A Negotiating Agents Model for the Provision of Flexible Telephony Services

Current telephone systems suffer from a service interface bottleneck problem, wherein network resources are under-utilised and customer requirements are often not met, in spite of these resources' ability to satisfy such requirements. This bottleneck is primarily due to a coarse-grain service interface, coupled with the inability to support arbitrary terminal types, and the inability to inter-operate with other systems. This paper outlines a new model for telephony services, based on the concept of negotiating agents. In this model, functionality is not made available to users in the form of services, as has been the case traditionally. Instead, users specify policies that describe how they wish their calls to be handled. These policies are used to guide agents appointed to act on behalf of users. The paper also describes a prototype that was built to demonstrate the capabilities of the model

The ODO project: a Case Study in Integration of Multimedia Services

Recent years have witnessed a steady growth in the availability of wide-area multi-service networks. These support a variety of traffic types including data, control messages, audio and video. Consequently they are often thought of as integrated media carriers. To date, however, use of these networks has been limited to isolated applications which exhibit very little or no integration amongst themselves. This paper describes a project which investigated organisational, user interfacing and programming techniques to exploit this integration of services at the application level

Blackbox: A Large Scale Repository of Novice Programmers’ Activity

Automatically observing and recording the programming be- haviour of novices is an established computing education research technique. However, prior studies have been con- ducted at a single institution on a small or medium scale, without the possibility of data re-use. Now, the widespread availability of always-on Internet access allows for data col- lection at a much larger, global scale. In this paper we re- port on the Blackbox project, begun in June 2013. Black- box is a perpetual data collection project that collects data from worldwide users of the BlueJ IDE – a programming environment designed for novice programmers. Over one hundred thousand users have already opted-in to Blackbox. The collected data is anonymous and is available to other researchers for use in their own studies, thus benefitting the larger research community. In this paper, we describe the data available via Blackbox, show some examples of analyses that can be performed using the collected data, and discuss some of the analysis challenges that lie ahead

A Formal Semantics of the GraalVM Intermediate Representation

The optimization phase of a compiler is responsible for transforming an intermediate representation (IR) of a program into a more efficient form. Modern optimizers, such as that used in the GraalVM compiler, use an IR consisting of a sophisticated graph data structure that combines data flow and control flow into the one structure. As part of a wider project on the verification of optimization passes of GraalVM, this paper describes a semantics for its IR within Isabelle/HOL. The semantics consists of a big-step operational semantics for data nodes (which are represented in a graph-based static single assignment (SSA) form) and a small-step operational semantics for handling control flow including heap-based reads and writes, exceptions, and method calls. We have proved a suite of canonicalization optimizations and conditional elimination optimizations with respect to the semantics.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, to be published to ATVA 202

A multinational, multi-institutional study of assessment of programming skills of first-year CS students

In computer science, an expected outcome of a student's education is programming skill. This working group investigated the programming competency students have as they complete their first one or two courses in computer science. In order to explore options for assessing students, the working group developed a trial assessment of whether students can program. The underlying goal of this work was to initiate dialog in the Computer Science community on how to develop these types of assessments. Several universities participated in our trial assessment and the disappointing results suggest that many students do not know how to program at the conclusion of their introductory courses. For a combined sample of 216 students from four universities, the average score was 22.89 out of 110 points on the general evaluation criteria developed for this study. From this trial assessment we developed a framework of expectations for first-year courses and suggestions for further work to develop more comprehensive assessments

A First Look at the Year in Computing

In this paper, we discuss students’ expectations and experiences in the first term of the Year in Computing, a new programme for non-computing majors at the University of Kent, a public research university in the UK. We focus on the effect of students’ home discipline on their experiences in the programme and situate this work within the context of wider efforts to make the study of computing accessible to a broader range of students

Postscript Tutorial and Reference

PostScript is the de facto standard Page Description Language produced by Adobe Systems Corporation and supported as a printer interface language by many manufacturers of laser printers and phototypesetters. This document provides an illustrated introduction to the major features of the language, it should contain enough information to enable potential users of PostScript to determine how much effort is required to perform a task they have in mind, and for some purposes it will serve as a programmer's guide to the language. It will never replace the Adobe Systems books, but then it's nowhere near as expensive

Negotiated assessment criteria and peer assessment in software engineering group project work: A case study

The core second level course in Software Engineering for Computer Science students at the University of Kent has, for many years, included a substantial design-and-build group project component. In recent years, this has been enhanced to address a number of issues crucial to students' development as reflective, professional practitioners. These include: . group allocation and formation . appropriate technical and non-technical goal-setting within the context of the taught material. These goals are used both to guide practice and as a basis for assessment. . students' critical evaluation of their own and others' achievements, in the context of moderated self and peer assessment. Although the work is assessed as a group, it has proved possible to account for variations between individuals' efforts using a novel questionnaire based approach initially developed by the University of Exeter. Problems (for both staff and students) in the implementation of these enhancements to the group learning and educational experience are addressed, and identified beneficial solutions are described. The value of this approach is situated firstly in terms of changes to the students' approach to subsequent, less constrained, project work, and secondly against the stated learning outcomes of the project; their improved technical and professional practices