From open resources to educational opportunity

Since MIT’s bold announcement of the OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of over 700 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programmes, through strengthening organizational capacity as well as through building open, standards‐based technology. Each of these initiatives point to a rich palette of transformational possibilities for education; together with the growing open source movement, they offer glimpses of a sustainable ecology of substantial and quality educational resources. This discussion piece will highlight some of the educational opportunity presented by MIT’s current information technology‐enabled educational agenda and related initiatives, along with their strategic underpinnings and implications. It will address various dimensions of their impact on the form and function of education. It will examine how these ambitious programmes achieve a vision characterized by an abundance of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities, not merely pervasive technology

CUSTOMERS’ SATISFACTION IN ATM SERVICE: AN EMPIRICAL EVIDENCES FROM PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR BANKS IN INDIA

The aim of this paper was to provide a preliminary comparative investigation of the customer satisfaction in ATM service of public and private sector banks in India. For this investigation primary data was collected from 150 respondents of public and private sector banks through a structured questionnaire. Collected data was analyzed according to the objectives of the present research and result of the statistical analysis indicates that private sector banks are providing more satisfactory ATM service as compared to public sector banks. Empirical evidences indicates that customers perception about Efficiency, Security and Responsiveness, Cost Effectiveness, Problem Handling and Compensation and Contact service related to ATM service is low in both public and privates sector banks (ranging between 3.00 to 3.50). Therefore both types of banks should aware about these aspects of ATM service to enhance customers’ satisfaction.ATM, Service quality, Brand perception, Perceived value, Satisfaction, Public and Private Banks, India

Low Correlation Sequences over the QAM Constellation

This paper presents the first concerted look at low correlation sequence families over QAM constellations of size M^2=4^m and their potential applicability as spreading sequences in a CDMA setting. Five constructions are presented, and it is shown how such sequence families have the ability to transport a larger amount of data as well as enable variable-rate signalling on the reverse link. Canonical family CQ has period N, normalized maximum-correlation parameter theta_max bounded above by A sqrt(N), where 'A' ranges from 1.8 in the 16-QAM case to 3.0 for large M. In a CDMA setting, each user is enabled to transfer 2m bits of data per period of the spreading sequence which can be increased to 3m bits of data by halving the size of the sequence family. The technique used to construct CQ is easily extended to produce larger sequence families and an example is provided. Selected family SQ has a lower value of theta_max but permits only (m+1)-bit data modulation. The interleaved 16-QAM sequence family IQ has theta_max <= sqrt(2) sqrt(N) and supports 3-bit data modulation. The remaining two families are over a quadrature-PAM (Q-PAM) subset of size 2M of the M^2-QAM constellation. Family P has a lower value of theta_max in comparison with Family SQ, while still permitting (m+1)-bit data modulation. Interleaved family IP, over the 8-ary Q-PAM constellation, permits 3-bit data modulation and interestingly, achieves the Welch lower bound on theta_max.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory in February 200

A Sub-optimal Algorithm to Synthesize Control Laws for a Network of Dynamic Agents

We study the synthesis problem of an LQR controller when the matrix describing the control law is constrained to lie in a particular vector space. Our motivation is the use of such control laws to stabilize networks of autonomous agents in a decentralized fashion; with the information flow being dictated by the constraints of a pre-specified topology. In this paper, we consider the finite-horizon version of the problem and provide both a computationally intensive optimal solution and a sub-optimal solution that is computationally more tractable. Then we apply the technique to the decentralized vehicle formation control problem and show that the loss in performance due to the use of the sub-optimal solution is not huge; however the topology can have a large effect on performance