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The research focus of my master’s program investigates the interaction of two types of glazes: shino and ash.

Despite substantial amount of research in software process improvement (SPI) and a wide variety of SPI approaches and software process maturity models, many of the SPI initiatives still fail. This is mainly because the improvement projects are found to be far more complex than expected from the beginning. They embrace a myriad of various organizational, managerial, process, and social properties that need to be considered, such as clear directions, full commitment, continuous sponsorship, and dedicated resources. Some of those properties have been already widely known within SPI arena while others have not yet been recognized. This paper identifies the properties that need to be fulfilled for making SPI projects successful and puts them into an SPI Checklist to be used in the assessment of SPI projects. It then reports on its pilot evaluation within 10 SPI projects at Rolls Royce. The evaluation results show a strong relationship between the fulfillment of the checklist items by the projects studied and the success rates of those projects. Thereby, the results provide a strong proof of concept demonstrating that the success of SPI projects is no accident but a foreseeable outcome of clearly identified and assessable characteristics., Updated from manuscript to article in journal.QC 20160201

Remote sensing is one of the tools used in precision agriculture to map the spatial variability of crops at critical grow stages. Remote sensing using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) enables the collection of high resolution imagery to aid in the precision agriculture decision management process and has demonstrated the detection of crop water stress, crop yield estimation, phenotyping and disease detection. However, the commercial adoption of UAV in precision agriculture to date has been limited due to a number of factors including technical and data interpretation challenges, UAV regulations and economic factors. To aid in the adoption and ease of use of UAV for Precision Agriculture, this work addresses two fundamental technical challenges i) reliable remote sensing image acquisition and ii) automated image processing. Accurate forward and side overlap between images ensures robust geometry is captured for image feature matching and stitching. To ensure reliable image acquisition, we implemented an adaptive intervalometer UAV photogrammetric payload system that adjusts image acquisition in real-time to accommodate ground speed and altitude variations. The adaptive intervalometer, evaluated on a multirotor and fixed-wing platform, achieved an image forward overlap RMSE of 0.84% and 2.26% respectively, which is a significant improvement in accuracy compared to the commonly used time-based intervalometer. To illustrate the effectiveness of the UAV payload, the adaptive intervalometer was used to simultaneously collect high resolution thermal and multispectral imagery to detect crop water stress status in an orchard. Several studies have demonstrated that high-resolution visual/near-infrared (VNIR) vineyard maps can be used as a PA tool for multi-temporal monitoring of vineyard spatial variability, shape and vigor to aid in the application of variable-rate treatments and irrigation scheduling. Generating vineyard maps requires separating vine pixels from non-vine pixe

Beginning in the summer of 2013, media reports of foreign intelligence activities conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) have been widely published. The reports have focused on two main NSA collection activities approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. The first is the bulk collection of telephony metadata for domestic and international telephone calls. The second involves the interception of Internet-based communications and is targeted at foreigners who are not within the United States, but may also inadvertently acquire the communications of U.S. persons. As public awareness of these programs grew, questions about the constitutionality of these programs were increasingly raised by Members of Congress and others. This report provides a brief overview of these two programs and the various constitutional challenges that have arisen in judicial forums with respect to each. Constitutional challenges to the NSA's acquisition of Internet communications of overseas targets under FISA have arisen in a number of different contexts. First, such challenges have arisen in both the FISC and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review as part of those courts' roles in approving the parameters of these collection activities. Secondly, constitutional challenges have been brought in traditional federal courts as civil actions by plaintiffs asserting an injury or in criminal proceedings by defendants who have been notified that evidence against them was obtained or derived from collection under Section 702. While the FISA courts have at times curbed the government's ability to engage in surveillance activity to ensure compliance with the Fourth Amendment, other federal courts have not yet reached the merits of any constitutional challenges to these collection activities., CRS Report for Congress.