CS405 Overview
CS405 Introduction to EM was introduced as a fourth-year module for MEng students on computer-science related courses and as module for MSc students. There were ten 'editions' of the module: links to webpages relating to the last nine of these are as below:
2002-3 2003-2004 2004-5 2005-6 2006-7 2007-8 2008-9 2009-10 2010-11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14
The last edition of CS405 Introduction to EM was taught in the Autumn term of 2013-14.
Online resources to support the module were first developed in 2005-6, when the module was delivered by Steve Russ with the help of several EM research students. These can be accessed via this link.
Click here for the online resources that were subsequently made available for CS405 from 2006-7 through to 2013-14.
The module CS405 Introduction to EM was first taught in 2002-3. The assignment for that year was the RU-BOARD / Pjawns modelling exercise.
In 2003-4, the assignment was the CheaperCHeating central heating system modelling activity.
From 2004-5 onwards, the principal assignment took the form of a submission to the Warwick Electronic Bulletin on Empirical Modelling. An additional assessment component was introduced in 2011-12 in order to differentiate between the MEng and MSc variants of the module. (The nature of this additional component - a comprehension exercise - is illustrated in these sample resources.) This took the form of a comprehension exercise. The module was taught in association with WEB-EM submissions on 10 occasions:
2004-5 Autumn term - WEB-EM-1
2005-6 Autumn term - WEB-EM-2
2006-7 Autumn term - WEB-EM-3
2007-8 Spring term - WEB-EM-4
2008-9 Spring term - WEB-EM-5
2009-10 Autumn term - WEB-EM-6
2010-11 Autumn term - WEB-EM-7
2011-12 Autumn term - WEB-EM-8
2012-13 Autumn term - WEB-EM-9
2013-14 Autumn term - WEB-EM-10
The primary modelling tool deployed up until 2009-10 was the EDEN interpreter. From 2009-10 onwards, alternative tools such as DOSTE (see several submissions to WEB-EM-6), DASM/Cadence (see Dangerfield and Evans's contributions to WEB-EM-7) and JS-Eden (see e.g. Matthew Cranham's WEB-EM-8 contribution) became available. An experimental variant of EDEN (eden-2.10) was introduced in 2009-10, but little used. Documentation and resources for Cadence were provided in 2010-11 and 2011-12 via an additional webpage and supplementary notes on the Lab 2 exercise sheets [2010-11] / [2011-12]. For the last two editions of CS405, the tools that featured in the labs were EDEN and JS-Eden.
Prior to 2005-6, the CS405 module was supported by more primitive online resources in the ~wmb/public/cs405 and ~wmb/public/projects directories:
2004-5 sources
Introductory lecture: What is EM?
Intro to EM via DMT (Lab 5), SEMI Aspects of State and Distributed Models (Lab 6), The Agent-0riented Parser tutorial (Lab 7)
System Development and EM (illustrated by the SQLEDDI development, and cameos from the heapsort and draughts models)
2003-4 sources
Introductory lecture on the role of tkeden in EM (30th Sept 1993)
About the written examination (18th November 1993)
Reference was made to
-
- the 'dishwasher' comparative study developed by Allan Wong in his PhD thesis (section 3.4, p61, Appendices A,B,C)
- exercises with the 'heapsort' model
- Ashley Ward gave a lecture on Implementing EM: Dependency as agency in November 2003ls-
- for this lecture, he developed the info sheet in the scicsYung1995/Docs directory and cited dtkeden
- Informal notes on the role of LSD
2002-3 sources
The original CS405 module specification
Some readings on sw development / Digest of Fred Brooks's Mythical Man Month / Annotated Lind on Agent-Oriented SW Development
Notes on Entity-Relationship modelling (as presented by WMB in the Theory of DBs module)
EM for Educational Technology (WMB+SBR) (based on Staff Development Seminar November 4th 1998)
These and other complementary resources are also recorded in the directory:
~wmb/TEACHING/CS405
This directory has CS405-0203, CS405-0304 and CS405-0405 subdirectories, but resources for all three editions are somewhat conflated.
For instance, notes for the initial sessions for all three editions can be found in CS405-0203/LECTNOTES/Week1. They include e.g. a Gatwick bus scenario that was used to illustrate and motivate EM in 2003-4 (see Lecture1.03.txt) (cf. this annotated list of resources.)
Some of the resources introduced in 2002-3 served as prototypes for the resources that can be accessed under Revision Guidance (wks 8-10) in 2004-5.
Other resources in the public/cs405 directory include J-P Dupont's EDEN symbol table tabulation routine: see the 'wmbsymdb' subdirectory.