Collaborative research: earth system curator: spanning the gap between models and datasets

Issued as final reportNational Science Foundation (U.S.

Designing a Communication Bridge between Communities: Participatory Design for a Question-Answering AI Agent

How do we design an AI system that is intended to act as a communication bridge between two user communities with different mental models and vocabularies? Skillsync is an interactive environment that engages employers (companies) and training providers (colleges) in a sustained dialogue to help them achieve the goal of building a training proposal that successfully meets the needs of the employers and employees. We used a variation of participatory design to elicit requirements for developing AskJill, a question-answering agent that explains how Skillsync works and thus acts as a communication bridge between company and college users. Our study finds that participatory design was useful in guiding the requirements gathering and eliciting user questions for the development of AskJill. Our results also suggest that the two Skillsync user communities perceived glossary assistance as a key feature that AskJill needs to offer, and they would benefit from such a shared vocabulary

Conceptual representations for transfer: A case study tracing back and looking forward

A primary goal of instruction is to prepare learners to transfer their knowledge and skills to new contexts, but how far this transfer goes is an open question.  In the research reported here, we seek to explain a case of transfer through examining the processes by which a conceptual representation used to reason about complex systems was transferred from one natural system (an aquarium ecosystem) to another natural system (human cells and body systems). In this case study, a teacher was motivated to generalize her understanding of the Structure, Behaviour, and Function (SBF) conceptual representation to modify her classroom instruction and teaching materials for another system. This case of transfer was unexpected and required that we trace back through the video and artefacts collected over several years of this teacher enacting a technology-rich classroom unit organized around this conceptual representation. We provide evidence of transfer using three data sources: (1) artefacts that the teacher created (2) in-depth semi-structured interview data with the teacher about how her understanding of the representation changed over time and (3) video data over multiple years, covering units on the aquatic ecosystem and the new system that the teacher applied the SBF representation to, the cell and body. Borrowing from interactive ethnography, we traced backward from where the teacher showed transfer to understand how she got there. The use of the actor-oriented transfer and preparation for future learning perspectives provided lenses for understanding transfer. Results of this study suggest that identifying similarities under the lens of SBF and using it as a conceptual tool are some primary factors that may have supported transfer

Live Logic Programming

Abstract-Logic programming languages are today used to build applications accessing large database systems. This raises the possibility of building live development environments for them. Of particular interest is how specific language features such as level of abstraction, transactions, etc. affect the design of such an environment. In this paper, we explore this question for a specific logic language, Datalog, contrast traditional and live approaches for its tooling and discuss issues that arise

A Feature Model of Coupling Technologies for Earth System Models

Couplers that link together two or more numerical simulations are well-known abstractions in the Earth System Modeling (ESM) community. In the past decade, reusable software assets have emerged to facilitate scientists in implementing couplers. While there is a large amount of overlap in the features supported by software coupling technologies, their implementations differ significantly in terms of both functional and non-functional properties. Using a domain analysis method called feature analysis, we explore the spectrum of features supported by coupling technologies used to build today's production ESMs. The results of the feature analysis will enable automatic code generation of ESM couplers

The detection and extraction of interleaved code segments

This project is concerned with a specific difficulty that arises when trying to understand and modify computer programs. In particular, it is concerned with the phenomenon of 'interleaving' in which one section of a program accomplishes several purposes, and disentangling the code responsible for each purposes is difficult. Unraveling interleaved code involves discovering the purpose of each strand of computation, as well as understanding why the programmer decided to interleave the strands. Increased understanding improve the productivity and quality of software maintenance, enhancement, and documentation activities. It is the goal of the project to characterize the phenomenon of interleaving as a prerequisite for building tools to detect and extract interleaved code fragments

The MASTERMIND User Interface Generation Project

Graphical user interfaces are difficult to construct and, consequently, suffer from high development and maintenance costs. Automatic generation from declarative descriptions can reduce costs and enforce design principles. MASTERMIND is a model based approach to user interface generation. Designers model different aspects of an interface using declarative modeling languages, and tools synthesize these models into run-time code. The design process begins with user task and application modeling. These models are then refined into dialogue, presentation, and interaction models and an application API. These latter models drive the synthesis of run-time code. A design tool called Dukas is employed to support the refinement of task models into dialogue models