Towards an industry-collaborative, reflective software learning and development environment

A significant mismatch (88%) has been found between what employers and graduates perceived as important abilities and how universities had prepared graduates for employment. Conventional Teaching and Learning approaches fall short of providing the kind of learning experiences needed to prepare graduates for the realities of professional practice in industry. On the other hand, current students have very different learning styles than their forebears. Their learning preferences are experiential, working in teams, and using technology for learning. One solution to address this mismatch issue is the software development studio. Our aim is to provide an industry-collaborative, reflective learning environment that will effect the students development of holistic skills, such as teamwork, collaboration and communication, together with technical skills, in a discipline context. This paper further describes the design and validation via prototyping for our software development studio, the progress that we have made so far, and presents the preliminary insights gleaned from our studio prototyping. The prototypes raised issues of attitudinal change, communication, reflection, sharing, mentoring, use of process, `doing time, relationships and innovation

Smart communications network management through a synthesis of distributed intelligence and information

Demands on communications networks to support bundled, interdependent communications services (data, voice, video) are increasing in complexity. Smart network management techniques are required to meet this demand. Such management techniques are envisioned to be based on two main technologies: (i) embedded intelligence; and (ii) up-to-the-millisecond delivery of performance information. This paper explores the idea of delivery of intelligent network management as a synthesis of distributed intelligence and information, obtained through information mining of network performance. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing

Modelling Architectural Abstraction with a Category of Poset Labelled Graphs

The design of large, complex computer based systems, based on their architecture, will benefit from a formal system that is intuitive, scalable and accessible to practitioners. The work herein is based in graphs which are an efficient and intuitive way of encoding structure, the essence of architecture. A model of system architectures and architectural abstraction is proposed, using poset labelled graphs and their transformations. The poset labelled graph formalism closely models several important aspects of architectures, namely topology, type and levels of abstraction. The technical merits of the formalism are discussed in terms of the ability to express and use domain knowledge to ensure sensible refinements. An abstraction / refinement calculus is introduced and illustrated with a detailed usage scenario. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the formalism in terms of its rigour, expressiveness, simplicity and practicality