Executable specifications for Java programs

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-57).In this thesis, we present a unified environment for running declarative specifications in the context of an imperative object-oriented programming language. Specifications are Alloy-like, written in first-order relational logic with transitive closure, and the imperative language for this purpose is Java. By being able to mix imperative code with executable declarative specifications, the user can easily express constraint problems in-place, i.e. in terms of the existing data structures and objects on the heap. After a solution is found, our framework will automatically update the heap to reflect the solution, so the user can continue to manipulate the program heap in the usual imperative way, without ever having to manually translate the problem back and forth between the host programming environment and the solver language. We show that this approach is not only convenient, but, for certain problems, like puzzles or NP-complete graph algorithms, it can also outperform the manual implementation. We also present an optimization technique that allowed us to run our tool on heaps with almost 2000 objects.by Aleksandar Milicevic.S.M

2003 Projects Day Booklet

https://scholarworks.seattleu.edu/projects-day/1018/thumbnail.jp

Knowledge and Artifact Representation in the Scientific Lifecycle

This thesis introduces SKOs (Scientific Knowledge Object) a specification for capturing the knowledge and artifacts that are produced by the scientific research processes. Aiming to address the current existing limitations of scientific production this specification is focused on reducing the work overhead of scientific creation, being composable and reusable, allow continuous evolution and facilitate collaboration and discovery among researchers. To do so it introduces four layers that capture different aspects of the scientific knowledge: content, meaning, ordering and visualization

Provision of academic data for research: a step for academic success

One of the most widely researched questions about higher education focuses on exposing paths that lead to academic success. This dissertation provides a tool aligned with the scientific contributions to the concept of success in higher education, as well as the implementation of a system capable of automatic generation of SQL queries based on high level constraints. It includes the use of students' data contained in the ISCTE-IUL University Fénix system in a web application, to assist analyzes and researches. Providing relevant data for consultation can offer a differentiated explanation of the pathways of success in higher education and identify problems and failures to support more effective intervention measures later.Uma das questões mais discutidas sobre ensino superior foca a descoberta de caminhos e padrões que levem ao sucesso académico. Esta dissertação fornece uma ferramenta alinhada com as contribuições científicas em relação ao conceito de sucesso no ensino superior, bem como a implementação de um sistema capaz de gerar automaticamente consultas SQL com base em restrições de alto nível. Inclui o uso dos dados dos alunos contidos no sistema Fénix da Universidade ISCTE-IUL numa aplicação web, de forma a auxiliar análises e investigações. Ao disponibilizar dados relevantes para consulta, pode fornecer uma explicação diferenciada dos caminhos de sucesso no ensino superior, bem como identificar problemas e falhas, para apoiar medidas de intervenção mais eficazes posteriormente

BUILDING DSS USING KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY IN DATABASE APPLIED TO ADMISSION & REGISTRATION FUNCTIONS

This research investigates the practical issues surrounding the development and implementation of Decision Support Systems (DSS). The research describes the traditional development approaches analyzing their drawbacks and introduces a new DSS development methodology. The proposed DSS methodology is based upon four modules; needs' analysis, data warehouse (DW), knowledge discovery in database (KDD), and a DSS module. The proposed DSS methodology is applied to and evaluated using the admission and registration functions in Egyptian Universities. The research investigates the organizational requirements that are required to underpin these functions in Egyptian Universities. These requirements have been identified following an in-depth survey of the recruitment process in the Egyptian Universities. This survey employed a multi-part admission and registration DSS questionnaire (ARDSSQ) to identify the required data sources together with the likely users and their information needs. The questionnaire was sent to senior managers within the Egyptian Universities (both private and government) with responsibility for student recruitment, in particular admission and registration. Further, access to a large database has allowed the evaluation of the practical suitability of using a data warehouse structure and knowledge management tools within the decision making framework. 1600 students' records have been analyzed to explore the KDD process, and another 2000 records have been used to build and test the data mining techniques within the KDD process. Moreover, the research has analyzed the key characteristics of data warehouses and explored the advantages and disadvantages of such data structures. This evaluation has been used to build a data warehouse for the Egyptian Universities that handle their admission and registration related archival data. The decision makers' potential benefits of the data warehouse within the student recruitment process will be explored. The design of the proposed admission and registration DSS (ARDSS) will be developed and tested using Cool: Gen (5.0) CASE tools by Computer Associates (CA), connected to a MSSQL Server (6.5), in a Windows NT (4.0) environment. Crystal Reports (4.6) by Seagate will be used as a report generation tool. CLUST AN Graphics (5.0) by CLUST AN software will also be used as a clustering package. Finally, the contribution of this research is found in the following areas: A new DSS development methodology; The development and validation of a new research questionnaire (i.e. ARDSSQ); The development of the admission and registration data warehouse; The evaluation and use of cluster analysis proximities and techniques in the KDD process to find knowledge in the students' records; And the development of the ARDSS software that encompasses the advantages of the KDD and DW and submitting these advantages to the senior admission and registration managers in the Egyptian Universities. The ARDSS software could be adjusted for usage in different countries for the same purpose, it is also scalable to handle new decision situations and can be integrated with other systems

Review : Best Practices In Educating Sustainability and Heritage

This result has been produced as a part of O1 INTELECTUAL OUTPUT "01: Review of the Best Practices on Educating Sustainability and Heritage" within HERSUS project, Erasmus + Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Teaching as Analogous Personalization: A pragmatic inquiry into expert teachers' process for fostering synchrony in educational dialogs, in post-secondary writing

Descriptive understandings of what human learning is, and so normative expectations of what teachers can and should do as educational leaders, has shifted greatly in society over the past century. The learning metaphors have moved from mechanical transfer to organic transformation; the educational approaches have moved from behavioral response-training to social-emotional facilitating: encouraging students not merely to repeat experts but to think like members in those knowledge-based communities, not merely to mimic disciplines' methods but to participate personally in the ongoing discourse of those fields. In an immediate sense, this shift is progress. Yet, in a larger sense, it is merely cycling back to acknowledge an old and persistent thread of practical wisdom among educators: that people learn complexly as emotional-social-intellectual creatures, and so that a teacher's work is to entice interest and effort, to foster a sense of belonging and trust, and to persuade students toward personally connecting with and valuing those same integral parts of a subject-matter that the teacher has already beneficially personalized for themselves. This longstanding rhetorical and pragmatic view of a teacher's educational role is now being supported directly by empirical research that shows the sense-bound, neurologically integrated, socially attuned, identity-and-meaning motivated character of human feelings, thoughts, and dispositions. I introduce the term “analogous personalization” to capture this synthetic (experience-based, scientifically supported) understanding of teaching as complexly social-emotional, intellectual, persuasive work. I then focus on educational dialogs—specifically within post-secondary writing-based courses—as a means of exploring how expert teachers foster synchrony between their own and their students' personal connections to (i.e., emotional inclination toward, social affiliation with, intellectual/practical understanding of) subject-matter. First, this dissertation offers a synthetic overview of some emergent mind-brain-body findings, and points out the fundamental educational realities that those findings substantiate. On that foundation, it next overviews insights from the field of rhetoric-and-writing about how teachers can usefully conceptualize the learner-knowledge-environment relationship from a dialogic perspective, to achieve effective (intentional, situated, synchronous) educational exchanges. Building from those scientific and practical literatures, it offers a flexible research method for studying the pragmatic arc of an educational exchange (from teacher intention to student take-away): by using the teacher's own personal, practical, principled framework of educational ideals and approaches; comparing their stated intentions with students' stated learning experiences, and tracing the arc of that educational dialog through actual classroom recordings. Finally, it enlists this radically situated research method to analyze three expert university writing teachers' practices: their idiosyncratic understandings of a teacher's role (from their own perspective); their experience-based manner of forming learning-centered relationships with students (from my observing perspective); and their apparent, persuasive self-investment in the course's subject-matter and the students' learning (from students' perspectives). It concludes with observations about the role of a teacher's sincerity (both practiced and perceived) in developing professional expertise and achieving synchrony with students in educational exchanges

A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-58).A key feature of relational database applications is managing plural relationships-one-to-many and many-to-many-between entities, be they customers and invoices, parts and suppliers, or meetings and conference rooms. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, a general and more familiar data management tool which, unfortunately, lends itself poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this thesis, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailormade relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a study involving 36 regular Excel users. First-time users of our software were able to solve most lookup-type query tasks without instruction, in one case 40% faster than on Excel.by Eirik Bakke.S.M

Learning process' analysis system: Learning Analytics

As a consequence of nowadays’ intensive data production, companies are setting its exploitation as a cornerstone for their growth, with new disciplines emerging with the intention of guiding this force of technological development, as it is the case of data intensive processes related with formative scenarios (academical or not). Guidelines have been provided with the purpose of tackling current and upcoming challenges identified for the advancement of Learning Analytics. With special attention on its development and analytics facets, this project aims to take a step towards its feasible adoption. With this purpose, an assessment of current literature’s approach to this discipline’s objectives has been conducted, concluding that, in order to capture a broader and effective picture of students’ engagement to learning processes, a wide variety of information sources need to be considered, including qualitative ones. Additionally, a set of scalable predictive models (involving regression and time series forecasting) related to students’ interaction and outcomes have been developed with favourable results. Finally, viability of the further development of these tasks and its inclusion in a real-world application are discussed.Grado en Ingeniería Informátic