The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

The Indonesian digital library network is born to struggle with the digital divide

IndonesiaDLN –The Indonesian Digital Library Network– is a distributed collection of digital library networks, digital library servers, full local contents, metadata, and people for the development of the Indonesian knowledge-based society. Beside the general issues of digital library such as publishing, quality control, authentication, networking, and information retrieval, we also face other issue –namely digital divide– in designing and implementing the Network. This paper describes basic design of the Network that able to handle the typical problems in developing digital library network in Indonesia as a developing country, such as internet accessibility, bandwidth capacity, and network delays. We also will describe our experiences in implementing the Network that currently has 14 successfully connected partners and more than 15 partners are in progress of developing their digital library servers

Social Networking in Education

Social networking has become one of the most popular communication tools to have evolved over the past decade, making it a powerful new information sharing resource in society. To date realising the potential of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) beyond their leisure uses has been severely restricted in a number of areas. This paper focuses on the application of SNSs in a learning environment and the impact this could have on academic practices. While undoubtedly, due to the very casual nature of social networking, there are serious concerns over how it could be integrated in a learning environment; the potential positive outcomes are many and varied. As a communication tool, its effectiveness is already manifesting in the millions who use these networks to communicate on a daily basis. So it is conceivable that educators should be able to create a learnscape - an environment for formal and informal learning - that adheres to educational guidelines, but also harnesses the social support system of these on-line communities. This paper examines the risks involved in the creation of this new learning ecology, and explores the challenges faced by both technology experts and teachers in delivering a truly innovative and effective new approach to education.</p

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

A lingualization strategy for knowledge sharing in large-scale DevOps

DevOps has become a generally accepted practice for software projects in the last decade and approaches certain shortcomings of the agile software development and the steadily gaining popularity of cloud infrastructure. While it shifts more and more responsibilities towards software engineering teams, the prevailing opinion is to keep DevOps teams small to reduce the complexity of inter-team communication. In circumstances where products outgrow the performance capability of a single team, microservice architecture enables multiple DevOps teams to contribute to the same application and meet the increased requirements. Since DevOps teams operate typically self-sufficiently and more or less independently inside an organization, such large-scale DevOps environments are prone to knowledge-sharing barriers. Textual Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) are one of the cornerstones of DevOps and enable key features like automation and infrastructure provisioning. Nonetheless, most commonly accepted DSLs in the context of DevOps are cumbersome and have a steep learning curve. Thus, they fall short of their potential to truly enable cross-functional collaboration and knowledge sharing, not only between development and operation, but to the whole organization. DevOps teams require tools and DSLs, that treat knowledge sharing and reuse as a first-class citizen, in order to operate sufficiently on a large scale. However, developing DSLs is still presumed as an expensive task which can easily offset the resulting benefits. This dissertation presents a lingualization strategy for addressing the challenge of knowledge sharing in large-scale DevOps. The basic idea is to provide custom-tailored Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs) that target single phases of the DevOps lifecycle and ease the DevOps adoption for newly formed teams. The paradigm of Language-Driven Engineering (LDE) bridges the semantic gap between stakeholders by custom-tailored DSMLs and thus is a natural fit for knowledge sharing. Key to a successful practice of LDE is as a new class of stakeholders. In the context of large-scale DevOps, language development can be realized by so-called Meta DevOps teams. Those teams, which themselves practice DevOps internally, manage a centralized repository of small DSMLs and offer them as a service. DevOps teams act as the customers of the Meta DevOps teams and can request new features or complete new DSMLs and provide feedback to already existing DSMLs. The presented Rig modeling environment serves as an exemplary DSML that targets the purpose of Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), one of the most important building blocks of DevOps. Rig comes with an associated code generator to fully-generate CI/CD workflows from graphical models. Those graphical models provide an executable documentation and assist knowledge-sharing between stakeholders. The fundamental modeling concepts of the lingualization strategy are evaluated against previously published requirements by Bordeleau et al. on a DevOps modeling framework in an industrial context. In addition to that, Rig is evaluated based on results of a workshop during the 6th International School on Tool-Based Rigorous Engineering of Software Systems. Both evaluations yield encouraging results and demonstrate the potential of the lingualization strategy to break down knowledge-sharing barriers in large-scale DevOps environments

Developing e-assessment using the quiz activity within Moodle: empowering student learning

Using formative assessment within Moodle has been shown to encourage self-directed learning (Bromham &#38; Oprandi, 2006). Our experience of using formative assessment quizzes as stand alone entities, as well as within Moodle lessons, has been used to introduce Moodle assessment quizzes over the past year in Level 1 and Level 2 Life Sciences courses. This experience has been distilled to inform the content of this workshop. Some advantages of incorporating assessments in the form of Moodle quizzes are that they allow for quick, reproducible and flexible assessment with a relatively small initial set-up cost, and substantial long-term staff and administration savings. One significant advantage is that staff and room pressures can be reduced as students can attempt the assessment at a time and location of their choice within a specified time period. This flexibility can help to reduce student stress associated with completion of a continuous assessment for their course. It is also a relatively simple process to account for students entitled to extra time during assessments. Providing clear instructions beforehand and at the start of the quiz ensures that students understand their responsibilities for completion of this assessment and ultimately the course. There are some disadvantages and limitations to the system as it currently exists, for example there is the perceived ability for students to “cheat” by completing the assessment as a group, accessing books and the internet. Strategies to account for these can be put in place and will be discussed in detail during the workshop. This workshop aims to take the participants through the initial set up of a quiz, highlighting the various question types and how these can be used to create a challenging assessment that can be quickly graded and prove informative for staff and course development. Reference Bromham L. &#38; Oprandi P. (2006) Evolution online: developing active and blended learning by using a virtual learning environment in an introductory biology course. Journal of Biological Education 41 (1): 21-25

Supporting graduate teaching assistants in two STEM areas

No abstract available