Departmental News 2008
Janina Voigt wins a 2008 Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
Google have just announced their Anita Borg Memorial Scholarships for
the 2009 academic year. Two scholarships were awarded for
Australasia, and both went to New Zealand students. Of the two, the
only undergraduate to get a scholarship was Janina Voigt, from CSSE at
University of Canterbury. Well done, Janina!
The scholarships ``aim to encourage women to excel in computing and
technology, and become active role models and leaders''.
More details at:
http://google-au.blogspot.com/
(2 October 2008)
COSC325 Project Showcase 2008!
At the end of each year, the advanced Software Engineering students (from
COSC 325)
present their group projects to the CSSE department at the
Software Engineering Project Showcase.
This year, the
SE Showcase 2008!
(featuring the 8 project groups) will be held in Erskine, Room 031 on:
10am - 12pm Friday 10th October, and
9am - 11am Wednesday 15th October.
All staff and students are invited to attend.
For more information, see:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/open/teaching/classes/cosc325/showcase
(25 September 2008)
CSSE Teams' Successes in Programming Competition.
Two teams from CSSE department have done very well in programming competitions
recently, and one of the teams will be representing NZ at world finals in
Stockholm.
The teams are:
Team JET (Joey Scarr, Edwin Flores, Thomas Steinke) and
Cantercoders (Michal Connole, Stephen Fitchett and Janina Voigt)
In the NZ Programming Contest, Cantercoders took first place in the
Tertiary Open Category, and Team JET were 4th.
In the ACM South Pacific Regional Programming Contest 2008 the top NZ
place went to Team JET, who also came second in the entire region
(Australia and NZ). Cantercoders took 2nd place in NZ, and 4th overall
for the region.
More information and results are at:
http://nzprogcontest.org.nz/Results/2008/NZPCResults2008.htm
http://www.sppcontest.org/2008/Results/summary.html
More information about the contest appears at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Programming_Contest
(24 September 2008)
CSSE Student Granted BuildIT Travel Award.
Sayan Ray, a PhD student of our Network Research Group, has been
granted a BuildIT travel award for PhD students, for his participation
in the 3rd International Conference on Access Networks, to be held in
Las Vegas, USA, October 15-17, 2008. Sayan will travel there to
present a research paper on "A fast MAC-layer handover for an IEEE
802.16e-based WMAN".
BuildIT is contestable funding established by New Zealand government
for growing and strengthening the ICT research community in New Zealand.
Applications for the next round are due on the 1st of December 2008; see
http://buildit.csi.ac.nz
(19 September 2008)
CSSE 2008 Postgraduate Research Conference.
CSSE recently held their 4th annual postgraduate research conference,
in which over 30 presentations were given by PhD, MSc and Honours
Students in the department. The event concluded with the presentation
of prizes for the best presentation in each degree programme category.
The winners were:
PhD: Susanne Tak, "Improving task switching interfaces";
MSc: Jay Holland, "A constraint-based approach to tutoring programming";
Honours: David Thomson, "Towards a negotiable student model for
Intelligent Tutoring Systems".
In addition, the judges made "lifetime achievement" awards to Jason
Alexander and Moffat Mathews who gave outstanding presentations but,
as previous winners, were ineligible for the 2008 prizes.
Further detail on the programme and the sponsors whose generosity made
the event possible is available at:
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/open/conf/pg2008/
(8 September 2008)
10th Year Celebration for MSCS Building.
On Friday 1 August 2008, members of the Maths & Statistics and
Computer Science departments held a social function to celebrate the
tenth year after completion of the building in which they reside. The
building, now known as Erskine, has won a number of awards for design
and architecture. A gallery of photos of the event and the building
is available at:
http://picasaweb.google.com/ForteTwo
(This web album is still in development; please
feel free to add comments (you can presumably login with a GMail
account if you have one).)
(1 August 2008)
Professor Krys Pawlikowski awarded a REANNZ grant.
Professor Krys Pawlikowski and our research groups on networks and
simulation have been awarded a REANNZ (Research and Education Advanced
Network New Zealand) grant of $200,000 for one year, to establish
PlanetLab in New Zealand and to use it in their research on new
network services and technologies.
PlanetLab is a global research network infrastructure, acting as an
experimental testbed for studying novel networking mechanisms and
applications. In June 2008 it was composed of 880 nodes at 460 sites
worldwide.
(30 June 2008)
Associate Professor Tim Bell Awarded UC Teaching Medal.
Associate Professor Tim Bell was presented with the
UC Teaching Medal
at the April graduation ceremony. This prestigious award is not
awarded regularly and has only been awarded twice before. It
recognises people who have made an outstanding and sustained
contribution to teaching in the University.
(30 May 2008)
Team Phoenix, a group of CSSE students, has won the Microsoft Imagine
Cup New Zealand finals.
They will be off to Paris in July to contest the world finals. The
team consists of Stephen Fitchett, 20, Louis Sayers, 21, Yugan
Yugaraja, 20, and Janina Voigt, 21; their academic mentor is Warwick
Irwin. Team Phoenix spent six months developing the Taxibus system,
designed to reduce congestion and pollution. More information is available
here and
here.
(2 May 2008)
Sung Eun Bae received a special commendation award for the Australian
Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation in 2008.
(26 February 2008)
Workshop on Future Technology in Computer Science and Engineering.
The University of Canterbury Student Chapter of ACM will host a workshop
on Feb 5, 2008 with two distinguished speakers from North America.
Further details are
here.
(24 January 2008)