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Investigating and verifying the connections between the foundations of quantum mechanics and general relativity will require extremely sensitive quantum experiments. To provide ultimate insight into this fascinating area of physics, the…
The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be experimenting with a new distributed approach to reviewing proposals, whereby a group of principal investigators (PIs) or proposers in a subfield act as reviewers for the proposals submitted by…
Likelihood ratio tests are intuitively appealing. Nevertheless, a number of examples are known in which they perform very poorly. The present paper discusses a large class of situations in which this is the case, and analyzes just how…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we…
Part of the theoretical motivation for improving the present level of testing of the equivalence principle is reviewed. The general rationale for optimizing the choice of pairs of materials to be tested is presented. One introduces a…
Randomized A/B comparisons of alternative pedagogical strategies or other course improvements could provide useful empirical evidence for instructor decision-making. However, traditional experiments do not provide a straightforward pathway…
We propose a new approach to promote safety in classification tasks with established concepts. Our approach -- called a conceptual safeguard -- acts as a verification layer for models that predict a target outcome by first predicting the…
Many hallmarks of human intelligence, such as generalizing from limited experience, abstract reasoning and planning, analogical reasoning, creative problem solving, and capacity for language require the ability to consolidate experience…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
Among the many decisions to be made in their teaching practice, physics teachers must decide how to explain each particular phenomenon to students. This study explores student teachers' (STs) decision-making process when presented with…
Grading can shape students' learning and encourage use of effective problem solving practices. Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading student solutions and providing feedback, thus, their perceptions of grading may…
Although repeatability and reproducibility are essential in science, failed attempts to replicate results across diverse fields made some scientists argue for a reproducibility crisis. In response, several high-profile venues within…
Many cluster similarity indices are used to evaluate clustering algorithms, and choosing the best one for a particular task remains an open problem. We demonstrate that this problem is crucial: there are many disagreements among the…
A common approach to aggregate classification estimates in an ensemble of decision trees is to either use voting or to average the probabilities for each class. The latter takes uncertainty into account, but not the reliability of the…
In Quantum Physics there are circumstances where the direct measurement of particular observables encounters diffculties; in some of these cases, however, its value can be evaluated, i.e. it can be inferred by measuring another observable…
Concept learning is a form of supervised machine learning that operates on knowledge bases in description logics. State-of-the-art concept learners often rely on an iterative search through a countably infinite concept space. In each…
We discuss philosophical issues concerning the notion of cognition basing ourselves in experimental results in cognitive sciences, especially in computer simulations of cognitive systems. There have been debates on the "proper" approach for…
This study investigates how Learning Assistants (LAs) and related course features are associated with inequities in student learning in introductory university physics courses. 2,868 physics students' paired pre- and post-test scores on…
Reinforcement learning offers the promise of automating the acquisition of complex behavioral skills. However, compared to commonly used and well-understood supervised learning methods, reinforcement learning algorithms can be brittle,…