According to a study conducted by J. D. Angrist (MIT) and colleagues1 involving 1,600 students at a large Canadian university (the equivalent of an American state university with heavily subsidized tuition), the combi...
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According to a study conducted by J. D. Angrist (MIT) and colleagues1 involving 1,600 students at a large Canadian university (the equivalent of an American state university with heavily subsidized tuition), the combination of participation in (a) a scholarship program and (b) academic support services resulted in higher grade achievement and retention for females (but both males and females used support services and peer advising at higher rates), compared to groups of students who participated in either (a) or (b) but not both. A report by the Educational Policy Institute2 lists financial aid as one critical factor that affects the decision to pursue a college degree and success in degree attainment for minorities. This paper reports the progress of a persistence-to-graduation scholarship program funded under the National science Foundation Scholarships (NSF) in science, Technology, engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program. We named our program YES (Young Entrepreneur and Scholar) scholarship program. The goal of YES is to enable academically talented, financially needy students to enter the workforce (Entrepreneurship Path) or to pursue a graduate degree (Research Path) following the completion of a baccalaureate degree in a targeted STEM discipline. This goal is facilitated through scholarships offered by the program to qualified student participants in the last two college years (maturing years - juniors and seniors), a mentorship program (faculty and industry mentors), and enhanced educational opportunities (Distinguished Speaker seminar series, Symposium, learning community). The program continues the efforts of and recruits from another NSF-funded program, science, Technology, engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion (STEP) program, which focuses on the first two student college years (early years- freshman and sophomore) and has been successful in retaining STEM students at significantly higher rates than academically similar STEM students at the
In the fall of 2009, a college of engineering and applied science at a public, Rocky Mountain region university embarked on a new inclusive excellence initiative called Broadening Opportunity through Leadership & ...
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In the fall of 2009, a college of engineering and applied science at a public, Rocky Mountain region university embarked on a new inclusive excellence initiative called Broadening Opportunity through Leadership & Diversity (BOLD). The BOLD Center is a new K-16 organizational structure to increase the performance, representation and retention through graduation of students who are underrepresented in engineering, including women, students of color, low income and first generation college attendees. A BOLD Center focus of concern is the declining retention rate of women that has dipped below that of men recently in our College. A survey consisting of 41 questions was distributed to all undergraduate engineering women in the college that incorporates scales from the Assessing Women in engineering (AWE) assessment and from the Academic Pathways of People Learning engineering Survey (APPLES). Five research questions were posed in the survey design: • Do women express a loss of interest during their program? • Is there a chilly climate for women in the college? • Do women?s self-efficacy levels change during the program? • Do academic performance levels play a role in women?s retention in engineering? • Do women have an adequate support structure in the college? The survey generated 116 responses from 2 solicitations, with women students represented from every major across all four undergraduate years. An unintended outcome was that the sample largely consists of women with high grade point averages. Thus, this paper offers insight on top performing women?s self-efficacy and their views on the college climate, the benefits from various support systems - advising, mentoring, social and financial - and the existing programming and initiatives that can play a role in their achievements. The results indicate that women students are interested and efficacious with respect to obtaining an engineering degree, and that the college climate is, on average, warm and accepting. Howev
Classifiers in a high dimensional space based on the signals of multiple electrodes in EEG-based BCIs suffer from the curse of dimensionality due to the limited training dataset. In order to tackle this problem, we de...
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Classifiers in a high dimensional space based on the signals of multiple electrodes in EEG-based BCIs suffer from the curse of dimensionality due to the limited training dataset. In order to tackle this problem, we design a framework of two-layer hidden Markov models (HMMs) for probabilistic classification of EEG signals. We first independently model the characteristics of EEG signals embedded in each channel for different motor imagery tasks in the lower-layer, and then represent the holistic task-related dynamic EEG patterns in the upper-layer by considering the relationships among channels. From the experimental results based on the dataset II-a of BCI Competition IV (2008), we demonstrated that our method achieved high session-to-session transfer results and was superior to previous methods.
This study is part of a larger research project, supported by a National science Foundation Research on Gender in science and engineeringprogram grant, designed to determine the effect of self-efficacy and other fact...
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HermesD is a high-rate, low-power wireless transmission system to aid research in neural prosthetic systems for motor disabilities and basic motor neuroscience. It is the third generation of our Hermes systems aimed a...
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HermesD is a high-rate, low-power wireless transmission system to aid research in neural prosthetic systems for motor disabilities and basic motor neuroscience. It is the third generation of our Hermes systems aimed at recording and transmitting neural activity from brain-implanted electrode arrays. This system supports the simultaneous transmission of 32 channels of broadband data sampled at 30 ks/s, 12 b/sample, using frequency-shift keying modulation on a carrier frequency adjustable from 3.7 to 4.1 GHz, with a link range extending over 20 m. The channel rate is 24 Mb/s and the bit stream includes synchronization and error detection mechanisms. The power consumption, approximately 142 mW, is low enough to allow the system to operate continuously for 33 h, using two 3.6-V/1200-mAh Li-SOCl2batteries. The transmitter was designed using off-the-shelf components and is assembled in a stack of three 28 mm × 28-mm boards that fit in a 38 mm × 38 mm × 51-mm aluminum enclosure, a significant size reduction over the initial version of HermesD. A 7-dBi circularly polarized patch antenna is used as the transmitter antenna, while on the receiver side, a 13-dBi circular horn antenna is employed. The advantages of using circularly polarized waves are analyzed and confirmed by indoor measurements. The receiver is a stand-alone device composed of several submodules and is interfaced to a computer for data acquisition and processing. It is based on the superheterodyne architecture and includes automatic frequency control that keeps it optimally tuned to the transmitter frequency. The HermesD communications performance is shown through bit-error rate measurements and eye-diagram plots. The sensitivity of the receiver is - 83 dBm for a bit-error probability of 10-9. Experimental recordings from a rhesus monkey conducting multiple tasks show a signal quality comparable to commercial acquisition systems, both in the low-frequency (local field potentials) and upper-frequency bands (act
In recent years, the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) technique has been at the center of some of very exciting developments in the area of signal processing and communications, and it has shown great significance and re...
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Product design is an important process in industry whereas it has been usually performed based on aesthetics and static strength rather than on dynamical features of the product in use, or more specifically, in graspi...
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In this article, BP network learning algorithm is improved by using momentum and genetic algorithm after analyzing the defects of the BP network learning algorithm. So the convergence rate of BP network is speeded...
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In this article, BP network learning algorithm is improved by using momentum and genetic algorithm after analyzing the defects of the BP network learning algorithm. So the convergence rate of BP network is speeded up greatly. The vehicle license plate character image is segmented and feature is extracted by edge detection using sobel operator. And then license plates of cars are automatically recognized by using improved BP neural network. This algorithm can improve the speed and accuracy for the automatic identification of the license plates of vehicle.
This paper presents a soft information fusion framework for creating a propositional graph from natural language messages with an emphasis on producing these graphs for fusion with other messages. The framework utiliz...
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This paper presents a soft information fusion framework for creating a propositional graph from natural language messages with an emphasis on producing these graphs for fusion with other messages. The framework utilizes artificial intelligence techniques from natural language understanding, knowledge representation, and information retrieval.
Event driven architectures are widely used in numerous software applications, for instance in GUI focused software. Currently most event driven softwares are applied merely in local environment. If we need to use even...
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Event driven architectures are widely used in numerous software applications, for instance in GUI focused software. Currently most event driven softwares are applied merely in local environment. If we need to use event driven architecture in a distributed environment, there are not too many candidates to choose from. Thus, although there are a number of techniques which support the event notification in distributed environments, such as Comet technique and ESB platform, we still require a light-weight and user-friendly system, free from platform and protocol, to support event notification in the Web environment. In this paper we implemented a middleware which supports event subscription and publication based on Web Service. Through the evaluations afterwards we finally found out the limitations of our current system and we offered our suggestions accordingly.
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