CFC (Comment-First-Coding) - A Simple yet Effective Method for Teaching Programming to Information Systems Students

Programming courses have always been a difficult part of an Information Systems curriculum. While we do not train Information Systems students to be developers, understanding how to build a system always gives students an added perspective to improve their system design and analysis skills. This teaching tip presents CFC (Comment-First-Coding) – a method for assisting students with information systems design and development tasks where a significant portion of the goal is to actually build the system using a programming language and development environment. CFC uses a scaffolding strategy for building programs where the using the comment construct of the programming language. In CFC, the first step students perform is to describe the programming task via plain English (or any other natural language) inside comments. The CFC process strategically and incrementally builds on this method to gradually add functionality and complexity to the program, while allowing the student to compile and test every individual step. In multiple offerings of a sophomore level data structures course, this method has provided evidence of improved student performance

Provenance in Software Engineering - A Configuration Management View

Information provenance is a mechanism for tracing and verifying sources of information. In software development, provenance can be seen in two dimensions: (a) traceability among different versions of the same artifact and (b) traceability among various artifacts across system lifecycle. Maintaining the provenance, including the history of changes and the rationale of changes, are critical in assessing change requests, identifying of appropriate products/builds, and ensuring configuration integrity. Although some Configuration Management (CM) tools support a form of provenance by keeping logs of changes, such logs are proprietary and cannot be migrated to other systems if needed. In this research, we demonstrate how provenance can be achieved in configuration management by binding an artifact to its traceability and evolution information and storing such information in XML-based metadata, so that the information can be moved along with the artifact from one CM tool to another

AMCIS 2007 Panel Summary: The Promise of RFID Technologies

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has started to revolutionize the way today\u27s organizations do business. Since its highly publicized adoption by Wal-Mart, several companies have started using RFID in their supply chains with varying results. On the academic level, many new research streams have been launched concerning the applications of RFID in business. However, whether or not the academic community is ready to adopt this technology itself remains a question. To consider the future of this technology in research and industry alike, the authors organized two panels on the topic of the promise of RFID technologies at the 2007 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) held in Keystone, Colorado. They also demonstrated the capability of the technology using a proof-of-concept pilot system as a means for providing added services to conference attendees. This article reports on the two panels, as well as on the results from the pilot experiment

Improving Accessibility of Educational Content - An Exploratory Data Analysis

A recent increase in settlements resulting from violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has resulted in institutions developing processes for improving course material accessibility. We analyze data from about 1670 sections of courses offered at a US school of business, spanning over 9 semesters that include numerical accessibility scores for various components of the course material. We combine this data with student performance and faculty evaluation data from the same period. In our analysis we observed improvement in overall accessibility scores, yet noticed statistically significant reduction in student performance as well as instructor evaluations. We document that one possible explanation for this result can be linked to the drastic reduction of course materials. We conclude that instead of relying only on a measure of accessibility, faculty should be involved in a multi-faceted process that includes communication and training to identify and improve issues with accessibility in course content

Characterization of wide-bandgap SiC field effect transistors and their active gate driving circuit in high power applications

Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices are slowly becoming one of the most reliable choices for high power density, high switching frequency applications with higher efficiency than Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Silicon (Si) devices. For a wide range of applications, such as Electric Motor Drives, Switching Power Supplies, and Renewable Energy Circuits, SiC devices are being tested and are found to yield prominent results.In this research, the characterization of two similarly rated commercially available SiC devices - a trench Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) and a cascoded Junction Field Effect Transistor (JFET) are done. It is followed by a comparative analysis of both devices. Firstly, a Conventional Gate Drive (CGD) circuit is implemented, followed by the proposal and implementation of an Active Gate Driver (AGD) circuit. Both the devices are characterized for the CGD and AGD topologies to predict whether the proposed circuit improves the device performance, based on dI/dt and dV/dt characteristics. Switching characteristics during turn-on and turn-off for both the CGD and AGD topologies are compared and it is observed that the proposed AGD circuit does minimize the switching losses. The proposed AGD topology follows a simple design of using an N-channel MOSFET (NMOS) with a series resistor in parallel with the turn-on branch and a P-channel MOSFET (PMOS) with a series resistor in parallel with the turn-off branch of the gate driver circuit of the device under test (DUT). Characterization of the DUT is done using SPICE models of the devices for a comparative study. It is followed by the design of a printed circuit board (PCB) to implement both the CGD and AGD topologies which is compatible with both the DUTs. The DUTs are chosen as such that their characteristics are very similar to one another for an accurate comparative analysis. The devices are tested at rail voltages from 200V to 800V and at inductor currents from 10A to 60A. A detailed analysis shows a reduction in switching losses and shortening of the miller plateau in the proposed AGD circuit when the switching is made faster whereas over-voltage and over-current reduction when the switching is slowed down. Thus the proposed AGD circuit can be used to either speed up switching to minimize losses or slow down switching to mitigate noise issues dynamically during circuit operation, which was the intended purpose of this research