Peter Horan

Foundation software engineering practices for capstone projects and beyond

This paper outlines an introductory course in software engineering undertaken by computing students at Deakin University. The course focuses on areas of that are often not emphasized in introductory software engineering. These areas include formal problem solving, management of software development, communication, and working in groups. The approach includes the application of concepts in a collaborative group setting. Enhancements to the course have been made over a number of semesters and evidence suggests that our overall approach is working. The skills acquired by students taking this course can be applied to later courses in software engineering, particularly the capstone project course, and to professional life.

An IT Bachelor Degree Using Modern Technologies to Illustrate Core Concepts and Principles and Building Generic Skills

Information Technology (IT) changes very quickly and influences business, industry and the public in an enormous manner. Outsourcing of IT jobs to cheaper overseas labor and globalization of IT companies become a common practice. Graduates of IT university courses must be well prepared to address the needs and expectations of business, industry and every day life. Many factors in an Information Technology curriculum influence graduates’ professional preparation and image. The most important of them is to reflect technology change, the current state of knowledge of computing, business and industry demands and students’ expectations. The aim of our project was to develop a new Bachelor of IT curriculum that satisfies these requirements. In this report we concentrate our attention on two critical aspects of IT curriculum content, the modern technologies to be used to illustrate basic concepts and principles of computing, and the generic skills that each graduate is expected to acquire to get a job in Australia.

Eiffel Assertions and the External Structure of Classes and Objects

The “external structure” in an object oriented system refers here to the graphs of objects and classes. The class structure graph or class model is derived from the object structure graph or object model, and in this operation structural information is lost, or never made explicit. Although object oriented programming languages capture the class model as declarations, contradictory assumptions about object model properties may be made introducing faults into the design. Consistent assumptions about the object model can be specified in the code using assertions such as Eiffel’s invariants, preconditions and postconditions. Three examples specifying the external structure are considered.

Investigating CO2 concentration and occupancy in school classrooms at different stages in their life cycle

ABSTRACT This study emanated from a project measuring the levels of CO2 in a range of school classrooms in Victoria, Australia. The primary purpose of this paper is to understand how classroom usage affects the rise and fall of CO2, so as provide an acceptable environment while saving energy. Our intention is to develop an understanding of the temporal and quantitative relationships of CO2 build-up, and what measures could better control this performance. A literature review precedes our indepth investigation of past classroom measurements. We investigated CO2 emissions in 24 classrooms in six different schools in Australia. The buildings are at different stages in their life cycle from new to 45 years of age. We found that the most important parameters in predicting carbon dioxide concentration in a school classroom during its occupancy period are the air change rate, carbon dioxide exhalation rate and the number of pupils respectively.

The Development of a Language for Specifying Structure of a Distributed and Parallel Application

A common characteristic of distributed and parallel programming languages is that the one language is used to specify both the organisation of the application, and its functionality. Large distributed and parallel applications will benefit if connectivity and functionality of processes are specified separately. Research is being carried out to develop two new programming languages for the specification and development of distributed and parallel applications. Here, we present a language for specifying process connectivity.

Data-driven indexing mechanism for the recognition of polyhedral objects

This paper is concerned with the problem of searching large model databases. To date, most object recognition systems have concentrated on the problem of matching using simple searching algorithms. This is quite acceptable when the number of object models is small. However, in the future, general purpose computer vision systems will be required to recognize hundreds or perhaps thousands of objects and, in such circumstances, efficient searching algorithms will be needed. The problem of searching a large model database is one which must be addressed if future computer vision systems are to be at all effective. In this paper we present a method we call data-driven feature-indexed hypothesis generation as one solution to the problem of searching large model databases.