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
 

Knowledge Management is...


Knowledge Management
Creating learning organisations hinges on managing knowledge at many levels. Knowledge can be provided by individuals or it can be created as a collective effort of a group working together towards a common goal, it can be situated as "war stories" or it can be generalised as guidelines, it can be described informally as comments in a natural language, pictures and technical drawings or it can be formalised as mathematical formulae and rules, it can be expressed explicitly or it can be tacit, embedded in the work product. The recipient of knowledge - the learner - can be an individual or a work group, professionals, university students, schoolchildren or informal communities of interest.
Our aim is to capture, analyse and organise knowledge, regardless of its origin and form and make it available to the learner when needed presented with the necessary context and in a form supporting the learning processes.