Research and Presentations

My interests are in teaching computing science and in organising student run software houses such as the Aberdeen Software Factory. I am interested in mobile issues, web application development using Ruby on Rails, Java and .NET.

Current work is tied to honours and MSc projects.

Agile at the University presented at ALE2011 Unconference in Berlin, 7-9 September 2011

Agile Games for Software Development presented at 12th Annual ICS HEA Annual Conference, University of Ulster, Belfast, 23-25 August, 2011

Fred goes Agile via Lean, Aberdeen Tech Meetup, 17 August 2011

Why study CS as second degree, Aberdeen March 2011

Why Mobile Matters at Mighty Meetup, Aberdeen, 15 February 2011

Playing with Clouds: Making Web Application Assessments More Realistic presented at 11th Annual ICS HEA Annual Conference, Durham University, 24-26 August, 2010.

Playing with Clouds: Student directed coursework in Computing presented at 'Student voice in curriculum design' for sparqs in Edinburgh, 28 April 2010.

Failure Demand for the Aberdeen TechMeetup (April 2010)

Teaching Ruby (pdf) for the Scottish Ruby Confererence (March 2010) in Edinburgh

Computing Science Mobile Computing Schools Roadshow (slides) presented to schools in August 2009

E-book thoughts for Word 09 panel on 'the e-book: the word of the future?'

Cannelloni beats Spaghetti for Scotland on Rails 2009 conference watch video and the Mobile Web for Rails

RESTful Assessments from BarCamp Scotland 2008 in February 2008 Why Study CS presentation about why you should want to study computing science

Teaching Ruby on Rails presented at Java and Internet in Computing Curriculum conference 26 January 2007.

Past topics

AHDIT - Ad Hoc Data Interoperability Tool

I'm studying the interoperability of ad-hoc data exchange between temporary organisations, or those who exchange data on an infrequent basis. This could be between governments, or international non-governmental organisations. This tool compares two XML files by parsing their accompanying XML Schema files into RDF models and then comparing the models. If they are different, then the user can modify one of the XML files to work with the other, and thus incorporate this new information into the organisation.

AHDIT presentation for Joseph Bell Centre Workshop, Glasgow 22 August 2002

AHDIT presentation for ES2002, Cambridge 11 December 2002

DIPLOMACY Online - Semantic Web

I used to explore how J2ME and J2EE plus the semantic web and agents all work together. In addition this explores the ease with which scalable and functional applications can intetgrate into both platforms.

One application using these ideas has come together with research projects with students. The basic idea is to play Diplomacy via a Java enabled mobile device (or a desktop browser) deploying agents to take over as many tasks as possible.

When the project ended it was a playable game via a browser and/or J2ME device.

The Diplomacy Online Platform

The last version of the game used these tools and applications listed below.

The server:

JBoss http://www.jboss.org - fully J2EE 1.4 compliant server for dealing with the Enterprise JavaBeans

Agent and Agent - Server:

BlueJade http://sourceforge.net/projects/bluejade - the glue betwen Jade and JBoss
Jade http://sharon.cselt.it/projects/jade/ - the Java Agent Development Environment

Game Adjudicator:

JDIP http://jdip.sourceforge.net/ - the game adjudicator which returns success or failure of moves

Game Maps:

Batik http://xml.apache.org/batik/ -XML scalable vector graphics for the browser