Pedagogical Issues

My work as a Teaching Fellow has interested me in the subject of teaching styles and similar educational/pedagogical issues.

Publication

June 2011: Paper at CLTR 2011 - full citation:

  • SHAPE your CLASS: Improving the Lecture Experience, Colquhoun, J., Devlin, M. and Marshall, L. Learning & Teaching Research Conference, 9 June 2011, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK.

    • CV-Decide

    I work on CV-Decide, formerly the CVR (Cardiovascular Risk) project. This involves writing a software tool that calculates a patient's risk of getting cardiovascular disease (CVD) and examine the outcome of possible treatment options. I work with Aad van Moorsel and Bob Sugden within the School and the project is a collaboration with The Institute of Health & Society and the NHS South of Tyne and Wear. Richard Thomson at the IHS is the Principal Investigator. The project wiki is here.

    CV-Decide Presentations and Posters

    June 2011: Poster at ISDM 2011 - full citation:

  • Development and usability testing of a shared decision support tool for cardiovascular risk reduction in primary care, Thomson, R.G., Beyer, F., Colquhoun, J., et al. 6th International Shared Decision Making Conference, June 19-22 2011, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

    • September 2010: Poster at EACH 2010 - full citation:

  • Risk Communication and Shared Decision Making in High Risk Cardiovascular Patients - a Tool in Development, Thomson, R.G., Colquhoun, J., Beyer, F., et al. International Conference on Communication in Healthcare 2010, 5-8 September 2010, Verona, Italy.

    • April 2010: The CVR Project was selected to appear at the Vitae Yorkshire & North-East Hub Public Engagement Competition. It is hoped that Vitae will place the poster online and a link will be placed here if they do.

    December 2009: A presentation on the CVR project was delivered at the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting at the Kassam Stadium, Oxford. The abstract and slides can be viewed here.

    July 2009: A presentation on the CVR project was delivered at the July SuperMonday event at the Research Beehive, Newcastle University.

    Other research work

    A Peer-to-Peer Database Server Based on BitTorrent

    This is the title of my PhD Thesis. However, the working title for the project was The Wigan Peer-to-Peer Database System.

    Database systems have traditionally used a Client-Server architecture, where clients send queries to a database server. If the data proves popular, the server may become overloaded, leading to clients experiencing an increase in query response time.

    In the domain of file-sharing, the problem of server overloading has been successfully addressed by the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques in which users (peers) supply files – or pieces of files – to each other. My research examines whether P2P techniques can be applied successfully in a database environment and included the development of the Wigan Peer-to-Peer Database System, a P2P database system based on the popular BitTorrent file-sharing protocol.

    The potential benefits of a P2P database system include performance and scalability; allowing peers to answer each others’ queries will reduce the load on the database server and so could overcome the problem of a busy server becoming overloaded. Other potential benefits are fault tolerance and cost reduction.

    The Wigan architecture was developed, firstly by studying the BitTorrent algorithms and then by examining how these algorithms must be modified for use in a database system. Experiments carried out on a simulator of Wigan were analysed in order to determine factors which affect its performance.

    Further extensions to the Wigan architecture include investigating possible means of handling data updates.

    Wigan Publications

    Formal citations are available at my homepage at the School of Computing Science.

    Wigan Presentations and Posters

    December 2009: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Oxford. Presentation co-written with Paul Watson.

    July 2009: 26th British National Conference on Databases, Birmingham. Short paper, co-authored with Paul Watson.

    September 2008: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, Edinburgh. Presentation co-written with Paul Watson.

    July 2008, 25th British National Conference on Databases, Cardiff. A poster paper co-authored with Paul Watson, full citation: A Peer-to-Peer Database Server. Colquhoun, J. and Watson, P. In Sharing Data, Information and Knowledge. 25th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 25 , Cardiff, UK, July 7-10 2008. Gray, A., Jeffery, K. and Shao, J. (eds.) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 5071, pp 181-184. Springer-Verlag, 2008

    July 2007, North-East Regional e-Science Centre Summer School. This presentation concentrated primarily on join algorithms in the Wigan system.

    May 2007, UKGrad Yorkshire & North-east Hub Poster Competition, Leeds. A poster on Wigan was selected as one of 10 entrants to represent Newcastle University at the in Leeds. My poster can be viewed here.

    May 2006, School of Computing Science seminar.

    April 2006, North-East Regional e-Science Centre Easter School.

    DynaSOAr

    Earlier project work concerned Dynamic Deployment of Services in Distributed Query Processing. This was the original project title until we decided to focus on P2P. The original idea was to examine standard and P2P databases, but we decided that P2P presented a more interesting challenge.

    Project Dynasoar: Dynamic Deployment of Web Services

    This system originally had the working title of Janus, but has now been renamed Dynasoar, this name comes from Dynamic deployment and Service Oriented Architecture! I wrote the component which does the actual deployment and also a prototype service store to hold the web services in the initial version of the software. We have now completed and tested this initial version, including a successful demonstration to BT. For further information, including a list of publications and presentations on Dynasoar, please click here.