Building And Running An Open-Source Community: The Freebsd Project
Marshall Kirk McKusick - Unix & BSD Guru
10/10/2013
This talk will tell the story of the FreeBSD project, which started 20 years ago from the open-source release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the University of California at Berkeley. The FreeBSD project patterned its initial community structure on the development structure built up at Berkeley. It evolved and expanded that structure to create a self-organizing project that supports an ever growing and changing group of developers around the world. This lecture concludes with a description of the roles played by the thousands of volunteer developers that make up the FreeBSD Project of today. Dr. Marshall Kirk McKusick's work with Unix and BSD development spans over thirty years. It begins with his first paper on the implementation of Berkeley Pascal in 1979, goes on to his pioneering work in the eighties on the BSD Fast File System, the BSD virtual memory system, the final release of 4.4BSD-Lite from the UC Berkeley Computer Systems Research Group, and carries on with his work on FreeBSD. A key figure in Unix and BSD development, his experiences chronicle not only the innovative technical achievements but also the interesting personalities and philosophical debates in Unix over the past thirty years.
Who Owns Your Software? Why Open Source, And Open Standards, Matter
L Peter Deutsch - Aladdin Enterprises
10/17/2013
We take for granted that we can loan (or give or sell) a book to a friend, play a CD on any device we want, repair a car (or pay someone to repair it), reinforce a ladder, or break the lock on a box whose key we've lost. But for software, we usually sign away all of these rights, or accept technical measures that nullify them. What are the costs and benefits of this situation, and its available alternatives, for you as a software user and/or creator?
A Machine Learning Approach For Assessment And Prediction Of Teamwork Effectiveness In Software Engineering Education
Dragutin Petkovic - San Francisco State University
10/24/2013
One of the challenges in effective software engineering (SE) education is the lack of objective assessment methods of how well student teams learn the critically needed teamwork practices, defined as the ability: (i) to learn and effectively apply SE processes in a teamwork setting, and (ii) to work as a team to develop satisfactory software (SW) products. In this talk we present a novel approach to address the assessment and prediction of student learning of teamwork effectiveness in software engineering education based on extracting only objective and quantitative student team activity data during their team class project together paired with grading of their teamwork proficiency, then applying a machine learning (ML) approach for assessment and prediction of student learning achievements. The work is joint work between San Francisco State University (SFSU), Florida Atlantic University (FAU) and Fulda University, Germany (Fulda).
The Future Of Augmented Reality
Jason Shankel - The Stupid Fun Club
10/31/2013
Augmented reality devices such as smart phones and the upcoming Google Glass are currently in their infancy. Let’s discuss the future development path of augmented reality and compare and contrast this emerging field with previous innovations in networking, hypertext and gaming. (PIZZA AFTER TALK IN DARWIN 28)
Iterative Design And Development Of The 'World Of Balance' Game: From Ecosystem Education To Scientific Discovery
Ilmi Yoon, San Francisco State University
11/07/2013
Advances in computer science are continuing to help expand a new subfield of ecology based on computational analyses of complex ecological networks where the nonlinear dynamics of many interacting species can be more realistically modeled and understood. Research has recently elucidated how the network structure of feeding relationships both generally stabilizes complex ecosystems and also specifically predicts effects of experimentally removing species. Still, further research is inhibited by the exponential increase of parameter space with the number of nonlinearly interacting species. Such increases prevent more thorough exploration and understanding of complex ecosystems. We describe how intelligent interfaces for multiplayer games help researchers surpass these limitations. A multiplayer online game, “World of Balance,” educates players about interdependence and non-linear population dynamics among species within ecosystems while helping to explore critically important parameter space in a scientifically productive manner. Our evaluation tests found that benefits of playing World of Balance on knowledge gain and learning significantly surpassed the benefits of reading scientific articles among undergraduates. Such work efficiently leverages multiple resources to expand education and research potential within critically important areas of ecology and sustainability science.