University of North Carolina at Charlotte

About: University of North Carolina at Charlotte is a education organization based out in Charlotte, North Carolina, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 8772 authors who have published 22239 publications receiving 562529 citations. The organization is also known as: UNC Charlotte & UNCC.

Review of Pathways for Building Fire Spread in the Wildland Urban Interface Part I: Exposure Conditions

Abstract: While the wildland–urban interface (WUI) is not a new concept, fires in WUI communities have rapidly expanded in frequency and severity over the past few decades. The number of structures lost per year has increased significantly, due in part to increased development in rural areas, fuel management policies, and climate change, all of which are projected to increase in the future. This two-part review presents an overview of research on the pathways for fire spread in the WUI. Recent involvement of the fire science community in WUI fire research has led to some great advances in knowledge; however, much work is left to be done. While the general pathways for fire spread in the WUI (radiative, flame, and ember exposure) are known, the exposure conditions generated by surrounding wildland fuels, nearby structures or other system-wide factors, and the subsequent response of WUI structures and communities are not well known or well understood. This first part of the review covers the current state of the WUI and existing knowledge on exposure conditions. Recommendations for future research and development are also presented for each part of the review.

Experimental evaluation of an educational game for improved learning in introductory computing

Abstract: We are developing games to increase student learning and attitudes in introductory CS courses. Wu's Castle is a game where students program changes in loops and arrays in an interactive, visual way. The game provides immediate feedback and helps students visualize code execution in a safe environment. We compared the game to a traditional programming assignment in an introductory CS course. In our study, half of the students were randomly selected to play the learning game first and half to write a program first. Our results show that students who play our learning game first outperform those who write a program before playing the game. Students in the game-first group felt they spent less time on the assignments, and all students preferred the learning game over the program. These results suggest that games like Wu's Castle can help prepare students to create deeper, more robust understanding of computing concepts while improving their perceptions of computing homework assignments.

Attention Mechanism Exploits Temporal Contexts: Real-Time 3D Human Pose Reconstruction

Abstract: We propose a novel attention-based framework for 3D human pose estimation from a monocular video. Despite the general success of end-to-end deep learning paradigms, our approach is based on two key observations: (1) temporal incoherence and jitter are often yielded from a single frame prediction; (2) error rate can be remarkably reduced by increasing the receptive field in a video. Therefore, we design an attentional mechanism to adaptively identify significant frames and tensor outputs from each deep neural net layer, leading to a more optimal estimation. To achieve large temporal receptive fields, multi-scale dilated convolutions are employed to model long-range dependencies among frames. The architecture is straightforward to implement and can be flexibly adopted for real-time applications. Any off-the-shelf 2D pose estimation system, e.g. Mocap libraries, can be easily integrated in an ad-hoc fashion. We both quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate our method on various standard benchmark datasets (e.g. Human3.6M, HumanEva). Our method considerably outperforms all the state-of-the-art algorithms up to 8% error reduction (average mean per joint position error: 34.7) as compared to the best-reported results. Code is available at: (https://github.com/lrxjason/Attention3DHumanPose)

Vacuum microelectronics

Abstract: An overview of the progress, problems, and potential of vacuum microelectronics is presented. Particular attention is given to fabrication processes. It is emphasized that vacuum microelectronics represents a promising field with many potential applications niches (i.e. with intrinsic advantages over other technologies), rather than a single great revolution comparable to that of silicon. Important research problems that remain and potential applications are discussed. >

Temperature Rise Associated with Adiabatic Shear Band: Causality Clarified.

Abstract: One of the most important issues related to adiabatic shear failure is the correlation among temperature elevation, adiabatic shear band (ASB) formation and the loss of load capacity of the material. Our experimental results show direct evidence that ASB forms several microseconds after stress collapse and temperature rise reaches its maximum about 30 μs after ASB formation. This observation indicates that temperature rise cannot be the cause of ASB. Rather, it might be the result of adiabatic shear localization. As such, the traditional well-accepted thermal-softening mechanism of ASB needs to be reconsidered.