at 9 months: Associations with children's language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months(2023) Chen, Yu; Cabrera, Natasha J; Human Development; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Infants learn language through the back-and-forth interactions with their parents where they “serve” by vocalizing, gesturing, or looking and parents “return” in a temporally and semantically contingent way. My dissertation focuses on these “serve and return” (SR) interactions between 9-month-old infants and their mothers and fathers (n = 296 parents and 148 infants) from ethnically and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds by examining the variability in SR interactions explained by maternal and paternal psychological distress, the association between SR interactions and children’s language skills at 18, 24, and 30 months, and the moderation effect of maternal and paternal SR interactions on language outcomes. Psychological distress was indicated by parent-reported depressive symptoms, parenting stress, and role overload, and SR interactions were transcribed and coded from video-taped parent-child toy play activities during home visits. I report three major findings. First, neither maternal nor paternal psychological distress was significantly associated with and SR interactions at 9 months, controlling for demographic factors. Second, fathers who responded to their child’s serves more promptly and mothers who provided more semantically relevant responses had children with higher receptive and expressive language skills, respectively, at 18 and 30 months. Third, fathers’ semantically relevant responses were negatively associated with children’s receptive language skills at 24 months; however, this main effect was moderated by mothers’ semantically relevant responses. Understanding how mothers and fathers engage in temporally and semantically contingent social interactions with their children during the first year, especially among families from diverse backgrounds, would enable programs and policies to more effectively promote early language development and reduce gaps in school readiness.Item A STUDY OF GENDER DIVERSITY IN U.S. ARCHITECTURE, ENGINEERING, AND CONSTRUCTION (AEC) INDUSTRY LEADERSHIP(2023) Hickey, Paul Joseph; Cui, Qingbin; Civil Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Anecdotally, men dominate the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) field. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by quantifying the gender composition of the c-suite, identifying differences in career paths between women and men, and gathering in-depth information on women engineering executives’ professional stories. Using the industry recognized Engineering News Record (ENR) Top 400 largest companies, initial phase of this research found women filled 3.9% of engineering executive positions in 2019, reducing to 3.5% in 2021. However, certain sub-segments, highlighted by firms with a public commitment to diversity, ENR Top 100 Green companies, and larger organizations, offer more opportunities to women. Exploring further into individual and collective career paths, researchers applied web scraping algorithms to extract LinkedIn data for 2,857 industry leaders. Data found that women work for more companies (+56%), hold more positions (+19%), earn more advanced degrees (53.9% to 31.2%), assemble larger professional networks (+14%), yet remain significantly underrepresented (-83%). Confirming a difference between the career paths of women and men, Machine Learning (ML) modeling predicted profile genders with 98.95% training sample and 89.53% testing sample accuracy. Final stage of research incorporates interviews with women engineering executives, seeking to learn about pathways and barriers in their respective and collective professional journeys and test the findings from the initial two phases of this study. An overriding theme throughout the progressive study, recommendations for increasing women’s representation include directed Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) scholarships for young girls, targeted recruiting of women, establishing mentoring relationships, and creating nurturing cultures to retain early and mid-career women.Item IN SEARCH OF A THEME: ALTERNATIVE STRUCTURES FOR THE MODERN VIOLIN RECITAL(2022) Ducreay, Phillip Alexander; Stern, James O; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)It is the purpose of this dissertation, at its core, to ask and explore a central question: Can a successful and diverse recital program be curated not based on a pre-set historical or theoretical theme but rather on some type of narrative arc that runs throughout the program? By exploring how these programs work I hope to find hidden connections which both tie these pieces together and justify my programming in the order I have chosen. The curation I have proposed aims to change the way audiences consume and engage with music by connecting them with new works and a well-ordered musical experience. Inspired by the flexibility of nineteenth and twentieth century programs, modern programs can be crafted with a narrative approach in mind. Just as a composition can express an idea or feeling, the order and narrative of a program can be crafted to do the same in the manner I have put forth. The first recital described in this dissertation was performed in Gildenhorn Hall at the Clarice Smith Center on April 14th 2021 at 5pm with the pianist Alexei Ulitin. The second recital was performed in Ulrich Hall in the Tawes building at UMD on December 9th 2021 with the pianist Leili Asanbekova. The recording submitted as part of this dissertation is of the second recital program, recorded in Nashville, TN at Laura Turner Hall in the Schermerhorn Symphony Center on Oct. 13th and 26th with pianist, Megan Gale.Item APPLICANT REACTIONS TO ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE SELECTION SYSTEMS(2022) Bedemariam, Rewina Sahle; Wessel, Jennifer; Psychology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Practitioners have embraced the use of AI and Machine Learning systems for employeerecruitment and selection. However, studies examining applicant reactions to such systems are lacking in the literature. Specifically, little is known about how job applicants react to AI-based selection systems. This study assessed fairness perceptions of hiring decisions made by AIdriven systems and whether significant differences existed between different groups of people. To do so, a two-by-two experimental study where participants in a selection scenario are randomly assigned to a decision-maker condition (human vs AI) and outcome variability condition (hired vs rejected) was utilized. The results showed that the condition had a significant effect on the interactional justice dimension. The interaction effect of outcome and condition had an impact on job-relatedness, chance to perform, reconsideration opportunity, feedback perceptions, and interactional justice. The three-way interaction of outcome, race and condition influences general fairness reactions and emotional reactions. Given these findings, HR personnel should weigh the pros and cons of AI, especially towards applicants that are rejected.Item Social Aspects of Algorithms: Fairness, Diversity, and Resilience to Strategic Behavior(2021) Ahmadi, Saba; Khuller, Samir; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With algorithms becoming ubiquitous in our society, it is important to ensure that they are compatible with our social values. In this thesis, we study some of the social aspects of algorithms including fairness, diversity, and resilience to strategic behavior of individuals. Lack of diversity has a potential impact on discrimination against marginalized groups. Inspired by this issue, in the first part of this thesis, we study a notion of diversity in bipartite matching problems. Bipartite matching where agents on one side of a market are matched to one or more agents or items on the other side, is a classical model that is used in myriad application areas such as healthcare, advertising, education, and general resource allocation. In particular, we consider an application of matchings where a firm wants to hire, i.e. match, some workers for a number of teams. Each team has a demand that needs to be satisfied, and each worker has multiple features (e.g., country of origin, gender). We ask the question of how to assign workers to the teams in an efficient way, i.e. low-cost matching, while forming diverse teams with respect to all the features. Inspired by previous work, we balance whole-match diversity and economic efficiency by optimizing a supermodular function over the matching. Particularly, we show when the number of features is given as part of the input, this problem is NP-hard, and design a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm to solve this problem. Next, we focus on studying fairness in optimization problems. Particularly, in this thesis, we study two notions of fairness in an optimization problem called correlation clustering. In correlation clustering, given an edge-weighted graph, each edge in addition to a weight has a positive or negative label. The goal is to obtain a clustering of the vertices into an arbitrary number of clusters that minimizes disagreements which is defined as the total weight of negative edges trapped inside a cluster plus the sum of weights of positive edges between different clusters. In the first fairness notion, assuming each node has a color, i.e. feature, our aim is to generate clusters with minimum disagreements, where the distribution of colors in each cluster is the same as the global distribution. Next, we switch our attention to a min-max notion of fairness in correlation clustering. In this notion of fairness, we consider a cluster-wise objective function that asks to minimize the maximum number of disagreements of each cluster. In this notion, the goal is to respect the quality of each cluster. We focus on designing approximation algorithms for both of these notions. In the last part of this thesis, we take into consideration, the vulnerability of algorithms to manipulation and gaming. We study the problem of how to learn a linear classifier in presence of strategic agents that desire to be classified as positive and that are able to modify their position by a limited amount, making the classifier not be able to observe the true position of agents but rather a position where the agent pretends to be. We focus on designing algorithms with a bounded number of mistakes for a few different variations of this problem.Item Exploring Diversity and Fairness in Machine Learning(2020) Schumann, Candice; Dickerson, John P; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning becoming ubiquitous in our society, we need to start thinking about the implications and ethical concerns of new machine learning models. In fact, two types of biases that impact machine learning models are social injustice bias (bias created by society) and measurement bias (bias created by unbalanced sampling). Biases against groups of individuals found in machine learning models can be mitigated through the use of diversity and fairness constraints. This dissertation introduces models to help humans make decisions by enforcing diversity and fairness constraints. This work starts with a call to action. Bias is rife in hiring, and since algorithms are being used in multiple companies to filter applicants, we need to pay special attention to this application. Inspired by this hiring application, I introduce new multi-armed bandit frameworks to help assign human resources in the hiring process while enforcing diversity through a submodular utility function. These frameworks increase diversity while using less resources compared to original admission decisions of the Computer Science graduate program at the University of Maryland. Moving outside of hiring I present a contextual multi-armed bandit algorithm that enforces group fairness by learning a societal bias term and correcting for it. This algorithm is tested on two real world datasets and shows marked improvement over other in-use algorithms. Additionally I take a look at fairness in traditional machine learning domain adaptation. I provide the first theoretical analysis of this setting and test the resulting model on two deal world datasets. Finally I explore extensions to my core work, delving into suicidality, comprehension of fairness definitions, and student evaluations.Item CULTURAL RESPONSIVENESS IN THE CONTEXT OF A LARGE URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICT: AN ANALYSIS OF MATH & ELA TEACHER PERCEPTIONS OF CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE PRACTICES IN TEACHING LATINA/O ELLs(2019) Beato, Carlos Manuel; Eubanks, Segun; McLaughlin, Margaret; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Latina/o English language learners are not achieving at the same levels as their White and English speaking peers. Research shows that 63% of ELLs, in large part Latina/o, are graduating high school, compared to an 82% overall rate. This study aimed to gather Math and ELA teacher perceptions around teachers’ ability to implement culturally responsive strategies. The researcher sought to answer three questions: (1) How do secondary Math and ELA teachers in District A schools with large populations of Latina/o ELLs perceive their own capacity to serve linguistically diverse students in their classroom? (2) What are the culturally responsive pedagogical practices that secondary Math and ELA teachers say they currently use to support Latina/o ELLs in District A schools with large populations of Latina/o ELLs? (3) What are the gaps that Math and ELA teachers perceive that exist in District A with building teacher capacity in culturally responsive practices in schools that have large populations of Latina/o ELLs? Based on a review of the literature on cultural responsiveness, the researcher distributed a web-based survey on the Qualtrics platform to 133 Math and ELA teachers at six District A high schools. The researcher used 18 statements from the Culturally Responsive Teacher Preparedness Scale [CRTPS] to gauge teachers’ perceptions on their ability to implement culturally responsive strategies. Teachers recorded their levels of agreement with their perceived abilities on each statement on a five point Likert scale ranging from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree.” Teachers were also invited to participate in a focus group to gather specific examples of culturally responsive practices being implemented. Analysis of the survey indicated that teachers perceive to have the capacity to implement culturally responsive practices. The focus group, however, illustrated a need for deeper understanding of culturally responsive practices and how/when/where to implement them. On this basis, the researcher recommends that District A implement a collection of self-assessment data from all teachers that teach Latina/o ELL students, a curriculum review across major content areas, and the development of a network improvement community that addresses Latina/o ELL needs. Further research is needed in order to determine the influence of culturally responsive practices on academic achievement.Item Membership Diversity and Tactical Adaptation within Violent Non-State Organizations(2018) Dunford, Eric Thomas; Birnir, Johanna K; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines why some violent non-state organizations experiment with and develop a broader repertoire of tactics and targets to achieve their political goals while other groups consistently utilize the same methods across their lifespan. Social movement theory argues that challengers to the state's authority should continually innovate their repertoires of contention to mobilize support and sustain an effective challenge against the state; however, rebel groups vary markedly in the size of the tactical repertoires that they employ in their campaign to alter the status quo. Some non-state organizations are more capable of experimenting with and implementing new variations on existing methods than others. I explore the factors that shape a militant organization's ``adaptive capacity.'' Specifically, these are the conditions that make an organization more or less capable of the incremental innovations necessary for expanding its set of violent repertoires and generating a larger tactical menu from which it can draw when selecting a strategy to challenge the state. The project first delves into how measure tactical adaptation, employing a text as data pipeline to classify and numerically compare descriptions of violent events. It then argues develops a theory of membership diversity as an internal driver of tactical adaptation. The theory emphasizes the stochastic elements that underpin membership interactions, arguing that individuals bring with them prior knowledge and experience when joining an organization and that knowledge diversity in an organization positively impacts an organization's adaptive capacity. The argument establishes two distinct mechanisms that focus on the endogeneity inherent to how solution concepts emerge and members learn in an organization. The project directs the analytical focus on \textit{who} is in a violent organization and argues that the answer to this question can shape (a) the ultimate outcome of a civil conflict, (b) how analysts assess the military capabilities of an armed group, (c) other arenas for innovation, such as rebel governance or institution building, and (d) the underlying severity of the conflict. the theoretical framework advanced here atomizes the individual and thinks carefully about the information he or she possesses and how such information can operate contagiously in a closed system. Moreover, the theory generates a framework whereby individual-level interactions and outcomes contribute to larger organization-level outcomes that we observe. The theory reduces the concept of diversity down to its most basic element: information. This allows one to think about the impact of membership diversity more formally and to treat it as another resource that a violent organization has available to it.Item DE LA LITTÉRATURE UNIVERSALISTE SENGHORIENNE AU TOUT-MONDE DE GLISSANT: MÉTISSAGE ET DIALOGUE DES CULTURES DANS L’ÉCRITURE DE FATOU DIOME, ALAIN MABANCKOU, GASTON KELMAN ET AMINATA SOW FALL(2018) DIENE, Khady; Orlando, Valérie; French Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis focuses on how Senghorian universalism has influenced the world-views of contemporary mondial authors as well as Glissant’s concept of Tout-Monde. After reading the works of contemporary authors as Fatou Diome, Alain Mabanckou, Gaston Kelman and Aminata Sow Fall, we realized that their main themes as Métissage and Dialogue des cultures echo Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel. We also examine how le voyage, with its relation to globalization, influences or not these authors’ vision, as well as their writing and discourse about the universal ideas on the human condition. The objective of this thesis is to put in conversation Senghor’s Civilisation de l’Universel with contemporary works and to show through our literary and theorethical analysis that Senghorian universalism is atemporal.
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