This talk presents a number of projects in health care and disaster management where computational thinking dramatically improves human and social welfare. It also explains why these problems are extremely challenging computationally and gives a brief overview of some of the problem-solving methodologies to approach them.

Pascal Van Hentenryck

Pascal Van Hentenryck leads the Optimisation Research Group at National ICT Australia (NICTA), the centre of excellence for ICT research in Australia. Van Hentenryck is the recipient of two honorary degrees and is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He was awarded the 2002 INFORMS ICS Award for research excellence at the intersection of operations research and computer science, the 2006 ACP Award for research excellence in constrain programming, the 2010-2011 Philip J. Bray Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at Brown University, and is a 2013 IFORS Distinguished speaker. Van Hentenryck is the author of five MIT Press books and has developed a number of innovative optimization systems that are widely used in academia and industry. He also teaches a successful and innovative massively online course on discrete optimization (check it out on YouTube!).

Van Hentenryck has recently been appointed to the position of Strategic Chair in Data Intensive Computing at the Australian National University.

The workshop will be a brief introduction to everything iOS. The workshop will cover using the Xcode IDE and getting the hang of the Objective-C language. After mastering the basics we'll go into a bit more detail of some of the features in the Cocoa Touch framework and what it has to make your life easier. The workshop will finish up by covering the basics of app appearance and animations.

Tim Nugent

I am a PhD student in the field of mobile awareness at the University of Tasmania, currently investigating how people can better share information in busy environments. I have been doing iOS development for several years as well as having presented iOS and mobile talks at several AUC /dev/world/ and CreateWorld conferences as well as having presented mobile research papers at the Australian Human Computer interaction (ozchi) conference twice.

I will present an outline of how logic can be used to solve real-world problems ranging from digital circuit verification to reasoning about legal documents. The technical content requires only basic first-year knowledge about logic, and I will introduce all the rest.

Rajeev Gore

Rajeev did his BSc and MSc at the University of Melbourne and did his PhD at the University of Cambridge, England, in 1992. He was a post-doc at the University of Manchester, UK, from 1992-1994. He has been at the ANU since 1994, first as a Research Fellow, then as an Australian Research Council Queen Elizabeth II Fellow and finally as a researcher in the Research School of Computer Science. He is currently the leader of the Logic and Computation Group.

The approaches to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last century may be labelled as (a) trying to understand and copy (human) nature, (b) being based on heuristic considerations, (c) being formal but from the outset (provably) limited, (d) being (mere) frameworks that leave crucial aspects unspecified. This decade has spawned the first theory of AI, which (e) is principled, formal, complete, and general. This theory, called Universal AI, is about ultimate super-intelligence. It can serve as a gold standard for General AI, and implicitly proposes a formal definition of machine intelligence. After a brief review of the various approaches to (general) AI, I will give an introduction to Universal AI, concentrating on the philosophical, mathematical, and computational aspects behind it. I will also discuss various implications and future challenges.

Marcus Hutter

Marcus Hutter is Professor in the RSCS at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and NICTA adjunct. He received his PhD and BSc in physics from the LMU in Munich and a Habilitation, MSc, and BSc in informatics from the TU Munich. Since 2000, his research at IDSIA and ANU is centered around the information-theoretic foundations of inductive reasoning and reinforcement learning, which has resulted in 100+ publications and several awards. His book "Universal Artificial Intelligence" (Springer, EATCS, 2005) develops the first sound and complete theory of AI. He also runs the Human Knowledge Compression Contest (50'000 C= H-prize).

NOTE: Ends at 15:45
While video games are the most glamorous of the electronic arts, splashy graphics and amazing sound isn't the defining feature of games. Rather, games are games because they are the world's only interactive medium. Good interaction needs to be designed, and the master crafters of engaging interaction design are game designers.

In this workshop, you'll learn how to apply the art and science of constructing enjoyable, engaging games. This is entirely non-electronic; we're not talking about programming, game engine development, or how to approach a publisher with your totally rad idea about how you can have, like Mario only there's explosions. Instead, we'll be taking a deep dive into game design theory. Everything you'll work on will be done with pens, paper, and human brain-meat.

This workshop is based on the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics framework (as devised by LeBlanc et al), and is based on a series of small exercises in which participants rapidly iterate on game designs. It's designed for interested students of game design, teachers seeking an interesting perspective on creative computing, and enthusiasts looking to understand how games work.

Paris Buttfield-Addison

Paris is co-founder of Secret Lab Pty. Ltd., leading production and design efforts in the mobile game and app development space. A frequent speaker at conferences, workshops and training sessions, Paris enjoys discussing engineering, product development, design and other facets of the mobile and game development worlds. Recent conferences include Apple Australia's /dev/world/2012 in Melbourne (and 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), a keynote at CreateWorld Brisbane 2010 (and a speaker in 2009, 2011, and 2012), IxDA's Interaction 11 in Boulder (March 2011), XMediaLab Location-Based Services in Malmo, Sweden (January 2011), tutorials and sessions at OSCON 2011, OSCON 2012, OSCON 2013 (all in Portland, OR), and presentations at linux.conf.au, and many others.

Paris is the co-author of the books 'iPhone and iPad Game Development For Dummies' and 'Unity Mobile Game Development For Dummies'. The books cover game development on mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices in languages/frameworks such as Objective-C, CocoaTouch, Open GL ES, Unity, C# and JavaScript. They also cover game design techniques, principles and patterns. Recently, Paris released 'Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Third Edition' for O'Reilly, covering iPhone and Mac development. Paris is currently working on the 'iOS Game Development Cookbook' and 'Mobile Game Development with Unity', both with O'Reilly.

Paris is a highly experienced software developer, product and project manager. Key experiences include Objective-C/Cocoa on the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad platforms, Java on Blackberry and Google Android and C# on Windows Mobile. Open GL ES and Unity are also favourites.

Paris recently spent 2 years leading Meebo Inc.'s mobile strategy; Meebo was one of the world's fastest growing consumer internet companies and was acquired by Google in 2012. Paris is currently working on his next book, also with O'Reilly, whilst working towards the completion of his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on the iPad (at the University of Tasmania).

Jon Manning

Jon is co-founder of Secret Lab Pty. Ltd., leading production and design efforts in the mobile game and app development space. A frequent speaker at conferences, workshops and training sessions, Jon enjoys discussing engineering, product development, design and other facets of the mobile and game development worlds. Recent conferences include Apple Australia's /dev/world/2012 in Melbourne (and 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011), a keynote at CreateWorld Brisbane 2010 (and a speaker in 2009, 2011, and 2012), IxDA's Interaction 11 in Boulder (March 2011), tutorials and sessions at OSCON 2011, OSCON 2012, OSCON 2013 (all in Portland, OR), and many others.

Jon is the co-author of the books 'iPhone and iPad Game Development For Dummies' and 'Unity Mobile Game Development For Dummies'. The books cover game development on mobile platforms such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices in languages/frameworks such as Objective-C, CocoaTouch, Open GL ES, Unity, C# and JavaScript. They also cover game design techniques, principles and patterns. Recently, Jon released 'Learning Cocoa with Objective-C Third Edition' for O'Reilly, covering iPhone and Mac development. Jon is currently working on the 'iOS Game Development Cookbook' and 'Mobile Game Development with Unity', both with O'Reilly.

Jon is a highly experienced software developer. Key experiences include Objective-C/Cocoa on the Macintosh and iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad platforms, Java on Blackberry and Google Android and C# on Windows Mobile. Open GL ES and Unity are also favourites.

Jon recently spent 2 years working on Meebo Inc.'s mobile strategy; Meebo was one of the world's fastest growing consumer internet companies and was acquired by Google in 2012. Jon is currently working on his next book, also with O'Reilly, whilst working towards the completion of his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction, focusing on the social networks and manipulation (at the University of Tasmania).

App Engine provides a Java and Python API for Search which uses the same search backend through Megastore that is used to power search of many of Google's properties. Ged will talk about using the API and combining with Prospective Search API for more advanced search features that can add liveness to your applications and search.

Ged Ellis

Ged Ellis is a Senior Software Engineer working in Google's Sydney office. Ged graduated with a B.App.Sc-Computing from QUT in 1985 and a Phd from UQ in 1995. Ged worked on semantic search engines and combining rule engines with search engines prior to joining Google in 2007. At Google Ged has worked on search features in Wave and App Engine, and is currently working on Docs/Drive backends.

NOTE: Runs from 15:30 to 16:15
This interview workshop includes 10 minutes of a lecture-based presentation. We also provide a sample interview question and encourage volunteers attending to break up the student audience into small groups to go through the question as they would in an actual interview. This workshop is intended for Bachelors and Masters students preparing for software engineer (technical) interviews.

Ged Ellis

Ged Ellis is a Senior Software Engineer working in Google's Sydney office. Ged graduated with a B.App.Sc-Computing from QUT in 1985 and a Phd from UQ in 1995. Ged worked on semantic search engines and combining rule engines with search engines prior to joining Google in 2007. At Google Ged has worked on search features in Wave and App Engine, and is currently working on Docs/Drive backends.

Our current education system dates back to the advent of literacy with the printing press, the need for literacy and numeracy to run a global empire, and the reformation of work with the industrial revolution. Since then we’ve seen macro-economic forces of urbanisation, globalisation, population growth, and information explosion. We’ve also experienced accelerating technological change. This presentation argues that the new literacy is the ability to “write” with digital technologies. From teaching to nursing, accounting to retail, every role is at risk of being disintermediated by technology. This is why from simple networking to macros, interactive video to programming, every student will benefit from digital literacy. In fact, this is imperative.

Roger Lawrence

Roger Lawrence is the Chief Technologist for Strategic Enterprise Services in HP ES, South Pacific, responsible for producing the Technology Strategy and Roadmap for capabilities HP offers across Cloud, Security, Application Modernisation and Big Data. He also works with senior client executives to understand industry trends and develop strategic solutions, and he regularly presents at industry forums. In his spare time (as much as one gets with 4 daughters) he can be found touring far flung places on a motorcycle.

Join us for a light-hearted primer on user experience (UX) for geeks. In this session, we'll take a fast paced tour of the world of Android and explain how, while smartphones may initially bare no similarities to vi, good UX design is something our community should know all about.

Find out what Android design can learn from vi, why a carefully considered interface is a critical dependency of any Android app, how to design an amazing Android app when you're more at home in a console than you are in Inkscape, and how context switching means something completely different when it comes to a smart phone.

Chris Neugebauer

Christopher is a Python programmer from Hobart, Tasmania. He's a Computer Science Honours graduate of the University of Tasmania, and he now works as an Android developer, which means his day job involves more Java than he'd like. He has a strong interest in the development of the Australian Python Community -- he is an immediate past convenor of PyCon Australia 2012 and 2013 in Hobart, and is a newly-minted member of the Python Software Foundation.

In his spare time, Christopher enjoys presenting on Mobile development at Open Source conferences, and presenting on Open Source development at Mobile conferences.

This talk looks at problems faced by many of today's languages, how those problems arose, what we could do to address those problems and what we could do to avoid history repeating itself. The basic question is why is it that languages like JavaScript, PHP, and Python are so important and yet have such conspicuous shortcomings? The talk is part sociological (how do we as a community end up making such mistakes?) and part research (what are the technological solutions to such problems and why is it hard?). The talk will include an exploration of what is happening to computer architecture and how that affects language design and implementation, some recent work on making languages run faster and more energy efficiently, and new, ambitious project that a group of us at ANU, Purdue and NICTA have embarked on that targets the broader problem of why so many languages today suffer significant problems.

Steve Blackburn

Steve Blackburn is a professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University and leader of the Computer Systems group. His research interests include programming language implementation, architecture, and performance analysis. Steve continues to get his hands dirty via his heavy involvement in two major research infrastructure projects; the DaCapo benchmark suite and Jikes RVM. Steve has a PhD from the Australian National University. He is a Distinguished Scientist of the ACM.

Network-on-chip is an on-chip interconnect used for interfacing components on a complex system on chip. Although the advantages of formal methods-based verification are well known, networks-on-chip are generally verified using system C simulators as it is currently not possible to perform system level verification of NoC using formal methods. Currently, formal methods are used to verify only specific functional blocks or specific functional properties of NoCs.

The key factor limiting usage of formal methods for system-level modeling and verification of NoC for multiple properties is the lack of a formal language specific to NoCs. In this thesis a new NoC-specific heterogeneous modeling language called "Heterogeneous Protocol Automata" was developed and used to model and verify NoCs. The formal model is abstracted to enable verification of large NoCs and estimate "worst-case latency", a performance metric. The results of formal model verification are compared with state-of-the-art NoC simulators to show the advantages of formal methods-based verification.

Vinitha Palaniveloo

Vinitha Palaniveloo is a PhD student from UNSW, Sydney. She is currently in the final stages of her thesis. In her research she has developed a new formal based methodology to verify network on chips, called NoCs in short. She undertook this research under the guidance of Profs Arcot Sowmya and Sridevan Parameswaran.

In a phenomenally short time OpenStack has risen to be the dominant platform for building private and public clouds of any scale. With 1000s of contributors and hundreds of companies backing the project, Tristan will demonstrate why you need to know about OpenStack and get involved now.
- What is OpenStack
- History of the project
- Phenomenal growth of the project
- Relevance in Australia and internationally, presenting opportunities to build green field clouds the world over.
- Massive job demand

Tristan Goode

Tristan is CEO of Aptira, a member of the Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation as well as a founder/organiser of the Australian OpenStack User Group. With over 25 years' experience in the ICT industry he is responsible for leading the design and implementation of innovative technical solutions for organisations worldwide.

Cloud Robotics is a fancy new buzzword, which seems to apply to anything in the field of Cloud connected robots. People have been discussing similar technologies in sci-fi fantasies for quite a while but only now is the technology catching up to the vision. The creation of large Cloud Robotics applications such as RoboEarth allows robots to have the knowledge and experiences of any other robot using the system. This essentially turns every robot using such a system into one giant distributed robot. This has a lot of potential for increasing the capabilities and learning speeds of robots as well as preventing each robot from reinventing the wheel when they carry out common tasks. Other systems allow people and other robots to access and task robots for their own purposes, such as NASA’s Earth Observing One (EO-1) spacecraft.

This presentation will discuss the ways that Cloud Robotics is being used, current obstacles for the technology and the potential for the future.

Jessica Lethbridge

I’m a first year PhD student at UTAS studying in conjunction with the CSIRO Intelligent Sensing and Systems Lab in the fields of Cloud Robotics and Computational Scientific Discovery. I received my Honours in Computing from the University of Tasmania in 2011 for my thesis “Autonomic Smartphones for Remote Environmental Sensing”, which involved the creation of smartphone based weather stations for flood monitoring in remote locations. My hobbies include reading fantasy and sci-fi novels, belly dancing, creating e-textiles and letting the magic smoke out.

Real-World software engineering is an enabling discipline used in multi-disciplinary teams to address complex problems and some of society's most significant challenges including climate change, population health and education. It is a human activity which operates within complex, uncertain and rapidly evolving socio-technical environments. Unfortunately, most Software Engineering degree programs are not designed around this reality. In general, they extend computer 'science' degrees with courses covering topics such as project management, software quality, process and industrial practice through work placements and group projects. While this structure covers the core subject matter of software engineering, it tends not to deal with the above reality of real-world software engineering. This presents a challenge to both students and curriculum developers. Students find it difficult, especially in the early years, to appreciate the relevance of every course they take. They often have difficulty putting the bits together to understand what software engineering is really about and to develop the skills necessary to practice as effective engineers. Curriculum developers face the challenge of addressing these student difficulties while covering the required technical content and satisfying various professional accreditation requirements. In this presentation we will introduce Systems Thinking and argue that it can be integrated into a software engineering degree to address the challenges identified above. Systems Thinking can help students appreciate the complexity of software engineering and how the courses they study fit together within the context of real-world software engineering. In addition, Systems Thinking and related ideas can give students a powerful set of tools they can use to make sense of and tackle complex situations, ideas and problems throughout their studies and careers. We will conclude our presentation by describing how we have introduced Systems Thinking into the Bachelor of Software Engineering degree at the Australian National University. We will talk about how we might extend the use of systems thinking to design a degree program which would appeal to a broad range of students wanting to use computing technology to make a real difference in the world. Finally, we will provide a range of Systems Thinking materials in the hope that attendees will be motivated to explore Systems Thinking as tool for improving their study and practice of software engineering and computing more generally.

Shayne Flint

Shayne Flint is a senior lecturer in the Research School of Computer Science at Australian National University. After a 17 year career as a practicing engineer, he completed a PhD at the ANU in 2006. His research interests include the development of methodologies and tools for generating radical improvements in software development productivity, quality and satisfaction of stakeholder needs. He is Convenor of the ANU Bachelor of Software Engineering and teaches various software engineering courses as well as the ANU Vice Chancellor's course 'Unravelling Complexity'.

Damien Beard

Damien Beard is in his third year of the Bachelor of Software Engineering program at the Australian National University. He is interested in the design and construction of software, as well as investigating the role software plays in everyday life. Damien has particular interest in investigating the way humans interact with software, and the practices undertaken to best facilitate this interaction. Damien is also a participant in the ICT Cadetship program within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

OpenStack Nova is the compute portion of the OpenStack open cloud project. That means that Nova is responsible for booting your virtual machines and then managing them once they're booted. Nova supports a variety of hypervisors, as well as pluggable software defined networking. This talk will cover a quick over view of Nova, and then deep dive into how the libvirt hypervisor driver works. Due to its openness and popularity, Nova makes a good choice for cloud and cluster computing research. There are around 800 active developers on OpenStack, and a community which is helpful and friendly.

Michael Still

Michael Still is a Nova and Oslo core reviewer at Rackspace, where he works on the Open Source OpenStack project as part of the Private Cloud team. He spends most of his time hacking on the libvirt virtualization layer in nova.

Before joining Rackspace in 2012, Michael spent six years as a Site Reliability Engineer at Google and one year as an Operations Engineer at Canonical. In both roles, he was responsible for maintaining and improving web systems with millions of users. He was also the director for linux.conf.au 2013, the largest Open Source conference in Australia.

Michael holds a Bachelor of Engineering with first class honours from the University of Cranberra in Australia, where he lives with his wife, three kids and a ludicrous number of pets. In his spare time, he enjoys reading bad science fiction and working on OpenStack development.

Some of the best universities around the world are rushing to develop massive open online courses - fully automated courses that can teach demanding courses to hundreds of thousands of students at a tiny fraction of the price of traditional courses. Some believe that this will completely disrupt the business model of universities, much as the internet has destroyed Video rental companies, Newspapers and record shops. Others believe that this is all hype and that nothing can replace traditional (expensive) face-to-face teaching. I will discuss what is happening fought now - the technologies involved, and where it might be heading.

Paul Francis

I am an astronomer at the Australian National University. I do research on comets, quasars, high redshift galaxies, and novel interactive teaching techniques.

I grew up in London, studied in Cambridge and have worked with Steward Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, with the University of Melbourne, and have been based at the ANU since 1997.

There is only one serious course about Free and Open Source Software Development delivered in Australia annually, the postgraduate level COMP8440 at ANU. Moreover the course is delivered by Andrew "Tridge" Tridgell who authored the seminal open source projects samba and the rsync algorithm. During this course he discusses his wealth of experience and trains then assesses students on contributing to the open source community.

This talk will be conveying as much of this week-long course as is possible in the time available, as seen through the eyes of a graduating student who was always keen about open source yet who hadn't made their first pull-requests until during this course. Now, more than a year later, the presenter is actively involved in several open source projects and will be talking about some of the characteristics of the open source community today and describing in specific detail about how to become involved. The presenter will discuss the highs, the lows, the awkwardness and unique sense of connection and achievement that can only be fulfilled by contributing to open source.

Elena Williams

Elena Williams is a python/django web developer now working in Perth. She graduated from Master ITS program from CECS ANU in 2012. She's taught Django/Python, been involved with the Django, Python and Linux communities around Australia and organised the Python user group in Canberra whilst studying at ANU. She presented about open source participation at PyConAU 2012. She is also enthusiastic about teaching programming to non-programmers, kitesurfing, snowboarding, endurance navigation sports; is an active hacker/maker and was only called a Douglas Adams "tragic" by the Canberra Times once.

Please ensure that you follow the instructions BEFORE the Workshop: https://github.com/daxtens/diy-web-app/blob/master/README.md

In 2 hours, you'll build a full stack and (partially) buzzword compliant web app. It's the ideal platform for something too 'different' for a CMS like WordPress and too simple/small to justify using a massive framework like Django.

By the end of the workshop, you'll have built a web application using Python, the Bottle micro framework, a MongoDB backend, the nginx web server, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and a Bootstrap front-end with some jQuery based AJAX-y fun. We'll also cover authentication (and how not to screw it up), and Google Analytics, so you can watch your app go viral. We'll learn about Fabric for simple deployment, and Vagrant for painless team development. I'll tell you about common security vulnerabilities and how to avoid them. Even better, you will be given a week's usage of an AWS micro instance to host your new app.

Don't worry if any of these terms are new to you: zero web development knowledge is assumed. However, it is assumed that you are familiar with procedural programming. Basic knowledge of Python and HTTP (the difference between GET/POST and the meaning of 404/500 errors) would be helpful. Knowing about git would also be helpful. Helpful links are available here.

You absolutely must bring your own laptop. You will need a GitHub account. (Only GitHub is officially supported, but if you're confident with another site/system that's fine.) You must also download and install Vagrant and a disk image from vagrantup.com before participating.

Daniel Axtens

I'm a self-employed web and software developer. I study Engineering at ANU, in the electronics/communications area. I've built some interesting web apps, including openeconomy.org.au, a novel way to visualise financial data; and, as part of a team competing in GovHack 2013, the award-winning planyourpicnic.dja.id.au. I've done things across the full spectrum of web tech: hosting, servers, relational and non-relational databases, Python and PHP backends, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and security. I've also done other random stuff like caching (ask me about Squid!), XSLT, and some other 'off-line' software development.

Many problems related to automatic detection of program errors can be solved using monitoring, a technique that deals with instantiated values and therefore is light-weight and sound in the presence of such features as aliasing or dynamic memory allocation, where static methods are either incomplete or require a signifcant computational effort. In recent years much attention has been drawn to monitoring through instrumentation, where an input (i.e., a test) program is instrumented with functionality that observes that program's execution identifying program defects as execution proceeds. One of the main benefits of such an approach is that statements added to the input program can access the program's internal structures and evaluate its state at run-time detecting program defects.

In this talk we describe a generic analysis framework in monitoring of programs which uses instrumentation and focusses on the detection of errors in memory safety (such as buffer overflows, memory leaks, null pointer dereferences) and information flow security vulnerabilities (i.e., disclosure of confidential information to unauthorised parties). Differently to other instrumentation frameworks, which enable users to express monitoring using a concrete implementation language, our approach allows to specify monitoring abstractly, using a dedicated specification language. This separates monitoring logic from the actual implementation, allowing to use a single specification for monitoring of a variety of programs.

During the presentation we concentrate on the technical details of the proposed approach using a simple imperative language and the abstraction over a specification language to describe program transformations, the power of expressiveness of the monitoring specification and the execution of a monitored program. We further use a number of motivating examples to illustrate different aspects of the technique, such as monitoring of various program events or transformations required to track memory and information flow. Finally, we discuss approximations required to adopt this approach for realistic programs at the source code or assembly level.

Kostyantyn Vorobyov

Kostyantyn Vorobyov is a third-year PhD student at the Department of Informatics, Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia. He has commenced his PhD degree after completing a Bachelor of Information Technology at Bond University in 2010 and working at Oracle Labs in Brisbane in the area of software complexity for six months. He also holds Bachelor and Master degrees in Mathematics from Kiev National University, Ukraine. Kostyantyn's research interests include program instrumentation, monitoring, information flow, automated test generation, security.

Computer Vision interprets the world from images and image sequence. Here we show the role of computer vision is playing in Bionic vision, and in the vision of three patients in Melbourne.

This presentation will overview the problem of vision processing for implantable prosthetic vision, present some approaches that have been taken, and highlights ongoing key problems for computer vision in this challenging area.

Nick Barnes

Nick Barnes is a principal researcher and leader of the computer vision research group at NICTA, and is a lead investigator of the Bionic Vision Australia consortium which aims to develop a bionic eye. He has been at NICTA's Canberra Research Laboratory since 2003. He was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne from 2000 to 2003, a visiting researcher at the LIRA Lab, University of Genoa, Italy in 1999. He completed his BSc (Hons) and PhD in computer vision for robot navigation at the University of Melbourne, in 1999. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications in refereed journals and conferences. His research interests focus on computer vision and prosthetic vision.

Many people wish they had a job at Google: Googlers enjoy a wide variety of perks, good salary and bonuses, and get to solve genuinely interesting and challenging problems in a fun environment. Take it from me: it pretty much is all it is cracked up to be. So how is it done? In this talk I will describe some ways in which one may a score an engineering job at Google, and how to maximise your time at university with that goal in mind.

Josh Deprez

Josh is studying a PhD in mathematics at UTas - it's this close (holds up hands) to submission, yet he insists on submitting a talk to CompCon. He has interned at Google and is signed to start again full-time at the end of the year, he has programmed iOS apps with Secret Lab, and he knows too much about enterprise application integration from his time with Federal Group.

I will give an overview of machine learning problems that arise in the area of big data. I will present some example projects that NICTA is using machine learning to solve a range of real-world problems, and I will outline some of the exciting research challenges that remain.

Bob Williamson

Professor Bob Williamson is the leader of the Machine Learning group at NICTA. He received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the Queensland University of Technology in 1984 and a Masters of Engineering Science (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Queensland in 1986. In 1990 he obtained a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He joined the Australian National University as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Systems Engineering in 1990 and held a series of appointments before becoming a professor and head of the Computer Sciences Laboratory, Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering at the Australian National University. From 2003 to early 2006 Professor Williamson was the Director of NICTA's Canberra Research Laboratory. In 2006 he was appointed as NICTA's Scientific Director. Since 2011 he has been leading the Machine Learning group. He is a member of the advisory board of the National Institute of Informatics (Japan) and was previously a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. His scientific interests include signal processing and machine learning.

Bill will talk about the global and Australian innovation systems, how they operate and how technological innovation is done inside and between research institutions, established companies and startups. He will also talk about the roles and skills that computing graduates can have in helping drive future technological innovation.

Bill Simpson-Young

Bill is Director of Engineering and Technology Development at National ICT Australia (NICTA). In this role, he is leading a group of 45 software engineers and user experience designers to build globally competitive software from NICTA’s research. This is critical so that NICTA can make lasting real-world impact from its work.

Prior to joining NICTA he was General Manager of Video Processing Technology at CiSRA (Canon’s Australian R&D lab) and led the development of technologies and products released globally by Canon. He also worked at CSIRO developing early WWW technology (including two web browsers in the mid 90s) and networked video software.

Bill has worked in computing R&D as a software engineer, research engineer, research scientist and in R&D management. His interest is in bridging the gap from ICT research into real-world use by leading R&D teams to develop robust technologies, products and services with strong technological competitive advantages.

Bill also developed and teaches a Masters course at the University of Sydney on “Understanding IT Innovations” covering topics such as disruptive innovation, R&D practices used by established companies, practices and business models used by tech startups, and more.

In this talk, we will sail together briefly into a comparative evaluation of two career choices for fresh graduates: joining the band of employees in industry as an engineer and pursuing an advanced PhD degree to aim for much higher goals. Then, we will dive into computer vision and talk about recent developments in this field. As you may already know, computer vision started with the goal of building machines that can see like humans and perform perception for robots. Over the years, it has become much broader than that. Applications such as face/fingerprint recognition, autonomous car navigation, human detection, object tracking, action recognition, image/video retrieval, cancer diagnosis, and super-resolution, redefined not only robotics but also many other areas including computational photography, biological sensing, graphics, GIS, biometrics, nanotechnology, surveillance, defence, intelligence, etc. Even your mobile phone now may have many applications using the core developments in computer vision. Rapid developments in supportive technologies -- such as digital cameras and computers -- ensure that computer vision systems will become increasingly more capable and affordable. Finally, I will demonstrate you some exciting research results and open discussion for potential future research projects.

Fatih Porikli

Fatih Porikli is the Leader of the Computer Vision Research Group at the NICTA. He is also a Professor in the Research School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University. His research is concentrated in the areas of computer vision, machine learning and signal processing. Previously he worked 14 years at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Massachusetts, USA where he was a Distinguished Member Research Staff & Technical Manager within the Imaging group.

Data structures have a rich algebraic structure which hasn't really been properly explored. To start with, I'll explain the isomorphism between set size expressions and immutable data structures. I'll explain how differentiation leads to the zipper over a mutable data type, and what zippers are.

Then, we'll get to the interesting stuff. There's a correspondence between data structures and context-free grammars, which is really cool.

In software engineering, we talk about contracts and class invariants. We can carefully select data structures such that these class invariants and contracts are ensured by the type system.

We can describe problems in combinatorics as questions about abstract data structures. I'll exposit this.

Most of this presentation is not original. However, the isomorphism between this algebra and context free grammar is original as far as I know.

Buck Shlegeris

Buck Shlegeris is an undergraduate computer science student at ANU (and also the Director of Sponsorship for CompCon 2013!). His interests are varied, and range from the highly theoretical (How hard is the median instance of the halting problem?) to the practical (How should I make this GUI have a right click menu?). In his spare time, he writes music for his band Buck et al.