James Acres

Distributed Computing

Topics Covered

• Concurrent Computing in practice
  • Implementation issues (Java and Promela, synchronised methods, monitors)
  • Threads and processes
  • A comparison of threading models
  • Threads in practice
• Distributed systems in practice
  • Introduction to client/server computing
  • Sockets for client/server communication
  • Distributed Objects, Remote method invocation (RMI)
  • Transaction Processing
  • Message Passing (MQ and JMS)
  • Peer-to-peer Systems
  • Distributed Algorithms

System Admin Tools and Techniques

Topics Covered

• Introduction to the Unix philosophy and environment; files, processes, pipes, filters and basic utilities.
• Data manipulation tools; editors, grep and other utilities.
• Scripting
• Shells and shell programming.
• Program development tools.
• Document preparation.
• The Web and Web languages.

Database Systems

Topics Covered

• Rationale behind Database Systems
• Database System Architecture
• Database Modelling using the Entity-Relationship Model
• Data Models and Data Sublanguages
  • The Relational Model:
  • relations, domains, attributes, keys, dependencies
  • normalisation
  • relationships between relations
  • SQL, MySQL and PHP
• The Hierarchical Model
• Object-Oriented Databases
• Distributed Databases
• Database Management Issues
  • concurrency, security, integrity
• New requirements from database systems
  • transaction semantics, data management requirements

Personal & Professional Development

Topics Covered

• Introduction to Personal Communications
• Knowledge and Learning
• Organising Your Own Learning
• Library Skills
• Presentation Skills and Personal delivery
• Presentation skills and personal delivery
• Writing technical reports
• Verbal Communications
• Professionalism and Ethical Issues
• Group Working
• Personal Development
• Time Management

Software Engineering

Topics Covered

• Introduction and Overview
  • Waterfall model
  • Spiral model
  • Prototyping and incremental development
• Requirements Analysis
• Structured Methods
  • ER-Diagrams
  • DFD and ELH Diagrams
  • CASE tools and UML diagrams
• Object Oriented Methods
• Architecture and Systems Integration
• Design to Implementation
• Validation and Verification
  • Black box testing
  • White box testing
  • Integration Testing strategies
• Project Planning and Management
  • Function Point Analysis
  • COCOMO and other estimation methods

Programming Principles

Topics Covered

• Software Engineering
  • Writing and running programs
  • Testing and debugging
  • Compilation and run-time environments
  • Programming style
  • Programs as models of the real world
• Object-Oriented Programming
  • Classes and objects
  • Methods and message passing
  • Inheritance and polymorphism
• Programming Principles
  • Identifiers
  • Variables
  • Expressions
  • Data Types
  • Collections
  • Sequence, selection and iteration
  • Recursion
  • Exceptions
• The User Interface
  • Input/Output
  • Graphical and user interface programming
  • World Wide Web programming

Data Structures and Algorithms

Topics Covered

• Introduction
  • Data Objects, Data Structures, Complex Data Structures
• Simple Data Structures
  • List, Stack, Queue, Tree, Tree traversal
• Algorithm Analysis
  • The big O
• Sorting
  • Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, Shellsort, MergeSort, QuickSort, Bucket Sort, Radix sort, External sorting
• Searching
  • Sequential Search, Handling Failure, Binary Search, Binary Tree Search,
• Advanced Tree Structures
  • AVL Trees, Retaining Balance, Single Rotation, Double Rotation
  • Splay Trees, Red-black Trees, B-trees
• Hash tables
  • Terminology, Hash table size, Hash function collision resolution, Separate chaining, Open Addressing, Re-hashing
• Priority Queues (Heaps)
  • Terminology, Simple implementations, Binary heaps, Heap sort
• Graphs
  • Terminology, Adjacency Matrix and List, Connectivity, Shortest path algorithms, Unweighted graphs, Breadth first search, Weighted Graphs, Minimum Spanning Tree, Prim's algorithm

Introduction to Formal Methods

Topics Covered

• System specification in B
  • The uses of formal specification
  • Specifications as contracts
  • Specification case studies
• Proof in Software Engineering
  • Verification, assurance
  • Mechanical theorem proving, model checking
• Introduction to proof techniques
  • Proof by case analysis
  • Proof by contradiction
  • Proof by induction
• Calculational proof
  • Equational, inequational reasoning
  • Laws, inference rules, hypotheses
  • Set theoretic proofs
• Reasoning about specifications
  • Determining proof obligations
  • Discharging proof obligations
• Reasoning about programs
  • Preconditions, postconditions
  • Loop invariants, loop variants

Advanced Programming

Topics Covered

• Objects in JAVA
  • Instance data and methods
  • Constructors and Destructors
  • Inheritance (simple and multiple
  • Polymorphism
  • Overloaded functions
  • Class library
• Graphical User Interface Programming
  • Writing Swing User Interfaces
  • Inner and Anonymous Classes
  • User Interface Components
  • Simple Graphics
• Multithreaded Programming
  • Threading in GUIs
  • User created threads
  • Synchronisation primitives
• Storage and I/O
  • Memory and Garbage Collection
  • File Structure
  • I/O Streams
  • Serialisation
• Data Structures in C
  • C language
  • Structures and arrays
  • Classes and Objects
  • References and Pointer manipulation

Computational Systems

Topics Covered

• Recursive Techniques
  • recursion on numbers, lists, trees.
• Procedural Abstraction
  • procedures as arguments
  • procedures as return values
• Objects
  • structures
  • closures
• Metalinguistic Abstraction
  • Environment model
  • evaluation
  • metacircular evaluators

Theory of Computing

Topics Covered

• Automata theory
  • Finite state automata, regular expressions and regular languages
  • Context free grammars and push down automata
• Computability theory
  • Turing machines, recursively enumerable and recursive languages
  • Church-Turing thesis
  • Limitations of algorithms: universality, the halting problem and undecidability
• Computational complexity
  • Definition of complexity
  • Big O/ Big Theta notation
  • NP-Completeness and Cook's theorem
• Formal systems in Computer Science
  • Formal systems
  • A formal system for propositional logic
  • Soundness and completeness
  • Hoare logic for automatic program verification

Computer Systems and Applications

Topics Covered

• Computer Hardware.
• Operating System Principles.
• Using Unix & Windows
• Electronic mail and bulletin boards, and the World Wide Web
• Assemblers, compilers and interpreters.
• Handling text on computers.
• Spreadsheets.
• Databases and 4th generation languages.
• The evolution of computer languages.
• Artificial intelligence.
• Communications and networks.
• Theory of computation and computability.
• The history of computing and future trends.

Software Engineering Group Project

Topics Covered

• software production methodology, design, implementation and testing
• the value and limitations of software tools in all phases of a software development
• teamwork and time management
• abilities to "pick up" and use new tools and environments without formal training
• planning and execution of a professional user acceptance test schedule
• realistic estimates of the cost in time and effort required for a project of up to 20 KLOC
• responsibility for scheduling and running group meetings

Artificial Intelligence

Topics Covered

• Topics selected from:

• Introduction to AI
  • Flavours of AI: strong and weak, neat and scruffy, symbolic and sub-symbolic, knowledge-based and data-driven.
  • The computational metaphor. What is computation? Church-Turing thesis. The Turing test. Searle's Chinese room argument.
• Search
  • Finding satisfactory paths and outcomes; chosen from: depth-first and breadth-first, iterative deepening, evolutionary algorithms, hill-climbing and gradient descent, beam search and best-first. Finding optimal paths: branch and bound, dynamic programming, A*.
• Representing Knowledge
  • Production rules, monotonic and non-monotonic logics, semantic nets, frames and scripts, description logics.
• Reasoning and Control
  • Data-driven and goal-driven reasoning, AND/OR graphs, truth-maintenance systems, abduction and uncertainty.
• Reasoning under Uncertainty
  • Probabilities, conditional independence, causality, Bayesian networks, noisy-OR, d-separation, belief propagation.
• Machine Learning
  • Inductive and deductive learning, unsupervised and supervised learning, reinforcement learning, concept learning from examples, Quinlan's ID3, classification and regression trees, Bayesian methods.
• Key Application Areas, selected from:
  • Expert system, decision support systems
  • Speech and vision
  • Natural language processing
  • Information Retrieval
  • Semantic Web

Professional and Legal Issues

Topics Covered

Management Issues in IT

• Contractual restraints
• Compromises in systems planning
• Constraints of a legal nature

Professional Issues in IT

• Professional societies
• Career structures
• Ethics
• Codes of conduct and practice
• Liability
• Contractual obligations in software

Legal Issues in IT

• Copyright and patent
• Trade secrets and registered design
• Computer generated evidence
• Obscene publications

Compiler Engineering

Topics Covered

• Overview of Compilation Process
  • Interpretation v Translation
  • Specification of a compiler
  • Structure of a compiler
• Theoretical Background
  • Regular languages and finite automata
  • Context Free Languages
  • Parsing Techniques
• Compiler Modules
  • Lexical analysis
  • Syntax trees
  • Error recovery
  • Semantic Analysis
  • Symbol tables
  • Intermediate code
  • Translating statements
  • Run-time storage administration
  • Optimisation
  • Parameter passing
  • Data structure representation and access
• Software Tools
  • Lexical analyser generators
  • Parser generators
• Further Topics
  • Construction of portable compilers
  • Compiling object oriented languages
  • Garbage collection: language issues

Engineering Maths

Topics Covered

• Algebra (1 module) Simplification of expressions and functions; indices; linear and quadratic equations; simultaneous linear equations; inequalities; partial fractions.
• Calculus (2 modules) Differentiation - standard rules; Newton's method for finding roots; partial differentiation; integration - standard integrals; integration by parts; numerical integration.
• Statistics (2 modules) Elementary probability formulae; combinations and permutations; discrete and continuous probability distributions; sampling; confidence intervals; hypothesis testing.
• Matrix Algebra (2 modules) Basic properties; inverse; determinant; solution of systems of linear equations.
• Vectors (2 modules) Basic properties; scalar product; vector product; lines and planes; differentiation and integration of vectors.
• Calculus (2 modules) Inverse, trigonometric, exponential and hyperbolic functions; maxima and minima; curve sketching; implicit parametric and logarithmic differentiation.

Human-Computer Interaction

Topics Covered

• User Psychology
• Hardware (input/output) devices
• Models and Metaphors
• Interaction styles, Graphical User Interface (GUI) and windowing systems
• Design methodology
• Accessibility
• Guidelines, standards and metrics
• Evaluation
• Advanced Interfaces

Communications and Networks

Topics Covered

• Basic Data Communications
  • Transmission media
  • Clock synchronisation
  • Error detection
  • Link management and flow control
• Protocols
  • Protocol models, standards and definitions
  • Design and efficiency
• Local Area Networks
  • Topologies - bus, ring, star
  • Ethernet, Token Ring
  • Design - hardware, cabling, bridges and switches
  • Performance
• Network and Transport layer
  • IP
  • ARP
  • UDP and TCP
  • ICMP
• Routing basics
  • General issues
  • Routing strategies
• Network Security
  • Cryptographic algorithms
  • Security mechanisms
• Internet Applications and Services
  • DNS
  • The World Wide Web (HTML, HTTP)
  • E-mail systems - SMTP, RFC822
  • Network management issues - SNMP
• Network Misuse and the Criminal Law
  • Unauthorised Access
  • Unsolicited Network Traffic
  • Eavesdropping
• Internet architecture
  • General issues in the evolution of the Internet
  • The 'end-to-end' principle
  • Considerations for future Internet growth
• Overview of IP routing protocols
  • Intra-site (e.g. RIP)
  • Inter-site (e.g. BGP)
• IP multicast
  • General principle of 'one-to-many' networking
• IPv6
  • The protocol, its features and differences to IPv4
  • General principles of coexistence of IPv6 with IPv4
• Wireless networking (WLAN)
  • Technology basics
  • Methods to control access to WLAN infrastructure

Operating Systems

Topics Covered

• Overview: Why operating systems?
• Structure of an operating system
• Introduction to disks and file systems
• A flat file system: original MSDOS
• Processes
• Synchronisation
• Message passing
• Scheduling
• Real-time
• Character I/O, interrupts
• Disk I/O, DMA
• Network I/O
• Global networks
• File systems revisited
• The UNIX file system
• Memory systems
• Memory management
• Security
• Object oriented development
• DOS, Windows and NT

Computer Architecture

Topics Covered

• Introduction. Computer Evolution
• Computer arithmetic
• CPU structure - Pipelining etc
• RISC, Superscalar Architectures
• Buses and Interconnection
• Memory Systems and cache
• Input and Output. Interrupts
• Storage systems and RAID
• Advanced architectures

Software Analysis and Design

Topics Covered

• Requirements Analysis
• Object Modelling
• Design Patterns
• Use of CASE Tools
• Verification, Validation, and Testing
• Planning and Documentation
• Working in teams

Discrete Maths

Topics Covered

• Sets, functions and relations
  • Basic notation, represenations and examples. Disjoint sets. Subsets.
  • Operations on sets: Union, intersection and complement.
  • Pairs, tuples, cartesian products, powersets.
  • Functions: injections, surjections, bijections.
  • Relations. Equivalence relations and partial orders.
  • Cardinality, infinite sets.
• Logic
  • Propositional logic. Logical connectives. Semantics.
  • Natural deduction, soundness and completeness.
• Combinatorics
  • Counting with sets. Pigeonhole principle, inclusion-exclusion principle.
  • Combinations, Permutations.
  • Binomials.
  • Introduction to discrete probability.
• Induction and Recursion
  • Mathematical induction, structural induction.
  • Lists, trees, recursive functions, recursive data structures.

Lumina Team and Persona Wheel

Working on this project required creating a complex Object Oriented PHP system to generate images with imagemagick for portrait report PDFs.

Every dot on the wheel represents a team member or a learner's persona. Dots are smart and their final position is only placed where they do not overlap and collide with a dot already on the wheel.

Creating the Team and Persona wheels were critical to releasing Lumina Team Intro as well as enhancing Lumina Spark. I conceived and implemented algorithms for the Team and Persona wheels after many discussions with Stewart Desson, this of course required a lot of trigonometry to determine where to place a dot within the circle.

Once the dot is placed it has the ability to swing clockwise/anti-clockwise depending on the scores of the aspects either side. Dots can also move in and out depending on the score of opposite aspects.

Lumina Splash

Stewart Desson conceived the original Lumina Splash algorithms requiring a lot of complex maths. The splash represents a learner's personality and the area of the splash is representative of the overall colour scores as well as the spokes representing the aspect scores.

Stewart's original mathematics were all entered into Excel and the splash was drawn slowly as an Excel graph. My task on this project was to go through this huge and complex Excel spreadsheet and work out how to implement the functions in modern programming languages for on the fly generation by a background service on a server.

I have implemented this algorithm in both PHP and Java, the code generates an SVG of points which represents the Splash's mask which is then used to cut out a colourful splash graphic which is then overlayed on top of a very attractive Lumina Mandala graphic and saved in the users directory on the server, this final result is then included in the final PDF document output of Lumina Spark.

As well as generation via a service on Lumina's webserver splashes are created in Lumina Lite which is used by Lumina's partners for marketing purpose where potential customers can fill out a quick questionnaire and see their splash taking shape. This tool also includes a Splash-o-Matic which has been useful in creating SVGs for Lumina's graphic designer.

Lumina Tag Clouds

For this project I created an object oriented tag cloud system. Every tag cloud is unique and each word shifts randomly to get a unique position.

Tag Clouds can be generated for a learner's colours, aspects or qualities. The size, weight and opacity of each word is relational to its score.

Lumina tag clouds were first seen in a custom made version of Lumina Leader, they have since been integrated into Lumina Spark and have proven a new popular way of visualising scores compared to bar charts.

Social Media Integration

Social Media now plays a huge role in a company's marketing strategy. Lumina Learning now has a Social Media strategy and posts regularly to sites such as Twitter to engage with their audience. My role in this project was to work out how best to integrate the feeds and media from the various social networks and display content from them on the Lumina Learning website. Social Media now helps to keep the website up to date and relevant, keeps visitors on the site for longer and promotes sharing of content.

Lumina Learning HQ is not the only part of Lumina to post to Social Media. Lumina is made up of many Partners around the world and each partner has a lot of Affiliates. The users under the affiliates should only see local content relevant to them, therefore the social media system only shows relevant feeds on the user dashboards and homepages.

The Social Media settings pages are accessible by users who are in control of another set of users and uses various web service APIs to search for their account and gather their avatar, account ID and name for use of the social media caching system I developed for Lumina Learning in PHP. This required use of cURL, JSON and XML.

Lumina Learning now has many versions of its home page for different partners and affiliates with different target audiences in different locations. The pages display status and blog updates as well as videos and images from various social networks. The social networks are only updated hourly and the content is stored on Lumina's own servers in order to speed up requests and not have excessive connections to the services.

Social Media has enhanced Lumina Learning's marketing website with share buttons appearing across the site. Facebook like buttons, Google +1 buttons and LinkedIn recommend buttons are also used. These buttons make it easy for website visitors to share Lumina's content with others and increase the number of potential customers reached.

Product Customisation Wizards

Lumina Learning's products can be customised by Lumina's affiliates before they print and present materials at workshops.

During my time at Lumina I worked on making these product customisations as easy as possible and developed a Product Wizard system inside Lumina's in-house framework and CMS.

The wizard takes Affiliates step by step through the customisation process customising everything like text on the pages, whether the page numbers should appear at the top or the bottom and also the order of the pages. The wizard also allows Affiliates to add new custom pages to their portraits and workbooks and also include custom images.

Customisation is an important part of e-business and Lumina Learning has taken big steps into making their products customisable for independent Affiliates.

Lumina Leader Portrait

I implemented the entire technical backend of a bespoke Lumina Leader Portrait for a company requiring a targeted Lumina Learning product. This was a fast paced project that required as much automation as possible in order to produce a big portrait in a minimal number of steps.

The project was a success for the IT team with all the algorithms to select statements being in place before the text had even been written for the pages.

Lumina Spark Portrait

As well as the Lumina Splash and Tag Clouds mentioned previously I also played other roles in the Lumina Spark portrait. I was responsible for a lot of the original PHP implementation that selects statements as well as graphically representing scores in bars. I have also done lots of design work to make pages appear attractive and match the product specifications.

Contracts System

I created a Contracts System as part of Lumina Learning's Legal process. Lumina has the ability to request any user of the system to sign a specific contract. All contract versions and signatures are logged and can be retrieved by Lumina Learning on-demand as proof the contract was accepted.

Checking for pending contracts is one of the first actions that is performed when a page is loaded in the framework.

Automated Marketing Factsheets

Lumina Learning is a global company with translations in several languages. As well as updating the website text it is important that the printable factsheets that match the webpages are also updated with the latest information.

When re-coding the marketing website I simultaneously coded the factsheets to use the same translated text and design so whenever the website text is updated the factsheets follow. The website's design has since changed but the Factsheets system remains in place and has an alternate design to the webpages themselves. Factsheets are generated by the IT team for the main website and customised versions can also be generated manually by Affiliates in order to have their own logo and address included in the PDF.

Cisco

I am a Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician (CCENT) valid until July 20 2012. I took the Cisco ICND1 exam after my A-Levels during the holidays. The course covered networking fundamentals, WAN technologies, basic security and wireless concepts, routing and switching fundamentals, and configuring simple networks. I passed first time with 94%. I also completed CCNA Exploration semester 1 and 2 at St Crispin's School during my A-Levels.

A-Levels

I studied for my A-Levels at St Crispin's School, Wokingham and achieved the following results (A was maximum grade at the time):

• A - Maths
• A - Computing
• B - Physics

Music

I have played Clarinet for many years. I have played at The Hexagon in Reading and The Anvil in Basingstoke as a band member and have also been on tour to Devon. My Clarinet grades are the following:

• Grade 6 - Pass
• Grade 5 - Pass
• Grade 4 - Merit
• Grade 3 - Pass
• Grade 2 - Merit
• Grade 1 - Merit

GCSE

I also did my GCSEs at St Crispin's School, Wokingham. My GCSE grades are the following (A* was maximum grade at the time):

• A* - Mathematics, English Language, ICT
• A - Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, Music, Graphic Products
• B - English Literature
• C - Religious Studies (Short course)

Vocational - OCR Level 3

In the same year as GCSEs I achieved the following in IT Practitioners (ICT Systems Support) which is the equivalent of 3 B grades:

• Providing Customer Support
• Maintaining equipment and IT Systems
• Installing hardware/equipment and systems

Crown Wood Cricket Club

Project outcomes: Setting up the Joomla Content Management system and creating a brand new custom module to display fixtures and results, allow players to set their availability and allow captains to select players plus all the administrative backend such as adding and editing games, teams, clubs, grounds and users.

Visit http://crownwoodcc.co.uk/

Ken Faulkner's Cricket Books and Memorabilia

Project outcomes: Creating an attractive website without any dynamic serverside tricks and still allowing it to be updated often with ease and interacted with, such as sorting tables of flat data. The website also has a page one postion on Google for Cricket Books.

Visit http://www.bowmore.demon.co.uk/

Kalkan Chat

Project outcomes: Creating a website whilst in Turkey for a Turkish restaurant owner. My first project outside of England. I designed the website plus the logo and graphics. I also installed a forum which matches the design of the rest of the website.

Visit http://www.kalkanchat.com/

St Sebastian's Playing Field Trust Sports Club

Project outcomes: Setting an accessible website that can easily be edited and is accessible to all.

Visit http://stsebs-sports.org.uk/

Argyle Electrical Services

Project outcomes: Designing and creating a content management system for AES from scratch for them to add their own pages and edit them as they wish.

Website has since had a redesign

Apex Office Centre

Project outcomes: Creating a nice, professional website design to match their existing logo and to link to their existing online catalogue.

Website is no longer active