For most young people growing up today, video games have been a part of their life on the same level as music, films, and other entertainment. They regard video games as a fun, exciting, and absorbing source of entertainment and stimulation. Transferring these properties into an educational context can prove to be very valuable and motivational. In this master thesis, the introduction of video game development with the XNA game development platform in software architecture projects at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) is evaluated. This includes an evaluation of a 2D XNA game library used in the projects. In addition, we present an assessment of the effort and time spent required to grasp the necessary 3D concepts and techniques involved in producing 3D games with XNA. We also describe our improvements and extensions of the game library to support and include 3D features, based on the evaluation and assessment. The students of the course had the choice between the traditional project (a robot simulation) and the new XNA project. We find that the students who chose the XNA project were more motivated, struggled less, and thus required less assistance. On the other hand, the XNA students admitted to over focusing on the gameplay of their game, at the expense of the software architecture. This should even out when more learning material specific to the XNA project becomes available. 40% of the XNA students used the game library in their project. Overall, they were satisfied with the usefulness and usability of it, but did not think it helped them focus less on technical matters and more on the architecture.

JExercise is a programming assistance tool used by students working on exercises for the programming course TDT4100. A prototype of Jexserver, a server for automatically grading students' submissions, was developed in fall 2007 to grade exercises for the course. The Jexserver prototype is now further developed into a production-quality system, tested on students attending TDT4100 with a range of exercises, and a simulated exam is staged to test the performance. The system performance of Jexserver is found to be sufficiently good to use it to host a digital exam, and the conclusion is that Jexserver is ready to be used as the primary exercise grading tool for TDT4100 and other programming courses. The JExercise client itself is extended to be able to submit exercises directly to Jexserver with zero configuration, improving student usability. Finally, Jexserver is successfully integrated with it's learning, the learning management system used by NTNU, by implementing the IMS Tool Interoperability Guidelines, and by specifically targeting the implementation at it's learning, the user interface is also seamlessly integrated, providing a coherent solution with JExercise, Jexserver and it's learning.

Social network services like Facebook, and instant messaging services like MSN Messenger have gained an enormous popularity in just a few years, and are undoubtedly popular among users.hat happens when these networks are combined with information about the user’s location? This master’s thesis has investigated if people are willing to use systems that share the users’ location for the purpose of locating friends. It is also investigated if users’ of systems that shares their location behave in a different ways as a consequence of this location sharing. Finally, this thesis investigated if users of location sharing systems will get the feeling of loosing their personal privacy, and how privacy mechanisms can help the users not to get this feeling. These questions were investigated by developing a location-tracking social network service called The FriendRadar, which was developed for usage in Wireless Trondheim. Pupils from Trondheim Katedralskole were equipped with wireless devices to test the system in the environment. The logged data of the system was analysed and the users answered a questionnaire after the test period was completed. One user also participated in an interview. The results of these investigations show that the users did not use The FriendRadar very much, but according to the users answer to the questionnaire it seems that users are willing to use systems that share their location with others, if the benefit is that they can locate them back. It also indicates that the users do act in different ways because of the possibility to share their location. Users seem to use the fact that others can see their location deliberately to tell other their locations, but they do not avoid doing any actions. Further, it seems like spontaneous actions possibly can happen as a consequence of users seeing other’s location. Users of the system did not show concerns about privacy while using the system, but they could imagine this being a problem in a system with larger user mass. The most important privacy mechanisms for a future location-tracking systems, seems to be able to turn the system off and reciprocity in location sharing. Together these results shows that if the right amount of privacy mechanisms are implemented to a location-tracking system, the system can both be privacy preserving and useful for the users.

Mobile phone gaming has seen an enormous growth over the last decade and many countries now have more cell phone subscriptions than they have people. Combined with the ever increasing interest in games, the mobile gaming market still hasn't reached it's full potential. Newer and more powerful phones with interesting features hit the market every day. Many of those features are directed at locating position, and that opens up for the prospect of location-based gaming. This branch of gaming is still in the starting phase, and public awareness is relatively low. Meanwhile, developers and operators explore the opportunities that are yet to be tested. In this project, we have developed a game to test different aspects related to infrastructure, network and playability in location-based mobile gaming. From the testing of GSM and UMTS networks, results show that basic network properties such as CellID can be utilized to make challenging and social games. Furthermore, the tests hinted at UMTS as the best suited network to perform location-based gaming, as the smaller and less overlapping zone structure, response times and bandwidth facilitates a multiplayer game better than the GSM network. This is not a global truth, though, since EDGE increases the GSM response times and bandwidth to an acceptable level. As long as a suitable mapping of game zones and real-world cells can be made, GSM is still a candidate in many environments. Developers face new challenges with location-based gaming, as testing no longer can be confined to the development environment. Extensive field testing is vital to both flesh out techincal issues as well as gameplay-related issues. Outdoor distances makes testing take longer time, and communication between test team and developers is harder than in a studio. Finally, playtesting shows that most people are open to the idea of physical movement as input when playing in a virtual reality. When incorporating social elements and multiplayer options in a dynamic setting, location-based games can be seen as a replacement for a friendly football game or similar outdoor activities. When such an approach can be made, while keeping communication and team-feeling among players high, the full potential of location-based gaming migh be unlocked.

Both global software development and agile approaches have gained significant popularity. Companies even show interest in applying agile approaches in distributed development to combine the advantages of both approaches. This is done despite their differences in key tenets. In their most radical forms, agile and global software development can be placed in each end of a plan-based/agile spectrum because of how work is coordinated. This study describes how four global software development projects applying agile methods coordinate their work. The findings show that there are at least three approaches to distributed Scrum; local Scrum independent of remote team’s approach, multiple Scrum teams coordinated with Scrum of Scrums and geographic transparency and a single distributed Scrum team. It was also found that trust is needed to reduce the need of standardization and direct supervision when coordinating work in a global software development project, and that electronic chatting supports mutual adjustment. Further, co-location and modularization mitigates communication problems, enables agility in at least part of a global software development project, and renders the implementation of Scrum of Scrums possible. Proper mechanisms to provide transparency are needed to achieve mutual adjustment.

The main goal of this project was to create new game concepts for mobile and social games. The project was a continuation of the depth study performed by the project in the course TDT 4570, Game Technology, at NTNU. The focus of this project was slightly more shifted toward the social side of mobile multiplayer games compared to the depth study. Additionally the project group were to create a prototype game using one of the concepts implemented in Java ME. The project group performed a prestudy of the technologies required to create the prototype(such as Java ME and features specific to mobile phones, such as location), as well as looking at games from a general viewpoint, but also by looking more closely at mobile and social games, current game genres, and multiplayer games available on mobile platforms and looking at how these games implement social game mechanisms. Several concepts were conceived and described during the project, with concepts from both the depth study and concepts created specifically in this project. The textit{Platform-puzzler} concept was chosen to be implemented as the prototype game. The prototype game is a 2D side scrolling platform multiplayer platform game with puzzle elements. The game was implemented in a development process, and at the end of the process the game was tested by two testers not from the project group. The test allowed the project group to assess how it performed in a simulated setting using emulators, as well as testing to see how the cooperative elements of the game performed, and additionally the test was performed in two sessions were in the first session the two testers were located in the same room, whereas in the second test the were located in the same room. The test session performed on the prototype indicated to the project group that there for the prototype game there were quite clear differences between playing the game in the same versus playing the game in different rooms. This indicates further that special care must be taken when designing and creating cooperative games for mobile platforms. The additional research performed by the project group also indicate to the project group that creating mobile and social games for mobile platforms is highly viable, and that social gameplay mechanisms can strengthen the experience of playing games.

In news articles the focus on named entities is quite common and usually a news case is tied around a person, a company, or similar. One challenge from an information retrieval point of view is that one entity often have more than one way of referring to it. This means that when users use news search engines they have to use the exact same name for the entity as the articles they are interested in use. Therefore the usage of synonyms to refer to the same entity forms the basis of this thesis. We explore the idea of using Wikipedia as a data source for building a large dictionary of named entities and their synonyms. An entity dictionary like that would be very interesting because it make it possible to link synonyms to the same entity. The evaluation shows that Wikipedia is well suited as a source of named entities and synonyms as the semi-structure aids in recognizing the entities and related synonyms. The use of the dictionary in a modified search solution shows on the other hand mixed results. On problem with evaluating a solution like this is that the precision of the different synonyms is usually very high for popular entities, and when we combine different synonyms in the same query we end up giving more weight to the results that use multiple synonyms.

This report investigates JACK Intelligent Agents and JACK Teams, and makes a comparison between the two. The main object was to find indications that point out which modeling paradigm that results in least development effort, and which one that is creating the most feasible platform regarding teamwork construction. The application domain is decision-support systems used in oil production. The aspects evaluated are development effort, degree of coupling, encapsulation of functionality, abstraction level, delegation of autonomy, and scalability. The solutions developed in the comparison had static team formations that included few teammembers. This caused less development effort by using JACK Intelligent Agents, and was the main reason why it was considerate to be the preferred modeling paradigm in this case. This was partly experienced because reasoning based on the actual team membership was not used in the JACK Teams version. The use of roles was used instead, causing more JACK entities where it could have been avoided. Dynamic team formations during runtime were not needed due to the reference problem introduced. Maintaince during runtime, for instance introducing new subteams and changing the role structure was not looked into. Introducing teams in large scale was not performed. These four factors could have caused a different result. The question is if JACK Teams shows its potential through the oil production system designed in this report.

As part of the Semantic Web movement, the Resource Description Framework (RDF) is gaining momentum as a format for storing data, particularly metadata. The SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language is a SQL-like query language, recommended by W3C for querying RDF data. FAST is exploring the possibilities of supporting storage and querying of RDF data in their Mars search engine. To facilitate this, a SPARQL parser has been created for the Microsoft .NET Framework, using the MPLex and MPPG tools from Microsoft's Managed Babel package. This thesis proposes a solution for efficiently storing and retrieving RDF data in Mars, based on decomposition and B+ Tree indexing. Further, a method for transforming SPARQL queries into Mars operator graphs is described. Finally, the implementation of a prototype implementation is discussed. The prototype has been developed in collaboration with FAST and has required customized indexing in Mars. Some deviations from the proposed solution were made in order to create a working prototype within the available time frame. The focus has been on exploring possibilities, and performance has thus not been a priority, neither in indexing nor in evaluation.

This project is a continuation of the work carried out autumn 2008 by the author, which reviewed the digital communication channels currently used for distribution of student information at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and defined the key design decisions for a mobile service called MSIS. The project proposes a new mobile computer system (MSIS) intended to make user-centric information more easily available to students at NTNU. The system is designed using a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), providing a number of services which offers functionality such as a dynamic course schedule, and a location search tool. Furthermore, MSIS makes use of context-awareness and elements of mobile computing, in order to provide a service that dynamically adapts to the situation of the user. A geographical positioning module based on Wi-Fi location fingerprinting technology is described, which makes it possible to determine the position of a handheld device within existing wireless network infrastructure. The project has been carried out in accordance with the design-science research model over a number of implementation and evaluation iterations. A user-driven evaluation of the MSIS service has been conducted among a group of NTNU students. The utility and usability of the system were evaluated by applying observational and empirical evaluation methods in a real-world environment on campus. The user tests identified numerous issues with the initial design, and suggested ideas for enhancements which have been implemented in the final version of the system. The Mobile Service Acceptance Model (MSAM) has been used to examine the factors that are influential for user adoption of mobile services in light of our project. The MSAM instrument measures different facets of a mobile information service, such as the perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usage intention. Our findings confirm that the utility of the MSIS system is perceived as very high, and students would likely benefit from such a system. There is no doubt great potential for a service like MSIS, and it is believed to be a useful addition to existing systems.