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 | Newsletter April 1998 Number 4 |
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ContentsAppointmentsVisitors Departmental News: Canterbury Lincoln Massey Auckland The Audiograph Lecture Recorder Events Conference Report Postgraduate News Masters Theses PhD Theses
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Professor John Hughes (July - August)
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Software engineering - methods and education
Professor Marco Marsan (July - August)
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy
Petri nets, data communication networks, discrete-event simulation
Professor Vaclav Dvorak (March - June)
Computer Science & Engineering, Technical University of Brno, Czech Republic
Computer architecture, parallel and distributed computing and reconfigurable systems
Dr Carl Gutwin (January - June)
University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Digital libraries and computer supported collaborative work
Dr Rob Holte (January - May)
Computer Science, University of Ottawa, Canada
Machine learning, digital libraries and heuristic speech
Abhijit Sen (July '97 - June '98)
Computer Information Systems, Kwantlen University College, Surrey, Canada
Data communication and software engineering
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Lecturer on the Move: Unfortunately Michel deChaplain has left us for icier pastures. He has returned to an associate professorship at Concordia University in Montreal. His lecturership has been readvertised and we are in the process of inviting 3 shortlisted candidates for interviews.
In the meantime one of our graduate students, Warwick Irwin, has been employed on a temporary position for teaching parts of a course Michel was involved in.
Wolfgang Kreutzer
Applied Computing Enrolments up in 1998: Enrolments in our first year programming paper are up 80% this year. This is particularly pleasing, given that first year enrolments at Lincoln this year are slightly down. It probably reflects our move from traditional structured programming in Pascal to teaching in Visual Basic. Indeed there are a number of staff enrolments from people wanting to learn how to automate their Microsoft based applications.
A feature of our 200 and 300 level computing classes this semester is the unusually high percentage of women enrolled, ranging from 24% to 45%.
Asia2000 Grant: Keith Unsworth has received a grant from Asia2000 to support a six months visit to Lincoln University by Associate Professor Abdul Rahni of the School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. The work which will be carried during the visit is concerned with the application of shape preserving surfaces to the transport of pollutants in aquifers, and the visualization of such surfaces.
The visit was supposed to start in May 1998, but because of the current Malaysian financial crisis, it has been postponed until 1999.
Elizabeth Post
Well I hope this has not confused you too much, but don't worry there are still a lot of confused people at Massey University. The point of this short piece is really this: RIP Computer Science at Massey!
Chris Jesshope
Change to Java: The department completed a major change this year, with Java replacing Pascal as the main programming language for teaching. This process began in 1996 with the introduction of Java at stages 3 and 4, followed by its introduction at stage 2 in 1997. This staged approach was taken to ensure that more senior students became familiar with Java before we introduced it at earlier levels-many senior students provide support in demonstrating, marking and tutoring.
The change to Java is a major one, due mainly to its object-oriented nature, but also to the large set of packaged classes that are standard with Java. This has a big impact on the way in which programming is taught, especially at stage one, and also has flow-on effects on the stage two papers. The change has led to much rethinking of how to teach programming, with some staff having had to come to terms with classes, event-handling, applets, and the Web. Adequate tools and textbooks have also been a problem, but are now improving.
Rick Mugridge, Clark Thomborson
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This collaboration has just released the first professional version of the Audiograph lecture recorder (a prototype version has been available for over a year). The Audiograph lecture recorder is an authoring tool which can be used to record formal lectures, tutorials, training material or other presentations for publication on the worldwide web. The recorded lectures are encoded as a file which includes presentation graphics, (e.g. powerpoint slides) graphical annotation and synchronised audio and which can be played from within Netscape using the Audiograph Player plugin.
The key to the success of the Audiograph principle is that it is easy to use and requires little or no knowledge of html to produce professional multimedia results. Anyone who has given a presentation using an overhead projector will feel at home with the audiograph and will quickly be able to prepare audio-graphic material for publishing on the web. The reason for this is that it provides a close simulation of the classical lecture presentation environment.
This release of the Audiograph package is a stable beta release and can be downloaded for free from our Audiograph web site. It includes the recorder, which is a Macintosh application, and Netscape plugins for both Macintosh and PC platforms, so that playback is platform independent. In order to use the package seriously you will need a pen input device as drawing with a mouse is not ideal. But then these devices can be obtained for as little as $100 US.
The prototype lecture recorder has been used to prepare lecturer-less lectures for courses and tutorials at Surrey University, Massey University and the Open University and a number of other universities are currently evaluating the software.
For download and more information, including demonstrations and documentation, please visit our web site at http://fims-www.massey.ac.nz/~audiogph.
Chris Jesshope
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Paper submission important dates:
| Now!! 15 May 1 June 1 August 5 September 5 October |
Register intent to contribute a paper Submit abstract 500-1000 words Notification of provisional acceptance Submit full paper for review Notification of final acceptance and/or revision Final submission deadline |
| 1 July 1 August 5 October |
Submit extended abstracts 1000-2000 words Notification of acceptance and/or revision Final submission deadline |
ACSW'99-Australasian Computer Science Week
Auckland 18-21 January '99
The last conferences this millennium of the Australasian Computer Science
Association will be hosted by the Computer Science Department at the University
of Auckland. This is only the second time that these conferences have been
held in New Zealand.
ACSW'99 will incorporate the following conferences:
All conferences will have proceedings published by Springer. We are hoping that there will be a wide range of papers selected from New Zealand. More details, including calls for papers for the individual conferences, are available at:
http://www.tcs.auckland.ac.nz/~acsw99/
Organizing Chair: Professor Bob Doran, Computer Science Department
E-mail Address: bob@cs.auckland.ac.nz
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Steve MacDonell
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According to all the examiners Blair's thesis was outstanding and very impressive. His stochastic and discrete approach to a problem traditionally approached by continuum mechanics formulations was ground-breaking. The overseas examiner, a world authority in yarn mechanics and modelling, thought the research was 'world class' and was very positive about the thesis. Congratulations to Dr Blair Cassidy for his outstanding achievement!
Elizabeth Post
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