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- All Subjects: Computer Engineering
- All Subjects: Evaluation
To facilitate rapid, correct, efficient, and intuitive development of graph based solutions we propose a new programming language construct - the search statement. Given a supra-root node, a procedure which determines the children of a given parent node, and optional definitions of the fail-fast acceptance or rejection of a solution, the search statement can conduct a search over any graph or network. Structurally, this statement is modelled after the common switch statement and is put into a largely imperative/procedural context to allow for immediate and intuitive development by most programmers. The Go programming language has been used as a foundation and proof-of-concept of the search statement. A Go compiler is provided which implements this construct.
are constantly changing, and adapting to these changes in an academic curriculum
can be challenging. Given a specific aspect of a domain, there can be various levels of
proficiency that can be achieved by the students. Considering the wide array of needs,
diverse groups need customized course curriculum. The need for having an archetype
to design a course focusing on the outcomes paved the way for Outcome-based
Education (OBE). OBE focuses on the outcomes as opposed to the traditional way of
following a process [23]. According to D. Clark, the major reason for the creation of
Bloom’s taxonomy was not only to stimulate and inspire a higher quality of thinking
in academia – incorporating not just the basic fact-learning and application, but also
to evaluate and analyze on the facts and its applications [7]. Instructional Module
Development System (IMODS) is the culmination of both these models – Bloom’s
Taxonomy and OBE. It is an open-source web-based software that has been
developed on the principles of OBE and Bloom’s Taxonomy. It guides an instructor,
step-by-step, through an outcomes-based process as they define the learning
objectives, the content to be covered and develop an instruction and assessment plan.
The tool also provides the user with a repository of techniques based on the choices
made by them regarding the level of learning while defining the objectives. This helps
in maintaining alignment among all the components of the course design. The tool
also generates documentation to support the course design and provide feedback
when the course is lacking in certain aspects.
It is not just enough to come up with a model that theoretically facilitates
effective result-oriented course design. There should be facts, experiments and proof
that any model succeeds in achieving what it aims to achieve. And thus, there are two
research objectives of this thesis: (i) design a feature for course design feedback and
evaluate its effectiveness; (ii) evaluate the usefulness of a tool like IMODS on various
aspects – (a) the effectiveness of the tool in educating instructors on OBE; (b) the
effectiveness of the tool in providing appropriate and efficient pedagogy and
assessment techniques; (c) the effectiveness of the tool in building the learning
objectives; (d) effectiveness of the tool in document generation; (e) Usability of the
tool; (f) the effectiveness of OBE on course design and expected student outcomes.
The thesis presents a detailed algorithm for course design feedback, its pseudocode, a
description and proof of the correctness of the feature, methods used for evaluation
of the tool, experiments for evaluation and analysis of the obtained results.
However, poor performance of IQA algorithms has been observed due to complex statistical computations involved. General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) programming is one of the solutions proposed to optimize the performance of these algorithms.
This thesis presents a Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) based optimized implementation of full reference IQA algorithm, Visual Signal to Noise Ratio (VSNR) that uses M-level 2D Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) with 9/7 biorthogonal filters among other statistical computations. The presented implementation is tested upon four different image quality databases containing images with multiple distortions and sizes ranging from 512 x 512 to 1600 x 1280. The CUDA implementation of VSNR shows a speedup of over 32x for 1600 x 1280 images. It is observed that the speedup scales with the increase in size of images. The results showed that the implementation is fast enough to use VSNR on high definition videos with a frame rate of 60 fps. This work presents the optimizations made due to the use of GPU’s constant memory and reuse of allocated memory on the GPU. Also, it shows the performance improvement using profiler driven GPGPU development in CUDA. The presented implementation can be deployed in production combined with existing applications.
Preventing heat-associated morbidity and mortality is a public health priority in Maricopa County, Arizona (United States). The objective of this project was to evaluate Maricopa County cooling centers and gain insight into their capacity to provide relief for the public during extreme heat events. During the summer of 2014, 53 cooling centers were evaluated to assess facility and visitor characteristics. Maricopa County staff collected data by directly observing daily operations and by surveying managers and visitors. The cooling centers in Maricopa County were often housed within community, senior, or religious centers, which offered various services for at least 1500 individuals daily. Many visitors were unemployed and/or homeless. Many learned about a cooling center by word of mouth or by having seen the cooling center’s location. The cooling centers provide a valuable service and reach some of the region’s most vulnerable populations. This project is among the first to systematically evaluate cooling centers from a public health perspective and provides helpful insight to community leaders who are implementing or improving their own network of cooling centers.