Shanghua Sun

Categorising computer science education research

The interdisciplinary nature of Computer Science Education as a field of study is a complicating factor when authors are choosing appropriate journals and conferences for publishing research results. This paper reports a survey of 42 such publications in order to identify the types of paper frequently accepted for publication in each. We review existing taxonomies developed for the general fields of Computer Science and Education, and from this starting point, we develop a novel faceted taxonomy, specifically aimed to help new researchers in the field understand what types of papers are published and where they appear. Our results confirm previous studies indicating the predominance of practice-based, technology-driven reports. We also observe certain differences in educational themes between those found in publications grounded in the Computer Science Education corpus and those emerging from more general Higher Education literature.

Supporting peer-to-peer collaboration through trust

Distributed systems generally require their component parts to interact cooperatively, in order for the system as a whole to function effectively. For any given activity, several alternative components may have the required capabilities. However, these components may be unreliable or dishonest, and are typically locally controlled. We view such systems as multi-agent systems, comprising autonomous agents that must cooperate for the system to be effective. In this paper we propose a mechanism, called MDT-R, for agents to delegate activities appropriately, using trust and the recommendations of their peers to meet preferences such as minimizing risk and maximizing quality.