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.
This event took place on Thursday 18 November 2004 at 12:30
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.
Future Internet
KnowledgeManagementMultimedia &
Information SystemsNarrative
HypermediaNew Media SystemsSemantic Web &
Knowledge ServicesSocial Software
Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...
Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...
Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.
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