A Case Study of Choices of the Host University and Decisions to Stay or Leave the U.S. upon Graduation of Chinese Adult and Traditional Students

Chinese students are the largest group among all the international students. Many factors motivate them to study in the U.S. and their decision to stay or leave the U.S. after graduation. However, limited research investigates these aspects by differentiating students into non-traditional students and traditional student groups. As a result, this study conducted individual interviews to examine: 1) factors that influence Chinese students’ (non-traditional students vs. traditional students) choices of the host college or university in the U.S.; and 2) their decisions to stay or leave the U.S. after graduation. Eleven Chinese students participated in this study, including seven female students and four male students. Their ages range from 23 to 30 years old with the mean of 25.8. They are from majors across STEM and non-STEM fields. Among them, four had working experience who are considered as non-traditional students, while the rest are traditional students. Findings show that Chinese non-traditional students consider financial aid availability most when choosing the college abroad, while traditional students focused on the ranks of academic programs or colleges. In addition, most Chinese non-traditional students preferred to return to their home country. However, most traditional students would choose to remain in the U.S. after graduation. Meanwhile, most students desired to have some working experience in the U.S. It is hoped that this study would lead to a greater awareness of Chinese international students and enlighten higher education professionals and administrators with practical ideas to build a better campus environment and climate to serve this growing population

Generation of Optical Chirality Patterns with Plane Waves, Evanescent Waves and Surface Plasmon Waves

We systematically investigate the generation of optical chirality patterns by applying the superposition of two waves in three scenarios, namely plane waves in free space, evanescent waves of totally reflected light at dielectric interface and propagating surface plasmon waves on a metallic surface. In each scenario, the general analytical solution of the optical chirality pattern is derived for different polarization states and propagating directions of the two waves. The analytical solutions are verified by numerical simulations. Spatially structured optical chirality patterns can be generated in all scenarios if the incident polarization states and propagation directions are correctly chosen. Optical chirality enhancement can be obtained from the constructive interference of free-space circularly polarized light or enhanced evanescent waves of totally reflected light. Surface plasmon waves do not provide enhanced optical chirality unless the near-field intensity enhancement is sufficiently high. The structured optical chirality patterns may find applications in chirality sorting, chiral imaging and circular dichroism spectroscopy

Distributed tracking control of leader-follower multi-agent systems under noisy measurement

In this paper, a distributed tracking control scheme with distributed estimators has been developed for a leader-follower multi-agent system with measurement noises and directed interconnection topology. It is supposed that each follower can only measure relative positions of its neighbors in a noisy environment, including the relative position of the second-order active leader. A neighbor-based tracking protocol together with distributed estimators is designed based on a novel velocity decomposition technique. It is shown that the closed loop tracking control system is stochastically stable in mean square and the estimation errors converge to zero in mean square as well. A simulation example is finally given to illustrate the performance of the proposed control scheme.Comment: 8 Pages, 3 figure

Mutual Help or Social Responsibility of Higher Education—A CJCU Experience

In 2009, Typhoon Morakot caused severe damage to the mountains in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Laulong was one of the villages affected by the typhoon. While all the communities have made all the efforts to restore their infrastructure and livelihood, Laulong village has its unique mission to restore the history and culture of their own. The residents there identify themselves as “Tavorang Tribe”, whose ancestors were from other areas. After merging with other people, they are gradually losing their tribal language. They have come to realize that their traditional rituals and tribal history are at risk of extinction; thus, they have endeavored to preserve and reconstruct their heritage. Chang Jung Christian University (CJCU) has involved in reviving these areas after Morakot. The Department of Applied Philosophy targets at this community as the educational field. The way to flip educational field requires taking students into the society. The purpose of this paper is to share the teaching experience of the past and students’ learning outcomes. It will introduce how a university tried to utilize resource from the government to work with a community while claiming to fulfill its social responsibility, but in fact, both actually received mutual benefits by executing this project

Outlier-Resilient Web Service QoS Prediction

The proliferation of Web services makes it difficult for users to select the most appropriate one among numerous functionally identical or similar service candidates. Quality-of-Service (QoS) describes the non-functional characteristics of Web services, and it has become the key differentiator for service selection. However, users cannot invoke all Web services to obtain the corresponding QoS values due to high time cost and huge resource overhead. Thus, it is essential to predict unknown QoS values. Although various QoS prediction methods have been proposed, few of them have taken outliers into consideration, which may dramatically degrade the prediction performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose an outlier-resilient QoS prediction method in this paper. Our method utilizes Cauchy loss to measure the discrepancy between the observed QoS values and the predicted ones. Owing to the robustness of Cauchy loss, our method is resilient to outliers. We further extend our method to provide time-aware QoS prediction results by taking the temporal information into consideration. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both static and dynamic datasets. The results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods.Comment: 12 pages, to appear at the Web Conference (WWW) 202