Implementation of a Hybrid Teaching Environment for a Traffic Engineering Course

Students learn in different styles. They learn via hearing and visualizing. They can also reflect and act upon what is presented to them. Afterwards, they start to reason in a logical and intuitive ways as well as memorizing and visualizing, and eventually building mathematical models. Teaching approaches also differ from one course to another and from one instructor to another. Some instructors tend to lecture, others demonstrate or discus while some focus on principles and applications. The quality of student learning process is controlled by the student’s own ability and previous preparation but it also depends on the affinity of the student’s learning style and the instructor’s teaching delivery style. This case study illustrates the transition of a four-thousand level traffic engineering course from a pure face-to-face to a hybrid environment. The implemented hybrid teaching style included one face-to-face weekly lecture besides another lecture being posted online as a YouTube video. Analytical comparisons were conducted between two offerings of the course: before and after the hybrid teaching style Implementation. Based on the presented results, including improved overall grades, student enrollment increase, and positive evaluation feedback, it can be concluded that the implementation process was successful.Cockrell School of Engineerin

Getting the most from NOvA and T2K

The determination of the ordering of the neutrino masses (the hierarchy) is probably a crucial prerequisite to understand the origin of lepton masses and mixings and to establish their relationship to the analogous properties in the quark sector. In this talk, we follow an alternative strategy to the usual neutrino--antineutrino comparison: we exploit the combination of the neutrino-only data from the NOvA and the T2K experiments by performing these two off-axis experiments at different distances but at the same $/L$, $$ being the mean neutrino energy and $L$ the baseline. This would require a minor adjustment to the proposed off-axis angle for one or both of the proposed experiments.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, Proccedings of Neutrino 2006 Conference, Santa Fe, New Mexico, June 13-19, 200

Trivalent Graph isomorphism in polynomial time

It's important to design polynomial time algorithms to test if two graphs are isomorphic at least for some special classes of graphs. An approach to this was presented by Eugene M. Luks(1981) in the work \textit{Isomorphism of Graphs of Bounded Valence Can Be Tested in Polynomial Time}. Unfortunately, it was a theoretical algorithm and was very difficult to put into practice. On the other hand, there is no known implementation of the algorithm, although Galil, Hoffman and Luks(1983) shows an improvement of this algorithm running in $O(n^3 \log n)$. The two main goals of this master thesis are to explain more carefully the algorithm of Luks(1981), including a detailed study of the complexity and, then to provide an efficient implementation in SAGE system. It is divided into four chapters plus an appendix.Comment: 48 pages. It is a Master Thesi

Physics Potential of the Fermilab NuMI beamline

We explore the physics potential of the NuMI beamline with a detector located 10 km off-axis at a distant site (810 km). We study the sensitivity to $\sin^2 2 \theta_{13}$ and to the CP-violating parameter $\sin \delta$ as well as the determination of the neutrino mass hierarchy by exploiting the $\nu_\mu \to \nu_e$ and $\bar{\nu}_\mu \to \bar{\nu}_e$ appearance channels. The results are illustrated for three different experimental setups to quantify the benefits of increased detector sizes, proton luminosities and $\nu_e$ detection efficiencies.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure

Semantic Heterogeneity Issues on the Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the traditional Web in which meaning of information is well defined, thus allowing a better interaction between people and computers. To accomplish its goals, mechanisms are required to make explicit the semantics of Web resources, to be automatically processed by software agents (this semantics being described by means of online ontologies). Nevertheless, issues arise caused by the semantic heterogeneity that naturally happens on the Web, namely redundancy and ambiguity. For tackling these issues, we present an approach to discover and represent, in a non-redundant way, the intended meaning of words in Web applications, while taking into account the (often unstructured) context in which they appear. To that end, we have developed novel ontology matching, clustering, and disambiguation techniques. Our work is intended to help bridge the gap between syntax and semantics for the Semantic Web construction