Several sites from around the world are being used operationally and are suitable for vicarious calibration of space-borne imaging platforms. However, due to the proximity of these sites (e.g., Libya 4), a rigorous characterization of the landscape is not feasible, limiting their utility for sensor intercalibration efforts. Due to its accessibility and similarities to Libya 4, the Algodones Sand Dunes System in California, USA, was identified as a potentially attractive intercalibration site for space-borne, reflective instruments such as Landsat. In March 2015, a 4-day field campaign was conducted to develop an initial characterization of Algodones with a primary goal of assessing its intercalibration potential. Five organizations from the US and Canada collaborated to collect both active and passive airborne image data, spatial and temporal measurements of spectral bidirectional reflectance distribution function, and in-situ sand samples from several locations across the Algodones system. The collection activities conducted to support the campaign goal is summarized, including a summary of all instrumentation used, the data collected, and the experiments performed in an effort to characterize the Algodones site. (C) The Authors.

There are many different types of gasifiers used for commercial or research purposes. These gasifier varieties differ in a number of ways, such as the direction of material flow or the physical chemical contact between the different species. These differences affect the modelling procedure and philosophy required to describe the gasification processes accurately. Honeywell wishes to incorporate a generic gasifier model into their UNISIM DESIGN engine to simulate gasifiers accurately and calculate certain properties. Such a model does however not yet exist. Presented in this document is a summary of the similarities and mutual properties among the different coal gasifiers, which allow for certain generic modelling procedures to be followed. The paper also highlights the discrepancies among these gasifiers and the areas where different modelling approaches should be followed. Apart from the specific gasifier characteristics, the phenomena of reaction kinetics, heat transfer and mass transfer were also investigated to ascertain their significance on gasifiers and specifically gasifier modelling. By following the guidelines provided in this paper, it should be possible to develop a generic gasifier model in any modelling environment. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Chemical Engineering / unrestricted

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Within computer science education, goal-oriented feedback motivates beginners to be engaged in learning programming. As the number of students increases, it is challenging for teaching assistants to cater to all the doubts of students and provide goals. This problem is addressed by intelligent visual feedback which guides beginners formulate effective goals to resolve all the errors they would incur while solving a programming assignment. Most current automated feedback mechanisms provide feedback without categorization, prioritization, or goal formulation in mind. Students may overlook important issues, and high priority issues might be hidden among other issues. Also, beginners are not well equipped in formulating goals to resolve the issues provided in the feedback. In this research, we address the problem of providing an effective, intelligent goal-oriented feedback to student's code to resolve all the issues in their code while ensuring that the code is well tested. The goal-oriented feedback would eventually implicitly navigate the students to write a logically correct solution. The code feedback is summarized into four categories in the descending order of priority: Coding, Student's Testing, Behavior, and Style. Each category is further classified into subcategories, and a simple visual summary of the student's code is also provided. Each of the above-mentioned categories has detailed feedback on each error in that category to provide a better understanding of the errors. We also offer enhanced error messages and diagnosis of errors to make the feedback very useful. This intelligent feedback has been integrated into Web-CAT, an open-source automated grading tool developed at Virginia Tech that is widely used by many universities. A user survey was collected after the students have utilized this feedback for a couple of programming assignments and we obtained promising results to claim that our intelligent feedback is effective. / Master of Science / Within computer science education, goal-oriented feedback motivates beginners to be engaged in learning programming. As the number of students increases, it is challenging for teaching assistants to cater to all the doubts of students and provide goals. This problem is addressed by intelligent visual feedback which guides beginners formulate effective goals to resolve all the issues they would incur while programming. Most current automated feedback mechanisms provide feedback without categorization, prioritization, or goal formulation in mind. Students may overlook important issues, and high priority issues might be hidden among other issues. Also, beginners are not well equipped in formulating goals to resolve the issues provided in the feedback. In this research, we address the problem of providing an effective, intelligent goal-oriented feedback to student’s code to resolve all the issues in their code. The goal-oriented feedback would eventually implicitly navigate the students to write a logically correct solution. The code feedback is modularized smartly to guide students to understand the issues easily. A simple visual summary of the student’s code is also provided to help students obtain an overview of the issues in their code. We also offer detailed feedback on each error along with enhanced error messages and diagnosis of errors to make the feedback very effective.

- Application of the UNCITRALArbitration Rules in practice This master thesis deals with the new trends in arbitration and their applicability by the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules as the most important ad hoc arbitration rules worldwide. The purpose of the master thesis is to clarify how UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules are applied in practice related to the new trends and compared to "rival" institutionalized arbitration rules. The aim of the master thesis is to determine which of these trends can be incorporated in the form of new provisions into the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules and to what extent such an amendment would be beneficial to the "user" of these rules. It is worth noting that the aim of the thesis is not to provide an exhaustive enumeration of all current trends in the arbitration. The thesis is divided into three parts; each part is made up of several chapters. The first part analyzes the basic elements of the arbitration, the differences between institutionalized and ad hoc arbitration as well as the basic elements of the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules. The second part deals with the new trends in arbitration: expedited procedure, summary procedure (summary dismissal) and consolidation of arbitrations. In the introduction, there is a list of all above-mentioned trends in the arbitration. In later...

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 27-30, 1997 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Stanford’s Space Systems Development Laboratory is developing methods for automated spacecraft health operations. Such operations greatly reduce the need for ground-space communication links and full-time operators. However, new questions emerge about how to supply operators with the spacecraft information that is no longer available. One solution is to introduce a low-bandwidth health beacon and to develop new approaches in on-board summarization of health data for telemetering. This paper reviews the development of beacon operations and data summary, describes the implementation of beacon-based health management on board SAPPHIRE, and explains the mission operations response to health emergencies. Additional information is provided on the role of SSDL’s academic partners in developing a worldwide network of beacon receiving stations.

Students receiving special education services occasionally experience problems with accessing adult services after graduation. Mandated by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act reauthorization of 2004, the summary of performance (SOP) is a document that should ideally provide necessary information to adult service providers on needed services and eligibility of a student after graduation. This project examined student-completed portfolios and teacher-completed SOP forms to determine which form was more useful for providing necessary documentation for eligibility. Participants were vocational rehabilitation (VR) counselors and special education teachers who evaluated a student-completed portfolio compared with a teacher-completed SOP form in an online survey. Variables assessed by VR counselors included (a) value of the information provided for determining eligibility, (b) value of the information provided for plan development, (c) value of the information provided for identifying functional limitations, (d) comprehensiveness of information, (e) usefulness for communicating with other professionals, (f) usefulness for communicating with family members, (g) usefulness in creating familiarity with student, (h) time required to conduct review, and (i) time required to read/comprehend the document compared to value. Special education teachers evaluated and compared a student-completed portfolio with a teacher-completed SOP form using a similar survey. Variables assessed by special education teachers included (a) value of the information provided for determining postsecondary goals, (b) value of the information provided for transition plan development, (c) value of the information provided for identifying functional limitations, (d) comprehensiveness of information, (e) usefulness for communicating with other professionals, (f) usefulness for communicating with family members, (g) usefulness in creating familiarity with student, (h) time required to conduct review, and (i) time required to read/comprehend the document compared to value. The results show that a student-completed portfolio was rated more favorably than a teacher-completed form on most variables. VR counselors reported receiving a more complete picture of a student in the student-completed form. Special education teachers rated the student-completed portfolio as higher in value than the teacher-completed SOP. Findings suggest the need for more research on a student-completed portfolio as an SOP.

Most existing Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems support only title-based searches and are limited in functionality when compared to today’s search engines. In this paper, we present the design of a distributed P2P information sharing system that supports semantic-based content searches of relevant documents. First, we propose a general and extensible framework for searching similar documents in P2P network. The framework is based on the novel concept of Hierarchical Summary Structure. Second, based on the framework, we develop our efficient document searching system, by effectively summarizing and maintaining all documents within the network with different granularity. Finally, an experimental study is conducted on a real P2P prototype, and a large-scale network is further simulated. The results show the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of the proposed system. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

A software Bug report contains information about the bug in the form of problem description and comments using natural language texts. Managing reported bugs is a significant challenge for a project manager when the number of bugs for a software project is large. Prior to the assignment of a newly reported bug to an appropriate developer, the triager (e.g., manager) attempts to categorize it into existing categories and looks for duplicate bugs. The goal is to reuse existing knowledge to fix or resolve the new bug, and she often spends a lot of time in reading a number of bug reports. When fixing or resolving a bug, a developer also consults with a series of relevant bug reports from the repository in order to maximize the knowledge required for the fixation. It is also preferable that developers new to a project first familiarize themselves with the project along with the reported bugs before actually working on the project. Because of the sheer numbers and size of the bug reports, manually analyzing a collection of bug reports is time-consuming and ineffective. One of the ways to mitigate the problem is to analyze summaries of the bug reports instead of analyzing full bug reports, and there have been a number of summarization techniques proposed in the literature. Most of these techniques generate extractive summaries of bug reports. However, it is not clear how useful those generated extractive summaries are, in particular when the developers do not have prior knowledge of the bug reports. In order to better understand the usefulness of the bug report summaries, in this thesis, we first reimplement a state of the art unsupervised summarization technique and evaluate it with a user study with nine participants. Although in our study, 70% of the time participants marked our developed summaries as a reliable means of comprehending the software bugs, the study also reports a practical problem with extractive summaries. An extractive summary is often created by choosing a certain number of statements from the bug report. The statements are extracted out of their contexts, and thus often lose their consistency, which makes it hard for a manager or a developer to comprehend the reported bug from the extractive summary. Based on the findings from the user study and in order to further assist the managers as well as the developers, we thus propose an interactive visualization for the bug reports that visualizes not only the extractive summaries but also the topic evolution of the bug reports. Topic evolution refers to the evolution of technical topics discussed in the bug reports of a software system over a certain time period. Our visualization technique interactively visualizes such information which can help in different project management activities. Our proposed visualization also highlights the summary statements within their contexts in the original report for easier comprehension of the reported bug. In order to validate the applicability of our proposed visualization technique, we implement the technique as a standalone tool, and conduct both a case study with 3914 bug reports and a user study with six participants. The experiments in the case study show that our topic analysis can reveal useful keywords or other insightful information about the bug reports for aiding the managers or triagers in different management activities. The findings from the user study also show that our proposed visualization technique is highly promising for easier comprehension of the bug reports.

Thesis (J.C.D.)--Catholic University of America. / Running title: The summary matrimonial process. Biographical note. Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-152) and index.