MSCS News

Hot on the heels of most influential paper award from ASWEC98 earlier this year, James Noble was awarded another Most Influential Paper award, this time from the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications - OOPSLA.

The Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award is presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the OOPSLA held 10 years prior to the award year. The award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.

OOPSLA is the largest and most prestigious conference in the area of Object-Oriented programming languages. It is CORE A+ rated and has consistent low acceptance rate of around 15%.

Prof Noble received the award for his paper "Ownership Types for Flexible Alias Protection", along with co-authours David G. Clarke and John M. Potter. The citation is as follows:

In their 1998 OOPSLA paper, "Ownership Types for Flexible Protection," David Clark, John Potter, and James Noble introduced the notion of "ownership types" to control inter-object aliasing statically, making it easier to reason about the dynamic topology of an object-oriented program. This work is part of the broader trend of trying to handle issues of isolation and modularity while retaining expressiveness.

More details of the award can be found at http://www.sigplan.org/award-oopsla.htm

MSCS PhD student Adam Day has been awarded the prize for the best student paper for his paper "On Process Complexity", in the upcoming CATS (Computing Australasian Theory Symposium) 2009. Adam is studying towards a PhD in Algorithmic Information Theory, under the supervision of Rod Downey and Noam Greenberg

The CATS 2009 conference will be held in Wellington in January, 2009. For more information, see the symposium website:

http://velorum.ballarat.edu.au/~pmanyem/CATS09/

On Saturday, 13th of September, SMSCS hosted the Wellington Site of the 2008 ACM South Pacific Regional Programming Contest (http://www.sppcontest.org/2008/Report2008.html) as part of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (http://cm2prod.baylor.edu/login.jsf). Two teams, both from SMSCS, took part in the competition at Wellington Site. There were 89 teams competing in South Pacific at sites spread throughout Australia and New Zealand. There were 9 problems with the winning team from Australia (Hobart) solving 8 and the winning team from New Zealand (Christchurch) solving 7 (http://www.sppcontest.org/2008/Results/summary.html). The winning team from Australia and the winning team from New Zealand will advance to World Finals in 2009.

The first SMSCS team was Hugh_Mudge_Will: Hugh Davenport, Michael Mudge, William O'Neil.

Hugh_Mudge_Will solved 7 problems and came 8th in South Pacific (or 5th in NZ).

The second SMSCS team was CGC: Carlton Downey, Gustav Van Der Merwe, Constantine Dymnikov. CGC solved 5 problems and came 24th in South Pacific (or 10th in NZ).

Each team got a variety of prizes from the contests main sponsor: IBM, as well as a free year of ACM Student Membership.

For more information about our regional site see our web site: http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/Events/ACMProgrammingContest. The contest was organised by Stuart Marshall, Alex Potanin, and Neil Ramsay. Please contact Alex Potanin for more information.

From 2009, Victoria University will establish two new Schools: the School of Mathematics, Statistics and Operations Research, and the School of Engineering and Computer Science.

These two Schools will replace the current School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science.

Professor David Bibby, Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Science, Architecture & Design and Engineering, says the spilt will facilitate the continuing development of Engineering and Computer Science at the University. The Bachelor of Engineering was first offered in 2006.

The new Schools will continue to foster the strong research culture of their disciplines and continue to contribute to research throughout the University.

This change does not affect the range qualifications offered by each School or impact on current students’ intended qualifications in any way.

As part of the IEEE New Zealand Central Section's technical activities the following computer science thesis students presented at the post-graduate presentation event: Craig Anslow, Urvesh Bhowan, Natsuki Hasegawa, Sergio Hernandez, Rashina Hoda, Alan Kinzett, Alvin Kok-Lim Yau, Radu Muschevici, Kourosh Neshatian, and Ben Palmer. The event was held on Thursday 28 August from 1-6pm at Pipitea Campus. The aim of the event was for post-graduate students who are pursuing higher degree studies in the areas of engineering and technology to present their research work and to share their knowledge with fellow-students and peers. Each presentation was eight minutes followed by two minutes for discussion and questions. Students who presented at the event received a participation certificate and received sponsorship for IEEE membership fees. Ben Palmer also received an award for an outstanding presentation and research work (pictured below). Pizza and drinks were provided to keep the students entertained.

MSCS Computer Science PhD student Faisal Nabi has been awarded $63,000 in a scholarship from the BuildIT fund, which he will receive over the next three years. The BuildIT fund was set up to grow the number of PhD students studying computer science in New Zealand.

Faisal is an active researcher in the field of e-Commerce Systems Security. He is currently focusing on his PhD research into "Designing Frameworks for Secure Business Application Logic in Distributed e-Commerce Systems", under the supervision of Ian Welch and Peter Komisarczuk.

MSCS is proud to announce that Prof James Noble has been awarded "most influential paper for ten years" from the Australian Software Engineering Conference for his previous work on object-orientated programming at Microsoft Research in Sydney. For more of James' work, visit his personal page.

On Friday 9 May from 12pm-2pm, SMSCS, SIM and Vic Careers are hosting an IT Careers expo, on the 2nd floor of Cotton Building. The expo is a good opportunity for Engineering, Computer Science and BIT Students to liaise with potential employers, find out what jobs are available in IT (and maybe even sign up for some!), and make a few contacts.

The focus of the careers expo is graduate recruitment opportunities, but it should also be of interest to first and second year students who want to find out what is available in the job market. Employers are interested in offering permanent and summer work, as well as Work Experience programmes.

The list of employers who are currently scheduled to have a stand at the expo include Innaworks, Westpac Banking Corporation (NZ), Catalyst IT Ltd, Intergen, Orion Health, 3months.com, Foodstuffs Wellington Coop Society, Contact Energy, GCSB, Provoke Solutions Ltd, Fronde Systems Group Ltd, SecuritEase International Ltd, NZ Computer Society/Women in Technology, Datacom, IBM, Summer of Code, EDS (NZ) Ltd, ANZ National, Sidhe Interactive, Trade Me, and Statistics NZ.

For more information, including detailed info on each employer, click here.

Press Release from Google

As part of Google's ongoing commitment to furthering Anita Borg's vision, we are pleased to announce the 2008 Google Australia and New Zealand Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. In 2006, the Australia Anita Borg Scholarship was established to honour the legacy of Anita Borg and her efforts to encourage women to pursue careers in computer science and technology. Three years later, we continue to strive to encourage women to excel in computing and technology, and become active role models and leaders.

Anita Borg Scholarships will be awarded based on the strength of candidates' academic background, community involvement and demonstrated leadership. A group of female undergraduate and graduate student finalists will be chosen from the applicant pool. The scholarship recipients will each receive a scholarship for the 2009 academic year and an expenses-paid trip to the 2009 Grace Hopper Conference.

In addition, all finalists and scholarship recipients will be invited to an expenses-paid networking retreat to be held at Google's Sydney Engineering centre in September. It will include workshops with a series of speakers, breakout sessions, social activities, and will provide an opportunity for all finalists to meet and share their experiences.

Applying to the Scholarship To apply, you should be a female student studying Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering or a related technical undergraduate or postgraduate degree at an Australian or New Zealand university in 2009. For complete details, please visit www.google.com.au/anitaborg. Applications close June 13th 2008.

Young Hong has recently accepted a permanent research position at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre (http://www.wbic.cam.ac.uk) at the University of Cambridge in the UK, as a kinetic modeller. The Wolfson Centre is dedicated to imaging function in the injured human brain using Positron Emission Tomography and Magnetic Resonance. Young finished his PhD in Mathematics in 2005 at this School, under the supervision of A/Prof Mark McGuinness, on "Cardiac Control Models".

Here is a photo of Young with the River Cam in the background - clearly not letting the grass grow under his feet...