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October 25, 2023
Location: SB 156
Time: 12:00 pm
Presenter: Stephen Mattingly
Incorporating Evaluation into Research Projects and Training Programs
Abstract:
Many funders such as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health require either internal and/or external evaluation of research projects or training programs to improve the processes and outcomes of the funded activities. Principal investigators on such projects must include evaluation plans and budgets in their proposals, collaborate with evaluation teams to ensure quality evaluations for the funded project, and include evaluation reports in their periodic reports to the funder. Principal investigators may also choose to conduct evaluations of their projects even when they are not required by funders for continual quality assurance and improvement.
This presentation discusses program evaluation from grant application to project closeout for research and training grants. It explains what to expect from an evaluation team and an evaluation plan, including the various roles that an evaluator may perform during the life cycle of a project. The presenters discuss the differences between internal and external evaluators and the differences between process and outcome evaluation. We provide strategies for incorporating evaluation into research and training activities and provide examples from our program evaluation of the Houston DES AGEP project that includes TSU.
Participants will be able to:
Stephen Mattingly is a Professor in Civil Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA). He completed his B.S. in civil engineering in 1991 at Rice University and his MS at UTA in 1994. He completed his Ph.D. in 2000 from the University of California, Irvine. Dr. Mattingly is the Director of the Center for Transportation Studies at UTA and serves on the Executive Committee for the National Institute for Transportation and Communities and as the Associate Director of Research for the Center for Transportation Equity, Decisions, and Dollars. He has held previous positions at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks (UAF) and the University of Southern California.
He has authored more than 175 technical papers, conference proceedings, research reports, and book chapters. While at UAF (2000-2002), he served as the PI or co-PI on six projects. Since joining UTA, he has served as the PI and co-PI on over sixty projects totalling more than $10.4M in funding and including over twenty federal awards and fifteen state Department of Transportation (DOT) projects. He currently serves as an external evaluator for the National Science Foundation funded AGEP STRIDES Texas DES Alliance. His most recent research projects address a variety of interdisciplinary topics including transportation equity, transportation mobility for the transportation disadvantaged, developing an app for crowd-sourcing bicycle and pedestrian conflict data, transportation public health performance measures, data fusion of bicycle count data, nudging older adults to increase physical activity using technology, and the development of planning and transit performance measures for access to opportunities.
Light lunch will be served.
Quantum Computing and Space-Terrestrial Integration
Texas Southern University, TECH 316
10:00 am – 5:00 pm, August 11, 2023
Cyber Security Awareness Day. TSU Tech Building Rm 129 & 133, October 28th 2017, 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. Free of charge with Lunch.
Transportation Safety: Challenges for Continuing Improvement
Christopher Hart
Chairman of National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)
15:00 – 16:30, Thursday, February 16, 2017 Room 148 at Science Building
Abstract
The National Transportation Safety Board is the federal agency that investigates transportation accidents, determines the cause, and issues recommendations to prevent them from happening again. Transportation safety has generally been improving, except recently on our nation’s highways, and NTSB investigations have revealed several longstanding issues – namely, operator fatigue, distraction, and impairment — that must be addressed in order to continue improving safety. That will lead to the discussion of another issue – automation – that could theoretically help address the first three issues by reducing or eliminating the role of the human operator. However, several decades of automation development in various transportation modes, primarily aviation, as well as the recent introduction of automation onto our streets and highways, have demonstrated that automation introduces several of its own challenges. These challenges will be discussed, along with opportunities for learning from the successes and failures of prior automation experience to inform the process of automating cars, trucks, and buses.
Please download the flyer here .
CREST Seminar:
Perspective of IoT-based Healthcare Systems
Yo-Ping Huang
Department of Electrical Engineering National Taipei University of Technology
15:00 – 16:30, Thursday, February 2nd , 2017 Room 148 at Science Building
Texas Southern University.
Please download the flyer here.
The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) Research Lab hosts a state-of-the-art experimental research facility for WSN. The test-bed facility is used for the prototyping and evaluation of developed protocol solutions and serves as a basis for the development of novel mobile context aware services and applications. The test-bed consists of wireless sensor and actuator nodes that can be organized in different network topologies and individually configured for various experiments and uses the backbone infrastructure of the Wireless Network Test-bed.
The WSN Research Lab conducts research mainly on the problems at the network and application layer of various wireless ad hoc networks including smart grid communication networks (SGCNs), wireless mesh networks (WMNs), wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), online-social networks (OSNs) and underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWSNs). Specifically, researchers are working on energy efficiency, security, privacy, routing, graph mining, key management, connectivity, node placement, clustering, coverage, fault- tolerance, and QoS problems in these networks.
Wireless Sensor Networks provide a new paradigm for sensing and disseminating information from various environments, with the potential to serve many and diverse applications. Current WSNs typically communicate directly with a centralized controller or satellite. Students trained in this Lab will know how to make use of sensor related technology to make the world work as it does. Employment in the WSN technology field includes jobs such as Wireless Communication Technician, Sensor Networking Technician, Data Communications Technician, Systems Engineer, Website Administrator, Unix System Administrator, Java programmer, Database Administrator, Database developer, Computer Artist, Website Coder, Data Management Analyst just to name a few.
WSNs have garnered a considerable amount of attention over last half a decade, primarily due to the unique applications they enable. However, there is an important constraint on the operation of such networks – the energy source at sensors. Except for environments where an energy source can be harnessed in a low cost manner, the very survivability of WSNs depends upon how energy efficient the sensors operate while performing their required functions.
Web Development Lab
The Web Development Lab will offer a full range of professional web services, including:
Our professional artists and programmer collaborate to deliver stunning websites that meet the individual requirements of our clients. Whether you’re looking for a traditional TSU look with a few tweaks, or a highly creative identity, the Web Lab is here to help build a site that is both visually compelling, and in compliance with all University Web Standards. Web Development Laboratories tend to be scientific areas in the science industry which are used to appoint, carry through, or address assessment results.
Students in the Web development Lab
Unix Lab
UNIX was created in the 1970s by AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and has gone through design evolutions by both universities and companies. After more than 30 years of use, the UNIX operating system is still regarded as one of the most powerful, versatile, and flexible operating systems. Its popularity hinges on its simplicity, open standards design, its ability to run on a wide variety of machines, and its portability.
Students learning about Unix
Students performing labs
Students will conduct experiments where they will conduct, test and debug hardware and software components for computer networks. Students will study and test the standard protocols of LANs and WANs. Students will also analyze the design and operation of micro computer networks, including inter-networking, routers, and network management.
Electronic equipment
From classroom and lab instruction students will be able to perform duties necessary to manage assigned departmental computing and network resources including technology assessment and planning, systems analysis and design, evaluation and establishment of computing and computer training standards. Students will learn how to coordinate and provides expert technical consultation for the selection, evaluation, purchase, and installation of computing hardware, software, and supplies.
The department will now be able to host a number of research opportunities in the area of software development to meet real world goals and functions. This can help in the development of advanced technology and artificially intelligent systems.
Networking equipment
The second track, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science with Computer Networks Concentration, is for students who plan to have in-depth knowledge of today’s rapidly growing field of Computer Networks. Once they graduate, students pursuing this track will be ready to apply for leading industry certificates such as the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certificate which improves their competitiveness in today’s challenging job market where networking is an essential ingredient of almost every business.
The mission of our networking paradigm is to explore, design, develop, and study reliable, scalable, self-managing networks and systems. We have two goals: to engage in fundamental research that improves the state-of-the-art in networked systems design; and to help IT professionals build and deploy compelling networking concepts. Research spans mobile and wireless networks; wide area internet systems and protocols; datacenter, enterprise and home networks, network monitoring, inference, diagnosis, and network performance improvements and analysis. Research can investigate new connectivity paradigms emphasizing scenario-based research with rapid prototyping so that researchers can experiment with actual systems.
Multimedia Networking lab
Multimedia Networking lab setting
The Integrated Development Environment (IDE)Lab is designed to teach students how real- world problems can be solved using computer programming languages. Concepts and techniques covered include:
Data Representation and Number Systems Basic Components of Computer Systems Problem Solving Strategies
The IDE Lab will provide an environment that allows developers to gain awareness of each others activities within the collaborative software development space. The purpose of Collide is to allow software developers/collaborators a view of highly compact visualizations of each others actions on the source code artifacts which they are working on. Some possible applications of Collide include any software development project made up of two or more developers although we do not have to limit the scope to more than one developer as a fair bit of the information provided by Collide would be useful to single developer projects as well.
The mission of this IDE Lab is to explore, design, develop, and study reliable, scalable, self- managing systems. We have two goals: to engage in fundamental research that improves the state-of-the-art in IDE systems design; and to help IT professionals build and deploy compelling networking concepts. Research can span mobile and wireless networks; wide area internet systems and protocols; datacenter, enterprise, and home networks, network monitoring, inference, and diagnosis, and network performance improvements and analysis.
Database training
This lab’s main focus is:
Advanced programming techniques and data structures including tables, linked lists, queues and stacks, abstract data types, recursion, searching and sorting, hashing, binary trees.
External storage devices, file organization, file processing techniques.
Theory and current practices in database management systems, database design, data modeling and normalization, query optimization, functional dependencies, data integrity, and data security.
Data organizational models, including hierarchical and networked, with relational and semantic models stressed.
Traditionally, databases contain data that are both exact and highly structured. However, many modern applications (e.g., sensor networks, satellite images, Web text extraction) require the storage of data that have neither of these characteristics. The data may have contradictory pieces of information, and could be of only uncertain correctness. Dealing with uncertain data in an effective and systematic manner is a challenging and important issue that requires solutions for many different problems; for example, modeling of uncertain or probabilistic data, semantics for querying, and efficient query-evaluation algorithms.
Databases make sense, they bring and maintain order, they force the user to think in a very logical and linear path, and they are flexible. A database is truly an invaluable tool for any organization. There are a lot of research opportunities.
Students during the database class
The computing literacy lab
The Computer Literacy Lab is involved with training students in the fundamental concepts of computing: how computers work, what they can do, and how they can be used effectively. Topics covered in this laboratory are the following:
Students in the lab
Computers have touched every part of our lives: the way we work, the way we learn, the way we live, even the way we play. It almost is impossible to go through a single day without encountering a computer, a device dependent on a computer, information produced by a computer, or a word that was introduced or whose meaning has changed with the advent of computers. Because of the significance of computers in today’s world, it is important to be computer literate. Being computer literate means you have knowledge and understanding of computers and their uses.
Student learning the basics of computing
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