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Simon Wells
Simon Wells

Simon Wells is an academic researching Argumentation Theory, Automated Reasoning, Intelligent Agents (IA) and MultiAgent Systems (MAS) all approached through a ludic lens.

He is particularly interested in how these tools can be usefully applied to critical literacy, security, gamification, and complex systems.

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2011 (12)
2010 (27)
2009 (3)
 

Alan Turing and the Ace computer

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To get you in the mood for thinking about the development and history of computing, here is an article from the BBC about Alan Turing, an important figure in the development of both early computer hardware and computational science, and the ACE computer, the Automatic Computing Engine.
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Video Lecture: From NAND to Tetris

A video lecture that shows how to build a game-playing computer starting from first principles, e.g. hardware, and piling on the abstractions until you have a CPU, language processors, and a VM that can be used to write, compile, and run a Space Invaders game. If you are not sure whether it is worth investing the hour for the full lecture then try this 10 minute taster:

The full hour-long lecture, "From NAND to Tetris" is here:

As you begin the revision process ready for the exams you might find that taking a look at relevant video lectures like these will be a useful alternative to reading through your notes yet again.

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Security in Open Systems

Last week in one of the tutorials the subject of open security systems came up. I tried to explain how open systems can encourage security and that knowing all of the details of the security of a system actually translates into a more secure real world system, mainly because the security doesn't rely merely on keeping secrets but on good engineering. Anyhow, here is an article on the security of the nascent Mastercard Chip Authentication Program that explains some of the issue.
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Academic Earth - Operating Systems and System Programming

Academic Earth, the academic video lecture site has a series of lectures by Brian Harvey of Berkeley on Operating Systems and System Programming. Described thus:
Basic concepts of operating systems and system programming. Utility programs, subsystems, multiple-program systems. Processes, interprocess communication, and synchronization. Memory allocation, segmentation, paging. Loading and linking, libraries. Resource allocation, scheduling, performance evaluation. File systems, storage devices, I/O systems. Protection, security, and privacy.
Much of this is in more depth than we cover in AC2B but I think that dipping into many of the lectures could give you great background on the topics of the module. For example, lecture 21 on network communication abstractions and RPC might be useful. Anyhow, here is the introductory lecture to get you started:
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Academic Earth - Machine Structure Lectures

Academic Earth, the academic video lecture site has a series of lectures by David Culler of Berkeley on Machine Structures. Described thus:
The internal organization and operation of digital computers. Machine architecture, support for high-level languages (logic, arithmetic, instruction sequencing) and operating systems (I/O, interrupts, memory management, process switching). Elements of computer logic design. Tradeoffs involved in fundamental architectural design decisions.
Lectures 5, on instruction set architecture, and 8, on Technology and Digital Abstraction, in particular look relevant to this module and lecture 12 is probably just interesting. To get you started here is the introductory lecture in the series:
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Posterous theme by Cory Watilo.
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