Abstract
Many of the current approaches used in teaching and learning in engineering education are not the most appropriate to prepare students for the challenges they will face in their professional careers. The active involvement of students in their learning process facilitates the development of the technical and professional competencies they need as professionals. This article describes the organisation and impact of a mini-conference and project work - the creation of a software product and its introduction in the market - aimed at the development of professional competencies in general and writing skills in particular. The course was evaluated by assessing the students' perception of the development of a number of professional competencies through a questionnaire completed by 125 students from two consecutive year groups. The results indicate that the project work and the mini-conference had a positive impact on students' perceptions of the development of professional competencies. © 2012 Copyright SEFI.

Abstract
Version vectors and their variants play a central role in update tracking in optimistic distributed systems. Existing mechanisms for a variable number of participants use a mapping from identities to integers, and rely on some form of global configuration or distributed naming protocol to assign unique identifiers to each participant. These approaches are incompatible with replica creation under arbitrary partitions, a typical mode of operation in mobile or poorly connected environments. We present an update tracking mechanism that overcomes this limitation; it departs from the traditional mapping and avoids the use of integer counters, while providing all the functionality of version vectors in what concerns version tracking.

Abstract
Optimistic distributed systems often rely on version vectors or their variants in order to track updates on replicated objects. Some of these mechanisms rely on some form of global configuration or distributed naming protocol in order to assign unique identifiers to each replica. These approaches are incompatible with replica creation under arbitrary partitions, a typical operation mode in mobile or poorly connected environments. Other mechanisms assign unique identifiers relying on statistical correctness. In previous work we have introduced an update tracking mechanism that overcomes these limitations. This paper presents results from recent experimentation, that brought to surface a particular pattern of operation that results in an unforeseen, unlimited growth in space consumption. We also describe informally a new update tracking mechanism that does not exhibit this pathological growth while providing guaranteed unique identifiers for a dynamic number of replicas under arbitrary partitions and the same functionality of version vectors.

Abstract
Causality tracking mechanisms, such as vector clocks and version vectors, rely on mappings from globally unique identifiers to integer counters. In a system with a well known set of entities these ids can be preconfigured and given distinct positions in a vector or distinct names in a mapping. Id management is more problematic in dynamic systems, with large and highly variable number of entities, being worsened when network partitions occur. Present solutions for causality tracking are not appropriate to these increasingly common scenarios. In this paper we introduce Interval Tree Clocks, a novel causality tracking mechanism that can be used in scenarios with a dynamic number of entities, allowing a completely decentralized creation of processes/replicas without need for global identifiers or global coordination. The mechanism has a variable size representation that adapts automatically to the number of existing entities, growing or shrinking appropriately. The representation is so compact that the mechanism can even be considered for scenarios with a fixed number of entities, which makes it a general substitute for vector clocks and version vectors.

Abstract

Abstract