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Message from the Dean As this is the first edition of the new School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics newsletter it is a jam packed issue. The School has many new staff members commence this year and we welcome them all to the School.

In particular we congratulate Mary Hardie on being awarded her PhD at the April 2012 graduation. Many our staff have achieved awards and

recognition for their hard work this year, Christian Tietz was a recipient of UTS Reconciliation Award, one of UTS Human Rights Awards where he is completing his PHD.

SCEM staff research projects have also been highlighted in the UWS news and leading the way is Professor Anthony Maeder and Associate Professor John MacFarlane. Well done to Dr Carmel Coady in gaining a National Office for Learning and Teaching Round One Grant. This is a highly competitive grant which involves working with partner institutions in a national context (Monash University and the University of Melbourne) to develop a shared understanding of assessment criteria and standards for undergraduate mathematics.

Four SCEM staff achieved significant milestones in their career at UWS and the staff at Parramatta had a morning tea for them to celebrate. Two of our professional staff also had success in achieving the Cert IV in frontline management.

Several of our students have also received awards including a final year BCompSci honours student supervised by A/Prof Miroslav Filipovic from SCEM has scooped the top prize in the ‘Unleash Your App’ competition run by Optus and National ICT Australia (NICTA), with his Android mobile ‘green’ app.

The School has been involved or hosted a variety of events this year including the inaugural postgraduate research forum and the annual school prize ceremony of which both were a great success. The UWS Science and Mathematics Exposed day was ably assisted by our staff and students providing information to students in secondary schools. The “BBQ with the Boss” had a large student and staff turnout where “Bosses” from industry to talked to SCEM students about their career planning.

This has been an extremely busy year for SCEM staff, adjusting to the new School structure and introducing new processes and modifying existing ones and it has be done with professionalism and good humour.

Research and International

Automated annotation tools

Professor Anthony Maeder from the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics will lead the design and implementation of cloud-based software providing a toolkit for use in the management of research collections of digital medical images. Associate Professor Murk Bottema from Flinders University will collaborate in the project, which is funded by Microsoft Research.

‘Images of medical conditions are an important resource for clinicians and researchers,’ says Professor Maeder. ‘There are large collections of images which are essential source datasets for research on population health or disease cohort studies using patient trait information derived from the images. Currently to derive useful information from this data the images must be reviewed in a very time consuming and costly fashion. Annotation of medical images is conducted either manually by highly specialist expert viewers or radiologists or by using complex proprietary computer-assisted-diagnosis software. This is a time consuming and costly process and can result in error and bias in the results. What we need is an easier and more reliable process. Selection of images according to established content-based image retrieval (CBIR) criteria such as "similar to a given image" or "containing a specified range of characteristics" would be more objective if conducted automatically. To achieve this requires a set of software functions which cater for the typical components of image similarity and can be tuned to suit different medical image types.’

The research team will develop, test and tune the software using an existing collection of several hundred images including brain MRI and CT scans, chest X-rays and screening mammograms. The software will be deployed within the Microsoft Azure

cloud computing environment, allowing performance evaluation of this new approach to handling large datasets, as compared with a conventional server and network situation. This will allow evaluation of the computational efficiency of the tools, as well as the success of the automated annotations as rated by comparison with human expert opinions. This project will develop software providing a generalisable toolset to apply specific image analysis tasks

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on medical digital images, providing information on fundamental visual appearance characteristics of the images for metadata explanation purposes. The research will contribute to advances in a number of clinically related activities, permitting a broader use of image data with a resultant increase in clinical benefits of research.

Project Title: Automated annotation tools for medical image collections

Funding has been set at: $47,059

------------------------------------------------------------------------- Research Collaboration between UWS and UTS brings Hollywood science fiction to life

Researchers from UTS and UWS have developed real-time full-body robot teleoperation technology portrayed in last year's Hollywood movie "Real Steel". Dr Anton Bogdanovych from SCEM together with Chris Stanton and Edward Ratanasena from Innovation and Enterprise Research Laboratory at UTS have created a prototype demonstration of remotely controlling a humanoid Nao robot using a full-body motion capture suit.

A video showing the results of this project is available online at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggLge1Rw2z4

With this technology a human can teleoperate (remote control) a robot by wearing a full-body inertial motion capture suit (this is the kind of equipment James Cameron

employed for animating those 3D models of alien Navi' creatures in the Avatar movie). The suit consists of 17

sensors. Each sensor is located close to the corresponding joint of the human body and can capture position changes and rotations of those joints. In a way each of those sensors

works similar to an Iphone that can detect its own orientation in space, but this equipment is much more accurate and can detect very small movements with millimetre precision. Knowing the orientation of each human joint it becomes possible to create a mapping between the human joint orientation and rotation of the corresponding robot motors.

Apart from mapping the motion capture data to robot motors - the biggest problem was to overcome embodiment dissimilarity. Robot joints are very different from human joints, have very different range of motion, there less joints on the robot with much less motion flexibility and the centre of gravity is different. To overcome those embodiment/balance dissimilarity is where most of research efforts where spent on. Researchers have managed to create an accurate real-time mapping between most human joints and corresponding robot motors, while also ensuring that the robot can maintain its balance when mimicking the human.

The commercial potential for this technology is in high-risk environments or disaster recovery situations, pretty much all those places where it's too dangerous to send humans. The robotic hardware technology still has a fair way to go until it becomes technologically feasible to deploy something like this on a large scale, but all the software building blocks for it are already in place.

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For what it’s worth...

Associate Professor John MacFarlane from the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics in collaboration with the Office of the NSW Valuer General is continuing to develop and evaluate the NSW Mass Valuation System for land and property valuation. This

project is funded by the Office of the NSW Valuer General.

‘For a number of years now, NSW has had a land valuation system based on the use and geographic location of the property’, says Associate Professor MacFarlane. ‘This “Mass Valuation” system assigns land values to some 2.5 million land parcels in NSW each year. Land values are not only based on use and location, but are also affected by local planning laws, nearby developments, facilities and

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infrastructure. Properties typical or representative of a group are assessed, based on the evidence drawn from the most recent sales, and their value movement is then applied to similar properties in the group. A system of quality assurance has been implemented to monitor outcomes from this type of Mass Valuation procedure in order to ensure accurate, consistent and fair valuations. This project continues to develop and implement quality assurance measures.’

Use of recently developed automated valuation models provides statistical analyses of new valuations via an online reporting system and helps to identify areas of high risk that need more detailed analysis. Best-practice quality assurance developments will continue and ongoing training in the application of quality assurance methods will be provided, including assistance with using online land value analysis tools.

Land values are used to determine council rates and other property taxes so it is important that the general public has confidence in the underlying land valuations. With property values going through unsteady and turbulent “bust and boom” cycles and in the current post-GFC economic environment, it is important for NSW property-owners to have an up-to-date and accurate value for their land, based on available market evidence and developed using a high-quality valuation system.

Project Title: Ongoing Development of the NSW Mass Valuation System - Phase 7.

Contact Details: j.macfarlane@uws.edu.au

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Media Mention Forbes business magazine:

Aliens with lasers: SETI bets on nano-second flashes From E.T.Dr. Ragbir

Bhathal at the Australian Optical SETI Project, Rotary Observatory, at the University of Western Sydney (UWS) Campbelltown. Credit: Luke Fuda, Camden Advertiser (Fairfax Media). Nearly four years ago, a tiny optical observatory in a remote Sydney suburb created a minor news flap after potentially detecting an intelligent laser signal from the direction of 47 Tucanae — a truly ancient

globular cluster of some 35,000 stars in the southern constellation of Tucanae. “We were doing the normal run on our 0.4 meter (16 in.) Telescope in December 2008 and found this spike on our computer screen,” said astrophysicist Ragbir Bhathal, Director of the Australian Optical SETI Project at the University of Western Sydney, Campbelltown. “It was quite exciting to see this very sharp signal and I wrote on the print-out “Is it E.T.?”

But alas, no. Although Bhathal said there was no fault with the instruments; six months of trying to relocate the signal turned up nothing. “We have now dismissed it as spurious,” said Bhathal, who notes that instead of an intelligent signal from E.T., the spike was most likely caused by wayward cosmic rays. After 50 years of searching the skies for E.T. in the radio spectrum, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) astronomers are finally taking Optical SETI to whole new levels.

The idea of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial optical signals has been around since Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Townes, along with colleague Robert Schwartz, wrote a paper proposing the idea in 1961. Today, Townes’ office is right down the hall from Werthimer and the two now collaborate on Optical SETI experiments.

As for Ragbir Bhathal, after 10 years of looking, his project has targeted more than 3000 stars and 50 globular clusters. Their searches are continuing, and he hopes to find sponsorship to build a one-meter telescope in the Australian state of New South Wales sometime soon.

What are the chances that anyone will actually find a real signal?

When pressed, Werthimer will only make statistical predictions based on logarithmic timescales. He says there’s a 10 percent chance that earthlings will find E.T. within the next decade and equally a 10 percent chance that E.T. will never be detected.

“If technology keeps up its exponential growth, in 50 years we will be able to do thorough SETI searches,” said Werthimer. “If we don’t find signals then, it either means E.T. is not out there or they’re not sending signals. And even if the signals are out there, we’d still be lucky to find them.” The full article can be found at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/2012/07/18/aliens-with-lasers-seti-bets-on-nano-second-flashes-from-e-t/.

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Dr Ragbir Bhathal gave invited public lectures on astronomy in the Netherlands at the beginning of this year. His lecture on the search for nanosecond laser pulses from outer space was delivered at the Sonnenborg Observatory, University of Utrecht. The University of Utrecht is one of the oldest universities in

Europe. A public lecture on Perspectives on Aboriginal Astronomy which explored the laws on the land and the laws in the heavens and other aspects of Aboriginal astronomy was delivered at the aboriginal Museum in Utrecht. It is the only Museum in the world devoted to Aboriginal society, art and culture. The reception for the lecture was hosted by the Australian Embassy in Holland.

------------------------------------------------------------------------- Delegation from the City University of Hong Kong visits UWS

UWS Staff along with Prof. Liew Kim Meow, Prof. Kwok Leung Tsui and A/Prof. Richard K. K. Yuen from the City University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

The City University of Hong Kong delegation visited the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics on Wednesday, 21 March 2012 to explore possible student exchanges between CUHK and UWS. Discussions about the strengthening of already existing research ties between the two Institutes took place. Julie Lantz from the Office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor, Engagement and International will be looking into the details of potential ‘addendum’ to the existing MoU between UHK and UWS. Dr Swapan Saha, Associate Professor Surendra Shrestha, as well as Mauricio Novoa will be liaising with Associate Professor Yuen at the School level.

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Dr Mary Hardy and Phillip Love with members of the AIB Chapter

The UWS staff members attended AIB New South Wales Chapter Annual Industry Leaders Forum held at NSW Parliament house on 2 July 2012. This event provided an excellent opportunity for the UWS staff to meet building and construction industry’s senior management that have a commitment to the building profession and its future. Guests of Honour at this year’s lunch were The Honourable Anthony Roberts MP, Minister for Fair Trading, Mr John Tansey, Assistant Commissioner, Home Building Service and Sir Laurence Street AC KCMG QC HFAIB. This annual event was also attended by senior management of the building and construction industry.

Dr Swapan Saha with Sir Laurence Street

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School News

Recent Events

UWS Open Day on Sunday 26 August 2012 was held at Parramatta Campus. The day started at 10.00am and runs through to 2.00pm.

The University of Western Sydney Solar Car Team has their sights set on international acclaim as they power towards the 2013 World Solar Challenge.

The Solar Car Team, established in 2011, consists of a group of 35 students, volunteers and alumni from the disciplines of mechatronics, electrical, computer, business, accounting, health sciences, science, media and industrial design at UWS. This skilled group has been working together to design and construct a vehicle powered entirely by solar energy that is eligible to compete in the 2013 race from Darwin to Adelaide.

Dr Ali Hellany, senior lecturer at the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics and academic supervisor for

the Solar Car project believes UWS has the potential to succeed in the 2013 World Solar Challenge. “At UWS, we are fortunate to be working with a highly

talented and enthusiastic, multidisciplinary team,” says Dr Hellany. “Even at this early stage we can see the potential for the team to not only complete the race but also do quite well in it.”

The bi-annual 3000 kilometre race will run from 6th October 2013 at which time teams will depart Darwin and travel south along the Stuart Highway. Even the harsh central-Australian environment and tough competition –

which includes Japan’s Tokai University and America’s University of Michigan – has not fazed the UWS Team.

“The race is all about energy management and efficiency,” says UWS engineering alumni and team leader Jay Manley. “We’re aiming for an average speed of 100 kilometres per one of the main missions of the team is not only to encourage collaboration within the university but to also encourage thinking and research on sustainable transport at UWS.”

The vehicle, constructed out of light-weight carbon fibre, will be of 4.5 metres in length and 1.6 metres in width. The design features a CSIRO in-wheel motor that will take full advantage of the solar energy produced and give the

vehicle a theoretical top speed of 150 kilometres per hour. The team has already started construction of the vehicle's body

and chassis and displayed it at the University of Western Sydney Open Day on 26th August 2012. The team hard at work laying foam over

the car's shell.

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Inaugural UWS “BBQ with the Boss”

which was held for UWS students on Monday 30 July 2012

The “BBQ with the Boss” is a concept where the AIB organise “bosses” from industry to talk to students about career planning, the market and strategies as to how to best position yourself to commence

work as a building professional. The “bosses” and organisers were;

George Bardos FAIB - Regional Building Manager at Abigroup & NSW AIB VP

Bill Stavrinos FAIB - Operations Director of Grindley Living & NSW AIB Committee Member

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Paul Heather FAIB - Director of Kuringah Consulting &

NSW AIB VP Paul Heather FAIB - Director of Kuringah Consulting &

NSW AIB VP Penny Heather Assoc.AIB - UWS Student, NSW AIB

Coordinator and YBA Committee Member Clint Wilson Grad.AIB - Coordinator at A W Edwards &

YBA Committee Member Chris Bulmer FAIB - Chief Operating Officer at Hansen

Yuncken & NSW AIB President ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Staff Graduations Dr Mary Hardie, Lecturer and Course Advisor for Construction Management and Housing, was awarded PhD at the April 2012 graduation.

Her PhD thesis tilled “Technical Innovation Delivery in Small and Medium Construction Enterprises”.

Mary’s thesis was supervised by Associate Professor Jonathan Allen, Professor Graeme Newell and Dr Swapan Saha.

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2012 New Academic Appointments Professor Jonathan Tapson joined the School in June 2011, having previously been Head of Electrical Engineering at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He has joined UWS to pursue his research interests in bio-inspired sensors and systems; he particularly likes to make sensors that imitate the human auditory

system. He was based at the UCT for 13 years and has held visiting positions at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Sydney. At UWS he is associated with the Bioelectronics associated with the Bioelectronics associated with the Bioelectronics and Neuroscience Group (BENS) and the MARCS Institute. In addition to his research interests, Jonathan likes to start companies, having spun two profitable (and one not-for-profit) startups out of his laboratory. These can be found online at www.hotplatinum.com, www.motornostix.com, and www.cell-life.org. In his free time he likes to go mountain biking and fly gliders. ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr Weisheng Si joined the School on 9 January 2012 as Lecturer in Networking and Mobile Computing, leaving his position as Research Engineer with NICTA (National ICT Australia Ltd). Will brings the experience in working in a leading ICT research enterprise in Australia, where he was working on the Trusted Networking project, conducting research on routing,

privacy and trust issues in wireless ad hoc networks and cellular networks. He has rich expertise in network modelling and simulation.

Prior to NICTA, Will was a Lecturer at Dalian University of Technology in China, teaching Computer Networks, Computer Networking Labs and Discrete Mathematics. He won a research grant ‘The application of graph theory in P2P overlay networks’ and supervised five master students to their graduation.

Will was a two-time recipient of a university teaching award at Dalian University of Technology in 2005 and 2006. He

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received a 2007 Endeavour IPRS & International Postgraduate Award, University of Sydney.

Don't miss the "early bird" opportunity to get in touch with Will (but not Smith) and to explore the opportunities that he brings to the School - when you are on the Parramatta Campus, please, pop in ER.G.19 and take him for a nice treat.

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Dr Bahman Javadi joined the School on 13 February 2012 as Lecturer in Networking and Cloud Computing, leaving his position as Research Engineer with Melbourne e-Research Group in the University of Melbourne. Prior to this, Bahman was a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne in the Computer Science and Software

Engineering department, where he was working in the CLOUDS Laboratory with focus on Cloud Computing and Web Services for the Utility Computing systems.

Bahman brings a nice mixture of academic and industry experience, garnished with experience in different research

cultures. Prior to his appointment with the University of Melbourne, Bahman was a postdoctoral research fellow in France at Laboratoire Informatique de Grenoble, INRIA Rhône-Alpes. He had been working for several years at the High Performance Computing Research Centre (HPCRC) in Amirkabir University of Technology, Iran as a research scientist and team leader.

He was involved in many research and commercial projects to design the network infrastructures for cluster-based servers. In 2008 Bahman was a recipient of the Khwarizmi International award as a team member for research at the HPCRC to develop high performance computing systems. All these are intertwined seamlessly with connoisseur knowledge of fine sweets. If you are on the Parramatta Campus – just grab Bahman from ER.1.03 for a cuppa and ask him for the sweets that go well with cloud computing.

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Attila Egri-Nagy has joined SCEM as a postdoctoral researcher for the next two years. He arrived at UWS in late September 2011 from Eszterh´azy Ka´roly College in Hungary, following a PhD and postdoctoral work at the University of Hertfordshire in England. He is working on problems in algebraic biology with Andrew Francis.

Attila is an expert on semigroups, cellular automata and artificial life, and is as much a computer scientist as a mathematician. So he will have expertise in common with a number of SCEM staff. He is based in Building EN, the aromatic new piece of real estate the School has grown into on Parramatta campus.

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Dr Vute Sirivivatnanon has joined the University after ten years of experience in bridge design, quality control of both precast and in-situ concrete production, and implementation of a Quality Assurance System at Singapore Housing & Development Board (HDB). He spent 20 years conducting and managing fundamental and

applied research at CSIRO Division of Building, Construction & Engineering and the last 5 years managing industrial research at CCAA.

He has published widely in Australia and internationally on the design for durability, utilisation of industrial by-products, and limit-state service life design. He has joined the University of Western Sydney as an Associate Professor of Construction Materials in February 2012 where he wishes to pursue a closer collaboration between academia and industry in research & development.

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Dr Richard (Chunhui) Yang joined the School on the 1 January 2012 as Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Smart Structures. Prior to this, Richard was holding the position of senior lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, the School of Engineering, Deakin University (Deakin).

Richard brings his high-level academic expertise on research, teaching and service through his diverse and colourful experiences in several universities with different cultures and environments. Apart from his six years working in Deakin University, he has worked for a couple of years each in the University of Sydney and at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and

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Technology (KAIST) as a post-doc research fellow (after he finished his PhD in the University of Hong Kong in 2002). He has been working in computational solid mechanics for about 15 years, focusing on characterization of material properties and behaviours

via modelling and simulations, including multi-scale modelling of advanced engineering materials and structures, structural health monitoring (SHM) and smart structures, metal forming and manufacturing and metal surface treatment, etc. He has been awarded two ARC Linkage grants; one ARC LIEF grant; one Beijing Natural Science Foundation grant (BNSF) on roll forming; one National Science Foundation of China grant (NFSC) on bio-materials with his colleagues from China; and several internal research grants. In teaching, he has been mostly being involved in the Year-3 and -4 and postgraduate subjects, bringing teaching innovations and modern technologies into class, e.g. Mechanics of Materials, Dynamics of Machines, Finite Element Analysis, Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing, Mechanical System Design and Automated Manufacturing, etc. He has published about 100 journal /conference papers and confidential reports for industrial partners in research areas and a journal paper in Engineering Education. As for external service, he is serving as an Australia-based reader for the ARC, an editorial board member, conference committee member, and reviewer of journals and conferences, etc. Richard is looking forward to contributing his outstanding skills, expertise and experience to the newly-open Mechanical Engineering program in the School

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Associate Professor Sathasivan (who is happy to be called Sathaa) joined the school at the end of January 2012 leaving his position with Curtin University where he held academic position for 6 years and managed projects totaling about 1.2 million dollars including an ARC linkage grant. The projects resulted in supervision of 10 postgraduate students inclusive of 7 PhD students to successful

completion.

Sathaa brings a nice mixture of industrial and academic experience in environmental engineering from around the world. He finished his PhD in The University of Tokyo in Water Quality Engineering and then worked as a research

fellow in the same university for two years. Following this, Sathaa was an Assistant Professor in Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok for two years. Prior to joining Curtin, he worked with Sydney Water Corporation as a Water Quality Scientist for six years on several operational and research and development projects which included Cooperative Research Centre for Water Quality and Treatment. His main research interest is in drinking/recycled water distribution systems and water treatment processes. He uses biotechnology to maximize the effectiveness of available technologies. He loves the challenges the sustainable development present and the opportunities life cycle assessment tool and other technologies offer.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr Helen Wu is a senior lecturer at the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Western Sydney. Helen was awarded a Bachelor Degree in Mechanical Engineering in China and a PhD in Civil Engineering at the University of Technology, Sydney. She has twenty years experience in teaching, research and consulting relating to the

dynamic response of materials, machines and structures including vibration and condition monitoring.

Before joining UWS, Helen worked at UTS, ECU and Hyder Consulting, a multi-national consultancy, where she has been involved in conceptual, detailed design and implementation of tests on many projects related to vibration and noise control. She has expertise in conducting full scale measurements and analyses of civil engineering structures such as bridges, railway tracks, tunnels, and buildings.

An interesting project in which Helen was a project manager was to conduct full scale vibration measurements of ‘BurjKhalifa Dubai’ (the tallest building in the world) during various stages of the construction. She participated in the design of a vibration monitoring system to monitor the building movement induced by wind and possible future earthquake attacks. Helen was also involved in the project of Epping to Chatswood Rail Link (ECRL) during design and construction stages.

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2012 New Professional Staff Appointments

Cheryl Murray joined the School at Easter 2012 from School of Management at Parramatta Campus, where she worked as a Research and Engagement Administrator and has worked in a similar role in the School of Nursing at UWS. Previously she worked as a Project

Assistant/Officer in the commercial arm of Macquarie University working on international aid projects and an Administrative Officer/ Manager in the Children and Families Research Centre in the Faculty of Human Sciences at Macquarie University. She holds a Master of Policy and Applied Social Research, and a Bachelor of Arts, from Macquarie University majoring in policy. She completed a Certificate IV in front line Management at UWS in 2011.

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Professional Staff Achievements

Susan Henley (pictured) and Cheryl Murray both graduated in June 2012 with their Certificate IV in Frontline Management.

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Awards and Recognition Professor Willard McCarty of the School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics, is to receive the 2013

Roberto Busa Prize from the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations.

The Busa Prize is named in honour of Roberto Busa SJ and is the Alliance’s most prestigious international award. It is given 'to recognise outstanding lifetime achievement in the application of information technology to humanistic research'. Father Busa, who died last year, was the first pioneer in this field, starting in the late 1940s to use computational methods in his analysis of the writings of Thomas Aquinas.

Prof McCarty will receive the award, and will deliver the associated Busa Lecture, at the Digital Humanities 2013 Conference, which is to take place at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln 16-19 July 2013. The award was announced at the recent Digital Humanities 2012 conference at the University of Hamburg. The announcement, from the Chair of the Busa Award Committee, Matthew Jockers of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is as follows:

"The winner of the 2013 Busa Award is a man of legendary kindness and generosity. His contributions to the growth and prominence of Digital Humanities will be familiar to us all. He is a gentleman, a scholar, a philosopher, and a long time fighter for the cause. He is, by one colleague’s accounting, the ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ of Digital Humanities. And I must concur that ‘the force’ is strong with this one. Please join me in congratulating Willard McCarty on his selection for the 2013 Busa Award."

Prof McCarty has held a fractional appointment at the University of Western Sydney since 2010. He is also Professor of Humanities Computing at King's College London, where following retirement in 2010 he retains a part-time appointment. He has published extensively on developments in the digital humanities, including Humanities Computing, London: Palgrave, 2005. Since 1987 he has edited the online seminar Humanist. Prof McCarty is Editor of the journal Interdiscipinary Science Reviews and a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society.

Prof McCarty’s work has previously been recognised, in 2005 by the Canadian Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities, and in 2006 by the

Richard W Lyman Award from the USA’s National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation.

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Dr Laurence Park’s paper was nominated in the SWIRL 2012 workshop as an important new research direction:

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Examining document model residuals to provide feedback during Information Retrieval evaluation - Laurence A. F. Park

The Sixteenth Australasian Document Computing Symposium (ADCS 2011) December, 2011 Given a ranking function and a test collection, this paper uses the basic idea of optimising regression residuals to improve the ranking function. The idea is principled and elegant; but will it lead to better ranking functions?

Examining document model residuals to provide feedback during Information Retrieval evaluation

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Human Rights Award

Congratulations to Christian Tietz from the Industrial Design part of our School, who is the recipient of UTS Reconciliation Award, one of UTS Human Rights Awards (for more information about these awards see:

http://www.equity.uts.edu.au/uts/awards/human-rights/, for the details of UTS Reconciliation Award see

http://www.equity.uts.edu.au/uts/awards/human-rights/categories.html).

Christian is currently doing his PhD studies at UTS.

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Best Paper Award

Paper presented at 37th Australasian Universities Building Educators Association (AUBEA) held at UNSW by Dr Mary Hardie and Philip Love titled "The role of industry based learning in a construction management program" won the best paper award. This paper was also selected among 10 papers out of total 57 accepted papers for the publication in the Australian Journal of Construction Economics and Building. This conference was attended by all of our accrediting bodies including AIB, AIBS and AIQS.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Masters Graduate Wins a Professional Development Award

Mr Richard Stoddart, a Master of Building Surveying graduate, received Victoria Building Commission’s Continuing Professional Development Award last year, for

his dedication to further learning and, in particular, for his thesis work entitled “Characterisation of Fuel Loads in Small Retail Tenancies”. The CPD awards applaud Registered

Building Practitioners who have contributed to the industry and excelled through further training and development. A presentation based on Mr Stoddart’s thesis work was also made in the Annual Engineering Technology Conference of Society of Fire Protection Engineers in October last year at Portland, USA.

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Recent Student Events

The School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics Inaugural Research Futures Postgraduate Forum was held on 6-7 June 2012 Penrith (Werrington South) Campus.

The annual School Prize Ceremony

for the 2011 Academic Year was held on the evening of Wednesday August 1, 2012 at Kingswood campus. Families and friends, along with a number of VIP guests, and academic and administrative staff attended the ceremony to congratulate over 30 students who received an array of awards for their outstanding achievement.

These awards included prestigious Dean’s Medals, Donor funded prizes, and lastly, awards received by graduated students with the highest GPA (Grade Point Average) in their undergraduate or postgraduate course.

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Notably, the Donor prizes have been generously supported by a range of individuals, organisations and UWS staff

members dedicated to encouraging our students to strive for excellence.

With over 120 people in attendance, the theatre was filled with anticipation as the students walked across the stage in elation as they received their awards. It was definitely a night of celebration with lots of smiling faces to be seen amongst helium balloons and flowers, all of which created the perfect setting for a very joyous occasion.

In the words of the Dean of our School, Professor Simeon Simoff,

“Congratulations to all our magnificent prize winners at this year’s Prize Ceremony. The talent, hard work, dedication and mastery you have shown during your studies have set a very high standard that will no doubt continue in your chosen career.”

Thank you to all the presenters, and staff who worked tirelessly to put together a great night!

To view the professional photo’s taken at the School Prize Ceremony, please go to

http://flickr.com/gp/givingtouws/NLBet1/

Su-Yin Jowett

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UWS Science and Mathematics Exposed Day

The School of Computing, Engineering and Mathematics took part in the UWS Science and Mathematics Exposed

Day on the 3rd August at the Parramatta campus. This event, held in conjunction with Lachlan Macquarie College, attracted over 900 secondary school students. These

school students participated in a day of practical, interactive stalls and listened to keynote speakers, including Professor Mary O'Kane, the NSW Chief Scientist.Anton Bogdanovych and Chris Stanton generated a huge amount of interest with their robot (now named George)

while two 18th century mathematicians, the renowned Swiss mathematician, Leonard Euler (aka Mr Yogesh Rao) and the French mathematician Marie - Sophie Germain (aka Sangeeta Bhatia), delighted students with their tales about mathematics from both the 18th century and now.

Dr Sheldon Cooper from the TV show, The Big Bang Theory (aka Associate Professor Glenn Stone) delighted students with his caustic wit! It was a great day where our school showcased in the best possible light, what is possible at UWS.

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UWS Staff Service Recognition Rehez Ahlip: Parramatta (25 years)

Julian Wang: Parramatta (20 years)

Alexander Lee: Campbelltown (20 years)

Preethi Kottegoda: Kingswood (20 years)

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Stop Press!!! UWS and the School has also been successful in the

National Office for Learning and Teaching Round One

Grants scheme. These highly competitive grants involve

working with partner institutions in a national context.

Congratulations to Dr Carmel Coady (pictured above)

Title: Developing a shared understanding of assessment criteria and standards for undergraduate mathematics

Lead Institution: Monash University, with the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Sydney Total amount of grant: $218,00

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SCEM student wins green mobile app competition

(20 September 2012 By Peter Dinham – reprinted in part from ITWire)

A final year BCompSci honours student supervised by A/Prof Miroslav Filipovic from SCEM has scooped the top prize in the ‘Unleash Your App’ competition run by Optus and National ICT Australia (NICTA), with his Android mobile ‘green’ app that assists commuters with planning their public and private transport journeys, while also keeping track of their carbon footprint on the way.

Daniel Grech took out first place in the competition initiated two years ago by Optus and NICTA, giving university students across Australia the opportunity to develop innovative Android mobile apps that make everyday lives easier.

The TripGo Sydney app developed by Daniel Grech gives Sydney siders useful information on how to get from point A to point B in the Greater Sydney area - by train, bus, car, ferry, motorbike, taxi or bicycle - while keeping track of their carbon footprint. As well as tracking the carbon footprint generated by their trip, TripGo users can also tailor their movements according to cost, duration, environmental impact and hassle.

As the 2012 winner, Grech will receive a new Samsung Galaxy Note on which he can play around with his own app and $5,000 which is already earmarked for a conference trip next year to attend the Google I/O conference. Looking ahead to a career in the app developer field, Grech will also take part in a session with industry experts from Optus and NICTA who will help refine his skills to fast-track his path to becoming an app developer.

“Since I got my first Android phone, making apps for it has been a favourite hobby of mine,” Grech said. “Developing apps is something I would love to do professionally in the future, and the recognition from winning this competition will help a lot.”

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Editor - Cheryl Murray: Email: c.murray@uws,.edu.au