Learning a Unified Control Policy for Safe Falling

Being able to fall safely is a necessary motor skill for humanoids performing highly dynamic tasks, such as running and jumping. We propose a new method to learn a policy that minimizes the maximal impulse during the fall. The optimization solves for both a discrete contact planning problem and a continuous optimal control problem. Once trained, the policy can compute the optimal next contacting body part (e.g. left foot, right foot, or hands), contact location and timing, and the required joint actuation. We represent the policy as a mixture of actor-critic neural network, which consists of n control policies and the corresponding value functions. Each pair of actor-critic is associated with one of the n possible contacting body parts. During execution, the policy corresponding to the highest value function will be executed while the associated body part will be the next contact with the ground. With this mixture of actor-critic architecture, the discrete contact sequence planning is solved through the selection of the best critics while the continuous control problem is solved by the optimization of actors. We show that our policy can achieve comparable, sometimes even higher, rewards than a recursive search of the action space using dynamic programming, while enjoying 50 to 400 times of speed gain during online execution

Wheels on the Bus: School Transportation as a Reflection of Sprawl

The second half of the twentieth century constituted a change in land use ideology and development practice brought about by the rise of the automobile, increasing economic upward mobility, and privatization of the family home. During this time, the districting and building of public schools similarly changed, turning schools from local community centers to regional and de-contextualized places of education. The purpose of this study was to investigate the extent to which these development practices have caused children to rely on car and bus transportation to get to and from school. Using the variable of distance within a GIS analysis of three case study locations in California, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, we tested the hypothesis that the increasing regionalization of schools in conjunction with the sprawl of developed parcels diminishes walkability to those schools for the children who attend them. Our results suggest that increased distance from schools and the districting mandates for determining school attendance decrease the ability of children to walk to school, reflecting the shift to automobile-centered land use. Our research also suggests that infrastructure-related walkability is further impeded by economic, cultural, and socio-psychological norms that are in many ways connected to or facilitated by the automobile

School Safety in North Carolina: Realities, Recommendations & Resources

The primary mission of North Carolina schools is to provide students an excellent education. To fully achieve this mission, schools must not only be safe, but also developmentally appropriate, fair, and just.Unfortunately, many so-called "school safety" proposals in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut have been shortsighted measures inspired by political expediency but unsupported by data. We aim to provide a more thoughtful approach informed by decades of research and centered on the mission of public schools.This issue brief responds to the newly established N.C. Center for Safer Schools, which has requested public input on "local concerns and challenges related to school safety" and has made available the opportunity to submit written comments.The first section of the brief debunks common myths and provides essential facts that must provide the backdrop for the school safety debate. The second section offers proven methods of striving for safe, developmentally appropriate, fair, and just public schools. It also provides examples of reforms from other cities and states. The third section makes note of resources that we encourage Center staff to study carefully.This brief rests on several key premises. First, "school safety" includes both physical security of students as well as their emotional and psychological well-being. Many of the proposals following the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School have had an overly narrow focus on physical security at the expense of this broader picture of holistic student well-being. Second, public education in this state needs more funding in order for schools to even have a chance of achieving their core mission. North Carolina consistently ranks among the worst states in the country for funding of public education.Schools need more resources to implement measures that can truly ensure student safety. Third, student well-being depends on a coordinated effort by all the systems that serve youth. For example, school safety will be helped by laws that keep guns off school property and by full funding of the child welfare, mental health, and juvenile justice systems. Finally, this issue brief is not intended to be a comprehensive set of suggestions. Instead, our focus is on providing the Center important context that we view as missing from the current debate

Developing the vision: preparing teachers to deliver a digital world-class education system

In 2008 Australians were promised a \u27Digital Education Revolution\u27 by the government to dramatically change classroom education and build a \u27world-class education system\u27. Eight billion dollars have been spent providing computer equipment for upper secondary classrooms, yet there is little evidence that a revolution has occurred in Australian schools. Transformation of an education system takes more than a simplistic hardware solution. Revolutions need leaders and leaders need vision. In this paper, I argue that we must first develop educational leaders by inspiring future teachers with a vision and by designing our teacher-education courses as technology-rich learning-spaces. A multi-layered scenario is developed as the inspiration for a vision of a future-orientated teacher-education system that prepares teachers to deliver a \u27worldclass digital education\u27 for every Australian child. Although written for the Australian context this paper has broad relevance internationally for teacher education

Hidden in Plain Sight: Homeless Students In America's Public Schools

Student homelessness is on the rise, with more than 1.3 million homeless students identified during the 2013-14 school year. This is a 7 percent increase from the previous year and more than double the number of homeless students in 2006-07. As high as these numbers seem, they are almost certainly undercounts.Despite increasing numbers, these students - as well as the school liaisons and state coordinators who support them - report that student homelessness remains an invisible and extremely disruptive problem.Students experiencing homelessness struggle to stay in school, to perform well, and to form meaningful connections with peers and adults. Ultimately, they are much more likely to fall off track and eventually drop out of school more often than their non-homeless peers.This study:provides an overview of existing research on homeless students,sheds light on the challenges homeless students face and the supports they say they need to succeed,reports on the challenges adults - local liaisons and state coordinators - face in trying to help homeless students, andrecommends changes in policy and practice at the school, community, state and national level to help homeless students get on a path to adult success.This is a critical and timely topic. The recent reauthorization of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides many new and stronger provisions for homeless students (effective Oct. 1, 2016); requires states, district and schools for the first time to report graduation rates for homeless students (effective beginning with the 2016-17 school year); and affirms the urgency and importance of dealing with homelessness so that all children can succeed

STNet: Selective Tuning of Convolutional Networks for Object Localization

Visual attention modeling has recently gained momentum in developing visual hierarchies provided by Convolutional Neural Networks. Despite recent successes of feedforward processing on the abstraction of concepts form raw images, the inherent nature of feedback processing has remained computationally controversial. Inspired by the computational models of covert visual attention, we propose the Selective Tuning of Convolutional Networks (STNet). It is composed of both streams of Bottom-Up and Top-Down information processing to selectively tune the visual representation of Convolutional networks. We experimentally evaluate the performance of STNet for the weakly-supervised localization task on the ImageNet benchmark dataset. We demonstrate that STNet not only successfully surpasses the state-of-the-art results but also generates attention-driven class hypothesis maps

African American Male Achievement Initiative: A Deeper Look At African American Males In OUSD

This report provides further insights into the status of African American boys in Oakland Unified School Distric (OUSD) and aims to reverse the academic and social inequities they face in seven key areas: the achievement gap, graduation rates, literacy, suspensions, attendance, middle school holding power, and juvenile detention. A framework of three levels of well-being (on course, at risk of falling off course, and off course) was used to understand how African American male students are faring in these areas