Abstract
This paper describes a study conducted at the University of Nottingham, whose goal was to assess whether the students registered on the first-year module "Mathematics for Computer Scientists" appreciate the calculational method. The study consisted of two parts: "Proof Reading" and "Problem Solving". The goal of "Proof Reading" was to determine what the students think of calculational proofs, compared with more conventional ones, and which are easier to verify; we also assessed how their opinions changed during the term. The purpose of "Problem Solving" was to determine if the methods taught have influenced the students' problem-solving skills. Frequent criticisms of our approach are that we are too formal and that the emphasis on syntactic manipulation hinders students' understanding. Nevertheless, the results show that most students prefer or understand better the calculational proofs. On the other hand, regarding the problem-solving questions, we observed that, in general, the students maintained their original solutions. © 2009 Crown.

Abstract
From an application point of view, the Grid computing with its powerful processing power and large amounts of data storage offers the possibility to process large quantities of data, to run computationally-intensive operations, or both. For instance, in computational biological pipelines, one often has to process large quantities of data in individually computationally-intensive operations. To process this data in the Grid, hundreds, or even thousands of jobs need to be submitted and their results processed. Obviously, performing these tasks manually is unfeasible. On the other hand, developing software to this end, specifically for a single application, is unproductive because if the application changes, or the Grid submission engine changes, then the code needs to be rewritten. In this paper we present a middleware that facilitates the submission of jobs to grids (or clusters) and helps handling their results. The middleware, that we call UbiDis (Ubiquitous Distribution), copies all files necessary for running the program to the UI or front-end host (in a Grid or cluster), compiles programs on the UI or front-end (if necessary), generates and submits the jobs, and copies the outputs to the local machine. Furthermore, UbiDis transparently generates jobs to different job managers, allowing the user to easily and quickly change the location to where the jobs are submitted. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of UbiDis using two applications.

Abstract
The preservation of musical works produced in the past requires their digitalization and transformation into a machine-readable format. The processing of handwritten musical scores by computers remains far from ideal. One of the fundamental stages to carry out this task is the staff line detection. We investigate a general-purpose, knowledge-free method for the automatic detection of music staff lines based on a stable path approach. Lines affected by curvature, discontinuities, and inclination are robustly detected. Experimental results show that the proposed technique consistently outperforms well-established algorithms.

Abstract

Abstract
As the internet becomes the most significant source for seeking information and acquiring services, the problems raised by the lack of usability and accessibility on websites lead to problems of e-exclusion, which phenomena may potentially have a great impact on one's life. Although some groups of individuals with special needs, namely the visual disabled people, have received the help of researchers to overcome the problem of accessing the information, there are other groups, particularly intellectually disabled people, that received little attention, indicating that their ability to access information is still limited. In this paper we present a study that investigates how people with the mentioned intellectual disabilities interact with web pages, which difficulties do they have while accessing the information and we propose guidelines for the studied group. While conducting this study we have also analyzed how the guidelines (1.0 and 2.0) suggested by W3C are applied to this particular group.

Abstract