Recent news
SIT Professor named editor of IEEE TC
Professor Albert Zomaya has been elected as the new Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers. The appointment for an initial two years will start from 2011. IEEE Transactions on Computers is the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society. First published in 1952, it is one of the most prestigious publications in the field of computing.
Welcome to visiting visualisation expert Professor Beppe Liotta
Professor Giuseppe (Beppe) Liotta from the University of Perugia (Italy) is visiting the School of IT this month. Professor Liotta will mainly be working with Professor Peter Eades on research on information visualization, graph drawing, and geometric computing research.
Visualization is a common approach for making sense of data. Data in different application fields can be relational in nature and is conveniently modeled as a network. Examples include: social networks, telecommunication and computer networks, web maps, biological networks, and software engineering diagrams. Devising systems and algorithms for effectively visualizing data requires the integration of techniques from different areas of computer science, including algorithm engineering, software engineering, data mining, and human computer interaction.
Think, for example, of the problem of mining information from the world wide web: Instead of browsing a long list of results returned by a classical search engine, it could be more efficient to visit a map where the pages are semantically grouped into categories and the relationships between the different categories are described by the edges of a graph. The categories can be expanded, and include subcategories, so users could find information with just a few clicks.
Professor Liotta will be giving a Basser Seminar, “The Anatomy of a Graph Visualization System” on Friday 20 August, 4pm. Full details including abstract and bio.
GIO gets student eGreenslips redesign
Insurance company GIO is undertaking a redesign of its online eGreenslips system through a student work placement program with University of Sydney student, Edgar Martinez Rico.
Luke Hopewell, ZDNet.com.au, 28 June, 2010.
Read full story.
2010 Teaching citation awards announced
SIT's Dr Tara Murphy and Dr James Curran will shortly receive citations from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) for their significant contributions to student learning.
Read full story.
Big ISPs to benefit from mandatory Internet filter: Academic
The burden of managing the costs associated with the implementation of ISP-level filtering could put many of Australia's smaller ISPs out of business, according to a University of Sydney academic Asscociate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Tim Lohman, Computerworld, 19 April, 2010.
Read full story.
Students develop rival to Microsoft's Surface
School of IT students have developed a tabletop computing device at a fraction of the cost of the $20,000 Microsoft Surface.
Article in The Australian, 2 March 2010 featuring SIT students Anthony Collins and Trent Apted, and Professor Judy Kay.
Read full story.
Keynote
Professor Judy Kay has been invited to be a keynote speaker at the 5th European Conference on Technology-Enhanced Learning (ECTEL2010), to be held in Barcelona, Spain in September.
ECTEL is a series of conferences used as the key forum for presenting state of the art European research in technology-enhanced learning. It attracts many participants from both technology, education, psychology and industry.
ECTEL 2010 Call for papers.
Internet filtering laws outdated before they are passed
The Federal Government's plan to compel Internet Service Providers to filter the Internet has been unanimously opposed by Australasian Computer Science academics, says University of Sydney Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
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CORE Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Prize
University of Sydney alumnus Dr Michael Cahill has won the 2010 Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE) Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation prize.
Universities around Australasia compete for this prize, entering the most outstanding doctoral work by an IT student awarded their degree the previous year. A committee of CORE judges then select the best thesis in the field, based on originality, significance, innovation and the scale of the work.
The prize was awarded to Dr Cahill, who graduated in November 2009, for his thesis “Serializable Isolation for Snapshot Databases”.
Dr Cahill’s thesis proposes an innovative change to the internals of database management systems. Professor Alan Fekete from the School of IT, Dr Cahill’s supervisor, explains: “Michael’s thesis describes a novel algorithm, which allows database operations to run in parallel but avoids situations where data consistency is violated. The algorithm can be implemented by making a small modification to current techniques, and will have an impact on commercial and open-source databases around the world.”
His work has previously been recognised, winning the Best Paper Award at the 2008 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, the leading forum for work in this area. This paper has been chosen as one of the core readings in the graduate Database course at University of California at Berkeley.
The Dissertation prize was announced at the Australasian Computer Science Week on 19th January, held at Queensland University of Technology.
The Computing Research and Education Association of Australasia (CORE), is an association of university departments of computer science in Australia and New Zealand.
To Google and Beyond: University nurtures future IT programmers
It's not everyone's idea of how to spend their January school holidays. But for 78 motivated high-school students, interested in web applications and robotics, the University of Sydney's National Computer Science School (NCSS) - now in its fifteenth year - still holds great appeal.
Read full story.
Best Student Paper at ADCS
Honours student Tim O'Keefe and Irena Koprinska have been awarded the Best Student Paper for their submission, Feature Selection and Weighting Methods in Sentiment Analysis, at the Fourteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS) in December, 2009.
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems
IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems has recently released a list of it’s most published authors. Using data from Scopus, the list was compiled and sorted according to the number of papers that an author published for the whole life of the journal. The list was limited to authors who have published at least 4 papers in the IEEE TPDS over the last 20+ years. SIT’s Professor Albert Zomaya was on the list, with the 5th highest number of papers in the TPDS. Professor Zomaya was also the only person listed from Australia.
General Sir John Monash Award
SIT Honours student Jonathan Kummerfeld has received the General Sir John Monash Award.
The award, presented this week by the Governor-General Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce, recognises excellent academic achievement and future leadership potential.
Jonathan has a Bachelor of Science (Advanced), and completed honours this year in the School of IT, supervised by Dr James Curran. He was awarded first class honours and the University Medal. The General Sir John Monash Award will enable him to study a Doctor of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) in Computational Science.
His research involves developing computational approaches to problems in chemistry, which he hopes will further the field of sustainable power generation and storage. Jonathan is also a trumpeter, a vocalist, and a long distance runner.
Zelie Wood, who has Bachelor of Arts and LLB from the University of Sydney also received an General Sir John Monash Award.
Dr Peter Binks, CEO of the John Monash Foundation, highlighted the success of the Sydney University graduates: "Jonathan and Zelie are outstanding winners, not just for their academic excellence, but also for their community involvement and their leadership capabilities."
About The General Sir John Monash Award
Annually, up to eight Awards are made to outstanding Australian citizens graduating from Australian Universities to enable them to undertake postgraduate study abroad at the world's best universities.
The awards are based on various criteria, including outstanding intellect, leadership, altruism and active citizenship and the applicant's potential to contribute to their field and to the community.
IT Students win Graph Drawing Competition
School of IT students Nicholas Jefferson and Hui Lui have won prizes at the 16th Graph Drawing Contest, which was held in conjunction with the 17th International Symposium on Graph Drawing (GD 2009) in Chicago this year.
Competition organisers provide graphs that are partially laid out, then entrants from around the world try to make pictures of the graphs, creating an aesthetic drawing suitable for the application domain. They need to be innovative and in most cases, the winning entries invent new visualization algorithms. There were 4 categories this year: A Simple Tree; An Org Chart; A Flow Chart and A Mystery City Graph, and each category was awarded a prize.
PhD student Nicholas Jefferson won first prize in the Org Chart category, and MIT student Hui Lui won first prize in the Flow Chart category. The flow chart had 57 nodes and 72 directed edges. 26 nodes were fixed and 24 edges were fixed. A diamond pattern was created to highlight the fixed nodes.
Congratulations to Nicholas and Hui.
ARC grant sucess
Congratulations to staff of the School of IT, who have secured over $3 million in ARC Discovery Grant funding:
- Dr Michael Charleston; Modelling disease evolution and emergence, total funding $290,000 from 2010-2012.
- Dr James Curran; Parsing the web: Exploiting redundancy to understand language, Australian Research Fellowship, total funding $362,000 from 2010-2014.
- Associate Professor Alan Fekete and Dr Bernhard Scholz; Computing with nearly consistent data, total funding $280,000 from 2010-2012.
- Professor David Feng (SIT), Professor Michael Fulham and Associate Professor Stefan Eberl (RPA); Large scale knowledge and image based biomedical modelling and derivation of PET-CT, total funding $610,000 from 2010-2013.
- Professor Albert Zomaya; Holistic Energy Aware Scheduling for Distributed Computing Systems, Australian Professorial Fellowship, total funding $930,000 from 2010-2014.
- Professor Albert Zomaya; Dr Bing Bing Zhou; Replica Placement in Data Intensive Distributed Computing Systems, total funding $250,000 from 2010-2012.
- Associate Professor Paula Dawson (UNSW), Associate Professor Masahiro Takatsuka (SIT), Dr H Yoshikawa; Professor R L Gregory; Holoshop: The design, implementation and evaluation of rapid 3D drawing technology for content creation in holograms and other three-dimensional displays, total funding $430,000 from 2010-2014.
Special congratulations to Albert Zomaya for winning the Australian Professorial Fellowship and James Curran for the Australian Research Fellowship.
2009 ACM Programming Competition
The South Pacific Region of the Association for Computing Machinery 2009 Programming Competition was held over the weekend, and the School of IT hosted the Sydney site. Twelve teams competed, three representing the home-ground; three from Macquarie University and six from UNSW.
The problems had the usual varied range of difficulty and our site's top six teams did well to solved five problems. I am pleased to report that the winning team - Tajabe - represented the University of Sydney. Students, James Constable, Tarek Elgindy, Ben Taylor and coach, Taso Viglas, took out the top prize, solving 5 problems in 639 minutes. Second prize went to team Justin Time from UNSW, Michael Rose, Oleg Sushkov, Prashant Varanasi and coach, Tim Lambert, who solved 5 problems in 798 minutes.
The top first year team was "#include python" from Sydney, and they were not far behind the winners, solving 5 problems in 864 minutes. Congratulations to Yunlong Chen, Peter Ward, Carlo Zancanaro and coach Taso Viglas.
The competition ran extremely well, due to the heroic efforts of the Site Technical Director, Greg Ryan, whose usual calm, competence and commitment overcame the many expected and unexpected technical
challenges that come up on the day as well as in the set up period. Greg also generously supported the various practices through the year for which the University of Sydney teams are very grateful.
Thanks also to our visitors, Matt Cabanag and Daniel Sutantyo from Macquarie and Tim Lambert from UNSW for helping with just about everything, together with Sydney coach Taso Viglas who provided lots of technical support through the day. Finally, many thanks go to the judges Steve Bian, Edmund Tse (also the official photographer for the day) from Sydney, and Patrick Coleman, who works for Google, but is a seasoned prog comper who generously volunteered to help.
Photos (by Edmund Tse):
Left: Sydney site winners Taso Viglas, James Constable, Tarek Elgindy and Ben Taylor.
Right: Sydney Site volunteers.
Research promises to slash data centre energy consumption
University of Sydney researchers have found a way of simultaneously optimising the energy consumption and completion time of computationally intensive processes.
iTWire Article, 8 September 2009, featuring Professor Albert Zomaya and Dr Young Choon Lee
Read full story.
See other articles on this topic at Computerworld, ARN, Anthill and A to Z of Clean Technology.
Conroy urged to 'end net censorship farce'
The Federal Government's internet censorship trials have been repeatedly delayed over the past nine months, leading to claims from the Opposition that the Government is deliberately withholding the results to avoid embarrassment.
SMH Article, 2 September 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
SIT goes green with Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems and the University of Sydney are collaborating to improve computing education in multi-core technology.
Multi-core technology is the future of computing because the clock-speed of single-core CPUs has reached its physical limits.
Sun Microsystems recently donated a SPARC Enterprise T5120 computer server to the School of IT, University of Sydney. The server has two UltraSPARC T2 processors with 8 cores and 64 threads.
‘Building on fruitful research collaborations between the two institutions, Sun Microsystems was encouraged to extend our university involvement to student education – the researchers of the future.' said Dr. Cristina Cifuentes of Sun Microsystems.
‘With the omnipresence of multi-core processors, multi-core technology education is essential and will form a base requirement in our curriculum to educate the next generation of computer engineers.’
said Dr. Bernhard Scholz from the University of Sydney.
Multi-core technology is consistent with reducing greenhouse gas emissions in IT. By implementing efficient parallel software for multi-core computers the energy consumption of computers can be reduced. The academic staff at the School of Information Technologies is looking forward to teaching this new technology.
For more information, please contact
Dr Cristina Cifuentes, Sun Microsystems
Phone: +61 7 3238 8379
Dr Bernhard Scholz, University of Sydney
Phone: +61 2 9351 4216
Answer to absolutely everything gets closer
How long would it take an auctioneer to speak 6000 words? What was the weather in Beijing on the day Kevin Rudd was born? How many Americans are named Andrew?
SMH Article, 18 May 2009, featuring Professor Judy Kay
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Leaked Australian Blacklist reveals banned sites
The Australian communications regulator's top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia's forthcoming internet censorship regime.
SMH Article, 19 March 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
The Queensland dentist included on the Australian communications regulator's blacklist of prohibited websites has demanded that the list be cleaned up.
SMH Article, 19 March 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
Listen to Professor Landfeldt on ABC News Radio.
Watch Professor Landfeldt on ABC TV's Good Game (27 April 2009).
Watch Professor Landfeldt's public lecture on the internet filtering scheme (3 April 2009).
Fatal flaws in website censorship plan, says report
Trials of mandatory internet censorship will begin within days despite a secret high-level report to the Rudd Government that found the technology simply does not work, will significantly slow internet speeds and will block access to legitimate websites.
SMH Article, 23 December 2008, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
SensorKDD-2008 Best Paper Award
Postgraduate students Elizabeth Wu and Wei Liu together with Associate Professor Sanjay Chawla have won the Best Paper Award (Second Prize) at the 2nd International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data (SensorKDD-2008) for their paper "Spatio-Temporal Outlier Detection in Precipitation Data". The $500 prize was donated by the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA.
Obama young vote won with Twitter
Associate Professor Sanjay Chawla says Barack Obama's victory was perhaps due more to the technology savviness of his campaign rather than just a triumph of political ideas.
Read full story.
Alumni of the Year sell to YouTube
After selling their web company to YouTube, Simon Ratner and Ryan Junee are named Young Alumni of the Year by the Faculty of Engineering and IT.
Read full story.
See also Silicon Valley success for savvy Aussies, SMH Biztech, 11 November 2008.