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1. The Worthiness of Disability: Economization and Exception in Veteran and Non-Veteran Worlds

   Wool, Zoë H. (March 2018, American Ethnological Association)

   Roughly half of all post-9-11 U.S. veterans peruse disability claims through the Veteran’s Health Administration (VA), a highly technical and bureaucratic process through which veterans are often guided by certified counselors. The benefits to which they may become entitled are politically and culturally sacrosanct. This was not always the case, but now, as the VA finds itself engulfed in scandal after scandal, and the federal government swings from budget crisis to budget crisis, veterans’ disabilities, especially those acquired during the exceptional work of war, seem increasingly economized and increasingly valuable. Seemingly a world away, Americans’ with disabilities comprise more than half of the nation’s Medicaid expenditures, expenditures that have been among the lowest hanging of sacrificial political fruit (vis Medicaid block granting and work requirements). The economization of these “unexceptional” disabilities increasingly insinuates they are worthless, hence the need to insist that “disabled lives matter.” Deploying “worthiness” as an analytic that combines the spheres of value and virtue that liberal reckonings attempt to keep distinct, this paper works through ethnography and economization as well as recent work on the worth of disability to muddle the distinction between the exceptional worth of injured soldiers and the unexceptional worthlessness attached to other disabled people, moving between biopolitics and biolegitimacy, and working away from a distinction between populations and toward figures and moments of resemblance. 

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2. Establishing a Pathway to Completion for Pursuing Engineering and Engineering Technology Degrees through a Scholarship Program at Old Dominion University

   Jovanovic, Vukica; Dean, Anthony; Sibson, Kim; Tomovic, Cynthia; Landaeta, Rafael (January 2019, ASEE annual conference & exposition proceedings)

   There are various barriers facing adult students and veterans completing engineering degrees. Many of these student’s work part- or full-time while in college. In order to help these students, enable high retention rates, and decrease time to graduation require an in-depth understanding of specific student populations, especially ones classified as underrepresented. This paper provides an initial look into the first year of a scholarship program, funded by the National Science Foundation, and student success activities designed to support high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need pursuing bachelor's degrees in engineering and engineering technology. Support services and scholarships are for veterans who have exhausted their GI Bill Benefits, but have not yet graduated. This paper will give an overview of current academic and mentoring support to increase academic success and workplace readiness, ensuring these students are ready to meet the demands of government, industry, and business. 

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3. Board 78: Establishing a Pathway to Completion for Pursuing Engineering and Engineering Technology Degrees Through a Scholarship Program at Old Dominion University

   Jovanovic, Vukica M.; Dean, Anthony W.; Sibson, Kim Bullington; Tomovic, Cynthia; Landaeta, Rafael (July 2019, ASEE annual conference exposition proceedings)

   There are various barriers facing adult students and veterans completing engineering degrees. Many of these student’s work part- or full-time while in college. In order to help these students, enable high retention rates, and decrease time to graduation require an in-depth understanding of specific student populations, especially ones classified as underrepresented. This paper provides an initial look into the first year of a scholarship program, funded by the National Science Foundation, and student success activities designed to support high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need pursuing bachelor's degrees in engineering and engineering technology. Support services and scholarships are for veterans who have exhausted their GI Bill Benefits, but have not yet graduated. This paper will give an overview of current academic and mentoring support to increase academic success and workplace readiness, ensuring these students are ready to meet the demands of government, industry, and business. 

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4. Guided By AI: Navigating Trust, Bias, and Data Exploration in AI‐Guided Visual Analytics

   https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.15108  

   Ha, Sunwoo; Monadjemi, Shayan; Ottley, Alvitta (June 2024, Computer Graphics Forum)

   Abstract The increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in visual analytics (VA) tools raises vital questions about the behavior of users, their trust, and the potential of induced biases when provided with guidance during data exploration. We present an experiment where participants engaged in a visual data exploration task while receiving intelligent suggestions supplemented with four different transparency levels. We also modulated the difficulty of the task (easy or hard) to simulate a more tedious scenario for the analyst. Our results indicate that participants were more inclined to accept suggestions when completing a more difficult task despite theai's lower suggestion accuracy. Moreover, the levels of transparency tested in this study did not significantly affect suggestion usage or subjective trust ratings of the participants. Additionally, we observed that participants who utilized suggestions throughout the task explored a greater quantity and diversity of data points. We discuss these findings and the implications of this research for improving the design and effectiveness ofai‐guidedvatools. 

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5. Multiple Support Mechanisms for Adult and Veteran Students that Increase Academic Success in Engineering and Technology Education

   Jovanovic, Vukica; Dean, Anthony.; Landaeta, Rafael; Tomovic, Cynthia; Sibson, Kim (October 2018, 6th IAJC International Conference)

   Continuing education after years of technician experience can pose multiple challenges to the adult student population, such as incumbent workforce technicians and veterans. Veterans, through their active service, frequently receive training in highly skilled technical areas but may lack a theoretical background in underlying engineering principles. While STEM education is important for the maintenance of national competitiveness, it is especially critical that the nation’s veterans, who possess technical STEM training gained in the military, are enabled to pursue higher education in order to increase the quantity and quality of talent available in the STEM workforce. A program that will be presented in this paper emphasizes the importance of recruiting students to engineering and engineering technology disciplines, mentoring and supporting students through degree completion, and partnering with employers to facilitate student academic success and career placement in the STEM workforce. Enabling multiple mechanisms which support and provide guidance are especially important at universities with large veteran populations such as Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia. Advancing the field’s understanding of interventions that affect these outcomes for adult students and student veterans is important for the improvement of future support programs as well as to guide implementation across different institutions. The program presented in this paper is funded by the National Science Foundation. 

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