Proceedings of the African Diaspora Conference on Sustainable Development

The authors urge the Western donor organizations to facilitate and support the take up of such more sustainable models

Is Computer Science Education in Crisis?

Introduction Computer science is a very young discipline, and a controversial, much-maligned and misunderstood one - even amongst computer scientists. Some have questioned the raison d'être for computer science and some employers mistrust or dislike computer science education. Some (in many cases, themselves computer scientists) debunk it and even go as far as questioning its very existence! It leads me in this paper to examine briefly why computer science education may be in crisis. The breakdown of this short paper is as follows. Section 2 reports on the background to this paper. Section 3 presents a worrying criticism of the discipline. Section 4 concludes the paper and raises a research question which could serve as the basis for an empirical investigation. 2 Background Back in 1974, D. L. Fisher, then head of the Computer Laboratory at the University of Leicester in the UK, wrote a paper entitled `Computer Science: a suitabl

Software agents: An overview

Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the overuse of the word ‘agent ’ has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. Next, it places agents in context, defines them and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of the various agent types in our typology. Hence, it attempts to make explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. 1

An Investigation into UK Undergraduate Computer Science Education - Part I: Methodology, the Results/Views of Stakeholders, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats

This paper is the first part of two which reports on an investigation into the general area of UK undergraduate computer science education. More specifically, this first part discusses the extent to which computer science education currently meets the needs of its stakeholders, and how widely various views on computer science and computer science education are held. It also details various weaknesses, opportunities and threats to computer science education. This paper is presented in two parts for reasons of length. 2 1 Introduction Computer science is a very young discipline, in addition to being a controversial, muchmaligned and misunderstood one - even amongst computer scientists. It is truly absurd that a discipline which has been so evidently successful appears to face such a crisis of identity (see Nwana, 1997a). Computing is now inextricably interwoven into the fabric of modern life (Hartmantis & Lin, 1992, 13). Furthermore, "for every field X, it sometimes seems that someone ..

An iterative-style approach to constructing intelligent tutoring systems in mathematics

Mathematics is highly structured and also underpins most of science and engineering. For this reason, it has proved a very suitable domain for Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) research, with the result that probably more tutoring systems have been constructed for the domain than any other. However, the literature reveals that there still exists no consensus on a credible approach or approaches for the design of such systems, despite numerous documented efforts. Current approaches to the construction of ITSs leave much to be desired. Consequently, existing ITSs in the domain suffer from a considerable number of shortcomings which render them 'unintelligent'. The thesis examines some of the reasons why this is the case. Following a critical review of existing ITSs in the domain, and some pilot studies, an alternative approach to their construction is proposed (the 'iterative-style' approach); this supports an iterative style, and also improves on at least some of the shortcomings of existing approaches. The thesis also presents an ITS for fractions which has been developed using this approach, and which has been evaluated in various ways. It has, demonstrably, improved on many of the limitations of existing ITSs; furthermore, it has been shown to be largely 'intelligent', at least more so than current tutors for the domain. Perhaps more significantly, the tutor has also been evaluated against real students with, so far, very encouraging results. The thesis thus concludes that the novel iterative-style approach is a more credible approach to the construction of ITSs in mathematics than existing techniques

A Perspective on Software Agents Research

This paper sets out, ambitiously, to present a brief reappraisal of software agents research. Evidently, software agent technology has promised much. However some five years after the word `agent' came into vogue in the popular computing press, it is perhaps time the efforts in this fledgling area are thoroughly evaluated with a view to refocusing future efforts. We do not pretend to have done this in this paper -- but we hope we have sown the first seeds towards a thorough first 5-year report of the software agents area. The paper contains some strong views not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community

To appear in: Knowledge Engineering Review, 1996 Software Agents: An Overview

Agent software is a rapidly developing area of research. However, the overuse of the word ‘agent ’ has tended to mask the fact that, in reality, there is a truly heterogeneous body of research being carried out under this banner. This overview paper presents a typology of agents. Next, it places agents in context, defines them and then goes on, inter alia, to overview critically the rationales, hypotheses, goals, challenges and state-of-the-art demonstrators of the various agent types in our typology. Hence, it attempts to make explicit much of what is usually implicit in the agents literature. It also proceeds to overview some other general issues which pertain to all the types of agents in the typology. This paper largely reviews software agents, and it also contains some strong opinions that are not necessarily widely accepted by the agent community. 1

Stability, Fairness and Scalability of Multi-Agent Systems

: We study a general network of agents that can be built with Zeus [18]. Relationships between agents can be peer, slave, master, discounter, or no relation at all. There are four possible strategies: the cheapest agent is selected, preference to slaves rst, cut-price discounting based on the utility, and cheapest agent chosen, but preference given to cheapest slave. The cost of a task for the agent originating it, is the cost of the resources used. The size of the initial endowment is determined so that there are never any lost tasks in the system. We also establish the inuence of agent strategies on stability and fairness. We were able to determine how much discounting the agents can allow, and how to control the coordination time. The growth of the maximum communication load with respect to the number of agents is calculated for various topologies of networks of agents. A performance measure related to the speed of the network is also calculated. Keywords: Intelligent ag..