Understanding electrical circuits can be difficult for novices of all ages (Grotzer & Sudbury, 2000; Osborne, 1983; Shipstone, 1984; Tarciso Borges, 1999). Research shows that novices tend to have inadequate understandings of what happens at the level of atoms and electrons, leading to difficulty predicting the outcomes of electrical circuits...
In this dissertation, I explored the pedagogical content knowledge of in-service high school educators recently assigned to teach computer science for the first time. Teachers were participating in a professional development program where they co-taught introductory computing classes with tech industry professionals. The study was motivated by three questions: (1)...
As device sizes decrease, more functionality can be placed in an integrated circuit. Therefore, the design complexity of these circuits increases. To deal with complexity, designers move to higher abstraction levels. Currently, the highest abstraction level is the system-level. In our work we investigate the synthesis and verification problem at...
Live streaming media will form a significant fraction of Internet traffic in the near future. YouTube clips, animations and other video applications already account for more than sixty percent of Internet traffic and, at its current acceptance rate, streaming media could quickly surpass television in terms of the size of...
Process scaling has enabled the production of integrated circuits with millions of transistors. System-on-a-Chip becomes feasible as more functionalities can be packed into a single chip. As the human brain power is limited, the design process of such sophisticated systems should be automated in order to meet the stringent design...
High-performance scientific computing in a modern age uses parallel techniques at a scale of hundreds of thousands of processors. These large-scale applications have I/O system workloads that are primarily driven by small, sparse I/O operations. While parallel file systems have provided application developers with scalable peak I/O bandwidth for large,...
Living in a world where the machine and the Internet are ubiquitous, many people work and play online, in a world that is, ironically, often isolated and lonesome. While the Internet, as intended, connects us to information, products and services, it often draws us away from the rich connections that...
Constructing 3D objects from 2D images has been an active research area for decades. Given captured 2D information from various devices, different techniques were developed to assign 3D positions to the target object. However, methods for reconstructing a 3D model from a single 2D image remain largely manual and labor-intensive....
Self-assembly is the process by which objects autonomously assemble into complexes. It is believed that self-assembly technology will ultimately permit the precise fabrication of complex nanostructures. Of particular interest are self-assembly systems that are highly programmable. That is, we can view a self-assembly system as analogous to a program, the...
Spatial-temporal data mining, with data driven model and machine learning techniques, significantly benefit the traditional transportation research. This dissertation focus on three problems related to uncertain location data, lane-level traffic speed clustering and anomalous traffic speed prediction.
We take a first step towards combining the uncertain location data i.e., fusing...