Practitioner Track Proceedings of the 6th International Learning Analytics & Knowledge Conference (LAK16)

Practitioners spearhead a significant portion of learning analytics, relying on implementation and experimentation rather than on traditional academic research. Both approaches help to improve the state of the art. The LAK conference has created a practitioner track for submissions, which first ran in 2015 as an alternative to the researcher track. The primary goal of the practitioner track is to share thoughts and findings that stem from learning analytics project implementations. While both large and small implementations are considered, all practitioner track submissions are required to relate to initiatives that are designed for large-scale and/or long-term use (as opposed to research-focused initiatives). Other guidelines include: • Implementation track record The project should have been used by an institution or have been deployed on a learning site. There are no hard guidelines about user numbers or how long the project has been running. • Learning/education related Submissions have to describe work that addresses learning/academic analytics, either at an educational institution or in an area (such as corporate training, health care or informal learning) where the goal is to improve the learning environment or learning outcomes. • Institutional involvement Neither submissions nor presentations have to include a named person from an academic institution. However, all submissions have to include information collected from people who have used the tool or initiative in a learning environment (such as faculty, students, administrators and trainees). • No sales pitches While submissions from commercial suppliers are welcome; reviewers do not accept overt (or covert) sales pitches. Reviewers look for evidence that a presentation will take into account challenges faced, problems that have arisen, and/or user feedback that needs to be addressed. Submissions are limited to 1,200 words, including an abstract, a summary of deployment with end users, and a full description. Most papers in the proceedings are therefore short, and often informal, although some authors chose to extend their papers once they had been accepted. Papers accepted in 2016 fell into two categories. • Practitioner Presentations Presentation sessions are designed to focus on deployment of a single learning analytics tool or initiative. • Technology Showcase The Technology Showcase event enables practitioners to demonstrate new and emerging learning analytics technologies that they are piloting or deploying. Both types of paper are included in these proceedings

Gunrock: A High-Performance Graph Processing Library on the GPU

For large-scale graph analytics on the GPU, the irregularity of data access and control flow, and the complexity of programming GPUs have been two significant challenges for developing a programmable high-performance graph library. "Gunrock", our graph-processing system designed specifically for the GPU, uses a high-level, bulk-synchronous, data-centric abstraction focused on operations on a vertex or edge frontier. Gunrock achieves a balance between performance and expressiveness by coupling high performance GPU computing primitives and optimization strategies with a high-level programming model that allows programmers to quickly develop new graph primitives with small code size and minimal GPU programming knowledge. We evaluate Gunrock on five key graph primitives and show that Gunrock has on average at least an order of magnitude speedup over Boost and PowerGraph, comparable performance to the fastest GPU hardwired primitives, and better performance than any other GPU high-level graph library.Comment: 14 pages, accepted by PPoPP'16 (removed the text repetition in the previous version v5

Cultivating Lifelong Donors: Stewardship and the Fundraising Pyramid

This handbook helps nonprofits build long-term giving programs that span the entire supporter lifecycle, from engagement through the end of life. It highlights strategies for engaging new supporters online, investigates the characteristics of loyal donors, examines the importance of developing personal relationships with transitional giving prospects, and discusses donor cultivation

Executive Blogging: Indian Corporate Heads in the Blogosphere

This study analyzes the content, usability, interactivity and connectivity of Indian executive blogs. Results indicate that among the Indian CEOs and top executives who blog, most are associated with the Information Technology and Internet sectors. A content analysis of the blogs shows that popular blogging topics include industry outlook, technology trends and tips, current affairs and insights on the economy. Executives working with privately-held companies blog more about their personal lives and topics such as entrepreneurship, marketing and advertising, and entertainment than those with public companies. The blog posts of these executives are often in the nature of individual opinions. The executives also provide actionable tips on various topics and products on their blog. While the blogs score high in the interactivity category and do reasonably well in the usability category, most suffer from poor connectivity in terms of providing links to other blogs and websites in the blogroll. Indian executive bloggers need to break out of their isolation and get better exposure by improving connectivity.

Sustainability Education and Learning Committee Web Portal

Course Code: ENR/AEDE 4567This project was completed for The Sustainability Education and Learning Committee (SELC) of OSU's Sustainability Institute to provide insight and student perspective on the best way to design an interactive web portal that encompasses and makes easily accessible all sustainability-centric and and sustainability-related majors, minors, and coursework in one platform.Sustainability Education and Learning CommitteeAcademic Major: Environment, Economy, Development, and Sustainabilit

Effective Feature Representation for Clinical Text Concept Extraction

Crucial information about the practice of healthcare is recorded only in free-form text, which creates an enormous opportunity for high-impact NLP. However, annotated healthcare datasets tend to be small and expensive to obtain, which raises the question of how to make maximally efficient uses of the available data. To this end, we develop an LSTM-CRF model for combining unsupervised word representations and hand-built feature representations derived from publicly available healthcare ontologies. We show that this combined model yields superior performance on five datasets of diverse kinds of healthcare text (clinical, social, scientific, commercial). Each involves the labeling of complex, multi-word spans that pick out different healthcare concepts. We also introduce a new labeled dataset for identifying the treatment relations between drugs and diseases

How 5G wireless (and concomitant technologies) will revolutionize healthcare?

The need to have equitable access to quality healthcare is enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which defines the developmental agenda of the UN for the next 15 years. In particular, the third SDG focuses on the need to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. In this paper, we build the case that 5G wireless technology, along with concomitant emerging technologies (such as IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning), will transform global healthcare systems in the near future. Our optimism around 5G-enabled healthcare stems from a confluence of significant technical pushes that are already at play: apart from the availability of high-throughput low-latency wireless connectivity, other significant factors include the democratization of computing through cloud computing; the democratization of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cognitive computing (e.g., IBM Watson); and the commoditization of data through crowdsourcing and digital exhaust. These technologies together can finally crack a dysfunctional healthcare system that has largely been impervious to technological innovations. We highlight the persistent deficiencies of the current healthcare system and then demonstrate how the 5G-enabled healthcare revolution can fix these deficiencies. We also highlight open technical research challenges, and potential pitfalls, that may hinder the development of such a 5G-enabled health revolution

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

The digital transformation of the banking industry: case of Caixa Geral de Depósitos

This project emerges from the evidence of failures in terms of the Digital Marketing strategy at Caixa Geral de Depósitos, and its ambition to achieve the leadership position in digitalization of banking services, while transforming it with a focus on digital inclusion, to boost sales and guarantee competitiveness in the open banking era. CGD has been evolving its digital offer, but it presents several areas with a lot of potential for evolution. This project aims to provide information and highlight the relevance of this topic, as well as defining an efficient digital marketing strategy and establish the most suitable methods for the company to improve its online presence. It was found that it will not be easy to expand Digital Marketing at CGD, has there are many barriers such as compliance and data protection regulations in the banking industry. The strong hierarchical structure, dispute of resources and priorities, need of alignment between several departments, archaic softwares, analytics limitations and lack of knowledge and autonomy, will definitely slow down all the processes. Despite of this process not being easy, there are many quick wins that can be implemented that will improve the company’s Digital Marketing drastically. Increasing traffic and engagement on the various touchpoints, both for potential customers and current customers, either through our own channels or paid channels; Optimizing the digital conversion ratio in the various acquisition journeys, through the optimization and customization of the conversion funnel; and maximizing the customer experience, end-to-end, from the landing page to the purchase decision.Este projeto surge na sequência da evidência de falhas ao nível da estratégia de Marketing Digital na Caixa Geral de Depósitos, e da sua ambição de alcançar a posição de liderança na digitalização de serviços bancários, focando na inclusão digital, para impulsionar vendas e garantir competitividade na era do open banking. A CGD tem vindo a evoluir a sua oferta digital, mas apresenta várias áreas com muito potencial de evolução. Este projeto pretende fornecer informação e realçar a relevância deste tema, bem como definir uma estratégia de Marketing Digital eficiente para determinar os métodos mais adequados para a empresa melhorar a sua presença online. Verificou-se que não será fácil expandir o Marketing Digital na CGD, visto que existem muitos entraves, como o compliance e as normas de proteção de dados no setor bancário. A forte estrutura hierárquica, disputa de recursos e prioridades, necessidade de alinhamento entre diversos departamentos, softwares arcaicos, limitações de analítica e falta de conhecimento e autonomia, certamente irão desacelerar todos os processos. Apesar deste processo não ser fácil, há muitos quick wins que irão melhorar drasticamente o Marketing Digital da empresa. Aumentar o tráfego e engagement nos vários pontos de contato - tanto para clientes potenciais como para clientes atuais, seja por meio de canais próprios como canais pagos; Otimizando a taxa de conversão digital - nas várias jornadas de aquisição, através da otimização e customização do funil de conversão; e maximizar a experiência do cliente, de ponta a ponta, desde a página de destino até a decisão de compra