Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Publication
    Real-time monitoring and validation of waste transportation using intelligent agents and pattern recognition
    (University College Dublin. School of Computer Science and Informatics, 2015) ; ;
    Within Ireland and other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries there has been a growing problem of unauthorised waste activity. A report on this activity highlighted a number of problems. Of these, unauthorised collection and fly-tipping of waste is of particular concern due to the potential to cause pollution and health problems.This thesis presents the Waste Augmentation and Integrated Shipment Tracking (WAIST) system. WAIST utilises technologies from the area of pattern recognition, agent-oriented programming and wireless sensor networks to enable the monitoring and validation of waste transportation in near real-time.As components of the WAIST system, this thesis also introduces and evaluates two technologies. The first is the classification of object state based on accelerometer data, and the second is the use of agent-oriented programming languages as a high level abstraction for reducing ``programmer effort'' when implementing intelligent behaviours within WAIST.Both evaluations show positive results. In the classification component, an accuracy of 95.8% has been achieved in an eight class problem. In the agent component, students completed more tasks when using agents than when using Java. Additionally, subjective feedback highlighted a perception that problems were easier to solve using agents.Finally the WAIST system itself was evaluated over a number of simulated waste shipments based on a number of criteria. The results are very positive for the timeliness of the system, the ability to track stopping locations of the shipment, the accuracy when identifying illegal dumping and the efficient management of energy resources.
      1274
  • Publication
    A Simple, Language-Independent Approach to Identifying Potentially At-Risk Introductory Programming Students
    For decades computing educators have been trying to identify and predict at-risk students, particularly early in the first programming course. These efforts range from the analyzing demographic data that pre-exists undergraduate entrance to using instruments such as concept inventories, to the analysis of data arising during education. Such efforts have had varying degrees of success, have not seen widespread adoption, and have left room for improvement. We analyse results from a two-year study with several hundred students in the first year of programming, comprising majors and non-majors. We find evidence supporting a hypothesis that engagement with extra credit assessment provides an effective method of differentiating students who are not at risk from those who may be. Further, this method can be used to predict risk early in the semester, as any engagement-not necessarily completion-is enough to make this differentiation. Additionally, we show that this approach is not dependent on any one programming language. In fact, the extra credit opportunities need not even involve programming. Our results may be of interest to educators, as well as researchers who may want to replicate these results in other settings.
      6Scopus© Citations 5
  • Publication
    Reflecting on Agent Programming with AgentSpeak(L)
    Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP) researchers have successfully developed a range of agent programming languages that bridge the gap between theory and practice. Unfortunately, despite the incommunity success of these languages, they have proven less compelling to the wider software engineering community. One of the main problems facing AOP language developers is the need to bridge the cognitive gap that exists between the concepts underpinning mainstream languages and those underpinning AOP. In this paper, we attempt to build such a bridge through a conceptual mapping that we subsequently use to drive the design of a new programming language entitled ASTRA, which has been evaluated by a group of experienced software engineers attending an Agent-Oriented Software Engineering Masters course.
      469
  • Publication
    From bogtrotting to herding : a UCD perspective
    This is the third year in which a team from University College Dublin has participated in the Multi Agent Contest. This paper describes the system that was created to participate in the contest, along with observations of the team’s experiences in the contest. The system itself was built using the AF-TeleoReactive and AF-AgentSpeak agent programming languages running on the Agent Factory platform. A hybrid control architecture inspired by the SoSAA strategy aided in the separation of concerns between low-level behaviours (such as movement and obstacle evasion) and higher-level planning and strategy.
    Scopus© Citations 4  611
  • Publication
    Agent Factory: a framework for prototyping logic-based AOP languages
    Recent years have seen the emergence of a number of AOP languages. While these can mostly be characterized as logic-oriented languages that map situations to courses of action, they are based on a variety of concepts, resulting in obvious differences in syntax and semantics. Less obviously, the development tools and infrastructure - such as environment integration, reuse mechanisms, debugging, and IDE integration surrounding these languages also vary widely. Two drawbacks of this diversity are: a perceived lack of transferability of knowledge and expertise between languages; and a potential obscuring of the fundamental conceptual differences between languages. These drawbacks can impact on both the languages’ uptake and comparability. In this paper, we present a Common Language Framework that has emerged out of ongoing work on AOP languages that have been deployed through Agent Factory. This framework consists of a set of pre-written components for building agent interpreters, together with a set of tools that can be easily adapted to different AOP languages. Through this framework we have been able to rapidly prototype a range of different AOP languages, one of which is presented as a case study in this paper.
    Scopus© Citations 16  554
  • Publication
    Bogtrotters in Space
    This is the fourth year in which a team from University College Dublin has participated in the Multi-Agent Programming Contest. This paper describes the system that was created to participate in the contest, along with observations of the team’s experiences in the contest. The system itself was built using the AF-TeleoReactive and AF-AgentSpeak agent programming languages running on the Agent Factory platform. Unlike in previous years where a hybrid control architecture was used, this year the system was implemented using only agent code and associated actions, sensors, modules and platform services.
      329Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Transit and Transport : Monitoring and Validating the Transport of Waste
    The illegal disposal of waste is a growing problem in many countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. A weakness with the conventional waste-management cycle concerns the validation and integrity of the transportation process, from collection at industrial premises to delivery at a licenced waste-disposal facility. The Waste Augmentation and Integrated Shipment Tracking (WAIST) an on going project, at CLARITY:Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, focuses on this very problem. WAIST integrates a triptych of sensing technologies in addressing this problem
    Scopus© Citations 1  122