Future Livestock Systems: Scenario-guided policy review workshop

The recent CCAFS and the LSIL scenarios process focuses on contextual drivers of change for agriculture and food security – climate change and socio-economic changes (e.g. in markets, governance, broad economic developments, infrastructure)

Primary to Secondary Engineering Learning: A Framework for International Consideration

The teaching of engineering has made its entrance into the subject of Design & Technology Education (DTE) around the world over the past few decades. This inclusion has been particularly true for the United States which refers to its DTE-related subject as Technology & Engineering Education. The inclusion of engineering has likely been due to the closely aligned epistemologies and classroom practices between engineering and DTE. But, while engineering has been emphasised in primary and secondary schooling, there has also been limited guidance for articulating how engineering could/should be taught, both authentically and equitably, across the years of school and how it is connected with other school subjects. To aid in this effort, a Framework for P-12 Engineering Learning was formed through over 3 years of iterative research and development work and published by the American Society of Engineering Education (2020). This framework was created to help provide a unifying vision and guidebook to inform decisions for improving the coherency and equity of engineering teaching and learning across the country. In addition, throughout this process, Engineering Performance Matrices (EPMs) were generated to offer sample blueprints of how the engineering concepts and sub-concepts identified within the framework could build upon each other to support teachers in creating authentic learning experiences that increase in sophistication over time—enabling students to achieve any designated engineering-related performance tasks or standards related to engineering/technology.  The goal of this poster presentation is to share the framework, and the EPMs, with the international DTE community for consideration of any useful components that could be adapted for their own efforts related to engineering learning. The poster will specifically highlight engineering literacy elements of the framework, the EMPs, and examples of ways in which this information can be used to establish engineering-focused instruction in the pursuit of engineering-literacy for all

Design & Technology Education: What can we do to Influence Transdisciplinary Undergraduate Learning?

Creating new ways to position Design and Technology (DT) teacher preparation programs in higher education can be considered critical today. For example, in the United States, the few remaining DT-related teacher programs can be in jeopardy of supporting the school subject as a result of teaching workforce declines. But, while some may view that DT programs are no longer relevant in parts of the world today, there can be an opportunity to leverage and make pertinent DT content/practices beyond teacher preparation. New DT approaches can be important to consider, not only to just sustain the remaining programs, but to also create new educational experiences that provide valuable skills/knowledge to a broader audience. In doing so, teacher programs can deliver DT experiences across college campuses that many students may no longer have access to in secondary schools—due to the aforementioned teacher workforce concerns. These DT learning experiences can involve the content/practices related to designing/making/innovating as well as the pedagogical approaches that support transdisciplinary learning. With a variety of educational transformation initiatives happening at universities, DT programs can help shape the way that undergraduate learning occurs. So how do DT programs leverage their value related to transdisciplinary learning through design/innovation practice to reach new audiences while also sustaining programs that develop teachers? To provide an answer, this poster will highlight a transdisciplinary program, titled Mission Meaning Making (M3), that was developed to provide a new cross-college learning experience for undergraduate students focused on design and innovation. The M3 program has been created to synergize the key strengths of three partnering units/disciplines (DT, anthropology, and business) to prepare undergraduates for addressing contemporary challenges in innovative, and transdisciplinary ways. The poster will provide details/research related to the M3 program and explore how DT can strive to make a broader impact on campuses

Reinventing Secondary School:: An Investigation of a Polytechnic School Model Focused on Industry/Community-driven Design Projects

Higher education and industry leaders seem to continuously call for transforming the way learning occurs within schools to better meet the needs of students, society, and the workforce. Many attempts have been made to address these calls such as increasing integrated STEM programming in schools, providing after-school robotics activities, as well as developing novel school models. One such innovative model, the focus of this study, is a polytechnic high school model developed in collaboration between a public research-intensive university and several industry/community partners. This model was developed to be implemented in urban settings with an emphasis on serving minoritized youth through design project cycles created with local industry/community partners rather than through subject-specific classes. It can be valuable to investigate a school model that has been created to have this design-based learning approach as its central focus. The purpose of this exploratory study was to understand 1) how teachers perceive the influence of the school model on the learning of students from diverse backgrounds and 2) how teachers view their own experiences working within the school model. This study examined pre/post teacher surveys to provide insights into how the teachers believe the school model is working with respect to students' ability to perform within this style of design-based instruction and any challenges faced by the teachers to implement the school model. This information can help to inform those who seek to provide different learning environments for students through restructuring schools around industry/community-focused design projects. This paper will introduce the components of the polytechnic school model, detail the emphasis of the industry/community-driven design cycles, highlight the methodology used, present some preliminary findings, and discuss insights and recommendations for secondary schooling. &nbsp

ADAPTER-RL: Adaptation of Any Agent using Reinforcement Learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agents frequently face challenges in adapting to tasks outside their training distribution, including issues with over-fitting, catastrophic forgetting and sample inefficiency. Although the application of adapters has proven effective in supervised learning contexts such as natural language processing and computer vision, their potential within the DRL domain remains largely unexplored. This paper delves into the integration of adapters in reinforcement learning, presenting an innovative adaptation strategy that demonstrates enhanced training efficiency and improvement of the base-agent, experimentally in the nanoRTS environment, a real-time strategy (RTS) game simulation. Our proposed universal approach is not only compatible with pre-trained neural networks but also with rule-based agents, offering a means to integrate human expertise

The Value of Instructor Interactivity in the Online Classroom

As the number of faculty teaching online continues to grow, so has the interest in and understanding of the role of instructor interaction in the online classroom. Online education provides a unique platform in which course design and teaching are independent factors. Understanding faculty and student perceptions about the shifting role of instructor interaction in the online classroom can provide insight on policies and procedures that can support student learning through student-instructor interaction. Participants included faculty and students responding to an anonymous online survey who indicated “online” as their primary mode of teaching. Three key “value” themes emerged as significantly valuable: instructor interactivity, instructor feedback on participation, and asynchronous interaction in discussion forums. These findings illuminate opportunities and areas of consideration for three stakeholders in the student-teacher interaction equation: faculty, faculty developers, and administrators that can be used to inform quality online teaching through instructor interactivity

CONAN: Complementary Pattern Augmentation for Rare Disease Detection

Rare diseases affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide but are hard to detect since they have extremely low prevalence rates (varying from 1/1,000 to 1/200,000 patients) and are massively underdiagnosed. How do we reliably detect rare diseases with such low prevalence rates? How to further leverage patients with possibly uncertain diagnosis to improve detection? In this paper, we propose a Complementary pattern Augmentation (CONAN) framework for rare disease detection. CONAN combines ideas from both adversarial training and max-margin classification. It first learns self-attentive and hierarchical embedding for patient pattern characterization. Then, we develop a complementary generative adversarial networks (GAN) model to generate candidate positive and negative samples from the uncertain patients by encouraging a max-margin between classes. In addition, CONAN has a disease detector that serves as the discriminator during the adversarial training for identifying rare diseases. We evaluated CONAN on two disease detection tasks. For low prevalence inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) detection, CONAN achieved .96 precision recall area under the curve (PR-AUC) and 50.1% relative improvement over best baseline. For rare disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) detection, CONAN achieves .22 PR-AUC with 41.3% relative improvement over the best baseline

Templated Synthesis Of Glycoluril Hexamer And Monofunctionalized Cucurbit[6]uril Derivatives

We report that the p-xylylenediammonium ion (11) acts as a template in the cucurbit[n]uril forming reaction that biases the reaction toward the production of methylene bridged glycoluril hexamer (6C) and bis-nor-seco-CB [10]. Hexamer 6C is readily available on the gram scale by a one step synthetic procedure that avoids chromatography. Hexamer 6C undergoes macrocylization. with (substituted) phthalaldehydes 12,14,.15, and 18-in 9 M H2SO4 or concd HCl at room temperature to deliver monofunctionalized CB[6] derivatives 13,16,17, and 19 that are poised for further functionalization reactions: The kinetics of the macrocyclization reaction between hexamer and formaldehyde or phthalaldehyde depends on the presence and identity of ammonium ions as templates p-Xylylenediammonium ion (11) Which. barely fits inside CB[6] sized cavities acts as a negative template which slows down transformation of 66 and paraformaldehyde into CB[6]. In contrast, 11 and hexanediammonium ion (20) act as a positive template that promotes the macrocyclization reaction between 6C and 12 to deliver (+/-)-21 as a key intermediate along the mechanistic pathway to CB[6] derivatives. Naphthalene-CB[6] derivative 19 which contains both fluorophore and ureidyl C=O metal-ion (e.g., Eu3+) binding sites forms the basis for a fluorescence turn-on assay for suitable ammonium ions (e.g., hexanediammonium ion and histamine)

Prefrontal cortical microcircuits bind perception to executive control

During the perception-to-action cycle, our cerebral cortex mediates the interactions between the environment and the perceptual-executive systems of the brain. At the top of the executive hierarchy, prefrontal cortical microcircuits are assumed to bind perceptual and executive control information to guide goal-driven behavior. Here, we tested this hypothesis by comparing simultaneously recorded neuron firing in prefrontal cortical layers and the caudate-putamen of rhesus monkeys, trained in a spatial-versus-object, rule-based match-to-sample task. We found that during the perception and executive selection phases, cell firing in the localized prefrontal layers and caudate-putamen region exhibited similar location preferences on spatial-trials, but less on object- trials. Then, we facilitated the perceptual-executive circuit by stimulating the prefrontal infra-granular-layers with patterns previously derived from supra-granular-layers, and produced stimulation-induced spatial preference in percent correct performance on spatial trials, similar to neural tuning. These results show that inter-laminar prefrontal microcircuits play causal roles to the perception-to-action cycle