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Teachers today have increasing access to professional learning communities (PLCs) through a rapidly expanding menu of online professional development offerings. While a valued opportunity for growth, online PLCs can limit opportunities for co-teaching, pedagogical practice, and experiential learning. This paper examines a teacher professional development program implemented in 2022, where 14 middle school teachers joined either an online or an in-person version of a summer practicum in which PLCs were fostered. In both versions of the PD, teachers worked in small teams of co-teachers to learn and practice teaching middle school students about Artificial Intelligence (AI), a topic in which teachers were non-experts. Findings from qualitative analysis of teacher interviews suggest affordances and barriers to teacher learning online as compared to in-person PLCs. The paper offers recommendations for online PLC structure and co-teaching to enhance teacher learning. 

This paper proposes SmartBench, a benchmark focusing on queries resulting from (near) real-time applications and longer-term analysis of IoT data. SmartBench, derived from a deployed smart building monitoring system, is comprised of: 1) An extensible schema that captures the fundamentals of an IoT smart space; 2) A set of representative queries focusing on analytical tasks; and 3) A data generation tool that generates large amounts of synthetic sensor and semantic data based on seed data collected from a real system. We present an evaluation of seven representative database sys- tems and highlight some interesting findings that can be considered when deciding what database technologies to use under different types of IoT query workloads. 

Abstract Continuous gravitational waves (CWs) emission from neutron stars carries information about their internal structure and equation of state, and it can provide tests of general relativity. We present a search for CWs from a set of 45 known pulsars in the first part of the fourth LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA observing run, known as O4a. We conducted a targeted search for each pulsar using three independent analysis methods considering single-harmonic and dual-harmonic emission models. We find no evidence of a CW signal in O4a data for both models and set upper limits on the signal amplitude and on the ellipticity, which quantifies the asymmetry in the neutron star mass distribution. For the single-harmonic emission model, 29 targets have the upper limit on the amplitude below the theoretical spin-down limit. The lowest upper limit on the amplitude is 6.4 × 10⁻²⁷for the young energetic pulsar J0537−6910, while the lowest constraint on the ellipticity is 8.8 × 10⁻⁹for the bright nearby millisecond pulsar J0437−4715. Additionally, for a subset of 16 targets, we performed a narrowband search that is more robust regarding the emission model, with no evidence of a signal. We also found no evidence of nonstandard polarizations as predicted by the Brans–Dicke theory.