LA BELLA FIGURA: MAKING A GOOD IMPRESSION WHEN TEACHING AN INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING TO NON-ENGINEERS

ABSTRACT This paper presents real and practical solutions to teaching an introductory course in programming to non-engineering students. It addresses the challenges and the potentials of making a good first impression in such a course, including the desire to fit everything into one quarter, the opportunity to encourage students to explore programming further, and the reality that students are looking for a useful tool for use in their respective fields. Specific suggestions and ideas for course content presentation, textbook selection, and course projects are presented that address these challenges

A Remote Patient Monitoring System for Congestive Heart Failure

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a leading cause of death in the United States affecting approximately 670,000 individuals. Due to the prevalence of CHF related issues, it is prudent to seek out methodologies that would facilitate the prevention, monitoring, and treatment of heart disease on a daily basis. This paper describes WANDA (Weight and Activity with Blood Pressure Monitoring System); a study that leverages sensor technologies and wireless communications to monitor the health related measurements of patients with CHF. The WANDA system is a three-tier architecture consisting of sensors, web servers, and back-end databases. The system was developed in conjunction with the UCLA School of Nursing and the UCLA Wireless Health Institute to enable early detection of key clinical symptoms indicative of CHF-related decompensation. This study shows that CHF patients monitored by WANDA are less likely to have readings fall outside a healthy range. In addition, WANDA provides a useful feedback system for regulating readings of CHF patients

Scheduling on heterogeneous resources with heterogeneous reconfiguration costs

In this paper, we provide an optimal algorithm and a fully polynomial time approximation algorithm for the problem of scheduling independent tasks onto a fixed number of heterogeneous unrelated resources with heterogeneous reconfiguration costs. The notion of solution dominance is used to consider all or approximately all possible assignments of tasks to resources. To demonstrate the utility of the approximation algorithm, it is used to schedule blocks of data that are to be encrypted using the Rijndael encryption algorithm on a generalpurpose processor and an FPGA. The results confirm the theoretical conclusions. 1

�ÔÔÐ � �Ø�ÓÒ Ð�Ø�Ò Ý �ÓÖ Ñ�ÒÝ Ð�××� × Ó � �ÔÔÐ � �Ø�ÓÒ × �Ò � Ñ���Ø �Ú�Ò �ÓÑ�Ò�Ø � Ø� � �ÔÔÐ � �Ø�ÓÒ

ÖÙÒØ�Ñ � �ÓÖ Ø� � ØÝÔ � �Ð Ð�××� × Ó � �ÔÔÐ � �Ø�ÓÒ × Û��Ö � Ø� � � ØÙ�Ð �Ü � ÙØ�ÓÒ ��Ð�Ý Ó � Ø� � ��×� ÓÔ�Ö�Ø�ÓÒ × � × Ò��Ð����Ð � ÓÑÔ�Ö� � ØÓ Ø� � Ö � ÓÒ¬�ÙÖ�Ø�ÓÒ ��Ð�Ý Ï � ÔÖÓÚ � Ø� � ÓÔØ�Ñ�Ð�ØÝ �Ò � Ø�� �Æ ��Ò Ý Ó � ÓÙÖ �Ð�ÓÖ�Ø�Ñ Ï � Ö�ÔÓÖØ Ø� � �ÜÔ�Ö�Ñ�ÒØ�Ð Ö�×ÙÐØ × Û� � � ��ÑÓÒ×ØÖ�Ø � � 2�5 % ØÓ 40% �ÑÔÖÓÚ�Ñ�ÒØ ÓÒ Ø� � ØÓØ�Ð ÖÙÒØ�Ñ � Ö � ÓÒ¬�ÙÖ�Ø�ÓÒ ��Ð�Ý � × ÓÑÔ�Ö� � ØÓ ÓØ��Ö ��ÙÖ�×Ø �