Training Students for Critical Thinking in an Electrical Engineering Core Course

Analysis and Design of Control Systems is a core course in most Electrical Engineering programs in the United States. This course is the first course that provides a systemic view of engineering designs and links classroom knowledge to real-world applications. Training students for critical thinking (CT) skills in this class is essential to their career success. However, a high D and F grades and withdraw (DFW) rate has been observed in this course for years. The goal of this study is to redesign the course components to integrate critical thinking training into classroom activities and reform students’ habits in problem-solving. The new course components include a series of lectures on cognition, critical thinking, examples of famous engineering projects with critical thinking, and decomposition of critical thinking skills in classroom examples. Evaluation of the new course module was conducted based on critical thinking assessment test, two student surveys through the semester, three classroom observations, and students’ performance comparing against an untrained control group in the previous semester. Our results illustrated an effective way to improve critical thinking with this training module.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Biochemical prevention and treatment of viral infections – A new paradigm in medicine for infectious diseases

For two centuries, vaccination has been the dominating approach to develop prophylaxis against viral infections through immunological prevention. However, vaccines are not always possible to make, are ineffective for many viral infections, and also carry certain risk for a small, yet significant portion of the population. In the recent years, FDA's approval and subsequent market acceptance of Synagis, a monoclonal antibody indicated for prevention and treatment of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) has heralded a new era for viral infection prevention and treatment. This emerging paradigm, herein designated "Biochemical Prevention and Treatment", currently involves two aspects: (1) preventing viral entry via passive transfer of specific protein-based anti-viral molecules or host cell receptor blockers; (2) inhibiting viral amplification by targeting the viral mRNA with anti-sense DNA, ribozyme, or RNA interference (RNAi). This article summarizes the current status of this field

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation on Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension (RC) has been studied in a variety of datasets with the boosted performance brought by deep neural networks. However, the generalization capability of these models across different domains remains unclear. To alleviate this issue, we are going to investigate unsupervised domain adaptation on RC, wherein a model is trained on labeled source domain and to be applied to the target domain with only unlabeled samples. We first show that even with the powerful BERT contextual representation, the performance is still unsatisfactory when the model trained on one dataset is directly applied to another target dataset. To solve this, we provide a novel conditional adversarial self-training method (CASe). Specifically, our approach leverages a BERT model fine-tuned on the source dataset along with the confidence filtering to generate reliable pseudo-labeled samples in the target domain for self-training. On the other hand, it further reduces domain distribution discrepancy through conditional adversarial learning across domains. Extensive experiments show our approach achieves comparable accuracy to supervised models on multiple large-scale benchmark datasets.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables, Accepted by AAAI 202

Robust quantum repeater with atomic ensembles and single-photon sources

We present a quantum repeater protocol using atomic ensembles, linear optics and single-photon sources. Two local 'polarization' entangled states of atomic ensembles $u$ and $d$ are generated by absorbing a single photon emitted by an on-demand single-photon sources, based on which high-fidelity local entanglement between four ensembles can be established efficiently through Bell-state measurement. Entanglement in basic links and entanglement connection between links are carried out by the use of two-photon interference. In addition to being robust against phase fluctuations in the quantum channels, this scheme may speed up quantum communication with higher fidelity by about 2 orders of magnitude for 1280 km compared with the partial read (PR) protocol (Sangouard {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. A {\bf77}, 062301 (2008)) which may generate entanglement most quickly among the previous schemes with the same ingredients.Comment: 5 pages 4 figure