Reimagining Wilmer's Park

Final project for LARC:340 Site Planning and Design Studio (Fall 2022). University of Maryland, College Park.Wilmer’s Park is a “80-acre parcel containing the ruins of a dance hall, motel, ranch house, covered stage, baseball and football fields. As a major stop on the Chitlin Circuit, Wilmer’s Park opened its doors to African-American musicians, entertainers, athletes and fans from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. Arthur Wilmer used his experience and connections developed as the owner of a night club in Washington, D. C. to bring both popular acts and up-and-coming performers to rural Prince George’s County; the bandstand at Wilmer’s Park showcased everyone from Duke Ellington and Otis Redding to the Temptations, Patti La Belle, and a young Stevie Wonder. The former tobacco farm played an important role in exposing emerging musicians to local African Americans during a time of segregation.” The park has been closed for 10+ years and the purpose of this project is to transform Wilmer’s Park for the residents of Brandywine or nearby communities. For this project, students work in teams of three to design a master plan along with an individual detailed site plan. The design program for these plans came from the residents’ comments from community engagement workshops, notes from Councilman Harrison’s interview, important stakeholders, the field trip, and guest lectures. The master plan does not include all 80 acres of the park and often identifies a phasing plan for the entire project.Prince George's County Parks Departmen

Patterns of governance structures in trade associations and unions

Most research on the governance of nonprofit organizations concentrates on welfare-oriented organizations and disregards other types of nonprofits. This article examines the governance structures of trade associations and unions as a special type of nonprofit organization. Analysis is based on a qualitative case study survey of thirty Swiss trade associations. The results distinguish four categories of governance: satellite governance, delegate governance, executive governance, and inner-circle governance

State-set branching:Leveraging BDDs for heuristic search

In this article, we present a framework called state-set branching that combines symbolic search based on reduced ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) with best-first search, such as A * and greedy best-first search. The framework relies on an extension of these algorithms from expanding a single state in each iteration to expanding a set of states. We prove that it is generally sound and optimal for two A* implementations and show how a new BDD technique called branching partitioning can be used to efficiently expand sets of states. The framework is general. It applies to any heuristic function, evaluation function, and transition cost function defined over a finite domain. Moreover, branching partitioning applies to both disjunctive and conjunctive transition relation partitioning. An extensive experimental evaluation of the two A * implementations proves state-set branching to be a powerful framework. The algorithms outperform the ordinary A * algorithm in almost all domains. In addition, they can improve the complexity of A * exponentially and often dominate both A * and blind BDD-based search by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, they have substantially better performance than BDDA*, the currently most efficient BDD-based implementation of A*