Recommender systems are now pervasive and seek to make profit out of customers or successfully meet their needs. However, to reach this goal, systems need to parse a lot of data and collect information, sometimes from different resources, and predict how the user will like the product or item. The computation power needed is considerable. Also, companies try to avoid flooding customer mailboxes with hundreds of products each morning, thus they are looking for one email or text that will make the customer look and act.

The motivation to do the project comes from my eagerness to learn website design and get a deep understanding of recommender systems. Applying machine learning dynamically is one of the goals that I set for myself and I wanted to go beyond that and verify my result. Thus, I had to use a large dataset to test the algorithm and compare each technique in terms of error rate. My experience with applying collaborative filtering helps me to understand that finding a solution is not enough, but to strive for a fast and ultimate one. In my case, testing my algorithm in a large data set required me to refine the coding strategy of the algorithm many times to speed the process.

In this project, I have designed a website that uses different techniques for recommendations. User-based, Item-based, and Model-based approaches of collaborative filtering are what I have used. Every technique has its way of predicting the user rating for a new item based on existing users’ data. To evaluate each method, I used Movie Lens, an external data set of users, items, and ratings, and calculated the error rate using Mean Absolute Error Rate (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). Finally, each method has its strengths and weaknesses that relate to the domain in which I am applying these methods.

The goal of this project was to develop a two-tiered application to solve the color communication problem. The first part is an Android application, which allows the user to deliver an image off a digital device via the gallery/device storage or the camera. The idea is that a user could bring in a digital image of their carpeting, walls or other furniture. An intelligent front end processes the image to extract meaningful color information. The second part of the solution implements a Tomcat-based web service that receives color information sent from the device and interfaces with a fabric database. Both tiers use OpenCV, an open-source real-time computer vision library, to implement search and comparison routines. The result is a solution that returns a selection of matching fabrics, including the use of similarity metrics to determine complementary colors.

Incorporating game elements into applications is one technique that appears particularly promising with regard to increased engagement. This process is referred to as gamification. The availability of inexpensive high quality flat panel displays has increased the use of digital signage in public places, and raises another interesting question: can the integration of smartphone app experiences with shared situated displays be used to encourage sustained engagement with users? This project investigates both of these opportunities as a way to encourage smartphone engagement. An existing campus app (that lacked an engaged user base) was enhanced with game features, and integrated into a series of situated displays. By comparing analytics data collected during the experiment, we can conclude that gamification encouraged engagement, but the impact of the shared displays was not conclusive.

played the basic version. Learner engagement did not differ based on gender or prior experience playing digital games. 76.1% of learners playing the full version agreed that ParabolaX helped them understand quadratic functions compared to only 50% of those who played the basic version.

Since health care has become an area of continued attention in the pursuit of reducing government waste, it is a natural candidate for the application of the systematic and data driven techniques defined by TQM, Six Sigma, Lean, and ISO 9001 philosophies. The nature of healthcare as a service necessary for wellbeing, the presence of 3^rd party payers, and the non-employee relationship between hospitals and healthcare providers contribute to presenting unique challenges when implementing quality improvement initiatives. This paper performs a literature review of the relationship between quality management practices and their effects on quality outcomes focusing on the unique challenges to implementing quality improvement initiatives in a healthcare setting. An approach is suggested using elements of TQM to create a standardized management structure and organizational focus (Irani et al., 2004; Taveira et al., 2003), lean to identify waste, six sigma to reduce redundancy and monitor processes so that small tests of change can be effectively monitored via the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle, and ISO 9001 to ensure that monitored processes are documented and enforced.

Previous studies have shown Baldrige Award (for Performance Excellence) winning hospitals to have better patient safety records than similar hospitals that have not won the Baldrige Award (Denney et al., 2009; Foster, 2011). We continue this investigation by comparing patient safety in hospitals that choose DNV accreditation to hospitals that choose another accrediting body. The DNV hospital accreditation organization “seamlessly introduces ISO 9001 quality methods into the hospital setting.” If the assumption is made that hospitals focused on standardization and process oriented quality improvement initiatives would choose the accreditation agency most closely aligned with its quality improvement philosophy, then DNV accredited hospitals would represent a more process-oriented population than their peers. This paper investigates whether a hospital’s investment in a formalized methodology of quality improvement translates into better performance on select AHRQ and SCIP measures of patient safety, patient satisfaction via the HCAPS survey, readmission rates for select conditions, and hospital acquired conditions by comparing DNV accredited to non-DNV accredited hospitals. I found significance in 6 of 61 metrics available in the data.

The following pipeline is used for the analysis:

The model is tested on a selected number of human disease genes. To assess the clinical risk of a specific disease the fly gene orthologs of the human disease genes are identified and extracted from the fly genome. The risk is calculated using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) trained from known mutations of the corresponding gene.

Here is the software currently used for the project:

a) Acquire Genome (Mapping and sorting): BWA, SAMTOOLS

b) Genes associated to diseases: AUGUSTUS (http://augustus.gobics.de/)

c) Calculation of likelihood of clinical risk (similarity of sequences): NCBI BLAST, HMMER

d) Gene-Environment Interaction Diagram: Programmed in HTML5.

This is a proof of concept study.

According to a 2008 survey conducted by the Washington, D.C. based Pew Research Center, 97% of children between the ages of 12 and 17 in the United States play computer, Web, portable or console games. Based on these numbers we can conclude young students like video games. Over the past few years, a new body of research has begun to develop, demonstrating how video games can have a positive impact on young people by stimulating their imagination and curiosity, and by encouraging the exploration of new concepts.

According to Gee [28], “Games give children the tools they need to explore complex systems and experiment with different possibilities and outcomes”. By using video games students can learn how to use facts to solve problems rather than simply memorizing data.

Two seemingly unrelated content areas in which handheld touch-­‐enabled devices appear to be drawing immediate attention are the areas of education and video games. Apple iPhones, iPads and similar products are rapidly finding their way into classrooms around the world. Many educators and educational institutions are trying to make use of these technologies in classrooms. The impact of technology in education remains to be formally studied.

Modern handheld touch-­‐enabled devices are also playing a role in changing the face of the video game industry. Instead of being preoccupied with fast twitch, highly realistic game experiences, running on dedicated game hardware platforms, (e.g. game console devices) and targeted at adolescent and young adult males, video game designers are finding that casual game genres have a broader appeal and could potentially have a more profound impact. These games, involving puzzles, or simple arcade experiences, run on smart phones and tablets, and have universal appeal across all age demographics. A recent report published by the mobile analytics firm Flurry indicates that these new smart phone platforms are rapidly replacing traditional dedicated video game platforms [41].

The focus of this study is the intersection of these two developments: the recent popularity of handheld touch-­‐enabled devices in education and video game content. In particular, the study aims to investigate the use of video games on handheld touch-­‐enabled devices in helping algebra students learn mathematical concepts related to the link between linear and quadratic functions.

The game used in this study, ParabolaX, is a new experimental mathematics educational game and runs on handheld touch-­‐enabled devices. In conducting the testing, the ParabolaX application gathered anonymous data from players to determine whether they were engaged, how well they understood the mathematical content, whether they understood the challenge, and whether they could apply an appropriate problem solving strategy to the challenge. The subject of the study was not the game player, but the effectiveness of the game itself.

The results of this research showed that the gap between genders is not very large, and both female and male students were very engaged with the use of ParabolaX. When the students were asked if the game helped them to understand the concept of quadratic functions, all females and 84% of the males agreed.

Thus, the main thesis can be stated as: An educational game developed for handheld touch-­‐enabled devices can be helpful in learning mathematics.

ADLib is a small communication framework that aims to simplify the construction of ambient displays built using the Arduino prototyping platform. The ADLib framework provides an easy-to-use library for communicating with an Arduino, allowing the user to focus on the construction and development of the display.

The framework consists of three main components:

• A protocol for encoding information to be sent from a host computer to the Arduino

• An Arduino library for receiving and parsing incoming data

• A desktop application for sending data to the Arduino

The purpose of this project was to develop a web based application that can enable users to explore data already stored in a database, using an interface familiar to many computer users. My approach was to represent database querying, through the use of a tree structure similar to that used in file explorers, such as in the Microsoft Windows operating system. The content displayed in the tree interface is displayed dynamically based on which nodes in the tree are opened. The developed solution was built using Microsoft Silverlight, C#, ASP.NET, LINQ to SQL, and SQL Server.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) was used as an example dataset. The BRFSS is state based and the world’s largest, on-going telephone health survey system, tracking health conditions and risk behaviors in the United States yearly since 1984. States use BRFSS data for a multitude of purposes, e.g., to identify emerging health problems and establish and track health objectives, or support health-related legislative efforts. For many states, this is the only data source on health-related behaviors. The BRFSS 2009 data contains 432,607 responses and 400 questions. The size of this dataset makes it both a challenge to study, yet full of interesting querying possibilities.

The application is accessible through this website: http://capstone.arivium.com/.

Lava consists of two main components: a server, and a set of application base classes. The server dynamically generates and caches application content from the source files. The base classes exist to provide functionality to application objects. The entire project is written in Groovy, a dynamic language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine.

Lava's primary focus is simplicity. Lava applications are composed of plain Groovy objects that inherit from one of Lava's base document classes. The base classes provide functionality that allows the application objects to include files, remote URLs, or other Lava objects through the use of tags in their markup. The combination of Groovy's compact syntax and Lava's built-in capabilities will allow a web developer to write compact, modular, reusable code.