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KMi Seminars
Building the future with weapons of maths construction
This event took place on Thursday 18 November 2004 at 12:30

 
Prof. Harold Thimbleby Computer Science Department, University of Wales, United Kingdom

Computers are complex, unreliable and occasionally dangerous. What can be done?

Familiar handheld calculators represent a microcosm of how computers are used, misused and misunderstood - and how we are stuck in the past. Calculators are so popular we hardly think about them. Indeed, desktop PCs, both Macintosh and Windows - powerful computers - simulate them, presumably because nobody has thought of any better ways of working.

Yet try working out 4x-5 on almost any calculator, and you will get -1; not the correct answer by any means! There are clearly some assumptions at play that need questioning.

This talk explores the problems --- how they affect school teaching and how we should teach university computer science. More importantly than pointing out problems, though, the talk will go beyond today's calculators to demonstrate a novel approach that will change the way we interact with computers. The new approach not only gets the maths right, but can be used on handheld devices or in the classroom, and is surprisingly engaging to use.

Please bring your own calculator, PDA or mobile phone to join in!

This talk will be of interest to anyone whose work involves a calculator or computer, including teachers, lecturers, and especially mathematicians and computer scientists.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Future Internet is...


Future Internet
With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

  • Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

  • Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection

  • Interoperability of semantic data and metadata, and of services which will be dynamically orchestrated

  • Pervasive usability for users of mobile devices, different languages, cultures and physical abilities

  • Mobility for users who expect a seamless experience across spaces, devices, and velocities