News and Events
ARC grant sucess
Congratulations to staff of the School of IT, who have secured over $3 million in ARC Discovery Grant funding:
- Dr Michael Charleston; Modelling disease evolution and emergence, total funding $290,000 from 2010-2012.
- Dr James Curran; Parsing the web: Exploiting redundancy to understand language, Australian Research Fellowship, total funding $362,000 from 2010-2014.
- Associate Professor Alan Fekete and Dr Bernhard Scholz; Computing with nearly consistent data, total funding $280,000 from 2010-2012.
- Professor David Feng (SIT), Professor Michael Fulham and Associate Professor Stefan Eberl (RPA); Large scale knowledge and image based biomedical modelling and derivation of PET-CT, total funding $610,000 from 2010-2013.
- Professor Albert Zomaya; Holistic Energy Aware Scheduling for Distributed Computing Systems, Australian Professorial Fellowship, total funding $930,000 from 2010-2014.
- Professor Albert Zomaya; Dr Bing Bing Zhou; Replica Placement in Data Intensive Distributed Computing Systems, total funding $250,000 from 2010-2012.
- Associate Professor Paula Dawson (UNSW), Associate Professor Masahiro Takatsuka (SIT), Dr H Yoshikawa; Professor R L Gregory; Holoshop: The design, implementation and evaluation of rapid 3D drawing technology for content creation in holograms and other three-dimensional displays, total funding $430,000 from 2010-2014.
Special congratulations to Albert Zomaya for winning the Australian Professorial Fellowship and James Curran for the Australian Research Fellowship.
2009 ACM Programming Competition
The South Pacific Region of the Association for Computing Machinery 2009 Programming Competition was held over the weekend, and the School of IT hosted the Sydney site. Twelve teams competed, three representing the home-ground; three from Macquarie University and six from UNSW.
The problems had the usual varied range of difficulty and our site's top six teams did well to solved five problems. I am pleased to report that the winning team - Tajabe - represented the University of Sydney. Students, James Constable, Tarek Elgindy, Ben Taylor and coach, Taso Viglas, took out the top prize, solving 5 problems in 639 minutes. Second prize went to team Justin Time from UNSW, Michael Rose, Oleg Sushkov, Prashant Varanasi and coach, Tim Lambert, who solved 5 problems in 798 minutes.
The top first year team was "#include python" from Sydney, and they were not far behind the winners, solving 5 problems in 864 minutes. Congratulations to Yunlong Chen, Peter Ward, Carlo Zancanaro and coach Taso Viglas.
The competition ran extremely well, due to the heroic efforts of the Site Technical Director, Greg Ryan, whose usual calm, competence and commitment overcame the many expected and unexpected technical
challenges that come up on the day as well as in the set up period. Greg also generously supported the various practices through the year for which the University of Sydney teams are very grateful.
Thanks also to our visitors, Matt Cabanag and Daniel Sutantyo from Macquarie and Tim Lambert from UNSW for helping with just about everything, together with Sydney coach Taso Viglas who provided lots of technical support through the day. Finally, many thanks go to the judges Steve Bian, Edmund Tse (also the official photographer for the day) from Sydney, and Patrick Coleman, who works for Google, but is a seasoned prog comper who generously volunteered to help.
Photos (by Edmund Tse):
Left: Sydney site winners Taso Viglas, James Constable, Tarek Elgindy and Ben Taylor.
Right: Sydney Site volunteers.
Research promises to slash data centre energy consumption
University of Sydney researchers have found a way of simultaneously optimising the energy consumption and completion time of computationally intensive processes.
iTWire Article, 8 September 2009, featuring Professor Albert Zomaya and Dr Young Choon Lee
Read full story.
See other articles on this topic at Computerworld, ARN, Anthill and A to Z of Clean Technology.
Conroy urged to 'end net censorship farce'
The Federal Government's internet censorship trials have been repeatedly delayed over the past nine months, leading to claims from the Opposition that the Government is deliberately withholding the results to avoid embarrassment.
SMH Article, 2 September 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
SIT goes green with Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems and the University of Sydney are collaborating to improve computing education in multi-core technology.
Multi-core technology is the future of computing because the clock-speed of single-core CPUs has reached its physical limits.
Sun Microsystems recently donated a SPARC Enterprise T5120 computer server to the School of IT, University of Sydney. The server has two UltraSPARC T2 processors with 8 cores and 64 threads.
‘Building on fruitful research collaborations between the two institutions, Sun Microsystems was encouraged to extend our university involvement to student education – the researchers of the future.' said Dr. Cristina Cifuentes of Sun Microsystems.
‘With the omnipresence of multi-core processors, multi-core technology education is essential and will form a base requirement in our curriculum to educate the next generation of computer engineers.’
said Dr. Bernhard Scholz from the University of Sydney.
Multi-core technology is consistent with reducing greenhouse gas emissions in IT. By implementing efficient parallel software for multi-core computers the energy consumption of computers can be reduced. The academic staff at the School of Information Technologies is looking forward to teaching this new technology.
For more information, please contact
Dr Cristina Cifuentes, Sun Microsystems
Phone: +61 7 3238 8379
Dr Bernhard Scholz, University of Sydney
Phone: +61 2 9351 4216
Answer to absolutely everything gets closer
How long would it take an auctioneer to speak 6000 words? What was the weather in Beijing on the day Kevin Rudd was born? How many Americans are named Andrew?
SMH Article, 18 May 2009, featuring Professor Judy Kay
Read full story.
Leaked Australian Blacklist reveals banned sites
The Australian communications regulator's top-secret blacklist of banned websites has been leaked on to the web and paints a harrowing picture of Australia's forthcoming internet censorship regime.
SMH Article, 19 March 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
The Queensland dentist included on the Australian communications regulator's blacklist of prohibited websites has demanded that the list be cleaned up.
SMH Article, 19 March 2009, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
Listen to Professor Landfeldt on ABC News Radio.
Watch Professor Landfeldt on ABC TV's Good Game (27 April 2009).
Watch Professor Landfeldt's public lecture on the internet filtering scheme (3 April 2009).
Fatal flaws in website censorship plan, says report
Trials of mandatory internet censorship will begin within days despite a secret high-level report to the Rudd Government that found the technology simply does not work, will significantly slow internet speeds and will block access to legitimate websites.
SMH Article, 23 December 2008, featuring Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt.
Read full story.
SensorKDD-2008 Best Paper Award
Postgraduate students Elizabeth Wu and Wei Liu together with Associate Professor Sanjay Chawla have won the Best Paper Award (Second Prize) at the 2nd International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery from Sensor Data (SensorKDD-2008) for their paper "Spatio-Temporal Outlier Detection in Precipitation Data". The $500 prize was donated by the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the USA.
Obama young vote won with Twitter
Associate Professor Sanjay Chawla says Barack Obama's victory was perhaps due more to the technology savviness of his campaign rather than just a triumph of political ideas.
Read full story.
Alumni of the Year sell to YouTube
After selling their web company to YouTube, Simon Ratner and Ryan Junee are named Young Alumni of the Year by the Faculty of Engineering and IT.
Read full story.
See also Silicon Valley success for savvy Aussies, SMH Biztech, 11 November 2008.