Saber Elsayed

Saber Elsayed

The popularity of generative text AI tools in answering questions has led to concerns regarding their potential negative impact on students' academic performance and the challenges that educators face in evaluating student learning. To address these concerns, this paper introduces an evolutionary approach that aims to identify the best set of Bloom's taxonomy keywords to generate questions that these tools have low confidence in answering. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated through a case study that uses questions from a Data Structures and Representation course being taught at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia. The results demonstrate that the optimization algorithm is able to find keywords from different cognitive levels to create questions that ChatGPT has low confidence in answering. This study is a step forward to offer valuable insights for educators seeking to create more effective questions that promote critical thinking among students.

A. L. Baxter, S. Y. BenZvi, W. Bonivento et al.

Developing sustainable software for the scientific community requires expertise in software engineering and domain science. This can be challenging due to the unique needs of scientific software, the insufficient resources for software engineering practices in the scientific community, and the complexity of developing for evolving scientific contexts. While open-source software can partially address these concerns, it can introduce complicating dependencies and delay development. These issues can be reduced if scientists and software developers collaborate. We present a case study wherein scientists from the SuperNova Early Warning System collaborated with software developers from the Scalable Cyberinfrastructure for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics project. The collaboration addressed the difficulties of open-source software development, but presented additional risks to each team. For the scientists, there was a concern of relying on external systems and lacking control in the development process. For the developers, there was a risk in supporting a user-group while maintaining core development. These issues were mitigated by creating a second Agile Scrum framework in parallel with the developers' ongoing Agile Scrum process. This Agile collaboration promoted communication, ensured that the scientists had an active role in development, and allowed the developers to evaluate and implement the scientists' software requirements. The collaboration provided benefits for each group: the scientists actuated their development by using an existing platform, and the developers utilized the scientists' use-case to improve their systems. This case study suggests that scientists and software developers can avoid scientific computing issues by collaborating and that Agile Scrum methods can address emergent concerns.

Saber Elsayed, Hemant Singh, Essam Debie et al.

Shepherding involves herding a swarm of agents (\emph{sheep}) by another a control agent (\emph{sheepdog}) towards a goal. Multiple approaches have been documented in the literature to model this behaviour. In this paper, we present a modification to a well-known shepherding approach, and show, via simulation, that this modification improves shepherding efficacy. We then argue that given complexity arising from obstacles laden environments, path planning approaches could further enhance this model. To validate this hypothesis, we present a 2-stage evolutionary-based path planning algorithm for shepherding a swarm of agents in 2D environments. In the first stage, the algorithm attempts to find the best path for the sheepdog to move from its initial location to a strategic driving location behind the sheep. In the second stage, it calculates and optimises a path for the sheep. It does so by using \emph{way points} on that path as the sequential sub-goals for the sheepdog to aim towards. The proposed algorithm is evaluated in obstacle laden environments via simulation with further improvements achieved.