Posts tagged technology
Graduating seniors give CU Boulder high marks
May 8th
The 2012 study is the latest edition of the senior survey, conducted 11 times since 1985 by CU-Boulder’s Office of Planning, Budget and Analysis, or PBA.
“The survey data clearly demonstrate that these students, from their perspective as seniors, judge the university in overwhelmingly positive terms,” said Michael Grant, CU-Boulder associate vice chancellor for undergraduate education. “CU-Boulder routinely invests a lot of time and energy in polling our senior students about their experiences, academic and otherwise, in order to continuously work toward improving those experiences.”
The online questionnaire was sent to 7,646 degree-seeking seniors and was completed by 2,890, or 38 percent, of the recipients. Comprising about 200 scaled items, plus four open-ended questions, the survey collected a massive amount of information including nearly 7,900 written comments.
The 2012 seniors’ ratings of CU-Boulder advising services were higher than those from any previous senior survey. The seniors’ satisfaction with numerous other CU-Boulder services, from libraries to information technology, was high and generally comparable to that of earlier cohorts.
“We use the survey results extensively to look at what’s popular and working well, to set goals to improve services, and even to pass along advice,” said Jim Davis Rosenthal, CU-Boulder director of orientation and director of the Office of Student Affairs Assessment. “Based on one of the survey questions, we are able to let incoming freshmen know what outgoing seniors wished they had gotten involved in. Other departments also use the results to encourage students to try opportunities they might not otherwise have considered. In a way, it’s like older siblings giving advice to their younger siblings.”
Large proportions of seniors said that if they were to start over at CU-Boulder, they would put more effort toward or spend more time on interacting with faculty (60 percent), career exploration (51 percent), and campus-related research projects, internships and applied experiences (45 percent).
Nearly two-thirds of seniors who expected to graduate by summer 2012 reported that their principal activity in fall 2012 was most likely to be paid employment, either full time (48 percent) or part time (15 percent). A combined 15 percent said they were most likely to be enrolled in graduate studies, professional school or other coursework. A combined 13 percent expected to go into military service, or pursue volunteer service, an internship, student teaching or travel.
The thousands of student comments included praise for various aspects of their major programs, suggestions for ways to enhance and improve major programs, and descriptions of ways in which their major program did or did not meet their educational goals.
One student wrote, “I feel that I am prepared to be an exceptional teacher after I graduate. The school had a lot to do with my preparedness.” Another wrote, “Excellent material, mostly great professors, and fantastic facilities all add up to a well-rounded education.”
The survey collects information on seniors’ satisfaction with their educational experiences at CU-Boulder and about their post-graduation plans. The survey’s findings are used primarily to provide systematic information for academic and service units to use in planning and improvement, and for use by prospective and current students, their advisers, and their families.
Preliminary results for the Seniors’ Future Plans Survey, which is separate from the comprehensive senior survey and which has been conducted each year since 2009, show a jump in full-time employment expectations. The initial data show that 54 percent of CU-Boulder seniors in 2013 expect full-time employment to be their principal activity after graduation, an increase from 48 percent in 2012. Expectations for part-time employment were reported by 15 percent of the 2013 seniors.
The 2012 questionnaire and comprehensive data from the senior survey, including summary reports from students in each of CU-Boulder’s schools and colleges and nearly 50 departments, are available athttp://www.colorado.edu/pba/surveys/senior/12/index.htm.
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CU study: Bug-eyed lenses capture wide view with no distortion
May 1st
To create the innovative camera, which also allows for a practically infinite depth of field, the scientists used stretchable electronics and a pliable sheet of microlenses made from a material similar to that used for contact lenses. The researchers described the camera in an article published today in the journal Nature.
Conventional wide-angle lenses, such as fisheyes, distort the images they capture at the periphery, a consequence of the mismatch of light passing through a hemispherically curved surface of the lens only to be captured by the flat surface of the electronic detector.
For the digital camera described in the new study, the researchers were able to create an electronic detector that can be curved into the same hemispherical shape as the lens, eliminating the distortion.
“The most important and most revolutionizing part of this camera is to bend electronics onto a curved surface,” said Jianliang Xiao, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at CU-Boulder and co-lead author of the study. “Electronics are all made of silicon, mostly, and silicon is very brittle, so you can’t deform the silicon. Here, by using stretchable electronics we can deform the system; we can put it onto a curved surface.”
Creating a camera inspired by the compound eyes of arthropods — animals with exoskeletons and jointed legs, including all insects as well as scorpions, spiders, lobsters and centipedes, among other creatures — has been a sought-after goal. Compound eyes typically have a lower resolution than the eyes of mammals, but they give arthropods a much larger field of view than mammalian eyes as well as high sensitivity to motion and an infinite depth of field.
Compound eyes consist of a collection of smaller eyes called ommatidia, and each small eye is made up of an independent corneal lens as well as a crystalline cone, which captures the light traveling through the lens. The number of ommatidia determines the resolution and varies widely among arthropods. Dragonflies, for example, have about 28,000 tiny eyes while worker ants have only in the neighborhood of 100.
Imitating the corneal lens-crystalline cone pairings, the camera created by Xiao and his colleagues has 180 miniature lenses, each of which is backed with its own small electronic detector. The number of lenses used in the camera is similar to the number of ommatidia in the compound eyes of fire ants and bark beetles.
The electronics and the lenses are both flat when fabricated, said Xiao, who began working on the project as a postdoctoral researcher in John Roger’s lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This allows the product to be manufactured using conventional systems.
“This is the key to our technology,” Xiao said. “We can fabricate an electronic system that is compatible with current technology. Then we can scale it up.”
The lens sheet and the electronics sheet are integrated together while flat and then molded into a hemispherical shape afterward. Each individual electronic detector and each individual lens do not deform, but the spaces between the detectors and lenses can stretch and allow for the creation of a new 3-D shape. The electronic detectors are all attached with serpentine filament bridges, which are not compromised as the material stretches and bends.
In the pictures taken by the new camera, each lens-detector pairing contributes a single pixel to the image. Moving the electronic detectors directly behind the lenses — instead of having just one detector sitting farther behind a single lens, as in conventional cameras — creates a very short focal length, which allows for the near-infinite depth of field.
The new paper demonstrates that stretchable electronics can be used as the foundation for a distortion-free hemispherical camera, but commercial production of such a camera may still be years away, Xiao said.
The three other co-lead authors of the paper are Young Min Song, Yizhu Xie and Viktor Malyarchuk, all of the University of Illinois. Other co-authors are Ki-Joong Choi, Rak-Hwan Kim and John Rogers, also of Illinois; Inhwa Jung, of Kyung Hee University in Korea; Zhuangjian Liu, of the Institute of High Performance Computing A*star in Singapore; Chaofeng Lu, of Zhejiang University in China and Northwestern University; Rui Li, of Dalian University of Technology in China; Kenneth Crozier, of Harvard University; and Yonggang Huang, of Northwestern University.
The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation.
CU news release
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