Patricia Charlton | University College London (original) (raw)
Papers by Patricia Charlton
Proceedings of the first international conference on Autonomous agents - AGENTS '97, 1997
Google, Inc. (search). ...
Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between hete... more Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between heterogeneous automated systems. While extensive work on semantic models has been carried out, much of this work remains to be tested in real open environments. This paper describes some of the issues and challenges to be considered when combining existing semantic frameworks for effective agent communication. In particular, we describe issues related to the development of the Agentcities Network which is a large-scale open test bed for agent systems that aims to enable on-line experimentation with semantic frameworks for agent communication. The presentation is kept discursive in nature: characterizing different aspects of communication, outlining research challenges, commenting on possible strategies and describing the current status of activities in the Agentcities Network.
Abstract. Distributed multi-agent systems propose new infrastructure solutions to support the int... more Abstract. Distributed multi-agent systems propose new infrastructure solutions to support the interoperability of electronic services. Security is a central issue for such infrastructures and is compounded by their intrinsic openness, heterogeneity and because of the autonomous and potentially self-interested nature of the agents therein. This article reviews the work that the FIPA agent standards body has undertaken to specify security in multi-agent systems. This enables a discussion about the main issues that developers have to face at different levels (i.e., intra-platform, inter-platform and application level) when developing agent-based security solutions in various domains. 1
Summary oriented applications and agent-based systems are increasingly demanding security guarant... more Summary oriented applications and agent-based systems are increasingly demanding security guarantees that concern confidentiality, integrity, availability, accounting and non-repudiation in order to be deployed in business applications such as e-commerce, e-finance that include both B2B and B2C transactions. This paper considers the main challenges concerning security that need to be overcome for Multi Agent Systems (MAS) to succeed in business enterprises. We outline the main design issues for developing agent security. Finally, we survey some specific initiatives currently underway within the FIPA agent forum that seeks to address MAS security and then we draw conclusions. Introduction of computational devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The e-business world is being driven to create and enhance technologies to support dynamic services, automated interaction, rich information exchange and tailored solutions, to underpin such open service environments. Indeed such environments ar...
Over the past decade, agent research has reached a significant level of maturity with wellestabli... more Over the past decade, agent research has reached a significant level of maturity with wellestablished theories, languages and methodologies. Despite these successes, the vision of agents as intelligent, autonomous entities seamlessly interacting with one another in open heterogeneous environments [Hewitt90] has yet to be realised. As Nwana and Ndumu [Nwana98] point out "the devil in realising the promises of agent technology is in the details." These details include the challenging coordination, communication, discovery, trust, security and ontology issues that are found in truly open environments where agents that are owned by many different individuals and organisations can interact and interoperate.
This paper presents emerging requirements for learning analytics on interactive mathematical e-bo... more This paper presents emerging requirements for learning analytics on interactive mathematical e-books and a framework that can be used for the seamless integration of complex learning objects with ebook platforms. We describe the opportunities that this approach opens up regarding interoperability and configurability of learning analytics and intelligent support. The framework is generic and can be used for any type of system with similar requirements. In this paper we present a case that covers configuration of learning analytics for teachers and intelligent support for students in constructionist mathematical e-books.
This research investigates part of the challenge of widening participation and inclusion for teac... more This research investigates part of the challenge of widening participation and inclusion for teaching and learning about CS that the Institute of Coding plans to address. This research reports on working with a large number of schools, researchers and academics both formally and informally and across a wide age range and ability. The findings from a number of studies reflects important pedagogical theory, design and practice of teaching and learning about the computer science and engineering through tangible learning context. These findings and observations are examined in the light of these teaching and learning experiences and especially the observation of development of resilience in students learning and engagement in challenging areas of study.
aceMedia has taken the challenge of organising personal content by creating tools to automaticall... more aceMedia has taken the challenge of organising personal content by creating tools to automatically generate metadata descriptors and search content intuitively. In this paper we review part of the approach taken by aceMedia to create semantic metadata (ontologies) and use of this to enable more appropriate search and matching and managing of content. However, there is further benefit the end user can gain from this semantic metadata and this is from adding intelligence in the software. The benefits and how intelligence can be added is described with a particular focus on assisting the user in the creation of privacy preference rules when sharing content: the creation of self-governing inferencing.
British Journal of Educational Technology
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
This paper focuses on a design based research study about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering ... more This paper focuses on a design based research study about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) learning by making through collaboration and production. This study examines learning by making by students to explore STEM using a constructionist approach with a particular focus on computer science and engineering. The use of IoT as a technology enhanced learning (TEL) tool created the learning conditions to be studied: (a) collaborative: no one person had the knowledge to complete the project alone, (b) problem-based: no off the shelf solution was used, and (c) multidisciplinary: the learning context pushed the boundaries across the subjects. The study investigated the learning conditions and indicators of collaboration and production taking place when learning about STEM. The results were used to inform the design of effective data analytics and visualization tools for the PELARS project to advance practice-based learning activities in STEM teaching. However, more specifically, the findings provide insight into the knowledge construction process when learning through making in complex environments. These insights illustrate the combined pedagogical value of collaboration and production supporting the multidisciplinary learning opportunities. The importance of community knowledge construction and its relationship to the pedagogical approach is examined. The significance of these findings in the context of IoT TEL tools in education is explored.
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion - DSAI 2016, 2016
Our idea relates to the combination of emerging HCI technologies such as Virtual and Mixed Realit... more Our idea relates to the combination of emerging HCI technologies such as Virtual and Mixed Reality and an innovative Question and Answering (Q&A) system with already existing concepts of spatial learning and inquiry-based learning in education in order to evolve them to answer the needs of modern education. In the project we use the concept of the curiosity cabinet as our core 'learning enabling' metaphor. To enable the creation of learning experiences we are combining the curiosity cabinet metaphor with a set of artefacts (real of virtual objects) so that educators can set the stage for the learning experience. Moreover, we also facilitate learners to design and create their learning spaces by accessing the artefacts collection and selecting items they find appropriate to include in their spaces attaching additional information related to the respective learning experience. Therefore, learning spaces created during a learning experience support both highly individualized curiosity cabinets as well a shared space to co-design, co-create and share the learning artefacts. This supports both the personalized learning spaces for the individual learning to develop agency of learning, as well as collaborative group learning spaces. These personalized and collaborative learning spaces evolve over time to reflect changes in the learning and development and, habits and needs of each particular learner or group of learners.
2016 12th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE), 2016
If we are to engage a younger generation to become future engineering and science innovators, we ... more If we are to engage a younger generation to become future engineering and science innovators, we need to widen participation and interaction with technology and science. Maker movements have the potential to do this by making tools, materials, and processes more readily available to people in a more informal learning setting who may not initially self-identify as makers. We address a chief limitation of such maker communities, where it can be difficult for participants to develop and continue an application outside the inherent limited time and space of the maker event. We ran a series of 6 maker events aimed at groups of six 14-15 year olds that focused on learning through making the BBC micro:bit device interact as part of an Internet of Things (IoT) application. We report on one event and a challenge to develop a sharable wearable IoT application to address the aim for participants that could sustain interest outside the event. This application was a club badge to send secret messages to members. The evaluation revealed a keen engagement and commitment to social wearable design, as seen through the students building and participating in the successful use of the application through authenticity. This authentic engagement to problem solving at a technical level to motivate personal goals was inspired through a sharable wearable design that participants deemed to be beneficial.
This paper draws upon the practical experience gained in the development of software agents for t... more This paper draws upon the practical experience gained in the development of software agents for the deployment of intelligent distributed services and information access. We review a set of multi-agent architectures starting from the communication and co-ordination requirements of such systems. The aim is to illustrate the common components in current designs and implementations of MAS which are often based on the communication nature of these systems. Further to this we show some benefits and drawbacks of these systems that are developed form this aspect. Part of the limitations of these systems is due to basing their communication semantic interpretation on the belief desire and intention model (BDI) which is a mental agency. The mental agency is used for the internal reasoning part of the agent and places implicit assumptions on the communication behaviour. We examine this limitation and report on how two MASs overcome some of the constraints. In light of these practical solution...
The European ‘MC-squared’ project has a number of Communities of Interest’ (CoI) (Fischer, 2001) ... more The European ‘MC-squared’ project has a number of Communities of Interest’ (CoI) (Fischer, 2001) in European countries that work on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks, called cBooks. A community of interest consists of several stakeholders from various ‘Communities of Practice’ (Wenger, 1998). In this paper we outline the creation of an English CoI describing the development of a cBook on numbers and equivalence. We use a design-based research methodology approach for teachers, designers, researchers, teacher-educators jointly working on cBooks as ‘boundary objects’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) to facilitate thinking about creative mathematical thinking and social creativity. We illustrate our design-based approach through the example artefacts created during the different stages of development of the cBooks. The details of our approach provide a blueprint for the formation of CoI’s by working on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks.
This workshop illustrates how a digital tool, the Learning Designer, facilitates a new way of des... more This workshop illustrates how a digital tool, the Learning Designer, facilitates a new way of designing teaching and learning. It enables teachers to: build on the work of others, adopt and adapt learning designs, analyse and test their designs, and then share their own teaching ideas and experience using the tool. The Learning Designer is one of the outputs of a three-year research project*, which investigated how to support teachers developing their design skills and knowledge in order to profit from the creative possibilities opened up by digital technologies. Evaluations from teachers using the learning design tool demonstrated that it helps teachers in all sectors of education. The Learning Designer tool is used across the world in the exchange of knowledge when delivering formal and informal “teaching.” It is underpinned by a theoretically-informed model of learning and by empirical work with teaching practitioners, and uses Semantic Web technologies for developing this knowle...
The EU-funded ‘MC-squared’ project is working with a number of European communities to develop di... more The EU-funded ‘MC-squared’ project is working with a number of European communities to develop digital, interactive, creative, mathematics ‘textbooks’ that the project calls ‘cBooks’. The cBooks are authored in a Digital Mathematics Environment in which participants can construct books with various interactive ‘widgets’. This paper provides an outline of the MC-squared project illustrating an interactive storyboard of the Digital Mathematics Environment architecture. This includes examples of how authoring by cBook designers of interactive ‘widgets’ is possible. The workshop that relates to this paper is augmented, of course, by suitable ‘hands-on’ materials aimed at two possible cBooks: one focusing on aspects of geometric and spatial thinking using building blocks, the other on aspects of number and fractions.
Lilies (Localisation and InterLeaving stragIES) was developed to deal with a forest fire fighting... more Lilies (Localisation and InterLeaving stragIES) was developed to deal with a forest fire fighting planning environment. The apphcation required adaptive planning in a reactive and generative environment. To model the application, it was necessary for multiple agents to be developed which added the usual communication [15, 19] issues. The planning environment needed to deal with both reactive and generative problems. To provide a unified and adaptative environment we used reflection [20, 13, 4, 18]. Lilies provides a framework which develops and extends the taxonomy of actions [16] and the interleaving [1] for planning environments. To deal with the planning in a reactive and generative environment, and having only partial information required a system which could evaluate, interleave and adapt on both single and multiple agent(s) model. this paper we explain why and how we developed Lilies, a system which provides agents with a means of inspection and introspection [4].
Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between hete... more Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between heterogeneous automated systems. While extensive work on semantic models has been carried out, much of this work remains to be tested in real open environments. This paper briefly describes some of the issues and challenges to be considered when combining existing semantic frameworks for effective agent communication. In particular, we describe issues related to the development of the Agentcities Network which is a large-scale open test bed for agent systems that aims to enable on-line experimentation with semantic frameworks for agent communication. The presentation is kept discursive in nature: characterizing different aspects of communication, outlining research challenges, commenting on possible strategies and describing the current status of activities in the Agentcities Network.
Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Written communication skills are considered to be highly desirable in computing graduates. Howeve... more Written communication skills are considered to be highly desirable in computing graduates. However, many computing students do not have a background in which these skills have been developed, and the skills are often not well addressed within a computing curriculum. For some multidisciplinary areas, such as data science, the range of potential stakeholders makes the need for communications skills all the greater. As interest in data science increases and the technical skills of the area are in ever higher demand, understanding effective teaching and learning of these interdisciplinary aspects is receiving significant attention by academics, industry and government in an effort to address the digital skills gap. In this paper, we report on the experience of adapting a final year data science module in an undergraduate computing curriculum to help develop the skills needed for writing extended reports. From its inception, the module has used Jupyter notebooks to develop the students' skills in the coding aspects of the module. However, over several presentations, we have investigated how the cell-based structure of the notebooks can be exploited to improve the students' understanding of how to structure a report on a data investigation. We have increasingly designed the assessment for the module to take advantage of the learning affordances of Jupyter notebooks to support both raw data analysis and effective report writing. We reflect on the lessons learned from these changes to the assessment model, and the students' responses to the changes. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computer science education; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments.
Proceedings of the first international conference on Autonomous agents - AGENTS '97, 1997
Google, Inc. (search). ...
Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between hete... more Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between heterogeneous automated systems. While extensive work on semantic models has been carried out, much of this work remains to be tested in real open environments. This paper describes some of the issues and challenges to be considered when combining existing semantic frameworks for effective agent communication. In particular, we describe issues related to the development of the Agentcities Network which is a large-scale open test bed for agent systems that aims to enable on-line experimentation with semantic frameworks for agent communication. The presentation is kept discursive in nature: characterizing different aspects of communication, outlining research challenges, commenting on possible strategies and describing the current status of activities in the Agentcities Network.
Abstract. Distributed multi-agent systems propose new infrastructure solutions to support the int... more Abstract. Distributed multi-agent systems propose new infrastructure solutions to support the interoperability of electronic services. Security is a central issue for such infrastructures and is compounded by their intrinsic openness, heterogeneity and because of the autonomous and potentially self-interested nature of the agents therein. This article reviews the work that the FIPA agent standards body has undertaken to specify security in multi-agent systems. This enables a discussion about the main issues that developers have to face at different levels (i.e., intra-platform, inter-platform and application level) when developing agent-based security solutions in various domains. 1
Summary oriented applications and agent-based systems are increasingly demanding security guarant... more Summary oriented applications and agent-based systems are increasingly demanding security guarantees that concern confidentiality, integrity, availability, accounting and non-repudiation in order to be deployed in business applications such as e-commerce, e-finance that include both B2B and B2C transactions. This paper considers the main challenges concerning security that need to be overcome for Multi Agent Systems (MAS) to succeed in business enterprises. We outline the main design issues for developing agent security. Finally, we survey some specific initiatives currently underway within the FIPA agent forum that seeks to address MAS security and then we draw conclusions. Introduction of computational devices are becoming more ubiquitous. The e-business world is being driven to create and enhance technologies to support dynamic services, automated interaction, rich information exchange and tailored solutions, to underpin such open service environments. Indeed such environments ar...
Over the past decade, agent research has reached a significant level of maturity with wellestabli... more Over the past decade, agent research has reached a significant level of maturity with wellestablished theories, languages and methodologies. Despite these successes, the vision of agents as intelligent, autonomous entities seamlessly interacting with one another in open heterogeneous environments [Hewitt90] has yet to be realised. As Nwana and Ndumu [Nwana98] point out "the devil in realising the promises of agent technology is in the details." These details include the challenging coordination, communication, discovery, trust, security and ontology issues that are found in truly open environments where agents that are owned by many different individuals and organisations can interact and interoperate.
This paper presents emerging requirements for learning analytics on interactive mathematical e-bo... more This paper presents emerging requirements for learning analytics on interactive mathematical e-books and a framework that can be used for the seamless integration of complex learning objects with ebook platforms. We describe the opportunities that this approach opens up regarding interoperability and configurability of learning analytics and intelligent support. The framework is generic and can be used for any type of system with similar requirements. In this paper we present a case that covers configuration of learning analytics for teachers and intelligent support for students in constructionist mathematical e-books.
This research investigates part of the challenge of widening participation and inclusion for teac... more This research investigates part of the challenge of widening participation and inclusion for teaching and learning about CS that the Institute of Coding plans to address. This research reports on working with a large number of schools, researchers and academics both formally and informally and across a wide age range and ability. The findings from a number of studies reflects important pedagogical theory, design and practice of teaching and learning about the computer science and engineering through tangible learning context. These findings and observations are examined in the light of these teaching and learning experiences and especially the observation of development of resilience in students learning and engagement in challenging areas of study.
aceMedia has taken the challenge of organising personal content by creating tools to automaticall... more aceMedia has taken the challenge of organising personal content by creating tools to automatically generate metadata descriptors and search content intuitively. In this paper we review part of the approach taken by aceMedia to create semantic metadata (ontologies) and use of this to enable more appropriate search and matching and managing of content. However, there is further benefit the end user can gain from this semantic metadata and this is from adding intelligence in the software. The benefits and how intelligence can be added is described with a particular focus on assisting the user in the creation of privacy preference rules when sharing content: the creation of self-governing inferencing.
British Journal of Educational Technology
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which... more This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies
This paper focuses on a design based research study about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering ... more This paper focuses on a design based research study about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) learning by making through collaboration and production. This study examines learning by making by students to explore STEM using a constructionist approach with a particular focus on computer science and engineering. The use of IoT as a technology enhanced learning (TEL) tool created the learning conditions to be studied: (a) collaborative: no one person had the knowledge to complete the project alone, (b) problem-based: no off the shelf solution was used, and (c) multidisciplinary: the learning context pushed the boundaries across the subjects. The study investigated the learning conditions and indicators of collaboration and production taking place when learning about STEM. The results were used to inform the design of effective data analytics and visualization tools for the PELARS project to advance practice-based learning activities in STEM teaching. However, more specifically, the findings provide insight into the knowledge construction process when learning through making in complex environments. These insights illustrate the combined pedagogical value of collaboration and production supporting the multidisciplinary learning opportunities. The importance of community knowledge construction and its relationship to the pedagogical approach is examined. The significance of these findings in the context of IoT TEL tools in education is explored.
Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion - DSAI 2016, 2016
Our idea relates to the combination of emerging HCI technologies such as Virtual and Mixed Realit... more Our idea relates to the combination of emerging HCI technologies such as Virtual and Mixed Reality and an innovative Question and Answering (Q&A) system with already existing concepts of spatial learning and inquiry-based learning in education in order to evolve them to answer the needs of modern education. In the project we use the concept of the curiosity cabinet as our core 'learning enabling' metaphor. To enable the creation of learning experiences we are combining the curiosity cabinet metaphor with a set of artefacts (real of virtual objects) so that educators can set the stage for the learning experience. Moreover, we also facilitate learners to design and create their learning spaces by accessing the artefacts collection and selecting items they find appropriate to include in their spaces attaching additional information related to the respective learning experience. Therefore, learning spaces created during a learning experience support both highly individualized curiosity cabinets as well a shared space to co-design, co-create and share the learning artefacts. This supports both the personalized learning spaces for the individual learning to develop agency of learning, as well as collaborative group learning spaces. These personalized and collaborative learning spaces evolve over time to reflect changes in the learning and development and, habits and needs of each particular learner or group of learners.
2016 12th International Conference on Intelligent Environments (IE), 2016
If we are to engage a younger generation to become future engineering and science innovators, we ... more If we are to engage a younger generation to become future engineering and science innovators, we need to widen participation and interaction with technology and science. Maker movements have the potential to do this by making tools, materials, and processes more readily available to people in a more informal learning setting who may not initially self-identify as makers. We address a chief limitation of such maker communities, where it can be difficult for participants to develop and continue an application outside the inherent limited time and space of the maker event. We ran a series of 6 maker events aimed at groups of six 14-15 year olds that focused on learning through making the BBC micro:bit device interact as part of an Internet of Things (IoT) application. We report on one event and a challenge to develop a sharable wearable IoT application to address the aim for participants that could sustain interest outside the event. This application was a club badge to send secret messages to members. The evaluation revealed a keen engagement and commitment to social wearable design, as seen through the students building and participating in the successful use of the application through authenticity. This authentic engagement to problem solving at a technical level to motivate personal goals was inspired through a sharable wearable design that participants deemed to be beneficial.
This paper draws upon the practical experience gained in the development of software agents for t... more This paper draws upon the practical experience gained in the development of software agents for the deployment of intelligent distributed services and information access. We review a set of multi-agent architectures starting from the communication and co-ordination requirements of such systems. The aim is to illustrate the common components in current designs and implementations of MAS which are often based on the communication nature of these systems. Further to this we show some benefits and drawbacks of these systems that are developed form this aspect. Part of the limitations of these systems is due to basing their communication semantic interpretation on the belief desire and intention model (BDI) which is a mental agency. The mental agency is used for the internal reasoning part of the agent and places implicit assumptions on the communication behaviour. We examine this limitation and report on how two MASs overcome some of the constraints. In light of these practical solution...
The European ‘MC-squared’ project has a number of Communities of Interest’ (CoI) (Fischer, 2001) ... more The European ‘MC-squared’ project has a number of Communities of Interest’ (CoI) (Fischer, 2001) in European countries that work on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks, called cBooks. A community of interest consists of several stakeholders from various ‘Communities of Practice’ (Wenger, 1998). In this paper we outline the creation of an English CoI describing the development of a cBook on numbers and equivalence. We use a design-based research methodology approach for teachers, designers, researchers, teacher-educators jointly working on cBooks as ‘boundary objects’ (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) to facilitate thinking about creative mathematical thinking and social creativity. We illustrate our design-based approach through the example artefacts created during the different stages of development of the cBooks. The details of our approach provide a blueprint for the formation of CoI’s by working on digital, interactive, creative, mathematics textbooks.
This workshop illustrates how a digital tool, the Learning Designer, facilitates a new way of des... more This workshop illustrates how a digital tool, the Learning Designer, facilitates a new way of designing teaching and learning. It enables teachers to: build on the work of others, adopt and adapt learning designs, analyse and test their designs, and then share their own teaching ideas and experience using the tool. The Learning Designer is one of the outputs of a three-year research project*, which investigated how to support teachers developing their design skills and knowledge in order to profit from the creative possibilities opened up by digital technologies. Evaluations from teachers using the learning design tool demonstrated that it helps teachers in all sectors of education. The Learning Designer tool is used across the world in the exchange of knowledge when delivering formal and informal “teaching.” It is underpinned by a theoretically-informed model of learning and by empirical work with teaching practitioners, and uses Semantic Web technologies for developing this knowle...
The EU-funded ‘MC-squared’ project is working with a number of European communities to develop di... more The EU-funded ‘MC-squared’ project is working with a number of European communities to develop digital, interactive, creative, mathematics ‘textbooks’ that the project calls ‘cBooks’. The cBooks are authored in a Digital Mathematics Environment in which participants can construct books with various interactive ‘widgets’. This paper provides an outline of the MC-squared project illustrating an interactive storyboard of the Digital Mathematics Environment architecture. This includes examples of how authoring by cBook designers of interactive ‘widgets’ is possible. The workshop that relates to this paper is augmented, of course, by suitable ‘hands-on’ materials aimed at two possible cBooks: one focusing on aspects of geometric and spatial thinking using building blocks, the other on aspects of number and fractions.
Lilies (Localisation and InterLeaving stragIES) was developed to deal with a forest fire fighting... more Lilies (Localisation and InterLeaving stragIES) was developed to deal with a forest fire fighting planning environment. The apphcation required adaptive planning in a reactive and generative environment. To model the application, it was necessary for multiple agents to be developed which added the usual communication [15, 19] issues. The planning environment needed to deal with both reactive and generative problems. To provide a unified and adaptative environment we used reflection [20, 13, 4, 18]. Lilies provides a framework which develops and extends the taxonomy of actions [16] and the interleaving [1] for planning environments. To deal with the planning in a reactive and generative environment, and having only partial information required a system which could evaluate, interleave and adapt on both single and multiple agent(s) model. this paper we explain why and how we developed Lilies, a system which provides agents with a means of inspection and introspection [4].
Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between hete... more Explicit communication semantics are often considered essential for rich interaction between heterogeneous automated systems. While extensive work on semantic models has been carried out, much of this work remains to be tested in real open environments. This paper briefly describes some of the issues and challenges to be considered when combining existing semantic frameworks for effective agent communication. In particular, we describe issues related to the development of the Agentcities Network which is a large-scale open test bed for agent systems that aims to enable on-line experimentation with semantic frameworks for agent communication. The presentation is kept discursive in nature: characterizing different aspects of communication, outlining research challenges, commenting on possible strategies and describing the current status of activities in the Agentcities Network.
Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
Written communication skills are considered to be highly desirable in computing graduates. Howeve... more Written communication skills are considered to be highly desirable in computing graduates. However, many computing students do not have a background in which these skills have been developed, and the skills are often not well addressed within a computing curriculum. For some multidisciplinary areas, such as data science, the range of potential stakeholders makes the need for communications skills all the greater. As interest in data science increases and the technical skills of the area are in ever higher demand, understanding effective teaching and learning of these interdisciplinary aspects is receiving significant attention by academics, industry and government in an effort to address the digital skills gap. In this paper, we report on the experience of adapting a final year data science module in an undergraduate computing curriculum to help develop the skills needed for writing extended reports. From its inception, the module has used Jupyter notebooks to develop the students' skills in the coding aspects of the module. However, over several presentations, we have investigated how the cell-based structure of the notebooks can be exploited to improve the students' understanding of how to structure a report on a data investigation. We have increasingly designed the assessment for the module to take advantage of the learning affordances of Jupyter notebooks to support both raw data analysis and effective report writing. We reflect on the lessons learned from these changes to the assessment model, and the students' responses to the changes. CCS CONCEPTS • Social and professional topics → Computer science education; • Applied computing → Interactive learning environments.