Online Educational Outcomes Could Exceed Those of the Traditional Classroom

An axiom of online education is that teachers should not mechanically translate existing courses into an online format. If so, how should new or ongoing courses be reshaped for the online environment and why? The answers come both from the opportunities offered by the structure of online education and from a body of research from cognitive psychology and cognitive science that provides insight into the way people actually learn. Freed from the time and space constraints inherent in face-to-face higher education settings as well as the deeply ingrained expectations of both teachers and students, online education provides a more flexible palette upon which evidence-based ideas about learning can be integrated into course structure and design. As a result, online education can potentially deliver learning experiences and outcomes that are superior to typical face-to-face classrooms. The ability to integrate experiences that stimulate real, long lasting learning represents one of online education’s greatest potential benefits

Parallel incremental compilation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Dept. of Computer Science, 1990.The time it takes to compile a large program has been a bottleneck in the software development process. When an interactive programming environment with an incremental compiler is used, compilation speed becomes even more important, but existing incremental compilers are very slow for some types of program changes. We describe a set of techniques that enable incremental compilation to exploit fine-grained concurrency in a shared-memory multiprocessor and achieve asymptotic improvement over sequential algorithms. Because parallel non-incremental compilation is a special case of parallel incremental compilation, the design of a parallel compiler is a corollary of our result. Instead of running the individual phases concurrently, our design specifies compiler phases that are mutually sequential. However, each phase is designed to exploit fine-grained parallelism. By allowing each phase to present its output as a complete structure rather than as a stream of data, we can apply techniques such as parallel prefix and parallel divide-and-conquer, and we can construct applicative data structures to achieve sublinear execution time. Parallel algorithms for each phase of a compiler are presented to demonstrate that a complete incremental compiler can achieve execution time that is asymptotically less than sequential algorithms. Historically, the symbol table has been a bottleneck to parallel compilation; no previously described algorithm executes in time less than linear in the number of declarations. We describe new algorithms for parsing using a balanced list representation and type checking based upon attribute grammars modified with a combination of aggregate values and upward remote references. Under some mild assumptions about the language and target program, these phases run in polylogarithmic time using a sublinear number of processors. The design of computer languages has been influenced by the compiler technology available; we show how some language design decisions can simplify the design of a parallel incremental compiler, allowing more efficient algorithms to be used

SMP: A Message-Based Programming Environment for the BBN Butterfly

SMP is a message-based programming environment for the BBN Butterfly similar in flavor and scope to the BBN Uniform System package. As such, SMP provides an alternative to the shared memory model of the Uniform System. SMP supports the construction of process families, a fixed set of asynchronous processes that communicate. using messages, according to a given interconnection pattern. A dynamic hierarchy of such process families is possible. In this report we describe the SMP user interface and an implementation on the Butterfly

Computer Science and Engineering Research Review 1987-1988

Table of Contents: Elmwood -An Object-Oriented Multiprocessor Operating System / John Mellor-Crummey, Thomas LeBlanc, Lawrence Crowl, Neal Gafter, Peter Dibble p. 5; Eye Movements and Computer Vision / Dana Ballard, Christopher Brown, David Coombs, Brian Marsh p. 20; Infinite Behavior in Connectionist Models with Asymmetric Weights / Sara Porat p. 28; Covering a Set of Test Patterns by a Cellular Automaton / Sue-Ken Yap, Alexander Albicki p. 35; Faculty p. 40; Publications p. 43; Doctoral and Master's Theses p. 54; Seminars p. 57; Grant Support p. 59; Industrial Support p, 60

DARPA Parallel Architecture Benchmark Study

In intensive work over a four-week period in the summer of 1986, seven problems were studied and implemented on the Butterfly. The problems were Inspired by various capabilities in computer vision, and were proposed as benchmarks for a DARPA workshop on parallel architectures. They were: convolution and zero-crossing detection for edges, edge tracking, connected component labeling, hough transform, three computational geometry problems (convex hull, voronoi diagram, and minimum spanning tree), three-dimensional visibility calculations, subgraph isomorphism and minimum cost path calculation. BPRs 10, 11, and 14 are detailed reports on three of the problems. BPR13 contains the conclusions of the study and writeups of the work not covered in other BPRs