Putting Educational Reform Into Practice: The Impact of the No Child Left Behind Act On Students, Teachers, and Schools

This thesis seeks to investigate the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) on U.S. student achievement and teacher effectiveness. By combining the results from various data sources, I am able to indicate the levels of student preparedness, school spending, and specific classroom practices. After an analysis of my results, I suggest that NCLB has found moderate success in increasing the level of math preparedness for younger students from historically disadvantaged backgrounds. On the other hand, the data also suggests that there have been no statistically significant gains in reading achievement after the implementation of NCLB. Additionally, spending by school districts increased a significant amount and NCLB raised teacher pay and the number of teachers entering the profession with graduate degrees. Within schools, NCLB appears to have directed instruction towards math and reading and away from other subjects as teachers strove to achieve proficiency on the new accountability measures implemented by NCLB

Sketch-a-Net that Beats Humans

We propose a multi-scale multi-channel deep neural network framework that, for the first time, yields sketch recognition performance surpassing that of humans. Our superior performance is a result of explicitly embedding the unique characteristics of sketches in our model: (i) a network architecture designed for sketch rather than natural photo statistics, (ii) a multi-channel generalisation that encodes sequential ordering in the sketching process, and (iii) a multi-scale network ensemble with joint Bayesian fusion that accounts for the different levels of abstraction exhibited in free-hand sketches. We show that state-of-the-art deep networks specifically engineered for photos of natural objects fail to perform well on sketch recognition, regardless whether they are trained using photo or sketch. Our network on the other hand not only delivers the best performance on the largest human sketch dataset to date, but also is small in size making efficient training possible using just CPUs.Comment: Accepted to BMVC 2015 (oral

Deep Spatial-Semantic Attention for Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval

Human sketches are unique in being able to capture both the spatial topology of a visual object, as well as its subtle appearance details. Fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) importantly leverages on such fine-grained characteristics of sketches to conduct instance-level retrieval of photos. Nevertheless, human sketches are often highly abstract and iconic, resulting in severe misalignments with candidate photos which in turn make subtle visual detail matching difficult. Existing FG-SBIR approaches focus only on coarse holistic matching via deep cross-domain representation learning, yet ignore explicitly accounting for fine-grained details and their spatial context. In this paper, a novel deep FG-SBIR model is proposed which differs significantly from the existing models in that: (1) It is spatially aware, achieved by introducing an attention module that is sensitive to the spatial position of visual details: (2) It combines coarse and fine semantic information via a shortcut connection fusion block: and (3) It models feature correlation and is robust to misalignments between the extracted features across the two domains by introducing a novel higher-order learnable energy function (HOLEF) based loss. Extensive experiments show that the proposed deep spatial-semantic attention model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art

Regulation-Structured Dynamic Metabolic Model Provides a Potential Mechanism for Delayed Enzyme Response in Denitrification Process

In a recent study of denitrification dynamics in hyporheic zone sediments, we observed a significant time lag (up to several days) in enzymatic response to the changes in substrate concentration. To explore an underlying mechanism and understand the interactive dynamics between enzymes and nutrients, we developed a trait-based model that associates a community’s traits with functional enzymes, instead of typically used species guilds (or functional guilds). This enzyme-based formulation allows to collectively describe biogeochemical functions of microbial communities without directly parameterizing the dynamics of species guilds, therefore being scalable to complex communities. As a key component of modeling, we accounted for microbial regulation occurring through transcriptional and translational processes, the dynamics of which was parameterized based on the temporal profiles of enzyme concentrations measured using a new signature peptide-based method. The simulation results using the resulting model showed several days of a time lag in enzymatic responses as observed in experiments. Further, the model showed that the delayed enzymatic reactions could be primarily controlled by transcriptional responses and that the dynamics of transcripts and enzymes are closely correlated. The developed model can serve as a useful tool for predicting biogeochemical processes in natural environments, either independently or through integration with hydrologic flow simulators

Generalizable Person Re-identification by Domain-Invariant Mapping Network

We aim to learn a domain generalizable person reidentification (ReID) model. When such a model is trained on a set of source domains (ReID datasets collected from different camera networks), it can be directly applied to any new unseen dataset for effective ReID without any model updating. Despite its practical value in real-world deployments, generalizable ReID has seldom been studied. In this work, a novel deep ReID model termed Domain-Invariant Mapping Network(DIMN) is proposed. DIMN is designed to learn a mapping between a person image and its identity classifier, i.e., it produces a classifier using a single shot. To make the model domain-invariant, we follow a meta-learning pipeline and sample a subset of source domain training tasks during each training episode. However, the model is significantly different from conventional meta-learning methods in that: (1) no model updating is required for the target domain, (2) different training tasks share a memory bank for maintaining both scalability and discrimination ability, and (3) it can be used to match an arbitrary number of identities in a target domain. Extensive experiments on a newly proposed large-scale ReID domain generalization benchmark show that our DIMN significantly outperforms alternative domain generalization or meta-learning methods