Virtual Capstone Design Teams: Preparing for Global Innovation (Journal article)

Global innovation requires collaboration between groups of people located in different parts of the world, and is a growing trend in industry. Virtual teams are often used to manage new product development projects. These teams are similar to traditional teams but are geographically separated and rely heavily on virtual methods of communication (email, Skype, teleconferencing, etc.) instead of regular face-to-face meetings. Experience working as a member of a virtual capstone design team can help prepare students for this growing trend. To begin preparing students for work on virtual teams in industry, we co-advised two virtual capstone design projects with students from Marquette University and Smith College. This paper describes our experience with managing two virtual capstone design project teams across institutions. Presented here are the challenges we encountered, the lessons we learned as a result of this experience, as well our recommendations for others who might want to include virtual project teams in their capstone design courses. We also include retrospective feedback from the students on these teams regarding their perceived value of their virtual team experience to their careers in engineering

Formalising sharing mechanisms in object-oriented paradigm

Sharing of behavior is one of the most important features in the Object-Oriented paradigm. The two classical organisations of sharing are classes and prototypes, raising two different models and two families of object oriented languages. It has been largely discussed which of these two models is the most basic, giving the essence of the Object-Oriented paradigm.\nWe claim that sharing schemes can be constructed in a more basic model with just objects and messages. We analysed the features this model must express, specially the ability to share behavior. Abadi and Cardelli have defined a calculus of objects which represents the basic elements. They describe how to build the concepts of class based languages in their formalism.\nIn this work we show how to express delegation between concrete objects in the calculus. The key advantage of our contribution is that by providing per object delegation we can represent every sharing scheme possible in a prototype environment, thus completing the conviction that all the usual constructs found in OO can be built using only objects and messages.\nWe have defined sharing constructs for an object based (prototypes) high level language, and their translation into the formal calculus. This shows how constructs similar to those appearing in usual programming languages can be written in the formal calculus, and allows writing programs in the formalism without requiring understanding details about it. There are primitives to express the sharing relationship in object creation, to change that relationship and to reference the donor of an object.Eje: Ingeniería de software. Bases de dato

Formalising sharing mechanisms in object-oriented paradigm

Sharing of behavior is one of the most important features in the Object-Oriented paradigm. The two classical organisations of sharing are classes and prototypes, raising two different models and two families of object oriented languages. It has been largely discussed which of these two models is the most basic, giving the essence of the Object-Oriented paradigm. We claim that sharing schemes can be constructed in a more basic model with just objects and messages. We analysed the features this model must express, specially the ability to share behavior. Abadi and Cardelli have defined a calculus of objects which represents the basic elements. They describe how to build the concepts of class based languages in their formalism. In this work we show how to express delegation between concrete objects in the calculus. The key advantage of our contribution is that by providing per object delegation we can represent every sharing scheme possible in a prototype environment, thus completing the conviction that all the usual constructs found in OO can be built using only objects and messages. We have defined sharing constructs for an object based (prototypes) high level language, and their translation into the formal calculus. This shows how constructs similar to those appearing in usual programming languages can be written in the formal calculus, and allows writing programs in the formalism without requiring understanding details about it. There are primitives to express the sharing relationship in object creation, to change that relationship and to reference the donor of an object.Eje: Ingeniería de software. Bases de datosRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Political Economy of Fiscal Institutions

We discuss two essential problems of the political economy of public finances: The principal agent problem between voters and elected politicians and the common pool problem arising from the fact that money drawn from a general tax fund is used to pay for policies targeting more or less narrow groups in society. Three institutional mechanisms exist to deal with these problems, ex-ante rules controlling the behavior of elected policy makers, electoral rules creating accountability of and competition among policy makers, and budgeting processes internalizing the common pool externality. We review recent theoretical and empirical research and discuss its implications for research and institutional design.electoral systems; fiscal rules; budgeting processes

Developing a Marketing Plan Using Design Thinking

Design Thinking has become associated with some of the most innovative products coming out in the market today. Though it was originally a model used to design products, practitioners have found it also helps companies develop innovative mindsets throughout their organizations. This project takes Design Thinking in another direction, where it is not applied to something that already exists, but instead serves as the incubator for a marketing plan that will be used to convince small to medium-sized Western New York businesses to consider doing business in Korea. This project will give insight into how to use Design Thinking to overcome cultural and organizational hurdles by using the “customer-centric” focus of Design Thinking to find the opportunities embedded in the differences between WNY companies and potential Korean consumers

Implementing a Business Process Management System Using ADEPT: A Real-World Case Study

This article describes how the agent-based design of ADEPT (advanced decision environment for processed tasks) and implementation philosophy was used to prototype a business process management system for a real-world application. The application illustrated is based on the British Telecom (BT) business process of providing a quote to a customer for installing a network to deliver a specified type of telecommunication service. Particular emphasis is placed upon the techniques developed for specifying services, allowing heterogeneous information models to interoperate, allowing rich and flexible interagent negotiation to occur, and on the issues related to interfacing agent-based systems and humans. This article builds upon the companion article (Applied Artificial Intelligence Vol.14, no 2, pgs. 145-189) that provides details of the rationale and design of the ADEPT technology deployed in this application