GRUMPS Summer Anthology, 2001

This is the first collection of papers from GRUMPS [http://grumps.dcs.gla.ac.uk]. The project only started up in February 2001, and this collection (frozen at 1 Sept 2001) shows that it got off to a productive start. Versions of some of these papers have been submitted to conferences and workshops: the website will have more information on publication status and history.
GRUMPS decided to begin with a first study, partly to help the team coalesce. This involved installing two pieces of software in a first year computing science lab: one (the "UAR") to record a large volume of student actions at a low level with a view to mining them later, another (the "LSS") directly designed to assist tutor-student interaction. Some of the papers derive from that, although more are planned. Results from this first study can be found on the website. The project also has a link to UWA in Perth, Western Australia, where related software has already been developed and used as described in one of the papers. Another project strand concerns using handsets in lecture theatres to support interactivity there, as two other papers describe. As yet unrepresented in this collection, GRUMPS will also be entering the bioinformatics application area.

The GRUMPS project operates on several levels. It is based in the field of Distributed Information Management (DIM), expecting to cover both mobile and static nodes, synchronous and detached clients, high and low volume data sources. The specific focus of the project (see the original proposal on the web site) is to address records of computational activity (where any such pre-existing usage might have extra record collection installed) and data experimentation, where the questions to be asked of the data emerge concurrently with data collection which will therefore be dynamically modifiable: a requirement that further pushes on the space of DIM. The level above concerns building and making usable tools for asking questions of the data, or rather of the activities that generate the data. Above that again is the application domain level: what the original computational activities serve, education and bioinformatics being two identified cases. The GRUMPS team is therefore multidisciplinary, from DIM architecture researchers to educational evaluators. The mix of papers reflects this.