Description:
Year-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group should be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is likely. This paper presents a reflective analysis of teaching at three different institutions and presents the resulting distilled wisdom of experience that has produced a structured framework for capstone project units.
Description:
Year-long team projects with external clients provide a well recognized opportunity for students to gain industry experience, whilst being supported and guided by staff to minimize risks. Each group should be supervised to ensure that they have enough direction and confidence to approach a new problem of significant size, without being daunted. A structure is needed that is flexible and adaptable to suit various institutional cultures but, at the same time, provides the safety net to ensure that success is likely. This paper presents a reflective analysis of teaching at three different institutions and presents the resulting distilled wisdom of experience that has produced a structured framework for capstone project units.
Description:
We propose attributes that are needed in sophisticated agent teams capable of working to manage an evolving disaster. Such agent teams need to be dynamically formed and ca- pable of adaptive reorganization as the demands and com- plexity of the situation evolve. The agents need to have self- awareness of their own roles, responsibilities and capabilities and be aware of their relationships with others in the team. Each agent is not only empowered to act autonomously to- ward realizing their goals, agents are also able to negotiate to change roles as a situation changes, if reorganization is required or perceived to be in the team interest. The hierar- chical 'position' of an agent and the 'relationships' between agents govern the authority and obligations that an agent adopts. Such sophisticated agents might work in a collabora- tive team with people to self-organize and manage a critical incident such as a bush-¯re. We are planning to implement a team of agents to interface with a bush-¯re simulation, working with people in real time, to test our architecture.
Description:
We propose attributes that are needed in sophisticated agent teams capable of working to manage an evolving disaster. Such agent teams need to be dynamically formed and ca- pable of adaptive reorganization as the demands and com- plexity of the situation evolve. The agents need to have self- awareness of their own roles, responsibilities and capabilities and be aware of their relationships with others in the team. Each agent is not only empowered to act autonomously to- ward realizing their goals, agents are also able to negotiate to change roles as a situation changes, if reorganization is required or perceived to be in the team interest. The hierar- chical 'position' of an agent and the 'relationships' between agents govern the authority and obligations that an agent adopts. Such sophisticated agents might work in a collabora- tive team with people to self-organize and manage a critical incident such as a bush-¯re. We are planning to implement a team of agents to interface with a bush-¯re simulation, working with people in real time, to test our architecture.
Description:
We seek to engineer adaptive coordination between agents working in and across dynamic organizations in a complex, distributed setting. Guided by predefined social policies, agents can create social commitments at run time to achieve coordination of knowledge and behaviour. We demonstrate coordination requirements by providing example policies, drawing on the need for knowledge cultivation in an emergency management scenario.
Description:
To perform successfully in the workplace, employers demand that a new ICT graduate should be equipped with a strong set of technical skills, coupled with a flexible and creative approach to problem solving (Dawson, 2000; Hagan, 2004). To prepare students for their transition to industry, many tertiary institutions incorporate a team project into the final year of their IT and Computing courses (Clear, Young, Goldweber, Leidig, & Scott, 2001). Such projects include diverse technical areas including software development on specialised platforms, hardware design, networking problems and multimedia development. The importance of a software team project in final year computing degrees is without argument (Newman, Daniels, & Faulkner, 2003; Lynch, Goold, & Blain, 2004); however, there is academic debate about how to best achieve ‘industrial strength’ authenticity for students. Should the project problem be one constructed by academic staff? Or should the problem be that of a real client? In this paper we argue the latter case by describing our experiences drawn from supervising student ICT projects done for real clients in the local community across three different institutions. An assessment model for student projects that successfully promotes the development of good graduate attributes and the development of professional processes is detailed. The model includes explicit scaffolding and support structures to aid students engaged in real‐life (and loosely defined) software projects. We argue that assessment of project work is about valuing process as much as product; we also report upon lessons learned from implementing this model at different institutions.
Description:
To perform successfully in the workplace, employers demand that a new ICT graduate should be equipped with a strong set of technical skills, coupled with a flexible and creative approach to problem solving (Dawson, 2000; Hagan, 2004). To prepare students for their transition to industry, many tertiary institutions incorporate a team project into the final year of their IT and Computing courses (Clear, Young, Goldweber, Leidig, & Scott, 2001). Such projects include diverse technical areas including software development on specialised platforms, hardware design, networking problems and multimedia development. The importance of a software team project in final year computing degrees is without argument (Newman, Daniels, & Faulkner, 2003; Lynch, Goold, & Blain, 2004); however, there is academic debate about how to best achieve ‘industrial strength’ authenticity for students. Should the project problem be one constructed by academic staff? Or should the problem be that of a real client? In this paper we argue the latter case by describing our experiences drawn from supervising student ICT projects done for real clients in the local community across three different institutions. An assessment model for student projects that successfully promotes the development of good graduate attributes and the development of professional processes is detailed. The model includes explicit scaffolding and support structures to aid students engaged in real‐life (and loosely defined) software projects. We argue that assessment of project work is about valuing process as much as product; we also report upon lessons learned from implementing this model at different institutions.
Description:
We consider requirements for adaptive agent organizations in a dynamic and complex situation. We propose a new "jazzy" organizational approach to enable flexible real-time coordinated agent behaviour: plan-based performance that is loosely scripted and modified in real time with improvisation between parts of an organization.