Departmental News 2010
2010-12-22: PhD scholarships have been awarded for two PhD students of our Network Research Group and Simulation Research Group: Ehsan Tabatabaei Yazdi received the UC Doctoral Scholarship, and Muhammad Asad Arfeen has received the PlanetLab NZ Scholarship. Congratulations!
2010-12-02: Isaac Lee and Ray Hunt have won the award for best paper at the 8th Australian Information Security Management Conference, which is part of the 2010 SECAU Security Congress (30th November - 2nd December, 2010, Perth Western Australia, http://conferences.secau.org/). The paper was "A Novel Design and Implementation of DoS-Resistant Authentication and Seamless Handoff Scheme for Enterprise WLANs" by Isaac Lee and Ray Hunt.
2010-10-29: One of our students, Janina Voigt, has just been awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Rutherford Foundation to undertake her PhD at the University of Cambridge in England, following in the footsteps of Lord Ernest Rutherford. Janina says she is looking forward to working with some of the best researchers in the field of software engineering. Her plan is to work on reinventing computer programming for the future, as better programming technologies will streamline programming, bringing benefits to industry and to society. Congratulations Janina!
For more details, please see the official media release.
2010-09-24: Two groups of researchers at CSSE, led by Andy and Tanja, have received prestigious and strongly-contested research grants from the Marsden Fund. The projects are:
Understanding and improving the transition from novice to expert performance with user interfaces - Professor A Cockburn and Professor CA Gutwin (University of Saskatchewan)
Adaptive computer-based cognitive training for post-stroke rehabilitation - Professor AM Mitrovic, Professor S Ohlsson (University of Illinois at Chicago), Dr A McKinlay, Mr MM Mathews.
The official announcements are available here.
For more details, there's a UC press release available here.
2010-09-20: Recent publications of our Network Research Group include:
- “Handover in Mobile WiMAX Networks: The State of Art and Research Issues”, by S. K. Ray, K. Pawlikowski and H. Sirisena. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, No. 3, 2010, pp.376-399
- "A New Topological Index for Capacity Allocation Problem in Survivable Networks", by W. Liu, Ha. Sirisena, K. Pawlikowski and A. Willig. In Proceedings of Australasian Telecommunication Networks and Applications Conference (ATNAC 20100), to be held in Auckland, 31 Oct - 3 Nov 2010); archived in IEEE Xplore
- "A Fast and Simple Scheme for Mobile Station-Controlled Handover in Mobile WiMAX" , by S. K. Ray, K. Pawlikowski, A. McInnes and H. Sirisena. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Access Networks (Accessnets 2010), to be held in Budapest, Hungary, 3-5 November 2010; published by Springer, in ICST Lecture Notes series.
2010-07-12: Congratulations to Richard Green and his team on getting a FRST grant to develop an intelligent vision-based pruning system. The world leading research team includes UC’s Professor Tanja Mitrovic (Computer Science HOD), Professor XiaoQi Chen (Mechatronics Director), Dr David Aithison (Mechanical Engineering), Lincoln University viticulture researcher Dr Val Saxton and Dr Dean Kirk (Product Innovation Centre). The team plan to spend the next four years in the research and development of advanced vision-based real time 3D modelling, interfaced to multiple high performance robotic arms with cutters to accomplish economically automated pruning. Read more »
2010-06-20: Tim Bell has won a 2010 BuildIT Research Publicity Prize, recognising his achievements in publicising ICT research in the NZ media, in particular with respect to being a featured guest on the "Nine-to-Noon" programme of Radio NZ National.
2010-06-15: Mofassir Ul Haque, a CSSE PhD student from our Network and Simulation Research Group, has been awarded a conference scholarship by PlanetLab NZ, for participating in the 10th Wuerzburg Workshop on "Visions of Future Generation Networks" (EuroView2010), to be held in Wuerzburg, Germany, on August 2-3, 2010. Mofassir, who is working on his PhD research proposal in the area of Future Internet, will also visit the research group of Prof. Phuoc Tran-Gia in the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Wuerzburg, which is well known for their research on Future Internet Applications & Overlays, as a part of the European Network of Excellence Euro-NF.
2010-05-20: A research paper on "Architecting Survivable Networks Using SABSA", by Malcolm Shore and Xianglin Deng has been accepted for presentation at the prestigious IEEE Wireless Communications Networking and Mobile Computing Conf. (WICOM 2010), to be held in Chengdu, September 23-25, 2010. Xianglin Deng is a graduate of the CSSE programme now working with Alcatel-Lucent who is continuing to maintain her research collaboration with the department.
A research paper on "SABSA at a National Level", by Malcolm Shore and Yi Xiao Du, has been accepted for presentation at the 17th annual COSAC Conference and SABSA World Congress (COSAC) to be held in Dublin, September 19-24, 2010. Yi Xiao Du is a graduate of the CSSE programme who is researching critical infrastructure aspects of SABSA while preparing to enrol for her Masters research.
A one day seminar on "SNAP: A SABSA approach to Survivability", by Malcolm Shore has been accepted for the 17th annual COSAC Conference and SABSA World Congress (COSAC) to be held in Dublin, September 19-24, 2010. This seminar presents an industry-focused methodology deliverable from the computer security group's work in survivability.
2010-04-30: Andy Cockburn has been awarded a BuildIT Postdoctoral Fellowship award. This is one of the two awards in the 2010 round in New Zealand. This award will allow him to seek a postdoctoral fellow in the next six months working in the area of Human-Computer Interaction for two years.
2010-04-14: Muhammad Asad Arfeen, CSSE PhD student from our Network and Simulation Research Group, has been awarded a conference scholarship to participate in TRIDENTCOM 2010 (6th International Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures for Development of Networks & Communities, to be held in Berlin, Germany) and the Workshop on Stochastic Processes in Communication Networks for Young Researchers (organized by International Centre for Mathematical Sciences & Cambridge University, to be held in Edinburgh, UK). He will also visit Telecommunication Networks Group at Department of Electrical Eng. & Computer Science, Technical University of Berlin, and the AESOP (Analysis, Engineering, Simulation & Optimization of Performance) Research Group at Department of Computing of Imperial College London, UK.
2010-04-13: Sayan Ray, CSSE PhD student from our Network and Simulation Research Group, has been accepted into the Summer Entrepreneurship Program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In total, Stanford University only accepted seven students from New Zealand. Sayan's costs of participation in this summer school are covered by a scholarship awarded by Foundation for Research, Science & Technology.
2010-03-31: The summer project (COSC366) by Myse Elmadani and the Intelligent Computer Tutoring Group (ICTG) has attracted interest from various sources, the most recent being an article titled "Concept Tagging: Making Moodle Domain-Aware", which featured in the February 2010 issue of the Distance Education Association of New Zealand (DEANZ) magazine (http://www.deanz.org.nz). Concept tagging allows Moodle to become more domain-aware by enabling teachers to create a list of domain concepts and tag the various resources with one or more concept tags. Various views then allow the student to browse through either a list of concepts to find relevant resources or vice versa. Developments to extend this module, incorporating Educational Systems' research, are now under way.
2010-02-20: A research paper on "Self-Tracking Mobile Station Controls Its Fast Handover in Mobile WiMAX", by Sayan K. Ray, Swapan K. Ray, K. Pawlikowski, A. McInnes and H. Sirisena, has been accepted for presentation at the prestigious IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conf. (WCNC 2010), to be held in Sydney, April 18-21, 2010. Sayan's participation in the conference will be covered by our departmental conference fund for PhD students.
2010-02-19: CSSE PhD student (and postgrad rep) Susanne Tak has won a $5K Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship.
2010-02-19: A new course, COSC433 Special Topic: Computer Science Education is available in Semester 1, 2010.
2010-01-26: Professor Andy Cockburn was featured in an article which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.
2010-01-22: Philip Buchanan has been awarded a research scholarship under the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FRST) Capability Fellowship program to pursue a doctoral degree in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering. His research work will involve the development of algorithmic properties of visual styles and their applications to procedural content generation.
2010-01-22: Professor Tadao Takaoka has had a paper accepted for the International Conference on Computational Science and its application (ICCSA 2010) to be held at Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka, Japan, 22-27 March 2010. The title of the paper is "Efficient algorithms for the 2-center problems".
2010-01-14: The Computer Security and Forensics group have been very fortunate in being lent a range of top-end equipment for its teaching and research. This includes:
- The very latest CISCO wireless access points supporting 300 Mbps transmission rates, 802.11i Security and 802.11e Quality of Service.
- An RSA Envision Security and Information Event Management engine.
- RSA SecureID authentication system.
- Novell's Sentinel Security and Information Event Management engine.
- Juniper Firewall (courtesy of Telecom NZ).
2010-01-13: Telecom has awarded a $5000 scholarship for research and development work in security to Luke Williams who is doing honors in 2010.
2010-01-13: Funding is available for a Masters (part 2) thesis in the area of IPv6 multicasting, mobility and security with a focus on protocols for the support of video applications.
Sponsored by Allied Telesis Labs and funded by TechNZ Capability Funding. $20,000 stipend (non-taxable).
A post graduate student producing a paper acceptable at a recognised international conference is eligible to apply for funding to attend such a conference.
Equipment (hardware and software) required to build the development and test environment will be provided by Allied Telesis Labs and the University of Canterbury. Normally additional funding is also available for the purchase of specialised equipment.
Further details available from Ray Hunt or Andrew Bainbridge-Smith.
2010-01-13: Andy Cockburn will present a keynote address on "Revisiting the Human as an Information Processor" at the Australasian Computer Science Week conference in Brisbane.