The Second Workshop on Computing within LIMITS was held at UCI on June 9-10.  Among the organizers of the workshop were ISR faculty members Debra Richardson and myself, Professor Bonnie Nardi.  The objective of this series of workshops is to foster discussion on the impact of present and future ecological, material, energetic, and/or societal limits on computing. These topics are seldom discussed in contemporary computing research.  A goal is to foster concrete research that innovates on technologies, techniques, and contexts for computing within fundamental physical planetary limits.

Workshop, sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation, is held in cooperation with ISR each year.  GSAW 2016 was held February 29 – March 3 in Los Angeles, CA. This year ISR Prof. Walt Scacchi  delivered a half-day tutorial titled “Beyond Open Architecture: Issues, Challenges, and Opportunities in Open Source Software Development (OSSD) for Aerospace and Defense Applications.”  The goal of the tutorial was to provide software developers, system architects, project managers, program managers, and others with an introduction to the state of the art in open source development processes, work practices, and community dynamics.  Over 30 attendees participated in this informative tutorial.  This is the third time Prof. Scacchi has given a tutorial at GSAW. 

Many students have an active interest in playing computer games on a variety of different devices. Some students want to transform their interest in game play to game design or game making. Many games employ game mechanics and software development kits (SDKs) that are designed to encourage or embrace game making or modding. While making and modding are important modalities for learning about game design, they primarily rely on informal game design practices and observational learning (e.g., watching online tutorial videos). Such learning modality may be effective, but may also be ad hoc, difficult to systematize and assess, and thus often inefficient or ineffective.