Innovative Remote Smart Home for Immersive Engagement

An openly accessible, remotely operated smart home will be demonstrated as a tool for students to learn about residential energy usage and environmental impacts. Specifically, the demonstration unit provides classrooms an engaging experience that teaches students about energy efficiency technologies and how their behavior will have an impact on energy usage and the environment. It is expected that as students become aware of and understand how various energy efficiency technologies work barriers to their adoption will be lowered. The use of a web accessible, remote laboratory dramatically reduces lab setup time and equipment cost/space requirements for educators. Special attention is given to the web based interface to ensure the system is easy to use and requires only a standard web browser in order to operate. The interface also includes a video link so the user can feel that they are working with real hardware in real time and not using a simulation or virtual facility. An associated website provides a self-scheduling tool to provide access to the system and a resource for related background information on smart grid and residential energy efficiency technologies. In addition, supporting instructional materials that coincide with NGSS standards are available via download

Ideologies of computer scientists and technologists (Correctness beyond reason)

Ideologies of computer scientists and technologist

Quantum-Inspired Keyword Search on Multi-model Databases

With the rising applications implemented in different domains, it is inevitable to require databases to adopt corresponding appropriate data models to store and exchange data derived from various sources. To handle these data models in a single platform, the community of databases introduces a multi-model database. And many vendors are improving their products from supporting a single data model to being multi-model databases. Although this brings benefits, spending lots of enthusiasm to master one of the multi-model query languages for exploring a database is unfriendly to most users. Therefore, we study using keyword searches as an alternative way to explore and query multi-model databases. In this paper, we attempt to utilize quantum physics's probabilistic formalism to bring the problem into vector spaces and represent events (e.g., words) as subspaces. Then we employ a density matrix to encapsulate all the information over these subspaces and use density matrices to measure the divergence between query and candidate answers for finding top-k the most relevant results. In this process, we propose using pattern mining to identify compounds for improving accuracy and using dimensionality reduction for reducing complexity. Finally, empirical experiments demonstrate the performance superiority of our approaches over the state-of-the-art approaches.Peer reviewe

Deadlines and MOOCs : How Do Students Behave in MOOCs with and without Deadlines

Full research paper-Online education can be delivered in many ways. For example, some MOOCs let students to proceed with their own pace, while others rely on strict schedules. Although the variety of how MOOCs can be organized is generally well understood, less is known about how the different ways of organizing MOOCs affect retention. In this work, we compare self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs in terms of retention and work-load. Using data from over 8.000 students participating in two versions of a massive open online course in programming, we observe that drop-out rates at the beginning of the courses are greater than towards the end of the courses, with self-paced MOOC being more extreme in this respect. Mostly because of different starts, the fixed-schedule course has a better overall retention rate (45%) than its self-paced counterpart (13%). We hypothesize that students initial investment of time and effort contributes to their persistence in their course, meaning that they do not want to let their initial investment go to waste. At the same time, in both self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs, there are students who receive almost full points from one week but fail to continue to the next week. This suggests that the issue of dropouts in MOOCs may also be related to participants struggling to take up new tasks or schedule their work over a longer time period. Our results support scheduling student activities in open online courses and opens up new research directions in engaging students in self-paced courses.Peer reviewe