106 research outputs found
Promoting Mindfulness Through Contemplative Education
No full textFor years, higher education institutions in the United States have developed courses in the field of liberal education that focus on social, political, economic and environmental issues with a global outlook. As such, students are taught critical thinking, critical reasoning, and critical writing skills. While students learn to engage in debates, decisive speaking, and critical analysis, they are rarely taught to feel compassionate toward these issues. Hence, in the current global community in which many countries are at war, or are facing poverty and financial crises, it is essential that higher education institutions prepare knowledgeable citizens that not only ascertain critical assessment and judgment skills, but also ascertain the art of contemplation. This article reviews literature from various disciplines and suggests that higher education institutions must work toward integrating contemplative education and mindfulness in their curriculum in order to enhance students’ learning and understanding through contemplation and personal insight. Furthermore, it is essential that higher education institutions implement multidimensional educational strategies that encourage a vigorous and universal understanding of cross-cultural communication. Additionally, this paper examines the role of elements, such as experience, contemplations, and transformation, in teaching and preparing future graduates for the current global community. Furthermore, it evaluates strategies that can be used by higher education leaders in creating multidimensional and effective learning environments
Applying Culturally Relevant Pedagogy to Online Learning
No full textDespite the prevalence of online learning in higher education, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is limited literature about what constitutes effective culturally relevant and responsive online teaching. While online education has revolutionized learning by increasing educational access and opportunities to students, it has also led to an increase in classroom diversity, leaving instructors to struggle with how to create and foster a culturally relevant and responsive learning environment. In this paper, as an online educator who teaches graduate level Education courses, I examine culturally relevant pedagogy and reflect on my practices that focus on diversity, equity, and social justice. I will conclude by sharing strategies that educators can utilize in creating culturally relevant and responsive online courses
Fast Genetic Algorithm For Feature Selection — A Qualitative Approximation Approach
No full textWe propose a two-stage surrogate-assisted evolutionary approach to address the computational issues arising from using Genetic Algorithm (GA) for feature selection in a wrapper setting for large datasets. The proposed approach involves constructing a lightweight qualitative meta-model by sub-sampling data instances and then using this meta-model to carry out the feature selection task. We define "Approximation Usefulness" to capture the necessary conditions that allow the meta-model to lead the evolutionary computations to the correct maximum of the fitness function. Based on our procedure we create CHCQX a Qualitative approXimations variant of the GA-based algorithm CHC (Cross generational elitist selection, Heterogeneous recombination and Cataclysmic mutation). We show that CHCQX converges faster to feature subset solutions of significantly higher accuracy, particularly for large datasets with over 100K instances. We also demonstrate the applicability of our approach to Swarm Intelligence (SI), with results of PSOQX, a qualitative approximation adaptation of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method. A GitHub repository with the complete implementation is available2. This paper for the Hot-off-the-Press track at GECCO 2023 summarizes the original work published at [3].References[1] Mohammed Ghaith Altarabichi, Yuantao Fan, Sepideh Pashami, Peyman Sheikholharam Mashhadi, and Sławomir Nowaczyk. 2021. Extracting invariant features for predicting state of health of batteries in hybrid energy buses. In 2021 ieee 8th international conference on data science and advanced analytics (dsaa). IEEE, 1–6.[2] Mohammed Ghaith Altarabichi, Sławomir Nowaczyk, Sepideh Pashami, and Peyman Sheikholharam Mashhadi. 2021. Surrogate-assisted genetic algorithm for wrapper feature selection. In 2021 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). IEEE, 776–785.[3] Mohammed Ghaith Altarabichi, Sławomir Nowaczyk, Sepideh Pashami, and Peyman Sheikholharam Mashhadi. 2023. Fast Genetic Algorithm for feature selection—A qualitative approximation approach. Expert systems with applications 211 (2023), 118528.© 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).</p
Spaces of contestation: the everyday experiences of ten African migrants in Cape Town
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.Xenophobia in South Africa is so overt that it has take a covert form. The 'xenocide' events that took place in 2008 were called xenophobic acts. It is the recurrent denialism of xenophobia on an everyday basis that this project has explored through the narrative accounts of ten African migrants in Cape Town. The lived everyday experiences of ten African migrants have brought forward the central argument of this thesis. From the data, it is evident that as a reponse to everyday pressures of prejudices and xenophobia in social and physical spaces, African migrants have developed mutable, unsettled and vagrant identities in order to cope with everyday low level violence. This argument emerged as four key stressors have been identified as the components of a more substantial explanation of xenophobia in South Africa. The four key components are: the enforcement of identity (national and group), the demarcation of spaces of belonging, the experiences of economic insecurity, and lastly a 'culture of violence' in South Africa. This thesis argues that these four stressors are the result of an on-going active process of xenophobic attitudes
Internationalization Of Higher Education: A Reflection On Success And Failures Among Foreign Universities In The United Arab Emirates
No full textGlobalization has affected many sectors of the society, including higher education. In the current global economy, higher education institutions face numerous challenges. Factors such as the increasing international competition, achieving higher ranking among global universities, and the pursuit of creating world-class institutions has had a significant impact on higher education institutions. While universities respond to these challenges differently, some higher education institutions are increasingly moving toward the internationalization of their campuses. Internationalization of higher education programs includes branch campuses, cross border collaborative programs, exchange of international students, and establishment of English-medium programs and degrees. Over the past decade, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has been on the receiving line of this phenomena. Internationalization of higher education has greatly affected the UAE as it continues to strive toward becoming a leading education hub in the Middle East. Until recently, the goal of the UAE has been to make higher education accessible to all students within the UAE by providing them with quality learning resources. However, over the past several years, in addition to providing its citizens with quality education, the country is working toward establishing itself as a world-class regional education hub through inviting prominent universities to set up campuses in the country. This paper examines the current trends in internationalization of higher education and analyzes the recent successes and some unanticipated outcomes of this phenomenon in the UAE
Enhancing The Quality Of Teaching And Learning Through Action Research
No full textIn every society, a great deal is expected from teachers. They are often expected to react sufficiently and proactively to the ongoing changes in the world and amend their instructional methods and resources to help students reach their academics potential. In today’s society, teachers are persistently in pursuit of developing ways to reach the new generation of students who are perhaps the most globalized and tech-savvy to date. While academic researchers continue to investigate and analyze current educational issues and trends, the products of these studies have limited practicality to classroom teachers. As a result, teachers are encouraged to collaborate with their colleagues and engage in action research in order to tackle issues specific to their classroom practices and teaching. Some examples of action research in educational settings include educators who wish to undertake research in their classrooms or schools for the purpose of improving teaching, to test educational theory, or to evaluate and implement an educational plan. In this paper, the authors will analyze action research as a method of intellectual inquiry in education settings. Furthermore, they will examine the common methodologies, data collection and analysis in action research and will illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of action research
Sublinear algorithms for massive data problems
No full textThesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-244).In this thesis, we present algorithms and prove lower bounds for fundamental computational problems in the models that address massive data sets. The models include streaming algorithms, sublinear time algorithms, property testing algorithms, sublinear query time algorithms with preprocessing, or computing small summaries for large data. More precisely, we study the following problems. The (Approximate) Nearest Neighbor problem models the task of searching among a large data set of objects. Given a data set of n points in a high dimensional space, its goal is to search for the closest point in the data set to a given query point, in sublinear time, and by suitably preprocessing the data. This problem has numerous applications in image and video databases, information retrieval, clustering, and many others. In these applications, the points model the objects in a large data set, and their closeness measure similarity between the objects. However, for the purpose of many applications, the basic formulation of Nearest Neighbor as described, encounters several challenges which we address in this thesis: we show how to deal with the case where the data is corrupted or incomplete, how to handle multiple related queries, and how to handle a data set of more complex objects rather than simple points. Next, we show a general approach for solving massive data problems. We introduce the notion of Composable Coresets, defined as small summaries of multiple data sets that can be aggregated together to summarize the whole data. We show how to compute such summaries for several clustering problems, and at the same time, demonstrate that no such summaries are possible for other natural problems such as maximum coverage. Finally, we study the Set Cover problem in alternate sublinear models: streaming algorithms (where one makes a small number of passes over the data using small storage), and sublinear time algorithms (where one computes the answer without reading the whole input). We present tight approximation algorithms for the Set Cover problem in both of these models. In this thesis, we introduce theoretical problems and concepts that model computational issues arising in databases, computer vision and other areas. Most of the presented algorithms are simple and practical to implement.by Sepideh Mahabadi.Ph. D
Feature engineering for microstructure-property mapping in organic photovoltaics
No full textLinking the highly complex morphology of organic photovoltaic (OPV) thin films to their charge transport properties is critical for achieving high performance material system that serves as a cost-efficient approach for energy harvesting. In this paper, a novel unsupervised feature engineering framework is developed and used to establish reduced-order structure-property linkages for OPV films. This framework takes advantage of digital image processing algorithms to identify the salient material features of OPVs undergoing the charge transport phenomenon. These material states are then used to obtain a low-dimensional representation of OPV microstructures via 2-point spatial correlations and principal component analysis. It is found that in addition to the material PC scores, two distance-based metrics are required to complete the microstructure quantification of complex OPVs. A localized version of the Gaussian process (laGP) is then used to link the material PC scores as well as the two distance-based metrics to the short-circuit current of OPVs. It is demonstrated that the unsupervised feature engineering framework presented in this paper in conjunction with the laGP can lead to high-fidelity and accurate data-driven structure-property linkages for OPV films.This is a pre-print of the article Hashemi, Sepideh, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Stephen Casey, Ji Su, and Surya R. Kalidindi. "Feature engineering for microstructure-property mapping in organic photovoltaics." arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.01897v1. (2021). Copyright 2021 The Author(s). CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Posted with permission
Designing a locomotive device driven by a shape memory alloy composite: a mimicry of the caterpillar movement
No full textThe materials we encounter in our every day lives already extend beyond the traditional materials of wood, metal, ceramics and glass. The characteristics and behavior of materials and material composites are continuously being tweaked. The introduction of new materials that can respond to inputs from the environment has brought about a new movement for material development and interaction design: computational composites. A computational composite is capable of sensing inputs from the environment, processing and controlling the consequent expression or formation of the material.The aim of the thesis was two-fold: to design and develop a soft bodied mechanism inspired by the movement of a caterpillar, using a Shape Memory Alloy-based (SMAs) composite, and to design material concepts based on the qualities of the composite.This was an explorative project, investigating the application of a bio-inspired approach and the Material Driven Design (MDD) approach to the development of a moving material.The first phase of the project focused on uncovering the technical aspects of a SMA-based composites and its relation to a computational composite. To understand caterpillar locomotion, a thorough study on its anatomy and locomotion strategies was performed. A qualitative study on howdesigners interpret caterpillar-like motion lead to four interesting movements, which were further developed in moving SMA-based composites from silicone and 4D printed textile.One SMA-based composite was selected for further improvement of the mechanism to be capable of translational caterpillar-like motion.The mechanism can also be interpreted and applied in other ways, and thus the experiential characteristics of the material were uncovered to define a material experience vision for further applications. Through a creative session and ideation phase three material concepts were proposed, suited for three types of user input on the computational composite: none, indirect and direct.The ultimate purpose for the material would be to sensitize people to the idea of a world where materials move from passive objects to active elements in our daily lives. It is recommended to do more research on the composite and to apply the materials experience vision to applications beyond every day objects and into the more innovative field of computer interface design and human-material interaction.Integrated Product Desig
Designing a recyclable impact resistant tablet cover
No full textThis thesis looks into the application of self-reinforced polypropylene (SRPP) in a tablet cover for the company Gecko Covers. Gecko Covers is a company that provides protection for devices in the form of covers and sleeves. They are performing at their best in the tablet market. They would like to enter the impact resistant tablet cover market using an impact cover that is both impact resistant and stylish. Their product style is characterized by the usage of contrast in both material texture and color, simple shapes and an attention to detail. Based on a market analysis, the tablet user on the go is selected as target group. These people carry their tablets with them wherever they go. To differentiate from the current competitors in this tablet market segment, Gecko has to focus on reducing the environmental impact of the new cover by e.g. making it recyclable. The most important material properties for the impact cover are high toughness, low density and a minimum ductile-to-brittle temperature of -20 °C. Not only does SRPP meet these requirements, it is also recyclable as it is only made out of a single type of thermoplastic. The manufacturing process of producing laminates out of woven SRPP influences the material properties such as impact resistance. Literature research shows that a combination of hot compaction and film stacking improves the impact resistance of the SRPP laminate the most. The values of the other parameters which influence the material properties of the laminates were determined through trial and error. To evaluate the SRPP laminates, a bending fatigue test and an alternative Izod impact test were conducted. In the end, the laminates with a compaction temperature of 170 °C, a pressure of 1,73 bar, an active heating time of 5 min and 1 PP film layer in between the SRPP fiber layer are the toughest and ductile. The focus of the design was on a minimum viable product. A back structure inspired by those of suitcases, the screen edge and the regular corners and edges of the cover were all taken into account. To validate that the shape is manufacturable from SRPP, a proof of concept was made with a mold. Furthermore, this proof of concept was tested via a drop test to get more information about the actual performance of the SRPP layer and to determine which orientation would have the highest impact resistance. The drop test showed the importance of the screen edge, which was missing from the proof of concept as it cannot be made out of SRPP. The test also showed that the SRPP lacked damping. To add the screen edge and the damping to the product, additional injection molded PP was used in order to add the screen edge and damping elements to the product. The final design was inspired by natural Voronoi structures and also creates a contrast in material texture and color, matching the current style of Gecko Covers.Integrated Product Desig
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