Armed with innovation grants, Glendale Community College will be scaling up an automated system to help students with career guidance; Irvine Valley College will expand its pathways work with veterans; and College of the Redwoods will build up a program for incarcerated students. These three California institutions, as well as eight others, have been awarded grants ranging from $1 million to $3 million by the California Community Colleges Board of Governors to help them grow programs with a track record for boosting student success.
Carnegie Mellon University has unveiled plans to launch an undergraduate degree program in artificial intelligence this fall. Offered through the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, the program will be the first undergrad degree in AI offered in the nation, according to information released by the university.
A new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce and the Century Foundation offers a simple standard by which to determine the worthiness of a college education. The basic idea: to measure college programs and determine whether they'd allow degree-holders to attain middle class earnings and recoup their education costs within 10 years of graduating.
Cornell University's Department of Sociology is offering five large introductory courses that have been reimagined as part of the College of Arts and Science's Active Learning Initiative. The initiative is remaking discussion sections and lectures, in part by better relating them to one another. Other changes include clicker polls, short data analysis assignments and "think-pair-share" activities.
Upcoming events include the Learning Impact Leadership Institute, the NISOD International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence and InfoComm 2018.
In a paper appearing in the journal Nature Biotechnology, researchers from MIT and Stanford University have described a new system they've developed for protecting the privacy of people who contribute their genomic data to large-scale biomedical studies. These studies are intended to uncover links among genetic variations in identifying the causes for diseases. The protocol is intended to help make currently restricted data available to the scientific community, potentially enabling secure genome crowdsourcing while still making sure individuals can contribute their genomes to a study without compromising their privacy.
A student team at Penn State University has created Aspire, an application to help students map out their college careers by offering A.I.-generated recommendations on experiences and skills needed for their dream jobs after graduation. Another team is using machine learning to scale up competency-based learning by integrating human and algorithmic grading for instant student feedback. These are two of the five prototypes students, faculty and staff at the university are working on as part of this year's Nittany A.I. Challenge. The artificial intelligence challenge is overseen by Penn State's EdTech Network, which builds relationships between the campus and industry.
A technical college in Washington has received National Science Foundation funding to expand its maker-based learning program. Bellingham Technical College received a $649,480 "Scholarships in STEM" grant to support the college's project, "Building Inclusive Maker Communities for Engineering Technology Students." The program will connect three cohorts of 12 low-income, academically talented students over the course of five years, who will participate in multi-year, extended projects.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is upgrading its network in an effort to better serve students and employees, streamline the network infrastructure and support emerging technologies like the Internet of Things. The university decided to deploy approximately 3,200 Aruba gigabit WiFi access points and Aruba 303H access points, which are designed specifically for housing and hospitality environments; Aruba access and core switches; network management solutions AirWave and I.M.C.; and ClearPass for additional security.
Smartphone shipments fell to 334.3 million in the first quarter of the year, down 2.9 percent compared to the same period last year, according to a new report from International Data Corp. Sales in China, where shipments dipped below 100 million for the first time since 2013, are largely behind the drop.