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NewsSky.NET Simulation Project wins the 2006 Virginia and Griff Lawhon Digital Education Award By Katherine Manuel March 24, 2006 - The Sky.NET Simulation Project—a project focused on building applications to model political, social, and economic scenarios—will receive the Virginia and Griff Lawhon Digital Education Award for 2006. Sky.NET is a system designed and built in an undergraduate Computer Science course to run simulations and games. "Sky.NET has become a potentially interesting platform from which one could build and explore interesting models and games,” said Associate Dean of Engineering Tony Elam, one of the project leads. “It has been created through a series of CS classes focused on teaching Software Engineering. Each class inherits the legacy code of the preceding class and is given new requirements for functional enhancements. Over time the base functionality has grown and we now will explore the potential use of Sky.NET for a more serious and complete gaming simulation.” The Sky.NET project team, led by Elam and Computer Science Lecturer Stephen Wong, will accept the $600 award, which is granted by Dean of Engineering Sallie Keller-McNulty and University Librarian Chuck Henry. Other Sky.NET project participants include: Leslie Miller, Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Technology in Teaching and Learning; Dung Nguyen, Computer Science Lecturer; Richard Stoll, Associate Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science; and James Thompson, Noah Harding Professor of Statistics. Students in the 2005 COMP 410 class “Software Construction Methodology” built the Sky.NET framework to create highly accurate games and simulations for educational or governmental use. Sky.NET exhibits entities with attributes—such as speed, health, and possessions—and behaviors—such as the ability to move, attack, or even consume fuel. The Sky.NET entities can interact with one another, and they are governed by a transparent rule system. The entities, as well as their attributes, behaviors, and rules are all configurable to various scenarios. "The idea for a generic simulation engine grew out of previous COMP 410 projects,” said Wong. “In 2003, the class built MallSim, which was a very general simulation of interacting people and objects in a shopping mall… This system used a single server but multiple clients viewing the simulation. In 2004, COMP 410 built Voltron, a peer-to-peer grid computing system that enabled distributed processing of arbitrary tasks… And so, Sky.NET arose as a melding of these ideas, a generalized, distributed system, designed for highly accurate simulations running across multiple servers and viewed by multiple clients.” The Sky.NET Simulation Project, which is also funded by a grant from Rice’s Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI) through its "Enhancing Rice through Information Technology" program, aims to further develop Sky.NET and find applications for the technology. One future application planned for Sky.NET includes a model of the Houston region and “what-if” scenarios involving terrorist and counter-terrorists actions. Researchers will define a virtual world that reflects the Houston region and infrastructure, including transportation systems, water system, power grid, and population distribution, and create entities to represent both terrorists and counter-terrorist units. This virtual world would, in theory, allow local government officials to simulate and plan for a terrorist attack. The Lawhon award, which was established to provide support for the exploration of new and innovative applications of information technology for teaching and learning, “will be invaluable in funding the hardware infrastructure to support Sky.NET, such as memory and processor upgrades for the servers,” said Wong. "It is hoped that we can be successful and grow to the point of being able to win larger grants for the more complex projects,” said Wong. “Also, it is my dream to create a community software project where the students, as part of being CS major, would be involved in on-going development of improvements and extensions. A massively multiplayer on-line game (MMOG) which could be based on Sky.NET technology would be ideal for such a community-building project.” |
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Mailing Address: PO Box 1892, MS-132, Houston TX 77251-1892
Physical Address: 3122 Duncan Hall, 6100 Main Street, Houston TX 77005 | ||||||||||||||||||
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