Anet Potgieter

RoboCup Junior: A vehicle for S&T education in Africa?

One of the challenges of the 21st century is to prepare learners for the rising technological challenges in jobs and daily life. In order to be able to do so curiosity and motivation of the learners have to be stimulated. There exist initiatives such as the First Lego League or RoboCupJunior to spark interest in youngsters for science and technology. In a playful way, the children get into contact with technology and become more interested in these fields. In this paper we report on the experiences of the South African RoboCupJunior Rescue team AmaJukuJuku that participated in the 2010 RoboCupJunior in Singapore. From the first-hand experiences of this group of learners with a disadvantaged learning background, we show the positive effects and argue that such initiatives are helpful and important, particularly in the African context. We propose a scheme how such initiatives could be undertaken in the whole of Africa.

Software Project Profitability Analysis Using Temporal Probabilistic Reasoning

Providing viable estimates, understanding project requirements and doing proper risk management on software projects require extensive application and sophisticated techniques of analysis and interpretation. There is still a lack of informative techniques and feedback mechanisms that help to assess how well and efficiently a specific development methodology is performing. Analyzing project tasks would enhance how well individual tasks are estimated, how well they are defined, and whether items are completed on-time and on-budget. In this work, we propose a temporal probabilistic model that addresses feedback control mechanisms in project planning using the complex adaptive systems software engineering framework (CASSE). We have tested our approach in industry with a software development company in South Africa on two commercial project evaluations. Our preliminary results show that the temporal probabilistic model of the framework demonstrably enhances practitionerspsila understanding in managing software projects profitably - hence increasing business sustainability and management.

Using Actor Object Operations Structures to Understand Project Requirements Complexities

Some of the major challenges still facing the software industry are use of inappropriate methodology, lack of customer involvement, project complexity, and requirements volatility and management. In this work we propose the use of the complex adaptive system software engineering framework (CASSE) that analyzes value-related aspects of systems development - addressing satisfaction of all project requirements as a measure for project success. We specifically look at actor object operation structures (AOOS) and how they impact on the complexity of project requirements. We demonstrate our approach by analyzing use-case artifact properties and how a change in any properties can impact on project management during the development process. Our results show that the hidden interrelationships enhance implementation prioritization and schedule optimization.Our major contribution is in demonstrating that alternative engineering approaches that analyze AOOSs can enhance the way we understand project complexities, increase customer commitment and generate project value and success.

An Agent Based Layered Framework to Facilitate Intelligent Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have emerged with many useful applications but require a number of conflicting desirable properties such as: scalability, self-configuration, self-organization, deployability and simplicity. Most existing WSN proposals meet one or more of these requirements, but not all of them. Besides prior to the deployed of a network, it is challenging to alter the underlying technologies, such as: localization, routing, etc. This paper attempts to solve the complexity of these systems by proposing a dynamic structured framework using agents to facilitate different demands of WSN applications. For proof-of-concept, an initial prototype system was developed on the Solarium SunSPOT emulator.