Analyzing the Mediating Effects of Social Capital and Sense of Community between International Student’s College Sports Fan Identification and Acculturation

According to the number provided by the International Institute of Education (IIE), there are over one million international students enrolled in the United States. Although the number of international students is increasing, the incremental rate started to decrease after reaching its peak in the 2017-2018 academic year. While previous studies focused on the role of leisure activities, such as physical activity participation, to analyze how international students can receive social support from their communities to better acculturate in the U.S., this study focused on the role of spectator sports on providing social support and its effect on international student’s acculturation. Four hundred eighty-seven international students enrolled in 25 Power-5 affiliated colleges participated in this study to analyze the acculturation path model suggested by the primary researcher. The initial path model did not show a statistically significant model fit, which led to modifying the model once following the available theory in academia. As a result, international students’ fan identification for their college sports team showed a statistically significant effect on their social capital and a sense of community. International students’ social capital and a sense of community showed a statistically significant effect on their acculturation in the U.S. Participants’ sense of community also significantly affected their social capital. Finally, fan identification had an indirect effect on acculturation through a sense of community and on both sense of community and social capital. Discussions, future research options on utilizing spectator sports to promote international students’ acculturation, and limitations of the study were provided

Distributionally Robust Decentralized Volt-Var Control with Network Reconfiguration

This paper presents a decentralized volt-var control (VVC) and network reconfiguration strategy to address the challenges arising from the growing integration of distributed energy resources, particularly photovoltaic (PV) generation units, in active distribution networks. To reconcile control measures with different time resolutions and empower local control centers to handle intermittency locally, the proposed approach leverages a two-stage distributionally robust optimization; decisions on slow-responding control measures and set points that link neighboring subnetworks are made in advance while considering all plausible distributions of uncertain PV outputs. We present a decomposition algorithm with an acceleration scheme for solving the proposed model. Numerical experiments on the IEEE 123 bus distribution system are given to demonstrate its outstanding out-of-sample performance and computational efficiency, which suggests that the proposed method can effectively localize uncertainty via risk-informed proactive timely decisions

Federated Short-Term Load Forecasting with Personalization Layers for Heterogeneous Clients

The advent of smart meters has enabled pervasive collection of energy consumption data for training short-term load forecasting (STLF) models. In response to privacy concerns, federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a privacy-preserving approach for training, but the quality of trained models degrades as client data becomes heterogeneous. In this paper we alleviate this drawback using personalization layers, wherein certain layers of an STLF model in an FL framework are trained exclusively on the clients' own data. To that end, we propose a personalized FL algorithm (PL-FL) enabling FL to handle personalization layers. The PL-FL algorithm is implemented by using the Argonne Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning package. We test the forecast performance of models trained on the NREL ComStock dataset, which contains heterogeneous energy consumption data of multiple commercial buildings. Superior performance of models trained with PL-FL demonstrates that personalization layers enable classical FL algorithms to handle clients with heterogeneous data

Analyzing the Mediating Effects of Social Capital and Sense of Community Between International Student’s College Sports Team Identification and Acculturation

Previous studies focused on the role of leisure activities, such as physical activity participation, to analyze how international students can receive social support from their communities to better acculturate in the U.S. This study focused on the role of college sports in providing social support and its effect on international student’s acculturation. Four hundred eighty-seven international students enrolled in 25 Power-5 affiliated colleges participated in this study to analyze the acculturation path model suggested by the primary researcher. The initial path model did not show a statistically significant model fit, which led to modifying the model once following the available theory in academia. As a result, the proposed model resulted in a good model fit (RMSEA = .03, SRMR = .01, CFI = 1.00, TLI = .98). Discussions on utilizing spectator sports to promote international students’ acculturation, suggestions for future study options, and limitations of the study were provided