CGIAR Excellence in Breeding Platform - Plan of Work and Budget 2020

At the end of 2019, all CGIAR centers had submitted improvement plans based on an EiB template and in close collaboration with EiB staff while – in a parallel process with breeding programs, funders and private sector representatives – a vision for breeding program modernization was developed and presented to CGIAR breeding leadership at the EiB Annual Meeting. This vision represents an evolution of EiB in the context of the Crops to End Hunger Initiative (CtEH) beyond the initial scope of providing tools, services and expert advice, and serves as a guide for Center leadership to drive changes with EiB support. In addition, EiB has taken the role of managing and disbursing funding, made available by Funders via CtEH to modernize breeding and enable CGIAR breeding programs to implement the vision provided by EiB

Improving performance through HEI–industry engagements in the built environment

The poor performance and inefficiencies of the construction industry are well recognized and documented. Through a variety of combined industry and government initiatives there has been a continual expression in the UK over the last decade of the urgent need to address the fragmented nature of the industry to improve its performance. A major challenge is for education and industry stakeholders to create closer and more effective relationships with each other to facilitate greater mutual understanding. ‘Accelerating Change in Built Environment Education’ (ACBEE) is a sponsored initiative designed to encourage the closer working together of industry, education and professional bodies to provide more relevant training and education. This paper introduces ACBEE, along with an evaluation framework for measuring the performance of engagements at various levels. This is followed by an analysis of the application of this performance measurement framework through case studies of industry–education engagement. A number of case studies were identified as operating at the grades of ‘strategic alliance’ and ‘partnership’ (as classified in the ACBEE evaluation framework). The analysis of these cases focuses on the drivers behind and the purpose of the engagement, and how these are aligned with the business strategy of the collaborating organizations and measurement of the activity. Evidence of meeting the explicit business needs and strategic objectives and the contribution to good practice knowledge are also discussed

Exploring the mathematics of motion through construction and collaboration

In this paper we give a detailed account of the design principles and construction of activities designed for learning about the relationships between position, velocity and acceleration, and corresponding kinematics graphs. Our approach is model-based, that is, it focuses attention on the idea that students constructed their own models – in the form of programs – to formalise and thus extend their existing knowledge. In these activities, students controlled the movement of objects in a programming environment, recording the motion data and plotting corresponding position-time and velocity-time graphs. They shared their findings on a specially-designed web-based collaboration system, and posted cross-site challenges to which others could react. We present learning episodes that provide evidence of students making discoveries about the relationships between different representations of motion. We conjecture that these discoveries arose from their activity in building models of motion and their participation in classroom and online communities

A Service based Development Environment on Web 2.0 Platforms

Governments are investing on the IT adoption and promoting the socalled e-economies as a way to improve competitive advantages. One of the main government’s actions is to provide internet access to the most part of the population, people and organisations. Internet provides the required support for connecting organizations, people and geographically distributed developments teams. Software developments are tightly related to the availability of tools and platforms needed for products developments. Internet is becoming the most widely used platform. Software forges such as SourceForge provide an integrated tools environment gathering a set of tools that are suited for each development with a low cost. In this paper we propose an innovating approach based on Web2.0, services and a method engineering approach for software developments. This approach represents one of the possible usages of the internet of the future