Investigate and promote the use of the SSCLI as a teaching and research tool

Peter Wentworth, Pat Terry, Peter Clayton, Shaun Bangay

Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Participants,  interests and milestones

  

Presently Dean of Science at Rhodes University, Professor Pat Terry is on sabbatical from July 2002 to June 2003.  Our grant will enable him to take up an invitation to spend part of that sabbatical at the Programming Languages and Systems Research Centre, Queensland with John Gough . (Pat Terry served with John on the ISO Modula-2 Standards committee in the late 1980s).

 

Pat Terry teaches the undergraduate courses at Rhodes in assembly languages, machine architecture, and compiler technologies. Of particular concern to our group is that the current generation of students often miss key concepts and skills at the elementary stages, because the complexities of the languages and environments tend to overshadow the core language concepts. We currently mitigate this to some extent in our assembler and compiler courses by using small simple "simulated" architectures and interpreted languages for this teaching.

 

Specific objectives of Terry's work are to 

·        determine to what extent the CLI, C#, and the assembler, disassembler and other SSCLI tools could be incorporated beneficially into the existing assembler and compiler courses in curricula such as ours, and, if necessary, to develop modified teaching materials attractive to a wider audience (target date end of 2002).

·        determine the impact of retargetting the compiler tools currently used in our courses to show how to generate CLI in addition to (or in place of) the current pseudocode (target date end of 2002),

·        produce a revision of the earlier textbook aimed at a less sophisticated market than John Gough has catered for with his influential "Compiling for the .NET Common Language Runtime" (Prentice Hall, 2002), but which would prepare students for more advanced studies of compilers.  The target here would be to produce a draft no later than July 2003, and to "consumer test" it on the next year's crop of students at Rhodes University (where the academic year runs from February to November). 

 

Professor Peter Wentworth has been actively promoting the .NET platform inside and outside the university and manages a small .NET interest group. 

 

The objectives here is to build up the .NET interest group through these specific activities and milestones:  (there is some discontinuity because some students complete in November and others start in February.)

 

·        Sept 2002: We are building a distributed facial recognition system using .NET. Our first paper is in preparation for the  SATNAC Conference in Sept 2002, by which time we will deliver a demonstration-quality version of our Principal Component Analysis (PCA) facial analysis system in C#, and will have it coupled via XML web services with a Neural Net Classifier written in Matlab, and exposed as a .NET service. (Although some of this is not strictly SSCLI based, it is generating significant momentum in our group which in turn is promoting our SSCLI activity.)

·        By December 2002, four honours graduates will complete our first .NET related projects. The Distributed Web Computing course will have been adapted to incorporate a larger chunk of material on XML and web services.

·        By March 2003 our facial recognizer will be installed for field trials in our building (typically, to assist the receptionist to remember students' names, and to track photocopier usage). Our 2003 students will have selected new projects and we expect to replace the 4 finishing students with 8 new ones in .NET related activities. Some of these will start migrating current departmental work in wireless and mobile devices to the .NET for small devices, or the Compact Framework.

·        By Sept 2003 we will have experimental results and be finalizing our facial recognition project, and we will have deployed our first .NET or Compact Framework applications. 

Professor Shaun Bangay is porting Rotor to Linux.  This work is well advanced, running most of the C# examples, and we expect our first public release before the end of July.

 

Contacts:  Tel +27 (46) 603 8291;   Fax +27 (46) 636 1915;   http://www.ru.ac.za/
mailto:{p.terry|p.wentworth|s.bangay}@ru.ac.za  p.wentworth@ru.ac.za  s.bangay@ru.ac.za  p.clayton@ru.ac.za (Head of Dept)