Abstract

Domain Specific Modeling Languages (DSML) significantly improve productivity in designing Computer Based System (CBS), by enabling them to be modeled at higher levels of abstraction. It is common for large and complex systems with distributed teams, to use DSMLs, to express and communicate designs of such systems uniformly, using a common language. DSMLs enable domain experts, with no or minimal software development background, to model solutions, using the language and terminologies used in their respective domains. Although, there are already a number of DSMLs available for modeling CBSs, their need is felt strongly across multiple domains, which still are not well supported with DSMLs. Developing a new DSML, however, is non trivial, as it requires (a) significant knowledge about the domain for which the DSML needs to be developed, as well as (b) skills to create new languages. In the …

Abstract

Student internships are necessary for every student to learn and apply the learning to deliver tangible and relevant outcomes. In-person internship opportunities are less in number and have major challenges in scaling such as lesser number of available projects in relevant technologies, inadequate mentorship during the internship, varying college calendars and others. This paper presents SRIP (Student Remote Internship Program) approach which focuses on the domain of programming in open source technologies and projects for the internships that are relevant to 2nd and 3rd year engineering college students. It aims to overcome the stated challenges and simultaneously make a contribution to the open source community. Virtual Labs is the open source repository that we leveraged to implement SRIP pilot study for interns to contribute and develop programming skills.

Abstract

Virtual Labs is an MHRD (Ministry of Human Resource Development, India) initiative in which over 1100 virtual experiments are freely available to engineering students across India and the rest of the globe to access and learn. Until the beginning of 2018, the lab usages by students were mostly in the push mode during the workshops. The average usage per workshop was significantly low, at about 8 usages per student. Interventions were proposed in the process to improve the usage by enhancing 'Arousal' and 'Choices' as students' motivation. Qualitative observation of the results shows that students conducted more than the requested 15 experiments, along with the expectation of instant appreciation and recognition. This change in the process to create extrinsic motivation increased the usage per student from 8.62 to 19.7. self-reported motivation levels of students after doing the experiments improved from 5 to …

Abstract

India graduates 1.5 million engineering students every year, majority of them from its Tier 2 and Tier 3 colleges where there is severe shortage of qualified faculty and lab infrastructure, and where English is second or third language for most students. To provide affordable virtual laboratories to these engineering colleges, Government of India runs the Virtual Labs project with a select set of participating institutions to create virtual labs required for entire engineering student population of India. The program suffers from two problems: 1) lack of focus on pedagogy and learnability of labs being created, and 2) little ability to scale to more teachers and subject matter experts to produce labs aligned to local contexts. This paper presents a model (LEAD model) for the design of virtual labs for a data structures and algorithms course in computer science and is intended to address the problems stated above. The model …

Abstract

eterson’s Mutual Exclusion Algorithm as Feedback Control

Abstract

Software systems often serve as the agents of operation for both enterprise systems and embedded systems. Engineering such systems is a knowledge-centric activity. A clear understanding of the relationship between knowledge, systems and engineering can help us to establish firm theoretical foundations for software and systems engineering. Currently we have a strong intuitive understanding of how knowledge flows into engineering, while our understanding of the relationship between systems and knowledge is part explicit and part tacit. A symptom of this is that we have difficulty in building unified models of large systems such as telescopes and enterprises that span multiple knowledge domains and viewpoints. We are able to build multiple models covering various aspects and particular viewpoints. However, we have challenges in integrating them into a single unified model. Another symptom is that software and systems engineering practice are widely viewed as empirical fields, without sufficiently strong theoretical foundations. This work attempts to explicate and synthesize our common intuitive understanding in this space to develop a conceptual model of the relationships. It then explores the validity of this model by examining the extent to which it is able to explain and illuminate current engineering practices and issues. This is an initial strawman version of the model, presented with a view to obtaining feedback and inputs from the community.

Abstract

Software systems often serve as the agents of operation for both enterprise systems and embedded systems. Engineering such systems is a knowledge-centric activity. A clear understanding of the relationship between knowledge, systems and engineering can help us to establish firm theoretical foundations for software and systems engineering. Currently we have a strong intuitive understanding of how knowledge flows into engineering, while our understanding of the relationship between systems and knowledge is part explicit and part tacit. A symptom of this is that we have difficulty in building unified models of large systems such as telescopes and enterprises that span multiple knowledge domains and viewpoints. We are able to build multiple models covering various aspects and particular viewpoints. However, we have challenges in integrating them into a single unified model. Another symptom is that software and systems engineering practice are widely viewed as empirical fields, without sufficiently strong theoretical foundations. This work attempts to explicate and synthesize our common intuitive understanding in this space to develop a conceptual model of the relationships. It then explores the validity of this model by examining the extent to which it is able to explain and illuminate current engineering practices and issues. This is an initial strawman version of the model, presented with a view to obtaining feedback and inputs from the community.

Abstract

The Virtual Labs project (vlabs) is a country wide effort to provide access to internet and browser based virtual laboratories to science and engineering college students in India. There are currently over 800 experiments packaged in 70 vlabs in more than ten science and engineering disciplines. More than five hundred workshops on these virtual labs have been conducted and the experiments have been used over 2 million times. Vlabs are an important Government initiative in higher learning in engineering in India. This paper examines virtual labs from a usability perspective, focusing on vlabs. Usability of user-interface elements (technical usability) as well as how they aid learning (pedagogical usability) has been considered. We adapt Nielsen's technical usability heuristics and Nokelainen's pedagogical usability criteria to virtual labs and evaluate the usability of the top three most used vlabs. We construct checklists for each of these criteria and evaluate the vlabs against this checklist. Our analysis reveals a lack of usability focus in lab design. Lab design and implementation guidelines seem to be deficient in covering key usability criteria. We make suggestions on how to quickly improve the usability of these labs.

Abstract

Software systems often serve as the agents of operation for both enterprise systems and embedded systems. Engineering such systems is a knowledge-centric activity. A clear understanding of the relationship between knowledge, systems and engineering can help us to establish firm theoretical foundations for software and systems engineering.

Abstract

Systems engineering is widely perceived as an empirical discipline, with a need for theoretical foundations that can facilitate reasoning about practice. This is an attempt to help build such foundations by systems‐theoretic inquiry into the nature of the relationship between knowledge and engineering. We conceptualize this relationship in terms of four worlds: the real world, the world of systems models, a world of aspect knowledge, and a world of wholes knowledge: knowledge that indicates how aspects come together and also how wholes relate to each other. This leads us to a generative understanding of systems engineering: synthesizing aspects to develop blocks; and generating the network of blocks that form a system, through recursive performance of three activities: decomposition, dependency closure and refinement. The problem of systems engineering practice involves augmenting this core with the …