Student Service Needs of non-Caucasian Students at a Four Year College

This study was developed as a needs assessment to determine if non-Caucasian students have unmet needs at a predominantly Caucasian four year university. Caucasians and non- Caucasians were both surveyed in order to determine if there was a difference in the needs of Caucasians and non-Caucasians, or if the students shared the same basic needs regardless of ethnicity. A survey was developed and distributed in various highly populated buildings on campus. Once these surveys were collected, each question was analyzed and all results were placed in a comprehensive table. After reviewing and analyzing all data, it was determined that there are specific unmet needs reported by non-Caucasian students, as well as common needs of all students regardless of ethnicity. The volume of participants was not as high for each ethnicity as originally hoped. There were only four international students and nine Asian respondents, making it difficult to get a true sense of their overall needs. Though 36 surveys were collected from Hispanics, the hope was to get at least 50, as Hispanic enrollment is increasing each year. Based on the results, recommendations were made for programming and ways in which to address the reported needs of the students

Adaptive Compression of Slowly Varying Images Transmitted over Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article a scheme for image transmission over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) with an adaptive compression factor is introduced. The proposed control architecture affects the quality of the transmitted images according to: (a) the traffic load within the network and (b) the level of details contained in an image frame. Given an approximate transmission period, the adaptive compression mechanism applies Quad Tree Decomposition (QTD) with a varying decomposition compression factor based on a gradient adaptive approach. For the initialization of the proposed control scheme, the desired a priori maximum bound for the transmission time delay is being set, while a tradeoff among the quality of the decomposed image frame and the time needed for completing the transmission of the frame should be taken under consideration. Based on the proposed control mechanism, the quality of the slowly varying transmitted image frames is adaptively deviated based on the measured time delay in the transmission. The efficacy of the adaptive compression control scheme is validated through extended experimental results

Improved Analysis and Visualization of Community Indicators and Indices

poster abstractThe analysis and interpretation of community indicators has been widely conducted to understand community trends, and subsequently, to support program planning, public policy initiatives, and target geographic regions for research. Given the importance of the outcomes, selecting good indicators is key, and usually a balance of stakeholder input and analytical evaluation. The most common analysis method used to evaluate a set of indicators is principal component analysis (PCA), a linear multivariate analysis method. However, the assumptions of PCA may be too restrictive and consequently, the analysis may fail to provide a sound evaluation of the set of indicators. In response to this shortcoming, we paired PCA with an unsupervised, non-linear multivariate method, known as self-organizing maps (SOMs), to analyze a set of indicators focused on population trends in education, income, employment, among others, at both the county level and the census tract level. The joint results were used to: exclude or include indicators from the indicator set, determine the latent primary dimensions of the dataset, identify peer counties and census tracts (relative to Indiana counties / census tracts), identify associations among different indicators at different geographic scales, identify temporal changes in the value of indicators, and develop one or more indices to describe socio-economic conditions of communities. Outcomes are presented geographically, topologically, tabularly, and graphically, offering different mechanisms of understanding and interpreting the analysis results. A goal of this project is to provide a web-based interface for researchers and community stakeholders to identify and evaluate candidate sets of community indicators, potentially accelerating sound public policy decisions and public health research

Retrieval of the Extreme Values under Deadline Constraints in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider a problem of retrieving the extreme value among sensed data under deadline constraints in wireless sensor networks with potential applications to alarm systems. The sensed data is mapped to a score which we adopt as a unified measure of the relative urgency of the data. The objective is to retrieve the data with the maximum score. We propose fully distributed schemes for contention based medium access and data combining. The proposed medium access scheme uses a randomized back-off which is controlled based on the score of the data to be transmitted. Data combining techniques are proposed to further suppress unnecessary traffic and reduce contention. The key observation is that one should aggressively prioritize packets with high score, up to an extent that does not incur excessive contention in channel access. Designed to capture such aspect, the proposed scheme is shown to substantially decrease the latency of the retrieval

Digital Atlas of American Religion

poster abstractOur poster presentation will introduce DAAR, the Digital Atlas of American Religion (http://www.religionatlas.org). DAAR is a web-based research platform with innovative data exploration and visualization tools to support research in the humanities. Time and location are essential components of humanities exploratory research; however, GIS technology, especially in its web form, does not support the easy exploration and visualization of the complex spatio-temporal data manipulated by humanists. DAAR presents researchers with an integrated solution stemming from several fields including GIS, visualization, and classification theory. Researchers using DAAR are provided with the following exploration/visualization techniques: maps, cartograms, tree maps, pie charts, and motion charts. Using these tools and methods, researchers can explore patterns, trends, and relationships in the data that otherwise are not apparent with traditional GIS or statistical software. DAAR allows researchers to understand the multiple dimensions and diversity of religion across geographies, or within geographies. Paired with historic census data, it allows them to explore relationships to give better context and meaning to the patterns and trends. Maps provide the spatial patterns and relationships, tree maps show relative strength and relationships, charts show trends, cartograms reveal relative numbers of adherence, and motion charts animate trends over time

SOMM: A New Service Oriented Middleware for Generic Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks Based on Code Mobility

Although much research in the area of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) has been done in recent years, the programming of sensor nodes is still time-consuming and tedious. It requires expertise in low-level programming, mainly because of the use of resource constrained hardware and also the low level API provided by current operating systems. The code of the resulting systems has typically no clear separation between application and system logic. This minimizes the possibility of reusing code and often leads to the necessity of major changes when the underlying platform is changed. In this paper, we present a service oriented middleware named SOMM to support application development for WMSNs. The main goal of SOMM is to enable the development of modifiable and scalable WMSN applications. A network which uses the SOMM is capable of providing multiple services to multiple clients at the same time with the specified Quality of Service (QoS). SOMM uses a virtual machine with the ability to support mobile agents. Services in SOMM are provided by mobile agents and SOMM also provides a t space on each node which agents can use to communicate with each other

A Secure Cluster-Based Multipath Routing Protocol for WMSNs

The new characteristics of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network (WMSN) and its design issues brought by handling different traffic classes of multimedia content (video streams, audio, and still images) as well as scalar data over the network, make the proposed routing protocols for typical WSNs not directly applicable for WMSNs. Handling real-time multimedia data requires both energy efficiency and QoS assurance in order to ensure efficient utility of different capabilities of sensor resources and correct delivery of collected information. In this paper, we propose a Secure Cluster-based Multipath Routing protocol for WMSNs, SCMR, to satisfy the requirements of delivering different data types and support high data rate multimedia traffic. SCMR exploits the hierarchical structure of powerful cluster heads and the optimized multiple paths to support timeliness and reliable high data rate multimedia communication with minimum energy dissipation. Also, we present a light-weight distributed security mechanism of key management in order to secure the communication between sensor nodes and protect the network against different types of attacks. Performance evaluation from simulation results demonstrates a significant performance improvement comparing with existing protocols (which do not even provide any kind of security feature) in terms of average end-to-end delay, network throughput, packet delivery ratio, and energy consumption

SAVI Public Health Needs Assessment: Final Report and Recommendations

This report summaries the 2007 assessment of current and projected health sector uses of the SAVI Community Information System (SAVI) and recommends SAVI enhancements to meet the information needs of decision makers, practitioners, and researchers. Based on focus groups and key informant interviews, it was discovered that local decisionmakers and practitioners in Central Indiana currently used SAVI, or would like to use SAVI, to assess the relative spatial demand and supply of health and human services, select sites for new health and human service facilities, assess patient access to health and human service facilities, select locations for services and programs, and track characteristics of facility catchment areas. Health practitioners and public health professionals were interested in using geospatially-enabled indicators for more effective planning and interventions, including to track public health outcomes, understand the socio-economic and physical environment of individual patients and communities, locate target populations for existing and potential health programs and services, support grant applications, and inform the public about environmental risk factors and disease prevalence in their communities. Clinical translational and public health researchers are using, or would like to use, geospatially-enabled measures for the study of social and environmental determinants of health, health disparities, environmental exposure and health risk, predictors of health knowledge, ecological models of health behavior, health service access, quality, and cost, and efficacy of health interventions. Detailed recommendations are provided for both short- and long-term enhancements to SAVI based on the existing and potential SAVI users and uses identified via this study and toward assisting the local health sector improve health knowledge and ultimately the health and wellbeing of Central Indiana communities.United Way of Central Indian

Community Health Information Resource Guide: Volume 1 - Data

This resource guide contains useful information for those who would like to use data to assess the health status of an Indiana community. Targeted users include local organizations such as county health departments and community health coalitions. Being able to access and use relevant data and information resources is a common hurdle for those interested in assessing and advancing community health. As a result of this need and at the request of the Community Advisory Council of the Community Health Engagement Program, we developed this resource guide to assist individuals, organizations, and coalitions in Indiana in identifying appropriate resources that guide their community health research and evaluation activities. The term “data” is used in this volume in reference to both data and information sources. While data consist of raw facts and figures, information is formed by analyzing the data and applying knowledge to it so that the findings are more meaningful and valuable to the community. The benefit of using data is that you can often manipulate it for your specific purposes. The benefit of using information sources is that the work of generating meaning from the data might already have been done, while a potential downside is that the available sources might not answer your specific questions. There are diverse sources of data that can be used as a basis for community health evaluation and decision making. Those looking to use data must consider multiple factors before determining the appropriate data to seek and use.Community Health Engagement Program (CHEP) Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (Indiana CTSI