Tech Program Research Articles

Education and Training Packages for CAD/CAM

SUMMARY The provision of education and training almost always lags behind the needs of industry. This is particularly so in the case of rapidly developing high technology fields such as CAD/CAM (Computer Aided Design and Manufacture), where the educational sector finds it difficult to keep up with industry's requirements not only because of the rapid growth rate, but also because of the high level of funding which is required to purchase and maintain suitable facilities. Two education/training initiatives are described in this paper. The first of these is a pack of resource material for lecturers teaching CAD/CAM to undergraduate level, and the second is a training course for the managers of CAD/CAM systems which is part of the U.K. Manpower Services Commission's Open Tech programme.

The Open Tech Programme

Abstract In this article, the author reviews the Open Tech Programme, its progress and some of the opportunities it offers.

The Open Tech Programme: New Developments in Open Learning

Abstract The paper presents an overview of the Manpower Services Commission's Open Tech Programme, a developmental project‐based programme begun in 1982 to open access for adults to updating and upgrading training at technician and supervisory skill levels. The paper discusses issues arising in the management, administration, design and process of open learning, and pays particular attention to the impact and development of educational and training technology in the Programme.

Open Tech Workstation

The need to develop new techniques of authoring and delivery of open learning material has led to a new generation of open learning workstations, the most recent being the Open Tech Workstation developed by the MSC's Open Tech programme. When fully exploited in an industrial training centre trainees at each Workstation can learn a whole range of technical information. The powerful computer and high quality graphics system allow the teaching of computer aided design drafting to be taught, with a live computer aided manufacture link with machine tools in the workshop.

The Open Tech Programme: A New Initiative for Adults

The Open Tech Programme: A New Initiative for Adults

Open all hours

This article submitted by the Training Division of the Manpower Services Commission outlines the intentions of the Open Tech Programme, which should affect Supervisors both as users and providers so far as they are concerned with involvement in tutoring and oversight of practical experience

Careers:

The Open Tech Programme will need to balance a collaborative approach, building on existing resources, facilities and experience, with a strong, clearly recognisable national identity. This is the most important theme of the Council for Educational Technology's response to the Manpower Services Commission's consultative document.

Problems, Programs, Processing, Results –Software Techniques for Sci–Tech Programs

P Quittner Bristol: Adam Hilger 1977 pp 381 price £13.50 (Institute members, 25% less) It is the author's contention that if a scientist is to write efficient computer programs, then knowledge of a high-level programming language needs to be supplemented by an understanding of the processing to which a program is subject when submitted to a computer. This book has been written with the intention of providing the programmer with just such supplementary knowledge.

AI research at CMU

The most populous project at CMU is the speech recognition project headed by Professor Raj Reddy and Lee Erman. The current achievement is a voice-chess system incorporating several knowledge sources working in a hypothesize-and-test mode and interacting smoothly as a set of cooperating independent processes. This Hearsay system is reasonably successful in recognizing connected speech in the limited chess context, even though the chess-move grammar includes about five million possible utterances. It relies on a chess semantic specialist, the Tech program, on a grammar specialist, and on basic acoustic routines. Presently, re-analysis and reorganization of that effort is being undertaken, by Lee Erman, Victor Lesser, and Richard Fennell, with views towards implementation on the CMU C.mmp (multi-mini-processor) system. Bruce Lowerre and Richard Smith are analyzing the performance of Hearsay for multiple speakers on several other tasks: a Doctor task, voice news retrieval, and a desk calculator.