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This study evaluates the productivity improvements achieved using a generative artificial intelligence personal assistant tool (PAT) developed by Trane Technologies. The PAT, based on OpenAI's GPT 3.5 model, was deployed on Microsoft Azure to ensure secure access and protection of intellectual property. To assess the tool's productivity effectiveness, an experiment was conducted comparing the completion times and content quality of four common office tasks: writing an email, summarizing an article, creating instructions for a simple task, and preparing a presentation outline. Sixty-three (63) participants were randomly divided into a test group using the PAT and a control group performing the tasks manually. Results indicated significant productivity enhancements, particularly for tasks involving summarization and instruction creation, with improvements ranging from 3.3% to 69%. The study further analyzed factors such as the age of users, response word counts, and quality of responses, revealing that the PAT users generated more verbose and higher-quality content. An 'LLM-as-a-judge' method employing GPT-4 was used to grade the quality of responses, which effectively distinguished between high and low-quality outputs. The findings underscore the potential of PATs in enhancing workplace productivity and highlight areas for further research and optimization., Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures

A stable, reliable, and controllable orbit lock system is crucial to an electron (or ion) accelerator because the beam orbit and beam energy instability strongly affect the quality of the beam delivered to experimental halls. Currently, when the orbit lock system fails operators must manually intervene. This paper develops a Machine Learning based fault detection methodology to identify orbit lock anomalies and notify accelerator operations staff of the off-normal behavior. Our method is unsupervised, so it does not require labeled data. It uses Long-Short Memory Networks (LSTM) Auto Encoder to capture normal patterns and predict future values of monitoring sensors in the orbit lock system. Anomalies are detected when the prediction error exceeds a threshold. We conducted experiments using monitoring data from Jefferson Lab's Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). The results are promising: the percentage of real anomalies identified by our solution is 68.6%-89.3% using monitoring data of a single component in the orbit lock control system. The accuracy can be as high as 82%., Comment: 6 pages

The Intercultural Development Research Association (IDRA) was awarded an Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Early Phase grant from the U.S. Department of Education in 2017 to develop, implement, and test a promising program to improve student achievement and educational progress for high-need students: Reenergizing Leadership to Achieve Greater Student Success (Reenergize). Reenergize is intended to improve the achievement and educational progress of high-need students by selecting, training, coaching, and empowering principals and school leadership teams to be effective advocates, collaborators, and risk-taking innovators. This report provides findings from the EIR-funded Abt Associates implementation and impact evaluation of the Reenergize program in ten schools (four elementary, four middle, and two high schools) serving a total of 8,464 students around San Antonio, Texas. The implementation study assesses whether key intervention activities were implemented with fidelity. The comparative short interrupted time-series (C-SITS) impact study examines the effect of Reenergize on student academic success outcomes: attendance, reading/writing and math achievement, high school graduation, college and career readiness, and postsecondary enrollment. IDRA intended to implement Reenergize for three school years: 2019-20, 2020-21, and 2021-22. The COVID-19 pandemic, combined with high rates of teacher and administration turnover, severely attenuated the implementation of Reenergize. Over the three years of implementation, more than 60 principals and leadership team members received professional development services for a total of more than 250 hours of professional development. However, relatively few intervention schools experienced the full Reenergize program as designed. Consequently, Reenergize did not meet any of the program-level thresholds for adequate fidelity of implementation over the three years, and with the exception of attendance in Year 2 (2020-21), there were no statistically significant differences in educational outcomes based on a school's participation in the Reenergize program. Given the small school sample size, the evaluation's ability to detect small statistically significant effects is limited. Despite the challenges IDRA faced implementing Reenergize, IDRA learned valuable lessons that can inform future efforts. Assessing stakeholder capacity and aligning the program to fit within this capacity, cultivating district and school champions to advocate for and support the program, and flexibly adapting to shifting stakeholder needs are crucial when implementing a program in this context. IDRA was able to develop and maintain effective partnerships in some Reenergize schools by building on existing relationships. The effective planning and collaboration from school administrators allowed the Reenergize coaches to integrate into these schools smoothly. As IDRA continues to support schools around San Antonio, the findings from the Reenergize study and the lessons learned can inform future implementation and evaluation efforts.

This Data Point looks first at whether students who planned to go to college also met with a high school counselor about financial aid. The second question considers a different population of students, addressing whether students who enrolled in college also received aid. This analysis does not indicate a causal relationship between meeting with a counselor and receiving financial aid for college; further research is needed into the underlying mechanisms. It uses data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). HSLS:09 is a national study of more than 23,000 students in ninth grade in 2009. Students answered surveys between 2009 and 2016. College transcripts and financial aid records for HSLS:09 students were collected in 2017-18 in the Postsecondary Education Transcript Study and Student Financial Aid Records Collection (PETS-SR).

This Data Point uses data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). HSLS:09 is a national study of more than 23,000 students in ninth grade in 2009. Students answered surveys between 2009 and 2016. College transcripts were collected in 2017-18. This Data Point looks at the connection between views of college affordability in high school and college enrollment and employment three years after high school. This Data Point looks at: (1) How do views of college affordability in high school relate to college enrollment and employment? and (2) Does the connection between affordability views and college attendance differ by parent education?

After reviewing evidence from more than 280 studies conducted in 25 countries, Abt found consistent evidence that inclusive educational settings--in which children with disabilities are educated alongside their non-disabled peers--can have substantial benefits for the cognitive and social development of those children. The research also suggests that inclusion can have important positive benefits for all students, because including a student with a disability requires teachers and school administrators to develop a better understanding of the individual strengths and needs of every student. [The report was prepared for Instituto Alana.]