Clean Energy as a Platform for Interdisciplinary Collaborations within a Technology-Driven Institution

Using biodiesel production as the centerpiece, the efforts of multiple academic programs were combined to achieve a common objective, thus illustrating the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration. These programs include Chemical Technology, Sustainable Energy, Automotive Technology, HVAC, Biotechnology, and Agricultural Technology. By participating in the implementation of a closed-loop biodiesel supply chain, students learned the significance of communication and the interdependence of the myriad programs

Clean Energy as a Platform for Interdisciplinary Collaborations within a Technology-Driven Institution

Using biodiesel production as the centerpiece, the efforts of multiple academic programs were combined to achieve a common objective, thus illustrating the importance of cross-disciplinary collaboration. These programs include Chemical Technology, Sustainable Energy, Automotive Technology, HVAC, Biotechnology, and Agricultural Technology. By participating in the implementation of a closed-loop biodiesel supply chain, students learned the significance of communication and the interdependence of the myriad programs

Tracking Rodent Social Interactions Using Machine Learning

We have developed a video-annotation pipeline that can be used to automatically track the movement of particularly social rodents (Degus) during interactive behavior. Using open source software (DeepLabCut), our approach requires methodical training of DeepLabCut neural networks, along with custom post-processing scripts to ensure continuity of the annotation of individual Degus. This tracking work is the first phase in a larger effort to automatically classify and label behaviors observed in video recordings of Degu interactions. Such behavioral annotation will influence our understanding of social behavior in general, with possible long-term impacts on diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorder and other mental health conditions

Obvious Independence of Clones

The Independence of Clones (IoC) criterion for social choice functions (voting rules) measures a function's robustness to strategic nomination. However, prior literature has established empirically that individuals cannot always recognize whether or not a mechanism is strategy-proof and may still submit costly, distortionary misreports even in strategy-proof settings. The intersection of these issues motivates the search for mechanisms which are Obviously Independent of Clones (OIoC): where strategic nomination or strategic exiting of clones obviously have no effect on the outcome of the election. We examine three IoC ranked-choice voting mechanisms and the pre-existing proofs that they are independent of clones: Single Transferable Vote (STV), Ranked Pairs, and the Schulze method. We construct a formal definition of a voting system being Obviously Independent of Clones based on a reduction to a clocked election by considering a bounded agent. Finally, we show that STV and Ranked Pairs are OIoC, whereas we prove an impossibility result for the Schulze method showing that this voting system is not OIoC

Revisiting pre-trained remote sensing model benchmarks: resizing and normalization matters

Research in self-supervised learning (SSL) with natural images has progressed rapidly in recent years and is now increasingly being applied to and benchmarked with datasets containing remotely sensed imagery. A common benchmark case is to evaluate SSL pre-trained model embeddings on datasets of remotely sensed imagery with small patch sizes, e.g., 32x32 pixels, whereas standard SSL pre-training takes place with larger patch sizes, e.g., 224x224. Furthermore, pre-training methods tend to use different image normalization preprocessing steps depending on the dataset. In this paper, we show, across seven satellite and aerial imagery datasets of varying resolution, that by simply following the preprocessing steps used in pre-training (precisely, image sizing and normalization methods), one can achieve significant performance improvements when evaluating the extracted features on downstream tasks -- an important detail overlooked in previous work in this space. We show that by following these steps, ImageNet pre-training remains a competitive baseline for satellite imagery based transfer learning tasks -- for example we find that these steps give +32.28 to overall accuracy on the So2Sat random split dataset and +11.16 on the EuroSAT dataset. Finally, we report comprehensive benchmark results with a variety of simple baseline methods for each of the seven datasets, forming an initial benchmark suite for remote sensing imagery

Management of Construction Delays in South East Nigeria

Timely completion of construction projects and the position in certain quarters that construction delays are almost unavoidable made it imperative to examine the management of construction delays with South East Nigeria as case study. In the study, 3 research questions with 43 multiple choice items were formulated and administered to 100 construction professionals who have been involved in construction projects in South East Nigeria to elicit responses through a questionnaire. The questionnaire was constructed using Likert Four-Point Scale Response Alternative and analysed using weighted mean. The study also sourced for information through observations and oral interviews conducted by the researchers. The study found out that extra cost claims, professional negligence labour and material cost escalation among others are the causes of construction delays in Nigeria. It also found out that cost overrun, time overrun, damaged relationship between the parties and the like are effects of construction delays in South East, Nigeria. On management of these delays when they occur, the respondents accepted that appointment of a project quantity surveyor, prompt release of funds to contractor, timely purchase of material and immediate delivery on site among others are remedial actions. Of essence in the study is the discovery by the researchers that most clients are willing to honour payment certificates as and when but lack the financial capacity to do so. Thus, the researchers among others recommend the financial empowerment of clients to ease timely honouring of payment certificates; and the appointment of project quantity surveyors for financial guidance. Keywords: construction delays, construction projects, cost overrun, management and time overrun DOI: 10.7176/CER/11-11-01 Publication date: December 31st 201