Departmental News From 2006
Computer Science
Unplugged project receives US$50,000 backing from Google
Computer Science Unplugged project of Associate Prof. Tim
Bell has received US$50,000 backing from Google for development and
promotion.
The project teaches principles of computer science without using
computers. More about it here.
(21 December 2006)
COSC Student
wins prize in UC Postgraduate Showcase
Congratulations to Masters student Nancy Milik for
claiming a prize in the UC
Postgraduate Showcase ’06, which was held on October 18th. Nancy’s
award winning presentation on "Fitting spatial cognition and
free-formed questions into ITS" won her $200 for being the Best
Presenter from the College of Engineering. Computer Science and
Software Engineering had a high turnout at the Showcase, with 9
speakers and 1
poster entrant. Congratulations also go to, Nilufar Baghaei, Kon
Zakharov, Andrew Gin, Pramudi Suraweera, Lin Tian, Jason Alexander,
Taher Amer, Jay Holland and Amali Weerasinghe for their very
professional entries, which were of a very high standard.
(24 October 2006)
ICTG awarded a
Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching grant
Congratulations to the ICTG
who has been awarded a Hewlett-Packard Technology for Teaching grant,
to develop and Intelligent Tutoring System for ENGR102, the Engineering
Mechanics course. The project is led by Associate Prof. Dr Tanja
Mitrovic. Other participants on the project are Dr Brent Martin, Dr
Charles Fleischman (Civil Engineering) and Pramudi Suraweera.
(5 September 2006)
Andrew Gin
awarded a UC Masters' scholarship
Congratulations to CSSE student Andrew Gin, who has been
awarded a UC Masters' scholarship. Andrew’s project is based around
designing a secure transaction network. This could form the basis of an
EFTPOS over IP network. In the telephone world, it would be the
equivalent of connecting your phone to the internet, instead of the
Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). This project is essentially
the EFTPOS version of migrating the phones in NZ from the PSTN to use
Voice over IP (VoIP).
Using this analogy, the advantages are that you require less
infrastructure (you only need equipment for one network: the IP
network) at the telephone exchange, instead of one for the IP network,
and one for the PSTN.
(27 July 2006)
Mohammad Obaid
awarded merit prize in engineering poster competition
COSC Masters student Mohammad Obaid has been awarded a
merit prize in the engineering poster competition. Mohammad’s work is
part of his Masters project supervised by Dr R. Mukundan and Dr Tim
Bell.
His winning poster can be seen here.
Mohammad's research looks at how moment functions have recently been
used
to compute stroke
parameters for painterly rendering applications. The technique is based
on the estimation of geometric features of the intensity distribution
in small
windowed images, to obtain the brush width, colour and direction. The
newly developed method proposes an improvement, by additionally
extracting the connected components so that the adjacent regions of
similar colour are grouped for generating a larger and noticeable brush
stroke image.
(13 April 2006)
ICTG awarded a
further eCDF grant.
ICTG has been awarded a further eCDF grant of $250,000
for a year, to continue work on the ASPIRE project. ASPIRE is a
Web-enabled authoring system for building intelligent tutoring systems.
The project is led by Associate Prof. Dr Tanja Mitrovic and Dr Brent
Martin. Other participants of the project are four PG students: Pramudi
Suraweera (PhD), Konstantin Zakharov (MSc), Nancy Milik (MSc) and Jay
Holland (MSc). The article in the Chronicle can be found here.
(13 April 2006)