116,909 research outputs found
Student teamwork: developing virtual support for team projects
In the 21st century team working increasingly requires online cooperative skills as well as more traditional skills associated with face to face team working. Virtual team working differs from face to face team working in a number of respects, such as interpreting the alternatives to visual cues, adapting to synchronous communication, developing trust and cohesion and cultural interpretations. However, co-located student teams working within higher education can only simulate team working as it might be experienced in organisations today. For example, students can learn from their mistakes in a non-threatening environment, colleagues tend to be established friends and assessing teamwork encourages behaviour such as āfree-ridingā. Using a prototyping approach, which involves students and tutors, a system has been designed to support learners engaged in team working. This system helps students to achieve to their full potential and appreciate issues surrounding virtual teamwork. The Guardian Agent system enables teams to allocate project tasks and agree ground rules for the team according to individualsā preferences. Results from four cycles of its use are presented, together with modifications arising from iterations of testing. The results show that students find the system useful in preparing for team working, and have encouraged further development of the system
Mesmerizer: A Effective Tool for a Complete Peer-to-Peer Software Development Life-cycle
In this paper we present what are, in our experience, the best
practices in Peer-To-Peer(P2P) application development and
how we combined them in a middleware platform called Mesmerizer. We explain how simulation is an integral part of
the development process and not just an assessment tool.
We then present our component-based event-driven framework for P2P application development, which can be used
to execute multiple instances of the same application in a
strictly controlled manner over an emulated network layer
for simulation/testing, or a single application in a concurrent
environment for deployment purpose. We highlight modeling aspects that are of critical importance for designing and
testing P2P applications, e.g. the emulation of Network Address Translation and bandwidth dynamics. We show how
our simulator scales when emulating low-level bandwidth
characteristics of thousands of concurrent peers while preserving a good degree of accuracy compared to a packet-level
simulator
Definition of avionics concepts for a heavy lift cargo vehicle, appendix A
The major objective of the study task was to define a cost effective, multiuser simulation, test, and demonstration facility to support the development of avionics systems for future space vehicles. This volume provides the results of the main simulation processor selection study and describes some proof-of-concept demonstrations for the avionics test bed facility
An agent system to support student teams working online
Online learning is now a reality, with distributed learning and blended learning becoming more widely used in Higher Education. Novel ways in which undergraduate and postgraduate learning material can be presented are being developed, and methods for helping students to learn online
are needed, especially if we require them to collaborate with each other on learning activities.
Agents to provide a supporting role for students have evolved from Artificial Intelligence research, and their strength lies in their ease of operation over networks as well as their ability to act in response to stimuli.
In this paper an application of a software agent is described, aimed at supporting students working on team projects in the online learning environment. Online teamwork is problematical for a number of reasons, such as getting acquainted with team members, finding out about other team membersā abilities, agreeing who should do which tasks, communications between team members and keeping up to date with progress that has been made on the project. Software agents have the ability to monitor progress and to offer advice by operating in the background, acting autonomously when the need arises.
An agent prototype has been developed in Prolog to perform a limited set of functions to support students. Team projects have a planning, doing and completing stage, all of which require them to have some sort of agent support. This agent at present supports part of the planning stage, by prompting the students to input their likes, dislikes and abilities for a selection of task areas defined for the project. The agent then allocates the various tasks to the students according to predetermined rules.
The results of a trial carried out using teams working on projects, on campus, indicate that students like the idea of using this agent to help with allocating tasks. They also agreed that agent support of this type would probably be helpful to both students working on team projects with
face to face contact, as well as for teams working solely online. Work is ongoing to add more functionality to the agent and to evaluate the agent more widely
An open and extensible framework for spatially explicit land use change modelling in R: the lulccR package (0.1.0)
Land use change has important consequences for biodiversity and the
sustainability of ecosystem services, as well as for global
environmental change. Spatially explicit land use change models
improve our understanding of the processes driving change and make
predictions about the quantity and location of future and past
change. Here we present the lulccR package, an object-oriented
framework for land use change modelling written in the R programming
language. The contribution of the work is to resolve the following
limitations associated with the current land use change modelling
paradigm: (1) the source code for model implementations is
frequently unavailable, severely compromising the reproducibility of
scientific results and making it impossible for members of the
community to improve or adapt models for their own purposes; (2)
ensemble experiments to capture model structural uncertainty are
difficult because of fundamental differences between implementations
of different models; (3) different aspects of the modelling
procedure must be performed in different environments because
existing applications usually only perform the spatial allocation of
change. The package includes a stochastic ordered allocation
procedure as well as an implementation of the widely used CLUE-S
algorithm. We demonstrate its functionality by simulating land use
change at the Plum Island Ecosystems site, using a dataset included
with the package. It is envisaged that lulccR will enable future
model development and comparison within an open environment
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A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence
Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches
Modeling structural change in spatial system dynamics: A Daisyworld example
System dynamics (SD) is an effective approach for helping reveal the temporal
behavior of complex systems. Although there have been recent developments in
expanding SD to include systems' spatial dependencies, most applications have
been restricted to the simulation of diffusion processes; this is especially
true for models on structural change (e.g. LULC modeling). To address this
shortcoming, a Python program is proposed to tightly couple SD software to a
Geographic Information System (GIS). The approach provides the required
capacities for handling bidirectional and synchronized interactions of
operations between SD and GIS. In order to illustrate the concept and the
techniques proposed for simulating structural changes, a fictitious environment
called Daisyworld has been recreated in a spatial system dynamics (SSD)
environment. The comparison of spatial and non-spatial simulations emphasizes
the importance of considering spatio-temporal feedbacks. Finally, practical
applications of structural change models in agriculture and disaster management
are proposed
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