Talent Management in Higher Education: Developing Emerging Leaders Within the Administration at Private Colleges and Universities

This research focused on identifying a series of successful practices relating to administrative talent management within the higher education setting. The field study included a thorough examination of seven small to mid-size private colleges and universities that have incorporated employee development strategies. These strategies were aimed at growing future leaders from within the organization in order to achieve continuity and support institutional priorities. Specifically, several focus areas were investigated including presidential vision, leadership commitment, talent management’s place among institutional priorities, program characteristics, and program evaluation. Among the commonalities that were gathered included support at the senior officer level who serve as advocates, mentors, and program facilitators, a strong connection between talent management and the institutions’ strategic plans, and a holistic approach to developing talent at all levels of the organizations. In addition, both coaching and opportunities for growth in the work environment were evident within several of the institutions. Also, academic leadership development was considered to be a part of the talent management strategy within three of the colleges and universities. The key differentiators included the incorporation of organizational and leadership competencies to provide focus toward the performance development process at two institutions, the implementation of a succession planning model at another institution, and the location of human resource generalists in departments across two of the institutions to identify learning opportunities for both individuals and work teams. Based on both the findings from the field study and the literature review, a comprehensive procedural model is introduced that serves to support human resource departments and higher education professionals, in general, who are looking to either begin or broaden their own talent management approach. However, despite the progress that has been made across several institutions noted throughout the research study, much more must be learned in terms of how the time and resources invested in talent management translates to institutional success. Advisor: James O‘Hanlon

Design of a Wireless Vision Sensor for Object Tracking in Wireless Vision Sensor Networks

The integration of CMOS cameras with embedded processors and wireless communication devices has enabled the development of distributed wireless vision systems. Wireless Vision Sensor Networks (WVSNs), which consist of wirelessly connected embedded systems with vision and sensing capabilities, provide wide variety of application areas that have not been possible to realize with the wall-powered vision systems with wired links or scalar-data based wireless sensor networks. In this paper, the design of a middleware for a wireless vision sensor node is presented for the realization of WVSNs. The implemented wireless vision sensor node is tested through a simple vision application to study and analyze its capabilities, and determine the challenges in distributed vision applications through a wireless network of low-power embedded devices. The results of this paper highlight the practical concerns for the development of efficient image processing and communication solutions for WVSNs and emphasize the need for cross-layer solutions that unify these two so-far-independent research areas.