Building Community Partnerships in Support of a Postsecondary Completion Agenda

This report highlights key lessons from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Community Partnerships portfolio evaluation. It assesses the communities' progress over the course of the investment, and describes their work in the areas of building public commitment, using data, building and sustaining partnerships, and aligning policies and practices. The OMG Center served as the national evaluator of this initiative and the report also discusses the steps these communities can take to sustain their programs

Data Warehouse (DWH) Efficiency Evaluation Using Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA)

This paper proposes the macro model and micro model for the efficiency evaluation of data warehouses (DWH), and introduces Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to comprehensively assess DWH efficiency. FDEA can determine the efficiencies of data warehouses with multiple input / output variables, and also resolve the problem that standard DEA cannot handle with imprecise input / output data. FDEA results present efficiency from different viewpoints: Best-Worst Scenario and Worst-Best Scenario. The final ranking results between FDEA and DEA are similar on the highest efficiency and the lowest efficiency of data warehouses. Compared with DEA, FDEA can distinguish the efficiency difference for some data warehouses

Hybrid Approach for the Maintenance of Materialized Webviews

In this paper, we have developed an approach to specify when updating materialized webviews. A webview is a web page that is automatically constructed from a structured database. We have introduced a new update policy called “early ondemand” update which is based on the user preferences. Then we have combines this policy with the on-demand one to update the materialized webviews. Our experiments showed that the proposed hybrid approach guarantees strong consistency of data and allows reducing latency of updating webviews. In addition, they prove that our solution decreases the server overload (access+ update cost) significantly better that the on-demand and the immediate policies

CERN openlab Whitepaper on Future IT Challenges in Scientific Research

This whitepaper describes the major IT challenges in scientific research at CERN and several other European and international research laboratories and projects. Each challenge is exemplified through a set of concrete use cases drawn from the requirements of large-scale scientific programs. The paper is based on contributions from many researchers and IT experts of the participating laboratories and also input from the existing CERN openlab industrial sponsors. The views expressed in this document are those of the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their organisations and/or affiliates