The City Museum is housed inside a once-abandoned 600,000 square foot building in St. Louis, MO. The museum is the brainchild of sculptor artist Bob Cassily. The museum describes itself as an “eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel” (

As we are re-designing the Vialogues application in order to improve its effectiveness in supporting educational dialogues, the following research is particularly relevant:C. Clark, N. Strudler, and K. Grove (2015). Comparing Asynchronous and Synchronous Video vs. Text Based Discussions in an Online Teacher Education Course. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Network, Vol. 19, Issue 3.In this research, the authors compared a text-based ...

Since Amazon launched their cloud computing business AWS ("Amazon Web Services") in 2006 they have been striving to broaden and deepen their offerings. By broadening I mean allowing greater and greater access to the cloud whether that is geographically, or from an ever increasing range of devices. By deepening I mean allowing for a greater complexity of services provided. This has been part of their strategy to become the premier cloud computing company. It's safe to say (for better or for worse) that Amazon has succeeded in their strategy. This year's ...

Thanks Gonzalo and Pan for a great wall!

This paper talked about results of comparing different machine learning techniques in classification problem. The results are interesting and somehow expected. Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) performed best overall. Also, feature selection is a a great factor for any algorithm. Selecting irrelevant features will have a huge impact on any of them and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) suffered most. Apply some sort of filter before using features as it is very important, especially for ...

The AWS Summit last week introduced to us some great tools for creating and maintaining scalable cloud-based products on AWS. In building scalable products on cloud, developers are faced with a few challenges that are insignificant when working with single-instance servers. These challenges include quick configuration of multiple servers, quick codebase deployment, performance monitoring, autoscaling, etc. The three most relevant tools introduced were CloudFormation, Elastic BeanStalk and OpsWorks. All of them belong to the Deployment & Management section of AWS. They are tools for develop...

The following is the first part of my review on conversation modeling. Please feel free to highlight any ideas, feedback or recommendations. The hidden Markov models are widely used in the field of speech recognition, bioinformatics and so on. In the paper “Unsupervised Modeling of Twitter Conversations” by Ritter et al. (2010), it was applied to model Twitter conversations. Here is the plate diagram of this model. Here are my understandings of what this plate diagram means:

Link: THE SCIENCE BEHIND YOUR IDEAL WORK ENVIRONMENT. I want to share this blog post. This does not really talk about library space but the ideal productive environments is interesting: ambient noise, dim light , individual messy desk and warm room is the perfect work/ study environment.

Why are faculty unenthusiastic about almost all learning management systems? Check out this thorough description of the limitations of such systems.