Dynamic stability of a bearingless circulation control rotor blade in hover

The aeroelastic stability of flap bending, lead-lag bending and torsion of a bearingless circulation control rotor blade in hover is investigated using a finite element formulation based on Hamilton's principle. The flexbeam, the torque tube and the outboard blade are discretized into beam elements, each with fifteen nodal degrees of freedom. Quasisteady strip theory is used to evaluate the aerodynamic forces and the airfoil characteristics are represented either in the form of simple analytical expressions or in the form of data tables. A correlation study of analytical results with the experimental data is attempted for selected bearingless blade configurations with conventional airfoil characteristics

Moving beyond access: widening participation in post compulsory teacher education through the integration of LAMS

The School of Education at Greenwich University offers a range of courses in primary, secondary, higher and community teacher education from foundation degrees to doctorate programmes. The postgraduate certificate in teaching in the post compulsory sector registers approximately 2,000 students on its part-time, flexible, full time and subject specialist additional diploma courses every year. In addition, 28 Further Education colleges in London work in partnership with Greenwich University to provide these teacher education courses. Over fifty per cent of course participants at Greenwich University belong to Black and Ethnic Minority groups. This paper explores integrating LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) for developing flexible learner centred teaching/learning strategies for the delivery of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teacher education programmes. Currently the Additional Diploma (ESOL) subject specialist programme has paper based study guides to support course participants. Feedback from course participants has indicated that the study guides are limited in providing interactive activities, are text heavy, undifferentiated and do not lend themselves to collaborative work outside the class context. Developing differentiated multimodal activities through LAMS may enable people to engage with course content through a variety of learning preferences and work collaboratively outside the class. By drawing on a pilot project and the work of Burns & Walker (2009) this paper will explore the use of LAMS: 1. To design multimodal and multicultural Additional Diploma (ESOL) resources for supporting active and reflective teaching/ learning practice. 2. As an e-learning tool that encourages reflective thinking and supports differentiated, self paced, inclusive and collaborative ESOL teaching/ learning practice

Decentralized Event-Triggering for Control of Nonlinear Systems

This paper considers nonlinear systems with full state feedback, a central controller and distributed sensors not co-located with the central controller. We present a methodology for designing decentralized asynchronous event-triggers, which utilize only locally available information, for determining the time instants of transmission from the sensors to the central controller. The proposed design guarantees a positive lower bound for the inter-transmission times of each sensor, while ensuring asymptotic stability of the origin of the system with an arbitrary, but priorly fixed, compact region of attraction. In the special case of Linear Time Invariant (LTI) systems, global asymptotic stability is guaranteed and scale invariance of inter-transmission times is preserved. A modified design method is also proposed for nonlinear systems, with the addition of event-triggered communication from the controller to the sensors, that promises to significantly increase the average sensor inter-transmission times compared to the case where the controller does not transmit data to the sensors. The proposed designs are illustrated through simulations of a linear and a nonlinear example

HIST 173: Old World and New World Encounters Course Redesign

Poster summarizing course redesign activities for HIST 173: Old World and New World Encounters.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/davinci_itcr2014/1001/thumbnail.jp

Memory Networks

We describe a new class of learning models called memory networks. Memory networks reason with inference components combined with a long-term memory component; they learn how to use these jointly. The long-term memory can be read and written to, with the goal of using it for prediction. We investigate these models in the context of question answering (QA) where the long-term memory effectively acts as a (dynamic) knowledge base, and the output is a textual response. We evaluate them on a large-scale QA task, and a smaller, but more complex, toy task generated from a simulated world. In the latter, we show the reasoning power of such models by chaining multiple supporting sentences to answer questions that require understanding the intension of verbs

Question Answering with Subgraph Embeddings

This paper presents a system which learns to answer questions on a broad range of topics from a knowledge base using few hand-crafted features. Our model learns low-dimensional embeddings of words and knowledge base constituents; these representations are used to score natural language questions against candidate answers. Training our system using pairs of questions and structured representations of their answers, and pairs of question paraphrases, yields competitive results on a competitive benchmark of the literature