Human-Centred Computing News

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today the next winner in the New York City Applied Sciences Initiative.

The Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is an applied science research institute which will be a partnership of top institutions from around the globe, led by NYU and NYU-Poly with a consortium of world-class universities including The University of Warwick, Carnegie Mellon University, The City University of New York, The Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and The University of Toronto. Industry partners include IBM, Cisco, Siemens, Con Edison, National Grid, Xerox, Arup, IDEO, and AECOM.

Warwick Computer Science will play a significant role in CUSP, with new and existing academics providing research and teaching in areas including operations research, service computing, complexity theory, networking and communications, data analytics, modelling and visualisation.

The completed institute will host 50 faculty and researchers and over 500 masters-level and PhD students. Students and staff from Warwick Computer Science will be able to engage in urban sciences projects in the New York ‘living lab’, in areas including smart buildings, digital healthcare, transport solutions, and public safety.

The Centre will open its doors to its first class of Warwick-CUSP students in September 2013.

For more information see:

1. http://www.nycedc.com/press-release/mayor-bloomberg-new-york-university-president-sexton-and-mta-chairman-lhota-announce
2. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/warwick_only_european/
3. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/04/urban-science-centre-born-in-the-big-apple.html

Last week a training day was held in the Department for ICT/Computing teachers interested in starting GCSE Computing in their school. While all the main Boards are offering this qualification we were pleased to have our opening talk from the Chief Examiner for the OCR GCSE Computing, Sean O'Byrne. It became typical of the whole day, that even in this first session, many participants (30 teachers or advisors) interjected with vigorous, sometimes critical, questioning and discussion. It was an intense day with sessions on practical sorting activities at KS3, on programming (Scratch and Greenfoot), on the potential of on-line support especially for programming, and on what to do next! Two major themes that emerged were:

(i) problems associated with the assessment of programming tasks and the kinds of teacher intervention and support that are allowable and desirable,

(ii) how should teachers new to programming choose and learn languages suited to the GCSE and suited to students gaining valuable concepts for future work in computing.

There was a huge range of experience among those present: some had been on the OCR pilot scheme already for two years, others were committed to starting the GCSE this September, some had industry experience of programming, others no programming knowledge at all. The day proved a good success for most participants (judging by the detailed feedback) and will result in our setting up a dedicated schools portal (soon) and preparing to offer further CPD training for teachers this July.

Nick Pope successfully completed his PhD entitled "Supporting the Migration from Construal to Program: Rethinking Software Development" under the supervision of Dr Meurig Beynon. His thesis is both a significant contribution to Empirical Modelling research, and a vigorous critique and reappraisal of some of its established principles and tools.

Where previous EM research highlighted the role of families of definitions in developing construals Nick has proposed a richer framework in which to conceptualise the transition from construals to programs. In his vision, the current state of a construal is expressed by a single binary function of the form ϕ: R × R → R that changes dynamically.

His work draws on ideas from prototype-based object-oriented software development and functional programming that have been the basis of practical tools and models first deployed in Warwick Games Design Society. Nick is currently working on the development of a web-based EM tool that will integrate his own distinctive contribution with those of many other graduates from the EM research group.

Nick's independent spirit has not only been evident in his research contribution: he spends as much time as possible trekking, ski-ing, cycling and mountaineering. At the time of writing Nick is believed to be scaling some 4000m peaks in Morocco.