[ Jocelyn
Ireson-Paine's Home Page
| Invited talks
| OxTALENT Events
| OxTALENT Home Page]
OxTALENT OPEN MORNING
Economics on the Web
Artificial Intelligence on the Web
A new Web authoring tool
Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
This page was prepared for the OxTALENT Open
Morning
on January 14th 1998, a demonstration of information technology
in teaching at Oxford. I have updated it since, to take account
of new things that I've done.
These programs are the result of a project carried out with the
Institute for Fiscal Studies,
to develop methods for connecting economic simulation programs to the Web.
They allow Web users to change policy variables such as tax rates,
and see the effect on UK households.
The IFS was set up to improve public understanding of fiscal policy,
and has had a Web site, with copies of all its research papers, since
late 1994. Connecting these models was an obvious next step in improving
public access. All the programs below are based on the IFS TaxBen
microsimulation model for investigating the distributional effects of
tax changes.
Working programs
-
Be
Your Own Chancellor
- The user changes tax rates and thresholds, VAT duties, and so on, and
sees the effect on government revenue and on a range of sample families.
-
Budget 98
- The user submits their own financial details, and sees how the last
Budget
will affect their income and expenditure. We put this and BYOC up
at the BBC.
Articles and presentations
- TOW:
a system for teaching economics on the Web (with Graham
Stark,
Institute for Fiscal Studies).
- In
Proceedings of CALECO97,
Bristol
25-26 September 1997. Downloadable as Zip file containing article
in Word format.
- TOW:
a system for teaching economics on the Web (with Graham
Stark).
- HTML slide-style presentation on the above.
- Virtual
Economy: an integrated economic teaching aid (with Graham
Stark).
- HTML slide-style presentation on a successor project. Presented
at CALECO98,
Bristol 10-11 September 1998.
- How to
connect existing educational programs to the Web:
a simple guide.
- In
Computers
in Higher Education Economics Review for September 1997.
- Economics
comes on-line.
-
In Economic Review for September 1997.
- Economics
on the Internet.
-
In
Guardian
On-Line magazine of Thursday 23rd November 1995.
This work arises from the AI practical course at the Department of
Experimental Psychology, which
introduces students to
classic symbolic AI and the history of AI on
the one hand, and to nouvelle AI on the other. The software includes
an agent-building kit written in Poplog,
allowing students
to construct agents to inhabit a simple microworld. The old version had
a grid-world VT100 interface, but I'm experimenting with a Java
replacement to make it more appealing visually. This will also let students
use it from a Web browser on almost any computer, solving
the problems caused by
every college and departmental computer having different
terminal emulation. With the old VT100 interface, it was
impossible to give students instructions
they could take away and guarantee to use in getting the emulation
to work on any computer their college might provide, no matter what.
The University ought to take some blame here, since it never appears
to have tried making things easier by enforcing standards.
Working programs
The front-end doesn't yet work as an applet, because of the security
restrictions applets impose in accessing remote files - ask to
see me demonstrate it separately. Overcoming
this requires writing a file-server via which the applet can take
student programs written locally and save them remotely. This must
also plug into a Java editor that the student uses locally, and must be
able to send code to the Prolog back-end. It is almost complete.
- Boinkaroids
- I'm experimenting with Mark Tacchi's Gamelet toolkit as the alternative
environment for the agents. The above is a simple shoot-'em-up game he
wrote as a demo.
-
Boink
- Another Gamelet demo - some bouncing balls.
Articles
- Using
Java and the Web as
a front-end to an agent-based Artificial Intelligence course.
Course notes
- Popbeast
- Course notes written for the pre-Java version. They lead a simple
classical AI program through its tricks, showing how it builds up and
analyses different representations.
- Production
Systems (1)
- An introduction to production systems and some ideas of nouvelle AI.
- Production
Systems (2)
- More on production systems.
-
Eden
- About the pre-Java microworld, called Eden.
The original documentation, for Pop users,
is here.
- Student
notes
- A page containing links to all the practical notes, as well as
my lectures and tutorials.
Downloadable code
Gamelet can be downloaded from here. Unfortunately,
there doesn't seem to be any archive that's committed to keeping or
maintaining it, so this link may disappear.
Web-O-Matic/Java, or WOM for short, is a tool for writing
server-side interactive Web pages. It avoids the Web page author needing
to know about CGI protocols and how servers work; instead, pages can
be written in an extended dialect of HTML, with Java code inserts to
control interaction. You can easily write session-based applications such
as shopping services, and
forms that save data to a file
for a program to read. WOM is written in Java and generates Java
code, and comes with its own Web server. It should run on any machine
with a Java implementation. It is based on a new programming method,
System Limit Programming,
involving some fairly advanced mathematics (category theory and sheaves)
and a new way of looking at the concept of objects.
Articles
- Web-O-Matic/Rexx:
a tool for building complex interactive Web
applications by compiling HTML to Object Rexx
.
-
In
Proceedings of
8TH REXX SYMPOSIUM,
Heidelberg 22-24 April 1997.
- Web-O-Matic:
using System
Limit Programming in a declarative
object-oriented language for building complex interactive Web
applications
.
-
In
Proceedings of
DOCUMENT PROCESSING AND SGML,
Workshop of project DAVID - Algebraic Document Processing
Braga 2-4 September 1996.
Downloadable code
Web-O-Matic is free for academic use, and can be downloaded
via my Web-O-Matic
page.
[ Jocelyn
Ireson-Paine's Home Page
| Invited talks
| OxTALENT Events
| OxTALENT Home Page]