User:GBraught

Grant Braught is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College. The computer science program at Dickinson currently has 3.5 faculty members and 67 students as declared majors.

Grant's research interests include: Computer Science Education; Effects of tool design and pedagogy on student learning in introductory courses; Development of software tools for teaching bio-inspired artificial intelligence and robotics; Bio-Inspired Artificial Intelligence and its applications; Artificial life; Interactions between learning and evolution; The evolution of evolvability; Co-evolutionary systems; Swarm algorithms; Evolutionary and developmental robotics.

Outside of academia Grant enjoys golf, skiing, volleyball, craft beers, cooking and eating ethnic foods, Penn State Football and Norwich City FC.

Intro IRC Activity:

• How do people interact?

Interaction is via text messaging. In specific interactions between individuals they call each other out by name, which is necessary to infer who is talking to who.

• What is the pattern of communication? Is it linear or branched? Formal or informal? One-to-many, one-to-one or a mix?

Overall conversation is linear with darci mediating and calling on each in turn for updates. Within each update the communication is often many-to-one, with multiple users providing thoughts, input, suggestions and questions related to the updates.

• Are there any terms that seem to have special meaning?

There is a ton of jargon related to the project specifics and context that is being carried along from past meetings, emails and/or discussions amongst the team.

The #info, #action and #topic tags appear to be commands to the bot that is logging the meeting. Looking at the minutes later it is clear that these tags log information into the meeting minutes.

• Can you make any other observations?

The conversations can be very difficult to follow when they become many-to-one and many-to-many as each line is difficult to connect to the prior lines to which it is responding. Perhaps this is easier with the context of past meetings and when participating with familiar collaborators in real time.