Motivation and Background. Advance in healthcare has led to longer life expectancy and so-called aging population trend. Statistics in Taiwan have shown that the percentage of population over 65Y is expecting to increase steadily from 8.5% of population (1,895,000 persons) in 2000 to 9.9% of population (2,357,000 persons) in 2010. This population aging trend is concurring with yet another social, economical trend of young adults, traditionally the main caretakers of their elders in Taiwan, living and working apart from their elder family members. Statistics in Taiwan have shown that the percentage of 65Y+ elder population living with their children has declined steadily from about 61% in 1992 to 51% in 2002. These two social trends give rise to a need to utilize intelligent sensing, computing, wireless technology to assist elder population to live independently, safely, and comfortably at their own home for as long as possible; at the same time, should provide remote family members the peace of minds to closely monitor and attend to physical and mental well-beings of their elders anytime, anywhere. It should be able to eliminate “geological distance” in the provision of physical and mental healthcare between elder population and their care-givers. In order to reduce the “geological distance”, we propose a home-based care system shown below.
Motivation and Background. The main motivation for the articulation agreement was the desire to create a pipeline for students with two year ET degrees, who are mostly place-bound due to job and family responsibilities to get their BS-ET degrees without having to relocate to the Greater Atlanta/Marietta area. The agreement benefitted from the timely coincidence of being worked out at the time the TCSG was switching from the quarter-based system to a semester-based system. The ET faculty at SPSU were able to play an instrumental role in assisting the TCSG with this conversion process which greatly facilitated the smooth articulation of the programs. The agreement became effective in the fall semester of 2011, which coincided with the transition of the TCSG system from a quarter-based system to a semester-based system. Page 25.352.3 The agreement calls for SPSU to deliver the upper-division curricula in EET, IET, and MET to students at the TCSG schools via distance learning. Students register for the Pre-Engineering Technology program at a participating TCSG school and upon completion of the first two years, they will have received approximately sixty credit hours towards the BS-ET degree. They then matriculate into SPSU and complete the upper division requirements for their particular degree program via distance education courses offered by the faculty at SPSU. Some laboratory classes can be offered online depending upon the major. When labs cannot be effectively delivered online, a low residency format will be offered on the SPSU campus. As the programs grow in enrollment we hope to partner further with the TCSG to offer the low residency laboratory format at selected TCSG schools. This agreement is in line with the missions of both SPSU and the TCSG, and is in line with the State's goal of providing state-of-the-art high-technology programs to its residents in rural areas. “The Technical College System of Georgia is a system of technical education, custom business and industry training, and adult education programs. Our programs use the best available technology and offer access to lifelong learning for all Georgians 2.” “The agency's primary objective is to create a well-educated, technically trained, and highly competitive workforce, thus ensuring economic success for both the state and its citizens. The TCSG commissioner, along with the State Board of Technical and Adult Education, which is composed of members from the state's thirteen congressional districts, and nine members a...
Motivation and Background. In recent decades, scientific and traditional observations of polar environmental and socio-economic systems have revealed a pace, magnitude, and extent of change that is unprecedented by many measures. These changes include rapid depletion of the cryosphere, shifts in ecological communities that threaten biodiversity while precipitating challenges to food security and resilience across northern communities. Climate and environmental impacts have effects not only within the Polar Regions but - because of the connections between the poles and lower latitudes - affect the entire global society. It is, for instance, widely accepted that the Southern Ocean is a major driver of the Antarctic climate with the circum- polar currents that isolate and insulate the continent, while through the flow of cold Antarctic bottom water currents it links the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. However, in the face of increased human presence and local pressure from climate change and pollution, high quality current and historic data from Polar Regions are becoming increasingly valuable by contributing to a global framework of scientific knowledge. Such a reliable framework is indispensable to effectively address pressing issues, such as the impact of increasing economic activities in a sustainable manner. Moreover, due to the harsh environmental conditions that characterize Polar Regions, such as extreme cold, limited accessibility of remote places, or polar night, the collection of data is often logistically difficult and expensive. But while often great care is taken in collecting and archiving data from specific public funded expeditions or scientific programs, the management of these data is still largely lacking coordination. As a consequence, the data that has been collected is fragmented across different institutions or data centers and is often very difficult to access and use. Europe has a long tradition of scientific interest in the Arctic and the Antarctic, and records can sometimes date back to the 19th century. These can provide irreplaceable benchmarks that are indispensable to understand the current rates of environmental change.
Motivation and Background. During the spring 2008 we attended the course heuristic optimization methods lectured by xxxxxxxxx Xxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx at Molde University College. This course was our introduction to the world of combinatorial optimization and heuristics, and it sparked our interest in this reaserch field. One part of the heuristics course was to apply a meta heuristic for solving the 0/1 Multiple Knapsack Problem. This work should result in a scientific article. It was during the work with our article Solving large Multiple Knapsack Problems using xxxx search (2008), we decided that we wanted a master thesis in the field of combinatorial optimization using meta heuristics. The choice of supervisor was then quite simple, xxxxxxxxx Xxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx is one of the leading reaserchers in combinatorial optimization and was therefore our main choice. Xxxx Xxxxxxxxxxx had many proposals for a master thesis, and in cooperation with him we finally chose the Integrated Production and Distribution Problem (IPDP) and solver parallelization. This thesis will continue the work presented in the Doctoral Thesis of Xx. Xxxxx Xxxxxx- moto (2009) (at UNICAMP, Campinas, Brazil). In his thesis he proposes an integrated model for the IPDP problem. This problem consists of the subproblems production and distribution, and when combined the new problem has increased complexity. Over the past couple of decades there has been a substantial increase in computing power in normal personal computers, ranging from a few mega hertz to giga hertz, and the computational power of modern PC’s can be multiplied with thousands over computers from the early 90’s. A couple of years ago there was a generation change in the CPU architecture which introduced the multi-core processors. As a result of this the clock- frequency on new processors are not increasing very much, instead the number of CPU-cores increases. These new multi-core processors are especially good on multi-tasking. Since all CPU-cores operate in parallel, several tasks can be run at the same time. In theory a dual- core CPU is twice as fast as a single-core CPU running at the same frequency. In practice this is true for the whole system with all its running processes, but for running a traditional single-threaded program, the performance gain a modern multi-core processor can give is very small compared to a single-core processor running at the same clock-frequency. This is because single-threaded applications only can utilize one CPU-core, which m...
Motivation and Background. For the past year, our team has successfully established a digital-healthcare prototype platform which canis applicable to assist elder population to live independently, safely, and comfortably at their own home for as long as possible. We have focused on utilizingutilized intelligent sensing, computing, and wireless technology to track the indoor positions of elders at home, focusing on developing algorithms for optimizing meanwhile using positional tracking accuracy and power efficiencya power efficient algorithm to save as much energy as possible. In addition, we have also designed and prototypedbuilt the activity tracking and proactive control given the constant streams of location data and environment sensors to identify activities of daily living (ADL) as well as the exceptional activities. In order to further provide remote caregivers or family members the peace of minds to closely monitor and attend to physical and mental well-beings of their elders, our goal aims at eliminating “geological distance” in the provision of physical and mental healthcare between elder population and their care-givers. Seamlessly integrated with our prior achievements of adaptive indoor localization system, our proposed location-aware interactive care wall system (shown in Figure 1) can further reduce the “geological distance,” thus increasing their face-to-face interaction so as to establish a more attentive health-care environment.
Motivation and Background. The main aim of the project is to take existing and worldwide on-going deployments as a foundation for a deep analysis from various perspectives to guide future research activities for IoT deployments. Without the absolute vital aspect of interoperability, a great amount of research investment could be wasted, because of probably unavoidable fragmentation of the market, in case of non-interoperable technical solutions. As a result, it is undoubtedly important to conduct key benchmarks and investigate existing roadmaps to deduce if all technical issues on validation and interoperability are considered in a sufficiently detailed form.
Motivation and Background. For the past year, our team has successfully established a digital-healthcare platform which can assist elder population to live independently, safely, and comfortably at their own home for as long as possible. We have utilized intelligent sensing, computing, and wireless technology to track the indoor positions of elders at home, focusing on developing algorithms for optimizing positional tracking accuracy and power efficiency. In addition, we have also designed and prototyped activity tracking and proactive control given the constant streams of location data and environment sensors to identify activities of daily living (ADL) as well as the exceptional activities. In order to further provide remote caregivers or family members the peace of minds to closely monitor and attend to physical and mental well-beings of their elders, our goal aims at eliminating “geological distance” in the provision of physical and mental healthcare between elder population and their care- givers. Seamlessly integrated with our prior achievements of adaptive indoor localization system, our proposed location-aware interactive care wall system (shown in Figure 1) can further reduce the “geological distance,” thus increasing their face-to-face interaction so as to establish a more attentive health-care environment.
Motivation and Background. Sustainability is one of the most pressing challenges for humans this century. For us humans to live susbtainably on Earth with its limited resources, we must be careful in monitoring and conserving resource consumption at a rate that Earth can naturally replenish them. This requires collective efforts from human beings in becoming aware of and adapting our everyday resource consumption lifestyle. We believe that digital technologies can play an important role in encouraging and motivating such collective efforts.
Motivation and Background. Since the 1960s, the UK Higher Education (HE) sector has undergone dramatic reforms from the end of free universal education to the internationalisation of higher education, and the evolution of the Widening Participation movement which was formed as a way of improv- ing HE participation for underrepresented and non-traditional learners, e.g., mature students, students with disabilities, or first generation students. In the aftermath of these reforms there have been significant transformations to the composition of the student population which may impact on students in terms of their outcomes, e.g., access, continuation, attainment, and progression. The expansion of the HE sector originated from the recommendations of the 1963 Xxxxxxx Committee report (Xxxxxxx, 1963) which called for the creation of new universities in order to expand the UK HE sector on the premise that every qualified young person should be given the opportunity to participate in HE (Xxxxxxxx, 1973). Following this period, increasing participation rates for underrepresented students became a top priority, beginning with the 1987 White Paper (White, 1987) which introduced the notion of fair access to HE for both old and young learners. The concept of increasing participation for all learners in terms of their access to HE was expanded by the 1997 Xxxxxxx Report which served as the foundation for the Widening Participation movement in the UK. The recommendations from the report included broaden- ing HE participation for non-traditional students, including students from minority ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and those students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Xxxxxxx and Xxxxxxx, 1997). However, while the WP movement was given initial priority, the publication of both the Xxxxx report (Xxxxx et al., 1999) and the Xxxxxx Review (Xxxxxx, 2006b) emphasised the need for skill expansion as well, calling attention to the relatively lower skill performance of the UK working age population, compared to the higher skill levels of adults in comparable countries like France and Germany. The Government response to tackling the problem of low skills led to the establishment of the Skills for Life strategy in 2003 and the Skills for Sustainable Growth strategy in 2010, both with main objectives to ensure the development of long-lasting, competitive skills of the UK working age population. Nevertheless, the UK skills deficit problem remains a persistent one, as revealed in a relatively...
