CENTRE FOR APPLIED INTERNET RESEARCH
Newsletter April-June 2004 (Vol. 1, No. 2)
Game Research & Development Team
A new CAIR initiative is launched this month …
The Game
Research and Development Team (GRDT), led by Rich Hebblewhite, is
currently finalising designs for a new 2D game engine. North East Wales Checkers (NEWC, pronounced
‘nuke’) is a by-product of work completed by Computing degree students studying Artificial
Intelligence. It is designed to be an
expert at playing the traditional board game ‘draughts’ (Checkers in the good
old US of A).
On
completion, it is intended to present NEWC to the British Draughts Federation
for evaluation and entry into the World Man-Machine Checkers Championship. If successful, NEWC will be competing for the
title alongside heavyweights such as Chinook, the current world Man-Machine
Champion. All (yes,
that includes you) are invited to pit your wits against the NEWC engine
using a web-based version that will be available on the GRDT website shortly.
Several
other projects are underway, including 2D game engines for dominoes, chess and
connect-four. NEWC is also developing
its very own 3D game engine that can be used in the testing and production of a
series of ‘in-house’ game titles.
Anyone
wishing to contribute should contact Rich
Hebblewhite.
Watch this
space …
Grand Challenges in Computing Education
Rich Hebblewhite and Stuart Cunningham have returned from the wilds of
Tyneside, where they presented their paper, ‘Computing for the New Generation’, at the
BCS/CPHC Conference on Grand Challenges in Computing Education. Their paper was very well received as part of
a theme on ‘Scope of Computing Courses’. They will be feeding
back to other Computing staff over the next few weeks.
CAIR Research Seminars
The next
round of ‘open-to-all’ lunchtime seminars is currently being planned. ‘Turns’ are anticipated from Fatima Mansour, Rich Hebblewhite, Stuart Cunningham and John Davies.
Details to follow.
Invited Papers
Vic Grout
has been invited by Professor Gregory Gutin, Royal
Holloway University of London, to present two papers at the seventh Applied
Mathematical Programming and Modelling (APMOD
2004) conference at Brunel University, Middlesex in June. Professor Gutin is
one of the world’s leading researchers in combinatorial optimisation so an invitation
from him is to be prized highly. Vic’s
papers will be titled ‘Real-Time Network Optimisation’ and ‘Internet Traffic
Policies and Routing’. Initial abstracts
are available here.
In fact,
it’s another busy month for Vic as he has two more papers to present at the
BCS/IEE International Network Conference in Plymouth the following week!
Several CAIR members have material in various
stages of preparation, submission and refereeing so there’s no sign of a
breather for anyone yet!
That’s it
for this month, folks! See you in May.
Further information about CAIR
can be found at http://www.newi.ac.uk/computing/research.
Details of all recent CAIR
activity and copies of most material can be found at http://www.newi.ac.uk/computing/research/school.htm.
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Newsletter May/June 2004
It’s that time of year again. Lectures have finished, assignments are in,
exams have been sat and research staff are rushing
around doing what they’re paid to do – marking and preparing for exam
boards. Consequently, it’s a quiet time
for research. That doesn’t mean that
there’s nothing going on though. Several
CAIR members have conference presentations
coming up and being planned, or journal articles in various stages of
preparation, submission and refereeing.
So maybe it’s just an excuse to roll two months into one? There’s been some good news on funding and
Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) and plenty of
other stuff as well. First, though, an
introduction …
New CAIR Member
Nigel Houlden joins us this
month. He works as an Information
Systems Officer in the IS department here at NEWI. Nigel graduates this year in Business
Information Technology and will be signing up for an MPhil
programme. He
will be investigating the current shortcomings in internet routing protocols
and, hopefully, identifying some improvements.
Always remember to be nice to Nigel: your email is in his hands!
Game Research & Development Team
Rich Hebblewhite’s GDRT continues to move apace, and
is about to go live on the web. Anyone
wishing to contribute should contact Rich
Hebblewhite.
CAIR Research Seminars
Two very
successful seminars have just taken place:
‘Network Performance’ by John Davies
‘Adaptive Tutoring’ by Rich
Hebblewhite
and several more are planned:
28th June 2004
- 1pm Room TBA
‘Distributed Information Systems’ by Fatima
Mansour
‘Music File Formats featuring MusicXML’
by Stuart Cunningham
November 2004
‘Ethics and Professional Issues in IT’ by Denise Oram
‘Ants in the Web!’ by Vic Grout/Nigel
Houlden
All NEWI staff and students are welcome to attend. Fairtrade coffee, tea and biscuits available.
Endpiece
We’re trying to keep these newsletters as informal as
possible, to make them accessible to everyone, not just us strange
researchers. To that end, apart from the
style, we also publish them at the beginning
of the month, not the end. We add to it as time passes. That means that what you’re reading now is a
‘work in progress’, not a finished product.
It will grow as things
happen. Go on, watch it, it will, really!
Further information about CAIR
can be found at http://www.newi.ac.uk/computing/research.
Details of all recent CAIR
activity and copies of most material can be found at http://www.newi.ac.uk/computing/research/school.htm.
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