| These are my graduate students. I'm proud of them. I try to keep them very busy. :-) |
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Shaoqun Wu is
seeking automatic ways to construct lexical acquisition systems based
on a collection of text that teachers or learners provide. She is
looking at how to identify important and typical lexical items for language
learning from a given corpus by using human language, artificial intelligence,
and information retrieval technologies. She is exploring the pedagogical value of these
lexical items and using them to construct a computer
assisted learning system that facilitates lexical acquisition.
You can play with some of the language games she has developed in our Flexible Language Acquisition (FLAX) project.
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| Michael Walmsley is designing
second language learning activities that utilise time spent
reading online to refresh and extend your language skills.
He is aiming to combine research in second language
acquisition and computational linguistics to develop systems for
automatically creating vocabulary lists and second-language reading texts from
document collections. The lists and texts must be tailored
specifically to the interests, goals and abilities of individual
learners.
Software for Japanese and Spanish language learners will be
developed to evaluate the systems and activities in longitudinal user
studies.
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Anna Huang is interested in document clustering. She is
investigating algorithms for interactive clustering, and the
scatter-gather approach for facilitating the browsing of digital
library collections. She is also interested in improving the
efficiency of clustering, particularly incremental clustering, by
using keyphrases extracted from free texts as descriptors of the
document content. She would like to investigate the potential theoretical
and practical performance improvements due to the use of automatically
extracted keyphrases as the basic document representation.
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| Craig Schock is interested in improving the development and
maintenance of medium and large-scale software systems. Software
systems are subject to constant change pressures and because of this,
they must remain flexible. The evolution of a software system is
heavily dependent on its structure. The field of network theory has
been used to analyze complex systems in a variety of different fields
and has shown that specific structural characteristics contribute
greatly to the evolvability of the system.
Craig's goal is to validate
network theory as a viable mechanism for evaluating the evolvability
of software systems.
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Veronica Liesaputra is working
on our Realistic Book project for her PhD. Her goals are (a) to
produce a three-dimensional book model that is natural and interactive;
(b) represent the Wikipedia as a huge three-dimensional book; and (c) produce a three-dimensional visualization of a personal digital library.
She has produced a lightweight implementation of realistic books that
provides a quick, easy-to-use, and responsive page-turning mechanism, and
combines the ability to include hyperlinks and animated media. You can see
sample books or
make your own
from a HTML or PDF file.
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| Daniel McEnnis's task is simple to describe: separate the world's
music into music they will like and music they will not like.
The complexity of music recommendation systems has increased rapidly
in recent years, drawing upon different sources of information:
content analysis, web-mining, social tagging, etc. However, the tools
to scientifically evaluate such integrated systems are not readily
available; nor are the base algorithms available.
He has produced
the Relational
Analysis Toolkit, which provides a large library of graph-analysis
routines within a framework that seamlessly integrates both flat and
graph-based algorithms.
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Olena Medelyan is
interested in natural language processing techniques applied to
information retrieval, information extraction and text mining. Her PhD
research is on automatic indexing with controlled vocabularies.
The central hypothesis of her thesis is that
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with access to domain and general semantic knowledge, computers will index better than humans.
Olena has produced the latest version of the KEA algorithm for keyphrase extraction. |
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The goal of David Milne's PhD is to develop a framework for automatically generating highly accurate, concise thesauri for domain specific document collections.
He hypothesizes that
(a) for any document set, automatically-created thesauri
suit users' searching needs better than manually defined
ones,
and (b) appropriately crafted thesauri can be integrated into the searching process to improve retrieval without placing an undesirable cognitive load on the user.
David's Koru is an example of interactive query expansion:
a highly responsive web application based on AJAX. He has also produced the Wikipedia Miner toolkit.
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Rob Akscyn is proposing a radical shift in software tools for
knowledge workers: from highly-fragmented applications using flat data models with pull-down intensive
interfaces to lattice-structured hypermedia, rich with knowledge schemas, in concert with extreme direct
manipulation user interfaces, digital library search technology, and personal agent assistants.
The central hypothesis of his thesis is that the productivity of knowledge work will be significantly improved by transitioning from current computer-based tools to this new knowledge work paradigm. |
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Kathryn Hempstalk's
PhD topic is Continuous Typist Recognition Using Machine
Learning. She is trying to figure out to what extent typists can
be identified by the patterns they exhibit while typing at keyboard. She is focused on a setting where the user is continuously monitored, rather than password hardening where only the login identification is monitored.
Kathryn produced the Digital
Invisible Ink Toolkit, a Java steganography tool that can hide any sort of
file inside a digital image, and the Digital Image Resizer Toy, an
implementation of Avidan and Shamir's algorithm for "content aware" image resizing.
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Past graduate students |
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Here are a few of my past graduate students, and where they are now (when known). Most don't seem
to have web pages; perhaps I kept them too busy!
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Kathryn Hempstalk
Livestock Improvement Centre, Hamilton, New Zealand |
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Lin-Yi Chou
| 2006 | PhD | Improving the performance
of hierarchical hidden markov models on information extraction |
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David Milne
| 2006 | MSc | From phrase browsing to interactive query expansion |
Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato |
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Shaoqun Wu
| 2006 | MSc | A language learning digital library |
Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato |
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Angela Mlynarski
| 2006 | MSc | Automatic text summarization in digital libraries |
University of Lethbridge, Canada |
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| | Imene Jaballah
| 2005 | MCMS | Digital libraries for personal information management |
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|  | Kathy Don
| 2002 | MSc | Efficient phrase hierarchy inference |
Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato |
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|  | Yong Wang
| 2001 | PhD | A new approach to fitting linear models in high-dimensional spaces |
Department of Statistics, University of Auckland |
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| | YingYing Wen
| 2001 | MPhil | Text mining using HMM and PPM |
School of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Monash University |
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Eibe Frank
| 2000 | PhD | Pruning decision trees and lists |
Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato |
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| | Hong Chen
| 2000 | MSc | A new architecture for digital libraries |
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Gordon Paynter
| 2000 | PhD | Automating iterative tasks with programming by demonstration |
National Library of New Zealand |
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 | Tony Smith
| 2000 | PhD | N-gram models of agreement in language |
| 1993 | MSc | Language inference from function words |
Computer Science Dept, University of Waikato |
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 | Stuart Inglis
| 1999 | PhD | Lossless document image compression |
Managing director of ReelTwo |
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| | Zane Bray
| 1999 | MSc | Using language models for generic entity extraction |
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| | Jamie Littin
| 1996 | MCMS | Learning relational ripple-down rules |
Information Technology Services, University of Waikato |
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 | Craig Nevill-Manning
| 1996 | PhD | Inferring sequential structure |
Engineering Director at Google |
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Matt Humphrey
| 1996 | PhD | A graphical notation for the design of information visualisations |
Information Visualization Technology, Stafford, VA |
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Brent Martin
1995 MSc Instance-based learning: nearest neighbour with generalisation
Department of Computer Science, University of Canterbury |
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David Maulsby
| 1994 | PhD | Instructible agents |
| 1988 | MSc | Inducing procedures interactively: adventures with Metamouse |
24C Group Inc., Calgary, Canada |
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| | Thong Phan
| 1994 | PhD | Function induction |
| 1989 | MSc | The equal-value search: accelerating search in function induction |
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| | Abdul Saheed
| 1993 | MCMS | Processing textual images |
Walker Architects, New Zealand |
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|  | Anja Haman
| 1992 | MSc | Deformation-based modeling |
atlargemedia, Canada |
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| | Brent Krawchuk
1992 MSc Inductive theorem generation |
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| | Darrell Conklin
| 1990 | MSc | Prediction and entropy of music |
School of Informatics, City University, London |
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Antonija Mitrovic
| 1990 | MSc | Interactive induction of procedures |
Department of Computer Science, University of Canterbury |
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| | Dan Mo
| 1989 | MSc | Learning text editing procedures from examples |
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| | John Darragh
| 1988 | MSc | Adaptive predictive text generation and the Reactive Keyboard |
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|  | Saul Greenberg
| 1988 | PhD | Tool use, re-use, and organization in command-driven interfaces |
| 1984 | MSc | User modeling in interactive computer systems |
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| | Mike Bonham
| 1985 | MSc | Viewing and formatting documents on-line |
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| | Adrian Zissos
| 1985 | MSc | Generating advice by monitoring user behaviour |
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| | Roy Masrani
| 1985 | MSc | Conceptual analysis in Prolog |
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| | Rod Cuff
| 1982 | PhD | Database query using menus and natural language fragments |
1979 MSc Database query systems for the casual user |
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|  | John Yardley
| 1981 | PhD | Automatic construction of word vocabularies for connected speech recognition |
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|  | John Foster
| 1980 | MSc | A C cross-compiler for the 8086 |
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Essex |
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| | Franklin Ha
| 1980 | MSc | Low bit-rate facsimile transmission of handwriting |
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| | John Abbess
| 1978 | MSc | A microprocessor-based speech synthesis by rule system |
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| | Angela Corbett
| 1974 | MSc | A telephone enquiry service using synthetic speech |
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| | Stephen Crocker
| 1974 | MSc | A personal computer terminal using packet switching |
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