Wearable learning tools

In life people must learn whenever and wherever they experience something new. Until recently computing technology could not support such a notion, the constraints of size, power and cost kept computers under the classroom table, in the office or in the home. Recent advances in miniaturization have led to a growing field of research in ‘wearable’ computing. This paper looks at how such technologies can enhance computer‐mediated communications, with a focus upon collaborative working for learning. An experimental system, MetaPark, is discussed, which explores communications, data retrieval and recording, and navigation techniques within and across real and virtual environments. In order to realize the MetaPark concept, an underlying network architecture is described that supports the required communication model between static and mobile users. This infrastructure, the MUON framework, is offered as a solution to provide a seamless service that tracks user location, interfaces to contextual awareness agents, and provides transparent network service switching

Engineering simulations for cancer systems biology

Computer simulation can be used to inform in vivo and in vitro experimentation, enabling rapid, low-cost hypothesis generation and directing experimental design in order to test those hypotheses. In this way, in silico models become a scientific instrument for investigation, and so should be developed to high standards, be carefully calibrated and their findings presented in such that they may be reproduced. Here, we outline a framework that supports developing simulations as scientific instruments, and we select cancer systems biology as an exemplar domain, with a particular focus on cellular signalling models. We consider the challenges of lack of data, incomplete knowledge and modelling in the context of a rapidly changing knowledge base. Our framework comprises a process to clearly separate scientific and engineering concerns in model and simulation development, and an argumentation approach to documenting models for rigorous way of recording assumptions and knowledge gaps. We propose interactive, dynamic visualisation tools to enable the biological community to interact with cellular signalling models directly for experimental design. There is a mismatch in scale between these cellular models and tissue structures that are affected by tumours, and bridging this gap requires substantial computational resource. We present concurrent programming as a technology to link scales without losing important details through model simplification. We discuss the value of combining this technology, interactive visualisation, argumentation and model separation to support development of multi-scale models that represent biologically plausible cells arranged in biologically plausible structures that model cell behaviour, interactions and response to therapeutic interventions

Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.Comment: Proceedings of 3nd ICST/CREATE-NET Workshop on DIstributed SImulation and Online gaming (DISIO 2012). In conjunction with SIMUTools 2012. Desenzano, Italy, March 2012. ISBN: 978-1-936968-47-

Coordinated constraint relaxation using a distributed agent protocol

The interactions among agents in a multi-agent system for coordinating a distributed, problem solving task can be complex, as the distinct sub-problems of the individual agents are interdependent. A distributed protocol provides the necessary framework for specifying these interactions. In a model of interactions where the agents' social norms are expressed as the message passing behaviours associated with roles, the dependencies among agents can be specified as constraints. The constraints are associated with roles to be adopted by agents as dictated by the protocol. These constraints are commonly handled using a conventional constraint solving system that only allows two satisfactory states to be achieved - completely satisfied or failed. Agent interactions then become brittle as the occurrence of an over-constrained state can cause the interaction between agents to break prematurely, even though the interacting agents could, in principle, reach an agreement. Assuming that the agents are capable of relaxing their individual constraints to reach a common goal, the main issue addressed by this thesis is how the agents could communicate and coordinate the constraint relaxation process. The interaction mechanism for this is obtained by reinterpreting a technique borrowed from the constraint satisfaction field, deployed and computed at the protocol level.The foundations of this work are the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) and the distributed partial Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). LCC is a distributed interaction protocol language, based on process calculus, for specifying and executing agents' social norms in a multi-agent system. Distributed partial CSP is an extension of partial CSP, a means for managing the relaxation of distributed, over-constrained, CSPs. The research presented in this thesis concerns how distributed partial CSP technique, used to address over-constrained problems in the constraint satisfaction field, could be adopted and integrated within the LCC to obtain a more flexible means for constraint handling during agent interactions. The approach is evaluated against a set of overconstrained Multi-agent Agreement Problems (MAPs) with different levels of hardness. Not only does this thesis explore a flexible and novel approach for handling constraints during the interactions of heterogeneous and autonomous agents participating in a problem solving task, but it is also grounded in a practical implementation

Simulating social relations in multi-agent systems

Open distributed systems are comprised of a large number of heterogeneous nodes with disparate requirements and objectives, a number of which may not conform to the system specification. This thesis argues that activity in such systems can be regulated by using distributed mechanisms inspired by social science theories regarding similarity /kinship, trust, reputation, recommendation and economics. This makes it possible to create scalable and robust agent societies which can adapt to overcome structural impediments and provide inherent defence against malicious and incompetent action, without detriment to system functionality and performance. In particular this thesis describes: • an agent based simulation and animation platform (PreSage), which offers the agent developer and society designer a suite of powerful tools for creating, simulating and visualising agent societies from both a local and global perspective. • a social information dissemination system (SID) based on principles of self organisation which personalises recommendation and directs information dissemination. • a computational socio-cognitive and economic framework (CScEF) which integrates and extends socio-cognitive theories of trust, reputation and recommendation with basic economic theory. • results from two simulation studies investigating the performance of SID and the CScEF. The results show the production of a generic, reusable and scalable platform for developing and animating agent societies, and its contribution to the community as an open source tool. Secondly specific results, regarding the application of SID and CScEF, show that revealing outcomes of using socio-technical mechanisms to condition agent interactions can be demonstrated and identified by using Presage.Open Acces

Verificare: a platform for composable verification with application to SDN-Enabled systems

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become increasing prevalent in both the academic and industrial communities. A new class of system built on SDNs, which we refer to as SDN-Enabled, provide programmatic interfaces between the SDN controller and the larger distributed system. Existing tools for SDN verification and analysis are insufficiently expressive to capture this composition of a network and a larger distributed system. Generic verification systems are an infeasible solution, due to their monolithic approach to modeling and rapid state-space explosion. In this thesis we present a new compositional approach to system modeling and verification that is particularly appropriate for SDN-Enabled systems. Compositional models may have sub-components (such as switches and end-hosts) modified, added, or removed with only minimal, isolated changes. Furthermore, invariants may be defined over the composed system that restrict its behavior, allowing assumptions to be added or removed and for components to be abstracted away into the service guarantee that they provide (such as guaranteed packet arrival). Finally, compositional modeling can minimize the size of the state space to be verified by taking advantage of known model structure. We also present the Verificare platform, a tool chain for building compositional models in our modeling language and automatically compiling them to multiple off-the-shelf verification tools. The compiler outputs a minimal, calculus-oblivious formalism, which is accessed by plugins via a translation API. This enables a wide variety of requirements to be verified. As new tools become available, the translator can easily be extended with plugins to support them