Lloyd Smith BMus MS MS PhD(North Texas)
Congratulations to Lloyd Smith who was promoted to Associate Professor at Waikato earlier this year.
Speech analysis, machine learning and computer applications in music

Visitors

Otago IS

Canterbury

Prof Allen Tucker (July ­ August)
Bowdoin College, Brunswick, USA

Victoria

Waikato

Auckland

Dr Moshe Porat (July ­ September)
Technion's Department of Electrical Engineering, Haifa, Israel
Signal theory, image processing, multimedia systems

Departmental News

Otago CS

We were pleased to be able to appoint four new lecturers to our staff during 1998 thereby giving some relief to our overworked staff. We are currently advertising for a second chair in the department.

During 1998 we held a three day display as part of the University's contribution to the 150th celebrations of the province of Otago. Many youngsters (and some not so young) were intrigued as they attempted to program one of our robots, MacHaggis. There was also an open day in May as well as taking part in a three day careers expo in September.

Kaye Saunders

Otago IS

Visiting Speaker: Danielle Bernstein will be visiting the Information Science Department at Otago University on 3-4 June. Danny is from the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Kean University in New Jersey and is a distinguished visiting Professor at the University of Wisconsin Women and Science program. Her interests are women in science and technology and gender issues in computing.

William Wong

Canterbury

Tim Bell

Lincoln

Elizabeth Post

Auckland

We have secured an outstanding international keynote speaker, Professor Doris Carver from Louisiana State University. Professor Carver was the 1998 President of the IEEE Computer Society and is a Co-Chair of the IEEE-CS/ACM Joint Task Force on "Defining the Software Engineering Curriculum". She has had considerable experience at directing Software Engineering programmes and will address the Forum on international trends in this field. In addition Professor Carver will address a meeting of the local Engineering profession and also conduct an open lecture to which we shall invite members of the public, the press, and liaison officers from Auckland schools. The aim of this lecture will be to sell Software Engineering as a new and exciting career opportunity for young people, particularly women.

Immediately after the Forum in July we shall mail out an information brochure to all secondary schools in New Zealand. At the same time a website will be set up for further information about the degree.

Clark Thomborson

CITR Official Formation: On May 31, the Centre for Imaging Technology and Robotics (CITR) will celebrate the official formation of the centre as well as the opening of the new robotics lab. This event is combined with an open day, which includes demonstrations of recent research results in robot soccer, mobile robotics, and 3D reconstruction.

Reinhard Klette

Computer Science Unplugged

Tim Bell

ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest

The contest, sponsored by IBM (and the first to be held outside the US) was an enormous success, possibly inspired by the memories of Edsger Dijkstra still haunting the environs. After 5 hours of hard slog, pitting their brains against the 8 problems the Otago team finished team tied for 11th place with five solutions, ahead of institutions such as Cornell, National University of Singapore and Moscow University. The winning teams had six solutions to the eight problems. Our team were awarded a prize as South Pacific Champions for 1999. All in all a very creditable effort and we look forward to their being in Orlando, Florida next year where we should do even better.

Kaye Saunders

Events

ICONIP'99 Post Conference and Workshop
Dunedin (Otago IS) 22­23 November '99
A two-day workshop and expo will be held in Dunedin, New Zealand, following the Annual Conference of the Asian Pacific Neural Network Assembly (APNNA), International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP'99), to be held in Perth, Australia. The conference, workshop and expo will be held jointly with the Australian and New Zealand International Conference on Intelligent Information Processing (ANZIIS'99) and the New Zealand International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and Expert System (ANNES'99).

The expo will present the latest developments in information systems and software systems that include new software releases, speech technologies, image processing, robotics, computing systems for genetic engineering, expert systems, knowledge-based systems, decision support systems in agriculture, horticulture, medicine, environment, education, business and finance. Presentations are invited for both software demonstrations and poster papers.

For more information see divcom.otago.ac.nz/infosci/kel/iconip99-workshop.htm.

SIRC'99-11th Annual Colloquium of the Spatial Information Research Centre
Dunedin (Otago IS) 13­15 December '99
The theme of this Colloquium is "Our Safe Living Environment: The Changing Face of Spatial Systems". The colloquium is divided into 3 major themes; Health, Business and the Environment. The increased use of spatial systems for analysis, support, research and education within each of these themes demonstrates the changing face of spatial systems. This colloquium aims to bring people together from each of these evolving areas to promote new techniques and a greater understanding of the possible applications for spatial systems in the future. For more information see divcom.otago.ac.nz/sirc/webpages/Conferences/SIRC99/sirc99.htm.

Conference Reports

There were 45 attendees representing the following:

Institution	Department	No
Auckland Uni	Computer Science	3
Canterbury Uni	Computer Science	11
Canterbury Uni	CUAP representative	1
Lincoln Uni	Applied Computing	6
Massey Uni	Computer Science	3
Otago Uni	Computer Science	9
Victoria Uni	Computer Science	5
Waikato Uni	Computer Science	5
Tait Electronics	Industry representatives	2

Having only one day for the subject conference meant that the chairs of each session needed to keep the discussion focused. This was greatly helped by having previously distributed the position papers which meant that participants already had a reasonably clear idea of the situation in other institutions. If a longer time had been available it is not at all clear that significantly more would have been accomplished.

Each session chair produced a final report that summarised the discussion and decisions made.

I would like to express my thanks to Dr Krishnan who did much of the local organisation to the session chairs who kept things to time and wrote the final reports, those who contributed to the initial position papers and all those who attended to make this a successful conference.

If you would like to learn more about the conference visit the conference Web-site at: www.cocs.canterbury.ac.nz/SubjectConference.

Bruce McKenzie

ACSW'99-Australasian Computer Science Week
Auckland 18­21 January '99
From 18 through 21 Jan '99, we hosted the "Australasian Computer Science Week" with four separate conferences, many impressive keynote speeches, and dozens of fine papers presented both orally and in the printed conference proceedings. Please see www.tcs.auckland.ac.nz/~acsw99/ for more details.

Clark Thomborson

NZCSRS-3rd New Zealand Computer Science Research Students' Conference
Hamilton (Waikato) 6­9 April '99
"Research, Computer Science, Fun-can I really put them all in the same sentence?" is how graduate students nationwide were introduced to the launch of the Third New Zealand Computer Science Research Students' Conference; and feedback from the 50 or so attendees who gathered for the conference suggests we did indeed hit upon the right mix of formal and informal events.

Held in the welcoming atmosphere of the Waikato University campus marae, Te Kohinga Marama Marae, attendees arrived on an overcast and rainy Tuesday afternoon to be formally welcomed on to the marae through the powhiri ceremony. Speaking on behalf of the visitors, Simon McCallum (Otago), Stuart Yeates (Waikato), Stan Szpakowicz (Ottawa, Canada), and Te Taka Keegan (Waikato) gave eloquent speeches that were both humourous and moving at times, helping set the mood for the following days. On completion of the ceremony a hangi was served, followed by an outing into town for anyone not too exhausted by their trip to Hamilton.

With the arrival of Wednesday came a brighter day, and the serious task of presenting research work. The general structure to each conference day was a mixture of student presentations and guest speakers during the morning and afternoon, and a social event organised for the evening.

The five guest speakers all gave excellent presentations on topics pertinent to graduate research: Bruce McKenzie, How to choose a research topic; Jacky Baltes, Time and project management as a graduate student; Sally Jo Cunningham, How to use a library effectively for research purposes; Ian Witten, How to write to be published; and Mark Hall, How to write a thesis.

The main social events were a trip to a local hot spring (Wednesday evening), where the hydro-slides and the king of the pole competition proved extremely popular; and a barbecue (Thursday evening) where the poster session and the ability to play free pool featured strongly.

At the end of the conference, attendees voted on the best student paper. Results are as follows:

1st	Aaron Roydhouse, Victoria Discovering regularities in sequential data
2nd	Simon McCallum, Otago Mechanisms for memory consolidation
3rd	Steven Mills, Otago Graph-based object hypothesis
4th=	Brent Martin, Canterbury Constraint-based student modelling: representing student knowledge
4th=	Sasha Rubin, Auckland Finite automata and well ordered sets
6th	Richard Littin, Waikato Data and control speculative execution

These six papers are due to appear in a special issue of NZCJ later this year.

If you would like to learn more about the conference visit the conference Web-site at: www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/cs/GradConf.

David Bainbridge

Masters Theses

Canterbury

Brendon Harris-Firewalls and virtual private networks
Kahn Mason-Notes on the parallel decomposition theory of finite state machines
Elizabeth Ng-Development of the Presto Pen-based music editor

Otago CS

Michael Keeley-Animation from motion capture
Michael Mundy-Neural networks model of localisation
Brendon Woodford-An intelligent knitwear design aid
Justin Wright-Co-operative access to a temporal database

Chris Butcher-Growing and animating visually realistic trees
Jason Butler-Further studies of the pixel-independent ray tracer
Tracy Mason-Virtual display case
Julian Peterson-An interactive application for texture synthesis

Lincoln

Mike Youngman-The determination of moisture gradients in pinus radiata timber during kiln drying

Waikato

Niann-Tsuu Chiang-Optical music recognition: processing the Sacred Harp
Michael Williams-An evaluation of passage-level indexing strategies for a full-text document archive

Kirsten Thomson-The analysis and evaluation of collaborative systems
Kadir Wijaya-Extending Cantor: an optical music recognition system

Auckland

Gordon Alford-DNA computations: from Turing machines to H systems
Sanjoy Banik-Interactive computer vision course
Wing Kai Chan-Synchronisation Library for PVM
Ling Chen-Telephony over the Internet
Sunny Daniels-State-based model of parallel computation
Morteza Khomami-Study of queue prediction, a fast cell scheduling algorithm
Jeong Koo-DermatExpert: a knowledge based system for dermatological diagnosis through the Internet
Douglas Low-Java control flow obfuscation
Angela Ng-Towards 3D model reconstruction from photometric stereo
Grant Ng-Fitting surfaces to multiple orthogonal contour sets
Kirubalaratnam Nithyaganesh-Talk-net project: real-time speech communications using T-codes
Ben Noonan-Distributed event controller
John Pearson-Heuristic search in route finding
Jarno van der Linden-Querying in program visualisation
Richard Westera-Interactive machine translation using an Interlingua

PhD Theses

Otago CS

Chris Handley-Analysis and synthesis of visual texture

Margaret Jefferies-Cognitive maps: understanding how local environments are computed

Otago IS

Colin Aldridge-A theory of empirical spatial knowledge supporting rough set based knowledge discovery in geographic databases
William Wong-Information portrayal in dynamic decision making environments

Waikato

Mark Hall-Adaptive prediction from multi-dimensional data
Stuart Inglis-Document image compression

Auckland

Asat Arslanov-Topics in algorithmic information theory
Elena Calude-Automata-theoretic models for computational complementarity
Ulrich Guenther-Robust source coding with generalised T-codes