A Corporate View of Mobile Learning

In the corporate training environment, acquisition of new skills by employees through training is critically important. This obviously implies that practice-based training programs that enable employees to internalize, and, more importantly, experience, new skills by doing have a significant impact on getting employees started quickly. This paper looks into the opportunity that is presented by mobile devices to deliver on-the-spot (OTS) practice that interlaces guidance with the do-it-yourself experience, particularly for the non-office based distributed workforce. Further, the paper deals with instructional constructs that enrich audio-based mobile learning. These instructional constructs are an attempt to deliver effective and enriching learning experience through short duration mobile lessons and leverage podcasting capabilities for the development of episodic learning.InfoPro Corporatio

Flare: Architecture for rapid and easy development of Internet-based Applications

We propose an architecture, Flare, that is a structured and easy way to develop applications rapidly, in a multitude of languages, which make use of online storage of data and management of users. The architecture eliminates the need for server-side programming in most cases, creation and management of online database storage servers, re-creation of user management schemes and writing a lot of unnecessary code for accessing different web-based services using their APIs. A Web API provides a common API for various web-based services like Blogger [2], Wordpress, MSN Live, Facebook [3] etc. Access Libraries provided for major programming languages and platforms make it easy to develop applications using the Flare Web Service. We demonstrate a simple micro-blogging service developed using these APIs in two modes: a graphical browser-based mode, and a command-line mode in C++, which provide two different interfaces to the same account and data.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Multicomponent rendezvous of cofilin, profilin and twinfilin at the actin filament barbed end

Cellular actin dynamics result from collective action of hundreds of regulatory proteins, majority of which target actin filaments at their barbed ends. Three key actin binding proteins - profilin, cofilin and twinfilin individually depolymerize filament barbed ends. Notwithstanding recent leaps in our understanding of their individual action, how they collectively regulate filament dynamics remains an open question. In absence of direct and simultaneous visualization of these proteins at barbed ends, gaining mechanistic insights has been challenging. We have here investigated multicomponent dynamics of profilin, cofilin and twinfilin using a hybrid approach that combines high throughput single filament experiments with theory. We discovered that while twinfilin competes with profilin, it promotes binding of cofilin to filament sides. Interestingly, contrary to previous expectations, we found that profilin and cofilin can simultaneously bind the same filament barbed end resulting in its accelerated depolymerization. Our study reveals that pair-wise interactions can effectively capture depolymerization dynamics in simultaneous presence of all three proteins. We thus believe that our approach of employing a theory-experiment dialog can potentially help decipher multicomponent regulation of actin dynamics.Comment: Primary research pape

Towards birational aspects of moduli space of curves

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-46).The moduli space of curves has proven itself a central object in algebraic geometry. The past decade has seen substantial progress in understanding its geometry. This has been spurred by a flurry of ideas from geometry (algebraic, symplectic, and differential), topology, combinatorics, and physics. One way of understanding its birational geometry is by describing its cones of ample and effective divisors and the dual notion of the Mori cone (the closed cone of curves). This thesis aims at giving a brief introduction to the moduli space of n-pointed stable curves of genus ... and some intuition into it and its structure. We do so by surveying what is currently known about the ample and the effective cones of ... , and the problem of determining the closed cone of curves ... The emphasis in this exposition lies on a partial resolution of the Fulton-Faber conjecture (the F-conjecture). Recently, some positive results were announced and the conjecture was shown to be true in a select few cases. Conjecturally, the ample cone has a very simple description as the dual cone spanned by the F-curves. Faber curves (or F-curves) are irreducible components of the locus in ... that parameterize curves with 3g - 4 + n nodes. There are only finitely many classes of F-curves. The conjecture has been verified for the moduli space of curves of small genus. The conjecture predicts that for large g, despite being of general type, ... behaves from the point of view of Mori theory just like a Fano variety. Specifically, this means that the Mori cone of curves is polyhedral, and generated by rational curves. It would be pleasantly surprising if the conjecture holds true for all cases. In the case of the effective cone of divisors the situation is more complicated. F-conjecture. A divisor on ... is ample (nef) if and only if it intersects positively (nonnegatively) all 1-dimensional strata or the F-curves . In other words, every extremal ray of the Mori cone of effective curves NE1(Mg,n) is generated by a one dimensional stratum. The main results presented here are: (i) the Mori cone ... is generated by F-curves when ...by Shashank S. Dwivedi.S.M

Towards a Performance Interference-aware Virtual Machine Placement Strategy for Supporting Soft Real-time Applications in the Cloud

REACTION 2014. 3rd International Workshop on Real-time and Distributed Computing in Emerging Applications. Rome, Italy. December 2nd, 2014.It is standard practice for cloud service providers (CSPs) to overbook physical system resources to maximize the resource utilization and make their business model more profitable. Resource overbooking can lead to performance interference, however, among the virtual machines (VMs) hosted on the physical resources causing performance un-predictability for soft real-time applications hosted in the VMs, which is unacceptable to these applications. Balancing these conflicting requirements needs a careful design of the placement strategies for hosting soft real-time applications such that the performance interference effects are minimized while still allowing resource overbooking. These placement decisions cannot be made offline because workloads change at run time. Moreover, satisfying the priorities of collocated VMs may require VM migrations, which require an online solution. This paper presents a machine learning-based, online placement solution to this problem where the system is trained using a publicly available trace of a large data center owned by Google. Our approach first classifies the VMs based on their historic mean CPU and memory usage, and performance features. Subsequently, it learns the best patterns of collocating the classified VMs by employing machine learning techniques. These extracted patterns are those that provide the lowest performance interference level on the specified host machines making them amenable to hosting soft real-time applications while still allowing resource overbooking.This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation CAREER CNS 0845789 and AFOSR DDDAS FA9550-13-1-0227.Publicad