Parallel processing and expert systems

Whether it be monitoring the thermal subsystem of Space Station Freedom, or controlling the navigation of the autonomous rover on Mars, NASA missions in the 90's cannot enjoy an increased level of autonomy without the efficient use of expert systems. Merely increasing the computational speed of uniprocessors may not be able to guarantee that real time demands are met for large expert systems. Speed-up via parallel processing must be pursued alongside the optimization of sequential implementations. Prototypes of parallel expert systems have been built at universities and industrial labs in the U.S. and Japan. The state-of-the-art research in progress related to parallel execution of expert systems was surveyed. The survey is divided into three major sections: (1) multiprocessors for parallel expert systems; (2) parallel languages for symbolic computations; and (3) measurements of parallelism of expert system. Results to date indicate that the parallelism achieved for these systems is small. In order to obtain greater speed-ups, data parallelism and application parallelism must be exploited

Facilitating Equitable Access and Retention for Underrepresented Students at the University of Mary Washington

Higher education institutions are facing increasing pressure to find new ways to attract, retain, and graduate the diverse populations of college students. As a result, colleges and universities need to adapt to the changing demographics of students who benefit from more sustained and engaged forms of support that are responsive to their specific social, cultural, and economic backgrounds. This sequential mixed methods study seeks to understand the ways in which the University of Mary Washington serves its underrepresented students in order to develop strategies to enhance the recruitment and retention of Black, Hispanic/Latinx, low-income, and first-generation college students. Building on the literature on retention and persistence, sense of belonging, and organizational change, researchers developed a student sense of belonging survey, an organizational readiness for change assessment, and conducted focus group discussions with UMW students. In particular, the project sought to understand the current institutional culture regarding inclusion and sense of belonging for underrepresented students. This study\u27s findings inform how the University of Mary Washington can better facilitate the recruitment, retention, and graduation of underrepresented students

The distributed computer system

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University

Being everything to everyone: the lived experiences of first-generation college students and how colleges can better support them

Over the course of the past few decades, first-generation college students have been analyzed from many angles. With research ranging from quantitative reviews of lower graduation and retention rates, as well as higher attrition rates (Engle & Tinto, 2008; Inman & Mayes, 1999; Terenzini et al., 1996; Tinto, 1975), to qualitative case studies focusing on the psychological aspects of preparation, parental support, and identity formation (Lara, 1992; London, 1989; Rendón, 1992; Rodriguez, 1975 1982; Skinner & Richardson, 1988; Weis, 1985), this population has been well documented across a spectrum of research methodologies. More recently, scholarly attention has shifted toward a more individualized approach, focusing on smaller cohorts within the larger first-generation college student population (Collier & Morgan, 2008; Covarrubias et al., 2019; McCoy, 2014; Phinney & Haas, 2003). The goal of this three-article dissertation is to highlight and prioritize first-generation college students’ voices and narratives by emphasizing their lived experiences, as well as reviewing the support services currently available to them. This goal is addressed using three distinct, yet interconnected articles all utilizing different research methodologies. The first article, a phenomenological case study, addressed the experiences of six female first-generation college student caregivers (Orbe, 2004; Pyne & Means, 2013; Covarrubias et al., 2019) at a large, prestigious, research-driven institution in the Northeast. The second study, a singular, narrative case study, utilized the construct of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1994; Pyne & Means, 2013) to examine the experiences of a female, first-generation college student caregiver of color as she navigated the higher education system. The last article, a comparative case study, examined the available first-gen support programming at three institutions in the same metropolitan area. This final study also included administrator perspectives about what is required to implement and execute first-generation college student support initiatives. The major implications of this dissertation project include the following: a strong recommendation for increased intersectionality in all first-gen support programming; a discovery of the causational relationship of being a first-gen caregiver and the added difficulty that multi-layered identity creates; a demonstration of the need to motivate and utilize collected student data in order to inform first-gen program creation; and a recognition of the stressors placed on certain campus stakeholders and the need for enhanced cross-campus collaboration to improve first-generation college student support. Future research and specific recommendations for the field of higher education are discussed

Influence of Deliberate Peer-to-Peer Interactions on First-Generation College Students’ Educational Outcomes

First-generation college students are first in their families to go to college and may not have the resources to help them navigate a college setting. They have parents who have not received a four-year degree, which diminishes the amount of knowledge they accumulated to help them navigate a college setting effectively. They are typically underprepared academically and socially, which can impede their ability to adjust and negatively influence their persistence and ultimately degree attainment. There is research that suggests there are ways to retain students and provide better support systems that help them graduate. Studies have found that peer-to-peer interactions has potential to influence a peer’s disposition, which may affect certain educational outcomes. Since any environment is conducive to peer formation, then the setting is also an important factor in studying peer-to-peer involvement to find where the effect resides. This study measured deliberate peer-to-peer interactions in academic and social activities of college-aged women at a private elite liberal arts setting to determine whether a peer can affect their peer’s first year persistence and academic GPA. Using a dual research design that incorporates a quantitative secondary data analysis with a complementarity qualitative approach makes it possible to measure whether a peer effect resides in these interactions and provides rich in-depth insight into first-generation students’ lived college experiences in their first year. The preliminary model used in this study on peer effects takes into consideration who the students are when they enter the college and how important their background characteristics are to their educational trajectory. This model focuses on how the student develops, which can help determine the precise activities and interactions that may produce either a positive or negative impact. This preliminary model also has implications for immediate application because it can account for important predictors that institutional practitioners can incorporate with ease and generate results, so they can be used to inform policies and drive decision-making practices and program development

Comparative metric semantics for concurrent Prolog

AbstractThis paper shows the equivalence of two semantics for a version of Concurrent Prolog with non-flat guards: an operational semantics based on a transition system and a denotational semantics which is a metric semantics (the domains are metric spaces). We do this in the following manner. First a uniform language L is considered, that is a language where the atomic actions have arbitrary interpretations. For this language we define an operational and a denotational semantics, and we prove that the denotational semantics is correct with respect to the operational semantics. This result relies on Banach's fixed point theorem. Techniques stemming from imperative languages are used. Then we show how to translate a Concurrent Prolog program to a program in L by selecting certain basic sets for L and then instantiating the interpretation function for the atomic actions. In this way we induce the two semantics for Concurrent Prolog and the equivalence between the two semantics

Query-Answer Causality in Databases: Abductive Diagnosis and View-Updates

Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize and possibly compute causes for query results (answers). Connections between query causality and consistency-based diagnosis and database repairs (wrt. integrity constrain violations) have been established in the literature. In this work we establish connections between query causality and abductive diagnosis and the view-update problem. The unveiled relationships allow us to obtain new complexity results for query causality -the main focus of our work- and also for the two other areas.Comment: To appear in Proc. UAI Causal Inference Workshop, 2015. One example was fixe